Oil Spill Commission Planned By White House

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An administration official says the White House will establish a presidential commission to investigate the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

President Barack Obama will establish the commission by executive order. It will be similar to panels created to investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a public announcement.

No current government employee or elected official will be eligible to serve on the commission, the official said. Other details weren't immediately available.

Comments

[Telemachus]

01:49 PM on 05/18/2010

Ooooh, a commission. Tony Hayward must be shaking in his tiny, effeminate boots.

[cheetahpea]

11:27 AM on 05/18/2010

THIS PRODUCT COULD CLEAN UP THE OIL IN THE GULF.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRvOOHxusrg

[WhatChanged]

08:45 AM on 05/18/2010

Another freaking commission. How wonderful.

Maybe it would have been a good idea to have the commission before Obama opened thousands of miles of US coastline to drilling - and before Obama told us all how environmentally safe offshore drilling is.

Maybe the commission should look into the money that politicians, including Obama, took from BP.

What a sham

[Renifer]

11:48 AM on 05/18/2010

Obama did take money from BP employees, and if you look at OpenSecrets, you will find that it was individual employees, not the company itself, many of them from the Alternative Energy division. Feel free to fact check.

I am in agreement with the sentiment of deep disappointment regarding Obama opening up the coast to drilling.

[dawlishgal]

08:10 AM on 05/18/2010

Don't just "plan." DO IT NOW!

[onedayaat]

09:53 AM on 05/18/2010

AGREED!!!

What about plans to stop the oil from gushing out?

[PigsOnSoma]

08:09 AM on 05/18/2010

And while you're at it please remove anybody from any industry now in the regulatory agencies for the products they are meant to oversee. For example - get big beef out of the FDA!

[dfdougherty]

07:41 AM on 05/18/2010

Thank God, a commission is going to solve the problem. This administration is starting to look pretty incompetent.

[dashcat]

05:01 AM on 05/18/2010

Is the Federal Commission going to go back and read all the data from the oil spills off the California Coast? That ought to give them some pretty good info on why drilling was banned here.

Gosh, not only has BP polluted the entire Gulf but they are losing all that oil they covet so much. It just keeps pouring out

[John Smith123]

02:33 AM on 05/18/2010

Why federal govt is giving a free ride to BP's propaganda?
In fact, the Obama administration approved this oil well without the environmental study.
They have tacitly supported the false under reporting of the amount of oil spill.
Why the federal govt is not forcing BP to disclose the the video of the oil spill?
Why federal govt is allowing BP to use toxic oil dispersants, while there are safer alternatives?
American engineers can repair delicate instruments thousands of miles up in the sky. Yet, the federal govt has not utilized advice and expertise from the military and NASA and make a concerted effort to stop this oil leak soon.

It was ironic that Obama was accusing of finger pointing of oil industry executives, while the federal regulators are also guilty of neglect. If these Democrats cannot stand up to the oil industry, Republicans are totally beholden to the oil industry with their shallow slogan "Drill baby drill".

It is sad to see the great rich diverse natural environment of America is being destroyed by the greedy oil industry, while the politicians are pathetically enabling the same. Why the so called "Conservatives" do not want to conserve the natural environment, instead want to destroy nature for short term greedy profit?

[onlythetruthcounts]

01:20 AM on 05/18/2010

The guy on 60 Minutes said that he told his boss that rubber from the BOV was coming out with the mud, and he said no problem. He said a lot of other stuff too.

[Renifer]

01:03 AM on 05/18/2010

Thom Hartmann wrote:
"The Times-Picayune reported last week that an oil worker who survived the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon.... said a key safety measure was not being implemented on the rig.

Lawyer Scott Bickford said his client claims a column of mud was being removed from an exploratory well before it was sealed with a top cement cap.
Halliburton confirmed the top cap was not installed. The column of heavy mud is one of the core defenses relied upon by drillers to prevent explosions.

They cut corners to get the job done quickly.
There were 6 senior British Petroleum execs on the rig at the time of the explosion, celebrating a recent safety award the company had gotten, which requires coordination and planning.

Were drillers and Halliburton told that the execs were going to be there on April 20th for the party, and to hurry it up? They skipped the time-consuming step of putting the mud plug in and went straight to cementing, the fatal mistake that let the giant methane out, blowing up the rig.

Who were these six executives? How far out was their visit planned?

