Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Oil Drum provides one answer:

Gas flows more easily through cracks than oil, and the disaster was first evident when leaking gas reached the drilling rig, and then ignited. The BOP then, at least partially, functioned. After the rig sank, the riser also sank, bending the pipe just above the BOP. At that time there were reports that a Coast Guard ROV examined the underwater assembly and did not see any obvious oil leaks. A couple of days later the flow was suggested at about 1,000 bd, and this then escalated to 5,000 bd. As cameras began to publicly monitor the outlet of the riser the estimates started to grow, but a not-well-publicized effort measured the flow out of the riser, and found that it was around 8,000 bd, with allowance for leaks, the overall flow was estimated to be perhaps 12,000 bd. Once the broken part of the riser was removed and a cap placed over the well, a significant portion of the escaping oil was captured and could then be measured as it flowed into the surface vessel recovering it. Those values are currently at around 15,500 bd. BP is currently planning on additional capture this week of up to another 10,000 bd, and preparing for a worst case scenario with a flow rate of 80,000 bd. These numbers vary a lot, and yet they could all be correct.

Why? Well, its called erosion, and simply put, the oil and gas that are flowing out of the rock are bringing small amounts of that rock (in the form of sand) out with them. Rocks that contain lots of oil are not that strong and are easily worn away by the flow of fluid through them.

(Image: TPM)

Meishan pigs walk through their enclosure at the Tierpark Friedrichsfelde zoo in Berlin on June 15, 2010. The animals were originally held as domestic pigs in China. By Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images.

The answer from the readers is clear: we will keep the format as it is every day, with a contest once a week on Saturday. No jumps! And I hope you've noticed we've cut down on them as much as we can in the last month or so.

You get idiotic and offensive statements like this about the president invoking prayer for those in the Gulf last night:

[GRETCHEN] CARLSON: But Mr. Speaker, did you find it at all disingenuous, because some people are analyzing that this morning as saying it was disingenuous from a president who does not go to Church on a regular basis?

You mean: like Bush and Reagan? See where you end up with this pious bullshit?

Dashiell Bennett defends that godawful noise:

It figures that the French would have the temerity to blame their crappy performance on the noise.

A reader writes:

The fact that anyone considers that interview "pwning" of Palin shows us just how far we've gone in accepting that Palin should be treated with kid gloves. The interview was very mildly challenging of her, while not being critical of her by any reasonable standard.

Sarah came in blathering nonsense about what is being done wrong, and O'Reilly doesn't interrupt her, but changes the topic a bit with his questions and asks her a challenging, albeit totally fair question of what she would do in this situation. She gets lost for a while, stumbling on her answer and then coming to one coherent thought about allowing help from outside, at which point he is sure to mention "good point."

The only point in which he's not in agreement with her is when she claims Obama isn't putting the effort to stop the leak first, which he does challenge, but is very reserved and deferential in comparison to standard O'Reilly outrage.

Have you ever seen O'Reilly interview someone who he truly distrusts or says something which angers him? In those cases he will talk over the interviewee, accuse them of insincere motives, and constantly redirect the interview any time they make a point, without giving them any sort of concession. He would never say "good point" in such an interview. He would never let the interviewee go on for a full paragraph of their scripted answer, as he often does with Palin, in such an interview.

Now, her blank stares and weak answers may be exposing, but in no way is O'Reilly trying to give her a tough interview. He's bending over backwards to give her credit, and at some point she goes so far into the crazy that he can't defend it, although he reacts in mild disagreement rather than horror.

Of course, my reader is right. It does say something about how low we've sunk that even I treated this softball interview as some kind of breakthrough.

Shani Hilton profiles Holla Back DC:

Taken objectively, it's…an amazing collection of often very short accounts of street harassment, written by harassees who are mainly women. They can be as simple as a few sentences describing a man saying things like, "Damn, baby. I thought you were coming to see me. Mmm, mmm." They are sometimes longer tales of harassers saying they want to rape the harassee. And there are stories of men groping and assaulting women….

One thing that nearly all of the posts have in common is an acknowledgement of the effects that street harassment have on women.

Most write that they felt shaken, angry, helpless, or tearful after an incident. They write that it took time for them to pull themselves together. That's the thing I think many men don't understand about the harassment: it completely strips a woman of autonomy and it forces a reaction that lasts long after the incident is over. Many times, harassers are seeking a positive reaction, and when they don't get that, they turn to calling the woman they complimented moments earlier a "bitch." And either way, the woman has been forcibly dragged out of her own thoughts. That's why so many women studiously ignore all strangers on the street, I think. It's a form of insulation from getting shook.

"(The bailiff just made Maggie NOM put her bare feet down. She is so disrespectful)," – Rick Jacobs, live-blogging the closing arguments of the Prop 8 trial.

Maggie Gallagher had her bare feet up on a chair or table?

Yglesias tweaks Drezner's argument:

I guess what I wonder is what would soccer displace if it were to become more popular? It’s not like people are spending tons of time these days sitting alone on the couch playing solitare and hoping for someone to dream up a new sport to watch. The general trend has been toward creating more and more options and more and more fragmentation of the audience for just about everything. The TV networks are in decline, the record labels are in decline, the movie studios are in decline, everything’s in decline. Not because entertainment is in decline, but because we’ve never had more entertainment options. Under the circumstances, it seems to me less likely that soccer will break through and become as popular as basketball or hockey is today than that football and baseball will see their popularity ebb down…

Bradford Plumer flags the EPA's new global warming analysis:

Yesterday, the EPA released its modeling of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. A lot of the coverage focused on the agency's conclusion that the cap-and-trade program would be quite affordable—costing families less than a dollar a day. But I'd say the most salient part of the analysis was the section Brad Johnson highlighted: If the United States passes something like the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill and helps negotiate an international agreement on carbon emissions, we'll have a 75 percent chance of keeping temperature rises below the danger zone of 2°C. But if we do nothing, our chances of meeting that goal are roughly 1 percent.

That's the difference between barreling headlong toward catastrophe and staying safe.

Steinglass asks:

Maybe the EPA is wrong about these probabilities. But if it's right, how much is that worth?

Chart via Leonhardt.