Later On

And pretty much for the same reason the thing exploded: thawing methane hydrates. Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

Efforts to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher with a 100-ton, four-story concrete-and-steel box have failed, BP officials announced. The giant box, known as a cofferdam, was lowered onto the leaking wellhead yesterday, with the intent of pumping the leaking oil up a pipe to the sea surface a mile above. However, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles announced in a press briefing this afternoon that the dome effort failed. After the cofferdam was lowered onto the leak site, a slurry of methane crystals formed on the inside of the dome’s surface, making it buoyant and clogging the outtake at the dome’s roof.

The giant box has been moved 200 meters from the disaster site, and is sitting on the sea bed. BP had anticipated that methane hydrates could form within the pipework from the dome to the surface, but not within the dome itself, especially at such a rapid rate.

Suttles, clearly chastened by this setback, had a much less confident tone about containing the leak than he had at previous press conferences, such as the one attended on Tuesday by the Wonk Room when he announced the cofferdam was being shipped out to the disaster site. “It’s very difficult to say whether solutions will work,” he admitted.

The methane hydrates — natural gas that under the extreme pressure and low temperatures of the ocean floor is in a semi-frozen state — have also been implicated in the oil rig explosion, according to rig worker testimony acquired by the Associated Press. The liberal blog FireDogLake was the first media source to discuss the role of hydrates, noting a presentation from November, 2009 by Halliburton, who was responsible for cementing the Deepwater Horizon well, that warned of blowouts caused by hydrate destabilization:

Destabilization of hydrates during cementing and production in deepwater environments is a challenge to the safety and economics.

Suttles also admitted that David Rainey, BP’s VP for Gulf of Mexico exploration, was on the rig celebrating its safety record when it blew up. Although 11 workers were killed, Rainey and the other BP employees on the rig safely escaped the inferno.

Also during the briefing, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry was unusually optimistic about the preparations being made for the oil that is just now reaching the shores of Louisiana, but looms closer to the entire Gulf Coast as each day passes: “We’re ready for it.”

I’ve got to make this.

Apparently, they are evaluating that raid. Matt Pearce reports in the Missourian:

The fatal shooting of a dog during a Columbia Police SWAT team raid in February has prompted the department to review its policies, Chief Ken Burton said at a news conference Thursday.

SWAT officers raided the home of Jonathan Whitworth, the dog’s owner, eight days after securing the search warrant on suspicion that Whitworth was dealing marijuana, Burton said.  The officers encountered a pit bull and a Welsh corgi when they burst through the door of Whitworth’s home at 1501 Kinloch Court in southwest Columbia. They fatally shot the pit bull and wounded the corgi. Whitworth’s wife and child were also in the home when the police executed the raid, according to a report in the Columbia Tribune.

Whitworth pleaded guilty on April 20 to a misdemeanor charge of unlawful use of drug paraphernalia and was fined $300.

As Mayor Bob McDavid stood next to him, Burton said that the warrant to search Whitworth’s home was "stale" and that he has changed department policy to conduct raids immediately after a search warrant is obtained. Burton said the department moved slowly in Whitworth’s case because the SWAT team is made up of part-time members who hold other jobs within the department.

Though an internal department review is ongoing, Burton said the pit bull was acting aggressively. He guardedly defended the actions of the officers involved, whom he declined to name.

"We’re getting death threats from literally all over the world," Burton said.

A video of the incident (seen above) had received about 168,000 views on YouTube as of 1:30 p.m. Thursday. Information contained in the caption of the video has not been verified by the Missourian.

And since he’s technologically knowledgeable, it’s worth reading how it happened.

Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.com:

A Russian government report, which corroborated allegations that Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations in 1980, was apparently kept from the Democratic chairman of a congressional task force that investigated the charges a dozen years later.

Lee Hamilton, then a congressman from Indiana in charge of the task force, told me in a recent interview, “I don’t recall seeing it,” although he was the one who had requested Moscow’s cooperation in the first place and the extraordinary Russian report was addressed to him.

The Russian report, which was dropped off at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Jan. 11, 1993, contradicted the task force’s findings – which were released two days later – of “no credible evidence” showing that Republicans contacted Iranian intermediaries behind President Carter’s back regarding 52 American hostages held by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government, the so-called October Surprise case.

I was surprised by Hamilton’s unfamiliarity with the Russian report, so I e-mailed him a PDF copy. I then contacted the task force’s former chief counsel, attorney Lawrence Barcella, who acknowledged in an e-mail that he doesn’t “recall whether I showed [Hamilton] the Russian report or not.”

