Reject Them Both

Via Down With Tyranny

What the Bluegrass Pipeline Has In Store For Kentucky

Fossil fuel is dead.  But before we finally dispose of its rotting corpse, it's going to spread death and destruction further than any of us dare imagine.

Charles Pierce:

Steve Jensen's land is dead now. His farm in North Dakota is a dead zone because an oil pipeline run by a company called Tesoro ruptured somehow and blessed Jensen's land with 26,000 barrels of crude that has bubbled to the surface, and now, from the air, Jensen's farm looks like the Talladega Speedway. Because it is a pipeline, and pipelines burst, this one burst. And because it is an oil company, and oil companies lie, especially about their pipelines, which burst, Tesoro immediately broke the glass on the bullshit-alibi alarm that hangs on the wall of its company cafeteria.

That company won't pay a fucking dime in compensation. Neither will Williams Co. when - not it - their toxic fracking waste pipeline through the heart of the Bluegrass bursts and destroys Central Kentucky's economy.

Because it is run by greedy fools, North Dakota is a state that has sold its soul to the oil companies, which lie, especially about their pipelines, which burst, and it also appears that North Dakota, and the greedy fools who run it, may have set a land-speed rcord for ass-covering.

SNIP

Frankly, I have no reason to believe "officials" when they say the leak has been stopped. I don't have any reason to believe that this gunk hasn't gotten into the groundwater until somebody from outside North Dakota, which pretty plainly is terrified of pissing off the extraction industries that now run the state, tells me that's the case. ("A thick band of clay"? OK, trust but verify.) Frankly, given what we know about pipelines, and the people who build them, and the people who operate them, and how they are the property of an entire industry that poisons the land and then lies about, the fact that we even deliberating building our old pal, the Keystone XL pipeline, is completely mad.

Send This Murdering Corporate Person to Prison

People who destroy evidence of a crime go to prison.  In fact, people who destroy evidence of a crime during the commission of which other people DIE, get convicted of felony homicide.  According to the Supreme Court, corporations have all the rights of people.  Why isn't Halliburton going to prison? 

TPM:

Halliburton Energy Services has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the Department of Justice said Thursday.
Federal officials said in a news release that a criminal information charging Hallburton with one count of destruction of evidence was filed in federal court in Louisiana.

Halliburton has agreed to pay the maximum fine, be on probation for three years and continue to cooperate with the government’s criminal investigation, said the news release, which did not spell out the fine amount.

The Houston-based company has also made a $55 million voluntary contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It was not a condition of the court agreement, the news release says.

Halliburton was BP’s cement contractor on the drilling rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The blowout triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers and spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf.

Tell ya what: I'll settle for Halliburton surrendering all its assets to the U.S. government, going completely out of business, and preventing all its executives from ever doing business with the U.S. government. No, make that ever doing business with any public or private entity in or of the United States.

Compared to prison, that's extremely lenient.

How Civilized and Rational Nations Handle Polluting Corporations

The Obama administration continues to allow ocean rapist BP to continue to drill for oil and suck up billions in taxpayer subsides while the millions of people along the Gulf Coast die slowly from their BP-poisoned economy.

But not every country in the Americas is that stupid.

From William K. Wolfrum:

There is something odd happening here in Brazil. There is an oil spill – courtesy of Chevron – off the coast here. That’s not the odd part. In fact, it increasingly seems like a normal occurrence. Chevron has thus far lied about the oil spill and has shown a lack of preparation in dealing with it. But there’s nothing strange about that, either.

No, the odd part is this – there are no sectors of Brazilian politics or the media that are rushing to defend Chevron on the oil companies for this spill, nor is the government working to help Chevron’s public relations team. In fact, the Brazilian government is working hard to make Chevron responsible for the spill, which is coming from a leak at more than 1,000 meters below the sea in the Frade oil field off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

(Last week), the Brazilian government banned Chevron from drilling in Brazil (all of Chevron’s drilling activities are in the Frade oil field) while the government investigates the reasons for the spill.

Isn't there a World Trade Organization rule preventing democratically-elected governments from persecuting fossil fuel giants?

Gulf Oil Catastrophe Still Bad and Getting Worse

From edger at They Gave Us A Republic ....:

BP and the Feds have fooled America and the entire world into thinking the BP Gulf Oil Spill is over, that the beaches are clean and that the seafood is safe, and everything is OK.

Titled "The Gulf Oil Spill isn’t over!" here's a little bit of mournful Louisiana blues to tell the real story.

Let's make this one viral....

Uploaded to YouTube Oct. 02, 2010 by:
Holt Webb - writer/photographer & publisher of The Vanishing America Project
"a multi-year journey I’ve undertaken to use my skill as a photographer and a writer to promote conservation and raise awareness about what we are losing – our culture, our wildlife, and our landscape – in hopes that some of it will still be around for future generations to enjoy."

Hat tip to Alexander Higgins who for months on his blog has been collecting every bit of news you can imagine about the BP's Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe.

