Oil Spills

[Bruce551]

BP owns the oil rig that exploded and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico last week, causing what CNN reports officials say “could become one of worst spills in U.S. history.†Tragically, there are 11 missing rig employees who are presumed dead. The well continues to leak 210,000 gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico—five times the original estimate. This growing oil slick already covers an area larger than West Virginia and and oozed onto the Louisiana shore early this morning. A major portion of the oil slick looms only five miles offshore. This major oil spill could be the worst environmental disaster since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, and it is a tragic reminder that we must dramatically reduce our oil use.

The Exxon Valdez spill cost Alaska’s fishermen an estimated $800 million in damages to their livelihood. This oil spill could bring an economic Armageddon to the gulf coast seafood industry. Bloomberg reports:

Louisiana is the largest seafood producer in the lower 48 states, with annual retail sales of about $1.8 billion, according to state data. Recreational fishing generates about $1 billion in retail sales a year, according to the state.

BP should be required to place its first quarter profit of $5.6 billion in an escrow account to provide compensation to the fishermen whose livelihoods are threatened. These funds should also be used for cleaning up the soon to be blighted shores.

Oil spill clean-up plans never work. There are commities, action plans, lists, tasks, but at the end of day it's all bullshit.

:!:

[eagle]

Yes Its a major disaster and its been happening for a long time 1 spill at a time. Obama has already called a halt to more offshore drilling without safeguards in place. :shock: So they have been drilling without safeguards. Morons and their oil won't stop till the ocean is a dead zone !!!! :twisted:

[Dave40]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/05/2864207.htm

This happened a few weeks ago but still will have an effect on the water as well!!!!!!! :cry: :cry:

[eagle]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/05/2864207.htm

This happened a few weeks ago but still will have an effect on the water as well!!!!!!! :cry: :cry:

Yea but that just threatens to destroy the Great Barrier Reefs. The Gulf of Mexico Spill could destroy tons of potential Gumbo!

[DJTX]

Yea but that just threatens to destroy the Great Barrier Reefs. The Gulf of Mexico Spill could destroy tons of potential Gumbo!

Will that put Forrest out of business? :roll:

[DANNO]

Yea but that just threatens to destroy the Great Barrier Reefs. The Gulf of Mexico Spill could destroy tons of potential Gumbo!

Will that put Forrest out of business? :roll:

It is going to hurt his business quite abit....

[drlovelife8]

I don't give a **** about many things but this really upsets me.

Terrible waste.

Totally avoidable.

When will they learn.

All that oil gone to waste, what a waste of cash. :twisted:

When will they learn to nest somewhere else, stupid animals. :twisted:

[Bruce551]

The imperiled marshes that buffer New Orleans and the rest of the state from the worst storm surges are facing a sea of sweet crude oil, orange as rust. The most recent estimate by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20 and sank days later, was gushing as much as 210,000 gallons of crude into the gulf each day. Concern is mounting that the flow may soon grow to several times that amount.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02spill.html?hpw

:cry:

[beej]

This ones still got a lot of life left in it, and could easily be the worst in history, it'll have a lasting effect for a great many years.

BP will blame it on fake Red shirts I'm sure.

[PiAnt]

Yes Its a major disaster and its been happening for a long time 1 spill at a time. Obama has already called a halt to more offshore drilling without safeguards in place. :shock: So they have been drilling without safeguards. Morons and their oil won't stop till the ocean is a dead zone !!!! :twisted:

Yes, but if you could choose where this **** happens, you couldn't choose a better place.

[PiAnt]

Woohoo!!!

Yeehaa!!!

"Come 'n listen to my story 'bout a man named Jed

A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed

And then one day, he was shootin' at some food

And up through the ground come a bubblin' crude

Oil, that is, black gold, Texas tea"

Ride 'em cowboys!!!

