Lying, misdirection and obfuscation. The Republican exercise regimen.

Michele Bachmann:

“Oil production can create dependable jobs in the United States if given the chance. Too bad Obama has said ‘no’ to American energy production.”

Hugh Hewitt:

“Of course, we don’t have new wells off East or West Coast, and, of course, the president hasn’t done anything to expand production in Alaska either. It is absurd for the president to claim anything other than that for which he deserves complete credit: Bringing new exploration to a halt in a vain and destructive attempt to force America to stop consuming the oil that in his mind and the mind of his political allies is imperiling the planet.”

World Net Daily:

. . the House Natural Resources Committee unveiled figures showing under Obama, there were the fewest onshore oil and gas leases issued since 1984. . .

And oil and natural gas production on federal lands has plummeted by more than 40 percent compared to just 10 years ago.

The House committee noted White House press secretary Jay Carney has been trying to defend Obama’s “dismal energy record.”

Boo hoo. If energy companies can’t decimate our wildlife reserves, coasts and fisheries, America can’t produce any oil. Or can it?

U.S. oil gusher blows out projections
By Simone Sebastian | Houston Chronicle | February 19, 2012

The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts. . .

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.

Here come record amounts of oil:

“It’s staggering,” said Marshall Adkins, who directs energy research for the financial services firm Raymond James. “If we continue growing anywhere near that pace and keep squeezing demand out of the system, that puts you in a world where we are not importing oil in 10 years.” . .

Last month, the U.S. Energy Information Administration upgraded its forecast of crude production in 2025 to 6.4 million barrels per day – 1 million barrels more than were pumped in 2010.

Previously, the EIA had projected the U.S. would peak at 6 million barrels in 2022. . .

By the EIA’s forecast, the United States will challenge Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer when crude and other forms of liquid petroleum are included.

The reasons: Surges in production in South and West Texas, North Dakota and the Gulf of Mexico. Natural gas production, through fracking, has also gone through the roof. Through the roof’s roof.

So American energy production is way up. How inconvenient for the Republicans. I’d say this supports Obama’s decision making on off-shore leases and the Keystone pipeline.

If there’s any debate about the seriousness with which House Republicans take science, it’s been ended with their choice of Science and Technology Chair.

Of all people, they’ve chosen the ancient, doddering Texas oil cheerleader, Ralph Hall. Global warming, anyone?

Recent events have uncovered extensive evidence from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, which involved many researchers across the globe discussing the destruction, alteration and suppression of data that did not support global warming claims. Leaked email exchanges detail attempts to alter data that is the basis of climate modeling. These exchanges reveal actions that constitute a serious breach of scientific ethics.

The University of East Anglia disagrees. The BP oil disaster?

“As we saw that thing bubbling out, blossoming out – all that energy, every minute of every hour of every day of every week – that was tremendous to me,” he said. “That we could deliver that kind of energy out there – even on an explosion.”

Eleven dead men and tens of millions of Americans don’t share that view.

Wingnut and notoriously lazy blogger Confederate Yankee posts another gem.

In Conserva-circles, a “gem” appears to be a chunk of somebody else’s work that you mis-read, mis-interpret and then put up as your own opinion. Come to think of it, that’s also “rank stupidity” and “Conservative punditry,” something of a Norton Utility for right-wing internettia. If only “Norton” were “Kristolbennetto’reilly.” Anyway, it must be an especially useful practice when your own weak-backed analysis can’t manage more than 20 or 30 words of ricocheting irony.

This one’s a howler. In a post he titled “Governed by Fools” (*cough*), he bracketed the cut-and-paste job with the only effort he muscled up for the affair, two sentences:

They mismanage wars, economies, and even disasters:

[...]

Why, why do liberals place such blind trust in legendary incompetence of government bureaucrats, instead of the ingenuity of the people?

Why, oh why, my Jeebus? Governments and arrogance and fascism and bureaucrats and statism and socialism, oh lordy. When will you collectivist a-holes finally look to the individual? (In this case, by Yankee link, to a gritty American entrepreneur by the name of “Kevin Costner.”) When?!

Anyway, here’s the point, or someone else’s, so vital that he had to copy it onto his site:

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company’s expense. “If there’s a country that’s experienced with building dikes and managing water, it’s the Netherlands,” says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

That socialist Dutch government: there go a pile of bad-asses. No kidding, see for yourself.

