Obama administration reimposes offshore oil drilling ban

If the current administration has its way, rigs like this may soon be a thing of the past.

From Wednesday’s Washington Post, and NOLA.com

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as part of the next five-year drilling plan, reversing two key policy changes President Obama announced in late March.

"We are adjusting our strategy in areas where there are no active leases," Salazar told reporters in a phone call, adding that the administration has decided "not expand to new areas at this time" and instead "focus and expand our critical resources on areas that are currently active" when it comes to oil and gas drilling.

In March--less than a month before the BP oil spill--Obama and Salazar said they would open up the eastern Gulf and parts of the Atlantic, including off the coast of Virginia, to offshore oil and gas exploration. On both of those new areas, the administration said it would start scoping to see if oil and gas drilling would be suitable. The eastern Gulf remains closed to drilling under a congressional moratorium, but the White House indicated it would press to lift the moratorium if necessary.

Wednesday's announcement is sure to please environmentalists while angering oil and gas companies as well as some lawmakers from both parties who have pressed for continued offshore energy exploration in the wake of massive Gulf of Mexico spill.

Salazar said while the administration will still allow offshore drilling in both the central and western Gulf of Mexico and in the Arctic, it will delay lease sales planned for March and August in the gulf to conduct additional environmental reviews, and will prepare a new environmental assessment of Shell's proposal to drill in Alaska's Beaufort Sea next year. Shell officials warned that the additional review could jeopardize its ability to explore for oil and gas in the Arctic in 2011.

Stephen Sears, chairman of Louisiana State University's Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering, said the narrowing of drilling options for oil and gas companies, even if not directly affecting the state, has adverse economic consequences.

"There are a lot of Louisiana businesses that supply resources, people and equipment for off-shore drilling rigs, so that can have a long-term effect on our economy," Sears said.

Still, he said, if federal regulators do as Salazar suggests -- concentrate on existing areas now open to drilling -- perhaps it can lead to the renewed issuance of drilling permits that have been slowed, even since the administration dropped its moratorium on deepwater drilling Oct. 12.

The early word, however, wasn't promising with Salazar confirming earlier reports that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement was delaying planned lease sales for the central Gulf, including Louisiana, scheduled for March and August. He said they would be delayed until at least late 2011, when he anticipates completion of environmental studies.

Salazar said Wednesday's decision was based on science. But it's also clear that expanded domestic drilling is no longer seen by the administration as a bargaining chip for cap-and-trade legislation designed to reduce global warming. The president came out for expanded drilling in March -- just one month before the BP accident, hoping it would help him win support for global warming legislation.

But cap and trade never made it through the Democratic controlled Senate, sunk by opposition from Republicans and moderate Democrats such as Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. With Republicans securing control of the House, it's clearly a non-starter in the new Congress.

The president no longer needs the domestic-drilling bargaining chip, and after the BP spill, the action announced Wednesday is likely to be popular with the Democratic base.

And while Obama critics say he's putting the squeeze on the oil and gas industry, it's also clear that portions of the drilling plans cancelled Wednesday -- most notably drilling off the Florida coast -- probably could not have won Senate approval, even with the GOP gains.

Salazar's announcement, made in a teleconference with reporters, immediately was condemned by oil industry officials and oil-state members of Congress, but praised by environmental groups.

"As our country looks for ways out of the hole of lackluster economic growth and job creation, today's decision shows that this administration would rather keep digging than take the ladder to increased economic prosperity offered by developing our nation's domestic energy resources," said Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.

An Aspirin a Day – Or Not

Along with a large handful of other pills for various ailments, my physician has prescribed an aspirin a day. I take all the rest of my pills at once, first thing in the morning, and I’ll admit the aspirin often gets forgotten.

I probably don’t feel as guilty as I should about that, but just to assuage what little twinge might remain, here’s an article I came across today:

Can an Aspirin a Day Do More Harm Than Good?

Experts are re-evaluating who should swallow a daily dose.

by: Emily Anthes | from: AARP Bulletin | April 30, 2010

Some 43 million Americans do it every day: take a tiny aspirin to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. In fact, doctors have been routinely recommending the practice to older adults for years. But recently, experts have been questioning the aspirin-a-day regimen, concerned that this everyday miracle drug can pose serious risks, including bleeding in the brain and stomach.

The aspirin-a-day controversy erupted publicly in March when a 10-year study of nearly 30,000 adults ages 50 to 75 without known heart disease found that a daily aspirin didn’t offer any discernible protection. The group taking aspirin had cardiovascular disease at the same rate as those taking a placebo. Moreover, the study—published in the Journal of the American Medical Association—reported that taking a daily aspirin (100 mg) almost doubled the risk of dangerous internal bleeding.

