Month: May 2010

The Bad, The Worst And The Ugliest

by digby

The financial overview:

Cumberland Advisors

Oil Slickonomics

May 2, 2010
“At its current leak rate of 5,000 barrels of oil per day, the spill could surpass the size of the 1969 Santa Barbara spill by next week. If the leak cannot be contained, it could exceed the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska by mid June.” Paul Harrison, Environmental Defense Fund

Three scenarios lie ahead. They rank as bad, worse, and ugliest (the latter being catastrophic and unprecedented). There is no “good” here.

The Bad.

Containment chambers are put in place and they catch the outflow from the three ruptures that are currently pouring 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf every day. If this works, it will take until June to complete. The chambers are 30-foot-high steel configurations that must be placed on the ocean floor at a depth of one mile. This has never been done before. If early containment is successful, the damages from this accident will be in the tens of billions. The cleanup will take years. The economic impact will be in the five states that have frontal coastline on the Gulf of Mexico: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

The Worse.

The containment attempts fail and oil spews for months, until a new well can successfully be drilled to a depth of 13000 feet below the 5000-foot-deep ocean floor, and then concrete and mud are injected into the existing ruptured well until it is successfully closed and sealed. Work on this approach is already commencing. Timeframe for success is at least three months. Note the new well will have to come within about 20 feet of the existing point where the original well enters the reservoir at a distance of 3.5 miles from the surface drilling rig. Damages by this time may be measured in the hundreds of billions. Cleanup will take many, many years. Tourism, fishing, all related industries may be fundamentally changed for as much as a generation. Spread to Mexico and other Gulf geography is possible.

The Ugliest.

This spew stoppage takes longer to reach a full closure; the subsequent cleanup may take a decade. The Gulf becomes a damaged sea for a generation. The oil slick leaks beyond the western Florida coast, enters the Gulfstream and reaches the eastern coast of the United States and beyond. Use your imagination for the rest of the damage. Monetary cost is now measured in the many hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some thoughts about markets and impacts.

Usually, the first estimates in any crises are too low. That is true here. 1000 barrels a day is now 5000, and some estimates of spillage are trending higher. No one knows exactly. The containment and boom mechanism is subject to weather cooperation as we can see this weekend. Soon we are entering the hurricane season. The thoughts of a storm stirring up the Gulf, hampering any cleanup or remediation drilling effort and creating a huge 10,000 square mile black stew is frightening to every professional in the business.

This will be a financial calamity for many firms, not just BP and its partners and service providers. Their liabilities are immense and must not be underestimated. The first estimate of $12.5 billion is only a starter.

Thousands of small and independent businesses as well as larger public companies in tourism are hurt here. This is not just about the source of half the nation’s shrimp. That is already a casualty. It’s also about the bank loans for the $200,000 shrimp boat and the house the boat owner and/or his employees live in and the fact that this shock piles on a fragile financial system that is trying to recover from a three-year financial crisis. Case study, my fishing guide in the Everglades splits his time between Florida and Louisiana. His May bookings in LA have cancelled. His colleagues lost theirs and their lodge will be empty. They are busy trying to find work in the clean up. For him, his wife and eleven year old daughter, his $600 a day guide fees just went “poof”. When I asked him if he thought he had a legal claim on BP, he said he hadn’t thought about it yet but it gave him pause. As we suggested above, the $12.5 billion loss estimate is only a starter.

Federal deficit spending will certainly rise by tens, and maybe hundreds, of billions as emergency appropriations are directed at larger and larger efforts to clean up this mess. At the same time, federal and state revenues tied to Gulf-region businesses will fall. My colleague John Mousseau will be discussing the impact on state and local government debt in a separate research commentary.

We expect that the Federal Reserve will extend the timeframe that we have come to know as the “extended period” in the making of its monetary policy. We do not expect the Fed to raise interest rates at all for the rest of this year, and maybe well into next year. We expect to see the deterioration of the economic statistics for the US to reveal the onset of this oil-slick crisis in May, and the negative impact will intensify during the summer months. A “double-dip” recession probably has been made more likely by this tragedy.

We are at the highest level of cash in our US stock accounts that we have seen in over a year and a half. We expect a market correction will present entry points at lower stock prices. We have exited the financial sectors, including the insurance ETF. We now worry about the banks that are exposed. We do not own the major oil stocks now. Some of them face enormous liability payments.

