The Whole Delivery

Look at one some folks found ! Scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico are finding a substantial layer of oily sediment stretching for dozens of miles in all directions. Their discovery suggests that a lot of oil from the Deepwater Horizon didn't simply evaporate or dissipate into the water — it has settled to the seafloor. The Research Vessel Oceanus sailed on Aug. 21 on a mission to figure out what happened to the more than 4 million barrels of oil that gushed into the water. Onboard, Samantha Joye, a professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, says she suddenly has a pretty good idea about where a lot of it ended up. It's showing up in samples of the seafloor, between the well site and the coast. "I've collected literally hundreds of sediment cores from the Gulf of Mexico, including around this area. And I've never seen anything like this," she said in an interview via satellite phone from the boat. But ...

The push back against the attacks on Sonia Sotomayor have been well documented, with the video of Samuel Alito's similar comments surfacing and Gwen Iffl's well thought out statement yesterday on This Week. The Washington Monthly writer Daphne Eviatar probably gives the most striking point in defense of Obama's pick: Buried in Jeffrey Toobin’s recent profile of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is this astonishing fact: (bold emphasis added by me) In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. The recent uproar over Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s comment eight years ago that being a Latina influences her perspective as a judge has led to charges by de facto R epublican spokesmen from Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck that she’s a “racist” for acknowledging th...