It’s sad to have to post news like this, but it’s important to know the truth about what’s really happening down in the Gulf. I doubt that Americans really appreciate the amount of misery BP has caused. The oil conglomerate’s done a pretty professional job of keeping the bad press to a minimum, but that doesn’t do anything for the suffering of the people. It just keeps piling up:

FORT MORGAN, Ala. — An Orange Beach, Ala., charter boat captain shot and killed himself this morning just before his vessel was scheduled to set out to take part in oil cleanup and protection efforts, investigators said.

Well, I guess there’s just no keeping some people down.

Like your idiot uncle at your mother’s funeral service. The one who needed to stand up in the middle of the eulogy and advise everyone: “Aww, stop your sobbing, you pissy fools! People die all the time!”

Or that moron at your office. The one who interjected, while the videos of The Towers coming down were still on an endless loop just after September the Eleventh, “It was only a matter of time.” Whatever that meant.

Some people are just smarter than others. Some people just have the vision thing and a big, fat mouth.

Meet Alaska Representative Don Young. This Republican obviously is one of those people, sees the forest and the trees and that you’re an idiot. He’s reviewed the whole BP Gulf disaster, and, boy, does he have some good news for you. Brace yourselves — your day, heck maybe your whole Summer, is about to get a whole lot better:

It’s not a disaster. Hooray! It sure looked like one.

Millions of barrels were spilled during World War II, “and no natural catastrophe.” Well, he’s got a point there: that War was a natural phenomenon, like Halley’s Comet. The next World War II will swing by when someone again invades Poland in two-thousand-and-I’ll-be-dead.

For me, the interesting word there is “world.” It’s one thing to spill 7,500 barrels of oil a day into the oceans, across “the world.” It’s another to spill twice that much each day into a 3 by 3 by 3 foot space. Granted, it’s waaay under the surface of the ocean, but it just won’t stay there, shoot.

Considering his strapping genius and need to be listened to, I’m surprised we haven’t heard from him before. How many other horrid tragedies have we been foolishly mourning? What additional disasters might Don be capable of talking America’s frown upside down?

Certainly the Exxon Valdez disaster:

‘Congressman Young, I’d like you to take a look at this picture and get your reaction to the devastation:’

“It’s a coat. A naturally occurring coat! Oil is a natural substance that’s present in the environment, and it coats things — that’s what Mother Nature intended! She coats lady minks with fur, polar bears with snow and and petrol geese with oil. Haven’t any of you geniuses noticed where the hell this is going on? Butt-cold up there!”

. . probably the recent Tennessee flooding:

‘Representative Young, we have some images of the terrible tragedy in Tennessee, at least 29 people have lost their lives. As you look at these pictures, what thoughts come to mind?’

“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking water is a natural substance! Can’t live without it — not you or me! I’m thinking the Good Lord himself knew that better than any of you, that’s for sure! That’s why he once covered the entire world with a big ol’ water flood — bigger than this one. And ya know what? He didn’t destroy the world — he SAVED it. Go on and tell your egghead FEMAs that. GO ON!”

. . and how did he explain the Bhopal disaster again?

‘Congressman, it’s a shocking tragedy. A horrific cyanide leak into unsuspecting neighborhoods, with people poisoned, choking, dying in the streets, dying in their sleep — an unmitigated nightmare. Over 3,000 bodies so far. Any comments?’

“Comments? You bet I got comments! Cyanide is a natural thing, comin’ from the peach pits. But it’s got a helluva kick to it. You got to spit it out. Spit ‘em out! What is wrong with these, the Indians? You gonna get a turrible headache otherwise! Whatever the Union Carbides have been handing out to the poor, hungry people there, I’m sure they were doing their best. But you got to let ‘em know — once ya get to the pit, spit ‘em out!”

‘Eh, congressman? It wasn’t food, it was a gas leak. A cyanide gas leak.’

“Exackly! Can’t go on with peach pits in ya’ lungs!”

Sadly, it appears that Waveland, Mississippi, has become an early ground zero for the appearance of dead wildlife from the on-going BP disaster. While the vast quantities of oil that wash onto the barrier islands of Louisiana coat, poison and kill the precious biodiversity where it lays, in Waveland the sea life that once swam washes ashore.

While some of it may be naturally occurring, there’s little doubt that more of it resulted from what is probably the worst environmental disaster in America’s history.

