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By Marc Cooper
Edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea and Polly O. Walker
$21.95
$22
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Illustration from White House photo by Pete Souza
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Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes, “If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Adm. Thad Allen is an expert on thankless jobs. After the initial response to Hurricane Katrina had been botched, President Bush assigned him to clean up the mess. Now President Obama has put him in charge of handling the worst oil spill in the nation’s history.
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U.S. Coast Guard
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It’s already the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history, and the oil spill continues to dump somewhere between 504,000 and 4.2 million gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. BP will continue to try to plug that hole, but its best chance to succeed is the drilling of relief wells, a process that won’t be finished until at least August.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
“We’ve tried containment domes, rubber tires and even golf balls,” said William Cathermeyer of the National Oil Leakage Institute, a leading consultancy in the field of oil leaks. “Now it’s time to shove some BP executives down there and hope for the best.”
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Barack Obama is, in many admirable ways, our most progressive president in decades. But as an environmentalist, let’s face it, he’s no Richard Nixon.
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By David Sirota — Someone is going to bear the massive cost of damage to the Gulf Coast economy, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is out to make sure it isn’t the oil firms whose rig caused the catastrophe in the first place.
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google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill/
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By the most conservative estimate, BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster has already spilled nearly twice as much oil as the Exxon Valdez. The impact of the 1989 environmental and commercial catastrophe is still being felt in Alaska more than 20 years later. The gulf spill could already be five times as big as Valdez. Watch live footage of the effort to stop the undersea gusher after the jump.
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What happens when you mix a massive oil spill with a hurricane? When Obama finally decides to negotiate with the Taliban, what will he ask for? And how did Jane Austen become such a big celebrity? Answers to these and other vexing questions after the jump.
Posted on May 27, 2010
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — So who is in charge of stopping the oil spill, BP or the federal government? The answer to this question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
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U.S. Coast Guard / CPO John Kepsimelis
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By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica —
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.
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Monte Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons —
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The interior secretary, defending the government’s response to the ocean of oil building up in the Gulf of Mexico, says the U.S. has assembled “a team of all-stars that are now leading an Apollo 13 type effort” to kill the well and contain the disaster.
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By Amy Goodman — In the disasters at the Massey coal mine in West Virginia and on the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, people were killed. So why aren’t the executives of these companies behind bars?
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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In a stern rebuke of the irresponsibility that has defined the actions of those involved in the Gulf oil spill, President Barack Obama has revoked the “cozy relationship” that the U.S. government has had with oil companies and criticized those companies’ finger-pointing as part of a “ridiculous spectacle.”
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White House / Pete Souza
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It’s difficult to predict how many billions of dollars the cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico is going to end up costing, but President Obama, touring the devastation over the weekend, says he knows who should pay ... (continued)
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Agence France-Presse
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Iran’s “Sacred Defense Week” is a time when Iranians can appreciate the natural awesomeness of military weaponry and missile tests, including the just-completed test-firing of long-range missiles able to hit both Israel and U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf.
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Flickr / DavidDennisPhotos
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A Yemeni freighter has become the 39th vessel seized by Somali pirates this year. Such hijackings have become a common occurrence off the coast of Somalia. Ship owners have called on the U.N. to police the affected waters.
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As it turned out, New Orleans dodged the full brunt of Hurricane Gustav, which had substantially weakened by the time it reached the Louisiana shoreline on Monday, but Hurricane Hanna still looms as a potential threat to the nation’s East Coast.
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Skyrocketing oil and natural gas prices in the second quarter of this year led ExxonMobil to report the highest profit ever by an American company. Despite falling production and rising operating costs, Exxon brought in $138 billion in revenue and reported an astounding net income of $11.7 billion. Who else is profiting?
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Flickr / marcn
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John McCain had hoped for a photo op atop an oil rig, but he got a hurricane and an oil spill instead. The senator is known for his superstitions, but lately his lucky charms don’t seem to be doing the trick. The Washington Post takes a closer look at McCain’s week of bad luck and finds there’s more to frown about on the horizon.
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The Mosaic Intelligence Report looks at two welcome developments in the Middle East: On Wednesday, Israel and Syria said they had begun indirect talks in Turkey, the first confirmation in eight years of negotiations between the long-time enemies. On that same day, the Gulf state of Qatar scored a diplomatic coup by pulling off a deal intended to end Lebanon’s protracted crisis.
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opendemocracy.net
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On Friday, a day after an American cargo ship fired warning shots at two small boats off the coast of Iran, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said the Pentagon is considering various options, including military action, to deal with what he characterized as the Iranian government’s “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq.
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Remember those Iranian vessels that allegedly menaced U.S. warships in the Gulf, threatening explosions? Just a few days after the president issued stern warnings to Iran over the incident, the Pentagon now says the threats, which were spoken by someone without an Iranian accent, might not have come from the Iranians and might not have even been directed at the Americans.
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U.S. Navy / John L. Beeman
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The carrier group sent to the Persian Gulf to intimidate and irritate Iran apparently struck a nerve. The U.S. Navy says that five suspected Iranian ships came within “close proximity” of one of a group of three American vessels. The ships turned around and no shots were fired, according to a Navy official and news reports.
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Vice President Dick Cheney made the symbolic move of delivering a warning to Iran while aboard a nearby U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Cheney said the U.S. would use military force if necessary to prevent Iran from interfering with oil trade or “gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”
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The Gulf nations of the Mideast have long been allies of the U.S. and Vice President Dick Cheney has been dispatched to make sure that doesn’t change, but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also visiting the region in an attempt to win over disgruntled governments. Mustafa Alani, a regional analyst, sums up how the Gulf is handling all the attention: “We have a deep mistrust of both sides.”
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The White House is considering whether to further pressure Iran by adding to the naval fleet already stationed in the Gulf region. The carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and four other ships and submarines already present could be joined by at least one additional carrier in this dicey bid to rattle Tehran.
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