If tea partiers had bollocks

See the bloke behind Gordon Brown at last night's vote count in the British prime minister's Scottish constituency?

Yeah, that one. The one with the upraised fist. Right on. Can you dig it?

That is Deek Jackson of the Landless Peasant Party. And he -- along with the Jesus Christ guy and the Monster Raving Loony Party -- is why British politics is far and away more entertaining than the colonial brand of democratic futility.

BELOW, enjoy a not-work-or-family-friendly advert for the Landless Peasant Party, featuring Mr. Jackson, whom we'll refer to as Angus X. This is what the tea partiers would be on this side of the Atlantic . . . if only they had . . . er, bollocks.


AND HERE is Scotland's No. 1 peasant, Angus X, on the campaign trail.

AYE, 'tis a bonnie thing to have a candidate tell a voter he thinks he's daft. Almost as good as when the BBC's Jeremy Paxman gets a hold of a politician who unwisely tries to "spin" him.

Bad night for Jesus in the UK

David Cameron may be hard pressed to win an outright majority for the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, but he had amazingly little trouble dispatching the King of King and the Lord of Lords in his Witney, Oxfordshire, constituency.

No wonder no one thinks it will go well for the British after the politicking is done and the attempts at governing begin.

Another disappointment was the poor showing of the Monster Raving Loony Party, though I believe it did come in ahead of the Almighty.

ALL IN ALL, you have to admit there is far greater entertainment value in British elections than in ours. Then again, I'm just geeky that way -- as you can see here.

A most pleasant surprise in the BBC coverage of the UK national balloting is the emergence of veteran Beeb presenter David Dimbleby as the most entertaining damn thing on network television since Dan Rather spun his last Election Night simile and mangled his last metaphor.

Dimbleby -- who has a refreshing lack of patience for any kind of television, or political, foolishness -- even came up with a Ratherism fine enough to warm a colonist's heart: "But behind the scenes, you know they're fighting like cats in a sack."

And then there was this question from someone on the BBC team to a Labour minister: "It's 20 past 3 in the morning, couldn't we please just have a straight answer?"

Hear! Hear!

Never trust anyone under 30

You know how Millennials just have to share . . . and share . . . and share . . . and share, and it seems like they have no sense of privacy or discretion?

You know what I'm sayin', Bubbie?

I hate that.

And now the king of the Millennials, Mark Zuckerberg, is bringing that ethos to its fullest fruition on Facebook. And we Boomers -- who, to be fair, started this damn mess with our "letting it all hang out" -- apparently have to like it.

Or else.

SAYS The New York Times:

For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations.

On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.

Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether.

Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.

“Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md.

Mr. Ament said he was so fed up with Facebook that he deleted his account this week after three years of using the service. “Every week there seems to be a new privacy update or change, and I just can’t keep up with it.”

Facebook said it did not think the security hole, which was open a few hours, would have a lasting impact on the company’s reputation.

“For a service that has grown as dramatically as we have grown, that now assists with more than 400 million people sharing billions of pieces of content with their friends and the institutions they care about, we think our track record for security and safety is unrivaled,” said Elliot Schrage, the company’s vice president for public policy. “Are we perfect? Of course not.”

Facebook is increasingly finding itself at the center of a tense discussion over privacy and how personal data is used by the Web sites that collect it, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University.

“It’s clear that we keep discovering new boundaries of privacy that are possible to push and just as quickly breached,” Mr. Katz said.

Social networking experts and analysts wonder whether Facebook is pushing the envelope in a way that could damage its standing over time. The privacy mishap on Wednesday, first reported by the blog TechCrunch, did not help matters.

“While this breach appears to be relatively small, it’s inopportunely timed,” said Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It threatens to undermine what Facebook hopes to achieve with its network over the next few years, because users have to ask whether it is a platform worthy of their trust.”

Over the last few months, Facebook has introduced changes that encourage users to make their photos and other information accessible to anyone on the Internet. Last month its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled plans to begin sharing users’ information with some outside Web sites, and Facebook began prompting users to link information in their profile pages, like their hobbies and hometowns, in a way that makes that information public.

That last change prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, to file a complaint on Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission.

“Facebook continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for commercial purposes,” Marc Rotenberg, the group’s executive director, said in a letter to the commission.

DAMN PUNK KIDS. They learn all too well, then they start an Internet company that eats the world.

Before it "jumps the shark." That's another thing we Boomers started. Heh.

Just one question. . . .

Why wouldn't I just buy a laptop instead?