And last year the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—a panel of medical experts—issued new guidelines for patients, recommending only those at risk for heart attacks or strokes should take a daily aspirin. Risk factors include having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, as well as being overweight.

The panel also recommended that people over 80 not take aspirin at all because of bleeding risk.

For the first time, the panel also broke down its advice by gender, recommending against daily aspirin use in women under 55 and men under 45.

Is it right for you?

So, should you take a daily aspirin or not? The answer is not quite as simple as doctors previously thought. Aspirin, they say, can still be a lifesaving drug, but it’s not for everyone.

For reasons researchers don’t fully understand, aspirin seems to provide different benefits for men and women.

In men, aspirin can prevent heart attacks but seems to have no effect on strokes, says Michael LeFevre, M.D., a member of the task force that wrote the new guidelines and a professor of family medicine at the University of Missouri. Conversely, he says, aspirin appears to help women avoid strokes but not heart attacks.

The new recommendations suggest that aspirin will be most beneficial to:

• men between 45 and 79 who have a high risk for heart attacks;
• women between 55 and 79 who are at high risk for strokes.

Drawbacks

Aspirin, which has been around for more than 100 years, is a cheap, easy, effective way to control pain and inflammation. In 1989, when a major study revealed that a small dose could reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack by preventing blood clots, doctors began recommending that their older patients take a low dose of aspirin, 81 mg, every day.

“Aspirin is a lifesaving medicine in patients with established cardiovascular disease,” says Jeffrey Berger, M.D., a cardiologist at New York University who has studied the use of aspirin. But, he warns, it does come with some real drawbacks.

Aspirin has been linked with chronic ringing in the ears (tinnitus), and earlier this year scientists reported that people who took aspirin regularly were more likely to suffer from hearing loss.

Dangerous bleeding

The drug’s ability to prevent blood clots is also a double-edged sword. The body’s ability to stop bleeding is what prevents a small cut, for instance, from causing uncontrollable bleeding. While aspirin might keep clots from blocking blood flow to our hearts and brains, it also makes it more likely that we might develop serious internal bleeds, particularly in the stomach. “That’s not a trivial side effect,” says LeFevre. “We’re talking about people who get hospitalized” and may end up in the intensive care unit, he adds.

Some patients are more likely to suffer these complications than others; a recent review of the research reveals that men are twice as likely to experience bleeds as women, and the risk also increases with age. Researchers estimate the risk of internal bleeding for those who take aspirin is two to four times greater than for those who don’t take aspirin at all, depending on factors such as age and overall health.

Even though people are more likely to bleed as they get older, researchers don’t think aspirin causes the risk of bleeding to build up over time. “In fact, it’s likely that if one is to bleed, their risk of bleeding is seen early on,” Berger says.

Taking ibuprofen and naproxen—common pain relievers such as Advil and Aleve—also can make bleeding more likely. Unfortunately, this kind of severe bleeding doesn’t usually come with obvious warning signs, but sudden gastrointestinal pain can be a tip-off. The bleeding is often caused by inflammation of the stomach lining or an aspirin-induced ulcer and can result in vomiting blood or blood in the stool.

The traditional point of view, LeFevre says, was: “Aspirin is a pretty benign thing. Why doesn’t everybody take one? Aspirin, as it turns out, is not harmless.”

Strokes vs. heart attacks

Many of the risk factors for heart attacks and strokes—including age, diabetes and smoking—overlap, but there are slight differences. High total cholesterol and high levels of LDL or “bad” cholesterol, for instance, are important predictors of heart attacks.

The most important risk factors for strokes include high blood pressure, certain kinds of irregular heartbeats (known as atrial fibrillation) and a condition known as left ventricular hypertrophy in which some of the heart muscle thickens.

Experts agree that women who have already had strokes and men who have already had heart attacks should absolutely be taking aspirin. “You have to make sure that people with a history of heart attack or stroke do not stop their aspirin, because it could be a deadly mistake,” says NYU’s Berger.

Clearly, the benefits of aspirin have to be weighed against the possibility of bleeding, and that’s a conversation that experts say every patient needs to have with his or her doctor.

“This decision has to be made one person at a time,” LeFevre says. “There is no one blanket recommendation for everybody.”

DWI Lite?

I strongly support criminal penalties for DWI, particularly where death or injury is involved, but the City of Houston is considering a new law that seems like overkill.  I suspect that, like red light cameras, this is just another way to generate revenue.

