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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."
Nothing really ever changes.
Politicians screw things up again, confuse issues, try to get a certain spin on things!
EXTRA! EXTRA! Read All About it!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Wait a sec.....wrong administration.......
Never mind.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Film at 11:00pm
Obama lied, fish died.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Even their lies are obvious!
Was there really any doubt that the ban was a purely political decision in the first place?
The Interior Department inspector general has released a report stating that the White House edited a drilling safety report ...
So now we're getting a report about a report. That's just grand. I personally am waiting for the report about the report about the report. Add a few more levels of abstraction, and we will all forget what the original issue was anyway.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Quite frankly, I'm surprised this made it to the front page of Slashdot given the majority of liberals that make up this community.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Somewhere, at some time in the past, some underpaid, over-motivated intern had a brilliant idea to help save the world by fighting the evil oil companies first hand! He or she was more than excited just to get an internship at the white house, under the Obama administration no less! And then, this! He or she was given the opportunity to audit a world-changing report regarding one of the most publicized environmental disasters in history for typos and grammatical correctness. Being an over-achiever and one who is full of gumption, the intern took it upon him or herself to rearrange some paragraphs and really stick it to BP, knowing that they were doing the right thing to protect the world from eco-terrorists! Captain Planet would be proud, yesiree!
A few months later, a report about the report reveals the tampering, the public becomes outraged, Obama has to answer for it all, and the intern is currently shitting his or her pants in fear of the Pandora's box that they unlocked, perhaps,even developing a nasty cocaine addiction in the process....
Either that or the politico douchebags in the white-house just fucked everyone over again out of sheer boredom.
Either way, it's times like this that make me proud I went to school to become an engineer, rather than getting muddled about in that dark world of hurt that is politics!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
All this hullabaloo and we don't even have a diff of the two versions. Lots of hot air being blown around, but nobody's seen what the real cause of the problem is. Two words got moved, should be a simple thing to diff.
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Who needs proof when they have a hot air balloon?
Shouldn't the blame be placed on the Governor?
After all he's the one who, when Bush called to send troops to help, refused to allow them entrance: "It's okay. Louisiana can handle this alone." A president is powerful, but per the constitution still not allowed to overrule a Governor during peacetime. I think we sometimes forget the US is a lot like the EU..... the EU president would not be able to send help either if, for example, Greece's PM refused entrance.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Except there was nothing a sitting president could do about utter incompetence and corruption of local officials during a natural disaster, as virtually all disaster response resources are not controlled by the federal government and Federal powers are extremely limited in that regard. But I'm sure you'd be perfectly fine with President Bush suspending posse comitatus and unseating state and local government officials, right?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Dunno, when the largest oil blowout (it was not a spill!) happens, most people would think it prudent to stop and check all other similar endeavors. Maybe they misrepresented stuff on purpose. Yet, the _end_ to which they did it sounds scientific to me.
Though the real question is why you can drill in the US waters without a cement-clad drill hole and a ready-made emergency sarcophagus already in place before you even start drilling. We have those requirements in Europe and people still make gobs of money with oil.
Communists and Corporatists are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. You need to start taking your meds.
I am sure majority of American voters (of the time) would have opposed civil rights law or abolishing slavery or vote/equality for women.
That is why referendum on every major decision is a bad idea.
You vote for what you think is the best leaders and let them make decision popular or unpopular and kick them out if you want
later...i think that is better than making decision by popular acceptance which would mean daily electioneering already its terrible every 2 years.
Run for power if you think you'd do a better job than is being done. But the question is: ow come every libertarian or small govt person that gets into power morphs into yet another protect wall street person ? Is Wall St the center of liberterianism ?
I'm mostly okay with what you're saying, maybe not to the degree you are taking it, but largely I would agree. Save for one point:
- Democrats - Clinton's White House created a "no person shall be turned down" policy in 1997 which directly led to the housing boom
The "no person shall be turned down" policy of 1997 only effected a very specific subset of banks. Specifically, of the top 20 sub prime mortgage lenders in the build up to the 2008 blow out, 2 we under the regulations applied by that law. And they were (IIRC) 18th and 20th for the total amount of money lent to sub-prime loans.
No, the underlying cause of the housing bubble is a standard free-market behavior couple with greedy people willing to lie. You had a whole lot of upper-middle and upper class individuals with money to invest. They gave their money to investment firms (and banks, which after the repeal of the GS act, could behave like investment firms). These investment companies had too much liquidity, too much money in the pocket, and not enough out in the market earning interest. So they pushed for more loans. Business loans, construction loans, home loans, personal loans, etc...
