BP Oil Spill was inevitable

OBAMA: PLEASE LISTEN AND TAKE ACTION!!!

TIME TO TAP T.R. and RENEW PROGRESSIVE TRADITION
by Jonathan Alter
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/58-58/2239-obama-bp-and-theodore-roosevelt

EXCERPT:

If he can frame the message more memorably than he did in his Oval Office address, Obama may yet use the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history to speed the transition to a green economy, just as George W. Bush used terrorism to refashion foreign policy. To do so, “deregulation”—once a Reaganite call to arms—must be transformed into an epithet. If the president can’t put the antigovernment, Tea Party types in their place now, when will he? The legacy of the American progressive tradition is on the line.

More than 100 GOP members of Congress belong to a committee that attacked Obama’s plan to make BP set up a $20 billion escrow fund.

Conservatives are again trotting out the idea—slam-dunked by history—that energy and environmental regulations kill jobs. If we’d listened to them in the ’70s, we would be living in a cesspool of pollution. And if we listen to them now, and stay addicted to fossil fuels, we’ll miss out on the clean-energy technologies that are already changing the world. On the ballot this fall, it’s the 19th century vs. the 21st.

If you think I’m exaggerating, listen to the Republicans. Glenn Beck believes progressivism is “a cancer” and we should go back to the Gilded Age’s unfettered capitalism. Rush Limbaugh and his Capitol Hill stooges still oppose more stringent regulation and won’t renounce their “Drill, baby, drill!” platform.