...The Senate Armed Services Committee voted Tuesday to support the nomination of Gen. David Petraeus to lead U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan, hours after he told the panel that he backed President Obama's proposed drawdown of troops there starting in July 2011.
At his confirmation hearing to replace ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus also said he would recommend delaying a large-scale withdrawal if security conditions on the ground are untenable. He called the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan "enduring."
There’s been a lot of crying about “thugs and anarchists” in Toronto. I live about 4 blocks from where some of the vandalism occurred, though I wasn’t there at the time.
As best I can tell, what happened is that for about an hour, the Black Bloc protesters clearly and visibly prepared for action, with both the police and other, non-violent protesters able to see they were doing so. The number of Black Bloc vandals seems to have been between 50 to 100, certainly not more than 200. (The police had 20,000 men.)
The police actually withdrew, leaving behind police cars for the Black Block to torch. Which they then did. The Black Bloc then proceeded up Yonge street (the main north/south street in downtown Toronto), vandalizing as they went, and eventually many headed over to Queen’s Park, the Provincial capital. Two hours after the first violence, the police finally take action, ensuring that there are plenty of videos of police cars burning and vandalism that would not have occurred if they had taken action earlier.
According to the police, rather than confront a maximum of 200 protesters, they withdrew behind the barrier around the G20 meetings and let them vandalize downtown Toronto for 2 hours.
At the end of the day the people who matter never even saw any protests and the 1 billion dollar police presence and suspension of civil liberties was “justified” by vandalism and burning police cars.
Simply put, the police decided that they couldn’t spare say 2,000 out of their 20,000 men to stop 200 vandals. This was a deliberate decision to allow downtown to be vandalized.
I leave it as an exercise for readers to decide if this was a matter of incompetence, or if it was a deliberate strategy. And if it was deliberate strategy, just what they were trying to accomplish with their strategy.
Of course, along the way Canadian Civil Liberties observers were arrested as well, and protesters were not allowed to see lawyers.
I am ashamed to be Canadian today, and I am ashamed of my governments, at all levels...
...I noted that for years, conservatives running for the Senate have made it almost an article of faith that they won't vote for activist judges who make law from the bench. And when asked to name a model justice, they would often cite Justice Thomas, who I noted has voted to overturn more federal laws than Justices Stevens and Breyer combined. In recent cycles, they would name Chief Justice Roberts...
...Well, I think we established very convincingly during the Sotomayor hearings that there is such a thing as judicial activism. There is such a thing as legislating from the bench.
And it is practiced repeatedly by the Roberts Court, where it has cut in only one direction: in favor of powerful corporate interests, and against the rights of individual Americans.
In the next few days, I want to continue this conversation. Because I think things have only gotten worse.
And so I want to say one thing to the Minnesotans watching at home: With few exceptions, whether you're a worker, a pensioner, a small business owner, a woman, a voter, or a person who drinks water, your rights are harder to defend today than they were five years ago.
Our state has been victim to the third-largest Ponzi scheme in history.
And yet in 2008, in a case called Stoneridge, the Roberts Court made it harder for investors to get their money back from the people that defrauded them. The Twin Cities have more older workers per capita than almost any other city in the nation.
And yet in 2009, in a case called Gross, the Roberts Court made it easier for corporations to fire older Americans and get away with it.
Minnesota has more wetlands than all but three states.
And yet in a case called Rapanos, the Court cut countless streams and wetlands out of the Clean Water Act-even though they'd been covered for up to 30 years.
Our state has banned all corporate spending on elections since 1988.
And yet in January, in Citizens United, the Roberts Court nullified our laws and turned back a century of federal law by allowing corporations to spend as much money as they want, whenever they want, in our elections. Not just federal elections. Duluth elections. Bemidji elections. Minnesota elections.
There is a pattern here. Each of these decisions was won with five votes. And in each of these decisions, that bare majority used its power to help big business.
