from very bad to very worse

No solid proof yet, but recent suggestions here seem verified:

...Some drilling experts said that the "top kill" effort failed over the weekend because the force of the oil and gas pushing up from the reservoir 13,000 feet below the seafloor was so great that it had shoved most of the drilling mud through the blowout preventer and into the sea.

Tadeusz W. Patzek, chairman of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was the "equivalent of six or seven fire hoses blasting oil and gas up, while two fire hoses were used to blast the drilling mud down. They never stood much of a chance."

Sources at two companies involved with the well said that BP also discovered new damage inside the well below the seafloor and that, as a result, some of the drilling mud that was successfully forced into the well was going off to the side into rock formations.

"We discovered things that were broken in the sub-surface," said a BP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said that mud was making it "out to the side, into the formation." The official said he could not describe what was damaged in the well...

Answer: the entire well wall. [tip o'teh tinfoil to Lambert]

Meanwhile, there are increasingly strident voices that suggest the way to deal with this is to nuke the wellhead.



Don't do it. Clean this up the hard way. Protect the shorelines the right way. Experts say they aren't even trying to do it right. Siphon the oil with a fleet of tankers for as long as needed. It's going to cost. These quick and easy fixes are going to be neither and are likely to increase the damage exponentially.

Leaving the Criminal in Charge of the Crime Scene

Yes we can.

Oh, and will somebody please take the One's blackberry away from the Rahmmer, so someone can tell him that if the

...oil keeps gushing until relief wells are finished sometime in August...

it is not the worst-case scenario.

I really don't think any of them have a clue.

Sink Like a Stone

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'...

Still hemorrhage in the Gulf.

The main$tream are calling this what we called it in April.

As in Britain, the Left is joining the Right in this:

We are in the midst of what is probably the worst environmental catastrophe in our nation’s history, and it looks like the damage will continue to worsen for the next few months. Barack Obama may not know this yet, but his credibility and leadership are being destroyed along with the ecosystem of the Gulf Coast. He has come under heavy criticism even from Democratic strategists and analysts in the capitol, usually among his most reliable allies. It has gotten so bad that even wingnut welfare shops have started getting off tough but fair commentary.

When the geyser erupted the right wing half heartedly pushed a “this is HIS Katrina” line, on the anemic logic that both were crises in the Gulf states. As the weeks have gone on the comparison has started to become apt, though. As then, our president pays lip service to the magnitude of the problem but does not seem to truly comprehend it. Bush had his “tidal wave of compassion for hurricane victims,” Obama has his “plug the damn hole.” Bush had an empty, ostentatious announcement from the scene and now Obama has his. It is almost an invitation to reprise Stephen Colbert:

I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

(Speaking of mockery, the following is still on the official White House web site: “President Obama will keep the broken promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”)

Some of his supporters have been frustratingly eager to excuse his lethargic attitude. There has been a sort of defensive “oh yeah? Well why don’t you tell us what he should do” response from bloggers like Jed Lewison and John Cole that show an entirely inverted understanding of how politics is supposed to work. I generally enjoy their writing, but really: It isn’t my job to think up the answers! It’s the job of our leaders to think up the answers! That’s what they are there for! That’s the fucking point of representative democracy! I’ve already got a job, I’m kind of busy here; I’m certainly willing to toss out any suggestions I have, kick in a few bucks for various relief efforts, and generally do what I can given the distance - but coming up with effective policies is what we elect people for!...

Look for the worse-than-ineffective policy to increasingly emerge as the scope of this catastrophe widens.

Look for the response of the locals to get increasingly strident.



Look for the Homeland $ecurity apparatus to target them, leaving the real corporate danger to the security of the nation alone.

And as for what we should do? Here's a beginning:

How about we issue subpoenas against those responsible?
How about finding what that big party on the rig was about before the explosion?
How about NOT allowing BP to gather their own evidence in advance of them being a defendant in a future trial?
How about taking action against the oil thugs that held survivors in captivity for 48 hours while their family members worried about them?
How about taking action against the fatcat bubbas who tried to get residents to sign a “we won’t sue BP” waiver for a $5k payoff?
How about getting adminstration officials on TV who know what the hell they’re talking about?
How about doing away with the last 30 years of laissez-faire regulation for the oil industry?
How about Obama making the decision to start acting like Huey Long instead of Ghandi?

More good ideas:

Kick BP’s ass out of the way

Issue an immediate/emergency appeal, with a humongous cash award, to person/persons who can fix this, inside or outside of BP.

Put all relevant government resources behind the effort NOW.

Criminal arrests NOW, of BP executives.

Criminal arrests NOW, of government “regulators” who allowed lax oversight.

Freeze new drilling permits in the gulf, as well as any additional work on wells already approved but not yet pumping.

Detail the ways in which 8 years of Bush administration oil whoredom led us to this point.

KICK OFF AN IMMEDIATE, MEGA EMERGENCY, MANHATTAN PROJECT-LEVEL NATIONAL PROGRAM TO GET US OFF FOSSIL FUELS.

Raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 per year to pay for this, tax the hell out of the oil, gas and coal industries to pay for this.

Do all of the above very publicly, kicked off with a major hoo hah, night time, prime time speech, followed up with weekly speeches to keep us updated on progress.

