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D and I recently had the special honor of hanging with the main driver behind America’s slow devolution into our very own Dark Ages – aging, scared, neocon Baby Boomers. It was all Obama This, Healthcare That, I Worked With Polacks So I Don’t Need Diversity Training and Accidents Happen. When the conversation reached the intellectual fever pitch of one especially ignorant, cantankerous old guy asking, “Why do we have to talk about the stupid oil spill instead of something cheerful like the best music ever, Southern rock?” was when I asked D to pack up our things. “Good night, it was very nice to have met you.” Have fun toasting Ronnie Van Zant and secession while the rest of America burns and so does your town but you refuse to see it, dumb asshole. We’re leaving.

D travels and is stressed out all the time thanks to the crap Ohio economy. We are both extremely depressed and nauseated over the gross mishandling of the oil disaster response. No one seems to care as long as the price of gasoline sits under $3 a gallon and they’re keeping up with the Kardashians. Every single day, though, I remind myself how lucky I am for being employed, healthy, living near my family and able to take care of myself. But, every single day any more, living in America tries my patience and sense of community and security.

Wonkette | Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students“ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student“s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

… Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over.

Couple this with influential idiots using Indian-Americans as fetishes and punchbags, referring to us as everything from the Chosen People to F**king Ragheads. On very public forums. And getting away with it.

I don’t have a problem with conservatism, its principles and opposition based on policy, but Republicans and now The Tea Party are a whole different animal. This is the first time since 9/11 that I have been worried for my safety and that of others of my skin color. When I sincerely hope on a daily basis that these dogwhistles during a time of economic uncertainty don’t incite cultural and physical violence against perceived and real ragheads. The malcontents have begun projecting their rage onto people of color in Arizona. Where next? It is scary.

Also read: First Draft’s Arizona Displeases Tube Kitten Again

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Day 46 Links

The LMRP tophat is in place. Closing the vents in the cap is slow going with the formation of hydrates and high flow pressure out of the well. Indeed, we are still watching and discussing.

The Oil Drum | Lessons Left Unlearnt From 2003 Gulf of Mexico Near-Spill: “Reading through some MMS reports, it seems that near-misses happen a lot.”

A good maritime law blog on the legal machinations surrounding the oil spill. As Brad says, “He begins each day with a summary of the relevant legal developments pertaining to the spill, then expands on them individually and includes hyperlinks to underlying documents.”

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So, this has been puzzling me for the last couple of days: Both IfItWasMyHome and Paul Rademacher offer the ability to overlay the latest geographic extent of the oil spill on a location of your choice. It’s a good exercise in geographic scale, but if they both source their data from NOAA on any given day, why do the maps look so different?

IfItWasMyHome.com June 4, 2010

Paul Rademacher Oil Spill June 3, 2010

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Are the American people and media so naive that they cannot discern between disaster and disastrous response? How many times must these things happen before they get it? America, keep this in mind as you go into another weekend (and Pistolette sums it up very nicely): “I didn’t blame Bush for Katrina, but for failing to act after. I don’t blame Obama for the oil spill, but for failing to act after.” Disaster prevention is one thing, while effective response is wholly another.

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Ohio News You Can Use

Sandusky Register | Crapshoot results in stinky day for bomb squad

Officers found a fizzing homemade bomb planted in a portable toilet near a construction site at Turtle Bay and decided the safest way to detonate it was to shoot at it.

After five shots with a .22 caliber rifle, the bomb exploded, spraying the contents of the toilet everywhere. One of the bomb squad members was covered in feces, according to the police report.

*Blink blink* I don’t know whether to laugh or to ask for my taxes back. Now that we have the poop news out of the way, on to more important things like

Banning The Creation Of Human-Animal Hybrids

“The Ohio Senate has passed Sen. Buehrer’s bill banning ‘the creation, transportation, or receipt of a human-animal hybrid, the transfer of a nonhuman embryo into a human womb, and the transfer of a human embryo into a nonhuman womb.’ So much for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

I wish someone would give Adrien Brody five years in prison and $250,000 in fines for having anything to do with that awful Splice movie.

And then …

Ohio Supreme Court Decides That Police Can Hand Out Tickets If You “Look Like” You’re Speeding

“Officers can rely on their unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed, but the intent is not to allow officers to routinely issue tickets based solely upon unaided visual observations,” [Copley Police Chief Mike] Mier said.

Now that they have determined the safest way to defuse a toilet bomb is to shoot at it, I have full faith in all of the rest of their abilities.

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Financial Times

The containment effort on the surface, [BP CEO Tony Hayward] said, had been very successful in keeping oil away from the coast. Considering how big this has been, very little has got away from us.”

Washington Post | As the oil spill spreads, BP battles to contain the media

“There’s going to be, I think, a natural hesitancy to let journalists show images of the horrific scenes that are going to happen purely in the next few weeks,” [trial lawyer, Chip] Babcock said. “You’ll see these beaches clogged with oil, and animals suffering, and I think — human nature being what it is — there’s going to be some people who don’t want those images shown.”

WWL.com | Thick Oil On Grand Isle

“For the last three days, we reported every day that our helicopter was watching this oil off our shore, and nothing was done to stop it,” says [Jefferson Parish Emergency Management Director, Deano] Bonano.

Rick’s Blog | BP Ad: We Will Make It Right

BP is spending massive amounts of money on this, but where, for what and with whom? I visited Dauphin Island, Ala. yesterday. Their staging area had six security guards standing around guarding what? In a nearby restaurant out-of-town contractors were downing high balls, discussing their per diems and laughing about how this was a vacation for them.

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Day 45 Links

BP Chief: Company Never Had the Tools to Address Oil Leak

What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool-kit, [CEO Tony] Hayward told the Financial Times.

But didn’t BP tell feds it could handle oil spill 60 times larger than Deepwater Horizon?

In its 2009 exploration plan for the Deepwater Horizon well, BP PLC states that the company could handle a spill involving as much as 12.6 million gallons of oil per day, a number 60 times higher than its current estimate of the ongoing Gulf disaster.

Looks like it’s time for Gulf Coast communities to file civil and criminal lawsuits. Wait … Hello? Can Anyone Down There Handle The Oil-Spill Litigation?

the bulk of the litigation arising out of the spill might end up in front of a judge who doesn’t sit in New Orleans … six of the 12 active judges in the Eastern District of Louisiana have removed themselves from oil-spill cases. The judges are citing conflicts tied to the energy sector and personal relationships with lawyers or companies involved … Federal judges in southern Alabama also have stepped away from handling spill-damage cases, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, BP program to hire cleanup boats has resulted in windfalls for rich pleasure-craft owners

… a Daily Beast investigation reveals that this much-touted program is far more effective as a PR stunt than a financial savior. Specifically, a large number of the 1,900 contracts BP has issued across the Gulf have gone to the owners of pleasure boats: doctors, lawyers, and the like, who use their vessels for Saturday fishing trips or family outings, rather than the decimated commercial fishermen.

and, 5000 feet below the sea, the plan now is cutting the riser above the BOP with large shears after the DSAW failed. I’m still watching.

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