The Vermilion 380 blew up today, but it looks like we may have dodged an oily bullet.

Still, could it have been prevented?

Well, as the title suggest, it’s very likely. Because fines are usually in the thousands to tens of thousands. So, to be fined the better part of a million dollars is patently absurd.

The facts from Big Think:

Reviewing the Minerals Management Service database, I see that Apache paid a $435,000 fine on April 23 for the following lapse which apparently unfolded over a period of weeks in January 2009:

The level controller had been removed from the caisson sump, therefore the sump system could not automatically maintain oil at a level sufficient to prevent discharge into the Gulf of Mexico.

Apache also paid a $255,000 fine in April for the following infraction:

On May 2, 2009, the Surface-Controlled Subsurface Safety Valve (SCSSV) at Well JA-001, failed due to a leakage rate greater than the allowable rate of 5 cubic feet/minute. Records indicate that no corrective action to remove, repair, reinstall, or replace was taken prior to the May 19, 2009, notification of inspection.

But wait…what about 2007?

Apache paid another spectacular fine of $446,000 in 2007 for repeatedly neglecting blow out prevention (BOP) equipment. A failed BOP was the ultimate cause of the Deepwater Horizon spill:

Records verified that there was not a low or high pressure test conducted on the following BOP related equipment: HCR choke valve, manual choke valve, HCR kill valve, manual kill valve, kill line check valve, IBOP, TIW valve and choke manifold. These violations were for 2 BOP test periods, 7/19/2006 and 7/26/2006. A mud-pit-level indicator with both visual and audible warning devices had not been installed. There was not a BOP station installed in the work basket of the snubbing unit. The secondary power source (air supply) was isolated with a closed manual block valve located on the inlet piping to the accumulator.

Now, I want to show you how many oil rigs are currently in the gulf from 1942 until recently. Short answer: nearly 4,000. Longer answer: this short video…

(h/t: Deep Sea News)

And Obama calling for a short moratorium to make sure we have the proper safety measures in place is a bad thing?

More as it develops…

A couple of fun videos outlining what happened in Southern Europe.

Part One


Part Two


I’ll share Part Three when it’s available…but we all know that the EU opened up the cash drawer and created a TARP fund of their very own to make sure that these countries remain solvent…at least for now.

More as it develops…

Bernie Madoff scam artist action figure

In this economy, would you pay $149.99 for a Bernie Madoff action figure?

Would your answer be influenced if you knew it was a limited edition action figure?

Herobuilders.com is no stranger to controversy, brazenly giving G.I. Joe collectors the meanest enemies possible to wage war on — Saddam, Osama, Hugo Chavez.  Without bad guys, who are the good guys gonna fight, right?

But as brash toymaker Emil Vicale tells the Boston Herald, not everyone wants real-world evil (corrupt CEOs like Lex Luthor are fine) represented in the playroom.

“Everything we do offends somebody,” he says. “If you are looking for a company not to offend somebody, it’s not us.”

(Darren Garnick, who has an Apollo Creed bobblehead on his desk, can be reached at www.cultureschlock.com)

Kind of an odd statement coming from a guy who accepted a paid gig to be a war correspondent, but hey…it’s not like Pajamas TV is paying Wurzelbacher to be consistent or even correct.

AP reports…

And here’s a partial transcript just in case you can’t see the video…

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

I do love Joe’s honesty though, because the fact that he prefers the pro-war propaganda created by the government instead of actual facts is pretty much all you need to know about him.

By the way, I will never forgive McCain for unleashing this guy on us.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

But after 8 years of being told half truths, who will believe any of this…especially now that word has leaked that these are just talking points?

From LA Times:

A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials offers a guide for discussing Bush’s eight-year tenure during their public speeches.

Titled “Speech Topper on the Bush Record,” the talking points state that Bush “kept the American people safe” after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained “the honor and the dignity of his office.”

The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.

It mentions none of the episodes that detractors say have marred his presidency: the collapse of the housing market and major financial services companies, the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In a section on the economy, speakers are invited to say that Bush cut taxes after 2001, setting the stage for years of job growth.

As for the current economic crisis, the memo says that Bush “responded with bold measures to prevent an economic meltdown.”

Let me take a moment and say that Bush does deserve credit for helping reduce the spread of HIV in Africa. For that he should definitely be commended.

But as for the rest…this is actually what he wants people to say? He really wants people to come out and be rosy and bright for a guy who has an approval rating in the 20s and a massive economic collapse looming? REALLY?????!!?!!?

Maybe the fact that this memo leaked in the first place is somebody’s way of telling him, “Sure, I’ll say it, but I’m going to let everybody know you asked me to say it.”