There is a silver lining, although the fellow who wrote this doesn’t see it that way:

In addition, the offshore-drilling energy sector will face much-increased and more costly regulation. Deepwater and all offshore drilling in the US has been set back for a generation, just as Three Mile Island set back nuclear power development for decades. No politician can win an election now with a permissive view on drilling. Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill” now condemns her to political marginalization. Off shore drilling has lurched to the top of the political agenda in this November’s election cycle.

The funny thing is that they weren’t winning elections with a permissive view on drilling before this. It’s just that every 20 years or so, the president proclaims that some genius has invented technology that makes oil unspillable, opens up drilling somewhere and then a huge accident happens. In 1969 it was Santa Barbara, 1989 it was Valdez and now this. And in between accidents everyone forgets and decides that driving anything less than a behemoth gashog is unAmerican.

So my financial advice is to wait a couple of weeks and then buy BP. If history is any guide it’s going to make a very smart comeback in no time.

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Taking Care Of Them

by digby

This is nice:

Ron Kirkland, George Flinn and Randy Smith criticized President Obama for trying to lift the ban, arguing that it would add “unnecessary” stress the military. Then, Kirkland re-called how gay servicemembers were treated during his time in the military:

Kirkland, a Vietnam veteran, said of his time in the military: “I can tell you if there were any homosexuals in that group, they were taken care of in ways I can’t describe to you.” Smith, who served in the first Iraqi war, added: “I definitely wouldn’t want to share a shower with a homosexual. We took care of that kind of stuff, just like (Kirkland) said.”

It sounds to me like this sadistic creep wishes someone would “take care of him” like he “took care of” others.

When asked about his comments later, he said he was just joking and that he was really worried that a “bad element” was going to come into the military if don’t ask don’t tell is lifted which will make the poor gays very vulnerable.

Did I mention that both of the men who said this crap aren’t old Birchers remembering their glory days in WWII? They’re running for congress. And they made these remarks to the allegedly socially tolerant tea party.

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The Most Memorable Nerdprom Moment

by digby

… sure didn’t happen last night. It was this:

From what I saw of the highlights today, last night was a low point. But I can’t let the event pass without mentioning that the google search that most often leads to my blog is for this post about the White House Correspondents dinner in 2005. If you click through you’ll understand why.

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Times Square

by digby

I wonder if anyone other than I flashed on the Rachel Maddow documentary about Tim McVeigh and Oklahoma City the other night when they read about this bomb? Obviously this couldn’t have done the same kind of damage, but the thing about smoke filling up the cab is right out of McVeigh’s rather unbelievable story of what happened when he drove up to the Murrah Federal Building with his truck full of fertilizer and explosives. It’s probably a total coincidence, but the first thing I thought of when I heard it described was that strange story.

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Solving The Wrong Problem

by digby

Media Matters caught David Gregory doing his job and correcting the oleaginous phony Mike Pence on immigration reform:

He’s right, of course. The Republicans did block immigration reform during the Bush years. The question now is whether there is one Republican Senator who will break a filibuster. From what I gather, they have been counting on Huckleberry to convince a couple of Senators to come over with him which is like counting on Ahmadinejad bringing along Hezbollah to recognize Israel’s right to exist. It would require an earth shattering change of personal character and strategy on both their parts. It’s possible, but probably not the most practical plan. In fact, it’s so impracticaly, you can only assume it is designed to fail.

So, the problem is still Republicans, obviously. But it’s also pretty obvious that it’s Democrats too. I don’t know how many votes they have today for immigration reform in either house, but if this is any indication, they are losing them rather than gaining them. I doubt very seriously that they have 59 in the Senate and who knows what they have in the House. The ground has shifted because of inaction and economic distress and it’s very likely that there have been a lot of Democratic defections since the last go. And I’d guess they would have a hard time getting more than a handful of Republicans, even those who desperately need Latino votes. The whole political class is running scared of the angry right, as usual.

The irony of all of this is that this issue has actually been solving itself the last couple of years:

The estimated 12 million immigrants believed to be living in the country illegally have by no means disappeared from the American work force. In the past decade, the population skyrocketed 40 percent. They now fill about 5 percent of American jobs.

However, the dramatic year-after-year increases in the population have stalled. The Pew Hispanic Center, which regularly estimates the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., concluded in its most recent report last April that the growth in their population began slowing in 2006, a full year before the recession hit.

