BP

“There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of September, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.

White shrimp season began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in memory. It is bad not just in spots but all over southeastern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, calling it the worst season he had seen since he began shrimping in 1950. Some fishermen said their catches were off by 80 percent or more.

“A lot of people say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.”

We all know.

Unhappy Anniversary

What do we have in the Gulf of Mexico one year after the hugest oil spill in memory, courtesy of BP et al?

That tragedy is the ill and declining health of the Gulf of Mexico, including the enormous dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi and the alarmingly rapid disappearance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, roughly 2,000 square miles smaller than they were 80 years ago. Few here would take issue with the commission’s question, but the answer to it is far from resolved.

Eclipsed by the spill’s uncertain environmental impact is the other fallout: the vast sums in penalties and fines BP will have to pay to the federal government. In addition to criminal fines and restitution, BP is facing civil liabilities that fall roughly into two categories: Clean Water Act penalties and claims from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, whereby state and federal agencies tally the damage caused by the spill and put a price tag on it. This could add up to billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars.

It doesn't seem like a year -- mainly because of the time it took to cap the gusher. But it seems that there's something worse happening to our oceans, of which the spill is but one contributor:

That CO2, of course, leads to global warming and climate change, as well as what’s called ocean acidification, which might be thought of as oceanic global warming and is a greater catastrophe than any spill to date. The oceans absorb about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, creating carbonic acid. Since the start of the industrial revolution we’ve added about 500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the oceans, which are 30 percent more acidic than they were a couple of hundred years ago.

This acidification makes it difficult for calcifying organisms — coral, snails and oysters and other mollusks, and more — to build shells and skeletons sturdy enough for them to survive. Many of these are on the bottom of the food chain and, as they begin to die off (we’ve already seen massive oyster declines on the Pacific coast), the effects trickle up. Acidification has already wreaked havoc on coral reefs, on which about 25 percent of all marine life depends. By the end of this century, Safina says, the ocean will begin dissolving coral reefs — unless we make a big change in our fossil-fuel use.

If acidification endangers marine life leisurely, fishing does it quickly. Around 70 percent of global fish stocks are fully or overfished, and 30 percent have collapsed, which means they produce less than 10 percent of their original capacity. Commercial fish catch has declined by 500,000 tons per year since 1988, not for lack of effort, money or technology — in fact because of those factors — but for lack of fish. The danger becomes dual, says Danson: “If you’re overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you’re creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system.”

Why does it feel that Cormac McCarthy was all too prescient?

Koch Head

Freshman Republican Gov. Scott Walker of the great state of Wisconsin is one of the guys (per Forbes) fueled by the Koch Brothers, doing their bidding in his now seemingly rash attempt to steal the rights of public unions to collectively bargain under the guise of reducing the deficit, in a Shock Doctrine of his own making:



People are starting to think Walker is an asshole, and he's just upping the ante with "dire" layoff threats. Sieg heil. But other GOP Governors are already distancing themselves from trying to eliminate the worker's universal right to collective bargaining. With US union membership down to maybe 11% of the national workforce. And there's definitely shock resistance engaged and in motion.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Rahm had a most excellent night.

Proud to Be CA

If I knew he was going to do something like this, I would have supported Gov. Schwarzenegger a long time ago:

Yesterday, outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1449 —which reduces adult marijuana possession charges from a criminal misdemeanor to a civil infraction...

...Senate Bill 1449 amends the California Health and Safety Code so that the adult possession of up to 28.5 grams of marijuana is classified as an infraction, punishable by no more than a $100 fine — no court appearance, no court costs, and no criminal record.Passage of this bill will save the state millions of dollars in court costs by keeping minor marijuana offenders out of court.

The number of misdemeanor pot arrests has surged in recent years, reaching 61,388 in 2008.

Fiscally responsible, libertarian in nature, socially evolved...bravo, Governator!

And especially for calling out the oil companies trying to gut our new environmental laws by throwing major dollars at a dastardly proposition on the ballot in November:

I wonder what will be next for Arnold after his term ends this year. A position in the Obama Administration?

More Spew

There's more to killing the Gulf of Mexico than Deepwater Horizon:

NEW ORLEANS - (AP) Oil is spewing from a damaged well north of a bay where officials have been fighting the spill from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Coast Guard says a tow boat called Pere Ana C. hit the wellhead near Mud Lake early Tuesday. No injuries were reported.