Read the whole thing, including captions from the video, here.

The Gulf is Completely Fucked Forever

Zandar points us to the story that's as invisible to the MSM as the billions of gallons of oil still poisoning the Gulf of Mexico are invisible to the EPA.

MoJo's Julia Whitty has a pretty sobering report on what to expect from the Gulf of Mexico now that the spill is "contained".

Consider that while we've all been fixated on the true spill rate—is it 35,000 barrels a day? 60,000 barrels? More?—those figures are only estimates, and only of the oil. Few people realize that some 40 percent of what spews from the Deepwater Horizon well is methane, the primary component of natural gas—a dangerous greenhouse gas and a toxin to most life. Indeed, methane may hold the answer to the quantity of vented oil. David Valentine, a biogeochemist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, suggested in May in an op-ed in the journal Nature that plumes of dissolved methane could be used to calculate how much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. But BP has blurred the evidence trail—intentionally or otherwise—by treating at least some of the escaping methane with methanol, another toxin, in an effort to prevent a dangerous buildup and possibly even another explosion. Nevertheless, around the spill site, Valentine and his colleagues found clouds of dissolved natural gas at 100,000 times the normal density and at depths of more than 2,500 feet. They also found that little of the gas seemed to be reaching the air. Which is good news for the atmosphere, but probably bad news for the ocean.

That's because the methane may also be powering up blooms of microbes that eat methane but use up the oxygen in the water as they do so—causing dead zones where most life cannot survive. The Gulf of Mexico is already home to the second-largest dead zone on Earth; the last thing it needs is another. On the surface above the methane clouds, Valentine and colleagues discovered a mass kill of pyrosomes—free-floating colonies of jellyfish look-alikes that straddle the vertebrate-invertebrate divide, and an important food for sea turtles. It's not yet clear which of many smoking guns killed the pyrosomes. "We'll be working up the story of the relationship between dispersant, oil, gas, and the microbial community for some time to come," says Valentine.

Then there are the drilling fluids contaminating the seafloor near the wellhead. Euphemistically called muds, these heavy fluids are pumped into wells to keep the highly pressurized oil and gas from exploding upward. BP's drilling muds have been pouring out of the wellhead, along with 30,000 barrels added in its failed "top kill" and other efforts to plug the leak. Along with oil, methane, methanol, and Corexit, drilling fluids add their own frightening recipe to the disaster: arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, barite, fluoride, chrome lignosulfonate, vanadium, copper, aluminum, chromium, zinc, radionuclides, and other heavy metals. Relief wells require pumping thousands more barrels of drilling fluid into the reservoir, with all the same risks of explosion attending the original well. The EPA estimates these drilling fluids will pose a threat to the seafloor and surrounding waters for up to 40 years. Plus a recent study finds that oil spills create a whole new pathway for arsenic pollution in the sea. The oil prevents seafloor sediments from bonding with and burying arsenic that naturally occurs in the ocean. This shutdown of the natural filtration system allows arsenic levels to rise from the deep water to the surface, disrupting photosynthesis in phytoplankton, increasing birth defects and triggering behavioral changes in marine life, and killing animals that feed on poisoned prey.

Never before in human history has the vast food web of the ocean—rooted in the dark, and flowering at the surface—come under so many assaults from below, above, and within the water column: marine warfare masquerading as a cleanup.

Do read the whole story. The cold hard truth is that the Gulf has suffered a toxic, possibly fatal event that will rewrite the entire ecosytem of the area, like taking a crowbar to a stained glass window. What's left will not be recognizable to most of us. For the next generation or so the effects of this spill will change the Gulf for good, and it may not survive the damage. What does emerge will be something totally different.

This is far from over folks. You and your kids will still be reading about how the Gulf of Mexico is damaged for years to come.

MoJo actually has a whole ongoing section/series on the BP catastrophe, which you can keep up with here.

Susie Madrak spots the equally invisible story of the people of the Gulf, whose lives are destroyed by the "cleaned up" oil.

As a member of the Professional Left, I'm sorry to say that my attitude toward the Gulf oil spill cleanup is that the glass is not even half-full. I'm sorry to say it, because it's an implied criticism of the administration and it will make poor Bobby Gibbs cry. I think it's got to be said, loudly and often: This seafood is not safe to eat.

From the Solve Climate blog:

HOPEDALE, LA.— In the small towns of coastal Louisiana, the widespread consensus is that the oil is far from gone.Fishermen return from working on cleanup crews or from recreational angling trips with stories of crabs whose lungs are black with oil, or of oysters with shells covered in sludge. They take photos and carry tarballs home like talismans to show what they have seen. They talk about their fears with anyone who will listen, and often their voices are tinged with panic.

Yet a government report released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that 75 percent of the oil has been cleaned up, dispersed or otherwise contained. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that of all the samples of seafood that have been tested since the oil spill, none have shown evidence of contamination.

