If his tough talk doesn't help in the polls, Obama can show his displeasure and frustration with BP by starting an online petition. Maybe even frown a bit when he does the crowd photo ops in the gulf, after delivering BP's latest press release.

http://TakingCongress.net

Obama is BP's poodle. HIs 'rage' and 'ass kicking' is little more than a badly acted child's tantrum. I see more passion from people who are pissed off because they got a parking ticket.

BP knows how bad this catastrophe is. They had studies and contingency plans, all of which predicted a large scale blowout and, oil dispersion and the generation of underwater plumes of oil form a blowout. The MMS did their own studies that confirmed the BP information.

Now BP demands that we listen to their spin and propaganda, rather than, as the song goes, our own lying eyes.

When (or if) BP personnel are hauled before a court, they should be found guilty of terrorism at a minimum, and ecocide, and should be sentenced to exile in the contaminated marshes and coastal areas, eking out bare survival on the oil tainted water and fish that will wash ashore. A slow death sentence to be sure, but one poetic in it's execution.

BP and its U.S. subsidiary, the White House, are updating the philosophical riddle, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around, is there a sound. The update? If there's a huge oil spill in the ocean, but it's not visible because it's hundreds of meters below the surface, is there a plume?

BP is in a corner....they must deny, portray false appearances and pass-the-buck if they want to avoid paying out the NOSE.

Froomkin - What wasted breath: " To put it bluntly, the scientific community is hamstrung until we know precisely how much oil and gas has leaked and is leaking from the wellhead."
Whatever the volume of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico???
IT IS ALREADY WAY WAY TO MUCH! The only important question is -
WHEN WILL THE POWERS THAT BE; GIVE UP THE INSANITY?
Why didn't the (Bad People) BP close the pipe with explosives in the first week of the leak?
Answer- Greedy Profit before Ecology! Here below is my Poem again revised as the kill damage grows.
THE QUESTION IS?
Where Will the Oily Blob go,
Black death slime sea raging,
Pristine Gulf already devoured,
Death dirth rolling over Cuba,
Kissing pitch eyes of a French statue,
Then a Blackened Amerikan Schooner,
It's sails lurching burning at bay,
Extinction speeding head on,
Consuming the White cliffs of Dover,
A greed filled folly relentless,
Even Media dark lies can't hide!

Will this crime awaken the sublime?
Forsaking the reptile brain?
Can black blood bondage change?
Returning warm blue verdant vapor,
Once more redeeming life's brillance,
Lapping the shores of radiance,
For all living creatures,
Respectful of Natures Balance,
Heart felt Mind's Eye Seeing,
The Blue Green Whirling planet?

The BLACK BLOP IS LURKING BENEATH THE SURFACE!
And the Powers that Be are driving the Space Ship called Earth to death!

For those who want to laugh to relieve their grief, the past few episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report have been wonderful. Take a break, folks, and return, refreshed, to incessant indignation.

Cheers!

BP = Broken Promises

Reminds me of the mournful song by Naked Eyes (adjusted for the betrayal).

Ne-ver had a DOUBT,
In the beginning,
Never-a-DOUBT.
Trusted-TOO-TRUE,
In the beginning,
Big Oil I-loved-you-Right-THROUGH.

Arm in arm we laughed like kids, At all the silly-things BP did,

You-Made-Me: Promises! Promises!
Knowing I'd belieeeeve
Promises! Promises!
You knew you'd never keeeeeep

Second-Time-Around,
I'm still believing,
Words-That-You-Said.
You said you'd always be here,
In love forever,
Still repeats in my head.
You can't finish what you start, If this is love it breaks my heart!

You-Made-Me: Promises! Promises!
You knew you'd never keeeeeep
Promises, Promises!
Why do I belieeeeeeeve??????????????????

[Instrumental Interlude]

Arm-In-Arm, we laughed like kids, At all the silly things Haliburton did,
You can't finish what you start, If this is love it breaks my heart!

