Last Call

Steven D has some interesting predictions for the rest of the year...or what won't happen this year, anyway.

Just Beneath The Surface

Massive deep sea oil geysers are like icebergs.  It ain't the 10% on the surface that's going to kill you...

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.” 

Goodbye fishing industry.  Now, here's my question.  If you're a Teapublican, once again, why aren't you screaming at the Republicans and the free market solutions that created this and will end up putting thousands of hard working real Americans out of work for good?

I mean you can blame Obama for this all you want to, but the fact of the matter is he's not the one running the oil well, not the one who decided to cut safety measures to cust costs, not the one who subcontracted the rig out to Transocean and Halliburton, and not the ont that screwed up the plans for the blowout preventer and failed to maintain the piece of vital safety equipment.

And if your Republican buddies have anything to say about it, you're the ones who will be stuck with the bill, too.  This is a disaster caused by the corporations who are funding this movement.  Just like the banks, this isn't a conservative or liberal issue, or a black or white issue, or a red state vs blue state issue, or a religious vs secular issue, this is a greed issue.

And you're being played for fools by the same people who are literally wrecking this country.

[UPDATE]  BP has managed to get that siphon tube on the oil riser pipe, but the "percentage reduction of the oil flow is unknown" at this point.  So who knows if it's even working at all.

The Play Continues On Script

Remember my call last week on how the Kagan nomination process would play out?  It's proceeding exactly according to my theory, and we've now officially reached step 5:

There will be no need for the Senate to waste their time interviewing President Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court if Newt Gingrich has his way. Fox News' Chris Wallace asked Gingrich Sunday what he thought of the nomination of Elena Kagan.

"I think the president should withdraw it," said Gingrich. "You don't need a whole lot of hearings. The very fact that she led the effort -- which was repudiated unanimously by the Supreme Court -- to block the American military from Harvard Law School...."

Expect the next month or so to be filled with pointless speculation now over whether or not Obama will withdraw the nomination or Kagan will ask her name be withdrawn.   It will continue until it becomes clear that Kagan will not only get her hearings, but passes them easily.  We'll be in this phase of the mess unfortunately until July or August.

Keep in mind however I did call this a week ago.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

When it comes to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the only things at this point stopping a massive march on Washington by the Teabaggers (with thousands of rabid El Rushbo and Glennsanity fans screaming for Obama's blood, literally) are:

• The complete incompetence of the response of the companies involved in the spill, BP, Transocean, and Halliburton.

and

• BP being able to get away with lowballing the oil geyser numbers for three weeks.

That's it.  If BP's public relations guys weren't horrible, and BP hadn't tried to buy off thousands of Gulf residents in the first days of the spill, if they had actually come clean and said "Yeah we think it's three million gallons of oil a day, easy" you'd have Teabagger primary candidates being asked if they would support impeaching Obama over this oil spill.

You still may.  After all, factor two there is no longer in play, so the only thing saving Obama's ass right now is because BP is a bunch of complete tools and publicly demonstrates the fact they have no clue what they are doing on a daily basis.

So as long as BP continues to screw up, Obama's in the clear.  Of course, the longer it takes to cap, the worse off it's going to be for all of us, so maybe Obama should tell BP to get the hell out of the way and get the military down there.  If Obama can prove that the government can resolve this and not the "free markets" then it'll go a long way to restore confidence in the government.

If he can't however, he's in real, real trouble.  We all will.

Gates At The Barbarians Again

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has served past his usefulness according to BooMan.

It's time to be realistic about Afghanistan. And it's time for some clean hands at the Pentagon. Bob Gates has served his purpose. He's actually done a pretty good job of cleaning up Rumsfeld's mess and of being a team player in the Obama administration. But there is just too much rot in the Pentagon from the Bush years for someone who served during the Bush years to be credible enough to clean it up. If Gates remains, bad things will happen. He should stay no later than the end of the year. 

BooMan's talking about this story in the NY Times this morning:

Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence. 

