Monday, May 3, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, May 3, 2010


I don't know why, but I've just got this song stuck in my head...

Oh... btw... Norman Greenbaum is... er... Jewish...

Don't read anything into the video itself; it's simply the YouTube option with the best sound quality!

(*GRIN*)
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18 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jqDBGmaJF45-4xA1CXCFeBGQPBkQD9FF2SAO0

Close to 20 businesses were damaged after...[an] "immigrants' rights" march in downtown Santa Cruz turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said.

May 3, 2010 at 11:20 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/san_francisco&id=7417829

Tens of thousands of people across the Bay Area turned out in protest of Arizona's tough new immigration law. The demonstrations went on all day and some stretched into the night.

In San Jose, thousands of marchers headed to an evening rally at city hall. In San Francisco, a separate demonstration wrapped up in the afternoon, but not without a bit of trouble. Three people were attacked and at least two others were arrested. The people assaulted were part of the Minutemen demonstration, a group in favor of Arizona's new immigration law.

May 3, 2010 at 11:21 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704608104575219663720214920.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopBucket

Call it another example of your U.N. at work.

Last week Iran won a seat at the U.N.'s Commission on the Status of Women, the mission of which is to "set global standards and formulate concrete policies to promote gender equality and advancement of women worldwide."

May 3, 2010 at 2:08 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704608104575219022492475364.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

When a government department refuses to spend money that Congress has allocated, there's usually a telling backstory. This is doubly so when the funds are for a purpose as uncontroversial as making the Internet freer.

So why has the State Department refused to spend $45 million in appropriations since 2008 to "expand access and information in closed societies"? The technology to circumvent national restrictions is being provided by volunteers who believe that with funding they can bring Web access to many more people, from Iran to China.

A bipartisan group in Congress intended to pay for tests aimed at expanding the use of software that brings Internet access to "large numbers of users living in closed societies that have acutely hostile Internet environments." The most successful of these services is provided by a group called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, whose programs include Freegate and Ultrasurf.

When Iranian demonstrators last year organized themselves through Twitter posts and brought news of the crackdown to the outside world, they got past the censors chiefly by using Freegate to get access to outside sites. To counter government monitors and censors, these programs give online users encrypted connections to secure proxy servers around the world. A group of volunteers constantly switches the Internet Protocol addresses of the servers - up to 10,000 times an hour. The group has been active since 2000, and repressive governments haven't figured out how to catch up. More than one million Iranians used the system last June to post videos and photos showing the government crackdown.

So why won't the State Department fund this group to expand its reach, or at least test how scalable the solution could be?

During the Cold War, the West expended huge effort to get books, tapes, fax machines, radio reports and other information, as well as the means to convey it, into closed societies.

Circumvention is the digital-age equivalent.

May 3, 2010 at 2:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704302304575214133783517578.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

In March 1965, a young political appointee in the Labor Department named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report warning of high levels of out-of-wedlock births in the black community. "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," as the report was officially titled, noted that nearly a quarter of all black children were born out of wedlock, a ratio that had been rising since the end of World War II. Such a trend, Mr. Moynihan warned, could deepen black poverty rates and lead to a "tangle of pathologies."

The phrase "freedom is not enough" comes from LBJ's 1965 speech at Howard University, partly written by Mr. Moynihan himself. Johnson called not just for equality of opportunity for black Americans but for equality of result. ... Yet the problem of black poverty, as we know too well, was not so easily solved. One of the charts in the Moynihan Report showed that, by the early 1960s, inner-city welfare rates and unemployment rates were moving in opposite directions: Government subsidy for black single mothers was needed even when there was work to be had for black males. In short, poverty persisted even in good economic times. Clearly cultural changes were taking place, and economics alone could not explain the problem or solve it.

Whatever its causes, illegitimacy has proved to be among the most vexing aspects of modern society, especially in black communities. Ever since the Moynihan Report it has been argued that more job opportunities could help strengthen family life in the inner city. But better jobs depend on a decent education, and educational success depends in part on a stable home environment and a steady household income. A high rate of illegitimacy thus perpetuates the conditions that bring it about in the first place, creating a cycle of poverty.

