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By Michael Paul Mason
$16.50
By Roger Lowenstein
$17.13
$19
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The simple truth is that the most important issue facing the nation is not the oil spill, however horrific its effects will be, but the economy.
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By Eugene Robinson — How is it possible that BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward hasn’t been fired? At this point, how can anyone believe a word the man says? If he told me my mother loves me, I’d want a second source.
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By Ruth Marcus — The presidency is not a play in two acts. The disaster in the Gulf is not six characters in search of a leader. So why the coverage of President Obama and the oil spill as theater criticism?
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Flickr / mikebaird (CC-BY)
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With atrocious timing, the Minerals Management Service has approved a new oil well to be drilled off the coast of Louisiana. As decisions go, this one seems dumber than a bag of nails. Why not just build an offshore bucket? There’s plenty of oil in the water these days. You can thank Team Obama, which let a ban on shallow drilling expire, for this bizarre development.
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Rick Rowley / Big Noise Films
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By Amy Goodman — The anger is palpable across the Mississippi Delta. As the Deepwater Horizon oil geyser, almost a mile underwater, continues unabated, the brunt of this, the largest environmental catastrophe in United States history, is rolling onto the coast, impacting the ecology, the economy and entire ways of life.
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By William Pfaff — The conduct of Barack Obama in the BP affair, and all that preceded it, has become to this writer all but incomprehensible. I cannot imagine a more compelling portrayal of impotence.
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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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cnn.com
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A parish official in coastal Louisiana has publicly accused BP of busing in cleanup workers to be present only for President Obama’s visit on Friday. BP rejects the accusation, claiming no out-of-the-ordinary temporary hiring had taken place.
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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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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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NASA
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Since oil began leaking into the Gulf of Mexico more than a month ago, the U.S. government and oil giant BP have been engaged in a marriage of convenience that has left the public—and public commentators—furious at both. (continued)
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By David Sirota — If progressive groups were anything but shills for the Democrats, they would be protesting President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee and demanding the firing of his interior secretary.
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By Joe Conason — The more we learn about the BP oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the more we ought to question the basic assumptions that led us here.
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What Obama hasn’t learned about offshore oil drilling, why Steve Jobs and Apple want to offer “freedom from porn,” and how GM bamboozled the country into thinking it repaid its bailout money.
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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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A whistle-blower tells the news show that BP has another troubled oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Also in this episode: L.A.‘s visionary young maestro, plus Andy Rooney complains about something.
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U.S. Navy / MC2 Justin Stumberg
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By Chris Hedges — These deformed individuals carrying out the global genocide against human life and the natural world lack the capacity for empathy. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications.
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RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch —
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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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AP / Gerald Herbert
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In the messy wake of the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster, three giants of the oil industry—the aforementioned British Petroleum, perennial favorite Halliburton and Transocean—were butting heads and looking to stick each other ... (continued)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?
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By Amy Goodman — Less than a week after British Petroleum unleashed what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits.
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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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Flickr / LAXFlyer
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Barring any last-minute mess-ups, a deal to merge air carriers Continental and United will likely be announced as early as Monday, a union that would create the world’s biggest airline.
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AP / U.S. Coast Guard
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Amid a wave of finger-pointing, rough waters in the Gulf of Mexico have quickly tripled the surface area of what could become one of the most disastrous oil spills in U.S. history, with the goo already lapping at valuable shoreline habitat.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Just a month after President Obama’s rightward lunge into the realm of political appeasement known as offshore drilling, the administration reinstituted a ban on new drilling as it investigates the causes of the rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Wikimedia Commons / Joint Pipeline Office
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If you thought “drill, baby, drill!” was only a right-wing slogan, think again. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama outlined a plan for doing a little drilling for oil and gas off a few sections of our nation’s coastline, including the East Coast, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
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Flickr / No Sweat UK
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In an announcement that was one part election hackery and one part good domestic politics, the Iraqi prime minister has declared that his country will not sell the rights to any more of its oil fields to foreign companies, a move that signals an intent by Iraq to develop its own national oil industry.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Calling back memories of the Falkland Islands war, Argentina has blocked a cargo ship from leaving one of its ports after suspicion arose that the vessel would supply oil drilling equipment to the British-occupied islands. The Argentines allege that the ship was trying to aid in an “illegitimate” search for oil and gas.
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Flickr / azrainman
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A new government report has found that the United States will import almost as much foreign oil 25 years from now as it does today. Pitiful policy initiatives simply haven’t done enough to fulfill the stated ambition of just about every administration since Richard Nixon’s—to liberate the homeland from a dangerous dependency on energy imports. (Continued)
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Flickr / B69D
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A legal challenge by environmental and indigenous Alaskan groups may dampen Shell Oil’s chances of drilling for billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. portion of the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea. It’s feared the controversial plan could spell disaster for endangered species as well as increase global warming.
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Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
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