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Archive: April, 2010
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has ordered Cabot Oil & Gas Corp to halt drilling in Dimock, PA after some 14 residential water wells were contaminated with methane gas that "migrated," into the wells, DEP says, as a result of the company's drilling activities in the area.
Funny enough, I wrote about Dimock and its bubbling wells, at which Cabot has installed vent pipes to relieve some of the methane, and which sound like turkeys gobble-gobbling in this week's "Man Overboard.":
Bubbling is only one of the magical properties the Sautners' well water has taken on since they first leased land to Texas-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale geologic formation two years ago. The water has also turned brown, tested positive for strange salts, metals and chemicals and started clogging things: "[Cabot] cut into a pipe that was less than a year old," says Craig Sautner, "and it looked like solid peanut butter in there."
Cabot, the Inquirer reports, continues to deny responsibility:
Despite agreeing to plug and abandon the three gas wells, Cabot maintains those wells are not at fault - it says the methane comes from shallow shale formations and is seeping into groundwater through natural fractures. Pre-drilling tests on more recent wells show preexisting methane concentrations in groundwater in that area, Cabot says.
"We're agreeing to plug the wells in order to comply with the order," said Kenneth S. Komoroski, a Cabot spokesman. "We do not believe they are a source of methane migration or contamination."
Interesting especially, since the order, which is signed by a Cabot attorney, says that Cabot agrees to take responsibility and not to challenge the DEP's findings in "any matter or proceeding involving Cabot and the Department" apparently that doesn't hold true for Cabot and the news media:
Not that Cabot has been put out of business. Reports the Inquirer:
But Dan O. Dinges, the Cabot chief executive who met with Hanger Wednesday, said in a news release that the DEP's order does not affect the number of wells planned for 2010, or its expected production.
The ban on drilling affects only the Dimock area, Komoroski said. Cabot has about 25 permits to drill wells in other parts of Susquehanna County.
Isaiah - aLex is not the only one to deeply appreciate the work that you and all the other sharp journalists are doing on my behalf... oh... um THAT IS on behalf of the public!! Don't we ALL benefit!?
big important news. way to go.
Thanks, Alex, for your continued readership of the Clog. I hope to someday earn the praise you so generously heap on me. - Isaiah
So, hey - what's taking the federal government so long to stop the oil spill? The federal government should have federalized the spill response over a week ago. The fumbling and bumbling of this is aggregious...Obama's Katrina. According to the National Enquirer, Obama has been ridin' dirty with Vera Baker, an assistant http://www.nationalenquirer.com/obama_cheating_scandal_vera_baker_video_/celebrity/68589 Maybe Obama should focus more on making sure oil doesn't coat our shores instead of spending time banging Vera behind Michelle's back (if it's true)?
Where can I find a good weeknight late night happy hour?
I know Prohibition Taproom does $1 off on weeknights from 10pm-12am, any other places with deals like this?
Are you a member of Facebook?
Askadelphia runs on Facebook Connect.
I will try to process this story in my brain a little more and write something more cogent about it tomorrow. But, anyway, it seems Webcam-gate has gotten a little weirder: According to Blake Robbins' lawyers, the Lower Merion School District's super-spy Webcam gizmo shot pictures of the kid in his bed, sleeping lots of them and then zipped those photos around into the District's network.
And, it seems the lawyers have them.
In the filing, the Penn Valley family claims the district's records show that the controversial tracking system captured more than 400 photos and screen images from 15-year-old Blake Robbins' school-issued laptop during two weeks last fall, and that "thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes."
Weirder still:
Robbins, a sophomore at Harriton High School, and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, contend e-mails turned over to them by the district suggest [Carol] Cafiero [the system's administrator] "may be a voyeur" who might have viewed some of the photos on her home computer.
The motion says Cafiero, who has been placed on paid leave, has failed to turn that computer over to the plaintiffs despite a court order to do so, and asks a judge to sanction her.
Cafiero's lawyer Thursday night disputed the suggestion that his client had downloaded any such photos to her home computer. Lawyer Charles Mandracchia said Cafiero has cooperated with federal investigators and is willing to let technicians hired by the district examine her computer if the judge so orders.