Why is nobody talking about who these executives were, and nobody is telling the life and family stories of the eleven workers who died in the rig explosion."

http://www.thomhartmann.com/

[WhatChanged]

08:46 AM on 05/18/2010

Obama's MMS people gave BP permission to clear the mud and seawater out of the well head area before pouring the concrete

[Renifer]

11:39 AM on 05/18/2010

I think that we can agree that Obama and Salazar should have replaced every single person at the MMS. Drilling without permits should mean the end of Salazar's career. I lived in Colorado when Salazar was campaigning, and I met him and spoke with him at a rally in Boulder, and I didn't like him then, and I campaigned for Mike Miles. Salazar is a rancher at heart, and I get the sense that he doesn't really care about the environment all that much, which is a typical Colorado rancher attitude. I was very disappointed that Obama picked him as Secretary of the Interior. Salazar said that he cleaned house with the MMS. Now I wonder what, if anything, he did. My guess is that Obama took his word for it. Now we know that things didn't really change from the Bush admin spirit of "do unto others, then split" when the MMS was a brothel. Remember, schiese always flows downhill, hence the "firing" of the MMS head. I saw to Obama, fire Salazar and put in a real environmental activist. I blame Obama for not cleaning house faster and more ruthlessly.

[Indra]

12:12 AM on 05/18/2010

Commission eh! Yeah that will really solve the problem. Hahahahahahah!

[horsey]

12:24 AM on 05/18/2010

it's actually a good idea but you obviously know very little about good ideas..

[jcaunter]

01:14 AM on 05/18/2010

A good idea would be nationalizing these companies and using the proceeds to begin repairing the lives of the people along the Gulf Coast and to begin restoring the Gulf's environment immediately.

Doing a "commission" for this leak just reinforces everyone's opinion that Obama is an indecisive, spineless shill.

[TheBaffler]

11:09 PM on 05/17/2010

Commissions tend to be a cute way of pretending to deal with a problem while actually doing nothing. We already know what happened. It's indictments and trials that we need.

[playon]

12:05 AM on 05/18/2010

My sentiments exactly. We don't need a fig leaf commission, we need a criminal investigation.

[onlythetruthcounts]

01:25 AM on 05/18/2010

Exactly, the crimes have already happened and they wanna investigate some more. Time for action. Is Big O immune to caffeine or something? What's it take to get him stirred up about something so important.

[coalgaggifts]

10:41 PM on 05/17/2010

Oil spills are a crisis, but look at how oil is necessary for transportation. Alternative fuel sources are still in the making. But what to do with the abundant supply of coal?
www.coalgaggifts.com

[Mensch99]

10:51 PM on 05/17/2010

Uh, pollute ourselves to death with it?

[yathink]

11:07 PM on 05/17/2010

Leave it in the ground and put wind farms on the mountains in West Virginia and solar panels on every house in America.

[onlythetruthcounts]

01:33 AM on 05/18/2010

I'll take my 75% tax break for solar panels whenever the people in power wanna get serious. I want a huge tax incentive to buy electric because in a lot of cases it is not cheap. When it's more practical to buy electric, that's what you do. That's a start in the right direction as opposed to more drilling (I'm looking at you Big O.).....

[yathink]

10:12 PM on 05/17/2010

Oh, goody--commissions are where scandals go to die. I am so fed up with this mess, I am screaming. I just wrote to the white house:

"Mr. President:

You need to lead this country into a better, cleaner energy future. And that means not making deals with members of congress who will maybe support some sort of partial improvement.

That a foreign corporation, British Petroleum (BP) can tell US scientists that they cannot take measurements near the outflow of the devastating blow out of the Deepwater Horizon well is horrific.

BP must be prosecuted and the executives of that corporation and Transocean and Halliburton need to be held criminally liable for what looks like the biggest environmental disaster this planet has ever seen.

I hope you or your staff saw the 60 Minutes report last night. If not, please find the video.

The employees at the Minerals Management Service who were burrowed into the civil service at the end of the Bush administration need to be fired--now. And Ken Salazar has too many ties to big oil for the sake of solving this mess.

You either believe in saving this planet or you carry on politics as usual in this country.

It is your choice."

[namwith]

09:53 PM on 05/17/2010

I'm disturbed by something with this whole disaster - what are the financial benefits to BP if they didn't completely 100% seal the well?

At first glance it seems like its in BP's best interest to stop the spill, but there are some complex factors at work here concerning money that I've been thinking about. Namely that if the well was completely plugged and sealed for good (no oil at all), the 'relief' wells would serve no function other than to continue drilling for oil in the same spot.

If BP wants to continue to drill in this extremely lucrative oil deposit, they basically have to stall until they can complete the relief wells. Because if they 100% plug it before the relief wells are drilled they will very likely be told by the govn't to stop drilling until an assessment is made, litigation etc. Which could take years. How much is that deposit worth to BP over the course of 5 years? How much would it cost BP if they can't drill there for up to a decade? Probably a lot.

Food for thought.

[4KixAfter6]

01:04 AM on 05/18/2010

I said the same thing yesterday. They're stalling till they get the second well drilled. They wouldn't have the support to drill the second if the first well was capped.

[Lefty08]

03:22 AM on 05/18/2010

Yes, totally agree. I've posted similar thoughts on other threads & got thrashed.
Glad you're here posting. Let me be your first fan.