In recent decades there has been progress of course; the black middle class has grown substantially. But inter-generational poverty continues in many inner-city communities. As for out-of-wedlock births, the problem has worsened and widened. In 2008, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate stood at 72.3%, more than three times the rate when Mr. Moynihan compiled his report. The white out-of-wedlock birth rate in 2008 was 28.6%, higher than the 1965 rate for blacks that had so alarmed Mr. Moynihan. (The rate for Hispanics is 52.5%.)

Clearly we are witnessing cultural changes that now go beyond the black family and even beyond the U.S.; Western Europe has also seen an increase in out-of-wedlock births.

* SOMETHING TO PONDER, FOLKS... SOMETHING TO PONDER...

May 3, 2010 at 2:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703871904575216633061219378.html

It's good news there's now bipartisan agreement that the financial reform bill should not be a "bailout bill," and that amendments to Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd's draft legislation are being proposed and debated with this agreement in mind.

* WE'LL SEE... (*SHRUG*)

The biggest challenge in this bailout reform debate is to avoid giving the federal government more discretionary power, whether by creating a special bailout fund or by providing more ways to bypass proven bankruptcy rules.

Experience shows that such power would increase, not decrease, the likelihood of another crisis...[and] demonstrates why it is dangerous for the "orderly liquidation" section of the Dodd bill to institutionalize such a process by giving the government even more discretion and power to take over businesses...

Many experts doubt the ability of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) to take over large, complex financial institutions, as the current bill calls for, without causing disruption. [In addition,] the moral hazard associated with protecting creditors will continue even if the FDIC has the discretionary authority to claw back later some of the funds it provides in the bailout.

The proposed liquidation process would have the unintended consequence of increasing the incentive for creditors and other counterparties to run whenever there is a rumor that a government official is thinking about intervening. Who is going to be helped? Who is going to be hurt? It is up to government officials to decide, not the rule of law.

* THIS PROPENSITY TO DO AN END RUN AROUND THE RULE OF LAW SEEMS A HALLMARK OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION.

* OH... AND LET'S NOT FORGET THAT THE BAILOUTS STARTED WITH BUSH...

* I'LL KEEP YOU FOLKS UPDATED ON "PROGRESS" REGARDING THE FINANCIAL "REFORM" BILL... IN THE MEANTIME YOU COULD DO WORSE THAN READING THE FULL ARTICLE. (*SHRUG*)

May 3, 2010 at 2:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/american-oligarchy

The movers at Goldman Sachs, whose top employees were grilled before the Senate Banking Committe last week, gave Obama’s party three times as much money in the last cycle ($4.5 million) as they gave to Mitch McConnell’s ($1.5 million).

The shakers at Citicorp gave Democrats almost twice as much ($3.1 million) as they gave Republicans ($1.8 million).

* JUST TO BE SURE WE'RE ALL ON THE SAME PAGE, I'M NOT HIGHLIGHTING THIS TO "CONGRATULATE" REPUBLICANS FOR BEING LESS IN THE POCKET OF THE FINANCIAL OLIGARCHS THAN THE DEMS. NO. SIMPLY REITERATING BASIC INFO THAT READERS OF BARKER'S NEWSBITES SHOULD ALREADY BE AWARE OF BUT THAT I'M SURE MOST "REGULAR" FOLKS AREN'T. (*SHRUG*)

In the year and a half since the implosion of Lehman Brothers, Simon Johnson, who was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008 [has been] examining the United States as an IMF analyst would examine some bankrupt basket-case of a country in what used to be called the Third World.

Johnson believes that the leaders of the American finance industry have turned into the sort of oligarchy more typical of the developing world, and that they have “captured” the government and its regulatory functions. (Johnson [actually] laid out this bombshell thesis in the Atlantic a year ago.)

There are many ways for countries to blunder their way into big economic trouble: Kleptocracy, capital flight, or a commodity-price crash can all spark a panic or collapse.

Nevertheless, Johnson wrote, “to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar.

Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work.”

In a gripping new book, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, 304 pages, $26.95), written with his brother-in-law James Kwak, Johnson explains why those changes aren’t happening in the United States.

