Posted by
William D. Dannenmaier on Saturday, June 12, 2010 4:35:47 PM
Responding to the oil disaster in the Gulf, President Obama appointed a special presidential bi-partisan commission to investigate the situation. The co-leaders of the commissioner are former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and William K. Reilly, former Chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency. Because of the emergency their report is due in six months. Both are lawyers. Commenting on the lack of any experts on drilling or petroleum engineers to my bride, Sheila replied, “Their job is to fix the blame – probably to Bush – not the problem.”
It was nice for Obama to take time off from his major tasks of playing basketball and golf, fund raising, campaigning and criticizing the people of the United States to other countries to address the gulf problem – his way. And he did it quickly, after only a few weeks, after all, it took Bush three days to realize his people were not doing the job and visit New Orleans and the Democratic Governor a month to ask for assistance, as federal law requires. But Bush did not have as many important jobs to do at the time of the disaster. Obama will get to it, probably right after he visits the flooding disasters in Nashville and surrounding counties. (Bush ignored federal law by sending in the Coast Guard, which rescued some 20,000 people.)
Governor Jindal of Louisiana was unhappy with the two month delay in receiving approval from Obama’s people to build a barrier in the Gulf to protect the Louisiana wetlands. Perhaps this is a politically polite way of refusing to permit Louisiana to help herself. We have replaced medical care with ObamaCare, now we are replacing the Gulf of Mexico with the Gulf of Obama.
Obama wants BP to pay the salaries of all oil workers unemployed as a result of his (Obama’s) decision to halt off-shore drilling. Does that mean that President Obama believes the Federal Government should pay the salaries of all workers in Alaska, Colorado and Montana whose salaries have been stopped or marginalized because of President Obama’s refusal to permit drilling into known oil reserves in those states?
More recent headlines reported that President Obama was frantically busy sending out memos for action to various departments. It made me wonder what has happened to his 32 Czars. I have not heard any mention of them during the Gulf crisis. In fact I haven’t heard of any of them doing any work at all. I was wondering how much they are being paid for doing nothing, at least nothing publicly. First, I looked up Michelle Obama’s 21 person staff. Susan Sher, her chief of staff, makes $172,200 a year, I expected the Czars would make more since they are running the country, not a staff of twenty servants. I was wrong again. The highest paid Czar makes $172,200 a year. Number 3, Czar Nancy-Ann DeParle makes only $158,500 for overseeing the nation’s entire health system. Seems unfair: if the Czars do anything.
An article I read recently named four men serving long penitentiary terms at Leavenworth for killing “civilians” in Iraq. That is a problem for all combat military: courts, military or otherwise, whose members have never experienced combat have no basis for judging men who were in combat. In combat, it is always your life or someone else’s life, and everyone I knew preferred that it would be someone else’s. In Korea our attitude was, better safe than sorry. Experienced friends tell me it was the same in Europe and Asia in WW II. In Iraq and now in Afghanistan, our soldiers are being sent to fight enemies who do not wear uniforms. One of the men in prison killed an unarmed man in civilian clothing who appeared to be spotting American positions for enemy fighters. Everyone I knew who served in combat, including me, would have killed the apparent spotter. He was behaving suspiciously in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Come to think of it, according to our modern courts all surviving World War II veterans who served in the bomber commands should be imprisoned immediately. They killed hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children in Germany and Japan. Infantrymen should not be exempt either: we killed lots of people we considered enemies without reading them their Miranda rights.
Affirmative action strikes again. We received an advertisement from Direct TV which gave us the wonderful option of receiving “over 150 channels” for the bargain price of $29.99 a month for 12 months. Sheila, who can read, noticed that on the back, in Spanish, was an offer of 150 channels for 12 months at the cheaper price of $24.99 a month.