Ex-Con, Ex-Rep. Jim Traficant is now an ex-candidate to get his old job back. Didn’t get enough legit signatures to get on the ballot.
This smart piece from Reuters makes what should be an obvious observation: The contingency plans all the offshore drillers have for skimming up a major spill rely on materiel and equipment that’s already deployed for the BP blowout. In other words, the industry doesn’t have the skimming capacity to deal with multiple major spills at the same time. (Let’s set aside the issue of how effective our current skimming capacity actually is on a deep sea blowout.)
So it adds up to this: The government won’t let oil companies drill without contingency plans for a spill. The contingency plans all rely on a skimming capacity that is at present unavailable and which in any event can only handle one spill at a time.
If you extend that logic, you end up having to shut down current deepwater production and additional exploration, which isn’t really feasible and which again highlights the point that a lot of what has passed for regulation of the industry consists of providing ourselves with the comfortable illusion that we’ve got a plan for when something goes wrong.
A Chinese bank may set the record today for largest IPO ever, breaking the record set by another Chinese bank in 2006.
The GOP just can’t quit Social Security privatization, even as they try to downplay it in an election year.
The Daily Show‘s Michael Steele puppet: It ain’t easy running a Ponzi scheme of stupid! Watch.
Boehner seems to be opening the door to bringing back President Bush’s failed plan to partially phase-out Social Security as part of the GOP program if they take back the majority.
Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) is suing the Billings fire department for not getting a fire out quick enough and letting it burn some trees on a subdivision he owns.
After Sharron Angle scrubbed her campaign website of her most extreme policy positions as part of her post-primary makeover, the Harry Reid campaign republished chunks of her old website as ‘The Real Sharron Angle’. Now Angle has threatened to sue Reid’s campaign for publishing her old positions.