I’ve lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 33 years. Never have I seen a sea turtle on the beach either dead or alive. Today I saw 2 dead sea turtles covered in oil just miles from my home in Waveland, MS.

. . 47 sea turtles on average are reported stranded along the upper Gulf Coast each May, based on a five-year average, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday. The range is from 15 to 80 on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle in May each year.

But this month there have been 77 dead in Mississippi alone, said Moby Solangi with the Institute of Marine Mammals Studies in Gulfport. Most of these are the endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle . .

“These are the only three we’ve seen alive in the past three weeks,” Solangi said.

Came across these shocking images amongst some viewer submitted Gulf of Mexico oil spill photos on the New York Times website. The two photos show thousands of little fish washed up dead in Waveland, Mississippi. The photos are credited to Sabrina Bradford.

According to first hand accounts oil has been spotted washing up in Waveland. One person writes on the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker that,”We walked along the beach just outside of the Silver Slipper Casino area and saw many dead fish, 2 cats and at least 5 trout and a quite large fish we could not identify. In addition we saw upwards of 20 dead baby crabs spread out along the beach. We were not able to locate any tar balls or residues of any type.”

The increase in dead sea animals ashore along with the lack of an obvious cause of death, like their being coated with toxic tar, may point to a less obvious but troubling culprit: suffocation by oil. Specifically, oxygen starvation caused by being enveloped in oil plumes.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times underscored the possibility. Because the oil originates deep undersea and because BP has aggressively used hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersant to prevent the oil from coating the Gulf’s surface (and then being photographed, some say), the millions of gallons of oil stay submerged as tiny droplets that loosely aggregate into large plumes.

The scientific work detailed in the article showed:
1). The plumes exist.
2). They are massive.
3). They are so oxygen-poor that they are capable of killing sea life in huge quantities.

Scientists Build Case for Undersea Plumes
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: May 28, 2010

. . The water samples they pulled up suggested that any oil in the plumes was highly diffuse — not even visible to the naked eye. But when several gallons of the water were forced through a fine filter, tiny black oil droplets appeared.

Even in that diffuse form, the plumes were having a drastic impact on the chemistry of the ocean, with dissolved oxygen levels plunging as each plume drifted through the sea.

That, Dr. Joye said, was most likely because bacteria were ramping up to consume the oil and gas — a good thing, over all, but it was creating a heavy demand for oxygen and other nutrients. Aside from the toxic effect of the oil, the declining oxygen was a potential threat to sea life. Slowly, as the Walton Smith and other boats worked the gulf this past week, the weird physics of a deep-water well blowout came into better focus.

We may be yet unaware of the oil’s terrible impact upon our ecosystems because it’s most evident within these lethal oxygen-less clouds, beneath the surface of the Gulf where nobody can detect it. No one outside a few hard-working scientists and their instruments . .

I’m going to try to keep this brief. I just spent, oh, 3 or 4 hours reading up on the disaster (actually, I’m lying, it’s probably double that), and I think it’s pretty clear what happened. It’d be easy to go on and on about it, but I’ll try to avoid that.

They were working on a well that they drilled, found their expected oil, and decided to shut it down in order to return to it later. They were capping it, getting ready to leave it behind, when it blew up. They had a violent, catastrophic ‘blowout’ that killed 11 people, their remains never recovered, and the well continues to gush something like 5,000 barrels a day out of the sea floor, threatening thousands of miles of American coastline and ecology.

The key to understanding the catastrophe is to realize that the oil, mixed with gases, is 18,000 plus feet down, hot and highly pressurized. Once vented by drilling into it, they had to be careful how they managed it.

Having tapped it and held it in check, they were sealing it. It’s here where the testimony between the three operators differs as to what they did, and who was responsible for the explosion.

British Petroleum has the rights to the oil, so they own the well on the sea floor. Transocean ran the giant floating rig, now dead. Halliburton were the hands-on contractors doing most of the work. In testimony Tuesday, they all blamed each other. What I believe is clear is this: they never properly ‘capped’ the well. [see diagram here]

The ‘capping’ of a well is a tricky thing, having to make the transition between having a constant, dynamic control of the situation and sealing it off, leaving it behind. With so much pressure in the well, the important thing was to keep the thousands of feet of heavy ‘drilling mud‘ in the riser (‘pipe’) above the well in the line. Everybody recognizes that. It’s what pushes back on the considerable pressure in the well.

