Visualizing The Oil Spill
An interactive map lets you compare the size of the Gulf oil spill to your part of the country. (I think the spill is actually bigger than this map shows.) 
Thursday had been a bitch, so Congressman Barton decided to take the day off.
People For The American Way has published an excellent dissection of the Christian right's takeover of the Texas textbook program. The Religious Right has invested so heavily in Texas textbooks because of the national implications. School districts in Texas have to buy books from a state-approved list, and Texas is such an enormous market that textbook publishers will generally do whatever they can to get on that list. Textbooks written and edited to meet Texas standards end up being used all over the country. So Religious Right leaders in Texas can doom millions of American students to stunted, scientifically dubious science books and ideologically slanted history and social studies books. Advances in printing technology make it easier to prevent that from happening now, but it will take vigilance to keep publishers from following the path of least resistance.
The war heated up in recent years after far-right groups won a working majority on the elected state board of education and Gov. Rick Perry appointed the ringleader of the far-right faction, dentist Don McLeroy, as chair of the board in 2007. Since then, the Religious Right faction focused on standards for the approval and purchase of science textbooks for the next decade. McLeroy and his allies stripped any mention of the age of the universe from the science standards (those millions and billions of years are annoying to young-earth creationists who insist the universe is only 6,000 years old). In addition, the new standards will essentially require the teaching of evolution denialism and climate change denialism. The most recent battle, over the standards for new social studies textbooks, culminated in May with the adoption of social studies standards that give the far-right faction and its Religious Right advisors far too many victories in their efforts to replace history with ideology and turn public school classrooms into Heritage Foundation seminars.
Here he compares the congressional hearings to "the Salem witch trials," implying that BP, the 4th largest corporation in the world, is being wrongfully accused of crimes during an epidemic of religious zealotry and fear: http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2010/06/glenn_beck_angr.html
All of this from a guy who spends every show sermonizing and attempting to expose alleged "communists" and "Marxists" using flimsy evidence and doctored evidence. I suppose that makes him an expert on McCarthyism and witch trails, though.
###
Two thousand is probably the low end estimate "Kyrgyzstan's interim leader Roza Otunbayeva has said the death toll in the country's worst ethnic violence in decades could be as high as 2,000. Officials say at least 191 people were killed in fighting between Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks around Osh and Jalalabad. But Ms Otunbayeva told a Russian newspaper that the real toll could be "10 times the official figures". Meanwhile, a US envoy in the region has called for an investigation into the unrest. Central Asia envoy Robert Blake made the call while visiting refugees in camps in the Uzbek border city of Andijan on Friday. About 400,000 people have fled their homes, with many ethnic Uzbeks crossing into Uzbekistan. Mr Blake is due to travel later to the capital, Bishkek, for talks with Kyrgyz officials."
###
How's this for... well, I don't know whether to call it arrogance or simple buffoonery but it hasn't changed my opinion that the whole damned agency should be abolished and every bureaucrat in it kicked to the curb with no severance or pension.
Obama administration still approving flawed Gulf drilling plans.
###
Back in April the city council of the small town of Missoula, Montana added LGBT people to its housing and employment protections. Now the idiots behind the site Not My Bathroom have filed a lawsuit against the town claiming their petition attempt to have the law repealed by referendum is being blocked. The lawsuit says plaintiffs diligently worked to craft a valid petition but faced "discriminatory delaying tactics." The filing appears to ask the court to mandate the defendants put the ordinance on the ballot or explain why they shouldn't "perform their statutory duties." When contacted, plaintiff Tei Nash would not clarify the demands and directed calls to his attorney, who could not immediately be reached for comment. NotMyBathroom.com formed to fight the anti-discrimination ordinance, which the Missoula City Council adopted April 13. The measure protects people in the gay, lesbian and transgender community from discrimination in housing and employment. Some opponents who fought the ordinance before it was approved now want to put it on the ballot. If they had turned in enough signatures on a valid petition within 60 days of adoption, the law would have gone dark while awaiting voter response at the ballot. So the lawsuit also asks the court to stop the clock on the 60 days, "taking into account that Respondents' tactics denied Petitioners the June 8 primary voting opportunity to collect signatures."
