The demonstrators used a mic check to denounce the auction taking place, calling it immoral. “The sale of blighted property is the city’s attempt to remove poor homeowners who have already suffered tremendously from economic and natural disaster. Blight has become an excuse to gentrify,” they said. “Charging poor homeowners outrageous fees in order to steal their homes is an underhanded way to keep people displaced.” Watch the demonstrators disrupt the auction:

Bridging The Gulf explains what happened after the disruption began: “The sale was scheduled to begin at noon. At approximately 1:45 pm, after several potential buyers had already left, the police arrived and threatened the nonviolent protestors with arrest. Before declaring that the remainder of their protest would be silent, the protestors announced their intention to physically defend any properties sold: ‘We will be in court. We will be in the streets. We will be in the houses–defending them, boarding them up, and occupying them.’”

Jindal said he couldn’t understand why anyone would oppose the bill, comparing the new notices to Miranda warnings for women who receive abortions — a constitutionally protected procedure — to criminals:

“When officers arrest criminals today, they are read their rights,” he said. “Now if we’re giving criminals their basic rights and they have to be informed of those rights, it seems to me only common sense we would have to do the same thing for women before they make the choice about whether to get an abortion.”

The analogy, however, may be somewhat apt, since Louisiana already has some of the harshest anti-choice laws in the country. According to NARAL, the state still has an unconstitutional and unenforceable measure that prohibits abortion by anyone other than the woman unless necessary to preserve the woman’s life or if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. Louisiana outlaws second-trimester abortion procedure with no exception to protect a woman’s health and in 2006 “enacted a near-total ban on abortion, to become effective if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.”

Under the state’s Right To Know law, abortion providers in Louisiana are already required to distribute pamphlets with information about pregnancy, termination, and alternatives. Women must also sign a statement that they have received the state information and are not being coerced into an abortion before undergoing the procedure.

There will be no fireworks this year exploding over Fort Sill in Lawton. The U.S. Army base’s Independence Day celebration and concert will go on as planned Saturday, but its fireworks have been canceled. A fire that started on a base firing range last week burned across 5,500 acres before it was contained. Thirteen homes were destroyed and 1,500 people had to be evacuated.

Firework shows from Texas to Massachusetts have been canceled because of the deadly climate conditions:

In Oklahoma, 36 counties suffering from extreme to exceptional drought have issued burn bans, which include a prohibition on fireworks except for public displays.

In Kansas, fireworks have been banned in Dodge City and surrounding rural areas due to the extreme drought.

In Louisiana, fireworks have been banned in Shreveport and neighboring Bossier because of extreme heat and drought.

In Texas, 170 counties have fireworks bans, including all of metropolitan Houston. Nearly all of Texas has burn bans as well. Because of the extreme drought, Fourth of July fireworks displays have been canceled in Texas towns large and small: San Antonio, Austin, Amarillo, Lubbock, Plainview, Magnolia, Tomball, DeSoto, Woodlands, Roman Forest, and Patton Village.

In Arizona, authorities have banned fireworks from Flagstaff in the north to Tucson, Douglas and Sierra Vista in the south.

In New Mexico, Gov. Susana Martinez (R-NM) has said that there is “absolutely no reason to buy, sell or use personal fireworks.” She has declared a “state of emergency in New Mexico regarding the use of fireworks.” Albertson’s, WalMart, and Smith’s stores have stopped selling fireworks in the state. Taos, with wildfires raging nearby, has canceled its fireworks display.

In Joplin, Missouri, where a devastating tornado hit on May 22, officials have banned fireworks because of the amount of combustible debris in the tornado’s path.

In Massachusetts, the historical recreation site Old Sturbridge Village has canceled its fireworks display because its fireworks launch site was flooded and alternative launch sites were damaged by tornadoes.

Austerity budgets are also killing Fourth of July celebrations, with fireworks displays canceled at Jones Beach in New York, in Chicago, Illinois, and in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

Today, the Louisiana House will debate a bill that would make abortion “a prosecutable crime for doctors who perform” a constitutionally-protected service or prescribe drugs with the intent of ending a pregnancy. Originally planning to prosecute women as well, the bill — introduced by state Rep. John Labruzzo (R) — now allows for medical exceptions but no exception for rape or incest. Labruzzo, who once suggested sterilizing poor women to lower welfare costs, was joined by a Personhood USA lawyer in a recent committee hearing to defend his radical efforts.

