BP gets a taste of the brave, new world
We’re still having internet connection difficulties out here, so I can’t write as much as I wish, but I’ve got to try to chime in on the Oil Spill fiasco at least one more time. I’m particularly distressed about the idea of retroactively raising BP’s liability cap to cover damages beyond what the law calls for.
The Oil Pollution Act of 1990, introduced by the Democrats and sailing through both chambers of Congress after the Exxon Valdez spill, was intended to “mitigate and prevent civil liability for future oil spills off the coast of the United States.” It set the maximum amount of civil liabilities for Oil Companies at $75 million, a real sum of money before that idiot spilled hot McDonald’s coffee on his/her crotch, but simply couch change in these sue-happy days.
Obviously, BP has, or will, pay way, way, way more than that because of this leak. But when Rahm Emmanuel begins talking about how the government is forcing BP to do things it doesn’t want to do, let’s all be mindful of the fact that some of the things the Obama administration is forcing BP to do is in direct violation of the law.
Which the President is tasked with enforcing.
I am not at all thrilled about the idea of living in a country where you can be presumed guilty, rather than innocent (BP hasn’t had a trial, there may have been nothing they could have done), and once everyone realizes that you’re being forced to break the law because the old law still thinks you’re still supposed to be innocent until proven guilty (as they did when they realized BP’s liability under the current law wasn’t sufficient), they decide to go back in time and change the law to make you guilty of something.
Once they get rid of the “grandfathered” clause, where you aren’t guilty or liable for something before the current law was passed, mayhem will ensue. This is always the end result of removing the rule of law and replacing it with the rule of man, which is what Obama and Company are all about. It will be only a matter of time before someone tries to make certain individual rights criminal and throw people in jail for things they had done and said in the past…
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Dumbest statement of the week, but surely not of this guy’s lifetime:
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on the $20 billion escrow fund that President Obama is making BP commit to:
“But this escrow bothers me that it’s going to make them less able to pay us what they owe us. And that concerns me.”
Translation: “Paying us what they owe us makes them less able to pay us what they owe us.” Though the translation loses something without the Southern drawl.
Wouldn’t retroactively raising the liability cap be blatantly unconstitutional? Specifically, as an ex post facto law, which is expressly banned by Article I, Section 9, clause 3.
Then there’s that lady lady politician in the West, the one who said we should pay for our bypass surgery and broken legs and cancer treatments by bringing the sawbones a chicken or two and a bushel basket of fresh farm produce, just like great-grandpa used to do. Now she says the national government cannot make BP pay for the damages it caused from oil drilling because BP is a private company. Fellow here who remembers such things said it was just like what that British politician, Sir Kingsley Wood, in charge of the Royal Air Force, said during World War II, that Britain couldn’t bomb Germany’s Black Forest or the Ruhr industrial region because it was private property.