Project Katrina

In an ongoing struggle to save what is left of its brand equality, BP has launched numerous efforts to revamp its image as “part of the community.” Now, the “embattled oil giant” has “stepped forward to pay” for the annual July Fourth fireworks display in Durango, CO. BP Agreed to pay for the display five months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, BP is pitching the display as a community donation:

The display typically costs $15,000 and city officials were poised to cancel it because of a budget crunch. But representatives of BP’s office in southwestern Colorado surprised the council by announcing the company would pick up the tab.

Company spokesman Curtis Thomas says BP knows how important the celebration is to the community and didn’t want it to be lost. He says BP hasn’t asked for any advertising in exchange for its donation.

I just don’t think BP is going to be able to “buy” their way out of this. But I could be wrong (lets hope not).

Yet another major revelation in the last week to undermine Bobby Jindal’s consistent claims he has effectively managed Louisiana’s response to BP’s oil spill gusher:

For more than two months, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has made it clear that he considers the response of the federal government and BP to the gulf oil leak a failure on many fronts.

But elected officials in Louisiana and members of the public seeking details on how Mr. Jindal and his administration fared in their own response to the disaster are out of luck: late last week the governor vetoed an amendment to a state bill that would have made public all records from his office related to the oil spill.

The measure was proposed by Senator Robert Adley, a Republican, and easily passed the Democrat-controlled Legislature. He told the Associated Press that the veto was a “black eye” on the state. “This governor has opposed transparency for the three years he’s been in office,” he said.

According to the New York Times, Jindal says he vetoed the measure to strengthen the state’s position if it pursues legal action against BP. This argument seems transparently bunk since if any legal action is taken (and why wouldn’t it BTW) would require all those documents to be turned over to BP during discovery.

Other recent revelation include CBS noting that despite Jindal’s attacks on the Obama administration for not delivering enough resources fast enough, Jindal actual held up the deployment of 5,000 National Guard troops authorized by the Obama administration. And over the weekend, the New York Times reported that experts at the state and federal level had panned Jindal’s response, saying the state was ill-prepared for the spill and that Jindal’s attacks on the Federal response smacked of political calculation designed to distract attention from his own failures. Oh you got to love (insert hate) Louisiana politics.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post reports Jim DeMint has backed down from his attempt to deny subpoena power to the Obama Administration’s Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission.

Last week the House near-unanimously passed legislation giving the commission that power, but yesterday, Senator  Jim DeMint infuriated Democrats by  putting a block on the legislation when a Dem brought it to the floor for a voice vote.

DeMint claimed he was doing this on behalf of unnamed GOP Senators in his caucus, prompting Dems to charge that Republicans were shielding Big Oil from a real probe.

But the Senate GOP leadership has informed DeMint’s office that it has no objections to the legislation, and it will proceed, DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton tells me.

According to Sargent, DeMint’s office says they never had any objections to the concept of subpoenas, but put a hold on the legislation because a number of other senators had not had time to read it yet.

In his daily press briefer earlier today, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, commander of the federal response to BP’s spill gusher, announced that rough seas caused by Hurricane Alex are forcing a delay in a plan to double the rate of oil captured from the well head. The plan depends on the addition of a third vessel by the end of the month, the Helix Producer, to the two already capturing oil. The Helix Producer is on location, but with waves at between seven and twelve feet, the conditions in the Gulf are too rough to connect it to the piping carrying the captured oil. Allen said that until the waves fall to between three to five feet, it won’t be possible to connect the new vessel to the piping.

According to the Houston Chronicle BP saved $5 million by taking shortcuts while drilling the Macondo/Deepwater Horizon well. BP stock has lost $80 billion. $20 billion placed into an escrow for damages. $2.5 billion in clean up costs to date. Solid business decision there BP.

There is a Republican meme that continues to circulate on the on the 24/7 news networks about the Federal response to the BP oil spill gusher that is not only wrong, but it’s pointless.

On “Fox News Sunday” yesterday, Liz Cheney sought to prove in her “unique” way that President Obama isn’t doing everything possible to address the disaster in the Gulf.

“[The president] doesn’t say that he’ll allow foreign carriers to come in, [he] doesn’t then move to do anything possible, [and he] won’t grant a waiver for the Jones Act.”

Former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin said something similar, ranting on that the administration:

Should have [....] accepted the assistance of foreign countries.

Glenn Beck told his minions on radio that Obama:

Needs to explain why we haven’t—why we turned down all the international help. They offered it within a couple of days. We said no.

There are two important things to keep in mind when you hear this talking point. The first is that Cheney, Palin, Beck, and others who keep repeating we are not accepting foreign help are just flat out wrong. Foreign governments have offered assistance and we have accepted it— including skimmers and boom from Mexico, three sets of Koseq sweeping arms from the Dutch, eight Norwegian skimming systems, and 3,000 meters of containment boom from Canada.

Should we have accepted more international help? Maybe, but as Obama has already explained much of the offered assistance is redundant and unnecessary.

The second point to keep in mind, and maybe most important, is that the White House hasn’t granted a waiver for the Jones Act because there’s been no need to. There have been “15 foreign-flagged vessels” involved in the response. How many needed a waiver to participate? None. Zero. How many vessels have been turned away because of the Jones Act? None. Zero.

The government has released a new estimate of the amount of oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. The new estimate is 35k to 60k barrels a day, a 50 percent increase on the high end of the range.

Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post, nails it on the problem Obama is facing:

The issue isn’t what Obama is feeling, it’s what he’s doing. Why haven’t skimmers been brought in from around the world to scoop up more of the oil? Why isn’t the defense of the coastline being run like a military campaign, with failure not an option? Why is the answer to every question essentially the same—”We’ve repeatedly asked BP to get that done”—when we’re dealing with a crisis that has to be seen as an urgent matter of national security and the public welfare?

[....]

The Post reported Monday that the administration has received offers of assistance from 17 nations. Sweden has volunteered to send three ships that can each collect about 15,000 gallons of oil an hour. Norway has offered to send nearly a third of its oil-spill response equipment. Japan has offered to send some boom, which authorities on the scene complain is in short supply.

[....]

Every available piece of equipment in the world that can vacuum, skim, scoop or sop up oil ought to be in the gulf by now, deployed under a central —probably military—command structure. The beaches should be defended as if from a threatened enemy invasion. This is a time for overkill, for the Powell Doctrine, for “decisive force.”

I think I, like most Americans know there isn’t much we can do. But it just seems like there is a lot of stuff we could at least try. And we’ve been hearing for a long time other nations have offered us assistance. Why have we not taken it? Are we too darn proud of a nation? I really wish I knew.

Newsweek ponders something I’ve been wondering about myself. Why the heck has Dick Cheney been so silent on the oil spill gusher? I mean virtually everything he did while in the White House was in service of the oil industry. Plus, it isn’t like he has been remotely silent in this views concerning Obama and willing to yell them from the highest mountain:

His ears ringing with the cries of “Cheney’s Katrina,” a title many are striving to bestow on the gulf oil spill, one might expect the former VP to convene journalists for a speech, like he did in May last year at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute to talk about national security. That lengthy rebuttal was timed specially to coincide with a speech President Obama gave on the same topic—a ploy calculated to get the maximum press attention. The closest we have this time is Liz Cheney, Dick’s daughter, arguing with Arianna Huffington on ABC’s This Week.

It just makes no sense. On countless issues before this Cheney should have been “blackballed” in polite circles. But that somehow has never happened. Why would we think it would happen over this topic? Kind of makes you wonder, or at least it does for me.