Obama's prime-time address on his oil spill strategy

We'll be able to watch it here live, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. (Thanks to the White House for the "blogger-friendly" embed code.)



Here's the text.

President Obama said:

The families I met with last week who lost their loved ones in the explosion -- these families deserve to know why. And so I've established a National Commission to understand the causes of this disaster and offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place. Already, I've issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue. And while I urge the Commission to complete its work as quickly as possible, I expect them to do that work thoroughly and impartially.

Jason (the commenter) says on Twitter:

Obama sure does like starting commissions. His campaign slogan should have been "hope, change, and commissions (mainly commissions)".

Amba says:

I got to clean up sh*t while listening to the president's speech; that seems appropriate on so many levels.

Jason responds:

You should set up a commission to figure out how it happened, another to advise you how to do it, and a third to make sure it never happens again.

RELATED: "Give Obama a Break: Presidents Don't Have Magic Powers That Clean up Oil Spills."

UPDATE: The New York Times has a run-down of commentators on Obama's address, which concludes with a long quote from my mom, Ann Althouse. She says, channeling the president:

We need to "jump start" the "clean energy" future. There's "the potential" to create "millions of jobs" but "only" if we "act together." We need to do something big at the national level to make this happen. Some people say we can't afford this, but he's saying we can't afford not to do it. He's vague about what this will be. The only thing he won't accept is doing nothing. He won't accept the "paltry limits of conventional wisdom." So even though we don't "precisely know" what we need to do, we will do it. Like we did in WWII and in going to the moon. We'll do something. And it will have to be big, but we don't know what it is. Then he drops from that scarily high level of abstraction and the unknown to... shrimpers. Something about shrimp people. We must think BIG and... shrimpy.