All I can say is, this guy better stay off small planes and deserted roads.

I still can't quite believe the oil companies had the sheer audacity to lie like this, considering the weight of evidence to the contrary. But then, I guess I can't blame them when they like lax enforcement just the way it is, thank you very much:

Reporting from Washington — Oil and gas companies have told the Obama administration that environmental regulations for deep-water drilling rigs do not immediately need to be toughened because the Deepwater Horizon explosion was an unforeseeable event, not a failure of federal oversight, according to documents filed last week with the White House.

The industry's chief lobbying arm, the American Petroleum Institute, submitted written comments to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The council is reviewing whether the federal Minerals Management Service — the now-splintered and much criticized agency charged with regulating oil drilling — has appropriately conducted reviews mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA.

"One accident does not mean that the practice and procedures of MMS are inadequate to implement NEPA's requirements, especially when the cause of the accident has yet to be determined," wrote the lobbying group, which represents 400 oil and gas companies, including BP.

Anadarko Petroleum, which owns a quarter share of the leaking BP well, wrote in a separate filing that it believes the government's enforcement of environmental laws has not "in any way played a role" in the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Since the April 20 explosion, the MMS has drawn fire from environmentalists for routinely exempting hundreds of offshore drilling projects from detailed environmental analysis, including the one for the Deepwater Horizon rig. The practice is known as granting "categorical exclusions." That practice is a specific focus of the White House review.

Must. Hit. Head. On. Wall.

And by the way, BP? If I had a dog that did to my house what your company did to the Gulf, he'd be history.

I just love Bernie Sanders. He sticks to his principles and tries to do what's fair. The man is a real rarity in the Senate:

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders is pushing a measure to end more than $35 billion in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry.

The Vermont independent today proposed putting $25 billion in savings toward reducing the deficit and $10 billion toward the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program over five years. Such funds help municipalities build windmills, make energy efficiency improvements or improve sewer treatment plants.

“If there is anything we should be learning from the Gulf disaster, it is that it is time to move aggressively away from polluting and unsafe fossil fuels, which are getting more and more difficult to produce as we move further and further offshore to drill for them,“ he said in a statement. “And, with a $13 trillion national debt, the last thing we need to be doing is giving tax breaks to big oil and gas companies that have been making record-breaking profits year after year after year."

Sanders said all of the oil and gas tax breaks that his measure seeks to repeal were targeted for elimination in President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget. Sanders argued that instead of using their profits to invest in renewable energy and prevent oil spills, oil and gas companies are primarily using the money to buy back their own stock and enrich their CEOs.

I would think if we don't have money for unemployment benefits, we certainly don't have money to clean up this catastrophe. And yet, I guarantee you that many of the same politicians who are screaming about the jobless will be more than willing to pay the tab for these

Democrats in Congress and officials in the White House are making yet another major push to pass legislation to make the liability for oil companies involved in damaging spills unlimited.

On Monday evening, the White House confirmed that it favors the most recent piece of legislation that would drop any numerical ceiling to the amount of money an oil company like BP would have to pay for economic damages caused by a spill. Currently, the cap is $75 million.

"The president supports removing caps on liability for oil companies engaged in offshore drilling," said spokesman Ben LaBolt. "Oil companies should have every incentive to maximize safety and arbitrary caps on liability create a disincentive to achieve that goal."

The statement was the most detailed the administration has offered to date with respect to the debate surrounding BP's liability. And it reflects a growing sentiment within the White House that more aggressive action (if not optics) need to be in place to stem the fallout of the Gulf crisis. Several weeks ago, U.S. Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli made the case for an unlimited cap without formally endorsing the policy.

The government, he said before a congressional hearing, needs to "ensure that there is no arbitrary cap on corporate responsibility for a similar major oil spill."

I simply do not see how this story ends without criminal charges -- and for more than the guys at the bottom, who were reacting to the pressure from above. I'd like to point out the superb work done by Mother Jones on this story, and urge you to go throw them a few bucks for their investigative fund if you can spare it:

A prominent Houston attorney with a long record of winning settlements from oil companies says he has new evidence suggesting that the Deepwater Horizon's top managers knew of problems with the rig before it exploded last month, causing the worst oil spill in US history. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 15 rig workers and dozens of shrimpers, seafood restaurants, and dock workers, says he has obtained a three-page signed statement from a crew member on the boat that rescued the burning rig's workers. The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship's bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone. Buzbee told Mother Jones that, according to this witness account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you f*cking happy? Are you f*cking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen."

