…rules must be obeyed. Where’s the boss to stop this nonsense?

Outside the Beltway:

One of the most frequently heard stories coming out of the Gulf Region over the past two months is the extent to which bureaucracy is standing in the way of efforts to cleanup the oil spill and prevent it from causing further damage to coast areas. The most recent example of that can be seen in the Coast Guard’s order barring ships designed to suck the oil off the water from sailing:

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.

“It’s the most frustrating thing,” the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. “Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges.”

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk.

“These barges work. You’ve seen them work. You’ve seen them suck oil out of the water,” said Jindal.

So why stop now?

“The Coast Guard came and shut them down,” Jindal said. “You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, ‘Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.’”

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

“We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

I’m not against martime safety, of course, but it strikes me as more than a little absurd that the Coast Guard it worry about life vests and fire extinguishers while the Governor of Louisiana is worrying about stopping the oil from entering the Louisiana marshes. At the very least, it would seem reasonable that, in an emergency situation such as the one the Gulf Coast has been in since April 20th, the enforcement of rules like these could be modified so that they don’t interfere with actual productive work.

If there is a reason to fault the Federal response to the oil spill, I think it can be found in actions like this where the blind adherence to rules stands in the way of reasonable efforts to get the job done.

…the bigger threat is Green Religion, which is already part of the curriculum.

Millard Public Schools will stop using a children’s book about global warming — but only until the district can obtain copies with a factual error corrected.

A review committee, convened after parents complained, concluded that author Laurie David’s book, “The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming,” contained “a major factual error” in a graphic about rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Mark Feldhausen, associate superintendent for educational services, this week sent a letter to parents who complained, including the wife of U.S. Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska, outlining the committee’s findings.

“Although the authors have pledged to correct the graph in subsequent editions, the committee recommends that this correction be made to all MPS-owned texts before using it with students in the future,” Feldhausen wrote.

Corrected versions will continue to be used in Millard’s sixth-grade language arts curriculum, he wrote.

// //

However, the district will cease to use a companion video about global warming, narrated by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, he wrote.

The committee found the video “without merit” and recommended that it not be used.

Robyn Terry, the congressman’s wife, had described the video as a “political commercial.”

Lee and Robyn Terry released a statement saying they were pleased with the decision and “impressed” by the district’s handling of the case.

A school kid’s offense.

…the school banned the hat because it ran afoul of the district’s zero-tolerance weapons policy. Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns.”His teacher called and said it wasn’t appropriate,” Morales said.

Morales’ 8-year-old son, David, had been assigned to make a hat for the day when his second-grade class would meet their pen pals from another school. She and her son came up with an idea to add patriotic decorations to a camouflage hat.

Earlier this week, after the hat was banned, the principal at the Tiogue School in Coventry told the family that the hat would be fine if David replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn’t have any, according to Superintendent Kenneth R. Di Pietro.

…

Lt. Gen. Reginald Centracchio praised the school system for supporting the military in the past, including with a junior ROTC program.

But he said he disagreed with the decision to ban the hat and hoped it offered a chance for the school to review its policies.

“The American soldier is armed. That’s why they’re called the armed forces,” he said. “If you’re going to portray it any other way, you miss the point.”

The prissiness exemplified by the school brings to mind this exchange from Michael Totten’s interview with military historian, Victor Davis Hanson:

MJT: What do you think about Peace Studies programs? What goes on in these departments?

VDH: Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution is something that grew out of the Vietnam War, and it’s predicated on the principle of the United Nations Charter, the League of Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are wonderful ideas in the abstract, and they’re based on the idea that all the players involved can agree on certain premises—that peace is better than war, that war makes no sense, that war is legalized murder. And they’re right.

MJT: Of course. We can all agree with that, but some people in these departments seem to think military historians like you must not agree, that you’re creeps who like war.

VDH: They think we feel that war brings out the best in people, that war is a ritual that’s necessary for society, or that war is a macabre interest like video games are for some people. It’s like assuming an oncologist must like cancer, because why else would he study cancer?

They often don’t agree with supposedly archaic ideas like the balance of power, pre-emption, and deterrence. President Obama is a good example of a product of that kind of thinking. He seems to believe that if he can just sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez that he can talk to them as a reasonable and charismatic person and convince them of the logic of not having a bomb.

But if you take the classical tragic view, it makes perfect sense for Iran to have a bomb. I see it as a win from Iran’s point of view.

MJT: Sure. At least from the point of view of the Iranian government.

VDH: It’s a natural expression of the European Enlightenment. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Locke deified their God, reason. It was a quantum leap in human thinking, in intellectual evolution. We no longer had to explain natural phenomena through superstition. Just as we could explain the tides and eclipses and no longer had to rely on Zeus, so too human existence could be charted and predicted and changed. That really got going in the 20th century with advanced technology, better nutrition, and so on. War is a disease, and since we conquered all these other things, why can’t we conquer war the way we conquered polio?

It’s an attractive idea because the alternative is medieval. Some people have a hard time accepting that we’re no better than medieval man, that the only thing that keeps some of us from clubbing somebody else is the fear that they’ll be clubbed worse.