No relief coming from BP's mounting failures

Because of the fact that virtually nothing BP has tried or said has worked or proven to be truthful, I wonder if some government agency is making worst-case contingency plans to stop the oil? Who is to say that relief wells, the alleged ultimate fix scheduled for later this summer, will solve the problem in the Gulf of Mexico?

Here is something to ponder. If approximately 32 percent of the Gulf of Mexico has already been closed to fishing in just under two months, wouldn't that mean that after six months the gulf will be more or less destroyed by the crude oil? Logic tells me that the oil will begin to work its way into the Caribbean and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. In a year, most of the eastern waterways, including fresh-water rivers, bays and inlets, will have been contaminated by BP's spill.

There is enough oil in Deepwater Horizon well to flow for decades

Extend the doomsday scenario out to the end of, oh, say 2012, and most of the planet will have been impacted by this gusher. Clean water will become a rare commodity. Economies will collapse, particularly in small countries like the Dominican Republic, which rely heavily on tourism. Many animals will go extinct and human beings will get sick or die from exposure to the oil. It's not too far-fetched to believe that wars will ignite in the quest for clean water, something that has been suggested even before this latest environmental disaster.

Is it too far-fetched to believe in a snow-balling effect that will lead us to the brink? What evidence is there to lead anyone to think that this gusher will be capped this summer or even this year? If the technology existed to stop it, wouldn't it have been sealed by now?

The relief well (there are actually two being drilled, one as a backup) is just another theory of how to stop the flow. But it's never been proven at this depth. It's not a guaranteed end, despite what BP claims.

Our government seems to be placing too much faith in BP.

Our founding fathers warned of the dangers of corporations having too much power within our democracy. They saw large corporations as potential threats to our country, and many of the causes of our economic woes are certainly proof that the founders were correct. I bet, however, they never envisioned a corporation having the power to destroy the planet as we know it.

Check out this website for more oil spill news from CNN's Anderson Cooper.

One news story that needs to go away

I wasn't going to do this. I didn't want to be part of the madness. But the insanity of the coverage of the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James breakup is just too much for me not to comment.

Why does anyone outside of their families and friends care about this couple? Their split should have been a brief in the newspaper, a mention at the end of some celebrity-oriented show, a blurb on the Yahoo news home page. That's it.

But here we are, several weeks into the breakup and now we learn that Bullock is going to make an appearance at The MTV Movie Awards on June 6 in Los Angeles. Oh, my God! Stop the presses. Get those CNN reporters out of Louisiana and send them to Hollywood.

I've had it with this story. Not one more minute of any legitimate journalist's time should be spent on it. Unless the mediocre-at-best actress sets herself on fire at the awards or the biker-turned-drama queen figures out a way to stop the oil leak in the gulf, I don't want to hear or read another word about them, their marriage, their childhood traumas or anything else. In fact, I am getting ready to burn my West Coast Choppers t-shirt when I am done with this post.

Lighter news is sometimes a necessary evil in a celebrity-obsessed society such as ours. Media companies need to stay in business. I get it. But the breakup of these two morons doesn't even rise to the level of the Gore separation. Get off of it already.

While on the subject of media coverage, I am glad to see newsman Anderson Cooper of CNN doing a good job on the oil story each night at 10 p.m. ET. While some other major media have pulled back a bit, CNN seems to be intensifying its coverage of the environmental disaster. This is literally a story that gets worse by the day and deserves smart coverage, which Cooper seems to be providing.

The oil spill story, not the Bullock-James ordeal, is one that needs to remain above the fold for many weeks, if not months to come. It's a story that impacts us all in ways we might not have ever seen, while the divorce of two celebrities means relatively nothing.