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying. 

Gates in other words is breaking his own rules in order to help us "win" in Afghanistan...and we're not even winning in Afghanistan.  By our own admission we're not winning in Afghanistan.  I agree that Obama absolutely needs to find a replacement for Gates, and I'll add this to the myriad of good reasons he needs to go:  Gates is stonewalling on DADT.

CNN is reporting that tonight, during an interview on John King USA, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will reiterate his support for repealing the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (DADT) and argue that lawmakers should wait for the Pentagon to complete its review before rescinding the policy. Gates has expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO), and his tone has drastically chilled any chance of ending the policy before the end of the year. But during tonight’s interview, he will go one step further, suggesting that a quick repeal would be “a stupid way to do change.”

Obama wants it gone.  Congress wants it gone.  Gates is dragging his feet on purpose, against the President's orders, and if he's not going to implement the President's orders as Defense Secretary, he needs to resign.  Period.  That's the way a chain of command works, Mr. Defense Secretary.  Perhaps you're familiar with the concept.

Racists Don't Make Very Good Grifters

After all, the point of being a grifter is to get the mark to like you and to talk them up to get them to trust you.  Besides, Moose Lady the Griftebrity's modus operandi is to play the gender card, not the race one.  To her credit, she's left the issue of race very much alone and gone with her Christian Dominionist Girl Powah thing instead.

That was the case until she stepped into Arizona's immigration law like a moose patty and stumped for Gov. Jan Brewer, and went hard core racist on us.

As calls spread for an economic boycott of Arizona, the state's governor enlisted the help of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday to defend a new law cracking down on illegal immigration.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and Palin blamed President Obama for the state law, saying the measure is Arizona's attempt to enforce immigration laws because the federal government won't do it.

"It's time for Americans across this great country to stand up and say, 'We're all Arizonans now,'" Palin said. "And in clear unison we say, 'Mr. President: Do your job. Secure our border.'"

The former Alaska governor appeared with Brewer at a brief news conference on Saturday. Palin defended the controversial legislation Brewer recently signed, calling Arizona "ground zero for our nation's border security issues." 

Now, I figure she's left Arizona alone until now due to that soft spot she has (in her head) for Johnny Volcano.  This is McCain's state, and coming in here to make a mess complaining about Mexican border issues when being a half-term governor of a state like Alaska makes her the second least-qualified person in the GOP to talk about it (number one being Hawaii's GOP governor, Linda Lingle.)  Even better, after McCain's embarrassingly bad border fence ad (one so awful that Republicans are laughing at him at this point) you'd figure she'd steer clear of the state for a while.

But she can't help herself.  She's even using McCain's avenue of attack:  "The federal government won't seal the border!"

Well now, Sarah, dear?  You may not remember this, but about five years ago a guy named John McCain put forth one of those Congress bill thingies that would have improved this whole Mexican border doohickey, and that plan got shot down by the Republican party.

It's not Obama's fault here.  It's the GOP's fault.  And this really is a losing argument for you guys long-term.  And judging by the reaction by Arizona to the threat of boycott, it's a real big loser short-term too.  You can't call for action on immigration reform and then block immigration reform.

So now Sarah's weighed in as Arizona's white knight...emphasis on the white.  Not a good move for a grifter...

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Headline at CBS News: "Angry Obama Seeks to Deflect Blame for Gulf Oil Spill Crisis"

Boy that left-wing liberal media is really in the tank for the President, aren't they?

What Digby Said

It really is all about winning.

I've told the story before about sitting despondently in my front yard on the morning after the Supreme Court stopped the vote in Florida chatting with my neighbor about how shockingly undemocratic it was and wondering whether or not people would accept Bush as president. He shrugged and said that most people probably secretly respect him more for having gotten away with it. That was way too cynical for me at the time. Now, not so much. All you have to do is watch one of the ubiquitous reality show competitions (or Wall Street) to see that bending the rules is considered the smart move.

