Obama's Administration enacts media ban near oil spill:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpJBsjKhR…

WHY?! What don't they want us to know?!

If this was happening anywhere else, there would be rioting in the streets over this. But it's the Gulf - America's backwater. It's so easy for the rest of the country to not really care.

Try googling "boom vandalism." Either intentionally or unintentionally, boats have been damaging and moving the booms that are in place to contain the oil. To help stop this they have ordered a safety zone - nobody can get within 65 feet.

And really, 65 feet is not far in today's age of telephoto lenses.

@2: anywhere else BUT america. we hate anyone who complains, unless it's about taxes.

Keep voting for those southern Republicans and then you come running to the government when they fuck you over. The south sucks! They are getting what they deserve! I know that sounds harsh. And I don't think it's fair the animal life is dying, but goddamn people. Wake the fuck up!!!!

#6,

Good liberal, keep thinking that the Republicans are the only ones in bed with big business and the good guys like Obama aren't.

The ballsy Obama gave BP that stiff $20 billion penalty teaching them a lesson, even though Texas A&M says the Gulf region makes about $230 billion a year.

Obama was the top recipient of cash from BP in 2008. Obama is a neo-con, so are almost all Dems.

I'm not from the South, so i dont really have a dog in the fight. But maybe if some of us "coastal elites" studied the South a little more outside of slavery (which was much more prominent with white slaves in the northeast before it ever was with blacks slaves in the south) you might understand the anti-government/fed sentiment that runs wild in that part of the country.

Mostly look to Appalachia, start with the taxing of whiskey shortly after the Declaration was signed. Take a look at the way they treated moonshiners. Look at how the media in NYC and DC portrayed southern folk, look at how DC and the wealthy elites in the Northeast used them for their natural resources, especially cole. You'll find that long before Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh the south had serious issues with looking to the government for help. In fact, whenever the government usually got involved, it was too hurt poor southerners.

"obama was the top recipient of BP cash in 2008" because obama was the top recipient of cash, period, in 2008. BP employees can give 2K to anyone they want, just like you and me. it doesn't mean he's equivalent to the GOP. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton was one of the 3 corporations with their fingers in this pie.

It was the Bush administration that let them put in wells in deep water without the safeguards every other civilized country requires. Do you see this happening on either of the other coasts run by Dems and enviromentalists? NO!!! So fuck you conservatives who are stupid enough to fall for the corporate lies that keep screwing the tax payers out of billions!

"slavery (which was much more prominent with white slaves in the northeast before it ever was with blacks slaves in the south)"

This statement is ludicrously false.

Also, black slavery in the deep south wasn't eradicated until after WWII.

In the future we will plan such spills to fertilize the seabed floor.

Source for that, Fnarf?

@12, "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War To World War II" by Douglas Blackmon, who is a WSJ bureau chief, not some lefty college-professor kook.

Black men and women all across the south were routinely arrested off the street for imaginary crimes, sentenced to fines they couldn't pay, but which would be paid by white farm, mine and mill owners in exchange for employment contracts (the breaking or refusal to renew of which was also a crime), resulting in people working in conditions often much worse than typical slavery (18 hours a day naked in dangerous mines or steel mills) until they died. It wasn't just an occasional thing, either; it was a primary form of industrial labor in the south.

He's got a website here: http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/

Thanks for bumming me the fuck out on Saturday night, guys.

Also, Fnarf owns you, 5280.

Basehead, you're conflating two distinct regions of the country, with completely different ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Slavery was virtually unknown in Appalachia. The Scotch-Irish folk who settled that area brought their deep distrust of government with them from the old country, where they had been fiercely persecuted. Southerners, on the other hand, had always been highly aristocratic, and only took up the mantle of "government oppression" when said government tried to stop them from treating other human beings like livestock.

Southerners talk a good game, and some of them may even believe it, but take it from someone who lived there for many years: the South is overrun with hateful, virulently racist scumbags. There are also decent people there, of course, but they are a politically impotent minority.

Thanks, Fnarf.

@ Fnarf, basehead was probably speaking of indentured servitude, which in practice was slavery. Unlike the rosy picture painted in textbooks, indentured servants were often coerced or tricked into it, were often traded or sold like property, were easily denied their promised rewards when service was up, and even found their terms lengthened or renewed without their consent. Being poor working class, they had very little recourse against such abuses. Indentured servants were as likely to rebel and run away as African slaves, and in fact much of our bad race relations has its roots in the fact that landowners, fearing uprisings, used race as a wedge to keep white indentured servants from banding together with black slaves. They figured this out after joint rebellions of this nature had actually taken place.

But for the eventual termination of service, indentured servitude was slavery, as much as sharecropping can be deemed the same.

What oil spill? It's all a big conspiracy. They ran out of oil in the gulf 12 years ago (Iranian Gravity Siphon). Google it: "Art Bell Oil Gulf Mexico"

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/black-…

Zoe Strauss is a gifted photographer. Her photographs of what is taking place in the Gulf are important as journalistic documents and as Art. What has happened there is horrific. We needn't dismiss any region of the country or stereotype any particular group of people. As Americans we need to come together, stop the hate speech, and move into action. Zoe is doing something, what are we doing?