June 18, 2010
Dr.Zero
The Helpless Titan
http://www.doczero.org/2010/06/the-helpless-titan/

The current federal government of the United States is the largest, best-funded organization in human history. Our public debt has grown to over $13 trillion. We pay hundreds of billions per year just to service this debt. The federal government has over two million civilian employees. The Postal Service, all by itself, employs more people than any American company except Wal-Mart. Our government has shed almost every vestige of Constitutional restraint over the last few decades, exercising powers that would have shocked the Founding Fathers.

And yet, this federal titan is currently face-down in the oil-soaked waters of the Gulf of Mexico, its flabby arms twitching feebly. It has become too bloated to stand up. It can only lie there and scream threats at private citizens and corporations, until vast sums of money are shoveled into its maw, to sustain it for a few more years.

It’s not necessary to ignore the misdeeds of British Petroleum to criticize the appalling performance of our massive super-State. Big Government and Big Business have become so entwined that any disaster on the scale of the Gulf oil spill, or the subprime mortgage crisis before it, will have both public and private agencies to blame. Suggesting that government cannot be criticized until every one of its private-sector “partners” has been bankrupted or nationalized is a recipe for tyranny. We should study the example of BP and understand that only one half of the government-business alliance can call press conferences at will, addressing a media prepared to extend them unlimited credit for their good intentions.

One of the reasons Big Government is so helpless in the face of an actual crisis is that it never learns anything, because it evades blame and consequence for its failures. The politicians who brought you the subprime crisis are richer and more powerful than ever before. The Gulf oil crisis may well end the same way, if the Democrats use a lame-duck session of Congress, plus resources from their new minions at BP, to shove cap-and-trade legislation down America’s throat. Like ObamaCare, such a bill can inflict serious wounds to American liberty during the two years it will take to replace a President determined to veto repeal attempts.

Indulging the urge of politicians to increase their power and wealth produces a government that spends all its time feeding, instead of doing the things it’s supposed to be doing. It is blinded by hunger, and uninterested in duties that yield no direct political reward. The lavishly funded agency in charge of regulating offshore drilling scarcely bothered to inspect the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. It’s painfully obvious that the Administration didn’t notice the Gulf crisis until it became a political problem. Our vast government apparatus was completely unaware of a large supply of containment boom until Jake Tapper, an ABC reporter, told them about it.

Even now, as oil begins fouling the coasts of our Gulf states, the federal government is entirely focused on shielding itself from blame, and taking advantage of the crisis to absorb more money. Out on the high-octane open waters, they’re shutting down oil-skimming barges over trivial bureaucratic issues. Bobby Jindal, the desperate governor of Louisiana, has taken to ignoring the comatose federal giant slumped across his coast, and getting things done on his own. Unable to think rationally or compare costs to benefits, the government panicked and shut down offshore drilling… just as previous generations threw hysterical fits, and killed nuclear power and DDT. We’re spending an awful lot of our children’s money on this government, and getting very little value in return.

No Presidential speech could obscure the fact that incalculable, perhaps irreversible damage has already been done, while union politics prompted the President to ignore valuable offers of assistance from foreign ships. Innovative strategies for dealing with the oil gather cobwebs while the Administration focuses on the really important task of securing a $20 billion down payment on a massive new slush fund. Of course Obama and the Democrats will steal much of this money, the same way they robbed the taxpayers for political cash and called it a “stimulus.” The reptilian Bart Stupak has already floated the idea of raiding the BP fund for health care money. I wonder if some of it would end up paying for abortions.

Over at Liberty Pundits, Melissa Clouthier watches in horror as Obama and BP dance a stiff, lightheaded tango of incompetence, and wonders:

Long term, do Americans want the President to have the right to confiscate or bully funds from a company that is clearly wrong-doing but the law has not meted out justice, yet? This seems like a dangerous prec

BP disaster started in February?

If ‘daddy plugs the hole” he will be double-crossing his benefactors.

Scroll down to the 9-min. video # 3 all the way to the end for the hideous details:
http://www.therightscoop.com/glenn-beck-show-discussion-june-17-2010

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Then read Michael Barone’s column for Monday, June 21, 2010:
http://townhall.com/columnists/MichaelBarone/2010/06/21/obamas_thuggery_is_useless_in_fighting_spill

Failure of Rig’s Last Line of Defense Tied to Myriad Factors
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/us/21blowout.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

VIDEO at above link.

June 21, 2010, page A1 of the New York Times.

