Welcome to the Results of TransOcean’s Record Safety Year

Posted: April 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Gulf Oil Spill | Tags: , , , , , | 28 Comments

Republicans are busy today with their attempts to dismantle the EPA because, after all, they stop businesses from doing so much business, right?  No reason told businesses back, is there?  Those paragons of job creation and responsibility are just drowning in EPA regulation.   Meanwhile, dead dolphins, drowning in BP oil continue to wash ashore down here in Louisiana. Ask me why I haven’t eaten anything from the Gulf for months now. Aren’t you glad Transocean had the best safety year evah?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that eight months after the Deepwater Horizon oil well was capped, dolphins are washing ashore in east Louisiana with some oil from that spilled on their bodies.

Spokeswoman Kim Amendola says the dolphins had spots of weathered oil.

Blair Mase — NOAA’s Gulf Coast stranding coordinator — emphasizes there’s no way yet to know why the dolphins died. She says the most recent dolphin bearing BP oil was found two weeks ago.

Mase says 15 dolphins with confirmed or suspected oil on their bodies washed ashore since the spill began last April — and eight had oil from that well, which was capped July 15.

I thought we got told that little miracle microbes ate it all.  Get the feeling NOAA is covering up stuff again?

Related News:

Feds forbid scientists probing Gulf dolphin deaths from speaking to media

Dolphins accidentally drowned by scientists trawling in Gulf

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says federal scientists trawling for fish to test for possible damage from last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill accidentally caught and drowned three dolphins.

Spokeswoman Connie Barclay says the pantropical spotted dolphins were caught Wednesday by scientists on the NOAA research ship Pisces, which works out of Pascagoula, Miss.

She said Friday that NOAA is reviewing the incident and will conduct an enforcement investigation.

 

Monday: Hillary, Gerry, and No Limits

Posted: March 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, morning reads, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 72 Comments

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears during a pre-taping of "Face the Nation" to discuss the latest developments in Libya, Syria and the Middle East, in Washington March 26, 2011. (Reuters)

Hey all. Wonk the Vote here filling in with some Monday Reads for Kat while she rests up. Get well soon, Kat! We’re all thinking of you and sending you healing thoughts.

Alright news junkies, let’s get this morning roundup started.

Hillary on the Sunday Shows

  • Yesterday Hillary did a bunch of joint interviews with Robert Gates on the Sunday morning shows, basically doing all the leg work for Obama’s speech tonight. If you missed the Clinton-Gates interviews and would like to judge for yourself, Stacy at SecyClintonBlog has all the transcripts and videos up here.
  • I’ll let the headlines do the summarizing:

NYT: Clinton and Gates Defend Mission in Libya.

Huffpo/AP: Clinton, Gates: Libya Operation Could Last Months.

David Gregory: Clinton and Gates try to clarify U.S. involvement in Libya.

CBS News: Clinton: No military action in Syria for now.

Jake Tapper’s Political Punch: Clinton Cites Rwanda, Bosnia in Rationale for Libya Intervention. From the link:

In an interview with ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper on “This Week,” Clinton said that the United Nations-backed military intervention in Libya “is a watershed moment in international decision making. We learned a lot in the 1990s. We saw what happened in Rwanda. It took a long time in the Balkans, in Kosovo to deal with a tyrant. But I think in what has happened since March 1st, and we’re not even done with the month, demonstrates really remarkable leadership.”

[…]

In an interview on “This Week” in December, 2007, Clinton told George Stephanopoulos that she urged President Clinton to intervene in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide there.Then-Senator Clinton said, “I believe that our government failed. … I think that for me it was one of the most poignant and difficult experiences when I met with Rwandan refugees in Kampala, Uganda, shortly after the genocide ended and I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off who had seen their husbands and children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies, and then when I was able to go to Rwanda and be part of expressing our deep regrets because we didn’t speak out adequately enough and we certainly didn’t take action,” she told Stephanopoulos.

Hillary, on the passing of Gerry:

  • At the end of the Clinton-Gates appearance on Meet the Press, David Gregory played the “Ms. Ferraro, could you push the nuclear button” clip and asked Hillary to react to it. Here’s what Hill had to say (scroll to the end to find this in the transcript at the link):

SECRETARY CLINTON: It just makes me smile because she was an extraordinary pioneer, she was a path-breaker, she was everything that – now the commentators will say an icon, a legend. But she was down to earth, she was just as personal a friend as you could have, she was one of my fiercest defenders and most staunch supporters, she had a great family that she cherished and stood up for in every way.