He also said Robbins' attorney had never asked him for Cafiero's personal computer. "He's making this up because his case is falling apart," Mandracchia said.
PREVIOUSLY>> Inky: Laptop family lives in Main Line mansion, doesn't like to pay the power bill
PREVIOUSLY>> Blake Robbins' crime? Popping Mike-and-Ike's, he says.
[...] PREVIOUSLY>> Webcam-gate, now with pictures! [...]
[...] students’ homes had only happened 42 times. It turns out what they meant was that there were 42 instances when they began intensive surveillance on the suspected stolen computers. This consisted of (among other things) transmitting a picture [...]
In the article, Carol Cafiero says "I know, I love it," (meaning the pictures they get from kids' computers) and therefore probably should be investigated for being a potential pedophile.
Is this supposed to be a sidebar or something? It's like 20 characters wide down the whole page.
I get that you're trying to process the story and this isn't the cogent version, but you misspelled the words "his" and "then" "gizmo shot pictures of the kid in hie bed, sleeping lots of them and thin zipped" just saying
Dave, "I know, I love it," was said in reply to "like a little LMSD soap opera," which to me does not necessarily translate to what you seem to think it implies. She's going to turn over her home computer anyway.
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| Photo | Neal Santos |
At the end of last year, City Paper's Andrew Thompson did a piece on Brett Mandel, the former director of Philadelphia Forward who seemingly checked out of city politics after being disillusioned with Mayor Nutter:
"[Nutter] didn't promise that we would tread water. He promised a renaissance," Mandel says.
And when the campaign was over, he threw up his hands and walked away. "For the last two decades, I've been screaming and yelling about Philadelphia, inside city government, outside city government," he says. "That can be frustrating. Dealing with the political structure is a pain."
We thought he might be back, though. (In fact, the piece mentioned that he had become a committee person for the city's Eighth Ward but just as a hobby.) Recently, he's been circulating critiques of Nutter's budget, which you can read here. Also, he's speaking at Penn's Houston Hall (Room 281) on April 22 at 6 p.m., about such problems he has with the budget. Additionally, he's pushing for a "thorough purge" of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and asking that reform-minded folk attend new candidates' fundraisers with him.
Can we call it a comeback?
Brett will be speaking to the members of the Loyal Opposition on April 22nd as Holly mentioned. Please join us to hear the significant and alarming insights Brett has on the Philadelphia budget crises.
Well, OK, they didnt actually say that. But, close enough. Yesterday, lawmakers in Harrisburg berated the booze warriors over their general fuckery in the raids on three Philly beer bars last month. These bars, you'll recall, supposedly committed the very high crime of selling improperly licensed microbrews (though, not really). Here's KYWs account (if only we had the budget for a Capitol reporter; dang):
John Taylor, ranking Republican on the House Liquor Control Committee, believes the response was excessive:
To have four armed agents go into a small establishment about this kind of violation is an overuse of manpower.
But Maj. John Lutz, director of the state police department's Bureau of Liquor Enforcement, says his troopers often go into volatile situations:
With all due respect to these three bars, there are a lot of bars that we go into that may not have that particular clientèle, and there is a danger.
BLE officials go into volatile situations? In gastropubs? Really? I had my doubts, so I ran a search of newspaper stories over the last five years that included the words "Bureau of Liquor Enforcement," "agents," and "Pennsylvania." Surely, if such dangerous situations arose, some newspaper somewhere would have reported it, right?
Apparently not: I got nothing. So, I called up the BLEs Harrisburg office, to ask if they had any record of a state booze cop pulling his weapon in the line of duty in the last few years. They said they'll get back to me sometime this afternoon. If/when they do, I'll update.
In the meantime, some statistics: In the first two months of 2010, according to its Web site, the BLE has filed 37 criminal complaints throughout the state (of which just three were here in Philly, and 19 came from Pittsburgh, for whatever that's worth). As of the end of February, the PLCB had reported 2.064 "total incidents," meaning everything from warnings to routine inspections to compliance checks to something called "speeches" (not sure what those are, but there were 38 of them during this timeframe). Of these 2,064 incidents, 414 came from Philadelphia, which leads the state.