The typical capping procedure appears to go like this:

1.) Cement the upper well area between the drilled rock and outer edges of the metallic well lining to provide a gas-and-oil tight seal.

2.) Drop a cement plug deep into the bore hole, above the oil.

3.) Drop a 2nd cement plug above the first, separated by some amount of drilling mud.

4.) Wait some amount of time to allow the cement to seal and to allow some testing of the ‘cap.’

5.) If assured of the seal, pump salt water into the riser to extract the drilling mud. The well is capped.

We know this: they were capping the well. But someone ordered the heavy drilling mud removed before the cap was properly set. At least one and maybe both cement caps were never set, but they began to back off the well anyways. With minimal ceiling pressure, the gases exploded out of the well and then ignited only a minute or two later, killing 11 people, sealing the fate of the rig and the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. Once exposed and embarrassed, once pushed into the spotlight for being horribly, perfectly wrong, somebody’s got to start repairing the facade of Conservative philosophy. It can’t be as stupid and reckless as we say it is.

So, one by one, the brave and the callow and the fearless crawl out from the woodwork to come up with whatever excuses they can to rehabilitate the brand and its brilliant proponents.

So, here we go again. There are almost no sea animals dead — have you seen any? It’s not so bad, c’mon . .

SEE? It’s nothing, pffft.

Hey – by the way — if we stop offshore drilling, the spilling of oil and the environmental damage will only get worse . .

Absolutely perfect timing. This ‘sabotage’ gambit about Bhopal is something right wingers love to pull out of their asses. It has never been substantiated and neglects to admit that the chemical plant was in wretched condition and dangerous as hell.

Accepting offshore drilling and its spills is better for the environment. See? It’s all so easy to understand, you people are upset for nothing.

Lastly: let’s face it, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? I bet you liberals just blew the rig up . .

Next up: the rig itself was liberal, and it failed exactly as they predicted . .

Condolences to the family and friends of the 11 men killed in the explosion.

The resultant oil spill is an ecological disaster that may already be as large as the Exxon Valdez spill, and could end up being both far, far larger and more devastating. It’s an historic tragedy.

[click to get larger image]

National Review’s clown-prince of ‘epistemic closure,’ Mark Levin, demonstrating his now-famous chops:

. . which links to this:

An Earth Day tradition: George Carlin on the intellectual bankruptcy of “saving the planet”
By: J.P. Freire
04/22/10 11:27 AM EDT

As Carlin put it: The planet is fine.

And just exactly how is the planet fine? Because Homo sapiens will surely die off, and the Earth won’t even notice. Which is certainly an option, to do absolutely nothing on our behalf to intervene in the goings-on around us, the environment included. Just let the chips fall where they may, if we all die, we die.

But that’s the last thing that the Conservatives would actually choose to do, their lives being more sacred than the Earth itself. Until they’re forced to make a decision about the environment, they’ll say that the Earth is perfectly fine for us and for all human life forever because, well, I don’t know. Because The Lord said we’re so special? Carlin’s take is the opposite: we’re nobodies and we’ll probably be wiped out sooner than later. Not that they were ‘open’ to hearing and remembering it.

Senator from Alaska Lisa Murkowski is an enemy of the environment — and why is it that folks from maybe the most beautiful state want to decimate the place?

Anyways, she’s been trying to substitute the Clean Air Act with her own ‘Dirty Air Act’, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate CO2 emissions. What a great idea.

For her greedy, misbegotten efforts, Greenpeace put this together:

Funny. Well, that may look like a comedic clip masquerading as politics, but that was actually some sort of attempt on the defenseless Senator’s life, or the lynching of her children, or something.

[Robert] Dillon said the [video] site featured “insults to the senator and her family — as if these people have no bounds, no sense of truth, and no interest in meaningful climate policy. Greenpeace should be downright ashamed to be associated with, let alone paying for, these ads.”

On the contrary, it’s pretty well ‘bound’ed — it’s satire. Sensitive?

“This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with Washington. Too often outside groups go for the personal attack when they can’t win on the merits. Rather than have a legitimate debate about the policy, they launch a smear campaign.”

There you go. If you ask Washington what the problem with Washington is, it’s people outside of Washington.

If I had some extra time, I’d actually create a transcript of this: easily a “Top 10 Morons” attempt at simply discrediting that complex phenomenon, Global Warming.