One man's account:

""At West Jefferson, there were tents set up outside the hospital, where I was stripped of my clothing, washed with water and several showers, before I was allowed into the hospital," Wunstell said. "When I asked for my clothing, I was told that BP had confiscated all of my clothing and it would not be returned.""

nope, no cover-up here.

As for the "food poisoning" theory:

"An expert on foodborne illness cast doubt on Hayward's theory.

Is there a workable theory of oil spill cleanup of this magnitude? If so I have yet to see it.

YMMV, but I like a little spring-back in the step to cut down on accumulated fatigue (which occurs stepping upwards from inertia) and shock during mid-long distance hiking. I learned this as a capricious Young Kid growing up in the goat-ridden, mountainous ancestral homeland. (My family is lamentably goaty.)

I like a 1/2-1" padding for outdoor activity, esp. on unforgiving concrete, but as little as possible between me and Mother Earth out in the wild.

Tabi or "Ninja boots" have the added plus of just looking deadly cool! The split toe design keeps the big and second toes from crumpling on impact -- the big toe misalignment from which most foot injuries radiate -- and keep ankles gently supported and aligned during assasinations and whatnot to avoid the shame of being caught, immobilized, at the scene of the act. (Ninjutsu is the Art of Stealth, after all.) Jika brand are popular, with a rubber sole for outdoors and a moleskin for indoor workouts.

From the post:

The excuse which the court condemned [in Alaska Wilderness League, et al. v. Kempthorne], as "misleading" is exactly the one Obama and his aides have been repeatedly making for why they issued exemptions to BP:  namely that, as the President put it, "under current law, the Interior Department has only 30 days to review an exploration plan submitted by an oil company. That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review."  As a result, the court found that MMS's approval of Shell's drilling plan (including the exemptions it issued) violated NEPA, and thus invalidated the approval and ordered MMS to re-review the proposal in compliance with the law.  That decision was issued in November, 2008 -- before the Obama administration even began -- so the notion that Obama Interior officials believed they only had 30 days to conduct a review, and that it therefore was forced to issue exemptions to BP, lacks credibility, to put that mildly.

Had MMS complied with the law and conducted an EIS of the BP project, would that have prevented the spill?  It's impossible to say, but quite possibly not.  But the broader point illustrated by this is the important one:   the extent to which the Executive Branch continues to be beholden to, controlled by, the industries it ostensibly regulates.

and

Salazar turned out to be exactly what it was obvious he would be when Obama chose him.  As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reported this week, Salazar hired Sylvia B. Vaca for the position of  deputy administrator for land and minerals management.  Who is Vaca?  She's a former BP Executive who is the classic case of the revolving-door sleaze that runs the Federal Government on behalf of the industries it purportedly regulates.  She was an Interior Department official during the Clinton administration, and then -- when the GOP took over -- she went to BP where she "held several senior management positions with the company," then went back to the Interior Department under Salazar.  Though she did not work on BP matters, she is, as Sheppard put it, "an excellent example of the revolving door between government and industry that MMS has been accused of facilitating" (h/t Susie Madrak).

At his Press Conference, Obama blamed the Bush administration for what he called the "cozy relationship" between MMS and the oil industry, but was then asked by CBS' Chip Reid:  "you knew as soon as you came in, and Secretary Salazar did, about this cozy relationship. But you continued to give permits -- some of them under questionable circumstances.  Is it fair to blame the Bush administration? Don't you deserve some of that?"  In reply, Obama acknowledged:  

Well -- well, let -- let me just make the point that I made earlier, which is, Salazar came in and started cleaning house, but the culture had not fully changed in MMS. And absolutely, I take responsibility for that. There -- there wasn't sufficient urgency in terms of the pace of how those changes needed to take place.

Was hiring a BP executive one of the ways that Salazar was trying to end the "cozy relationship" between Interior and the oil industry?  Was automatically issuing exemptions from NEPA's Environmental Impact Study requirement a way of doing so?  Of course "there wasn't sufficient urgency" in cleaning up MMS.  What happened here was obvious:  Obama chose one of the most industry-pleasing, industry-subservient Democrats to head the Interior Department despite what everyone knew was the pervasive corruption at that Department and its serving as an industry rubber stamp for years.  And Obama got exactly what was obvious he would get by making that choice.

And this, also from update to the post, should make people's blood boil:

UPDATE:  In a New York Times article detailing internal BP documents regarding safety concerns for the Deepwater Horizon project, this passage appears:

One of the final indications of such problems was an April 15 request for a permit to revise [BP's] plan to deal with a blockage, according to federal documents obtained from Congress by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.

In the documents, company officials apologized to federal regulators for not having mentioned the type of casing they were using earlier, adding that they had "inadvertently" failed to include it.  In the permit request, they did not disclose BP's own internal concerns about the design of the casing.

Less than 10 minutes after the request was submitted, federal regulators approved the permit.

Now that's some fast rubber-stamping.

As for the shallow water drilling, David Dayen at the FDL News Desk say this:

It's the same Minerals Management Service doing the same lax regulatory oversight job, whether the wells get drilled in deep water or shallow water. The same environmental impact studies are likely to be waived. The same laissez-faire attitude on safety equipment is likely to predominate. Indeed, the MMS may get broken into parts shortly, which would at least alter if not stall the regulatory oversight of particularly new wells. The simplest recommendation that I've seen made - force oil companies to drill a relief well at the same time as the main well, in case of a blowout - would not get incorporated into this shallow-water project, in all likelihood. Yet their blowout preventer could just as easily malfunction, and the operations to cap it could face the same fate as the Ixtoc I disaster in the Gulf in 1979, which was only 150 feet deep.

So let's be as precise as the President: we're currently under a moratorium for offshore drilling, unless the well would dip less than 500 feet into the water, in which case, go for it.

Reid trails the other two candidates in a head to head but pulls out if it's the cookiest of the three. poll

Obama said this when he signed the order:

"That process has now concluded, and I am proud to announce that earlier today, I signed a memorandum that requires executive agencies to take immediate action to extend to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees a number of meaningful benefits, from family assistance services to hardship transfers to relocation expenses," Obama said in a statement.

And then there's this:

The president also has urged Congress to pass the Domestic Partners Benefit and Obligations Act, which would extend family benefits now available to heterosexual federal workers to gay and lesbian federal workers as well.