Roughly 300,000 fewer immigrants came to the country each year between 2005 and 2008, an almost 40 percent drop annually, according to the center.

As the recession deepened in 2009 and into 2010, the numbers likely continued to decline, said Jeff Passel, a senior demographer with the center, which is preparing an update of their report.

Some immigrants say their decision to leave or stay away is much more subtle than fear of detection or the lack of jobs. They feel a broader disillusionment with a country that was once more welcoming — or at least grudgingly tolerant — during good times, but has abandoned them as the economy soured.

“We’re sold this idea of the ‘American Dream’,” said Gustavo, a 46-year-old undocumented construction worker who says he’s watched fellow illegal workers return home, discouraged by the lack of jobs. “But when we arrive, we realize it doesn’t exist.”

The American Dream has been patented for use only by Real Americans, I’m afraid. But immigrants shouldn’t feel slighted. According to the right wing anyone who doesn’t vote Republican is “foreign” too.

Arizona’s problems, whatever they are, can’t be chalked up to illegal immigration. The numbers are going down there just like everyplace else. What they do have is some high profile crimes due to the dumbass drug and gun policies. But even that isn’t born out as a crime wave:

FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down.

While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.

In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.

Bermudez said people unfamiliar with the border may be confused because Nogales, Sonora, has become notorious for kidnappings, shootouts and beheadings. With 500 Border Patrol agents and countless other law officers swarming the Arizona side, he said, smugglers pass through as quickly and furtively as possible.

“Everywhere you turn, there’s some kind of law enforcement looking at you,” Bermudez said. “Per capita, we probably have the highest amount of any city in the United States.”

In Yuma, police spokesman Sgt. Clint Norred said he cannot recall any significant cartel violence in the past several years. Departmental crime records show the amount of bloodshed has remained stable despite a substantial population increase.

So where’s this new anti-immigrant fervor coming from?

Since the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz by a suspected illegal immigrant in March, politicians and the national press have fanned a perception that the border is inundated with bloodshed and that it’s escalating.

In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that the failure to secure that border between Arizona and Mexico “has led to violence – the worst I have ever seen.”

He reiterated that Saturday after speaking at the West Valley Military Family Day event in Glendale, saying the concern that drug violence could spill across the border remains intense because Mexico’s political situation is volatile.

“The violence is on the increase,” McCain told The Arizona Republic. “The president of Mexico has said that it’s a struggle for the existence of the government of Mexico.”

Congressional members, including Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and John Shadegg, R-Ariz., sent President Barack Obama a letter asking that National Guard soldiers be sent to the border because “violence in the vicinity of the U.S. Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate.”

And last month, as she signed Arizona’s tough new law cracking down on illegal immigrants, Gov. Jan Brewer also called for National Guard troops. The law makes it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally and requires authorities to check documents of people they reasonably suspect to be illegal. Brewer said she signed it to solve what she said is an Arizona “crisis” caused by “border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration.”

Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said there always has been crime associated with smuggling in southern Arizona, but today’s rhetoric does not seem to jibe with reality.

“This is a media-created event,” Dupnik said. “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”

Well sure. This is the way right wing populism always works. The Big Money Boyz screw the little guy and the little guy, feeling impotent, takes it out on the even littler guy, usually an African American or recent immigrant. And then a bunch of politicians exploit it for their own gain. Welcome to America whenever things aren’t going well.

Treating anyone who looks like they might be Latino like a criminal isn’t going to assuage anyone’s fears and frustrations, however. In fact, it’s going to make it worse because the entire Hispanic community — citizens and non-citizens alike — can no longer trust the authorities and are far less likely to cooperate in investigations, which makes everyone less safe. And because of that one of the sad results of of this whole mess is that it is now going to be open season on Latinos, with the predator types assured that their victims won’t feel comfortable going to the police. Everybody loses but the assholes.

*Note: click through to the McClatchy article to see a video of a truly decent man talking about illegal immigration. He’s what I would call an old-school American straight arrow. There are more of them than we think. They just don’t prance around in costumes screaming about birth certificates and pretending to be patriots.

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Virtually Speaking

by digby

I’ll be doing my regular monthly discussion thing at Virtually Speaking this evening at 5pm PDT and 8pmEDT with blogospheric commenter extraordinaire Stuart Zechman. You can listen on blogtalk radio as well.

