It's Finally Time To Comment On The Magician & This Oil Spill...

I have done my best to give this thing time. I have done my best to not be reactionary. I have done my best to not be swayed by media sources. I have still reached the following conclusion, though:

I am not impressed with this administration's efforts to date. While you cannot accuse them of doing nothing, and I do see that significant efforts are being made, I feel that these efforts were not undertaken as quickly as they should have been and while in an "unprecedented" volume, the efforts I am seeing are still not enough. While your efforts on any task may be the most by volume that have ever been done in history, it does not automatically mean that you are doing enough by default.

The Magician says that they explored every alternative, have done all that they could have, and would have tried anything that they know would have worked. I argue that they could have authorized the building of sand barriers along the coastlines much sooner than they did, could have better ensured that more resources were fighting in the water and not waiting until the oil reached the shore. When you are in a crisis, it is wise in the best of circumstances to not undertake efforts that you know will have no effect on the situation, but at the same time, if there is a chance that something will have an effect, you try it. You don't just sit there and wait for a better alternative to be suggested.

I must admit, also, I am bothered by the fact that The Magician has not had a direct conversation with BP's CEO at this point. I don't think the American people are asking you to pick up the phone and shout at the guy, but they are asking you to take command of the situation in the manner that you claim to have done. How do you command a situation when you have not had a direct conversation with the person that is in charge of the most important part of your operations?

I think that we need to take a long look at the fact that while drilling at these "incredible" depths, there are not enough safeguards in place, obviously, to make sure that this does not happen. We should take a long hard look at our drilling policies as a whole. While I understand some people's argument that a lapse in regulation and governance is to blame, we also need to look at the market and supply and demand as it relates to our current environmental policies. We're still using gas, which requires oil. We don't want to see oil rigs off our coastlines, so we force the oil companies to drill further and further out at deeper and deeper depths, then get upset when they cannot repair wells that are too deep. Do you not think that BP would much rather be drilling oil that is under the beach than under a mile of ocean? Why aren't they? Because we've told them that they can't, yet at the same time, demand low gas prices.

While I do appreciate the fact that The Magician has visited the area, I do still make the argument that he has not done so enough. Regardless of the fact of what he can and cannot do personally while there, the American people want to see him down there fixing this thing. A three hour stay on four hours of flight time so that he can get back home for the holiday weekend does not impress me.

Again, whether or not he is effecting the situation, the people of the Gulf Region would have at least liked to have known he was in the area, working well into the night and early morning with local officials, not see him stroll on the beach for a few hours and then go home. How in the world does a politician like The Magician not understand that? Also, I still think The Magician flew to California more times for campaigning this election season than he flew to the Gulf Region since this spill started. That says a lot to me.

The bottom line, Mr. Magician, is that we are not asking you to perform for the cable shows, we are asking you to perform for the American people, especially those that are being directly effected by this oil spill. Sometimes, when you need to get things done, you just don't take the time to figure out exactly whose butt to kick, you kick them all until people and resources get moving and start fixing the problem. Empowering local resources, moving federal resources, taking the time to be cool, calm and collected, you are doing, but commanding, you are not.

What Is Wrong With This Country?!

What is wrong with this country? The three main headlines today are as follows – 1.) John Edwards Admits He Fathered Rielle Hunter’s Child - 2.) Conan Signs $45M Deal To Leave Network and - 3.) The New Heidi Montag. While most days when I pop open MSN for the first time (it’s my home page), I shake my head and think to myself, “…and we wonder why religious fundamentalists want us dead”, but today takes it to entirely new level.

The man who would have been Vice President and just as much a single heartbeat away from the Presidency as Sarah Palin had an affair while his wife was battling cancer, fathered a child with his mistress then took some very politician-like steps to cover up the whole thing, including a very Willy Jeff-esque denial with later denial retraction. It seems as if he even went as far as to have one of his staffers ready to take on the role as the baby’s father. 

While John Edwards is the latest in a long line of disgraced politicians from both sides of the aisle, this again leads me to ask the question, “Why do we tolerate this type of behavior from our politicians? Why do they feel that they can continually get away with being on the very bottom step of the moral ladder?”

This behavior is unacceptable and we should hold our politicians to a better standard in this country, yet it seems there will be a good percentage of people out there who will not only defend this behavior but try to convince us that a politician’s actions in their personal life have no bearing on the job they do, or the person that they are. I, for one, beg to differ.

What has gone on with Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien and NBC is a fantastic example of how we view agreements and honesty in this country. While it is our right to change our mind here in America, I also think that we are too easily ready to let people out of their agreements. Bankruptcy is a fine example of this. You get to run up debt, promise to pay it, but then get to say, “Oh, no, I don’t want to pay it after all,” and come up with an excuse as to why you can’t. We, as a society, and as an economy, should be holding people to better standards than that.

If you look at the history of our government, you will see time and time again, this same type of back-tracking and revisionist history that we as Americans should not allow to be forced upon us. I, for one, do not believe that agreements are made to be broken. America, however, seems to feel differently. We allow people, businesses, and our entire government to back out of agreements that we have made way too easily.

Who do you think that Al Qaeda is thinking of when they form their description of the average American? Heidi Montag, that’s who. Poor troubled, vain, oblivious and self-centered Heidi, whose coming out party with her new ten plastic surgeries is taking up valuable space on my news page.

While I will be the last to condone the efforts of our enemies, we also must take a few minutes to try to understand where they are coming from. Think if every morning you had to wonder how you were going to eat, or how you were going to get medicine for your kids, whether your house would be standing when you got home from a job that paid you pennies a day, and/or if a rebel army, or even your own government was going to come and take you away, drag off your family, etc. etc. etc. – and then you turn on the TV and there is poor little Heidi Montag, the picture of America, talking about how she was teased as a child and how hard it was for her growing up, and how hard is to be poor little Heidi Montag. You’d want to wipe her off of the face of the earth, too, America. Don’t lie and tell me that you wouldn’t.

We have reached such a level of complacency in this country because we don’t have to fight for anything anymore. We have truly lost sight of what is important and what should be the main focus in our lives, and honestly, what should be the focus of our free press. Your children should be learning about all the wonderful things the world has to offer from arts to music to literature, but instead, the best that we can offer up as a nation is a two-part interview with Heidi Montag so that she can explain to us why she felt she needed a new look to the extent of spending 10 hours under the knife. Go America!

We can really do better as a nation and as a people…