And she went before many women to a political height that is very, very difficult still, and she navigated it with great grace and grit, and I think we owe her a lot. And I’ll certainly think about her every day, and thanks for asking me to reflect on it briefly, because she was a wonderful person.

“Gerry Ferraro was one of a kind — tough, brilliant, and never afraid to speak her mind or stand up for what she believed in — a New York icon and a true American original. She was a champion for women and children and for the idea that there should be no limits on what every American can achieve. The daughter of an Italian immigrant family, she rose to become the first woman ever nominated to the national ticket by a major political party. She paved the way for a generation of female leaders and put the first cracks in America’s political glass ceiling. She believed passionately that politics and public service was about making a difference for the people she represented as a congresswoman and Ambassador.

For us, Gerry was above all a friend and companion. From the rough-and-tumble of political campaigns to the important work of international diplomacy, we were honored to have her by our side. She was a tireless voice for human rights and helped lead the American delegation to the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Through it all, she was a loyal friend, trusted confidante, and valued colleague.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Gerry’s husband John, her children and grandchildren, and their entire family.”

(Note the use of Hillary’s trademark “No Limits” in the statement. There’s no higher compliment from Hill than that.)

Remembering Gerry from Queens

  • If you haven’t read Stacy’s tribute to Geraldine Ferraro yet, it’s by far my favorite. I was barely three years old when Mondale picked Ferraro. Stacy’s post gave me a sense of “meeting” Ferraro in the way that she was introduced to many of you in 1984.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department

Europe

Gulf of Mexico

Louisiana officials were confounded last weekend when a thin oil slick washed up on around 30 miles of Gulf shoreline. Initial tests sought to determine whether it might have been residual oil left over from last April’s massive Deepwater Horizon spill, but it turns out that yet another offshore drilling accident may have occurred. Tests matched the oil with crude that Houston-based Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners had reported spilling from one of its wells. The latest accident comes at a bad time for federal regulators, who have just approved four new permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf — not to mention Gulf fishermen and residents.

MENA region

First, from NY Mag’s roundup… Five Men [allegedly] Arrested in Connection to Libyan Rape Allegations.

LA Times… Libyan woman who alleged rape remains missing:

The whereabouts of a woman who was taken away by security officials while making allegations of rape to Western journalists are unknown. A government official says she is a prostitute and that an inquiry is underway.

Nicholas Kristof, via twitter:

The heroic Libyan woman #EmanalObeidi turns out to be a law graduate, age 29, seized at checkpoint http://bit.ly/fNp4Nf

  • Speaking of Nick Kristof, he has an important piece out about the battle for human rights in Egypt…what Kristof calls Freedom’s Painful Price. He calls attention to the torture, humiliation, and degradation that the women protesters of Egypt are facing…the horrifying circumstance of virginity tests and calling women prostitutes to scare them into silence and submission. Kristof concludes:

The lesson may be that revolution is not a moment but a process, a gritty contest of wills that unfolds painstakingly long after the celebrations have died and the television lights have dimmed.

Previewing Obama’s Week-Late, Leadership-Short Speech Tonight

The speech from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., will be his first major attempt to explain his thinking.

He offered a preview in his weekly address on Saturday, saying that the U.S. should not and cannot intervene every time there is a crisis somewhere in the world.

But Obama said, “When someone like Gadhafi threatens a bloodbath that could destabilize an entire region, and when the international community is prepared to come together to save many thousands of lives — then it’s in our national interest to act.”

President Obama plans a Monday evening address with an increasingly common goal, to sell the American public on an increasingly unpopular war. But while those previous speeches were about the decade-long Afghan War, the Monday speech will be about the new war in Libya.

[…]

President Obama’s effort to sell the American public on support for a third major war will be complicated by admissions from top officials that the new war isn’t even a vital American interest in their eyes.

So what’s on your blogging list today?

Gulf Update

Posted: May 20, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Comments Off on Gulf Update

I went out last night to Jack Dempsey’s Seafood Restaurant. It’s my local seafood place that’s just down the street from me. Since I live between the Coast Guard Base and the east bank portion of a Marine Base and the ninth ward is the Gateway to the Coastal parishes, I get to hear a lot about what’s going on with the Gulf Spill. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it’s not good. I asked about the oyster plate and there were basically no oysters. I had to settle for the shrimp platter where the shrimp were much smaller than I usually see on plates this time of year. At least there are still some around.

