Obama is making his fourth trip to the Gulf. Will it matter?

I guess we'll know tomorrow with his "speech to the nation," as it is being called by the TV Pundits. It's been 56 days now since the explosion that started the oil eruption under water and just about everything that has been tried has been functionally useless (there's a cap of sorts taking our a small percentage of the flow, but not enough to make a difference, and two relief wells are being drilled to cut off the leak itself, but we're about two months away from it happening).

BP is spending millions on advertising where they say that they are taking "full responsibility" for the leak and the cleanup, and that no American taxpayers will have to pay for this. Of course, such a statement is utter bullshit, since all the news shows talk about lately is business owners and fishermen on the Gulf who have appealed to BP for recompense do to their losses in the tragedy and have not been able to get the oil company to pay for anything.

BP put this out on it's website:
BP's onshore response efforts have rapidly expanded, with equipment and people staged and ready in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. BP has positioned rapid response teams in Alabama and Louisiana to enable quick response and cleaning of areas where oil may come ashore. These 12-person teams will assess initial impacts, and then call in a larger contingent of trained responders and volunteers to clean the affected area.
If that sounds good you should tie it to the word yesterday afternoon from Alabama that their beaches were now covered with tarballs and oil mass and their summer tourist season has been destroyed (along with the wildlife.) So much for "rapid response." One of the things Obama is supposed to be doing today is speaking with BP officials. Let's see if that gets him anywhere.

Joe Scarborough made what I thought was the best suggestion on his show this morning...and I rarely agree with Joe Scarborough... when he said that Obama should use the "speech to the nation" to bring our National Dream into a non-oil-dependent energy target. He compared it to JFK's famous speech pledging to put a man on the moon in a decade.

This from Scarborough:
"I would make the John Kennedy speech that by the end of the decade, we will go to the moon. This president can say, thank god it's the beginning of the decade, by the end of a decade, America will break its dependence on foreign oil. By the end of the decade, we will control our own destiny. By the end of the decade, we will be positioned to dominate the world in energy for the next century. We will do it because we must do it..."
That's a terrific idea.

I'll be astonished if it happens.

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