Monday, May 31, 2010

Last Call

And the oil geyser news just keeps getting worse.
The disaster, in its 42nd day Monday, is already the largest oil spill in U.S. history and officials are treating it it as the country's biggest environmental catastrophe.

Although Louisiana's wetlands and fishing grounds have been the worst hit so far by the spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said moderate southerly and southwesterly winds this week may start moving oil closer to the Mississippi Delta.

"Model results indicate that oil may move north to threaten the barrier islands off Mississippi and Alabama later in the forecast period," NOAA said in its 72-hour prediction on the expected trajectory of the huge oil slick.
Mississippi and Alabama have escaped lightly so far, with only scattered tar balls and "oil debris" reaching its coasts.

But the NOAA forecast was a sober reminder that oil from the unchecked spill, broken up and carried by winds and ocean currents, could threaten a vast area of the U.S. Gulf Coast, including tourism mecca Florida, as well as Cuba and Mexico.
Seven weeks in, no end in sight.  Could be another 2 months and change before it stops, too.  Should BP's latest plan fail, and the sawed off riser pipe increases the spillage by another 20-25%, then who knows.

That worst-case scenario of hundreds of billions in damage is looking more and more like reality every day.

A Slick Takeover

Former Clinton Treasury man Robert Reich argues it's time for the government to take over BP's operations until the geyser is capped.
It's time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP's operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public will know what's going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP's strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the president is ultimately in charge.

If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP's north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The Obama administration keeps saying BP is in charge because BP has the equipment and expertise necessary to do what's necessary. But under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public's interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public. As a result, the public continues to worry that a private for-profit corporation is responsible for stopping a public tragedy.
He goes on to list five reasons:
  1. BP continues to lie.
  2. BP has no accountability.
  3. The plans from here on out get riskier and riskier.
  4. The government has no authority to force BP to use other strategies.
  5. The President has no legal authority otherwise.
Probably worth looking into, I would think...

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

In all seriousness, does somebody want to explain to me how Israel's move today wasn't a message to Barack Obama consisting of the words "screw" and "you"?

BooMan games out the world response, especially from Turkey, who is now on the brink of turning this into a much, much bigger problem by withdrawing its ambassador from Israel and vowing to send another aid flotilla.
If Turkey is promising to send new supplies with naval escort, then we're headed for an epic showdown between two of Americas closest allies. I don't think Obama is getting too much rest and relaxation this Memorial Day.

Meanwhile, the Arab League will meet tomorrow and put immense pressure on Egypt to lift their portion of the Gazan blockade. I can't imagine that Egypt will refuse. In fact, I think Israel has jeopardized their peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan.

All this, and for what? To keep construction materials from the Gazan people? Israel is not behaving in anything resembling a rational manner. They just lost the only friends they had not named America. And who can help them now but Big Daddy? The problem is that Big Daddy has more to consider than Israeli's deluded interests. We have to worry about our own image and international relationships. 
Israel is now forcing us to choose between them and the Islamic world.  Obama's decision will shape our country for a generation.

No pressure, Mr. President.

Close All Shops In The Mall, Cancel The Three Ring Circus

The Economist has a good point: if you think President Obama hasn't done enough in the Gulf, shouldn't you be advancing the idea that we should shut down all offshore oil rigs?
Who's raising concrete critiques of administration policy? Chiefly Mr Obama. Last Thursday he laid out a series of mistakes he felt he had made. Chief among them was taking oil companies at their word when they claimed to have the capability to cope with worst-case deep-sea drilling catastrophes. Now, if we feel that the president has failed to act aggressively enough on this issue, both before and since the accident, then what course of action should we now be calling on him to take? One logical step might be for the government to immediately shut down every offshore drilling rig in proximity to America's coasts, pending the development of redundant, fail-safe capacity for capping and remediating catastrophic blowouts. Is this a good idea? I don't know. But if you wanted to argue concretely that the administration had not been acting aggressively enough in this crisis, then this is the sort of more-aggressive action you might be calling for.
And of course if Obama did this, he'd be slaughtered in the media and by the Republicans.  The Village cries out for "Daddy" to save us, but if Obama did that, he would be immediately portrayed as a fascist dictator of the highest order.
What we're seeing here is a perfect circus of media nothingball: people aggressively criticising the administration for not acting aggressively enough while aggressively ignoring the fact that they oppose anything aggressive the administration does.
It's almost like the entire Village is running on an irrational knee-jerk reaction to attack anything that Barack Obama does.

I wonder if there's a name for that?

The Kroog Versus Neo-Hooverism

I like Paul Krugman, he's a smart guy, a brilliant economist, and he knows what he's talking about on the fiscal side of things.  But on the politics side, he comes across as a bit naive at times, like he does today as he talks about the growing crusade to cut the deficit in the middle of the worst unemployment in a generation.
A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.

Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”

The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”

Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading. And it’s already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed — and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both — and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more. 
Now Krugman's correct on all this...except for the why.  He attributes it to craziness when he should be attributing it to old fashioned greed.

Look folks, the powers that be have decided that the continuation of the covenant between government and worker is unsustainable.  That's not true of course, but to keep this up, the wealthiest would actually have to, you know, pay more taxes.  That will not be allowed to happen.

So, the notion that we have to cut spending, that government is evil and inefficient, and that those who are out of work are simply lazy and undeserving parasites, well that's all over the newspapers and blogs these days.  The GOP is more than happy with it, and the Democrats are increasingly falling for it.  After all, poor people don't get into Congress, ya dig?  They don't matter.

Let them suffer.  The wealthier will grow more wealthy, and that's the way the world is supposed to work, right?

StupidiNews Focus

The Gaza flotilla story is a grim one.

The Israelis are basically saying that this was suicide by soldier, and that the aid workers killed were shot in self-defense as Israel was maintaining its naval blockade in its own waters.  The entire mission was a trap, the Israelis say, and that they had no choice but to open fire.  Two commandos were wounded in the exchange.

The Palestinians on the other hand say the flotilla was boarded in open, international waters, and that means the Israelis were committing international piracy, and that the aid workers grabbed whatever was handy to try to defend themselves from the Israeli commandos.  They lost badly and were slaughtered as a result.

Neither side is fully telling the truth, I suspect.  But the ship was either in international waters or it wasn't.  If it was in international waters, then Israel has a lot to answer for.  Turkey has already recalled its ambassador to Israel, the EU is furious, and even the White House is demanding a full investigation.

If the ship was in Israeli waters however, that's blockade running.  The Israelis used excessive force to stop the flotilla, but a naval blockade on your own nation's waters is perfectly legal.

The key is where the flotilla was at the time of the attack.  Somehow, I doubt we will never know the truth there.

And the clock ticks closer to a Israel/Iran conflict.

StupidiNews, Memorial Day Edition

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Last Call

More than 50,000 protested against Arizona's Papers Please law this weekend.  But nobody cared.
Critics and supporters of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigrants held separate rallies in the state on Saturday, highlighting the deep rift over immigration ahead of congressional elections this November.


Thousands of civil rights and labor activists from across the United States -- carrying banners that read: "Obama Keep Your Promise" -- rallied in Phoenix to protest the law, which requires state and local police to investigate the immigration status of people they suspect are in the country illegally.