* IN OTHER WORDS, "THE BARKER SCENARIO." AN UNSTOPPABLE DECLINE (WITH HILLS AND VALLEYS OF COURSE) AND THUS UNAVOIDABLE COLLAPSE OF THE UNITED STATES AS WE KNOW IT OVER THE NEXT FEW DECADES.

* FOLKS... I'M NOT TELLING YOU TO NECESSARILY BUY THE BOOK... BUT FOR GOD'S SAKE PLEASE FOLLOW MY LINK TO THE REVIEW AND READ IT; THE REVIEW WILL GIVE YOU THE HIGHLIGHTS OF JOHNSON'S AND KWAK'S ANALYSIS.

* FRIENDS... IF YOU RESPECT MY JUDGMENT AT ALL YOU'LL READ THE REVIEW IN ITS ENTIRETY; IT'S JUST TOO LONG TO "BARKERIZE," BUT IT'S REALLY SOMETHING THAT EVERYONE WITH AN OPEN MIND IN GOOD WORKING ORDER SHOULD READ!

May 3, 2010 at 2:54 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/scuttle-uss-murtha?page=2

[According to] Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute... “If we were truly concerned about minimizing risks of oil spills in the ocean, we’d cut back on shipping oil by tanker.

The amount of oil spilled in tanker accidents dwarfs the amount spilled from drilling rig accidents.

(BTW... The long-term global trend of oil spills from all sources is down, despite the increase in both offshore drilling and oil shipped by tanker.)

The Deepwater Horizon spill is on course to match or exceed the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. But the Exxon Valdez spill was only the 35th largest tanker-related spill over the last 40 years.

Since the Exxon Valdez, there have been seven larger tanker spills; the ABT Summer disaster off the Angolan coast in 1991 spilled seven times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, but received hardly any media coverage in the United States. And while it is too early to know how extensive will be the damage to Gulf Coast shoreline ecosystems, it is not too early to expect that many dire predictions will be proven wrong.

This has been the pattern since the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. A hastily assembled White House panel of experts concluded that it might take 10 to 20 years to stop the still-seeping oil in the Santa Barbara Channel. It took only a few weeks. Another group of experts forecast that with the number of rigs operating in the channel, a similar blowout could be expected to occur on average once a decade. There hasn’t been another one in the channel since. Dire predictions of the permanent loss of wildlife and damage to the channel’s ecosystem became a daily refrain. But as Time magazine reported five months after the spill, ‘dire predictions seem to have been overstated.' ... A multi-volume study by the University of Southern California two years later concluded that ‘damage to the biota was not widespread.’

No energy source is risk-free or environmentally benign; just ask West Virginia coal miners, or check up on the avian mortality of wind power, or the potential disruption of desert ecosystems from proposed large solar power projects, or, indeed, the additional pollution of the Gulf coast from ethanol production.

The greatest risk of all is the inability to weigh trade-offs.

May 3, 2010 at 4:55 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/crs-on-health-care-fines.pdf

* JUST CLICK ON THE LINK... TAKE 30 SECONDS TO SCROLL DOWN THE PAGES... TELL ME WITH A STRAIGHT FACE THAT YOU HAVE ANY CONFIDENCE WHATSOEVER IN THE CONGRESS OR EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF THE UNITED STATES...

(*ROLLING MY EYES*)

* SERIOUSLY, FOLKS... AND THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A DELIBERATE GOOD FAITH ATTEMPT BY WELL-MEANING, WELL-EDUCATED, KNOWLEDGEABLE NON-PARTISAN BUREAUCRATS OF THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE TO ANSWER A RELATIVELY SIMPLE QUESTION IN... er... PLAIN ENGLISH.

* WE ARE SO FRIGG'N SCREWED...

May 3, 2010 at 4:55 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=6951

In March, the Center for Naval Analysis, a federally funded research institute published a report called, "The Navy at a Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake."

Demand for U.S. naval force has increased over the past 10 years, as carrier-based aircraft played an important role in Iraq and currently conduct a large portion of strike missions in Afghanistan.

