newsalarmonline.com

The rapid break-up of the Gulf Oil Spill should have been a sign to the Obama administration that continuing the offshore drilling ban was a bad idea.  However, they preferred not to learn anything from the experience, so Texas is acting on their own to remedy the situation:

The Texas attorney general sued the Obama administration Wendesday over its new deep-water offshore drilling moratorium, claiming it is unjustified and federal officials did not contact the state before issuing the ban.

Attorney General Greg Abbott filed the 18-page suit in federal court in Houston against Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The ban halted the approval of any new permits for deep-water projects and shut down drilling at 33 exploratory ocean wells in the wake of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In his lawsuit, Abbott called the ban “an unjustified, arbitrary and capricious policy that will inflict harm upon coastal communities.”

Challenges to Obama will start coming fast and furious. The same day Texas filed their suit Florida announced plans for a new immigration law that promises to be tougher than Arizona’s law. This could make for some interesting times for Obama, because if this law passes you have to wonder if he’ll be willing to sue Florida like he did Arizona. Arizona was not going to vote for him in 2012 no matter what, but he really needs to win Florida to win another term in office. Is he willing to take on a state he needs so badly? We’ll see.

From Drudge:

BP may drill again in oil spill reservoir…

Of course they will. If there’s anything the last several months have shown us is there’s a heckuva lot of oil down there and somebody should go get it.

Mother Gaia is on the job:

The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

The end of the world will have to wait for another day.

Now somebody explain why the drilling moratorium is still in place until the end of November?

Good news from Louisiana:

Louisiana has reopened key commercial fishing areas that were closed as a result of the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a statement released by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
The news will be taken very well by local fishermen who have been sidelined as a result of the spill.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries opened up specific areas to allow the fishing of shrimp and finfish east of the Mississippi in New Orleans, St. Tammany, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes yesterday the statement read.

I guess it won’t be 50 years until the Gulf recovers after all.

Once again the environwackos have tried to scare us into making draconian changes in our national energy policy, and Democrat politicians prayed for enough damage to justify cap-and-trade:

President Obama has called the BP oil spill “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the “Catastrophe Along the Gulf Coast,” while CBS, Fox and MSNBC slap “Disaster in the Gulf” chryons on all their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted the spill was an “environmental catastrophe.” The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it “the leak” — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Well, Rush has a point. The Deepwater explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the birds killed by the Exxon Valdez. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but, so far, wildlife response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of any mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And, yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but, so far, shorelines assessment teams have only found about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

Yesterday on his show Rush played an interview with an environwacko who promised that it would take 50 years to clean up the damage from the Gulf Oil Spill. Three months later the clean-up crews are having trouble finding any oil.

 Another interview played on Rush’s show from an expert in cleaning up oil suggested that the Gulf had ramped up its own natural defenses as the oil gushed and once the flow stopped the bacteria and other critters that eat and dissolve that stuff were in high gear and are rapidly degrading what’s left of the slick.

 The Chicken Little crowd just can’t get it right.

I wonder who was driving the boat?

Fox News is being told by the Homeland Security director for Jefferson Parish, La., that a new oil leak has sprung up in the Gulf of Mexico after a boat struck an oil well in the early morning hours on Tuesday.

A tugboat or other workboat collided with the well near Bayou St. Dennis, La., shearing off its valve structure and releasing pressurized natural gas and light oil, DHS official Deano Bonano told Fox News.

Cleanup workers are currently booming off the area and the scene at sea has been taken over by federal agents. The U.S. Coast Guard, Jefferson Parish police and fire officials, as well as Vessels of Opportunity boats have all been dispatched to the scene.

Federal officials do not know who owns the well, but a contractor who handles wild wells is also on the way, Bonano said.

There’s hope for cap-and-trade yet.

From Chuck Dizzle:

Want to make a lib’s head explode? Tell them every barrel of oil spilled into the gulf is 100% organic.

Can it be organic and still be evil?

I guess the American contracts are pretty important to BP, but don’t feel bad for former CEO Tony Hayward:

BP’s embattled Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward will be replaced by American Robert Dudley on Oct. 1, the company said Tuesday, as it reported a record quarterly loss and set aside $32.2 billion to cover the costs of the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

BP said the decision to replace Hayward, 53, with the company’s first ever non-British CEO was made by mutual agreement. In a mark of faith in its outgoing leader, BP said it planned to recommend him for a non-executive board position at its Russian joint venture and will pay him $1.6 million, a year’s salary, in lieu of notice.

Britain’s The Sun newspaper reported Tuesday Hayward will also receive a massive payout worth more than $20 million.

Hayward’s problem was his tone-deafness with the press, not his ability as CEO. He’s made BP a lot of money and will continue to do so in the Russian deal. Retaining him in a new capacity shows his value to the company and reassures the stockholders that his talents won’t be just thrown away.

Though the environmentalists want him tossed out on his ear as a symbolic gesture, big business doesn’t work that way.

This is not going to help Obama get cap-and-trade passed (h/t Say Anything):

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem — they’re having trouble finding it.

At its peak last month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.

Today, ABC News surveyed a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen.

“That oil is somewhere. It didn’t just disappear,” said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser. …

Still, it doesn’t mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.

“[It's] mother nature doing her job,” said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

Fortunately there will still be enough oily pelicans for the photo ops.

Not THAT Joe the Plumber, but a different plumber named Joe (from Michael Barone):

As amazing as it may seem, there’s considerable evidence that Joe Caldert, a plumber from St. Francis, Kan., submitted the design which was the basis for BP’s at least temporarily successful effort to stop the flow of oil.

At the very least, Caldert’s proposal, which he relayed through a University of California at Berkeley professor, closely resembles the technique BP is using. This is an interesting example of how knowledge widely distributed through society can be brought to bear on difficult problems—and how credentialed experts inside or outside government and the academy do not have a monopoly on useful knowledge.

Next time I need some plumbing done, or need a socialist called out in front of the TV camera’s, I’m looking for a guy named Joe.