A laptop, after all, can multitask, unlike an iPad. A laptop also can run lots more programs than an iPad, and it has a full-featured operating system.

Why, given all this, would I try to turn an iPad into a really lame fake laptop? Instead of buying the real thing.

Shoot the messenger principal

Denial in the name of "school reform" is going to do no one any good.

And in Omaha, politically correct political posturing may have just turned into full-blown delusion. Unfortunately, Washington has the clout -- and state officials are craven enough -- to turn a public-policy psychotic break into a world of hurt for children . . . and for those struggling to teach them.

Here's the story: One day, Nebraska education officials are praising the excellence of four local high schools. The next, the state puts the schools on a "persistently lowest achieving" list, qualifying them for federal stimulus money aimed at lifting troubled schools out of the educational gutter.

To qualify for these stimulus funds, Omaha Public Schools must institute "reforms" at the excellent-yet-underachieving schools, reforms ranging from removing the "excellent" administrators to shutting down the "excellent" schools.

We are Americans. That means we do insane things, from destroying Vietnamese villages in order to save them from the Red Menace to closing "excellent" schools to rescue them from dissoluteness.

AND IN OMAHA, according to a story in today's World-Herald, Americans are about to elevate their "crazy" to a whole new level:

The full list includes 28 high schools, eight middle schools and 18 elementary schools. Two of the schools house both middle and high school students.

Included on the list are five Omaha area high schools Omaha Central, Omaha North, Omaha South, Omaha Benson and Bellevue East. Indian Hill Elementary School in OPS also made the list.

The designation could mean federal grant funding for the schools if their districts agree to reforms prescribed by the Obama administration such as staffing changes at each school building.

John Mackiel, superintendent of the Omaha Public Schools, expressed frustration Wednesday at OPS schools making the list.

The four OPS high schools made the list because they have graduation rates below 75 percent.

Mackiel sharply criticized state officials for labeling the schools in order to receive federal funding.

“I don't believe there's anything more reprehensible than gaming the system to access $77 million of federal money by accepting it and then labeling schools that two months ago you just celebrated in terms of the educational opportunities going on in those schools,” he said.

Schools on the list are eligible for a total of $17 million in grants, but there probably will only be enough money to serve schools with the greatest need of improvement. As a result, many of the districts with schools listed won't have to make difficult decisions on whether to remove principals or take other drastic measures.

Schools that accept federal School Improvement Grants would have to implement one of four models. The models range in severity from removing the principal to closing the school.

Nebraska sought and received a waiver in the federal rules allowing use of a graduation rate of 75 percent instead of the 60 percent called for by the federal government.

Nebraska Education Commissioner Roger Breed said no Nebraska high schools except for Native American schools would have qualified for funding at 60 percent.

(snip)

Mackiel called it “a curious Alice-in-Wonderland contradiction” that in February, the Nebraska Department of Education performed an annual assessment of the district and issued a “glowing” report commending the leadership at South, North, Central and Benson high schools.

In the next 10 days, Mackiel said, graduating seniors at the four high schools will be awarded more than $25 million in scholarships, “but to see the list today you wouldn't know that.”

MACKIEL is right. Both Central and North, to name just two, are excellent schools. Both feature first-rate facilities, and Omaha North also is a magnet school.

What all Omaha's "failing" schools also happen to be are smack-dab in the inner city. What all Omaha's "failing" schools happen to be charged with is educating most of the offspring of the city's underclass.

These are the young victims of a failed culture, one which values many things, just not education, responsibility, achievement or familial stability. Back when I was taking just enough college sociology courses to be dangerous, one term of art for such was "deviant." Another was "dysfunctional."

As in "deviant behavior." Within a "dysfunctional environment."

According to the state -- and to the feds, eager to remedy a crisis, just not the right one -- the likes of Benson, North, South and Central are "persistently lowest achieving" schools because they graduate only 75 percent of the children who wander through their doors. According to the real world, Jesus Christ never performed a bigger miracle when he caused Peter to walk on water or fed more than 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.

Verily, I say unto thee if North, South, Central and Benson were more white, less underclass and a lot more suburban, the quality of teaching going on there would have the world beating a path unto them as the new MIT, if not the new Jerusalem.

But you cannot say that in America, because that would be impolitic.

IT IS BETTER for state and federal officials to ignore that Omaha, for example, has the third-highest black poverty rate in the nation. Ignore that its percentage of African-American children in poverty is atop the American hit parade of suck.