And to you losers in comments who keep whining about how Obie cannot DOOOOOOOOO ANYTHIIIIIIIING…what the hell? Why did you bother to vote for him then, if you did? What difference does it make if he can’t do anything when it matters the most? I saw him a couple of days ago doing some lame ass interview/photo op with ES-fucking PN, talking sports and draft pics and what not? WTF? The man has nothing more important to do? It was embarrassing...

It was the product of a culture that values the image of concern, the image of doing something more than actually being concerned and doing something.

It was sinking, like a stone.

Here's another really good idea:

...US government could kill two birds with one stone: offer every unemployed person in the effected states a job on the coast clearing up the oil, and send the full bill to BP...

Yes We Can!

Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

Three strikes and they're still not out, perhaps because they own the umpires.



In the light of all the Clintonesque pain the Brother-in-Chief is feeling, Bob Herbert drills the One a new one himself:

...how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to worst-case scenarios.

These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.

President Obama knows that. He knows — or should know — that the biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP’s profits are counted in the billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering beneath a brilliant sun. You don’t want to know what people will do for that kind of money.

There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?

The idea of relying on the assurances of these corporate predators that they are looking out for the safety of their workers and the health of surrounding communities and the environment is beyond absurd. Even after the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon site, BP officials were telling us (as their noses grew longer and longer) that about only 1,000 barrels of oil a day were escaping into the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly a month into the disaster, BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, was publicly offering the comforting assessment that the environmental damage resulting from the spill would likely be “very, very modest.”

They were somewhat wide of the mark (as reputable scientists were telling us day after day after day). We now know, of course, that this is the worst spill in U.S. history, that instead of 1,000 barrels a day, something in the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day have likely been spewing into the gulf. And the environmental impact can fairly be described as catastrophic.

The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.

President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

Mr. Hayward of BP was on television on Friday referring to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent fouling of the Gulf of Mexico as a “natural disaster.” He was wrong, as usual. Like the unholy alliance of government and big business, this tragedy set in motion by Mr. Hayward’s corporation is a grotesquely harmful and wholly unnatural disaster.

This is a disaster for, not of, the natural world.

If the oil well casing was ruptured during the explosion and subsequent drift of the burning station- remember it never disconnected, it sank- this well is likely ruptured for hundred of yards under the seabed. This means it will be impossible to seal, and accounts for the multiple plumes forming as they shove things into the wellhead.

Left alone, this well will be releasing a million gallons of crude a day for the next seven years into the ocean.

You want to talk greenhousing? This much natural gas hasn't been released all at once since the end of the last Ice Age.

Over at Corrente, liz polaris picks up a comment from jevman at Fark I like:

...One loser from Connecticut puts the wrong fertilizer, fireworks, and closed propane tanks in his car, kills 0 people, injures 0 people, and we arrest him, a bunch of people he conspired with (rightfully so of course), and are considering re-writing the constitution to remove the rights from the rest of us who aren't terrorists (not rightfully so).

A company shows a pattern of ignoring safety rules, causes a complete environmental catastrophe, that kills 11 people, and ruins the lives of thousands of people. No one arrested. No one charged. And they have a limit on their liability, so we the taxpayer will wind up subsidizing the losses, while they keep all the profit.

The corporate oligarchy continues.

And the oceans are turning to blood.

The Burning Sea

Various chain length hydrocarbons and an ocean that smells like gasoline.

But it's a very, very moderate catastrophe.

Lack of Closure

Today I hear on National Propaganda Radio that the leak is plugged. Again. For the second time this week.

There are other sources however- thanks again to Monkeyfister- that suggest it's deja vu all over again all over again.

...The technician working on the effort said that despite all their injections, at various pressure levels, engineers had been able to keep less than 10 percent of the injection fluids inside the stack of pipes above the well.

He said that was barely an improvement on the results Wednesday, when the operation began and was suspended in its 11th hour of operations.

“I won’t say progress was zero, but I don’t know if we can round up enough mud to make it work,” said a technician working on the project who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Everyone is disappointed at this time.”

The technician also said that there were disagreements among engineers about why efforts have been unsuccessful so far, but that those disagreements were based on a lack of a clear understanding of what was happening inside the pipes on the sea floor...

It's quite simple, really. This reservoir is every bit as big and pressured as BP bragged about last fall when they discovered it. Hubris, meet Nemesis.

Oh, and that second plume that erupted Wednesday? It's been joined by a third:

A day after scientists reported finding a huge "plume" of oil extending miles east of the leaking BP well, on Friday a Louisiana scientist said his crew had located another vast plume of oily globs, miles in the opposite direction.

James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, said his crew on Wednesday found a plume of oil in a section of the gulf 75 miles northwest of the source of the leak.

Cowan said that his crew sent a remotely controlled submarine into the water, and found it full of oily globules, from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a golf ball. Unlike the plume found east of the leak -- in which the oil was so dissolved that contaminated water appeared clear -- Cowan said the oil at this site was so thick that it covered the lights on the submarine.

"It almost looks like big wet snowflakes, but they're brown and black and oily," Cowan said. The submarine returned to the surface entirely black, he said.

Cowan said that the submarine traveled about 400 feet down, close to the sea floor, and found oil all the way down. Trying to find the edges of the plume, he said the submarine traveled miles from side to side.

