More Lives, Money Down The Drain

Amazingly timed with the wikileaks data dump that confirmed what many of us had feared about our escalating war in Afganistan, there's this:

Washington (CNN) -- The House of Representatives held a heated debate Tuesday over whether to pass a nearly $59 billion emergency spending bill, the bulk of which would go toward the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan.

It took months to pass an extension on unemployment benefits, yet the funding for a war that even the commie hippies at the Council on Foreign Relations are beginning to question seems to be right on schedule.

I really thought the wikileaks disclosure would have put more pressure on the media and our politicians to ask a bit more about just what we're doing there, but everyone seems to have already moved on.

Leaving once we kill everyone who doesn't like us isn't a strategy, but from what I can tell that seems to be the plan. The sooner the Administration realizes this the better, and we can move on to other things, like not spending all of our money on pointless wars.

Financial Reform Becomes Law

After a long legislative fight, the financial reform bill finally passed the Senate. It's extremely lacking in some key areas, and definitely doesn't do nearly enough to break up the power of the megabanks. With that said, unlike how I felt after the passage of health care reform, I feel pretty confident that this is a major improvement over the status quo, and I'm very happy it passed.

A major way the reforms can have an intimidate impact is if the right person is nominated to head the newly formed Consumer Protection Agency. Labor and advocacy groups are pushing Elizabeth Warren, and it's such a no brainer you can bet it won't happen. Tim Geithner seems to be opposed to her nomination, which should tell you everything you need to know about why she'd be a good choice.

The PCCC is gathering signatures in support of her nomination, so sign on to show your support.

As for the point of financial reform ("so that we never have a crisis like this again") I'm far far less optimistic. The big banks are just as powerful as they were before, and the masters of the universe whose ideas caused the crisis are still highly thought of (or you know, in the Administration), while the economists who have been right remain marginalized and largely ignored by those calling the shots.

The Elizabeth Warren thing is huge. If Obama fucks that up, it's a pretty big black eye not only because she would be amazing, but because it shows the worst elements of his Administration really are calling all the shots. Warren's nomination would at least be a glimmer of hope that the Larry Summers and Tim Geithner Experience might finally be coming to an end, Jared Bernstein could be let out of his cage and the chance of better economic policy might be in sight.

This is a fork in the road for the Administration's economic policy, hopefully they make the right call.

Conservative Hacks Rule Their World

Step 1: A right wing asshole (who also happens to be a pathological liar) releases part of a video featuring USDA employee Shirley Sherrod with the sole purpose of making it look like she said scary stuff about white people.

Step 2: Tom Vilsak (Obama's Secretary of Agriculture) immediately fires her, reportedly with pressure from the White House because "Glenn Beck was going to talk about it".

Step 3: Various news outlets (and unlike the ACORN scam, most of the mainstream media as well) decided to do the slightest bit of research to realize the story is 100% BS. The tape was taken out of context, CNN actually checks out the family in question, who call Sherrod a "family friend".

Step 4: The White House says that the decision to fire Sherrod was "100%" on Vilsak, but that they stand by it.

Chris Bowers pointed this out, but it's fairly telling that it took a couple of minutes to make the decision to fire Sherrod based on a known liar's bullshit, yet as of now she doesn't have her job back. And even though they denied it earlier, new reports say that Rahm chief of staff Jim Messina celebrated how quickly they had fired her at their morning staff meeting.

I'm pretty happy that the fallout from this will probably force the administration to rehire her, and I'm sure everyone's sorry now, but they way this whole episode went down speaks volumes about the Administration.

If you're a conservative, no matter how much of a lying hack you are, the White House will always ask "how high?"

Now if you're a Nobel prize winning economist offering substantive criticism of how Obama is running the economy...

Nobody Could Have Predicted...

The Washington Post has a massive investigative piece today that takes a look at the military/intelligence/contractor clusterfuck that was spawned post 9/11:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The article is definately worth a read, but I thought two reactions were pretty dead on:

Atrios:

Oh Well

It occurs to me that some crazy hippies thought that a massive overreaction to 9/11, including pointless wars and massive expansion of the security state, might not be such a good idea. Well, nobody could have predicted. Bygones.