No, it is much more expedient to pretend that none of these things stack the deck against even the best educators and the best-resourced schools. It's a lot easier to downplay the fact that this kind of endemic poverty breeds real cultural deviance -- as opposed to America's everyday, middling cultural deviance -- and that a deviant hip-hop subculture glorifying Every Wrong Thing takes real cultural deviance and supersizes it.

Why, oh why, open up that can of racially-charged Whoop-Ass when you can just blame the schools instead?

Not acknowledging plain facts does not make them any less plain. Or factual.

It certainly doesn't make stigmatizing certain schools and punishing the educators formerly known as "excellent" any less of an insanely stupid starting point for embarking on the Sisyphean task of trying to fix broken people and a deviant culture.

Tightass likes . . . tight ass?

Can we agree it's not a good idea to engage in a culture war when you're completely outgunned and your ranks are full of Benedict Arnolds?

Can we agree that "conservative" Christians engaged in this "war" with all the forethought and all the tactical aplomb of George W. Bush, circa 2003?

And finally, can we just agree the culture war is over, and the "moral majority" lost? Actually, it wasn't even a contest.

MAYBE WE could call it "Dobson's Last Stand," considering this story in Miami New Times about one of the men who co-founded the Family Research Council with him:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch c*** (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

On April 13, the "rent boy" (whom we'll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.

That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy's client and, as it happens, one of America's most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. "I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him." (Medical problems didn't stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.)

Yet Rekers wouldn't deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it.

At the small western Miami townhome he shares with a roommate, a nervous Lucien expressed surprise when we told him that Rekers denied knowing about his line of work from the beginning. "He should've been able to tell you that," he said, fidgeting and fixing his eyes on his knees. "But that's up to him."

For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the culture wars, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America's best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a D.C.-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation's extreme right wing. Its annual Values Summit is considered a litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls, and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have spoken there. (The Family Research Council would not comment about Rekers's Euro-trip.)

THE FRC will be unable to hide from this one, so it just as well address the issue. Then again, what in the world could its officials say? "Holy crap! This may have just discredited us?"

As for Rekers' part, it seems there's no explaining this one away. His pathetic attempt to do just that was his best possible shot. Read on:

In his interview with New Times, Lucien didn't want to impugn his client, but he made it clear they met through Rentboy.com, which is the only website on which he advertises his services. Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.

To arrive at Lucien's site, Rekers must have accepted Rentboy.com's terms of use, thereby acknowledging he was not offended by graphic sexual material. He then would have been transported to a front page covered with images of naked, tumescent men busily sodomizing each other.

OH, MY! And then it gets really disturbing if you apply just a little imagination.

Not to mention Rekers' blog, TeenSexToday.com. Again, from New Times:

Indeed, much of Rekers's activism over the past three decades — beginning with his 1983 book, Shaping Your Child's Sexual Identity — has been devoted to improving children's lives by educating them, protecting them from their own budding sexualities, and keeping them safe from gay adoptions — as he did by testifying as an expert witness in favor of gay adoption bans in both Arkansas and Florida.

Well, it's a good thing Rekers isn't gay himself. Lucien tells us that Rekers frequently takes in foster children and that four years ago he adopted a 16-year-old boy. We found the boy, who is now Lucien's age, on Facebook. He declined to be interviewed.

IN THE ARENA of culture and morals -- in the quest to redeem a fallen culture and dysfunctional society -- it just doesn't work to look at this and say "Well, he's a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch."

You can't preach the gospel and promote good morals with a gay "rent boy" by your side. Well, you can, but the cynics will laugh and everybody else will be scandalized. You can't win a "war" by giving your "enemies" ammunition.

Assuming, of course, that what Christians are called to is war. Which we aren't.

We're called to love our neighbor and proclaim the truth -- in love. This is not achieved by entrusting a pearl of great price to culture-war hypocrites who lust after "rent boys" as they troll the halls of power, flattering Caesar and living a lie.

On a note of wistfulness

What you are about to hear is a voice -- a voice lost. A voice faded into the haze of the memories of old men and old women, a world lost in the fog of history.

The voice speaks in an unfamiliar dialect. It speaks of strange things in a strange manner.

This voice -- this lost voice -- calls to us from a nation that is no more. A people who are no more.

The voice is strident. It is confident. It is imperfect, and its sins are as manifest as its hope for the future and its determination to do better tomorrow. Somehow.

This alien voice sounds like Shakespeare, performed in a tavern. By Broderick Crawford.


THE FUTURE GENERATIONS who hear this voice are strangers to its cadences. The future that plucks this voice from the ether -- from the past -- belongs to an alien people, a weary people, a frightened people. They, I think, are a beaten people, though I am not sure they would recognize this.

