What you're looking at is a $360 million boondoggle. It is the continuing construction of sand berms on the Louisiana coast, once supposed to help clean up oil from the BP oil geyser that gushed for so long below the Gulf of Mexico.
You remember the great sand berm debate? When Louisiana's creepy hunchbacked governor, Bobby Jindal, and oil industry lackey turned folk hero, the giant pudding bag named Billy Nungesser, whimpered and whined and shouted outrage that they had to had to had to build these barriers to the waves of oil hitting the coast? Hell, they were so loud and pathetic that eventually Barack Obama said, "Fuck it," and let them build. (Over on the Fox "news," Fred Barnes sniffled behind his glasses o' smarts that Obama actually considering whether or not the sand berms were a good idea meant "That is not decisive leadership.")
Back in the summer, everyone was sand berm crazy. Mike Huckabee told Sean Hannity's manly jaw on June 12, "Well, you know what, sand is a lot less of an impact than the oil, for gosh sake." On the radio, Glenn Beck mocked the President when he halted the berm construction for a bit to make sure that it wouldn't fuck things up worse than they were fucked. Oh, sure, there were, you know, "scientists" and "researchers" who all said that it would be bullshit, that it wouldn't do a thing, that it would wash away as soon as it was built, that the dredging required would just do more damage.
Now, hey, look, there's a big presidential commission report out saying, in essence, "Wow, that was one colossal bundle of fucktardery right there." Yeah, seems like the sand berms collected one tenth of one percent of the oil, a big 1000 barrels, or, roughly, the amount to fill up a Hummer for a drive across town. The report says that the okay was given because of political pressure, not because of real confidence in the claims about the magical mountains of sand.
The report even takes the time to call out Jindal for being a little corporate bitch: "In his book Leadership and Crisis, Governor Jindal claims that berms 'proved to be one of the most effective protection measures... Indeed, time and time again, [berms] stopped the oil that got past the skimmers and boom.' Similarly, appearing recently on Meet the Press, Governor Jindal argued '[t]he sand berms were a great success.' We disagree. From a long-term coastal restoration perspective, the berms may indeed be a 'significant step forward,' as Governor Jindal has claimed, but they were not successful for oil spill response."
Maybe, just maybe, in the guise of a response to the oil spill, Jindal, not wanting to seem like he was asking the big, bad federal government for cash so he could remain Tea Party pure, actually conned BP and the feds out of $360 mill for coastal restoration. Nah. That'd be vaguely honorable. And that ain't a Republican quality.
