Life vests and fire extinguishers

Put me in charge and I will bring back firing squads,

Death by Super-Taser Firing Squad. Watch the bastard wiggle a while. Who cares if it hurts, the bastard didn't care who he was hurting.

By the time I got done, there would never be another corrupt politician again. And nobody would be crossing our borders unchecked either.

If you are going to chime in do try to be correct once in awhile. Duck hunting with bullets is called poaching. Now, go look at ballistic charts for shotguns, pistols and rifles and see what percentage of each that is supersonic.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

"Question: Was there any reason the Coast Guard could not have inspected the barges while they were in operation, so as not to waste a day while the oil spreads ever closer to the Gulf Coast?"

Maybe they didn't want to get their boats dirty?

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." -Rahm Emanuel

Somewhere in Obama's socialist agenda he sees a way to politically profit by the Gulf coast being ruined... shutting off our use of oil, raising electricity costs out-of-sight, etc ???

I just read in Bloomberg Businessweek that the _wholesale_ price of the wind-farm-generated electricity in Massachusetts will be

Couldn't happen to a better socialist state ;-) ...Jim Thompson

In message , Jim Thompson writes

Possible - but highly unlikely. You could equally argue that the Obama regime doesn't want to be seen to be handing down orders from the top - something that the Americans might choose to readily identify as one of the characteristics of a totalitarian 'socialist' government!

But I do think that your quotation that "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" does hit the nail on the head. The insistence that the barges must be inspected is typical of what we Brits call a 'jobsworth' mentality, that is, "It's more than my job's worth to allow you to do that". The breed proliferates in all branches of politics.

I hear that line quoted a lot but I'm not sure people realize just how despicably unethical and basically immoral that 'philosophy' is.

The 'point', which he explains immediately after that line, is that desperate people, in the irrational panicked state, can be induced to do things they never would were they given time to think rationally about it.

Think about that. It's a deliberate policy of deception and abuse based on 'winning' at any cost, utterly devoid of ethics, regardless of whether the public you supposedly serve want it or not.

It's the morals of a despot.

You mean the man who arbitrarily ordered a court over-turned shutdown of all Gulf oil operations and without due process extorted 20 billion from BP had a spontaneous spurt of temporary humility about doing what he's actually authorized, for a change, to do?

The more likely scenario is he, and the ideological fools he appointed, are clueless when it comes to managing anything, much less a crisis.