The unholy sacrifice of the gas

I can't look at this picture from the oil-fouled Louisiana coast without tears coming to my eyes.

It's a brown pelican -- the state bird -- turned almost black with oil. It will die. It is doomed.

Then again, so is Louisiana, my home state. Maybe.

Above is a picture of not only an ecological catastrophe -- a mass killing of wildlife unlike anything since the last ice age, or the last megavolcano blew, or the last asteroid strike -- but of a murder. The greed and negligence of an oil company, BP, and the corruption and incompetence of a government, the United States, now has claimed the environment, the culture and the economy of a large part of a state that's damn well suffered enough.

The oil is in the marshes -- the wetlands. Good luck getting that out.

And everything in those oil-soaked wetlands is dead, or will be soon enough. The shrimp. The oysters. The birds. The roseau cane that holds it all together, that keeps it from becoming open Gulf water, however tenuously even before this crude apocalypse.

THAT WILL DIE, and whole masses of the Louisiana coast will join thousands of square miles of other masses of Louisiana coast over the last seven decades in becoming the former coastline of my home state. South Louisiana was fast disappearing due to coastal erosion, subsidence and sea-level rise even before now.

Now it will disappear a lot faster.

Along with it, other things will vanish forever. The oil already has wiped out the fishing industry in southeastern Louisiana, and with it the livelihoods of people who have done nothing else. As their fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had done nothing else but harvest God's bounty that greed is killing.

That, likely, is gone for decades . . . if not forever. The culture centered on that is gone, too. It's a dead man walking, this culture that in large part informs the identity of an entire state -- an entire people. It has been executed by a lethal, uncontrolled injection of Louisiana Sweet crude.

It is a form of genocide. What kind? The kind that you don't have to sit on trial at The Hague after committing. The kind, unfortunately, that doesn't end with the perpetrators swinging from the end of a rope.

Accidents happen. Gross neglect that ends in an "accident" is a crime. In this case, a crime against nature and a crime against humanity.

A crime against a people who, to the federal government and the petrochemical industry, must have a gigantic "Kick Me!" sign attached to its collective back. Sadder still -- and intellectual honesty compels its acknowledgment -- the victims are not entirely blameless; Louisiana is thoroughly complicit in putting the sign there in the first place.

But just because a woman goes "commando" in a short skirt with a skimpy top, it doesn't mean she's fair game for the raping. I guess BP's defense will be that Louisiana "asked for it," being that half the politicians are crooks and state regulations are, shall we say, less than Scandinavian.


BUT THERE'S MORE to the body count in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill -- beyond the 11 souls who never made it off the doomed rig, beyond the murder of a culture and an ecosystem.

After the epic Republican political fail that was Katrina, we're in the agonizing midst of the epic Democratic political fail of this present catastrophe. Democratic strategist James Carville is absolutely right in the above video from Good Morning America:

“His approval rating should be up seven points right now,” said Carville. “I have no idea why they didn’t seize this thing; I have no idea why the attitude is so hands-off here; it’s just unbelievable.

“I hope he seizes it now because very seldom do you get something that is really good politics and really the right thing to do. Get involved here.”

When host George Stephanopoulos asked Carville what Obama should be doing, in addition to consoling the family members of the 11 workers killed in the explosion, he rambled off a laundry list of suggestions, “He could be commandeering tankers and making BP bring in tankers to clean this up. They could be deploying people to the coast right now. He could be with the Corps of Engineers and Coast Guard with people in Plaquemines Parish doing something about these regulations (for the construction of barrier islands). These people are crying, they are begging for something down here and it just looks like he’s not involved in this.”

REPUBLICANS. DEMOCRATS. They're all the same. Neither of the parties can . . . govern. Neither of them can deal with the nation's severe and ongoing problems, and neither of them can effectively deal with national emergencies when they gain the reins of power.

Both of them are in bed with corporate America, making the country safe for fat cats and dangerous for the ordinary man.

Like Louisiana oystermen and fishermen.

In other words, no we can't "just plug the damn hole":

The government is starting to look powerless. The administration has been pushing BP to move rapidly forward with the so-called “top kill” process — essentially a high-pressure injection of mud and trash to seal off the rupture in the earth. BP says it is working on it, but the effective start date has slipped by over a week. You see, BP has to bring in all the high-tech equipment it was supposed to have stockpiled to do just such a job ... and that takes time. Five weeks so far. We’re told all will be ready to go as I write this, but we’re also told there is only a 60 percent chance it will work. If it doesn’t, BP’s next backup is the drilling of relief wells, which should be completed by August, it says.

