I have sputtering anger enough for both parties.
Like the banking crisis, the Republicans set timebombs and traps all over the world and the bureacracy. Now they will go off, and Obama and Democrats will take the fall.
Is Obama to blame? Yes.
1) For not going on a manaical search for the timebombs
2) For not making sure the country understood who, what President and what party, was to blame for the forthcoming messes.
(PS:Cheney made sure the CIA Central Asian proliferation section was distracted and dispirited for a long long while)
Yahoo Headline This morning:
President Barack Obama has some advice for the class of 2010: Don't get caught up in the partisan bickering that often consumes Washington and use your talents to help your country confront its greatest challenges.
Fuck Obama
OK. This is what incipient fascism looks like. The rules should now change fundamentally, if you want to do anything about it. In practice, they won't.
I actually place the blame on Obama's feet prior to November 2008 as well. How could he stand idly by and do nothing while excusably-incompetent people in the Bush administration made predictable errors? What a piece of shit.
Thanks, I was in a good mood for a bit there this morning. I was feeling optimistic about my ability to get my work done on time and maybe spend time with the family. Now I am restored to my natural mindset, where I only want to curl up and die. So right order has been restored to the world.
(You can tell wanting to curl up and die is my natural state, because it only takes a little sputtering anger from one or two imaginary friends to restore me to it.)
It's too nice outside this morning to hate everyone, but I'm working on it. Just at this moment I'm hating this dude a lot. I mean, fuck me! You have an agent for smearing your shit on the walls?
Bob, if that dude has an agent, you need one, too, my friend.
Well, see, if you were all productive and happy, you probably wouldn't have commented as much as you will now. Curling up and dying is conducive to commenting, and did I mention I'm proctoring final exams all day?
3: If O had positioned himself farther to the left prior to November 2008, he would be in a better position to say "I told you so" now, which would have made it easier for him to kill the narrative that this is his Katrina. He might even have been able to call this Cheney's Katrina, which would be fun.
He can still salvage the situation by massively backpeddling on offshore drilling, and goad the Drill Baby Drill crowd to chant louder. He also needs to be really visible on the gulf coast right now.
Also, if it's any comfort, posting this made me feel better.
I thought the Underpants Bomber was supposed to be "Obama's Katrina"?
Don't put Obama's Katrinas in a box. He can have as many as he wants.
OT: Does anyone know why, according to this article, two people who are neither US citizens nor US residents can sue another person who is also not a US citizen or US resident, for a crime that allegedly took place not in the US? The ex-wives of former Rwandan and Burundian leaders are suing for wrongful death in Oklahoma? "Because of Mr Kagame's ties to the university"?
I don't get it.
I've been in the car a fair amount this week, and NPR keeps talking to the president of Plaquemines Parish. (Fer instance.) I find him infectiously plucky and optimistic, and I'm all like, yeah, dude! We'll get through this together! And then they finish up the interview and move on to whatever and I sink back to thinking, holy cow, you guys , the clams, the shrimp, the birds, the whole hot mess? So fucked.
Hadn't seen about the potential Cheney link, though. Thanks for the heads up, heebers.
The quoted claim that an acoustic switch "would" have prevented the spill is dubious. It assumes the reason the blowout preventer failed to work is because it never received a signal to activate. This is possible but it seems more likely that it did receive a signal to activate but failed to work for some unknown reason.
Clams? I meant oysters, I think. In fact, I don't off the top of my head know the difference between a clam and an oyster.
11
You can sue anybody for anything. Winning is another matter of course. As to why laws exist facilitating such suits, US politicans don't care too much about the rights of foreigners not to be sued in US courts.
As to why laws exist facilitating such suits, US politicans don't care too much about the rights of foreigners not to be sued in US courts.
Difficult to enforce a judgment, though, if neither party is resident in the country. As per the link.
Nice day and I am remembering "Mission Accomplished Day" by doing a lot of Bush memorial brush clearing. Still cleaning up a lot of branches and stuff damaged in the heavy snowfalls. It does bring to mind how although a lot of early progress in the Natural Sciences was triggered by throwing over the regime of biblical-inspired "catastrophism", rare, extreme events do exert a disproportionate influence on human and natural history. One ecosystem environmental catastrophe can ruin your whole day.
