Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / That Was Quick

Reader Interactions

40Comments

  1. 1.

    John PM

    Am I acting immature because I saw the phrase cervical cap and started giggling? Anuway, the name for this current attempt by BP to stop the leak is appropriate, since we are getting f-cked.

  4. 4.

    Wag

    Anyone doubt that if Bush were still President, his response to the Deepwater blow out would have been to make it easier to drill in shallower water? After all, we would have needed to ease the regulatory burden on our beseiged oil industry to keep us free.

  5. 5.

    John PM

    It is also my understanding that if the cervical cap does not work BP’s next option is something called the Intercepting Underwater Device.

  6. 6.

    Jeff

    There are two explanations as to why the MMS continued to grant drilling permits in the face of this catastrophe– and they are not mutually exclusive.
    First is that the agency is more or less brain dead, working with out a functioning top executive for months, since the Republicans won’t allow a vote on the agency head, and
    second is that the agency is shot thru and thru with Bush moles who have burrowed into civil service positions and were operating on a
    “drill, baby, drill” mentality.
    Either way this is an agency that needs shock therapy.

  7. 7.

    MikeJ

    @Jeff: Isn’t the current solution to do away with the MMS and replace it with something competent and unbought?

  9. 9.

    Thomas

    @Wag: Well said, I can just see it now. Palin, Limbaugh et. al. have already raised this notion. As if, if we could just drill in Anwar and close to shore we’d have all the oil we need and it would be earmarked to the U.S. market.

  10. 10.

    Tom Levenson

    All hail the power of Balloon Juice and its thralls! I’m not surprised, I must say — my sense of Obama and his crew is that they are sometimes slow, but never actually dumb. Makes a nice change.

  12. 12.

    cat48

    Kieran Suckling, as always, appears in the article to criticize Salazar. Don’t know if it’s valid or not. His first stmt about the spill was “Fire Salazar!” Of course, he wanted Grijhalva appointed. (Robert Redford likes Salazar). Environmentalist don’t seem to agree on much of anything. It gets confusing listening to them sometimes. They have their own priorities like everyone else I suppose.

    Whether Suckling likes it or not, Obama sets the policy, not the Interior Secy. Just like Rahhhhm doesnt decide policy.
    Respect folks more if they just blamed Obama, not someone he appoints.

  13. 13.

    Ash Can

    @Jeff: This. There has to be a way to clean house over there. I mean, let’s face it — an agency that was literally in bed with the energy producers just a couple of years ago isn’t going to become Albert Schweitzer overnight when the administration changes hands.

  15. 15.

    Chyron HR

    But, but, Jason Lipton, who works in the mail room at BP’s Chicago office, gave Obongo $100 in 2008. That proves that Obambi is on the payroll of Big Oil!

  17. 17.

    Bulworth

    It took the Interior Department less than a day to rescind the shallow-water drilling permits I was bitching about yesterday

    .

    Bulworth “likes this”.

  18. 18.

    Punchy

    It seems clear this oil condom thing aint working. I’m not sure I can handle 2 more months of 80K+ barrels/day leakage. My wife finally broke into tears this morning at the sight of oil-covered birds. Dammit, I almost did too.

    This shit is going to fuck everyone and everything on the coast.

  19. 19.

    Wilson Heath

    Joke though it may be, the cervical cap is a more serious measure than the combination of prayer and rhythm method that BP had been using before.

  20. 20.

    Ash

    I really want to make a cervix and dilated joke but I didn’t get enough sleep to think of anything witty enough. Dammit.

  21. 21.

    liberal

    OT, on citizenship:

    A Maryland teen-ager who was the subject of a long extradition battle between the United States and Israel has agreed to plead guilty in the murder of another Maryland youth and to accept a 24-year prison sentence in Israel, state prosecutors in Maryland announced today. … But in February the Israeli Supreme Court refused the request from American prosecutors, accepting the argument of defense lawyers that Mr. Sheinbein could claim Israeli citizenship by virtue of his father’s birth in 1944 in what was then British-occupied Palestine.

    Israeli became a state in…1948.

  22. 22.

    liberal

    @cat48:

    Whether Suckling likes it or not, Obama sets the policy, not the Interior Secy. Just like Rahhhhm doesnt decide policy.
    Respect folks more if they just blamed Obama, not someone he appoints.

    I nominate this for “dumb O-bot comment of the day.”

  23. 23.

    maya

    Obama should listen to ExGuv Palin and start authorizing shallow water leases right off West Palm Beach. Call it the Rushbo field.

  24. 24.

    shortstop

    Have we resolved the drilling permit thing? Look at this amazingly contradictory AP story from yesterday, which the AP has now pulled from its own site, and tell me what it says about the status of shallow-water drilling permits. Because hell if I can tell.