More and more Americans are asking why the administration can’t get this under control. Yes, MMS was a mess long before Obama took office. No, the president had nothing to do with the explosion and subsequent disaster. But Americans of all stripes expect their government, and that means President Obama, to take care of problems like this. For five [weeks] oil has been pumping into the Gulf at the rate of 20- to 70,000 barrels a day — the government can’t even give us a straight number on that. Unless the administration can show some real progress on stopping the hemorrhaging, voters are going to get a message no one in the White House wants them to consider: This is Obama’s well.

AND IT WAS George W. Bush's thoroughly inept and corrupt regulatory infrastructure before that.

Thus, the final corpse after all this is said and oiled may be that of whatever political legitimacy the U.S. government still possesses. What started out as an ecological, economic and cultural crisis likely will end as a political one as Americans -- most particularly in Louisiana -- grapple with the sad reality that the best government corporate America can buy is useless so far as carrying out its constitutionally stated purpose.

So far, the best solution the Republicans and tea partiers can come up with is to, by design, make the government even more ineffective in the jaws of the new millennium. As if trusting the sainted "private sector" has worked out so well for the Gulf Coast.

I look at the picture of the oil-coated, dying brown pelican, and I think of the Louisiana state flag. On it, a mother pelican rips open her chest -- fatally wounding herself -- to feed her young with her own blood.

It is the "holy pelican," an ancient symbol of the Eucharist -- the body and blood of Christ, in the form of bread and wine, by which Christians are fed and receive new life.

Of course, it is beyond the power of Louisiana to live up to the symbolism of its banner. All the state can do -- has done -- is allow its resources to be plundered, its people to be sickened, its environment to be spoiled, its coastline to be eroded . . . and now, its economy and culture to be ravaged just so, somewhere in suburbia, Bobby and Susie's mom can schlep them to soccer practice in a street-legal, gas-guzzling tank.

Unlike that of our Lord and our God, this is a sacrifice without a point. And given the last likely casualty of When Big Business Owns Feckless Government -- confidence in, and the legitimacy of, the American government -- Americans had better get in their gas guzzlers and drive their overprivileged asses to church and give their hearts to Jesus.

Because their asses are about to belong to reality, which, alas, cannot be cheated.

Oh my God! BP killed Louisiana!

You bastards!

The Associated Press explains how the oil company's latest attempt to stop the BPocalypse joined the long list of epic BP fails:

The company determined the "top kill" had failed after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 5,000 feet underwater. It's the latest in a series of failures to stop the crude that's fouling marshland and beaches, as estimates of how much oil is leaking grow more dire.

The spill is the worst in U.S. history — exceeding even the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster — and has dumped between 18 million and 40 million gallons into the Gulf, according to government estimates.

"This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven't succeeded so far," BP PLC Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said Saturday. "Many of the things we're trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 feet."

(snip)

Word that the top-kill had failed hit hard in fishing communities along Louisiana's coast.

"Everybody's starting to realize this summer's lost. And our whole lifestyle might be lost," said Michael Ballay, the 59-year-old manager of the Cypress Cove Marina in Venice, La., near where oil first made landfall in large quantities almost two weeks ago.

Johnny Nunez, owner of Fishing Magician Charters in Shell Beach, La., said the spill is hurting his business during what's normally the best time of year — and there's no end in sight.

"If fishing's bad for five years, I'll be 60 years old. I'll be done for," he said after watching BP's televised announcement.

The top official in coastal Plaquemines Parish said news of the top kill failure brought tears to his eyes.

"They are going to destroy south Louisiana. We are dying a slow death here," said Billy Nungesser, the parish president. "We don't have time to wait while they try solutions. Hurricane season starts on Tuesday."

OK, I KNOW the cofferdam, the siphon, the top kill and the junk shot all failed to make a dent in the geyser of doom's flow rate. But have BP engineers tried the "jerk shot"?

You know, the procedure where you put a cork in the mouth of BP CEO Tony Hayward, shoot him under pressure into the damaged wellhead, then let him expand from his own hot air until the oil flow is stopped.