Still cleaning up a lot of branches and stuff damaged in the heavy snowfalls
Route 64 from C-ville to Richmond is currently littered with brown, dead tree parts all along the roadside, because VDOT came through and cleared everything but just tossed it on the side of the road. It's really kind of eerie.
11: Under the Alien Tort Claims Act, an alien/nonresident/noncitizen can sue in federal court for violation of a U.S. treaty or international law, including international human rights norms.
Also, Kagame's ties to the university are likely relevant because they form the basis for assertion of personal jurisdiction by a court in the state of Oklahoma, rather than being the basis for filing suit within the U.S.
Is one of the front page poster's replacing ToS's comments with more accurate statements, rather than simply deleting them? So far I've seen "I lack depth" and "I crave attention from my intellectual superiors."
19: That stretch of highway always surprises me a bit as to how heavily-wooded it is.
23: no, the ToS is just being unusually forthright.
12:I sink back to thinking, holy cow, you guys , the clams, the shrimp, the birds, the whole hot mess? So fucked.
Seymour Friendly has been covering the oil spill flood deluge over at FDL. This post as of yesterday afternoon.
Just a blog comment by "EdwardTeller*"
Just off the phone on a series of calls to close friends who lived through the EVOS, in close contact - mostly Cordova fishers and environmentalists. They're all starting to go into PTSD.They are the most valuable resource out there, though, for coming up with improvisatory solutions to saving small areas as the oil hits the shorelines. Nobody is calling them: oil companies, contractors trying to mobilize, the USCG, the administration, etc. The most experienced group of people on the planet with dealing with this crap are not being contacted.
*Having just watched a tv show on the bikini atoll I think Edward Teller might be history's greatest monster.
Just read on Yahoo some Alabama official is planning on a worst-case scenario of 6 million gallons of oil per day for months. Exxon Valdex was 11 million total.
I probably won't, but am thinking about heading over. 1) Last I heard, volunteers need to be Hazmat certified, b) my health, especiallly respratory, is not oprimal, 3) there are a lot of potential volunteers in people whose livelihoods are now gone, 4) those people should be paid by BP and Halliburton.
This can be fixed, this can be cleaned up. Might take a million people and a trillion dollars but it can be done. The oil industry needs to set that trillion in a trust. Now.
Oh. recently, SCOTUS overturned punitive damages in the Exxon Valdex case. Zero punitive.
26.last: John "Dick" Roberts playing at being Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.
"So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?" Roberts asked in court.
The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. "Well," he said, "it can hire fit and competent people."
The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused....
Roberts seemed the most agitated as he argued that Exxon wasn't responsible for the captain's unauthorized drunkenness. "I don't see what more a corporation can do," he said. "What more can the corporation do other than say 'Here is our policies' and try to implement them?"
So, why are we going straight to hell, is my question?
They could go for proper subject/verb agreement.
Weird. The first google result for "sc justice roberts" is Samuel Alito's wikipedia entry. THEY'RE CLONEZ!!1!
26
Oh. recently, SCOTUS overturned punitive damages in the Exxon Valdex case. Zero punitive.
Actually one billion (give or take) punitive damages if I recall correctly.
Edward Teller might be history's greatest monster.
What no love for Herman Kahn?
28:"It's not your planet." ...Klaatu
Ain & Screwfly
...my heroes
26: Capped at $507M of which they agreed to pay $383M and were also assessed $480M in interest--but not that might still being contested..
35:Aw hell, I read so much so many places I can't remember where a fact is found. Keeping a separate set of notes and reminders would just add another layer to remember. Probably a comment.
The $383m looks very familiar, and, I am pretty sure just this week I read that that is compensatory damages, not punitive.
Numbers and descriptions must always distinguish between the two.
Hell, Wiki has enough
Exxon appealed again. On May 23, 2007, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied ExxonMobil's request for a third hearing and let stand its ruling that Exxon owes $2.5 billion in punitive damages. Exxon then appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.[16] On February 27, 2008, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for 90 minutes. Justice Samuel Alito, who at the time, owned between $100,000 and $250,000 in Exxon stock, recused himself from the case.[17] In a decision issued June 25, 2008, Justice David Souter issued the judgment of the court, vacating the $2.5 billion award and remanding the case back to a lower court, finding that the damages were excessive with respect to maritime common law. Exxon's actions were deemed "worse than negligent but less than malicious."[18] The judgment limits punitive damages to the compensatory damages, which for this case were calculated as $507.5 million.[19] Some lawmakers, such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, have decried the ruling as "another in a line of cases where this Supreme Court has misconstrued congressional intent to benefit large corporations."[20]
I read a comment this morning that describes why compensatory damages are never really adequate. The cost of a fisherman being unable to provide a college education for his children. 3 x 50k x 40 years. EV victims got $500k apiece.