[GAV]

I think the book for Best Practices for Oil Recovery and Best Practices of Banking and the "Fed" were written by the same author. (Mr Gung Ho)

[eagle]

Yes Its a major disaster and its been happening for a long time 1 spill at a time. Obama has already called a halt to more offshore drilling without safeguards in place. :shock: So they have been drilling without safeguards. Morons and their oil won't stop till the ocean is a dead zone !!!! :twisted:

Yes, but if you could choose where this sh*t happens, you couldn't choose a better place.

i see no good in it, mans greed manifest

[PiAnt]

Yes Its a major disaster and its been happening for a long time 1 spill at a time. Obama has already called a halt to more offshore drilling without safeguards in place. :shock: So they have been drilling without safeguards. Morons and their oil won't stop till the ocean is a dead zone !!!! :twisted:

Yes, but if you could choose where this sh*t happens, you couldn't choose a better place.

i see no good in it, mans greed manifest

There is no good in it.

It's happened before and no doubt will happen again.

Just about time the biggest users and abusers cop for some fallout.

I'm just hoping one of those there wicked Caribbean storms moves in and whips it up and over all those rebuilt levvies!!!!

Nat Geo's looking for new material na

[vbroker]

CALLER: Hello. How are you?

RUSH: Very well. Thank you.

CALLER: Good. Don't believe that Obama isn't jumping for joy over this.

RUSH: You're right.

CALLER: My husband's a petroleum engineer. We talked about it last night. He may be acting indifferent but they're jumping up and down.

RUSH: I'm sure.

CALLER: I mean that's the reason why they haven't done anything to help. They want the damage to be so extensive that it's gonna -- I won't be surprised after all this if they actually shut down the Gulf, the drilling completely. It's the only area which can be drilled in the US, and they're going to put an end to it.

RUSH: Is that what your husband thinks, too?

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: So this just came along at an opportune time, Obama doesn't like oil to begin with, he doesn't like our dependence on it.

CALLER: That's exactly right.

RUSH: By the way, if you're right, what faster way is there to get the price of gasoline up to four bucks?

CALLER: Well, he's been chipping away at it oil and gas industry for I would say long before he even became the president.

RUSH: Right. And don't forget the coal industry. He promised to put them out of business.

CALLER: When you had brought up the fact that the layoffs really started right after Obama's election, that is the truth. My husband's company laid off 5,000 people, not all of them, but mostly before and during and right after his inauguration.

RUSH: Your husband works for Big Oil?

CALLER: He works for a service company that they do completion drilling.

RUSH: A-ha.

CALLER: Now, they don't do offshore drilling.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: But, you know, this rig that was out there, it was a massive state-of-the-art rig. It's unprecedented. I mean they still don't know what happened. I don't believe that it's any kind of sabotage. But I mean if you can imagine this rig, you know, it was actually using GPS positioning right over the hole, it's not anchored, it's 5,000 feet from just the rig just to the sea floor. And they were cementing 18,000 feet down.

RUSH: Yeah. Well, it looks, like I said earlier, that the blame is being placed on that safety shutdown valve not working because of the way the cement was poured, and Halliburton poured the cement.

CALLER: Huh?

RUSH: Halliburton poured the cement. You wait, Halliburton's going to be brought up to Washington for show trials. Democrats have wanted that since the Iraq war. If they can blame this on Halliburton -- (laughing) -- and say that Cheney somehow approved the project, even as an ex-CEO, oh-ho-ho, they may not even need Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So the regime has shut down drilling in the Gulf. But you know who hasn't shut down drilling? The Russians are drilling in a deal with the Cubans in the Gulf. The Vietnamese and Angola are drilling for oil in the Gulf in deals with the Cubans. And of course the Mexicans have this giant new find that they're getting ready to go get. There's no mention of the Louisiana oil spill on FEMA's website. Which tells me, you know, I think Obama must really have it in for wildlife down there, 'cause these are the first victims, and who knew that he had this kind of animus for animals out there?

[eagle]

CALLER: Hello. How are you?

RUSH: Very well. Thank you.

CALLER: Good. Don't believe that Obama isn't jumping for joy over this.

RUSH: You're right.

CALLER: My husband's a petroleum engineer. We talked about it last night. He may be acting indifferent but they're jumping up and down.