Michelle Malkin June 23, 2010: "My syndicated column follows up on federal judge Martin Feldman’s decision yesterday overturning the Obama drilling moratorium. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has now signaled that he will push for another drilling ban — with brand-spanking new, wholly manufactured evidence, no doubt. Salazar is scheduled to testify to a Senate subcommittee on Capitol Hill later today at 11:00am. He better get the grilling he deserves over his junk science zealotry. .."bttt

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"According to Feldman's 2008 financial disclosure form, posted online by Judicial Watch [pdf], the judge owned stock in Transocean, as well as five other companies that are either directly or indirectly involved in the offshore drilling business." ~ sam_paine

If the judge owned BP stock, it looks as if he wasn't an "insider" - he didn't get any memo to dump it.

BP Disaster Started in February

BP Chief Sold Stocks Shortly Before Oil Rig Explosion, Goldman Sachs Sold Shares

MORE HERE

The Obama Administration loans 10 billion to Petrobras (Brazilian Oil Company) to drill in 3 times the depth of water as BP or any other oil company has ever drilled. bttt

Thursday, June 17, 2010 (4 videos 9-10 minutes each)
If ‘daddy plugs the hole” he will be double-crossing his benefactors. (See 3rd video especially)
http://www.therightscoop.com/glenn-beck-show-discussion-june-17-2010

More:

Monday, June 21, 2010 (4 videos 9-10 minutes each)
http://www.therightscoop.com/glenn-beck-show-discussion-june-21-2010

More:

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 (4 videos 9-10 minutes each)
http://www.therightscoop.com/glenn-beck-show-discussion-june-22-2010#more-10171

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The Obama Administration Took a $10 Billion Dive into Ultra-Deep Ocean Drilling.
http://community.tasteofhome.com/forums/t/787062.aspx

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IBD:
Lend $10 Billion To Drill ... Brazil?
Posted 08/12/2009 06:43 PM ET
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=503235

Having said all this, the question remains: Why must we go so far and spend so much taxpayer money to drill oil when we could unleash our private sector to do it here for free ?
.... If lending money to Brazil for oil is a good idea, isn’t freeing our own companies to develop America’s vast reserves an even better one? ...”

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IBD:
Green Groups Had Cozy Ties With BP
Mon., June 21, 2010 4:40 PM ET
http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/1848-green-groups-had-cozy-ties-with-bp

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US government to loan Petrobras $10 billion [to Drill 4.3 Miles ...
May 31, 2010 ... Petrobras plans to invest close to $29 billion through 2013 to develop .... Did you know that Petrobras drills deepwater wells in US waters of the ... they own 80% of the world’s deep drilling rigs, so I would guess they ... www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2522642/posts

Google Results 1 - 10 of about 6,830 for how deep is that well petrobras plans to drill? http://tinyurl.com/26jkj3f

Brazil May Top Second Biggest Pre-Salt Find at Well (Update2 ...
www.businessweek.com/.../brazil-may-top-second-biggest-pre-salt-find-at-well-update2-.html
A second oil well Brazil is drilling ... below the sea floor in waters 2189 meters (7181 feet) deep, Chambriard said.
May 14 (Bloomberg) .... The new prospect, named Libra, may be larger than Franco based on seismic data obtained from the well, Magda Chambriard, a director of oil regulator ANP, told reporters today in Rio de Janeiro. Franco is Brazil’s largest discovery since the 8- billion barrel Tupi find in the offshore Santos Basin in 2007.

“This opens a new exploration opportunity in Santos,” Chambriard said. “With the data we have, it may be bigger than Franco.” .....

“....Deep Waters

Franco sits about 3.7 miles below the sea floor in waters 2,189 meters (7,181 feet) deep, Chambriard said. The ANP hired Petrobras to drill the $150 million well, to the northeast of the Iara discovery that holds 3 to 4 billion barrels, she said.

Franco’s oil flows through a porous layer of rock 272 meters thick that is ideal for oil production, she said. The Franco well didn’t find any natural gas, she said, making the reservoir more profitable and easier to develop than other fields that have a layer of gas above the oil.

The ANP and Petrobras started drilling Libra this month and it will take another five months to complete and test the well, she said. The two fields have opened “a new front” for exploration, she said.

Brazil has more than 50 billion barrels of oil reserves in the so-called pre-salt layer, which runs 800 kilometers along Brazil’s coast from Espirito Santo to Santa Catarina states. The biggest discoveries to date are in the Santos Basin, where a thick layer of salt traps oil that sits as much as 3,000 meters beneath the ocean surface.

“Now we are calculating 50 billion barrels, but if you ask me if it could increase, it can,” Chambriard said.

More Wells

The ANP plans to drill an additional two wells along the Southern edge of the Santos Basin to test how far the pre-salt oil reservoirs stretch into the Atlantic, Chambriard said.

