I do believe this calls for a song!

Lax regulations and you - partners in catastrophe:

Ah, I see the Mellon Scaife gazette is trying to spice up their corporatist propaganda with silly music and dramatizations. How precious.

@kronosposeidon, not sure I get why people think that oil spill is the effect of lax federal oversight. I do believe oil companies have strict regulations. If you don't believe it, start an oil drilling expedition in your backyard and see how long that goes before you're paid a visit by Uncle Sam.

The oil company should be held accountable for fucking up our ocean! But all the regulation in the world most likely wouldn't prevent that.

@blankfist, even Ken Salazar admitted that the Dept. of the Interior was lax in overseeing offshore drilling activities. Just doing a simple Google search yielded these articles, among many, many others:

- Lax Oil Industry Oversight? That's an Understatement

- Legal Briefing: Federal Agency Sued for Lax Oversight in BP Spill

- As administration official admits lax oversight, scientists watching where Gulf oil spill headed next

I'm certainly not blaming it all on the federal government (even though most of my right wing co-workers are already saying its somehow Obama's fault). The majority of guilt lays with BP, Halliburton, and Transocean. But if our government is going to do a half-assed job of monitoring these operations, then it has to shoulder some of the blame too.

@kronosposeidon, agree to disagree about government having to share some of the blame. I don't personally see how it should be their job, but I know I'm in the minority on here. The blame, in my eyes, falls squarely and absolutely on BP, Halliburton and Transocean. I hope we don't give them an out by creating a "we need more government intervention" smokescreen that will lift blame from them and place it on government.

I'm actually in agreement with @blankfist. This is BP, Transocean, and Halliburton's responsibility. They need to provide the funding for all cleanup efforts, including costs incurred by government agencies (like the Coast Guard) in the course of the clean up efforts, plus we're somewhat relying on BP to clean up the oil spill because it's not like we have a federal oil spill clean up team.

To the degree that this is government's fault (and blankfist, you must be aware that that's the Republican party line on this topic), it seems to purely be in that they didn't enforce the existing safety regulations, and stuck instead to that libertarian ideal -- they just took BP's word that they were doing things safely. Following the Republican ideal, they even did so despite having evidence that BP was lying.

The real political battle will probably be about that $75 million statutory limit on BP's liability for the spill. Democrats want to raise or eliminate it, Republicans like Ran Paul go on TV and say shit like "accidents happen", and generally oppose raising or eliminating the limit.

I'm on the "why would there ever be a limit" side of that argument, BTW. That's one regulation that just flat out needs to go.

Moving this video to blankfist's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.