The Coast Guard did not know who owns the small well or how much oil has leaked. But a sheen has been spotted in the lake. Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts says oil is spewing from the wellhead.

And there's more to killing our ecosystem with oil than just the Gulf of Mexico:

MARSHALL TOWNSHIP -- A leaking pipeline spilled about 840,000 gallons of oil into a creek leading to the Kalamazoo River on Monday, according to estimates from Enbridge Energy Partners, the company taking responsibility for the spill.

The leak resulted from a pipeline malfunction that was still under investigation Monday, said Tom Fridel, general manager for Enbridge Liquids Pipelines in Chicago. The 30-inch pipeline carries about 8 million gallons of oil per day from Griffith, Indiana, to Sarnia, Ontario, according to Enbridge.

The leak originated at the Enbridge site, at 16000 Division Drive near the border of Marshall and Fredonia townships. The oil spilled into Talmadge Creek, which flows northwest into the Kalamazoo River.

Should we start a new slogan, "Extinction in 100" as in human species wiped out within one hundred years?

We can do it, people!

Cat Got Your Oil?

Yep, British Petroleum has been behaving badly -- perhaps criminally -- for years:

The confidential inquiries, which have not previously been made public, focused on a rash of problems at BP's Alaska oil-drilling unit that undermined the company’s publicly proclaimed commitment to safe operations. They described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured or harassed employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections in order to reduce production costs. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them.

Similar themes about BP operations elsewhere were sounded in interviews with former employees, in lawsuits and little-noticed state inquiries, and in e-mails obtained by ProPublica. Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations - from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas.

Or, as performed by cats:



Bad kitty! Time to lift your liability cap.

Varietals

Varieties of scum:

The Rogue Gambler

The Father's Daughter

The Denial Party

Teachable Moment

More like this, please:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We're in a rare seismic moment where something so horrific is happening that there's no way to hide the reality. Time for a major change, including manufacturing and behavior. Are we citizens first or are we consumers first? Is there a common good where we must come together to preserve this world for our children, or do we just grab whatever we can, build whatever security we can, and have our families hole up until the earth falls off its axis and mass suicide becomes the only logical alternative?

One thing I've read recently is how bad we are at imagining and preparing for the low-likelihood, high impact events, like the mortgage meltdown and deep-water oil exploration disaster. I feel like we were better at it in the middle of the 20th Century, but somehow we've grown so over reliant on technology, easy credit, comfort and Hollywood special effects that we're no longer preparing for the worst.

This is essentially a conservative argument in the classic sense rather than the mutated version of today. Conservatism shouldn't be "Drill, baby, drill," like some entitled moron, but conserve, baby, conserve. Conserve investments, conserve the planet, prepare for the seven lean years instead of, as Bush/Cheney did, spent everything saved during the seven fat years (when Clinton/Gore ran up a surplus).

While there's spending now to shore up our nation's populace during this horrific period of unemployment, caused by the policies of the previous eight years as well as practices begun under the Clinton Administration all the way back to the wildly irresponsible Reagan deregulation of the financial markets, in some sense President Obama is the last best hope for a conservative future, small "c." His handling of his personal life -- steadfast in marriage, writes his own books, self-made man, concern for community going back to his early organizer days -- is exemplary from a conservative viewpoints.

Moreso than, say, a GOP gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina.

Still Leaking

Here's some latest news on the British Petroleum crime against our oceans: the Feds are looking at a criminal probe:

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.

Ideally Halliburton gets indicted as well, and maybe we finally learn what the hell kind of deal President Cheney cut the oil industry in the early days of that disastrous administration.

Finally, some protesting of BP and a call for a boycott:



The President visited the Gulf today and reiterated some of what he said yesterday. This guy is clearly smarter and more engaged than his predecessor but it still staggers me what he's got to know or learn very quickly in order to be the expert we've come to expect, as well as the father/fixer figure we expect all of our Presidents to be. I trust he has a better chance than most to gain some level of competence talking about the issue at hand, but holy cow, how in control can you ever feel in a situation like this? Nightmare disaster in extremely deep water, with monstrous machines being used for giant-sized remote surgery...it makes assassinating a Taliban leader seem easy.

