Actual scientific studies are few and far between, but what’s out there paints a pretty damning picture. One, titled “Livestock Poisoning from Oil Field Drilling Fluids, Muds and Additives,” appeared in the journal Veterinary & Human Toxicology in 1991. It examined seven instances where oil and gas wells had poisoned and/or killed livestock. In one such case, green liquid was found leaking from a tank near a gas well site. The study’s authors found 13 dead cows, whose “postmortem blood was chocolate-brown in color.” Poisoning cases involving carbon disulfide, turpentine, toluene, xylene, ethylene, and complex solvent mixtures “are frequently encountered,” the study concluded.

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WASHINGTON – The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier – holding 30 per cent of the market – but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials.

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Four days before Nora Dannehy was appointed to investigate the Bush administration’s U.S. attorney firing scandal, a team of lawyers she led was found to have illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case. Andrew Kreig writes that this previously unreported fact calls her entire investigation into question as well as that of a similar investigation by her colleague John Durham of DOJ and CIA decision-making involving torture.

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July 24, 2010

Dear Markos:

You have labeled discussions of election fraud a “conspiracy theory” and at one time banned those who posted on this topic. Thousands of Kossacks believe that the 2004 election was stolen and you still call these very astute posters “conspiracy theorists”. You claim there is no “proof” the election was stolen despite tons of inferential and descriptive statistical evidence that have accumulated over six years.

You do not consider exit poll anomalies to be sufficient “proof” of election fraud. But they are powerful circumstantial evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. The raw, precinct exit poll data that would strengthen the case even further is kept from public view (as always) by the National Election Pool consortium (CNN, Fox, NBC, AP, ABC, NY Times, Washington Post) that sponsors the exit polls.

Are you aware the National Election Pool (NEP) has a stated policy that exit pollsters must force all state and national exit polls to match the recorded vote? The NEP claims it won’t release the raw precinct data because of the need to maintain “voter confidentiality”. That is a transparent canard; the exit poll respondents do not reveal names, so there is no confidentiality issue.

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MCM

American Crossroads GPS, New Rove Group, Has Dems Questioning Obama’s Political Operations
Sam Stein

News that two former top Bush strategists have formed a spinoff organization to dig up dirt on Congressional Democrats before the 2010 elections has reignited a debate about how the Obama administration has structured the Democratic Party’s own political operations.

On Wednesday morning, Politico reported that American Crossroads GPS, the organization formed by operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, hauled in an impressive $5.1 million in June. A separate legal entity from its parent shop, American Crossroads (a distinction that allows it to hide the names of its donors), GPS was poised to use that money for the ostensible purpose of wreaking havoc on behalf of Republican candidates.
It’s the type of secretive electioneering that has Democrats publicly crying foul — the Democratic National Committee sent out the story on Wednesday morning. In private, however, party operatives expressed anxiety with the development.

During the 2008 campaign, a group of Democratic operatives essentially tried to create its own version of American Crossroads GPS. Progressive Media was formed in 2007 as an independent opposition research arm for the presidential campaign. The organization, structured then as a 527 group, produced notable hits, including footage of John McCain saying he would be comfortable if U.S. forces were in Iraq for 100 years as well as the first mention of the Arizona Republican’s numerous homes.

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Stop the presses and call the government spokespeople back from Martha’s Vineyard.

The corporate media have discovered that the United States is radically outsourcing national security and sensitive intelligence operations. Cable news channels breathlessly report on the “groundbreaking,” “exclusive” Washington Post series, Top Secret America [1], a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin. No doubt there is some important stuff in this series. Both Arkin and Priest have done outstanding work for many years on sensitive, life-or-death subjects. And that is one of the main reasons why this series has, thus far, been incredibly disappointing. Its greatest accomplishment is forcing a discussion onto corporate TV years after it would have had an actual impact.

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Hurghada, Egypt – When Hamdy Shahat and his four-man crew first set sail from this resort town last month, he expected to return with a boatload full of red snapper to sell at the market later that night.

Instead, the 33-year-old skipper came back empty-handed, except for several streaks of thick, brown oil gummed along the hull of his wooden boat.

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MCM

Experts: Health Hazards in Gulf Warrant Evacuations
by: Rose Aguilar, t r u t h o u t | Report

When Louisiana residents ask marine toxicologist and community activist Riki Ott what she would do if she lived in the Gulf with children, she tells them she would leave immediately. “It’s that bad. We need to start talking about who’s going to pay for evacuations.”

In 1989, Ott, who lives in Cordova, Alaska, experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdex oil disaster. For the past two months, she’s been traveling back and forth between Louisiana and Florida to gather information about what’s really happening and share the lessons she learned about long-term illnesses and deaths of cleanup workers and residents. In late May, she began meeting people in the Gulf with symptoms like headaches, dizziness, sore throats, burning eyes, rashes and blisters that are do deep, they’re leaving scars. People are asking, “What’s happening to me?”

She says the culprit is almost two million gallons of Corexit, the dispersant BP is using to break up and hide the oil below the ocean’s surface. “It’s an industrial solvent. It’s a degreaser. It’s chewing up boat engines off-shore. It’s chewing up dive gear on-shore. Of course it’s chewing up people’s skin. The doctors are saying the solvents are making the oil worse.”

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MCM

China Oil Spill PHOTOS: Environmental And Economic Damage Becomes Clear

(AP)BEIJING – China and environmental observers said cleanup efforts on the country’s largest reported oil spill were progressing Thursday, but the environmental and economic damage was clear.

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