HuffPost Hill hears that during Obama's meeting with bipartisan
congressional leadership yesterday, Leader Boehner cited reports
saying health care could cost more than originally estimated and
recommended the debate over health care be reopened. Obama's reaction?
Laughter.
lyric by Roxy Dawn
Six Democrats sided with Republicans in an attempt to block the EPA
from regulating greenhouse gases indicating very soft support for
action in the Senate. Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben
Nelson, Mark Pryor and Jay Rockefeller all voted for the resolution.
The good news for Helen Thomas: She finally got somebody to defend her
position on Israeli Jews.
Natural Oil Seeps and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster: A Comparison of Magnitudes
by Dr. Cutler J. Cleveland, Professor in the Department of Geography
and Environment at Boston University.
release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident by arguing that
natural oil seeps release large volumes of oil to the ocean, so why
worry? Lets look at the numbers.
Satellite images have identified hundreds of areas where oil is
likely to seep from the Earth's crust into the waters of the Gulf of
Mexico. These seeps occur over a wide range of the 615,000 square
miles of the Gulf. Between 560,000 and 1,400,000 barrels per year
(1,534 to 3,835 barrels per day) seep into the Gulf of Mexico from
natural sources. These natural seeps are quasi-continuous or chronic
inputs that represent a "background" rate of oil input that have been
in existence for hundreds or thousands of years.
The Deepwater Horizon site releases 3 to 12 times the oil per day
compared to that released by natural seeps across the entire Gulf of
Mexico. By May 30, the Deepwater Horizon site had released between
468,000 and 741,000 barrels of oil, compared to 60,000 to 150,000
barrels from natural seeps across the entire Gulf of Mexico over the
same 39 day period.
As the oil moves upwards in the water column, a wide range of microbes
consume the oil and produce intermediate products, and those
intermediate products are then converted by another group of microbes
to natural gas and other compounds. Oil from natural seeps normally
stays in the water for between ten hours to five days.
A sudden, concentrated and massive pulse of oil from an event such as
the Deepwater Horizon disaster presents a fundamentally more acute
stress to marine and coastal systems. The amount, rate and spatial
concentration of crude oil released from such an event overwhelm the
natural mechanisms of oil dispersal and breakdown, producing the
significant ecological effects that we observe.
Brian McCrary just bought a website to complain about a $90 speeding
ticket he received from the Bluff City PD — the Bluff City Police
Department site. The department let its domain expire and [0]McCrary was
quick to pick it up. From the article: "Brian McCrary found the perfect
venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City
Police Department's website, saw that its domain name was about to
expire, and bought it right out from under the city's nose. Now that
McCrary is the proud owner of the site, [1]bluffcitypd.com, the Gray,
Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about
speed cameras — like the one on U.S. Highway 11E that caught him — and
how people don't like them."
technology_dude found an unsurprising but amusing little story that BP
is buying keywords on Google and Yahoo for things like "Oil Spill" to
help spin some damage control. I guess if you can't plug your spill, the
least you can do is try to clog the flow of information.
Photo by ED FREEMAN. See more on Facebook