Matt Yglesias:

Dana Priest continues to do the kind of reporting that 90% of "reporters" only think they do.

Obama Embraces Deficit Hysteria with Open Arms

When the Democrats get slaughtered in the fall because the economy hasn't turned around, people will start looking for places to put the blame.

One of these quotes is Barack Obama, one of these quotes is from John Boehner:

"It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it"

"At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own"

Krugman:

We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.

Talking like a Republican while advocating conservative ideas isn't 11 dimensional chess, it makes it look like an idiot who doesn't stand for anything. And when the economy is this bad and voters can't tell who stands for what, it's the people in power who get booted.

But it's not just Republican talking points that this Administration has embraced, it's their failed policies as well: (via Digby)

Obama picks adviser to cut deficit

“Jack’s challenge over the next few years is to use his extraordinary skill and experience to cut down that deficit and put our nation back on a fiscally responsible path. And I have the utmost faith in his ability to achieve this goal as a central member of our economic team,’’ Obama said.

Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, called Lew “a superb choice’’ and a person of “the highest integrity.’’

“He knows how to make the tough choices. And he knows how to reach across the aisle to find bipartisan solutions,’’ Conrad said.

So Obama adopts Republican rhetoric and conservative ideas... which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy it leads to Repblican gains in the 2010 elections, giving Obama more Republicans to appease and beg for their affection.

I bet he and John Boehner will have some great discussions about the government "tightening it's belt" after Obama's deficit fetishism has made him speaker of the house.

It's Not About The Deficit

It's about the right wing ideology that believes that the poor should be forced to feel the pain of a recession. Kevin Drum:

Republicans like to pretend that deficit reduction is their (and their base's) top priority -- but have you noticed how often they reject ideas to actually help close the budget shortfall?

The Democratic health care reform proposal lowered the deficit ... and Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic student-loan bill lowered the deficit ... and Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic effort to let Bush tax cuts for the rich expire will lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

The Democratic energy/climate bill would lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

The Democratic effort to reduce bloated Pentagon spending would lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

And if you press Republican leaders on how they'd prefer to lower the deficit, they can't answer the question.

It's almost as if Republicans say they care about deficit reduction, until they're offered a chance to actually reduce the deficit. If I didn't know better, I might think GOP officials don't think a deficit-reduction measure "counts" unless it undermines struggling families in some way.

And if you weren't convinced that none of this was about the deficit, this type of economic logic should drive it home: (Drum again)

Fiorina, who decided to parlay her professional failures into becoming the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in California, talked to a the CBS affiliate in San Francisco this week about her approach to tax cuts.

"Let me propose something that may seem crazy to you: you don't need to pay for tax cuts. They pay for themselves, if they are targeted, because they create jobs."

This is, in most respects, even more ridiculous than Sen. Jon Kyl's (R-Ariz.) assertion that shouldn't try to pay for tax cuts. For the Senate Minority Whip, tax cuts are always good, even if they increase the deficit, because they shrink government. For the deeply confused Carly Fiorina, the policy is more fantastical -- paying for tax cuts is unnecessary because once taxes are cut, more money simply materializes, magically, in the federal treasury. The deficit simply won't go up, she argues, no matter how much taxes are cut.

Thirty years ago, this raving stupidity had a name: "voodoo economics." More recently, it's come to be known as belief in the "Tax Fairy."

Regardless of the name, the notion that tax cuts necessarily pay for themselves is one of the more pernicious lies in the far-right arsenal. It's both gibberish and right-wing propaganda, but it's nevertheless repeated from time to time.

In the conservative mind there's no problem with cutting taxes and creating massive deficits, because it shrinks government, and that's inherently a good thing in their eyes. Cheney famously said "Regan proved deficits don't matter" and he's right because nothing that conservatives care about will ever get cut, even when Democrats come into office.

Hell, Obama was so terrified of these harmless talking points that he went of his way to create a commission that will submit a bill that could cut Social Security and Medicare to a lame duck congress. Chances are it won't pass, but lending all that credibility to a right wing talking point does enough damage on it's own.

