Tuesday Open Thread

12 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. The Trumpstink report will be delayed today.  An unexpected wind shift brought one of our measuring teams within 100 yards of Rudy Guiliani and they had to be rushed to Walter Reed Car Wash for emergency decontamination procedures.

   The team is expected to make a full recovery because of the swift application of clothes pins to their noses.

   Meanwhile, remember that Trump Minions stink almost as badly as Trump himself.

   Stay upwind, America.

    

    

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2. Not in Colorado, but you should be rooting for Don Blankenship in the WVA GOPer primary.

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   1. Agreed. It often works out well (Roy Moore, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Christine O'Donnell). But there are notable exceptions (Two Scoops being one).

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3. Anyone joining the Denver Post staff at their noon-time extravaganza? According to the Colorado Independent,

   "Denver Post employees plan to rally outside their printing facility in Adams County at noon tomorrow, and a contingent flew to New York City where they plan to protest outside the building owned by Digital First Media’s primary controller, the Alden Global Capital hedge fund. They want the company to “invest in the newspaper or sell it to someone who cares about Colorado.”

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4. Surprising no one…

   Former Anadarko brass slam company for safety risks, callousness

   Within about six months of the 2013 land swap [with Noble Energy], as the complaint cites Castilian saying, top Anadarko executives learned that several hundred wells had deteriorated with age and posed environmental and safety risks far beyond what they had expected. He said the company budgeted tens of millions of dollars to fix them, but drastically reduced the remediation budget after oil and gas prices crashed in the fall of 2014 and winter of 2015. Safety problems were compounded in March 2016 when the company laid off more than 20 percent of its workforce, including as many as 1,000 workers in Colorado, the complaint says. Rather than cutting back oil and gas production here, it asserts, executives ramped it up, expecting a skeleton staff to do more work than had been done when it had fully staffed its crews.

   In this context, Castilian said the company didn’t inspect much more than “a tiny proportion” of the wells it acquired from Noble. He said executives were fully aware of the safety risks and made a spreadsheet ranking several hundred wells as risky and problematic. Even then, the complaint alleges, they were intent on keeping wells in production for financial reasons stemming partly from the fact that they lease most of the land on which Anadarko operates in Colorado. Contractually, most of those leases expire if the company isn’t using a well. So, as former employees tell it in the complaint, the company kept faulty wells in production to avoid having to renegotiate leases, presumably at much higher prices.

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   1. Noble Energy! Talk about a misnomer!

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      1. Military intelligence.   Journalistic ethics.  Noble energy.   The Trifecta!

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5. Sadly it's looking like Don Blankenship will not make it onto the ballot in November…..

   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/08/us/elections/results-west-virginia-primary-elections.html

   The fat lady may not have sung yet, but she is clearing her throat.

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   1. Don't call me Sadly!

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   2. I'm glad about that. Even the Trump-humpin' voters of West VA don't want to elevate a candidate to the Senate who has been adjudicated to be a"murderer by negligence". They'd rather elect a generic Republican.

      It's also revealing that Trump knows exactly how toxic his brand of racist, pugilistic reality TV showmanship is for down-ballot candidates.

      Because Blankenship surely followed the Trump model of political discourse. So when Trump tweeted at WVA voters not to vote for Blankenship, he was really saying "Don't vote for Trump lite! It can't win in the general."

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      1. Why wouldn't they? Alabama nominated a pedophile last year. I think it s close call in the race for the bottom between Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia.

         At least there was some good news in Ohio where Cordray beat that clown, Dennis the Menace, in the Democratic primary.

         The turnout in West Virginia was encouraging. Manchin and his token opposition pulled in almost 150,000 votes (with 94% of precincts counted) who the combined Republican primary candidates (with a hotly-contested race) got 126,500.

         Ohio is the opposite. Cordray, Kucinich and a third candidate pulled 597,000 while the Republican gubernatorial race drew 762,000. Ohio may remain red for some time to come.

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         1. Well, the WVA voters didn't race to the bottom this time.  So even if Morrisey's beating Blankenship for the GOP nom makes it a tad more difficult for Sen Manchin to hold on to his seat, I'm glad for what it says about fundamental human decency.

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