The "jerk shot" may or may not work but, in this case, stopping the oil flow would just be lagniappe, right?

When wankers get portfolios

While the shores of America's Gulf coast are slowly being choked to death by a foul tide of British-owned petroleum, some in the new UK government are terribly, terribly concerned that the colonials are being mean to them.

No, really.

British Petroleum -- as a byproduct of greed, corner-cutting and blatant disregard for, well . . . everything -- killed 11 American oil workers, 140 miles and counting of the Louisiana coastline, God-only-knows how much of the Gulf's wildlife and ecosystem, a big chunk of the Dead Pelican State's economy and culture, and then the livelihoods of thousands all along the coast, and now some asshole minister in the British government is terribly, terribly concerned that Americans are saying harsh things about the Limeys?

Really?

YOU CAN'T make this crap up. It's in the Daily Mail:

Vince Cable has hit out at the "extreme and unhelpful" anti-British rhetoric from the U.S. over BP's handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The Business Secretary stopped short of criticising President Barack Obama personally, and declared that Britain should not use "gunboat diplomacy".

Some MPs, however, have said Mr Obama was wrong to blame Britain for the problem.

The comments, which came yesterday as BP announced that a plan to funnel the oil away had partially worked, risked provoking a trans-Atlantic rift.

American politicians and broadcasters have laid the blame for the accident on the Deepwater Horizon rig at the feet of the UK - despite BP being a multinational company.

Mr Obama has continually referred to the company as "British Petroleum" although it changed its name to BP more than a decade ago.

Mr Cable said yesterday: "It's clear that some of the rhetoric in the U.S. is extreme and unhelpful."

He added that the fury being levelled at the company was "a reaction to big oil".

Mr Cable cautioned against the Government resorting to "gunboat diplomacy" by aggressively lobbying the White House on the oil company's behalf.

He said Mr Obama was treating BP no more harshly than he would a U.S. company such as Exxon -- the previous holder of the dubious record for the biggest oil leak in American history.

But other MPs voiced their concern about the hostile tone of the U.S.

Tory MP Andrew Rosindell said: "It is not the British government or the British people who are to blame. It's a multinational company and it is up to them to fix this."

HOW DOES ONE argue with such arrogance and condescension? One doesn't.

One just points out that the f***ing Brits are evah so quick to condemn America and "brutish" Americans over our "insane gun laws" every time an English tourist takes a slug in the gut trying to score some weed in the 'hood, yet we're supposed to be nice about it when British Petroleum rapes whole cultures, peoples and ecosystems in the former colonies.

Holy s***, the "wogs" really do "begin at Calais" . . . and on the North American shoreline, don't they? And the wogs are supposed to . . . what? Say "Thank you, Tony, may we have another dose of death"?

NO, YOU CAN'T argue with the likes of Vince Cable and some of the other swells trolling the halls of Westminster. Or is is trolls swelling the halls of Westminster?

All one can do is remind the right members of Parliament what happened to Britain on Jan. 8, 1815 -- the last time it tried to screw with south Louisiana -- and leave the right members with some friendly final words.

Piss off.

Wankers.

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?

This apocalypse is brought to you by. . . .

We hold some truths to be self-evident. Likewise, so are some tragedies.

The Gulf oil spill is one of those self-evident catastrophes. The destruction speaks for itself; the plain facts speak to the unspeakable sins against nature and man in all this, and no poor words of mine can add to that or subtract from it.

The plain facts in one Times-Picayune article Monday say enough about what went so horribly wrong on an exploration rig 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.

The plain facts speak to the horror wrought by poor judgment and careless complacency. And the testimony of the living, brought to light by a righteous engineering professor, bears witness to the horror of the last moments of the dead.

What happened in the Gulf in April led to an ongoing catastrophe the coastal states -- most notably, Louisiana -- are just beginning to live now. It is, and will be, an affront to the economy of that region and, especially, to nature and nature's God.

It took just two of the "seven deadly sins" to turn an effort by three horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse -- BP, Transocean and Halliburton -- into the "destroyer of worlds" Robert Oppenheimer referenced upon witnessing the first atomic blast.

Greed and pride. That's all it took.

HERE'S A TASTE of the Times-Picayune's account of catastrophe in the making. Read on, and do go and read the whole thing:

Shortly before the accident, engineers argued about whether to remove heavy drilling mud that acted as a last defense against such catastrophic kicks, and the decision to replace the mud with much lighter seawater won out.

