"There's no evidence that we don't have integrity."

The Mobile Press-Register published an article on its website Friday alleging that BP has been offering lucrative contracts and signing bonuses to top scientists at universities around the Gulf of Mexico as part of its defense against oil spill litigation.BP PLC even tried to sign up the entire marine sciences department at an Alabama university. The university declined due to confidentiality requirements the company sought to impose.

In no other country do people genuinely love their bosses the way Americans do. They'll go home after 12 hard hours of capricious superiors peeing in their faces, and the very first thing they'll do is call up some talk radio show and denounce the graduated income tax that gives them a break at their bosses' expense. In other countries bosses need to constantly fend off revolts and strikes; in America people tune in by the millions to cheer on an impetuous, bloated asshole like Donald Trump as he ritualistically fires a succession of sheepish sacrificial stand-ins who are clearly chosen for their resemblance to the target demographic. And The Apprentice was just one of many reality shows where people literally jack off to their own job insecurity!



They've got peoples' heads so turned around in this country that this ring-around-the-collar self-flagellating terror at being thought of as poor and subordinate has people reflexively worshipping their bosses, to the point where George Steinbrenner -- a workplace Caligula so stupid and self-centered that he could not be convinced George Constanza wasn't named after him -- is somehow thought of as cute and lovable. George Steinbrenner was not cute; he was the biggest fuckhead of his generation. Steinbrenner was the kind of guy who wouldn't accept that two plus two equaled four if a parade of MIT professors proved it to him on a fifty-foot blackboard. And if you tried to point that out to him, he fired you in the middle of the night, which he thought was funny, except that you were feeding your kids with that money.

Also, expect many, many fake scandals; we’ll be having hearings over accusations of corruption on the part of Michelle Obama’s hairdresser, janitors at the Treasury, and Larry Summers’s doctor’s dog. If you don’t believe me, you weren’t paying attention during the Clinton years; remember, we had months of hearings over claims that something was fishy in the White House travel office (nothing was).

The basic idea of the airplane analogy is this: We don’t ground all airplanes after a single plane crash, therefore we shouldn’t stop all drilling rigs if we have a problem with one of them. Now, if rigs only posed a danger to the workers on them, then the parallel would hold up better. But, as bad as the deaths on the Deepwater Horizon were, it’s the catastrophic risks that oil gushers pose to an entire region that make them so potentially dangerous. This event is so newsworthy because of the resultant oil gusher, not the original rig fire. Everyone understands that, yet this analogy obscures this central, gruesome fact. It equates a fiery rig to a fiery plane crash, and complains that we’re responding to one situation differently than another. But the oil that’s currently polluting five Gulf Coast states complicates things a bit, doesn’t it? Why is the biggest element in this ongoing disaster – namely, the flowing oil – missing from the airplane scenario?

Feldman ruled that it was too much of a leap to impose a blanket moratorium because of a mishap on one rig, enabling politicians to argue that a resumption of deepwater drilling would entail little risk. To believe that, it is necessary to assume BP is the wild man of the oil business and other rigs will be operated with sufficient care to obviate any risk of another major spill.



There is indeed some evidence that BP is the most slapdash company in the business; it has racked up safety violations at a staggering rate. Thus, the argument against the moratorium goes, the spill happened not because deepwater drilling is inherently hazardous but because Deepwater Horizon was a rogue operation.



Maybe it is so, but anyone tempted to trust the oil companies' sense of environmental responsibility would be well advised to take a tour of the Louisiana marshes. Oil spills, albeit on a smaller scale than Deepwater Horizon, are hardly a rare occurrence.

Today I sliced off parts of what could have been several different crappy blog posts and crammed them all together into this one big crappy product which obviously increases its overall market value somehow.The Lens asks some questions about property tax assessments on a Georges property. Georges responds in the comments.According to this article Shinn and Chouest are "barely on speaking terms" The whole situation is very strange. But then Shinn has a long track record of being involved in strangeness.It's a fun article anyway because it ends on this quote from BP Vice-President Kent Wells regarding the ongoing well integrity testing.Certainly. No evidence they can't buy anyway...I wonder how much they gave Ivor Van Heerden Read this Matt Taibbi post about the ridiculous media love fest following upon the death of George Steinbrenner.Remember that most Americans are like this come Novemeber as Republicans ride to major gains while blaming the unemployed for not having jobs. Oh and when that happens, Krugman predicts another Government shutdown just like that which followed the 1994 elections.Democrats will never get anywhere if all they do is continue making excuses for Wall Street criminals and compromising into impotence on every issue of critical import from health reform to financial regulation. Do they deserve to have their asses handed to them in November? You bet. Do we deserve the horrifying consequences of that? Well of course not but most of us don't really count for much anymore anyway.Finally, here's a pretty good pairing of two recent opinion columns:Meanwhile James Gill addresses much of the same topic