Second Line!

 

So, after getting the worst of Hurricane Ida, Louisiana is about to get the worst of the still-ongoing oil spill from somewhere in the thousands of miles of decomissioned and abandoned pipeline — previously owned and operated by who the hell knows who — on the bottom of the Gulf Of Mexico.

"The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has allowed the offshore oil and gas industry to leave 97 percent of pipelines (18,000 miles) on the seafloor when no longer in use" since the 1960s, said a report issued by the Government Accountability Office earlier this year.

— "Oil Leak off U.S. Louisiana Coast Continues to Spread", TeleSUR English 09.09.2021

It's as if they're getting two hurricanes down there.  

11x13.5 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 832kb

Happy Anniversary!

So, here we are two years after the massive oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore rig which devestated ecosystems, fisheries and tourism along the US Gulf Coast. Our Exalted Boy Emperor and Nobel Laureate, Barack Drone Strike Obama, responded by sitting around saying nothing for a couple of weeks before giving a speech so empty and loaded with blue-sky platitudes about our wonderful energy future that he should’ve been wearing a cardigan.

Meanwhile, large numbers of eyeless shrimp and mutated fish are being caught by Gulf Coast fishing boats, Gulf fisheries are in deep decline, and not a single BP executive has served so much as a day of prison time for this crime.

Happy anniversary, everybody! Have some cake.

11×17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 676 kb

…and for those of you with long-term memory issues — or, “looking forward”, as your average Democrat would say — here’s a quick recap of the Gulf Coast oil disaster:

“Spill, Baby, Spill!” 04.30.10
“Climate Change?” 05.12.10
“Plugged, At Last!” 05.29.10
“Nerobama no. 2″ 06.17.10

Nerobama no.2: Still Fiddling

OK, so I’ve ripped off one of my own cartoons that I did about a year and a half ago — and it was a cartoon that ripped off a famous painting, at that. Still, given the response of Our Exalted Leader Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Skywalker Obama The One to the massive man-made environmental disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico, and the incompetence and obstructionism of British Petroleum, it just seemed fitting considering the response — or, should I say non-response — of Our Exalted Leader Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Skywalker Obama The One to this and every critical situation that’s confronted him since taking office: basically, sitting on his ass and saying silent, making like Nero, and metaphorically fiddling while metaphorical Rome burned — fiddling while Gaza burned, fiddling while Oakland police executed a young black man on a subway platform, fiddling while home foreclosures and unemployment skyrocketed, fiddling while Wall Street ruined the economy, fiddling while Israel committed piracy and murder, and now fiddling while ecosystems and economies on the Gulf Coast are ruined for generations.

Nerobama played golf, hung out with Bono and rocked out with Paul McCartney while the Gulf Of Mexico was destroyed. Only weeks into the debacle did Our Exalted Leader Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Skywalker Obama The One bother to actually show his face on the Gulf Coast, only to pose for photo ops with the people actually trying to clean up the mess — with “workers” bused in by BP specifically for the photo op — and making inane pronouncements such as this one, in the Gulf Coast town of Theodore, Alabama, this past week:

Apologists for Our Exalted Leader Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Skywalker Obama The One will point to the fact that he got BP to agree to a $20 billion (a drop in the bucket) escrow fund to pay out damage claims to Gulf Coast residents whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed by BP. Yeah, he finally got that one little thing done, but how long did it take him? Nearly two months, that’s how long — two goddamn months of fiddling, hemming, hawing, and excuse making while BP made pathetically cartoonish attempts to plug the Deepwater Horizon blowout, bought giant ads in the newspapers, bought sponsored keywords on Google, and prevented the press from viewing or photographing the blowout site.

This is something that Our Exalted Leader Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Skywalker Obama The One should’ve been right on top of from day one, but instead he fiddled.

Medium-res .jpg image, 728k

Plugged, At Last!

Damn! Why didn't they think of this before?

Late last week, after a tedious morning of futile job-searching, I took a break to hit the news and found this excellent little piece by Al Schumann at Stop Me Before I Vote Again, one of my favorite lefty blogs, in which he proposed a solution to the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf Of Mexico which left a mental image that I just couldn’t un-see.

For nearly a month, BP attempted “solutions” which were just PR exercises designed to do little more than make the spill less visible from airplanes and satellites, keep the media from being flooded with images of fouled beaches, oil-soaked birds and dead fish, and make it looked as if BP actually gave a damn. Meanwhile, our Glorious Leader, Booker T. Obama, got the George W. Bush Katrina Tour of the affected areas — though he did manage to keep it classy by not telling the Minerals Management Service that they were doing a “heckuva job” — while Interior Secretary Salazar was busy enforcing an offshore drilling moratorium that wasn’t.

Meanwhile, the mental image provided by Schumann’s blog entry continued to eat into my brain. It sounded like a better and better idea the more I thought about it. Why not round up all the people responsible for the disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico, and use their bodies to plug the leak? Let’s see who we’ve got, here:

First, of course, our Exalted Boy Emperor, Booker T. Obama, a leading recipient of campaign contributions from BP, not to mention the entirety of the oil and nuclear industries. Then, of course, the Board Of Directors of BP, for caring more about profits and PR than about actual responsibility for environmental disaster and cleaning up after itself. After that, we’ve got our environmentalist nonprofit organizations, outfits like the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, who entered into “partnerships” — or, to be more accurate, took payoffs — in the form of large donations from BP. Then, let’s not forget you — that’s right, you, the people who clog the highways in fat-assed SUVs, sedans and station wagons on your daily commutes, traveling one to a vehicle, while remaining silent about the American Empire’s wars of aggression in the Middle East in search of more oil. Didn’t think I’d let you off the hook, did you?

Now, that’s what I call “Top Kill”!

Medium-res .jpg image, 832k

Climate Change?

Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates between right and left, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.
– President Barack Obamessiah, “Drill, Baby, Drill” Speech, 03.31.10

Well, it certainly looks like the last cartoon has started a sizzling but happy shitstorm across the Leftie blogozone, especially at my favorite, Stop Me Before I Vote Again. So, I thought, perhaps I need to take responsibility and do something to quiet things down a bit – so, here we go: something about a topic we can all agree on, and it has Barack Obama being made to look like a big-assed Ichabod in it, and everything.

You’ll recall a couple of weeks ago, I had something to say about the Obamessiah throwing his environmentalist constituencies under the proverbial Bus with his announcement that he was joining in the zesty chorus of “Drill, Baby, Drill” in an effort to appease the Right. (Hell, it’s always about keeping the Right off their backs to the goddamn’ Democrats, isn’t it?) Well, it wasn’t a week later that suddenly the Obamessiah was reconsidering his position – or, as most of us like to say, “backpedaling”. Hah, Mr. O, I guess those debates aren’t so damn’ tired now, are they?

Medium-res .jpg image, 676k.