RUSH: I'm sure.

CALLER: I mean that's the reason why they haven't done anything to help. They want the damage to be so extensive that it's gonna -- I won't be surprised after all this if they actually shut down the Gulf, the drilling completely. It's the only area which can be drilled in the US, and they're going to put an end to it.

RUSH: Is that what your husband thinks, too?

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: So this just came along at an opportune time, Obama doesn't like oil to begin with, he doesn't like our dependence on it.

CALLER: That's exactly right.

RUSH: By the way, if you're right, what faster way is there to get the price of gasoline up to four bucks?

CALLER: Well, he's been chipping away at it oil and gas industry for I would say long before he even became the president.

RUSH: Right. And don't forget the coal industry. He promised to put them out of business.

CALLER: When you had brought up the fact that the layoffs really started right after Obama's election, that is the truth. My husband's company laid off 5,000 people, not all of them, but mostly before and during and right after his inauguration.

RUSH: Your husband works for Big Oil?

CALLER: He works for a service company that they do completion drilling.

RUSH: A-ha.

CALLER: Now, they don't do offshore drilling.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: But, you know, this rig that was out there, it was a massive state-of-the-art rig. It's unprecedented. I mean they still don't know what happened. I don't believe that it's any kind of sabotage. But I mean if you can imagine this rig, you know, it was actually using GPS positioning right over the hole, it's not anchored, it's 5,000 feet from just the rig just to the sea floor. And they were cementing 18,000 feet down.

RUSH: Yeah. Well, it looks, like I said earlier, that the blame is being placed on that safety shutdown valve not working because of the way the cement was poured, and Halliburton poured the cement.

CALLER: Huh?

RUSH: Halliburton poured the cement. You wait, Halliburton's going to be brought up to Washington for show trials. Democrats have wanted that since the Iraq war. If they can blame this on Halliburton -- (laughing) -- and say that Cheney somehow approved the project, even as an ex-CEO, oh-ho-ho, they may not even need Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So the regime has shut down drilling in the Gulf. But you know who hasn't shut down drilling? The Russians are drilling in a deal with the Cubans in the Gulf. The Vietnamese and Angola are drilling for oil in the Gulf in deals with the Cubans. And of course the Mexicans have this giant new find that they're getting ready to go get. There's no mention of the Louisiana oil spill on FEMA's website. Which tells me, you know, I think Obama must really have it in for wildlife down there, 'cause these are the first victims, and who knew that he had this kind of animus for animals out there?

:roll: yea Obama did it sheeeez

[eagle]

Yes Its a major disaster and its been happening for a long time 1 spill at a time. Obama has already called a halt to more offshore drilling without safeguards in place. :shock: So they have been drilling without safeguards. Morons and their oil won't stop till the ocean is a dead zone !!!! :twisted:

Yes, but if you could choose where this sh*t happens, you couldn't choose a better place.

i see no good in it, mans greed manifest

There is no good in it.

It's happened before and no doubt will happen again.

Just about time the biggest users and abusers cop for some fallout.

I'm just hoping one of those there wicked Caribbean storms moves in and whips it up and over all those rebuilt levvies!!!!

Nat Geo's looking for new material na

I though that way when Exxon Valdez happened. BUT what I found out was Exxon , after getting sued for billions, pushed off paying with lawyers. Spills happen all over the world by many companies and countries and the ocean is treated like an endless garbage dump. Would be nice if this woke up people to the dangers of oil wells in the ocean but the number of oil tankers in the ocean right now is scary. At least as Vchoker pointed out Obama is happy now :roll:

[Bruce551]

Yes Its a major disaster and its been happening for a long time 1 spill at a time. Obama has already called a halt to more offshore drilling without safeguards in place. :shock: So they have been drilling without safeguards. Morons and their oil won't stop till the ocean is a dead zone !!!! :twisted:

Yes, but if you could choose where this sh*t happens, you couldn't choose a better place.

i see no good in it, mans greed manifest

There is no good in it.