In other words, the Russian report – possibly representing Moscow’s first post-Cold War collaboration with the United States on an intelligence mystery – was not only kept from the American public but apparently from the chairman of the task force responsible for the investigation.

The revelation further suggests that the congressional investigation was shoddy and incomplete, thus reopening the question of whether Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 was, in part, set in motion by a dirty trick that extended the 444-day captivity of the hostages who were freed immediately after Reagan was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 1981.

The coincidence between Reagan’s inauguration and the hostage release was curious to some but served mostly to establish in the minds of Americans that Reagan was a tough leader who instilled fear in U.S. adversaries. However, if the timing actually resulted from a clandestine arms-for-hostage deal, it would mean that Reagan’s presidency began with an act of deception, as well as an act of treachery.

The Russian report also implicates other prominent Republicans in the Iranian contacts, including the late William Casey (who was Reagan’s campaign director in 1980), George H.W. Bush (who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate), and Robert Gates (who in 1980 had been a CIA officer on the National Security Council before becoming executive assistant to Carter’s CIA Director Stansfield Turner).

Casey, who served as Reagan’s first CIA director, died in 1987 before the 1980 allegations came under scrutiny. Bush, who was President during the task force’s 1992 inquiry, angrily denied the accusations at two news conferences but was never questioned under oath. Gates, who was CIA director in 1992 and is now President Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary, also has brushed off the suspicions.

Read the rest of this entry »

A terrible disease of genetic origin. D.T. Max in the National Geographic:

Cheryl Dinges is a 29-year-old Army sergeant from St. Louis. Her job is to train soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. Specializing in Brazilian jujitsu, Dinges says she is one of the few women in the Army certified at level 2 combat. Level 2 involves a lot of training with two attackers on one, she explains, with the hope of "you being the one guy getting out alive."

Dinges may face an even harder fight in the years ahead. She belongs to a family carrying the gene for fatal familial insomnia. The main symptom of FFI, as the disease is often called, is the inability to sleep. First the ability to nap disappears, then the ability to get a full night’s sleep, until the patient cannot sleep at all. The syndrome usually strikes when the sufferer is in his or her 50s, ordinarily lasts about a year, and, as the name indicates, always ends in death. Dinges has declined to be tested for the gene. "I was afraid that if I knew that this was something I had, I would not try as hard in life. I would allow myself to give up."

FFI is an awful disease, made even worse by the fact that we know so little about how it works. After years of study, researchers have figured out that in a patient with FFI, malformed proteins called prions attack the sufferer’s thalamus, a structure deep in the brain, and that a damaged thalamus interferes with sleep. But they don’t know why this happens, or how to stop it, or ease its brutal symptoms. Before FFI was investigated, most researchers didn’t even know the thalamus had anything to do with sleep. FFI is exceedingly rare, known in only 40 families worldwide. But in one respect, it’s a lot like the less serious kinds of insomnia plaguing millions of people today: It’s pretty much a mystery.

If we don’t know why we can’t sleep, it’s in part because we don’t really know why we need to sleep in the first place. We know we miss it if we don’t have it. And we know that no matter how much we try to resist it, sleep conquers us in the end. We know that seven to nine hours after giving in to sleep, most of us are ready to get up again, and 15 to 17 hours after that we are tired once more. We have known for 50 years that we divide our slumber between periods of deep-wave sleep and what is called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when the brain is as active as when we’re awake, but our voluntary muscles are paralyzed. We know that all mammals and birds sleep. A dolphin sleeps with half its brain awake so it can remain aware of its underwater environment. When mallard ducks sleep in a line, the two outermost birds are able to keep half of their brains alert and one eye open to guard against predators. Fish, reptiles, and insects all experience some kind of repose too.

All this downtime comes at a price. An animal must lie still for a great stretch of time, during which it is easy prey for predators. What can possibly be the payback for such risk? "If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function," the renowned sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen once said, "it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made." …

Continue reading.

I don’t know why Obama is favoring Kagan when he has an excellent alternative in Diane Wood, a superb choice who presents none of the problems that Kagan does. OTOH, Kagan apparently favors a very powerful (imperial, may I say?) Executive, which seems to fit with Obama’s ideas (as shown in his keeping the Bush-Cheney structure on terrorism intact, including all the civil liberties abuses, and has even extended them to include the President’s ability to call for assassinations of American citizens without due process—a breathtaking innovation in American government. So he undoubtedly wants someone who responds to the call of jackboots.

