Posts from — April 2011

They are already writing off the $20 billion that doesn’t seem to be making it into anyone’s hands, and the research funds that aren’t funding any research, as I mentioned earlier, and now they are creating another write off according to the ABC: BP pledges $1 billion to restore oil-stained Gulf

BP has pledged $1 billion to jump-start projects aimed at restoring the US Gulf Coast after last year’s massive oil spill.

“The agreement in no way affects the ultimate liability of BP or any other entity for natural resource damages or other liabilities, but provides an opportunity to help restoration get started sooner,” the US Justice Department said in a statement on Thursday (local time).

It is touching that the Justice Department believes that, but wait until this gets to court and we’ll see if that has any truth to it.

Notice the wording – “pledged”, like this was a public broadcasting fund-raiser. BP may not get a tote bag, but it will damn sure use the money for a tax write-off.

As with every other fund that BP has created, the first step is the battle in Office Depot over the shape of the conference table, because there has to be a board to oversee the disbursement of this money. You are going to have the five Republican governors of the Gulf states trying to steal as much as they can to balance their budgets and the people along the coast can pound salt.

Checking the weather at 7PM CDT there is a cold front that runs along the path of I-44 [US Route 66] from Oklahoma City to St. Louis that is throwing off tornadoes. The Tornado Map on my sidebar under Tropical Weather shows the current tornado sightings and it is crowded.

Stay safe out there.

So Elayne put up this video that is associated with a movie that is coming out as a Silly Site. It’s cute and all, but if there wasn’t some coordination with Volkswagen, there may be a bit of a legal problem because of this Superbowl commercial.

I think that “fair use” doesn’t come close to covering it, and it is an ad for a commercial venture, so unless there was a some agreement I expect the Silly Site to evaporate quickly.

The gaming interests and good ol’ boys of the Nevada Republican party are trying to take all of the fun out of the resignation of John Ensign according to The Hill.

The Republican governor of Nevada could appoint Sue “Chicken Lady” Lowden, or Harry Reid’s opponent in the 2010 Senate race who makes Genghis Khan look like Chairman Mao, Sharron Angle, but he seems to be ready to appoint current Congresscritter, Dean Heller.

There will be a special election to replace Heller, but it would seem that the GOP establishment gets to appoint their candidate without a primary, so they can again avoid Sharron Angle, who is very much the leading Tea Party candidate in the state.

The word on Ensign’s resignation, based on rumor mostly, is that the funding for his reelection campaign just wasn’t there, and if he wanted a job after the Senate he had better play along and get out now to help the GOP retain the seat in 2012.

It is possible that the corporate interests have decided that the Tea Party is getting out of hand.

She’s the only planet we have, if we blow it, we can’t pack up and move.

Wikipedia as an Earth Day entry, with links to other sites.

Advantage: Cats

Try this with opposable thumbs.

[Editor: Ringo demonstrating an advantage of a cat’s “fluid spine” as she washes up for dinner.]

Friday Ark

So, a fracking gas driller in Western Pennsylvania has a well blowout on the anniversary of the Well from Hell, but this isn’t really a problem. There’s no need for closer inspection or tighter regulation.

Laura Legere of the Scranton Times-Tribune provides an update on the Bradford County, PA gas well blowout

Thousands of gallons of natural gas drilling waste fluids spilled onto a farm and streams for more than 12 hours Wednesday after a driller in Bradford County lost control of a well late Tuesday.

The Atgas 2H well operated by Chesapeake Energy Corp. in LeRoy Twp. blew out during the hydraulic fracturing process at around 11:45 p.m., swamping the lined well pad and overflowing into a field, a small tributary and Towanda Creek, state environmental regulators said.
…

Emergency crews were able to stop the fluid from flowing into Towanda Creek by Wednesday afternoon, but crews struggled to regain control of the well into Wednesday evening. The-well control specialty firm Boots and Coots was brought to the site from Texas, Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Katy Gresh said.
…

“Evidently the crack is in the top part of the well below the blowout preventer,” Skip Roupp, the deputy director of the Bradford County Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday afternoon, referring to a device used in emergency situations to choke off flow from a well. “They don’t really know what happened yet because they don’t have it controlled yet.”

The well casing is busted below the BOP, and they have brought in one of the best known [and most expensive] well control specialists in the world, but people shouldn’t worry? The drilling fluids flowed into a tributary of the Susquehanna River, so they can poison the Chesapeake Bay seafood.

When do they call Halliburton to cement the well?

Invest 91 is in the Atlantic between Puerto Rico and Bermuda, but the wind shear is extremely high and the sea surface temperatures are only marginal, so no development is expected.

Currently the models have it heading Southwest and then curving to end up going Northeast. The curve could take it close to the Bahamas and the coast of North Carolina, but rain is about all that can be expected.

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.

[Read more →]

Here are the sources of revenue for the US Federal budget for fiscal year 1999 [a balanced budget] and fiscal year 2010. It shows the percentage of the revenue based on the type of tax:

As is obvious, the burden has been shifted from the personal income tax, the corporate income tax, and the excise tax to the FICA payroll tax and the miscellaneous taxes.

When someone says the wealthy pay “40% of the taxes”, they may or may not mention that the only tax they are talking about is the personal income tax. In 1999 that was just under 20% of revenue, and in 2010 it has dropped to about 16%. In contrast between the income taxes and FICA taxes, the working people provided over 60% of the revenue in 1999 and about two-thirds of the cost in 2010. This despite the fact that wages haven’t even been able to keep up with inflation, and the large increase in productivity.

I would also note that the receipts for the FICA taxes are severely impacted by high unemployment, so they will fall unless something serious is done about creating jobs. Creating jobs will also increase the receipts for the income tax. If you are really concerned about the budget deficit, jobs should be your top issue.