The ANP will drill one well to the south of Tupi, and the other to the south of the BM-S-21 block, where Petrobras and Galp Energia SGPS SA made the Caramba discovery.

The wells “have higher exploration risk” than Franco and Libra, she said. Still, the ANP is drilling at prospects where it expects to find over 1 billion barrels of oil, she said.”

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Google Results 1 - 10 of about 54 for Soros Hedge Fund Bought Petrobras Stake Worth $811 Million http://tinyurl.com/2vp5qcf

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Google Results 1 - 10 of about 216 for US government to loan Petrobras $10 billion [to Drill 4.3 Miles http://tinyurl.com/2u2txps

[Click the link below to access the hot links embedded in the article]

Soros’s Oil Spill Payoff

Posted By Tait Trussell On June 22, 2010 @ 12:20 am In FrontPage |
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/06/22/soros-oil-spill-payoff/

Within 48 hours after President Obama issued the six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling, the George Soros-backed Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, [1] contacted a large New Orleans company, Laborde Marine, which services the deep-water drilling market. The company was seeking to lease all its vessels. “If the moratorium on deep-water drilling is not lifted, 33 semi-submersible rigs and/or drill ships affected will simply go to other countries [2] where they will be well received, such as Brazil,” Cliffe F. Laborde and J. Peter Laborde, Jr. wrote in a June 4 letter to their Louisiana Senators.

Could this be merely a happy coincidence for George Soros, [3] the major financial backer of Obama’s presidential campaign who also has $811 million invested in the Brazilian oil company, Petrobras? Wasn’t it enough of a payback to Soros when the Obama Administration loaned up to $10 billion to Petrobras? Soros, with his far left-wing organization, MoveOn, is called the Godfather of world socialism. But most relevant currently is that he has been an enthusiastic proponent of global warming [4] and environmental liberalism. He has urged adoption of a global carbon tax. Could it be more than coincidence that his position is strikingly similar to what Obama called for in his June 14 Oval Office speech [5] on the Gulf oil spill and future energy actions?

“Seizing on the widening calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, to push for legislation he had advocated [a carbon tax] since his campaign” a New York Times article noted. “Mr. Obama said he was willing to look for approaches from Republicans as well as Democrats….” Obama delivered the speech the evening before he was to meet with British Petroleum top executives to demand that they agree to the creation of a multi-billion dollar escrow account to pay claims stemming from the disaster when the company’s rig blew up and spewed oil into the Gulf.

The moratorium could mean the loss of at least 20,000 jobs [6], Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wrote in a letter to Obama. “The last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs while preventing the creation of thousands more,” Jindal’s statement said. Each drilling platform idled by the ban puts 1,400 jobs at risk, according to the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), a group of drillers and companies that support oil production. Lost wages could reach $10 million a month for each rig, according to Jangal. NOIA has said: ”The offshore industry [7] is responsible for nearly 200,000 jobs in the Gulf of Mexico alone, and provides 30 percent of our nation’s domestic oil production….[W]e must be careful not to make things worse.”

The Labordes, in their letter to their senators, wrote: “To shut down the entire industry is overkill and analogous to shutting down all commercial air traffic after one plane crash due to pilot error.” The Labordes also wrote,

Over the last three years, we have built in U.S. shipyards or acquired new U.S. built and flagged vessels primarily designed to service the deep water drilling market. We own and/or operate 21 vessels. Our annual payroll is over $14 million. Now, the U.S. government is telling us to simply ‘park’ our vessels for at least six months. Never in the history of the United States has the government decided to shut down an entire industry for six months. That decision seems to be a knee-jerk reaction based on an emotional response to the spill, and made without a full appreciation of the consequences which will adversely impact tens of thousands of hard working people who are engaged in the industry. It is a decision that advances the Administration’s agenda for transferring to a clean/alternative energy economy, but at an enormous cost to the thousands of us engaged in offshore exploration and development.

If the moratorium on deep water drilling is not lifted, the 33 semi-submergible rigs and/or drill ships will simply go to other countries where they will be well received [and] will not return to the Gulf of Mexico for years if ever. The damage to our industry will be irreversible….For us to move internationally, we will have to compete with vessels built in foreign yards at a much lower cost and often subsidized by foreign governments. It will not be a level playing field. The moratorium may well be the death-knell for U.S. businesses engaged in the energy service sector….While alternative energy is a laudable goal, it will be decades before alternative fuels make a dent in our county’s needs….This is the United States of America, where reason and sound judgment have always been the foundation of our system of governmentnot poorly thought-out and capricious reactions that destroy the livelihoods of thousands of its citizens in order to promote a partisan political agenda….”

