The prospect of losing oil drilling revenue was a major factor in their decision.
More evidence of creep like governance?
Obama seems to have a serious character flaw - inability to tell the truth and a need to off load blame. There is nothing new about a politician occasionally lying, twisting facts or blaming others but this president is habitual. You decide. (See 1 below.)
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One man's meat is anothers poison. (See 2 below.)
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Giant Eagle advertises Sweet Tammy's and is looking to expand their baked products in 8 more stores. You can order Sweet Tammy's delectables on line: SweetTammys-Com (See 3 below.)
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Semper FI! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1))Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies
By NEIL KING JR. And KEITH JOHNSON
Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore oil drilling.
The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea, relying on an "irrational" environmental analysis of the risks of offshore drilling.
The April 2009 ruling stunned both the administration and the oil industry, and threatened to delay or cancel dozens of offshore projects in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
Despite its pro-environment pledges, the Obama administration urged the court to revisit the decision. Politically, it needed to push ahead with conventional oil production while it expanded support for renewable energy.
BP's daily spend on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill continues to grow through the crisis. Here is the daily spending in millions of dollars.
Another reason: money. In its arguments to the court, the government said that the loss of royalties on the oil, estimated at almost $10 billion, "may have significant financial consequences for the federal government."
The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed its decision and allowed drilling in the Gulf to proceed—including on BP PLC's now-infamous Macondo well, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.
The Obama administration's actions in the court case exemplify the dilemma the White House faced in developing its energy policy. In his presidential campaign, President Obama criticized the Bush administration for being too soft on the oil industry and vowed to support greener energy forms.
But, once in office, President Obama ended up backing offshore drilling, bowing to political and fiscal realties, even as his administration's own scientists and Democratic lawmakers warned about its risks.
After the Macondo well blew out, sinking the Deepwater Horizon rig and causing a catastrophic spill, Mr. Obama said his administration should have been more vigilant in handling the oil industry. "More needed to be done, and more needs to be done" to tighten oversight, he told reporters recently.
Still, the administration defends its intervention in the court case, and says the ruling made it look more cautiously at whether to open new areas to offshore drilling. It pins blame on the Bush administration for pursuing a policy for deep-offshore drilling "that was driven by one principle: open everything," said White House spokesman Ben LaBolt.
"Over the course of the year," he said, "the Interior Department conducted a review process to produce an offshore strategy that closed a number of environmentally sensitive areas from exploration and put in place a process to explore where additional production could take place." Since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, he added, "we are implementing top to bottom reforms to ensure that a disaster like this is never repeated."
Michel Olsen, a former official in the Bush Interior Department, defended the previous administration's offshore approach. "Our policy was founded on the requirements of the law," he said. "It wasn't just to give industry whatever it wanted."
Mr. Obama inherited a slew of energy challenges when he took office in early 2009. The agency within the Interior Department charged with overseeing the oil and gas industry, the Minerals Management Service, was reeling from scandals. An inspector general's report months earlier had described rigged contracts, drug use and sex between MMS employees and industry representatives.
Along with cleaning up the MMS, Interior had to wrestle with a five-year drilling plan the Bush administration had filed just days before leaving office. The plan sought to open the waters in most of the U.S. outer-continental shelf to oil and gas exploration between 2010 and 2015. The push into ever deeper waters in the Gulf, which began in earnest in the mid-1990s, reflected the reality that drilling in shallower waters was largely tapped out.
To buy time and work out its own policy preferences, the Obama administration reopened the Bush plan for public comment.
The tensions in the administration's own deliberations were clear from the start. Mr. Obama's Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, quickly picked a fight with the oil industry when he retroactively withdrew 77 oil-and-gas lease sales in Utah that the Bush administration had approved in its final weeks. The move drew applause from environmentalists and criticism from oil companies.
In April 2009, Mr. Salazar went on a four-city tour to discuss the nation's offshore energy future. His first stop: A solar-powered convention center in Atlantic City, N.J., where he touted the potential of offshore wind power to supply clean electricity to the eastern seaboard. Boosting offshore renewable energy had become a "top priority" for Interior at the express wish of Mr. Salazar, who had issued a secretarial order to that effect just three weeks earlier.
But, before the packed house of politicians, activists and interested citizens, Mr. Salazar also defended the need for more offshore oil and gas. "The reality is that we have oil and gas potential in significant ways, especially in" the Gulf of Mexico, he said, according to a video of the event.
