Day: April 3, 2009

Oil oozes from the single-hulled Exxon Valdez in 1989

Poor Exxon. The biggest profits in the history of the world must, unfortunately, not be enough to cover the cost of using tankers that virtually eliminate oil spills. And of course Exxon, which was responsible for the country’s largest oil spill, is all about avoiding them in the future. Or not.

On March 24, 1989 — 20 years ago exactly — the Exxon tanker Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound and along 700 miles of its coast, killing tens of thousands of marine animals and birds, and mostly wiping out the sound’s then-thriving commercial fishing industry.

The company got off light, by filing endless appeals to its award of punitive damages (the type of damages intended to teach a lesson, as opposed to compensatory damages which should only repay financial costs), and by throwing the ship’s captain, a recovering alcoholic, under the bus.

On June 25, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered an opinion permitting the assessment of punitive damages…However, the Court held that the punitive damages award against Exxon was excessive and should be limited to $507.5 million, an amount equal to the trial court’s calculation of appropriate compensatory damages.

While $507.5 million sounds like a lot to you and me, for Exxon, it’s just an oil drop in the bucket. Recall that this company’s earnings in 2007, when gas hit $4 per gallon, was $40.6 billion. That record was broken last year, when Exxon posted $45.2 billion for 2008.

So you’d think they could afford to join almost every other oil refiner in using double-hull tankers. You’d be wrong.

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The American public understands something must be askew if every single Republican votes against something.

— Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), when asked by reporters why Republicans have said “no” to nearly everything the Democrats have proposed.

Yesterday, in excoriating British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for expressing support and admiration for Pres. Obama at a news conference during the G-20 summit, Rush Limbaugh made yet another reference to sodomy:

LIMBAUGH: “So here is a full-fledged, committed global socialist praising the president of the United States for all of his achievements in the first 70 days — a global socialist happy with the changes Obama has made, and ‘you have changed America’s relationship with the world,’ which is why all of the losers that make up the protesters are breaking bank windows,” Limbaugh said. “But the slobbering, the slobbering – this guy, folks I’m telling you – if he keeps this up throughout the G20, Gordon Brown will come down with anal poisoning and may die from it.”

Of course, there is no such thing as “anal poisoning,” but the formulation suggests Limbaugh is using the phrase as a slightly more politically correct way of saying Brown will be infected with HIV, contract AIDS and die.

And this is not the first time Limbaugh has suggested that the friendship of two politicians was more than an innocent bromance. In February 2008, he used the same phrase to describe the friendship of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is 54 and has never been married, and Sen. John McCain:

Limbaugh was ranting against Sen. John McCain on his radio show this week when a caller asked whether he thought McCain would pick Sen. Lindsey Graham as his running mate. Limbaugh doubted it, though he admitted: “I may be wrong … Lindsey Graham is certainly close enough to [McCain] to die of anal poisoning.”

Over the last year, Limbaugh has made at least three other references to anal sex during his radio propaganda rantfest:

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