This is turning out to be a very fun experiment with a free flowing one hour talk, featuring a rotating list of interesting bloggers, activists and others. You may find it an interesting alternative to the usual fatuous gasbags. (I know I am often a fatuous gasbag myself, but none of us are usual, I guarantee it.)

If you click the links you’ll see that there is a ton of Virtually Speaking activity featuring very impressive guests on important topics. It’s developed into a serious alternative media and is a valuable blogospheric resource.

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SWAT Flies

by digby

There is such a plethora of conspiracy thinking going on these days from all directions that I’m dizzy with it. Nothing is an accident, there are no coincidences, no circumstance is as it seems and vast numbers of people are all involved in arcane conspiracies — except us ordinary schmucks. I’m guess this is the result of about 40 years of very rapid social change, the new gilded economy and the usual millennial madness. (Or it’s all true and Armageddon actually is upon us.) Either way, of all the conspiracy theories I’ve heard recently from any place on the political spectrum (and this includes Beck) this one takes the cake:

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t hear this myself, but I have been informed that President Obama is sending SWAT teams to the Gulf oil rigs. SWAT teams? I’m waiting on audio sound bite confirmation of this, but why in the world would you send SWAT teams to Gulf oil rigs? Oh, I know! Obama probably thinks the tea party blew up the rig. That’s what it is. (laughing) Yes. Of course the tea party did it! (laughing) Seriously, you know, this rig… We had this call from a guy out there who said nobody’s talking about whether this was an act of sabotage because I guess they can’t prove it, but they’re going to send SWAT teams down there? He was going to send a SWAT team to the rig that blew up or are you going to send a SWAT team to other rigs? What’s going on here? Remember, this rig blew April 21st, which is one day prior to “Erf” Day. I have a story here from Reuters, September 24th, 2008 (shuffling paper) right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers: “Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.” So you got the guru here urging civil disobedience, you got the regime sending SWAT teams down there to all the rigs in the Gulf. They’re sending SWAT teams to all the rigs in the Gulf! Whoa ho-ho-ho. So obviously Obama thinks the tea partiers are expert scuba divers as well or maybe they have their own fleet of underwater submarines that can go deep enough to go undetected, set explosives, and hightail it back to the protests in Ohio, or wherever they (laughing) happen to be. So 15 years of no global warming. “That’s just anecdotal! It doesn’t disapprove anything! It doesn’t disapprove that there’s a man-made threat going on.” But one oil spill — one oil spill which might have been intentional — is enough to prove that offshore oil drilling is unsafe and should never be done. This is the logic we’re forced to live with. There hasn’t been any warming in 15 years, that doesn’t mean anything. Those e-mails were hoaxed! The readings at the climate unit in East Anglia, they were all made up. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is who leaked those e-mails. What the e-mails said doesn’t matter.” But those guys made it all up, and they wouldn’t produce the data that led to their conclusions. They say they lost it. “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all!” But it hasn’t warmed in 15 years. “It doesn’t matter.” But I just saw a story you guys say you’re looking for the “lost” heat. “Doesn’t matter.” One oil rig blows up, and it proves we can’t dig, drill, find more oil. RUSH: Now, here’s the regime kicking into action here on the Gulf oil well or the rig explosion, President Obama mere moments ago in the Rose Garden before presenting the teacher of the year award. OBAMA: I do want to speak briefly to the American people about the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier today DHS Secretary Napolitano announced that this incident is of national significance and the Department of Interior has announced that they will be sending SWAT teams to the Gulf to inspect all platforms and rigs and I have ordered the secretaries of interior and Homeland Security as well as administrator Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency to visit the site on Friday to ensure that BP and the entire US government is doing everything possible not just to respond to this incident but also to determine its cause. RUSH: Wow. All right, so SWAT teams, we’re sending big sis down there, Janet Napolitano, to look at all the valves and stuff, make sure they’re properly greased. He-he-he-he. Ahem. And Lisa Jackson is doing the same thing. So obviously the regime is open to the idea that this is not an accident. The regime is open to the possibility that this could well have been on purpose. Don’t forget, the original Earth Day, 40 years ago, was inspired by the river in Cleveland catching fire. Forty years later, the day before Earth Day this year, the Gulf is on fire. Coincidence? Jury’s still out. The regime is on the case, soon to tell us what happened.

