Headlines - Wednesday June 2

BP; the "P" stands for "Poisoning"

Can we all agree to stop using the term "leak" to describe what is going on?

It's not a leak, it's a freaking gusher. At 25,000 barrels or so of oil a day, that is over a million gallons of oil a day. That's not a leak. That's roughly like filling two Olympic-sized swimming pools with oil each day and dumping them into the Gulf of Mexico, and then adding several tons of toxic chemicals to break up the oil.

Oh, that's right. BP CEO Tony "I would like my life back" Hayward says that the reason that the fisherman working to clean up the oil are getting sick is because they are eating bad food, not because BP's dispersant is poisoning them.

"I'm sure they were genuinely ill, but whether it was anything to do with dispersants and oil, whether it was food poisoning or some other reason for them being ill," Hayward said. "You know, food poisoning is clearly a big issue when you have a concentration of this number of people in temporary camps, temporary accommodation. It's something we have to be very, very mindful of. It's one of the big issues of keeping the army operating. You know, armies march on their stomachs."

It's about time that we consider using Grabthar's Hammer on BP. It is clear that they went into drilling a well this deep with little thought or planning for what to do if the well failed. It is also clear that BP seems to be continually amazed that anybody gives a shit about both what they have done and what they have failed to do.

Oh, and while I am on the subject of the environmental fuckery of the oil companies, it may be worth paying attention to the large-scale and long-term pollution of the Niger delta by Exxon/Mobil, Shell and other companies.

 

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True Colors BP has hired Anne Womack-Kolton to handle the press surrounding the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. If that name sends a shiver up your spine, it is because she is a former spokeshole for Dick Cheney. BP is at least forthright and says flat-out "It wasn't a popularity contest."

 

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Building a better vocabulary Mooselini-style

I think she meant ravaged, but hahahaha!

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Under federal law oil companies like British Petroleum can only be held liable for up to 75 million dollars. However if an individual downloads music illegally it will cost you a fine of 250 thousand dollars. So the maximum penalty for destroying the entire gulf coast is the same penalty as downloading 300 songs illegally.

After we the taxpayers bailed out the banks, now we have to bail out the oil companies? Although the Constitution says "We the People" it seems like the country has been run like "We the Corporations". Whatever happened to concepts like fairness and honesty?

 

Marc Perkel

 

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Finally, there have been some arrests in connection to the Gulf oil spill. Oh, wait.

 

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Wisco: the oceans can't absorb the oil - here's why.

 

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It only took six weeks, unlimited barrels of petroleum, dead birds and dolphins, ruined businesses, sickened cleanup workers, lawsuits, countless lies and overwhelming negative polling, but Attorney General Holder has finally opened a criminal investigation into the oil gusher. t too much ugly criticism of the GOP policies that got us here in the first place because that would be much too partisan. The last thing we need is to destroy the spirit of bipartisan cooperation, since it's been working out so well for everyone.

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From "can-do" to "can't do" 

 

In a mere 40 years.

Bob Herbert

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For a nation that can't stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we've become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.

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Instead of staring mesmerized at the tragedy in the gulf, like spectators at a train wreck, we should be trying to regain that innovative can-do spirit that made America the greatest of nations.

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The result of the American people being told, for the last 30 years, that they can have everything for nothing, that they can spend beyond their means, rape the environment, and not pay to support the national infrastructure (except for our military infrastructure, you betcha).

 

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Pray for the Rachel Corrie.

 

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I am shocked, shocked to learn that ....

 

BP is allegedly only doing the bare minimum to stop the deep-sea gusher and clean up the oil that they think they can get away with.

The dispersant that they are using, Corexit, is reputedly the most toxic one available. So BP is deliberately poisoning the Gulf of Mexico in order to make sure that the oil is less visible. The oil is still there.

Robert Reich has been writing about why it may be necessary to take over BP for he short term. His blog is worth reading.

 

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Oh Boy

NEW POLL FINDS THAT AMERICANS DON'T KNOW STUFF: Did you know that a large portion of the United States citizenry doesn't know shit about anything? According to Internet thing FindLaw.com, "Nearly two-thirds of Americans cannot name any members of the U.S. Supreme Court." Which is not really a huge problem, because Americans don't vote for Supreme Court justices (directly), and Supreme Court justices are SUPPOSED to keep to themselves. But still jesus fuck. PR Newswire

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The war of terror must be ending soon!

Al Qaeda No.3 killed for the ten-millioneth time

Look, the War on Terror's "funniest" recurring joke… recurred! This particular Al Qaeda #3 got nabbed in the ass by one of Obama's science-fiction robo-death birds, what a loser. Isn't it just terrible that this recurring joke is still recurring five years after it was coined as a recurring joke by freaking Slate Internet magazine? Anyway, suck it, Muslims. Washington Post

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Worst case: oil gusher won't be stopped until Christmas

"The worst-case scenario is Christmas time," Dan Pickering, research director for energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co., told Bloomberg News for a story Wednesday. "This process is teaching us to be skeptical of deadlines."

Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government's current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline, said Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University.

So much crude pouring into the ocean may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results, said Mak Saito, an Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts...

Keep reading: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0602/worst-case-bp-leak-christmas/

 

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It might hurt Bibi Whatayahoo's feelings, so ....

 

Pelosi: "I don't want to go into a discussion of the blockade of Gaza."

 

Maybe I don't want my tax dollars going to pay your salary, or to fund the murder of Palestinians, Nancy.

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Yes, half-term governor, we do get it now! When you were leading thousands of morons in shouting "drill, baby, drill" (or, sorry, "drill,baby,drill") and "drill here, drill now", what you were trying to get at was that we should in no way be doing exploratory offshore drilling, baby, exploratory offshore drilling, because that's dangerous. How could we have been so blind?

If an oil well in ANWR had blown up, the oil would just kind of pool all over the tundra, where it's really too cold for media people to come up and make a big fuss, and it would be much easier to just nuke it, like the Russians did. Funny how none of that came across in your slogan, which just seemed to imply that we should drill the crap out of everywhere to get oil! It's almost as if reductionist chants don't carry nuance, and allow you to claim they mean any convenient bullshit you want when they become inconvenient!

Oh, and, word to the wise: it's totally OK to use whatever pill-based stimulants you need in order to get in the Twitterin' mood, but it's not necessary to actually name-check them at the beginning of your tweet. That just eats into your 140 characters. [The Greatest Twitter In The World]

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Is Right Wing Conservatism A Personality Disorder?

Provided the incentive was right, I feel sure Charles Krauthammer could even find a way to blame the Holocaust on the Jews.

That obscenity is not exponentially more offensive that the argument Krauthammer actually did float in his Washington Post column last week when he blamed the BP oil spill, not on the folks who cut corners on blowout preventers, but on the "environmental chic" of those who tried to outlaw off shore drilling in the first place.  "Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water?" Krauthammer asked.  It's because "environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production."

The radical right smells more than oil in the waters off the Gulf Coast.  It also smells blood.  And taking advantage of President Obama's tardy response in rescuing pro-corporate conservatives, yet again, from the consequences of their failed worldview, America's right wing is trying to turn the tables and do what it does best: shift blame.  

Keep reading: http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/diary/5775/is-right-wing-conservatism-a-personality-disorder

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How dare you?

That one phrase applies to a lot of outrages this week: Israel murdering peace activists, BP smothering the Gulf Coast in oil, repugs blocking more economic stimulus, Congress kicking the unemployed off a cliff; President Obama planning to gut social security, and so on ad nauseum.

So what are the wingnuts screaming about? That Democratic politicians are daring to - oh, the humanity! - play politics.

Steve M. has the the only effective response:

It isn't corruption by any reasonable person's standards. Corruption is the relationship between government and BP, or government and Massey Energy, or government and Goldman Sachs. This isn't corruption.

The notion that the Sestak job offer violates Obama's promises of "change" and transparency is a Republican talking point painstakingly crafted to appeal to centrist and liberal Beltway journalists who gave favorable coverage to the Obama campaign. And, of course, crafting talking points in order to destroy the careers of Democrats and liberals is simply what Republicans do. The Republican Party is no longer a political party, really, as we've previously understood the term. The Republican Party is an opposition-research operation that also runs candidates for office. Political parties care about governing. Political parties care about legislating. The Republican Party cares only about driving Democrats from office and winning power for the sake of winning power.

This is an attempt at a coup by talking points. The goal is to get everyone across the political spectrum talking about how this is a really big deal. For the red-meat-craving right-wing base, there's talk of impeachment and the invoking of Watergate, with the suggestion that there must be much more to this than meets the eye because, well, there just must be. For mainstream journos, there's the talk of Obama's betrayal of his promises of change. And now the effort is self-sustaining: When reporters as far left as Eric Alterman are arguing that this is a self-inflected wound because the White House and Sestak could have released all the facts right away (as if that would have stopped the GOP scandal-generation machine), it's meant as friendly advice, but it plays into the Watergate-evoking "cover-up is worse than the crime" meme that's the subtext of other coverage of the story.

I suppose it's futile to hope for this, but the left response to the Sestak story should be: Republicans, how dare you. Amid job losses, oil spills, terrorist attacks, and all the other problems we have, you want to bring down a government now, over this? Talk about the criminalization of politics.

But then, Republicans simply don't care about what happens to America. They'd burn America to the ground if it meant they'd rule over the ashes.