Oh, you'll go bananas. . . .

It's a Tony Hayward world out there, and the soon-to-be-ex-BP CEO's monumental solipsism and tone deafness obviously is catching.

The Obama clan has it now, probably transmitted from Mr. Let 'Em Eat Oil to the president when he "kicked" Hayward's ass at that White House confab a while back. And then Barack gave it to Michelle who, while eschewing yachting after killing the Gulf of Mexico, did settle on a high-dollar Spanish fiesta while the American economy burns, the Gulf states smother and the ordinary Joe languishes.

OF COURSE, robber barons and the diffident rich always have behaved so, even throughout American history. But when the First Family starts behaving like Marie Antoinette amid hard times, widespread austerity and spreading decay, you just may find you've become a banana republic.

And even the Australians, a world away, are noticing. Look at this in The Age from Sydney:

As the U.S. economy endures high unemployment and a jittery stock market, President Barack Obama has preached sacrifice and fiscal discipline. But the pictures coming out of a sun-splashed Spanish resort may be sending a different message.

First lady Michelle Obama is in the midst of a five-day trip to a luxury resort along with a handful of friends, her younger daughter, aides and Secret Service. Her office said the Obamas would pay for personal expenses, but would not reveal the taxpayer cost for the government employees.

Elected officials -- Democrats and Republicans -- were reluctant to weigh in, not wanting to appear critical of the President's wife. But the trip provided fodder for television news shows, talk-show hosts and bloggers. Critics portrayed the foreign getaway as tone-deaf to the deep economic anxiety back home. Every first family takes vacations: the criticism aimed at Mrs Obama is that she chose to visit a foreign country rather than remain in the US and support its fragile economy.

Just last month, Mrs Obama flew to the Florida panhandle, a tourist draw hit hard by the oil spill crisis, and delivered the message that for parents "looking for things to do with their kids this summer … this is a wonderful place to visit."

The opulence of the European trip also has drawn scrutiny. Mr Obama has urged frugality in lean economic times. He once cautioned that families saving money for college shouldn't "blow a bunch of cash in Vegas."

AT LEAST in Vegas, there's the slimmest of chances you might hit it big, though. When you're dealing with Washington, politics and the public's bankroll, not so much.

Because while money still talks (in this case, en Español), Obama's bullshit has just taken a walk.

Life in these United States: Shores apart

On the Jersey shore

"I'm the best thing in this town," she arrogantly declared after cops busted her for being a drunk nuisance Friday, according to an insider.

"She was bad-mouthing everyone who walked by her [in the police stationhouse]. She was saying 'I'm a star, you can't do this to me.'"

Snooki unleashed a boozed-up, expletive-filled rant after being arrested for disorderly conduct, and attempted to use her new-found fame as a "get-out-of-jail-free" card.

"You can't tell me what to do - I'm Snooki," she yelled at officers, according to witnesses. "Do you know who I am? I'm f------ Snooki. You can't do this to me. I'm f------ Snooki. You guys are going to be sorry for this. Release me!"

Not surprisingly, her harsh language didn't do the trick.

The pint-sized reality TV star was hauled away from the Jersey shore boardwalk in cuffs Friday as her oversized shades slid down her nose. A photo of her looking dishevelled with mascara running down her face while in custody also surfaced yesterday, as locals took stock of her unruly behavior and lashed out at the reality show cast.

-- From the (New York) Daily News

On the Louisiana shore

"My world's been turned upside down," says Chris Wilson, a charter boat captain in Venice, La. "Our life as fishing guides and marina owners — and everybody down here. We used to fish every day. Now we ride around and look for oil, or ride people around, you know. They say we're working, they say they're paying us, but nobody's got paid yet ... I guess it's coming."

This quotation comes from photographer David Zimmerman's latest series, "Gulf Coast." A fine-art photographer based in New York and Taos, N.M., Zimmerman relocated to Louisiana just after BP's April oil spill and, for the past few months, has been using a large-format view camera to put faces to the oil spill. "For all the devastation I saw offshore," Zimmerman writes in his artist statement, "the worst of what I saw was onshore; in the faces and voices of the people who call this place home."

-- From NPR

They died for your sins

Never has there been a more appropriately named place than Delacroix, La.

Delacroix. De la croix.

Of the cross.

Two millennia ago, civilized society hung the Son of God on a cross and killed him due to practical concerns, as recounted in John 11:

47
So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs.
48
If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation."
49
But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing,
50
nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish."
51
He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
52
and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
53
So from that day on they planned to kill him.

TWO MILLENNIA LATER, modern, industrial society hung Delacroix, its people and their way of life on a modern, industrial cross and killed it due to practical concerns, as recounted in The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune:

On a blustery spring day, Delacroix native Lloyd Serigne stands on the banks of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, 30 miles south of New Orleans, talking about the village that raised him in the 1950s. Reaching into a deep well of memories, he paints an idyllic picture: A community of several hundred fishers, farmers and trappers whose homes were surrounded by a wetlands paradise of high ridges, marshes and swamps. The outside world -- unwanted, unneeded -- seemed a thousand miles away.

