198 new deepwater leases in the Gulf

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So how's that six month moratorium on granting new permits for offshore wells deeper than 500 feet in the Gulf doing?

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While waiting for the ban to be lifted, the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Services, these guys, have approved five new offshore drilling projects since June 2.
An Exxon Mobil site at a water depth of 1,000 feet and a Marathon Oil site at 775 feet were approved with waivers exempting them from detailed studies of their environmental impact.
A Chevron site 6,730 feet underwater and an Exxon site at 6,943 feet were approved after environmental reviews.

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The MMS has approved 198 new deepwater leases - the step before the submission of drilling plans - in the central Gulf since the BP spill began.
According to Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center, of the 198 deepwater leases sold, at least 10 are owned by BP and are located over a mile deep.
Lease Sale 213 covers 36 million acres in the central Gulf off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

If federal regulators opt to cancel a lease once it's issued, the government must repay the company the fair market value of the lease or compensate it for the cost of its bid plus interest.

So the Department of the Interior approves the leases, and then either the company gets to go ahead and drill or the taxpayer pays them not to ... with interest.

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Pocket change you can believe in.

G8/G20 The gift of spin that just keeps on giving

The problem with starting something spinning is that it will occasionally go out of control. Anyone who has tried to maintain a perfect heading on a gyro-compass knows this. Interrupt the source of energy and the damn things topple. Don't correct for latitude and you get a phenomenon known as "Earth Drift". Move the compass, as ships have a tendency to do, and you'll get a thing known as "Transport Wander".

You have to constantly pay attention to that spinning thing because the "North" it's pointing to is completely imaginary. Let your attention move off the gyro mechanism for too long and it's pointing to an imaginary point of its own - not the one you initially picked.

That's why ships always carry a back up magnetic compass. A magnetic compass always points at a real position on earth - Magnetic North. You can mess up a magnetic compass, but when you take away temporary influences, it will always return to Magnetic North.

The problem with the Harper conservatives is that they've been doing everything based on that imaginary point. Nothing is real. They're so into spin that they didn't pay attention to the laws of gyro-dynamics, probably because they don't understand such things anyway.

Thus, when their compass card, pointing to an imaginary position, started to wander a little, they didn't notice. When the need for a latitude correction arose, they ignored it. Arrogant people regularly do that. The result is that their gyro has toppled, leaving them wallowing around with no idea where they really are.

They could grab a magnetic compass, which is always telling a single truth, and apply known variation along with Harper's particular deviation to come up with their imaginary point again... except that they don't have one.

Now, even if they get their gyro up and running again, it's going to take a significant amount of time to find its rigidity and precess into its focus on that imaginary position (known as Harper's truth).

So, when the Conservative spin machine tries to point at some artificial object, calling it an "environmental legacy" intending to show everyone how green they are, they shouldn't be surprised at the calls of bullshit! from those of us in possession of magnetic compasses which are pointing at an urban privacy hedge.