37: In this instance there were punitive damages in addition to the compensatory one--they were just capped to not be more than the compensatory ones (I found the Wiki article not entirely clear).
21: The alien tort claims act is really old, like from the 18th century, and probably wasn't called that originally. It's modern incarnation as a way to get people on human rights violations is relatively new.
Wikipedia confirms that it was part of the Judiciary Act of 1789. Further from 1789 to 1980, there were only two cases where the courts based jurisdiction on the ATC.
Guess what else? There was a whistleblower in this instance too.
39: Right. ATCA provides jurisdiction in very narrow circumstances where the claims rest on established international norms defined with the specificity of 18th century paradigms, such as piracy.
Also, 15 is silly. US courts may or may not care about protecting foreigners from suit, but they care quite a bit about jurisdiction and not wasting their time on stuff that's not really their concern. (Human rights norms come within "universal jurisdiction" because human rights are the concern of all nations.)
43
Also, 15 is silly. US courts may or may not care about protecting foreigners from suit, but they care quite a bit about jurisdiction and not wasting their time on stuff that's not really their concern. (Human rights norms come within "universal jurisdiction" because human rights are the concern of all nations.)
I didn't intend to say anything about the preferences of US judges, just about the US politicians in the legislature who have been passing laws extending the reach of US courts.
Another reason politicians pass stupid laws is they expect the courts to throw them out (or mitigate the worst effects) so they can safely grandstand or in some cases pretend to be doing something.
I'm back.
Jane Hamsher ...is despairing and bitter. Yes, this is about the oil spill and Sierra Club, but see I made it easy for you to skip.
The Bower's post a while back was important, saying essentially that Obama had won the hearts and minds of too many liberals and progressives for any resistance to whatever Obama wanted to be at all possible. Yggles & Ezra are the kind of guys to internalize that without discussion and run with it, The Iraq war was going to happen, and supporting it then being embarrassed after it all went to hell was the only productive path. Thus with Obama. If Obama wants to drillbabydrill, you have to go with the drill, for not only will the administration attack you, but the entire party. This was Bower's point. Resistance is beyond futile.
That is what is so depressing about the progressive era. All those struggles, all that organization, all those lives lost, all the events like Triangle Shirtwaist...all were co-opted and defused by corporatism. The Federal Reserve started as nothing but banker bailout at taxpayer expense. Nothing good really happened til FDR.
I hate hate hate great man theories or or catastrophe politics or heightening the contradictions, but history is a fucking nightmare.
This is a pretty great sentence:
"The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement," said Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer in the oil industry.
PS:The consensus at FDL is that Obama has called for an investigation that reports back in two weeks. A little soon for damage assessment?
Obama will find a cause or condition or mistake, mandate a new regulation, and drillbabydrill from Miami to Bangor.
Unless, as some are worrying, this spill moves into the Gulfstream and destroys the Florida Keys Coral reefs and the entire East Coast fisheries and tourist industry.
But heck it will be completely over then, so why not drillbabydrill? Couldn't get worse.
||
People suck. When there is a burst which requires tapping into emergency water supplies and rendering the tap water undrinkable, it is assholeish to fill your cart up with gallon jugs of water instead of taking just a few.
I wish that the supermarkets had rationed, but the run occurred before they knew about the problem.
|>
BG, our infrastructure was feeling neglected, with all the attention being paid to the Gulf.
50 sounds unpleasant. I wonder what the impact is on people with compromised immune systems, who have to be even more careful. A friend of my family's has MS and is on major immuno-suppressant drugs. I don't think they keep a particularly large supply of bottled water in the house.
Apparently the "2 million gallons a day indefinitely" comes from a "Not for publication" NOAA memo.
There is a comment on that link that says the oil gusher could be stopped instantly with a blast/explosion (Wages of Fear) but that would destroy the largest part of the British Petroleum investment. So we will just lose the Everglades instead.