Anyway, back to the point, which is that, basically, it seems like overkill on steroids for these BLE agents to go in, armed (!), to raid beer bars for selling beer that may not (or, in this case, may) be on the state's omnibus "approved" list, which in and of itself is a really stupid thing, but that's a discussion for another day.
Allow us to echo Rep. Taylor:
Taylor says that state police need to use common sense in each situation.
[...] Bureau of Liquor Enforcement: Common sense is for pussies :: The … [...]
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| Photo | Neal Santos |
In this week's cover story, I wrote about the Philadelphia Tea Party.
If you're interested in seeing the group in person, head to LOVE Park today from noon to 2 p.m. the members are throwing their second annual Tax Day protest there. Even more interestingly, perhaps, is that some local Tea Party members fear the Crash the Tea Party! group may infiltrate the protest.
Could make for quite the scene.
Disappointing to see Holly branding the Tea Party Patriots as a racist group. I assumed she'd do at least a cursory investigation into the bogus claims by the left surrounding the alleged racial slurs. It was a totally manufactured and untrue claim. Andrew Breitbart has offered $100K to anyone producing proof of these allegations. With hundereds of video cameras rolling, many by the staff members of the Congressional Black Caucus, not a single incident of a racial slur. Not one; and it was exactly what they were looking for. A manufactured event that didn't pan out for them. Sad when reality doesn't comport with the pre-conceived notions of the left. But hey, the New York Times printed it anyway so it must be true, right? After all, the NYT is the left wing Bible.
Yes. Clearly, John Lewis, civil rights hero, and the other members of the Congressional Black Caucus made it up. THOSE people can't be trusted, right? ~rolls eyes~ http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3457385 WASHINGTON Republican Party officials and Tea Party protest organizers Sunday condemned health care demonstrators who hurled racial and homophobic slurs at black and gay lawmakers Saturday at the Capitol.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/cover-story/Tea-Party-Crasher.html
Well, it's time again to identify the inspiring, intimidating, and just plain mystifying depictions of His Honor, Philadelphia's own Mayor Michael Nutter.
The front page of phila.gov almost always features a picture of Nutter but every now and then, that picture is updated. And with each time, with each pic, we get a chance to remark on it.
Before I weigh in on the current picture (above), some history is in order.
This little game began in 2008, when phila.gov featured the following picture, so ambiguous that it demanded public scrutiny:
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| 2008: We're-in-trouble Nutter |
I thought, at the time, that Nutter looked "frightened and defensive" and it was posted, after all, in the thick of the city's budget collapsing. Doron Taussig, my former editor, called it "perplexed and slightly angry."
Then came 2009, with a decidedly more cheerful-looking Nutter:
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| 2009: Confident Nutter |
Last year, I called it "decidedly more confident if less interesting."
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| 2010: Captain Nutter |
This year's most recent picture (above) takes us back into ambiguous territory: Nutter looks earnest, even concerned a throwback, methinks, to 2008. Yet rather than reacting to something, as he appears to be in Nutter '08, Nutter '10 seems to be demanding our own reaction.
Maybe it's the Philadelphia flag waving in the background. Maybe it's the podium, which resembles the helm of a great ship. Or maybe it's the right hand, lifted in action about to crash down with an angry slam or gently point us in the right direction, we don't know. Regardless, I call this depiction Captain Nutter: Eying the storm, while grabbing the wheel.
But the most important question is: What do you think?
I see it as more of a "What part of 'No More Money' do you not understand?" Mayor Nutter.
Haha, I think you hit it on the head, Doron. Maybe this is Slightly-Impatient-Yet-Not-Un-Paternal Nutter?
Hmm. I see this differently. I think the Mayor looks exasperated. He looks like he could be saying, "As I've explained several times now..."
REPORTING GOVT. CORRUPTION - (Click on link below) http://www.congress.org/congressorg/bio/userletter/?id=497&letter_id=5027836306 I advised Mayor Nutter personally on 11/16/2009 but have not heard back from him?
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