And while it's true that Republicans whine all the time about Democrats breaking the rules, they do it with a smirk and a wink thereby letting everyone know they are the ones gaming the system. (Do you think they really cared that someone called General Petraeus, General Betrayus? --- And doesn't that seem quaint at this point considering the current level of discourse?)

The Democrats should just eliminate the filibuster and let the Republicans howl. The teabaggers will have a mass aneurysm, of course, babble about revolution and say black helicopters are coming to take the babies away to FEMA camps, but so what? They do that when Obama attends the White House egg rolling ceremony. The Dems should be far less afraid to have that fight than to be seen whining about how the Republicans aren't playing fair. That's the main thing people like about them. It shows they are winners.

Because even when Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008 and gave the Democrats the largest margin of control in Congress in generations, by Summer 2009 the Dems were losers again.  These days the only question the Village is asking is how badly the Democrats will be crushed by in November, and how long they will be in the wilderness this time after Obama is rendered irrelevant along with the party, their elitist, out-of-touch ideas, and how dead liberalism itself will be as the GOP is rightfully restored to permanent power.  Obamamania was just a hiccup, you see.  We've been a right-wing nation since 1776, and liberalism only emerges through bouts of unfortunate kicking and screaming and the occasional civil war.

The reality is that the Dems still cling to antiquated, worthless ideas like "facts" and "logic".  Perception is reality.  Al Gore is fat.  Kerry is a coward.  Obama is a Kenyan Muslim, and Sarah Palin will save us all because she's the smartest woman on the entire planet because she knows just how stupid she is and doesn't mind telling us.

That makes her a winner because El Rushbo and Glennsanity say so, over and over again.  One side has people interested in debate, the exchange of ideas, and the betterment of all.  The other side is interested in crushing the first side into bloody paste and then setting that paste on fire until all vestiges of the first side's ideals pass into myths and legends used to scare children at night.  Guess which side wins in the end?

History is written by the winners, as they say.  Even more important is the fact that laws, budgets, jurisprudence and executive orders are also written by the winners.   One side understands that.

It's not the Democrats.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Nice of CNN Money's David Ellis to let us know that the people who have made an entire industry based solely on ripping you off at the ATM with a 20% fee on a $20 withdrawal don't much like the notion of limiting those fees to 50 cents.

In fact, some experts suggest that capping fees might result in more harm than good for consumers.

One likely consequence would be a reduction in the number of ATMs. At the end of last year, there were roughly 425,000 cash-dispensing machines across the country, according to industry figures. About half of them were controlled by independent operators like Cardtronics (CATM) and Louisville, Ky.-based firm Payment Alliance.

Experts said these companies would be devastated by a fee cap since they earn nearly all of their revenue from charging customers that visit their machines.

Independent operators, as a result, might choose to operate only in locations that generated a lot of foot traffic, where a greater volume of transactions would offset the decline in fees. Some community lenders and credit unions might also rethink whether it's worth having so many ATMs for their customers.

Consumers, of course, might argue that a decline in the number of ATMs wouldn't necessarily be a terrible thing, given the glut of cash-dispensing machines.

But some experts fear the contraction would be far more severe than people expect.

"You could get an ATM wasteland," said Nicole Sturgill, research director in delivery channels for consulting firm TowerGroup.

An ATM wasteland would be horrible!  You wouldn't want that.  Continue giving your money to people so you can use your money, peons!  How dare you ask for lower fees from an industry that makes a third of your domestic profits...why they won't be able to afford to run ATMs!

Won't anyone think of the poor, poor banks?

California Schemin'

You know those deep, painful, nasty budget cuts in California that Gov. Schwarzenegger keeps talking about but wasn't really specific on?

Yeah, meet the specifics.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked lawmakers Friday to eliminate the state's welfare program starting in October and dramatically scale back in-home care for the elderly and disabled as part of his May budget revision to close a $19.1 billion deficit.

