Waiter Is That Corexit In My Shrimp Cocktail?

So now it looks like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill did, indeed, contaminate the food chain:

The study, “Macondo-1 well oil-derived polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in mesozooplankton from the northern Gulf of Mexico,” found that oil has contaminated zooplankton, one of the first links in the oceanic food chain.

“Traces of oil in the zooplankton prove that they had contact with the oil and the likelihood that oil compounds may be working their way up the food chain,” Dr. Michael Roman of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science said in a statement accompanying the study.

Baby fish and shrimp feed on the tiny, drifting zooplankton, and then introduce contamination and pollution to the larger sea creatures in the food web.

Those larger creatures also include us, let me point out. Anything that eats shrimp is at risk of getting contaminated. And here we are nearly two years after the fact, and I’m sure a lot of people feel like everything is fine, go ahead and tuck into that shrimp special at your favorite local restaurant. Freedom! But two years is not nearly long enough for any of this stuff to be cleansed from the ecosystem.

I bring this up because I’ve been having a long-running battle with the seafood guys at Whole Foods about this. First, let me say: I rarely eat shellfish anymore because well, they’re seabugs, y’all! That lobster is just a giant cockroach! But Mr. Beale likes it and so I will occasionally cook shrimp for him, and sometimes I can forget crabs are big sea-spiders, if they’re chopped up in a crab cake and I don’t have to see the legs.

But ever since the BP oil spill I have avoided Gulf shrimp, and no amount of “oh you’re just being silly” cajoling will get me to change my mind, because of this:

That Ain't Natural & I Ain't Eating It

This is some gross orange-y gook that I often find when I clean Gulf shrimp and only Gulf shrimp. It looks just like Corexit and is found along the “mud line.” It also discolors the meat around it, and sometimes even a toughens the texture.

Now usually on the rare occasion that I buy shrimp I ask where the shrimp is from and if I’m lucky I can get shrimp from Savannah. Thanks to the USDA’s COOL laws, the store has to tell you where your food is from, and I am eternally grateful for this information (don’t get me started on grapes from Chile, people. That’s a whole ‘nother blog post). But on Monday all Whole Foods had was Gulf shrimp and once again I got into an argument with the guy about what that orange gook is. I even showed him the picture (taken the last time I made the mistake of buying Gulf shrimp), at which point he told me I was being silly and that these were teeny tiny eggs.

That is the second time someone has told me that these are shrimp eggs. Okay look, I know it’s been a few decades since I took biology class and I’m definitely not a fisheries biologist, but the mud line is not where one finds shrimp eggs. The mud line is the shrimp’s GI tract. That “mud” is shrimp shit. Shrimp do not shit out their eggs. If you’re a female shrimp and you have eggs, they are on the other side of your body, where the legs are. In fact, those little tiny legs are called “swimmerets” and are there so females can hold their eggs.

Look:

So people, if anyone tells you that the orange gook in your shrimp are eggs, please show them this picture and ask them how it’s possible, biologically speaking, for eggs to be where feces is. You can also let them that they are full of shit, if you wish. Just like your shrimp.

If you’re a fisheries biologist and can offer me any more insight on what this orange gook is, please weigh in. Until then, I’m going to assume this is some kind of oil-spill related contaminant, because I never saw it before the Deepwater Horizon disaster and I’ve never seen it in any kind of shrimp besides those from the Gulf. And let me be clear: before I started boycotting Florida for being racist fucktards, we used to go to the beach every summer and buy Gulf shrimp from those little refrigerated shrimp stands on the beach. I’ve cleaned a lot of shrimp in my day. But now Gulf shrimp seems to have orange slime in it and I ain’t eating it.

>BP Clean-Up Crews Sick & Dying

>Here’s a story the national news media seems to be ignoring:

This young woman, Jennifer Rexford, BP-hired oil cleanup worker, is documenting her illness from the toxins in the gulf with her video camera. If you think it’s just headaches or something like that, watch this. Severe neurological damage. Doctors and hospitals refuse to acknowledge this with anyone there who’s sick.  And there are apparently tens of thousands now.

