Inquiry by BP Finds a ‘Sequence of Failures’ Involving Several Companies Led to Oil Spill

The oil giant BP said Wednesday in an internal report that
multiple companies and work teams contributed to the Gulf of
Mexico spill that fouled waters and shorelines for months.

In its 193-page report posted on its Web site Wednesday, BP
described the incident as an accident that arose from a
complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human
judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and
team interfaces.

The report was generated by a BP team led by Mark Bly, the
company’s head of safety and operations.

The report is far from the final word on possible causes of
the explosion, as several divisions of the federal
government, including the Justice Department, Coast Guard and
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and
Enforcement, are also investigating.

Yes we all know the Democrats are doomed, DOOMED! The writing’s on the hand, the fat Al Gore lady has sung, turn out the liiiiights the paaartyyy’s, ooooveeeer!

Reel Amurkkka’s refudiation of the Democratic party is now complete. You can all go home and never bother to show your faces in a voting booth again for the havoc you have wrought on the noble designs of our Founding Paters Familii!

Without further ado, I’d like to formally introduce you to our Re-Founding, er..Fathers?:

President Issa	President Paul	President Angle	President Miller
President Brewer	President Bachmann	President O'Donnell (who!?)	Supreme Chancellor Boehner

Yeehawwww! If that doesn’t make you want to scream out, CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION!!! in your sleep for the next 55 nights, I don’t know what will.

This is no time for disarray. $50 billion for infrastructure and jobs is on the table with the promise of more to come! Kick Obama and the Dems in the ass! Get ‘em in line! MakeThemDoIt!™ Don’t forget about 10.2.10! Don’t forget to vote! And if you’re threatening to hold that vote back, make those fuckers sweat ’til the final hour then vote anyway!

What we knew, even then, was that these years would be some of the most difficult in our history. And then, two weeks later, the bottom fell out of the economy. Middle-class families suddenly found themselves swept up in the worst recession in our lifetimes.

So the problems facing working families are nothing new. But they are more serious than ever. And that makes our cause more urgent than ever. For generations, it was the great American middle class that made our economy the envy of the world. It’s got to be that way again.

It was folks like you, after all, who forged that middle class. It was working men and women who made the twentieth century the American century. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today – the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans, those cornerstones of middle class security that all bear the union label.

And it was that greatest of generations that built America into the greatest force for prosperity, opportunity and freedom the world has ever known. Americans like my grandfather, who went off to war just boys, returned home men, and traded one uniform and set of responsibilities for another. Americans like my grandmother, who rolled up their sleeves and worked in factories on the home front. When the war was over, they studied under the GI Bill; bought homes under the FHA; raised families buttressed by good jobs that paid good wages with good benefits.

And he said:

But on this Labor Day, there are two things I want you to know, Milwaukee. Number one: I’m going to keep fighting, every single day, to turn this economy around; to put our people back to work; to renew the American Dream for your families and for future generations.

Number two – and this I believe with every fiber of my being: America cannot have a strong, growing economy without a strong, growing middle class, and the chance for everybody, no matter how humble their beginnings, to join that middle class. A middle class built on the idea that if you work hard and live up to your responsibilities, you can get ahead – and enjoy some basic guarantees in life. A good job that pays a good wage. Health care that’ll be there when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you’re not rich. An education that’ll give our kids a better life than we had. These are simple ideas. American ideas.

To steal a line from our old friend, Ted Kennedy: what is it about working men and women that they find so offensive?

Obama also brings up what the opposition party is doing, nothing:

But there are some folks in Washington who see things differently. When it comes to just about everything we’ve done to strengthen the middle class and rebuild our economy, almost every Republican in Congress said no. Even where we usually agree, they say no. They think it’s better to score political points before an election than actually solve problems. So they said no to help for small businesses. No to middle-class tax cuts. No to unemployment insurance. No to clean energy jobs. No to making college affordable. No to reforming Wall Street. Even as we speak, these guys are saying no to cutting more taxes for small business owners. I mean, come on! Remember when our campaign slogan was “Yes We Can?” These guys are running on “No, We Can’t,” and proud of it. Really inspiring, huh?

What also was reported yesterday are two things Obama will try to push through Congress to help the economy:

A combative President Barack Obama rolled out a long-term jobs program Monday that would exceed $50 billion to rebuild roads, railways and runways, and coupled it with a blunt campaign-season assault on Republicans for causing Americans’ hard economic times.

Under mounting pressure to intensify his focus on the economy ahead of the midterm elections, President Obama will call for a $100 billion business tax credit this week, using a speech in Cleveland on Wednesday to launch what administration officials said was a new policy push.

