Same Criminal Corporation, Different Oil Spill

Remember the Exxon Valdez spill? BP was the company that was responsible for being prepared for oil spills in Alaska. BP cheaped out and they had neither the equipment nor the crews that they told everyone that they had. Because being ready for emergencies is expensive.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

BP is still cheaping out and cutting corners in Alaska:

In congressional hearings after the 2006 Prudhoe Bay spill, BP management was accused of making "draconian" budget cuts that affected safety and health, including limiting the use of a corrosion inhibitor inside the pipeline, a step that could have prevented the deterioration that led to the 2006 spill.

Note that BP has amassed a track record of ignoring safety rules and having to pay large fines after being found out.

The company is a corporate felon, following an explosion that killed 15 workers at a BP refinery in Texas City because of flagrant disregard of safety protocols. But unlike people, where a felony conviction inflicts lasting legal limitations, BP just carried on, doing whatever the hell they thought was the cheapest. "Safety be damned" seemed to be their motto.

It is also expensive to tell the truth and do what is right, things that BP also has a track record of not doing.

The BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Everyone who has been an believer in the philosophies of Ayn Rand that businesses will do the right thing because their good names are on the line should head down to the Gulf Coast and start cleaning up oil. Every teabagger who has been spouting the "we don't want government to do anything" line should join them.

And the Bureau of Prisons should be repainting a cellblock for the BP retirement plan.

zOMG!!!1!! The Times Square Bomber Bought a Gun!!!1!!!

As the New York Times and Mayor Michael Bloomberg go into full-blown pearls-clutching mode.

News flash: The guy bought a {gasp} car!!1!! He could have driven it down Broadway and smashed into a crowd of pedestrians at high speed!!!1!!1! Somebody do something!!!!

Oh, and he visited Time Square two years ago!!! Nobody ever goes back there, somebody has to do something!!!!!

By the crotch hairs of Your Dear and Fluffy Lord, will somebody please repeatedly tase Mike Bloomberg (and Joe Lieberman, while you are at it)?



Get a fucking grip.

A Modest Proposal

Let's take away American citizenship from anyone who matches all of the following:

1. Their first name begins with the letter "J" and it has six letters.
2. Their last name begins with the letter "L" and it has nine letters.
3. They lost an incumbent primary for the United States Senate.
4. From Connecticut.
5. And they ran anyway under a bullshit one-man party designation.

If we do that, then maybe I can see my way clear to agreeing with Joe Liberman's idea that people charged with crimes that make him piss his pants should be stripped of their citizenship.

Using Satellites for Air Traffic Control

Is not a very good idea.

No surprise that LockMart's fingerprints are on this one.

One of the Reasons Crime is Down in NYC

Because the cops are either refusing to take crime reports or they are downgrading the seriousness of the reported crime to make the statistics look better.

In the meantime, the patrol officers are writing bullshit tickets because that is what they are ordered to do.

Musings on the Times Square Bombing Attempt

It seems to me that this attack was beyond amateurish and crossed the line into inept; especially when it came to both trying to detonate the bomb and covering up the tracks. Any reasonably intelligent 13 year old could build a decent pipe bomb as a detonating device. And anyone who has done a few milliseconds worth of research into either the first WTC bombing in `95 of the OKC bombing in `95 would know that you have to saturate the fertilizer[1] with fuel oil (or gasoline) and that VIN numbers are stamped on things that are likely to withstand the vehicle being blown up.

So that leads me to one of two possibilities:

First, al Qaeda is drawing from the really shallow end of the talent pool. If Paki-McVeigh indeed went to bomb-making school, he must have slept through all of the classes.

Second, carrying out non-deadly and seemingly retarded attacks might be what al Qaeda has in mind. The US has shown that if sufficiently provoked, it can cause enormous damage to al Qaeda and its supporters. Given that the House of Saud's family of American butt-monkeys no longer controls the White House, a spectacularly successful attack might cause the US to become interested in making like difficult (or shorter) for some Saudis who have been supporting and financing al Qaeda.

A failed attack sheds little blood, does no damage, and yet causes the US and others to engage in further acts of useless security theater, which serves to both increase costs to the American people and to piss off people, especially Muslims who are just going about their daily business. Tales of the latter tend to work against our interests in the propaganda struggle between the US and al Qaeda.

And that might be just what they are trying to achieve.

[1]I'll bet that the "fertilizer" that they supposedly found wasn't the ammonium nitrate kind.

Scratch a Virulent Homophobe, Find a Closeted Homosexual

It more and more seems that the men in public life who are virulent homophobes are all turning out to be closeted gay men.  In this case, the clown in question is one George Alan Rekers, a Baptist preacher and co-founder of the "Focus on the Family", a group that specializes in advocating censorship and providing intellectual cover for gay bashers.

Reker went on a vacation with a male prostitute, whom he had hired through a web site which advertises "rent boys". And, if you read between the lines of the story, ol' Reker seems to be quite the chickenhawk.

(H/T)

Luke. I am Your Father.

Darth Vader's Facebook page.

(H/T)

Will the Tea-Baggers in Arizona Be Out Drinking Today to Celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

Just wondering.

This Country Has Gone Totally Beserk

When Glenn Beck is the reasonable one about the rights enshrined in the Constitution, we are probably going into the final spiral of decline of this nation. (Go to 3:00)

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And the cops tased a kid who was running on a baseball field? Really? That's a reasonable justification to taser someone?

That cop should be doing jail time.