Here’s the story from Culturemap.com :

BY CAROLINE GALLAY

11.30.10 | 11:50 pm

One too many MGD 64s these days could land you in court.

A proposed new charge, nicknamed a DWI Lite (not to be confused with a penalty for drinking shitty ultra-light beer), would let the police write drivers citations for having a blood alcohol content of between 0.05 and 0.07 — lower than the current DWI law limit of 0.08. (For some perspective, two glasses of wine over a 90-minute dinner result in a .044 BAC for a woman weighing approximately 130 pounds.)

The citation, called a DWAI, or "driving while ability impaired," is supported by Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, who considers the charge another tool in prosecutors' arsenal when procuring plea deals for drunk driving offenders and a means for the state to better track repeat offenders.

Critics argue that level of impairment, not level of blood alcohol content, should be the real focus, and charge that roadblocks installed to issue citations to low-BAC-level offenders divert attention from efforts to catch seriously impaired drivers. Even MADD has stated that while it doesn't oppose the measure, it doesn't support it. MADD's legislative director Bill Lewis told the Houston Chronicle, "I'm just not sure it's necessary."

In New York, where DWAI charges already exist, a DWI is considered a criminal misdemeanor while a DWAI qualifies as a traffic infraction.

No penalty has yet been proposed for the DWI Lite, except the everlasting shame of having been pegged with the most pansy-assed of arrests ever.

AARP? What About Triple A? Cash?

Bad Sex Award

To quote my favorite jazz drummer/comedian/philosopher Brother Dave Gardner,  “…the worst I ever had was wonderful.” but I never knew it could win prizes.  

Britain’s Literary Review presented their Bad Sex Award this past weekend, according to this story from the BBC:

Second-time novelist Rowan Somerville has pipped Alastair Campbell to the post to win the Literary Review's bad sex in fiction award.

The author picked up the prize for his book The Shape of Her.

The novel includes the line: "She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself."

Somerville said: "There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation, I thank you."

Former Labour spin doctor Campbell was nominated for his novel, Maya.

The judges felt that Campbell's public enthusiasm for winning the prize was not in keeping with the Bad Sex in Fiction's original purpose - to discourage further poor writing of a sexual nature.

Its aim is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."

Other shortlisted authors for the tongue-in-cheek prize included Jonathan Franzen for Freedom and Christos Tsiolkas for The Slap.

Last year's prize went to Jonathan Littell for his novel The Kindly Ones.

Auberon Waugh established the Bad Sex in Fiction prize in 1993.

Previous winners include Norman Mailer, AA Gill, Melvyn Bragg and Tom Wolfe.

Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee etc.

 

My maternal grandmother grew up in Groveton, in East Texas.  Her maiden name was Thompson, and I was always told that she was part Indian. 

That’s where things got confusing - my aunt Claire said she was pretty sure that her mother was Choctaw, but it could have been Chickasaw or maybe Cherokee. I could never understand why you wouldn’t know one way or the other; it just didn’t make any sense at all until I came across Chata.org., the website of the Choctaws of Texas.

The website’s genealogy section confirms that, at the very least, my grandmother’s great-grandfather, Willoughby Tullos, was Choctaw.  He was born in Mississippi, but there is confusion on whether his birth  occurred  in the 1830’s or the  1850’s.  He died in Trinity County, Texas in the 1890’s.

The Mt. Tabor Group history on the website solves my confusion over whether we are descended from Choctaw, Chickasaw, or what.  The two groups were so affiliated and intermarried in Texas as to be indistinguishable, and, on top of that, they aligned with the Cherokee for treaties, etc.  No wonder my aunt wasn’t sure.

 

Sonny Ragsdale

A really outstanding Thanksgiving weekend was diminished when we got home to find an email telling me that my uncle Sonny Ragsdale had died this morning.

I’d guess he was my favorite uncle.

Sonny was half Indian, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper, and later a game warden. He led a long and interesting life, and was married to my Aunt Barbara for something like 60 years.

He had quite a few adventures in his career. I remember the time he pulled over what he thought was a drunk driver who was weaving down the road. The guy pulled a gun, but Sonny calmly disarmed him and hauled him into jail. He said that he was never particularly worried until he learned that the “drunk” was an escaped mental patient who had killed two Arizona troopers the day before.

Shortly after they were married, we visited them in their first home, an apartment in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. I was about eight or nine years old, probably making a real nuisance of myself, and Sonny handcuffed me to the kitchen door. As soon as he left the room, I took out my pocket knife and unscrewed the doorknob. It made him mad as Hell at the time, but he told that story just about every time I saw him after that.