Happy now?

Is the Gulf of Mexico becoming the cesspool of the Oil business; the repository of all the spills resulting from accidents, neglect, irresponsible drilling and all the other inevitable situations we refuse to listen to while sneering at "enviros" and calling for more oil whatever the cost?

Sure it is, but we may just be beginning to give a damn, now that it's appearing that many of us won't live to see that section of the great mother of life, the World Ocean, and it's shorelines restored to any kind of health.

We have another gusher, apparently. Just off the coast near New Orleans where a barge has reportedly crashed into a well spilling more oil just where we need it least and just where we have our equipment otherwise occupied. It hasn't been the first time, and it won't be the last, but maybe now we're starting to realize that you can't get all the world's oil out of the ground without the nasty consequences we've been ignoring. You can't transport it by ship or by pipeline and you can't pump it without leaks and spills and fires and of course, loss of life.

Yes, that's right, you're paying three bucks a gallon -- much, much less than other countries do and all our efforts to ruin what's left of what's worth keeping in our country aren't going to reduce that price. It's all going to get worse until you start listening to those hippie, treehugging, sandal wearing weirdos and stop listening to the bought and paid for politicians who refuse to do a damned thing that might stop the campaign contributions and free propaganda that keep them in office. The rich TV blowhards, your friends, your neighbors and all their stupid stories about vast reserves of oil ready to pour into your tanks if only the government and those environmental freaks would let our friends at Exxon sell it to China and Japan at a higher price than we want to pay.

I'd like to blame it all on Republicans, like the ones in Florida who refuse to take any steps whatever to keep the oil off our shores ( or the industrial and agricultural waste that poison our inland waters) but even the President we elected in our naivete, thinking that he could be immune, has been tainted.

Oil corrupts. Big oil corrupts big time, whether it's in Nigeria, Venezuela or Iraq. It's corrupted us and has corrupted presidents since the Harding administration. But before you think I'm going into another partisan rant, think again. It's us - it's you who elect these people. It's the American people, the snickering snarky states of America looking for scapegoats while we support the Palins and the McCains and the Cheneys and the Bush's who tell us we need more oil and that we need only to disregard all prudence to get and use more of it and faster. Yes, they either bought or bamboozled Obama into thinking it was all so safe despite the shaky safety record and now they want you to forget that we all cooperated in eliminating all traces of safety standards -- you know, the things we've been dumb enough to see as "Communism." It's us, the soccer moms, the commuters, the SUV fashionistas who don't think past our daily concerns and laugh at the concept of giving a damn about the future. You wanted oil and you've got oil. Are you happy now?

Too much business

It's one of those things many Obama supporters hoped he would do, and do quickly. It's also one of those things nobody should have expected him to be able to do given any amount of time. I'm talking about the malignant, corrupting influence of unfettered, and unlimited lobbying.

Amidst the chorus singing about too much government influence in the oil industry being the culprit in the Gulf Oil Disaster (along with the president, of course) isn't it time to listen to the quiet voices trying to remind us that it's too much business involvement in Government that's corrupting both sectors? Of course they're quiet only in comparison, because the volume of noise is directly proportional to the volume of oil bucks and Gas bucks and the volume of Republican/Corporate money wells pumping away at the opportunity to make even more through more obfuscation and deregulation.

If The Washington Post has it right and 3 out of 4 oil and gas lobbyists were formerly part of the Federal Government, we have to believe that congress isn't going to find fault with a practice that can offer lucrative employment to the departing congressman or the promise of election support that opens the spigot of campaign financing from those industries. No, I don't see Obama doing much about it. In fact I don't see us or anyone else doing much about it. We just can't afford to compete.

WORMWOOD - The BP Apocalypse

By Octopus

And the third angel sounded the trumpet, and a great star

fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch, and it fell 

on the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of 

waters: And the name of the star is called Wormwood.

- The Apocalypse of St. John -

(Note: Chernobyl in Russian means 'Wormwood.)