Greenwald sums up what we know about Kagan:

I’ve laid out my case against Elena Kagan as thoroughly as I could, but with several anonymous (i.e., unreliable) reports percolating that she’s the likely choice and could be announced as early as Monday, it’s worthwhile to note several recent items from others pertaining to her selection:

(1) University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos, who previously expressed shock at the paucity of Kagan’s record and compared her to Harriet Miers, has a new piece in The New Republic entitled (appropriately): "Blank Slate."

(2) Digby examines what a Kagan selection would reveal about Obama, and she particularly focuses on Kagan’s relationship to Goldman Sachs.  That relationship is relatively minor, but it is illustrative in several ways and will certainly be used by Republicans to advance their attacks on this administration as being inextricably linked with Wall Street.  The Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein has more on the Kagan/Goldman Sachs connection.

(3) Following up on the article published yesterday in Salon by four minority law professors — which condemned Kagan’s record on diversity issues as "shocking" and "indefensible for the 21st Century" — Law Professor Darren Hutchinson of American University School of Law today writes that Kagan’s record is "abysmal."

Regardless of your particular views on these matters, that diversity is both vital and fair in the hiring process has long been a central plank in progressive thinking.  It takes little creativity to imagine what Democrats would say about a Republican Supreme Court nominee with a hiring record similar to Kagan’s.  The question is whether they will be as consistent as these law professors are in applying their claimed beliefs to their own side.  This is the issue that caused Linda Monk to rescind her endorsement of Kagan.  Will Kagan-defending progressives now suddenly say that diversity is irrelevant?  Will they try to claim that there were no qualified minorities for the Harvard Law School faculty?  How will they reconcile everything they’ve always said about diversity with Kagan’s record as Dean?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m glad that we have a blogosphere that catches things like this:

Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, May 4, 2010

A news analysis article on the front page of the May 4 New York Times about the Gulf oil spill was titled "Gulf Oil Spill is Bad, but How Bad?"

It quoted an "expert," Quenton R. Dokken, a marine biologist who is also the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times described as a conservation group based in Corpus Christi, Texas. Dokken played down the gravity of the spill, saying "The sky is not falling … We’ve certainly stepped in a hole and we’re going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico."

Who is this "conservation group" that minimizes the impact of an oil spill in its area?

It turns out it’s not really a conservation group at all.

At least half of the group’s 19 board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry, and one of them is currently an executive at Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf, causing the spill.

Other board members are employees of oil companies or businesses that supply the offshore oil and gas industry.

After being confronted with the undisclosed information about the Gulf of Mexico Foundation’s board, the Times published an Editor’s Note saying that the article "should have included more information about" the Gulf of Mexico Foundation.

Interesting:

Source: Washington Post, May 6, 2010

BP’s former chief executive, John Browne, used to brag about his company’s relative lack of political involvement and said he purposely shied away from spending too much on lobbying and political donations, but all that has changed.

Since Tony Hayward took over as CEO of BP in 2007, the company has greatly increased its spending on American politics.

BP has mobilized a massive lobbying machine in Washington, D.C., and since January, 2009, has poured almost $20 million into lobbying the federal government.

The company has also hired powerhouse lobbyists like Tony Podesta, former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and Kenneth M. Duberstein, former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan.

BP’s political action committee has ramped up its contributions to lawmakers of both parties, and especially to representatives from oil-drilling states like Louisiana and Alaska.

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D) has accepted over $15,000 in PAC contributions and thousands more from BP employees.

Earlier this year, Landrieu said at a hearing that the risks of offshore drilling were "minimal," and even since the spill, she has cautioned against curtailing offshore drilling.

Mary Landrieu tries to earn her bribes.

His comment (and links) are worth repeating:

A knock-and-announce “dynamic entry” raid – one of more than 100 carried out in this country every day – ends with the police shooting one of the family dogs to death as a seven-year-old watches. The first shot fired at the dog, a bull mastiff, missed and hit a corgi, which is a reminder that gunshots tend to hit organisms other than the one they’re intended for. Did I mention the seven-year-old? Yes, dogs can be dangerous; and police ought to have less drastic means of dealing with them. They probably do, outside the adrenaline binge of a dynamic entry.

Payoff: a misdemeanor quantity of cannabis. (Admittedly, the homeowner had a prior for cocaine distribution. But since the police waited eight days between getting the warrant and serving it, it’s not clear what the hurry was. There’s no claim that they had reason to think anyone was armed, beyond the simple fact that it was a drug raid.)