The result of this whole situation, besides the permanent damage to the Gulf and surrounding ecosystem, must be some sort of raised consciousness, both about the value of big government (regulation, enforcement, solutions in reserve) and, most importantly, alternative energy. Per Eugene Robinson:

Obama has rethought his enthusiasm for offshore drilling. Now he, and the rest of us, should rethink the larger issue -- the trade-off between economic development and environmental protection. In the long run, our natural resources are all we've got. Defending them must be a higher priority than our recent presidents, including Obama, have made it.

Energy policy is one of Obama's priorities. He talks about "clean coal," which I believe to be an oxymoron, and favors technologies -- such as carbon capture and sequestration -- that are new and untested. The environmental risks must be a central and paramount concern, not a mere afterthought. Let's preclude the next Deepwater Horizon right now.

It's a moral imperative -- borne of the threat to the survival of the species.

Ours.

The Hugest Bummer

Thanks to enough blame to go around and go way back and, what's not hard to predict will be proven in court before this all ends, criminal negligence we're in the worst man-made ecological crisis since Chernobyl. The making of portions of the earth uninhabitable, more like our long ago poisoned and dried up neighbors in this solar system. More like entropy.

Nature organizes. Man attempts to impose will on nature, nature all too often disorganizes. It's ultimately all about our appetites for creature comforts and layers of security in an often hostile world.

I'm willing to give President Obama a chance to prove he's got a handle on this nightmare, or putting one into place. He's earned my trust thus far making strategic decision of value when being handed huge fountains of dute. He spoke today and is taking the type of responsibility Bush and his cronies couldn't muster. The responsibility we all have to start taking as well if we want to have a planetary future:



And he's got to be busy with this huge pile of dute suddenly flowing from succession-wracked North Korea, while relaunching out strategy for managing threats with Secretary of State Clinton.

Let's hope daddy can plug the hole:

B to the P

So is "top kill" a.k.a. Armageddon underwater going to work? Are there more holes down there than we're seeing? In some ways, the massive damage already inflicted on the Gulf of Mexico and surroundings by what appears to be criminal negligence on the part of British Petroleum is too much to deal with until the hole is plugged...if it ever can be.

Per Philippe Cousteau Jr., the grandson of the legendary Jacques Cousteau, after taking a dive through Gulf waters tainted by both oil and the lethal chemical dispersants, it's a "nightmare" down there. We may lose a species (of whale, no less) thanks to our unquenchable thirst for oil, Dick Cheney-led watering down of regulations, and BP's unmitigated quest for "big and important" profits. Take a look at the ABC News report with Cousteau -- if you have the stomach for it:



For those complaining that the Obama Administration hasn't gotten off the dime, check out this list of actions they've taken. Maybe there's more to do, but at some level they need to be riding BP rather than nationalizing BP's liability. I'd like to see some Tea Party Baggers show they're actually more than identity politics partisans by protesting every BP gas station, U.S. office and even fly over to their home headquarters to show them how America feels about being used as their toilet bowl. They can go protest Halliburton as well, and Dick Cheney at whatever undisclosed location he might be hiding. Then I can give them credit for coherence. More likely, they'll blame Obama.

BP has a terrible reputation within the oil industry. Whatever you may think of big oil, we're addicted to the stuff, and not just in our cars. This PC I'm typing on? There's oil in it. That iPod? iPhone? iPad? And the second iPad you bought for your spouse or kids? Oil. So if we're draining the earth of it's oil and turning it into pollution, at least the companies with the better safety records should be the ones doing it.

Because if you think this is the last time BP is going to have spillage problems...welcome to Alaska.

Slick and Slicker

60 Minutes serves up actual broadcast journalism:

1. This was the second attempt to drill a well in about the same spot. The first well had to be abandoned because the well had been drilled too fast (under pressure from BP to bring the well in quickly). Result: the rock fractured, causing loss of control of pressure in the well. Twenty-five million bucks down the drain, said BP to the crew. So they had to try again, in a rock formation known to be problematic.

2. Early on while drilling the second well (the one that eventually blew up) an accident damaged part of the blowout preventer (BOP). According to Williams, they were conducting a routine test of the annular, a ring of rubber that closes around the well at the top of the BOP stack. While the annular was closed, thus closing off the well, a driller accidentally pushed a joystick, which pulled the pipe casing up through the rubber seal at very high pressure. A short time later, after drilling had resumed, pieces of rubber began coming up from the bottom of the well. A drilling supervisor told Williams that the rubber debris was "no big deal".