By siding with liberal Democrats who oppose off-shore drilling or even much safer drilling on the continent, Obama is costing the nation trillions in revenues and scores of thousands of new jobs. Meanwhile, his pal and sponsor, George Soros will see his investment in Brazil’s Petrobras turn a pretty profit when oil prices rise, as surely they will if U.S. resources are not tapped. The American Petroleum Institute [8] estimates that we have U.S. resources to generate nearly 160,000 new, well-paying jobs and $1.7 trillion in revenues to federal, state, and local governments, with $1.3 trillion from offshore drilling alone.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/06/22/soros-oil-spill-payoff/

URLs in this post:

[1] George Soros-backed Brazilian oil company, Petrobras,: http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/18/good-news-obama-backs-off-shore-drilling/

[2] go to other countries: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2535402/posts

[3] George Soros,: http://expreacherman.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/george-soros-moveonorg-backs-obama/

[4] proponent of global warming: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36166

[5] Oval Office speech: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16obama.html

[6] loss of at least 20,000 jobs: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/market-dispatches.aspx?post=1765815

[7] offshore industry: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/National-Ocean-Industries-bw-1809754078.html?x=0&.v=1

[8] American Petroleum Institute: http://www.api.org/aboutoilgas/upload/access_primer.pdf

On June 19th, 2010 Richard Blinne wrote another one of his left-wing biased, LAUGHABLE rants entitled, “Where’s the Outrage?” http://www.asa3online.org/Voices/category/environment/

He writes: “Since I’m revisiting the BP spill disaster, you might assume from my title I’m talking about the President. I’m not. Rather, I’m talking about evangelicals in general and global warming skeptics in particular. I’ve been debating global warming here for years because I believe that evangelicals have been manipulated by the energy companies and their political and ideological allies. The energy companies want two things. The first is less regulation and the second is to limit their exposure to legal liability. [.......] BP is doing the exact same thing that got all the people incensed about ClimateGate. Where’s the outrage? So far I’ve heard crickets.”

Ahhhhhhhhh.... the reason Blinne has heard crickets is because anyone who can legitimately rebut the OUTRAGEOUS stuff he writes is barred from commenting on the forum.

Since that’s the case, Blinne is rebutted by my post # 266 above.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=266#266

Obama’s Gulf Oil Spill Commission and the Missing Experts
American Thinker ^ | 23 June 2010 | Robert Eugene Simmons Jr
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/obamas_gulf_oil_spill_commissi.html

Instead of an oil spill commission staffed with experts, as promised in his Oval Office address, the president has announced a panel with membership that reads like a Who’s Who of radical environmentalism. Former Senator Graham of Florida, for example, has consistently pushed for a ban on oil drilling, and Frances Beinecke of the National Resources Defense Council has argued for the global warming agenda — including linking “global poverty” to global warming, an argument used at the Copenhagen conference to support reparations to be paid to nations such as Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe for our supposed global crimes.

In fact, if you peruse the names of the council members, there isn’t a single expert in oil drilling, oil platform rigs, or petroleum engineering. The panel’s membership doesn’t even include a single oil drilling company executive, or even a field engineer. In fact, the only technical-minded person on the commission at all is Cherry Murray, Dean of Harvard’s Engineering School. Murray has had a long and distinguished academic career at all of the “right” schools, but she has absolutely nothing in her resume to indicate that she has the slightest knowledge about petroleum exploration. When it comes to academics, there isn’t even one professor that specializes in petroleum exploration despite the plethora of possible names that could be drawn from institutions such as the prestigious Colorado School of Mines.

In addition to the shocking lack of engineering and petroleum drilling experience on the panel, there isn’t a single person with experience in investigation or forensic science. When we consider that the actual Deepwater Horizon rig is at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, we might expect to see an expert in deepwater salvage on the commission, but that expertise is also lacking.

In fact, the only thing this council is qualified to do is to put forth an alternative energy policy as a “solution” to oil drilling in general. Although that outcome would certainly please Obama and the Democrats looking for political cover to pass “Cap and Trade,” the panel wouldn’t be even remotely qualified to “offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place.”

What the commission should be charged with is finding answers, not providing political cover for the environmentalist agenda. Regardless of what you believe about global warming, there are more pressing questions that need to be answered. We need to know what exactly happened on the rig to cause the explosion. If faulty equipment or procedures were at fault, we need to find out how that equipment got past testing and who authorized its installation. We need to find out why the safety regulations were waived on the BP platform and who waived them. In addition, we need to find out why the fire was put out on the rig rather than allowing the oil to burn off. And who had the bright idea to spray several thousand gallons of water at a floating, burning ship, thus sinking it to the bottom of the gulf and snapping the riser pipe it was connected to?