The Republican governor also proposed cuts to state worker compensation. Besides asking for a 5 percent pay cut, 5 percent payroll cap and 5 percent increased pension contribution, Schwarzenegger has proposed cutting one day per month of pay in exchange for leave credit.

The proposal would affect all state workers under the governor's authority, regardless of whether they are general fund or special fund employees. Employees would not be able to cash out any of this unused leave credit when they leave state service. The plan would replace the three-day-a-month furloughs, which are due to end June 30.

Schwarzenegger said the sour economy, the failure of the Legislature to make cuts he proposed in January and the federal government's failure to come up with about $7 billion leaves policymakers with no choice but to make deep cuts.

How many other states are going to look at this and go..."You know...we could do this, and people would love us."  Quite a few, I'm thinking...

And in 2010 and 2012, the GOP wants to bring California's budget to the entire country, too.  Great news!

Because hey, the people who lose welfare can just, you know, turn to the UN or something.  Works in Africa, right?

A Stimulating Debate, Part 2

Matt Yglesias argues today that a substantially bigger stimulus still would not have produced anything close to the Public Works Administration of the New Deal era, due to the kinds of government regulations we have in place for environmental impact, contract bidding, and oversight acting as a bottleneck on stimulus, defeating the purpose.

Two lessons from this. One is that I think we need some more real talk about environment-impact reports and community input—it’s good that we no longer do infrastructure projects with a total disregard for these things, but there’s a real need to transform these processes into something more streamlined that takes a finite and knowable amount of time.

The other is that we need to work much better on our automatic stabilizers. The paradox of ARRA is that even though the stimulus package was sort of enormous, in the aggregate there’s been no net public sector stimulus whatsoever once you take state and local government into account. What’s needed for future downturns is some kind of fairly automatic mechanism to prevent this state and local contractionary impact. Recall that this was also actually the big problem with the Roosevelt administration’s policy—for all the WPA-nostalgia that exists in some quarters there was almost no aggregate public sector stimulus until the World War II defense buildup. 

On the other hand Atrios strongly disagrees with that assessment that the bottleneck is there at all, if anything there's a backlog of badly needed infrastructure repairs needed thanks to Republicans cutting projects.

Yes certain kinds of projects were never going to happen with stimulus money, but there are plenty of on the shelf projects that could have happened if the money showed up. My local transit authority has plenty - not new SUPERTRAINS, just years of deferred maintenance projects (stations, bridges) - as does my local water authority. My local transit authority did get some stimulus money for projects, of course, but it could have gotten more. Maybe the money can't get out the door quite as fast as we would like, but it can get out there fast enough.

I'm going to have to go with Atrios on this one.  I look at cities like Colorado Springs having to close parks and cities across the country laying off people left and right while we've got roads, bridges, water mains, gas lines, sewers, subway tunnels, transit lines, and power grids in various states of disrepair all over the place.  Those repairs and improvements seem like worthy ways to employ Americans if we had more money to do so, but Republicans said no.  Remember, the only worthy government spending to a Republican is military.  Roads?  Those are fixed by lazy gubmint unions living like kings and young bucks driving Cadillacs.

Science Applied As A Verb

Via the Rumpies, President Obama is sending top men...TOP MEN! to science all the hell over the oil spill.

President Obama's new plan to fix the Gulf oil spill is so crazy it just might work...

As BP's high-priced industry experts flail, the president has turned to a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak -- before it's too late.

OK, maybe that's going a bit far. In fact, the news that Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have sent a team of leading physicists and engineers to the Gulf to work with BP offers further evidence of the administration's essentially technocratic approach to governance, and its faith in knowledge-based expertise. That might seem like common sense, but it represents a shift from the Bushies' faith in the problem-solving power of industry, and its willingness to let science take a backseat to the concerns of its religious base.

 Yeah, I'll up StrangeAppar8tus's Team Banzai reference with...Misfits of Science!


Time to science this mofo.

