Could BP have finally stopped the oil gusher? Looks plausible in the ROV cam:
*Update 7/19/10* Uh oh, seepage detected…
*Update 7/19/10 7:27P PT* and oil leaking out of the cap 
*Update 7/21/10* The oil spill in China is now deemed twice as bad as originally thought.
Maybe the Feds will remove his eye shadow too...
The crazy Nazi skinhead who wanted to kill Obama is now asking for the Feds to remove his Nazi tattoos for fear of reprisal in prison. Doesn’t tattoo removal cost a bundle? Feds should comply to the spirit of his request by either modifying his swastika to be a little box with a cross in it, or just covering it with a suitable brand from a cattle ranch. Poor baby!
GOoPer Senator Dick Lugar comes to the realization that Shrubya’s Afghanistan Adventure is unwinnable. It’s about time, Dick! Welcome to the Reality-Based Community. Shame you didn’t figure that out before the invasion, or read Needlenose back in ’03 on Afghanistan’s slide into chaos – we coulda schooled you! Now if we could only get Obama to take our advice and start the withdrawal immediately!
Seems like a risky gambit for the Reactionaries to remind voters of Shrubya in the lead-up to the elections, as well as split the Reactionary Jingo Consensus.
Related news, pundit Joel Brinkley writes off Afghanistan, Dumbass Gingrich cracks open a newspaper, Michael Steele thinks Obama started the war (in his alternative reality shared by scary man-woman Ann Coulter) and our military continues to blow up Afghani civilians.
*Update 7/21/10* HuffPo has video montage of a bunch of Repug pols repudiating Shrubya’s Afghanistan Adventure. Or is that refutiating?
For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use ’true (or full) cost accounting’ to adequately compute the total cost of fuels. Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel. The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.
So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax. In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.
The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!
For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type. How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody? Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?
We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy. We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.
But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.
*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells? Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?
Some photos from downtown Oakland earlier today, hours after the riots partially inspired by the involuntary manslaughter verdict against BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in the death of Oscar Grant:
Several businesses had boarded up their windows as a precaution before the verdict was announced, and/or put up posters in support of Grant as a possible talisman against harm.
Even many that did not survived unscathed, though — the several blocks where the rioters ran rampant were more bruised than broken by the violence. Still, a significant amount of damage was readily visible…
Of the establishments that were attacked, jewelry stores and pawnshops were among the primary targets — suggesting either that they’re symbols of oppression I hadn’t realized previously, or that some of the rioters were more interested in scoring free stuff than protesting injustice.
The venerable downtown Sears department store was a more traditional object of the crowd’s anger, as were a couple of banks on the other side of the street.
As I said, though, the overall level of damage was far lower than many people feared — the City Center mall at the heart of downtown Oakland seemed more or less unaffected, as did the City Hall and other government buildings just a block to the north. (The police presence was probably strongest in these areas, inevitably leaving the neighboring blocks more vulnerable.)
In fact, one reason it was hard to tell just how many buildings and businesses had suffered from Thursday night’s outbreak of violence was that dozens had already been shuttered — due not to fear, but rather the chronic urban poverty of the area, amplified by the economic downturn of the last two years.
You could make a strong case that the latter have caused downtown Oakland more suffering than any pack of rioters could hope to inflict.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
Seriously, I just posted this bit about this thieving, male escort-loving priest for the bad headline pun. Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy.
*Update* While we are on the subject of Catholic priests, I give you “Priest Off”:
Remember the climate-change deniers mocking Al Gore last winter during the unusually heavy snowfall? Funny that they’re keeping their traps shut in the face of record-breaking June heat wave - the Earth Fuckers really owe Mr. Gore an apology.
And right after apologizing to Mr. Gore, the Earth Fuckers should apologize to the scientists of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit for stealing their emails and smearing them mercilessly over the last year – an independent panel of researchers has upheld their research results and professional integrity.
Don’t hold your breath, though – Uber-Earth Fucker Apologist Benny Feiser doesn’t put much faith in either solid science nor an unbiased review process:
But Benny Feiser, who runs the skeptic-leaning Global Warming Policy Foundation, said there was strong evidence that legitimate requests for information had been repeatedly stifled.
“I don’t think the university can just claim that this is a vindication,” he said. He promised his own inquiry into the matter, to publish its report in August.
This is the real difference between real scandals and reactionary-inspired scandals – just like Whitewater, Climate Gate has turned out to be nothing more than a Reactionary smear campaign of dirty ad-hominem attacks designed to muddy the waters of public discourse and keep it off the course from the discussion that really matters.
US Federal Budget: Current military includes Dept. of Defense ($653B), the military portion from other departments ($150B), and an additional $162B to supplement the Budget’s misleading and vast underestimate of only $38B for the “war on terror.” Past militar” represents veterans’ benefits plus 80% of the interest on the debt.
Well I’m not sure if including a token Rebel to the team constitutes ‘bi-partisan,’ but Rep. Barney Frank is calling for reductions to US Military spending. It’s about time somebody in a position of authority called attention to the freakin’ elephant standing in the middle of the budget room! I was a little ahead of the curve, if you compare my recommendations for cutting wasteful programs in 2003 to Barney’s recommended cuts (see page 12).
I’m not really very optimistic that Barney will accomplish much here, but it’s about freakin’ time somebody on Capitol Hill had the balls to even mention the subject!
Michael Steele on Afghanistan war:
“This was a war of Obama’s choosing,” Michael Steele said at the event. “This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
WTF? Here is some vintage Needlenose, predicting the path of Shrubya’s Afghanistan folly.