Paul Doomm is mentioned twice in this video.  He is a 22 year old who swam in and ate from the Gulf all summer, against his grandmother’s advice.  He has been hospitalized after seeing 94 doctors who don’t know what to do for him.  His  blood had the highest amount of PAH’s ever documented.

Shocking and sad videos at the link. Here’s one:

We all knew this was coming. I did. I told my mother in law not to go to the Gulf of Mexico (she didn’t listen). I won’t eat shrimp from there. We have poisoned the Gulf and the people who live there, because some rich assholes decided oil is more important than people. Think the free hand of the market will save those now sickened by toxic chemicals from oil and the dispersants used?

Let’s also remember that Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Republican of course, defeated a bill that would increase BP’s liability from $75 million to $10 billion. So all of those sick people … well, I guess “the best healthcare system in the world” will absorb all of those costs. Thank God they can’t be denied healthcare because getting poisoned by your corporate overlords is a pre-existing condition — yet. I’m sure if the Republicans had their way and destroyed ACA, hundreds of people would be facing severe neurological damage and no health insurance.

And let’s also remember that as horrible as the BP oil spill was (and still is), imagine if it were a nuclear accident, like what’s unfolding in Japan.

But God forbid we should learn from our mistakes! Let’s just keep chugging along as if nothing happened and continue to tell ourselves that solar and wind energy aren’t economical solutions. It always looks that way when you socialize the costs of the dirty alternative.

MORE… Baby dolphins dying, too….

What Happens When You Cave To Republicans

Hey, Democrats and President Obama: remember when you caved to Republicans on those Louisiana sand berms? Yeah that was so funny. Hilarious!

What did we get for it? Nothing!

(AP) NEW ORLEANS – The big set of sand barriers erected by Louisiana’s governor to protect the coastline at the height of the Gulf oil spill was criticized by a presidential commission Thursday as a colossal, $200 million waste of BP’s money so far.

Precious little oil ever washed up on the berms, according to the commission — a finding corroborated by a log of oil sightings and other government documents obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request.

Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered the berms built over the objections of scientists and federal agencies — and secured money from BP to do it — out of frustration over what he saw as inaction by the Obama administration. During the crisis, Jindal boasted that the sand walls were stopping oil from coming ashore, and the idea proved popular in Louisiana.

Actually, we wasted $360 million, destroyed the environment, and diverted funds from other, more effective measures to protect Louisiana’s coastline. But no fear: Jindal’s campaign contributors got taken care of:

The berm project has been a boon to Louisiana industry: although many of the dredging companies working on the project have out-of-state headquarters, all have a major presence in Louisiana. The Shaw Group, the lead contractor on the project, is based in Baton Rouge and has been one of Mr. Jindal’s leading campaign contributors over the years.

All together now, children: Nobody could have anticipated that!

So just to recap: we have the Republican governor and his Greek chorus of equally ambitious GOP partisans using the oil spill to portray the Obama Administration as inept in a crisis. They demand the construction of a massive multimillion-dollar project which scientists and engineers say won’t work, and use the media to complain that the big bad government is “dithering,” while never addressing any of the factual concerns experts raise about the project. The Obama Administration predictably caves out of fear of bad PR, and six months later we find the experts were right, and Bobby Jindal’s project is a massive, expensive FAIL.

As the final cherry on top of a giant pie of suckitude, we have Jindal whining about “partisan revisionist history at taxpayer expense,” government bureaucracies, and how his own failure proves the need for smaller government. WTF?

This is what happens when you cave to Republicans. You end up wasting massive amounts of money, you don’t fix the problem, and the assholes say mean things about you anyway. The only winners are the GOP moneybags who rake in the government contracts.

Lesson learned? Don’t listen to this maroon:

>Shocking

>Well, clearly the solution to this problem is more deregulation:

As early as February, oil-field service giant Halliburton was getting poor results in lab tests of the recipe for the cement it was planning to use, according to evidence collected by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Three separate tests suggested that the mixture would be “unstable,” according to a commission staff letter released Thursday.