My hope is that one day we'll have a Democratic leader that will take the GOP head on with this deficit bullshit, and ask them to lead the charge in letting the Bush tax cuts expire to ease the "deficit crisis".Or call them out on their plans to cut Social Security. Or to take on the military industrial complex where there really is plenty of wasteful government spending to be cut. It's the easiest gotcha in the book.

I don't know what will force the Democrats to stop being such reactionary wimps, but hopefully in my lifetime...

Not Fucking Helping

There's a general school of thought in progressive circles that while more stimulus is desperately needed, Obama is doing as much as possible to help the unemployment situation. I tend not to agree with that position for a variety of reasons, partially because they keep saying shit like this:

Here's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on The Kudlow Report last night:

Sec. GEITHNER: We have a pro-growth agenda. Part of the agenda is growing exports. They're central to our future. What the president today is to say, that is important to the United States, we're going to be committed to making sure we're that we're expanding opportunities for American business everywhere. Now, this president understands deeply that governments don't create jobs, businesses create jobs. And our job as government is try to make sure we're creating the conditions that allow businesses to prosper so they can hire people back, get this economy going again.

This echoes President Obama, as quoted in a piece by TAP's Tim Fernholz:

"Now, government can't create jobs, but it can help create the conditions for small businesses to grow and thrive and hire more workers," President Barack Obama said yesterday as he urged Congress to take up new jobs legislation at an event honoring Small Business Owners of the Year. "Government can't guarantee a company's success, but it can knock down the barriers that prevent small-business owners from getting loans or investing in the future."

As Adam Bink and atrios point out, to say that the Government can't create jobs is 1) not true, 2) a conservative talking point 3) not true 4) the last thing you want to say if you claim you're also pushing for THE GOVERNMENT TO CREATE MORE JOBS.

Taking this into acount, we there are two options:

A: The Administration wants to create more jobs, but is extremely incompetent when advocating for further job creation measures.

B: The Administration doesn't think our current unemployment rate is a problem.

I hope option B isn't true, but option A isn't very encouraging either.

Stupid Policy, Stupid Politics

Shit on Labor? Why Not? It's something this Administration seems to do for fun:

WASHINGTON — US President Barack Obama is risking a revolt within his own party as he presses ahead on a free trade agreement with South Korea, setting the stage for a showdown after November legislative elections.

Organized labor, a critical support base for Obama's Democratic Party, and several Democrats have already vowed to fight the deal which they say would hurt workers.

"To try and advance the Korean FTA when so many workers are still struggling to find work would simply move our economy backward," said Representative Louise Slaughter, a Democrat who leads the powerful Rules Committee.

The deal would be the largest for the United States since the the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico in 1994.

This was a deal negotiated by Bush and has the same problems found in the rest of the NAFTA style trade agreements. Some of the details:

Foreign Investor Rights. The investment chapter still affords foreign investors greater rights than those enjoyed by U.S. investors. Not one word was changed in the Korea FTAs’ foreign investor chapters that promote off-shoring, and subject our domestic environmental, zoning, health and other public interest policies to challenge by foreign investors in foreign tribunals. The Korea FTA also allows challenges by foreign investors in foreign tribunals of timber, mining, construction and other concession contracts with the U.S. federal government.

Food Safety Provisions. The amended text does not address limits on imported food safety and inspection. These FTAs still contain language requiring the United States to accept imported food that does not meet our safety standards.

Procurement Provisions. The Korea FTA procurement rules subject many common federal and state procurement policies to challenge in trade tribunals and directly forbid other common procurement policies. These procurement rules continue the NAFTA/CAFTA ban on anti-off-shoring and Buy America policies and expose U.S. renewable energy, recycled content and other environmental safety requirements to challenge.

Agriculture Provisions. The text does not address the problems in the NAFTA-style agriculture trade rules that have simultaneously undermined U.S. producers’ ability to earn a fair price for their crops at home and in the global market place. Multinational grain trading and food processing companies have made enormous profits while farmers on both ends have been hurt. Continuing this model is projected to increase hunger; illicit drug cultivation; undocumented migration; and continue the race to the bottom for commodity prices, pitting farmer against farmer and country against country to see who can produce food the cheapest, regardless of standards on labor, the environment or food safety.