  25. 25.

    wrb

    The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) just released this horrifying animation of how ocean currents may carry all the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. According to their computer modeling of currents and the oil, the spill “might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer.”
    __
    “I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?'” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock in a statement accompanying the animation, which he worked on. “Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood.”
    __
    The models show oil hitting Florida’s Atlantic coast within a few weeks, then moving north as far as about Cape Hatteras, N.C., before heading east

  26. 26.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Tom Levenson:

    my sense of Obama and his crew is that they are sometimes slow, but never actually dumb

    Winston Churchill is often quoted as having said that You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else. Bush and Cheney broke that time honored rule, by leaving out the last crucial step and just doing the fuckup part. Obama has restored balance to The Force. Once again, we fuckup, but eventually we get it right in the long run.

  27. 27.

    wrb

    @shortstop:

    Have we resolved the drilling permit thing?

    Sounds like it

    ”
    The Secretary recommends a series of steps immediately to improve the safety of offshore oil and gas drilling operations in Federal waters and a moratorium on certain permitting and drilling activities until the safety measures can be implemented and further analyses completed.
    __
    Summary…
    __
    Recommendations and Key Components (with implementation plan
    __
    Blowout Preventer – (BOP) Equipment and Emergency Systems
    Order re-certification of subsea BOP stacks (immediately)
    Order BOP equipment compatibility verification (immediately)
    Establish formal equipment certification requirements (rulemaking)
    __
    New Safety Equipment Requirements and Operating Procedures
    Develop new BOP and remote operated vehicle (ROV) testing requirements (immediately)
    Develop new inspection procedures and reporting requirements (immediately)
    Develop secondary control system requirements (emergency rulemaking)
    Establish new blind shear ram redundancy requirements (emergency rulemaking)
    Develop new ROV operating capabilities (rulemaking)
    __
    Well-Control Guidelines and Fluid Displacement Procedures
    Establish new fluid displacement procedures (immediately)
    Establish new deepwater well-control procedure requirements (emergency rulemaking)
    Well Design and Construction – Casing and Cementing Establish new casing and cementing design requirements – two independent tested barriers (immediately)
    Establish new casing installation procedures (immediately)
    Develop formal personnel training requirements for casing and cementing operations (rulemaking)
    Develop additional requirements for casing installation (rulemaking)
    Enforce tighter primary cementing practices (rulemaking)
    Develop additional requirements for evaluation of cement integrity (immediately)
    Study Wild-Well intervention techniques and capabilities (immediately)
    __
    Increased Enforcement of Existing Safety Regulations and Procedures
    Order compliance verification for existing regulations and April 30, 2010, National Safety Alert (immediately)
    Adopt safety case requirements for floating drilling operations on the Outer Continental Shelf (emergency rulemaking)
    Adopt final rule to require operators to adopt a robust safety and environmental management system for offshore drilling operations (rulemaking)
    Study additional safety training and certification requirements (rulemaking) ”

  28. 28.

    Michael

    @maya:

    Obama should listen to ExGuv Palin and start authorizing shallow water leases right off West Palm Beach. Call it the Rushbo field.

    I was going to suggest sticking a large sucking pipe straight into El Flobbo’s gut and to start sucking out fat. That’ll be good for a fair amount of oil production.

  30. 30.

    YellowJournalism

    Cervical Cap? Seems fitting since BP gave the Gulf area the oil slick version of HIV.

  32. 32.

    catclub

    @Wag:
    He would have called it the healthy coastlines initiative.

    Who says those guys aren’t literate? They clearly have picked up something from “1984”. Words means what they want them to mean, and torture is good.

  34. 34.

    maya

    @Michael:

    Unfortunately, we haven’t used that kind of oil for lighting since the mid-1800’s. And GreenPeace would probably tail your ship.

  35. 35.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @gnomedad: That’s funny that’s exactly the sentence I used when I first saw the link to the ROV cam, a week or more ago. Exactly.

  36. 36.

    The Other Chuck

    We got the cervical cap for this one … and now Jindal is lambasting Obama for instituting an abstinence program.

  37. 37.

    ET

    @Punchy: those pictures are soooo depressing and make me sick. I wasn’t totally sure a bird really was under the sort of bird like blob that was the picture on the front of the WaPo.

    I think that BP exec, all those involved with making safety and emergency equipment decisions, and those evaluating the odds on an “event” need to be dumped into the oil with their winter clothing on and be forced to “swim” in it for a hour or two and see how they like it.

    I hope the few million they saved by not having all the equipment, etc. was worth it.

  38. 38.

    Randy P

    @liberal:
    Glad to see this resolution. It happened in my neighborhood. Very weird case. My daughter was loosely connected, knew the people involved, went to school with his sister.

    Sheinbein and a buddy decided to kill an acquaintance of theirs. As far as I remember it was just for the hell of it, they wanted to know what it was like and they befriended this guy after deciding he was the target. Sick, sick dudes. Then Sheinbein got his parents or grandparents to help him flee the country and pull this Israeli citizenship stunt.

    Same neighborhood as the DC sniper, by the way.

  40. 40.

    DBrown

    I have a question – since they can reach the well head and it is just a pipe above the main shut-off tower, why in the hell don’t they just crimp it shut? That would stop the flow … is it because they don’t want to lose the ability to cap and pump? Let the Gulf go to hell for money? Please tell me I’m wrong … please. It can’t be that simple and overlooked by everyone … right?

Comments are closed.