Halliburton notified BP by e-mail about only one of the tests before the well explosion, according to the commission. The two companies went ahead with the cementing job anyway. Its failure became the first in a cascade of factors leading to the accident.

The results of a fourth Halliburton test – the only one indicating that the cement slurry might have been able to contain the high-pressure pool of oil and gas at the bottom of the Macondo well – were not available until the night of April 19 at the earliest and perhaps not until after the cement was poured, the commission staff said.

[…]

At the commission’s request, Chevron recently carried out independent lab tests of a cement slurry that Halliburton said was the same as that used in the Macondo well. The commission staff said Chevron reported that “its lab personnel were unable to generate stable foam cement in the laboratory using the materials provided by Halliburton.”

The commission staff said in the letter Thursday that the Halliburton tests before the Macondo well blowout and the new lab tests conducted by Chevron show that “Halliburton (and perhaps BP) should have considered redesigning the foam slurry before pumping it at the Macondo well.”

Well, I’m sure the free hand of the market will take care of that. I mean, this is Halliburton, y’all! The company which fleeced taxpayers with its Iraq reconstruciton corruption, overcharged the U.S. government for fuel, tried to cover up a female employee’s alleged gang rape. The company which got fat off U.S. government warmongering then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Such a patriotic group of people.

So now BP can share some of the liability for the country’s worst oil spill with Dick Cheney’s old company. This should be fun to watch.

>Offshore Oil Drilling Moratorium Lifted

>[UPDATE]:

And a big fuck you to Sen. Mary Landrieu. One of the main reasons I don’t give money to the DSCC anymore.

———————-

Those 33 oil rigs affected by the moratorium imposed post-BP spill can get back to work.

Hah fucking zah.

Hasn’t stopped the whining though:

“We’re still in the dark,” said Hornbeck, who heads up one of the companies that sued to block Interior’s initial moratorium. His company provides vessels and other services for the offshore industry.

“The devil is in the details, as they say, and the industry hasn’t seen the final requirements for what we would have to do to be able to actually get a permit issued,” he added. “Until that is done, lifting the moratorium may be just a moot or perfunctory act. … Right now, I’m skeptical that it will be anytime soon that permits will be issued even if the moratorium is lifted.”

Oh, you’re skeptical? Really? You should be on your knees thanking God your industry wasn’t wiped out, the way a lot of beachfront restaurants and fishing operations were. You should be grateful you weren’t told to find another line of work because the country decided your business was too risky to the country’s other vital resources.

You should have been told to shut your yap and quit your whining, and try providing “vessels and other services” to the thousands of oil rigs still chugging merrily along during the deepwater moratorium.

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, man. Show some personal responsibility. Figures you’d run straight for the lawyers. Of course you did. It’s only a bad thing when liberals do it.

Dick.

>Woefully Deficient In Leadership & Ingenuity

>[UPDATE]:

What I’ve been saying, courtesy of Krugman.

—————————-

I have been meaning to do a post on our incredibly stupid U.S. Senate which failed to do anything on climate and energy legislation, and then Robert Redford went ahead and did it for me. Man, that is one awesome rant. Go read it now.

Here’s the part that got me:

In the middle of the biggest oil disaster in American history, the hottest summer on record, and a war with an oil-rich nation, this group of cynics blocked efforts to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation. This was the moment brimming with potential for new jobs, a more robust economy and cleaner environment — this bill would have guided America down a profoundly safer and more productive path.



So therefore, the Senate is left to vote on an anemic energy bill of such remarkably limited scope that it could have been passed during the Bush era.

Compare this to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and the “societal punch” it packed. The contrast is striking. Our cowardly U.S. Senate caved to Big Oil, even as oil gushed out of the sea floor and coastal regions reeled from the loss of their tourism and fishing industries.

How far we’ve fallen in 40 years. I’m angry, and so is Redford. He writes:

The elected officials who steered this turnaround have abdicated their responsibility to uphold our nation’s best interests, and have shown us, and the world, an America woefully deficient in both leadership and ingenuity.

Tough medicine, but true. And the truth is, we’ve been woefully deficient in these areas for years. It is, in fact, a reference to a larger, far more nefarious decline in American public life: our inability to solve our national problems.

