Politics Plus

Hurricane Alex picked up strength before making landfall.  The projected effects are ugly.

Hurricane Alex disrupted the BP oil spill clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday as the storm gathered strength and was expected to make landfall.

US President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in Texas as Alex strengthened into the first Atlantic hurricane of the season late Tuesday.

Alex was far from the epicenter of the clean-up operation off the Louisiana coast, but churned up waves and strong winds that forced the suspension of oil skimming and booming operations off the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.

Two vessels continued to capture oil gushing from an undersea well 50 miles (80 kilometers) off Louisiana, where the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded ten weeks ago sparking the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Waves at the site were up to seven feet (two meters) high, a Coast Guard spokesman told AFP.

Coupled with winds of up to 22 knots it made it too rough for crews to deploy a third vessel, the Helix Producer, that was set to nearly double the capacity of BP’s containment system.

The current containment system is capturing nearly 25,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude spewing out of the ruptured well every day.

The rough seas have also shifted parts of the slick closer to sensitive areas in Florida and Louisiana, and could also push the oil deeper into fragile coastal wetlands… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Raw Story>

Keith Olbermann featured conservationist, John Walthen, who brought this home in a way that hits home.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I thought I was getting so used to the daily horror from GOP gusher that I was becoming jaded, but this prompted me to break down and cry.

Elena Kagan easily weathered the second day of her confirmation hearing, despite some ugly behavior by Republican Senators.

A poised Elena Kagan on Tuesday spent the second day of her Supreme Court confirmation hearing fending off Republican efforts to paint her as a liberal activist, saying she’d be a fair, open-minded justice and refusing to call herself a "legal progressive."

"I honestly don’t know what that label means," she said.

However, when Kagan was asked later where she stood politically, she said she’d been a Democrat all her life and that ”my political views are generally progressive.”

Senate Judiciary Committee members peppered Kagan with a wide range of questions, trying to discern a judicial philosophy and sense her temperament.

Democrats, who control 58 of the Senate’s 100 seats, routinely praised the record of the 50-year-old solicitor general, as well as her performance this week, and predicted confirmation. Republicans vowed to keep firing away at her record and philosophy. President Barack Obama nominated her to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. The hearings were to continue Wednesday.

Kagan looked comfortable most of the time Tuesday, as if she were among old friends, but there were times when she sat alert and even turned combative as Republicans hammered away at issues such as military recruiting at Harvard Law School while she served as its dean.

“I feel like she was not rigorously accurate in describing the whole nature of the circumstance, and so I’m disappointed in it,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s senior Republican member.

Lawmakers from both parties asked Kagan, in sometimes scattershot fashion, about the day’s biggest controversies, including abortion rights, campaign finance laws, national security and gun control.

While saying that she’d judge cases on their individual merits, she offered some glimpses of her views. When considering abortion rights, Kagan stressed, “the continuing holdings of the court are that the woman’s life and that the woman’s health must be protected.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, quizzed her on whether she agreed with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that corporations and labor unions could spend unlimited sums on political activity, a view that Kagan opposed as solicitor general.

“I did believe we had a strong case to make,” she said.

She left herself room to go both ways when commenting on the Supreme Court’s rulings Monday that put strict state and local gun laws in jeopardy. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a leading gun-control advocate, asked why the cases suddenly “become settled law."

“Because the court decided them as they did,” Kagan said. “And once the court has decided a case, it is binding precedent.”

Then again, Kagan said, “there are various reasons why you might overturn a precedent,” including whether it proves unworkable over time.

She bantered with the senators at times.

She joked with Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., that if court hearings were televised, “It means I’d have to get my hair done more often.” When Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked her what she was doing on Christmas Day, she grinned and said, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

Kagan disarmed Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, when he asked about her master’s thesis assertion that judges could help steer the law. “I would ask you to recognize I didn’t know a whole lot of law then,” she said… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

Although Kagan was circumspect about her opinion on issues that might come before the court, she revealed more about her nature and judicial philosophy than Roberts and Alito combined.  And subsequent decisions have shown that the little those two did reveal was deceptive.

Rachel Maddow and Dahlia Lithwick had some interesting observations.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Keith Olbermann and law professor, Jonathan Turley, exposed the hypocrisy and ugliness of GOP behavior,

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I agree with both that the questions from both sides of the aisle, especially the Republicans, were designed more for home consumption than anything else.

I listened to the hearings all day while working on other things.  Before Obama nominated her, she was low on my list, as I would prefer a more outspokenly progressive nominee.  Nevertheless, I believe that shwe is a woman of integrity.  I like Elena Kagan.

One of the most frustrating features of this crisis is that we don’t really know which effects of the spill will be most catastrophic.  Here is one that seems both horrific and likely.

High concentrations of methane gas – in some cases approaching 1m times the normal level – have been found around the BP oil spill, raising fears it could create an oxygen-depleted “dead zone” where marine life cannot survive.

Dead zones are areas in the water where algae blooms as it feeds on nutrients in high concentrations of foreign matter, such as  methane, in this case, or, more typically, the components of farmland fertiliser runoff into the water. The algae gorge, reproduce quickly and then, in turn, are eaten by bacteria in a process that depletes the immediate area of oxygen. Fish and other sea life cannot survive in these zones, leading scientists to call them “dead”.

That the spill could cause a dead zone in the Gulf would be yet another negative for the environment, already suffering from the destruction of marine nurseries and bird nesting grounds in the wetlands and projections of negative impacts on sea life along the Gulf Coast. The knock-on effect would be a pocket of the Gulf where fishermen would find no fish or other sea creatures to harvest.

The site where large concentrations of methane has been found is in a six-mile radius around the spill, where John Kessler, assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University, has just returned from a 10-day research trip.

From a previous trip last year to the same area, he has identified the rise in methane to the Deepwater Horizon accident. Methane is a key component of natural gas, such as ethane and propane, and it accounts for 40 per cent of the weight of material emanating from BP’s leaking well.

Last year the concentrations of these gases were at normal levels of one to two parts per million. This year, the concentration of methane dissolved in the seawater is 100,000 times more and, in some places, approaching 1m times more, he said.

While methane may be toxic to various marine organisms, one of the focuses of Kessler’s research is investigating if the high concentration of methane could lead to a feeding frenzy by marine microorganizations that feed on this hydrocarbon, depleting the oxygen in the area and creating a dead zone.

“There are some drawdowns in oxygen,” Kessler said. “It’s significant; we notice it. It’s there.”

But whether it will increase enough to cause a dead zone remains to be seen, he said, with significant factors being how high the concentrations of methane will get and how long they will remain at these enhanced levels… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Common Dreams>

Keith Olbermann interviewed marine conservationist Rick Steiner fore the latest on the GOP gusher.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Another problem with the huge quantities of methane being released is the effect on climate change.  As a greenhouse gas, methane is thirteen times more efficient at trapping heat than CO2.  Even a small rise in sea level inundate the rookery islands and overcome the marshlands.