Posts from — August 2010

Alone At Last

Stand Back!

[Editor: KT3 has a rare moment when neither Sleepy not Pita is bugging her, and I took a picture with the flash going off without real need.]

Friday Ark

Proving once again that they have no clue about the need for closure along the Gulf Coast, McClatchy reports on the latest delay: ‘Bottom kill’ of BP’s Gulf well now put off till after Labor Day

WASHINGTON — A relief well that government officials say will finally finish off BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be completed until after Labor Day, weeks later than officials had been predicting.

The delay is necessary in part because officials want to preserve the blowout preventer currently sitting atop the BP well as possible evidence in federal investigations into what caused the well to explode on April 20, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Thursday. That means the old blowout preventer will have to be removed and a new one set in place before engineers can complete the relief well. That process and associated tests will take at least three weeks, Allen said.

“We do not want to have damage to the blowout preventer,” Allen said in explaining the delay. “We are concerned about preserving evidence.”

Look, that blowout preventer has been a vital piece of evidence since the explosion in April, and could have been swapped out any time after the success of the top kill was confirmed, but they waited until just before the relief well was finished.

The weather pattern that produced the Russian heat wave, Pakistani floods, and suppressed Atlantic tropical storm development is breaking down just as the most active portion of the hurricane season begins. It is almost as if they are trying for a new blowout, with delay after delay.

Just a note to let you know that as a result of your campaign that fills my mail box with your brochures, calls me at least daily, and annoys the hell out of my Mother with your constant ads on television [congratulations, you have replaced the Scooter Store as the most hated advertiser], I am more likely to vote for a zombie “Tricky Dick” Nixon than you.

Should the Democrats of Florida be so delusional as to select you, and there is no alternate minor party candidate, I may be forced to vote for his “orangeness” or not vote at all.

I don’t imagine anyone has ever explained the concept of “wretched excess” to you.

So I have been looking around the ‘Net to clarify some things that have been bothering me on this whole deal and what I have found shows how totally bogus the whole thing is.

First off, when I was living in Southern California I did work for people in the development community, and the political scene in San Diego was heavily weighted with development issues. They were having their bubble, so there was a lot of money involved.

One thing I know from the experience is that building in a city is a long process filled with forms, fees, and a lot of public meetings. If you don’t like a particular project, there are a lot of ways to to express your opinion, and the easiest if you have the time is to go to the public meetings.

These meetings are a direct way of sending a message to politicians. You may not get a project stopped, but you can stall it if enough people show up, and you might force mitigation.

So, I was surprised when I read this article from the first week in May in the New York Daily News that quotes two relatives of people who died at the World Trade Center talking about the project being insensitive, but notes they didn’t attend the public meetings where the project was approved.

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Rick Outzen has scored again at The Daily Beast with BP Oil Spill Coverup

While officials claim most of the oil from America’s worst-ever spill has disappeared, fishermen hired by BP are still finding tar balls—and being instructed to hide their discoveries.

Two weeks ago, as federal officials prepared to declare that some three-quarters of the estimated 5 million barrels of oil released into the Gulf over three months had disappeared, Mark Williams, a fishing boat captain hired by BP to help with the spill cleanup, encountered tar balls as large as three inches wide floating off the Florida coast.

Reporting his findings to his supervisor, a private consulting company hired by BP, the reply, according to his logbook came back: “Told—no reporting of oil or tar balls anymore. Don’t put on report. We’re here for boom removal only,” referring to the miles of yellow and orange containment barriers placed throughout the Gulf.

BP has been controlling the information flow since the beginning and the Feds have let them get away with it. That’s why the numbers for dead birds and sealife are so low, people aren’t allowed to report the real numbers. BP brought in people from outside, their own contractors, to control the numbers and made local workers sign non-disclosure agreements. They have been suppressing the real numbers since the beginning.

According to the Pensacola News Journal the Republican candidate for the US Senate doesn’t see drilling off the Florida coast as a problem – Rubio: Offshore drilling could be good for state

Framing it as an issue of energy independence and national security, U.S. Senate hopeful Marco Rubio said Tuesday that offshore drilling isn’t a dead issue for Florida.