More than 10,000 sailors have been assigned to shore duty in support of the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Navy SEALs have seen service in large numbers in both wars.

At the same time the fleet is getting smaller: It has decreased by nearly 20% in the last decade, while the number of deployed ships has stayed about the same.

The report argues that multiple causes and conditions are likely to result in a diminishing U.S. combat fleet. [This causes include:] increasingly tight federal budgets; undiminished operational requirements; a shrinking industrial base and its depressive effects on the Navy's future ability to respond quickly to everything from greater demand for platforms to increased flexibility in ship design; and political correctness in distributing defense budgets evenly among the military services.

For these reasons, a smaller and smaller U.S. combat fleet is emerging:

* To be continued...

May 3, 2010 at 4:56 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (PART 2 of 2)

At the same time, the report sees uninterrupted international need for safe passage... In short, current [security threat] trends will persist or maybe accelerate.

The future that the document envisions looks like today, except more so. U.S. leadership wants to continue to influence events at a distance from our borders and hemisphere but is reluctant to pay the bill and doubly reluctant to reconsider how national policy could be changed to correct the likely growth in strategic imbalance that is a consequence of dividing the defense budget evenly. The report argues that we are painting ourselves into a corner that forces us to accept growing risk...

* WELL, "WE THE PEOPLE" WILL NO DOUBT BE AT RISK; AS FOR OUR POLITICAL MASTERS... SOMETHING TELLS ME OUR SENATORS AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS - ALONG WITH THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH - WILL BE SAFE AND SECURE LONG AFTER THE SHIT HITS THE FAN FOR US, OUR CHILDREN, OR PERHAPS OUR GRANDCHILDREN.

At the same moment that the future strength of our sea power is becoming more and more problematic, the U.S. is experiencing serious difficulties in our relationships with important traditional allies.

Disputes over our use of Japanese bases are shaking a relationship in Northeast Asia that is critical to balancing China. New Delhi is miffed at what its leaders perceive to be the current U.S. administration's inability to grasp the depth of India's problems with Pakistan and their effect on the fight against the Taliban (Indian leaders' increased receptivity to Russian arms deals is one sign). Cracks in the U.S. relationship with the UK and Israel are no secret and neither is Central European unhappiness over U.S. efforts to succor Moscow at the expense of a ballistic missile defense that was to be based in Poland and the Czech Republic.

* I STILL SAY OBAMA DID THE RIGHT THING... BUT HE (AND HILLARY) OBVIOUSLY BUNGLED THE DIPLOMACY BEHIND THE ACT.

The loss of a decisive U.S. naval strike force would largely abandon current allies in the Indian Ocean/Persian Gulf and Asia to regional powers in each location.

In Asia, this means China.

The withering of our regional alliances would end American influence along with the current assurance that superior U.S. and friendly forces could keep potential crises from spinning out of control.

A more radical future sees a nearly total depletion of U.S. naval presence. ... The idea of maintaining an American naval presence around the world would have almost disappeared, and U.S presidents - depending on their view of American power - would constantly have to calculate whether sending naval forces overseas would increase or diminish tensions that had approached the level of a crisis.

Put simply the report sees things getting worse and assumes, for the purpose of the discussion, that we cannot reverse course.

May 3, 2010 at 4:57 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/01/AR2010050100243.html#

Under the new health-care law, millions of Americans will get government help to cover medical bills. Many will simply be added to the rolls of Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor. But the rest will get their subsidies a different way - through tax credits that lower the cost of their insurance premiums and co-payments.

* NOTHING IS TRULY LOWERED; RATHER, IT'S SIMPLY MORE INCOME REDISTRIBUTION AND MORE INDEBTEDNESS. (*SIGH*)

The new tax credits, which will eventually cost the government more than $50 billion a year...

* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... "WE" ARE "THE GOVERNMENT." WE AND OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN WHO WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR FUNDING ALL THIS... er... LARGESS.

...are part of a growing array of federal benefits offered through the tax code. Known as "tax expenditures" in budget jargon, such tax breaks were worth more than $1 trillion to recipients last year.

That's more than the government spent on Social Security, and nearly enough to balance the federal budget.

