Whoa, whoa there! What’s this? The Associated Press actually calls out the “small government”, tea party hypocrites on their hypocrisy???! Well I’ll be guldurned…
All along the Gulf Coast, where the tea party thrives and “socialism” is a common description for any government program, conservatives who usually denounce federal activism suddenly are clamoring for it.
Halle-freakin-lujah.
It’s a pretty good article, actually.
They take a nasty stab at Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and his big cardboard stimulus checks that he ranted and raved against. Jindal is front in center in demanding federal aid now that his “Drill, baby, drill” mantra has come back to desecrate his beaches, marshes and estuaries.
Take Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican elected in 2007 when Democrat Kathleen Blanco opted not to seek re-election after she was widely panned for a bumbling response to Hurricane Katrina two years earlier.[snip]
Jindal, a possible 2012 presidential candidate, has demanded a stronger response from the Obama administration, accusing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of dragging its feet in approving Louisiana’s plans for protective berms – a plan that took three weeks to approve.
“This oil threatens not only our coast and our wetlands, this oil fundamentally threatens our way of life in southeastern Louisiana,” Jindal said last week.
Jindal is a fiscal conservative who made headlines last year by rejecting some federal stimulus money, then distributing other stimulus funds by handing out oversized cardboard checks to local officials.
They contrast Jindall to Mississippi governor Haley Barbour who has not asked for aid. Barbour has declared that there’s “there’s no reason to panic” and just yesterday compared oil-covered birds to people covered in toothpaste. Seriously.
Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Director Trudy Fisher said samples of what was apparently the same oil slick, taken when it was farther south of the barrier islands, were “nontoxic.” Fisher said water and weather had helped all the volatile chemicals in the oil evaporate.Barbour described the oil as “weathered, emulsified, caramel-colored mousse, like the food mousse.” “Once it gets to this stage, it’s not poisonous,” Barbour said. “But if a small animal got coated enough with it, it could smother it. But if you got enough toothpaste on you, you couldn’t breathe.”
Yeah, I try to avoid that at all costs.
But Barbour’s own Attorney General, along with a bipartisan group of attorneys general from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, all “sent Obama a letter May 6 asking for federal help in documenting information about oil company BP PLC’s response to the blown well.”
Another Mississippian, Republican state Rep. Steven Palazzo, an outspoken critic of “Obamacare” and big government is even getting in on the act. I guess Governor Barbour didn’t get the memo.
Kudos to the Associated Press. Hell, I didn’t think ya had it in ya.
I’m just sayin’…