But the scene surrounding him only mocks that vision.

Naked slabs and raw pilings that once supported homes stand like tombstones in open, soggy ground. Bare tree trunks rise from a salt marsh that used to be a vegetable field. Battered home appliances, ice chests and derelict boats litter the bank while a high tide moves through the remains of a hardwood forest. And a steady stream of heavy equipment heads down the road to fight the invasion of BP's oil.

None of it matches memories that seem as sharp as yesterday's news.

"Really, what we had here was a paradise -- a natural paradise," Serigne, 70, says with a smile of fond remembrance. He pauses to shake his head, a gesture half of wonder, half of despair.

"But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me like I'm crazy. They just can't imagine what was here such a short time ago.

"And now it's gone. Just gone."

DELACROIX. It died for your sins -- or, more specifically, for your SUV and all your stuff. A people, a culture and a now-gone landscape have born a cross of our society's making.

And the blood of people, cultures and whole places that are no more is upon us and our children . . . and our avarice.

BP's unwitting allies

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Ignorance kills.

When you're ignorant, you don't have options. You're an easy mark, because you lack power and, oftentimes, because you're too ignorant to know you're being played.

Or if you are savvy enough to know you're being played, what are you going to do about it?

Say you're a fisherman in Louisiana. You may or may not have much education -- and being that it's Louisiana we're talking about, chances are, not. All you've done is fish. All your daddy has done is fish. All your family has done for a hundred years or more is fish.

You have no options, because other options -- at least in many cases -- never have occurred to you. School, in all likelihood, wasn't a priority for you, just like it wasn't a priority for your daddy, or your daddy's daddy, or for the whole dying culture down there, for Pete's sake.

Same deal for all the other workers whose best option in life right now is to work cleanup for BP, sopping up or skimming up a toxic soup of crude oil and chemical dispersant that has a nasty habit of exploding the cells of mammals and fish.

PEOPLE on the Gulf Coast = mammals. For some reason, I felt the need to make that clear.

From the Facing South online magazine:

Today, 27,000 workers in the BP-run Gulf cleanup effort may still be in danger. Some are falling sick, and the long-term effects of chemical exposure for workers and residents are yet unknown.

Workers lack power on the job to demand better safety enforcement. They fear company retaliation if they speak out and are wary of government regulators who have kept BP in the driver's seat.

BP carries a history of putting profit before worker safety. A 2005 refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas, killed 15 and injured another 108 workers. The Chemical Safety Board investigation resulted in a 341-page report stating that BP knew of "significant safety problems at the Texas City refinery and at 34 other BP business units around the world" months before the explosion.

One internal BP memo made a cost-benefit analysis of types of housing construction on site in terms of the children's story "The Three Little Pigs." "Brick" houses -- blast-resistant ones -- might save a few "piggies," but was it worth the initial investment?

BP decided not, costing several workers' lives. Federal officials found more than 700 safety violations at Texas City and fined BP more than $87 million in 2009, but the corporation has refused to pay.

(snip)

Now workers in the cleanup effort face similar challenges to those Jason Anderson and his 10 slain co-workers woke up to each morning. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy analyst Hugh Kaufman says workers are being exposed to a "toxic soup," and face dangers like those in the Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, and 9/11 cleanups.

The 1989 Exxon Valdez experience should have taught us about the health fallouts of working with oil and chemical cleaners, but tests to determine long-term effects on those workers were never done, by either the company or OSHA. It appears they have faced health problems far beyond any warnings given by company or government officials while the work was going on.

Veterans of that cleanup, such as supervisor Merle Savage, reported coming down with the same flu-like symptoms during their work that Gulf cleanup workers are now experiencing. Savage, along with an estimated 3,000 cleanup workers, has lived 20 years with chronic respiratory illness and neurological damage.

A 2002 study from a Spanish oil spill showed that cleanup workers and community members have increased risk of cancer and that workers with long-term exposure to crude oil can face permanent DNA damage.

So far, Louisiana has records of 128 cleanup workers becoming sick with flu-like symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, and headaches, after exposure to chemicals on the job. BP recorded 21 short hospitalizations. When seven workers from different boats were hospitalized with chemical exposure symptoms, BP executives dismissed the illnesses as food poisoning.

BP bosses have told workers to report to BP clinics only and not to visit public hospitals, where their numbers can be recorded by the state.

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin has said that without the benefit of studies, or even knowing the chemical makeup of the Corexit 9500 dispersant (which its manufacturer calls a "trade secret"), scientific opinion is divided on long-term health impacts to the region.

Workers in the Gulf are not receiving proper training or equipment, says Mark Catlin, an occupational hygienist who was sent to the Exxon Valdez site by the Laborers union.

BP has said it will provide workers with respirators and proper training if necessary, but the company has yet to deem the situation a health risk for workers. The Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) provided respirators to some workers directly, but BP forbade them to use them.

THE TENDENCY of anybody looking for a good story, one that engages the heart as well as the mind in such situations, is to spend much time romanticizing the poor and the vulnerable. The majority of the media coverage of the BPocalypse follows this well-trod path into the morass of sentimentality and, ultimately, cognitive dissonance when the cold, hard (and complicated) facts of life break through the spin and screw up the narrative.