The Most Dangerous Game

I remarked earlier this week about how the Republicans will, if given control of Congress in 2010, immediately try to impeach Obama.  We've got the where, and when, now we just need why and the by whom.

Digby provides those clues this evening.
Here's the best example I've seen of how the noise machine is framing this Sestak non-scandal:

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney offered her thoughts on why the White House tapped former president Bill Clinton to try and persuade Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) to drop out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary. After saying Clinton doesn't have "an impeccable record of integrity," Cheney argued: "You know, there's a lot here that just smells funny. If the White House in fact thought that what they were doing was above board, why did they go to Bill Clinton? Why did they need a cut out for whatever they were doing?"

It's all there, even down to the "it just smells funny" routine. Earlier this week on the Mclaughlin Report, the increasingly agitated Monica Crowley accused the administration of a cover-up and they were all shrieking for an "independent counsel." (That's right, they're talking about bringing it back. I take that as a strong indication that they know they can't win the presidency in 2012, so they simply hope to wreak destruction upon this one.)

Media Matters has the full explanation of the non-scandal here, if you haven't ben following it. But none of that really matters. This has taken on a life of its own. Whether they can make anything of this specific charge is unknown. But what it signals is a return to the Clinton Rules and the scandal politics of the past. Regardless of whether or not any particular scandal takes hold, the way this works is by the cut of a thousand deaths.
Indeed.  Sestak, Obamacare, Deepwater Horizon, hey I even expect a few shots at Eric Holder.  That's the why.  The "by whom" is the most interesting part:  our old friend Liz Cheney.
I can't help but wonder whether or not the likes of Liz Cheney would so arrogantly shoot her mouth off if the Democrats hadn't decided that there was no need to look in the rearview mirror at the mayhem created by her father's bloodthirsty, corrupt regime. It might make these people think twice if they were held to the same standard they hold others. And until that happens, I'm afraid we are going to continue to see this dynamic play itself out in our politics.

BTW: You can see the ambition rolling off of Cheney in waves. She's going to run at some point, I have no doubt. And she makes Palin look like a frisky little kitten by comparison. She is the most dangerous woman in America.
Digby does have a point.  With the economy getting worse in 2011, no matter who's running the House, the Republicans will demand Obama be impeached.  And yes, Liz Cheney will make her bones off the drive to send Obama to prison for the crime of not being a Republican.

They will go all in on Obama Derangement Syndrome.  The bad part is there's a fair chance of it working.

Palmetto State Player

I haven't dived into the whole Nikki Haley thing in South Carolina yet (Betty Cracker has the story here) but I will say TPM's David Kurtz and his take on the whole sordid affair is fascinating.
I hadn't seen South Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley on camera until we found this video of her today addressing a hungry pack of reporters eager for any morsel about her alleged affair with political consultant turned blogger Will Folks. As a result, I didn't realize what a consummate pro she is. She's something to watch. Collected, sharp-witted, and always a smile, but not plastic. She's got the makings of a national politician, were it not for the current messiness.

She has quite the personal story, too. She was born Nimrata Randhaw in South Carolina to Sikh immigrant parents. She became an accountant, married, and had two children. In 2004, she knocked off the longest serving member of the South Carolina House to win her seat, becoming the first South Asian elected to public office in the state.

She denies the affair, and he hasn't produced proof of it yet. So I'm withholding judgment. But if it is true and the attractive first generation overachiever ended up in an affair with a scraggly blogger then decided to run for governor, doesn't that make her pretty much a badass? I don't condone it, but I kind of admire it
This one's raising my Moose Lady alarm bells.  I always said that if a smarter version of Sarah Palin ever came along, the Democrats were in a whole hell of a lot of trouble.  If Nikki Haley manages to come away the winner in the June 8 primary, she'll be South Carolina's next governor.  Her politics are straight Palmetto State GOP, the Tea Party loves her, Club For Growth loves her, the NRA loves her, and she's an Indian-American woman who pushes the Palin talking points...and a hell of a lot smarter.

My inner Karl Rove says "What better way for the GOP to win than by playing the race card AND the gender card against those mean old racist, sexist liberals?"

The Democrats had better keep a very, very close eye on her.  More than anyone else on the 2016 radar (and maybe even 2012) this woman is a bonafide threat.

Sunday Funnies: Great Minds Think Alike Edition

Bobblespeaks are particularly hysterical this week.  Best line from BP's Bob Dudley:
Dudley: uh I think we subcontracted that out to Acme and some coyote.
Great minds really do think alike.

The New Israel-ity

Now that the jig is up on Israel's nukes, the Obama administration wants Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  Israel on the other hand intends no such action.
Israel on Saturday rejected as "flawed and hypocritical" a declaration by signatories of a global anti-nuclear arms treaty that urged it to sign the pact and make its atomic facilities subject to U.N. inspections.

All 189 parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the United States, called on Friday in a declaration that singled out Israel for a conference in 2012 to discuss banning weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

"As a non-signatory state of the NPT, Israel is not obligated by the decisions of this conference, which has no authority over Israel," the Israeli government said in an emailed statement.

"Given the distorted nature of this resolution, Israel will not be able to take part in its implementation," it said.
Kind of makes it hard to demand Iranian nuclear inspections when Israel refuses to do the same, does it not?  Israel refuses to join the NPT because Iran keeps playing inspection games.  Iran won't honor the NPT because Israel won't.  And Israel doesn't have to because America keeps giving Israel cover.
The Israeli statement said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would discuss the NPT declaration with President Barack Obama when the two leaders meet on Tuesday at the White House.

Obama welcomed agreements on a range of non-proliferation issues at the NPT meeting but said he would oppose efforts to isolate Israel and any actions to jeopardize its security.
Right.  Iran signs the NPT and admittedly is violating the terms.  As a result, Iran has been hit with sanctions.  Israel simply refuses to sign the damn thing at all...makes it easier to violate the terms that way.  Which one's the rogue nation, again?

Oil's Well That Doesn't End Well For This Oil Well, Part 16

http://www.popcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/wile-e-coyote.jpg

So with Top Kill(tm) the latest Wile E. Coyote plan to go bad for BP, what's next?
The most ambitious bid yet for a temporary fix ended in failure Saturday when BP said it was unable to overwhelm the broken well with heavy fluids and junk. The company determined the "top kill" had failed after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 5,000 feet underwater.

Now, BP hopes to saw through a pipe leading out from the well and cap it with a funnel-like device using the same remotely guided undersea robots that have failed in other tries to stop the gusher. 
The odds of each successive plan working are less and less, folks.  I agree with Bob Cesca.
It's becoming increasingly clear that this oil will continue to gush until the relief well is finished.

Speaking of which, Canada requires mandatory relief wells to be drilled with every main well as an obvious safety mechanism. And BP is lobbying the Canadian government to drop that rule. Yes. Really.

Yesterday on MSNBC, which has a penchant for hosting lobbyists on their various shows for some reason, the senior economic adviser for the American Petroleum Institute, Rayola Dougher, scoffed at such an idea -- basically suggesting preemptive relief wells were out of the question.

The cost of drilling a relief well: $100 million. The cost of mitigating the BP oil spill so far: $930 million.