Here is the latest update on the Gulf oil spill from American Progress:

Based on "sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday," Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, told NPR that the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 70,000 barrels -- or 3 million gallons -- a day, which is 15 times the official estimate of BP and the federal government.  Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day.  These estimates suggest that the Deepwater Horizon wreckage has already spilled about five times as much oil as the 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster.  The new figure exceeds the "worst-case scenario" offered by Transocean, BP, and Halliburton officials, who told Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) last week that the maximum possible flow would be "60,000 barrels a day."  Markey said in a statement on Thursday that "an underestimation of the oil spill's flow may be impeding the ability to solve the leak and handle the management of the disaster," adding that, "If you don't understand the scope of the problem, the capacity to find the answer is severely compromised."  BP, meanwhile, has not endorsed the new estimate. It has also declined to take "off-the-shelf instruments routinely used" in deep sea research down to the gusher to measure the rate.  A BP spokesman said that the company "has decided to focus on stopping the leak rather than measuring it."  BP's CEO Tony Hayward sought to downplay the scope of the disaster, telling the Guardian that "the amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume [of the Gulf of Mexico]." The edges of the massive oil slick are expected to begin hitting shore in Mississippi by Sunday, although bits of "tar balls" from the spill have already been found on the beaches of both the state's mainland and barrier islands.

The "Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species," including the Deepwater Horizon site that just exploded.  Under current law the agency is required to get these permits.

Bottom line: This is the worst environmental disaster in history. It is no longer regional or national but international in scope. The entire Atlantic basin will be effected, and ocean gyres will move this mess around the globe.  Meanwhile, BP executives equivocate while tempers burn.

This disaster is in my backyard. It will impact our food supply, our local businesses, the livelihoods of neighbors, our coastline, our environment, our quality of life ... and there will be no fix within my lifetime.

When I read about 29 miners killed in the worst coal mine disaster in 40 years, and how Massey Energy bought off politicians and ducked safety standards, I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

When I read of defective consumer products imported from abroad, of adulterated pet food that killed the family dog and defective wallboard that caused health hazards, I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

When I read about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and how corrupt Wall Street bankers paid themselves bonuses from taxpayer-funded TARP money, I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

When I think of this GOP right wing crap, their raving insanity over free-market capitalism, and their steadfast refusal to support banking reform, environmental protection, consumer product safety, and healthcare (because reform is bad, big government is bad, and what’s good for business is good for America), I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

Damn idiots!  These corrupt business interests and their crooked politicians have gridlocked our government and crippled our ability to respond to crises.  As far as I am concerned, bipartisanship is dead.  Civility is dead.   There is more than a culture war being waged in this country.  We are locked in a struggle for survival itself.

Let's pity the victim

There should be an emoticon for a dumbfounded guffaw or something less childishly vulgar than WTF? to express my reaction to Michael Steele's attempt to make himself a martyr instead of a hypocrite. It would save so many keystrokes.

It takes a desperate man and a little man to dismiss the scorn over his involvement with the kinky strip club incident GOP contributors unknowingly funded. There's something distinctly oily about his assertion that he has a "slimmer margin of error" as a black man, even though that might be true in general.

"It's a different role for me to play and others to play and that's just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it"

he explained on Good Morning America this morning.

Whether or not he actually is held to a higher standard than a non-African American in his position as RNC Chairman would be, that frisky business is certainly at a level where anyone would be condemned for it and above the level where a white Democratic president might be impeached for it.

Yes, it's true that an honest politician (we're speaking hypothetically here) has to walk on eggs, so to speak and it's true that one of a minority group has to have even more delicate toes, but that certainly doesn't apply to a gleeful romp in the slime bucket, does it Mr. Steele? Falsely posing as a victim doesn't help real victims either.

If Gore had won Kentucky. . .

That Al Gore lost the state of Kentucky in the 2000 Presidential election was a bit of a surprise to some of us. Polls had him up as much as 8%, but of course he lost that state and his loss was accompanied by jeers, of course. Republicans love to hate Al Gore although some have since begun to love Lieberman. They'd also love to forget all the accusations of voter fraud and the way they excoriated all who were suspicious that those voting machines with no means to check whether they had been hacked or not might have in fact, been tampered with in several states. Sore losers, we were called by the smug victors who currently are losers sore enough to the point of threatening us all with violence and insurrection.

In a country with a memory, the mockery might haunt Republicans, but of course they live in the moment and reality is created anew every day to suit each day's requirements. The conviction of a former judge and seven others on Thursday gives renewed strength to the argument that the electoral victory in 2000 and perhaps the Bush-Kerry contest were influenced or decided by corrupt Republicans. former Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle and former school Superintendent Douglas C. Adams along with five others were convicted of a federal racketeering conspiracy and several of them of other charges, including mail fraud, extortion and laundering the money that was used to buy votes.