There's another pattern here. In each of these decisions, in every one, Justice John Paul Stevens led the dissent.
Now Justice Stevens is no firebrand liberal. He was appointed to the Seventh Circuit by Richard Nixon. And he was elevated to the Supreme Court by Gerald Ford. By all accounts, he was considered a moderate.
And yet he didn't hesitate to tell corporations that they aren't a part of "'We the People,' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established." And he didn't flinch when he told a President that "the Executive is bound to comply with the rule of law."
General Kagan, you've got big shoes to fill.
But before I turn it over to you, General Kagan, I want to talk a bit more about one of the decisions I mentioned. I want to talk more about Citizens United.
Now, you've heard a lot about this decision already today, but I want to come at it from a slightly different angle. There is no doubt: the Roberts Court's disregard for a century of federal law-and decades of the Supreme Court's own rulings-is wrong. It's shocking. And it's torn a gaping hole in our election laws.
So of course I'm worried about how Citizens United is going to change our elections.
But I am more worried about how this decision is going to affect our communities-and our ability to run those communities without a permission slip from big business.
Let me give you two examples of what I am talking about.
In the early 1960s, car companies knew that they could avoid a large number of fatalities just by installing seat belts in every vehicle. But they didn't want to. They said "safety doesn't sell."
But Congress didn't listen to the car companies. And so in 1966, Congress passed a law requiring that all passenger cars have seatbelts.
Since then, the fatality rate from car accidents has dropped 71 percent.
Here's another story. Around the same time that we passed the seatbelt law, people started to realize that the leaded gasoline that cars ran on was poisoning our air. But oil companies didn't want to take the lead out of gasoline. Because altering their refineries was going to be, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, a "multi-billion dollar headache."
But in 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act anyway. And thanks in part to that law, by 1995, the percentage of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had dropped by 84%.
Along with the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Motor Vehicle Safety Act are three of the pillars of modern consumer safety and environmental laws.
But here's something else they have in common. They were all passed around 60 days before an election.
Do you think those laws would have stood a chance if Standard Oil and GM could have spent millions of dollars advertising against vulnerable congressmen, by name, in the last months before their elections?
I don't.
So here's my point, General Kagan: Citizens United isn't just about election law. It isn't just about campaign finance.
It's about seat belts. It's about clean air and clean water. It's about energy policy and the rights of workers and investors. It's about health care. It's about our ability to pass laws that protect the American people even if it hurts the corporate bottom line.
As Justice Stevens said, it's about our "need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government."
The Escambia County Health Department lifted a health advisory on Pensacola Beach on Friday on the advice of a beach official and against the advice of a federal environmental official.
But the advisory was not lifted for Gulf Islands National Seashore’s Fort Pickens beach, immediately west of Pensacola Beach or Johnson Beach on Perdido Key.
And hours after the Pensacola Beach advisory was lifted, the health department asked for state approval to issue an oil-impact advisory that leaves the decision to swim in the Gulf of Mexico up to the discretion of individual beachgoers...
So far, 400 people have sought medical care for upper or lower respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, and eye irritation after trips to Escambia County beaches, Lanza said.
…
Swimmers who did venture into the water questioned whether it was really safe to wade, swim and play in the Gulf, especially when they had to walk through a line of tar balls and stay clear of skimmers scooping up oil just 25 and 50 feet from the shore.
“I only went into the water up to my ankles. That’s as far as I wanted to go,” said Joe Chambers, 28, of West Pensacola as he scrubbed off oily residue from himself and his son, Ethan, 4, in the public showers at Casino Beach. “It doesn’t smell like the beach. It smells like a gas station. There are no fish in the water. There’s nothing alive in the water. I don’t know how public officials can just look at the water and make a call to reopen it for swimming.”
Carol Doster of Grand Isle, Miss., said her son Dallas, 12, was frightened by the oil that streaked his legs and arms after a five-minute swim in the Gulf on Friday. “It won’t rub off,” Doster said.