The administration was apprehensive about expanding offshore drilling. But it also hoped to get a legislative package on climate change through Congress. At the center of the bill was a controversial and potentially expensive provision requiring companies to acquire permits to release carbon dioxide.
To navigate Capitol Hill, the administration needed to strike a balance between the "green energy" projects favored by environmentalists and liberals, and the traditional oil and gas projects favored by Republicans, whose support would be crucial in the Senate. Continuing to promote offshore drilling was part of that bargain.
But the federal appeals court decision, which came just days after Mr. Salazar's tour, threatened to throw a wrench in that process. The case was brought two years earlier by indigenous Alaskans and a coalition of environmental groups. It challenged a Bush-era plan to lease large chunks of offshore Alaska to oil drilling.
The groups argued the strategy didn't adequately account for the whole range of environmental perils raised by oil drilling on the outer shelf.
The appeals court agreed, ruling that the federal program was based on "irrational" analysis. The government's own assessment, the court found, weighed only the impact of oil washing up on shorelines. In a foreshadowing of the post-spill debate, the court noted that the analysis didn't address the impact of a significant spill further out at sea.
At first, Mr. Salazar used the ruling as a way to draw a distinction between his approach and that of the Bush White House. Blasting what he called "the previous administration's failure to apply the law," Mr. Salazar said in a statement that he planned to "fix the problems" the court identified. He would do so not by firing managers or shaking up MMS, but by subjecting offshore drilling to heightened scrutiny. Those fixes, he said, would "put oil and gas leasing decisions back on a firm scientific footing."
Still, the ruling presented an immediate problem. It threw into uncertainty hundreds of millions of dollars in drilling projects already under way in the Gulf—the source of about a third of the country's domestic oil supply and the lifeblood of the regional economy. In addition, the government had another big lease sale for Gulf offshore acreage coming up in August.
In its response, the government noted that the oil and gas from approved exploration and drilling projects had a combined value of $7.65 billion. Among the existing leases, the petition noted, was the March 2008 Lease Sale #206. That deal included BP's acquisition, for $34 million, of the acreage encompassing the Macondo well.
Voiding existing leases, the Justice Department argued on behalf of Interior, would cause "severe and unnecessary disruptions" to oil and gas activity in the Gulf of Mexico, and could push companies and drilling rigs toward other nations with less onerous regulations.
A day after the administration's petition, the industry's main lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, made its own case echoing the government's arguments. "The significance of [Gulf of Mexico] activities under the five-year program cannot be overstated," the API argued.
In late July, the D.C. appeals court responded to the government petition by clarifying its earlier ruling. Only drilling in Alaska, the case's main focus, would be stopped. Activity in the Gulf of Mexico could continue while the administration carried out a new environmental analysis to address the court's concerns about deep-water spills.
Mr. Salazar began to express confidence that he had resolved the problems within the Minerals Management Service that had led to poor oversight of offshore drilling. In September, in testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee, he listed the steps he had taken to make sure ethical lapses "don't occur in the future."
Still, inside the administration there was debate about the right policy for offshore drilling.
On Sept. 21, Jane Lubchenco, Mr. Obama's handpicked head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, filed a lengthy comment on the Bush-era drilling plan still under review. She cited several concerns, including the government's tendency to underestimate the likelihood of oil spills and to downplay their potential environmental impacts. She also noted the government's penchant for cribbing from older, often outdated, environmental analyses.
She cited a Congressional Research Service study from earlier in the year. "The threat of oil spills raises the question," the report said, "of whether U.S. officials have the necessary resources at hand to respond to a major spill."
The administration's struggle to find middle ground on its offshore policy came to a head in Senate hearings in mid-November, just weeks after a drilling rig off the coast of Australia had suffered a deepwater blowout, creating an oil leak that would go on for months.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) pointed to an enlarged photo of the Australian rig in flames and asked rhetorically whether he was "just being old-fashioned" to worry that a similar blowout could occur in the U.S.
MMS Deputy Director Walter Cruickshank assured the panel that such fears were misplaced. The Australian rig wouldn't have been licensed to operate in U.S. waters, he said. The U.S., he said, had "what we believe is the most aggressive oil spill contingency planning...in the world."
On March 31, Mr. Salazar joined President Obama in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to announce their new offshore policy. Standing before an F-18 "Green Hornet" fighter jet designed to run partly on bio-fuel, Mr. Obama told the audience that "we'll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration...And we'll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence."
