Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 14, 2010

Not as badly as it’s killing Robert Green right now.

BP = Brutish Petroleum.

They need to hire someone that sounds like Slim Pickens to play the CEO role. Although I’m not sure that Slim survived riding that H-bomb down to earth in Dr. Strangelove much less the bean eating scene in Blazing Saddles that was even more explosive.

The need someone that a bare majority of the American Public tends to trust for no good reason.

Where’s Dubya when he’s needed?

Dubya? He’s on his ranch in Paraguay, paid for with lots of the stolen Afghanistan gold we are supposed to believe his geologists were “ignoring” for the last five years, very likely mined with slave labor under the guns of Blackwater contractors and CIA agents.

randgrithr: Oooh…cynical. And pretty silly, too. I knew as soon as I saw the news about mind-blowing potential mineral wealth in Afghanistan that the conspiracy buffs would start coming out of the woodwork.

Sure, the potential is there for someone to become obscenely rich – someday. Have you any idea how hard it is to get a massive mining operation up and running, under the best and most stable of circumstances? Much less in a badly fractured country, in a state of running warfare, that nobody (including us) controls more than bits and pieces of? And you think this could be done in secret, under the noses of a world of spy satellites and other intel assets, a lot of which belong to people who don’t particularly like us?

“…with slave labor under the guns of Blackwater contractors and CIA agents” – oh, please. You confuse us with the Taliban, who make no pretense about being too principled to force people to do things at gunpoint, and who would have done all of this already if they could. And why would they? It’s easier for them to enslave and exploit the population by growing opium poppies for a lucrative global drug trade…when they’re not throwing acid in the faces of little girls for having the audacity to try to go to school, and beheading anyone they don’t like.

If we can promote a decent and stable government in that country, this could be a source of life-changing wealth for all of its people. Or (I’m not naive) it could be an opportunity for the rest of the world to trip over each other to get a piece of the action. History will judge us by the outcome.

Hah, Gee1A … I wonder what Sarah Palin’s saying about that NOW.

Ravenswing, she’s saying the ecologists are to blame because they wouldn’t let the poor oil companies drill closer to shore where they could have stopped it much more quickly. The fact that, if no one had drilled this would not have happened is completely lost on her.

I think that everyone is seeing this from the wrong perspective. If we let the oil reach the beaches we won’t need expensive rigs in the Gulf. Kevin Costner says he can separate the oil from the water. We could just line our beaches with his machines and suck up that oil without having to pump it out of the ground.

if you build it , then blow it up,

they will come

new spokesperson for BP: the Geico gekko , EVERYbody loves that dude

Given that BP employs many more Americans than British you’d have thought they’d have been able to find a suitably-accented spokesperson. Perhaps the problem is partly that while to an American a brit is obviously alien, the British tend not to really think of fellow anglophones as foreign. And of course Englishmen don’t necessarily perceive they have any sort of accent, as they are speaking English.

Gee, did Sarah Palin say “Drill, baby Drill!’? Now what’s the name of that politician who said it two weeks before the leak? Some Democrat in the administration. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me?” Why wasn’t it the golden boy who can do no wrong? The one who enforces the laws of Congress, what’s his name? The one who’s executive administrators gave BP the green light. You know the guy, he’s been in office a year and a half yet blames everything on the dude before him. If everything is the other guy’s fault, what has he done in his first half? Who was the officer on deck when the ship sank? But he took command. Made four photo op trips and appointed a commission.Leadership. For someone who’s 100% in control, how come he’s not.

was Paul Revere a conspiracy theorist? Naw. And he was so right.

we could run our cars on collateral-damage blood, or oil-flecked sand, or CEO martinis, shaken, not stirred.

How soon we forget. Drilling mud has been used since the early 1900’s to prevent blow outs such as what happened. Questions to ask; Who authorized the removal of the mud? What was the object of the mud removal? Where is Superman when we need him?

I agree that the government does not have the resources to handle the capping of the well. The government is not in the well drilling business and had someone proposed legislation forming a SWAT Team for deepwater drilling operations, it would have been shot down quickly as Big Government meddling in private business and a waste of taxpayer money.

