Cleaning Up Some Messes

BP announced that the well in the Gulf of Mexico is killed. I'm very pleased to hear this, but you think maybe they could have killed he well before they killed the Gulf?

Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who oversaw the government's efforts to contain the oil leak, was on the PBS NewsHour tonight, and he admitted that the Coast Guard and BP still have to continue working on cleaning the oil as much as possible. I only hope they keep up the not-so-good work. Many livelihoods have been lost already.

(Correction: Last night I wrote that Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell said she "dabbled in witchcraft" on Bill Maher's show in 1997. The clip is from 1999. October 29, 1999, in fact, two days before Halloween. Maybe that explains her admission. Well, if the [evil] spirit moves you. . . .)

Dumb, Baby, Dumb

First of all, let me make a correction regarding a statement I made earlier about the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. I stated that eighteen workers were killed in the blast. The actual number was eleven.

Anyway, it appears that the oil slick is likely to have an impact on more than just the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines, or even the Florida Panhandle. The Gulf Stream, the warm oceanic current that runs up the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico, could carry the oil slick - which is growing exponentially due to the ongoing well leak - to the Atlantic and possibly deposit all that oil on Florida's eastern coast. This oil spill is not a disaster anymore; it's an apocalypse.

I earlier lampooned Sarah Palin for having supported oil drilling in the past. Apparently, she still does. Not even an oil slick the size of Maryland that could destroy ecologically sensitive shorelines and fisheries have moved her from her position. This is what the former governor of Alaska - a state that had its own oil spill in Prince William Sound twenty years and change ago - had to say about the Gulf disaster on her Facebook page:

"No human endeavor is ever without risk – whether it’s sending a man to the moon or extracting the necessary resources to fuel our civilization. I repeat the slogan 'drill here, drill now' not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills – my family and my state and I know firsthand those consequences. How could I still believe in drilling America’s domestic supply of energy after having seen the devastation of the Exxon-Valdez spill? I continue to believe in it because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation."

So far, increased domestic oil production has made us more volatile to international petroleum price swings, diverted badly needed investment in alternative energy sources, and has caused unrest among people affected by such disasters.

Oh yeah, and that's not the only idiotic statement made about the BP disaster. Rush Limbaugh has actually opined that the initial explosion may have been caused on purpose by environmentalists to make offshore drilling look bad.

Sarah Palin continues to believe in offshore drilling - and she's not repeating the slogan "drill here, drill now," the original slogan was "drill, baby, drill" - in spite of the Exxon Valdez spill that affected Alaska because she either doesn't care or doesn't want to admit she's wrong. But mostly because she doesn't care, despite her (or her ghostwriter's) protests to the contrary. What's it to her if all of those poor birds end up getting saturated in oil? How would Sarah Palin like being covered in oil?

Hmm, I think I just offered a scenario some tea partiers fantasize about on a regular basis. :-O

Burn On, Big Gulf, Burn On

If the mere threat of an oil rig accident in the Atlantic Ocean from offshore drilling wasn't enough to convince supporters of noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin's energy policy - which was co-opted by President Obama earlier this month - to change their minds, then the real accident in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast should.

A BP oil derrick recently exploded, killing eighteen people and causing an underwater pipe to emit oil - now up to 42,000 gallons a day - into the the Gulf of Mexico. The oil slick is slowly making its way toward the shore, threatening several marshes and estuaries in Louisiana and possibly Mississippi. For a region still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, this man-made disaster maybe too much. Commercial fishing interests and environmentally sensitive areas alike are threatened, and no one knows what's going to happen. It could affect areas like Chandeleur Sound, just south of Gulfport, Mississippi, and western Mississippi Sound. Barrier islands that shield those waters, CNN reports, were devastated by Katrina in 2005 and haven't fully recovered.

Ironically, this is all happening as the Interior Department took a step in the right direction in energy policy - approving a wind turbine farm five miles off the coast of Nantucket.

The government plans to set fire to as much of the slick as possible to burn it out and prevent much of it from reaching the shore. So, "drill, baby, drill" has become, "burn, baby, burn."

That's why there's still no offshore drilling off the California coast. No one wants a "Frisco inferno."