They would not recognize this voice on a note of triumph. Nor would they any longer recognize the name Broderick Crawford.

Certainly they will not recognize the name Norman Corwin.

This program, On a Note of Triumph, was regarded as his masterpiece -- a masterpiece among many Corwin masterpieces -- aired on every radio network on the occasion of the end of the European War, May 8, 1945.

Adolf Hitler was dead. The Third Reich was vanquished. Americans remembered, and took stock, and gave thanks. On a Note of Triumph.

Lord God of trajectory and blast,
Whose terrible sword has laid open the serpent
So it withers in the sun for the just to see,
Sheathe now the swift avenging blade with the names of nations writ on it,
And assist in the preparation of the plowshare.
Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings,
Who walks in the circuit of heaven among the worthy,
Deliver notice to the fallen young men
That tokens of orange juice and a whole egg appear now before the hungry children;
That night again falls cooling on the earth as quietly as when it leaves Your hand;
That freedom has withstood the tyrant like a Malta in a hostile sea,
And that the soul of man is surely a Sevastopol
Which goes down hard and leaps from ruin quickly.
Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage
Who has furred the fox against the time of winter
And stored provender of bees in summer's brightest places,
Do bring sweet influences to bear upon the assembly line:
Accept the smoke of the milltown among the accredited clouds of the sky:
Fend from the wind with a house and a hedge
Him who You made in Your image,
And permit him to pick of the tree and the flock,
That he may eat today without fear of tomorrow,
And clothe himself with dignity in December.
Lord God of test-tube and blueprint,
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors
and give instruction to their schemes;
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color
or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream
as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of little peoples through
expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come
for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.

LORD GOD of history and culture . . . we do not understand. This world is lost to us.

Lord God of reality TV and bling, what is the past trying to tell us?

Lord God Almighty, are we all the better or all the worse for all the "progress" we, Thy unfaithful creation, hath wrought?

We laugh at the strange cadences. We laugh at the naiveté. We laugh at the world-weary optimism. We laugh at the reverence.

We, the sophisticates of monosyllabic mindlessness, have no time for these earnest ghosts.

Norman Corwin, the genius of glowing vacuum tubes and the "Golden Age of Radio," turned 100 on Monday. Unfortunately, this is no country for old men.

Or their genius. Or their poetic prose. Glorious words lovingly set so gently, so precisely onto the airwaves of a lost civilization.

What? I can't unders. . . .

Gone. The signal -- I lost it.

Curses, Kim! You've done it again!

LBJ killed JFK!

Elvis faked his death and last was seen at a Burger King in Chattanooga!

The North Koreans blew up the Deepwater Horizon!

We "know" all this because right-wingers hated the Great Society, beehived middle-aged ladies and assorted weirdos couldn't believe the King could ever die, and Republicans find it more plausible that Kim Jong-il launched a minisub on a suicide mission from a freighter steaming from Havana to blow up an oil rig that . . . oh, for pity's sake!

FACE IT, right-wing ideologues have gone around the bend, tinfoil hats are in vogue, and now is the time to buy, buy, buy those aluminum stocks.

The following story, self-published on some outfit by the name of Helium -- which probably is also what some folks have been huffing -- is all over conservative talk radio and the Interwebs:

With tensions increasing in the region throughout 2009 and into early 2010, the news suddenly reached the world that a SKorean naval patrol ship, the Cheonan, sank off Baengnyeong island in the Yellow Sea, near the border with NKorea on Friday, the 27th of March. A close range explosion had rocked the ship. More than forty sailors were missing and later presumed dead.

Earlier that same morning, the North's military leaders threatened SKorea and the United States with "unpredictable strikes."

At first, South Korea played down any involvement with its totalitarian neighbor to the north, but gradually incontrovertible evidence emerged that the North had deployed an armed, sophisticated mini-sub into the Yellow Sea. It launched a torpedo at the Cheonan and sunk it in an unprovoked attack.

Twenty-four days later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig owned by the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor Transocean, and operated by British Petroleum, suddenly exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico. More than a dozen were injured and 11 assumed dead.

(snip)

Now as SKorea vows retaliation for NKorea's act of war, evidence has surfaced that NKorea may have deployed the same type of armed military submersible against Deepwater Horizon.

Facts have also emerged that Hyandai Heavy Industries of Seoul, South Korea built the rig at a cost of $1 billion and despite insurance may have to write off significant losses. The oil rig explosion also has repercussions for the SKorean economy.