I’m late to this party – Radley Balko found the tape, Von at Obsidian Wings posted the best comment, John Cole nearly lost it, and Andrew Sullivan and Megan McArdle also weighed in.

But it’s a powerful reminder of the most important point left out of the new national drug strategy: that the drug enforcement effort is enormously expensive in money and in suffering: not only 500,000 people behind bars at any one time, but incidents such as this one. A serious strategy – i.e., one that didn’t have to pass agency review and White House vetting – would identify the costs of the drug-control effort as a social problem on the same level as illicit drug abuse itself. (Alcohol and tobacco abuse dwarf both halves of the illicit-drug problem, which is why I remain skeptical of most legalization schemes despite the demonstrated folly of much of the current policy.) We should be trying to minimize the costs of control as well as the costs of abuse. That means focusing enforcement and sentencing on the most violent drug dealers and those who create mass public disorder by selling in open markets, and abandoning the fantasy that enforcement – as opposed to the laws themselves – can substantially shrink the supply of illicit drugs in established mass markets.

Only in the drug-war atmosphere would this sort of behavior seem reasonable to the police, and to the elected officials who stand behind them. And Von is surely right that the demonstrated social and personal harms of cannabis are simply not adequate to justify this amount of violence in its suppression. I’m still against opening cannabis to commercial exploitation, but allowing growing for personal use or by genuine consumer co-ops has to be a less bad solution than the one we have now.

Even for the drugs we can’t reasonably think about legalizing, we need to de-militarize enforcement. This sort of raid shouldn’t be carried out for no better reason than to avoid destruction of evidence. If there’s reason to believe that there are weapons at the site of the raid , of course the cops have to go in heavy. But SWAT tactics have become routine in drug raids, based in this case on no specific suspicion about weapons.

If you haven’t seen the video, it’s after the fold:

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting letter in the journal Science, published by the AAAS, written by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates:

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.
Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That’s what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world’s scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business-as-usual practices. We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the un restrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

Very interesting column in Salon written by law professors: Guy-Uriel Charles is at Duke Law School; Anupam Chander is at the University of California-Davis Davis School of Law; Luis Fuentes-Rohwer is at Indiana University’s School of Law; and Angela Onwuachi-Willig is at the University of Iowa College of Law. Here’s what they write:

Like everyone in the legal academy over the last decade, we have watched with admiration the amazing changes that Elena Kagan brought to Harvard Law School. A fractured faculty, divided among ideological lines, seemed finally content, if not united. A boisterous student body was finally pacified. The logjam that had stopped faculty hiring had burst. Indeed, she hired so many new faculty the Harvard Law School’s newspaper’s 2008 April Fool’s issue declared, "Dean Kagan Hires Every Law Professor in the Country."

The first woman Dean of Harvard Law School had presided over an unprecedented expansion of the faculty — growing it by almost a half. She had hired 32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members (non-clinical, non-practice). But when we sat down to review the actual record, we were frankly shocked. Not only were there shockingly few people of color, there were very few women. Where were the people of color? Where were the women? Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women. All this in the 21st Century.

One of us aired some of these concerns, which we expressed in a joint letter to the White House, on a blog. The White House never responded directly to us, but it did provide a defense of the Solicitor General’s record to concerned civil rights groups, who then made the document public. (Salon obtained a copy, which can be found here.) We are glad that the White House has responded to some of the questions that we have raised.

Unfortunately, the White House’s defense of the solicitor general’s hiring record while she was Dean at Harvard is surprisingly weak.

To begin, and most notably, the White House does not dispute our basic facts. When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, four-out-of-every five hires to its faculty were white men. She did not hire a single African American, Latino, or Native American tenured or tenure track academic law professor. She hired 25 men, all of whom were white, and seven women, six of whom were white and one Asian American. Just 3 percent of her hires were non-white — a statistic that should raise eyebrows in the 21st Century.

These are the facts that the White House does not try to defend because these facts are indefensible. For those who think that more women and minorities qualified to serve on the Harvard Law faculty were simply nonexistent, one need only look at Harvard’s primary rival–Yale Law School. There Dean Harold Koh led the law school during almost the same period (Dean Koh, from 2004 to 2009, and Dean Kagan, from 2003 to 2009). Dean Koh hired far fewer faculty members–just ten–but he still managed to hire nearly as many women (5 of 10 at 50 percent), and just as many minorities (1 of 10 at 10 percent) as Dean Kagan.

Yet another comparison seems appropriate: …

Continue reading.

