CNN:A 1-by-5-mile sheen of crude oil mix has spread across the Gulf of Mexico's surface around the area where an oil rig exploded and sank, according to the Coast Guard.
"This is a rainbow sheen with a dark center," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry told reporters.
Officials do not know whether oil or fuel are leaking from the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig and the well below, but BP Vice President David Rainey said "it certainly has the potential to be a major spill."
Everything about this is disgustingly wrong.
Utah is set to execute a convicted killer by firing squad after a judge agreed Friday to the inmate's request for the method, renewing a debate over what critics see as an antiquated, Old West-style of justice.
Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was given the choice of being killed by lethal injection or shot by a five-man team of executioners firing from a set of matched rifles, a rarely used relic that harkens back to Utah's territorial history.
Why the hell is execution by firing squad still an option in Utah? Whatever one's thoughts on capital punishment, I can't think of one decent reason as to why this barbaric act is still allowed. It's 2010, assholes! Let go of the 1800s already.
John Cole runs down a partial list of right-wing beliefs.
-stem cell research is murdering babies
-Al Gore is a greater threat to America than climate change
-John Kerry is a war criminal and George Bush is a war hero
-liberals want to teach your kid to be gay
-liberals want to abort your baby
-the estate tax is the greatest infringement on human liberty ever-we can drill our way to energy independence
-you have to torture people in order to keep America safe
-liberals want to release terrorists into our cities
-only the second half of the first amendment and the second amendment count
-the more you cut taxes, the more money the government will take in
-free markets will handle everything
-evolution is just a "theory"
-liberals hate America
-ACORN stole the 2008 election
-lying about a blowjob is a serious crime, lying about a war is not
-Obama is a socialist Muslim Kenyan
While I'll freely admit that not all conservatives adhere to every one of these beliefs, no one could honestly argue that prevalent conservative thinking, at least among the rank and file, is centered around these very notions.
So what does all this say about conservatives in general? The easy response would be to label them all as bleepin' morons – but that would be disingenuous. As Cole points out, decades of right-wing BS by the conservative establishment in combination with a wingnut media whose very existence is based on distorting every issue liberals rally around, has led to a conservative base of badly informed individuals. We saw it last summer at town hall meetings and we see it today at tea party hate-fests. These sadly pathetic people are ignorant of the truth. They just don't know it.
When Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are where you turn to for information, then you are doomed to live in a world where up is down and a liberal bogeyman hides behind every corner. You are doomed to a world of ignorance and close-mindedness which has little room for either logic or compassion. In essence, you have doomed yourself to a dark world of self-imposed autistic delusion.
It can't be fun living in an alternate universe where unfounded hate, criticism, fear and distrust are the principles which guide your very existence.
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How crazy is Glenn Beck? This crazy.
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Value Added Tax - Bad Idea
Marc Perkel Letter to the Editor
News reports say that President Obama is considering a value added tax. That would be a really bad idea. A value added tax is really a national sales tax and it is a tax paid mostly by the poor and middle class because they spend all their money and the rich don't. Instead, I would rather see them rais taxes on the rich to pay off the deficit because the deficit was caused by the rich.
During the Bush administration the deficit ballooned because of the huge tax cuts for the rich. The bank bailout was to bail out the rich. Subsidies for the housing market were to keep housing prices up for the benefit of the rich. So why should we tax the poor to pay the debt of the rich?
The poor and middle class already pay taxes the rich don't pay. We pay medicare, medicaid, and social security taxes on the wages we earn where the rich pay no payroll taxes on their capital gain income, which is taxed at a lower rate. And finally Mr. President, you pledged not to raise taxes on people making less that $250,000 a year and we expect you to keep that promise.
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A jury on Friday ordered the Boy Scouts of America to pay $18.5 million to a man sexually abused by a former assistant Scoutmaster in what is believed to be the largest such award against the national organization.
And don't forget the Mormons conspired to cover it up.
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The Party of Fiscal Conservancy at work:
WASHINGTON — Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
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I have a feeling that, little by little, more and more members of the Bush crime family will be finding themselves in this awkward little stress position:Former U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch was charged today with criminal contempt of Congress in connection with his notorious use of Geeks On Call to scrub his computer while under investigation for misusing his office, according to a court filing in federal court in Washington. [...]That was in late 2006.
I just adore skipping down Memory Lane, especially when it leads me to a happy ending.
It has made images such as this a part of our lives (for those who are paying attention):
That is the Carina Nebula. (Photo from here)
Edwin Hubble was one of the very first Rhodes Scholars. He had a masters degree in Spanish, was a lawyer, he quickly gave up the law, earned a Ph.D in astronomy and he served in the Army in the First World War. Dr. Hubble was the first to recognize that what other astronomers were nebulae in our galaxy were, in fact other galaxies. Astronomers before WW1 had noted that some of the nebulae they had observed were redshifted, the stars were redder than they should have been. Dr. Hubble realized that the redshift meant that those galaxies were moving away and that the Universe was expanding.
It was very appropriate to name the Space Telescope after Dr. Hubble. The telescope is so well known that if you mention "the Hubble", a large number of people outside of the scientific community will know what you are talking about.
One of the saddest things about the retirement of the Shuttle is that the Hubble will not be retrieved at the end of its service life; it will be de-orbited and allowed to burn up as a useless bit of space junk. For what the telescope has added to our understanding of the Universe, it deserves better.
Hubble will be replaced by the James Webb Telescope. The JWT will be at the 2nd Lagrange Point, or nearly a million miles from Earth. The risk is that if they screw up in grinding the mirrors of the JWT the same way that they screwed up in grinding the mirror for the Hubble, the JWT will not be as useful as they hope, for unlike Hubble, nobody can fly to fix the JWT.. Presumably, the mirror-makers are well aware of this.
If you feel like reading:
Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae
Hubble: Imaging Space and Time
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