Moving on…

Over two months since Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast, there is still substantial damage and many state authorities are accusing FEMA of dragging its feet. Texas Governor Rick Perry has even announced he’s giving up on waiting for FEMA and will pay for the cleanup out of state coffers. He plans to stick FEMA with the bill later.

The problems aren’t just from Ike. Hurricane Dolly left its own trail of destruction along the state’s coastline near Mexico and officials there are also complaining that FEMA has done far too little, far too slowly.

The main complaint is the mountains of paperwork FEMA requires before providing aid. FEMA claims they are just protecting against fraud but that reasoning isn’t sitting well with counties where debris still litters the streets and snakes and alligators are moving in. The general consensus is FEMA is disorganized and bureaucratic to the point of being paralytic. Once again, FEMA has become a synonym for what’s wrong with government disaster relief.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need FEMA. States and localities could handle disaster relief themselves. The problem is, the cost of cleanup and aid is so immense that only the federal government has the kinds of resources necessary to provide adequate assistance. Without federal help, disaster-struck states and cities would go broke.

But, if we have to have a FEMA, can’t we at least make the organization more agile and more responsive? Obviously, there is no perfect disaster relief and those effected by calamity are always going to be impatient to get their lives back to normal. FEMA will never be loved. But can’t it at least be more efficient? One of the Texas counties hit by Ike just got the first part of a promised $3 million in aid — for cleanup after Hurricane Rita. Certainly FEMA can find a way to disburse funds in less than three years.

The Bush Administration became known for its inability to adequately manage the federal government. Hopefully Barack Obama and his appointees can better handle the complicated assortment of departments, programs and resources that make up the executive branch. One of the first priorities has to be reforming our disaster relief system.

Another month, another bailout, and this one is a biggie.

From NY Times:

Mr. Paulson’s plan begins with a pledge to provide additional cash by buying a new series of preferred shares that would offer dividends and be senior to both the existing preferred shares and the common stock that investors already hold.

The two companies would be allowed to “modestly increase” the size of their existing investment portfolios until the end of 2009, which means they will be allowed to use some of their new taxpayer-supplied capital to buy and hold new mortgages in investment portfolios.

And not only have both CEOs been fired and replaced, but Treasury secretary Henry Paulson is also putting the two mortgage giants on the road to either becoming publicly traded or owned by the government. They will no longer be a hybrid at the end of this process.

[...] the plan calls for the companies to start reducing their investment portfolios by 10 percent a year, beginning in 2010.

The investment portfolios now total just over $1.4 trillion, and the plan calls for that to eventually shrink to $250 billion each, or $500 billion total.

“Government support needs to be either explicit or nonexistent, and structured to resolve the conflict between public and private purposes,” Mr. Paulson said. “We will make a grave error if we don’t use this time out to permanently address the structural issues presented by the G.S.E.’s,” he added, a reference to the companies as government-sponsored enterprises.

Honestly, as much as this angers me personally that this type of system has gone on for so long, I think this move was inevitable and will ultimately be seen as the most responsible that could have been done.

I know a lot of free marketers say “let them fail”, but that’s putting flawed philosophy above fiscal realities, and since this move has a lot more to do with making sure the housing and mortgage market don’t completely implode, it’s a good move for Americans.

As I’ve said frequently in the past year, Clinton and her team was not up to the task of running the country. Disagree with me if you like, but as numerous behind-the-scenes exposes come out that show just how dysfunctional the campaign was, Democrats everywhere should breathe a sigh of relief that they secured Obama as their nominee.

Or, as Roger Simon of Politico puts it…

In the end, Hillary Clinton might not have gotten the campaign she deserved, but she got the campaign she created.

In any event, take a look at this amazing seven part series about how everything went so amazingly right for Obama and horribly wrong for Clinton.

Introduction: The path to the nomination

In the summer of 2006, Patti Solis Doyle offered David Axelrod a job. Hillary Clinton was running for reelection to the Senate and Solis Doyle was her campaign manager, but everybody knew Clinton was soon going to run for president. And Clinton wanted Axelrod onboard.

Part One: The improbable plan

In May of 2006, when Hillary Clinton was publicly running for reelection to the U.S. Senate, she was also secretly interviewing potential staff members for the presidential race that she would launch the following year. One person she interviewed was Steve Hildebrand.

Part Two: Looking like whiny babies

Obama campaign organizers drew up plans, lots and lots of plans, and always a budget for how to pay for what they were planning. They even planned for things that few people — including few people in the Hillary Clinton campaign — even knew about. In March 2007, only a month after Obama announced, Hildebrand came across two people in the Obama campaign offices he had never met before: Mike Robertson and Myesha Ward. Robertson was calling members of the House and Senate and Ward was calling members of the Democratic National Committee to lock up their votes as something called “superdelegates.” Hildebrand was baffled. “Just to throw myself under the bus, I remember meeting them and wondering, ‘Why do we have them on the payroll? What is that about?’” he said.

