Come on Down!

[Nbadan]

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) wants you to come down and have a good time on the Mississippi coast!!!

Wingnuts first!

On Fox News Sunday today, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) continued to aggressively downplay the massive BP oil gusher, explaining that tar balls washing up on his state’s beaches are “no big deal” because you can “pick them up and throw them in the bag.” And instead of attacking BP for causing the spill, he blamed the media for creating a “misperception” of crisis by daring to call attention to one of the worst environmental disasters in American history:

BARBOUR: Well, the truth is, Chris, we have had virtually no oil. … We have had a few tar balls but we have tar balls every year, as a natural product of the Gulf of Mexico. … So, tar balls are no big deal. In fact, I read that Pensacola or the Florida beaches when they have tar balls yesterday didn’t even close. They just sent people out to pick them up and throw them in the bag. The biggest, the biggest negative impact for us has been the news coverage. … The average viewer to this show thinks that the whole coast from Florida to Texas is ankle-deep in oil. … So it may be hard for the viewer to understand, but the worst thing for us has been how our tourist season has been hurt by the misperception of what is going on down here. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is beautiful. As I tell people, the coast is clear. Come on down!

Barbour has consistently refused to accept the gravity of the situation in the Gulf, and blamed the media for supposedly over-hyping the disaster. He’s compared oil to tooth paste, said all the oil on Mississippi’s beaches could barely “fill up a milk jug,” and handed out gas cards to encourage tourists to “ome on down here and play golf, enjoy the beach, catch a fish.” Meanwhile, dead dolphins have washed ashore on Mississippi’s beaches.

Barbour went on to suggest that President Obama was “destroying himself” by not adequately responding to the spill, but he had nothing negative to say of BP. Barbour — who received $1.8 million from oil and gas companies for his gubernatorial campaign — explained, “When we ask BP for something, they try to do it.” The lobbying firm Barbour founded relied highly on oil industry clients, with Barbour personally lobbying for regulation changes to the Bush White House.

Think Progress

BP has used over a million gallons of Corexit, a neurotoxin pesticide to keep the oil from surfacing...

But what most people don’t know is that the active ingredient of the toxic chemical dispersant, which is up to 60% by volume, being sprayed by BP to fight the Gulf oil spill is a is a neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and aquatic life, causes cancer, causes damage to internal organs such as the liver and kidneys simply by absorbing it through the skin and may cause reproductive side effects.

In fact the neurotoxin pesticide that is lethal to 50% of life in concentrations as little as 2.6 parts per million has been banned for use in the UK since 1998 because it failed the UK “Rocky shore test” which assures that the dispersant does not cause a “significant deleterious ecological change”.

Corexit has also earned the highest EPA warning label for toxicity which means the effects of the toxic chemicals to the eye are corrosive resulting in irreversible destruction of ocular tissue and other tissue with corneal involvement along with an burning that can persist for more than 21 days and effects to human skin are corrosive resulting in tissue destruction into the dermis and/or scarring.

Alexander Higgins

[DMX7]

Damn, I wish I owned an oil company in the Gulf. I could take a dump in their face and have them praise me for creating a job to clean it up.

[mouse]

This is why Nbadan is the best political poster ST has ever seen.