When you’re a government bureaucrat, it’s never a bad time to interrupt people with real jobs, doing real work, in order to apply pointless rules. Rather than deploying all resources to address the oil spill in the Gulf, the Coast Guard has been holding hostage the clean-up boats in order to do “inspections.”
Governor Jindal said, “We were told Wednesday morning that the Coast Guard was shutting down our vacuum barge operations so they could inspect and certify all the vessels we are using in our fight against this oil spill. We asked them to do these inspections quickly and if they could do them without shutting down ongoing operations that are cleaning up the oil that is killing our marsh. Before the shut down yesterday, oil suction operations using military and civilian vacuum barges had suctioned thousands of gallons of oil out of the marsh already and thousands more could have been removed yesterday if these operations wouldn’t have been shut down.
“We currently have operational vacuum barges – either military or civilian – in Bay Jimmy, Red Fish Bay, Pass A Loutre, Blind Bay, Four Bay Pass, Barataria Bay and two in Cat Island. All these barges had to stop their operations yesterday under the Coast Guard’s orders. Another eight vacuum barges were staged in Empire and awaiting deployment. Those eight were also awaiting Coast Guard inspection as of this morning until they were told the barges no longer needed to be inspected.
Governor Jindal is hopping mad:
One wonders if seeing government in action has caused Robert Reich to reconsider his call for government to put BP into receivership so that government can “do it faster.”
Sadly, true believers in the magical ability of big government to solve every problem don’t respond well to evidence. As this next video shows, our own Dan Mitchell has already explained to Reich how preposterous it is to put a bunch of politicians in charge and expect actual results, rather than just more politicization.