While some in the coastal seafood industry agree with these assessments, a majority seem to view the news with a sense of betrayal.

"The cleanup isn't even close to being done," said Karen Hopkins of Dean Blanchard Seafood, which accounts for about 11 percent of the U.S. shrimp supply, on the barrier island of Grand Isle.

"The last thing I want to do is scare anyone away from the seafood down here," said Dawn Nunez, standing at the counter of the shrimp wholesale business and deli she owns in the tiny fishing town of Hopedale. "But if I’m not eating it or feeding it to my children, I can’t advise anyone else to eat it either."

On their dock across the street, Dawn's husband Marty Nunez pulls a clump of oil-ridden marsh grass out of a plastic bag.

"There's people fishing where this is at – or worse than this," he said. "I can't understand how they say things are getting back to normal."

Nunez surreptitiously picked the grass while working as part of BP'sVessels of Opportunity cleanup operation on Monday. For him the oil-soaked grass is a symbol of a lurking threat. Like many other people living along the coast, Nunez is confident that vast quantities of oil remain in the environment, despite highly publicized announcements to the contrary.

"Our fishermen bring home grass and tarballs and then we watch the news and they say there is no sign of oil," said Dawn Nunez. "Where did it go? Where did millions of gallons of oil go if it's not in the Gulf?"

A widely held theory is that the 1.8 million gallons of dispersants that were sprayed during the cleanup operation caused the oil to sink to the bottom.

Make no mistake: the frantic scramble to dump millions of gallons of "dispersant" into the Gulf was a deliberate move by BP to ensure that billions of gallons of oil vanished from sight and sank far away from any attempt to collect it. That second gusher - of toxic Hide-It-All - was, in fact, BP's real "response plan" to a spill: Force the oil miles under the surface and pretend it's all gone.

For BP to properly compensate the people of the Gulf Coast, and all the people of the United States who used to eat the fish and seafood of the Gulf, who vacationed on the Gulf, BP will have to replace the entire economy of the Gulf Coast. Every household's income, every business' revenue, every state's tax collections - everything.

Because it's all gone now.

Dispersed Gulf Oil Now Invisible and Far More Deadly

I met Hugh Kaufman many years ago, and talked with him for about an hour about various environmental criminals. His target at that time was W.R. Grace, whose deliberate destruction of a swath of Massachusetts remains one of the all-time worst cases of water pollution.

Yes, Hugh Kaufman is a fanatic who makes people uncomfortable. But he has endured more than 30 years of abuse and harassment at EPA in order to remain the no-compromise hardass at an agency too eager to cave to polluters. He's speaking the truth still today - on BP.

KAUFMAN: If they did not use dispersants, they would have been able to get most of that oil off of the surface and would not have endangered all of the fish and ecosystem underneath the water that now will be affected for decades on down the line.

I was listening to some of the, quote, “experts” who are being paid by BP at universities who are saying that the oil has disappeared. It hasn‘t disappeared. It‘s throughout thousands of square miles in the Gulf, mixed with dispersants, and because the temperatures down there are so cold, they‘re going to be around for decades.

Heather at Crooks and Liars has the video.

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman about the claims that the oil is now "disappearing" from the Gulf of Mexico. There's no way in hell that much oil just goes away. Digby's got more on this here The Good News Is The Poison:

BP seems to have ably headed off the worst of the PR disaster by keeping the worst of the oil more or less off the shoreline. The actual disaster may have been made worse by the use of toxic chemicals. So it's all good.

That's what they want us to believe anyway. We need more Hugh Kaufman's out there to counter this nonsense.

See the video and read the transcript here.

Why the BP Disaster Didn't Happen in its British Home

The flip side of those stories about Brits defending hometown BP against American anger is that the the Brits have known for quite some time what malicious fuckers BP execs really are, and took measures to protect themselves.

From Down with Tyranny:

BEARD: But this was the company behind a string of American disasters. The Prudhoe Bay spill; the Texas City Refinery Fire, and now Deepwater Horizon. Critics say former chief executive Lord Browne created all these disasters with relentless cost-cutting. Tom Bower is author of "Oil Money Politics and Power."

TOM BOWER: Amongst the costs he dramatically cut were the costs of maintenance and safety and releasing many hundreds of engineers.

BEARD: Bower says a maniacal ambition drove Browne. He wanted to displace Exxon-Mobil and make BP the biggest oil company in the world. Instead, he says, Browne left behind a disaster zone.

