It's great to see the New York Times finally coming around to report on Bobby Jindal's ridiculousness -- and it only took weeks of Rachel Maddow exposing his roid rage grandstanding and nonsensical, ineffectual ideas (like the stupid sand berms) to get to this point. But we're here and it's about time.
Here's a rundown of Louisiana and Bobby Jindal oil spill failures, via Jed Lewison:
1. The state's oil spill coordinator's office has had its budget slashed by 50% over the last decade.
2. Last year, Jindal cut funding from the state's oil spill research program.
3. The state's oil spill contingency plan's include "pages of blank charts that are supposed to detail available supplies of equipment like oil-skimming vessels." A plan for a worst-case scenario was labeled "to be developed."
4. Before Jindal decided to attack the Federal response, state officials signed off on all Coast Guard response plans.
5. Jindal, who raged at the Federal government for not having enough boom, requested three times as much boom as the state's plan had called for -- and 50% more boom than existed in the entire nation.
And he's only deployed 1,053 out of 6,000 available National Guard troops. But he's doing a lot of yelling and helicoptering! That's just as good as troops, no?
We might know more, but Bobby Jindal has sealed the state's oil spill response records.