Sunday, June 13, 2010

Obama MMS appointee: no experience, no leadership skills


American Thinker has an interesting perspective on The One's lack of experience, shrouded background and general lack of ability to manage anything (other than his political campaign). 
From the first gushings of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, we have seen our president continuing to celebrate the presidential perks, gushing himself over the musical talents of Paul McCartney and the basketball talents of the Duke championship team. Yet it took President Obama twelve days to travel to Louisiana to view the hemorrhaging oil along the gulf coast. While blaming the Bush administration for a drilling project that his own Interior Department had approved, Mr. Obama still did not directly engage the chief executive officer of BP through the first six weeks of the crisis. When his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, fired Elizabeth Birnbaum from her position as head of the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS), the president accidentally revealed his obliviousness while at a press conference. The Obama-Salazar administration had appointed Birnbaum to her critical post in July 2009 because the president was determined to reconstitute America's energy program, replacing seasoned experts on oil-and-gas exploration with climate-change advocates focused on expanding renewable energy. 
The AT reference to the NY Times reveals that Birnbaum had no experience in the field of oil and gas and appeared to be more of a global warming/conservationist/activist type individual who had no leadership abilities. In fact, her employees complained that they never saw her, much less benefited by her leadership:
  In fact, though little attention has been paid to Birnbaum's inadequacy and Obama's appointment of her (in his usual fatuous impractical habit of appointing activists rather than leaders), The One seems to be in full protection mode, ridiculing tea partiers, blaming Bush for all problems, restricting press access to the devastated area and scheduling another press conference for Tuesday, where presumably he can tell the public he can't "suck the oil up in a straw" (I had no idea!) but that he will "put honest, smart, hardworking people in place" to fix the problem. 


People like Birnbaum, one assumes. 

3 comments:

  1. You might want to follow up on:
    > Lisa Perez Jackson's (EPA) decision to allow hundreds of thousands of toxic dispersants to be released into the subsea water column of the Gulf. Is this environmental protection? Did she have that authority? Is she trading wildlife for beach life?

    > Dr. Jane Lubchenco (NOAA) who justified toxic dispersant use underwater as the trade off decision in choosing the lesser of two poisonous evils, in order to accelerate oil degradation. As a marine ecology expert, she should know that degraded oil has significantly high toxicity to developing atherinid and clupeoid fish embryos and the fact that the biodegradation of crude oil is now known to produce water soluble fractions that may be toxic to marine life.
    < http://www.coastalresearchcenter.ucsb.edu/scei/oil.html >

    Also look up MMS' Chris Oynes...

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  2. What a fizzer The One has turned out to be :-(

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