Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Democrats are back in array!

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Come on, man.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Fight them, without becoming them!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

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Actual Headlines from the Liberal Media

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Gulf Shrimp Are Scarce This Season; Answers, Too

It’s a real fucking mystery:

Go pour a couple hundred gallons of crude oil in your garden, wait a year, and then feign surprise that nothing will grow. Congrats. You can now write for the NY Times. The ONLY missing answer is what did more damage- the oil spill, or the chemicals we dumped to break up the oil.

Oh, and in a bad piece of comedy, Bachmann released her “jobs plan.” Tax cuts, deregulation, and drilling anywhere and everywhere.

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  3. 3.

    General Stuck

    Very depressing as a once citizen of the Gulf Coast. One of the joys of living there was going to the piers when the shrimpers returned from a day’s shrimping, and buying a bag of fresh ones right off the boat . Stupid humans and their combustion engines.

  4. 4.

    beltane

    I recently had an interesting conversation about global warming with one of the old-timers around here. When the subject turned to the climate I thought he was going to tell me that Al Gore was fat/liberal hoax/blah blah blah, but instead he talked about how the storms just keep getting worse and worse and how things are wrong with some of the trees, and I realized that a man whose spent most of his life in the woods isn’t going to believe the Koch brothers’ propaganda on the subject.

  5. 5.

    Marginalized for stating documented facts

    So the Republican candidate’s jobs plan is tax cuts and deregulation?

    Hoocoodanode?

    “No one could ever have predicted…”

  6. 6.

    John O

    LOL…I have a blog tag titled “Funny Headlines” and this one struck me too, when I saw it today, but just didn’t have the energy to put a post up, and now I’m all right because John Cole put one up for me.

  7. 7.

    beltane

    I like the German version of Herman Cain’s plan better. Nien, nien, nien just about sums up my feelings towards the Republican party these days.

  9. 9.

    El Cid

    Because if we drill more, then oil companies will be kind and let us buy fuel for lower prices, especially as demand shrinks, because that’s what they do.

    The national average fell to $3.417, down three cents, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of service stations. That broke the old record for this week of $3.15 a gallon set in 2008. It’s 59 cents a gallon higher than the year-earlier price.
    __
    This is happening at a time of year in the U.S. when demand for fuel is usually low, the ebb between the summer driving season and the family gatherings of the holiday season.
    __
    In years past, this would normally result in a glut of fuel supplies that would force a much sharper drop in prices.
    __
    But these days, high global demand is keeping prices relatively expensive. U.S. refiners reap bigger profits by selling products to other countries, which keeps domestic prices higher than normal, Energy Department statistics show.
    __
    “Total U.S. exports of finished petroleum products have increased more than 60% since 2007 as markets have become more globally integrated.
    __
    This trend is driven primarily by finished motor gasoline and distillate fuel oil (which includes diesel) which are increasingly exported to Latin America. Annual U.S. exports of gasoline and distillate increased by 133% and 144%, respectively, from 2007 to 2010,” according to the Energy Department’s most recent Short Term Energy Outlook.

    The U.S. hasn’t significantly exported gasoline for a long time.

    If we drill here, drill more, drill now, it’s not going to help the average American. But too many people are just too stupid and ill-informed to get that.

  10. 10.

    jl

    So, a story about how there may or may not be a shrimp shortage, that may or may not be caused by the oil spill, or the storms or the weather, or climate change.

    More and more NY Times stories are like this. They are innovative, they are reinventing the news story.

    Who!?
    What!?
    Where!?
    When!?
    Why!?
    How!?

    Worth every penny, if you link in, or disable the pay thingee.

  11. 11.

    lol

    To be fair, the New York Times does eventually get to the point more than halfway through the article.

    But the sop to the “OIL IS GOOD FOR YOU” crowd at the start remains.

  13. 13.

    jl

    @lol: From my read it was high toned wool gathering agnatology all the way through. But we may have to agree to disagree on that.

  14. 14.

    El Cid

    I did enjoy all the bullshit following the cleanup operation about how a federal study supposedly proved that most of the oil on the seafloor had vanished (that’s not what it ever said, spokespersons’ suggestions to the contrary), and how microbes had eaten it all up.

    In each case, vagueness about the results (i.e., the oil couldn’t be located, so, what they hell, let’s interpret that as ‘gone’, or ‘microbes ate it up,’ except that only applied to one chemical in the mix and appeared to have been the natural gas contamination) led to idiot cheerleading, right wing snottiness, and the presumption that things were more or less okay.