Not the least of the questions that need to be answered is the nature of the money trail in relation to this disaster. We need to find out what the connection is between George Soros and Tony Podesta is in relation to the disaster. Soros stands to make billions from the offshore drilling ban, and Tony Podesta is the main lobbyist for BP and brother to John Podesta at Soros’ Center for American Progress. In every other investigation, the police will follow the money, but in this case, it is being brushed off and ignored. Were safety regulations and quality slowly eroded to create a ticking time bomb in the Gulf? All of these questions should be put to the test and answered.

Finally, we need to know why it is that these questions are not being investigated and answered. When terrorists slammed two planes into the World Trade Center, the government left no stone unturned to find out the causes of the disaster. However, when the lives of millions in the Gulf are being turned upside-down by the biggest ecological disaster of our time, the government isn’t interested in answers, but only politics?

The eleven who lost their lives on the rig are not being granted the most basic justice given to any worker killed on a job in the USA. Their names and faces are being coated with oil and politics. If the Obama administration had any sense of ethical responsibility, the commission would be staffed with experts and investigators looking for answers, not environmentalists looking to impose their agenda on the American people.

bttt

Here’s two images you missed:

1) April 19th Israel Celebrates it’s Independence
2) April 19th (Same say), Obama says, from the Oval office, the United States will no longer unilaterally stand with Israel in UN Council votes.

The next day, ka-blooey

Business Insider
Gus Lubin | Jun. 24, 2010, 11:14 AM | 510 |
BP Has Built An Artificial Island To Get Around Offshore Drilling Ban In Alaska

The offshore drilling moratorium that is falling apart in court already contains one major loophole -- and there's little surprise which company is threading the needle.

BP plans to begin drilling two miles under the sea just miles away from a delicate wildlife reserve in Alaska.

The company will get around the deep-water moratorium by constructing an artificial island -- 31 acres of gravel -- and registering as an onshore rig.

Not exactly the safest operation, reports Rolling Stone:

Here's what BP has in store for the Arctic: First, the company will drill two miles beneath its tiny island, which it has christened "Liberty." Then, in an ingenious twist, it will drill sideways for another six to eight miles, until it reaches an offshore reservoir estimated to hold 105 million barrels of oil. This would be the longest "extended reach" well ever attempted, and the effort has required BP to push drilling technology beyond its proven limits. As the most powerful "land-based" oil rig ever built, Liberty requires special pipe to withstand the 105,000 foot-pounds of torque the equivalent of 50 Mack truck engines needed to turn the drill. "This is about as sexy as it gets," a top BP official boasted to reporters in 2008. BP, a repeat felon subject to record fines for its willful safety violations, calls the project "one of its biggest challenges to date" an engineering task made even more dangerous by plans to operate year-round in what the company itself admits is "some of the harshest weather on Earth."

Don't expect the White House to crack down on the loophole. Just the opposite:

Ken Salazar said yesterday he would issue a new version of the moratorium that could include provisions to allow drilling in areas where reserves and risks are known. bttt

Also posted on FR HERE

Judge denies Obama admin stay on drill ban ruling
Yahoo

Judge denies Obama admin stay on drill ban ruling 10 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A judge refused on Thursday to put on hold his decision that blocked the Obama administration from enforcing its six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans rejected a request by the Obama administration to stay his decision that allowed deepwater drilling to resume after the Department of Interior ordered it halted temporarily when the BP Plc well began gushing oil more than two months ago.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

BP played big role in Alaska blowout preventer probe

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/26/96606/bp-played-big-role-in-alaska-blowout.html
By Richard Mauer | McClatchy Newspapers

ANCHORAGE, Alaska When two Alaska state agencies received complaints in 2005 that a BP drilling contractor routinely cheated on tests of blowout preventers and that BP knew it, the agencies let the very companies accused of wrongdoing join the investigation. [.......snip.......] bttt

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Saturday, June 26, 2010

No skimmers in sight as oil floods into Mississippi waters

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/26/96608/no-skimmers-in-sight-as-oil-floods.html
By Karen Nelson | Biloxi Sun Herald

GULFPORT, Miss. A morning flight over the Mississippi Sound showed long, wide ribbons of orange-colored oil for as far as the eye could see and acres of both heavy and light sheen moving into the Sound between the barrier islands. What was missing was any sign of skimming operations from Horn Island to Pass Christian.

U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor got off the flight angry.

