Tag: judy woodruff

California/Environment/Health/New York/Politics & Causes/seniors/USA
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Drill, baby, drill?

by Fran Johns

It’s going to be a long time fixing.

The Deepwater Horizon site is pouring some 200,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) of oil daily from a broken pipe into the Gulf of Mexico. Millions of dollars are being added to the leak’s cost, and despite BP‘s assurance that they will pay for the fix, long-term costs are beyond estimating at this point.

PBS NewsHour‘s Judy Woodruff got differing views Monday night from Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies and Sara Banaszak, senior economist for the American Petroleum Institute. Asked how the current catastrophe will affect his organization’s long-standing opposition to off-shore drilling, Davies said

Well, it reinforces what we have seen worldwide. As we drill for oil, it’s a dirty, dangerous business. And the farther afield we go, deep into the Amazon, into the Arctic, and into deeper water, the greater those risks are, and the worse the impacts when things go terribly wrong.

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Things have gone terribly wrong. But not wrong enough to change much, considering our continuing dependence on fossil fuels. Banaszak seemed unshaken:

(A)t this point”, she said, “we don’t know what happened in that incident offshore. And that’s what’s going to be critical to find out.

What the industry has focused on doing over the years is using advanced technologies and multiple safety systems in order to prevent accidents. So, it’s a constant process of using the latest information and the latest technology, to incorporate that into developing technologies that can deliver the oil that we’re consuming in our economy today. And that’s the way the industry has approached the problem.

It was not an encouraging interview (but worth reading the entire transcript.) Banaszak mentioned that 63% of our energy comes from oil and gas, and repeatedly said that dependence will continue for at least the next 20 or 30 years. Davies mentioned, at one point, that if a similar catastrophe were to happen off the Virginia coast, where this writer grew up sailing on a pristine Chesapeake Bay and where offshore drilling could soon begin, damage would hit beaches as far north as New Jersey and beyond.

So far, one glimmer of good news for the west coast: Governor Schwarzenegger is thinking that perhaps opening up the California coast to drilling might not be such a grand idea after all.

California/General interest/Health/Politics & Causes
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Obama, Pelosi & the health bill yo-yo

by Fran Johns

Invoking the not-so-long-ago proposals of Senators Bob Dole and Howard Baker, President Obama told the Republicans Friday that his health bill is “pretty centrist,” while suggesting they might leave off referring to it as a Bolshevik plot. “People in America don’t believe it’s centrist,” Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) told PBS NewsHour‘s Judy Woodruff just after the event — “the government defining costs, benefits…”  Hensarling did not sound much like someone ready for bi-partisan cooperation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, said yesterday, in a letter e-mailed to constituents, that “Congress will pass health insurance reform no matter what barriers stand in our way. We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in.” And therein may lie the problem: Obama’s move from health care to jobs as number one issue, and Pelosi’s, well, Pelosi-like determination to get some sort of a health bill through, no matter what. Some of us who agree that jobs and the economy are admittedly number one still believe the disaster that is our current health care system has got to be addressed. (One wonders what planet Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell lives on, commenting during his rebuttal to the State of the Union address that Americans don’t want to mess with “the best medical care system in the world.”)

Health reform, whatever remains of it, has become the yo-yo of the year: it’s up, it’s down, it’s tangling in multiple strings, and the axle connecting it between Democrats and Republicans looks more worn with every loop.

Here are a few of the assessments Friday night pundits were making: New York Times reporter Peter Baker on Washington Week in Review: “It’s become bad politics. There is no option but to slow down.” Also on Washington Week, Politico‘s John Harris remarked, “It’s comatose.”

The President did himself proud with the Republicans, in what was indeed a remarkable event, even if no immediate good will arises. It felt downright civil. But as to the health care yo-yo and whether it now rolls quietly under the sofa to rest a while, a parting thought came from columnist Mark Shields on NewsHour. “President Obama,” he observed, “doesn’t control Nancy Pelosi.”