While I'm Thinking About It

About last week

Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, has a Twitter account. Or perhaps it is more fair to say that there is a Twitter account with his name on it, that's run by "Organizing for America," his alleged grassroots group.

Except that Twitter says it's him ("verified" and all that), and the posts are written to appear like their his, so whatever. I decided to treat it like it really is him.

Last weekend, President Obama went on the record as saying that not only has he been present and involved in trying to solve the oil spill crisis, but that he was also in deep discussions about "whose ass to kick."

Charming fellow, this leader of the free world.

Anyway, I decided that if the president had really been involved from the get-go, he should certainly be able to answer a handful of fair questions. For the record, they were:

• @BarackObama, why isn't the oil spill getting capped the same way Ixtoc was in 1980? You know about the relief wells they drilled, right?
  Referring to this Wikipedia article. Obviously, Red Adair isn't available anymore, but the techniques should still be valid, right?
• @BarackOBama, I have heard NOAA had a plan for minimizing damage from underwater spills like this. Has it been put into action yet?
  Apparently, there has been a plan in place since 1994.
• @BarackObama, when will Gov.Jindal's sand-boom plan to minimize damage to Louisiana be approved?
  It does seem to be the case that at least some berms have been built, but when I asked the question I had been unable to find any sort of update to this story.
• @BarackObama, the April MMS inspection found no problems on the rig. Were these federal employees just sloppy or what?
  This story from the Associated Press reports that, while a disturbing number of required inspections did not happen, there was one in April that reported no problems.
• @BarackObama, are you planning to ignore this question, too?

What was I expecting? Ideally, a number of retweets and maybe even a response. After all, as it turns out one of my questions was based on outdated information, and there would have been no harm in pointing that out. Worst case would have been a Joe the Plumber-style character assassination.Ah, well. Maybe I got one person to think just a little deeper than the knee-jerk BP is evil storyline.