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November 10, 2010
Politico: White House Extensively Edited Key Sections of Interior Department Report to Suggest Panel of Experts Endorsed Offshore Drilling Ban... (Updated)
Topics: Political News and commentariesThis, from the "most transparent and honest" administration evah?
(Politico): Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling, the Interior inspector general says in a new report.Putting this all in a nutshell, it seems fair to say that Team Obama lied solely to please the far-left eviro-crazies, with no regard for those families who lost their jobs, savings, and way of life - many for generations to come.In the wee hours of the morning of May 27, a staff member to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited versions of the department report's executive summary back to Interior. The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts - who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations - endorsed the moratorium, according to the IG report obtained by POLITICO.
"The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts," the IG report states, without judgment on whether the change was an intentional attempt to mislead the public.
The six-month ban on offshore drilling installed in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill became a major political issue over the summer, as Gulf State lawmakers and industry groups charged the White House with unfairly threatening thousands of jobs. House Republicans have said they plan on investigating the circumstances surrounding the moratorium when they take power next year.
Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and several other Gulf State members of Congress asked the Interior IG to investigate the moratorium and the peer review claim.
"The inspector general's finding that the blanket-drilling moratorium was driven by a politics and not by science is bitter news for families who, because of it, lost their jobs, savings, and way of life," Cassidy said Tuesday. "Candidate Obama promised that he would guided by science, not ideology. If that were true, at least 12,000 jobs and 1.8 billion dollars of economic activity would have been saved on the Gulf Coast." (emphasis added)
And the reason for having this guy in the WH beyond his present term is?
Update: As Moe Lane points out, Browner is a notorious Greenie who took advantage of the Gulf Coast oil spill to do a little empire building. That the report just happened to get manipulated in such a way as to make it appear that the industry consensus supported an immediate moratorium on offshore drilling, and that it just happened to be manipulated by the office of the one staffer whose agenda would be advanced by a moratorium, is being treated as a... coincidence, apparently. You see, nobody's admitting any wrongdoing, which is expected to be treated as evidence that there wasn't any. And you can believe as much of that as you like, too.
Posted by Richard at November 10, 2010 9:20 AM
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