Month: June 2010

Desloge, Missouri, 3.12 pm

I might add to my post about Obama's crushing victory over BP that it has subsequently gotten attention in the blogosphere, because the GOP is complaining about it! Kleefeld exposes the critics:

• Rush Limbaugh said that the escrow fund would be a "slush fund," and wondered where the money would end up going: "Who's gonna get this money? Union activists? ACORN people? Who's gonna get this money. Let's keep a sharp eye on who Feinberg gives this money to. Because I'm telling you, this is just another bailout fund, called something else, and we'll see who gets it."

• Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) has also voiced criticism — saying that forcing BP to pay the money now would cut into their profits, thus making it more difficult to pay more down the line. "If BP is the responsible party under the law, they're to pay for everything. I do worry that this idea of making them make a huge escrow fund is going to make it less likely that they'll pay for everything. They need their capital to drill wells. They need their capital to produce income. … But this escrow bothers me that it's going to make them less able to pay us what they owe us. And that concerns me."

This is amazing to me. If Obama did not get the money from BP, he'd be a useless Carter. Now that he has, he's a commie. And this is also part of his core political skill. He drives his opponents mad, and in the end, their total incoherence and malice will hurt them. In the end, because he won't take the Modo bait, the destruction of the populist ideological right will be more effective and profound because it will be self-destruction. Yes, this means that you have to endure these loonies posturing and making shit loads of money from it for the foreseeable future. But that merely requires steel and patience. Maybe some Democrats, liberal cable hosts and bloggers could do with a little more of both.

Meep, meep.

Kung-fu bear, deadlier than ever:

A reader writes

I thoroughly enjoyed watching O'Reilly pull the plug on a silly talking point, but I was disappointed that he didn't have the courage to follow through. He said, "the reason why I'm pleased to have you on the program tonight is that there is not a governor in the United States who has more experience than you do dealing with the oil companies." Just a little brown-nosing, why bother with a blatant lie? One need only look to Rick Perry, who has been Governor of Texas for 10 years. Between drilling on the gulf coast and the presence in Houston of every major oil company, Perry of course has more experience than Palin's half of one term.

Another writes:

You missed the best part of Palin’s appearance: her reference to the Dutch and their expertise that could be used in the gulf.  Too good to be left out.

I figured I would leave the whole question of dikes alone. Another:

The Dutch weren't offering to help with the leak; they were offering to help with the clean-up.

Mudflats fisked the interview:

And by the way, there are 15 foreign-flagged vessels in the Gulf right now, and we’ve accepted equipment and assistance from many foreign countries INCLUDING … wait for it … Norway and The Netherlands.  Are we really surprised?

Nah. She lies. FNC moves swiftly on without comment – and longs for another staged interview. But it's good to see this duplicitous bullshit machine slowly exposed by attaching itself to this font of whatever pops into her head at any moment.

2012 unemployment forecasts are not so good:

The forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.4 percent, followed by 2.4 percent in 2011 and 2.8 percent in 2012, well below the 5.0 percent growth of previous recoveries and even a bit below the 3.0 percent long-term normal growth. With this weak economic growth comes a weak labor market, and unemployment slowly declines to 8.6 percent by 2012.

Weekly unemployment claims chart from Calculated Risk.

(Hat tip: Drum)

Liz Mair is understandably perturbed.

The awful fate of Ralph Maccio:

Alan Dershowitz thinks Jan Schakowski is too soft on the Palestinians. But she signed the AIPAC resolution blaming Hamas for the civilian casualties in Gaza. Money quote from the Republican Likudnik Dershowitz is backing:

If we want Israel to survive to 2012 and beyond, we have to make a difference in 2010.

Bruce Bawer is the latest of several victims of laws against "hate speech". Because he tells the truth, as he sees it, about Islam.

John Michael Greer sees the future of the Tea Party tendency (and other populist currents) as the obvious ecological limits to unlimited economic growth begin to sink in:

It seems uncomfortably likely to me that such movements could be set in motion by the emergence of peak oil as a publicly acknowledged crisis. Tendencies in that direction are already welded firmly in place in popular culture across the industrial world. The Sarah Palin supporters who turned “Drill, baby, drill” into their mantra du jour are engaging in incantation, to be sure, but there’s more to the slogan than a comfortable thoughtstopper; a great many of the people who mouth it believe with all their heart that all we have to do is drill enough wells and we can have all the petroleum we want, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get those wells drilled.

That plan of action can’t deliver the goods; they might as well be out there with the cargo cults, building mock airfields on isolated Pacific islands hoping to bring back the DC-3s full of K-rations and cheap trade goods that landed on a hundred archipelagoes during the Second World War. Still, that’s not something they are likely to grasp any time soon; mere reason has essentially no power against a nascent revitalization movement.

(Image via The Ecoterrorist).