Rubio spoke to about 50 supporters at McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola, touching on issues ranging from the BP oil spill and health care to religious freedom and immigration.

This is why there has to be an amendment to Florida’s constitution: the politicians just refuse to give up on ideas that will bring them a lot of money. It’s as if the lost tourist and fishing seasons never happened, and oil isn’t still coming ashore along the coast. You just can’t get through to them.

Oil is sold on the world market to the highest bidder because the US doesn’t control its supplies, multinational corporations do. How does that improve our energy independence or security?

The Miami Herald reports on a Study: Gulf oil spill still a threat to seafood safety

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill still poses threats to human health and seafood safety, according to a study published Monday by the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report comes two days after President Obama and members of his family swam in the Gulf at Panama City Beach and ate fish caught there, and hours after this year’s commercial shrimping season officially kicked off along the Louisiana coast.

Federal officials disputed the new report and said ongoing testing is aggressive and sufficient to protect public health.

In the short term, study co-author Gina Solomon voiced greatest concern for shrimp, oysters, crabs and other invertebrates she says are have difficulty clearing their systems of dangerous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) similar to those found in cigarette smoke and soot. Solomon is an MD and public health expert in the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
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Because of the dispersants, a major reason BP used them, so CNN reports that Plumes of Gulf oil spreading east on sea floor

Researchers at the University of South Florida have concluded that oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill may have settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico further east than previously suspected — and at levels toxic to marine life.

Initial findings from a new survey of the Gulf conclude that dispersants may have sent droplets of crude to the ocean floor, where it has turned up at the bottom of an undersea canyon within 40 miles of the Florida Panhandle. The results are scheduled to be released Tuesday, but CNN obtained a summary of the initial conclusions Monday night.

Plankton and other organisms at the base of the food chain showed a “strong toxic response” to the crude, and the oil could well up onto the continental shelf and resurface later, according to researchers.

“The dispersant is moving the oil down out of the surface and into the deeper waters, where it can affect phytoplankton and other marine life,” said John Paul, a marine microbiologist at USF.

The researchers are just finishing up compiling data and roughing out their reports, so you have to wonder what the Feds were using when they told us the oil went away. As I mentioned, fresh tar balls and patches showed up on beaches in Walton County when the tropical depression went by, so what is a hurricane going to do?

Bill Finch is director of Mobile Botanical Gardens, a senior fellow for The Ocean Foundation and garden writer for the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama. He has written a piece describing what is likely to happen as a result of the oil spill – Insight: The oil’s underhanded threat to life in the Gulf.

Robert Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal has a good piece on the continuing research – Much Oil Remains in Gulf, Researchers Estimate

The UGA team, which has been at the forefront of investigating the underwater oil plumes created by the leaking well, took a closer look at the government’s calculations and came to a more pessimistic conclusion: As much as 79% of the oil and its toxic byproducts still remained in the subsurface waters of the Gulf. Moreover, it might easily be years before these petrochemicals disappear.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said UGA marine scientist Charles Hopkinson, the senior investigator in the effort. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade.”

Dr. Samantha Joye, University of Georgia [UGA] Department of Marine Sciences blogs about her latest research in the post, Where has the oil gone? Short answer – it’s still in the Gulf.

All of the “happy talk” from BP and the Federal government is garbage. The oil is still there. Since last Thursday, oil patches have been coming ashore on beaches East of me in Walton County.

Republican economic policy is contained in two words: “cheap labor”.

Avedon Carol resurrected this post, Defeat the Right in Three Minutes, by Conceptual Guerilla from January 2^nd, 2006, and you should read the whole thing.

Everything they, and Obama have done is designed to weaken working people so they’ll accept lower wages. Of course, they don’t understand that their actions are pushing the economy into deflation, which is very difficult to recover from. Just think about the different approaches used to bail out the banks and the auto companies. The first requirement of the auto loans was to reduce wages.

H-1B and H-2B visas are designed to push down wages by replacing Americans with foreign labor. The “free trade agreements” are designed to access cheap labor. It’s all about cheap labor.