During the hearing, a fellow lawmaker noted LaBruzzo’s bill will have “unintended consequences when we do that broad brush” and questioned whether the bill would cause a “dramatic decrease on the abortion rate.” Sitting beside the Personhood lawyer, LaBruzzo dismissed her concerns and launched into a comparison between reproductive rights and drug abuse. To him, a woman who seeks an abortion is just like a heroin addict:

LABRUZZO: I can assure you if abortion is illegal, it will have a dramatic decrease in the number of abortions that take place. Now the opponents in the opposition argue that whether we make it illegal or not, people are going to get abortions. Well, we’ve illegalized [sic] murder and drugs for a long long time, and yet those crimes continue to take place. And it’s not our stance here to say that “just because people smoke pot and break the law or use heroin and break the law, then we should legalize it.” There are many who say we should. But we don’t agree, we don’t think so. We think it’s wrong and it’s best to keep it illegal…This is the pro-life bill. And I think you’d be in a difficult situation if you voted against this bill and tried to convince everybody that you are ardently pro-life.

Watch it courtesy of the Florida Independent:

As Planned Parenthood’s Julie Mickelberry noted, the bill could “go well beyond abortion” and end up denying women access to birth control, “both conventional prescriptions and emergency contraception.” Under this bill, gynecologists could refuse to prescribe birth control, pharmacists could refuse to fill legal prescriptions for such birth control. Such refusals, Mickelberry adds, would be particularly harmful to “women in rural areas with limited health care options or fro women, regardless of where they live, whose insurance allows limited office visits.”

“We found the ad to be totally abhorrent and shocking, and I’m going to use the ‘R’ word and say racist,” said Darlene Kattan, of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana.

Kattan said her issue is not with the senator’s position on border security, but rather how he presents his message. “In this ad, he has these Hollywood stereotypes, caricature-types portraying Latino workers,” Kattan said. “First of all, he uses the word ‘illegal’ so many times.” [...]

“To Sen. David Vitter, we are saying you owe us an apology, we are offended, we expect an immediate apology and we expect this ad to be yanked from the airwaves immediately,” Kattan said.

Watch the ad:

Kattan also noted that “No one seems to be objecting to the cute little blond-haired, blue-eyed cocktail waitress with her darling little eastern Europe accents serving cocktails in downtown New Orleans, but everyone has a problem with the workers who have come here to rebuild this city.”

In fact, Latino immigrants — many of them undocumented — have helped Louisiana get itself back on its feet. While half of New Orleans’ residents abandoned their decimated city after Hurricane Katrina hit and rebuilt their lives elsewhere, Latino workers were directly responsible for making 86.9% of households habitable after Hurricane Katrina in six parishes surrounding New Orleans in 2008. Almost 50 percent of the hurricane-repair workers in the New Orleans were Latinos and 54 percent of them undocumented. A study found that that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Louisiana, the state would lose $947 million in expenditures, $421 million in economic output, and approximately 6,660 jobs.

Melancon’s campaign denied the allegations in the ad, citing local newspapers that have already called it “distorted,” “misleading,” and “untrue.”

As experts warned, Bobby Jindal’s “obvious” response to the BP oil disaster is failing. Since the beginning of May, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has pushed a crash effort to build artificial “barrier islands” from dredged sand to prevent BP’s toxic oil from reaching Louisiana’s fragile coastline. He and other Louisiana politicians excoriated the federal government for waiting until June 3 to authorize the $360 million project, even though “categorically, across the board, every coastal scientist” questioned its wisdom. In mid-May, Jindal justified the barrier-island construction by saying it was the “obvious” thing to do:

It makes so much sense. It’s so obvious. We gotta do it.

“We know it works, we have seen it work, but if they need to see it work, they need to do that quickly,” argued Jindal. On May 27, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) attacked President Barack Obama, calling his administration’s caution “absolutely outrageous“:

Here the president doesn’t seem to have a clue. His decision on the emergency dredging barrier island plan is a thinly veiled ‘no.’ Approving two percent of the request and kicking the rest months down the road is outrageous, absolutely outrageous.