The facts of the matter is that many of the people we're supposed to be feeling sorry are victims of not only BP, but also of accidents of birth, the deficiencies of a culture that too often hasn't valued all the things that immunize a people against victimhood, and a crapload of poor choices accumulating throughout one's lifetime.

If you're in Grand Isle, La., faced with a royal screwing by a multinational oil company -- and, for that matter, one's own government -- it's all too easy to just take it out on the "animals," which is postmodern Southern-speak for "n***ers." Who happen to be cleaning up the multinational oil company's hazardous waste off your beach and out of your marshes.

And if you're one of those cleanup workers -- poorly paid, without respirators and working under ATV-riding "overseers" in a setup that looks so much like a fast-forward of what slavery might look like had the South won the Civil War -- you further screw up a good narrative by getting shitfaced in a titty bar and treating a bunch of strippers like the pieces of meat you know yourself to be. At least in the eyes of your "betters."

Who, you can be assured, will collect their piece of the pie (and yours, too) no matter how much they screw up the lives of others by hook . . . and by crook. Why? Because they can, that's why.

THE POOR . . . the "victims," who resist all attempts at romanticizing their plight much more successfully than they fend off humiliation and depredation by them that's got, will not fare well here. Neither will a state like Louisiana, home to so many of the poor, and likewise so much more adept at resisting all attempts to romanticize its desperate plight than it is at fending off humiliation, depredation and marginalization at the hands of Corporate America and the government it has bought and paid for.

Knowledge is power.

Culture is destiny.

The Gret Stet is screwed.

Playing with sugar daddy's money

Once upon a time, Grand Isle, La., was your average, everyday, sleepy Gulf Coast fishing mecca and tourist trap.

No more. BP changed that in a heartbeat.

Or . . . could it be that the BPocalypse -- this stress-inducing gumbo of lawyers, guns and money (and a big, big oil spill) -- merely has broken down inhibitions enough, just like extreme stress or extreme drink can do to people, so that now it's just more of what it already was beneath a carefully constructed facade?

This is the kind of question we'll be pondering all across the Gulf for a long, long time as klepto-capitalism rides the waves, crying "Havoc!"

IF YOU'VE NOT been regularly reading the oil-spill dispatches of Mother Jones' Mac McClelland already, now would be a good time to start:

I hear about the race riot at Daddy's Money almost as soon as I arrive on Grand Isle, Louisiana. My friend and I are going to the bar tonight to catch the "female oil wrestling" oil-spill cleanup workers have been packing in to see on Saturday nights. When we stop by the office of the island's biggest seafood distributor, he tells us that two days ago a bunch of black guys and a bunch of white guys got into a big fight at the bar. It spilled out all over the street and had to be broken up by a ton of cops.

According to the Census, 1,541 people live in this slow Southern resort town. An estimated 2.9 of them are black. That was before the spill. The seafood guy gestures in the direction of the floating barracks being built on barges in the bay to house the lower-skilled cleanup workers, and says that people think the barracks will keep those workers—who are mostly black—from "jumping off" onto dry land and causing trouble.

That night, dozens of men in race-segregated packs crowd around to watch strippers dance around and then tussle inside the bouncy inflatable ring set up inside Daddy's Money. Female oil wrestlers need, obviously, to be oiled. Plastic cups full of baby oil are being auctioned off, along with the right to rub their contents all over one of the thong-bikinied gals. "I hope there's no dispersant in that oil!" someone quips. The bidding before the first match starts at $10; it ends pretty quickly when some kid offers $100.

"He outbid me!" the guy next to me yells. His name is Cortez. He bid $80. He has dollar bills tucked all the way around under the brim of his hat, and piles of them in his fist. He has spent $200 of his $1,000 paycheck already tonight. "I am coming here every Saturday from now on," he says. He gestures expansively at the scene—writhing women; hollering, money-throwing men. "Sponsored by BP!" he yells, laughing, then throws his arms around me and grabs my ass.

Upstairs, on the open-air deck, the supervisors and professional contractors drink. One comes over to talk; he calls me a Yankee when I don't get that when he says "animals" he means black guys. Another tells us about the crime-prone "monkeys." I have already stopped counting how many times I've heard the n-word on Grand Isle today.

THE LONGER I live away from Louisiana, the more I think I'd consider it a badge of honor to be called a Yankee by some good ol' boy.

That said, chances are, Grand Isle -- and the rest of the eroding, subsiding Louisiana coast -- will sink into the toxic sea before the spill-induced societal Armageddon has run its course there, giving way to the everyday, ordinary Louisiana pathologies that have proven so resistant to enlightenment.

"We'll be here as long as oil keeps washing up," the contractor says.

"So..." I laugh sort of helplessly. "A year?"

"Three years..." he says. "Five years..."

"Hopefully forever," the guy next to him says. "I need this job if I can't work offshore anymore." Last week, the emcee that accompanies the oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, "Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!" The workers -— part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots -- the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered.

