And It Will Ever Be Thus

The Interior Department follies will end promptly only if Obama has learned the lessons of the attenuated McChrystal debacle. Lesson No. 1 should be to revisit some of his initial hiring decisions. The general’s significant role in the Pentagon’s politically motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start. The official investigation into that scandal — finding that McChrystal peddled “inaccurate and misleading assertions” — was unambiguous and damning.

[...]

He should have been cashiered after he took his first public shot at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last October. That’s when McChrystal said he would not support the vice president’s more limited war strategy, should the president choose it over his own. According to Jonathan Alter in his book “The Promise,”McChrystal’s London remarks also disclosed information from a C.I.A. report that the general “had no authority to declassify.” These weren’t his only offenses. McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity tour that culminated with “60 Minutes” — even as his own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation somehow leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama’s war deliberations. The president was livid, Alter writes, but McChrystal was spared because of a White House consensus that he was naïve, not “out of control.”

  Frank Rich NYT

Unfortunately, that would be Obama, not McChrsytal.

Or not. It seems every bit as likely that Obama is completely owned by corporate interests, just like all the others.

[Top] environmentalists warn, the suspension of drilling appears to be little more than a stalling tactic designed to let public anger over BP's spill subside before giving Big Oil the go-ahead to drill in an area that has long been off-limits: the Arctic Ocean. The administration has approved plans by both BP and Shell Oil to drill a total of 11 exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas above Alaska — waters far more remote and hostile than the Gulf. Shell's operations could proceed as soon as the president's suspension expires in January. And thanks to an odd twist in its rig design, BP's drilling in the Arctic is on track to get the green light as soon as this fall.

[...]

"Everything I've heard internally, from sources within both the administration and industry, tells me that the administration is all over wanting these guys out in the Arctic Ocean," says Rick Steiner, a top marine scientist in Alaska who helped guide the response to the Exxon Valdez spill. "They're trying to solve this political problem with this Gulf spill in time to get these guys out in the Arctic next summer."

[...]

[An] administration spokesman admits that BP's plan — which uses an unproven approach to extracting undersea oil — is not covered by the six-month moratorium on offshore drilling. This fall, the company plans to begin drilling for oil near Prudhoe Bay via an oil rig it created by building an island — a glorified mound of gravel — three miles out in state waters. Because the island rig is connected to the mainland by a causeway, BP and Interior agree that the "onshore" facility is not subject to restrictions on "offshore" drilling. It's the same kind of legal fiction that states like Indiana use to permit gambling on "riverboat" casinos that are permanently docked on dry land.

[...]

Here's what BP has in store for the Arctic: First, the company will drill two miles beneath its tiny island, which it has christened "Liberty." Then, in an ingenious twist, it will drill sideways for another six to eight miles, until it reaches an offshore reservoir estimated to hold 105 million barrels of oil. This would be the longest "extended reach" well ever attempted, and the effort has required BP to push drilling technology beyond its proven limits. As the most powerful "land-based" oil rig ever built, Liberty requires special pipe to withstand the 105,000 foot-pounds of torque — the equivalent of 50 Mack truck engines — needed to turn the drill.

[...]

Experts also warn that a spill in the Arctic would be far worse than the disaster currently unfolding in the Gulf, where experienced contractors and relief equipment are close at hand. By contrast, the sites in the Arctic where Shell plans to drill are devilishly remote. The closest Coast Guard station is on Kodiak Island, some 1,000 miles away. The nearest cache of boom to help contain a spill is in Seattle — a distance of 2,000 miles. There are only two small airports in the region, and even if relief supplies could somehow be airlifted to the tundra, there are no industrial ports to offload equipment into the water. Relief equipment can realistically be brought to the region only by boat — and then only seasonally. The Arctic is encased in ice for more than half the year, and even icebreakers can't assure access in the dark of winter.

[...]

The Arctic, it turns out, is not the only place that the Obama administration is poised to give oil companies a new lease on life. In another indication that the president's six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling may be nothing but a stalling tactic, MMS has continued to accept bids on drilling tracts in the Gulf. Indeed, since President Obama announced his halt to deep-water drilling on May 27th, MMS has approved bids on at least 96 tracts in deep water. Two of the bids are from BP — and one is in the same undersea canyon where the company's gusher continues to foul the Gulf.

[...]

"These new leases are based on the same fundamentally flawed and patently illegal environmental analyses used to greenlight Deepwater Horizon," says Mike Senatore of Defenders of Wildlife, which filed suit against MMS in June to block the expansion of drilling. "This agency is at the epicenter of the worst environmental disaster in history, and yet it's still going about business as usual."

  Rolling Stone

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.