In fact, the first artificial island project is already showing serious signs of erosion, with heavy equipment sinking into the ocean. Photographs released by Louisiana scientist Leonard Bahr and the US Army Corps of Engineers show that the artificial island E-4, intended to reach an 18-mile length, is struggling to survive at 1,100 feet:

Berm E-4, June 25	Berm E-4, July 7
Berm E-4, July 8

“You don’t want to destroy the village to save the village,” Tom Strickland, the U.S. Interior Department’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, explaining on June 23 the federal government’s decision to only provisionally approve the construction of forty miles of sand berms along the Chandeleur Islands. Strickland estimated the berms would last “probably no more than 90 days.”

Jindal is pressing for the federal government to approve the emergency construction of 125 miles of sand berms, arguing the 0.2 miles constructed are “are doing what they were intended to do.”

Nungesser said that a private contractor blocked Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) entrance to a contaminated area, and tried to do the same with Nungesser and Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA). The contractors hired to run the decontamination of wildlife — possibly the oil-industry-funded International Bird Rescue Research Center — are leaving oiled pelicans to sit in sludge for days before cleaning, Nungesser charged. They’re “making up their own rules,” he said:

We had a meeting here yesterday because the person that BP hired for the animal thing refused David Vitter entrance. He tried to keep me and the governor out with the coach of the LSU Tigers, and I took the chain and said, “Get out of the way. We are coming in.” He just said, you know, they want to keep you out. It is a contractor by BP. What’s happening is they are making up their own rules. I was out there with Anderson Cooper the other night. They let him on the grounds. When I showed up they said, “If we knew he was coming, we would not let you in.” It’s my land. They can’t stop us. It’s the parish land. They’re making up rules, like taking these pelicans, and they’re saying, well we leave them for five days with the oil so they calm down. I’m like, “Show me where that’s a rule, it’s not true.”

Watch at C-SPAN.org.

Nungesser and the members of the New Orleans City Council agreed that the state and federal government needs to take more direct control of BP’s army of contractors, and establish a more responsive command-and-control structure. The Center for American Progress has outlined practical plans for how the government can step up and protect our nation from the BP oilpocalypse.

Transcript:

NUNGESSER: We had a meeting here yesterday because the person that BP hired for the animal thing refused David Vitter entrance. He tried to keep me and the governor out with the coach of the LSU Tigers, and I took the chain and said, “Get out of the way. We are coming in.”

ARNIE FIELKOW: How are you doing? Nice to see you. Hi, how are you?

NUNGESSER: He just said, you know, they want to keep you out. It’s a contractor — talking about the bird place. The state and federal wildlife people — to find out that it is a contractor by BP. What’s happening is they are making up their own rules. I was out there with Anderson Cooper the other night. They let him on the grounds. When I showed up they said, “If we knew he was coming, we would not let you in.” It’s my land. They can’t stop us. It’s the parish land. They’re making up rules, like taking these pelicans, and they’re saying, well we leave them for five days with the oil so they calm down. I’m like, “Show me where that’s a rule, it’s not true.” You might want to leave them for hours or overnight if they’re really upset. But five days is not …

PATRICIA CLARKSON: There are hundreds of people waiting to come and help, wildlife experts waiting to come to our shores. Why are they not here?

NUNGESSER: There was a group from Australia told to come, we need your help. They got to Venice, they walked up, and well we don’t need you, go home. From Australia. And the guy came to see me. Here’s what they’re doing. They’re expanding. We asked them to add another bird place in the Myrtle Grove place it’s shorter. You don’t have to transport the birds for forty minutes.

What’s happening is they’re trying to keep their amount of work spread out. An area might get inundated, they bring in a hundred birds and they clean them up as short as possible then they’re out of work for three days. And or they don’t want to work long hours.

They keep three or four pens for the pelicans. They will keep them up for a week, that is inexcusable. And that is what they’re doing. They’ve got pens there, and you can see the pelicans that have not —

P. CLARKSON: covered with oil for days …

NUNGESSER: For four or five days so they calm down. They can’t move because they’re covered in oil.

P. CLARKSON: Covered with oil for days? who made that decision?

NUNGESSER: That’s a contractor.

P. CLARKSON: That is a BP decision. That is not a wildlife expert. What about the young man on Anderson’s show, I cannot remember his name, but he was saying that they’ve got teams of people waiting.

NUNGESSER: We’ve asked that it be taken away from the contractor, and put the federal and state wildlife over.