Whoever was on the other end of the line was apparently trying to calm Harrell down. "I am f*cking calm," he went on, according to Buzbee. "You realize the rig is burning?"

At that point, the boat's captain asked Harrell to leave the bridge. It wasn't clear whether Harrell had been talking to Transocean, BP, or someone else.

On Friday a spokesman for Transocean said he couldn't confirm or deny whether the conversation took place. He was unable to make Harrell available for an interview.

During hearings held late last month by the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, Harrell denied any conflicts with his BP or Transocean bosses. He said that he did not feel pressured to rush the completion of the well, even though the rig had fallen behind schedule.

Yet Buzbee's claims add weight to other statements that contradict Harrell's version of events. Testifying before the Coast Guard and MMS panel last month, Douglas Brown, the chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon, said that on the morning of the day that the rig exploded Harrell had a "skirmish" over drilling procedures during a meeting with BP's "company man," well site leader Robert Kaluza. "I remember the company man saying this is how it's going to be," Brown told the panel. As Harrell was leaving the meeting, according to Brown, "He pretty much grumbled, 'I guess that's what we have those pincers for,'" referring to the blowout preventer on the sea floor that is supposed to be the last resort to prevent a leak in the event of an emergency. The blowout preventer failed following the explosion on the rig, causing the massive spill. (Transocean's chief electronics technician, Mike Williams, also recalled the argument but named a different BP "company man," BP's top official on the rig, Donald Vidrine).

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Transocean appeared to back the claims that Harrell had feuded with BP: "The testimony certainly seems to suggest that [Harrell] disagreed with the operator's instructions, but what those were and why he disagreed are matters that will ultimately be determined during the course of investigations."

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Via Raw Story:

And as soon as this week, or next, Abramoff will he on his way out the doors of a federal prison and into a halfway house, where he will reside until he's formally released.

I'm still amazed at what he got away with and how light a sentence he received, because I'm idealistic enough to think somehow, somewhere, justice should be done. After his 3 1/2 years in prison, he will go to a halfway house, then he will go home to his wife and children. He may be disgraced, but I doubt he is repentant.

Caution: Rant ahead

He will probably write a book and recover enough money to allow him to travel in the circles of days past. Perhaps not with the kind of high-rolling money that he wishes for, but with enough that he will never worry about where his next unemployment check will come from. While he may not be the influencer that he was once, he will have enough influence to move in the same circles as though nothing had ever happened, as though he hadn't bilked tribes out of millions, as though he hadn't sold Congressmen on the idea of giving oil companies and financial firms lots of legislative breaks in exchange for campaign booty.

I suggest you see Casino Jack to remind yourself of the evil this man is and represents. He should spill it all, name names, hand over receipts and affidavits and hammer all of his College Republican buddies. Maybe then I could forgive his easy payment of his "debt to society."

The truth of Abramoff is this: our democracy is inexorably weaker because of what he did and because he did not pay a fair price for his malfeasance.

More on Abramoff in the archives.

Finally, something I want to hear coming out of the White House:

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says it's time to roll back "billions of dollars in tax breaks" for oil companies and use the money for clean energy research and development.

Obama made the comments Wednesday in prepared remarks for a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

He said the catastrophic Gulf oil spill shows the country must move toward clean energy by embracing energy efficiency, tapping natural gas and nuclear power and eliminating tax breaks for big oil.

Obama said that the Gulf spill "may prove to be a result of human error - or corporations taking dangerous shortcuts that compromised safety" - but that deepwater drilling is inherently risky and America cannot rely solely on fossil fuels.

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It's funny how right-wing talkers and their Beltway Village cohort really hate it when you point out how the lax regulatory oversight that resulted in the horrific Gulf oil spill originated in the Bush/Cheney administration.

Today at President Obama's press conference, it was Villager Chip Reid's turn to be all offended:

REID: Secondly with regard to the Minerals Management Service, Secretary Salazar yesterday basically blamed the Bush administration for the cozy relationship there.

And you seemed to suggest that when you spoke in the Rose Garden a few weeks ago when you said, for too long, a decade or more -- most of those years, of course, the Bush administration -- there's been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and federal agency that permits them to drill.