Justice22: from what little’s been published about goings-on aboard the Deepwater Horizon just before the blowout, it appears there were three factions with three different interests: BP, which was behind schedule and wanted to get that half-million-dollar-a-day rig moved on to the next site, Trans-Ocean, which was concerned about completing the well properly, and Halliburton, who was subcontracting the cement cap at the top of the hole. If I read the stories correctly, the Trans-Ocean guys wanted to leave the mud in the drill pipe until the cement had set (to keep pressure on the oil in the well and prevent a possible blowout); both BP and Halliburton had reasons to replace the mud with (lighter) sea water. BP wanted this because it would speed up the process, while Halliburton wanted it because the presence of drilling mud makes the cementing process more complex.

Of course, (at the risk of repeating myself), I will note that had the well been drilled in Canadian waters or the North Sea, there would have been relief wells in place before the bit reached the oil-bearing formation, and the blowout would have been capped in a day or two. Funny how nobody in government or the media want to mention how a simple, proven regulation could have prevented this disaster. True, it would have added a few pennies to the price of a barrel of oil from the well, but in retrospect…

Yes, I think Obama had a big wake up call concerning this oil spill. No one said he was perfect.

This is not a “spill.” A spill is when something tips out of a container, such as Exxon-Valdez. This is not a spill, it is a volcano.

I’m sure that Michael Sheen (Tony Blair in THE QUEEN & THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP and David Frost in FROST/NIXON) is just waiting to play that CEO. The resemblance is even more a gift from God as that of Tina Fey for Sarah Palin.

@puddleglum1066: All the regulations in the world don’t help if the industry is allowed to bypass them at will. We already know MMS gave BP a blanket exemption for the environmental impact study – that’s probably the tip of the iceberg.

By-topic: drilling in Afghanistan. SCAATY reminds us that nobody has been able to mine the gold or the iron (and now the lithium) that the Pentagon geologists–using old Soviet maps!–have discovered in Afghanistan.

But the lead-in time for a mine–ten to twenty years–hasn’t stopped China from leasing a good chunk of terrain. And the real headache for the U.S. govt. will be preventing Karzai’s crooks from staking claims to otherwise worthless tribal lands. How can we strengthen the Afghan courts? They’ll have to determine ownership before mining can begin, and to do that in a manner perceived as just by the tribes who despise Karzai’s govt.

If we want to cripple the Taliban (who rely on opium alone), we can do it more effectively by building Afghanistan into a minerals producer than we can by propping up Karzai’s timorous and unreliable army.

THANKS Puddleglum and others. Much appreciated.

@ Radish: The rig sank on Earth Day (22 April) – it blew up two days earlier…

SCAATY_423,

Re:randgrithr’s post, your sense of satire (and sarcasm) needs a good sharpening.

However, your post was very interesting (and maybe sarcastic. Haven’t had any caffeine yet).

In office a year and a half and he hasn’t gotten everything fixed that was f’d up the past 30 years! That guy better get moving.

Now we know how they got the Brits to support us in the Iraq War – when nobody else would. Just allow them unregulated drilling with no need for safeguards.

And Puddle’s absolutely right – this won’t happen to Canadian shores because they actually put regulations in place and enforce them regardless of who is in office – instead of using “government” as a political football to decide elections. Wanta see what it’s like with no govt – look at the Afghan-Paki border.

Lew, you are thinking of Michael Steele. I believe that you call him “golden boy”, because he insists on a huge expense account to run the Republican Party. It’s pretty insensitive, though, to refer to an African-American man as “boy”. Steele shouted, at the Republican convention in 2008, “Drill, baby, drill, and drill now!”

As for Sarah Palin, she, too, has spoken “drill, baby, drill” with enthusiasm (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9D3epQL704). Now, she & Steele whine that the government that ignored drilling problems for eight years under Bush-Dick, the government that they complain is “too big”, is not cleaning up the oil quickly enough, eventhough Steele & Palin endorse private solutions for all domestic problems.

heard a rumor it had broken off under the reef, very hard to close that

nighthawks said, new spokesperson for BP: the Geico gekko , EVERYbody loves that dude

They already have a reptile with a British accent for a spokesman. Their Chief Evading Officer.