If you've been watching the live video from the gusher, you'll have noticed the brand new yellow ring they inserted into the plume, apparently to more evenly inject the Corexit dispersant into the oil.
Oh good.
Environmental engineer Joe Taylor on the dispersant:
He says the sulfur and sulfuric acid based dispersant makes the oil spewing into the gulf sink, where its impossible to clean up--and where it depletes oxygen levels under the water, killing plankton and everything above plankton in the food chain. "Corexit is toxic, petroleum is toxic, and its depleting the oxygen levels," he says.What's worse says Taylor, is that if he knows this information, so does BP. "They have a lot of chemists who are a lot smarter than I am, and they know this," he says.
Of course there's no way of knowing the long term impact on humans, but it's not difficult to envision a decade or two from now a new epidemic of birth defects like autism or new strains of unexplained cancers. And everyone will be wondering, "How did this happen?"
I tend to subscribe to the hypothesis that most diseases and birth defects are multi-causal. It's possible that it's not just cellphones that cause brain tumors, but cellphones combined with the aspartame in diet foods and beverages. With the magnitude of the oil spill, we have 80,000,000 gallons of toxic oil combined with a million gallons of toxic dispersant combined with potential ocean dead zones combined with a variety of other toxins in the food supply or in prescription medications or in the air and water -- and POW! All new varieties of awfulness with multiple and therefore mysterious causes.
###
Mario Piperni: Stop your whining.
###
Why are the Republicans referring to this as a "natural disaster"?
If the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and resulting oil gusher is a natural disaster, then the Sears Tower in Chicago is a naturally-occurring structure.
Of course, when you look at the kind of GOBP horseshit that Americans were willing to buy for eight years, and how much of it they're STILL willing to buy, you can't really blame Boehner and Cantor for trying.
###
Halle-freaking-lujah. The White House has been loathe to criticize the Republicans, especially by name (usually they allude to "some people"). This time, they're actually naming names, and warning what would happen should the Republicans take control of the Congress - something, again, they haven't done nearly enough of. This is great. More of it, please.
Would it really be any different?
###
Joe Barton would like to apologize: he's very, very sorry.
###
###
###
Al Franken is in the American Constitution Society's base and killing their doodz.
The speech is here, and can not be embedded.
Note to absolute morons- this is how you move the Overton window. Full-throated attacks on conservative nonsense from the left.
(via)
###
So who would finish a story about Obama visiting Ohio to talk about the economy with this paragraph:
The trip Columbus probably cost taxpayers between $500,000 and $1 million.Air Force One alone bills out at $100,000 per hour, and the round trip is nearly two hours. Adding to the cost are military aircraft to carry limos and secret service vehicles, Marine One on standby, Secret Service, local police and other factors.
Mark Knoller, CBS news journamamalist.
Apparently Obama should remain sequestered at the White House to save taxpayer money. Which makes sense, if you are complete moron or Mark Knoller. Which might be redundant.
###
Joe LIEberman hates your freedom.
###
Does a company that both builds oil rigs and cleans up oil spills have any motivation to prevent oil rig disasters?
That's the question some people in business and politics are asking themselves after Halliburton's purchase of an oil clean-up company 10 days before the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and launched the worst oil spill in US history.
###
Hahahaha! Now I know why Weepy wanted the US Taxpayer to pick up the tab for BP's environmental disaster: he bought about $50,000 of BP stock, which –HAHAAAAAHAHAHAHA! — he bought right before the rig blew up real good. Which means he no longer owns $50,000 of BP stock.
House Republican Leader John Boehner bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in stock in BP, the company responsible for the spill that has spurred an environmental disaster. Boehner, of West Chester, purchased the stock on Dec. 10, four months before the April 20 explosion that set off the spill.
According to Boehner's office, the congressman sold his BP stock on May 18. It wasn't immediately clear how much money Boehner lost in the transaction.