JACQUELYNE BRECHTEL CLARKSON, New Orleans City Council Vice President: You remember this. State Fish and Wildlife have one of our best experts, they were performing better than most of the state probably put more into their hands when it was Mitch [Landrieu] that mobilized him.

NUNGESSER: the problem as.

J. CLARKSON: BP is controlling it.

NUNGESSER: They are not trusting them. and there’s nobody on the ground with BP saying, no, that is the wrong way. we’re going to do it this way.

P. CLARKSON: How you actually get someone to finally move BP out of the way? Is that forthcoming?

NUNGESSER: Yesterday’s with the meeting with state wildlife, we started the ball rolling. Now they realize they’re not in control.

P. CLARKSON: Can Obama make that official, that BP no longer has control of your parish?

NUNGESSER: It’s the Coast Guard that’s supposed to be in control right now, but it’s still sitting at the table. I will love to be sitting around the table working for every issue with them. I would much rather be cleaning up the oil than yelling and screaming. And I have done that for a couple of weeks in between, and just like right now, and there are a lot of Coast Guard people here and the local BP people are great. But we have got to get to a point where when something needs to be done, I can grab that person by the arm and say, let’s fix it. And it is not to that point yet.

ARNIE FIELKOW, New Orleans City Council President: It’s a command-and-control standpoint. You got four states being affected directly right now. Why is there not a single point person with Coast Guard, BP, for each of the four states so that when you as a parish president, or Orleans Parish has an issue, there’s one single person that can clear all of this, whether it’s a wildlife issue, or a boat issue, it doesn’t seem that difficult to create.

NUNGESSER: Sam is a great guy. Sam can pick up the phone. Sam does not have the authority that Thad Allen says that he does. It sends up the chain of authority. But he never gets an answer back. I feel like — I don’t blame them — a lot of the BP people on the ground do not have the experience or are relying on contractors that to me are more interested in putting bodies out there to make money than they are in cleaning up the oil.

FIELKOW: From both the BP and Coast Guard standpoint, whoever is the local, statewide contact for you not only needs to be named but they need to have authority and decision-making power so that they can make some calls. So that you do not have to go to that person and they have to wait for Coast Guard or BP. There needs to be more of a controlled decision-making process created here to get things moving faster.

On Wednesday, ThinkProgress spoke with Scalise about his change in rhetoric, and asked if BP’s spill has changed his perception of the role of government. Scalise saw no cognitive dissonance in likening proactive government policies to Nazi Germany, while complaining that not enough government action is a lack of “leadership.” Scalise instead said merely that everyone wants “competent government”:

TP: You criticized the federal government for, you know, not doing enough given the spill in the gulf. But just a couple of months ago, you were saying that the EPA bureaucrats are like the Gestapo. Has the spill changed your perception of the role of government?

SCALISE: Well what it shows is that you’ve got incompetent government right now. MMS, who is the federal regulator, has not been doing their job. What we’re asking is, whether you’re for bigger government or smaller government, we ought to be able to expect competent government. And unfortunately we haven’t gotten that. People need to do their jobs.

Watch it:

One might question whether Scalise himself — who believes the “Climategate” conspiracy theory about the world’s scientific community, and voted against the stimulus but touted the jobs it created in his district — meets the standard of “competent government.”

Scalise is hardly the only anti-government critic now demanding government action in the wake of BP’s spill. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) warned her constituents that living in D.C. placed her “behind enemy lines,” and that people should get “armed and dangerous” to prepare for clean energy policies. But now, Bachmann is ranting that the government didn’t do enough, and that Obama should have “commandeered” boats to deal with BP’s crisis. In March, Sarah Palin decried Obama’s “transformation of America into some kind of socialized country.” Now she wants a government that “regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable” and federal criminal investigations to end “oily corruption.”

I was watching this week as the CEO of BP was talking about he wants his life back. I’m to the point where I wish the board would call him back, and give us somebody that really wants to make sure that the people of this state, the people of this Gulf Coast region have what they need, when they want, to try and fight this oil spill.

Watch it:

Melancon said BP should get rid of Hayward because “the buck stops there.” However, earlier in the interview, Melancon made it clear that he still supports offshore drilling.

I have been a pro-oil-and-gas person here, and I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle that have refrained from saying “I told you so,” because I have been a defender of offshore drilling.