The plan was designed in part to allay the federal court's concerns. To satisfy the court's demand for better "balance," it included a broader environmental analysis, examining the impact of spilled oil on marine life and not just on shorelines.
It also ranked prospective drilling areas in terms of their environmental sensitivity. The Central Gulf of Mexico, where BP's Macondo well was based, topped the "most sensitive" column. It also scrapped a handful of planned lease sales in Alaska.
But the proposal kept much of the Bush plan intact, and even added for the first time new lease sales off the coast of Virginia.
It also relied extensively on environmental impact analyses carried out in April 2007 that the court had found wanting.
The 2007 document said "large oil spills associated with [outer continental shelf] activities are low-probability events." The "most likely size" of a serious spill, that report concluded, would total 4,600 barrels—a fraction of what the Deepwater Horizon continues to allow into the water every day.
Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which brought the original lawsuit, said their court victory wound up changing little. "Salazar, and by extension Obama, have pursued the same offshore program as the Bush administration, even while playing a smoke-and-mirrors game," he said.
Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, President Obama offered a plug for wider offshore exploration. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," he told a gathering in Charlotte, N.C. "They are technologically very advanced."
On April 20, with the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, everything changed.
The Macondo spill has forced the administration to take many of the steps it dismissed as draconian last summer in the wake of the appeals court ruling. On May 27, Mr. Salazar canceled a lease sale in the Gulf set for August. He ordered that all lease sales set for 2011 had to face tougher environmental scrutiny.
And he ordered a six-month moratorium on all drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. That moratorium was struck down as arbitrary by a federal judge in New Orleans in June, but Mr. Salazar has fought back, insisting the moratorium remain in place. So far the judge's ruling stands.
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2)Laid-Back Beach Town Welcomes Detouring Families
By BRIAN STELTER
TYBEE ISLAND, Ga. — The Rutherfords salvaged their beach vacation this year with a little help from Miley Cyrus.
Six months ago, Beckie Rutherford paid $7,000 for a week at a beach house in Gulf Shores, Ala., where the family has vacationed for as long as her five children can remember. Then the oil started to spill.
“When my mama found out that it was tattooing people and staining them — that wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of,” said her daughter Sarah, 16.
The Rutherfords swapped Gulf Shores for Tybee Island, a spit of land at the mouth of the Savannah River. When Sarah and her sister Cassie, 19, heard from their uncle that Ms. Cyrus had filmed the movie “The Last Song” here last summer, they were sold. “Miley is our favorite,” Sarah said.
The drive from the Rutherfords’ home in Carthage, Tenn., took about eight hours, the same as the drive to Gulf Shores. Ms. Rutherford is already thinking about a return trip at the end of the summer. “We fell in love,” she said. “I don’t know if I will ever go back to the gulf.”
Those words underscore the damage being done to resorts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, but they also show how other beach towns are benefiting from the unrelenting gusher in the Gulf of Mexico.
After oil started washing ashore along the gulf, “it only took a week or so for our people to start getting phone calls,” said Mayor Jason Buelterman of Tybee Island.
Tybee Island is laid-back and low-rise, purposefully quaint, with a permanent population of about 3,800 that remarked at nearly every opportunity last weekend about the influx of families like the Rutherfords. At the only grocery store in town, checkout lines snaked down the aisles. Near the pier, parking was impossible.
“I always ask, ‘Where you from?’ ” said Jimmy Kelleher, the owner of Seaside Sweets, who has met Tybee first-timers from Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Mr. Kelleher paused to take gelato orders from a family of three. As the family sauntered back to the beach, he said: “I don’t want to capitalize on their misfortune. I really don’t. It’s all the same country.”
Mike Kirby, who usually takes his sons, ages 3 and 8, to Fort Morgan, Ala., arrived in Tybee on Saturday evening, just in time for the fireworks show, which they watched at Fannie’s, a beachfront restaurant.
“I hated to cancel” the gulf trip, Mr. Kirby said. But he was worried that his kids would not be allowed to swim or, worse, that they would see dead animals on the beach. He found it easy to get his money back, except for a $170 deposit.
Ms. Rutherford had a much harder time. She said she called her rental agents seven days in a row and grew frustrated as they tried to reassure her that the beach was still open for business. She recalled telling them: “I’m not paying to sit on the beach. I’m paying to get in the ocean.”
