From the NewsHour twitter feed —
There does not appear to be oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. We are confirming w/@BP_America.
Holy moly!
Five Links:
- Update: The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP #OilSpill http://ht.ly/1Wuvf
- France and Japan propose an ‘IPCC for nature’ http://bit.ly/dmCB6c
- Holy &$%. Taliban executed a 7 year old boy as an informant? http://ow.ly/1Wvsh
- Budget cuts imperil Virginia’s largest and most welcoming university http://bit.ly/aEhzPg
- Chinese Exports Rise 48.5 Percent http://nyti.ms/c5fPet
via Mashable:
If you’re a Tumblr user, you can log on today and donate to a myriad of groups: Save Our Gulf, the National Audubon Society or the Greater New Orleans Foundation. Donating will also unlock the Limited Edition Black Dashboard as an account preference — and Tumblr will match every donation it receives.
Five Links:
- Video: Obama Gives Oil Spill Update From New Orleans. (June 4th.)
- Clinton Library releases scores of Kagan documents bearing relation to her work with the Domestic Policy Council.
- COP Hearing on TARP and other assistance to AIG.
- Interview with African/French-lit blogger Chez Gangoueus.
- Due to rising student debt, a growing number of universities are stepping up with “no-loan” aid pledges: http://bit.ly/9jdhVg
Go green, then go green faster. End coal. Paint your roof white. Volunteer, volunteer, volunteer.
(Map estimate via here.)
Volunteer in Louisiana. Volunteer in Florida. Go green, then go green faster. End coal.
(All the posts tagged ‘green’ on the site = this.)
West Wing Report tweets —
That the WH called reporters into the press office privately today to criticize them for asking about BP over & over is disturbing.
Firedoglake explodes —
1) Obama needs to use that goddamned unitary executive power he’s been clinging to and declare a state of emergency in federal waters along the Gulf of Mexico, using an Executive Order. This is now an international situation, not just an American one, because the oil will eventually end up in the North Atlantic.
2) Declare British Petroleum in violation of its lease and kick them off the site. Threaten to seize all American assets of BP-America immediately if they do not assist in setting up a claims system which will be administered and overseen by the U.S. and paid by BP. (Hire all those poor Sallie Mae folks who were going to lose their jobs because of student loan reform for this purpose. /snark)
3) Ask the Department of Energy’s Steve Chu to create a skunkworks rapid solutions team from NASA and DARPA along with schools which specialize in oceanography, mechanical technology, geology, and computer modeling. Stop waiting for the nice old farts they pulled from JASON because this is an emergency, goddamnitall, we don’t have time for them to come up with a vetted, peer-reviewed whitepaper on this. Don’t listen to anybody’s crap about so-called experts on deepwater drilling and how they’ll solve the problem. As my 16-year-old said, “If there’s experts, where are they? Show me one.” Yeah. What she said.
4) Threaten to kick Ken Salazar to the curb if he doesn’t not immediately have every one of the 15+ deepwater offshore drilling sites reevaluated; every evaluation must be on POTUS desk inside 15 days from the date the Executive Order. And we want the evaluations made public — no more of this bullshit opacity the White House calls transparency. No excuses; all this stuff should have been submitted when BP and the other oil industry firms applied for the leases to begin with.
…
7) Suck up the arrogance and pride and ask the elder statesman of the environment to be the face of this effort. Ask Al Gore to do the legwork with the corporations and educational facilities whose cooperation is needed. Tell him this is to be used as an example of what people can do for the larger environment if they focus on this problem first. If they can solve this, they can solve the big problems.
In the meantime, support your country and register to volunteer to clean up the mess.
If you want to register to help clean up the Gulf Coast, go here.
On May 2, Gov. Jindal requested that federal authorities and BP provide three million feet of absorbent boom, five million feet of hard boom and 30 ‘jack up’ barges. Of that, less than 800,000 feet of hard boom has arrived - less than a fifth of the request. About 140,000 feet of that hard boom is sitting waiting for BP to tell contractors where to take it.
“It is clear we don’t have the resources we need to protect our coast, we need more boom, more skimmers, more vacuums, more jack-up barges that are still in short supply,” Jindal said today. “Let’s be clear, every day that this oil sits is one more day that more of our marsh dies.”
via Boston.com’s The Big Picture.
Previously: Barataria Bay, some oil stories.
