58 days

is way too long to respond the greatest environmental disaster in decades.

When failure was not an option

From Watts Up With That? Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Dr. H. Harrison Schmitt comments on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly!

(...)

“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security.

With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Who gets the hockey stick?

There's lots of speculation about why this partnership is coming to an end after 40 years. Lots more speculation about who will get which mansion? Will Tipper get California and leave Tennessee to Al? Why the split? Did Tipper just get tired of the hypocrisy? the narcissism? or is she getting out before the lawsuits start and there's still something to get? Who gets the Prius the private jet? the hockey stick?

Ace has a good thread going and the comments are worth reading.

Update: Alan Caruba weighs in and he's not sympathetic.

After his election defeat Al Gore put in a call to David Blood, an 18-year veteran of Goldman Sachs. As stated in a new book ‘Killing Wealth’, “Together they began talking about the potential for the largest swindle in history.” In 2003, “Mr. Gore and Mr. Blood had established Generation Investment Management and created a $1 billion fund to invest in the ‘green technologies’ that would save the planet.”

Thereafter, in collusion with a handful of climate scientists, Gore led the most sophisticated and diabolical campaign to convince people and entire governments that “the Earth has a fever” due to too much carbon dioxide. It would require, he said, green technologies to save the Earth from global warming.

These are, by the way, the same technologies that have reaped millions in subsidies and grants from the U.S. government for those desperate to convince everyone that a zillion wind turbines or acres of solar collectors were a better source of energy that a few coal-fired or nuclear plants.

This is the same global warming scheme that enriched a number of university scientists like Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and government hacks like James Hansen who, as director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, started the hoax with his 1988 testimony about global warming before Congress. Their data has since been debunked.

There was, Gore told everyone, a climate crisis and, in the process he grew rich, hailed the first “carbon billionaire” for his various investments.