Year: 2013

Brian Merchant marks the three-year anniversary of the rig explosion by checking in on the damage:

Billy Nungresser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, which covers the part of Louisiana most heavily hit by oil after the initial spill, says that the oily fallout continues to this day. Just yesterday, Nungresser told a local TV news station that “oil is still washing ashore in places like Bay Jimmy.”

Meanwhile, fishermen say their catch is still drastically lower than it was before the spill—and the onslaught of chemical dispersants BP used to try to contain it. “The damage is still ongoing right now. My shrimp is down 40 percent and my oysters are down 93 percent,” George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, recently told Eyewitness News. He believes that the dispersant—a proprietary cocktail called Corexit that is believed to be comprised of butoxyethanol, organic sulfonates, and a small concentration of propylene glycol—interrupted the reproductive cycle of the shellfish in the region.

Mark Hertsgaard focuses in on the controversy surrounding Corexit at the time:

Wilma Subra, a chemist whose work on environmental pollution had won her a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, told state and federal authorities that she was especially concerned about how dangerous the mixture of crude and Corexit was: “The short-term health symptoms include acute respiratory problems, skin rashes, cardiovascular impacts, gastrointestinal impacts, and short-term loss of memory,” she told GAP investigators. “Long-term impacts include cancer, decreased lung function, liver damage, and kidney damage. (Nineteen months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, a scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution found that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit.)

BP even rebuffed a direct request from the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who wrote BP a letter on May 19, asking the company to deploy a less toxic dispersant in the cleanup. Jackson could only ask BP to do this; she could not legally require it. … Knowing that EPA lacked the authority to stop it, BP wrote back to Jackson on May 20, declaring that Corexit was safe.

Meanwhile, Shiva Polefka is disappointed by Congress’ inaction since the accident:

[T]he legislative branch has yet to pass a single law strengthening federal oversight of offshore oil and gas development. Congress did enact the RESTORE Act which allocates 80 percent of BP’s civil penalties to the affected Gulf Coast states, so they can apply it directly the environmental restoration and economic recovery. …

[O]ther than the RESTORE Act, Congress has done “nothing about the many other critical issues the Commission identified to improve safety and environmental protection.” A year ago, my colleagues at the Center for American Progress highlighted the need for Congress to raise the absurdly low $75 million limit on spill liability that oil companies currently face. While BP voluntarily excluded itself from the cap, the cleanup cost for Deepwater Horizon to date stands at over $14 billion, demonstrating starkly the fiscal as well as environmental risk to the American public from Congressional inaction. Similarly, Congress has refused to codify any new safety standards for offshore drilling. As a result, the gains made through Obama administration rulemaking, and voluntary industry efforts, could easily be easily lost to the whims of the next administration.

(Photo: Crude oil released following the sinking of the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, washes ashore on June 9, 2010 on Grand Terre Island, Louisiana. By Benjamin Lowy/Edit by Getty Images)

Daniel McCarthy attributes the bump in Bush’s favorability to nostalgia:

Republicans have reason to be a little wistful for the Bush years. And there’s a feeling among centrists that whatever his mistakes, the party Bush led wasn’t as nasty as it has since become.

Larison suspects it’s a function of politics in the present:

If I had to guess, I’d say that Bush’s higher approval mostly comes from people that want to express their disapproval of the current president, and this includes quite a few people who disapproved of Bush while he was in office. One way to do that is to affirm that Bush did a good job. If we look at the results by party identification and ideology, that tells us part of the story. 84% of Republicans and 45% of independents say they approve of how Bush “handled his job as president.” Both figures are much higher than they were in 2008. This reflects the perverse rally effect that causes some people to embrace their disastrous leaders simply because people on the other “side” keep attacking him.

Weigel agrees after speaking to the Tea Party crowd:

This is just desperate counter-factual denialism. Some were blaming the debt Bush’s wars, spending and Wall Street collapse almost as soon as Obama took office! And that kind of denialism is not a way out of the Republican hole but burrowing deeper into it. Bouie argues that Republicans need to make a clear break with Dubya or perpetually suffer guilt by association:

[T]his is a recipe for failure. The GOP’s losing streak, from the 2006 wave election to Obama’s re-election victory in 2012 (with a brief respite in 2010), has everything to do with George W. Bush, and Iraq in particular. It’s what gave Democrats the House and the Senate in 2006, and it’s a large part of what gave Barack Obama the presidency in 2008. And for as much as election fundamentals could predict the outcome of last year’s election, it’s also true that Democrats got a lot of traction out of tying Republicans to the “failures of the past.” Americans still remember the Bush years, and as long as Republicans are committed to same policies, they’ll still hesitate to give them the reins of state.

Joan Walsh advises the right to keep Bush out of the spotlight:

Bush’s ratings only improved because he went away. His comeback campaign is likely to remind people of the disaster he left in his wake, and backfire on him, his brother and his party.

Recent Dish on George Bush revisionism here.