She said, "That would be -- that would really make it unviable [sic]. I couldn't even imagine such a suggestion."

Corporate criminals.
Indeed.  You'd better start imagining that suggestion, lady.  On the other hand, I fully expect the Democrats to screw up offshore drilling reform as badly as they have health care and financial regulation reform, by passing reforms that aren't reforms at all.

Meanwhile, when this latest plan fails, there's always nuking the damn thing. We may not have a choice.
As the latest effort to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico meets with failure, the idea of nuking the immediate area to seal the oil underground is gaining steam among some energy experts and researchers.

One prominent energy expert known for predicting the oil price spike of 2008 says sending a small nuclear bomb down the leaking well is "probably the only thing we can do" to stop the leak.

Matt Simmons, founder of energy investment bank Simmons & Company, also says that there is evidence of a second oil leak about five to seven miles from the initial leak that BP has focused on fixing. That second leak, he says, is so large that the initial one is "minor" in comparison.
The worst case scenario I keep talking about, the one that will cripple the Eastern seaboard for a decade and cost half a trillion dollars in economic damage or more, is looking not only likely, but too tame.  The real damage could in fact be a full blown national economic depression.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Last Call

James Fallows explains precisely why our government doesn't work.
As you may have heard elsewhere, the Obama Administration has been relatively slow in vetting and choosing nominees for many of its important posts -- but then has encountered extreme slowness from the Senate in approving the appointments once they get made. If you go to this White House site, you'll find a searchable, sortable list of all 820+ nominations and appointments made so far in the Administration; about 240 have not even come up for a Senate vote. If you go to this U.S. Senate site and click on the link for "Executive Calendar," you'll get a long PDF showing in its "nominations" section the scores and scores of people who have come through committees but not received a vote on the Senate floor. (Direct link to the PDF here.)

On Thursday afternoon, just before its Memorial Day recess, the Senate had planned to consider about 80 of these nominations as a group. They all had been through financial and security vetting; they had been through committee consideration; they were headed for jobs that in many cases now stood vacant; they were ready to go. Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, moved for approval by unanimous consent, apparently believing that a deal to clear out the huge backlog had been struck. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, begged to differ. He was still sore about the recess appointment of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Therefore he wouldn't agree to the en-bloc vote. As he put it:
Unfortunately, we are snagged over one particular nomination which has already been defeated by the Senate, and that was the nomination of Craig Becker to be on the NLRB. The President then recessed Mr. Becker and recessed a Democratic nomination to the NLRB but not a Republican nominee to the NLRB. There is a fundamental lack of equity and fairness involved, and that has been a significant hindrance in coming to a consent agreement.
Fundamental lack of equity and fairness, indeed.
It really is that simple, folks.  Republicans right now are pointing at the Gulf of Mexico and screaming that Obama has failed, that the federal government has failed, and that it can never work.  Of course it can never work when the Republican Party does everything it possibly can to make sure it cannot work for anyone but the Republicans themselves.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

In the end, say what you will about Sarah Palin's politics, political acumen, capacity for wonkery or her speeches:  there is one thing that Sarah Palin does better than practically anyone else in America, and that's playing the victim card.
After that happened, McGinniss -- who is hoping to finish his local research for the book by Labor Day -- became the target of fury from Palin fans. After radio host Mark Levin gave out the author's e-mail address, McGinniss got 5000 messages in four hours, eventually shutting down the account. Wasilla police and state troopers are keeping a watchful eye on the place, although McGinniss said no one had come to the house to threaten him on Friday. He simply didn't anticipate the scale of Palin's response.

"I would term this hysterical," said McGinniss. "The mayor said to me, when I chatted with him in his office a couple of days ago, 'You know, if Sarah had the brains that we like to think she has, Todd would have come back and said, do you know who's living next door? This son of a bitch McGinniss who wrote that Portfolio piece. He's writing a book about you. Sarah should have baked a plate of cookies, and come around the fence, and said hi, and laughed about this.' I would have happily accepted a cookie, and then in my book I would have had a lovely scene about how gracious she had been." McGinniss sighed. "She is, in many ways, a very gracious person."
Even Joe McGinniss himself feels like the bad guy here is Joe McGinniss, when it's not.  And there are probably millions out there who would like to take this guy into the Alaskan woods and "finish his book for him".

If this is really what McGinniss thought, he's either very brave, crazy, or incredibly naive.  Either way, I don't expect him to last much longer up there.  He'll be "convinced" to leave somehow.

Top Kill Slays The Drag--OH YOU'RE KIDDING ME!

Top Kill(tm) has now officially failed.  Surprise!
BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, the company's chief operating officer said Saturday.


The oil giant has tried for days to stop the the largest oil spill in U.S. history by pumping heavy, mudlike drilling fluid into a ruptured oil well, a method known as "top kill."

The next option is to place a custom-built cap known as the "lower marine riser package" over the leak, the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles said. BP crews were working Saturday to ready the materials for that option should it become necessary, he said.

"We've been prepping that all along in case we need to move to that option," he said. "People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don't know."

And if "lower marine riser package" were to fail, he said, BP engineers would try placing a second blowout preventer on top of the first, which failed to cut of the oil flow after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.
If these other plans were more likely to work than top kill, wouldn't BP have tried them first?   Everything BP has thrown at this thing has failed miserably.  If we're risking 3-4 months of unrestricted flow putting potentially tens of millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf from any one deep water well, then why are any of the hundreds of these wells still being allowed to operate?

The Last Easy Rider

Via the Rumpies, we'll miss you, Dennis Hopper.

http://www.bikemenu.com/photos/famous/Dennis%20Hopper01.jpg

Ride on, brother.  Ride on.

Oiling The Wheels Of Justice

Oh hey, looks like there's federal criminal charges on the way for BP.
A team of top federal prosecutors and investigators has taken the first steps toward a formal criminal investigation into oil giant BP's actions before and after the drilling rig disaster off Louisiana.

The investigators, who have been quietly gathering evidence in Louisiana over the last three weeks, are focusing on whether BP skirted federal safety regulations and misled the U.S. government by saying it could quickly clean up an environmental accident.

The team has met with U.S. attorneys and state officials in the Gulf Coast region and has sent letters to executives of BP and Transocean Ltd., the drilling rig owner, warning them against destroying documents or other internal records.

Underscoring the gravity of the inquiry, the team is headed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Ignacia Moreno of the environment and natural resources division and Assistant Atty. Gen. Tony West, who heads the Justice Department's civil division.

The move by federal prosecutors represents an escalation in the government's involvement in the oil spill — from coordinating the environmental cleanup to searching for possible criminal violations.

The Justice Department's inquiry is a standard preliminary step taken to determine whether a formal investigation is warranted. But even in this early stage, it has the earmarks of one of the largest investigative undertakings of the Obama administration.
This is of course all happening because Obama is controlled by BP, right?

Look folks, what happened at Deepwater Horizon was criminal negligence, followed by BP misleading the government, the public, and investors about their ability to solve the problem, capped by mounting evidence that the company was cutting corners to save costs at every opportunity.

Yes.  Some people need to go to jail for a very, very long time...and BP needs to be punished so badly that every oil company that drills off our shores is more afraid of the legal action than the response from the damn stock market.