For this discussion I direct readers to this heartbreaking Financial Times article, which I found courtesy of John Cole at Balloon Juice. It’s a depressing read, and I hate to start the week off on such a downer note, but it’s also terribly enlightening. For starters:

Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.

[…]

The barometer is economic. But the anger is human and increasingly political. “I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America,” says Spence. “When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years.”

As for how we got here, the article presents several ideas: globalization, outsourcing, automation.

Or:

Then there are those, such as Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winner, who blame it on politics, notably the conservative backlash which began when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, and which sped up the decline of unions and reversed the most progressive features of the US tax system.

Fewer than a tenth of American private sector workers now belong to a union. People in Europe and Canada are subjected to the same forces of globalisation and technology. But they belong to unions in larger numbers and their healthcare is publicly funded. More than half of household bankruptcies in the US are caused by a serious ­illness or accident.

I can buy that 20+ years of conservatism has caused our economic problems, but has it made us unable to solve them? Well, it’s certainly responsible for today’s political paralysis in Washington, where Republicans operate in lockstep to block everything and anything in an effort to sink a Democratic President.

But the Democrats don’t get off scott-free. They were handed clear majorities in the last two elections — the mandate Bush pretended he’d had. The fact is, they’ve failed to lead. They’ve failed to engage the American public. That we can’t pass climate and clean energy legislation in the midst of the worst oil spill in American history isn’t the fault of Republicans, it’s the fault of Democrats, including the President, for failing to make this a priority.

And if we can’t do this, right now, I fear we won’t be able to do anything at all.

>Show Us The Money

>While news that BP CEO Tony Hayward will be replaced by Mississippi native Bob Dudley broke yesterday, a far more important piece of news has gone largely ignored.

Which is: apparently BP has failed to deposit any money into the promised escrow account:

BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. — Ken Feinberg said today he hasn’t been able to start writing claims checks because BP PLC has not yet deposited any money into the $20 billion escrow fund it promised to create.

Feinberg, who was appointed last month to administer individual and business claims stemming from the oil spill, held an early morning town hall meeting in Bayou La Batre on Saturday before meeting with the Press-Register editorial board in downtown Mobile.

[…]

Feinberg said he doesn’t have the authority to force BP to deposit the money, and that he can’t start making payments until it does.

“I don’t want the checks to bounce,” he said.

He said he has been told that the money would be available in the next week or so.

Ah yes, “the check is in the mail.”

I don’t know what the hold-up is, what parts of “the company’s agreement with the White House” still need to be “finalized.” I do know that people down in the Gulf have been promised that BP will “make it right,” and the White House has backed that pledge. The vehicle for this is the $20 billion compensation fund. If this doesn’t happen, the repercussions will be devastating.

Consider this:

We talked to several people afterwards, and with typical Southern courtesy they said they were “glad to see” Feinberg, and welcomed him to Alabama.

But most also said “talk is cheap,” and “we heard all that from BP, too,” just before they started denying claims and reducing compensation.

People aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being sold a bill of goods. The last thing anyone needs is for the White House to be a carbon copy of BP where dealing with the Gulf Coast is concerned.

Unfortunately, the White House’s credibility is now tied to BP’s. But let’s remember, when it comes to BP and the U.S. government, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

I don’t have a good feeling about this.

Liberal Media Fail, NPR Edition

Apparently no one told NPR’s Jeff Brady at All Things Considered that the offshore oil drilling moratorium affects just 33 rigs operating in deep water. Well they did — but that didn’t stop him from spewing oil industry propaganda. On tonight’s All Things Considered, he buys the oil industry’s bullshit propaganda hook, line and sinker. First we have the headline:

Small Businesses May Sink Under Drilling Hiatus

That’s some lovely fearmongering. Then we have this:

There’s a sign in front of Delmar Systems’ headquarters in Broussard, La., that reads “Mr. Obama you should not eliminate our jobs.”