Access to Medicines. While the amended text of these FTAs removes the most egregious, CAFTA-based, provisions limiting the access to affordable medicines, the text still includes NAFTA provisions that undermine the right to affordable medicines for poorer countries contained in the WTO’s Doha Declaration.

Obama has always been a fan of this broken model of trade, so him pushing these agreements isn't a surprise. And his Administration has shown multiple times that he doesn't give a shit about going against labor in a legislative fight.

But just like the way his Administration has embraced the deficit fetishists, Obama has once again endorsed the always elusive dumb policy/dumber politics combo. Not only is the NAFTA model of free trade a disaster, but it's extremely unpopular with voters! Not to mention it's going out of the way to pick a fight with union members, who will be even less likely to turn out to work for Democratic campaigns.

The 2010 midterms might have been bad without this stuff, but the Administration seems to be going out of it's make sure it's a slaughter.

Right and Wrong

Paul Krugman illustrates the problem:

A quick note on David Brooks’s column today. I have no idea what he’s talking about when he says,

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years

Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.

But there’s something else in David’s column, which I see a lot: the argument that because a lot of important people believe something, it must make sense:

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

Yes, I am. It’s called looking at the evidence. I’ve looked hard at the arguments the Pain Caucus is making, the evidence that supposedly supports their case — and there’s no there there.

And you just have to wonder how it’s possible to have lived through the last ten years and still imagine that because a lot of Serious People believe something, you should believe it too. Iraq? Housing bubble? Inflation? (It’s worth remembering that Trichet actually raised rates in June 2008, because he believed that inflation — not the financial crisis — was the big threat facing Europe.)

There are two types of economists right now: There are those that do actual research, examine the past and come to scientific conclusions, and there are those blinded by an ideology that believes everyone but the rich in this country have it too easy. This isn't a straight ideology split (McCain's former economist Mark Zandi has supported more stimulus), but it is most certainly a split between those that have been right, and those that have been wrong.

The economists who have been wrong about just about everything for the past 30 years think that we should focus on reducing the deficit, while the economists who have been largely right are arguing that we needed and continue to need more stimulus.

David Brooks is a moron who thinks the biggest problem our country faces right now is that the poor have it too good. Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize winning economist who has been spot on in predicting the economy over the last 3 years. The idea that the administration has shut out Paul Krugman (and similar minded economists) yet is bending over backwards to please David Brooks is fucking appalling.

The Unemployment Crisis

Really bad news: (via Ezra Klein)

A brutal unemployment report this month. Payrolls dropped by 125,000. In another one of those unwanted lessons in how we calculate unemployment data, the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7 percent to 9.5 percent -- but not because people got hired. Instead, 652,000 people gave up and stopped looking for work. And that number might be higher than it looks, as the natural monthly growth in the labor force is about 100,000 -- so to see a 652,000-person drop might mean something like 752,000 current workers left as 100,000 new workers entered.

The Douche caucus doesn't take this stuff seriously cause they're assholes, and Ben Bernanke doesn't believe lowering unemployment is his job, and the rest of Obama's econ team is too busy repeating Republican talking points about deficit reduction to spend any political capital on something that might help the situation.

Obama could have chosen Stiglitz, Krugman or Baker but instead he hired Summers, Bernanke, the very people whose ideology is responsible for the economic crisis we have today.

As atrios often says, he doesn't "hope" for bad news, but he hopes for something that will get the Administration's attention on the severity of this crisis. Maybe these numbers will do it, maybe they wont. All I know is that if they'd tackled this problem with half the crisis rhetoric/bullshit committee making energy that they've put into fighting the non existent problem of running a deficit during a rescission, we'd be in a far, far better place.

Sensible Liberals in the Obama Era

Tom Tomorrow doesn't disappoint:



And as someone pointed out on twitter, be sure to read the comments, which couldn't do a better job of proving Tom's point.