She said the two were not going to get in the water again...
There is nothing alive in the water.
So I'm sure to many this seems like a good idea, too. The Gulf, the Mediterranean, there's a kind of balance there, no?
So is it so very strange that if our betters are so willing to eat us and eventually themselves alive they would be willing to devour every last whale and dolphin in the seas as well as the oceans in which they swim?
The Pentagram Pentagon is alledgedly upset that the Rolling Pravda actually reported what it was told instead of getting on board with the pogrom program.
Frank Rich comments on some of the inconvenient laundry stains this whole episode has exposed to those paying attention:
...Once made the top commander in Afghanistan, the general was kept on long past his expiration date. He should have been cashiered after he took his first public shot at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last October. That’s when McChrystal said he would not support the vice president’s more limited war strategy, should the president choose it over his own. According to Jonathan Alter in his book “The Promise,” McChrystal’s London remarks also disclosed information from a C.I.A. report that the general “had no authority to declassify.” These weren’t his only offenses. McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity tour that culminated with “60 Minutes” — even as his own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation somehow leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama’s war deliberations. The president was livid, Alter writes, but McChrystal was spared because of a White House consensus that he was naïve, not “out of control.”
We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was out of control and the White House was naïve. The price has been huge. The McChrystal cadre’s utter distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death sentence for the general’s signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can’t engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow said last week of McChrystal, “the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn’t believe in it.”
This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war’s failures under McChrystal’s aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency fashion by rolling out a civilian “government in a box” after troops cleared it of the Taliban. Such is the general’s contempt for leadership outside his orbit that it extends even to our allies. The Hastings article opens with McChrystal mocking the French at a time when every ally’s every troop is a precious, dwindling commodity in Afghanistan.
In the 36 hours between the Rolling Stone bombshell and McChrystal’s firing, some perennial war cheerleaders in the Beltway establishment, including the editorial page of The Washington Post and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, did rally to the general’s defense and implored Obama to keep him in place. George Stephanopoulos, reflecting a certain strain of received Beltway wisdom, warned on ABC that the president risked looking “thin-skinned and petulant” if he fired McChrystal.
But none of the general’s defenders had an argument for him or the war beyond staying the course, poor as the results have been. What McChrystal’s supporters most seemed to admire was his uniquely strong relationship with Hamid Karzai, our Afghanistan puppet. As if to prove the point, Karzai was the most visible lobbyist for McChrystal’s survival last week. He was matched by his corrupt half-brother, the reported opium kingpin Ahmed Wali Karzai, who chimed in to publicly declare McChrystal “honest.” Was Rod Blagojevich unavailable as a character witness?
Wrong Company faction, there. This would require another Reptilian, not a DINOcrat.
The only reason this story gained any traction in the media was that it showcases one Company faction using popular support to override another. More Rich:
...The war, supported by a steadily declining minority of Americans, has no chance of regaining public favor unless President Obama can explain why American blood and treasure should be at the mercy of this napping Afghan president. Karzai stole an election, can’t provide a government in or out of a box, and has in recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on his national peace conference. Until last week, Obama’s only real ally in making his case was public apathy. Next to unemployment and the oil spill, Karzai and Afghanistan were but ticks on our body politic, even as the casualty toll passed 1,000. As a senior McChrystal adviser presciently told Hastings, “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”
To appreciate how shielded Americans have been from Afghanistan, revisit Rahm Emanuel’s appearance last Sunday morning on “This Week,” just before the McChrystal firestorm erupted. Trying to put a positive spin on the war, the president’s chief of staff said that the Afghans were at long last meeting their army and police quotas. Technically that’s true; the numbers are up. But in that same day’s Washington Post, a correspondent in Kandahar reported that the Afghan forces there are poorly equipped, corrupt, directionless and infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers and spies. Kandahar (pop. 1 million) is supposed to be the site of the next major American offensive.
