Spillover from a catastrophe  -A A +A By Rob Witwer   According
to polls, a large and growing percentage of Americans blame the
president for the lack of progress in containing the oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t count myself among them. In my
mind, BP is fully responsible for the accident and the woefully
inadequate response — and the company should be held fully
accountable.  A more difficult question — and one that cannot be
answered based on information available to the public right now
— is whether the president, through the agencies he oversees,
bears some responsibility in failing to prevent the disaster. 
But there is a danger here, one that goes beyond the immediate
situation. It’s the tendency of our government to overcompensate
for bad foresight by overreacting in the face of an emergency.
Emotion is an essential human characteristic, but when it drives
legislation, watch out for unintended consequences.  I saw it
happen all the time at the state legislature. In one case, a
colleague intr