j_b

You heard it on Glenn Beck's show, didn't you. Your logic is just as terrible.

"small government" with a big probe up your ass, of course.

still, no surprise and no call for self regulation of industry from the "small government" nitwits, today.

We don't need oil addiction to make climbing gear. Go away nasty troll.

Of course, we won't hear the nitwits talk about industry self-regulation today, they'd rather talk about the "personal responsibility" of joe average in rejecting the oil culture forced down his throat.

It looks like the closet bigots are closing ranks with the not so closeted bigots in this thread. Just Remember that they have a long history of blaming immigrants for the results of the regressive policies they cheered on for years. Xenophobic racists have done the same throughout history with disastrous results.

Aaaah, the "free market" needs no stinkin regulations ... Sex, Lies and Oil Spills by RFKennedy jr. 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 devise 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 Dick 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. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html

troll

First, you know nothing of my carbon footprint, so take your ad-hominem attacks and shove them where the sun doesn't shine. ANd second, i am clearly not responsible for people like you refusing the financing of public transit or doing away with urban sprawl or the all consumerist model. I am not responsible either for your backing up of the automotive industry when they fought off stringent fuel economy over the last several decades. I am not responsible either for your type pushing offshore drilling, or foreign wars to control our oil under their sand, etc .. All of these policies are yours. You are responsible for these dead-ender policies. I am not.

Don't worry about a thing! The invisible hand of the free market is certain to clean it all up. It's axiomatic.

"purity" by opposition to being "pragmatic", like in pushing offshore drilling, Klean coal and the moribund nuclear industry. Isn't it better known as triangulation?

who's talking about purity? reform coming from where? wth are you blabbering about?

For at least 20 years environmentalists have been saying that energy efficiency and conservation were a significant part of the transition to a new energy policy based on renewables, and now, the corner of the room that dragged its feet the entire time talks to us about personal responsibility?

Even if I were individually part of the problem, the only issue we are discussing right now is how the policies you advocate help or compound the problem.

you say that it's preferable now but it isn't that corporate tools like you ever demand clamping down on employers of illegal aliens. Instead you'd much rather deny needed social services to people who actually work in this country, illegals or not. Your aren't fooling anybody.

The object of this campaign is to blame brown people for the disastrous policies promoted by the racists themselves, not to promote immigration reform.

NOAA Warned Interior It Was Underestimating Threat Of Serious Spill by Dan Froomkin National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration officials last fall warned the Department of Interior, which regulates offshore oil drilling, that it was dramatically underestimating the frequency of offshore oil spills and was dangerously understating the risk and impacts a major spill would have on coastal residents. NOAA is the nation's lead ocean resource agency, and the warnings came in its response to a draft of the Obama Administration's offshore oil drilling plans. The comments were Web-published in October by the whistle-blowing group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). But NOAA's views were largely brushed aside as Obama went ahead and announced on March 31 that he would open vast swaths of American coastal waters to offshore drilling -- a plan now very much in doubt as a blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico spews out an estimated 200,000 gallons of oil daily, for the 13th straight day. [..] Jeff Ruch, the head of the public-employee whistleblowing group, said that as in many other regulatory agencies, Obama political appointees in the Interior Department's notoriously troubled Minerals Management Service (MMS) have not taken enough steps to reverse the anti-environmental and anti-science policies of the Bush years. "For the most part, the Obama team is still the Bush team," Ruch told HuffPost, noting that beyond a thin layer of political appointees, offices like MMS are run by managers who were "promoted during the Bush years -- In many instances, promoted for basically violating the law. And from what we can tell, their conduct hasn't changed." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/03/noaa-warned-interior-was_n_561615.html

He is blaming it on the people who have little choice but drive cars since nitwits like him are usually against public transit and fuel economy, and against investing in renewable energy, while he is for expansion of offshore drilling, nuclear plants even the private sector won't pay for, and fighting wars we can't afford, like the other disastrous dino policies we have heard shill for over the years.

Yeah, we hate it so much we want to secure the borders and encourage legal immigration. Maybe even reduce a little crime in the US caused by Illegal aliens in the process. Gosh, can you believe all the hate? We know exactly the type of people who run up anti illegal immigrant propaganda during economic hard times. Some of them even advocate that police forces should go indiscriminately after people who look like they are immigrants. These people are usually racist.

once more your advocacy of dead-ender policies that destroy our economy and our environment show that you know nothing of sensible policies for our future and this is all you have got to reply?

Just imagine, the fuckwits destroy the environment with their dead-enders policies, but we are "malcontent". ROTFL

i don't own a vw tdi or eat organic industrial food, moron.

you don't know shit about me, jackass.

As if most people had a choice of reasonable public transit or could avoid the 24/7 consumerist commercial propaganda of the corporate media.

look at the one who called for expanding offshore drilling blame the victims of his policies.