You-Made-Me: Promises, Promises (you fucking CEO's)
You knew you'd never keeeep
Promises! Promises!
Why do I belieeeeeve???????
All of your promises
You knew you'd never keeeeep
Promises! Promises!
Why do I belieeeeeeeeeeve???????????

Promises
Promises
Promises
Promises
Promise

"The Obama administration, while at long last officially confirming the presence of some underwater oil, is still not exactly going out of its way to contradict BP"

USans should remind themselves of their routine personal approval of the idea of the prez making each and every choice to advance a zero-sum private agenda (to get re-elected), collective fallout-be-damned. It's the "merkan way".

Whatever o is doing, it can be counted on to be what he his told, but with a slight accent of so some kind of indignation about what b(ig)p(rofits)'s self made expertise account, just so he might on an outside change still get re-elected in 2012.

It is very possible that o won't be re-elected and the one who does get elected could be as bad as o or his brother, w, or worse, most likely worse, but that is just the breaks.

o: hey, bigprofits, what you doin about this mess in the gulf?

bigprofits: I don't know nutin from nutin!

>>
But more than anything, she said, what scientists need to know is precisely how much oil and gas has leaked. Neither BP nor the Obama administration have been forthcoming on that front.
<<

Last evening, Wednesday, 6/9, MSNBC, reporting on the "top kill" attempt, revealed that BP pumped 80 barrels of mud per minute into the well trying to overwhelm the flow of oil to keep it in the well. We could all plainly see that the well was ejecting the mud as quickly as it was pumped in.

Excerpt from Keith Olbermann program on 6/9/10:

>>
CAVNAR: I think they certainly probably—they likely had a casing failure during the Top Kill procedure. Remember, they had 30,000 horsepower pumping mud at about as much as 80 barrels a minute. That kind of casing was probably already damaged, could have certainly failed.
<<

See complete story at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37592156/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/

1440 minutes in a day times 80 barrels per minute is equal to 115,200 barrels per day.

This monster blowout is pushing at least 115,200 barrels per day into the Gulf of Mexico.

"scientists need to know" how much mud per day was pumped into and ejected from that well, and now, if they watched MSNBC last night they know.

Finally, the story of giant, and intentionally disguised 'plumes' of underwater oil/water mix intentionally created by BP's criminal uss of Corexit, which was reported first by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) THREE WEEKS AGO, is 'spilling' out of the MSM's leaking propaganda hole in the NY Times and other 'Vichy' media.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

Have all the NYT columnists been reduced to being merely entertainers cynically writing about the symptoms, but not the CAUSE, of our existential collapse?

Clearly we are all caught in a maelstrom of hidden Empire, which is both unreported in what passes for 'news' to the public and not commented upon by analysts and columnists.

Certainly a ruling-elite global Empire pertains now at the un-hopeful beginning of the 21st century in America, and controls our disappeared democracy while hiding behind the facade of its two-party 'Vichy' facade of politics and press.

Presumably Kristof and the NYT are well aware of this guileful modern feudal fascist Empire headquartered in our former country ---- and yet there is no seriousness of discourse, but only entertaining and falsely 'funny' chatter.

Alan MacDonald

Sanford, Maine

Any questions now why we need an agency independent of BP investigating?

The following is an excerpt from a June 8th article by Hiram Lee entitled "BP and White House continue cover-up of oil spill"

"The falsification of the flow rate study by the Interior Department is the latest step in a deliberate effort by BP and the Obama administration to conceal the true dimensions of the oil spill.

"Immediately following the April 20 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, in which 11 workers lost their lives, BP reported there had been no oil spill at all resulting from the blast. Unable to maintain this assertion, BP then relented and admitted to a spill of 1,000 barrels per day.

"When this claim became untenable, the next estimate to be promoted was that of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, placing the size of the spill at 5,000 barrels per day. BP maintained this version of events until the end of May.