So with one attack, NKorea could have dealt a serious blow to two of its greatest enemies.

According to some reports, suspicion has fallen on a NKorean merchant vessel, the Dai Hong Dan, that left a port in Cuba the night of April 18th. The merchant vessel is the class of ship that intelligence agencies have long known can be fitted for—and has carried in the past—NKorea's two-man mini-submarines.

The mini-sub, an SSC Sang-o Class submersible, can carry two torpedoes. They have been known to be transported by several classes of their warships, disguised as merchant vessels or by their older submarines.

The older NKorean subs have been determined By the SKorean navy to be based on a former Yugoslavian design that the NKorean military adopted. Those 1990 versions were retrofitted to carry the two-man submersible and capable of sea launch.

The newest generation of the NKorean mini-sub has stealth abilities, a longer range and can stay submerged much longer than its previous versions.

According to Russian intelligence which released a report in Moscow on May 30, 2010, the NKorean vessel carried a force from the 17th Sniper Corps and departed the Cuban port of Empresa Terminales Mambisas de La Habana April the night of April 18, 2010. Although it's destination was Caracas, Venezuela, it changed course and steamed to within 113 nautical miles of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The mini-sub is estimated to have an effective range of 175 nautical miles.

Then, according to the Russians, the NKoreans launched one of its SSC Sang-o mini-subs (the same kind it used in the attack on the SKorean warship in the Yellow Sea). When the stealth sub reached the offshore oil platform it fired two incendiary torpedoes at the rig's superstructure.

BECAUSE ALL of this is soooooooooo much more plausible to conservatives than an oil company and its drilling partner getting greedy, lobbying against regulations requiring state-of-the-art blowout prevention, then cutting corners and screwing up . . . and blowing themselves up in a catastrophic fashion.

Next thing you know, the right-wing echo chamber will be arguing that destruction of the wetlands, and much of the Gulf fishing industry, actually is a good thing. That those shrimpers and oystermen ought to thank their lucky stars that multinational capitalists applied a little black-gold tough love to their blue-collar, loser asses and gave them such a golden opportunity to retrain for much more lucrative -- and much less smelly -- careers as derivatives traders and financial analysts.

Remember, no freedom-loving American capitalist patriot is worth the label if he can't believe at least a half-dozen impossible things before Rush comes on at 11.

It's all about correct branding

Along with the new logo, I am informed that BP is considering a new slogan: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

At long last, truth in advertising. Ask Louisiana.

Find Barney. Give him the bullet.

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

When Thelma Lou is getting robbed by a guy named Shirley (now there's a motive right there) in the real-life Mayberry, you know we must be living in a time somewhere near the end of the world.

And good riddance.

'The following is not public'

The Mobile Press-Register today got its hands on what the government isn't telling you.

It isn't pretty.

If what the experts fear might happen does happen, we will never have seen anything like this. Ever.

I RECOMMEND a good, stiff drink before reading the Press-Register story:

A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could be on the verge of becoming an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster in the Gulf makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf.

"The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."

Asked Friday to comment on the document, NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said that the additional leaks described were reported to the public late Wednesday night. Regarding the possibility of the spill becoming an order of magnitude larger, Smullen said, "I'm letting the document you have speak for itself."

In scientific circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 million gallons a day. It appears the new leaks mentioned in the Wednesday release are the leaks reported to the public late Wednesday night.

"There is no official change in the volume released but the USCG is no longer stating that the release rate is 1,000 barrels a day," continues the document, referred to as report No. 12. "Instead they are saying that they are preparing for a worst-case release and bringing all assets to bear."

The emergency document also states that the spill has grown in size so quickly that only 1 to 2 percent of it has been sprayed with dispersants.

The Press-Register obtained the emergency report from a government official. The White House, NOAA, the Coast Guard and BP Plc did not immediately return calls for comment made early this morning.

The worst-case scenario for the broken and leaking well pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico would be the loss of the wellhead and kinked piping currently restricting the flow to 5,000 barrels -- or 210,000 gallons -- per day.

If the wellhead is lost, oil could leave the well at a much greater rate.

"Typically, a very good well in the Gulf can produce 30,000 barrels a day, but that's under control. I have no idea what an uncontrolled release could be," said Stephen Sears, chairman of the petroleum engineering department at Louisiana State University.

GOD HELP my home state.

Lovely. Just lovely.

Every time the experts take a closer look at the Gulf oil spill, it gets five times bigger.