10 Years Isn't Enough War

One the worst Senators in the world continues to live up to her reputation:

A senior Senate Democrat on foreign policy issues said on Sunday that the president's pledged July 2011 timeline for a troop drawdown in Afghanistan was malleable to the requests of military command.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cali.), whose hawkish grounding has angered progressive in the past, likely facilitated that anger again, when she told "Fox News Sunday" that if General David Petraeus asked for more troops next summer, he should be granted them.

"I would say give it to him, absolutely," said the California Democrat. "Now, let's talk about the deadline. This is a transition point toward the beginning of a withdrawal or a drawdown as Petraeus said in his transcript before the Armed Services [Committee]. And I think he has flexibility realistically. Ten years is a long time to fight a war, particularly with what happened before the 10 years. And so we need to understand that [we have] to get the military trained, get the government online, secure and stabilize, and I think do away with the drugs to a great extent, because the drugs are now fueling the Taliban."

. . .

It's a position that will only fuel suspicion that Congress lacks the political will to actually stick to the timeline for withdrawal (by, say, using the power of the purse to affect it). Indeed, Feinstein seemed to fully cede legislative influence over the course of the war when she granted during the Fox News interview that the United States should "put all of our eggs in the Petraeus basket at this stage."

You gotta love firm, attainable goals like forming and training a military, creating a stable government, and doing away with the drug trade. And with Senators like Diane Feinstein deciding that they don't want to do their job in overseeing the operations, I can't imagine why anyone is worried that the 2011 timeline isn't going according to schedule.

The Stupidity of Hero Worship

Right now on dailykos, the top diary on their recommended list is titled "Obama is no wuss! Obama is the man!!!" and is filled with pictures of Barack and Michelle Obama looking awesome.

If people wake up in a few years with unemployment still at 10% and the biggest accomplishment of the decade was stopping a Democratic president from cutting social security, I think I know why.



It's nothing against Obama, it could be anyone.

It's just that deifying and blindly defending someone because they have a D next to their name/they're really awesome!11!/saved our country from McCain/followed the worst president in US history isn't particularly effective way of getting them to support a progressive agenda.

Chain Of Command

"Chain of command, Detective"

TPM:

In a Rolling Stone magazine article, McChrystal didn't criticize Obama himself but called the period last fall when the president was deciding whether to approve more troops "painful" and said Obama appeared ready to hand him an "unsellable" position.

McChrystal also said he was "betrayed" by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner in Afghanistan. He accused Eikenberry of raising doubts about Karzai only to give himself cover in case the U.S. effort failed. "Now, if we fail, they can say 'I told you so,'" McChrystal told the magazine. And he was quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden.

If not insubordination, the remarks — as well as even sharper commentary about Obama and his White House from several in McChrystal's inner circle — were at least an indirect and extraordinary challenge and one that consumed Washington on Tuesday. The capital hasn't seen a similar public contretemps between a president and a top wartime commander since Harry Truman stripped Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his command more than a half-century ago after disagreements over Korean War strategy.

Notably, neither McChrystal nor his team questioned the accuracy of the story or the quotes in it. McChrystal issued an apology.

McChrystal needs to be fired immediately, and hopefully that's what happens during his Wednesday morning meeting with the President.

There's simply no excuse for McChrystal's behavior in a Civilian controlled government, and if he isn't gone by the end of the day, it will be a massive failure for the Obama administration, and possibly the worst mistake of his presidency.

Update: Obama delivered, big time. Chris Bowers:

I disagree with our continued presence in Afghanistan, but it is laudable that President Obama emphasized how keeping McChrystal on as commander threatened civilian control of the military. If Generals can use the media obsequiousness to dictate military policy, and then stay on as commanders after denigrating virtually the entire civilian leadership of the military, then we would be at an extremely dangerous moment for our democracy.

I still think escalating the war in Afghanistan was a colossal mistake that may doom his presidency, but immense credit for making the right decision, and making it clear why he made that call.

Republicans Never Disappoint

Just when you think that you've seen it all:



The Republican party never fails to amaze me.

When Harry Reid was a lock to lose his election, they nominated a crazy person that will allow him to coast to victory. When they had a chance to cruise to a senate seat in Kentucky, they nominated someone who doesn't believe in the Civil Rights Act.