But you knew as soon as you came in, and Secretary Salazar did, about this cozy relationship. But you continued to give permits -- some of them under questionable circumstances. Is it fair to blame the Bush administration? Don't you deserve some of that?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well -- well, let -- let me just make the point that I made earlier, which is, Salazar came in and started cleaning house, but the culture had not fully changed in MMS. And absolutely, I take responsibility for that. There -- there wasn't sufficient urgency in terms of the pace of how those changes needed to take place.

There is no evidence that some of the corrupt practices that had taken place earlier took place under the current administration's watch, but a culture in which oil companies were able to get what they wanted, without sufficient oversight and regulation, that was a real problem. Some of it was constraints of the law, as I just mentioned. But we should have busted through those constraints.

This was just too much for Megyn Kelly and her right-wing pal Mike Gallagher, who devoted a post-conference panel on Fox bewailing how wrong it was for anyone to blame poor George W. Bush for any of this.

Gallagher burst into crocodile tears, saying it was wrong for people to blame Obama now -- because they shouldn't have been unhappy with Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, either:

Gallagher: There has been way too much finger-pointing going on, and frankly, as a Bush supporter, it frustrates me to see Obama critics do the same kind of thing that people try to do with George Bush. Now, having said that, it does seem like that answer was trying to again have Barack Obama point the finger of blame at the Bush administration to some degree. It's regrettable. All of this finger-pointing is counter-productive.

You know, we could have done one of two things, Megyn with this horrible oil spill -- we could have reacted, or we could have responded. Now that finally this flow has stopped, may we go forward and respond and be proactive and, and learn from what went wrong.

But this was a tragic accident that should not have been laid at the doorstep of either George Bush or Barack Obama, or even BP for that matter! No one wanted this to happen, they did everything they could to respond appropriately, and I think the blame game has just been absolutely appalling. And it's very distressing, and it breaks my heart to see what's happened the past few days.

Yeah, we can't blame BP because they didn't want it to happen -- they just decided to take the cheaper and far riskier route when drilling this well, thanks to the handy green light they got from the Bush/Cheney MMS.

Fortunately, the panel's token liberal, radio host Mark Levine, managed to make the salient point about all this:

Levine: Look, we've learned one thing -- if you don't learn from history, you're condemned to repeat it. The Republicans and conservatives have a philosophy -- they'll tell it to you all the time. They don't like any kind of government regulation, they trust corporations to do the right thing, they want government to get off the back of corporations, and not to regulate anything!

And we see what happens. When the Bush administration fills these regulatory agencies with a bunch of people watching porn and not caring, in bed with the oil companies.

This just produced more crocodile tears from Gallagher: "This makes me so sad," he said. Yeah, we bet. So sad.

After all, we recall how right-wing defenders of Bush, for the entirety of his tenure, blamed every conceivable obstacle he faced on Bill Clinton.

The first Bush recession? Clinton's fault. The 9/11 attacks? Definitely Clinton's fault. (Remember The Path to 9/11?) Indeed, they even tried to blame the 2008 Bush recession on Bill Clinton. They never gave up.

And of course, before Barack Obama was even sworn into office, they began calling the last Bush recession "the Obama recession"

Well, as we observed last time we heard this whine:

Continue reading »

Under the Bush administration, the Department of the Interior was literally handed over to the lobbyists (remember Steve Griles? He was convicted for lying to Congress in the Jack Abramoff case). So while the brand-new Obama administration rubber-stamped a waiver to Deepwater Horizon, the bulk of the blame for this spill properly belongs to Bush:

The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which triggered the spill spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, caught the energy world by surprise. The operator, Transocean Ltd., is a giant in the brave new world of drilling for oil in deep waters far offshore. It had been honored by regulators for its safety record. The very day of the blast on the rig, executives were aboard celebrating its seven straight years free of serious accidents.

But a Wall Street Journal examination of Transocean's record paints a more equivocal picture.

Nearly three of every four incidents that triggered federal investigations into safety and other problems on deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico since 2008 have been on rigs operated by Transocean, according to an analysis of federal data. Transocean defended its safety record but didn't dispute the Journal's analysis.

In addition, an industry survey of oil companies that hired Transocean perceived a drop in its quality and performance, including safety by some measures, compared with its peers, though it still scored tops in one safety category.

Already the largest deep-water driller, Transocean in November 2007 took over rival GlobalSantaFe in an $18 billion deal. A Journal analysis of records maintained by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that Transocean's share of incidents in deep water investigated by the regulator has gone up since the merger, even after accounting for its increased size.