"We really never found either end of it," he said. He said he did not know how wide the plume actually was, or how far it stretched away to the west. He said the plume was found in an area that had already been closed to fishing by the federal government...

Those whom the gods would destroy,

...they first make mad

As if oceans of blood aren't deadly enough. Go right ahead and volatilize all the methane ice on the floor of the Gulf. Rip a crater underwater oh, maybe 10 miles wide and a mile under the ocean over a trillion barrel reservoir of oil hundreds of square miles in area.



You think you've seen bad? You ain't seen nothin', babes.

just another short delay and a word from His sponsors

The guys at BP are starting to sound like Pentagon mouthpieces about Iraq (which is also still going on, all rumors to the contrary).

Apparently if you shove crap down a leaky hose, the pipe explodes. Who'da thunk?

Meanwhile, the guy they hired to take the heat for Bu$hCo's screw-ups has subcontracted to BP, too.

The Final Frontier

Star Wars over which contractor gets to walk away with a bundle.

There is no intelligent life down here.

No Sale but Admiring the Spiel

Team Xinhua knows better than most that the Company uses its casino economics to force its clients into line.

Upset the Europeans have a nice lifestyle that mocks the developing debt peonage of the West? Send Goldman-$achs into to talk to Greece and con it into wagering against the House. The amazing thing would be if any other power in the world failed to notice the alledgedly hot money was all bait and switch.

The Technology Police

Perhaps I am stating the obvious:

The goal of those who would rule us is to produce a post-industrial neo-feudal world over the next 50 years as fossil fuels are depleted. Technology will only exist for the rulers. The fate of the rest of us- the survivors anyway- is indeed serfdom.


If you need any better proof of the suppression of undesirable technology, look at biotechnology. Twenty years ago those of us who learned molecular genetics hoped to feed the starving and resolve the energy crisis. With time it became obvious we only fed the maws of the likes of Monsanto and Pfizer, while the dead last thing the petrodollar people wanted was a bacterium that could use light, water, and carbon dioxide to make hydrocarbons...

Smarter Republican Policy

Welcome to the hive-mind of the Oborg.

Those who would assimilate have become assimilated themselves [tip o'teh tinfoil to Digby]

that's why they're telling us

because it's a secret

heckuva job, brownie

Katrina moments keep coming in Louisiana

WASHINGTON — The U.S. official leading the response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill said Sunday that only BP had the expertise to plug the gaping hole in its deepwater well and that he trusted the oil company was doing its best.

The comments by Adm. Thad Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard, signaled that the U.S. government wouldn't take a larger role in stopping the five-week-old spill even as frustration in the Gulf coast grows over the Obama administration's policy of letting BP run the cleanup...

Lead, follow, or get out of the way, idiots.

proper #%*& booming

got it?

more than happy to sell you down the river

it's a tradition



scions of the same culture that developed slavery as the economic backbone of the old South

the disconnect between those that want the oil money and those it devastates bothers The New York Pravda not at all



should that be surprising? after all, it's a traditional cultural value of the denizens of New Amsterdam, scions of the mercantile empire that brought slavery to the Americas

non-anomaly

Frank Rich:

...It’s far-fetched to Democrats that Tea Party populists could possibly believe that the party of McConnell and Romney and Murdoch will in the end be moved to side with the little guy against the penthouse powers that are the G.O.P.’s traditional constituency and financial underwriter. Some Democrats also find it far-fetched that Paul could repeat his victory this fall, given how extreme his views are even for a state as reliably red as Kentucky.

But the enthusiasm gap remains real. Tea Partiers will turn up at the polls, and not just in Kentucky. Democrats are less energized in part because even now the president has not fully persuaded many liberal populists in his own party that he is on their side. The suspicion lingers that a Wall Street recovery, not job creation, was his highest economic priority upon arriving at a White House staffed with Goldman alumni. No matter how hard the administration tries to sell health care reform and financial reform as part of the nation’s economic recovery, these signal achievements remain thin gruel for those out of work.

The unemployment numbers, unlikely to change drastically by November, will have more to say than any of Tuesday’s results about what happens on Election Day this year. Yes, the Tea Party is radical, its membership is not enormous, and its race problem is real and troubling. But you can’t fight an impassioned opposition merely with legislative actions that may bear fruit in the semi-distant future. If the Democrats can’t muster their own compelling response to the populist rage out there, “Randslide” may reside in our political vocabulary long after “Arlen Specter” is leaving “Jeopardy” contestants stumped.

True to Form

The One didn't put an offically designated BP representative on the commission to assess the size of the spill.

[will someone tell these morons it's not a spill it's a leak from a deep reservoir of oil exuding from the earth's crust under the ocean? i doubt it]

No, no official presence by BP at all.

Just a former bureaucrat appointed by an Kennebunkport Skull-and-Bones, pseudo-Texas oilman, ex-CIA chief, wanna-be global hegemon, ex-President to pretend to protect his environment.



What could go wrong with that?

Usta Bee

Emerald Coast



very very moderate [tip o'teh tinfoil to Atrios]



criticizing BP is criticizing the Saudi British 'Merikan way



Emerald coast, I say

still pwnd

So much for reform, teabaggers, the officially accepted New Voice of Populist Change^® still owned by the Company.