Those are some of the new details gathered by Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor better known in New Orleans as co-leader of an independent team of scientists that conducted a forensic investigation of the causes for the failure of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina.

In an effort to piece together the cause of the region's most recent calamity, Bea has been gathering statements, transcripts and other communications from about 50 people since the accident, including workers on the rig, engineers who worked with the rig from onshore locations, and engineers and oilfield workers who have been active in drilling for decades.

"As the job unfolded, ... the workers did have intermittent trouble with pockets of natural gas," said one statement sent to Bea. "Highly flammable, the gas was forcing its way up the drill pipes. This was something BP had not foreseen as a serious problem, declaring a year earlier that gas was likely to pose only a 'negligible' risk. The government warned the company that gas buildup was a real concern and that BP should 'exercise caution'".

(snip)

Bea believes the narrative he is creating raises serious questions about the risk assessments used by BP and the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency charged with determining whether the drilling plans were adequate.

They failed to address what's called "residual risk," those things that planners don't think will fail. And in doing so, they underestimated the risk in ways very similar to the engineers who designed New Orleans' levee system, Bea said.

GREED. PRIDE. And then death -- death of 11 men, and perhaps death of a whole world, a whole ecosystem, a whole culture.

In the incident that forced Deepwater Horizon to shut down drilling temporarily, workers in the rig's drilling mudroom stabilized the situation by putting a heavier form of "mud," actually a mixture of clay and chemicals, into the drill-pipe as a counter-balance, pushing down against the upward pressure of the gas, Bea said.

A transcript Bea collected from a witness says the companies were confident enough they had a lucrative oil source that they decided to convert from an exploratory well to a more permanent production well, a process that requires them to apply a metal and cement casing to the well hole. They chose casing 7 inches in diameter, Bea said, and that was further sealed with cement pumped in by Halliburton. Bea said his sources reported that Halliburton was using a "new" kind of cement for the seal, something the scientist said made him say, "Uh oh."

"The cement is infused with chemicals and nitrogen, and those chemicals and nitrogen form a frothy cement that is like shaving soap sprayed from a can," Bea said. "It was put in there because of the concern about damage or destruction of the seals by methane hydrates."

The crew on the Deepwater Horizon waited 20 hours for the cement job to cure before opening a key valve at the wellhead so they could place a final cement plug about 5,000 feet down the well. Bea gives Halliburton credit for writing "many excellent papers" in the past two years about the challenge of setting cement seals in the presence of large amounts of methane hydrates, which the Deepwater Horizon crew encountered in spades.

"Because of the chemicals they've added, they think the cement can cure rapidly," Bea said.

But Halliburton's awareness of cementing's challenges did not stop the cement from failing in the Deepwater Horizon's well. The chemicals they added for the curing process also create a lot of heat, which can thaw the methane hydrate into the gas that causes dangerous kicks, Bea said.

"I call that 'Uh oh' again," he said.

One of Bea's witness transcripts describes in detail a heated debate among BP, Halliburton and Transocean officials as they are about to add the final cement plug to the well, 5,000 below the wellhead and 10,000 feet below the rig. They argued about whether to set the plug with drilling mud still in the well and riser, or if they should do it with lighter sea water there instead.

HALLIBURTON . . . is there anything (bad) it can't do?

No. No, there's not.

As The Times-Picayune reported last week, Bea's witness claims the decision was made to displace the heavy mud barrier with water before the final plug was set in order to finish the job more quickly.. The crew was planning to temporarily abandon the well, and before leaving, they would need to remove the riser and the blowout preventer, a massive stack of valves and slicing rams that are supposed to shut off the well in case of an emergency, and some time later another operation would re-tap the well to extract its riches.

The mud in the riser would have to be replaced with salt water before the crew could take the final step of removing the blowout preventer, or else polluting mud and chemicals would spill into the sea, angering environmental regulators. But based on Bea's witness, who describes the debate on board the rig and with officials in Houston, there was still a question about whether to replace the mud before the final plug was set.

"The debate comes back that it's been pressure-tested, the coast is clear, so they will displace the upper 10,000 feet of heavy mud and replace it with salt water," Bea said. "This is a crucial step, and the reason it's crucial is if the seal at the bottom is fine, it's OK, but if it's not OK, we're screwed. We don't have enough pressure (from mud) in the column anymore to fight the reservoir (gas and liquid) pressure."