THE HUMAN CONDITION can be an ugly thing. And leave it to a titty bar in some oil-soiled backwater of a too-poor, too-ignorant and too-hateful Southern state to "kick it up a notch."

Bloody Priceless is wot it is

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Hey, BP! Don't sweat Greenpeace.

All the eco-activists did was shut down your London petrol stations for a day, as we learn here from MSNBC:

As BP CEO Tony Hayward resigned under a cloud Tuesday, thousands of British motorists got an unexpected reminder of the oil spill that's wreaked havoc in the Gulf of Mexico.

Protesters with the environmental group Greenpeace said they shut off fuel supplies at 46 BP gas stations across London just in time for the morning rush-hour. Small teams of activists used a standard shut-off switch to stop the flow of fuel oil at the targeted stations. The switches were then removed to prevent most BP outlets in the capital from opening.

And to ensure there was no chance of drivers buying gas, demonstrators in fluorescent vests and helmets locked green metal fences around some sites.

"What BP needs to do is not just change CEOs it needs to actually come up with a new strategy," Greenpeace U.K.’s chief executive John Sauven said at one of the shuttered stations in Camden, north London.

ACTUALLY, poetic justice would have involved blowing those stations up and filling your headquarters building with crude oil.

But that wouldn't have been sporting, would it?

Won't you please hep' me?

My dear Twitter followers and blog readers:

As you know, times are tough. Especially for me.

How tough? More than a decade ago, I gave up on newspapers to go into radio. Bad career move. Slightly worse than staying put, even.

Now I stumble down a career path that -- no doubt -- will lead me to the Open Door Mission. This is a disaster. This is awful.

I WANT MY LIFE BACK! Just like a certain soon-to-be-former BP executive. Yes, I have screwed up badly -- made poor decisions.

Let's not gild the lily: I have f'***ed myself royally. But why should that mean I must suffer? That is sooooo not postmodern!

Like I said, I am hurting here. And I want my life back. And that's where you come in. You can help me. Here's the plan: All I want is the same deal Tony Hayward got. What I need to know is how -- within the sad limits of Twitter and the blogosphere -- I can screw you.

I need to find out how I can really f*** you over. Mess you up. Despoil your environment . . . MAKE YOUR LIFE A LIVING HELL.

I deserve mine -- "mine" being my life back . . . with certain accoutrements, of course. (Hey! I've had it rough, pally!)

SO . . . how I can f*** you up enough that you -- and everyone else online -- will pay me $900,000 a year (and then some) to go the hell away? What are you willing to pay me -- and, as I say, I'm not a cheap quitter -- to leave you the f*** alone?

I. WANT. MY. LIFE. BACK. And I will mess you up good to get it back. And you will pay me well to take it back -- and to go away ASAP.

That's my proposition . How can I Twibuse you -- and blogbuse you -- so you'll pay me off to get off your back?

After all, I deserve it. Because I'm special! Just like BP's top dog.

The cleanup worker is a WHAT?

I imagine many of us figured this would be coming down the pike at some point in Oil Spill Nation.

The scene: Our intrepid MSNBC.com reporter makes her way to Grand Isle, La., where, amid the oil, she finds cleanup workers. Most of them black. Plopped down amid seething, resentful locals in a small town in the Deep South.

Can you imagine what happens?

ACTUALLY, it doesn't take much imagination at all:

To hear it from permanent residents of this tiny town at the southernmost edge of the bayou, the community is under siege. Not only did the massive oil spill in the Gulf force an abrupt halt to age-old routines dictated mainly by fishing, but the cleanup up effort has brought an army of workers from "outside."

"It’s a drastic change for us, especially in our marinas. It’s all workers," said Sheriff Euris DuBois. "The biggest change is we don’t know them. They are a different nature."

Grand Isle has only about 1,500 permanent residents, most born here, said DuBois. They are accustomed to a large influx of families who own the cottages – or "camps" that line the beachfront. But this year, with the beaches off limits and fishing shut down, most of these perennial tourists have stayed away.

Instead there are an estimated 5,000 cleanup workers – from Texas, New Jersey, Alabama and elsewhere. The workers are all male, and the vast majority are black.

That alone is a shock here. The town has only one black permanent resident, said DuBois, and no black tourists that he can recall.

"And they congregate!" a waitress named Jane told diners from out of town as she described the situation, repeating rumors that there was also a rash of theft and violence. "It’s bad to where our pastor on Sunday warned the congregation to lock their doors."

Some black workers report they have had a cool reception.

"I don’t go out here. I am not welcome," said a worker from Houston who only gave his first name, John. Asked why he felt unwelcome, he said wryly, "uh, just a teeny bit of racism."

A co-worker chimed in: "They gouge us (on rent). They don’t want us here," he said. "But we just do the work cleaning up their environment."

IT WOULD SEEM that Tony Hayward isn't the only one around with no public-relations sense. Then again, the BP chief isn't the one with his hand out here.

"They don’t like any of us," said a captain from New Jersey who is running a boat in the cleanup.

"It's not just blacks. It’s Yankees, and everybody who is not from Grand Isle," he said, giving only his first name, Mike.

