“Ponies and Balloons”
I was invited the following week to go behind “enemy lines.” They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana eight days in. Open door invitation to sit like a fly on the wall. Can you believe it? It’s really going on. They also gave me security clearance to go up to the Homer Incident Command Post which is over the entire region of Louisiana. I’ve been in Coast Guard planes all the way out to the site itself. Helicopters. Boat rides. I have been everywhere that anybody could ever want to go to get an inside look at what’s really going on. …
about a week and half in, I learned what “ponies and balloons” meant. “Ponies and balloons” means that every time an official is headed anywhere near here, they get a heads up.. All assets are deployed into the hardest hit areas. The official comes in, flies over, “good job, fellas” (waves), pats ‘em on the back. When that official disappears out of the hardest hit area, so does 75%-80% of the response.
It’s happening. It’s happening every day. I’m watching it. I’ve seen it. I don’t agree with it. Anyone in this room’s not gonna agree with it. Anyone in our great nation’s not gonna agree with it.
We are expendable to these people. We do not matter.
Watch the whole thing:
I look over the Gulf and I notice that there’s big swarms of birds. That’s not unusual. I figured they was diving on bait. But what where they diving into oil sheen? Because birds don’t know any better. We’re driving out towards the birds. I wanted to see what they were diving into. I wanted to know. As we get out to the birds, I don’t know if you’ve been out on the water much, if you’ve seen a big school of fish. They have like a boil on the water. It looks like a pot boiling. The fish boil the water with their moves. As we drove into it, there was big Bull Reds (Bull Mouths?) with their mouths on top of the water , laying sideways , swimming upside down in a circle. Again, hundreds of thousands of them, school after school after school. They were dying. They were so disoriented that they were running into the side of my boat.
There’s something evil going on in the Gulf, something larger than BP.
