Wednesday Open Thread

Welcome to the Wednesday edition of your open thread. If the weather forecasters are right today is going to be even more miserable than yesterday. Hooray! Do you have plans for tonight? If not, think about attending the Progressive Democrats for Delaware candidate forum tonight at 7 PM at the New Castle County Democratic headquarters.

I’m sure shocked, just shocked to learn that Tea Partiers are actually just Republicans in funny costumes. New polling shows that teabaggers are just Republicans:

Those arguing that the Tea Partiers aren’t really anything new tend to point out that the vast majority of them are Republicans. But by itself, that isn’t really surprising or conclusive. This new chart from Gallup, on the other hand, documents that the political concerns and priorities of Tea Party supporters are virtually identical to those of Republicans:

It’s striking: Tea Party supporters and Republicans are almost in lockstep agreement on what constitute the biggest threats to America’s well-being: The size of the Federal debt; the power of the Federal government; terrorism; and illegal immigration. The percentages are almost the same on all those issues.

Similarly, Tea Party supporters and Republicans are also in close agreement on the things that don’t constitute serious threats: Unemployment; discrimination against minorities; and the power of large corporations.

This comes as a complete surprise to absolutely no one. 🙄

Reuters did an analysis of BP’s spill clean-up plan that was filed with regulators and found it was a fantasy. BP has only removed 60% of the oil that their plan said they could remove in a single day. Steve Benen at Washington Monthly did the math:

The March report, which federal officials should have pushed back on but didn’t, insisted that in the event of a major spill, BP had the capacity to skim and remove over 491,000 barrels of oil a day. As of yesterday, those remarkable BP skimming capabilities were averaging less than 900 barrels a day.

If my math is right*, that means BP’s skimming and removal efforts are operating at less than 0.2% of the promised capacity. The oil giant only exaggerated its abilities by a factor of 500.

With an estimated total of about 2 million barrels having already been released into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has captured only 67,143 barrels — or about 3% of the total.

All the oil companies have similar response plans. Regulations can be ineffective if they’re not written or implemented effectively.