is the White House purposefully sabotaging emergency efforts to save vital wetlands in order to serve a radical political agenda?

I don't think so. I frankly don't think they're that smart -- I call him "Barry Lackwit" for good reason. I think what we're seeing right now is exactly what it looks like on the surface: bureaucrats who are sticking to their routine power games and rigid regulation-enforcement because they truly don't understand what a disaster the Gulf Coast is facing. To allow the dredging plan to go forward would violate the Third Rule of Bureaucratic Survival, so they're not going to do it.

As a resident of the Gulf Coast, who has watched the destruction of our thriving fisheries, and our largely safe underwater well drilling for many years, I tend to feel that this kind of consistent stupidity is probably deliberate. Obama's ultimate plan is to nationalize our oil industry, which is why he wants our remedial efforts to fail.

Marianne Matthews

I can not understand this man Obama, does he want to destroy America or is he just stupid???

Marianne, you live on the gulf? Where is the anger, why no big protests?? You folk must kick back, I live in coastal North Carolina and if I could help you folks I would, promise you that when the oil reaches us we will raise some tar heel hell and God help anyone who tries to stop us from saving our coasts.

Why is our coast guard in bed with bp???

is the White House purposefully sabotaging emergency efforts to save vital wetlands in order to serve a radical political agenda?

Those are rhetorical questions, no?

David ... I agree that "we folk" on the Gulf Coast must kick back. Some of us already are ... like Louisiana's Gov. Jindal. I wish that I were 20 years younger so that I could take a more active role. But I'm 82 years old, and my aged white horse is out to pasture. I can't march in protest marches either, because of arthritis. The only way I can agitate these days is in print, which I'm trying to do, and our kindly blogging host is allowing me to do here. But I urge you to remember Pastor Niemoller's famous plaint about the Nazis coming for various groups during the Second World War. His last line read, "And then they came for me, and there was no one left to defend me." I am deeply afraid that this can happen again, if we don't "all hang together."

Marianne Matthews

Ya know, it may be that this sand derm stuff just don't work and that your new wingnut hero Jindal is just engaging in disaster theater... but I guess that just screws up the conservative narrative.
Help me out here... was Jindal or ANY conservative concerned about oil rig safety BEFORE the explosion-when it would have actually done some good?
Didn't think so.

As Auric Goldfinger said, "Once is happenstyance; twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

In answer to our Soros troll, stnetools:

The Obama admin CERTAINLY didn't care about rig safety. More to the point, the O-bots also rejected Dutch skimmer ships with a combined capacity greater than the flow rate from the well- in other words they would have done a LOT of good had Obama not blocked them.

The oil industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in America. Producing oil in great depths of water is always a risky operation, yet such is the expertise of the major industry operators, that there have been less than eight major blowouts globally-- GLObally-- in the last forty years. One of them was the IXtoc spill in the Gulf, a rig operated by PEMEX, I believe, though my memory may be tricking me here. But Pemex is the nationalized oil company of Mexico, and Venezuela, the other possible owner of Ixtoc, is the nationalized oil company of Venezuela.

At any rate, by far the greatest majority of the water-bourne oil spills are from tankers.

You know, there is a treasure-house of information for you folks who want to feed your indignation against petroleum production if you will contact the American Petroleum Institute. They have hard information out the bazoo about the industry, the production techniques, the chances of error or accident during production. And they'd love to send you some.

It makes me wonder why Obama formed this investigation committee to "find out what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon," and not one member of the committee is a petroleum scientist, or production expert of any kind. They're all environmentalists out to prove that we shouldn't produce any petroleum or natural gas, on land or on the water. And the mainstream media, except for the Wall Street Journal, are also keeping mum about the huge proven discoveries of natural gas and petroleum in the Bakken Shale, in Texas and Oklahoma and the Marcellus Shale up in the Northeast, just waiting, right here within our own borders, to be produced, safely and expertly. The Marcellus shale deposit is so large it reaches into Canadian territory, and the Canadians are already tapping it, to their own benefit.

Doesn't it make you wonder why this Administration doesn't want proven reserves on land to be produced, why it places so many obstacles in the path of the oil industry when it wants to produce these reserves in the lower forty-eight and in Alaska?

Oil and gas, after all, are nature's green energy. They are just older and more compressed.

Marianne Matthews