Wednesday oil spill edition.
NY Times:
Fifty-six days, millions of gallons of oil and countless hours of cable television second-guessing later, President Obama finally addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night to declare war.
His enemies were oil industry lobbyists and corrupt regulators, foreign energy suppliers and conservative policy makers, and a stubborn gushing well at the bottom of the sea. And ultimately, he was fighting his own powerlessness, as a president castigated for failing to stop the nation’s worst-ever oil spill tried to turn disaster into opportunity.
Maureen Dowd:
Once more on Tuesday night, we were back to back-against-the-wall time. The president went for his fourth-quarter, Michael Jordan, down-to-the-wire, thrill shot in the Oval Office, his first such dramatic address to a nation sick about the slick.
You know the president is drowning — in oil this time — when he uses the Oval Office. And do words really matter when the picture of oil gushing out of the well continues to fill the screen?
Susan Page:
For President Obama, the Oval Office address Tuesday night was about more than the oil spill.
His ability to project more command, competency and compassion in response to the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico— and the eventual success of the administration's actions — will have repercussions for his ability to do anything else, from pushing legislation on energy and jobs to holding down Democratic losses in the midterm elections.
EJ Dionne:
The two philosophical points he made will, I suspect, be heard again and again this campaign year. When he criticized the mess at the Minerals Management Service, he said this: "Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations."
This is an argument that needs to be pressed with some consistency. Democratic capitalism works because of the "democratic" part -- the use of government to achieve things capitalism can’t achieve on its own. There are some values the market doesn’t take into account and some valuable goods -- the environment in the gulf, for example -- that the market doesn’t price correctly, if at all.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yet what's happening on the left isn't the equivalent of the anti-incumbent anger on the right. Most progressives support Obama and want his agenda to succeed. And although Pelosi may have been bushwacked by a disability-rights group last week, she was celebrated by most of the conference attendees for her ability to forge a majority for hard votes.
At the same time, progressives have come to a realization. What we see, some 500 days into the Obama administration, is a president obstructed by a partisan Republican opposition, powerful entrenched corporate interests, and a minority of corrupt or conservative Democrats. The thinking is that if progressives organize independently and forge smart coalitions, building a mass movement for reform with a moral compass that can transcend left-right divisions, we may be able to push Obama beyond the limits of his own politics, overcome the timid incrementalism of the establishment Democratic Party and counter the forces of money and power that are true obstacles to change. As Arianna Huffington has said, "Hope is not enough. . . . We need a 'Hope 2.0' that depends not on what President Obama or other politicians say or do but on what we as progressives do."
Local opinion (Colorado):
It seems like everyone has their own idea about what should be done to fix the oil spill, and everyone has an opinion about how it's being handled so far.
Most people KJCT News 8 spoke with say they think the president is handling the situation about as best as he can. But almost everyone says the address should have happened much sooner.
Local opinion (Florida):
"We should have been fighting this thing 10 fold 3 months ago. The National Guard should have been called out months ago. The things that aren't working the booms should have been changed. The technology, he says he has called on all these scientists, good I'm glad, but it doesn't seem like there is a lot of teamwork," one man said.
Local opinion (Louisiana):
We went through Katrina. That was fine. We rebuilt," he said. "Now this -- this is not natural and it was done by BP."
Cepriano said he was unhappy with the government response, regardless of the president's tougher tone.
"Nothing's organized. None whatsoever ... they've got this really messed up," he said.
Obama delivered the speech after a tour of the Gulf Coast. An AP-GfK opinion polled showed 48 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the crisis, up 15 percentage points from a month ago. The spill is into its eight week.
Added for a lighter touch: Jonathan Bines:
Patient is a 66 year old Caucasian male, physically healthy, who presented at our initial consultation complaining of severe anxiety, insomnia, and panic attacks related to his belief that unnamed government officials were conspiring to form "death panels" with the intent of murdering not only patient, but patient's grandmother as well (Patient's grandmother is deceased).