  17. 17.

    J. Michael Neal

    @beltane:

    Nien, nien, nien just about sums up my feelings towards the Republican party these days.

    Well, I’d have to be doing lines of coke to agree with them, too, but I think you meant, “Nein, nein, nein.”

    This has been my foray into pedantry for the day. Good to get it out of the way early.

  20. 20.

    Delia

    Well, there are just so many possibilities. It could be the weather. It could be the hurricanes. It could be the drought. It could be that demand has gone down and the shrimp are disappointed that they’re not wanted anymore so they’ve just gone away . . . . I’m certainly glad that we’ve got the very serious NYT to put things in perspective and not put too much emphasis on that little unpleasantness last year that hardly anybody remembers anything about these days.

  21. 21.

    El Cid

    @J. Michael Neal: There is a creepy parallel arrived at accidentally.

    The Nien, or Nian, Rebellion in China.

    Nian is a North Hua dialect meaning one seed one assistant (一股一夥). The Nian movement was formed in the late 1840s by Zhang Lexing, and by 1851 numbered approximately 40,000. Unlike the Taiping Rebellion movement though, the Nien initially had no clear goals or objectives aside from criticism of the Qing government.
    __
    However, the Nien were provoked into taking direct action against the Imperial regime following a series of environmental disasters.
    __
    The 1851 flood of the massive Yellow River deluged hundreds of thousands of square miles and caused immense loss of life.
    __
    The Qing government slowly began cleaning up after the disaster, but were unable to provide effective aid as government finances had been drained during a recent war with Great Britain and the ongoing slaughter of the Taiping Rebellion.
    __
    The damage created by the disaster had still not been repaired when, in 1855, the river burst its banks again, drowning thousands and devastating the fertile province of Jiangsu.
    __
    At the time, the Qing government was trying to negotiate a deal with the European powers, and as state finances had been so severely depleted, the regime was again unable to provide effective relief.
    __
    This enraged the Nien movement, which blamed the Europeans for contributing to China’s troubles, and increasingly viewed the Qing government as incompetent and cowardly in the face of the Western powers.

  23. 23.

    El Cid

    @Delia: Actually there’s nothing of a diversion in those suggestions. Many times the worst damage is when the species and ecosystem get walloped by coinciding forces — the oil spill, higher Gulf ocean temperatures, so on and so forth. Weak systems don’t need more stress, but it’s certainly easy for those so motivated to point to other reasons to deny the effects of some particular reason.

  25. 25.

    sven

    @jl:

    This story really encapsulates everything that is wrong with modern journalism. After seven paragraphs of dancing around the oil spill the author just can’t avoid it any longer. So in paragraph eight he leads into it with this:

    some say there is evidence that is at the very least suggestive of a culprit.

    The author seems terrified by the prospect of actually addressing the real subject of his story.

  26. 26.

    Mark K

    Grew up in Tampa and raised my sons on Escambia Bay by Pensacola. Really heartbreaking.

    My oldest was taking grad. marine science courses at LSU when this happened and I was suprised at the Louisiana citiz…er consumers reaction and why they, much less the politicians, weren’t raising hell.

    Then I went for a visit to Baton Rouge and when we went to the top of the capitol building…literally due north of the legislature is a gigantic Exxon oil refinery. I thought “Duh! They own this state.”

  27. 27.

    trex

    Pitting the shrimping industry against the oil industry is un-American and nothing but crass warfare. There should be shared sacrifice: BP did their part by blowing up their rig so now it’s time for the 47% of shrimpers who aren’t paying any income taxes to contribute.

  30. 30.

    clayton

    The ONLY missing answer is what did more damage

    The way the media played it?

    The way conservatives were more interested in making it “Obama’s Katrina”?

    The way firebaggers used it to further weaken our president?

    I lost a lot of friends over this. Sorry, the Gulf of Mexico has been suffering from this oil industry for a long time before this spill. Anyone in Texas can tell you that the beaches in Galveston are full of tar and have been for decades. Trash and oil and tar from all of the oil industry in the area.

    Don’t tell me you thought gulf seafood was good to eat until the BP spill. That little bit of bio stop hazard is nothing compared to the amount of crap — oil and trash — that has been infecting your gulf “seafood”.