The gaping discrepancy between Emanuel’s upbeat assessment and the reality on the ground went unremarked because absolutely no one was paying attention. Everyone is now. That, at least, gives us reason to hope that the president’s first bold move to extricate America from the graveyard of empires won’t be his last.
Doubtful, that, given Petraeus Caesar's track record in Iraq, where the sounds of Hellfire missiles and sizzling phosphorous incindiaries were rapidly muffled. The War on Terra still goes on there, with American troops cocooned around the oil fields, and formerly Baathist Sunni factions bankrolled into the fight against the bankrolled Shiite government forces. Both sides are supported financially by Amerika. Mostly, both sides fight against each other.
This is the model McChrystal and Petraeus have developed so well in Afghanistan, where every tribe is always ready to shoot at the next when they're not shooting at the interlopers. But McChrystal's principal sin there was seek control of the drone war for himself instead of leaving it to the CIA. That, and seeking more press than his Caesar, who may well be the Reptilian candidate in 2012.
The policy being Empire. The need for Empire has to do with funneling most of the money of the Treasury into the perpetual motion war machine and the banks that profit from it.
...We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban. The American public gave up on the war long ago, and it is not at all clear that President Obama’s heart is really in it.
For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan — at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American taxpayer dollars — is demented.
Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.
The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren’t trying to win the hearts and minds of anyone.
In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which President Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next breath, he soothingly assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will begin on schedule, like a Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.
Both cannot be true.
What is true is that we aren’t even fighting as hard as we can right now. The counterinsurgency crowd doesn’t want to whack the enemy too hard because of an understandable fear that too many civilian casualties will undermine the “hearts and minds” and nation-building components of the strategy. Among the downsides of this battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to give our own combat troops the supportive airstrikes and artillery cover that they feel is needed.
In an article this week, The Times quoted a U.S. Army sergeant in southern Afghanistan who was unhappy with the real-world effects of counterinsurgency. “I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like when they were down in a platoon,” he said. “Either they never have been in real fighting, or they forgot what it’s like.”
In the Rolling Stone article that led to General McChrystal’s ouster, reporter Michael Hastings wrote about the backlash that counterinsurgency restraints had provoked among the general’s own troops. Many feel that “being told to hold their fire” increases their vulnerability. A former Special Forces operator, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, said of General McChrystal, according to Mr. Hastings, “His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.”
We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan and neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the slightest clue about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal...
That's because Mr. Herbert is in deep denial the goal is exploitation not extirpation. The Powell Doctrine is so 20th century even Powell himself discarded it. If he could get back into the Game he'd be COINing the war on Terra, too.
So many inevitable and unsurprising things happened today.
*The $upremes continue to provide the best Justice money can buy.
...Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of the Enron fraud, persuaded the Supreme Court that the concept of committing fraud through depriving an employer of “honest services” was not adequately defined in the law...
...I am glad to live in a world where the ongoing slaughter of civilians is a resume-builder but badmouthing the boss is a firing offense.
*Said bloody-handed butcher's seppuku accomplished exactly what it was supposed to: the man who "pacified" Iraq by withdrawing to bases around the oilfields, shutting down all main$tream reports out of there, and paying the Iraqi warlords whatever the hell they wanted to keep it quiet gets to do the same kind of thing in Afghanistan.
...“No one — be they adversaries or friends, or especially our troops — should misinterpret these personnel changes as a slackening of this government’s commitment to the mission in Afghanistan,” Mr. Gates said. “We remain committed to that mission and to the comprehensive civil-military strategy ordered by the president to achieve our goals there.”
*Yessir, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again alrighty;
What is the big deal about the methane venting from the Gulf?
ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2001) — A tremendous release of methane gas frozen beneath the sea floor heated the Earth by up to 13 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) 55 million years ago, a new NASA study confirms. NASA scientists used data from a computer simulation of the paleo-climate to better understand the role of methane in climate change. While most greenhouse gas studies focus on carbon dioxide, methane is 20 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere...
