The $20 billion dollar fund is mostly intact. About 90% of the research funding, hasn’t been spent. There is no rhyme nor reason for who gets money and who doesn’t.

The Local Puppy Trainer reports that a Downtown legend may close its doors: Staff’s says oil spill may seal its fate

FORT WALTON BEACH — Staff’s Restaurant has been a fixture downtown for nearly 100 years. These days it doesn’t look like it will make it to its centennial.

Fifth generation family members blame the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a long wait for claims money from BP and fewer customers for putting them on the brink of closure.

“We’ve been through the Great Depression, hurricanes and economic hard times, but the oil spill is what will shut us down,” said restaurant co-owner Martha Garvie. “To think this is what’s going to wipe us out … We’ve used all possible revenue that we could beg, borrow and steal, so to speak.”

No final decision has been made to close, but indicators point to that option.

They applied for BP money in January, and were told they would hear in April. In April they were told it would be another 90 days. In the meantime the deadline for filing will pass. No one is loaning money for a small business, and the rising cost of gasoline has depressed the local tourism business. The high unemployment and general uncertainty have kept locals out of restaurants, so there is no time left to “weather this storm”.

Well, at least they don’t have to worry about estate taxes, thanks to the Republicants. Low taxes and no services – that’s the ticket.

NPR reports that a ‘Quagmire Of Bureaucracy’ Stifles Gulf Spill Research. BP says it wants to fund research and sets up a fund, which spends more time arguing about “the shape of the conference table” than making grants for research, and the first year of the spill has been lost. It is almost as if the process was designed to prevent research from taking place … but, of course BP would never do that [yeah, right].

Geoff Pender of the Biloxi Sun Herald has a look at local politicians in his piece, Government officials defend questionable use of BP oil spill grants.

Gee, Mississippi politicians spending other people’s money in extravagant ways which don’t seem to correspond to the purpose behind the money. It’s like those lifeguard towers that FEMA paid to replace a few hurricanes ago. Not only does no one ever remember seeing a lifeguard tower on the beach, there is no record of that county ever hiring a lifeguard for the beach. They did spend money on signs saying “Swim at your own risk – no lifeguard”. There’s nothing quite like a fiscally conservative Southern politician. Don’t ever get between them and food, or “free” Federal money.

If you look at the Federal Wildfire Incident Information System you will see that 18 of the 20 fires on the first two pages are in Texas, and involve well in excess of a million acres, the Trans Pecos Fire Complex alone is in excess of 600,000 acres. The single fire in that listing that is marked “inactive”, was not put out, it merged with a larger fire. Those incidents called “complexes” are actually multiple fires that have merged.

Bill Hanna and Mitch Mitchell of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, are reporting on the Possum Kingdom complex that has already destroyed homes around Possum Kingdom Lake.

They reported the death of a second firefighter, Elias Jaquez, 49, of the Cactus Volunteer Fire Department, who died of injuries received while fighting a fire north of Amarillo.

Texas doesn’t have the resources to do this, and has asked for help. The Republicans in the House had better come back into this world and figure out that government is necessary. They had better be ready to approve funding to help fight these fires, because people won’t forget if they don’t.

The key to a successful lie is to have everyone on board and reading from the same script, otherwise people might suspect a lack of veracity.

When I read the story by Bettina Boxall of the Los Angeles Times, Scope of environmental impact of oil spill remains elusive, and see this:

“Quicker than anyone thought,” oil and gas levels in most of the spill area have returned to normal levels, said David Kennedy, an assistant administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with 30 years of spill experience.

I have to wonder why NPR is running a story, In Cleaning Oiled Marshlands, A Sea Of Unknowns, that tells me this:

On a coastal marsh south of New Orleans, oil still saturates a 30-foot-wide stretch. Where hip-high grass should be, the oil has formed a hard, dark mat. If you dig though that crust, you find a thick, oozy layer of oil.

“It hasn’t weathered or degraded much since it came ashore in early June,” says scientist Scott Zengel, a contractor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is overseeing the marsh survey crews.

A year ago, after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, one of the biggest fears was that BP oil would inundate the coastal wetlands that produce so much of the country’s seafood. Some oil still can be found on about half of the 1,000 miles of marsh and beach that got hit by BP oil.

Given that the NPR story includes pictures of the conditions described, I have to think that David Kennedy, an assistant administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, hasn’t been in the field lately, isn’t reading the reports of the people who are in the field, and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

BTW, these marshes are the hatcheries for Gulf fish. This is where the fry grow to a size that will help them survive in the open water. No marshes, no fish.

This is why people don’t believe that Gulf seafood is safe [me included] – there has been too much lying.

The GOP really is scum, and if the Democrats go along, so are they.

Oil started flowing into the Gulf when the Deepwater Horizon exploded at 9:53PM CDT on April 20^th, 2010. It stopped at 2:25PM CDT on July 15^th.

That’s 85 days, 16 hours, and 32 minutes of oil flow.

The Department of Energy’s final estimate of 2,604,000 gallons [62,000 barrels or 8,432 metric tons] per day exceeds BP’s “worse case” guess. PBS subtracts the guesses that BP has made about the amount of oil it was sucking up from the well to produce the final total of 190,120,055 gallons [4,526,668 barrels or 615,627 metric tons] of crude oil dumped in the Gulf to kill the wildlife, foul the beaches, and destroy livelihoods.

In the end, Joe Caldart, a plumber from Kansas, gave BP the design that capped the well. It is an old story played out on multiple sitcoms with the incompetent husband attempting to fix a leak, and the basement flooding before the plumber gets called.

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