Some of the juries are still out but the mockery, the Liberal bashing, the accusations of treason are sounding more and more off key as we move forward from the 8 year reign of the Right and we have to speculate on what might have been, for better or for worse, if the corrupt and unscrupulous, with all the lip service paid to freedom, had had respect for the law and tolerance of Democracy.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

And he said unto them that stood by, Take away from him the pound, and give it unto him that hath the ten pounds.

-Luke 19:24-

Once upon a time there were people who would lend you money at high rates of interest. We called them loan sharks and we put them in jail if we could catch them. We had usury laws to protect the public from being forced into ruinous transactions. We were just inches away from Marxism.

Then came the deregulators who told us that it was toxic government interference and was depriving us of our "freedoms" to apply the same laws to that class of supercitizens known as corporations and so now we are free to borrow at rates Don Corleone wished he could have charged. Sure, some states jumped in and capped payday loans and the government "protected" the military from being charged more than 36%, but of course that's an outrageous assault on our "freedoms" and sure enough, the lobbyists came out of the woodwork and bought themselves a House subcommittee which went to work legitimizing loans with a 391% APR. For many in the payday loan business, that's not enough.

H.R. 1214 introduced earlier this year by Congressman Rep. Luis "dances with jackals" Gutiérrez [D-IL4] is still in committee. Yes, Luis is a Democrat, let's give credit where it's due and Luis, who rose from poor Hispanic roots in Chicago promising to help others like him is now the champion of legalized juice loans and the big banks that screw the little guy in a big way.

The congressman got into trouble last year for getting a $200,000.00 loan from a contractor for whom he had intervened with the zoning board, but I'm sure he isn't paying 391%. A competing bill from Congressman Joe Baca would prevent States from capping rates at all and would allow much larger add-on fees and charges, but the really great feature would allow you to roll over the loan indefinitely, racking up that 400% or so until you're forced to commit suicide.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us who aren't desperate enough with trying to pay medical bills and mortgages we can't afford, the Credit companies are out to protect our freedom too. Faced with having to warn us they're tightening the screws in the near future, they're tightening them now without warning. I got a letter yesterday from my friendly MasterCard folk ( I won't mention the name but it rhymes with Citibank) informing me that since I've been such a good customer for 25 years and always paid the full balance on time, they would raise my interest rates to over 20%. Well to tell the truth there was a time or two when I got the un -postmarked bill on or after the due date although the last two times they tried that I'd switched to e-bills and had documentary proof that they sent the bill too late to be paid on time. They refunded the charges which would have amounted to nearly 100%, but I never got an apology for their attempt at petty larceny and I don't expect a letter of appreciation for my part ( and yours) in bailing them out when they choked on their own greed.

Yes, I know, when the Republicans justify their crimes by insisting the Democrats aren't pure at heart either, they don't avoid the guilt, but they're not always lying.

Cherche la slime

There is a broad and thick trail of slime following Mr. Cheney out of Washington and indeed if we could follow that trail, history could actually reflect what happened over the last 8 years, but sadly, Cheney seems to have succeeded in establishing a separate agency, outside the executive branch but funded by it, that is as invisible, yet as massive as the dark matter physicists are in love with these days. In short, the evidence that might foster indictments has disappeared, some reported destroyed. Of what remains, only that which Cheney allows to be viewed by posterity will be released. Cheney and Bush may have left behind a Temple of History as filled with booby traps, poison arrows, rolling boulders and pits of quicksand that no future historian, with or without fedora and bullwhip can penetrate.

District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a US District Judge often sympathetic to the legal arguments of the junta, has written a 63-page opinion stating that:

"Congress drastically limited the scope of outside inquiries related to the vice president's handling of his own records during his term in office."

In other words, the National Archive will no longer be able to determine what's important to keep of the records not yet shredded or destroyed. Dick Cheney's legacy will be what he wants it to be, not what it is, and in the language of Tense Logic: p→GPp “What is, will always have been.”

This seat's for sale

Let's hear it for young Rod Blagojevich,
Put his state up for sale, oh boyavich!
They surely won't fail
To put him in jail,
Where his cellmate will make him a a toyovich.