And now, when the country is becoming frustrated (rightfully so) with President Obama's handling of the spill, they apologize to BP's CEO because they thought Obama was too tough on them.

So thank you Joe Barton for reminding America that no matter how much Democrats may suck, the Republican party is nothing but crazy people who care more about the profits of a multinational corporation than the well-being of someone who lost their job because of the disaster that corporation created.

Spill Keeps On Spilling

Since it seems like Obama reversed his offshore drilling position to end the "age old debate" of whether or not you should preemptively cave to Republicans, I'm not too surprised they missed a few things:

An in-depth review by McClatchy Newspapers reveals how Obama reached that initial decision to expand offshore drilling - and why he failed to get information that might have led him instead to delay or oppose it and perhaps even raise questions about the deepwater drilling that was already under way.

Obama did roll back some of the offshore drilling that the George W. Bush administration had approved on Bush's last day in office. However, Obama never challenged the Bush era's fundamental faith in the oil industry or its ability to clean up a massive spill. Instead, he embraced expanded offshore drilling, in part to win Republican support for broader legislation to curb climate change.

"He deserved to be more skeptical," said Stephen Hess, a veteran of four White Houses back to the Eisenhower administration and an expert on how presidents do their job.

"They hadn't thought through the various ramifications. They should have, obviously. But it didn't seem obvious at the time."

"Not well thought through," said Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine scientist. "If they had really done their job, they would have understood there was high risk here."

Indeed, Obama and his team overlooked some important points as they prepared to give the green light to more offshore oil drilling. Expanding the drilling was something he'd promised to do during his campaign, when gas prices topped $4 a gallon, and it was a lure he planned to use to win Republican votes for legislation aimed at curbing climate change.

Among their oversights:

-Obama thought that funneling information through White House "czars" such as energy and environment adviser Carol Browner would get him all the data he needed.

-He failed to drill into the government bureaucracy to test that information. He didn't, for example, ask about the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which had prepared a report in 2000 on the dangers of deepwater drilling that proved to be eerily predictive of what happened in the Gulf. The MMS regulates offshore drilling.

-He never talked to the Coast Guard about its 2002 oil-spill drill in the Gulf or to the man who ran it, Adm. Thad Allen, who later would oversee the response to the Deepwater Horizon spill.

-He didn't reach out to outside experts, such as the National Academy of Engineering, to question claims that deepwater drilling technology was dependable.

Top Obama administration officials say that they did an exhaustive job marshaling information for more than a year, and that the president asked what he needed to ask when it arrived at his desk. Anyone, they said, would grow complacent about the safety of offshore drilling after decades without a major spill.

"It's really important to understand you have decades of nothing going wrong," said one senior administration official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity as a matter of White House policy.

"The last time you saw a spill of this magnitude in the Gulf, it was off the coast of Mexico in 1979," a second senior administration official said. "If something doesn't happen since 1979, you begin to take your eye off of that thing."

You gotta love how "nobody could have predicted" is just a standard response at this point no matter the issue. There may have been decades without a spill, but there have also been lots of people talking about the dangers of this stuff for years, it's just that no one listened to them.

That's why it's hard to have sympathy for the administration when you hear "woe is me, now we have the greatest environmental crisis in history too" type rhetoric. Well, if you hadn't given a speech a few days before the spill saying that anyone who doesn't think offshore drilling has a place in the future is a fucking idiot, than maybe you would have some higher ground to stand on.

When the response is filled with screw ups, instead of continually talking about how BP are good faith partners (something that about 0% of the population believes), you could use this moment to talk about renewable energy, and how the lack of a plan proves we need to end offshore drilling permanently.

Instead you get good speeches like last nights' falling on deaf ears because there are still daily reports coming from the gulf about BP's incompetent response, and how plenty of people still aren't sure who is calling the shots.

There's always the standard Obama era glass half full "hoping that the Administration learns from this" or "hoping this leads to tougher regulations", but the scale of the damage here is frankly far too serious for any of that to matter.

It's pretty fucking depressing, and there's really no getting around that.