Although it does seem quite obvious that all the main$tream heat he's generating is designed to make the scions of Poppy more acceptable in 2012 or 2016 or whenever the memories of the Bu$h depredations wear off.

change in the weather

Bob Herbert figures it out.

...This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter...

you are with them or against them

What is this "our" side they speak of?

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base...

This keeps happening, and many people keep repeating: without access to a fair trial for all, no one is safe.

Un'Merikan Activities

Brother Rand will love this:

WASHINGTON — An Obama administration task force formed this week to determine how much crude is surging into the Gulf of Mexico from a wrecked oil well includes an engineering professor who's told Congress he believes the spill is far larger than originally thought, but not a representative from BP, the oil company responsible for the spill.

Administration officials, who've stressed for nearly a month BP's preeminent role in cleanup efforts as the "responsible party," offered no explanation for BP's exclusion from the panel, which a top Coast Guard official said was expected to deliver a new estimate of the spill's size early next week.

A Coast Guard spokesman, Christopher O'Neil, said that BP would be a “welcome and needed contributor” to the task force by providing “reams of data” that the panel will need to make a decision on the flow rate.

Yes, it's much more effective for BP to pay off the investigators behind the scenes than move to squelch the investigation right up front.

...The move to keep BP from being a full member of the task force may be intended to provide credibility for the new estimate after nearly two weeks of open challenges to the official 5,000 barrel a day estimate. Experts who've studied videos of the spill pegged the amounts at many times that, and legal experts told McClatchy this week that a low estimate would favor BP in future court cases involving the spill.

BP's own announcement Thursday that a tube inserted into one of the leaks was now siphoning 5,000 barrels of oil to the surface, while a live video feed showed crude still billowing from the pipe, further discredited the official estimate...

They don't even begin to lie effectively, do they?

Meanwhile, people I am sure Rand Paul considers communists- like Republican Bobby Jindal- are starting to take aim at that Holy of Holies British Saudi Proxy Petroleum:

GRAND ISLE – Surrounded by officials from several parishes and towns threatened by the impeding oil, Gov. Bobby Jindal did not mince words.

“Let’s be clear,” Jindal said. “The oil is here. Heavy oil is here.”

At a press conference held Thursday afternoon in Grand Isle, Jindal made his case for the Army Corps of Engineers to issue an emergency permit so that the state could begin a dredging plan to build sand booms along the alignment of the state’s barrier islands in Chandeleurs, Barataria Bay and Timbalier Bay.

Across the street from the press conference, clumps of brown oil had already begun washing up on shore.

“We must get the dredging plan approved,” Jindal said. “We’ve seen firsthand this works.”

Jindal said the $350 million dollar plan needs to be approved because it’s easier and cheaper to fight the oil on the coastline than it would be to clean it from the wetlands.

“If I was them (BP),” Jindal said, “I wouldn’t worry about the cost. It’s a fraction of what they’re going to pay if this gets in the wetlands...”

why would they lie to you?

After all, money is green too, right.

Local environmental officials throughout the Gulf Coast are feverishly collecting water, sediment and marine animal tissue samples that will be used in the coming months to help track pollution levels resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of an oil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its biggest clients.

Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Fla., rebuffed instructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Tex. He opted instead to get a waiver so he could send his county’s samples to a local laboratory that is licensed to do the same tests.

Mr. Kirschenfeld said he was also troubled by another rule. Local animal rescue workers have volunteered to help treat birds affected by the slick and to collect data that would also be used to help calculate penalties for the spill. But federal officials have told the volunteers that the work must be done by a company hired by BP.

“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.”

The deadly explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig last month has drawn attention to the ties between regulators and the oil and gas industry. Last week, President Obama said he intended to end their “cozy relationship,” partly by separating the safety function of regulators from their role in permitting drilling and collecting royalties. “That way, there’s no conflict of interest, real or perceived,” he said.

Critics say a “revolving door” between industry and government is another area of concern. As one example, they point to the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, Sylvia V. Baca, who helps oversee the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling

She came to that post after eight years at BP, in a variety of senior positions, ranging from a focus on environmental initiatives to developing health, safety and emergency response programs. She also served in the Interior Department in the Clinton administration...

The official line is still there's nothing to see here, no matter what the science types say.

"...the coast is 100 miles away"

And they just might be right:

...from the French Quarter to New Orleans East, people here have been complaining about a tinge to the air that is unsettling even by local standards.

Many suspect that it has something to do with the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which has already leaked millions of gallons of crude about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. The authorities involved in the cleanup of the fallen Deepwater Horizon oil rig have been burning oil on the surface of the gulf and using chemical dispersants around the leak.

Could New Orleans possibly be smelling that, from more than 100 miles away? Many say yes. But the mystery odor, which is stronger on some days and in some areas than others, is hard for residents to describe.

“It’s chemical, and I’m trying not to think about it,” said Raymond Dillon, a karate teacher.

Diana Mecera, a restaurant worker who lives in the French Quarter, said, “It’s a kind of a sewage smell.”

Her co-worker, Lauren Graham, a waitress, put it this way: “It’s more like being at a gas station.”

Steven Payne, who owns a men’s store and lives in the Marigny area, said: “It is very distinctly oil. When I smelled it for the first time, I was walking my dog along the Mississippi River levee...”