Obama got a major campaign contribution from BP in 2008, and appointed the top BP scientist to his administration.
Is Obama to blame? Yes.
Bob, I can't help thinking that your tendency to assign enormous portions of blame to Obama personally is somewhat at odds with your self-proclaimed hatred of great man theories of history.
You object to the ways in which some of his more ardent supporters have treated Obama with a kind of reverence, held him up as some sort of saviour, as a lightbringer who was above and beyond regular politics, and so on. And fair enough, and I certainly share your objections on that score. But then you sometimes seem to indulge in the exact inverse of the great man theory, which looks to me like the flip side of the same coin: where some have engaged in an unwarranted hagiography, you engage in an undue demonization of the man instead.
Look, just because he's not a Great Man (which he's not, he's just another politician) doesn't mean he's one of history's Great Monsters either. He's just another centrist Dem, Bob, far to the right of what some people believed they were voting for, yes, but isn't that, sadly, the story of the Democrats more broadly?
54:My father never played ball with me.
Look, your questions just send me spinning.
have treated Obama with a kind of reverence
or deference, or submission, or acquiescence, or acceptance...or demonization or rebellion
What are there "kings", authority figures, leaders, anyway?
The inverse of a "great man theory" would be that Obama doesn't matter, is irrelevant. There are people like that on the Internet.
Martin Bento comment 127 at CT:"The attempt to abstract out consciousness as a causal factor also fails as an account of historical causation"
John Halasz responds:"Your @127 is no better. Why would you assume that Marx abstracted consciousness completely out of the "equation" in the name of some sort of determinist materialist causality, when the critique of ideology and the counter-appeal to "class-consciousness" was a key component of the systematic architectonic of his thinking?"
Max Weber's Charismatic Authority I doubt that whatever surplus power Obama has, that it is patriarchal or legal-rational.
What was the question again? I have intellectualized it away, I think. Good night. Thanks for listening.
Wait.
I lack the authority or the confidence to say that "Obama is neither the lightbringer nor the greatest monster."
He might or might not be.
There is a comment on that link that says the oil gusher could be stopped instantly with a blast/explosion (Wages of Fear) but that would destroy the largest part of the British Petroleum investment.
I think this is wildly optimistic, and the fact that it appears to be based on the movies* ought to tell you something.
I am not a petroleum engineer, but I would think the simplest explanation for why the valves didn't shut when the rig capsized and tore off the riser is that it simply tore the whole valve structure off. You can't operate a valve that isn't there.
*although, at least it's a good one..
57
You can't operate a valve that isn't there.
News reports say there have been unsuccessful attempts to activate the blowout preventer using remote controlled submarines. So it would seem it is still there, although perhaps damaged in some way.
One report also said the men on the rig had tried to activate the preventer when the trouble started but it apparently failed to work. There was also a failsafe switch that is suppose to operate automatically in case of disaster.
Very Very Reputable News Source here, says North Koreans caused the explosion with a sub launched from Cuba, and that Obama is going to use a nuclear weapon to close the well.
Can you refute it? Do you dare try? What, you believe Halliburton and the Gov't?
The truth will be free.
Three points from Open Left
1) Toxic fumes with longterm health damage
2) Dispersants kill ocean life
3) Oil increases ocean albedo at the start of hurricane season
heebie will be along to say I am enjoying this
I want a revolution, and I didn't spill the frakking oil. I don't heighten any contrads, I just want to heighten consciousness.
Obama is going to use a nuclear weapon to close the well.
Dude, I want to heighten my consciousness, too. Pass me some of what you're smoking.
61: Pass me some of what you're smoking.
bob meant 'reputable' in the generic Republican sense of 'reputable'.
m, ask me! about the illuminati in the vatican
61:Am I to understand by this that you consider the North Korean submarine plausible?
I went over to the oildrum for the first time in months. They are an energy blog, not an environmental blog, but they did have good articles on technology of deep drilling and this failure.
But their major take is that we are five years past peak oil, and maintaining consumption will require more expensive and ever more dangerous extraction efforts.
Seymour Friendly at FDL. He seems sane and moderate.
Dead fish and sea turtles are starting to wash up on shore.
The "dome" if it works, will take weeks+. The new drilling to collapse the original shaft will take months.