3. The BOP has two redundant electronics boxes, called pods, which communicate with the surface. These are critical devices which trigger the BOP to close the well in emergency. One of the two pods was problematic and occasionally inoperable. The batteries on the BOP were also weak.

4. The well was in the process of being closed with cement plugs when the blowout occurred. The day of the blowout, there was a disagreement between the Transocean supervisor and the BP supervisor over how that should be accomplished. The Transocean guy wanted to keep mud in the well (i.e., keep pressure in the well) during the cementing. The BP guy wanted the mud pulled from the well for cementing, because it was faster and they were already behind schedule. The BP guy won the argument. If pressure had been maintained in the well during the cementing operation, the blowout would not have occurred.

The bottom line: the blowout was caused by gross negligence on the part of BP. There is no other way to spin it.

The whole piece on Keith Pickering includes the damning clips from the show. More news includes lax regulatory inspections under the Bush/Cheney Administration that clearly continued after they left. And this is with BP having been called out along the way:

A summary of the inspection history said the Deepwater Horizon received six "incidents of noncompliance" – the agency's term for citations.

The most serious occurred July 16, 2002, when the rig was shut down because required pressure tests had not been conducted on parts of the blowout preventer – the device that was supposed to stop oil from gushing out if drilling operations went wrong.

That citation was "major," said Arnold, who characterized the overall safety record related by MMS as strong.

A citation on Sept. 19, 2002, also involved the blowout preventer. The inspector issued a warning because "problems or irregularities observed during the testing of BOP system and actions taken to remedy such problems or irregularities are not recorded in the driller's report or referenced documents."

During his Senate testimony last week, Transocean CEO Steven Newman said the blowout preventer was modified in 2005.

According to MMS officials, the four other citations were:

_ Two on May 16, 2002, for not conducting well control drills as required and not performing "all operations in a safe and workmanlike manner."

_ One on Aug. 6, 2003, for discharging pollutants into the Gulf.

_ One on March 20, 2007, which prompted inspectors to shut down some machinery because of improper electrical grounding.

Late last week, several days after providing the detailed accounting, Interior officials told AP that in fact there had been only five citations, that one had been rescinded. The officials said they could not immediately say which of the six had been rescinded.

And who will pay for the spills? Ask Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R):

In the wake of last month's catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is "not where we need to be right now" she said.

Murkowski's move came just hours after Washington's top oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API) expressed vociferous opposition to raising the cap. It argued that doing so would "threaten the viability of deep-water operations, significantly reduce U.S. domestic oil production and harm U.S. energy security." API's membership includes large oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP America, as well as smaller ones.

The big question that goes to the heart of our democracy is if the damage from BP's negligence destroys the grand natural resource that is the Gulf of Mexico and damages both land and water masses beyond, if it eliminates the livelihood of tens or hundreds of thousands, if it dries up a significant percentage of our food supply, all because they wanted to save some money, then what is the appropriate legal remedy? Is it for BP to go bankrupt and some government to seize its assets? Is it for our government to have to step in and spend billions in band-aids for these ills? Should the CEO on down be imprisoned for life?

I'm not sure there is precedent for an industrial environmental disaster of this magnitude, in large part because it is in the ocean, source of all life on earth. On dry land you can always erect fences; by it's very nature the ocean flows.

For a larger, starker analogy (that may not be so far off), if a large multi-national, billion dollar corporation were to accidentally irradiate the entire earth...would there even be a remedy? Sure, we wouldn't want them to get away with it, and we'd want them to pay everything possible in useful reparations, but at some point the damage to mama Earth is too great, when it irrevocably alters life as we know it, irrevocably degrades life as we know it.

So is the disaster in the Gulf a big enough warning, finally, that even the yahoos alter their drill baby way of thinking?

Terror on the Gulf

Gripping story of the fateful accident:

Workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, the interviews said.

"A small bubble becomes a really big bubble," Bea said. "So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face."

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

"What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run," Bea said. "The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."

The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.

"That's where the first explosion happened," said Bea...

Not the only explosion. Another version of it here, with this intriguing passage as well:

The day before the blast, workers from Halliburton, the oil services contractor, had finished one of the trickiest tasks in building a well: encasing it in cement, with a temporary plug of cement near the bottom of the pipe to seal the well.