The Miami Herald reports on the expansion of hurricane aerial resources:Agencies ready planes to study hurricanes

The Air Force Reserve WC-130 turboprop “hurricane hunters” make the most critical flights, feeding information on a storm’s strength and structure, necessary for forecasters to issue advisories and tropical warnings.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will deploy a WP-3 Orion turboprop and a Gulfstream G-IV jet to study how storms intensify. NASA will send three jets, a DC-8, a WB-57 and a Global Hawk, into storms to learn more about how tropical systems evolve and what triggers them to suddenly strengthen.

And the National Center for Atmospheric Research will dispatch a Gulfstream G-V to study how hurricanes form in the first place.

The C-130 is a cargo aircraft, the Orion a Navy patrol aircraft, and the Gulfstreams are business jets. The WB-57 is a heavily modified light bomber design used for high altitude missions, and the Global Hawk is a high altitude remotely piloted aircraft, or UAV. The DC-8 was a standard airliner, but NASA’s aircraft is a flying laboratory.

Now all they need are a few storms, although they might want to see what is going on that has been suppressing the formation of storms this year.

So, I had to go out and checked the weather. I looked at the local radar loop and it struck me that the storms in the area seemed to be moving in a counter-clockwise motion, like a tropical storm.

So, I jumped to the regional radar view and the storms were definitely moving counter-clockwise around a center near where Florida, Alabama, and Georgia meet. It was time to head to the tropical weather site to see what was going on:

Statement as of 2:00 PM EDT on August 15, 2010

For the North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico –

An area of low pressure, the remnant of Tropical Depression Five, is located over southwestern Georgia. This system is forecast to move southward toward the northern Gulf Coast later today and tonight and it could emerge over the Gulf waters by early Monday, where conditions are expected to be conducive for some development. There is a medium chance, 30 percent, of this system becoming a tropical cyclone again during the next 48 hours.

Elsewhere, tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 48 hours.

Forecaster Pasch

Just ducky! The slacker couldn’t hack it the first time around, so it decides to give it another go. Rain, more rain, and nothing but rain for yet another week.

That Obama had finally taken a stand on something, he steps back.

Ed Henry, Senior White House Correspondent Obama ‘not commenting on wisdom’ of controversial Islamic center

Panama City, Florida (CNN) — President Barack Obama told CNN Saturday that in defending the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near ground zero in a speech on Friday night, he was “not commenting on the wisdom” of the project.

Instead, Obama said he was trying to uphold the broader principle that the government should treat “everyone equal, regardless” of religion.

His comments were seen as step back from the support he appeared to give the controversial project during a White House dinner on Friday, though a spokesman for the administration quickly moved to clarify the president’s remarks.

“Just to be clear, the President is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night,” White House spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement Saturday afternoon.

“It is not his role as President to pass judgment on every local project. But it is his responsibility to stand up for the Constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans,” Burton added.

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Dave Helms of Press-Register covers the latest attempt by an element of the British press to make the Gulf Coast hate Britain: British newspaper article describes ‘spillionaires’ in Bayou La Batre

Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper got it wrong when it quoted Alabama state Rep. Spencer Collier describing newly rich “spillionaires” in Bayou La Batre, the lawmaker said Friday.

“I’m not that witty,” Collier said dryly, adding that he had taken heat over the story, which explored the situation in the fishing community as BP opened its checkbook for the oil cleanup.

The article, published last weekend and gaining traction via the Internet, quoted Collier as saying: “There are people here who have done very well out of the spill. We call them Spillionaires and in a short space of time they have earned more money than they would in a very long time.”

It went on to say that fishing boats were earning 2,000 pounds per day — about $3,121 — on cleanup operations, while deckhands were making 60 pounds a day, about $93.

I’m sure that someone thought the “Forrest Gump town” reference was “cute” at the Daily Mail, but it just displayed their ignorance and bigotry. They don’t know anything about Bayou La Batre, fishing for shrimp, or much of anything else, they were just trying to pick a fight.

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