"We Waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed"

Speaking of the Geneva Conventions, when the former President of the United States feels comfortable spouting off about violating them, something is clearly wrong:

Former President George W. Bush answers questions during his visit with the Economic Club of Grand Rapids on Wednesday. GRAND RAPIDS -- Former President George W. Bush was by turns affable, relaxed -- and deadly serious in his local appearance Wednesday.

"Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Bush said of the terrorist who master-minded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. He said that event shaped his presidency and convinced him the nation was in a war against terror.

"I'd do it again to save lives."

Someone should probably checking into this, although that would mean looking backwards, which can't be done because Obama said it could lead to the break up of the United States or something.

Real Talk for the White House

Jane Hamsher had the best response to yesterday's bullshit:

Labor is not your bitch, and their money isn’t yours to direct. They’re supposed to take what, another six years of black eyes from Blanche Lincoln just because you say so? If their $8 million buys derivatives legislation and limits the damage that the Masters of the Universe can do to the world economy in the future, it’s not only a bargain, it also means that a bunch of nurses and janitors have done more to rein in the banks than you and your entire pack of servile, visionless Wall Street lackeys has done since you took office.

Boom.

White House Declares War On Labor

Senator John Boozman, get used to hearing it.

I know I'm often mad when I write on this blog, but reading this from Ben Smith of Politico honestly made me want to throw my computer through the television and go to bed:

A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkanas.

"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toiled on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

While Labor "flushed away" money by supporting challenging someone who opposed their agenda, the Obama Administration was wisely spending the Democratic National Committee's resources to nominate an unelectable Republican.

As the AFL CIO said in a statement a few minutes ago, organized labor exists to support the interests of their members, not for the benefit the Democratic party or the Obama Administration. The next time they stick up for our issues will be the first, so if Obama's concerned that we aren't clapping loud enough when you give us the excise tax, eliminate the public option and don't push the Employee Free Choice Act, I don't know what to say.

Eddie Vale of the AFL-CIO is last night's real winner with this brilliant response the the White House:

"We are not an arm of the White House or the DNC or a political party," said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale. "We work on issues. And if we feel like someone is standing up for working families, we support them, and if they don't, we won't support it. In the past, people would have assumed that was talk, but now we have backed that up with action."

"Is the lesson they are taking out of tonight that they can go after labor and anonymously trash us and we will put our tail in between our legs and slink home? That ain't happening," Vale added.

Driving home the point that the White House was cravenly hiding behind the cloak of anonymity in their attacks, the AFL-CIO spokesman signed off the conversation with the following: "My name is Eddie Vale of the AFL-CIO and I'm proud to fight for working families and I don't hide behind anonymous quotes."

So, Senior White House Official who was so courageous that they anonymously fires off a gloating email to multiple journalists, from the bottom of my heart: Fuck off.

Have fun with Blanche Lincoln, Arlen Specter, Joe Lieberman and Douche bags you've seem to enjoy coddling. The age old question in the Labor movement is "which side are you on" and if we've learned nothing else tonight, you've made it pretty clear where you stand.

Fucking Morons

Ezra Klein flagged this passage about the Administration's response to the spill: (via atrios)

Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Chu at one point pushed the unusual idea of using gamma rays to peer into the blowout preventer to determine if its valves were closed, a technique he experimented with in graduate school while studying radioactive decay.

The suggestion at first elicited snickering and "Incredible Hulk" jokes. Then they tried it, and it worked. "They weren't hot on his ideas," a senior White House official said of BP's initial reaction to Chu's suggestions. "Now they are.

Two thoughts went through my mind when I saw this. One, I was thrilled to hear about Chu's involvement. I had heard various mentions of this, but I'm glad to hear they really did bring in a team of geniuses to come up with solutions to the problem.

The second thing to go through my head was blinding rage at the thought of these assholes from BP snickering at his suggestions. Sweet Jesus, these people are so arrogant that they're laughing off a Nobel Prize winner's attempts to contain THEIR FUCKING MESS. How Obama wasn't personally on Capitol hill whipping votes to eliminate the cap on their damages after this meeting is beyond me.