The Halliburton workers used a less common technique for the cement, whipping nitrogen gas into it to create a kind of mousse. This type of cement, if used correctly, forms a tighter seal, but it is trickier to handle.

Now do you want to know what was actually discussed and decided in Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney's secret talks with oil executives? Chairman & CEO of Halliburton from 1995 up until he took office in 2000?

Oh, and good luck with that box.

Underwater Oil Volcano

Worse than expected. Much, much worse:

The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn't really a spill: It‘s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.

"Everything about it is unprecedented," said geochemist Christopher Reddy, an oil-spill expert and head of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "All our knowledge is based on a one-shot event…. With this, we don't know when it's going to stop."

Accidents have occurred before in which oil has gushed from damaged wells, he said. But he knew of none in water so deep.

...

To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.

Imagine months, even a year of oil bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning the Gulf, the land around it, leaking into the Atlantic and poisoning the East Coast, creeping up while commercial fishing disappears and all the animals up the food chain start dying as well.

We've ripped a hole in Mother Earth and now she's bleeding out.

Drill, baby, drill?

Assholes.

Black Death

The Gulf of Mexico:



Another rig just overturned as well.

Plenty of blame to go around, but it turns out that secret meeting Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney had with oil companies back in 2001, the meeting he would not allow anyone to get answers about, has a big part to play:

An 'acoustic switch' would have prevented this catastrophe - it's a failsafe that shuts the flow of oil off at the source - they cost only about half a million dollars each, and are required in off-shore drilling platforms in most of the world...except for the United States. This was one of the new deregulations devised by Dick Cheney during his secret meetings with the oil industry at the beginning of Bush's first term.

The GOP appears eager to call this "Obama's Katrina," as if that might efface the culpability of their most recent two-term President. It turns out this on that Administration as well -- this one is Dick Cheney's Katrina.

Thanks for leaving all those burning bags of dogshit on President Obama's doorstep, guys.

U.S.A. Notes

So there were no responses to the Afghanistan question in yesterday's post -- fair enough, I dunno myself. Today we've got the issue of the dollar potentially no longer being the basis for the price of a barrel of oil, and the question of what that will do to the value of our currency. My bet is that if so many countries have so much debt in dollars, wouldn't they want those dollars to be worth something? Or do I have it backwards...

In better U.S. news, some of our nation's biggest corporations are expressing their displeasure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's stance against climate change legislation by quitting that organization.

Oh, and after being in seventh place last year, thanks to our new President (and, I would add, the more open-minded than expected democracy that elected him), we are once again the most admired country in the world.

Dangerous Candidate

It looks like the U.S. posturing in the Georgia debacle may ultimately be about -- surprise, surprise -- oil:

American policy makers hoped that diverting oil around Russia would keep the country from reasserting control over Central Asia and its enormous oil and gas wealth and would provide a safer alternative to Moscow’s control over export routes that it had inherited from Soviet days. The tug-of-war with Moscow was the latest version of the Great Game, the 19th-century contest for dominance in the region...

...Now energy experts say that the hostilities between Russia and Georgia could threaten American plans to gain access to more of Central Asia’s energy resources at a time when booming demand in Asia and tight supplies helped push the price of oil to record highs.

So is it any surprise that presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Senator John McCain is in bed with Georgia, who's President Mikheil Saakashvili started the fighting in the first place with at least a silent nod from the U.S. -- if not more -- and is somehow yet to pay the price in the U.S. media? The name is Randy Schuenemann:

Randy Scheunemann earned about $70,000 serving as Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser between the January 2007 and May 15, 2008.

During the same period, the government of Georgia paid his firm $290,000 in lobbying fees...

...On April 17, McCain got on the phone with Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili about Russian efforts to gain leverage over two of Georgia's troubled provinces. That same day, McCain issued a public statement condemning Russia and expressing strong support for the Georgian position.

And also on that same day, Georgia signed a new, $200,000 lobbying contract with Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, according to the Post.

Think there might be a conflict of interests? And with McCain always itching to start another Cold War with Russia (nostalgic for his youth?), he's escalating by sending campaign surrogates -- John thinks he can win the election on the basis of a new neocon revival against Russia.

But of all the quotes today about the conflict, this one takes the cake:



Make an embroidered pillow out of it: "In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations." Like the last five years in Iraq never happened.