(snip)

"The explosion hurls them against the other wall" of the galley, Bea said. "Here's where I broke down when I read it.... It describes bodies being broken, necks gashed and people bleeding, and now everybody's in the dark. People are screaming for help. People are busy helping their comrades get to two lifeboats.

"People in the lifeboats are screaming, 'We've got to get out of here!' but the lifeboats aren't full," Bea said. "The doors slam and they drop the (lifeboats), and as they do, they can see some of their colleagues jumping into the sea. They can see their outlines because the rig is burning behind them.

"Back on the drill floor, all hell has broken loose. Explosions are propagating from the mud pit room back toward them," Bea said. "At that point, one transcript that's obviously been an observer heading toward the lifeboats says the drill floor disappears in a ball of flame. And at that point, the three on-board transcripts stop."

Bea said the concluding paragraph from one of those observing the explosion summed up the depth of the failure.

"In order for a disaster of this magnitude to happen, more than one thing has to go wrong, or fail. First, a shitty cement job. The wellhead packoff/seal assembly (the equipment directly below the blowout preventer that connects the lower pipe casing to the preventer) while designed to hold the pressure, is just a backup. And finally, the ability to close the well in with the BOP somehow went away," the witness said.

OF ONE THING, I have no doubt. Satan is a libertarian.

Domination through negligence

Here's the blueprint for world domination:

Blow up an oil well, starting a massive oil spill. Let the oil go and go, then spray gunk on it that makes things worse and makes cleanup workers sick.

Destroy the environment; destroy people's livelihoods. Make them completely dependent on the jobs you create to clean up the mess you made.

Abuse your new employees, deny them safety equipment, cover up when they fall ill, threaten them and their jobs if they speak out.

BUY OFF the government and -- voila! -- you're King of the World! Cable News Network explains all this on their website:

The restraining order requests that BP stop using dispersants without providing "appropriate personal protective equipment" to workers.

Corexit, a dispersant, is being sprayed into the Gulf to break down the oil. The safety data information sheet from the manufacturer states that people should "avoid breathing in vapor" from Corexit, and that masks should be work when Corexit is present in certain concentrations in the air.

BP has not supplied workers with masks when they work near the oil and dispersants.

"We're been carrying out very extensive air quality since early on in this exercise, to make sure that we have working safe conditions, and thus far not found situations where there are air quality concerns that would require face masks," MacEwen said.

He added that workers who want to wear masks are "free to do so" as long as they receive instructions from their supervisors on how to use them.

According to Guidry from the shrimpers' association, BP told workers they were not allowed to wear masks.

"Some of our men asked, and they were told they'd be fired if they wore masks," he said.

Tony Hayward, the chief executive officer of BP, offered another explanation for the fishermen's illness: spoiled food.

"Food poisoning is clearly a big issue," Hayward said Sunday. "It's something we've got to be very mindful of. It's one of the big issues of keeping the Army operating. You know, the Army marches on their stomachs."

An expert on foodborne illness cast doubt on Hayward's theory.

"Headaches, shortness of breath, nosebleeds -- there's nothing there that suggests foodborne illness," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. "I don't know what these people have, but it sounds more like a respiratory illness."

WHAT DOES it matter, Cap? It's not like their lives have any value -- they're serfs!

Thought experiment: If a government can't fulfill its basic role, protecting the welfare of citizens, what then is it good for? And what legitimacy can it possibly have?

British Plantation

If you'd really like to know what's going on with the BPocalypse in Louisiana, it's helpful to tap into the experiences of people like Richard Shephard.

Shephard is an aerial photographer who has been teaming up with other grassroots types to document exactly what the hell is going on with the oil spill and cleanup. Or, rather, lack of cleanup.

IN A PHOTO GALLERY from last weekend, Shephard documents the breadth and depth of the public-relations farce BP is trying to perpetuate on the American public. As much as anything, this hearkens back to the South's sad past of slavery, racism and brutality, with the scene described below perhaps giving rise to yet another more-appropriate name for the United Kingdom-based oil spiller -- British Plantation:

So here I am on Grand Isle, surveying this fiasco. I carry no press credentials, emblems or logos, nor pretend to be other than some white dude taking pictures.