Here’s what bothers me. $50 Billion for infrastructure repairs and job creation. That’s great! But double that amount $100 Billion Tax Credit to Big Businesses that are sitting on their profits, for R&D? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Here’s another thing that really bothers me and shows that people are really not paying attention. From Plum Line:

The GOP game plan: Avoid discussing policy and only attack? So says Karen Tumulty, who offers up this droll reporting:

In coming weeks, House Republican leader John A. Boehner, the speaker in waiting, plans to unveil a blueprint of what his party would do if it regains a majority. But it is not clear whether that message will have much impact, or even whether Republican candidates will want to line up behind it. Many GOP campaign consultants are advising their candidates simply to stay on the attack and avoid getting tripped up by deep discussions of issues and policy.

Voters have very short memories: ABC’s Gary Langer reads the poll data and concludes that the economy has wrecked public confidence in the federal government.

What are your thoughts?

Call (614-556-4486 or Skype bluerootsradio for live talk

Special guests tonight are Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll from New Left Media

Panelists:
Michele
Steve
Bibi Mimi
Sandy
60th Street
Cent
toniD
Kate Anne
Craig
Rick Staggenborg
Chris

Frequent callers and members of the panel
Zeek
Jmach1P
Mire
Sunny Jim

Paul Krugman gives a great history lesson in his article: 1938 in 2010

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

Read the whole article here

——
Obama to Call for 50 Billion in Spending for Infrastructure “

President Obama is expected on Monday to call for long-term investments in the nation’s roads, railways and airports, in an effort to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

Hope you all have a great day because now the campaign starts and it’s going to be a rough ride til November!

CARTOON OF THE DAY:

In an Age of Voices, Moving Beyond the Facts
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

WHAT some call opinion, others call interpretive journalism — a label as opaque as the practice. Call it what you will, nothing has generated more reader indignation in the past few weeks than when it has appeared on a news page.

The morphing of news has stuck in some readers’ craw for a long time, and all three of The Times’s previous public editors dealt with the issue. But I believe the phenomenon is accelerating and has the potential to redefine the newspaper.

It’s not that editors have decided to abandon the traditional virtues of objective journalism. But the Times news pages increasingly are home to “voices,” not merely reportage, as editors commission work bearing the author’s distinctive point of view. And it is happening during the clamor of the Internet age, when such voices are the only ones that seem to rise above the din.

“How could anyone possibly think this piece belonged in a news section?” asked one reader, Donald Johnson, about a “Political Times” column by Matt Bai.

Another reader, Vicky Bollenbacher of Boulder, Colo., had the same concern about a news-page column in Business Day. “You should move such pieces clearly to your opinion section, or exercise a great deal more editorial muscle to clean pieces like his up from being advocacy pieces,” she said.

And David Hooper, a San Francisco reader responding to a column in the A section by Jonathan Weber, said, “In my opinion, your article was, in fact, an Op-Ed piece.”

Unhappy readers, all — reacting to a change that is unsettling to readers and journalists alike, according to Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “These norms are shifting almost invisibly beneath the seat of journalists,” Mr. Rosenstiel said. “It is even harder for audiences … to recognize the cues and the hand gestures that indicate whether a story is one kind of story or another.”

The trend has been decades in the making, but Mr. Rosenstiel believes the online medium is an accelerant in the process: “I think we are seeing the beginning … of a new hybrid style of writing which is a blend of opinion and news.”

When I asked Matt Bai about his Aug. 12 “Political Times” column on Representative Paul Ryan — the one Mr. Johnson criticized — he said: “I guess my column is part of a broader effort to take some chances in the paper and explore different formats for a new era. I think that represents a great and exciting trend for the paper; none of us can afford to think in old rubrics for new generations of readers.”

Bai’s editor, Richard Stevenson, the deputy Washington bureau chief, elaborated on how The Times is navigating the new norms. “We are still exploring how much of a voice you can have … what kinds of conclusions you can draw when it comes to politics,” he said.

A news-page column like “Political Times” carries the “freedom to reach a reported conclusion,” he said. Not to “throw opinion around,” but to “express in a restrained and fact-bound way a conclusion about something.”

Mr. Stevenson’s careful language draws a line between a Times news-page column and the kind of material one looks for on the Op-Ed page. I acknowledge the distinction in theory but think it is a very fine line, one that is easy to miss and easy to transgress. And one that readers often can’t see.

Read More

I don’t like the straight news mixed with opinion. I want straight, fact based news. The opinion pieces should be labeled as such. But I might be a dinosaur in my thinking on this. What do you think?

The Nasa team also offered to help design a rescue capsule

4 September 2010 Last updated at 05:34 ET

Nasa team advise Chile miners to start exercise regime

Scientists from the US space agency Nasa have advised the trapped Chilean miners to regulate their day and night sleep patterns.

A team of four visiting experts said the men should boost their Vitamin D intake and phase in an exercise program as their nutrition improves.

The 33 miners have been stuck in a tunnel 2,300ft (700m) below the ground for nearly a month after a rock fall.

They must now wait two to four months for engineers to drill an escape shaft.

Chile’s government invited the Nasa team to the San Jose gold and copper mine to offer tips for helping the men keep physically and mentally healthy while they wait to be rescued.