From 2005 through 2007, a Transocean rig was involved in 13 of the 39 deep-water drilling incidents investigated by the MMS in the Gulf of Mexico, or 33%. That's roughly in line with the percentage of deep-water rigs, 30%, Transocean owned and operated in the Gulf then, according to data firm RigLogix.

Since the merger, Transocean has accounted for 24 of the 33 incidents investigated by the MMS, or 73%, despite during that time owning fewer than half the Gulf of Mexico rigs operating in more than 3,000 feet of water.

Some of Transocean's clients have cited the merger as a reason they believe the company's performance has dropped.

The effectiveness of boycotts can be debated. Glenn Beck and Fox News have been hard hit, especially in the UK -- which proves that it never hurts to try.

Low on gas, I risked being stranded the other day to avoid spending money at a BP station. BP also owns AM/PM and ARCO stations so you may want to avoid them if you don't want to inadvertently give them your hard earned dollars.

Planning to change your oil soon? Castrol oil is wholly owned by BP and if you own a boat, BP sells fuel and lubricants for those as well. I'm not a fan of any of the big oil companies, but I have chosen not to spend one thin dime with BP and encourage others to follow suit.

You learn the darnedest things on the internets. For example, I just found out that the Gulf of Mexico is the primary disposal site for unexploded military munitions - over 30 million pounds of bombs, projectiles and chemical ordnance.

And because records are spotty and incomplete, we don't know exactly where these dumps are.

(Are you following me?)

Many of these bombs are unstable. Just about anything could detonate them - say, an oil rig that's digging deeper than what owners noted on their permit application. So we're leasing offshore drilling rights to oil companies IN A FRICKIN' MINE FIELD. (You'll notice this NY Times piece on the problems of offshore drilling doesn't even mention it.)

Drill, baby, drill!

There is technology available to carefully map underwater hazards like UXO but so far, I haven't found anything that indicates offshore drilling lessees are required to do so. I have to assume that a company will try to protect their investment, but you never know.

But it seems prudent that this fact be part of the public debate on offshore drilling.

Here's some of this information from a paper presented at the 2007 Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

In June of 2006, the MMS (Editor's note: Minerals Management Service) released its Notice to Lessees NTL 2006-G12, which outlined regulations for conducting Ancillary Activities in the Gulf of Mexico OCS Region.

Within this Notice, the MMS states a requirement to comply with protective measures when conducting activities within Ordnance Dumping Zones, as well as Military Warning Zones (“Water Test Areas”) 1 through 5. Figure 1 displays the areas delineated by the MMS as Ordnance Disposal and Military Warning Areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

Additionally, during the writing of this paper, the MMS released NTL 2007-G01, which updated the Shallow Hazards Program requirements. This notice also recognizes ordnance as a manmade hazard that may have an adverse effect on proposed well operations. Although the standard Gulf of Mexico geohazard survey and assessment does not currently involve a specifically defined unexploded ordnance

assessment, prudent owners, operators, and service vendors

should consider it on top of the To-Do list when planning projects in those sensitive areas. This paper presents such an assessment as well as provides additional insights into the problem of unexploded ordnance encountered in deepwater.

Three fundamental problems exist that the standard geohazard assessor faces in dealing with the UXO problem. These are simply limitations in technology, awareness, and expertise.

The solution lies in the utilization of innovative technology,

well thought out and appropriately planned geohazard survey specifications, and most importantly the utilization of unconventional industry experts with the ability to perform adequate and thorough ordnance risk assessments.

Historically, incidents involving ordnance discovered off the

coasts of the United States have been limited primarily to

fishing boats dragging ordnance up in their nets. It is very rare

that a detonation occurs during one of these events although it

has happened. In the early 1980s off the coast of New Jersey,

a fishing boat attempted to haul a WWII torpedo warhead in to

harbor. While at anchor, outside the harbor, and awaiting

Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) responders, a storm emerged. The increased wave and wind activity rattled the warhead against the fishing boat, accidentally detonating it and sinking the fishing boat. Due to instances like these, survey, transportation, and exploration companies venturing into deep waters are becoming more susceptible to encountering UXOs and the distinct possibility of an

accidental detonation.

UXO (unexploded ordnance) dump zones also exist off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Although the Atlantic and Pacific oceans drop off very quickly and oil and gas exploration has been limited along those coasts, current technology for deepwater production is making the possibility of Atlantic and Pacific margin exploration more of a reality. This will only increase the need for UXO awareness and viable solutions to their existence in deepwater.