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.

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.

Indeed, the poll shows that only 6 percent have a favorable rating of BP. In the history of the NBC News/Journal poll, Saddam Hussein (3 percent), Fidel Castro (3 percent) and Yasser Arafat (4 percent) have had lower favorable scores, and O.J. Simpson (11 percent) and tobacco-maker Philip Morris (15 percent) have had higher ratings.

Kind of hard to believe with facts at their fingertips that Republicans are still sticking up for them.

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 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.