“It’s criminal what’s going on out there,” Taylor said minutes later. “This doesn’t have to happen.”

A scientist onboard, Mike Carron with the Northern Gulf Institute, said with this scenario, there will be oil on the beaches of the mainland.

“There’s oil in the Sound and there was no skimming,” Carron said. “No coordinated effort.”

Taylor said it was a good thing he didn’t have a mic in the helicopter, because he might have said some things he didn’t want his children to hear.

“They’re paying all these boats to run around like headless chickens,” Taylor said, as reporters gathered to hear his assessment of the Sound.

There has been hope among state officials the islands would stop a lot of the oil and skimmers could take care of the passes or breaks between the islands.

Horn Island was doing its part Saturday, observers pointed out. The wiggly lines of sheen were coming straight at it from the south, headed for the island’s southern beaches. The island had boom in place to protect the inlets and sensitive wetlands along its northern shore, the side that faces the mainland.

Even the Pascagoula River was doing its part.

Carron pointed out the line where the river’s fresh water met the Sound’s salt water near Horn Island. All along the line was the orange oil caught between the two types of water and held at bay.

But where the failure came was in the human effort.

There were dozens of boats of all sizes running around, some leaving trails through the sheen. Two boats among a group near Ship Island were pulling boom in a line, but not using it to round up oil. That was at 10 a.m.

Taylor slipped a note to a fellow passenger.

It said: “I’m having a Katrina flashback. I haven’t seen this much stupidity, wasted effort, money and wasted resources, since then.”

Back on land in Gulfport, Taylor let loose.

“A lot of people are getting paid to say, ‘Look! There’s oil’ and not doing anything about it,” Taylor said. “There shouldn’t be a drop of oil in the Sound. There are enough boats running around.

“Nobody’s in charge,” Taylor said. “Everybody’s in charge, so no one’s in charge.

“If the president can’t find anyone who can do this job,” he said, “let me do it.”

Taylor and U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., took the morning flight on a National Guard helicopter with representatives of the state DEQ and BP.

After the flight Wicker said he feels it’s not too late for President Barack Obama to accept help from other countries that have offered the services of their large oil-skimming boats.

Wicker blamed bureaucracy and the president, but said, “Mississippi has been a champ from the beginning of this.”

He also said he noticed BP has been slow to accept prevention plans from local governments.

Taylor was ready for action.

Katrina wasn’t preventable, he said, but the disaster of oil reaching Mississippi beaches is preventable.

He had said earlier that if organized right, he believed a lot of small boats, working hard and working together, could contain the floating oil.

Instead, the vessels of opportunity seem to have no game plan.

There should be some light aircraft spotting for and guiding them, said Carron, who was also puzzled by the response. “I don’t really understand it all.”

Before he took the flight, Taylor said, he had submitted a detailed plan of action to BP and the Coast Guard commander. He was on the Coast on Saturday to see if any of it was being carried out it addressed ways to solve the lack-of-communication issues between spotters and skimmers.

He was scheduled to go aboard a boat in the Sound to see the situation from that perspective as well.

Taylor was concerned Coast Guard Cmdr. Jason Merriweather, assigned to Mississippi, doesn’t have the authority to act independently; that he reports to the Unified Command in Mobile; and that all his decision are filtered through that group.

Carron said he was just as concerned with whether there’s submerged oil coming in with the orange floating bands.

And all the while the NOAA trajectories for where the oil is heading get progressively grim for Mississippi.

Saturday’s briefing projected oil would be on the beaches of the barrier islands, the Chandeleurs, in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. For Sunday the projection of beached oil showed thicker lines as the bulk of the oil body moved closer.

For Monday the projection was more of the same, except it included a red X at Bay St. Louis, meaning the forecast is oil will reach the mainland there.

Avertible catastrophe

How U.S. labour and environmental rules blocked Dutch spill-cleanup technology

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company’s expense. “If there’s a country that’s experienced with building dikes and managing water, it’s the Netherlands,” says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks,” remarked Visser, despite BP’s desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round.

By May 5, the U.S. had not come round.

To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe?

Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules.

The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water.

Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, “We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily waterthe oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that.”

In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they offload their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls “crazy.”

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer but only partly.

Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, -

to appease labour unions

- the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe

that could have been averted

is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns.

According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work.

“Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands,” he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Then again, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerance for turning an accident into a catastrophe.

When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement, they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment.

The Exxon Valdez became the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history until the BP Gulf spill. bttt

a day

.

So where is the A-Whale now? In the Gulf? Not yet.