Wednesday night is pretty quiet so it wasn’t hard to get every one in the room to start opening up on the Gulf Spill. A good portion of the folks that eat and work at Jack Dempsey’s have that tell-tell Chalmette accent so you know that some one in there has family that makes a living on a fishing or shrimping boat. You could tell they’re all worried about their livelihoods even if they’re not on the boats any more. Everything from here east is about seafood and the Gulf. I kid you not.

We also decided that Governor Bobby Jindal looks like hell. One of the waitresses wondered if that was intentional because former Mayor Ray Nagin got so much criticism for his vanity aboard AF1 during Hurricane Katrina. Jindal looks like he’s been forgoing his little dab will do ya. He’s also obviously tired. He hasn’t slowed down when giving pressers, however. He still talks faster than any one can follow.

The first topic that came up were the complaints that BP was basically paying the small fishing business less than minimum wage for their boats and their services. This is prime shrimp season so they’re losing a lot more than just a day’s work. It’s also hurting the charter boats that take tourists out for a day’s fishing. Those boat owners and a lot of my neighbors with fishing camps in the area are complaining about their favorite weekend of the year. That’s when they all climb into a boat and compete in the the Grand Isle Tarpon Rodeo. The father-in-law of my neighbor across the street bought a brand new boat for the occasion and now it’s sitting in his garage indefinitely. Fishing Rodeos are better attended that mass in the coastal parishes.

The Grand Isle Tarpon Rodeo is the oldest fishing tournament in the country and was founded in 1928.

Raymond Stouder, a Metairie native who won the Bluefish catch category last year, said the event means more to him than the competition.

“Every year we try to get a bunch of us to go down there together, ” Stouder said. “It’s more than just fishing.”

Stouder, who said he tries to fish at least a couple of times a week, said it would be terrible for the state to lose any of its fishing rodeos this year.

“It’s going to be a bad situation, especially for (the) economy down there, ” Stouder said.

If canceled, the Grand Isle Rodeo will join a list of other major fishing rodeos in South Louisiana to be canceled.

The Golden Meadow-Fourchon International Tarpon Rodeo in Port Fourchon has already been canceled because of the spill. That rodeo was scheduled for July 1-3. Jesuit High School’s annual fishing rodeo, scheduled for June 25-26, has also been canceled.

This is just the beginning of how much life is going to change around here. We’re also getting reports that some Fisherman working in the Gulf are reporting they are ill.

One fisherman said he felt like he was going to die over the weekend.”I’ve been coughing up stuff,” Gary Burris said. “Your lungs fill up.”Burris, a longtime fisherman who has worked across the Gulf Coast, said he woke up Sunday night feeling drugged and disoriented.”It was like sniffing gasoline or something, and my ears are still popping,” Burris said. “I’m coughing up stuff. I feel real weak, tingling feelings.”Marine toxicologist Riki Ott said the chemicals used by BP can wreak havoc on a person’s body and even lead to death.”The volatile, organic carbons, they act like a narcotic on the brain,” Ott said. “At high concentrations, what we learned in Exxon Valdez from carcasses of harbor seals and sea otters, it actually fried the brain, (and there were) brain lesions.”

Earlier today, the EPA has ordered BP to use a less toxic dispersant. I posted earlier about the problems seen with Corexit. Finally, the information on it is getting to other people. Here’s some of the latest information on that. EPA head Lisa Jackson spoke about the problems.

Jackson used less glowing language, calling the dispersant “the lesser of two environmental outcomes no one wants to have to deal with. But we also need to be able to answer questions about what’s out there and what’s available for use,” she said Tuesday after a Senate environment committee hearing.

In her testimony, Jackson said the long-term effects of the dispersants on aquatic life are still unknown, and said the EPA would work to ensure that “the dispersants that are used are as non-toxic as possible.”

The agency has been working with manufacturers, BP and with others to get less toxic dispersants to the response site as quickly as possible, Jackson said.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of a House global warming committee, praised Jackson for acting swiftly to address concerns that the dispersant BP chose to use is more toxic than other available chemicals.