Well then it becomes a supply and demand issue. There are a finite number of "good bets" on the market at any given time. And with the excess liquidity in the credit market, all those were snatched up first. From there, we had loads of "pretty good bets". And those too got snatched up.
Then we started getting into the "completely crap bets." Ideally, there shouldn't be enough liquidity in the credit market that these loans are ever going through. But between the huge amount of demand for investments, and the completely bogus CDL vehicles misrepresenting the risk, they were selling like hot cakes.
Now, had the GS Act still been in place, all of this would have happened to investment firms, which should have known better, should have protected there investments, and if they neglected the signs, gone bankrupt. The problem though, is that banks were in on the deals. And when a bank loses hard like this they have insurance through AIG and if things get bad enough, FDIC. And that's when everything went to crap.
So yeah, the dismantling of GS opened the tax payers and economy to this risk, but it wasn't the cause. Nor was Clinton's affordable housing initiative.
The underlying cause is the exact same thing that lead up to the great depression: The excessive consolidation of wealth. I'm not a bleeding heart commie, but it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that when we have too much money in too few of hands, the economy suffers significantly.
Tax the wealthy. Not because it's right. Not because they can pay. Not because they have some obligation. Do it because it promotes a stronger middle class and leads to economic stability. The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, no matter how rich.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I am so terribly sorry, you were looking for the racism thread. Despite you low ID number I feel that I must tell you that here on Slashdot we don't really go in for the whole "Negro Bashing" thing. It might have been different when you started, and I really don't think it was, but now a days we don't actually bother with people's color because, well it has nothing to do with anything.
To help you understand my message I will use prejudicial terms so you can understand.
I know Kikes that are poor, Spics that dont pick fruit, Niggers that suck at sports and Faggots that don't like show tunes. See? Prejudice sucks - it doesn't help anyone at all.
Interestingly though - I now know someone that thinks 'Chocolate' is a special word for people who have dark skin. And I guess I also know someone that thinks the President is the Messiah. No one in the Theological world ever thought he was the Second Coming.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Fuck no, they would probably try them as traitors. Consider the royalist overtones of them advocating "small government" of a few with no checks and balances but close to absolute power. Listen to what is actually being said by people that call themselves "libertarians" at "tea parties" instead of what you think they stood for in 1970.
Half the time it's advocating feudalism with the extremely rich as the nobility but wrapped up in a patriotic sounding title.
I don't think Washington, Franklin and others were advocating a system where the rich nobility could do what they pleased, that is what they were fighting against!
I must have missed the day when every single person employed by the US government was fired and replaced by someone else and when the economic damage of having a government asleep at the wheel for nearly a decade vanished over night.
That's right - it never happened!
When are you guys going to wake up that you are not led by a magic nigger that you must all either love or hate on racial grounds and instead by a real human being that is a Chicago lawyer trying to do the best he can. McCain would have done many of the same things if he was in power and unconstrained by ties to donors, but may have faced less opposition if he went around firing horse judges in places where you need somebody that will actually work and other dead wood.
I think Obama will be hated far more than Carter mostly on racial grounds but also because there is no magic way for him to instantly get the USA out of the hole it has fallen into. Whoever follows after him will probably be hated for the same reason.
I think we sometimes forget the US is a lot like the EU..... the EU president would not be able to send help either if, for example, Greece's PM refused entrance.
Uh, no it isn't.
The EU president doesn't even have any troops to send. In fact, there is no such thing as "the EU president". Wikipedia:
President of the European Union (or President of Europe) could be an incorrect reference to any of:
* President of the European Council (since 1 December 2009, Herman Van Rompuy)
* President of the European Commission (since 22 November 2004, José Manuel Barroso)
* Presidency of the Council of the European Union (since 1 July 2010, Belgium)
Neither of them holds any executive powers. Especially the first two are administrative positions, basically the head organizers of their respective organisations.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"She." Kathleen Blanco was governor at the time. And was woefully inept during Katrina.
Other than Ray Nagin, there was actually a LOT of competence on the local level in small towns and such - it's just that the big mistakes were made by the big leaders. Louisiana suffered GREATLY there because of widespread ineptitude. Compare to Mississippi, where Haley Barbour did a VERY good job.
Of course, there were a lot of cultural differences where the generationally poor in New Orleans learned a hard lesson about what government won't do for them.
Compare to Gustav, when Bobby Jindal - and the people of Louisiana (and Baton Rouge in particular) - handled the situation on their own VERY well with FEMA being VERY late to the game.
Oh, and down there? It was area churches that came through more than anyone else. But you won't see that on the news.