Wingnut and notoriously lazy blogger Confederate Yankee posts another gem.

In Conserva-circles, a “gem” appears to be a chunk of somebody else’s work that you mis-read, mis-interpret and then put up as your own opinion. Come to think of it, that’s also “rank stupidity” and “Conservative punditry,” something of a Norton Utility for right-wing internettia. If only “Norton” were “Kristolbennetto’reilly.” Anyway, it must be an especially useful practice when your own weak-backed analysis can’t manage more than 20 or 30 words of ricocheting irony.

This one’s a howler. In a post he titled “Governed by Fools” (*cough*), he bracketed the cut-and-paste job with the only effort he muscled up for the affair, two sentences:

They mismanage wars, economies, and even disasters:

[...]

Why, why do liberals place such blind trust in legendary incompetence of government bureaucrats, instead of the ingenuity of the people?

Why, oh why, my Jeebus? Governments and arrogance and fascism and bureaucrats and statism and socialism, oh lordy. When will you collectivist a-holes finally look to the individual? (In this case, by Yankee link, to a gritty American entrepreneur by the name of “Kevin Costner.”) When?!

Anyway, here’s the point, or someone else’s, so vital that he had to copy it onto his site:

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company’s expense. “If there’s a country that’s experienced with building dikes and managing water, it’s the Netherlands,” says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

That socialist Dutch government: there go a pile of bad-asses. No kidding, see for yourself.

Sadly, it appears that Waveland, Mississippi, has become an early ground zero for the appearance of dead wildlife from the on-going BP disaster. While the vast quantities of oil that wash onto the barrier islands of Louisiana coat, poison and kill the precious biodiversity where it lays, in Waveland the sea life that once swam washes ashore.

While some of it may be naturally occurring, there’s little doubt that more of it resulted from what is probably the worst environmental disaster in America’s history.

I’ve lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 33 years. Never have I seen a sea turtle on the beach either dead or alive. Today I saw 2 dead sea turtles covered in oil just miles from my home in Waveland, MS.

. . 47 sea turtles on average are reported stranded along the upper Gulf Coast each May, based on a five-year average, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday. The range is from 15 to 80 on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle in May each year.

But this month there have been 77 dead in Mississippi alone, said Moby Solangi with the Institute of Marine Mammals Studies in Gulfport. Most of these are the endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle . .

“These are the only three we’ve seen alive in the past three weeks,” Solangi said.

Came across these shocking images amongst some viewer submitted Gulf of Mexico oil spill photos on the New York Times website. The two photos show thousands of little fish washed up dead in Waveland, Mississippi. The photos are credited to Sabrina Bradford.

According to first hand accounts oil has been spotted washing up in Waveland. One person writes on the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker that,”We walked along the beach just outside of the Silver Slipper Casino area and saw many dead fish, 2 cats and at least 5 trout and a quite large fish we could not identify. In addition we saw upwards of 20 dead baby crabs spread out along the beach. We were not able to locate any tar balls or residues of any type.”

The increase in dead sea animals ashore along with the lack of an obvious cause of death, like their being coated with toxic tar, may point to a less obvious but troubling culprit: suffocation by oil. Specifically, oxygen starvation caused by being enveloped in oil plumes.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times underscored the possibility. Because the oil originates deep undersea and because BP has aggressively used hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersant to prevent the oil from coating the Gulf’s surface (and then being photographed, some say), the millions of gallons of oil stay submerged as tiny droplets that loosely aggregate into large plumes.

The scientific work detailed in the article showed:
1). The plumes exist.
2). They are massive.
3). They are so oxygen-poor that they are capable of killing sea life in huge quantities.

Scientists Build Case for Undersea Plumes
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: May 28, 2010

. . The water samples they pulled up suggested that any oil in the plumes was highly diffuse — not even visible to the naked eye. But when several gallons of the water were forced through a fine filter, tiny black oil droplets appeared.

Even in that diffuse form, the plumes were having a drastic impact on the chemistry of the ocean, with dissolved oxygen levels plunging as each plume drifted through the sea.