And their cost is growing.

(*HEADACHE*)

Even if Congress doesn't add any tax credits, analysts predict that the rising cost of existing tax breaks could add about $3 trillion dollars to the federal debt by 2020.

The tax-free treatment of employer-paid health insurance will cost the government $160 billion this year, according to the Treasury Department.

The tax break for mortgage interest will cost $92 billion.

And deductions for state and local taxes... (*GRITTING MY TEETH*)... will take $34 billion from federal coffers.

* IN CASE YOU DON'T SEE WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE WRONG WITH DEDUCTING STATE AND LOCAL TAXES, WHAT THIS DOES IS SHIFT THE BURDENS OF HIGH TAX STATE RESIDENTS TO BE SUBSIDIZED BY LOW TAX STATE RESIDENTS. SO MUCH FOR "FAIRNESS."

Democrats initially proposed limiting the tax-free treatment of employer-provided coverage through a new tax on expensive "Cadillac" insurance policies. But labor unions objected, and lawmakers scaled back the tax and postponed its implementation until 2018.

* SCUMBAGS... (*SPITTING*)

[T]ax breaks often provide bigger subsidies to people with higher incomes. The tax deduction for mortgage interest, for example, offers bigger benefits to people with more expensive houses.

* BTW...

Almost two-thirds of all Americans, most on the middle and the lower rungs of the income ladder, cannot even take a deduction for mortgage interest because they don't itemize their taxes.

May 3, 2010 at 4:57 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/blaming_the_citizen_RXEVoCdMKmfm5mPSxqBWfL

There are deep differences between Europe's experience with legal immigrants intent on importing intolerant lifestyles and our problem with illegals responsible for social friction and violent criminality.

But the Left's blame-game is identical: Anyone who doesn't elevate the "rights" of the immigrant over the rights, safety and desires of the citizen is a bigot. No exceptions.

Could there be a formula better designed to excite anti-immigrant sentiment?

In Europe, right-wing movements once consigned to the fringe have gained electoral traction from the Netherlands to Hungary as desperate citizens, ignored by political elites, struggle to preserve their way of life. Here in America, where our political aristocracy is equally disdainful of the average citizen, Arizona found itself overwhelmed by illegals and abandoned by a federal government unwilling to enforce its own laws. [Arizona] felt compelled to act and has been damned for its self-preservation effort by the Left and its media acolytes.

[I]t's profoundly dishonest of American leftists anxious to pander to such extremist groups as La Raza to paint anyone alarmed by illegal immigration as a white supremacist.

Take Arizona -- Polls reveal that two-thirds to three-quarters of its citizens approve of the new enforce-the-law law. Yet only 58% of Arizonans are non-Hispanic whites.

(*SNORT*) (*AMUSED SHRUG*)

Over 30% are Hispanic. Another 5% are Native Americans, 4% black and 2% mixed race. According to the left's logic, every non-Hispanic white must be "anti-immigrant." Blacks and Indians must be piling on, too.

(*SMIRK*)

Of course, that's nonsense. Left-leaning whites don't support the legislation. Which means some Hispanics must favor it. Many do. Hispanic Americans have the same concerns as all other citizens. Assuming that all citizens who happen to be Hispanic automatically back illegal immigration is just the Left's selective [stereotyping].

Hispanics have been in Arizona for centuries and take great pride in their lineage. Tucson's known as "the Old Pueblo," not "Ye Olde Village." They don't like what's happened to their state any more than does Parker Van Barker III (NO RELATION!) in his retirement mansion in Scottsdale. (And, by the way... Hispanics are far likelier than other citizens to be the victims of illegal-immigrant criminality.)

May 3, 2010 at 4:58 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100503/ap_on_go_su_co/us_supreme_court_access

The Supreme Court is closing its iconic front entrance beneath the words "Equal Justice Under Law."

Beginning Tuesday, visitors no longer will ascend the wide marble steps to enter the 75-year-old building. Instead, they will be directed to a central screening facility to the side of and beneath the central steps that was built to improve the court's security as part of a $122 million renovation.

Two justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called the change unfortunate and unjustified.