The Newest Winger Outrage

The White House sent in hundreds of cleanup workers to be photo ops at the President's speech on Thursday!

Only it wasn't the White House...it was BP.
Officials from Jefferson Parish claim BP bused 400 cleanup workers into Grand Isle on Friday in time for a visit from President Barack Obama.

Jefferson Parish Councilman John Young said the workers were brought in to clean oil off Grand Isle's beaches.

The extra workers were brought in for Friday only, at a rate of $12 an hour, officials told WDSU. They were mostly from Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes.

Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts didn’t buy into the cleanup effort.

"They must think we're all fools," he said.Roberts called BP's efforts "shameful.""The level of cleanup and cooperation from BP in the last week in no way compares to the effort shown on the island today," Roberts said.

"This is a total shame that a mockery has been made of this visit by the executives of BP."
Now, how this ended up being the "White House" doing this I have no idea.   Oh wait, yes I do:  Wingers love their Obama Derangement Syndrome.  When it comes to facts, not so much....

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

Friday, May 28, 2010

Last Call

The Big Dog weighs in on Blanche Lincoln vs. Bill Halter, and tells progressives to go Lewinsky themselves.
Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.

He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here. 
Right.  Voting against Lincoln to send Dems a message is "being used" and "manipulated" by the Left.  I guess that means voting for Blanche Lincoln and her nakedly transparent ploy to win over progressive votes with her little derivatives amendment to the financial reform bill, which will be dropped by the House and Senate in conference the second Lincoln clears the primary runoff on June 8, is not manipulating voters at all.

Hey Big Dog?  Stop crapping on the rug again.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Digby asks, upon remarking that the DoJ is sort of looking into homegrown terror threats now:
Do people believe that Al Qaeda is going to take over the United States? Really?
This one's easy.  Replace "Al Qaeda" with "swarthy gentlemen" and you're a lot closer to the truth.

Something's Wrong, Something's Amiss...

Ask yourself with a 9.7% unemployment rate and tens of millions of Americans out of work why the deficit is now more important than job creation.
A Democratic plan to send $23 billion to the states to save the jobs of 100,000 to 300,000 public school teachers, librarians, counselors and other employees slated for layoffs looks dead for the time being.

Blame it on election-year politics. The anti-Washington, anti-spending mood has become so potent that even Democrats are antsy about helping teachers, one of their most long-standing and generous allies.

"We are in a situation now where a portion of our caucus is rebelling against just about any kind of spending," said Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri.

The layoffs already have begun. Advocates for teachers are calling them catastrophic. Critics of the emergency aid say states need to clean up their fiscal acts and make changes.

In the meantime, large, populous states such as California and Texas, for example, are each expected to absorb the loss of more than 30,000 teachers and other personnel, according to White House estimates.

Schools are cutting staff and programs because the recession has depleted state tax revenues, which pay for public education.

Democrats in the House of Representatives had hoped to pass the $23 billion emergency bailout this week as part of a spending bill for the war in Afghanistan that was slated for passage, but fiscally conservative members from tough districts weren't happy about having to defend another vote that would increase the deficit.
So another 100k-300k lost jobs in a borderline depression economy is a easier thing to defend?  Politically it's poison to save a teacher's job now?  You know what?  We deserve to have the GOP run this country into the ground.  States can't clean up their fiscal acts if they are never, ever allowed to raise taxes.

So all that happens will be cuts, cuts, cuts and cuts by people who say any taxes and any government spending are inherently evil.  Well, all except the military, that is.

If it wasn't going to assure the destruction of the country, I'd tell the Dems to screw it and let the GOP have the country again.

Top Kill Slays The Drag--OH NOW WHAT IS IT?!?

Top Kill(tm).  Still not working.
Warning that "ultimate success is uncertain," BP said Friday it could take all weekend to complete its "top kill" technique aimed at plugging the catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico. 
Good thing it's a long weekend.  Hope you weren't headed for, say, the Gulf Coast for Memorial Day.

Look, in all seriousness I understand the government doesn't have the expertise in plugging massive oil geysers a mile deep.  There's no Department Of Plugging Oil Well Geysers, either.  But since there's not, and since we live in a world where these things fail and will cost us untold billions, you think we could maybe, you know, work how how to fix stuff like this BEFORE IT HAPPENS.

Full Circle (Jerk)

It's our old friend Rep. Steve King of Iowa, and he's got everything figured out...
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) issued a press release today that partially blames Muslims for the Department of Justice's attempts to challenge Arizona's controversial new immigration law.

"The ACLU, SEIU and the Muslim American Society are calling the shots at the Justice Department," the press release says, later blaming "the ACLU and their radical affiliates" for "dictating the policy of the White House."
These guys are beyond embarrassing to the point of insanity.  Obama Derangement Syndrome is the only idea the GOP has.

The Pain In Spain

Fitch's just downgraded Spain's credit from AA to AA+.  This is one of those "not good" things.  Dow down 110 or so.  Meanwhile, the only constant in the financial universe is people who will tell you that the best stock market ever is just around the corner.
Nonsense, says James Altucher, president of Formula Capital. The economy and market will continue to surprise, he tells Aaron in this clip. In fact, he's calling for a 'checkmark'-shaped recovery, stronger than the ‘V’ we hear so much about. "The debate is over, it’s already been a V, now the question is, does it continue? I think it does," he says.
Why is he so confident?
  • -- The job market is improving. “We've seen temp workers go up for seven months in a row," the fastest pace since 2004. Average pay and hours worked are up and the U.S. added 290,000 jobs last month, the biggest jump in four years. Plus, he notes, “jobs in self-employed positions and start-up businesses have jumped by 1.9 million in the past four months."
  • -- Car sales are up by 25% in April compared to a year ago. “How did Toyota have 27% year over year car sales increase?"
  • -- Pending home sale are up 21% year over year.
Altucher is confident all this will translate into record profits and an all-time high on the S&P 500 by the end of next year. "I know people are going to laugh," but the proof is in the pudding, he says.
This one goes in the Future Stupidity file dated December 2012. Also, I want what he's smoking.

Low Nooners

Nooners hits a new Village Obama Derangement Syndrome low, and that's really saying something.
I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another. 
This goes on for another 1000 words or so, how Obama is just the worst, most incompetent, most aloof, most detached, most wrong President of wrongess that wrongosity has ever spawned in the history of wrongkind, and all of this is just so blindingly obvious after just 18 months that Nooners is just in shock, you see.

Your liberal media is in the tank for Obama, right?  She just completely blows a gasket here and goes full firebagger in the end, declaring the Obama presidency over, and every just really HATES HATES HATES the guy, right?  Best part:
But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We're in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they'll probably get the big California earthquake. And they'll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.  
Damn that government for not stopping earthquakes and oil spills and stuff!  Because the frre market can fix it, right?