Watch it:

Melancon went on to say that while he “can’t with a good heart encourage the continuation of deepwater” drilling until changes are made, he thinks the record for shallow offshore drilling is “very good.” Ironically, his fellow Lousiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu made sure to point out that the epic Ixtoc I blowout in 1979 and last year’s catastrophic Montara oil blowout in Australia took place in shallow water in yesterday’s hearings.

Louisiana State Capitol (National Park Service photo)

Time and again I’m struck by the extent to which political attitudes toward environmental issues are determined by local producer interests. You’d think that the people of Louisiana, who’ve already seen their state’s largest city devastated by a hurricane and now have a gigantic pool of oil headed for their shores, might be among the biggest skeptics of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, Louisiana is a big oil state and the spill has mostly just been causing Louisiana elected officials to double-down on their love of the industry. I saw Mary Landrieu on television yesterday talking about drilling, and Sharon Begley offers this tale of the state legislature working to kneecap environmental legislation (that’s via Mike Tomasky):

Just as Louisiana politicians are about to get an up-close-and-personal look at the BP oil spill (it is approaching the shores an hour’s drive from Baton Rouge, the state capital), they are considering a bill to “kneecap” all university environmental-law clinics in the state, which have led the way in challenging the historically cozy relationship between state politicians and the petrochemical industry. [...]

Although the bill would apply to clinics doing work in civil litigation, domestic violence, and juvenile law, says CLEA president Robert Kuehn of Washington University School of Law, “the target is clearly environmental-law clinics, especially Tulane’s.” Indeed, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the trade group of chemical (including petrochemical) companies which got a favored senator to introduce the bill, was quoted in The New York Times last month saying that if law clinics “want to play hardball by trying to kneecap industry,” then “we should play hardball and kneecap them with their state appropriations.”

This specific idea is a travesty that can and will be fought in the state legislature. But the overall mentality—that what’s good for oil companies is what’s good for Louisiana, and what’s good for coal companies is what’s good for West Virginia—is quite deeply entrenched and it’s a huge obstacle to change. Meanwhile, oil-led development has left Louisiana as one of the poorest states in the union.

With a naiveté reminiscent of the Bush administration, BP officials are claiming that the apocalyptic failure of its deepwater exploratory rig was unforeseeable, unprecedented and inconceivable. On Sunday, BP press flack Steve Rinehart — hired from the Anchorage Daily News after a mega-spill from a damaged Prudhoe Bay BP pipeline in March 2006 — even evoked the “I don’t think anybody” excuse that was the hallmark of the Bush administration’s attempts to deflect blame for their catastrophes:

“I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” — BP spokesman Steve Rinehart [AP 5/2/10]

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” — Condoleezza Rice [CNN, 5/16/02]

“The sort of occurrence that we’ve seen on the Deepwater Horizon is clearly unprecedented.” — BP spokesman David Nicholas [AP 4/30/10]

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will.” — President George W. Bush [GMA, 9/1/05]

BP did not build containment devices before disaster because it “seemed inconceivable” the blowout preventer would fail. — BP spokesman Steve Rinehart [AP 5/2/10]

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered. I guess the other area that I look at, in terms of an area where I think we were faced with difficulties we didn’t anticipate was the devastation that 30 years of Saddam’s rule had wrought, if you will, on the psychology of the Iraqi people.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, 6/19/06

Just as there were warnings about terrorists using planes as bombs, the threat of hurricanes to New Orleans, and post-invasion violence in Iraq, the BP failure was entirely conceivable and foreseeable:

Failures of blowout preventers and actual blowouts are common. Between 1992 and 1998 there were 319 failures of blowout preventers found in US offshore drilling, an average of 45 a year. [MMS, 1999] Between 1992 and 2006 there were at least 39 blowouts off the US coastline, 38 of them in the Gulf of Mexico. [MMS, 7/07] From 2007 to 2009 there were 19 blowouts, all in the Gulf of Mexico. [MMS]

The largest accidental oil spill in history was a Gulf of Mexico exploratory rig blowout. On June 3, 1979, the exploratory well IXTOC I blew out and ignited, burning down the platform. Divers later activated the blowout preventer to no avail.The well continued to spill oil at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 barrels per day until it was finally capped on March 23, 1980. [NOAA]

