Guest Column
by Pat Byington

“How do we make people in Kansas care about the lasting effects from the Gulf oil spill a year, three years, a decade, maybe even longer from now?”

Casi Callaway, the director of Mobile Baykeeper, posed this very question in a recent interview. She knows, all too well, that once the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is plugged, the national media will pack up their bags, leave for New York City, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, and in the future dutifully file quarterly, perhaps semi- annual stories on the Great Gulf Oil Spill of 2010.

In her own words, she is fearful that the world is going to forget, and frightened how that will impact the future of her two-year-old son, family, home and community.

My older sister, who has been a nurse for more than 30 years, best described to me what is happening to the Gulf. A terrible traumatic event has happened, like a car accident. When you are brought to the hospital, you stop the bleeding. Once that is done, you start to heal. And then the hard part occurs — rehabilitation.

“Therapies” are prescribed. And that, my sister said, can be the loneliest journey. It could be ours in the Gulf if we allow it.

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The House was debating a bill last night that would provide up to $7.4 billion in health care aid to rescue workers who have faced health problems in the wake of the September 11 attacks in New York. The bill ultimately failed to get the needed two-thirds majority, 255-159.

In expressing his outrage about the Republicans show voted against it, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) engaged in a two-miunute tirade, in which he called Republicans “cowardly” for voting against the bill because of “procedure.”

“It’s Republicans wrapping their arms around Republicans, rather than doing the right thing on behalf of the heroes,” Weiner exclaimed.

Weiner attacked those who “stand up and say, ‘Oh, if only we had a different process we’d vote yes’,: he said. :You vote yes if you believe yes! You vote in favor of something if you believe it’s the right thing! If you believe it’s the wrong thing, you vote no!”

“It is a shame,” he said. “A shame!”

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the CLEAR Act today, taking a landmark step toward fixing our broken offshore drilling system.

The Democratic Party controlled House voted to pass H.R. 3534 in response to the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf. The act reforms the structure of the offshore drilling oversight agency to avoid clear conflicts of interest; enhances the role of science, independent review, and other oversight agencies; and calls for the establishment of mandatory safety and environmental management standards.

The law fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund, helping to offset the inherent risk offshore drilling poses to our wildlife and important lands and waters. It also allows national wildlife refuges to collect and retain funds for damages from oil spills for the first time ever.

Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, said the vote was a start to reforming the offshore drilling industry and to protect and restore coastal communities, wetlands and wildlife and help prevent the next offshore oil disaster.

“The CLEAR Act overhauls the system that failed to prevent the BP disaster. And in securing critically needed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the bill reinvests in our nation’s public lands and waters,” she said in a statement issued from Washington, D.C.

More below…
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Beer Remains the Favorite American Beverage

Sixty-seven percent of U.S. adults drink alcohol, a slight increase over last year and the highest reading recorded since 1985, and beer remains the favorite beverage of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey.

Despite some yearly fluctuations, the percentage of Americans who say they drink alcohol has been remarkably stable over Gallup’s 71 years of tracking it. The high point for drinking came in 1976-1978, when 71 percent said they drank alcohol. (Many of us Baby Boomers first started drinking in the early 1970s, especially those of us from the bicentennial class of 1976 : )

The low of 55 percent was recorded when Gallup first asked Americans about drinking, in the waning days of the Great Depression in 1939, when 58 percent of adults admitted they were drinkers – long after national prohibition was repealed. (There are still counties in Alabama that still have legal prohibitions on the sale and consumption of alcohol : (

A majority of Americans in most demographic subgroups of the population drink, though in some groups drinking is more prevalent than in others.

One of the most significant predictors of alcohol consumption is church attendance. Those who seldom or never attend church are substantially more likely than more frequent church attenders to say they drink; and those who have no religious identity, Catholics, and non-Christians are more likely to drink than Protestants.

Medical research shows that moderate drinking is associated with a lower probability of heart trouble, and Gallup has recently confirmed that the incidence of heart attacks increases substantially with age.

Still, the data indicate that many older Americans are not taking advantage of the prophylactic benefit of drinking; 59 percent of older Americans drink alcohol, substantially lower than the percentages among those who are younger. Additionally, those with the lowest education levels and lowest incomes are less likely to drink than others.

Beer’s popularity has slipped only slightly over the years. In 1992 and 1994, 47 percent of drinkers named it as their preferred drink, compared with 41 percent this year.

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Daily Show Leader’s Digest

President Obama makes an appearance on “The View” and shows Americans how to use the government’s new health care website.

‎”Nothing Obama does will ever make you f**king happy, will it?” – Jon Stewart says to Fox News

EPA Senior Policy Analyst Hugh Kaufman blows the whistle on dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico on MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) unveiled a new campaign today called the “Republican-Tea Party Contract on America,” a play on the Contract with America, the 1994 platform on which GOP candidates campaigned.

The list:

1. Repeal the Affordable Care Act (Health insurance Reform)

2. Privatize Social Security or phase it out altogether

3. End Medicare as it presently exists

4. Extend the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy and big oil

5. Repeal Wall Street Reform

6. Protect those responsible for the oil spill and future environmental catastrophes

7. Abolish the Department of Education

8. Abolish the Department of Energy

9. Abolish the Environmental Protection Agency

10. Repeal the 17th Amendment which provides for the direct election of senators

See the video ad below…

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Greetings readers and fans. As you know, I’ve been covering the BP oil spill for the past three months, and working for several years on ways to fund the alternative, independent Web Press in the South.

A number of readers have expressed an interesting in helping, and some have mailed checks and made online contributions through our PayPal Donate button link.

We’ve been in talks for several months with David Cohn, the founder of Spot.us in San Francisco, the first online organization that came up with a business model and a Web interface to fund the kind of investigative journalism that has been falling by the wayside since newspapers suffered drastic budget cutbacks due to the Bush recession.

In the past couple of days, Spot.Us approved our pitch to experiment with raising online cash to help fund our efforts to continue covering the aftermath of BP’s massive Gulf oil spill, now that the mainstream media has lost interest in the story and the cable news helicopters have gone back to New York, Washington and Atlanta.

The effects of this spill will be around for weeks, months, years and maybe even decades, and we believe the story should continue to stay atop the news agenda.

Many readers have asked us how they can help. Here’s a very real opportunity for YOU to HELP for FREE! See below…

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Locust Fork News-Journal Editor Glynn Wilson Chosen First from the South

Glynn Wilson is the first free-lance journalist from the American South chosen to participate in a citizen-funded investigative journalism program that has proved successful on the West Coast.

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the “Center for Media Change” and funded by various groups like the Knight Foundation. They partner with various organizations including the Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles.

It is an open source project to pioneer “community powered reporting.”

Through Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics.

Contributions are tax deductible and they partner with news organizations to distribute content under appropriate licenses.

On some occasions they can even pay back the original contributors.

Spot.Us is a platform that can be used by other news organizations to fundraise for their freelancers.

Below are just some of the news organizations that have used Spot.Us to fund reporting projects. Their content is also made available for news outlets to republish.

Featured partners they’ve worked with include….

The New York Times

They sent a reporter to the Pacific Garbage Patch who chronicled her voyage and published a final story in The New York Times.

As it happens, that was the first free-lance story to carry a byline by the author ever published in the New York Times Science section not written by a former staff correspondent. When I worked for the National Desk and the Science Desk of the New York Times between 2002 and 2005, they did not give bylines to free-lancers.

More Examples

Click here to read what the press is saying about it.