What I heard...

Eighteen minutes, broken down as follows:

1. Six minutes of "BP will pay..." for various things up to and including restoring the Gulf area to a pre-Katrina state.

2. Five minutes of "The MMS is corrupt; we've eliminated some corruption but need to do much more. What we need is....MORE REGULATION". In other words, bigger government.

3. Five minutes of "...during my campaign..." hope and change blah blah blah, and a promise to accelerate our descent into reliance on wind and/or solar power, neither of which can produce enough energy to sustain our industries.

4. Two minutes of oddly misplaced and insincere references to the blessing of fishing fleets, somehow tied to the challenges America faces.

On a style note, I find it difficult to believe that anyone ever found the POTUS to be a compelling speech maker. He was reading from a prepared text, yet at least three times (after that, I quit counting) he lapsed into the "ya know" verbal tic, and the only thing flapping faster than his mouth were his hands. He seemed uncomfortable not having a podium to grab and lean on, at a loss as to how (and when it was appropriate) to gesture. His tone, rather than being presidential, firm and resolved, seemed more scolding at the beginning, segueing back into the campaign style he uses so often in the middle. The last two minutes seemed especially insincere.

I may be looking for blunders, simply because I believe he may be the worst leader to come along in my lifetime, but I honestly don't see how this address changed anything. He's not even meeting with the leaders of BP until tomorrow; I would have been more impressed if he had already met with them and come to some sort of agreement on the actions to be taken. Instead, we get another chorus of the blame game.

He may simply be embarrassed; it seems an actor has done more to provide actual solutions to the leak than his entire administration. Kevin Costner's oil separation units are on their way, and have been extremely successful in the tests that BP has run. It's not a plug, but they will help greatly in the clean up.