How dare they, huh? This is very much the way U.S. corporations treat human beings in Third World countries. It's what I meant to convey earlier this morning when I quoted Thom Hartmann looking out into the not-too-distant future and spelling out for us that we either have to change or perish and that "The new economic structure must consider, in every transaction, the environmental cost to all human (and corporate, and governmental) behavior, and appropriately mitigate that cost." BP didn't give a hoot about that. As Beard's guest, Tom Bower went on the explain, "Amongst the costs he dramatically cut were the costs of maintenance and safety and releasing many hundreds of engineers." Browne was clearly a typical corporate sociopath-- and he left a predictable catastrophe for his former company, not to mention the Gulf of Mexico and the areas that border it. "BP," continued Bower, "was really always on a knife-edge, always cutting corners, and to an extent it was a maverick corporation, shooting from the hip." But these kinds of environmental disasters haven't happened in the U.K. Why? Well, that's where the Republican Party's love for banana republicanism comes into play. Beard again:

Twenty two years ago, a gas leak on an American platform off Britain's Coast caused the world's worst offshore disaster. One hundred and sixty seven workers on the Piper Alpha rig died in the fire. Much tougher regulation ensued. Malcolm Webb speaks for British offshore operators. He says Piper Alpha...

MALCOLM WEBB: ..took us into an entirely different direction as regards safety and the management of our resources in the offshore.

BEARD: Britain split up licensing of operators from safety monitoring, unlike in the U.S. And another critical difference. No drilling operator ever gets a license here now without a meticulous safety assessment showing.

WEBB: That he is operating that installation so as to reduce to the lowest extent practicable the risks to human life and to the environment through oil spill.

BEARD: BP admits it never performed assessments on any of its U.S. wells because the U.S. government never required that.

In fact, it was much cheaper for B.P. and the oil industry in general to just buy off conservative politicians-- much cheaper. Still sitting in the Senate are 10 members-- all conservatives, of course-- who have taken over half a million dollars in thinly veiled direct bribes from Big Oil and all have worked to make sure BP would never be required to undergo the expensive regulatory regime they are forced to endure back in their home country.

SNIP

And there are 10 House members, again all conservatives, in the same cozy little club: handmaidens for Big Oil who have taken at least half a million dollars each from Big Oil executives and lobbyists.

SNIP

They also belong in prison-- along with the BP executive and lobbyists. But that's not going to happen... not ever. Even now, as we mentioned earlier today, Republican conservatives, each with financial connections to Big Oil, are urging that oil companies be allowed to drill in the Great Lakes, the source of drinking water for 40 million Americans. The U.S. learned nothing from this, although England did:

Read the whole thing.

Dear Suddenly-Environmentalist Southern Baptists: Fuck You

No. You don't get to spend 40 years accusing environmentalists of being The Source of All Evil in the Universe, then suddenly beg for protection when the pollution washes up in your yard.

From the Courier:

As the BP oil disaster poisons the waters off the states where many of them live, Southern Baptists are issuing their most sweeping call ever for something they have long distrusted -- government regulation of the environment.

And a Louisville seminary dean who helped push through that resolution says the catastrophe has the potential to galvanize conservative evangelicals just like the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

"In many ways, this ecological catastrophe can provide the exact same awakening for evangelicals," said Russsell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and chairman of the resolutions committee at last week's meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Orlando, Fla.

In the resolution, passed overwhelmingly, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, with 16 million members, called on "governing authorities to act ... with undeterred resolve to end this crisis."

First rule for the $20 billion Gulf compensation fund: if you have ever, in your lifetime, expressed opposition to government regulation to protect the environment, you get ... not one fucking dime.

Your self-righteous, anti-government, god-bothering lies undermined 75 years of progress in this country, and now you're reaping the lethal, oily shit you sowed.

Brett Guthrie and Geoff Davis Say YOU Should Pay to Clean Up BP's $20 Billion Mess

Guthrie (R-KY 2) and Davis (R-KY 4) are the two Kentucky members of the BP 114.

Steve Benen:

'THE BP 114'.... Democrats have made no secret of the fact that they want to keep exploiting Republican support for BP as the midterm elections draw closer. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and his infamous apology are clearly at the forefront of the effort, but also keep an eye on "The BP 114."

As we talked about last week, even before Barton started groveling to BP CEO Tony Hayward, the Republican Study Committee issued a statement condemning the White House for securing a $20 billion relief fund for Gulf Coast families and businesses, calling it a "Chicago-style political shakedown." The Republican Study Committee didn't extend an apology to BP, but in every other way, the RSC's statement was just as outrageous as Barton's. Indeed, they used largely the same language.

The Republican Study Committee has 114 House members, so the goal for Dems is to tie the pro-BP sentiment to each of the contingent's members. And thus "The BP 114" was born.

"While a Republicans criticized Barton once he became a PR problem, not a single member disagreed with the RSC attack on the accountability fund which happened the day before Barton's comments," noted DNC national press secretary Hari Sevugan.

To that end, the DNC sent out emails to the districts of the 114 members of the committee, which included tools allowing recipients to easily call local radio stations and express opinions on the members. The DNC also started running Google ads redirecting users who search for members of the committee to a Democratic-hosted page criticizing RSC members for their views on the oil spill.

If House Republicans are smart, they'll take the talking point away from Democrats, and formally distance themselves from the Republican Study Committee's BP-sympathizing statement. If RSC members say they disagree with their contingent's attack, it'll be tough for Dems to go after all of the group's members.