It’s on its way there after being tied to a dock in Norfolk, Virginia, and won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards bttt(h/t Deb Singer on Twitter):

"After making a brief stop in Norfolk for refueling, U.S. Coast Guard inspections and an all-out publicity blitz intended to drum up public support, a giant tanker billed as the world’s largest oil skimming vessel set sail Friday for the Gulf of Mexico where it hopes to assist in the oil-cleanup effort.

The Taiwanese-owned, Liberian-flagged ship dubbed the “A Whale” stands 10 stories high, stretches 1,115 feet in length and has a nearly 200-foot beam. It displaces more water than an aircraft carrier. …

But a number of hurdles stand in his way. TMT officials said the company does not yet have government approval to assist in the cleanup or a contract with BP to perform the work.

That’s part of the reason the ship was tied to pier at the Virginia Port Authority’s Norfolk International Terminals Friday morning. TMT and its public-relations agency invited scores of media, elected officials and maritime industry executives to an hour-long presentation about how the ship could provide an immediate boost to clean-up efforts in the Gulf.

TMT also paid to fly in Edward Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, to get a look at the massive skimmer.

Overton blasted BP and the federal government for a lack of effort and coordination in their dual oil-spill response and made a plea to the government to allow the A Whale to join the cleanup operation."

To be clear, the A-Whale has not yet been tested on the scale needed in this cleanup. Limited testing, the ship’s owners say, have proven the concept of their new skimming technique. They have already begun plans for a B-Whale to do the same work, but until someone gets the ship into the game, no one will know for certain whether it can operate at the full, advertised capacity.

However, the answer to that should be so what? We badly need increased skimming capacity. Even if this ship only ever gets one load of oil skimmed, that’s a potential 500,000 barrels of oil out of the Gulf, or an advance of 66 days at present rate. While the Coast Guard needs to ensure seaworthiness, the EPA’s regulatory hurdles are in this case ridiculous. We’re already in the worst-case scenario. Even if the A-Whale doesn’t skim a single barrel of oil, they can hardly make the situation worse than it is right now.

This, by the way, is Day 68 of the Gulf crisis. The A-Whale didn’t get refitted on Day 66; this work had to have been done over months, if not years. Shouldn’t the government have known about the existence of this ship two months ago, and been working on certifying it immediately? The A-Whale shouldn’t have had to stop at Norfolk at all to get the nation’s attention, but should have been hired to steam directly to the Gulf and get to work immediately. It’s indicative of a crisis management team that is spending more time worrying about regulations and red tape than cleaning up the mess, just as we saw with Packgen’s boom.

BOE = Barack Obama’s Error

A Rose, by any other Name ...

Rich Galen http://www.mullings.com/currentissue.htm
Monday June 28, 2010

With all the important things going on …
What with Obama paying off World Cup bets with beer; and,

What with Joe Biden calling the manager of a frozen custard shop a “smartass” for suggesting the administration lower taxes; and,

What with Obama having fired one General and demoted another to replace him in Afghanistan; and,

What with the BP oil spill producing more oil than anyone believed there was left in the Earth; and,

What with Obama having exactly zero influence on the G-8/G-20 conference in Canada; and,

What with his official job approval now down to 45 percent according to the latest Gallup, Rasmussen, and Wall Street Journal/NBC polls …

You would think there would be SOME good news SOMEwhere in the Administration. Perhaps in one of the many agencies which are under the total and complete control of the White House … like the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service.

Alas, you would be wrong.

As you remember, MMS according to its soon-to-be shut-down website:

“is the federal agency that manages the nation’s natural gas, oil and other mineral resources on the outer continental shelf (OCS). The agency also collects, accounts for and disburses more than $5 billion per year in revenues from federal offshore mineral leases and from onshore mineral leases on federal and Indian lands.”

These are the geniuses who approved the emergency plans submitted by the oil companies in case of a spill which included protecting the many walruses which inhabit the Gulf of Mexico and depended upon the on-site advice they would receive from a guy who has been dead for about two years.

That MMS.

While the oil is moving ever closer to the beaches and wetlands, the Obama Administration has decided to fix MMS by renaming it.

Not once, but twice. Within a week.

The new name of the Agency is - or was: the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOE).

This, from an official Department of the Interior press release:

A Secretarial Order that [Ken] Salazar has signed renames the Minerals Management Service the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (”Bureau of Ocean Energy” or “BOE”)

Note the “BOE” business. It seems that the old MMS would be the new BOE, a couple of million of our tax dollars in letterhead, and signage and all would be well.