But what's a little spilled oil between friends?

...The federal 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 — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.

Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day.

The Minerals Management Service, or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists...

I am sure that if the MMS can figure out who the current people that talked are they will soon be former.

They're winning hearts and minds, you know, and never mind the smell, it's air freshener. Would they lie to you?

Throwing the kitchen sink at it

Literally.

The main$tream is avoiding a lot of the scientific opinions about this leak from the earth's crust. That'd better be a helluva sink they're shoving into that hole, because it's flowing at 70,000 barrels a day even at a pressure of 40,000 pounds per square inch... which means the reservoir behind it has even greater pressure.

..."You're talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels in it," Resink said. At the current spill rate, it "would take years to deplete," he added.

Meanwhile, the man who promised single payer and an end to the War on Terra sez no more snuggles with the oil barons.

“We’re not calling it an operation”

...a process, more of a Predator party, doubtless.

they hate us for our freedom. as if.

They hate us because if they do, and they act on it, it gives the Company more of what they want.

Greenwald:

...The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack). A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations. Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind. The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow "public safety" exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino -- while noting (correctly) that Holder's Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive -- today demand that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).

...It is not hyperbole to observe that all of the above-cited recent examples are designed to formally exempt a certain class of American citizens -- those accused of being Terrorists and arrested on U.S. soil -- from the most basic legal protections. They're all intended, in the name of Scary Terrorists, to rewrite the core rules of our justice system in order to increase the already-vast detention powers of the U.S. Government and further minimize the remaining safeguards against abuse. The most disgraceful episodes in American history have been about exempting classes of Americans from core rights, and that is exactly what these recent, Terrorism-justified proposals do as well. Anyone who believes that these sorts of abusive powers will be exercised only in narrow and magnanimous ways should just read a little bit of history, or just look at what has happened with the always-expanding police powers vested in the name of the never-ending War on Drugs, the precursor to the never-ending War on Terrorism in so many ways.

What's most amazing about all of this is that even 9 years after the 9/11 attacks and even after the radical reduction of basic rights during the Bush/Cheney years, the reaction is still exactly the same to every Terrorist attack, whether a success or failure, large- or small-scale. Apparently, 8 years of the Bush assault on basic liberties was insufficient; there are still many remaining rights in need of severe abridgment. Even now, every new attempted attack causes the Government to devise a new proposal for increasing its own powers still further and reducing rights even more, while the media cheer it on. It never goes in the other direction. Apparently, as "extremist" as the Bush administration was, there are still new rights to erode each time the word Terrorism is uttered. Each new incident, no matter how minor, prompts new, exotic proposals which the "Constitution-shredding" Bush/Cheney team neglected to pursue: an assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens, formal codification of Miranda dilutions, citizenship-stripping laws, a statute to deny all legal rights to Americans arrested on U.S. soil.

The U.S. already has one of the most pro-government criminal justice systems in the world. That (along with our indescribably insane drug laws) is why we have the world's largest prison population and the highest percentage of our citizenry incarcerated of any country in the Western world. It is hard to imagine a worse fate than being a defendant in the American justice system accused of Terrorism-related crimes. Conviction and a very long prison sentence are virtual certainties. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act era, the rules have been repeatedly rewritten to provide the Government with every conceivable advantage. The very idea that the Government is hamstrung in its ability to prosecute and imprison Terrorists is absurd on its face. Decades of pro-government laws in general, and post-9/11 changes in particular, have created a justice system that strangles the rights of those accused of Terrorism. Despite that, every new incident becomes a pretext for a fresh wave of fear-mongering and still new ways to erode core Constitutional protections even further...

don't task don't shill

Ian Welsh:

...what I care about is that she has almost no record which will indicate how she’ll vote and much of what we do know, isn’t good.

What I do care about is that Obama’s word is not “good enough” for me, nor should it be good enough for anyone, given his record on civil liberties and his constant actions against liberal interests.

If the left had any balls at all, it would attempt to sink Kagan, insisting on the left wing equivalent, ideologically, or Scalia or Roberts—someone whose legal philosophy we don’t have to guess about. But it’s true that Kagan isn’t like Miers, because the left isn’t like the right—its leaders have no guts...

This n-dimensional chess crap always seemed a fishy con.



Just ask the dolphins on the Gulf. Just don't expect a reply any time soon.

the Dominion

via Michael Moore:

REPORTER: You didn't include Obama in your list of liar presidents. I'm wondering if you would include him also?

HERSH: To use a basketball or a football analogy, American football, fourth quarter – he may have a game plan. At this point he's in real trouble. Because the military are dominating him on the important issues of the world: Iraq, Iran, Afghan and Pakistan. And he's following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a fare-thee-well. He talks differently. And he's much brighter, he's much more of the world. So one only hopes he has a game plan that will include doing something, but he's in real trouble, in terms of – he's in real trouble.