Willful omission or yet another "senior moment?"

Both answers bode ill.

4th and Four

Four months from today the big decision gets made. Today the well-mannered, anti-Progressive ex-Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) has passed away. I won't pretend to mourn him politically, nor do I enjoy the white-washing (sic) the MSM is bent on doing, but do offer bloggy condolences to his family.

With four months to go we've got an outgoing President being openly heckled at a moderate-sized Independence Day event. We've got oil prices above where our nation's arch enemy, Osama Bin Laden, has wanted them since before the start of El Presidente's disastrous Presidency, Cheney/Bush essentially using their eight years of rule to give Osama the win. We've got a Republican candidate running who, in this time of economic peril and energy crunch, owns eight-count'em-eight homes.

On the other side, we've got a challenger to all of the above GOP cognitive dissonance whom they are flailing around to negatively brand, and whom is considering hosting the largest acceptance speech audience in American political history -- at Denver's Mile High Stadium.

So after reading attacks on Obama from the left, some of them even justified, most of them revealing partisan ignorance of the candidate who's being nominated, it is particularly enjoyable to read Andy Borowitz's latest juicy column full of satire, "Liberal Bloggers Accuse Obama of Trying to Win Election":

Suspicions about Sen. Obama's true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party's losing tradition.

"Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes," wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. "He must be stopped."

But those comments were not nearly as strident as those of Tracy Klugian, whose blog LoseOn.org has backed unsuccessful Democratic candidates since 2000.

"Increasingly, Barack Obama's message is becoming more accessible, appealing, and yes, potentially successful," he wrote. "Any Democrat who voted for Dukakis, Mondale or Kerry should regard this as a betrayal."

As a young teenager I watched the Left in this country commit ritual suicide with a combination of infighting and corruption.

Let's not let history repeat itself.

Odd

Here's a McCain ad that seems to actually sell Obama's energy positions quite well:



Is it true that McCain is essentially, per Simon Rosenberg:

...by any historic measure, a weak and bumbling candidate, ill-suited for a presidential race, and is still struggling to bring his party together -- a party which has never liked him very much anyway.

Ouch!

Xmas at Billy's

We came with the crusaders
To save the Holy Land
It's Christmas in Fallujah
And no one gives a damn

I'll be damned if the Piano Man hasn't written the best mass market antiwar song of the Iraq generation. And I mean that in a good way. Per the above lyric from Billy Joel's brand new song, "Christmas in Fallujah," he not taking a very intellectual view of the proceedings, just a street smart one with just enough sense of history. And Joel had the remarkable good sense to assign the singing to a young troubadour, fellow Long Islander Cass Dillon, 21 years old, i.e. soldier age:

At 58, Joel felt he was too old to sing the song, which was inspired by letters the Piano Man received from soldiers in Iraq. So he gave it to Cass Dillon, a 21-year-old singer-songwriter from Long Island.

"I thought it should be somebody young, about a soldier's age," Joel said in a statement on his Web site. "I wanted to help somebody else's career. I've had plenty of hits. I've had plenty of airplay. I've had my time in the sun. I think it's time for somebody else, maybe, to benefit from my own experience."

The clips of seen of their December 1st world premiere performance of the new number onstage in Chicago are both great, this one with the better angle and lyrics printing across the screen for maximum comprehension and sing-a-long, this other one with Joel's terrific introduction and better sound. I've even seen a fan version which I won't inflict upon you, dear valued reader. But even with the rather ingratiating synth hook repeating too much for my taste and the corny soldier chorus line, I'm on my fifth listen.

Why so gratifying? I guess it feels like when you've lost Billy Joel, you've lost America. He's made a conscious decision to put himself up against the GOP-rightwing media attack machine. Can you wait to see the clips from Fox News commentators? What are they going to do, say he doesn't really get letters from soldier?

The audience in Chicago goes nuts because Joel isn't saying anything that isn't true. Simple truths that everybody knows by now:

They say Osama's in the mountains
Deep in a cave near Pakistan
But there's a sea of blood in Baghdad
A sea of oil in the sand

Between the Tigris and Euphrates
Another day comes to an end
It’s Christmas In Fallujah
Peace on earth goodwill to men

The last line of that verse is as sardonic as it gets. It's over for these criminals, in the eyes of the public. Just start indicting them.

With any luck, their Party won't survive into the next decade.