SMALL TOWNS can be something else. Small towns in the recesses of the Gret Stet of Loosiana can be something else even by "something else" standards.

And In the Heat of the Night is always playing somewhere. Well, that or Blazing Saddles.

A foundation of . . . sand

Oh, what a tangled web he weaves when Bobby Jindal first practices to deceive.

Here's a good one, from an op-ed piece the Louisiana governor had today in The (Shreveport) Times:

When booms did begin to arrive, it was too little and too late in many areas, so we proposed a 24-segment sand berm plan to protect our shoreline by using the natural framework of our barrier islands to help block and trap oil for collection before it gets into our marshes. Even after we demonstrated the effectiveness of sand berms, it took us weeks to convince the Coast Guard to approve even six segments from this plan, and then longer for us to force BP to fund the work.

In what has now become a pattern, the U.S. Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife shut down our dredging operations on the northern Chandeleurs [sic] Islands recently where we had already created 4,000 feet of land to protect our interior wetlands from oil impact, and indeed it has already worked to stop oil. A U.S. Department of Interior official said they were worried that our dredging operations would hurt a bird habitat nearby. The only problem with that is we were dredging in a permitted area in open water and there isn't a place for a bird to land for a mile.

IN THE PHOTO above, you can see all the earth-moving equipment several feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico, atop one of the governor's "effective" sand berms.

The trouble with building sand berms in the middle of the ocean, however, is that the waves wash them away absent something to hold them together -- riprap, or grasses and other vegetation, for example. Obviously, nothing's holding these berms together.


ABOVE is one of the berms off the Chandeleur Islands on June 25. Next is that same berm July 2, photographed from a higher altitude.


AND THEN . . . last week. Even accounting for the possibility of a really high tide, that doesn't look like engineering success -- or an effective oil-spill barrier.


YOU UNDERSTAND the need to try even iffy propositions, given the urgency here and the consequences of doing absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, the chance of doing anything useful on the Louisiana coast is diminished by the Mexican standoff between the dithering, incompetent Obama Administration and the hyperventilating, mau-mauing (and clueless) tag team of Jindal and the perpetually apoplectic president of Plaquemines Parish, Billy Nungesser.

I had wanted to think the best of folks like Nungesser and Jindal in this, even though I see Jindal as, alas, an even bigger disaster as governor than Kathleen Blanco. In short, I've been away from Louisiana long enough that my Spidey senses have atrophied some.

In other words, I f***ed up. I trusted that a collection of Louisiana politicians couldn't be that stupid or -- alternatively -- cynical.

READ for yourself what Discovery.com had to say Monday about what a boondoggle this is, a news item based on a retired professor's blog post. And reflect now that this crew is all about building giant rock jetties across an inlet by Grand Isle.

A dramatic series of of aerial images show that plans to build artificial islands to block oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill from reaching Louisiana's sensitive marshland appear to be crumbling. Literally.

Two months ago, against the advice of many coastal scientists, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal began furiously campaigning for the construction of six artificial islands to hold back the advancing oil. The federal government quickly granted Jindal his wish, and construction on the islands has been continuing apace.

But images taken of one construction site near the northern edge of the Chandeleur islands appear to show the sea washing away a giant sand berm over the course of about two weeks.

The first image . . . was taken on June 25. The second and third . . . were taken from roughly the same vantage point on July 2 and 7. All three images were first published yesterday by coastal scientist Leonard Bahr on his blog, LACoastPost.

Bahr, a former researcher at Louisiana State University, spent 18 years in the governor's office, advising five administrations on their coastal policy.

"There have been a number of plans over 20 years to save the coast," he said. "But after Katrina, it morphed into 'coastal protection,' which gives me pause."

The crucial difference is that within the Jindal administration, coastal policy has been cast as a war between man and the sea. Plans have been devised to build massive levees and other earthworks to defend the Mississippi River delta and its marshes from the Gulf of Mexico.

(snip)

"Building what they call 'the Louisiana wall' makes sense at first, but the science doesn't support it," Bahr said. "The science should be leading this issue, but it isn't. It never has."

Unfortunately, the berms project has charged ahead in this vein, seeking to build (and spend hundreds of millions of dollars) first, and ask questions later.

LET ME say again: I was wrong. And CNN and Anderson Cooper are just as wrong -- probably more so -- for giving mau-mauers like Jindal and Nungesser a nightly pass to swamp unsuspecting viewers with pure propaganda when they no more know their ass from a hole in the ground than do Obama's nincompoop bureaucrats.

Then again, these Yankees can be forgiven, I suppose, for not knowing the score. I should have known better, that Louisianians -- particularly their elected officials -- have an almost limitless capacity for losing their s*** in a crisis. This almost always results in people running around, wild-eyed, saying crazy things and doing things even crazier.

Remember Ray Nagin's and police chief Eddie Compass' blood-curdling-yet-utterly-false reports about all the rapes and murders in the Superdome after Katrina? And the FBI is still cleaning up the aftermath of New Orleans cops killing innocent civilians in Algiers and on the Danziger Bridge.