If the current moratorium continues it could hit Delmar especially hard. The bulk of the company’s business is anchoring and mooring semi-submersible drilling rigs. If there are no rigs drilling in the Gulf — there’s nothing to anchor. So, it’s a little surprising how much activity there is in Delmar’s shop these days.

Yes, surprising, isn’t it? Why is that? Maybe it’s because the moratorium, I repeat, affects just 33 rigs doing exploratory drilling in water deeper than 500 feet.

Jesus.

Then we have this:

“We figure that for every deepwater well, there’s about 1,400 jobs affected,” says Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association.

Currently 33 rigs are idled — by Luthi’s calculation that’s more than 45,000 jobs hanging in the balance. Luthi says the bulk of those workers are employed not by the big names in the oil industry, but by companies like Delmar.

Well by all means let’s take Luthi’s calculation as gospel, why don’t we. Your entire business is predicated on 33 rigs when there are thousands operating in the Gulf of Mexico? Sounds like a bad business plan to me.

Okay, so who is NOIA? According to their website:

NOIA’s mission is to secure reliable access and a fair regulatory and economic environment for the companies that develop the nation’s valuable offshore energy resources in an environmentally responsible manner. NOIA members include producers of oil and natural gas, renewable energy, contractors, marine engineers, service and supply companies and others with an interest in producing energy from the nation’s outer continental shelf.

Oh, okay. In other words, an industry group. A trade group. Fair enough. Does NPR’s Jeff Brady tell you that? No he does not. They never do. Like how last month NPR’s April Fulton quoted “Justin Wilson” from the “Center For Consumer Freedom,” one of DC lobbyist Rick Berman’s many phony front groups. Wilson is a busy guy, holding lots of titles with lots of different fake “consumer groups,” all funded by Rick Berman. Did NPR’s April Fulton tell you that? No she did not.

Brady repeats the oil industry talking point thusly:

Some of the companies likely won’t survive a six-month moratorium. Luthi says that’ll lead to more consolidation in the industry and less competition — something he thinks will hurt his industry in the long run.

Oh I have a sad. Oh wait. No, I don’t. Maybe Jeff Brady needs to take this up with all of the tourism and fishing folks who really are suffering right now. Most of them didn’t just lose 33 points of business while thousands of others chug merrily along. These really are small businesses. Take it up with the mom-and-pop shrimp and oyster shacks which have been put out of business. Or New Orleans’ 134-year-old P&J Oyster House , shuttered by the BP oil spill.

Honestly, this is why I go nuts when people tell me that NPR is somehow the “liberal” equivalent of FOX News. No, it’s not. They don’t spew anything close to Democratic Party propaganda in the same way FOX spews Republican Party propaganda. Most of NPR’s programming is cultural, like “My Front Porch” and stories on obscure African drumming ensembles in Zimbabwe. There’s no political slant in that. And when they do cover news, it’s poorly done.

This is why I don’t give you people money.

Hey Jeff Brady, maybe next time instead of just buying the oil industry’s sad tale of woe, you might try checking with someone else, too. Just to give your piece a little, ya know, balance.

Adding …. And one more thing, because I didn’t have time to research it earlier: I know we’re all supposed to worship at the altar of the “small business” these days, but Delmar Systems apparently has 200 employees and annual revenues of $10.9 million. That might technically qualify as “small” by Small Business Administration standards, but it’s pretty gigantic compared to some of the truly small operations now shut down by the oil spill. People like Vicki Guillot, owner of Debbie’s Cafe, or Tarek Tay, owner of Catch Seafood Pub, both shuttered by the spill. Or people like Cassie Cox, who rents beach umbrellas. Or any of the hundreds of tiny little shrimp shacks and oyster outfits catering to tourists in the summer.

Jeff Brady and the people at Delmar Systems need to talk to these folks and see if anyone is crying for them right now.

>All Of Those Leaky Offshore Oil Wells

>Well this is just peachy. AP has discovered the Gulf of Mexico is littered with over 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells, some dating back to the 1940s. None are being monitored to determine if they are leaking which, considering the age of some of these wells, they undoubtedly are.

