Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Feel free to post whatever’s on your mind and play nice!
The latest estimates on the BP oil spill agree with what outside experts were saying all along – the oil leak was much much bigger than BP was estimating. Now BP is on the hook for a $21B fine (that’s in addition to the $20B damages fund that’s already been set up).
BP’s blownout Deepwater Horizon well gushed up to 2.6 million gallons a day, the federal government now says, a total equivalent of 19 Exxon Valdezes. For months, BP insisted the figure of 5,000 barrels a day (less than one tenth the actual amount) was the “best estimate” — even as outside experts got it right. According to this new estimate, the oil giant liable for the Gulf of Mexico disaster will be responsible for a $21 billion fine — $4,300 for each barrel of oil. The subscription-only Energy Guardian notes that this figure for the oil disaster “reveals how far off initial estimates turned out to be”:
At its height, BP’s leaking well gushed 62,000 barrels of oil a day, the federal government said Monday in a revision of its figures that reveals how far off initial estimates turned out to be. The government and BP initially offered estimates of the leak at 1,000 and 5,000 of barrels a day shortly after it began in late April, eventually reaching an estimate of between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day after several revisions. The new estimate Monday by federal scientists means 4.9 million barrels of oil likely were released by the well before it was temporarily capped last month. BP hopes to complete an operation this week that will permanently seal the ill-fated well.
The Republicans are still filibustering a bill to lift the cap on damages and to tighten regulations on oil drilling.
Mother Jones has a really interesting article on Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican Congressman from South Carolina who refused to pander to the Tea Party and lost big in a primary.
It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn’t sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn’t ponied up. Inglis’ task: Get them back on the team. “They were upset with me,” Inglis recalls. “They are all Glenn Beck watchers.” About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, “They say, ‘Bob, what don’t you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'” Inglis didn’t know how to respond.
He speaks with John Boehner, who basically tells him to pander. He recounts another meeting with conservative voters:
During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here’s what took place:
I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.
Inglis keeps getting in trouble because he refuses to call Obama a “socialist” and this disappoints voters. In case you don’t remember, Bob Inglis used to be a conservative firebrand who pushed every and all conspiracy theories about Bill Clinton. He’s sorry he did that now.
Inglis acknowledges he’s intimately familiar with extreme politics. He was part of the GOP gang that went after Clinton and impeached him for the Lewinsky affair:
I hated Bill Clinton. I wanted to destroy him. Then I had six years out [after leaving Congress in 1999] to look back on that, and now I would confess it as a sin. It is just wrong to want to destroy another human being and to spend so much time and effort trying to destroy Bill Clinton—some of it with really suspect information. We went on and on about Whitewater. We had talked about the strange things about Vince Foster’s death. The drug dealing at Mena airport. So in the six years I was out, I looked back and realized, “Oh what a waste.”
We’ve already seen the return of the politics of fear and smear but it’s 10,000x worse because many don’t seem to be restrained by human decency anymore. I expect lots of craziness and vendettas if Republicans gain control of one of the House this year.