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White House Edited Oil Drilling Safety Report
bonch writes "The Interior Department inspector general has released a report stating that the White House edited a drilling safety report by reordering paragraphs to make it appear as though a seven-member panel of independent experts supported the six-month ban on offshore drilling. The IG report states, 'The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,' but the panel had only reviewed a draft of safety recommendations and not a drilling ban. The White House has issued a statement saying that there was 'no intentional misrepresentation of their views.' This follows complaints from scientists and environmentalists that the administration has not been holding to its promise of policy guided by science and not ideology."
Good plan. Stick you head in the sand and ignore it. I'm sure it'll all just go away...
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
I tend to agree with the GP on this one. I think the issue is that this story really isn't remotely technology related, and could be found anywhere that was a general news or political news site. It doesn't really belong on a "news for nerds" website. When I want general news, I just go to news.google.com or similar. I come here to get things that aren't always found on mainstream sites, technology related, and perhaps a bit out of the mainstream media's reach. Nothing wrong with political stories on /. in the least, and they are wanted here, assuming they are at least remotely related to technology as well.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Now if people would only realize that since nothing has changed, BOTH sides suck.
Two sides of the same evil coin. Why do you keep returning to the other side expecting anything different?
Exactly which simpletons rated this blather insightful? Just because you personally do not consider something to be good (i.e. the stimulus) does not mean that knowledgeable people agree with you. Then again your signature shows you to be not only economically ignorant, but totally self centered. Fortunately, the grownups were able to prevent your ignorance from making things even worse.
Democrats - Clinton's White House created a "no person shall be turned down" policy in 1997 which directly led to the housing boom
Bullshit.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
You mean to tell us that President Chocolate Jesus's administration is no more ethical than the previous one?
What about all of that "The previous 8 years." stuff they they kept talking about?
The only news here is that some people are naive enough to believe that dishonesty is owned exclusively by one party.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This administration hasn't been around long enough to even come close to surpassing the lies of the previous administration.
And hopefully they'll be out of the White House before they can accomplish that particular goal.
They sure are trying though.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
We don't need a nanny state. Want to stuff your face with twinkies and hohos? You should have the right to do so and become a fatty without government telling you that you can't, and without my and everyone else having to pick up the tab when you fry your pancreas and become a diabetic.
While I agree we don't need a nanny state... it is really fucking hard to eat healthy in the US. EVERYTHING that is readily available, like fast food or most of the premade stuff in grocery stores, falls under the category of "probably unhealthy." In order to eat healthy, you have to either prepare all your meals from good ingredients that you were careful to select and careful to read all the small print on the boxes, or you drove to the other side of the city to get to the Organic Foods Coop, where all the stuff sold can be assumed to be good. It shouldn't be a pain to eat right, but americans are bombarded with shit on a daily basis.
Some clever prosecutor has used the PATRIOT ACT to prosecute some really unlucky crack dealer. I think that we can stand a few lawsuits like this against BigBURGER and their lobbies, and BigDESERTS and their lobbies (STOP SELLING DOG SHIT AS FOOD).
Yes you can claim that people eat the way they want... but if it was just the opposite of the way it actually is, if americans were bombarded with advertising for HEALTHY food, if the store shelves were filled with healthy food and you had to look hard for the tasty bad stuff, I assert that there would be, in the US, far less obesity and diabetes (the latter, as it happens, has been cured, btw... in a Toronto Lab about 4 years ago... think BigPHARM will ever allow this cure into the US? How much insulin is sold in the US annually? Too much to allow a cure, I can tell you that much).
ok, rant over... go libertarians...
Forgive me if I am mistaken, but the main reason why all these "green" devices and such are being pandered, is BECAUSE of the "increased oil prices."
Personally, I think it is GREAT that we are being overcharged-- why? Because it FORCES the issue of change away from this demonstrably destructive energy source. Are the alternatives "good" ones? Probably not, if you are looking for something to sate you hunger for cheap energy, so you can continue being wasteful with it---
In effect, this only benefits oil comanys in the short term; in the long term, it will drive the engine of necessity-- the necessity to replace oil.
There are 2 reasons one might get cancer :
1) bad genes (bad in the sense that they gave you cancer, although no matter how good your genes, eventually you'll get cancer. I believe that there are theoretical calculations that seem to indicate that if humans ever were to become 152 year old, cancer prevalence would be 100%)
2) bad behavior (with smoking as number 1 cause)
3) someone else's fault (employer buying building that's insulated with asbestos)
Clearly in the case of 2) people should pay for it themselves. That's only fair (of course, not a part of Obama's plan at all). In the case of 3) there's a case of civil liability, and the responsible party should pay. I don't think there's any argument about these cases.
In the first case there are 2 actions one might do. You could fix it (but not the genes themselves) at great cost, and continuous cost. Now obviously I'm 100% in favor of insurance companies, or private persons doing this. And dead against the government doing it. Why ?
Because of what darwinism states will happen if we expend public resources to attempt to equalize genes. It's not just, unfortunately, that the group with defective genes will grow. Unfortunately it's worse. If you were to succeed at saving these people, it would no longer matter if someone was born with good or bad genes. That disables natural selection, and the consequence of this is that genetic information of the entire population will be erased (randomized to be exact).
Now obviously leaving everyone to their fate is not a good solution either. But there must be balance. So why not simply use the capitalist solution : IF someone, even with partially defective genes (we all have defective genes, just defective in different ways. Some defects turn out to be godsends, that's how evolution works) manages to bring more benefit to society than it costs to fix him/her, the of course that's fine.
Of course, that's exactly how the OLD system worked before Obama. IF you can pay for the treatment you should be treated.
Now there's the idiotic illusion that Obama's system is somehow better. And for a remarkably short period of time it will be better. But fraud will increase, followed remarkably close by a large increase in the permanently ill population (just look to European countries). After that, it will be much worse, because Obama will have to cut corners to control costs (you should visit a public hospital in Brussels and talk to the staff, and there will be little doubt as to why/how this is happening). Eventually (after 100 years or so) the entire treatment system will collapse (in brussels it's already largely collapsed. Docter's are forbidden from spending more than 10 minutes to diagnose a patient. Needless to say, this leads to mistakes. Quite a few mistakes in fact). In Holland, the essential (and cheap) treatment of dialysis is denied to the eldery, for cost cutting reasons. If you need dialysis, for obvious reasons, you'll die in months.
The sad fact is that the holocaust, when it started, was directed against those that were overloading the healthcare system. Did you know the first victims of the holocaust ? It was permanently ill mental patients, whom nobody visited anymore. Then permanently ill normal patients (for instance, these cancer patients). Then it was expanded to anyone needing permanent medical care (ie. the handicapped). Then to undesirables (meaning POW's first, later it meant Jews, why ? Essentially because the nazi state promised absurd social services, and rather than cutting the social services, they "reduced the pool of the needy" shall we say). As the nazi state collapsed further it was extended and extended, and before long Germans understood that hospitals under the care of nazis were deathtraps (Russians found out the same about socialist hospitals a mere decade later). Eventually, the state collapsed to the point where water, food, and shelter were denied to most people.