That, Dr. Joye said, was most likely because bacteria were ramping up to consume the oil and gas — a good thing, over all, but it was creating a heavy demand for oxygen and other nutrients. Aside from the toxic effect of the oil, the declining oxygen was a potential threat to sea life. Slowly, as the Walton Smith and other boats worked the gulf this past week, the weird physics of a deep-water well blowout came into better focus.

We may be yet unaware of the oil’s terrible impact upon our ecosystems because it’s most evident within these lethal oxygen-less clouds, beneath the surface of the Gulf where nobody can detect it. No one outside a few hard-working scientists and their instruments . .

I’m going to try to keep this brief. I just spent, oh, 3 or 4 hours reading up on the disaster (actually, I’m lying, it’s probably double that), and I think it’s pretty clear what happened. It’d be easy to go on and on about it, but I’ll try to avoid that.

They were working on a well that they drilled, found their expected oil, and decided to shut it down in order to return to it later. They were capping it, getting ready to leave it behind, when it blew up. They had a violent, catastrophic ‘blowout’ that killed 11 people, their remains never recovered, and the well continues to gush something like 5,000 barrels a day out of the sea floor, threatening thousands of miles of American coastline and ecology.

The key to understanding the catastrophe is to realize that the oil, mixed with gases, is 18,000 plus feet down, hot and highly pressurized. Once vented by drilling into it, they had to be careful how they managed it.

Having tapped it and held it in check, they were sealing it. It’s here where the testimony between the three operators differs as to what they did, and who was responsible for the explosion.

British Petroleum has the rights to the oil, so they own the well on the sea floor. Transocean ran the giant floating rig, now dead. Halliburton were the hands-on contractors doing most of the work. In testimony Tuesday, they all blamed each other. What I believe is clear is this: they never properly ‘capped’ the well. [see diagram here]

The ‘capping’ of a well is a tricky thing, having to make the transition between having a constant, dynamic control of the situation and sealing it off, leaving it behind. With so much pressure in the well, the important thing was to keep the thousands of feet of heavy ‘drilling mud‘ in the riser (‘pipe’) above the well in the line. Everybody recognizes that. It’s what pushes back on the considerable pressure in the well.

The typical capping procedure appears to go like this:

1.) Cement the upper well area between the drilled rock and outer edges of the metallic well lining to provide a gas-and-oil tight seal.

2.) Drop a cement plug deep into the bore hole, above the oil.

3.) Drop a 2nd cement plug above the first, separated by some amount of drilling mud.

4.) Wait some amount of time to allow the cement to seal and to allow some testing of the ‘cap.’

5.) If assured of the seal, pump salt water into the riser to extract the drilling mud. The well is capped.

We know this: they were capping the well. But someone ordered the heavy drilling mud removed before the cap was properly set. At least one and maybe both cement caps were never set, but they began to back off the well anyways. With minimal ceiling pressure, the gases exploded out of the well and then ignited only a minute or two later, killing 11 people, sealing the fate of the rig and the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. Once exposed and embarrassed, once pushed into the spotlight for being horribly, perfectly wrong, somebody’s got to start repairing the facade of Conservative philosophy. It can’t be as stupid and reckless as we say it is.

So, one by one, the brave and the callow and the fearless crawl out from the woodwork to come up with whatever excuses they can to rehabilitate the brand and its brilliant proponents.

So, here we go again. There are almost no sea animals dead — have you seen any? It’s not so bad, c’mon . .

SEE? It’s nothing, pffft.

Hey – by the way — if we stop offshore drilling, the spilling of oil and the environmental damage will only get worse . .

Absolutely perfect timing. This ‘sabotage’ gambit about Bhopal is something right wingers love to pull out of their asses. It has never been substantiated and neglects to admit that the chemical plant was in wretched condition and dangerous as hell.

Accepting offshore drilling and its spills is better for the environment. See? It’s all so easy to understand, you people are upset for nothing.

Lastly: let’s face it, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? I bet you liberals just blew the rig up . .