Nobody knows, or is saying, how much oil is coming out.
Am I to understand by this that you consider the North Korean submarine plausible?
Is this the submarine that will launch the nuke Obama will close the well with? A very, very reputable source says that this is just a plan by Obama to deliver the US into the maw of bankers who are determined to consolidate power and convert the world into a sprawling high-tech prison planet.
Regarding the second link: There's a whole lot of people who think that HCR is as bad, if not worse, than the Iraq invasion. Throw in high unemployment, and you've got those numbers.
Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone's backyard, and when we don't reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria -- places without America's strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them... Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.)
(Via.) Could someone please tell me the bold part isn't true? I don't really care whether it is or it isn't; I just need someone I consider credible to please tell me it isn't, so I don't end up drinking myself to death.
I suspect that they are claiming that the total volume of spills each year is equivalent not that they have had individual spills that big. And consistent with things I've read. See for instance this National Geographic article from a few years back:, The government documented 6,817 spills between 1976 and 2001--practically one a day for 25 years--but analysts suspect that the real number may be ten times higher. The photo gallery is worth checking out as well.
North Koreans caused the explosion with a sub launched from Cuba
On the one hand, if such theories gain sufficient currency that they must be rebutted by our elected officials, it is a bad sign for the state of our body politic. On the other hand, I would enjoy seeing a government official use the phrase "hide the submarine" at a press conference.
The photo gallery is worth checking out as well.
Goddamit, JP, that sure as hell didn't help.
I am reading conflicting reports on the timeline for the "dome" that will cover the valve but I don't believe they could even tow the sucker to the site in the 6-8 days some are saying.
Basically they will cover the leak with a cap, and then pump the oil off the top into ships. Only been used in shallower water, they don't know if the fittings will work at depth. Hey, 10k-200k (who the hell knows) barrels a day pumped 5000 feet up into a supertanker...they will need to replace every week at least...no problem.
Cokie Roberts was on Morning Edition today explaining all the parallels between this and Katrina. What a stupid, unhelpful narrative.
72: Christ, I almost crashed my car when I heard that Cokie thing. She may be the supreme example of Bave's NPR critique.
73: Don't crash your car. Even if nobody gets hurt, you'll just spill more oil.
Cokie and Broder clearly have some kind of bucket list competition as to the number of inanities they can inflict on the public before they croak. Poster couple for decades of dysfunctional media. (Make one with two, Chopper.)
The "Obama's Katrina" meme is being pushed heavily by the right. They are trying to simultaneously minimize Bush's incompetence and distance themselves from him. Bush is not a "real conservative" so his failures are not failures of conservative government, and they are no worse than Obama's anyway, so neener neener neener.
I believe that this is either the eighth or ninth "Obama's Katrina" so far.
Well, I guess its understandable. After all "some people are asking" if this is Obama's Katrina. Never mind who exactly "some people" are. "Some people" have very important concerns that must be addressed!
And now ex-FEMA head and Arabian Horse Association official Michael Brown has emerged from his crypt to say that Obama "wanted" this.
So those "some people" think that what Obama ought to be doing is nationalizing the hell out of the oil industry and putting the EPA in charge, right?
#78. Yeah, Limbaugh has been pushing the theory that environmentalists deliberately caused the spill. This is not the first time that I've wished I could have an hour or two alone with His Immensity.
I knew they shouldn't have let Ernst Blofeld become president of the Sierra Club.
Bob, you have been awesome throughout this thread. It's good to see someone's kept their soul around here.
I don't have much hope for American liberalism, or progressivism or whatever you want to call it; the moment a movement gets hitched entirely to a political party it's pretty much worthless. At this point we should be seeing a massive pushback from environmentalists against Obama's offshore drilling campaign - hell, we should've seen that since the day he started it a month ago - to say nothing of everything else Obama's done, from Copenhagen to the IWC, to fuck the environmental movement. But there's barely any pushback here, let alone on the bigger issues like climate change, because most liberals have been conditioned to believe that supporting the politics, messaging and electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party is more important than advancing the causes they nominally believe in.
We've already seen this happen with war and civil liberties, we've seen it happen with the Wall Street bailout, we've seen it with health care. The distressing thing about seeing it happen on the environment is that we've only got so much time to dick around on climate change before we run out of time to do anything meaningful at all.