"All estimates produced by BP and the White House have drawn criticism from scientists throughout the country who have conducted their own independent studies of video footage of the leaking well provided by BP, under pressure. Steven Wereley, an engineering professor at Purdue University, estimates the size of the spill could be as large as 84,000 barrels per day.

"Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, found the size of the spill could be as large as 100,000 barrels per day."

Here is the site for the entire article
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/spil-j08.shtml

"In relation to BP, the administration has displayed a complete paralysis, once again unable to take any action that interferes with the interests of the giant corporations that control the American and world economy.

"BP has been left in control of the response operations, with the administration repeating the line that only BP has the scientific expertise to handle the situation. The company has employed one maneuver after another, all of which have been intended primarily to cover up the fact that neither BP nor the government had in place any contingency plans.

"The Obama administration operates under the assumption that all that is required is the mouthing of meaningless phrases about being “angry and frustrated,” that mass popular outrage can somehow be managed through well-tested media techniques and public relations stunts.

"Popular anger, however, is growing by the day. This anger and opposition must be armed with a political perspective, directed not only at BP and the other large corporations directly responsible for this disaster, but at the entire political and economic system that made such a catastrophe all but inevitable.

"Despite the attempts by BP and the US government to present the disaster as unforeseeable, it is the product of the decades of “free market” policies aimed at eliminating all constraints on corporate profit making.

"With each passing day, more is revealed about the way in which BP deliberately cut corners on safety, facilitated by the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS), which rubber-stamped all of BP’s actions up to the day of the explosion. Despite ample warnings of an impending disaster—including leaks in the blowout preventer, the failure of which has cut off attempts to cap the eruption—BP was determined to push ahead with the drilling. At the same time, additional safety measures and backups were not installed, with the oil industry unwilling to pay the extra costs.

"Regulation of oil industry operations has been left in the hands of the oil industry itself, with the MMS and the government functioning as little more than an auxiliary of corporate interests. This relationship has continued unabated under Obama. In 2009, the administration directly intervened after a court ruled that Bush’s offshore oil drilling plan did not include sufficient environmental impact studies. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar insisted that oil drilling in the Gulf should continue, citing the Deepwater Horizon project in particular.

"This disaster is another demonstration of the way in which global society is vulnerable to the destructive operations of privately owned corporations, whose guiding principle is profit and the enrichment of private shareholders.

"The government has committed massive resources to the military and the Department of Homeland Security, on the pretext that the greatest threat to the American people is some sort of terrorist action. And yet, during the course of the past decade, the greatest catastrophes have been created by giant corporations and the capitalist system. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the decay of social infrastructure in the United States. In 2008, the operations of finance companies plunged the world into economic recession. Now, the criminal actions of BP have led to the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Emergency measures are necessary to deal with this disaster. First, vast economic and social resources must be mobilized to limit the environmental disaster to the extent possible and provide jobs for all those affected in the region. BP has hired only a tiny fraction of those able to work, as the company is concerned above all with its bottom line.

"A criminal investigation into the activities of BP, Transocean, Halliburton and other companies must be launched. Top executives should be arrested and held accountable for this disaster.

"An international committee of scientists and other experts must be convened, completely independent of the corporations and the government, to determine the extent of the catastrophe and the necessary measures that must be taken. No confidence can be placed in the Obama administration or any section of the political establishment to do anything but continue to cover for BP and the oil industry.

"As the days and weeks pass, the impact of the disaster will escalate, as the unanticipated consequences come to light. One thing is certain: the ultimate cost of this disaster will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The resources for this must come from the oil companies themselves. BP and other energy companies must be immediately nationalized and placed under democratic control.

"These measures must be part of a far broader socialist reorganization of the American and world economy. This catastrophe is an expression of the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system. It must be replaced with socialism—the organization of economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit.