And now, according to this story in The Wall Street Journal, we have a true "Holy crap!" moment:

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be leaking at 25,000 barrels a day, five times the government's current estimates, industry experts say.

Basing their calculations on government data and standard industry measurement tools, the experts say the Gulf spill may already rival the historic 1969 Santa Barbara, Calif., and 1989 Exxon Valdez disasters.

The massive spill began washing ashore Friday along the Louisiana coast, reaching the mouth of the Mississippi River delta. The disaster also threatens to blunt new oil drilling along coasts, a politically sensitive issue as Congress debates climate change legislation.

The slick started oozing near Louisiana's fragile islands and barrier marshes overnight. Boats patrolled coastal marshes Friday looking for areas where the oil has flowed in, the Coast Guard said, and the state diverted thousands of gallons of fresh water from the Mississippi River to try to flush out the wetlands.

Reiterating the U.S.'s efforts to respond to the spill, President Barack Obama said Friday that the federal government is "fully prepared" and doing "everything necessary." The president said he has ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to report to him in 30 days on "what if any additional precautions and technologies should be required to prevent accidents like this from happening again."

Sunset on Louisiane

When I was young and full of dreams,
My whole life in front of me.
But things are not always the way they seem,
Some things will always change.

My papa’d been a trapper living hand to mouth,
But when I made shop foreman, I had it all figured out,
I thanked God each and every day
When the industry came to town.

Sunset on Louisianne,
The sun going down on the promised land,
I’ve given you everything I can,
I’ve got nothing left to lose.

Married a girl from Pauché Briide,
Raised a family of Cajun kids,
Nobody did no better than we did,
But things can always change.

My sister lost her baby premature,
And my papa got the sickness that got no cure,
And what they told us about it at the plant,
We could not be sure.

Sunset on Louisianne,
The sun going down on the promised land,
I’ve given you everything I can,
I’ve got nothing left to lose.

Smokestacks burning on the river,
From New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
How can I go on believing
When the won’t tell me the truth.

I take my grand son fishing down at Camanida Bay,
I hope some of this beauty will last,
But, lord, it’s changing so damn fast,
Each and every day.

I love the river and I love the swamp,
The snowy egret and the old bull frog,
But they’re harder to find one and all
Since the industry came to town.

-- Zachary Richard, 1992

Put this in your Post and stick it

On this blog, I don't, as they say, "work blue."

However. . . .

When I run across the likes of this in Friday's Washington Post, keeping things clean doesn't seem to do nearly enough justice to the magnitude of the sphincterlicious inside-the-Beltway shit peddling that's America's "new normal":

The worsening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday threatened not only the shores of five states but also President Obama's plan to open vast stretches of U.S. coastline to oil and gas drilling.

Hours before the spill started washing ashore in Louisiana late Thursday, members of Congress issued new calls for Obama to abandon his plans for expanded offshore drilling, and White House officials conceded that the spreading oil slick could cause the president to rethink his position. "We need to figure out what happened," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Would a finding of something possibly affect that? Of course."

The outlook in the Gulf of Mexico remained bleak in the wake of the April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and killed 11 workers. A change in the weather and choppy waters prevented a second burn of oil at sea and slowed efforts by a flotilla of ships to skim the oily mixture from the surface of the gulf, federal officials said. Continuing efforts to use remote-controlled robotic submarines to activate a malfunctioning blowout preventer lying on the sea floor in 5,000 feet of water failed.

The Coast Guard approved an experimental plan by petroleum giant BP, which had leased the rig, to apply chemical dispersants underwater near the places where oil is gushing from three breaks in the well pipes at an estimated rate of 5,000 barrels a day.

In Washington, the White House held a series of high-profile media events aimed at communicating that the administration is fully engaged in the crisis. Obama went to the Rose Garden and said, "While BP is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and cleanup operations, my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal, including potentially the Department of Defense, to address the incident."

WELL, there you go.

Because a multinational Big Oil conglomerate was too cheap to install state-of-the-art blowout protectors on its mile-deep oil well 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, and because the federal government is too craven to insist they just fucking do it, my home state -- at least according to the experts -- is about to face the biggest environmental, economic and cultural shitstorm ever unleashed on one of these United States.

Well, at least since 1865. Or 2005, if you're from Louisiana.

In southeastern Louisiana, people are still living in trailers five years after Katrina washed away half the damned region -- and the Army Corps of Shitty Engineers ravaged the rest -- and now they get to watch the fishing industry destroyed perhaps for a generation, the wetlands destroyed maybe forever, the wildlife smothered in a tarry layer of petroleum and a genocidal knife plunged deep into the heart of their very culture.