Apart from a few brave souls, these BP hired clean-up workers are under strict instructions not to speak to the press (which I am not). Within seconds of shooting as many images as possible, I am intercepted by white, paramilitary-cop-wanna-bees, who snap and growl to the workers to, quote, "shut the f*** up and say nothing".

Personally, I say nothing at all and continue shooting, filming their fake-bullshit badges, Rent-A-Cop black t-shirts and quasi-Special-Forces logos. The badges, I note, say nothing official, no county name, no badge number, not even a reference to BP. They appear to be just internet-purchase costumery.

They turn their heads, these wanna-bees, mumbling into Walmart walkie-talkies and eventually storming off in embarrassment. They have no authority what-so-ever. This is a total BP sham. Several times I am told to leave the beach as ‘it is under military control', yet no military is present. When I politely press them about this ridiculous contradiction, they fumble for an answer.

When I do leave the beach, the local (and very real) cops just smile and wave. They know who I am and what I'm doing.

The lack of Port-a-potties for this huge work force is nauseatingly apparent. Next to the main parking lot is a private campground, where the huge work force has been forced to relieve themselves. To quote a local, "It smells like a goddamn hog pen."

READ the whole thing. See all Shephard's photos.

Go here and here, too.

Your BP-English, English-BP dictionary

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BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg is right: His company does care about the "small people." And nothing but the "small people."

Trouble is, the folks in charge of BP are the smallest people around.

The rest of us? We're screwed.

Keep your eye on the bankruptcy courts.

Oil spill, hell! The Aussies might be offended!

There's a gushing wound in the Gulf, pumping out tens of thousands of barrels a day of this country's toxic lifeblood -- oil.

Right now, Louisiana is choking to death on the stuff. Soon enough, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida will be, too. Later, it will be Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. And maybe more states up the Eastern Seaboard.

That poisonous vein has been gushing out of control for 50-odd days. The oil field is hardly in any danger of exsanguination anytime soon, though south Louisiana, in particular, is in imminent danger of becoming an uninhabitable toxic wasteland -- a giant dead zone -- with countless thousands breathing in benzene fumes as they watch their jobs, their ecosystem and their culture sink beneath the soiled sea, the muck-filled marshes and befouled bayous.

BUT THAT'S not important now, according to the Kearney (Neb.) Hub. What's important is that President Obama might be pissing off Indonesia and Australia by canceling on them a second time to tend to an American BPocalypse:

To their credit, the foreign leaders have graciously accepted Obama’s excuses. They are legitimate. Many Americans opposed much of his health care reforms, but they accepted his judgment regarding the visits to Indonesia and Australia. If Obama believed health reforms would sink without his guiding hand, then it is understandable why he stayed home to finish what he started.

We’re less supportive about Obama excusing himself from the Indonesia-Australia visit for a second time. For all practical purposes, there’s not much Obama can do now about the oil spill other than to act interested.

He’s recently played that role well, having visited the Gulf Coast three times to express that he cares about people’s hardships and to prove that his boot remains on BP’s neck.

Appearances are important for Obama’s approval rating at home. Being present is the best way to demonstrate his resolve to end the Gulf crisis.

However, there’s a pressing need to follow through on his commitments to our Southern Hemisphere allies. Indonesia and Australia are valued trading partners and important to U.S. interests in many other ways.

Obama could fulfill his obligation to those nations while his deputies at home tend to the Gulf crisis.

YES, PEOPLE out in the boonies of Nebraska really can be that clueless. Some of them, like the editors of the Kearney Hub, even get paid for it.

Let me explain this to the booboisie out in Kearney so that even their newspaper editors might be able to understand.

I'm going to start asking some questions now. Try not to panic.

Now what would be the equivalent if BP ran amok in rural Nebraska?

How about this: What if, say, an oil company decided to bury a massive oil pipeline deep beneath the rolling farmland of Nebraska? Not only that, let's say the oilmen, to cut costs, didn't install equipment that could be relied upon to shut off the oil flow once it had started.

And let's also say the oil company decided to use thinner pipe -- to save costs -- and run the pipeline at pressures much higher than the industry norm.

NOW, IMAGINE that -- despite all the sweet nothings and promises of right-of-way fees whispered into the ears of the Hub editors' fellow members of the booboisie -- one day it all went to shit. The pipeline blew. It blew deep underground, nobody could stop it, and not a body knew what to do.