"The Socialist Equality Party is spearheading the struggle for a mass socialist movement of the working class in the United States and around the world. We urge all those who agree with this program to join the Socialist Equality Party and take up the fight for this program."

"The socialist response to the Gulf oil crisis"
by Joe Kishore and Patrick Martin
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j01.shtml

"The continued eruption of oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is an unmitigated catastrophe, with incalculable economic and ecological consequences.

"The Obama administration is now admitting what independent scientific experts have been maintaining for weeks: that this is the worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States. There is little prospect that the unchecked flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon site can be stopped before the end of August, if even then.

"Government scientists estimate that as much as one million gallons of oil are flowing every day, while other scientists have calculated the rate to be several times this amount. By the end of the summer, at least one hundred million gallons will have been dumped into the Gulf—many times more than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. In the worst-case scenario, the entire reservoir could be emptied—and no one knows how much oil this means.

"Hundreds of thousands of people who depend directly or indirectly on the fishing industry in the Gulf face the loss of their livelihoods. Entire species may be wiped out and fragile ecosystems devastated.

"Today marks the official beginning of the hurricane season. At least a half a dozen major storms are expected to strike the US mainland. A large hurricane intersecting the slick would propel both crude oil and the toxic chemical dispersants onto the shoreline and into the atmosphere, with incalculable consequences for public health.

"The event has global implications. If it has not already happened, the oil will soon link up with the “loop current,” which will pull the slick around the southern tip of Florida. From there, the Gulf Stream current could spread toxic waste up the US eastern seaboard and ultimately across the Atlantic to the coast of Western Europe.

"There remains a vast gulf between the immense scale of the disaster and the response from the government and the mass media. From the beginning, there has been a systematic attempt to downplay the significance of the event. The Obama administration did nothing for weeks. Its main concern was to prevent the BP disaster from disrupting plans for expanding offshore oil drilling, which Obama, like Bush, has aggressively supported.

(Continued)

An excerpt from
"The Gulf oil spill and the case for socialism" by Jerry White
June 6, 2010
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j08.shtml

"The president’s complacency and indifference is not simply a personal trait. It reflects the hostility and contempt that the political representatives of big business have for the masses of working people who are the victims of the profit system.

"The well-paid politicians, journalists and academics have long defended capitalism by claiming that the “market” is the most efficient and rational means of organizing the economy and allocating society’s resources. But the BP disaster has revealed to the world the terrible consequences of the anarchy and unplanned character of capitalism, and its subordination of human life to private profit.

"Like his Republican predecessor in the White House, Obama identifies not with the plight of the victims of this disaster but with the corporate criminals responsible for it. Less than three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Obama promoted his plan for the expansion of offshore drilling, telling a North Carolina audience, “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”

"In fact BP and other oil corporations were totally unprepared for what BP CEO Tony Hayward called “low-probability risk” of a leak one mile below the surface of the ocean. Like the Wall Street banks, the Big Oil companies are not driven by long-term and socially necessary considerations—including preserving the planet.

"Their overriding concern is ensuring the largest and quickest quarterly results and returns for their shareholders. How else can one explain the haste with which BP sought to wrap up operations on the Deepwater Horizon—ignoring and covering up the warnings of an impending disaster—and move on to the next multi-billion dollar drilling site.

"Even in the midst of the disaster a central focus of the company has been to keep its stock value from falling. BP’s share price actually rose 2.7 per cent on Monday morning, reportedly in response to statements by its Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg late last week that the company executives “fully understand the importance of our dividend to our shareholders.”

"The most logical and necessary response would be to requisition the dividends and all of the productive and financial resources of BP—which made a $17 billion profit last year—to effectively deal with the consequences of the spill and compensate those being devastated by it."

And this from David Walsh

"Reaganism, the program of unrestricted free market capitalism introduced in the early 1980s—which was, in fact, a bipartisan agenda—involved a concerted attack on the jobs, living standards and social conditions of the working population, accompanied by a ferocious ideological assault both justifying and concealing the vast transfer of wealth to a tiny elite.