God knows what fresh hell will come out of this one-two punch of federal deadheads and Louisiana pieces o' work.

It must be all the Corexit in the air

At 8:01 p.m. in New Orleans, you can stagger down Bourbon Street laughing and yelling like a lunatic.

At 8:02 p.m., you can lose your lunch in the gutter in front of Pat O'Brien's.

At 8:03 p.m. in the quarter, you can buy a T-shirt whose message begins with an F and ends with a K and has nothing to do with "fire truck." Then you can wear it into a titty bar, where the entertainment wears no shirt a-tall.

At 8:47 p.m., you can stagger out of the titty bar drunk as a skunk and randy as a junior U.S. senator from the Gret Stet . . . and once again upchuck into the gutter.

And at 9:14 p.m., you can randomly yell, "Heeeeyyy! Rock annnnnnd rolllllllllll!"

ALL THIS MEANS is you're from Iowa, and you're having a fine time in the Big Easy. Good for you; the city is happy to take your money.

But if it happens to be 8:01 p.m., and you happen to actually be from New Orleans, and you're standing on a French Quarter street corner playing music for the drunken, yelling and puking tourists . . . your ass is in trouble, Cap.

New Orleans has gone stark, raving (and tourism-killing) mad, and The Daily Reveille at LSU is here to tell you about it:

The curfew, which is being put into effect amid an abundance of protest, makes it unlawful for street entertainment to be performed between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. from the entertainment district of Bourbon Street to Canal and St. Ann streets.

Another ordinance brought to the musicians’ attention makes it unlawful for any person to play a musical instrument on any public right-of-way in the city between 8 p.m. and 9 a.m. unless granted a permit.

Now, in addition to their trumpets and saxophones, the members of To Be Continued and other musical staples of the French Quarter can often be seen holding signs reading “Please Don’t Stop the Music” and other marks of protest.

“[Bourbon Street] is the birthplace of what we do,” said Sean Roberts, a trumpet player in To Be Continued. “It’s the most famous street for people to come and see what you invented, and we are a representation of that. So why wouldn’t you want your representatives to represent you?”

Roberts is one of many musicians currently in discussion with New Orleans law enforcement to find a way to make the ordinance mutually beneficial for the residents of the city and the entertainers.

Lisa Palumbo, manager of To Be Continued and marketing professor at the University of New Orleans, said the band — which has performed in the French Quarter since 2002 — never had a problem with playing its music until a few weeks ago.

“We’re not trying to make the French Quarter unavailable for anybody, but the 100 block of Bourbon is there for entertainment and commercial purposes,” Palumbo said. “We’re not trying to play all day or all night in any area. We’re just looking for a curfew that is reasonable for all parties involved.”

PERSONALLY, I blame it on all the Corexit oil dispersant BP is spraying into the atmosphere and on the water all around the Louisiana coast.

Now, if any New Orleans musicians might like to play sans harassment by the cops, we'd be glad to have them in Omaha. In the Old Market, they don't roll up the sidewalks at 8.

BP's human laboratory rats

"I wanted to leave several weeks ago, but my wife didn't want to leave, and we been married . . . well, our 30th anniversary was April 21, the day after the spill. So, I figure if she's gonna stay here and die, I'm gonna stay here and die with her."

'This water is poisonous'

When the government has no credibility because it's of, by and for the corporations pillaging its citizens, and when the press is so busy with "oil-spill gotcha" that it fails to ask fundamental questions, somebody's going to step into the breach.

"Somebody" could be a heroic citizen journalist. "Somebody" also could be a half-loony paranoid baselessly scaring the bejeezus out of people on Coast to Coast AM.

Has BP tapped into an undersea volcano, which is sure to unleash a tsunami that will destroy the entire Gulf Coast? Is the air so poisoned with benzene and hydrogen sulfide that the Gulf states will become an American Chernobyl?

Will hurricanes -- or just regular summer weather patterns -- spread toxic rain all across eastern North America, leaving it incapable of supporting human life for years?

Or, alternatively, should we just remain calm, because all is well?


EVERYBODY is claiming something. Transparency is elusive, and so is credibility. Still, you have to believe somebody.

The trouble is in discerning which somebody to believe.

Let's start with a simple question: How much poison are the people of the Gulf Coast being doused with? The results some citizen watchdogs (top video) got from an independent lab are enough to give one pause.

This next video, an interview with a marine biologist on the Project Gulf Impact website, backs up one's worst fears on that point.


AS DOES this from the same website:


MEANTIME, the EPA tells us everything is all right. Meantime, clean-up workers aren't being given respirators. Meantime, the national press parrots the official line, interviews a dissenter or two . . . but won't spring for any independent testing.

And meantime, how many expendable, working-class Americans down there are going to turn up dead in five, 10 or 20 years?

This report from WWL-TV isn't encouraging. In fact, it makes you wonder why officials aren't starting to talk about evacuations.


AND WHILE one hesitates to believe a word of anything touched by Alex Jones and his Prison Planet website and radio show (not to mention Coast to Coast AM and a whole motley crew of online conspiracy nuts) . . . what the hell is up with this?