But either way, Dems like the hand they're playing -- if Republican Study Committee members stand by the group's statement, they're taking BP's side at an inopportune time. If RSC members denounce their own group's line, Dems are sowing seeds of division among Republicans.

Or they would be, if those emails to voters in all 114 districts had actually gone out. But Democratic activists in both Davis' and Guthrie's districts say they have received no such emails from the DNC.

Of course, if the DNC had not spent the last 20 years purging its ranks and mailing lists of actual Democratic activists, they might be able to reach the people who could do something with this information.

But I'm pretty sure the DNC's email list consists almost entirely of Blue Dogs, DINOs, Conservadems and other repug-fellators who forwarded the "BP 114" email to all their repug friends for a good laugh.

Do NOT Mess With the Mermaids

I love New York.

June 19, 2010: The annual Mermaid Parade is held on Coney Island in New York City. The parade has been an annual tradition since 1983, and participants typically dress up as sea creatures -- "mythical and real" -- to celebrate the beginning of summer. This year, some took the opportunity to draw attention to Gulf Coast marine life that is endangered because of the BP oil spill.

Click here for the slide show.

It's a Floor Wax AND a Dessert Topping - Redux

Steve Benen points out the latest repug about-face on President Obama.

GOP STEPS ON ITS OWN 'SHAKEDOWN' TALKING POINT.... It's hard to see how Wednesday's meeting at the White House could have gone much better. President Obama met with BP executives, told them how it was going to be, and BP quickly agreed. The result: a $20 billion pot of money that will bring much-needed help to workers, businesses, and families who've been victimized by a devastating oil spill.

The Republican response was quick: the relief fund is outrageous. The matter, the GOP said, should have been resolved in the courts. Obama pressuring BP on Americans' behalf was evidence of a "shakedown" and "extortion," which might have even been "illegal." How dare the president step up to secure needed funding for struggling families and small businesses in the region. The nerve. Hell, one key Republican official even apologized to BP for Obama strong-arming the oil giant into setting the money aside.

Yesterday, though, the Republican message seemed to shift a bit, at least in some corners. What was initially deemed an outrageous presidential abuse turned into a GOP idea that Obama shouldn't take credit for.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), for example, issued a statement yesterday implicitly arguing that there couldn't have been a shakedown, since BP intended to put $20 billion into the escrow fund before the White House meeting. "The true outrage," Franks said, "is that this was never the President's idea at all."

It wasn't just Franks.

SNIP

First, there was considerable disagreement about the escrow issue, since the entire Republican establishment quickly rose up to trash the agreement, loudly and publicly.

Second, this new message completely invalidates the first. Simultaneously, we have Republicans saying Obama extorted the money out of BP and that BP agreed to the payment before Obama walked into the room. The president's efforts were scandalous, some Republicans are arguing, but the effort was a GOP idea.

Can't anybody here play this game? Just pick a message and go with it.

A) Why should they? Throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks is easier and more effective.

B) The last time repugs used truth, facts, logic or reality to make accusations was so long ago there are no written records or survivors.

C) Cutting the tether to reality brings freedom: if one baseless claim doesn't garner enough support, try claiming the exact opposite.

D) Repug voters don't punish hypocrisy, contradiction or blatant lying. They do punish the failure to attack Barack Obama every minute of every day for anything and everything.

It only looks pathetic and politically dangerous to those of us in the reality-based community. To repug voters, it's heroic.

The Address the President Should Have Given

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Full transcript here.

Obama Tonight: Lead or Fail

There's speculation that President Obama's national address tonight will "go big," perhaps by calling for substantial carbon cuts in a comprehensive climate bill.

I've refrained from commenting on the handwringing over the "death" of the climate bill, because until it dies and is revived at least as many times as the health care bill did, it doesn't really count.

Now I'm getting deja vu with the prospect of a last-minute big push from Obama on a climate bill like the one he gave health care reform in the SOTU in January.

Here's Steven Benen on why a climate bill is in trouble, why that trouble makes no sense whatsoever, and why a big push on it from Obama is necessary and critical.

LETTING A RARE OPPORTUNITY SLIP AWAY.... The vote was far closer than it should have been, but a narrow Senate majority rejected Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) scheme to undercut the EPA. That's the good news. The bad news, the vote made it increasingly obvious that the Senate doesn't want to address energy policy this year, an impression reinforced later in the day.

Senate Democratic leaders and chairmen emerged from a meeting on climate change Thursday with no decisions on how or whether to move forward with legislation this summer, with some saying there is little appetite among even the chairmen with jurisdiction over the issue to take on the politically dicey topic this year.

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said the "dominant concern" in the meeting of six chairmen and five Members of the Senate leadership was whether Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) have 60 votes to beat back an expected filibuster of their bill to regulate greenhouse gases.

"What's the point of doing anything without 60 votes?" Rockefeller asked. "I think there's some feeling that you don't spend time on the floor trying to figure out if you've got 60 votes. You have to understand before you go to the floor that you have 60 votes."