A major offshore blowout followed by a two-month spill occurred in 2009. In “one of Australia’s worst oil disasters,” a PTTEP oil rig blew out in the Montara oil field on August 21, 2009. Efforts to control the leaking rig set it on fire on November 1st, two days before the leak was finally plugged. Official estimates of the leak rate were five times higher than those of the oil company. [Wikipedia]

A ‘spill of national significance’ exercise in 2002 concerned a major rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Adm. Thad Allen led a “spill of national significance” exercise in 2002 that dealt with the scenario of an oil rig exploding off the coast of Louisiana, with an “uncontrollable discharge” of oil that lasted for a month. These training exercises take place every three years as mandated by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, the most recent of which occurred in March, 2010.

On Sunday in Louisiana, President Barack Obama said that “the leak is unique and unprecedented.” (HT State of the Division)

The Sunday morning shows are dedicated primarily to the unfolding oil apocalypse:

– Charlie “Drill three miles off my coast” Melancon (D-LA), Sen. Mary “Drilling is safe” Landrieu (D-LA), Sen. Bill “Drilling is DOA” Nelson (D-FL) are on CBS’s Face the Nation

– Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Coast Guard Commander Admiral Thad Allen, Gov. Charlie “Now I Remember” Crist (R-FL) on NBC’s Meet the Press

– Napolitano, Salazar, and Rep. Marco “Drill Here, Drill Now” Rubio (R-FL) on Fox News Sunday

– Napolitano, Salazar, and BP America President Lamar McKay on ABC’s This Week

This visualization of the oil spill extent was created by the Times-Picayune from official data.

The new commander of the BP-Halliburton oil disaster response believes significant amounts of oil will soon be hitting the fragile beaches and wetlands of the Gulf Coast. Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, was named today the “national incident commander” for the oilpocalypse unfolding from the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig on April 20. His appointment follows Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s declaration that the disaster is a “spill of national significance,” as the oil slick from the underwater gusher tripled in size in one day. Changing wind direction has meant, fortunately, that only the leading edges of the slick have reached the farthest reaches of Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta. In a press briefing this afternoon, Allen explained that the future location of the slick is “dependent on the weather,” but that the sheer volume of oil means that “it’s logical to assume” the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida will be hit:

There’s enough oil out there it’s logical to assume it will impact the shoreline. The question is when and where.

Allen said that the underwater sea of oil will keep growing until BP is able to cap it, a process that “could go for 45 to 90 days.” If oil continues to flow at current rates for that length of time, that would add up to about 90 million gallons of oil, on the scale of the largest oil spills in history. The winds are expected to shift, directing the spill towards the Mississippi and Alabama coasts over the next 72 to 96 hours. The extended network of floating booms being deployed and dispersants sprayed from C-130s will only mitigate, not stop, the oil’s impact.

Allen led a “2002 planning exercise in New Orleans for an oil spill in the Gulf Coast,” and is applying lessons learned from that exercise today. In 2005, Allen rose to public prominence when the hapless FEMA director Michael Brown asked him to take over the Hurricane Katrina response, a week after the global-warming-fueled storm had made landfall, killed thousands, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. It’s a good sign that Allen is being called in this time when this new fossil-industry disaster is just hitting our shores.

I think we should remember that scientific knowledge is always moving forward. And actually using the best available and the most up-to-date scientific information is part of the current regulatory system. And it supports the OCS leasing, exploration, and development program. And I think we need to remember that OCS has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment.

Watch it:

Rainey’s testimony followed a September 14, 2009, letter from his predecessor Richard Morrison, which said “we are not supportive of the extensive and prescriptive regulations” in the proposed rule, because “[w]e believe industry’s current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs” since the American Petroleum Institute codified those programs in 2004 “have been and continue to be very successful.”

It appears that the MMS was correct when they argued in their proposed rule that existing safety rules were not sufficient. “The MMS believes that if OCS oil and gas operations are better planned and organized, then the likelihood of injury to workers and the risk of environmental pollution will be further reduced,” they wrote in 2009.

As we move forward with the recovery process, I hope that the rest of the country will realize that our state needs to be fairly compensated for this burden through increased revenue sharing from offshore production.