Are we facing an acid-rain blight across the Gulf South and Eastern Seaboard? Where are the mainstream science reporters when stuff, like the following sampling of YouTube dispatches, is showing up all over the Internet?

OK, mainstream journalism, does anyone have a plausible explanation for this not involving the end of life east of the Mississippi River? Plant biologists? Organic chemists? Climatologists?

Anyone? Anyone? Americans across the Gulf South are starting to lose their s*** -- and their vegetation -- because . . . anyone? Anyone?

AND NOW that we're heading toward the meat of what's forecast to be one of the worst Atlantic hurricane seasons ever, this (below) is the level of planning going on at all levels of government:

CREDIBILITY right now is about in as short supply as marine life in the central Gulf of Mexico. Legitimacy of the federal government is careening toward a similarly scarce state.

And if the wackos are right -- on any one of their apocalyptic forecasts -- the United States of America can put its head between its legs and kiss its ass goodbye.

FOR THAT MATTER, when you have Kindra Arneson -- the fisherman's wife-turned-activist who's become one of the go-to interviewees for the national media -- is saying s*** like this and still getting microphones stuck in her face, governmental credibility and legitimacy may well be so compromised that an oily tsunami or a toxic-rain apocalypse would just serve to speed up the inevitable.

We now return you to our continuing coverage of the political pissing match, live from Washington, D.C.

Ve haff veys uff makink you see no evil

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. . . .

And now the Obama Administration is out-Bushing the Bushies with an outright ban on the public -- or the press -- seeing what's going on with . . . anything. No one will be able, under penalty of federal law, to get close enough to clean-up boats or oil booms to see our government at work.

Or not.

FROM A story in Thursday's Times-Picayune in New Orleans:

The Coast Guard has put new restrictions in place across the Gulf Coast that prevent the public - including news photographers and reporters covering the BP oil spill - from coming within 65 feet of any response vessels or booms on the water or on beaches.

According to a news release from the Unified Command, violation of the "safety zone" rules can result in a civil penalty of up to $40,000, and could be classified as a Class D felony. Because booms are often placed more than 40 feet on the outside of islands or marsh grasses, the 65-foot rule could make it difficult to photograph and document the impacts of oil on land and wildlife, media representatives said.

But federal officials said the buffer zone is essential to the clean-up effort.

"The safety zone has been put in place to protect members of the response effort, the installation and maintenance of oil containment boom, the operation of response equipment and protection of the environment by limiting access to and through deployed protective boom," the news release said.

The Coast Guard on Tuesday had initially established an even stricter "safety zone" of more than 300 feet, but reduced the distance to 20 meters - 65 feet - on Wednesday. In order to get within the 65-foot limit, media must call the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans, Edwin Stanton, to get permission.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the oil spill, said in a press briefing Thursday that it is "not unusual at all" for the Coast Guard to establish such a safety zone, likening it to a safety measure that would be enacted for "marine events" or "fireworks demonstrations" or for "cruise ships going in and out of port."

Allen said BP had not brought up the issue, but that he had received some complaints from county commissioners in Florida and other local elected officials who "thought that there was a chance that somebody would get hurt or they would have a problem with the boom itself."

Associated Press photographer Gerald Herbert, who has been documenting the oil spill, raised concerns about the restrictions within his news organization on Wednesday. He has asked for a sit-down with Coast Guard officials to discuss the new policy - and the penalties - but has not received a response.

SOMEONE NEEDS to explain to President Obama and his enforcers that bad PR starts at the point where you begin to make tea-party paranoiacs' looniest pronouncements begin to look . . . prescient.

Acting like a bunch of thugs while performing official duties like the mayor's incompetent brother-in-law appointee is no way to inspire confidence in the federal government's response to a national environmental catastrophe. As I've said and said, the final crisis coming out of the BPocalypse will be one of governmental legitimacy.

And, ultimately, Obama won't be able to blame that one on George Bush.

Blithering Pinheads

Dear oiled wildlife: You're screwed.

Here's what happened Saturday when someone called BP's Oiled Wildlife Hotline:

"She kept putting us on hold constantly, and then she came back and asked me what restaurant I was close to. And obviously we're not near any restaurants, we're in the bay, out near an island -- Cat Island -- and she didn't understand what Cat Island was. She kept asking me what state I was in."

THING IS, you'd think these morons would know where Cat Island was by now. Saturday's wasn't the first call to the hotline from there:


(866) 557-1401. It's where IQ tests go to die.

Gulf wildlife, too.

Calling Sally Struthers. . . .

All Obama's horses and all BP's men can't put a good shrimp po-boy back together again.

This nursery rhyme from the oily bowels of hell represents yet another face of the BPocalypse, another glimpse into a culture and a people being murdered as surely as greed corrupts . . . and corporate greed corrupts absolutely.

When Tony Hayward and the feds are done with south Louisiana, I wonder whether Sally Struthers will trek down there to make Cajun Children's Fund ads with starving bayou babies?

HERE'S A little thing from The Associated Press, whose reporter is surveying the wreckage down near the End of the World, cher:

Vicki Guillot has served her last seafood po-boy.