He added there is some worry that the legislation could cause political problems for some vulnerable Members of the Democratic Conference. He said most of the participants at the meeting had concerns about embarking on a wide-ranging climate change debate this year, but he noted that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did not take a position.

Rockefeller is not exactly a credible voice on the subject -- he was one of six Dems who voted for the Murkowski measure -- but his comments nevertheless shed light on a larger truth. Some key senators are looking for excuses to let the initiative die, rather than looking for solutions on how to get it done.

Greg Sargent noted last night, "[I]n the wake of possibly the worst environmental calamity in our history, this is, well, freakin' insane."

I couldn't agree more. Look, this need not be complicated. Our existing energy policy is a mess; global warming is getting worse; our international competitors are getting way ahead of us in investing in a next-generation energy framework; and our dependence on oil is undermining the nation's interests in a wide variety of ways.

There's a reasonable, modest bill -- the American Power Act -- on the table, which was crafted by a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independent. It doesn't go far enough, but it addresses global warming; it reduces our oil dependence; it improves American competitiveness; it creates jobs in a critical industry; and it lowers the budget deficit. The effort enjoys the support of the president, and the leadership of both chambers, and polls show public support for this kind of effort -- support that's growing in the midst of a disastrous oil spill.

And yet, Republicans refuse to even consider acting, and a few too many Democrats are scared to try.

If nothing gets done this year, an opportunity like this one will not emerge again for quite a while. The consequences of failure will be severe.

Later, Benen adds this:

In any case, Matt Finkelstein helps set the record straight: "In fact, recent analyses show that clean energy legislation -- like the American Power Act -- would create millions of jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil at a minimal cost to consumers. For example, the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that the average household would see 'between a $136 increase and a $35 dollar decrease in annual energy expenditures.'"

I think Obama will try for the last-second long pass on climate change, if only because it's the only thing that will prevent a repug takeover of Congress in November, which will spell the end of his presidency.

Krewe of Dead Pelicans

Count on New Orleans to protest BP's crimes in its unique way.



Lisa Derrick at Firedoglake:

During New Orleans monthly art walk, the newly formed Krewe of Dead Pelicans staged their first parade through Julia Street, New Orleans’ gallery district, to mourn and protest the BP oil spill. Traditionally krewes parade for Mardi Gras, itself a final celebration before the sorrow of the Lenten season. The KoDP was organized by real estate agent and carnival costume designer Ro Meyer in late May who told the Times-Picayune

The thing is out there in the Gulf circulating and we don’t have any power. We’re not even able to go anywhere to get out of the way. Nobody appears to be doing anything about it, and I don’t have the power to do anything about it, and I don’t know anyone who’s stepping up, saying they have the power to do anything about it…

I just needed a place to channel my frustration and I felt like, ‘If I feel that way, other people must feel that way.’

Ro set up Facebook pages for the krewe and march which now has over 6000 friends from around the country. Several hundred–some in costumes, others dressed in black and blue to represent the ocean and oil and wearing shrimp boots–participated in the march which included a coffin, banners recycled from Katrina tarps, signs, flags featuring pelican (the state bird) and of course jazz bands. The parade permit was paid for by country music singer Sammy Kershaw a conservative candidate for Louisiana Lt. Governor (seems there are some Republicans who are putting “conservation” into the conservative platform…).

The krewe will be marching again, and a wing has formed in Tennessee. Expect to see other wings and supporters in Halloween parades across the country as well.

See more pictures here.

Ashley Judd Brings Mountaintop Removal to D.C.

Dave Niewert at Crooks and Liars captures Kentucky's own Ashley Judd schooling national environmentalists on the horror of mountaintop removal.

I have to admit celebrities don't normally do very well speaking out on political issues, but Judd's speech was powerful, in no small part because it was an emotional speech for this native Kentuckian:

But the ache I feel for my mountain home is now more than a bittersweet nostalgia accrued through inimitable generations of belonging. There is a searing tear, a gaping wound in the fabric of my life and the lives of all Appalachians. And it gets bigger with every Appalachian mountaintop that is blown up, every holler that is filled, every stream that is buried, every wild thing that is wantonly and recklessly killed, every ecosystem that is diminished, every job that is lost to mechanization, every family that is pitted one against the other by the state-sanctioned, federal government-supported coal industry-operated rape of Appalachia: mountaintop removal coal mining.

She went on to describe in heartfelt terms the kind of wretchedness -- the environmental devastation and job loss -- the mountaintop removal technique has brought to the Appalachians. Basically, the coal companies don't want to have to mine for the coal anymore: now they just blow up entire mountains to scoop it out with a handful of large machines.

I didn't capture it on video, but she also pointed out that the devastation is occurring on a scale similar to that being wrought by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She reads from a thought-provoking and poetic essay by Silas House titled "Sufferings":

I can’t imagine the president doing a flyover of a mountaintop removal site, or holding a press conference about it. And I’ve certainly never seen a mountain blown up on national television—not even once, much less every morning on the Today show.

