Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Even their lies are obvious!
Was there really any doubt that the ban was a purely political decision in the first place?
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.
-----
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
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.
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
You know, if you quote latin names for logical fallacies to sound superior, you should perhaps learn to identify said fallacies first. There is not a single ad hominem fallacy in there. Just a bunch of plain old - and much needed - insults. Not to speak of the fact that an argumentum ad hominem is first of all a rhetorical figure, but not necessarily in all cases a fallacy.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.