The local bounty of fresh shrimp and oysters that once kept the only restaurant in this rural Louisiana town bustling can no longer be culled from the Gulf of Mexico because of the massive oil spill that has fouled the water.

All her distributors can offer her now is imported shrimp at twice the price she was paying 10 weeks ago before an oil rig explosion triggered the disaster that has dumped millions of gallons of crude off the Gulf Coast.

"The last price I got from him was for imported shrimp, and I said, 'No thank you,'" Guillot said Thursday. "Our waters are all around here, our boys fished all the time. To buy imported?"

Then, she shook her head from side to side as she broke down in tears in the kitchen of Debbie's Cafe.

Guillot, 49, had to close the restaurant for good Tuesday after just six months in business.

Sign of the times

No, the oil spill never was funny. But whoever was behind the "BP cleanup crew" Twitter feed helped to keep us sane as we were hit with daily deluges of tragedy.

And now the BPocalypse claims another victim -- our sense of humor.

I concur with the above sentiments concerning BP. Rat-bastard genocide mongers.

Taking it out on the 'small people'

Devoured all the news today. That was a big mistake.

Got the top general in Afghanistan being insubordinate in front of a Rolling Stone reporter and, therefore, all the world.

Got any number of plugged-in political types saying, yeah, what Gen. Stanley McChrystal said about his civilian bosses was bad . . . but, geez, we don't know if President Obama can afford to fire him.

Got a federal judge in New Orleans striking down Obama's moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

And now we got Interior Secretary Ken Salazar vowing to impose a new moratorium on such offshore drilling.

A PATTERN is emerging here. A swaggering Obama talks about finding out "whose ass to kick" and then talks big about what BP is going to pay for in the Gulf . . . right before getting rolled by BP, which refuses to pay for what Obama promised Americans it would.

A swaggering Obama calls McChrystal on the carpet last fall for ridiculing remarks by the vice-president . . . right before McChrystal and the Pentagon roll him and get "the surge." And now McChrystal and his aides further heap ridicule upon the civilian leadership -- including Obama himself this time -- to Michael Hastings, who got it all on tape . . . or in his notepad:

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the f*** up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his f***ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

(snip)

Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown" who remains "stuck in 1985." Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review," says an adviser. "She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' "

McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on shit."

At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.

"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.

By far the most crucial – and strained – relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry – a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 – can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill – a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight," says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.

The relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as "not an adequate strategic partner," and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be "sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."

McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," says McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "

THE ONLY WAY the military -- or at least this part of it -- could show anymore contempt for the commander in chief, civilian rule and the constitution would be to frog march Obama out of the White House with an M-16 to his head . . . right before seizing control of the TV networks and announcing the coup d'état as a fait accompli.

The obvious course of action here would be to fire McChrystal on the spot. Now, it's starting to look not so obvious, says The Washington Post:

But relieving McChrystal of his command on the eve of a major offensive in Kandahar, which White House and Pentagon officials have said is the most critical of the war, would be a major blow to the war effort, said military experts. The president has set a July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, creating massive pressure on the military and McChrystal to make progress in stabilizing Afghanistan this summer and fall when troop levels are at their peak.

"My advice is to call him back to Washington, publicly chastise him and then make it clear that there is something greater at stake here," said Nathaniel Fick, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. "It takes time for anyone to get up to speed, and right now time is our most precious commodity in Afghanistan." If Obama believes the current counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan is the right one, then he cannot afford to jettison McChrystal, Fick said.

OBAMA CAN'T win Afghanistan. But he can lose civilian control over the military, and greatly speed up the bipartisan, administrations-long process of delegitimizing the U.S. government.

And faced with a fresh humiliation at the office, Barack Obama comes home, puts on his favorite "wife-beater" and opens up a fresh can of Stanley Kowalski on the hapless people of Louisiana:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday he will issue a new order imposing a moratorium on deepwater drilling after a federal judge struck down the existing one.

Salazar said in a statement that the new order will contain additional information making clear why the six-month drilling pause was necessary in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. The judge in New Orleans who struck down the moratorium earlier in the day complained there wasn't enough justification for it.

Salazar pointed to indications of inadequate industry safety precautions on deepwater wells. "Based on this ever-growing evidence, I will issue a new order in the coming days that eliminates any doubt that a moratorium is needed, appropriate, and within our authorities."

(snip)

Salazar said in his late Tuesday statement imposing a moratorium "was and is the right decision."

"We see clear evidence every day, as oil spills from BP's well, of the need for a pause on deepwater drilling," Salazar said. "That evidence mounts as BP continues to be unable to stop its blowout, notwithstanding the huge efforts and help from the federal scientific team and most major oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico."

OF COURSE, when a feckless and emasculated president starts abusing the "small people" just to prove he can kick somebody's -- anybody's -- ass, what he may well end up doing is finishing off a wounded state. And nothing says "economic recovery" like possibly erasing 100,000 jobs in a matter of mere months.

In that case, the bed Obama makes for himself just might be The Burning Bed.