» Why the freefall? Well, besides the general “Did you see the oil spill?” response to that question, BP was told to pay workers it laid off as a result of the government’s moratorium on offshore drilling. Which means they’re on the hook for millions of dollars they weren’t before.
We’re no longer dealing with a large, monolithic spill. We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions.
Thad “the good guy” Allen • Discussing the latest status of the oil spill. In explaining further, Allen said that while tackling the surface oil issues will take a couple of months, “long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats … will be years.”Not only are we not out of the woods, but the woods just keeps growing, and we have to see the forest for the trees. source
Thad Allen just scared usWant to feel something hit the pit of your stomach? Watch this clip, where Thad “this oil spill needs a hero” Allen says in very plain terms that the spill is going to be with us well into the fall. Let’s hope a hurricane doesn’t plow through in the meantime. *fingers crossed*
Obama the GOP’s “Enemy”? On “Fox News Sunday,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who has a reasonable beef with Obama over the response to the oil spill, compared him to a Napoleon quote about watching your enemy self-destruct. The key phrase there is not “self-destruct.” It’s “enemy.”
He only wrote the lyricsWhether or not the news cycle has just gotten faster or what, comedian Bruce Fine was able to take Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and focus it on everything that’s happened during the Obama administration. The Joel version covered 50 years. Whoa.
This chestnut from the ’60s seems all the more ironic in the wake of the current oil spill. Skip to around the 9-minute mark to see a bunch of oysters who really like crude oil. The American Petroleum Institute knows a thing or two about making bad PR seem good. source
What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit.
BP CEO Tony Hayward • Regarding his company’s lack of plan to take care of the massive oil spill that happened on their watch. While there has been some good news today – they managed to cut that pipe, which may allow them to further limit the damage caused by the spill – the fact of the matter is that they didn’t have a plan. Sure, they had tools ready to take care of an Exxon Valdez-like situation, but they had no plan for any sort of trouble below the surface. Hayward calls it “an entirely fair criticism.” We call it downright unbelievable. source
OH THE HUMANITY! BP has screwed up like four dozen times in the last month, so why wouldn’t the saw they were using to cut the pipe in the oil spill get stuck IN THE PIPE? Seriously. We bet you all thought it was going to be a bunch of aliens that were going to end the human race. But no. It’s a saw blade stuck in a #(&(@(&! pipe that did it. (Above is a clip from the most riveting television on the air right now, the oil spill webcam.) source