Saturday Blogging - click here
Not going to post a lot here today but I wanted to post what I thought was massively important to the, where are we now and how did we get here, dicussion on civics.
To know me or listen to my radio show is to hear me occasionally joke that we're all living in the age of stupid. Of course like a lot of jokes I've told over the years there's some truth in it... IMHO that is. I won't give you the litany about a whole generation not being aware of even the recent past, let alone the important ages of humankind. Let's just go back in time to the point I believe it all started to go in the wrong direction: the election of Ronald Reagan.
Today I learn that the 1980 Presidential election was, for all intents and purposes, stolen. Robert Parry of consortiumnews.com reports the investigation into, what became known as,the 'October Surprise,' did not have an extraordinary bit of evidence at their disposal that had been earmarked just for them:
The Russian report, which was dropped off at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Jan. 11, 1993, contradicted the task force’s findings – which were released two days later – of “no credible evidence” showing that Republicans contacted Iranian intermediaries behind President Carter’s back regarding 52 American hostages held by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government, the so-called October Surprise case.
There can be no doubt that Carter's failure to secure the hostage release doomed his bid at a second term and this is evidence that Reagan, the Republican Party apparatus and the Military Industrial complex did what they could to sabotage his efforts and forward their own political interests. In effect stealing the election in what should be considered an act of treason.
Disaster in the Gulf
Since I read the report from the Wall Street Journal that some estimates had one million gallons a day of oil streaming into the Gulf, or 25,000 barrels, I've been hard pressed to find that number anywhere else in the MSM. The number I keep seeing repeated is 210,000 gallons per day, or 5,000 barrels, and it's hard not to believe that it's the work of corporate shills. This, by the way, is in the wake of BP admitting on Wednesday that spill amounts could even be as much as 60,000 barrels per day.
So today I jump on board to ride the intertubes and there's stories aplenty that point to bigger and badder goings on in the Gulf. Now yesterday my local fishwrap only had one story about the continual spewing of oil into the Gulf and it was on page A-15. Hard for me to fathom because IMHO something that's going to affect food prices for possibly the next year and perhaps longer, as well as fuel prices, is absolutely the definition of what news is.
Now the alarming reports making their way onto the net at this time, as opposed to earlier in the week, strikes me as suspicious. Weekends for most of us are both a time to recharge and yet busy with familial responsibilities, especially on Mother's Day weekend. Not really a time to be paying close attention to the steady stream of bad news.
The news is frightening: from an NOAA report dated April 28, it makes clear that the Coast Guard fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."
Read the entire thing and prepare to be alarmed.
In the meantime, more coastal areas have been made off limits to the public and the dome they wanted to place over the geyser has failed for the moment. And as the media urges you withhold judgement as to who's at fault in this disaster, a piece of machinery costing .004 percent of BP's 2009 profits might have prevented the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that is currently threatening the U.S. gulf coast.
Also remember that Dick Cheney's cronies have their fingerprints all over this abominable mess.
Post new comment