From a political point of view, it seems crazy that President Obama has agreed — no, demanded — to turn an adversarial relationship between gulf coast residents and BP into an adversarial relationship between gulf coast residents and the president’s administration.

This week’s Lighthouse (available online here) touches on the Gulf oil gusher (William F. Shughart II); political reform in Cuba (Alvaro Vargas Llosa); F. A. Hayek on the limits of constitutional design (Scott A. Boykin); and Israel’s blockade of Gaza (Ivan Eland). Here are links to the individual items: 1. How to Prevent an...
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Open Letter to The Wall Street Journal June 23, 2010 Dear Editor: Paul Rubin argues that President Obama is getting a free pass in the media in light of the environmental disaster caused by the BP oil spill. The press, on the other hand, harshly chastised President Bush, for what Rubin thinks was a...
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Although President Obama’s executive order imposing a six-month moratorium on drilling for crude oil and natural gas in ultra-deep waters within the 200-mile territorial limit recognized by international law has at least temporarily been suspended by a federal district judge, offshore drilling will not come to a screeching halt even if that precipitous action...
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I received a message today from someone who questioned the position I had taken in a recent op-ed article on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Because I was unable to get a reply through to the person who wrote to me, and because others might have the same concern he raised, I am...
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Disasters have many fathers. The tragic explosion at BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 members of the Deepwater Horizon’s crew and continues to cause unprecedented economic and environmental damage from the oil “spill” that began more than two months ago, is no exception. President Obama and many others have been...
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(click on image to enlarge) HT: Guy Monahan and Julie Sheppard

Any vestiges of goodwill and support for President Obama that I hold are vanishing faster than the Gulf Coast wetlands. Our “green” president is directly responsible for the escalation of the worst man-made environmental disaster in American history. The catastrophic explosion of Deepwater Horizon on April 20 was not directly caused by Obama, obviously....
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How bad is the BP oil spill? Remember, many people make big bucks scaring you!

“[P]rogress marches with tragedy[;] … new capacities breed new horrors,” as T. J. Stiles writes on page 67 of his masterful biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt titled The First Tycoon (Knopf, 2009). Mr. Stiles refers in that passage to the death and destruction caused by a series of regrettable accidents at the dawn of the...
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