Tag Archives: Environment

Mr. Prez, It is Time to Lace Up the Jackboots


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
Oil Wave

A TSUNAMI OF INCOMPETENCE - You can’t swing a dead pelican without hitting gross incompetence and malfeasance in the Gulf these days. It's time for Obama to lace up the jackboots to stop it.

You can’t swing a dead pelican without hitting gross incompetence and malfeasance in the Gulf these days. BP is the most aggressively ignorant corporation on the face of the planet and the Feds have their noses so far up Tony Hayward’s poop chute it will require major surgery to remove them. Hence, some people wonder whether this is Barack Obama’s “Katrina moment”.

What a stupid question.

There are only two things that separate Obama’s oily hurricane from Bush’s merely windy kind – the human death toll is smaller and Obama actually made a speech accepting “responsibility” for getting the mess fixed. That’s a refreshing change from the man who could do no wrong, but the results are, sadly, the same.

On one level it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. There may be no way to plug the leak because a way may not exist. That’s what happens when you allow the free marketeers to write their own regulations, hire a bunch of sex-crazed crackheads to monitor them, and allow BP to act as though the rest of us are a bunch of whining pussies afraid of a little aioli crude on their seafood.

That said, there’s still plenty for St. Barry of Change to do. There should be no more of this politely asking BP to produce key data as though the we hate to intrude on their elite garden party. Using the Coast Guard to keep the world from seeing  just how poorly the Coasties are guarding the coast should be equally verboten.  And, no more of this limp-wristed enforcement that allows BP to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want either.

There’s only one thing arrogantly crapulent people like Tony Haward understand – brute force.

Obama’s job is to tell BP to jump and when they ask how high, offer them a size 13 boot liberally applied to their well-padded asses by way of explanation. To hell with the Republicans whimpering about shakedowns and stomping competition under the jackboot of anti-corporate fascism (or Communism, they never seem to know the difference). And, to hell with the deregulationists who got us here in the first place. In fact, if there was ever a case for lacing up the jackboots this is it.

And while you have them down, kick them hard and repeatedly.

Mr. Obama, the buck may stop with you, but you have to have the backbone to spend it.

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BP Gives PR a Whole New Dimension in Ineptitude


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
BP PR

BEE PEE PEE RRR-They may suck at drilling for oil, but there's an area where they are monumentally worse...getting you to believe they are responsible for anything.

There is, perhaps, only one area in which BP is more incompetent than in drilling for oil…public relations. The old adage may be that Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language, but BP’s PR department separates the two countries by speaking in some sort of crazy Esperanto that’s incomprehensible to everyone except rocks and Joe Barton.

Of course they know they suck at it. They even hired The Big Dick’s™ former campaign secretary, Anne Womack-Kolton, as their PR guru…now stop laughing, they were serious.

Since then they’ve banished their original plutonium-tongued orator, CEO Tony “I Want My Life Back” Hayward, in favor of BP exec Darryl Willis – who inexplicably wears an orange prison jumpsuit in his advertisements – to look all contrite and humblish. But as Alabama mayor Tony Kennon points out, making empty promises and lying about it isn’t quite the right formula for winning friends and influencing government.

The public has been Pavlovianly conditioned to expect oil companies to lie. No one except a few Republicans expect such upstanding, forthright corporations to do otherwise. But if your entire PR strategy is to outright lie, you need to learn two things.

First, make an attempt to make the lies sound real. Exponentially misunderestimating spill damage and denying there are oil plumes long after every university and high school science lab has confirmed them is a non-starter. Throw in at least a grain of truth.

Oiling for Dollars

OILING FOR DOLLARS - Why the damage escrow account doesn't matter.

Try something like, “Yes, there are hundreds of miles of oil plumes, but in relation to how much of them would fit into a tea cup, they really are negligible.”

The second lesson is don’t appear to be hiding anything. It only makes people dig harder and increases the number of lies.

Somehow, BeePee managed to enlist the help of the Coast Guard and local law enforcement agencies to chase off the media in an attempt to keep…shhhh…the big secret – there’s been an oil spill. WHO KNEW?!!

Any random third-grader with a passing knowledge of that slut Hanna Montana appearing on TMZ knows that if you try to hide something juicy the media will hound you to the ends of the Earth and beyond.

The best thing the Beepsters could do is throw off the blanket of secrecy and let the sun shine in. Embrace their crapulence. Not only should they show clips of the oiled birds in their commercials, they should tout the fact that they are well on their way to creating the largest environmental disaster the world has ever known.

Now that’s some good old-fashioned Cheneyesque PR!

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As We See It: You Know You Suck When Your Name is BP


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

Cover the Earth

BP Slathers it on Thick

BP Fish

So Much for the Loaves and Fishes

Tony Hayward Gets It

TONY HAYWARD REALLY GETS THE SUFFERING IN THE GULF - "I say old chap, do you have any 10W40?"

New BP Recycling Program

BP's New Recycling Program for Spilled Oil

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A Dark Ride Into a Dangerous and Unknown Future


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

It’s been 40+ days and nights since the doomed Deepwater Horizon ark begot The Big Ooze™. BP has exhausted enough of its supply of lame-arsed ‘emergency fixes’ they’re hiring The Big Dick’s™ former PR Czarina so poor BP CEO, Tony Howard, can get “his life back”.

There is no way to describe the revolting arrogance of Howard and his enablers in and out of the private sector. He may want his life back, but thousands of fishermen, resort operators, and just plain folk along the Gulf coast would like their way of life back. Like the botched messes left behind the Exxon Valdez spill, Katrina, and dozens of other failures it’s unlikely to happen in their lifetimes.

Pols and pundits are likening Mr. Brownie’s Boss’s screwing of the pooch named Katrina to The Messiah’s inability to walk on oil. There are similarities and differences, but the path of both disasters was paved with equal incompetence.

Bush the Lesser ran afoul of an unpreventable – though not, as he claimed, unpredictable – natural disaster and grandiosely failed to handle the aftermath with even a smidgen of credibility. The O-Man ran afoul of a preventable man-made disaster that he can now do little about. They are both the victims and perpetrators of the cascading failures of America to make marginally intelligent decisions for several decades.

The electorate consistently votes for the pencil-thin moustache with the best pickup line. Once elected, those suave and de-boner pols go about appeasing the free market Gods at any and all costs, including loss of life or environmental disaster on a global scale. We have outsourced our governance to a cabal of ruthless thugs who would sell thousands of people’s lives to “get their life back” – along with that hefty campaign contribution or quarterly bonus.

The problem of government is not its size and the insistence that the private sector is any better is writ large in dripping oil lights in the dark Gulf sky if only we care to look.

Whether you believe in it or not, the concept of global warming is perhaps the best metaphor. Generations of bad decision making, incompetent risk taking, corporate thuggery, and Le Grande Ineptitude has brought us to a place where there is no way to reverse the process and no way to fix it either.

We’re simply along for a dark ride into a dangerous and unknown future suspended in varying degrees of denial.

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Ramdomness: Obamacare Style


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
Dog Bag

YO QUIERO PURSE - In hindsight, Versace realized their purse would never sell in Middle America. Click photo >>

This Month in the Journal of the AMA

Just Your General WTFitude

What This World Needs is a Good 5 Cent Robot

Ow, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark!

Rat's Ass

HE DOESN'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS - Dick Cheney spent months hunting in the wild, but finally bagged his best trophy closer to home. Click photo >>

You Know that a Career in Crime Isn’t for You When…

And People Wonder Why Americans are the World’s Top Consumers

Japanialia

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