All because, basically, Gordon Gekko wrote the rulebook for America 2.0.

This is what's happening. This is what may be happening for the next generation . . . or more. And New Orleans -- what's left of New Orleans -- is going to be sitting there with the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico lapping at "hurricane-protection" levees the Army Corps of Shitty Engineers is rebuilding only slightly less shittily than previously.


THE BOTTOM LINE here is that New Orleans is pretty much doomed because America couldn't care less. All we need is a Category 3 to just come close enough -- to the west this time.

Because in the United States today, being in government -- or traded on Wall Street -- means never having to say you're sorry. Or invest in Soap on a Rope.

These are the stakes now as the Crescent City sits under a stinking petroleum haze -- fumes from the black-tar slick just now starting to kill Louisiana's coast. And the livelihoods of its shrimpers. And its oystermen. And its coastal tourism industry.

OK, we live in a Gekko world, so you want numbers, right?

How about this, then: According to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the state's fishing industry has a total economic impact of $2.3 trillion.

That's with a "T."

And amid all this -- amid all the implications of all the stuff the g**damn Eastern press can't be bothered to much think about -- we hear from The Washington Post that this is the most important damned thing about the whole deal:

Hours before the spill started washing ashore in Louisiana late Thursday, members of Congress issued new calls for Obama to abandon his plans for expanded offshore drilling, and White House officials conceded that the spreading oil slick could cause the president to rethink his position. "We need to figure out what happened," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Would a finding of something possibly affect that? Of course."

I WENT to journalism school. I used to work for newspapers. I know all about the hierarchical design of the "inverted pyramid" method of newswriting. And that, my friends, was the second paragraph.

An entire ecosystem -- and many of the creatures living in it -- may be in the process of being destroyed. Is this Obama's Katrina?

The culture of southeastern Louisiana is being petro-choked to death. Will BP be able to weather this public-relations storm?

Thousands of people will lose their jobs -- and a way of life that survived generations but couldn't survive the explosive mixture of Big Oil and the free market. Will this cause the president to rethink the White House's position on expanding offshore drilling?

Asshat bastards. There's a sea of suffering humanity -- and suffering wildlife -- waiting to slip under the oily waves and these fuckers can't see past the political posturing and Gallup polls.

"We need to find out what happened" ought to be the epitaph on America's tombstone. Written in oil.

You know, the oil industry and the ass-kissing politicians just as well could march all of southeast Louisiana at gunpoint to the giant dust bunny that is Oklahoma, and the g**damn national press would be speculating whether the added demand for walking shoes would be a boon for Nike.

Then again, nobody much paid attention to the original Trail of Tears at the time. Cherokees, coonasses, blacks, Croatians, Isleños, Vietnamese . . . the wogs begin in Northern Virginia, right?

IT'S A DAMN PITY, Louisiana, that over a century ago when you sold your soul to the devil -- or to John D. Rockefeller, I forget which -- you wasted all the money on hookers and booze. And on second-rate schools, second-rate hospitals, third-rate roads and lots of all-pork boondoggles that kept brothers-in-law everywhere in high cotton.

Because right now, as after Katrina, it would be really helpful to have a diversified economy, an educated workforce, a decent infrastructure and a functioning civil society.

But you don't. And you're fucked. And America doesn't give a shit that you're shit out of luck.

That's because America is the devil. It's a self-righteous country full of little satans, and they're -- we're -- all going to tea parties and chanting "Drill, baby, drill!"when we're not tooling around hell in air-conditioned SUVs.

And The Washington Post is riding shotgun.

God, does it suck to be you, or what?

Rich Man, Poor Man . . . invisible man

Channel 7 went to the videotape, and its story about Big Mama's was as I expected.

Which means they got about half the story -- the North Omaha half.

What KETV didn't notice was the South O half of the story -- a half that may be even more illustrative. Because in South Omaha, it wasn't that the area was ignored completely -- it wasn't -- but what restaurants there were ignored, amigo.

HERE'S WHAT the TV folk reported -- or some of it, at least:

She said her restaurant wasn't the only one in the area left out of the Berkshire Hathaway guide.

"North Omaha is here," she said. "We're on the map. We've been here. Why were we left out?"

Her daughter contacted Warren Buffett's office directly, twice in the last two years, but she wasn't able to get an answer.

After KETV NewsWatch 7 got involved on Wednesday, Barron received a surprising voice mail from the head of Berkshire Hathaway himself.