That pipeline blew and blew and blew, pumping millions and millions and millions more barrels of petroleum deep into the Ogallala Aquifer, eventually poisoning it for decades, if not forever.

In a matter of weeks, vast swaths of Nebraska were rendered too damned arid to grow much of anything other than winter wheat, or maybe some sugar beets and potatoes -- not on 15 inches of rain a year. In some places, crops outright failed. In others, yields plummeted without irrigation.

Meantime, streams fed by the aquifer were fouled, killing everything in them. And then the birds and other wildlife started to die, having drunk the fetid water or eaten what was in it.

Drinking water supplies suddenly were poisonous. Livestock began to die en masse, either of thirst or poisoning. And the government, faced with a logistical nightmare, was failing badly at trucking in sufficient drinking water for humans.

Seemingly overnight, 31 percent of the state's total employment had been to some degree threatened, if not eliminated. Not that any of that would matter if you lived somewhere with no drinkable water.

IF SOME future BP, through utter negligence and recklessness, were to do that to Nebraska, what would it mean for the state's future viability? What would it mean for its citizens' lives? Their livelihoods?

What would it mean to Nebraskans' lifestyle and culture? If much of the groundwater was no good and the land uninhabitable because of that, and if hundreds of thousands no longer could farm -- ever -- how would that affect how Nebraskans see themselves? What, then, would be their identity . . . even the city slickers in Lincoln and Omaha?

If you can't get a job, if you lose your identity, if you can't live on your land anymore, if all you know and love is destroyed because of somebody's greed and criminal negligence . . . do you think that might be a kind of genocide?

If all hell were breaking loose all around you, and the news kept going from catastrophic to unthinkable, would you then be so damned upset that President Obama canceled on the Indonesians and Aussies yet again? Wouldn't you want the president of the United States right here, in country, dealing with the crisis that just blew up your world?

Wouldn't you?

I'm waiting.

WHAT IF that were to happen here? Uh-oh.

According to a story in the Omaha World-Herald, some much lesser, yet awful still, version of Nebraska's petro-nightmare scenario isn't exactly unthinkable:

The ever-widening oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has state lawmakers rethinking whether Nebraska is doing enough to protect the fragile Sand Hills and groundwater-rich Ogallala Aquifer from a planned crude-oil pipeline.

The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline would pump 700,000 barrels of oil a day from the tar sand mines of western Canada.

It would cross 254 miles of Nebraska, including about 112 miles of the Sand Hills, intersecting with a pipeline near Kansas.

Proponents say the pipeline would provide an environmentally safe, politically stable and reliable source of crude oil and avoid risks exposed by the deep-sea drilling blowout in the Gulf.

Opponents worry that the Sand Hills region could host its own oil spill that could contaminate a precious deposit of groundwater.

Duane Hovorka, executive director of the Nebraska Wildlife Federation, said a small pipeline leak in the sparsely populated Sand Hills might go undetected for days and do major damage.

“There's a limit to how closely you can monitor that stuff,” Hovorka said. “You can pump a lot of oil into the aquifer before someone discovers it.”

Of key concern is TransCanada's application for a federal waiver to pump the pipeline oil at a higher pressure, using thinner pipe. The pipe could pump more oil and use less steel.

Cesar de Leon, former head of the nation's pipeline safety agency, said there's no question that using thinner pipe at higher pressure “lessens” the safety margin, although he said increased monitoring and maintenance could offset that risk.

Still, de Leon, now a private consultant based in Boerne, Texas, said using the higher pumping pressure “pushes the technological envelope,” which he likened to BP drilling deeper and deeper into the Gulf.

“It's running beyond what's been the norm,” he said of the pipeline project. “I think they'll be successful in getting it, but I certainly think you'd be safer running at a lower pressure.”

TransCanada, the Canadian company building the pipeline, has been safely using thinner pipe made of stronger steel for years in Canada, a spokesman said.

Jeff Rauh said the company plans several extra safeguards, including X-ray checks on every weld, more confirmation of steel integrity and coatings, and burying the pipeline 4 feet deep instead of the required 30 inches.

Historically, pipeline leaks are rare, small and localized, he said. The historic average is less than three barrels, or 126 gallons, he said. Leaks would be especially slow moving through the sands and groundwater of the Sand Hills, Rauh said.

