Politics. On Point.

 Focus Shifts To Mending Communities. NOAA Administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco explaining the sealing and containment phase that may have permanently stopped the oil from leaking in the Gulf, as National Incident Commander, Admiral Thad Allen looks on.  Photo/CD Brown. During yesterday's White House press briefing Rear Admiral Thad Allen, White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner, and NOAA's Jane Lubchenco came armed with pie charts and figures to show that the latest effort to contain the Gulf oil spill has been successful, and that for the most part, the oil has either "evaporated or been burned, skimmed and recovered from the wellhead, or dispersed." Dispersed "means broken up from large chunks into smaller chunks", explained Lubchenco. "Dispersed oil is just little tiny droplets that then remain beneath the surface."  The federal goverment released "new, scientific analysis" (that most Americans won...

We're Not In Kansas Anymore, Either. Adm. Thad Allen , national incident commander for Deepwater BP oil spill response, provided an update on the ongoing Deepwater BP oil spill response efforts in the Port of New Orleans Administration Building earlier this week. "I think the first thing to understand is, we’re not talking about capping the well anymore; we’re talking about containing the well. The difference between capping the well and absorbing the pressure and being able to hold that until the relief well is completed, we’re at, now, where we’re containing the well, which means that we’re taking the hydrocarbons that are coming up and actually bringing them to the surface and actually producing oil and flaring off natural gas. Since we’re in a containment operation, we don’t want to restrict the flow of pressures on that well bore, because I don’t think we know the conditions of it, given the results of the top kill data that we got back", said Allen. It'...