In Iraq I don't have to tell anybody the prospects – in the American press they never mention Moqtada Sadr, but look out. He's going to be the kingmaker of that country. He's now studying in Iran. And he's going to be the next ayatollah-to-be. I don't know how he'll work it out with Sistani. But he's going to be the force, the Shia. And so this is going to be very complicated for us because the two men we talk about, Allawi and Maliki, have about as much to do with the average Iraqi – they're both ex-pats. Allawi, let's see, he was certainly an American agent and a British agent, the MI-6, the CIA, the Jordanians ran him probably for Mossad. I'm not telling you anything that is not a fact. So who knows?

So Iraq is very problematical. There's going to be much more violence. Whether it's civil war or not it's going to be much more violence.

He's never going to win, whatever that means, in Afghanistan. The only solution in Afghanistan is a settlement with the Taliban. And the only person to settle with is Mullah Omar, and he's become another Hitler to the American public. So how we're going to do that and survive politically?

And the same in Pakistan. He's got the wrong policy there. So it is – and again for Obama, Iran's not resolved, in terms of, the Iranians have come out of this crisis stronger than ever. We don't want to believe that.

The $ecurity-Industrial complex owns Obama. But actually admit he's another liar president, and leave 2012 open to yet another Bu$hwacking similar to what happened when the Left voted for Nader instead of Gore in 2000.

they told us so

...but nobody believed the rumors:

The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on students and antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 were given an order to prepare to shoot, according to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audio tape of the event.

"Guard!" says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!"

"Get down!" someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, "Guard! . . . " followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds...

But of course it was an accident and nobody could have done it on purpose. That's what our government said back then, and what possible motivation would the government have to lie to us?

Whom the Gods Would Destroy

They first set up for a really big party:

...While the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and touched off the underwater gusher that has poured more than 3 million gallons of crude into the Gulf.

...A group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project's safety record, according to the transcripts. Meanwhile, far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.

Based on the interviews, Bea believes that the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

..."That's where the first explosion happened," said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. "The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below."

According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set "everything on fire," the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.

...The BP executives were injured but survived, according to one account. Nine rig crew on the rig floor and two engineers died.

"The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they managed to get in the life boats with assistance from others," said the transcript...

Meanwhile, there's another angle:

The oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico could be a well-timed and profitable accident for Halliburton, the global oil company with the famous connection to former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. Just eight days before the uber-Valdez accident, Houston-based Halliburton acquired Boots & Coots Services, also based in Houston, in a $240 million cash and stock deal.

Boots & Coots, which uses the graphic of a burning oil well to represent the ampersand in its name, specializes in "pressure control and well intervention services." In other words, when an oil well explodes, Boots & Coots can step in and help remedy the problem. In a release, Jerry Winchester, Boots & Coots president and CEO, says "Combining the resources of both companies creates the premier intervention company across the globe.”

While Halliburton's timing of the acquisition could be chalked up to luck, some members of Congress are asking questions. Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), have asked Halliburton provide all documents relating to "the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout" at the rig in the Gulf, according to a report in the LA Times...

Ah, Stupak leading the investigation. Now there's a good way to en$ure justice will be $erved. Now who would seriously think an ill wind blows no good?

Where was Big Time Dick himself when these developments were occurring? Why, talking to the Very Important People, of course.



Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

They're made out of meat

"...having got it right in a complicated way"

We're living in his world now.

useful assets

one could speculate that Godzilla-$acks not only owns the United States government, they do Company work by undermining political unity among potentially competing economies, dissolving the european union as an economic power

no evidence of wrong

one must approach this with an open mind, certainly:

May 7 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. regulators plan to examine whether securities professionals triggered yesterday’s stock- market plunge or exploited the turmoil to profit illegally, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission aims to determine if market participants accidentally or maliciously entered orders that derailed normal trading, the people said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn’t public. The agency will also examine if controls to prevent the rout from snowballing weren’t in place at exchanges and firms.

SEC officials, who haven’t drawn conclusions, began preparing for inquiries in the hours after a U.S. selloff triggered by Europe’s debt crisis briefly erased more than $1 trillion in market value, beginning around 2:40 p.m. in New York. U.S. stocks tumbled the most in a year as waves of computerized trading exacerbated the rout, sparking a slide in Asian shares.

The SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a joint statement after U.S. markets closed that they will examine “unusual trading” that contributed to the plunge...

via Cryptogon

certainly other explanations than profiteering come to mind. what this resembles as much as anything is a swift jerk on the reins to show people who's really in charge...

apparently, the message was heard.

another good one via Tiabbi:

you are special, yes you really are

you're the only one like you

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet...

so many exceptional corporate adventures...

Business Model: the Pirate's Code

It being a $election year, the Feds make a lot of noise about slapping Godzilla-$acks on the wrist, but charge them pocket change for it.

Tiabbi:

...On the list of crimes perpetrated by the big banks during the crisis period, naked short-selling probably isn’t near the top. But it definitely exists and it was almost certainly a tool that contributed to the mammoth-killing of firms like Bear and Lehman Brothers. The big banks like Goldman enabled this game by closing their eyes to shoddy locates in order to make sure they kept their prime brokerage clients. They’ve been caught at it before and now they’re being caught at it again. But you can add this to the list of offenses that the banks will get off for with a mild fine ($450,000? Are you joking) and the usual facsimile of legal consequence...

Ah yes, we're beyond crude things like admissions of guilt in our guvmint of $ophisticrat $ophistry.

The Third Way is kind of like the Pirate's Code.

More of a set of guidelines than a real set of rules.