WASHINGTON — A federal judge Tuesday struck down President Barack Obama's six-month ban on new deepwater drilling, siding with oil companies that argued that it would harm their businesses, eliminate jobs and weaken the economies of Gulf Coast states.
While the White House said it would immediately appeal the decision, environmental groups launched a quicker salvo, publicizing financial disclosure forms that showed that the judge in the case, Martin Feldman of the U.S. District Court in New Orleans, owns or has owned shares in several oil and gas firms. According to Feldman's 2008 disclosures, he held up to $15,000 in Transocean, the owner of the ill-fated rig at a BP well that's pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Legal experts said the revelation of a potential conflict of interest would bolster the Obama administration's case, but appealing the decision puts the president at odds with many Gulf Coast residents, who rely on the deepwater oil industry for tens of thousands of jobs...
As opposed to the 50 million or so of other people who depend on a live Gulf for a livelihood.
One heard Diane Sawyer wringing her hands about this on the Disney News the other night. Think of little Timmy, who will not be able to race his yacht.
...In an article in Rolling Stone magazine, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and his aides spoke critically of nearly every member of the president’s national security team, saying President Obama appeared “uncomfortable and intimidated” during his first White House meeting with the general, and dismissing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as “Bite Me.”
Now, while I'm sure Biden, the former DINOcratic $enator from MBNA, would be more than happy to Bite Him, the One seems to be a little more circumspect about snapping at this highly polished brass bait.
The fishers being the Company factors that support Petraeus Caesar for Prez. After all, McChrystal is a good Centurion for his Caesar first and foremost, and the One is in the perfect position to realize this. Why look how successful his efforts have been in Afghanistan [tip o'teh tinfoil to Ian Welsh].
The idiots in Washington think its been a failure. Just what do the Villagers know about the real motivations behind the War on Terra? What will they let themselves know? Like this is an accident.
McChrystal is smart and evil enough to realize that victory isn't measured in such a crude manner as winning the war on Terra. Victory is the Struggle itself, where the warrior elite endlessly rule in endless war. The bank$ters who profit tidily concur. They think it's easier to own an Empire than a Republic.
Obama had better not let McChrystal commit 腹切り his way. Best to sever the head from the body, lest this zombie or his master rise and run in 2012.
You don't want your soybeans making their own pesticides? Tough!
...A federal district judge in San Francisco had ruled in 2007 that the Agriculture Department had approved the genetically engineered alfalfa for commercial planting without adequately considering the possible environment impact, as required by federal law. The judge vacated approval, known as deregulation of the crop, and also imposed a nationwide ban on planting those seeds. The ban was later upheld on appeal.
But the Supreme Court, in a 7-to-1 decision, said the lower court judge had gone too far, ruling that the national ban prevented the Agriculture Department from considering a partial approval. That avenue, the court said, would have allowed some of the alfalfa to be grown under certain conditions; for example, isolating it from conventional alfalfa.
“The district court barred the agency from pursuing any deregulation — no matter how limited the geographic area in which planting of RRA would be allowed,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in the opinion, referring to Roundup Ready alfalfa...
But hey, it's great for Monsanto's drive to replace all traditional crops worldwide with sterile recombinant crops whose seed can only be purchased from Monsanto.
...The United States Embassy here said Saturday that the company once known as Blackwater Worldwide has been awarded a contract worth more than $120 million to protect new United States consulates in the Afghan cities of Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, The Associated Press reported.
The United States Training Center, a business unit of the former Blackwater, which is now called Xe Services, won the contract on Friday over two other American companies, Triple Canopy and DynCorps International, an embassy spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said, according to The A.P. The one-year contract can be extended twice for three months each for a maximum of 18 months, she said...