* YES... YOU CAN QUOTE ME: "GOD BLESS STEPHEN BREYER AND RUTH BADER GINSBURG...!!!

May 3, 2010 at 11:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://freep.com/article/20100503/NEWS06/100503031/1319/Judge-orders-release-of-9-Hutaree-militia-members

A federal judge in Detroit today ordered the release of nine members of a Lenawee County Christian militia group freed on bond over the objections of federal prosecutors.

“The United States is correct that it need not wait until people are killed before it arrests conspirators,” U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said in a 36-page decision. “But, the Defendants are also correct: their right to engage in hate-filled, venomous speech, is a right that deserves First Amendment protection.”

May 3, 2010 at 11:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2061

Last November, the federal corporation charged with protecting Americans’ retirement funds issued an ominous public warning: the amount of pensions at risk inside failing companies had more than tripled during the recession.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s announcement signaled it might need tens of billions of new dollars to rescue traditional pensions paid by U.S. firms whose economic collapse left them unable to meet their retirement obligations to workers.

At the same time, however, the federally chartered corporation was receiving some bad news of its own: for the first time it was going to flunk an independent audit of the way it manages its finances.

On Nov. 12, 2009, PBGC’s outside audit firm and the corporation’s own internal watchdog jointly informed the federal body it was being cited for a “material weakness” in its internal financial controls, the accounting equivalent of an F grade.

“PBGC did not have effective internal control over financial reporting (including safeguarding assets) and compliance with laws and regulations and its operations,” Inspector General Rebecca Anne Batts wrote in a letter that has escaped public attention despite their potential importance to taxpayers.

A Center for Public Integrity review of hundreds of pages of memos, audits and internal reports shows the pension guaranty corporation has been unable to make several guarantees about its own work — in some cases directly misleading Congress and its inspector general into believing long-simmering problems were resolved.

* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... WHAT CAN I TELL YOU? (*SHRUG*) I DON'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP - I JUST SHARE IT.

May 3, 2010 at 11:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/fire_boom_oil_spill_raines.html

If U.S. officials had followed up on a 1994 response plan for a major Gulf oil spill, it is possible that the spill could have been kept under control and far from land.

The problem: The federal government did not have a single fire boom on hand.

The "In-Situ Burn" plan produced by federal agencies in 1994 calls for responding to a major oil spill in the Gulf with the immediate use of fire booms. A single fire boom being towed by two boats can burn up to 1,800 barrels of oil an hour, Bohleber said. That translates to 75,000 gallons an hour, raising the possibility that the spill could have been contained at the accident scene 100 miles from shore.

"They said this was the tool of last resort. No, this is absolutely the asset of first use. Get in there and start burning oil before the spill gets out of hand," Jeff Bohleber, chief financial officer for Elastec, said.

"If they had six or seven of these systems in place when this happened and got out there and started burning, it would have significantly lessened the amount of oil that got loose."

In the days after the rig sank, U.S Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said the government had all the assets it needed. She did not discuss why officials waited more than a week to conduct a test burn.

At the time, former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oil spill response coordinator Ron Gouguet - who helped craft the 1994 plan - told the Press-Register that officials had pre-approval for burning. "The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away." Gouguet speculated that burning could have captured 95% of the oil as it spilled from the well.

Each boom costs a few hundred thousand dollars, Bohleber said...

(*SIGH*)

May 3, 2010 at 11:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/may/02/this-week-bill-maher-fact-checker/

[PoliFact] couldn't resist fact-checking a claim from liberal commentator Bill Maher, who sparred with conservative George Will on Brazil's energy sustainability.

"Can we have judges factcheck this on Brazil?" Maher asked.

Maher said, "I could certainly criticize oil companies and I could criticize America in general for not attacking this problem in the '70s. Brazil got off oil in the last 30 years; we certainly could have."

We checked into whether Brazil "got off oil in the last 30 years." We found Brazil still consumes a great deal of oil, ranking No. 7 for countries that consume the most oil in 2008.

We rated Maher's statement....

(*DRUM ROLL*)

False.

May 3, 2010 at 11:37 PM

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