It's happened before and no doubt will happen again.

Just about time the biggest users and abusers cop for some fallout.

I'm just hoping one of those there wicked Caribbean storms moves in and whips it up and over all those rebuilt levvies!!!!

Nat Geo's looking for new material na

I though that way when Exxon Valdez happened. BUT what I found out was Exxon , after getting sued for billions, pushed off paying with lawyers. Spills happen all over the world by many companies and countries and the ocean is treated like an endless garbage dump. Would be nice if this woke up people to the dangers of oil wells in the ocean but the number of oil tankers in the ocean right now is scary. At least as Vchoker pointed out Obama is happy now :roll:

Under the Bush administration regulation of offshore oil drilling was lax.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/26/big-oil-fought-off-new-sa_n_552575.html

BP and TransOcean have also aggressively opposed new safety regulations proposed last year by a federal agency that oversees offshore drilling -- which were prompted by a study that found many accidents in the industry.

There were 41 deaths and 302 injuries out of 1,443 incidents from 2001 to 2007, according to the study conducted by the Minerals and Management Service of the Interior Department. In addition, the agency issued 150 reports over incidents of non-compliant production and drilling operations and determined there was "no discernible improvement by industry over the past 7 years."

This is a criminal conduct by oil companies, lawyers, lobbyists, mostly Republicans in congress. The damage to the gulf states wet lands and wildlife is beyond words.

[DJTX]

The U.S. president, Barack Obama, blamed on British Petroleum (BP) for the environmental catastrophe that is affecting the sea off the coast of Louisiana and seriously threatens the coast.

“BP is responsible for the leak. BP will pay the bill,†said the president, who is visiting the State of Louisiana to examine the extent of disaster.

And we know BP will not pass that cost of this on to its customers. :roll:

[Bruce551]

Part of todays Op-Ed "No Fooling Mother Nature"

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Our dependence on crude oil is not just a national-security or climate problem. Some 40 percent of America’s fish catch comes out of the gulf, whose states also depend heavily on coastal tourism. In addition, the Chandeleur Islands off the Louisiana coast are part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge. It was created by Teddy Roosevelt and is one of our richest cornucopias of biodiversity.

As the energy consultant David Rothkopf likes to say, sometimes a problem reaches a point of acuity where there are just two choices left: bold action or permanent crisis. This is such a moment for our energy system and environment.

If we settle for just an incremental response to this crisis — a “Hey, that’s our democracy. What more can you expect?†— we’ll be sorry. You can’t fool Mother Nature. She knows when we’re just messing around.

Mother Nature operates by her own iron laws. And if we violate them, there is no lobby or big donor to get us off the hook. No, what’s gone will be gone. What’s ruined will be ruined. What’s extinct will be extinct — and later, when we’re finally ready to stop messing around, it will be too late.

You can follow the oil spil Tweets here: Oil Spill Crisis Map

http://oilspill.labucketbrigade.org/

[PiAnt]

Yes mate, but it's not a real crisis is it?

I mean, no one important is affected are they?

I would bet that most of the population, those not in the affected area, are bemoaning the waste of oil, not any superficial environmental impact.

And rightly so I hasten to add. Yanks have got it the right way round. GW I think it was got it right when he said "So what?"

Bleed it dry.

[Bruce551]

The oil spill is only part of the story.

During his first 1,000-mile crossing (Pacific) of the gyre, Moore calculated half a pound for every 100 square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at three million tons of plastic. His estimate, it turned out, was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. It was the first of many staggering figures he would encounter. And it only represented visible plastic: an indeterminate amount of larger fragments get fouled by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean's surface.

In fact, it wasn't even close: six times as much.

When he sampled near the mouths of Los Angeles creeks that emptied into the Pacific, the numbers rose by a factor of 100, and kept rising every year. By now he was comparing data with University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson. Like Thompson, what especially shocked him were plastic bags and the ubiquitous little raw plastic pellets.

In India alone, 5,000 processing plants were producing plastic bags. Kenya was churning out 4,000 tons of bags a month, with no potential for recycling.