I salute you madam.  This column will go down in infamy.  Sully finishes her off:
The premise of Noonan's moronic column is that the federal government, especially the president, should be capable of ending an oil-pipe rupture owned and operated by private companies, using technology that only deep-sea oil companies deploy or understand. And if such a technical issue is not resolved by government immediately, it reveals paralyzing presidential weakness and the failure of an entire branch of political philosophy. Again: seriously? It's Obama's fault that under Bush and Cheney, government regulation of oil exploration was so poor and corrupt, corner cutting appears to have been routine? And this, Peggy, is what governments do, even when run by crazy-ass liberals. Governments do not dig for oil; they merely regulate those who dig for oil. That the government failed to do so under the previous administration does not seem to me to be proof that this administration has failed. 
Too true.  This is Village Idiocy, even for the Village Idiots.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

CalcRisk shows us the money...for homebuilders?
Legislation introduced yesterday by Reps. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) and original co-sponsors Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Joe Baca (D-Calif.) would help alleviate the severe lack of credit for acquisition, development and construction (AD&C) financing that threatens to end the budding housing recovery before it has time to take root, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

“We applaud these lawmakers for taking the lead to address the housing production credit crisis that is jeopardizing the housing and economic recovery now under way,” said NAHB Chairman Bob Jones, a home builder from Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

H.R. 5409, the Residential Construction Lending Act, would create a new residential construction loan guarantee program within the Department of Treasury to provide loans to builders with viable construction projects. Designed to unfreeze credit for small home building firms, the measure would expand the flow of credit to residential builders on competitive terms.
Umm...guys?  Point of order?  The reason why homebuilders are hurting is because there are millions of unsold homes on the market driving the price of homes down nationwide...exactly what will giving billions of dollars in loans to homebuilders making it easier to build more houses do in order to fix the problem of too many houses on the market?

Specifically Not Feelin' Randy, Part 6

I was wondering when Rand Paul was going to weigh in on immigration.  And by "weigh in" I mean "reveal himself once again to be nothing more than a wingnut lunatic".
Paul recently suggested to a Russian TV station that the U.S. should abandon its policy of granting citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants -- even if they're born on U.S. soil.

Paul also said he's discussed instituting an "underground electrical fence" on the border to keep out unwanted elements, though he emphasized that he's "not opposed to letting people come in and work and labor in our country."

The real problem, Paul said, is that the U.S. "shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship" because of "demographics."

According to Paul, the proportion of Mexican immigrants that register as Democrats is 3-to-1, so of course "the Democrat Party is for easy citizenship."

He added: "We're the only country that I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen. And I think that should stop also."

The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of whether or not their parents are U.S. citizens.
Imagine that. Rand Paul, running as a Republican, thinks the Constitution should be amended because the 14th Amendment "helps the Democrats."   You know there Rand, the 13th Amendment gave rights to slaves and former slaves, and the 15th gave minorities the right to vote, and those are helping Democrats too, right?  Maybe you should get your GOP buddies to craft legislation to effectively repeal those like they are trying to do with the 14th.

What "libertarian" would want the government to repeatedly check papers of people to see if they are given the government-granted title of citizen, anyway?   Oh right, "Rand Paul libertarians".  Better known as Teabaggers.

Boston Uncommon

Arizona's immigration law and the lousy economy is leading to backlashes against "illegals" even in states like Massachusetts as that state's Senate cracks down.
The measure, which passed on a 28-10 vote as an amendment to the budget, would bar the state from doing business with any company found to break federal laws barring illegal immigrant hiring. It would also toughen penalties for creating or using fake identification documents, and explicitly deny in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.

The amendment would also require the state’s public health insurance program to verify residency through the Department of Homeland Security, and would require the state to give legal residents priority for subsidized housing.

The amendment will now be part of negotiations with the House as part of the entire state budget.
It's not law yet, but just as Republicans found their hated scapegoats in gays in the first decade of this century (and long before that, really) the reactionary crackdowns are now hitting Latinos.  It's the unintended consequences of laws like this that will be the problem:  getting sick or applying for housing while Latino in Massachusetts could soon be a nightmare.  After all, the onus is now on the person to prove they are a citizen if this law passes.

Do you think Republicans will stop demanding papers at subsidized housing and insurance?

Backhanded Compliments

The wingers are trying a new tack this week on blaming Obama for BP's oil spill as Obama's Katrina:  they're defending Obama. NRO's Yuri Levin sets ups the pins...
I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.

It’s like Katrina in that many people's attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them—and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.
You can feel the slime oozing out of Levin on this one like the oily mess washing up on Louisiana beaches.  Obama can't fix the problem because in Levin's view, the federal government is supposed to be incompetent and weak on domestic issues, and that's a good thing.  That virulent, rabidly anti-government Tourette's that wingers have rears its ugly head again, just another notch in the "Any Democratic administration is illegitimate" belt that they've been carving in since the Clinton years (and the Carter years before that).

Kevin Drum puts an end to this idiocy quickly.
The Deepwater Horizon explosion is almost the exact opposite [of Katrina]. There is no federal expertise in capping oil blowouts. There is no federal agency tasked specifically with repairing broken well pipes. There is no expectation that the federal government should be able to respond instantly to a disaster like this. There never has been. For better or worse, it's simply not something that's ever been considered the responsibility of the federal government. (The well capping, not the cleanup.)

In the case of Katrina, you have the kind of disaster that, contra Levin, can be addressed by the federal government. In the case of the BP spill, we're faced with a technological challenge that can't be. They could hardly be more different.
Wingers equate this to "See how useless government is?"  Thinking people equate this to "Boy, BP really should of had their act together."  As Digby reminds us, the last 20 months should have proven beyond a doubt that the whole "the best and the brightest among us go to the private sector" theory is a complete sham.

StupidiNews!

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Last Call

The Senate Armed Services committee voted 16-12 to end DADT today, bringing the measure to the floor for a full Senate vote as part of the defense appropriations bill...and an expected filibuster showdown with the GOP.
Maine Republican Susan Collins joined 15 Democrats in adopting the repeal plan as an amendment to the 2011 Defense Authorization Act, which should receive a floor vote next month. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) was the lone Democrat to vote 'no' with the Republicans. The House is expected to adopt similar language later tonight or tomorrow.

But key Republicans adamantly oppose the move, and are willing to take extraordinary measures to prevent the repeal from going through.

"I'll do everything in my power [to stop the repeal]," said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who serves as ranking member on the Armed Services Committee yesterday.

McCain was echoed by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who made his promise to obstruct explicit: "If it is adopted, I will not sign the conference report, and there will be an attempt to filibuster the bill on the floor," Wicker said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House all support overturning the ban, though until this week, their plan had been to delay legislative action until after the Pentagon completes a review, analyzing the effects of implementing repeal. But congressional leaders and activists forced their hand, and they agreed to a compromise: Congress will pass a law now, but instead of overturning DADT directly, it will delay repeal until the review is complete and Gates has given the green light.

Some wavering senators, including Webb, cite the Pentagon's reluctance as a rationale for opposing repeal. But by putting the provision in the authorization bill, Democrats gave themselves tremendous leverage--Republicans will have a hard time sustaining a filibuster of crucial national security legislation based on opposition to a policy that's supported at the highest levels of the military. 
The question is how many GOP Senators will be cut loose to vote for this, and how many ConservaDems will in turn stab an overwhelming majority of Americans in the back again and vote this down.   The problem is even if this passes, the Pentagon can simply choose not to repeal DADT in December...you know, AFTER the midterms.  Melissa McEwan is pretty correct here to be pissed off:
So, essentially, even if the Democratic majority passes the repeal, after midterm elections are already over, the military—and/or, "the military"—can then decide to make that legislation worth less than the paper on which it's printed. Gotcha.