  32. 32.

    clayton

    @MikeJ: That doesn’t make gulf shrimp any better, does it?

    The gulf is full of seafood. Unfortunately, this spill and the response to it are not the only problem. The ports and the oil industry have been using the gulf as a toilet for as long as I can remember and clearly longer than that.

  33. 33.

    Martin

    Bachmann released her “jobs plan.” Tax cuts, deregulation, and drilling anywhere and everywhere.

    Wait, what? I thought her husband was gay?

  35. 35.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @khead:

    Forrest: How are we going to find them?
    __
    Lt. Dan: Well, maybe you should just pray for shrimp.

    Lt. Dan is channeling the GOP presidential field.

  36. 36.

    fleeting expletive

    So, is there safe shrimp to be found? I swear, it’s the pits going to the grocery store. Between the crap processed food, the unsustainably farmed produce and the inhumanely produced meat products, some things that are just dangerous (and who knows ahead of time what those are–cantaloupes?)–what are we to buy to eat?

    I know, local, local, local. It just isn’t always possible, or affordable.

  37. 37.

    Morzer

    Bachmann released her “jobs plan.” Tax cuts, deregulation, and drilling anywhere and everywhere.

    In other words: free money for the rich, a blowjob for Wall Street, and a root canal for everyone else.

  38. 38.

    Tom in TN

    The ONLY missing answer is what did more damage- the oil spill, or the chemicals we dumped to break up the oil.

    That is not a missing answer. It has been known for decades. Crude oil is about 1000x more toxic than the dispersants, which were only used in a 20:1 (O:D) or so ratio. The oil wins that race by a mile light-year.

    The value of dispersants is that they let you choose what gets killed by the oil. Want to save stuff on the surface? Then use dispersants and kill stuff underwater. Want to save the stuff underwater? Then don’t use disperants, and lots of stuff on the surface and shore will die.

    Take your pick. You can’t make oil nontoxic. You can only pick what lives and what dies from it.

  40. 40.

    cbear

    Those Gulf Shrimp aren’t dead…they’re resting.
    Remarkable shrimp, the Gulf Shrimp. Beautiful colors.

  41. 41.

    slag

    How much does it piss me off that BP successfully avoided having the spill named after them? Apparently, that alone is progress in the oil spill world.

    Man, just thinking about that event is depressing all over again. Not enough four-letter words to go around.

  42. 42.

    fleeting expletive

    J. Michael Neal, I feel ya. Just eat, it ain’t gonna kill ya. You ever get the feeling that it’s all bullshit, everything, all the time? Yeah, I get that way sometimes.

  44. 44.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @fleeting expletive:

    You ever get the feeling that it’s all bullshit, everything, all the time?

    A couple months ago, I had a taste for salmon, but all they had was farm-raised. I knew we’re not supposed to eat it, but I couldn’t remember if it was for health, eco, or political reasons. I’m such a fucking tote-bagger. But at least I own it.

  46. 46.

    Llelldorin

    That story sent me straight to a state of +5, fuck all y’all fury, without all the fun drinking. It didn’t so much bury the lede as shoot it in the head and shove it into a wood chipper.

  49. 49.

    slag

    @Martin:

    Banning gay marriage

    I believe you mean “liberating gay people from their ability to get married”. Banning is for big government liberals.

  50. 50.

    Mino

    Did anyone notice an oddity when USDA was claiming the seafood was uncontaminated? The noses of 6-wks-trained humans were the source of that assurance. Uh, got any dogs in Louisiana, sirs?

  51. 51.

    A Mom Anon

    What’s really disgusting are those “Come to the Gulf” commercials featuring locals that are brought to you by BP.Makes me want to hit a BP exec with a chair.

    I really wish more people understood that these companies,our stupid media,the bullies in government and the rest of the idiot evil empire won’t stop this shit until they are physically stopped from doing so. Asking nice and expecting them to follow the rules(what little there are anymore-and could we DO something about that too?)is just stupid on our part.

  52. 52.

    Menzies

    @A Mom Anon:

    This is the part that particularly annoyed me, especially the guys who were all “BP gave me money after the spill!”

    . . . well, how nice for you. Hope you’re sticking it in your HSA or paying for some other plan, ’cause you’re going to need it.

    I’m with J. Michael Neal – I don’t care what I shove in my piehole until the blood work comes back with “sir, if you keep eating seafood you’re either going to die or develop superpowers” scribbled in the margin.

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