Yet I would venture to say that mountaintop removal (MTR) is as devastating as the oil spill in the Gulf.

I don’t mean to compare suffering. What I’m saying is actually the opposite of comparison: they’re equally as bad, yet everyone is outraged about the spill while very few people even know about MTR.

Both the oil spill and MTR are environmental, cultural, economic, and health disasters. Both are devastating an entire way of life.

Every time someone says that more than 100 miles of shoreline has been affected by the oil spill, I want to shout that at least 1,500 miles of waterways have been lost forever in Appalachia.

Every time I think about the spill I also think of the pollution pumping into our creeks and rivers by way of MTR. I think of all the people in the fishing industry whose jobs are threatened by the spill, and then of all the hard-working Appalachians who can’t find a good-paying job besides the mines because we live in a mono-economy created and fostered by the coal industry. I think of how the spill could affect the Gulf so badly that the region’s fishing industry could be wiped out. Immediately I think of how mountaintop removal is hurting all the industries in Appalachia, particularly timber and tourism. New economy doesn’t want to come into a place that has been turned into a war zone with pollution, constant blasting, and intimidation.

NRDC's Rob Perks has more. You can also watch the entire speech over at CSPAN.

Meanwhile, be sure to check out the NRDC's page on mountaintop removal, as well as sites like ILoveMountains.org, which has (among other resources) as great endangered mountains list that gives you a rundown of the scale of what's ahead. You should also check out the work of places like Appalachian Voices.

Read the whole thing and see the video here.

And guess who thinks blowing up mountains, poisoning fresh water and destroying people's lives to get coal is just hunky-dory?

Yeah, it figures.

Boehner Has the Right Idea

"I think the people responsible in the oil spill -- BP and the federal government -- should take full responsibility for what's happening there." -- John Boehner

I agree. Wait! Hear me out.

The federal government is not a people. (Neither is BP, of course, so the same following argument applies.) If Boner is really looking for the "federal government" people responsible, he can start with these two names:

George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

From The Nation:

Bush was never able to persuade Congress to approve drilling in ANWR. But he did succeed in expanding drilling in other areas, including the deepwater gulf. Bush's principal instrument in these endeavors was the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the branch of the Interior Department responsible for providing leases for offshore drilling as well as collecting the fees and royalties the companies paid for operating in federal waters.

Intended largely to promote offshore drilling, the MMS was also responsible for ensuring that all such operations complied with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws. Full adherence to these laws could have slowed the expansion of drilling or blocked it altogether—but the MMS provided the leases without making the companies, including BP, obtain required environmental permits. MMS officials routinely ignored warnings from the agency's own scientists and from those at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that this sort of deepwater drilling posed a risk of massive oil spills with devastating consequences for protected marine species. Such preferential treatment for industry is hardly surprising, given the cozy—in some cases criminal—relationships that developed between senior MMS officials and their corporate counterparts.

BP purchased the mineral rights to drill where the Deepwater Horizon exploded in March 2008, at the Minerals Management Service's lease sale. That's 10 months before Barack Obama took office, a year before Ken Salazar became Interior Secretary. Yes, Obama failed to uncover the offshore drilling booby trap Dick Cheney's oil industry buddies had set, and Ken Salazar failed to clean house at the MMS.

From now on, the damage caused by offshore oil drilling is on Obama's head. But the people responsible for the current Gulf oil catastrophe are at BP and in the spider holes hiding Bush and Cheney.

I am perfectly fine with the actual "people responsible in the oil spill" taking responsibility for once in their miserable fucking lives and paying for every penny of the trillions it's going to cost to put the Gulf Coast right.

Just make sure you're targeting the actual perpetrators, Boner.

The New "Malefactors of Great Wealth"

Speaking of class war, it's the reason why BP is going to get away with 11 counts of first-degree, pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder.

Chris Hayes explains why BP is Beyond Punishment:

(T)he public wants to see BP held accountable, and with good reason: early indications are that the company is guilty of a host of mortal sins—from ignoring repeated internal warnings about its safety procedures to harassing workers who raised safety concerns. According to reports from the Guardian and NPR, after the fatal explosion BP sequestered the surviving workers at sea, refusing to let them contact their loved ones, and bullied them into signing forms that indemnified BP for the accident.

After some initial foot-dragging, the Obama administration finally seems to understand that justice demands an aggressive stance. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department is opening a criminal probe into the accident, which claimed the lives of eleven workers; then the White House came out in favor of a bill that would raise the $75 million liability cap on damages from the spill under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. And, of course, President Obama famously told Matt Lauer that he's trying to figure out "whose ass to kick."

That's all well and good. But despite the public outrage at BP and the thirst for justice from the battered residents of the Gulf Coast, there's a decent chance BP will, like Exxon before it, escape fairly unscathed. The reason is the legal and social shift in how we approach punishment for powerful corporations—a shift that contrasts sharply with the trends in punishment for citizens, particularly those without money or power.

