Monday Mashup Part One (6/21/10)
(Once again, no posting tomorrow and probably Wednesday also – TBD for the rest of the week.)
1) Oh noes! Clownhall.com is telling us that gas prices are going up under our Kenyan Muslim pre-zee-dint who won't show us his Hawaiian birth certificate (here)…
Motorists heading out for the long July 4th weekend will find that filling up the family car is getting more costly.
Retail prices for gasoline have climbed over the past week and are headed back toward a national average of $2.80 to $2.90 per gallon with higher prices on the West Coast, said Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service.
This tells us that, in April 2008, the average price for a gallon of gas was $3.35 under Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History (it was about $1.66 a gallon when he took over). And every time Number 43 made noises about attacking Iran or threatening Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that country's "president," the price went up (not saying the puppet for the Mullahs didn't deserve it then as now, though).
The price of gas always goes up in the spring and summer (especially now with the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico) and, if we're lucky, it comes down in the fall and close to winter. It has more to do with the driving habits of the people in this country more than anything else, though as noted above, other "actors" can affect the price also to some degree.
2) Not to be outdone, though, someone named Kevin McCullough at Fix Noise tells us here that Obama should resign over the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe; according to McCullough, Obama was supposedly approached by BP for help on February 13 and the company was rebuffed (this starts off a really umbrage-filled rant by McCullough aimed at Obama – "how can you sleep at night," did you inform the families of the victims of the rig's destruction of your negligence when you posed with them for a photo-op, blah blah blah).Well, when you read the Bloomberg story linked to McCullough's rant, what you find is this…
On Feb. 13, BP told the (Minerals Management Service) it was trying to seal cracks in the well about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast, drilling documents obtained by Bloomberg show. Investigators are still trying to determine whether the fissures played a role in the disaster.
The company attempted a "cement squeeze," which involves pumping cement to seal the fissures, according to a well activity report. Over the following week the company made repeated attempts to plug cracks that were draining expensive drilling fluid, known as "mud," into the surrounding rocks.
BP used three different substances to plug the holes before succeeding, the documents show.
"Most of the time you do a squeeze and then let it dry and you're done," said John Wang, an assistant professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania. "It dries within a few hours."
Repeated squeeze attempts are unusual and may indicate rig workers are using the wrong kind of cement, Wang said.
So how is it Obama's fault if BP was using the wrong material to try and seal the fissures?
BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward and other top executives were ignorant of the difficulties the company's engineers were grappling with in the well before the explosion, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said today during a hearing in Washington.
"We could find no evidence that you paid any attention to the tremendous risk BP was taking," Waxman said as Hayward waited to testify. "There is not a single e-mail or document that you paid the slightest attention to the dangers at this well."
BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles and exploration chief Andy Inglis "were apparently oblivious to what was happening," said Waxman, a California Democrat. "BP's corporate complacency is astonishing."
In early March, BP told the minerals agency the company was having trouble maintaining control of surging natural gas, according to e-mails released May 30 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the spill.
And have to admit that I dismissed at first the story about film director James Cameron offering to help with fixing the mess, until I did more reading and learned about Cameron's extensive experience filming at the depths similar to that of the leaking pipe; you think his expertise would have come in handy here? And I had a similar reaction to the stuff involving Kevin Costner and his supposed oil/water separation device.
The Obama Administration is guilty of trusting BP to know what they were doing in this mess, though, as I've said before, if they'd taken over earlier, I'd bet McCullough and his pals would have been one of the first to complain that that Number 44 is trying to "nationalize" the oil company the same way he allegedly did to the car companies and the crooks on Wall Street (and the only mention of Obama in the Bloomberg story has to do with the $20 billion fund BP set up for the victims of the oil flood).
3) Finally, to complete this little "threesome" of stories pertaining to "Obama and the oil," Roger Wicker of Mississippi gave the response to Obama's Weekly Address on Saturday (here), stating as follows…
"(Obama) was slow in listening to state and local leaders, slow in getting skimmers to the Gulf, slow in understanding the seriousness of this crisis, and slow in taking ownership and responsibility for the recovery. Many of his actions have actually taken us in the wrong direction."
Since Wicker doesn't get into specifics about how Obama was supposedly "slow in listening to state and local leaders," I'm not going to do his work for him by responding. However, on the subject of getting skimmers to the Gulf, this story from June 4th tells us the following…
MISSISSIPPI — Dozens more private boats were deployed Friday to search for and skim oil, and many more were on standby as their crews awaited hazardous-materials training.
The new boats bring to 158 the number primarily working the Mississippi coast, according to U.S. Coast Guard officials. There are another 220 in Alabama and 112 in Florida.
And this story from last Thursday says "A decision is expected shortly on whether as many as 55 additional skimmers can be sent" to the Gulf (the Coast Guard reports that they're reluctant to send more skimmers since it might risk leaving other waterways vulnerable to oil spills also). Also, this tells us that oil seeped past skimmers in the Pensacola inland waterway; the county deployed booms to protect 17 separate individual inlets from bayous and coves where the seagrass is especially sensitive. But (resident Dorothy) King noted mournfully that "they said a month ago our seas were too rough for the boom."
Oh, and for Wicker's information, this New York Times story tells us that Mississippi governor Haley Barbour said that Obama "did more things right than wrong" on the spill.
You could go back and forth on whether or not the Obama Administration should temporarily waive the Jones Act, which Repug Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison argues here (apparently, Dubya did that when Katrina hit – as noted here, the Act protects our martime interests, but critics argue that the Act makes the U.S. less competitive in the global shipping industry, but the counter argument is that "U.S.-citizen mariner pool needed for the Department of Defense in times of national emergency or war would simply disappear"). Perhaps waiving it for now would make it easier to put in place skimmers of other countries who have offered to help.
But I shudder to think what would have happened by now if it had been up to Sarah Palin and John McCain to try and fix this mess (maybe they would have taken this idea seriously, for example).
Update 7/9/10: Gee, I wonder if Wicker will ever acknowledge that the Obama administration accepted 68 offers of help from other countries (here)? Do you even need to ask (and I never gave much of a thought to Mark Haines, but he did some good work here).
Leave a Comment »	| Barack Obama, Congress, Dubya Legacy Lies, Environment, Pundit Ponderings (Bad)	| Tagged: Barack Obama, BP, Deepwater Horizon, Doug Suttles, gas, Gulf, Haley Barbour, Henry Waxman, Jones Act, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Kevin McCullough, Minerals Management Service, Mississippi, price, Roger Wicker, spill, Tony Hayward	| Permalink