The President’s National Oil Spill Commission released preliminary findings from its investigation into BP’s oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Read about how the White House hid the truth on the spill.

An intensive study by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that microbial activity, spearheaded by a new and unclassified species, degrades oil much faster than anticipated. This degradation appears to take place without a significant level of oxygen depletion.

But President Pinocchio, How Can the Oil be Gone and the Oily Fish Good to Eat?! — by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)

Congress is heading back home for the August recess this week. Apparently our Senators need to rest after they failed to take up both a clean energy and climate bill and an oil spill bill.

I’ve stayed away from the whole Sarah Palin thing, for good reasons. It was my initial belief that the more attention you gave her, the more she would talk, and her “followers”, for lack of a better word, would become more emboldened. But I’ve changed my mind, at least for today.

Palin, the former governor who quit her Alaskan job to do God only knows what, said that President Obama had no time to appear on The View while the Arizona border remained so porous. She also indicated that she would be visiting the border area soon.

A recounting of a chilling story Mac McClelland reported on that has been featured prominently on blogs for the past few week followed by a question — What is the link between this prohibiting of media access and detaining of photographers/videographers to Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) programs?

A bill that calls for a moratorium on drilling for natural gas or “hydrofracking” in the upstate watershed currently sits in the Environmental Conservation committees in both the Senate and the Assembly. It could come up for a vote before the end of this legilative session.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That’s your second Great Depression bitch, right there. If you want to point a finger at what caused this massive recession (come on…it’s a depression) and massive 16% actual unemployment, you need look no further than Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Those are the three idiots at the top of this article. Their bill rendered the second part of the Glass Steagall act impotent.

Adm. Thad Allen has issued a directive further restricting media access. This comes days after the ACLU of Louisiana wrote a letter urging an end to blocking of the press and censorship of information.

“By sinking and dispersing the oil, BP can amortize the cost of the cleanup over the next 15 years or so, as tar balls continue to roll up on the beaches, rather than dealing with the issue now by removing the oil from the water with the proper equipment,” McCallister testified earlier this week before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “As a financial adviser, I understand financial engineering and BP’s desire to stretch out its costs of remediating the oil spill in the Gulf. By managing the cleanup over a period of many years, BP is able to minimize the financial damage as opposed to a huge expenditure in a period of a few years.”