3 minutes 11 seconds and well worth the time to watch the video above.
The Coast Guard stops barges with oil sucking vacuums from doing the job Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana authorized them to do.
The Coast Guard stopped those barges over "security concerns", yet after inspecting them and wasting critical time where thousands upon thousands of gallons of crude oil could have been pumped out of the coastal waters, they deemed those barges safe and allow them to continue.
This isn't an isolated story either. Governors from states affected have the same complaints, they can get answers or approval when they need them, they cannot get a straight answer when they approach the federal government about things they need and when they act to protect their state's interests, the red tape and feds get in their way and delay them unnecessarily.
The level of incompetence by the Obama administration is not only being noticed by those on the right side of the political arena, but by some on the left as well.
Taylor Marsh:
But on the other side, Democrats are expected to be competent at running the government. So far, Pres. Obama and his team have miserably flunked that test.
The other embarrassing issue out of the Obama administration is that despite promises, federal authorities are still blocking media access. This isn’t coming from Fox News either. It’s a complaint report from the Columbia Journal Review. This is not how our democratic republic is supposed to operate. That it’s happening under a Democratic administration makes it even worse.
I said the other day, Obama is not responsible for the oil spill itself, but he is responsible for his administration's response and the continued chaos that is ensuing in cleanup efforts by the states themselves.
The Governors of the states affected are frustrated, and rightly so, with the administrations inability to help, and instead end obstructing state leaders at every turn.
In Alabama today, Gov. Bob Riley said that he's had problems with the Coast Guard, too.
Riley, R-Ala., asked the Coast Guard to find ocean boom tall enough to handle strong waves and protect his shoreline.
The Coast Guard went all the way to Bahrain to find it, but when it came time to deploy it?
"It was picked up and moved to Louisiana," Riley said today.
The governor said the problem is there's still no single person giving a "yes" or "no." While the Gulf Coast governors have developed plans with the Coast Guard's command center in the Gulf, things begin to shift when other agencies start weighing in, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"It's like this huge committee down there," Riley said, "and every decision that we try to implement, any one person on that committee has absolute veto power."
Barack Obama, in his speech from the oval office said, and I quote from the White House website itself:
From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation’s history.....
The federal government is in charge and has been from the onset, therefore the response thus far, as Obama admitted right there, is his responsibility and this type of incompetence is unacceptable.
Politically speaking, the left had a field day criticizing Bush during the aftermath of Katrina, and in many cases rightly so, yet when stories such as the one above are reported, the reaction from the left is deafening silence.
As of right now, if you look at those writing about this complete travesty of the stopped barges over at Memeorandum, Taylor Marsh is the only left leaning blog showing the intellectual honesty to call it like it is and lay the blame for the response where it belongs.
Obama's doorstep.
.