I wrote about one such well three weeks ago. Taylor Energy’s Ocean Saratoga rig has been leaking 10 miles off the Louisiana coast since Hurricane Ivan hit back in 2004! (Remember when John McCain said hurricanes don’t affect offshore oil rigs? Yeah, me too.)

The Ocean Saratoga leak has been small — an estimated 14 gallons a day — but over six years it’s created a 10-mile-long oil slick captured on satellite. Worse, Taylor Energy says they’ve been working all this time to plug the leak. Okay, I’m going to call bullshit on that. Six years, people? You can’t stop a small oil leak after six years? If that’s the case, then things look pretty dim for BP’s gusher. Excuse me for saying this, but I don’t think the folks at Taylor Energy are trying very hard.

Anyway, I’m not surprised that the AP has uncovered leaky oil and gas wells going back decades. I’m not surprised that this is suddenly a news story. But I am surprised that people in the industry whose business it is to know about such things have basically kept quiet about it. I’m disturbed that the Interior Dept. has not conducted inspections, nor did it mandate that the oil industry do so. I’m tired of us ignoring things until a major disaster occurs, at which point we pass some legislation which inevitably is ignored.

I’m not surprised, but I’m very, very bothered by this:

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s — even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.

As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation’s history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.

(Before we go any further, let me say the very first thing on the agenda for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation & Enforcement (formerly MMS) should be an immediate and thorough assessment of all abandoned oil wells.)

There seems to be a pattern here. After the Kingston coal sludge disaster, we learned about more leaky TVA coal sludge ponds. But what was done about it?

The EPA has spent the past year assessing coal ash containment facilities. Last month they announced two options for dealing with coal ash, one regulating it as “special waste” and one treating it as “non-hazardous” which means basically keeping things exactly the way they are:

The EPA itself admits that under its weaker option, many states will not adopt strict federal guidelines and that approximately 50% of the coal ash generated in the U.S. will continue to be managed under state programs that do not require basic disposal safeguards.

I wonder which option the coal industry and electrical utilities support?

It cannot be stated often enough or loudly enough: there is a cost to our inaction and denial. We simply can no longer afford to put the needs of the energy industry above the needs of everyone and everything else. We can no longer tolerate one industry riding roughshod over everyone and everything else.

We cannot allow Big Oil and King Coal to dictate the health of the water we drink and the air we breathe, to destroy an entire fishing industry for which we have no alternative. Oil and coal are important to our economy right now, that’s a fact of life. But they are transient. Guess what: we have alternatives to oil and coal. We don’t have alternatives for clean air and water.

My message to Big Oil and Big Coal is a simple one: you’re selfish, greedy and irresponsible. Sorry guys, but you know it’s true. You’re important, but we do have alternatives. On top of which, your business depends on a finite resource. God stopped making dinosaurs a few million years ago. So if you want to keep playing on our playground, quit being bullies.

Learn to share.

>GOP Party Of Know-Nothing

>Jeeeesus but John Boehner is an idiot:

Perhaps most interesting was his attack on the Obama administration’s attempts to impose a moratorium on deep-sea drilling. “The deep-water drilling — maybe there’s a reason there to pause till we know what happened and we can make sure we can prevent it from happening again,” Boehner said. “But all of this other drilling that’s going on down there in the more shallow waters — there’s no reason to have a moratorium.”

Oh for crying out loud, what have I been saying for weeks now? One more time, for the Republican Minority fucking Leader who seems to have absolutely no fucking clue what he’s talking about:

The offshore drilling moratorium applies to just 33 oil rigs drilling exploratory wells in water deeper than 500 feet.

Got that? All of the whining and moaning about the final nail in the Louisiana economy (since the oil spill destroyed their fallback industries of tourism and fisheries) and yammering on right wing radio and threats that the entire Gulf oil industry would pick up sticks and move to the North Sea because oil workers and supporting industries simply can’t wait six months … all of that is over 33 exploratory wells.

Think about that. Even the House fucking Minority Leader doesn’t know it because everyone has been acting as if the entire offshore oil drilling industry has been mothballed for the duration. And that’s because no one in our glorious media has bothered to mention that, or at least not mention it often enough and loud enough.