“The effect of long-term use of dispersants on the marine ecosystem has not been extensively studied, and we need to act with the utmost of caution,” Markey said.

After hearing complaints from scientists that they were not getting enough information on the spill, the Administration compelled BP to broadcast the gusher and information concerning the conditions in the Gulf on the Web. The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has the live video feed. Much of this is provided by our Coast Guard.

If you didn’t get a chance to check out the pictures that were taken at Pass a Loutre by LAGOHSEP and Governor Bobby Jindal’s staff yesterday, please go look. I think you’ll see how bad things are getting down here just from the two I’ve put below. I’m still planning on going down there soon.

Gulf Gusher Update

Posted: May 15, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Gulf Oil Spill | Tags: , , | Comments Off on Gulf Gusher Update

It was very stormy today and I am still grading finals but I managed to catch a few things on the local news that show the level of frustration down here with BP and the response to the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf. There’s so much speculation as to how desperate the situation will be that every one wants more information and it doesn’t appear very forthcoming.

A group of fishermen got angry at officials at a meeting in the two hard hit parishes here. That would be Plaquemines and St. Bernard. Both were slammed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and haven’t really recovered to any place you’d call normal. Most of the folks that have stayed there have livelihoods that depend on the gulf including shrimpers and folks that live on commercial and sport fishing. These families are about at the end of their ropes and most have been in the area and in the business for generations. It’s more than just a living to them.

The fishermen said they feel like their livelihood is being threatened and they’re being punished twice — first by the spill and now by their parish and BP.

“We have to suffer because of their damn mistakes,” said Suzanna Guidroz, who works as a deckhand. “They should have had a backup plan for this oil spill before it even happened. It should have been in the works years ago.”

More of the frustration stemmed from the pay that captains and deckhands are being offered, which is far less than they’re used to making.

“I dropped out of seventh grade to do this,” fisherman Michael Thonn said. “I’ve been doing this my whole life, since I was a kid. It’s all I know. How am I supposed to pay my bills? I got family to take care of. I got kids.”

“These fishermen make a lot more than $17 an hour and $250 a day for their boat,” Guidroz said. “They could not compare to what these guys are making out there right now.”

Meanwhile, confusion over the testimony at last week’s congressional hearing has caused Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to fire off a letter to the CEO of BP. Since no one was claiming any responsibility, she felt the urge to get a little clarification.

The letter specifically mentions an interview with Reuters on April 30 in which BP CEO Dr. Anthony Hayword said, “We are taking full responsibility for the spill and we will clean it up, and where people can present legitimate claims for damages we will honor them. We are going to be very, very aggressive in all of that.”

As recent as May 11, Lamar McKay, the chairman and president of BP America, was reported as making similar claims before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In his testimony, Napolitano’s letter said that McKay agreed that BP will pay all claims, even if they exceed what he described as an “irrelevant” statutory cap of $75 million per incident.

If this winds up in court ala the Exxon Valdez and the AMOCO Cadiz, people will most likely be dead before they have hope of recovering any of the damages. The Napolitano letter followed up the White House Rose Garden speech where TOTUS instructed POTUS to be very angry. I think this means the buck is going to stop on the back of those of us that live on the Gulf right now. Believe me, the pain will spread too. If this thing gets up into the Mississippi, there is no telling what will happen. That’s a major artery for commerce as well as the source of a lot of drinking water. The President seems to think his administration’s response has been okey dokey.

With the Gulf spill, he said, the response was “comprehensive and fast” and the Coast Guard and Interior Department were on the scene almost immediately.

Yeah. That was the same group that pulled us off of roofs during Hurricane Katrina. I’m beginning to trust the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries over just about any body else in the country, frankly. How about sending us a few brilliant engineers to figure out how to plug up the gusher?

Meanwhile, back to the poor folks in Chalmette and to the rest of us that can’t live without our Shrimp Po’ Boys.

All of the waters directly affected by the spill remained closed to commercial and recreational fishing, so no seafood from the region is at risk of oil contamination.

It is almost certain, however, that the life cycle of shrimp in the Gulf will be affected by the spill. Shrimp reproduce and lay their eggs in the Gulf, which is now largely covered in dispersed and floating oil, and then move inshore to the estuaries, which are are also at risk.

I think we’re all kinda tired of making history down here.

You can consider this an open thread, but I have to tell you, there’s not much on my mind right now but how bad this is going to be.