Tag Archives: BP

Drill, baby, drill

Posted on by

Deformities in Gulf Seafood Found After BP Oil Spill

Via PopSi:

Deformed Gulf Shrimps On the left is a Gulf shrimp with growths, while on the right are a group of shrimps without either eyes or eye sockets. Left: Keath Ladner. Right: Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera just published a thoroughly disturbing report on the deformed fish and shellfish that are being pulled from the Gulf in the wake of the BP oil spill. Shrimp without eyes or even eye sockets, snapper with large pink growths, undersized and misshapen crabs–the fishermen in the Gulf that Al Jazeera talked to have never seen anything like it.

An excerpt from the report:

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.

Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.

“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”

Can we look at the bright side (GOP talking points side) for a minute: so you’re getting pink masses and lesions on your shrimp and fish at Red Lobster — doesn’t that mean you’re getting more for your money?

(Cartoon) The Teaparty: why listen to really dumb people who never learn from their past mistakes?

Posted on by

source: David Horsey via: azspot

It’s only money

Posted on by

Kenneth Bobby Jindal’s $360 million sand berm was a total boondoggle: The total amount of oil captured by the $360 million berm was, at most, 1,000 barrels.  Skimming and burning got rid of 890K-1.85 million barrels. (via)

Yes, that is $360,000 per barrel. Nice work, Jindal!

Tides Foundation CEO To Fox News Advertisers: Drop Glenn Beck Or Have Blood On Your Hands

Posted on by

In an extraordinary move to nip the inflammatory commentary coming from Glenn Beck, the founder and CEO of the Tides Foundation (a frequent Beck target) has written advertisers asking them to remove their sponsorship of the Fox News program or risk having “blood on their hands.”

Drummond Pike, who along with his organization was recently targeted by an assassin inspired by Beck’s program, penned a letter on Friday to the Chairmen of the Boards of JP Morgan Chase, GEICO, Zurich Financial, Chrysler, Direct Holdings Americas, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Lilly Corporate Center, BP, and The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc.

In it, he detailed the alarm he felt over having a “person carrying numerous guns and body armor” attempt to start a “revolution” by murdering “my colleagues and me.”  Story is located here

Read the full letter: Here

JoeWo

Morning in the bunker

Posted on by

null

.

FLOTSAM

  • Cool East Village studio design: LikeCool
  • Sandwiches in a can? Candwich! Discuss it with the Salt Lake City-based company that actually makes this monstrosity on Twitter.

POLITICS!

  • Coburn And McCain troubled by Stimulus Debt, which is 488 times smaller than debt impact of Bush Tax Cuts
  • The Tea Party is the Republican Party: A new poll by CNN and Opinion Research Corporation shows that 41 percent of Republicans believe President Obama was either probably not or definitely not born in the US.

MISC

.

null

.

Morning in the bunker

Posted on by

null
.

  • (Think Progress) – Colorado Tea Party candidate Ken Buck on abortion: “I don’t believe in the exceptions of rape or incest.” Buck’s extremist stance may help him regain favor with his far-right supporters, some of whom he recently got into trouble with when he called them “dumbass” birthers.
  • (Jeffrey Goldberg) – The Cordoba Initiative, which is headed by an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an enemy of al Qaeda, no less than Rudolph Giuliani and the Anti-Defamation League are enemies of al Qaeda.  Bin Laden would sooner dispatch a truck bomb to destroy the Cordoba Initiative’s proposed community center than he would attack the ADL, for the simple reason that Osama’s most dire enemies are Muslims.
  • (NY Times) – GOOD NEWS: The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.
  • (Greg Sargent) – Pew Research just released a new poll finding that more than twice as many Americans see a Palin endorsement as a negative for a Congressional candidate than view it as a positive. Sargent summarizes, “she’s successfully tightening her emotional grip on her devoted legions of supporters at the expense of just about everyone else. Far more see [Palin] as a turn-off than as a turn-on.”
  • (Reuters) – Barnes & Noble, the number one U.S. book store chain, is putting itself up for sale as business suffers in the high-stakes battle for a leading role in the digital books market.
  • (NYTimes) – 2.4 million more [Americans] became obese from 2007 to 2009, bringing the total to 72.5 million, or 26.7 percent of the population. The numbers are part of a continuing and ominous trend. The nine states with obesity rates of 30 percent or more are Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia. The highest rate, 34.4 percent, was in Mississippi.

null

Is BP killing wild horses for oil?

Posted on by

If Satan doesn’t run BP, I don’t know what company he would run.

The CNN report:

Via Alexander Higgins blog:

null

The ATS investigation reveals the real reason that Salazar made the decision to drive the the horses from Federal lands was so BP could install an oil pipeline.

Here is a rushed transcript from a piece of part 2 of the investigation by ATS News.

We have guys like Ken Salazar now talking toughing saying we are going to crack down we are going to get to the bottom of this.