Either this is the real deal, or Mullen's talking out his ass and the administration is so incapable of getting its ducks in a row that the chaos threatens to undermine an extremely important piece of radical and long-overdue legislation.

Either way, my contempt for this administration plummets to heretofore uncharted depths.  
I don't know if I would go quite that far, but this does seem like a completely self-serving and slimy deal to get the Dems out of harms' way, and then in the winter the Pentagon can go "Oh well, TEH GHEY is infectious or something, so we'll finish this up in 2018.  Have a nice day."  If that does happen, there are going to be a lot of really, really pissed off people, including myself.

Top Kill Slays The Drag--OHNOES IT LIVES!

The literary dragon, he is not as dead as BP would like.
BP temporarily stopped pumping drilling fluid into its stricken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico late Wednesday night after engineers saw that too much of the fluid was escaping along with the leaking crude oil.

BP officials said engineers spent Thursday revising their plans, and that the company hoped to resume pumping by midnight.

“We have not yet stopped the flow so the operation has not achieved its objective,” Doug Suttles, the chief operating officer of BP said in an afternoon news conference from Robert, La. 
BP's plan not working?  What, a plan to plug an underwater hole with mud failed?  Nobody could have predicted...

We're screwed.

The Kroog Versus Not Inflation

The noises that I'm hearing from the Serious Beltway People are that we need to do two things:  cut the debt and raise interest rates soon before inflation gets here.  The problem is the latter will do nothing for the former, and the former will ensure that we'll need to do the latter.  As Krugman points out, it's madness.
So the OECD wants the Fed to start raising interest rates soon — in the next six months or less — because … well, we can look at the OECD’s own forecast. According to this forecast, in the fourth quarter of 2011 — a year and a half from now — the unemployment rate will still be 8.4 percent. Meanwhile, inflation will be 1 percent — well below the Fed’s implicit target of 2 percent. My view is that inflation will be lower than that — core inflation is already below 1 percent. But even given the OECD’s forecast, what possible reason would there be to tighten monetary policy now, when the economy will still have vast excess capacity and inflation that’s too low at the end of next year?

The only explanation seems to be at the beginning of that passage: some people, the report claims, are starting to think there might be inflation, so even though they’re wrong according to our forecasts, see, we need to head off this phantom threat and slow the economy’s recovery … what?

What’s so scary about this is that the OECD virtually defines conventional wisdom; it’s a numbered-paragraph sort of place, where a committee has to sign off on everything, policing the nuances as they say. So what we get from this is that among sensible people the idea that you should undermine recovery to appease those who think there might be inflation even though actually there isn’t has become conventional wisdom — so conventional that it’s treated as self-evident.

This is really, really bad.
As I keep saying, massive disinflation from continues losses in the residential and commercial real estate markets will continue to keep prices AND growth low.  We have a 9.7% unemployment rate and an unofficial rate approaching 18%, Republicans are screaming that the national debt is more important than double-digit unemployment.
Republicans yesterday called the bill "irresponsible" because of its cost and impact on the national debt. To bolster their argument, they referred to the US Debt Clock.org, which marked a milestone yesterday of $13 trillion in borrowing by the Treasury.

Unless lawmakers act before June 1 to pass either HR 4213 or a short-term extension of federal unemployment benefits, thousands of people will begin exhausting their unemployment benefits next week.  
The GOP in other words would rather have these folks out of work. Conservative Dems aren't helping on this either.  And people wonder why they hate Washington.  You know what would help the economy?  EIGHT MILLION $^*%#&*@ JOBS.

Assholes.  Meanwhile, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reminds us just how bad things are going to be here.
The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of insitutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.

"It’s frightening," said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. "The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly," he said.

The US authorities have an entirely different explanation for the failure of stimulus measures to gain full traction. They are opting instead for yet further doses of Keynesian spending, despite warnings from the IMF that the gross public debt of the US will reach 97pc of GDP next year and 110pc by 2015.

Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, has asked Congress to "grit its teeth" and approve a fresh fiscal boost of $200bn to keep growth on track. "We are nearly 8m jobs short of normal employment. For millions of Americans the economic emergency grinds on," he said.

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said the White House appears to have reversed course just weeks after Mr Obama vowed to rein in a budget deficit of $1.5 trillion (9.4pc of GDP) this year and set up a commission to target cuts. "You truly cannot make this stuff up. The US governnment is freaked out about the prospect of a double-dip," he said. 
Think Republicans will allow another stimulus?  Course not. You thought the 2008 crash was bad?  Wait until you get a load of the second half of this disaster.

Specifically Not Feelin' Randy, Part 5

So, turns out Rand Paul may actually not be a licensed ophthalmologist.  Well, he is, and he isn't, the story is really, truly weird.  It turns out that the licensing board that certified Rand Paul is operated by...let's see here...a "Rand Paul".
In 1999, Paul created a new non-profit organization, the National Board of Ophthalmology (NBO), headquartered at his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in order to "provide information to the public concerning physicians with exemplary qualifications in the medical specialty of ophthalmology," according to the organization's founding document, filed online with the Kentucky Secretary of State's office.


"It was a certifying board," Beth Ann Slembarski, the administrator of the major existing ophthalmology certifying board, the American Board of Ophthalmology (ABO), told TPMmuckraker. 
Say what?  Rand Paul created his own non-profit certification board for eye doctors?  That doesn't exactly seem very cricket, does it? Ahh, but it gets more interesting.
But it's unclear how rigorous the certification process used by Paul's group is -- and how much legitimacy the group is seen as having in ophthalmologist circles. Unlike the established ABO, Paul's organization is not a member of the American Board of Medical Specialties, an umbrella group for medical specialty organizations. Slembarski declined to offer a direct assessment on how Paul's group is viewed in ophthalmology circles, but she said that creating a legitimate certification board is "a very big endeavor." She added: "I don't think [NBO] was very successful," though she acknowledged she wasn't personally familiar with the details of its record.

Officials for two other eye-doctor groups -- the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery -- told TPMmuckraker they'd never heard of Paul's group. "I think it's fair to say that we would have heard of most organizations involved in ophthalmology in the US," said John Ciccone of ASCRS.

An internet search turned up eight ophthalmologists, from California to Virginia, who claim that they're certified though NBO. All also claim certification through ABO, the established certification group.

Neither the Paul campaign nor any of those eye doctors responded immediately to TPMmuckraker's requests for comment on NBO. Paul -- whose father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), is a Texas obstetrician -- also did not respond immediately to a message left at his Bowling Green medical practice.

About 96 percent of American ophthalmologists are certified through ABO, the established group, Slembarski said. But Paul himself is not. He was certified from 1995 until 2005, when his certification lapsed.
So Rand Paul's been operating without a certification for the least five years.  Nice. And now this guy wants to be my Senator?  I think I'm a little blurry on that whole prospect.  About as blurry as Dr. Paul here is on his certifications, actually.