The ocean here is silty, with brown hues and perfect body-boarding waves, nothing like the clear water the Rutherfords enjoyed in the gulf. There are even some black particles in the water, though no one seemed to mistake it for oil residue.
Tybee Island was already on track to have a better summer than last year, when hotel tax revenue dropped almost 3 percent, a consequence of the economy’s tailspin. Now the oil spill is sending even more tourists to beaches like Tybee Island’s.
Hotels and condos here are usually at capacity on the Fourth of July weekend, but “this year we’ve had to turn away as many people as we take in,” said Amy Gaster, the chairwoman of the Tybee Island Tourism Council and a broker who oversees 140 units.
Keith Gay, another local broker, said the tourists who were opting for the East Coast over the Gulf Coast would provide an even bigger lift to the local economy later. “Ordinarily we would not be completely booked out the next two or three weekends, but this year we are,” Mr. Gay said. “It’s quite unusual.”
Despite the distance from the gulf, concerns linger about oil creeping up the East Coast. Tybee Island is installing a Web cam to reassure vacationers that the beach remains unaffected, save for an increase in the number of people vying for a front-row spot in the sand.
Among the transplants last weekend were Ashley Mitchell and his wife, Elisha, of Erin, Tenn., who normally vacation in Gulf Shores. This summer’s vacation was particularly important because it was the first trip to the beach for their 19-month-old daughter, Neeley.
“We want it to be a good one,” Mr. Mitchell said as he explained why he canceled the gulf trip.
On Saturday afternoon, Neeley took her first dip in the Atlantic, all the way up to her ankles, and she took to it with gusto.
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3) Challah, Cookies & Macaroons!
Our buyers love buying local, especially when they find gems like Sweet Tammy’s —
a Squirrel Hill bakery boutique specializing in gourmet goodies made with love.
Owned by Venezuelan-born Tammy Berkowitz and her husband, Daniel, Sweet Tammy’s reflects Tammy’sphilosophy of baking from the heart, an approach she learned growing up in her mother’s kitchen where friends and family gathered to make and serve food as an expression of love, caring and comfort. A strong belief in the
power of sweets — instant gratification, engagement of the senses, pleasure, indulgence, reward and escape all at the same time — is what Tammy brings to the table, and it just so happens that her treats are kosher and nondairy, too. In addition, she makes everything from scratch in small batches with no preservatives.
These are the principles Tammy bakes by, and it shows, not just in her challah, but her cookies, too!
“Challah is a ceremonial Jewish bread that is blessed and traditionally eaten on the Sabbath. Ours is an egg challah, which is denser and a bit sweeter than a water challah,” explains Tammy. “It feels heavy but the texture is incredibly light and airy. The crust is a glossy, golden egg wash, a little softer than a water challah. It’s moist, but not crumby and makes a fabulous deli sandwich. The rolls are great for burgers — and hot dogs, too.”
Tammy’s coconut macaroons are the talk of the town, but made so simply, it’s hard to believe they are so good. “Egg whites, sugar and coconut. That’s it, except the bittersweet chocolate coating on the bottom that provides a foil to the sweetness of the macaroon,” says Tammy. “Even people who don’t like coconut, like these. They’re light, sweet and fluffy — our most popular item.”
And her double-stuffed chocolate chip cookies? She dares anyone to take a bite and not get a big hunk of chocolate. Generous is an understatement when it comes to the chips. Look for Sweet Tammy’s baked goodies in our deli, fresh from her own bakery!
Challah Varieties, $4.99:
Traditional Challah Rolls, 6-pk., in Onion,
Pull Apart, Raisin, Traditional and Whole Wheat
Double-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies, 6-pk., $4.99
Coconut Macaroons, 6-pk., $4.99
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)This is little-known story from the Pentagon on 09/11/2001:
During a visit with a fellow chaplain, who happened to be assigned to the Pentagon, I had a chance to hear a first-hand account of an incident that happened right after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. The chaplain told me what happened at a daycare center near where the impact occurred. This daycare had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs. The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do. There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants that would need to be taken out with the cribs.
There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers. Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared. The director thought, 'well, there we are—on our own.'
About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow. Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers. The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac and the Pentagon. Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing - they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West. Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off. Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children..
The chaplain then said, "I don't think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there. There wasn't a dry eye in the room. The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon.
Remember Ronald Reagan's great compliment: "Most of us wonder if our lives made any difference. Marines don't have that problem."
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