Thune: DC Must Do More on Oil Safety, But Not SD

Senator John Thune has been making political hay out of the Executive Branch's response to the BP oil spill. The worst thing he could say about President Obama's address this past week on fixing the problem and holding BP accountable was that the speech "should have happened a lot earlier." He also insinuated that the President made his speech for purely political reasons... not that Senator Thune would ever do that.

Senator Thune says we (by we, I assume he means all of us, acting through government) need to do more to prevent disasters like the BP mess from happening:

I think an incident like this always reminds us of the importance of consistency and continually re-evaluating and re-assessing and looking at ways we can do things better, that we can do in a more safe way and make sure that incidents of this type of consequence and impact don't happen going forward [Senator John Thune, quoted by Amanda Weber, "Thune Says Incident in Gulf Shows Need for Precautions," KEVN, 2010.06.16].

So does this mean Senator Thune will be coming home for the South Dakota Republican convention next weekend to razz his eleven fellow Republicans, including Madison's Russell Olson, who killed the pipeline tax last winter?

Thune says his impression of the pipelines going through South Dakota is that all precautions have been taken to prevent a huge problem to our local ecosystem like what we've seen in the Gulf [Weber, 2010].

Ah. When President Obama gets BP to ante up $20 billion (a pittance from their corporate reserves), Thune grumbles the President should have acted sooner. When his home state Republicans block the establishment of a meager $30-million disaster response fund with a two-cent-per-barrel tax on TransCanada's Keystone oil pipelines, Thune says South Dakota is doing all it can.

In John Thune's world, slow action from the Democratic President is intolerable, but inaction from South Dakota Republicans on the same issue is just fine.