Paging Jack Conway:  you have your next campaign commercial.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Given that Larry Kudlow's track record on politics is even worse than it is on economics, if I were California's Meg "San Francisco eBay" Whitman or Carly "Demon Sheep" Fiorina, I'd be very, very worried right about now.
Come November, Fiorina will join the new tea-party nucleus in the GOP Senate caucus, while Whitman will change Sacramento after she defeats Jerry Brown, the quintessential yesterday’s man. 
Come to think of it, I'd be scared stiff if I were the Tea Party.

The Zen Of Legal Hackery

Former Bush AG Michael Mukasey of course found nothing wrong with all the Bush/Cheney shenanigans in Iraq, Afghanistan, warrentless wiretapping, torturing prisoners, or any of the people involved in any of the above lying to Congress and the American people...but Joe Sestak?  WE NEED A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR NOW!
"It seems to me that if the offer came from the White House, you need a special prosecutor," Mukaskey said. "People were railing on me for months, demanding a special prosecutor for this, a special prosecutor for that. But here's a case where ... well, he hasn't said what happened."

Mukasey suggested that there were two extreme scenarios in the Sestak story, one that might not be a big deal, and one that would require a real investigation. "The least bad case," Mukasey said, "is that the guy's 20 points down, and everybody says you don't want to do this and bloody up a candidate to no end. You want to do something, we can find something for you. But to call somebody in and tell them, 'Look, you bow out and we'll offer you a job' is very serious. No rational prosecutor should indict unless it's that blatant.’ "
You have to be kidding me.  By Mukasey's logic, he should have appointed a dozen special prosecutors himself to look into his own bosses.

Top Kill Slays The Dragon?

Early this morning the LA Times is reporting that BP's "top kill" procedure has in fact actually worked.
Engineers have succeeded in stopping the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government's top oil spill commander, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.

The "top kill" effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, has pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well is very low, but persists, he said.

Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.
No confirmation yet, but we'll see if BP finally got this damn thing fixed or not soon, I would think.  I'll reserve EPIC WIN status until then.

[UPDATE] Everyone's still hedging their bets on if it actually worked or not, but the official estimates are now in the 15-30k barrels a day range.  I think those are still several times too low.  Obama's presser:



And now the really, really bad news, there's far more oil under the surface, possible millions of barrels worth.
David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school, says the thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet. He says it’s more than 6 miles wide. Scientists say they are worried the undersea plumes may be from chemical dispersants used to break up the oil a mile under the surface.
Not good.

Unimpeachable Character

Jill over at Brilliant at Breakfast argues this morning that the White House better get on stomping this Joe Sestak job offer thing into the ground, because the Party of No is already shifting into Lewinsky Mode.  Salon:
The zeal that Rep. Darrell Issa has brought to his pursuit of the allegations that the White House dangled some kind of job in front of Joe Sestak last year while they were trying to muscle him out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary is impressive, if also a little amusing. Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, has been thundering about an alleged bribe, using scary words like "impeachable," "crime" and "ethics complaint." (Actually, considering how rarely the House Ethics Committee can be roused to do anything about lawmakers, that last one isn't so scary.)

But as Alex Pareene has already noted, this isn't exactly the first time someone in politics cut a deal for a job. When Sen. Judd Gregg was going to leave Congress to join the Obama administration -- which, in the end, he didn't do, because he realized he disagreed with everything President Obama stands for -- he wasn't going to take the appointment to become commerce secretary unless his replacement in New Hampshire's Senate seat would caucus with the GOP.
Right, so Issa's not about to throw fellow Republican Judd Gregg under the bus just to go after Obama, right?

If you've been paying any attention over the last, oh, 16 years, you know the answer already.
After we hung up, though, I found a quote from a Gregg statement, making clear he wanted a Republican appointed (and another quote from Gregg's appearance with Obama, where he thanked New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, for "his courtesy and courage in being willing to make this possible through the agreement that we have").

Which, to Bardella's credit, and Issa's, meant he changed his tune a little bit.

"If the White House had come to Judd Gregg and said, 'We will make you the secretary of commerce, in exchange for which we will guarantee the appointment of a Republican,' that would be just as wrong," Bardella said. (Which is, of course, exactly what happened.) "That would be worthy of the same scrutiny and would still be a violation of how [Obama] said he would govern. Once you vacate your seat, you announce your intention to take another job, you lose the right to dictate what should happen to that seat. No one person owns a seat ... Offices in the United States Congress should not ever be used as bargaining chips."

So to recap: Issa's staff says Gregg's deal is just as bad as the one Sestak alleged. We'll pause here to allow for the angry phone calls and e-mails back and forth between people who work for Gregg and Issa. (And while we wait, we also have a call in to Gregg's office for comment, which wasn't immediately returned.)
As Jill points out, this is where it will begin.
Let's not forget that Republicans regard ANY Democrat who is elected President by the will of the people as illegitimate. This is a party that has embraced the teabaggers and the birthers and is looking for ANY EXCUSE WHATSOEVER to remove this president from office. They did it before with Bill Clinton, when they tried to impeach him for lying about an affair -- something their peeps do all the time. They will trump up bullshit, and their lackeys in the media will huff and puff and clutch their pearls in outrage. Because where the media is concerned, the IOKIYAR rule always applies. (And yes, I'm talking to you, Chuck Todd.)

But remember one thing: Whatever this president's shortcomings, he's got a lot on his plate right now: a still-faltering economy, a persistent terrorist threat from the Middle East, a rise in right-wing violence and threats of violence here at home, tension between the Koreas, Europe on the brink of chaos, and an oil company run amok in the Gulf of Mexico. The last time the Republicans decided to impeach a president over nonsense, the effort failed because Americans regarded him as a lovable scamp. Barack Obama's cool aloofness will not serve him as well.
I happen to agree with her.  Understand that should the GOP take control of the House in November, Obama will face impeachment hearings.  This is an absolute, like gravity, birds crapping on your freshly washed car, and Uwe Boll movies based on video game franchises sucking horribly.  If you think Obama's doing a lousy job, that's one thing.  Do you think the Republicans deserve to be back in control?  That's another thing entirely.

[UPDATE] WaPo's Jon Bernstein agrees.
The incentives all run to impeachment, as far as I can tell. The leaders of such an effort would find it easy to cash in (literally, I mean) with books and appearances on the conservative lecture circuit. It's hard to believe that Rush, Beck and the rest of the gang wouldn't be tripping over each other to wear the crown of the Host Who Brought Down the socialist gangster president. And we've seen the ability, or I should say the lack thereof, of rank-and-file GOP pols to stand up to the talk show yakkers. Besides, it's not as if a new Republican majority would have a full agenda of legislative items to pass, and what they did have would face an Obama veto (and most likely death in the Senate at any rate). Against all that is the collective preference of the Republican Party not to have a reputation as a pack of loons, but that doesn't seem to be much of a constraint in practice. Of course, also against impeachment is the lack of a serious offense by the president, but I don't see that as a major impediment -- if offering a job to a potential Senate candidate is an impeachable offense (and see Jonathan Chait if you think it really is), then they'll have no trouble at all coming up with something.
It's not like voters punished the GOP short term in 2000 for impeaching Clinton in 98-99.   They ended up controlling Congress and the White House, remember?

If It's Thursday...