Part Three: Lost in Hillaryland

In the spring of 2007, several confidential discussions were held within the Hillary Clinton campaign to have Clinton admit that her vote to approve the Iraq war had been a mistake and to have her apologize for it. It made sense. The Democratic Party was solidly against the war, and many voters had gone to the polls in November 2006 to elect a Congress they hoped was going to end the war. The other Democratic candidates in the race who had voted for the war — Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and John Edwards — had all said their votes in 2002 to authorize the war had been wrong. Only Hillary was holding out, and Barack Obama was hitting her hard for it, saying that he (who, lucky stiff, had not been a senator in 2002) had opposed the war from the beginning. His attack was a dagger at the heart of her central message: Hillary was the candidate of experience? Yeah, the kind of experience that led her to vote for a disastrous war.

Part Four: Amid the corn

It was going to be all about Iowa. The caucus that would not die. The Iowa caucus had gained national attention in 1972 as an oddball little contest for party insiders, and now it was a monster rally. The rules had been designed to keep tourists, i.e., regular voters, away: It was always held on a winter’s night, everybody had to show up at the same time and stand around for hours, and there was no secret ballot. Only a very small universe of party activists used to attend, and it was meant to be that way. It was a party-building event for insiders and by insiders. But that was before presidential campaigns went on steroids with large staffs, enormous budgets and massive targeting operations.

Part Five: 100 percent delusional

The question for Hillary Clinton was not whether South Carolina was going to be bad — South Carolina was going to be bad — the question was whether it was going to be a loss or a disaster. The Democratic National Committee had moved South Carolina up in the voting calendar to Jan. 26 to give African-Americans a more prominent role in choosing the nominee, and it was estimated that nearly half the Democratic primary vote there would be black.

Part Six: Why believe the superdelegates?

At the beginning of the 2008 campaign, very few people even knew what a superdelegate was. It was like the Electoral College before the 2000 election. Who cared? Whoever won the popular vote became president, right? And whoever got the most pledged delegates in the primaries and caucuses became the nominee, right?

And scene…

New article from TNR today that has Clinton campaign insiders revealing how it all went so horribly wrong, and some of the details squaring with what we’ve talked about here frequently.

Among the most notable screwups…

1. Mark Penn had no business being a Chief Strategist

On the top tier team…

“Hillary assembled a team thin on presidential campaign experience that confused discipline with insularity; they didn’t know what they didn’t know and were too arrogant to ask at a time early enough in the process when it could have made a difference, effectively shutting out even some long-time Hillaryland loyalists. Her innermost circle of [Patti Solis] Doyle, [Mark] Penn, [Mandy] Grunwald, [Neera] Tanden and [Howard] Wolfson formed a Board of Directors with no single Chairman or CEO; nobody was truly in charge, nobody held truly accountable.”

Yeah, sounds like a President Hillary would have put together a cracker jack cabinet too.

On the lack of a national strategy…

“There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination. It was, ‘Win Iowa.’ There was not the experience level, and, frankly, the management ability, to create a whole plan to get to the magical delegate number. That to me is the number one thing. It’s starting from that point that every subsequent decision resulted. The decision to spend x amount in Iowa versus be prepared for February 5 and beyond. Or how much money to spend in South Carolina–where it was highly unlikely we were going to win–versus the decision not to fund certain other states. … It was not as simple as, ‘Oh, that’s a caucus state, we’re not going to play there.’ That suggests a more serious thought process. It suggests a meeting where we went through all that.”

And we were supposed to trust this woman with our health care? Our foreign policy? Hrmmm….

On Harold Ickes being ignored…

“Harold Ickes’s encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never operationalized into a field plan. The campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely, allowing Obama to create the lead of 100+ delegates that he has today. Most notably, we claimed the race would be over by February 5, but didn’t devote any resources to the smaller states that day and in the weeks that followed, allowing Obama to easily run up margins and delegate counts on the cheap–the delegate margin he will win by.”

You can almost hear the echoes…”Naw, we can ignore Ickes. I mean, he does know EVERYTHING about the primary system, but this thing will be a cake walk against somebody named Barack. Name’s too ethnic, it’ll never play in those small states.”

So yes, while it remains to be seen whether or not Obama will win in the fall, it does looks like Democrats really dodged a bullet by going with him. Because a Hillary White House sounds like it would have been a complete mess.

And seriously, please do read the whole thing. The mistakes they made are so obviously amateur hour it’s painful.

Just desserts for a job incompetently done. And yet another sign that the Bush administration’s partisan-charged handling of the Justice Department was highly unpopular in even the most conservative legal circles.

From NY Times:

Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought. [...]

