http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/ar...aster-news.php

So I like Yglesias enough but wtf bro:

Presidential elections matter because some agency sent a letter to some other agency?

I mean seriously, look at the "very damning" highlighted part of this incredible leaked memo; thank goodness for Presidential elections amirite!!!:



Where would we be without Presidential elections and Obama...imagine a world where this letter, from September 2009, from the NOAA on behalf of the Department of the Interior, to Minerals Management Service, also in the Department of the Interior, identifying the potential of oil spills?...image a world where letters like this didn't exist. Imagine that. We might have a huge environmental crisis due to an oil spill on our hands.

This is why Presidents matter imo, because of very important letters, just like this, that change everything.

WTF? 14 years ago and we're just hearing about it now???? If something this "crazy" had actually happened, wouldn't environmentalists have been screaming about it for many years?

44 years....

Duh, my addled brain read it as 1996.

Hmmmm.... Let's assume that the Soviets did indeed do this at the height of the cold war. Let's further assume that it would be possible for us to do this now from a technical/engineering standpoint (this I think quite likely). Would it be at all palatable for Obama to authorize it? Wouldn't Ahmadinejad or some other leader then be able to say "See, I told you our nuclear program was for peaceful purposes. We might need to close off a big leak some day."

Some interesting stuff here:

"How Steven Chu Used Gamma Rays to Save the Planet"

Yes and so they can reverse egregious executive policies such as unilaterally detaining indefinitely any person suspected of terrorism without the benefit if due process; so they can scale back the unjust wars abroad; so they can nominate Supreme's who reflect the value of their party; etc. Yes, Yggie, they do indeed matter.

Seriously, I cannot beleived he typed this article with a straight face. I am not a regular reader of Yglesias but I was under the possibly mistaken impression he was better than this.

Ignoring the other stuff (indefinite detention, SCOTUS nominees) -- think about what Yglesias argued: Presidential elections matter because one bureaucrat might write some other bureaucrat in the next department over a tepid letter in September 2009 about how offshore oil drilling has a risk for spills, so that when the spill actually happens in April/May of 2010....that's how we know, PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS MATTER.

To which I say: wat

Thank goodness for Obama imo!!! If he wasn't President, that letter may not have ever been written, and then where would we be?

Yeah I agree his actual argument is much worse, but I could not resist pointing out how lol the theme of his article was in light of issues where the Executive, you know, actually determines policy.

edit: HAHA how did I miss the date of the letter! I mean it is a ******ed assertion regardless of the date but cmon...lmao.

second edit: rofl....that is all.

Reminds me of Jiggs :P

What does this even mean? When have I once talked about "an extinction event?" Keep making up stuff.

If "rubber tires and golf balls" don't do the trick, maybe surplus politicians? Pork and hot air under pressure might congeal just right.

Because of the reasons I outlined in the post you quoted:

* senators and other gasbags would have a field day if they did violate the contract
* it's almost certainly very easy for those gasbags to find out what the contract actually says

do you disagree with either of those?

It won't be hard to find out what the contract says, but it will be a bit harder to prove how deep they were actually drilling at any given point in time. This is probably because the evidence is a bit exploded and a mile below the surface of the water..

Do you disagree?

There's got to be a huge amount of engineering documentation for a project like this, both hard copy and electronic.

WAT!?

Really over the top assertions about oil related topics is why. Not that he thinks we'll all drown in a sea of oil or something heh

They have data from the rig up to about 7 hours before the explosion. There was some sort of data transmission but not in real time I guess.

No. I was thinking they didn't have the data from the drilling yet but as I posted just above it seems they do have a lot of it and I would assume the drill depth would be part of those records.

exactly... i never said anything remotely similar to any sentence of that... there aren't "trillions" of barrels of oil anywhere.

Didn't mean that you had said those things. When I read crazy things about oil your name pops into my head, sorry.

Just ignore how I linked it and instead picture the Gulf becoming a giant fountain of oil. I wonder what would happen if we nuked it though, seems pretty crazy.

They don't have to nuke it. They could stop the well. They could run explosives into the casing and implode the hole. BP can say "they don't have the data" all day long from the last 7 hours. They have data, it's just data they don't want you to see. They weren't drilling, it was a completed hole, they were capping. Haliburton and many other outfits run explosives into wells on a daily basis doing what they call "shooting" the hole. It's a method of perforation using giant buckshot toward the end of a hole completion, to open up well walls to oil and gas pockets. It doesn't take a nuke to shut something like this down.

This whole thing is so bizarre. Who knows? It's like everything else these days, more excuses than answers. Amazing all the years they have been drilling in the gulf and in oceans around the world, and in 2010 with all the technology we have beyond all the holes punched in the past, all of a sudden BP has a well they claim they can't control and is whipping the @$$ of every engineer they have on the payroll, and they have no hard data as to what happened. Okay, I wonder how many days that well would still be wild if they were getting fined mega millions on a daily basis.

I don't know. You gotta nuke something.

LOL Just for the heck of it I guess. Or, for the show.