The Washington Post is reporting that the federal agency in charge of regulating offshore oil drilling repeatedly ignored warnings from government scientists about risks to the environment in a push to quickly approve energy exploration activities.

Also, an inspector general report discovered that during the Bush administration, regulators allowed industry officials to fill out their own inspection reports in pencil and the regulators themselves then traced over the pencil writing in pen and signed off on the reports.

We are seeing, in the Gulf, the predictable result of "small government" Libertarianism/Republicanism that protects monopolies and turns regulation of activities that could use or damage the commons over to monopolistic corporations. George W. Bush put Samuel Bodman in charge of the Department of Energy, for example, for the same reason that Reagan put Bill Bennett in charge of the Department of Education - both men had called for the elimination of the agencies they were put in charge of.

Combine that with a horse judge lawyer running FEMA and the damage done over the past thirty years of Reaganomics and so-called "small government" policies leads to disaster.

It's time for both the administration and our media to start talking about the important and useful functions of government, and how they should be funded.

And particularly for our media to start calling out these so-called "small government" cranks on the stupidity of their policies of putting BP in charge of our environment and monopolistic giant Wall Street Banksters in charge of our economy.