I am not sure if I trust Ken Salazar to do that.

Ken Salazar before he became a Senator, before he became Secretary of the Interior was a cattle rancher.

… I know what [Ken Salazar] has said about horses. Wild Horses they have no place on public range. They have no place there despite the fact that is what the law of the land says.

Ken Salazar has the same view of public lands that Bush and Cheney had for all of those years.

The public lands are for the public of oil companies, mining companies and cattle companies.

That’s the public they serve.

Those public lands are there to be exploited.

The American public is being ripped off every single day, every year to the tunes of billions of dollars.

We have this image of oil men, and gas men, wild catters, and the miners, the rugged individuals cattleists taming the west.

Its a bunch of crap.

All of those individuals exist because they suck off the public teet.

They are welfare, it is corporate welfare or they wouldn’t exist.

The report then goes on to discuss how environmentalists put together the a trail of documents showing that the Federal Government had other motives to drive the horses off Federal Lands.

The decision to drive the horses off the land was made during the course of discussions about the installation of a BP oil pipeline on the Federal Lands called the Ruby pipeline.

ATS report:

.

Weekend in the bunker

Posted on by
null

Lady Gaga LITERALLY becomes a fashion victim -- TMZ

.

NEWS

POLITICS / GOV

  • Village double standards: Ruth Marcus is outraged that President Obama would subvert democracy by making a recess appointment to get around Republican filibustering… except that BUSH APPOINTED HER HUSBAND TO THE FTC WITH A RECESS APPOINTMENT!

.
Via Crooks and Liars, yet another one of these studies:

The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

New data show that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it’s been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever.

The CBPP report attributes the widening of this gap partly to Bush Administration tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy. Of the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts taxpayers received through 2008, high-income households received by far the largest—not only in amount but also as a percentage of income—which shifted the concentration of after-tax income toward the top of the spectrum.

MISC

In Afghanistan, in the midst of war, many animals are lost and separated from their family. Many are found later by troops from the US, UK and Canada. Soldiers rescue these animals and get help from rescue groups that help them send these animals out of the country and to a forever loving home that they deserve. More…
.

Friday in the bunker

Posted on by

How a cat deals with being Rick-rolled:
.

.

News

Biggest defaulters on mortgages are THE RICH: Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population. More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
.
BP dumping oil waste in Mississippi landfills:
.

.

Politics / Gov

Palin’s got a slick new ad about “Mama Grizzlies“ and how their strength and freedom symbolizes a certain group of American women who hate things like death-panels, lamestream media, and Kenyan-born Socialists. A majority of grizzly bears resent this blatant hypocrisy.

But what is Palin’s most impressive “strength” demonstrated by the video?

Washington Examiner: Despite the campaign style of the video Palin recently released, she has over and over again demonstrated that her greatest strength to American conservatism is not in running for office but in getting liberals and Democrats to react to her comments.

.
Climate change: It’s odd how little we’ve heard lately from the skeptics who deny that climate change is real. What’s the matter, people? Heat stroke? ~ Eugene Robinson
.
Rape victims should use their pregnancies as a way to turn lemons into lemonade.

ALAN STOCK: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let’s say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?

SHARRON ANGLE: I think that two wrongs don’t make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.

Misc

What ever happened to Gallagher? He was recently in Bremerton, WA and…

Gallagher is—how best to put this?—a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac. I HAD NO IDEA.

“Hey, President Obama,” he spits out the name like a mouthful of burning hair. “You ain’t black. I don’t care what you say—you’re a latte. You’re half whole-milk. It could be goat milk—you could be a terrorist!” I am too busy losing my mind to catch the next joke, which is about Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer. Aaaaand we’re off.

.
null
.

Thursday in the bunker

Posted on by

null

News

A suspect in the abduction of 4-year-old Alisa Maier shot himself as police approached yesterday. Paul Serling Smith, 38, of Hawk Point, Mo., was in the process of spray-painting his car silver when police closed in. (stltoday.com)

.
Authorities in California said Wednesday they have arrested a suspect in the Grim Sleeper serial killer case and will charge him with 10 counts of murder. (CNN)

Gov / Politics

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—gingerly, gingerly—took a step towards addressing one of the most fundamental but unknown threats to public health: the overuse of antibiotics in animal food and water. …Drugs like penicillin and tetracycline were developed to help sick people, and it might stand to reason that they should be preserved for use in sick people—not to speed the growth of pigs, chicken and cattle… about 13 million lbs. or 70% of all antibiotics in the U.S. goes to food animal production. (Time)
.
“I don’t know what happened on that BP well. People keep asking me. I don’t know. Were there problems with what BP wanted to do and it was approved without enough scrutiny? I don’t know.” ~ Former MMS Director (2002–2007) Johnnie Burton “defending” her record.
.
“Government shouldn’t be doing that to a private company. And I think you named it clearly: It’s a slush fund.” ~ Nevada Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, today, on BP‘s $20 billion escrow fund for the oil spill.
.