(Photo: US President George W. Bush delivers remarks 01 May 2006 from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on the recent trip to Iraq by US Secretary of Defense Donand Rumsfeld and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Three years after his famous photo-op before a banner hailing ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq, Bush declared that the war-torn country had finally turned a corner in establishing security and democracy. By Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.)

While members of Congress continue to question whether or not the FBI properly handled its 2011 investigation of Tamerlan, Eli Lake explains Russia’s likely ulterior motives:

Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, warned the FBI in 2011 about a young Chechen named Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who they believed had become radicalized and was prepared to join an underground organization in Russia. The FBI interviewed the man, searched its databases and found nothing, and closed the case the same year. … But there were good reasons that the tip didn’t trigger a more aggressive American investigation, current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials tell The Daily Beast.

Those officials pointed to the FSB’s habit of treating much behavior by Chechens as suspicious, and nearly all such behavior as terror-related. The Tsarnaev request, they speculated, was likely triggered by the FSB’s concern that he would participate in or provide support to Chechen insurrectionists in Russia, rather that by any sense of a threat to American interests.

Hunter Walker speaks with a former FBI counterterrorism executive who further details why the US has to be suspicious of such requests from foreign governments:

“Generally speaking, certain foreign governments try to keep track of their expatriates, especially those who are outspoken on human rights issues,” the former [FBI] executive explained. “Countries will submit names to us and will say, you know, this guy’s a bad guy, a terrorist, or a drug trafficker, or whatever. And what you have to be careful about is, you may be being used as a proxy by a foreign government or a foreign intelligence agency to keep track of or to report back on their expatriate community in the United States. Their intent may not be as straightforward as determining whether or not they’re a terrorist or not.”

On the 70th anniversary of the famous children’s book, Amy Benfer criticizes the prince’s understanding of love:

He is driven off his home planet when made half mad over the love of a flower, a rose described as vain, weak, emotionally manipulative, “contradictory,” and given to “silly pretensions,” and who often coughs to hide her lies. “You must never listen to flowers,” confides the prince. “You must look at them and smell them.” This unflattering portrayal of romantic love seems even less appealing when one considers that the prince’s rose is widely considered to be a stand-in for [author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s] wife, Consuelo Sunsin, a tempestuous beauty from El Salvador (like the prince’s planet, home to three volcanoes), whom he often left alone during his travels, while he engaged in frequent adultery — the sin so singular to adulthood it shares its name.

Consuelo was no shy flower herself, but the portrait she created of their marriage in her posthumous memoir The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind the Little Prince, published days before the centennial celebration of Exupéry’s birth in 2000, was damning enough to put quite a damper on the festivities.

Despite the devout love it has inspired in generations of impressionable teenagers about to cross over into courtships of their own, Le Petit Prince is not a particularly convincing love story. It is better at describing the platonic friendship between equals that sustain men wandering away from their women: the prince and the fox; the pilot and the prince. The prince protects his rose, shields her behind glass, but never understands her. In a grisly twist, the souvenir he brings back to his planet to commemorate his travels — the sheep in the box — may or may not kill her.

(Photo: Graffiti of the Little Prince in Bratislava by Flickr user bekassine)

Emily Schuletheis claims that the “immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.” She imagines what would have happened if illegal immigrants could have voted in 2012:

Key swing states that Obama fought tooth and nail to win — like Florida, Colorado and Nevada — would have been comfortably in his column. And the president would have come very close to winning Arizona.

Republican Mitt Romney, by contrast, would have lost the national popular vote by 7 percentage points, 53 percent to 46 percent, instead of the 4-point margin he lost by in 2012, and would have struggled even to stay competitive in GOP strongholds like Texas, which he won with 57 percent of the vote.

Harry Enten finds these calculations laughable. His analysis:

All told, it would seem that only about 1.7 million new Latino voters would be added if undocumented immigrants were granted citizenship. Nationally, this would be a net of about 775,000 votes. This would increase Obama’s vote margin, but not to 7pt; it would only go up to about 4.4pt – in other words, half a point from where it actually was in November 2012. Even adding in new Asian voters, who vote at a lower rate than even Latinos, and other undocumented immigrants (and controlling for the percentage who apply for citizenship, percentage of citizens who vote, and the percentage who voted for Obama), the margin probably only goes up to, at most, 4.6pt.

The amount this would shift individual states in elections is debatable. Take Nevada, where, at last count, there were 190,000 undocumented immigrants – the highest percentage of any state population. Most of them are Latino. Apply the same math we did above, Obama would have gained about 17,000 votes. It would have increased his state margin of victory by 1.4pt. That’s not nothing, but we’re talking about the state with the largest percentage undocumented immigrants.

Nate Cohn’s math is similar. Bouie’s read on the situation:

Democrats do stand to strengthen their advantage with Latino and Asian American voters. What Republicans gain, on the other hand, is a chance to compete. Which, given their current poor standing, is far better than nothing.