Because of the 1990 Oil Pollution Act passed following the Exxon Valdez spill, BP will have to reimburse taxpayers for the cost of the government’s contribution to the response effort. Vitter is simply trying to exploit this tragedy to tie his state even more tightly to the fortunes of the deadly and destructive oil industry. Vitter is a long-time promoter of expanding offshore drilling, which is a central plank of his so-called “No-Cost Stimulus Act.”

That’s right: more than 6 million gallons spilled into the Gulf of Mexico so far. This, and other radar images that SkyTruth is getting, confirm what we’ve seen on the NASA/MODIS images so far, and support our conservative calculations showing that in the first week of this spill at least 6 million gallons have entered the Gulf. That’s a spill rate of at least 850,000 gallons (20,000 barrels) per day, 20 times larger than the official Goast Guard estimate of 42,000 gallons per day.

By today, about 7 million gallons will have been spilled, taking the Deepwater Horizon disaster more than halfway to the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez, which dumped 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prince William Sound — one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters. This catastrophe — which occured as Halliburton was cementing the well — will exceed the scale of the Exxon Valdez within a week.

The sea of oil spewing from the mangled pipeline is already larger than 31 nations. After the Montara oil platform blew up in Australia’s Timor Sea last August, it took 10 weeks to stop the flow of oil. If recent history is any guide, it may be months before the sea of oil stops growing.

On April 22, the U.S. Coast Guard estimated the flow rate to be 336,000 gallons of crude a day, but BP officials claimed on Sunday that the rate was only 42,000 gallons a day. By Thursday, officials admitted that the disaster is increasing at least 210,000 gallons a day, much closer to the Coast Guard’s original estimate. Amos called that estimate a “bare-bones limit.”

I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.

Watch it:

This is incorrect.

Eighteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon rig operated by BP America 41 miles of the Louisiana coast exploded. The giant spill has not yet reached the beaches of the Gulf Coast, and there is a chance the damage can be limited by setting some of the oil ablaze.

Obama’s claim that oil rigs did not cause any spills during Hurricane Katrina is simply false, as the Wonk Room reported in June, 2008, when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other conservatives made the same false claim:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs. [MMS, 1/22/07]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.” [MMS, 5/1/06]

On April 23, three days after the rig caught fire, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama’s support for offshore drilling was unchanged.

The right had such fun making hay out of the “Cornhusker Kickback” that they decided to make up more funny-sounding names for other allegedly shady state-specific deals in the health reform bill. Thus, you might have heard about the “Louisiana Purchase,” that exempts Louisiana from a change to the formula for calculating the state-federal split of Medicaid costs. The thing about this is that, as Katie Connolly argues, the Louisiana Purchase is in fact a perfectly justifiable policy response to a weird situation. The crux of the matter is that the Medicaid formula is supposed to provide more help to poor states than to rich states, and Hurricane Katrina had the weird result of making Louisiana register as suddenly much richer than it used to be:

It’s common knowledge that Hurricane Katrina devastated the state, destroying homes, livelihoods and entire communities. But in the wake of Katrina, millions of dollars flooded into the state, in insurance payments, aid and money for new construction and repairs. Although thousands of people were, and are, still suffering from Katrina’s impact, on paper it looked like the state had gained millions of dollars. On paper, incomes went up by 40%. Yes, some people, mainly those in engineering and construction, did well out of the unfortunate building boom, but in reality, thousands had lost their jobs, their homes and their savings. That sort of thing isn’t accounted for in income calculations.

The result was that because of this perceived increase in income, the funding formula compels the federal government to cut its Medicaid funding to Louisiana. (The federal calculations are done on a three year rolling average, so there’s a lag time between the post-Katrina income spike, which continued for some time, and the changes to federal funding.) The state government, already stretched from all the other post-Katrina demands on spending – repairing roads, schools, basic infrastructure – is looking at paying far more than it’s historic share of Medicaid payments.

Better-educated fans of free market economics will recognize what happened in Louisiana as an instance of Frederic Bastiat’s parable of the broken window. If everyone in Louisiana has insurance on their property, then a giant storm destroys 20 percent of the structures in Louisiana (note, I haven’t looked up the actual numbers), the inflow of insurance payments is going to provide a huge spike in the measured income of the state’s residents. But if Louisiana was a poor state before having 20 percent of its structures destroyed, it’s still poor afterwards. Tweaking the Medicaid rules to account for that properly is a totally reasonable idea.