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La Stampa, Italy

A Black Tide, and Obama Plays Golf


By Agnese Vigna

Translated By Roberta Mura

 22 June 2010

Edited by Sam Carter


Italy - La Stampa - Original Article (Italian)

Obama is playing golf while the Gulf is drowning in oil? How outrageous! At least this is the opinion of Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee chairman who compared Obama’s 39th round of golf of his presidency, and the 7th since the oil spill began, to the unfortunate and inopportune yacht race of Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, who apparently has neither said nor done anything right since the oil started spilling out in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It is equally incredible that President Obama finds himself on yet another golf course as oil continues to spew into the Gulf," Steele said in a statement commenting on Obama’s last golf game. The Republican also criticized the concert of ex-Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, held two weeks ago at the White House, and Obama’s trip to the Washington Nationals baseball game last Friday. “Until this problem is fixed, no more golf outings, no more baseball games, no more Beatle concerts, Mr. President,” said Steele.

Bill Burton, the deputy press secretary, defends the Obama’s right to leisure activities, underlying the fact that they happen only after the president has honored his commitments. “I don't think that there's a person in this country that doesn't think that their President ought to have a little time to clear his mind,” said Burton. He added that, in the last week, Obama got BP to agree to put aside $20 billion to pay claims, strengthened lobbying and ethics rules in the White House, and went to Ohio to talk about the economy and the stimulus package



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One Response to “A Black Tide, and Obama Plays Golf”

  1.  Vote: Add rating 1  Subtract rating 0   Scortch Says:
    July 8th, 2010 at 7:50 am

    Would you have felt bet­ter about him if he had stayed in the Oval Office & played video games, instead?…

    …or per­haps you feel he should be out in the gulf, per­haps nav­i­gat­ing a skim­mer around in cir­cles, pick­ing up oil…24 hours a day?

    The mas­sive breach that is spout­ing oil into our gulf and destroy­ing lives is entirely the fault of BP cost-cutting pro­ce­dures, which we now learn is typ­i­cal of the com­pany. And whether or not Pres­i­dent Obama is there to inspect BP’s dis­as­ter as it occurs, will not alter what BP has done to Amer­ica, nor will it alter the eco­nomic mis­ery BP has caused to our cit­i­zens in an already eco­nom­i­cally stressed region of my country.

    Don’t be mis­led by the polit­i­cal attempts to some­how hang BP’s reck­less dis­re­gard for safety around the neck of my president…if you wish to crit­i­cize Mr. Obama, there is plenty of inac­tion & fail­ures that can be laid at his doorstep, such as the half-measure health insur­ance deba­cle, that solves noth­ing, or the lack of action in return­ing our tax struc­ture to the func­tional struc­ture of the 1960’s, where we didn’t have ALL of the GDP in the pock­ets of just a few overly-wealthy indi­vid­u­als, or his refusal to lift the tax cap on the wealthy when it comes to Social Secu­rity, in order to save the insti­tu­tion from bankruptcy…

    …or, per­haps more impor­tantly, his refusal to rein­state tar­iffs on for­eign goods, to try and bring indus­trial jobs back to my coun­try, from which they fled…

    But this envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter is not his…it is entirely the fault of crim­i­nal neg­li­gence on the part of BP, and they have been caught doing this before.

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