Oil's Well That Doesn't End Well For This Oil Well, Part 10

The lowballing of the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe continues.  News outlets are still using the sexy "210,000 gallons a day" number, but that's still the same 5,000 barrels a day figure we've seen for a couple weeks now as the "official" figure.  Getting an official figure is suddenly impossible.

As a result, the media is losing interest in the story.  There's just not pictures of dead seagulls and otters on the short yet.

There will be.  And soon.  The outrage is going to be nasty.  But it may not be soon enough to save the people of Louisiana who are going to lose their livelihoods and any chance of compensation from BP.

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.

Senate Bill 549 would prohibit clinics that receive any government funding from suing state agencies, companies, or individuals for failing to comply with state or federal laws or for damages (unless the legislature granted an exemption). So "while the Gulf churns with oil and the state mourns the deaths of 11 oil rig workers, the Louisiana legislature is being asked to serve up a favor to the state's petrochemical industry," leaders of the Clinical Legal Education Association (the country's largest association of law teachers) warn in a letter obtained by NEWSWEEK and hand-delivered this morning to Sen. Ann Duplessis, chair of the committee that will hold hearings on the bill next week, May 19. A denial of state funding to a university would essentially cripple it, leaving a school no choice but to close or severely curtail its environmental-law clinic.

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."  

BP knows the magnitude of the disaster coming.  They are trying to now convince red state legislatures to protect them and the industry, and they are pulling every oil and blood-soaked string they have to get the lawmakers on their payroll to make good and shut down any effort to sue the companies. Starting with these environmental law clinics, the mission here is to make sure than anyone that tries anything funny gets crushed by the GOP and the Blue Dogs in Big Oil's pocket.

They've got to hurry.  I figure it's not going to be much longer before the shock of Greek Fire and Gordon Brown's resignation/Elena Kagan wears off, and the Lake Palin story starts getting really horrific footage.  Hearings by Congress today did not go well for the companies involved as BP, Halliburton, and Transocean all blamed each other for the accident.

They know they could be on the hook for billions.  On the other hand, the oil companies are counting on Obama Derangement Syndrome to save them.

43% now say the spill made them less inclined to support drilling while 36% say it didn't make a difference to them one way or the other. Perhaps most surprisingly 21% of voters said the spill made them more likely to support offshore drilling. That includes an even split among GOP voters, 28% of whom said the spill made them more likely to support drilling and 28% of whom said the spill made them less likely to support drilling.

Few voters buy into Rush Limbaugh's conspiracy theory that environmentalists may have been responsible for the spill in an effort to build support for their agenda. Just 9% of voters say they think environmentalists caused the spill while 22% are unsure and 69% don't believe they had anything to do with it. Even among GOP voters only 13% are buying into the 'the environmentalists' did it frame of mind.

"Obama's brownshirts sabotaged the oil rig on purpose!" is the new ACORN/birther/reeducation camps nonsense for 2010, just in time for the election.  It will be irresponsible not to speculate if Obama's Kenyan Mer-Ninjas blew up the rig.  One in four Republicans say we should drill more now and Tom Jensen is surprised by this?  He's surprised by 28% of Republicans saying "Good, let's drill more, we own this damn environment, and screw those goddamn hippie liberals!" Then they'll drive off in their GMC Yukons to the nearest Cabela's.


I'm not surprised in the least.  They hate liberals that much and really don't give a good god damn about the planet, only themselves.