"Hi, this is Warren Buffett. I was calling Patricia Barron," the message went. "I'd appreciate if you'd give me a call. Thanks."

"I'm just thrilled," she said. "He called me."

She said she plans to ask Buffett to get north Omaha in the loop.

"That I'd like to be included on his list, this year and next year, and that I want him to come down and have a meal at Big Mama's," Barron said.

ALAS, this is a story older than ol' Jim Crow. It, in fact, is as old as the Good Book.

It's as old as Lazarus begging for crumbs from the rich man's table and getting none. And in what might be a nice visual hook for television audiences, it also features the fantastic spectacle of rich people and trying to squeeze camels through the eye of a needle.

Stuff rich white people like

The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha is the epitome of "Stuff White People Like."

Specifically, stuff rich white people like.

And judging by the annual shareholder's meeting visitor's guide, rich folk got no use for soul food restaurants in North Omaha, or for Mexican restaurants owned by actual Mexicans who set up shop in Omaha's Latino quarter. "White" restaurants in South Omaha, on the other hand, are recommended to the Berkshire stockholders and Warren Buffett fanboys. Latino joints are not.

One in "deepest, darkest South O," Piccolo Pete's is among Buffett's faves.

But no El Aguila. No El Alamo. No Maria Bonita. No Taqueria Tijuana, or any of the other authentic-as-you-can-get Mexican eateries up and down S. 24th Street and, indeed, all over South O.

THE SAME goes for an acclaimed soul-food joint in North Omaha -- Big Mama's Kitchen. It's notable enough to be featured on the Food Network, but not notable enough that the Berkshire meeting organizers might think it worthy of wealthy, largely white palates.

Neither was another beloved Omaha joint featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives -- California Tacos. And what might be the connection between two eateries featured on national TV but not featured in the Berkshire visitor's guide?

Could it be proximity to the near north side, otherwise known as "the 'hood"?

In fact, there's not one North Omaha restaurant on the list. Not even a couple of good joints in the affluent Ponca Hills area of town -- nothing, in fact, that you can reach from downtown only by traversing the 'hood.

I'm just sayin'.

Channel 7 has been promoting a story on their late edition about just this tonight. Apparently, Patricia “Big Mama” Barron is not, shall we say, pleased about her eatery's omission from the Berkshire Hathaway guide. Film at 10.

IF ALL THIS turns out to be what my gut tells me it is, you have to wonder about some things.

When I was growing up in the Deep South decades ago, I remember how everybody spent inordinate amounts of time obsessing about "those people." Black people. The N-words.

Obsessing about what they were doing, what they might do to us white folk, and whether they were interested in somebody's white daughter. The rest of the time, white folks obsessed on the best means of maintaining the status quo, which meant keeping the black man -- and the black woman -- down.

But this is a different place more than four decades down the American timeline. We've got more minorities to consider and, besides, the whole George Wallace act is so passé.

Still, it looks pretty segregated to me in Omaha, by God, Nebraska. Very polite, very nice, very civilized . . . and very separate.

And very unequal.

You have to wonder. Wonder what's worse, the Southern obsessions of my youth, or the genteel, upper-class racism of not having to -- or even feeling the need to -- take notice of some people at all.

The accidental Van Gogh

If you're at a party, and you're having a fine time but suddenly get the notion to tell some chick she's fat . . . don't.

It could be that there's a very good reason she packed on a few extra pounds.

Like . . . SHE EATS GUYS' EARS!

YOU CAN just go ahead and file this story from The Associated Press under "People in Lincoln, Neb., Are Just Weird."

And hungry, obviously:

Police say a 24-year-old Lincoln man is missing a chunk of his right ear that was bitten off by a woman who didn't like being called "fat."

Police spokeswoman Katie Flood says officers were called to a Lincoln hospital around 3:25 a.m. Wednesday to talk to the injured man.

He told them that he'd been bitten at a party.

Flood says officers later learned that the injured man and two others had been arguing with other people at the birthday party. Flood says the man or one of his friends told 21-year-old Anna Godfrey that she was fat.

Officers say Godfrey then tackled the man and bit his ear.

Flood says the ear chunk was not found.

NOW, Miss Godfrey -- who is kinda cute for a girl who absolutely, definitely IS NOT fat, not in any way, shape or form . . . no way, no how, no siree, Bob -- is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and must not be prejudged, etc., and so on (and please don't eat my ear).

But if it does turn out that someone saw her putting a little bit of mustard on a chunk of ear and scarfing it down like a Cheez-Whiz canapé, the young lady has just lost the argument.