Epic What BooMan Said Win

Here's why BooMan Tribune should be on your core list of daily reading:

Why do you read this blog? Here's why. From tonight's The Hill:

CBC could see its spending clout increase in the next Congress If House Democrats keep their majority in the next Congress, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) is likely to become chairman of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations subcommittee. The only members ahead of Fattah in seniority are panel's chairman, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), who lost a primary race this week, and retiring Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.)

Here's me, three days ago:

Don't get me wrong, like most long-time appropriators of both parties, Mollohan had long ago compromised himself and become corrupt. I'm kind of glad to see that he's gone. I'd be more enthusiastic about it if his replacement gave me hope for improvement. But, hey, West Virginia's loss will probably be Philadelphia's gain. Mollohan was the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. Now that he's been defeated and Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island is retiring, the chair should go (by seniority) to my old congressman, Rep. Chaka Fattah. Of course, Fattah recently announced that he will compete in the next Congress for the chair of the entire Appropriations Committee. That doesn't surprise me. When he was running for mayor of Philadelphia, we were talking at the upstairs bar at The Khyber when he explained to me that he wasn't going anywhere in Congress. I had asked him whether he couldn't better serve Philadelphia as a member of the House Appropriations Committee. And he explained that he had no seniority and no prospects of even chairing a subcommittee anytime soon. So, he was bolting to be mayor. Except, he got crushed in the primary, so he went back to his dead-end job in DC. And now he's ready to become the first black man to be in charge of the Justice Department's budget. Amen.

I have to toot my own horn because no one else will. 

Hell, I will.  BooMan's been doing this dirty hippie blogger thing for years now and is better than 99.9% of the professional Village pundits out there when it comes to the workings of Capitol Hill, and equal to their best.  He absolutely called Chaka Fattah's expected rise, and did it before the pros did.

If you want to know what's going on in the Beltway, BooMan's got the gritty reality of Washington's Three Branch Circus down better than the big boys, and he's done it time and time again.

EPIC WIN.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• As Thai troops clash with Red Shirts, Bangkok has been declared a "live fire zone" by the government as violence continues.
• If the current pace of jobs created in 2010 continues, by the end of the year more net jobs will be created than during the entire Bush Presidency.
• The GOP offers capping corporate liabilities for oil spills to one year's worth of profit or $150 million, whichever is greater.
• The euro has fallen to its lowest level against world currencies since the financial crisis of 2008.
• A new UK study suggests women gain more of a happiness benefit from broadband technology than men do.

Last Call

Next week's big, with special elections in Pennsylvania and Hawaii for the House, and the Senate primaries in Kentucky.  Chris Cilizza argues that PA-12, the district of the late John Murtha, is a must-win for the GOP if the Orange Julius Prophecy of the GOP gaining 100 seats is true:

A Republican win -- coupled with the party's likely triumph in a Hawaii special election four days later -- would be a hugely important symbol to the House Republican conference that the majority is actually in reach.

A loss, however, would hand Democrats a cudgel with which they could beat back the "House majority is in play" story line -- noting that Burns ran against President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and came up short.

To quote De La Soul: "Stakes is high". 

Naturally, conservatives are downplaying the district's meaningfulness of a GOP loss there and the PA-12 results...

Cilizza severely downplays the counterarguments here, and overstates the stakes for Republicans. First, Republicans haven't won this district since the 1930s, and Democratic registration vastly outstrips Republican registration (most of the district that originally elected Murtha has been dismembered and placed in neighboring districts). While McCain did carry it, he only did so by 900 votes.

To put it differently, there are over sixty districts represented by Democrats with better Republican performances than PA-12. The Republicans' path to 218 seats doesn't necessarily run through this district – in fact, I don't think their path to a 1994-esque 230 seats necessarily runs through this district.

...unless they win, of course.  Then it's the end of the Democrats forever.

A Democratic loss in this district tells me that Jacksonians really are abandoning the Democrats at the Congressional level, and all sorts of hell is about to break loose in November.

Still, watch this race.