Author: Andrew Sullivan

A gruesome new detail:

[A] bird has a natural repellent in its feathers that keeps the water out. That’s a little area – a little cushion – that keeps it cool. Well, this oil here gets on those feathers, and they lose that little insulation. And then, when you have this oil at 100+ degrees, the bird experts say, it begins to literally cook the birds.

This thing begins to eat into your soul after a while, doesn't it?

I sound like a goddamned hippie but you have to be emotionally and spiritually dead not to watch this and not feel some deep qualms about what our civilization is doing to its environment and to itself. The addiction metaphor – even used by George W. Bush by the end of his term – is the only apposite one. We're like junkies trying to find a new vein. It keeps us alive and growing, but that simply brings into sharper focus the moral and spiritual costs of exploitation of the earth rather than prudent stewardship.

Heh:

Some are getting touchy over the demonization of the multinational with "British" in its name, and when you hear someone like Anthony Weiner mouthing off, you can understand why. My column for the Times last Sunday tried to address these concerns, but the right is getting antsy:

In a clear snub to the President, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson claimed this morning that BP was a victim of “anti-British rhetoric,” which he described as “permeating from America.” Mayor Johnson told the BBC’s flagship Today programme, “When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves.” The Mayoral view was echoed by former Conservative Party trade minister Lord Tebbit, who uses an interview in this morning’s influential Daily Mail newspaper to accuse Obama of “despicable” anti-British language. Tebbit accused President Obama on his blog of, “a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political Presidential petulance.”

Alliteration is not dead. I think they're being way too sensitive.

Betty Cracker imagines a conversation in which the president calls the half-term former governor for help.

A word about the Queen’s English:

I really could care less about “couldn’t care less.” But titbit? I’d die for that one. (His teeth are great, don’t you think?)

Joe Klein, in an elegant riposte to Dorothy Rabinowitz's strangely empty attack on the Americanness of Barack Obama, reminds us of something:

We are waging savage war–nightly attacks, I am told–on the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan (a process that might yield some success on the ground if the Karzai government weren't so titanically dreadful and corrupt). Afghanistan has been called Obama's war; it certainly wasn't George W. Bush's, who left the job unfinished to fight a war of choice in Iraq. We are also mounting regular Predator attacks that are decimating the leadership of Al Qaeda on the Af/Pak border, and chasing down–and killing–Al Qaeda operators in Somalia and Yemen. This effort has been made more effective by the enhanced human intelligence capabilities ordered by George W. Bush, but it has taken place on Obama's watch, at his behest. 

"Am I pretty?" – a North Korean woman, to a Western journalist.

The BBC documentary above is a must-watch. The more we discover in recent months, the more the revaluation of the currency last year may prove a death-blow to the regime.

"Real men don't need experts to tell them whose asses to kick," – Bill Kristol, via Chait.

Don't you miss the Cheney years?

An AP investigation finds that the company's contingency plans for both the Gulf and the Deepwater Horizon rig are "riddled with omissions and glaring errors":

Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005. Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf. The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

(Obama's contingency plan via Dead Dog.)