Obama, You've Got A Problem

When this oil spill crisis first became recognized as a crisis, President Obama quickly deferred clean-up and containment responsibility to the oil company that operated the rig. Instead of sealing off the broken pipe, they spent a month trying to salvage a way to harvest the oil. That failed, as thousands of barrels were pumped into the gulf coast on a daily basis for a month. Now that a month has passed, the oil company is finally shifted its strategy to sealing the leak instead of harvesting the oil. Sometimes what's best for the oil company isn't what's best for the millions of people who live along the gulf coast, where "tar bubbles" are now expected to float ashore with relative frequency for a generation.

Well done Mister President. As more and more people are calling this Obama's Katrina, finally today a month later he announced new measures and initiatives that are a month too late. The oil has already reached the shore, but a month later Obama is going to send hundreds of thousands of miles of boom nets to contain it? What does that do for the thousands of acres of fragile marsh lands and costal habitats that have already been contaminated? Maybe the people who made the mess should not have been the people who he abdicated responsibilities to at the beginning of the crisis.