News Day: Fast and cheap / Robyne Robinson / Operation Top Kill

What were they thinking? A misguided U.S. Wireless billboard campaign folded after a few hours of intense Facebook-organized protests yesterday.

USI Wireless is a pimp. This is how they’re selling their wireless service in Minneapolis. Give them… a call at 952.253.3262 (Option 1) or email: info@usiwireless.com. When I called, they assured me that they did some test marketing and everybody loved it, but the 100,000 American girls sexually trafficked in the US with an initial recruitment age of 11-14 might not guffaw quite as loudly as the focus group did. By: Stacey Burns

The campaign succeeded in about three hours. @DaveSnyder reports:

From CM Elizabeth Glidden: “Thanks to the many residents contacting me about USIW inappropriate billboards… I made personal calls to the 2 co-founders of USIW and forwarded a steady stream of your comments. The good news — billboards… will be down tomorrow. I thank you all for your advocacy — you made the dif…

Success is nice, but @CharleyUnderwood put it in context:

Life of sex references on billboards = 3 hours. Iraq war so far = 7 years, 2 months and 6 days so far. Just saying.

As operation Top Kill continues, BBC reports that President Obama is about to extend the moratorium on new drilling permits for six months. Of course, that doesn’t apply to extensions and waivers on existing drilling permits, as noted in the NYT. And Arctic drilling is still on, with the apparent enthusiastic support of the Alaska region of the U.S. Minerals Management agency:

The approvals also came after many of the agency’s most experienced scientists had left, frustrated that their concerns over environmental threats from drilling had been ignored. …

Shortly after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposed reconfiguring the agency, John Goll, the head of the Alaska region, called an “all hands” meeting, according to a staff member there.

Afterward, people lingered to eat a cake decorated with the words, “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

TPM is keeping tabs on Operation Top Kill, with minute-by-minute updates and embedded video feeds. Some news media say it worked, others say it didn’t quite work, others say it’s too soon to tell. Note: there does not seem to be general agreement on what “it worked” means, especially since:

Scientists are now reporting that the Gulf Coast oil spill has been leaking at least twice as much oil — and possibly five times as much — as originally estimated.

Just to keep it all in perspective, AP says the BP Gulf Coast spill has now surpassed the Exxon Valdez, with the most conservative estimates putting the total at 19 million gallons and the high end estimates at about 39 million.

In perhaps the only solid good news from the oil spill front today, the Minerals Management Service Director Elizabeth Birnbaum quit.

And, as every Twitter feed and news outlet has now reported, Robyne Robinson has accepted the lieutenant governor spot as Matt Entenza’s running mate. Now who will Tom Horner pick?

The Minnesota governor’s race is up for grabs, according to the most recent Rasmussen Report poll. All three of the DFL candidates run neck and neck with Tom Emmer, who holds a lead that’s less than the margin of error. And no matter which DFLer is matched against Emmer, Independence Party candidate Tom Horner holds steady at about 12%, while 15-17 percent are undecided.