Mo' Better Ho's with a Bipolar Disorder

The disorder being the delusion only the elite are qualified to decide for you, and only your side has rational reasons for doing exactly the same thing the other side would do... but for their excuses, not yours.

Hedges quotes Swanson and Scahill.

Swanson:

...“We don’t have any sort of communications system in the country,” said Swanson... “We have a corporate media cartel that overlaps with the war industry. It has no interest in democracy. The Congress is bought and paid for. It is absolutely corrupted by money. We kick ourselves for not being active enough and imposing our demands, but the bar is set very high for us. We have to try very, very hard and make very, very big sacrifices if we are going to influence this Congress prior to getting the money out and getting a decent media system. Hypocritical Congress members talk about money all the time, how we have to be careful about money, except when it comes to war. It is hypocritical, but who is going to call them on that? Not their colleagues, not their funders, not the media, only us. We have to do that, but we don’t in large part because they switch parties every number of years and we are on one team or the other.”

Scahill:

...“It is one of the sober realities of the time we are living in that you can put forward a bill that says something as simple as ‘we should not outsource national security functions to private contractors’ and you only get 20 members of Congress to support the bill,” Scahill said. “The unfortunate reality is that Rep. Schakowsky knows that the war industry is bipartisan. They give on both sides. For a while there it seemed contractor was the new Israel. You could not find a member of Congress to speak out against them because so many members of Congress are beholden to corporate funding to keep their House or Senate seats. I also think Obama’s election has wiped that out, as it has with many things, because the White House will dispatch emissaries to read the riot act to members of Congress who don’t toe the party line.”

“The entire government is basically privatized,” Scahill went on. “In fact, 100 percent of people in this country that make $100,000 or less might as well remit everything they owe in taxes to contractors rather than paying the government. That is how privatized the society is, that is how much of government has been outsourced in this society. There are 18 U.S. intelligence agencies on the military and civilian side and 70 percent of their combined budget is outsourced to for-profit corporations who simultaneously work the United States government as well as multinational corporations and foreign governments. We have radically outsourced the intelligence operations in this country because we have radically outsourced everything. Sixty-nine percent of the Pentagon’s entire work force, and I am not talking only about the battlefield, is now privatized. In Afghanistan we have the most staggering statistics. The Obama administration is infinitely worse in Afghanistan in terms of its employment of mercenaries and other private contractors than the Bush administration. Right now in Afghanistan there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors alongside 68,000 U.S. troops. There is almost a 2-to-1 ratio of private-sector for-profit forces that are on the U.S. government payroll versus the active-duty or actual military forces in the country. And that is not taking into account the fact that the State Department has 14,000 contractors in Afghanistan.”

“Within a matter of months, and certainly within a year, the United States will have upwards of 220,000 to 250,000 U.S. government-funded personnel occupying Afghanistan, a far cry from the 70,000 U.S. soldiers that those Americans who pay attention understand the United States has in Afghanistan,” Scahill said. “This is a country where the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, said there are less than 100 al-Qaida operatives who have no ability to strike at the United States. That was the stated rationale and reasoning for being in Afghanistan. It was to hunt down those responsible for 9/11.”

lucky for them there's no intelligent life down here

Hawking's recent speculative pronouncement that

..."If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

...has brought the requisite sneers and jeers of those who would be mutton:

...you could make a case that, though our moral “progress” to date has been driven largely by self-interest, with only a smidgen of true enlightenment, the role of enlightenment will have to grow if we are to venture beyond our solar system a century from now...



...the suggestion here is that before any species can shift into high technological gear, it has to undergo a moral test so stringent that most species would fail it. In which case the chances are we’ll fail it — and our best hope may be to hold on long enough for kindly space aliens to ride in and save the day...

Shades of the Second Coming. So much the easier for the Borg when they get here. The Faithful will be eager to line up for the plugins of the Rapture.

One just hopes They're so preoccupied with the logistics of the ingestion Assumption/ Assimilation they don't notice a few rogue units kiting off the net. Dr. Hawking, need a ride out of town?

short selling the seafood

Leave it the Faux News Glen Beck crowd to sell a reverse disinfo meme...

Apparently these guys are trying to implicate the liberals in blowing the BP rig last week.

But here's a point: who if anyone made the money off it- or positioned themselves to make money off it- immediately before it happened?

Priorities

After all that Hopeful talk here yesterday it's useful to look at the current administration's efforts to place first things first:

...The priorities of the National Institutes of Health(NIH) in the area of bacteriology have been “catastrophically re-ordered” by emphasizing bioweapons research over non-bioweapons research, a prominent authority states.

Giving priority to bioweapons research at NIH, started under the Bush Administration and continuing under President Obama, “diverts resources from critical public-health and scientific objectives,” says Richard Ebright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.

“The negative impact has been most severe in bacteriology, in which NIH research priorities have been catastrophically re-ordered---with research on bacterial bioweapons receiving more support than research on the top five bacterial causes of death combined---and in which non-bioweapons research has suffered catastrophic losses in resources and personnel,” Ebright said.

Ebright cited the examples of research into two bacterial pathogens: “Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, which claim 40,000 and 20,000 U.S. lives each year, respectively. Each kills more Americans than HIV-AIDS (15,000 U.S. lives) “but neither of these bacterial pathogens is on the list of NIAID Priority Pathogens,” Ebright pointed out. (NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the subdivision of NIH responsible for infectious-disease research.)

