Man I'm glad I'm not a Gulf Fisherman!

My family lives in Sarasota and I've fished the Gulf...and was HOPING to purchase a kayak down there for my extended stays.  The gulf coast, particularly in Florida, has a huge kayak fishing community.  There are a great number of fish inshore feeding in grass flats and around pilings: pompano, redfish, spanish mackerel, grouper, sheepshead and more... all easily catchable from a kayak.  Alot of the coastline is quite porous, salt marshes teeming with the life integral to the entire food chain.   If/when oil hits this delicate ecosystem the results will be catastrophic.  You can clean oil off a beach but not a marsh.  Bye bye fishing..and that's just the beginning.  It is upsetting beyond belief.

There is, unfortunately, a precedent to this gulf spill.  The Ixtoc oil spill, near the Yucatan Peninsula in 1979 is the 4th largest sopill in history.  Took 10 months to cap, and oil washed ashore in Texas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc

Reminds me of the quote from Colonel Jessup:  You can’t handle the truth!

Yeah, after I read about that (similar incident) I realized why we were being fed BS from day 1 (from BP) regarding flow rates and everything else.   We can't handle the truth cause it's bad - real bad.   Best case scenario is bottom kill from the relief wells now sometime in late August at the earliest.

Flame suit on. 

Honestly we would not NEED all this extra energy already if it were not for, welfare checks given to the women that can keep sneaking a new kid under the radar each year, or the fertility drugs that allow near infertile humans to breed like bunnies, or all the medication given to keep a person alive that wants it to end already, or the over packed jails with death row candidates.  So many "extra" mouths to feed.  Each one takes some form of energy to keep alive.

And another thing.... how much wasted energy is being used to ship goods out of our country, have it manufactured in a non environmentally consious manner overseas, only to have it shipped back and sold to us? 

It's unfortunate that for a given number of legitimate recipients of (name your favorite handout) there are always going to be those that take advantage of the situation.  I am not sure this is bad genes and stupidity either - something for nothing sounds like a sweet deal to me.
Especially when the alternative is work your whole life and risk losing your pension.  Sorry - let's get back to fishin'!

this has also impacted the HoW program. They'd had a major strategy session planned for that same time frame on Grand Isle, and ended up canceling it. Even the "alternate" site got  slammed.

I've got a long time friend named Greg who is a TxP&W Head Ranger on the Gulf. He's lived there all his life, and like many of the fishermen now losing their life's work, he's both frustrated and devasted that this has gotten so out of hand.

over the weekend, i caught a short ad on TV asking for people to volunteer their time in helping. It aired only about 4 times, and have not seen it since. Anyone else catch that?

Post Gulf War [ DS] our gov't dropped some kind of "oil eating microbe" over the Persian Gulf to mitigate the eco devastation caused by Saddam's forces. 4 years afterward, co workers who sport dove off the coast of Kuwait told me that the entire bottom of the Gulf there was coated in about 30 inches of grey black goo. after watching this thing spread across such a huge area, and how badly the people tryign to stop it are failing becuase they are seemingly restricted to "booms", i'm still wondering why that approach hasnt been tried.

Mary Nelson has overseen welfare benefits in Ramsey County since Ronald Reagan was president and the Soviet Union was our communist nemesis.

But one thing has remained constant over the decades: the size of Minnesota's welfare checks.

A single parent with one child received $437 a month in 1986 -- and still does today. Ditto for a parent with two children, who receives $532.

These stagnant numbers are coming under increased focus in the human-service community. Welfare spending is a target of state budget cuts, while the collapsing economy is increasing the number who need help.

"Most people don't have a clue that our welfare benefits have been frozen more than 20 years,'' Nelson said. "And it's not just government officials. You should see the faces of some of the people who come here and apply for benefits when they learn the size of the grant.''

Meanwhile, a recent study shows that Minnesota's welfare benefits no longer are among the highest in the nation. Instead they rank 16th nationally, according to a survey by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group.

Alaska, which gives $923 a month to a single parent with two children, topped the list. Mississippi was at the bottom, offering $170 a month for a family that size.


AIG bailout:
 A watchdog panel says it's still unclear whether U.S. taxpayers will ever fully recoup the $182 billion they plowed into American International Group Inc., and the government should have used up all its options before bailing out the crippled insurance titan.

   Welfare to unwed mothers   That dog don't hunt, compared to corporate welfare it's a drop in the bucket.

Including Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance (AFDC), supplemental security income (SSI), child nutrition programs, refundable portions of earned income tax credits (EITC and HITC) and child tax credit, welfare contingency fund, child care entitlement to States, temporary assistance to needy families, foster care and adoption assistance, State children's health insurance and veterans pensions.
(from Table 8.1, page 133)

The cost of these programs has increased from 0.8% of GDP in 1962 (before Medicaid) to 2.7% of GDP in 2006, or by 1.9% of GDP. If we exclude Medicaid, health care for children and veterans pensions it is 0.89 % of GDP, or $117 billion. (The numbers for the excluded items are found in Table 8.5, page 142). This represents approximately 7.5% of total non-Social Security receipts to the Federal Government. So, for every one of your tax dollars to the Federal Government, about 7.5 cents goes to these programs. I hate to use averages, but the average taxpayer had a tax rate of 12.45% in 2005 (the latest data available here), so if we multiply things out we see that about 0.93% of the average taxpayer's income went to non-medical "welfare". So, if you made $50,000 and paid $6,225.00 in Federal income tax, approximately $465.00 went to all of these programs x-healthcare and veterans pensions.