Exercise regime

“One of the things that’s being recommended is that there be one place, a community area, which is always lighted,” said Al Holland, a Nasa psychologist, speaking at a press conference outside the mine.

Continue at BBC News

ONE NATION
IS ABOUT REORDERING OUR NATION’S PRIORITIES TO INVEST IN OUR MOST VALUABLE RESOURCE
— OUR PEOPLE.

Location: Washington, D.C.

On Saturday, October 2, 2010, hundreds of thousands of Americans from across the country will gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate our re-commitment to change. The One Nation March will feature human and civil rights leaders, labor leaders, environmental and peace activists, faith leaders, celebrities and sports figures – all marching together to help Put America Back to Work and to Pull America Back Together. And to help reorder our national priorities so that investments in people come first.

ONE NATION seeks to transcend our superficial differences and bring us together in a common quest for equal opportunity and justice for all.

ONE NATION HAS A NEW STORY TO TELL AND WE WANT YOU TO BE A PART OF IT.

This movement includes human and civil rights organizations, unions and trade associations, nonprofit organizations, youth and student groups, religious and other faith groups, educational, peace, environmental, and ethnic associations, and any other groups and individuals who are committed to pulling our country back together now. As of late August 2010, there are more than 150 ONWT organizational partners and tens of thousands of individuals.

See a list of endorsing organizations here. Some examples:

NAACP

Communications Workers of America (CWA)

AFL-CIO

National Council of La Raza

CodePink

Watch here:

UPDATE: Ed Schultz of MSNBC’s the ED Show has been invited to speak at this rally. He announced it on his show just now and will be talking about it until the event. We need to get other Media involved as well.

Here, have at it....

***

Another Rig Explosion off Louisiana
Just now from MSNBC- more news on this when available!

***

If News Breaks, there will be a new topper!
toniD

Cartoon of the day, by Lalo Alcaraz:

60th sez…

The Panera posts got me hungry for panini-styled, so I busted out the George Foreman countertop grill and put some multigrain bread brushed with olive oil with sliced turkey and Havarti cheese in it.

Then I fried an egg and two bacon strips in the iron skillet, sliced some tomato, red onion, escarole,
added mustard, mayo, horseradish, Tobasco, salt, pepper, combined everything in the sandwich and served it with a side of Tabasco’d and salt/pepper’d avocado slices…and NOM!

Did I forget the carrot/apple/cran-raspberry juice and giant cuppa French roast? That, too.

Put that in yer topper!

..and so I did!

Adam Serwer of the American Prospect, blogging at Plum Line writes:

The message the White House wants you to take away from President Obama’s Iraq speech last night is that the president is respectful and grateful for the troops’ sacrifice. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to view this speech through an ideological prism — while the president made sure to remind everyone that he kept his campaign promise to end the war, most of the speech was focused on honoring those who fought it.

That’s appropriate. While much of the public discourse recently has focused on whether the president has done enough to inspire or placate his base, the end of combat operations in Iraq was not the right time to emphasize that Iraq was a “dumb war” that he opposed from the beginning. It was not a time to say I told you so.

Conversely, while conservatives are busy angrily denouncing the president for not giving more credit to Bush for implementing the surge — by which they mean not acknowledging that conservatives were right — that wouldn’t have been appropriate either. This speech was about the commitment of those who actually served, not the better part of valor displayed by those who sat in front of their keyboards and hammered out empirical or ideological arguments for or against the war.

Steve Benen of Washington Monthly writes:

It reminded me of a mini State of the Union, balancing out talk of foreign and domestic policy. That probably wasn’t widely expected in this Oval Office address — at least not by me — but it’s an acknowledgement of the larger political environment.

The Political Cartoon on this subject is from Mike Luckovich:

Today Obama meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to have another go at Mid East Peace. He’s not the first President to attempt this and may not be the last. I sincerely wish him luck with this since yesterday 4 Israelis Killed In West Bank; Hamas Claims Responsibility and West Bank settlers have pledged to resume building from 6pm tonight, in defiance of the Israeli government’s freeze on construction and in direct response to last night’s killing of four people by Hamas gunmen.

Sam Stein at Huffington Post writes:

The administration has insisted that getting the two parties to attend the first direct talks in more than 18 months is a major victory in its own right. The parameters of the negotiations are relatively undefined, however, and may be largely negotiable. Failed past talks may serve as a basis for a future agreement, but there is no set framework — and the ambiguity is deliberate.

“What we’ve tried to do is to avoid a slavish adherence to the past while trying to learn what might have been improved in the past, what worked, what didn’t work,” Special Envoy for Middle East Peace Senator George Mitchell told reporters on Tuesday. “And so we have avoided deliberately any specific label or identification that this is a continuation of process A or B or C.”

Obama will speak soon about this meeting and later there will be a newser with Netanyahu and Abbas.

What are your thoughts about Obama’s Oval Office speech last night and what do you think about this meeting today re Mid East Peace?