KABUL, Afghanistan — American taxpayers have inadvertently created a network of warlords across Afghanistan who are making millions of dollars escorting NATO convoys and operating outside the control of either the Afghan government or the American and NATO militaries, according to the results of a Congressional investigation released Monday.
The investigation, begun last year by the House Subcommittee for National Security, found that money given to these Afghan warlords often amounts to little more than mafia-style protection payments, with some NATO convoys that refused to pay the warlords coming under attack.
The subcommittee, led by Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, also uncovered evidence suggesting that American taxpayer money is making its way to the Taliban. Several trucking company supervisors told investigators that they believed the gunmen they hired to escort their convoys bribed the Taliban not to attack...
The Corporate State of Amerika has at least two divisions. One makes money on contruction. The other makes money on destruction. Thus the generalized policy: Chaos is the Plan.
Bob Herbert voices the concerns of the guys in the Empire-building division today:
We’ve blown so many enormous opportunities over the past several years. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when most of the world had lined up in support of the United States, President George W. Bush had the chance to lead a vast cooperative, international effort to combat terrorism and lay the groundwork for a more peaceful, more secure world.
He blew it with the invasion of Iraq.
In the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we had not just the chance but an obligation to call on our best talent to creatively rebuild the historic city of New Orleans. That could have kick-started a major renovation of the nation’s infrastructure and served as the incubator for a new and desperately needed urban policy. Despite President Bush’s vow of “bold action” during a carefully staged, nationally televised appearance in the French Quarter, we did nothing of the kind.
The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the “economic royalists” and asserting that “we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.”)
But there has been no radical change, only caution and timidity and more of the same. The royalists remain triumphant and working people are absorbing blow after devastating blow. More than 1.2 million of the long-term jobless are due to lose their unemployment benefits this month.
The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, as horrible as it has been, was yet another opportunity. In his address to the nation from the Oval Office last week, President Obama could have laid out a dramatic new energy policy for the U.S., calling on every American to do his or her part to help us escape the insidious, nonstop destruction that is the result of our obsessive reliance on fossil fuels.
He chose not to.
As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything...
We do one thing quite well. We prop our axels up and give it all the gas we can to spin our wheels, generating tremendous amounts of kinetic energy and burning through an incomprehensible amount of money doing so. Pretty good deal for the guys who sell the stuff, no?
And to say otherwise, to point the way out of the maze to the harried competing rodents, by the $upreme's estimation, that's now illegal.
So... if the Pentagon pays off Sunni insurgents to keep the peace in Iraq, and the CIA kisses up to Afghani Talibani warlords who let the opium, the lithium, and the gas lines through with dollars and روپیہ they can use across their border, am I breaking the law if I pay my taxes?
A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP's controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.
Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in a three-week effort to rescue as many sea turtles from unfolding disaster as possible, says BP effectively shut down the operation by preventing boats from coming out to rescue the turtles.
"They ran us out of there and then they shut us down, they would not let us get back in there," Ellis said in an interview with conservation biologist Catherine Craig...
Why not? Well, probably there is this little factoid involved:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An internal BP Plc document released on Sunday by a senior U.S. congressional Democrat shows that the company estimates that a worst-case scenario rate for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be about 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
The estimate of 100,000 barrels (4.2 million gallons/15.9 million liters) of oil per day is far higher than the current U.S. government estimate of up to 60,000 barrels (2.5 million gallons/9.5 million liters) per day gushing from the ruptured offshore well into the sea...
This is an estimate a lot of scientists have been tossing around ever since the beginning, and a likely reason BP has been trying to block flyovers or any scientific investigations of the crime scene.
...Ken Salazar left too many “long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge” at M.M.S. even as he added to their responsibilities by raising offshore drilling to record levels. One of those Bush holdovers was tainted by a scandal that will cost taxpayers as much as $53 billion in uncollected drilling fees from the oil giants — or more than twice what Obama has extracted from BP for its sins so far.