“These two killer bacterial pathogens are not in NIAID’s ‘Category A’, with the anthrax bacterium and the smallpox virus, or even in NIAID’s ‘Category B’ or ‘Category C,’" Ebright says. “Something is wrong---very wrong---when NIAID fails to prioritize the top infectious cause of U.S. death,” he said in an email to this reporter.

Other top bacterial causes of U.S. deaths include Enterococcus faecium/faecalis, Clostridium difficile, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. “Of these, only the last is on the NIAID Priority Pathogens list and this pathogen is only in Category C,” Ebright said.

Asked “What is the mood of the scientific life sciences community at this time toward the Administration?” Ebright responded, “Hopeful expectation” but “growing concern that, thus far, there has been more continuity [from the Bush Administration] than change...”

The Pentagon thus moves into Health and Human Services.

The Hands On approach was evident yesterday as he described what is going on in the Gulf:

“...Governments make sure that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that cause them...”

Heckuva job, Brownie. Or should I say Miss Manners?

think happy thoughts

shorter main$tream bluedog DINOcrat: let nature take its course



after all, everything dies sometime, right?

next, they'll be telling us obsessing over this isn't supporting our Dear Leader...

Believe It

The DINOcrats are continuing in reviving the worst ideas of the Bu$h-Cheneyburton administration, revising and extending them.

Not content with the Real ID concept of chipping your driver's license? Do it one better! A social insecurity card with a chip and your fingerprints, too, required by every employer for every slave working Citizen.

But not an ID, no, heavens, no, that's never what it would be. It would simply be a Citizenship Verification for the right to slavery work.



Now why wouldn't people go for that?

forget the word "spill"

via oyster:

... Forget the word “spill.”


Why?


“This isn’t a spill,” said Kerry St. Pe, who headed Louisiana’s oil spill response team for 23 years. “This isn’t a storage tank or a ship with a finite amount of oil that has boundaries. This is much, much worse.”

It’s a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could be running for two months or more...

Rivers of hydrocarbons are going to play havoc with the entire Gulf ecosystem.

It's summer. I wonder what the albedo of crude oil on top of water is without normal evaporation to cool the surface?

So it Could be a nasty hurricane season, too.

gold standard

it's done with smoke and mirrors

There was a strange moment last week during President Obama's speech at Cooper Union. There he was, groveling before a cast of Wall Street villains including Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, begging them to "Look into your heart!" like John Turturro's character in Miller's Crossing...when out of the blue, the POTUS dropped this bombshell: "The only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we're proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny."

The Big Secret, of course, is that every living creature within a 100-mile radius of Cooper Union would fail "this scrutiny"--or that scrutiny, or any scrutiny, period. Not just in a 100-mile radius, but wherever there are still signs of economic life beating in these 50 United States, the mere whiff of scrutiny would work like nerve gas on what's left of the economy. Because in the 21st century, fraud is as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet Volts--fraud's all we got left, Doc. Scare off the fraud with Obama's "scrutiny," and the entire pyramid scheme collapses in a heap of smoldering savings accounts.

That's how an acquaintance of mine, a partner in a private equity firm, put it: "Whoever pops this fraud bubble is going to have to escape on the next flight out, faster than the Bin Laden Bunch fled Kentucky in their chartered jets after 9/11."

And that's why this SEC suit accusing Goldman Sachs of fraud is really just a negotiating bluff to give Obama's people some leverage--or it's supposed to be, anyway--according to the PE guy. He dismissed all the speculation that the fraud investigations would turn on other obvious villains like Deutsche, Merrill, Paulson & Co., the Rahm Emmanuel-linked Magnetar and so on.

"You don't get it, Ames. Even Khuzami, the SEC guy in charge of the Goldman case, is a fraud; the fucker was Deutsche's general counsel when they pulled the same CDO scam as Goldman. You have no idea how deep this goes..."

via Avedon, who says

...There is no real economy on Wall Street. Confiscating all those ill-gotten gains is the only thing left to do to put it into all those pension funds where it belongs. These people do not add value to the economy, and in fact there has been pretty much no innovation in America since unfettered "innovation" took over the markets. We don't need them, we just need to take back what they've stolen and return it to its rightful owners (working Americans). Moreover, everybody knows that what they are doing is just pure fraud - why would you invest with them?

because most of America hasn't made the connection that since Reagan all of the money has been taken to the casino. even all of the casino's money has been bet at bigger casinos. you're given enough chips to trade for food and shelter to keep you betting- if you're careful.

what's wrong with unrestricted drilling in the Gulf?

>

we told you so

The worst-case scenario for the broken and leaking well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico would be the loss of the wellhead currently restricting the flow to 5,000 barrels -- or 210,000 gallons per day.

If the wellhead is lost, oil could leave the well at a much greater rate, perhaps up to 150,000 barrels -- or more than 6 million gallons per day -- based on government data showing daily production at another deepwater Gulf well.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill was 11 million gallons total. The Gulf spill could end up dumping the equivalent of 4 Exxon Valdez spills per week. ...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Atrios]

It's another Katrina moment.