Aerial surveillance of the pipeline would be done every two weeks. The pipe is designed to withstand puncturing by excavation equipment.

“This is a welded pipeline. It is designed for zero leakage,” he said. “However, if a leak occurs, we are absolutely ready to respond.”

A recent draft environmental impact statement on the project acknowledges that oil spills occur and that some could go undetected for “days or weeks.”

The draft statement also concludes Keystone XL would have “limited adverse environmental impacts” if the pipeline adheres to safety rules and laws.

SO, PERHAPS the time of geopolitically minded editors of a teeny weenie newspaper in the middle of nowhere might be better spent making sure TransCanada does pipelines a hell of a lot more safely than BP does deepwater oil wells.

It would be a terrible thing for them to have a certain editorial thrown back in their faces if everything went to shit one day and some future president took off for parts unknown, figuring the White House aides could handle it because, after all, it's only Nebraska.

Bobby good. Feds stoopid. College godless.

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

It's because this went down wrong. Of course, "this" is enough to challenge even the strongest stomach -- Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, proclaiming the wonderfulness of Himself to the perennially wacky Pat Robertson on The 700 Club as he ripped the federal government's inaction in the Gulf oil disaster.

"We kept tellin' them, lead or get out of the way," Jindal said while promoting his new book, "and the bottom line was we saw some of the same bureaucracy, the same red tape."

Urp. There I go again.

Listen, I know the gub'na likes to tell everyone what a strong Christian he is, so I know that he knows there's an old Hebrew proverb -- one quoted in the Good Book itself -- that says "Physician, heal thyself." Or something like that.

I think it's somewhere toward the back.

Anyway, you'd think that would be on his mind -- being such a fine and godly man and all -- when he's out on the road telling the world what a colossal screw-up Barack Obama is. Never mind that the headlines from Jindal's Louisiana don't exactly suggest administrative competence on the part of its absentee governor.

FOR EXAMPLE, higher education has been gutted because of an ongoing budget crisis. It will be gutted much, much more in the coming budget. This is Jindal's response to that:

Graduating only 38 percent of higher education students is unacceptable. My message to college administrators and everyone else is that we must find ways to live within our means and deliver more value. Budget cuts may result in fewer sabbaticals and may force professors to spend more time in the classroom teaching and interacting with students. But that is a good thing and will result in a better education for our students.

YOU'RE DOING a lousy job -- you'll do much better with far less funding. That's what he's saying.

When LSU leaders publicly fret over the disaster that awaits with further massive cuts next year, all the Jindal Administration can muster are straight-from-the-script red herrings about ending sabbaticals and increasing class loads as a cure for a looming cut of perhaps $60 million. No, really:

Jindal’s chief budget architect, Paul Rainwater, said Wednesday that universities must focus more resources on the classroom and make better use of taxpayer funds.

“We need to make sure the course load is maxed out and people aren’t taking sabbaticals,” said Rainwater, the state’s commissioner of administration, adding that LSU’s flagship campus has 19 faculty on sabbaticals. “That happens nowhere else in the real world.”

BOBBY JINDAL criticizes the president -- rightly -- for the federal government's lame response to BP's oily plague upon his state. Back home, the problem certainly isn't that Jindal has mustered a BP-type response to his state's myriad woes, most notably surrounding higher ed, public health . . . or just plain old fiscal responsibility.

No, back in the Gret Stet -- that place where the little lord Jindal has seldom laid down his sweet head -- the problem is that the gub'na is BP. And it's gonna be a hell of a blowout.

But that's OK. Whatever suffering . . . or surging ignorance . . . or mayhem . . . or sickness and death results from dismantling the concept of commonwealth is OK because when one asks "What would Jesus do?" -- that's it.

Obviously.

All because college professors are politically correct atheists, and the best way to fix a government that doesn't work is to destroy it altogether.

I'm sure the Deepwater Horizon never would have blown up if the feds' incompetent regulation had just given way to no regulation at all. Jesus said.

The chains 'businessmen' forge in life. . . .

Halliburton and BP knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday.

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

The failure of the cement set off a complex and ultimately deadly cascade of events as oil and gas exploded upward from the 18,000-foot-deep well. The blowout preventer, which sits on the ocean floor atop the well and is supposed to contain a well bore blowout, also failed.

-- The New York Times,
Oct. 28, 2010

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?

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.