The country will be looking for leadership tonight when Barack Obama addresses the nation in his first Oval Office address at 8 p.m., as he returns to Washington after spending the night in Pensacola.
His speech comes eight weeks into the environmental crises, while the country's economy continues to show dangerous signs of fading back into an official recession again (and with fears of the escalating federal deficit, a reluctance by lawmakers to spend more money to stave off the possibility of massive public employee job losses). Oh, and there's also more talk about how bad Afghanistan is getting, and how the idea of begin to withdraw troops in July of 2011 may not become reality.
But the major media has several stories today about the situation in the gulf which are just plain depressing. From today's New York Times, in a story entitled Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill are described as Chaotic, reporter Campbell Robertson reports:
From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.
Then there is the disturbing story of what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday, where documents unveiled at a Congressional hearing showed that BP made several "cost-cutting" decisions that went against the advice of contractors right before the explosion of the oil well on April 20.