Next up: the rig itself was liberal, and it failed exactly as they predicted . .

Condolences to the family and friends of the 11 men killed in the explosion.

The resultant oil spill is an ecological disaster that may already be as large as the Exxon Valdez spill, and could end up being both far, far larger and more devastating. It’s an historic tragedy.

[click to get larger image]

Big roller. That went on for a while, that’s a bad sign. Somewhere outside of Los Angeles . .

UPDATE: 4:19. No damage in Los Angeles.

Centered near Mexicali, Mexico, about a 6.9. No real news from Mexicali yet, but I fear bad things. That was a huge effing quake, it went on for well over a minute.

That from a Mexicali news site. So they had pre-shocks, which are rare.

ADD: 4:55. Chatted briefly with a nice front desk person at a Crowne Plaza hotel in Mexicali. The hotel is okay, but the people are rattled, they’re standing outside. I can imagine.

MORE: Pics, many from Twitter:

When you spend time in Haiti like me, you ‘feel the evil’:

Republicans have an instant explanation for everything that happens. It’s always about behavior. The great blessing of Conservatism, never being plagued with mysteries.

Chuck Norris got off a typically stupid and cynical take:

Save Lives in Haiti, End Lives in America?

While White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was announcing Friday all that the present administration was doing to save lives in Haiti, he reported that President Barack Obama was meeting with both the House and Senate Democrats to resolve how they could provide federal funds via Obamacare to terminate more American lives in the womb…

What a great time to scream at us about abortion. But Ann Coulter is the Queen, as usual:

“Stop asking about Rush’s statement. I made some controversial statements this week too,” Coulter said on Geraldo at Large.

Then she went on to prove it. Discussing the bi-partisan humanitarian effort by former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Coulter said Clinton is a “national embarrassment” and Bush shouldn’t be “forced” to partner with him.

“To force poor ex-President Bush — like he hasn’t suffered enough — to be hanging around with Bill Clinton, who’s leaving his essence on Kleenex in the White House…” she said to a chorus of groans from the rest of the panel…

Latest death toll: 200,000. Toll on right-wing egos: climbing by the minute.

In no particular order, the little stories of 2008 that said a lot.

Well, it’s no longer a ‘little’ story, but it sure seemed to start out as ‘yawn’ news:

Toxic Ash Pond Collapses in Tennessee
By David Biello

COAL WASTE: The coal ash left over after burning in the nine boilers of the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee pictured here is stored in three ponds, one of which collapsed.

The residue of millions of tons of coal burning at Kingston Fossil power plant in the Watts Bar Reservoir in Tennessee burst the bounds of the pond in which it was contained, burying as many as 400 acres of land in up to six feet of sludge. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which owns the coal-fired power plant—first operated in 1955—announced that 15 homes were buried and no injuries were reported.
A combination of rains and accumulating sludge likely contributed to the disaster—one of two major ash pond collapses in the past decade. All told, about 2.6 million cubic yards of so-called coal ash slurry escaped, the TVA says. The collapsed pond is one of three on the site.

“We deeply regret that a retention wall for ash containment at our Kingston Fossil Plant failed, resulting in an ash slide,” said Tom Kilgore, TVA president and CEO in an official statement today.

Such slurry worries environmentalists and public health activists because it is the residue of coal burning. The burning concentrates the impurities in the coal, including arsenic, lead and mercury, among many other potentially toxic contaminants. Coal ash is also radioactive.

There is no ‘clean’ coal. This is an ancient energy-producing process with current problems that are only barely different than they were 20 or 50 years ago. I had no idea that these pits were still around, and still this big. ‘Clean coal’ people have just been lying all year, this ain’t the future.

Also: there are all sorts of heavy metals in the stuff, which almost surely means that the company will eventually admit that it’s also carcinogenic, which means that those families who lived in houses now in the muck can also probably say ‘goodbye’ to their former homes.

But the company flacks are not telling you that yet, are they? They’re just saying they’ll clean it up as fast as they can. If you had kids, would you return? Exactly.

UPDATE: Heavy metals.