A presidential commission said the Obama Administration blocked the worst estimates for the BP spill, underestimated the size, and was not prepared for the use of dispersants. As expected, the response from the White House has been denial. Jeff Kruger at Time magazine has a great piece on the commission report, saying yes and no in their critique:

The commission is right that there was a random, wheel-of-fortune quality to the ever-changing estimates of the flow rate, with the only constant being that the numbers kept going up ... Part of the reason for the uncertainty was the lack of good monitoring data. The Obama administration did show regrettable credulousness in accepting BP's initial lowball figure, but there weren't a lot of alternatives since BP was the only party with access to the well and the robot subs that could begin to take the measure of the flow rate.

He concludes it's much better that we're discussing what should have happened rather than what still needs to be done:

It's a measure, perhaps, of how comparatively well the crisis was handled that as the six-month anniversary approaches, the majority of the discussions are over post-mortem analyses like the new report as opposed to over how to handle a still-unfolding environmental disaster. The oil spill was nowhere near "Obama's Katrina" as many claimed it would be. But nor was it the Administration's finest hour. The President likes to talk about teachable moment; let's hope this was one of them -- and that the White House itself learned a few things too.

Um, yeah. Thanks for that one. I see it a bit differently because the ecological impact will last decades as we enter the next phase of this disaster which is the Gulf spill damage assessement. The question for me is will we ban offshore drilling? Forever. 

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