On 21 August 2009, West Atlas oil rig owned and operated by Thai company PTTEP Australasia drilling in the Montara oil field offshore 200km from Broome, a West Australian town famous for its pearling and tourist industry, suffered a failure.

A blogger from another site wrote an article on 21 October detailing continuing failed attempts to stem the flow of oil from a rig in pristine marine area of the North West Coast of Australia.

Does any one think this a little out of the ordinary?

I am an alcoholic.

I got sober almost 20 years ago.  Before that, I abused alcohol, drugs, sex and money in order to ignore the damage I had done to my life, deluding myself .  I crawled through life in a cycle of being drunk or not yet drunk, making more mistakes that would need more drinking to erase.  I am nobody special.  Absolutely nobody.  Everyone on this planet has problems and I have mine.  I chose to deal with them by 'feeling better', one glass at a time.  All day.  Each and every day...week...month and year - until I turned to someone for help.

Gas has been found in at least three water wells in Pennsylvania and state regulators are trying to determine if gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale is to blame.

Did you ever see Thank You for Smoking?

Plot
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is the Vice President of and the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a tobacco lobby whose stated purpose is to research the links between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, the group, funded by cigarette companies, does not find any link between the two.

You know the saying that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a sound? Well, some governments and companies are banking that the public needs to hear or see uncontacted tribes before we care that they are being killed or relocated in the name of oil and mahogany. Companies are invading indigenous lands in the Amazon rainforest of uncontacted tribes causing their deaths, yet officials claim that unseen tribes are nonexistent mythical creations of environmental groups who oppose oil and logging developments. The tribes are then forcibly relocated or members killed sufficient to terminate the tribe's continuity with future generations. Yet, some would like the public to believe that no one was harmed because the tribes are mythical.

(Cross posted at The National Gadfly)

by Jeff Huber

I thought Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki showed state fair size baby makers when he told us to start packing our caissons and hit the dusty trail that leads out of Iraq. Then General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the closest thing Pakistan has to a head of state, did Maliki one better when he announced that "no external force" would be allowed to conduct operations inside his country.

But Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar took the blue ribbon when he told U.S. and NATO commanders that yeah, he'd negotiate; he'd negotiate how's about you accept safe passage the hell out of Afghanistan or I whip you like a Russian stepchild?

We can regard this kind of treatment from Iraq and the Bananastans in one of two ways: we can take umbrage and continue to dig ourselves China-ward, or we can think of it as a gift horse and not show bad form by dwelling on its third world dental work.

Well, from the looks of this article...we have a problem. A three page description problem...give it a read. Misconduct Found at Interior Dept.
excerpt:

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo..

Doing the people's business........yah right!

promoted - originally published 2008-09-04 06:06:32 -1000 - TXSharon emails Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor's excellent overview of the real issues with Palin [roxy].

REALITY: PALIN SAID SHE WOULD BEG TO DISAGREE WITH ANY CANDIDATE WHO SAID WE CAN'T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF OUR PROBLEM

Read more

While George Bush and John McCain are playing a cold-war version of monopoly to try to establish a U.S. military presence on Russia’s borders, and in the process, rally the U.S. electorate behind the Republicans, the Russians appear to be playing economic chess. While we have become military bullies whose diplomacy has devolved to brandishing our mighty imperial status as the only superpower, the Russians are calling for a multi-power world and apparently putting their money where their mouths are. Hat tip to Spengler at Asia Times, Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess"for the analogy.

You gotta get your ducks all in a row there before tooting those horns:

At a press conference she and Zebari said the negotiators were close to signing the deal but cautioned it had not yet been clinched.

Everyone says how intelligent you are, and after all you're the Secretary of State with a whole department working for you, or are they being allowed to.

promoted -- cho

As a philosopher concerned with logic and language, political speech provides ready to hand examples of standard fallacies from opponent caricaturing ad hominem attacks to position misconstruing strawman arguments. But we should take note of a intricate rhetorical ploy that has that is dominating the discourse from the McCain campaign recently, specifically in the cases of off-shore drilling and the efficacy of the surge. We can call this trick the "cage and frame" strategy.

Every politician has subjects he or she wants to keep from discussing and tries to keep them hidden away safely out of view in a rhetorical cage. Candidates usually take their cue from magicians by employing a tactic of misdirection – hey, look over there, it’s someone burning a flag while taking the Ten Commandments from a courthouse. This move, what logicians call a "red herring," is generally effective. But if the topic is urgent, a more sophisticated bit of sophistry is required.

update by carol. Originally posted 2008-08-08 12:37:43 -0500; Map image from Global Guerillas

John McCain has again been caught with his hand in the cookie job. One of his top campaign advisors is a lobbyist for Georgia. McClatchy carries the story, by Greg Gordon.

This is the same sludge pond I posted about HERE. (More pictures and back-story at that link)

It still has a strong stench of sewage from where the drilling company dumped their sewage. It also has a strong chemical and hydrocarbon smell.

We are on the so-called budget plan for heating oil up in here in the Northeast. That means we spread the payments out over 12 months and have a capped price per gallon, but if the price of oil is lower, we pay that instead.

Part of the reason that this arrangment is attractive to us is that we are contractors, and our monthly cash flow is dicey enough as it is, fluctuating with our project work. Our heating oil tank is 500 gallons. With the cost of heating oil just recently reported at $5.30, a "fill up" would be a $2650.00 hit that could kill us in a month when our receivables are low.

So we do the budget plan and spread it out over 12 months.

Last year: $175.00 a month
This year: $480.00 a month
Increase: $305.00