"Every form of backwardness—anticommunism, religious bigotry and fanaticism, homophobia, racism, militarism, chauvinism, the worship of money, markets and greed—was given a new life and encouraged on a daily basis by the political and media establishment.

"Political and social life was recast in quasi-religious and Apocalyptic terms. Reagan ranted against the “Evil Empire” (the USSR). Christian fundamentalists gathered in and around his regime. As governor of California in 1971 Reagan had publicly repeated the fantasies of the fundamentalists about Armageddon and the Second Coming. ...

"The end of the postwar boom in the early 1970s ushered in a period of increased economic insecurity that affected wide layers of the population. The global recession of 1975-76, the most serious since the Great Depression, was followed by a recovery which did not bring about a return to the conditions of the 1960s.

"Slumping profit and growth rates eventually obliged capital to devise new methods of production. Companies began to outsource production or establish offshore facilities, manufacturing processes were broken up and dispersed worldwide. The historic process which we know today as “globalization” had seriously begun. Living standards in the US came under pressure, stagnated or declined in absolute terms.

"The relatively stable economic conditions that had persisted for nearly 40 years were disrupted."

(My words now, not David Walsh's)

And over those 40 years the "soft-left" in America (e.g., Common Dreams, The Nation magazine, The Huffington Post, and the like) kept urging people to "vote for the lesser of the two evils." Kept trying to pull the Democratic Party to the left -- instead of recognizing that capitalism -- or more correctly nowadays "corporatism" (capitalism gone wild) is the problem.

The Democratic-Republican duopoly does the bidding of the ruling class. How much clearer can that be? Aparatchik functionaries such as Gore or Kerry or Obama aren't going to welsh on their deal, brokered "on bended knee," with the ruling elite -- they were paid by Corporate America to do a job (protect the narrow, selfish, death-dealing interests of ruling class) and they're doing it; in spades.

Nothing will change (which is another way of saving that the planet is doomed) unless and until there is a genuine oppositional party in the United States.

Even as much as I admire Ralph Nader, he is unwilling to advocate the jettisoning of capitalism as a way of life (or should I say death.) His meeting with John Kerry before the 2004 election was part of his overall strategy which was to pull the Democratic Party to the left. ... And you see how far he got with that notion.

At the beginning of the 20th century there existed in America strong workingclass, socialist forces. Sadly, little of that radical energy exists today in America.
Unless those socialist forces reemerge, bid a fond adieu to your children and your grandchildren. You will have left them with a doomed planet and a broken reality.
And children, of all ages, can't deal with that.

I do not defend BP. However, their statement that no (deep)underwater plumes with large oil concentrations (= more than one part per million) have been discovered by any one is probably correct.
Nevertheless because the volumes of the plumes are large the total amount of oil in them is significant and potentially dangerous for the fauna.
The two sides, as usual, are talking about different quantities.

Obomber owns this Gusher

In April 2009 his henchman Salazar went to DC circuit Court to overturn the Ban on permitting Mississippi Canyon Block 252, among others,where this Gusher is located.

Obomber from day one has not facilitated measuring the flow of this Gusher.

Obomber has done nothing to demand that BP workers be allowed to wear respirators.

Obomber is a War Criminal and is also Guilty, along with Salazar of Ecocide.

Nationalize the Federal Government (snark)!

Dear Readers:
Don't you people understand that Saddam Hussein had WMD's? His mobile biological and chemical labs are responsible for this mess. If not for the yellow cake uranium unleashed from Niger, none of this would be happening.
Sincerely,
G Bush
D Cheney
C Powell
H Barbour, et al

Who will be the next "lesser of two evils"

No to R or D. Vote anything/anyone other than R or D.

Even if you write in your own name.

The American public will always believe the rich and the powerful what they are told. They have been buying the crock about winning the war on terrorism willingly for more than ten years now. They will believe just about anything.