Dickinson reports that Salazar and M.M.S. continued to give BP free rein well after Obama took office — despite the company’s horrific record of having been “implicated in each of the worst oil disasters in American history, dating back to the Exxon Valdez in 1989.” Even as the interior secretary hyped himself as “a new sheriff in town,” BP was given a green light to drill in the gulf without a comprehensive environmental review.
Obama has said he would have fired Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, but his own managers have not been held so accountable. The new director of M.M.S. installed by Salazar 10 months ago has now walked the plank, but she doesn’t appear to have been a major player in lapses that were all but ordained by policy imperatives from above. The president has still neither explained nor apologized for his own assertion in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a statement that is simply impossible to square with Salazar’s claim that the administration’s new offshore drilling policy, supposedly the product of a year’s study, was “based on sound information and sound science.”
The president must come clean and clean house not just because it’s right. He must rebuild confidence in his government for that inevitable day when the next crisis hits the fan. That would be Afghanistan, and the day is rapidly arriving. Already Obama’s chosen executive there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — “a bleeding ulcer.” And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.
The president’s shake-up of his own governance can’t wait, as tradition often has it, until after the next election. The Tea Party is at the barricades. When Obama said yet again on Tuesday that he would be “happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party,” you wanted to shout back, Enough already! His energy would be far better spent calling out in no uncertain terms what the other party’s “ideas and approaches” are. The more the Fox-Palin right has strengthened its hold on the G.O.P. during primary season, the sharper and more risky its ideology has become.
When Rand Paul defended BP against Salazar’s (empty) threat to keep a boot on the company’s neck, he was not speaking as some oddball libertarian outlier. His views are mainstream in his conservative cohort. Traditional Republican calls for limited government have given way to radical cries for abolishing many of modern government’s essential tasks. Paul has called for the elimination of the Department of Education, the Federal Reserve and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The newest G.O.P. star — Sharron Angle, the victor in this month’s Republican senatorial primary in Nevada — has also marked the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Social Security and Medicare for either demolition or privatization.
Pertinently enough, Angle has also called for processing highly radioactive nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. If Americans abhor poorly regulated deepwater oil drilling, wait until they get a load of nuclear waste on land with no regulatory agency in charge at all. The choice between inept government and no government is no choice at all, of course. But there would be a clear alternative if the president could persuade the country that Washington, or at least its executive branch, can be reformed — a process that demands him to own up fully to his own mistakes and decisively correct them.
While the greatest environmental disaster in our history is a trying juncture for Obama, it also provides him with a nearly unparalleled opening to make his and government’s case. The spill’s sole positive benefit has been to unambiguously expose the hard right, for all its populist pandering to the Tea Partiers, as a stalking horse for its most rapacious corporate patrons. If this president can speak lucidly of race to America, he can certainly explain how the antigovernment crusaders are often the paid toadies of bad actors like BP. Such big corporations are only too glad to replace big government with governance of their own, by their own, and for their own profit — while the “small people” are left to eat cake at their tea parties.
When Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revived Rand Paul’s defense of BP last week by apologizing on camera to Hayward for the “tragedy” of the White House’s “$20 billion shakedown,” the G.O.P. establishment had to shut him down because he was revealing the party’s true loyalties, not because it disagreed with him. Barton was merely echoing Michele Bachmann, who labeled the $20 billion for gulf victims a “redistribution-of-wealth fund,” and the 100-plus other House members whose Republican Study Committee had labeled the $20 billion a “Chicago-style shakedown” only a day before Barton did.
These tribunes of the antigovernment right and their Tea Party auxiliaries are clamoring for a new revolution to “take back America” — after which, we now can see, they would hand over America to the likes of BP. Let Deepwater Horizon be ground zero for a 9/11 showdown over the role of government. There couldn’t be a riper moment for Obama, as a man once said, to bring it on.
"There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting..."
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King
No Hell below us,
above us only sky...
-John Lennon, Imagine