Misc

John Cole:  Heathers — Apparently Kos has been blacklisted at MSNBC because he hurt Joe Scar’s fee-fees on twitter.
.
A Rachel Maddow high school pic, featuring long, blonde hair!
.
 These videos are funny – you should watch them:

  • Schwiiing for Palin! Video

.

Wednesday morning in the bunker

Posted on by
null

Suining public baths in China's Sichuan province.

Misc

From Is Google Making Us Stupid?: “The Internet is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (Nicholas Carr “The Shallows” ~ NPR)
.
More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking. (AP)
.
BP’s embattled CEO, Tony Hayward, flew to the wealthy emirate of Abu Dhabi to meet officials amid speculation the oil giant is looking to raise cash to cover clean up costs from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. (ThinkProgress)

Lake Pontchartrain, which has until now been free of oil from the BP spill, is now home to tar balls and an oil sheen. (CSMonitor)
.
U.S. corporations are sitting on a lot of cash, but not spending it. If the U.S. government were to borrow some of the cash corporations aren’t spending, and spend it on, say, public works, wouldn’t this also create jobs? (Paul Krugman)

News / Politics

Het Laaste Niews is reporting that when authorities searched the home of the former archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, they discovered a hidden cache of documents and photographs on notorious child sex killer Marc Dutroux — documents that Danneels was not supposed to have. (LGF)
.
Charles Manson family acolyte Leslie Van Houten has been denied parole for the 19th time because she “still poses a risk to society,” California authorities said. (CNN)
.
President Obama will use the congressional recess to bypass the Senate and appoint Harvard Professor Donald Berwick to[day] to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. (Boston.com)
.
The Justice Department has decided to file suit against Arizona on grounds that the state’s new immigration law illegally intrudes on federal prerogatives. (WaPo)
.
A 4-year-old girl taken from her Louisiana, Missouri front yard has been found alive 80 miles away near St. Louis. (MSNBC)
.

Morning in the bunker

Posted on by

null
.

News

  • EVANSTON, WYOMING — A woman who has spent 20 years in a mental institution for beheading and mutilating her two young daughters, because she said they were evil clones, may soon get supervised release. (AP)
  • Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, an Iranian mother of two convicted of adultery, will be buried up to her chest and stoned to death, a human rights activist warns. (CNN)
  • U.S. to sue Arizona on immigration: Justice Department will argue that state’s law intrudes on federal prerogatives, sources say. (WaPo)

x

Politics

  • I support this: Re: Steele and the RNC: Allow me to chime in with my usual observation on this subject: This is a job for Sarah Palin. Palin would be a much better RNC chairman than presidential candidate or freelance kingmaker. She’d raise tons of money and help recruit good candidates, i.e., she’d excel at doing the things Steele should have been doing instead of appointing himself Republican pundit-at-large. (John Cole)
  • In September 2008, Fred Thompson decried government-backed mortgages as the cause of financial meltdown… Flash forward to 2010 and now Thompson is a TV pitchman for — you guessed it — a business selling government-backed mortgages. (DailyKos)

Unemployment

(Steve Benen) This week offered new evidence that our fragile economic recovery is on very shaky ground. The monthly job totals from June were deeply disappointing. The real estate market continues to struggle badly. Reports on construction spending and manufacturing activity both disappointed. [...]

But that’s why Chambliss’ GOP response is so striking. His articulation of the Republican message of the week sent an unmistakable signal about exactly what the minority party considers important right now. [...]

So, literally just one day after the release of the worst monthly jobs report since October, and with a genuine employment crisis undermining the economy, the official Republican message of the week is to talk about the debt — a debt, by the way, that grew by $5 trillion during the Bush/Cheney era because of breathtaking Republican recklessness.

How many times did Chambliss mention the word “jobs”? Literally none. How many references were there to “unemployment”? Zero. What did Chambliss offer in terms of ideas to improve the economy? There weren’t any — he didn’t talk about growing the economy at all.

The most important issue on the minds of Americans went completely ignored, because the GOP has decided a different issue matters more than the economy.

  • Republicans have always been vigorously preoccupied with the notion that poor people — as well as unemployed people in the aftermath of a deep recession — are somehow spoiled and overly pampered. Meanwhile, they don’t mind spoon-feeding billions of free dollars to the world’s largest corporations. (Bob Cesca)
  • The American taxpayer helped BP pay the lease for the Deepwater Horizon rig. And while they bitch and shriek about spoiled freeloaders on unemployment, I would wager that the Republicans would gladly continue to allow this tax loophole. And why not? The Republicans were happy to keep paying Big Oil $35 billion a year in corporate welfare. (Bob Cesca)