460K new jobless claims, 4.61 million continuing claims.  Best line:
The U.S. job market has failed to bounce back convincingly despite three straight quarters of solid economic growth.
Well, that's because the "growth" is all in corporate profits through additional job cuts, genius.

Headless Chicken Scramble

I've seen a lot of folks on both the left and the right scream OBAMA NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING about Lake Palin.

Do...what?  What should be be doing?  Very few people seem to have those answers, but they sure are mad.
The response to the disaster by energy giant BP, President Obama and the federal government all get terrible grades from Americans in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed Monday and Tuesday say BP is doing a "poor" or "very poor" job in handling the calamity. Six of 10 say that of the federal government. And a 53% majority give Obama a poor rating.
So, suddenly now everyone's mad and worried about the environment:
The catastrophe has boosted concern about the environment over development of new energy supplies -- a long-time balancing act in American politics.

Now, a majority say protection of the environment should be given priority, "even at the risk of limiting energy supplies."

The 55%-39% divide on that question was a reversal of American views in March, before the April 20 explosion sent crude oil spewing into the gulf. Then, by 50%-43% Americans said development U.S. energy supplies should be given priority, "even if the environment suffers to some extent."

On a similar question, those surveyed divided 50%-43% over whether the environment should be protected "even at the risk of curbing economy growth" or if growth should be given priority, "even if the environment suffers to some extent."

That's a big swing from March, too. Then, by 53%-38% Americans chose economic growth as their priority.
So, maybe the American people want the federal government to take over the effort to clean up?
Who should be in charge of cleanup efforts? More than two-thirds say BP, not the federal government.
Umm...okay... well, Obama can at least stop offshore drilling, right?
There is still majority support for increasing offshore drilling for oil and gas in U.S. coastal areas: 52% favor, 44% oppose. Just one in five oppose all offshore drilling. 
Right then.  Carry on, America!

[UPDATE]  A TPM reader has some interesting perspective on "top kill".
On having Obama "do more," WTF is he supposed to do? Everybody seems to be calling for more fire in his belly and scary, threatening speeches. What does that accomplish? It's like people want him to do a dramatic speech like post-9/11 about bringing the criminals to justice. It does nothing to actually plug the damn well. The government does not have the expertise to do more to stop this gusher. It's in BPs interest to stop the gusher. All the conspiracy theories about wanting to preserve the well for future production are technically wrong and ignore that NOBODY in the industry benefits from this gusher continuing. BP wants what everybody else wants, though I'll concede that I suspect dispersants are about killing life where it's less easily photographed. Dispersants aside, the only conflict of interest is regarding the causes of the blowout, not the capping of the well. Fed investigations are already taking care of that part.
Do read the whole letter.

The Real Deal Appeal Of Repeal, Part 4

Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli has become the de facto GOP point man on the efforts to overturn health care reform, and he's confident that the matter will go before the Supreme Court relatively quickly, but they have to start with the federal district court.
"Just statistically, we're most likely to survive standing, and then we have a better than even chance of winning on the merits," he said in an interview Tuesday, a day after the federal government filed a response to his suit. "I wouldn't go farther than that. I wish I could."

At the same time, a loss would strengthen the hand of those who have argued that Cuccinelli's suit is frivolous with little chance of success, and, for that reason, Cuccinelli argues his suit is a marathon that will undoubtedly be decided by the Supreme Court. Winning along the way to Washington would be more fun than losing, but not a necessity.

"Nobody likes to lose, but we're in this for the long haul," he said. "We understand this is going to be decided ultimately by the Supreme Court, and that's the course we're on, regardless of what happens in the district court or the 4th Circuit. ...You take them one at a time -- you don't think about the next drive until you finish your putt."

Cuccinelli said he realizes he faces the burden of proof in convincing judges the law is unconstitutional. But the federal government faces "the burden of persuasion."

"The federal government has a significant burden in convincing judges they can order people to do something, to go buy something, under the guise of regulating commerce, when that has never ever ever been done before in the history of the United States," he said.
It still amuses me that the idea of an insurance mandate was originally proposed by and fully supported by Republicans like Chuck Grassley.   I've gone over the legal arguments for and against the constitutionality of mandates before, and they are worth looking at again.  The fact of the matter is the courts have already decided on several occasions that the Commerce Clause extends this far, most recently five years ago:
Numerous constitutional scholars say the mandate is well within the scope of what the court has defined as commercial activity -- pointing to the 2005 case, Gonzales v. Raich, in which the Supreme Court found that the federal government could criminalize the growth and possession of medical marijuana, even when it was limited to within a single state, on the grounds that doing so was part of an effort to control the interstate drug trade.
This lawsuit is just a cynical political exercise, nothing more.  They're wasting time and state tax dollars, which the TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY crowd doesn't seem to care about all of a sudden...

StupidiNews!

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Last Call

Looks like Eric Holder and the DoJ are going to go after Arizona's immigration law after all.
Top Justice Department officials have drafted a legal challenge asserting that Arizona's controversial immigration law is unconstitutional because it impinges on the federal government's authority to police the nation's borders, sources said Wednesday.

At the same time, the government officials said, the department's civil rights section is considering possible legal action against the law on the basis that it amounts to racial profiling of Latinos who are legally in Arizona but conceivably could be asked to provide documents proving their citizenship.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. met Wednesday with 10 top police chiefs who object to the Arizona legislation and promised them he would act on the recommendations soon, a spokesman said.

The police chiefs urged Holder and the Obama administration, which has grave reservations about the Arizona measure, to stop the law. The chiefs said it would seriously hamper local police work if officers had to serve as border patrol policemen.

"He did say that the Justice Department is seriously considering what they would do and that could come very soon," said Chuck Wexler, the director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank that helped bring the police chiefs together with Holder.
The sooner the better.  Take it to the courts.  Let the GOP go on record saying the law doesn't amount to racial profiling when it's struck down for doing just that.   After all, Latinos are rapidly becoming the next block of reliable Democratic voters.
Smart GOP strategists know this is a problem; the consensus is that Republicans need to capture AT LEAST 35-40% of the vote to win national contests. Yet looking at Republican primaries across the country, GOP candidates aren't looking at the long-term. In Arizona, John McCain is airing a TV ad declaring “complete the danged fence.” In California, Steve Poizner is comparing Meg Whitman to Mexico’s president in a TV ad criticizing her opposition to the Arizona law, while Whitman has a TV ad saying she “absolutely” opposes amnesty. And in Alabama, gubernatorial candidate Tim James says, “This is Alabama, we speak English. If you want to live here, learn it.” Pete Wilson is an important lesson here, says co-pollster Peter Hart (D): In presidential races from 1952 to 1988, Dems won California just once. After Wilson’s Prop. 187, Republicans haven’t come close to winning the nation’s biggest state. The next California could be Texas, and the GOP can't afford to have that big state become competitive.
Texas, Florida, California, New York and increasingly states like North Carolina and Ohio have growing Latino populations.  They see what the GOP is doing to them in Arizona.  They see that Republicans increasingly don't care about them either, more and more just want to deport millions and couldn't give a damn about Latino families, children, or communities caught in the collateral damage.

So thanks, GOP.  We appreciate you handing over the country to the Dems for the next couple decades.
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