The greatest impediment to Mr. Gonzales’s being offered the kind of high-salary job being snagged these days by lesser Justice Department officials, many lawyers agree, is his performance during his last few months in office. In that period, he was openly criticized by lawmakers for being untruthful in his sworn testimony. His conduct is being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department, which could recommend actions from exonerating him to recommending criminal charges. Friends set up a fund to help pay his legal bills.

I expect Alberto will land in a conservative think tank somewhere. Because that’s one of the only places where his brand of hack lawyering will be appreciated.

If you haven’t seen Frontline’s documentary about how we got into Iraq and how it all went wrong, you need to. It’s probably the most well researched piece I’ve seen so far, and the interviews with insiders are simply stunning. Many saw this train wreck coming, but Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld just didn’t listen.

In particular, this doc details how much influence Cheney and Rumsfeld had over our foreign policy. They actually wanted to go into Iraq FIRST! Amazing.

Go here and watch.

“The strategy is to continue the chaos in this party. Look, there’s a reason for this. Our side isn’t going to do this. Obama needs to be bloodied up. Look, half the country already hates Hillary. That’s good. But nobody hates Obama yet. Hillary is going to be the one to have to bloody him up politically because our side isn’t going to do it. Mark my words. It’s about winning, folks!”
- Rush Limbaugh on his strategy to get his listeners to vote for Clinton tomorrow.

By the way, I don’t think he has the type of influence to actually get people to go to the polls and do this, but it does point to a severe panic inside the right-wing noise machine. To think that Limbaugh might actually get a handful of his listeners to cast votes for somebody they hate with every fiber of their being is simply hilarious.

The following is from Joel Hirschhorn of Delusional Democracy.

He sent it via email so I’m reprinting it in full here…

The incredible collapse of the Minneapolis bridge will send a message to the nation that has been repeatedly sent for decades, but that our political system has refused to effectively respond to. America ’s physical, engineered infrastructure has been in desperate need for massive spending to repair and replace, but the multi-trillion-dollar cost has been rejected by local, state and federal politicians.

First, understand that I have a professional background in this area. My career started as a metallurgist, than I obtained a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering and became a full professor of metallurgical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where I taught about mechanical metallurgy and failure analysis, and in my consulting practice regularly worked on explaining actual failures of products and systems.

Many academic and professional groups have for many years produced countless reports on mounting unpaid public costs for updating our crucial physical infrastructure, including bridges, but going way beyond those to, for example, roads, water and sewer systems, tunnels and much more. Make no mistake: The deeply researched and totally supported case for a massive national infrastructure spending program could not have been clearer. But spending on infrastructure is not sexy and politicians at ALL levels of government have found countless excuses for not facing the totality of the problem. Instead, public spending is dribbled out, dealing with the most urgent problems or, worse yet, the ones that are the most visible to the public. But unaddressed are massive numbers of problems, such as the Minneapolis bridge and thousands more bridges, that our bureaucratic system has learned to game, postpone, rationalize and, therefore, put the public safety at considerable risk.

As a metallurgist I can pretty much assure you that if there is a technically honest and complete investigation, the ultimate explanation of the Minneapolis bridge failure will be related to fatigue cracking in the metal structure. Already, news reports have revealed some prior observation of a fatigue problem with the bridge and that the bridge had a relatively low rating of four out of a possible nine, showing that it was structurally deficient. The game played by virtually all government agencies is to find excuses for delaying the most costly repair or replacement of bridges and other parts of our physical infrastructure. As just another example, in most older urban areas there are constant repairs of busted underground water pipes. What is really needed, but avoided, is a total replacement of very old underground pipe systems – in many places 100 or more years old!

Government inspection programs have been terribly compromised over many years. The incredible political pressures to minimize spending on infrastructure have filtered down to the people, procedures and technologies used to examine bridges and other things. When it comes to bridges it is also important to admit that many aspects of our automobile addiction have raised risks, including enormously greater numbers of vehicles creating heavy traffic during much of the day in urban regions. Add to this the massive increase in vehicle weight resulting from the incredible increase in monster SUVs, as well as huge increases in large truck traffic.

The Minneapolis bridge collapse happened during evening rush hour because that was a period of maximum stress, and that would be the trigger for expanding existing fatigue cracks. Once fatigue cracks get to critical sizes they grow and propagate very rapidly, producing powerful loads and stresses on remaining steel components and creating what appears to be a virtually instantaneous bridge collapse.

The remaining public policy question is clear: Will the nation spend what is necessary? Seven other major bridge collapses in the last 40 years have not done the trick. Inadequate bridge inspection has been a frequent documented problem, as well as some design defects. Many people have already died from bridge failures. But still the nation’s elected officials have not bitten the bullet and agreed to spend trillions of dollars over several decades to bring America ’s physical infrastructure up to the most modern standards.

Think about all this the next time you go over a bridge.

I will no longer be going over any bridges.