As for the little pellets known as nurdles, 5.5 quadrillion — about 250 billion pounds — were manufactured annually. Not only was Moore finding them everywhere, but he was unmistakably seeing the plastic resin bits trapped inside the transparent bodies of jellyfish and salps, the ocean's most prolific and widely distributed filter-feeders. Like seabirds, they'd mistaken brightly colored pellets for fish eggs, and tan ones for krill. And now God-knows-how-many quadrillion little pieces more, coated in body-scrub chemicals and perfectly bite-sized for the little creatures that bigger creatures eat, were being flushed seaward.

From: 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman

Today I was shopping in Tops (Chiang Mai), there was 90ft of "open" stand up refrigeration coolers for milk, vergies, meats and more freezers in middle of floor. 90% of the food is rapped in plastic. Power consumption est. 15,000 Watts, electric power is supplied by EGAT coal plants in Lampang.

We are living in a dream world that cannot last.

[Bruce551]

Dr. Jeff Hoffmayer, a shark specialist with the Center for Fisheries Research and Development, discussed the inevitable path the cloud of oil would take once it gets caught up by the gulf’s Loop Current that feeds the Gulf Stream. Dr. Hawkins found a limited amount of optimism that the “fractions of oil that are overtly toxic†are about five percent, and a lot of the toxic elements are “aerosolic†compounds — which would aid in dilution. Dr. Bruce Comyns, a larval ichthyologist — studying the early life stages of fish development — concluded that the worst-case scenario would be “devastating†beyond his ability to predict.

Historically, major blowouts of this kind have been stopped by drilling relief wells, a process that will take about three months at this site, the Macondo Prospect just off the continental shelf of Louisiana. Last year’s underwater Montara rig blowout in the Timor Sea took ten weeks to get under control. The 1979 Ixtoc I blowout took nearly a year to stop. BP is attempting experimental new efforts — containment domes, shutoff valves, and the like — to staunch the flow of oil, but none have previously been shown to work.

Transcript:

HAWKINS: All bets are off. I mean it’s an exposure-times-time kind of scenario. I don’t even want to think about that.

HOFFMAYER: I think oil’s bad for everything. To just add: It would go beyond just the Gulf of Mexico. If it gets entrained into the Loop [Current], it’s up into the Atlantic. And who knows where it’s going to go from there. As it moves around Florida, the next or another critical area would be the Florida Keys and the coral reefs we have down there. I don’t even want to think about that area being covered in oil. Once it works its way up the East Coast and potentially crossing the Atlantic, it could be far-reaching.

HAWKINS: Hopefully in that scenario there would be sufficient dilution, but you’re talking about some really fragile habitats as well. I shudder to think of a three-month blowout.

COMYNS: We’re kind of speculating, but obviously it would be devastating. Nothing’s ever really been seen probably quite like it, so it’s hard for us to tell you exactly what would the results be. We know it’s bad, we couldn’t tell you how bad. We’re just reacting to it as it slowly develops. If it was the worst-case scenario, I probably wouldn’t be qualified to tell you exactly how much devastation there would be. Obviously, it would be bad.

[eagle]

Yes mate, but it's not a real crisis is it?

I mean, no one important is affected are they?

I would bet that most of the population, those not in the affected area, are bemoaning the waste of oil, not any superficial environmental impact.

And rightly so I hasten to add. Yanks have got it the right way round. GW I think it was got it right when he said "So what?"

Bleed it dry.

The crisis is global and Oil is one of the pollutants that all life as we know it is in danger of. WHO is it effecting. I would say every living being on the planet.

I think you meant right this minute but it is slow death destroying the ocean at the rate we are :twisted:

[Bruce551]

The Rest Of The Story

May 6, 2010

Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University

[ur]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover.

Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team.

Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total.

In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President **** Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration.

Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies.

In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities.

Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally.

A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."

Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events.

The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.

It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts.

First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill.

And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper.

The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response.

Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

I think Cheney is a contender for causing more death and destruction than any other human being who has ever lived.