Andrew Sullivan hears from two readers:

A reader writes:

I saw the post about your reader who was horrified about the dog-killing raid and looking for “other documented examples…compiled into a single place.”  And I despaired.  This is a blog reader, presumably internet-savvy, and he is shocked, shocked, to discover the things that Radley Balko has been writing about with clarity and passion for years.  Maybe you can put a perma-link to Balko’s “Overkill” on your sidebar?  Seriously, none of this is new, and it isn’t just dogs being butchered, but people. Here are just a few that I know about off the top of my head:

Kathryn Johnston.
Jonathan Ayers.
Sal Culosi.
Tarika Wilson.
Gonzalo Guizan.

My partner of 20 years suffers from depression, fibromyalgia, and cervical dystonia.  All of those conditions are highly treatable with cannabis.  But we don’t dare.  Instead, she takes a half-dozen different medications and visits a neurologist every couple of months for muscle-paralyzing shots.  We have six dogs of our own, and usually have at least two fosters in the house;  a raid on our house would end with all of them dead and both of us dead or in prison for defending them.  We can’t take the risk.

Another writes:

It’s crazy that it takes something from a National Lampoon cover to get us to wake up to the realities of the failed war on drugs.  Maybe now that it’s becoming known that it is standard operating procedure to shoot pets during a drug raid – and we have the video to prove it – people will realize just how out of control the drug war is. Perhaps it’s easier for us to sympathize with our neighbor’s pets than with our neighbors.

But real people die in these raids all the time.  Their names are Tarika Wilson (killed with her baby—who was also shot but lived—in her arms), Alberta Spruill, and Kathryn Johnston (a 92 year-old shot 39 times).  Google their names.  These are just a few. And if you still haven’t gotten your fill of dead pet stories, google Cheye Calvo, or Pam and Frank Myers. Again, these are examples of what happens all the time.

And don’t forget that the police officers conducting the raids are often caught in broken system.  They are in danger too.  But they have to meet their drug arrest and seizure quotas so the mayor can get re-elected for being “tough on crime.”  Promotions and raises depend on it. Someone has to put food on the table.

Keep shining a bright light on this issue.  Perhaps we’ll finally realize that the drug war is doing more harm than the drugs themselves.

Ed Brayton:

The Washington Post reports that the Minerals Management Service, part of the Interior Department, specifically excluded the Deepwater Horizon platform from its assessments of the environmental risks of oil spills in the Gulf:

The Interior Department exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions — show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.

And when they did previous assessments that included that particular platform, they heavily downplayed the risk and basically said that if an accident happened, very little oil would be spilled and the damage would be minimum:

While the MMS assessed the environmental impact of drilling in the central and western Gulf of Mexico on three occasions in 2007 — including a specific evaluation of BP’s Lease 206 at Deepwater Horizon — in each case it played down the prospect of a major blowout.

In one assessment, the agency estimated that "a large oil spill" from a platform would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a "deepwater spill," occurring "offshore of the inner Continental shelf," would not reach the coast.

In another assessment, it defined the most likely large spill as totaling 4,600 barrels and forecast that it would largely dissipate within 10 days and would be unlikely to make landfall.

And it looks like such waivers are given regularly, and essentially get the companies out of having to take any serious steps to assure safety:

But Interior Department spokesman Matt Lee-Ashley said the service grants between 250 and 400 waivers a year for Gulf of Mexico projects…

Kierán Suckling, executive director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, said the federal waiver "put BP entirely in control" of the way it conducted its drilling.

"The agency’s oversight role has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petroleum’s self-serving drilling plans," Suckling said.

BP has lobbied the White House Council on Environmental Quality — which provides NEPA guidance for all federal agencies — to provide categorical exemptions more often. In an April 9 letter, BP America’s senior federal affairs director, Margaret D. Laney, wrote to the council that such exemptions should be used in situations where environmental damage is likely to be "minimal or non-existent."

An expansion in these waivers would help "avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays," she added.

I sure am glad they didn’t have to fill out a little extra paperwork, aren’t you?

And read the comments—this group is quite interesting.

I decided to go with Dovo soap, which lathers quite well—but I still needed to go back to the soap for the third pass.

The Pils handle today seemed slippery today, to the point that I rinsed and dried the handle and my right hand. I may have to wrap this handle with thick thread, aesthetics be damned. Or maybe a short piece of duct tape wrapped around the handle would do it.

At any I got a very fine shave, but the Progress held its own—and the Progress handle is easier to hold. Advantage: Progress.

A splash of TOBS Sandalwood, and I’m ready for the day.