VoteKansas.org

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pivoting to his latest election-year theme, President Barack Obama will go before college crowds in three swing states to warn of financial doom for millions of students if Congress does not halt a looming spike in interest rates. His clear political mission: rallying young voters whose support he needs again....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pivoting to his latest election-year theme, President Barack Obama will go before college crowds in three swing states to warn of financial doom for millions of students if Congress does not halt a looming spike in interest rates. His clear political mission: rallying young voters whose support he needs again....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pivoting to his latest election-year theme, President Barack Obama will go before college crowds in three swing states to warn of financial doom for millions of students if Congress does not halt a looming spike in interest rates. His clear political mission: rallying young voters whose support he needs again....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pivoting to his latest election-year theme, President Barack Obama will go before college crowds in three swing states to warn of financial doom for millions of students if Congress does not halt a looming spike in interest rates. His clear political mission: rallying young voters whose support he needs again....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pivoting to his latest election-year theme, President Barack Obama will go before college crowds in three swing states to warn of financial doom for millions of students if Congress does not halt a looming spike in interest rates. His clear political mission: rallying young voters whose support he needs again....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pivoting to his latest election-year theme, President Barack Obama will go before college crowds in three swing states to warn of financial doom for millions of students if Congress does not halt a looming spike in interest rates. His clear political mission: rallying young voters whose support he needs again....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin says he's unsure whether he'll vote for his party's leader, President Barack Obama, or the likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- At least three more Secret Service officers implicated in a prostitution scandal in Colombia were expected to lose their jobs Friday, a federal official told The Associated Press, as the Pentagon separately acknowledged that an 11th military person was involved....

Stop condemning a venerable and proud law enforcement force, says Jeffrey Robinson, for the misbehavior and idiocy of the few.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Mitt Romney's presidential campaign said it raised $12.6 million in contributions in March, adding to roughly $14 million his Republican Party brought in last month. But the combined figure still puts Romney at a disadvantage with the man whose job he wants in November....

President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are in the cat-and-mouse stage of their national race, chasing each other around the map as they jockey for position....

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney likes to portray himself as a better job creator than President Barack Obama, but he may have a hard time backing up those boasts....

Newt Gingrich's dynamic style in his first months of running the House as speaker in 1995 reduced President Bill Clinton to asserting that he was still relevant. Now President Barack Obama seems to be proclaiming much the same thing....

President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are sharpening their economic talking points....

President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are in the cat-and-mouse stage of their national race, chasing each other around the map as they jockey for position....

Once again, Massachusetts is in the cross hairs of a presidential race....

By Jason L. Riley Why are the political left's sympathies with the criminals instead of with the victims?

NEW YORK (AP) -- So let's get all the puns out of the way, shall we? It's the issue with legs - four of them. The doggone thing won't go away. Has the presidential race just gone to the dogs? Or are we simply in those dog days between the primary season and the start of the general election?...

Two years have passed since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, says Donna Brazile, but its lessons about our connection to the environment and our responsibilities must not fade

by Greg Palast - Exclusive for EcoWatch.org
Friday, 20. April, 2012

Evidence now implicates top BP executives as well as its partners Chevron and Exxon and the Bush Administration in the deadly cover-up –– which included falsifying a report to the Securities Exchange Commission.

Yesterday, Ecowatch.org revealed that, in September 2008, nearly two years before the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig had blown out in the Caspian Sea––which BP concealed from U.S. regulators and Congress.

Had BP, Chevron, Exxon or the Bush State Department revealed the facts of the earlier blow-out, it is likely that the Deepwater Horizon disaster would have been prevented.

Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the Gulf, and BP had covered it up.

To confirm this shocking accusation, I flew with my team to the Islamic republic of Azerbaijan.  Outside the capital, Baku, near the giant BP terminal, we found workers, though too frightened to give their names, who did confirm that they were evacuated from the BP offshore platform as it filled with explosive methane gas.

Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive!

Before we could get them on camera, my crew and I were arrested and the witnesses disappeared.

Expelled from Azerbaijan, we still obtained the ultimate corroboration: a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department in Washington laying out the whole story of the 2008 Caspian blow-out.

The source of the cable, classified "SECRET," was a disaffected US soldier, Private Bradley Manning who, through WikiLeaks provided hot smoking guns to The Guardian. The information found in the U.S. embassy cables is a block-buster.

The cables confirmed what BP will not admit to this day: there was a serious blow-out and its cause was the same as in the Gulf disaster two years later: the cement ("mud") used to cap the well had failed. Bill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, revealed the truth to our embassy about the Caspian disaster:

“Schrader said that the September 17th shutdown of the Central Azeri (CA) platform… was the largest such emergency evacuation in BP’s history. Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition. … Due to the blowout of a gas-injection well there was ‘a lot of mud’ on the platform.”

From other sources, we discovered the cement which failed  had been mixed with nitrogen as a way to speed up drying, a risky process that was repeated on the Deepwater Horizon.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council, calls the concealment of this information, "criminal. We have laws that make it illegal to hide this."

The cables also reveal that BP's oil-company partners knew about the blow-out but they too concealed the information from Congress, regulators and the Securities Exchange Commission.

BP's major US partners in the Caspian Sea drilling operation were Chevron and Exxon. The State Department got involved in the matter because BP’s U.S. partners and the Azerbaijani government were losing over $50 million per day due to the platform’s shutdown.  The Embassy cabled Washington:

“BP’s ACG partners are similarly upset with BP’s performance in this episode, as they claim BP has sought to limit information flow about this event even to its ACG partners.”

Kennedy is concerned about the silent collusion of Chevron, Exxon and the Azerbaijani government.  “The only reason the public doesn’t know about it is because the Azerbaijani government conspired with them to disappear the people who saw it happen and then to act in concert, in collusion, in cahoots with BP, with Exxon, with Chevron to conceal this event from the American public.” – To read the full story go to EcoWatch.org – Check out the Youtube video

______

Re-prints permitted with credit to EcoWatch.org and the author.

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic (Penguin 2011), which centers on his investigation of BP, bribery and corruption in the oil industry. Palast, whose reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4, will be providing investigative reports for EcoWatch.org.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

ShareThis