SNIP

Aside from the practical consequences of altering the incentive structure, the Exxon case and other statutory caps on liability present a deeper threat to the American moral fabric. Set against the increasingly punitive posture of the state toward its citizens over the past several decades, the arbitrary limits on punishment available to a party like Exxon make a mockery of equal justice under the law. Our criminal justice system is the most punitive of any industrialized democracy. We have 2.3 million people incarcerated, half of them for nonviolent property and drug offenses.

At least two dozen states have three-strikes laws, and in some cases citizens can face life imprisonment for minor nonviolent offenses. In 2003 the Supreme Court upheld a fifty-year sentence for a California man caught stealing videotapes.

And things are even harsher for Americans unlucky enough to need succor from the state to survive, a k a poor people. Just one drug-related felony conviction can get you booted from welfare, or from public housing (though if you own a house, the IRS will still allow you your mortgage-interest deduction). Under federal law, a drug bust disqualifies a college student from all federal student aid. As a result, between 2001 and 2006 almost 200,000 students lost access to aid. The greatest Congressional champion of this unforgiving policy was Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who resigned after revelations of his affair with a staff member. In his farewell speech, he took solace in the possibility of forgiveness.

A punitive society is not the best kind of society: there's a real virtue in forgiveness, in second chances. But for years we've been applying Rand Paul's "accidents happen" principle to those at the top while heaping blame, scorn and draconian punishment on those at the bottom. Punitive damages are capped for corporations, while punitive policies proliferate for citizens. This tears the social contract apart, and the only way to repair it is to apply the same principles of accountability up and down the social hierarchy. We should start with BP.

Read the whole thing.

Back in the '80s, as Reagan's radicals were creating the corporate plutocracy that plagues us today, occasionally a liberal would complain about the elevation of the rich at the expense of the poor. Broderist pundits would immediately scold them for playing class war.

Molly Ivins used to respond: "Of course it's class war. What do they think the republicans are playing, Mah-Jongg?"

Give 'Em Hell, Nancy!

Remember what Harry Truman's response was to that cheer?

"I just tell the truth, and they think it's hell!"

Nancy Pelosi is not letting Alan Grayson have all the repug-bashing fun.

From TPM:

In an interview on MSNBC this morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi mentioned that the root of the financial crisis lies in the policies of the Bush administration.

So, reporter Chuck Todd asked whether voters would tire of hearing Pelosi and her party blame today's problems on the last president.

"When do you feel like that runs out with the public?" Todd asked.

"It runs out when the problems go away," Pelosi said.

President George W. Bush, she said, "brought us to the brink of financial crisis. He brought us to the bring of deep recession, ignoring issues related to climate change."

Todd asked whether she would make "what happened then" an issue in November.

"It continues to happen now," she said, referring to Republican filibusters of health care reform and financial reform.

"Republicans said no. We didn't get a single vote from the Republican in the House on the Wall Street reform legislation ... so it's a continuation of those Bush policies in the Congress, but they have their roots, and the problems were caused during, the Bush administration," she said.

Then came this:

At her weekly press event this morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reaffirmed her commitment to holding BP fully accountable for the spill, and backed a legislative initiative to lift a $75 million liability cap on oil companies...but she also snuck in a pot shot.

Asked by a reporter to respond to Boehner's contention that any changes to the liability law should be kicked down the road, Pelosi couldn't resist.

"Is that when he said that the taxpayer should be paying for it? Was that the same speech? When he said BP and the taxpayer should be footing the bill? Was that the same statement?" Pelosi asked rhetorically. "I disagree."

SNIP

"What we've learned in that period of time is that BP misrepresented what their technology could do. They misrepresented the...amount of oil that was being spewed forth into the gulf."

"When they start telling you to cut your hair and send golf balls and diapers for the cleanup, you know that's not the technology of the future...unless you're changing diapers, getting a haircut or playing golf."

And when you're getting beaten daily by a little old San Francisco grandma, you might want to hedge those big bets on November.

"Globs of death out there"

Brian Sonenstein at Firedoglake:

For weeks, we’ve been inundated with images of bright orange booms floating idly in the Gulf. We’ve tried to digest images of plane after plane dumping endless gallons of chemical dispersant into already-polluted waters. We’ve sat helplessly as we watch long slicks of oil make landfall on some of our most fragile coastline, smothering any wildlife in its path.

But while we’ve heard an awful lot about them, we have yet to actually see perhaps the greatest danger that lies before us– the massive plumes of oil and dispersant that now lurk hundreds of miles from the Deepwater Horizon explosion site, choking the life out of anything and everything in their path.

Now, courtesy of intrepid diver Al Walker, we have a real, fish-eye view of the catastrophe.

Check out this segment from AP, in which Walker remarks, "It’s just globs of death out there." (h/t bmaz)