It’s been a long time since I’ve actually written something for this screed, nearly three weeks. Besides the daily J.O.B., life intercedes and, sadly to admit, I’ve been lazy and given to my … err … less productive predilections.
So much has happened. British Petroleum finally stopped the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico … although we haven’t been assured the method used is safe. They put a “cap” on the well with lines going to the surface where ships collect the oil. The problem: the pressure at about a mile below the surface, not only from the weight of the water, but also from the oil gushing from the crust of the Earth.
Hard to imagine how much pressure it takes for that oil to overcome the pressure from the weight of the water to come gushing out of that well at such force it can put 100,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf every day. Fortunately, there are instruments that measure that sort of thing: 6,900 pounds per square inch at last measurement. That’s still pretty hard to comprehend.
Now, going in the other direction, the pressure of the water pressing down on the Earth’s surface at that depth, 2,236 pounds per square inch; that’s almost 10,000 PSI pummeling that “cap.” No wonder people are worried about whether it will hold until the “static kill” method is working. That process is supposed to start August 2, just six days away.
Not to be confused with the relief drilling, which is supposed to be similar to the static kill and top kill methods. All three require pumping mud, specialized cement, into the well and blocking the flow of oil. The relief drilling is supposed to be the ultimate plan for stopping the oil.
That’s the plan you may have seen diagrammed on TV programs, where you see two or three rigs drilling towards the Deepwater Horizon well. What’s startling about this is the amount of guesswork that is involved. Not just for the relief drilling, but for the static kill. What’s really saddening: BP and its fellow oil companies haven’t done this homework before they had a major catastrophe like the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
This would be funny, if so many lives hadn’t been lost, but it’s still worth noting. In 2005 BP’s oil refinery in Texas blew up: the now infamous Texas City explosion that killed 15 and injured over 170. The company was charged with a record amount of fines due to the explosion and all the environmental and safety violations, apparently a record itself.
Since 2005, after British Petroleum claimed it had cleaned up its act, we find out that of 761 OSHA violations recorded since that explosion at Texas City, BP is cited for 760 of them.
Exxon has the other one. They should just give it to BP so they can claim a monopoly on violations.
So, it is not a surprise BP really doesn’t have a plan for stopping a catastrophe like the Deepwater Horizon. It’s just sad. Maybe now they will, but don’t hold your breath.
This just in: several months ago, BP CEO Tony Hayward said the mud being pumped into the oil well was water-based and therefore not toxic. Now we find out it contained lye and ethyl cyclo-something that is not only hard to spell, but must be a bitch to pronounce on TV. And it’s quite toxic.
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The other “big” story, now almost forgotten, happened last week when a extreme right wing blog aired a snippet of video of former Obama Administration Agriculture Department executive Shirley Sherrod supposedly regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she denied the full force of her help to white farmers about to lose their farm back in the 1980’s.
“RACISM,” everyone cried! None louder than
FoxNews. Hell, they still have their original story posted on their website:
HERE. The White House asked for, and got, Ms. Sherrod’s resignation. Apologies were given. Everyone in the Obama Administration was forlorn.
And then we find out the rest of the story. If you watch the entire clip of Ms. Sherrod’s speech, she didn’t do what the clip implies, but instead gave the family all the weight of her job and employer to make sure the people kept their farm. That couple, now very old, were on
CNN over the weekend defending Ms. Sherrod and thanked her for the help she gave then in 1986. They didn’t understand why anyone would think she discriminated against them.
Well, the perpetrator of the fraud, Andrew Breitbart, the guy behind the blog BigGovernment.com, now claims he wasn’t trying to show Ms. Sherrod was racist, but that the NAACP was, when it cheered after Ms. Sherrod said she tried to decide just how much help she would give to the White farmers. Everyone knows that’s a lie and
CNN anchor (I should have written down his name and that of the couple) pressed Breitbart on it in the same story in which he spoke with the White couple.
Now the White House and all the media outlets* are issuing apologies to Ms. Sherrod for over-reacting to a story from a very untrustworthy source like Andrew Breitbart. My question is: why didn’t all these apologizing parties do their homework before piling on the smear of Shirley Sherrod? Especially the White House? Why were they so quick to throw her under the bus?
* Except
Fox, although Bill O’Reilly apologized to Ms. Sherrod and Shepherd Smith admonished his colleagues for not doing their homework on the story.
Fear. And that is going to sink the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration if they continue to cower in front of these right wing extremists and their supporters in the Republican Party.
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The latest big story: the new “Pentagon Papers,” published on
WikiLeaks.com. It shows the war in Afghanistan going very badly, far worse than either the Bush and Obama Administrations were and are willing to admit, at least publicly.
We’ve all read the stories of our tax dollars meant for humanitarian purposes going into the pockets of warlords and others; these leaks document that theft. We’ve all read stories of innocent civilians being killed in the crossfire of war, but these leaked documents show the figures we’ve been given publicly for the past six years have been woefully under-reported.
But the majority of the documents published on WikiLeaks.com are from soldiers in the fight and the stories they tell are harrowing.
The Obama Administration knew this was coming.
The New York Times was given access to the documents before WikiLeaks.com published them and had a meeting in the White House to discuss the story last week. Names of individuals have been redacted for their protection, but what happened, when, how and why, that is all there.
So today White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs put their spin on it: the documents show why the president needed to make a change of strategy in Afghanistan. Well, how about a change in relations with Pakistan? The documents also show that the Pakistan security agency has been
helping the Taliban fight the U.S. and coalition forces. Pakistan is supposed to be an ally in our efforts.
The Bush Administration fucked it up in Afghanistan by starting its war in Iraq. As Mr. Gibbs correctly pointed out, the war in Afghanistan had been under-funded and over-ignored until the Obama Administration came into office. Is the new strategy, punctuated by the departure of General Stanley McChrystal, too little too late? A lot of experts outside of government seem to think so, but we have this culture of never giving up that plague our foreign policy.
It doomed us in Vietnam and is doing so in Iraq. Three car bombs exploded in Iraq on Monday along, killing dozens of people. Remember nearly eight years ago when then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said we would be in and out of Iraq in five months?
“I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.” November 15, 2002.
Oops. Let’s support our troops while they serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, but lets bring them home as soon as possible.
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