Except all was not well. At about the same time a robotic submarine was knocking the collection cap off the top of the well, someone at “BOE” got the word that MMS would NOT be known as “BOE” but would, instead be known by the full acronym for its new name the “Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement” or BOEMRE.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these are the people whom Barack Obama has chosen to replace the first group of morons he had appointed to run the off-shore drilling program.

I am told that there are BOEMRE employees who have done nothing since the change from “BOE” but try and figure out how to pronounce it.

BOOM-ray has gathered some fans, if only because it has something of a creole flair. Others have cut to the chase and begun referring to the organization they work for as “Bummer.”

So, all of that snazzy “BOE” letterhead and all those design solutions were tossed into the - we hope - the recycle and new letterhead is now in process.

Why the screeching halt to “BOE?”

Maybe the folks at the Department of Energy (DOE) were afraid there would be confusion amongst the multitudes as to who to blame for the lack of any leadership in the Gulf of Mexico.

Maybe it’s because people like me might suggest it stands for “Barack Obama’s Error.”

I took this much of your time to help you understand why local business leaders and politicians - Republicans and Democrats - are pounding their fists on the table complaining about the lack of cooperation they are getting from the Obama Administration, it is - at least in part - because the Interior Department was so busy trying to figure out the new name of MMS.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: A link to the YouTube video of Vice President Biden calling the manager of a custard shop a “smartass”; to the website of the Agency formerly known as MMS; and to the press release renaming MMS to BOE - but only for a day or so. Click here: http://www.mullings.com/dr_06-28-10.htm

<>

“… MMS ... “: Here’s what you get when you type in:

http://www.mms.gov/

The New Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOE) Web Site is Under Construction

Secretarial Order 3302, issued June 18, 2010 renames the Minerals Management Service to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOE). The name change is effective immediately.

We will be working over the next several days to make the appropriate changes to our web site. To visit the former MMS web site, click here. http://www.doi.gov/deepwaterhorizon/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=35872

<>

bttt NOTE: If you click on the link within that release, the Secretarial Order, you will notice two things: One, it is undated; and, Two, the name of the bureau automagically changed from BOE to BOEMRE

Business Insider Researchers Have Now Found Evidence Of Oil Contamination In Gulf's Food Chain

Gus Lubin | Jun. 30, 2010, 11:16 AM

Researchers made another ugly discovery in the giant Gulf of Mexico petri dish.

Oil particles have been found beneath the shells of larval crabs, according to Mississippi Press. Not only does larva contamination auger ill for other creatures, but it will certainly work its way up the the food chain to affect everything:

The tiny droplets are visible under the transparent shells of the 2-millimeter-sized crabs collected in Davis Bayou, said Harriet Perry, director for the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratorys Center for Fisheries Research and Development.

"These larvae are up in the marsh and they are picked off by small fish, small speckled trout and those type of things, so that's the way these things get into the food chain," she said.

Of course larger animals could choke on the toxic oil directly. There was that dead whale and then this sad video of whales swimming through the dangerzone:

VIDEO

San Francisco's eco-conscious Mayor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom are invested in BP's gulf oil rig, Petroleo Brasileiro, Dorchester Minerals, Resolute Energy and Schlumberger Ltd., etc., etc.

San Francisco Chronicle - Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross Wednesday, June 30, 2010 bttt

WaPo Mum on White House Effort to Exploit Gulf Crisis

June 30, 2010 2:10 PM By Chris Horner

The Washington Post‘s coverage of yesterday’s White House meeting doesn’t address the outrage that occurred (which I noted here), but it does mention that environmentalist Joe Mendelson director of global warming policy for the National Wildlife Federation questioned Republicans’ resistance to a sweeping carbon cap.

“Republican leadership emerged from a meeting today saying nothing different than from a year ago,” Mendelson said in a statement. Yes, that is odd. Then again, a few things have come out in the past year.

The Republican leadership should be slamming this effort to exploit the Gulf-spill crisis.

BP Has Built An Artificial Island To Get Around Offshore Drilling Ban In Alaska

Judge denies Obama admin stay on drill ban ruling

Avertible catastrophe

How U.S. labour and ­environmental rules blocked Dutch spill-cleanup technology

to appease labour unions

that could have been averted

Day 68: Why isn’t the A-Whale in the Gulf yet?

a day

Researchers Have Now Found Evidence Of Oil Contamination In Gulf's Food Chain

San Francisco's eco-conscious Mayor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom are invested in BP's gulf oil rig, Petroleo Brasileiro, Dorchester Minerals, Resolute Energy and Schlumberger Ltd., etc., etc.

WaPo Mum on White House Effort to Exploit Gulf Crisis

How U.S. labour and environmental rules blocked Dutch spill-cleanup technology