[…]

RUSH: I want to get back to the timing of the blowing up, the explosion out there in the Gulf of Mexico of this oil rig. Since they’re sending SWAT teams down there now this changes the whole perspective of this. Now, lest we forget, ladies and gentlemen, the carbon tax bill, cap and trade that was scheduled to be announced on Earth Day. I remember that. And then it was postponed for a couple of days later after Earth Day, and then of course immigration has now moved in front of it. But this bill, the cap-and-trade bill, was strongly criticized by hardcore environmentalist wackos because it supposedly allowed more offshore drilling and nuclear plants, nuclear plant investment. So, since they’re sending SWAT teams down there, folks, since they’re sending SWAT teams to inspect the other rigs, what better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants, than by blowing up a rig? I’m just noting the timing here.

That’s not some looney teabagger from Nowheresville. That’s the man whose ring every Republican in government is required to kiss.

And when you think about it, the fact that this lunatic became thoroughly mainstream should have alerted us that The End was nigh years ago.

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Alien Rule

by digby

Obama gave an interesting commencement speech yesterday, discussing the role of government and America’s contentious political discourse. It’s a little “on the hand/on the other hand” for my taste, but then I’ve always wished he’d stake out a position instead of trying to play both ends. (It drove me crazy about Clinton too.) But considering that predictable limitation, I think this one was pretty good, particularly this part:

But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad. One of my favorite signs during the health care debate was somebody’s who said “Keep Your Government Hands Out Of My Medicare,” which is essentially saying “Keep Government Out Of My Government-Run Health Care Plan.” When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders, and change our laws, and shape our own destiny.

Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities and the service men and women who are defending us abroad. Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them. Government is this extraordinary public university – a place that is doing life-saving research and catalyzing economic growth and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t leave it at that and dragged out the old trope about not needing “bigger government but better government” and ruined the point. But that passage is the first time I’ve heard any Democrat make the perfectly obvious affirmative case for government and I wish he’d do more of it without all the equivocating. It just waters down just about everything he says to some sort of post-partisan mush that doesn’t mean anything.

He went on to talk about civility:

The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation. It prevents learning – since after all, why should we listen to a “fascist” or a “socialist” or a “right wing nut” or a “left wing nut”? It makes it nearly impossible for people who have legitimate but bridgeable differences to sit down at the same table and hash things out. It robs us of a rational and serious debate, and one we need to have about the very real and very big challenges facing this nation. It coarsens our culture, and at its worst, it can send signals to the most extreme elements of our society that perhaps violence is a justifiable response.

[…]

For if we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we will become more polarized, more set in our ways. That will only reinforce and even deepen the political divides in this country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

Now this requires us to agree on a certain set of facts to debate from; that is why we need a vibrant and thriving news business that is separate from opinion makers and talking heads. That’s why we need an educated citizenry that uses hard evidence and not just assertion. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Still, if you’re somebody who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try glancing at the page of The Wall Street Journal once in awhile. If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website. It may make your blood boil; your mind may not be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. It’s essential for our democracy.

Good advice. To that end, I’ll “expose” you all now to a little essay which Rush talked about on his show yesterday:

I finally realized that the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally non-indigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections. It is not about Obama’s birthplace. It is not about race, either; millions of white Americans have had black mayors and black governors, and this unease about out-of-synch values never surfaced.

The term I settled on is “alien rule” — based on outsider values, regardless of policy benefits — that generates agitation. This is what bloody anti-colonial strife was all about…

Awareness began with Obama’s odd pre-presidency associations, decades of being oblivious to Rev. Wright’s anti-American ranting, his enduring friendship with the terrorist guy-in-the-neighborhood Bill Ayers, and the Saul Alinsky-flavored anti-capitalist community activism. Further add a hazy personal background — an Indonesian childhood, shifting official names, and a paperless-trail climb through elite educational institutions. None of this disqualified Obama from the presidency; rather, this background just doesn’t fit with the conventional political résumé. It is just the “outsider?” quality that alarms…

The suspicion that Obama is an outsider, a figure who really doesn’t “get” America, grew clearer from his initial appointments. What “native” would appoint Kevin Jennings, a militant gay activist, to oversee school safety? Or permit a Marxist rabble-rouser to be a “green jobs czar”? How about an Attorney General who began by accusing Americans of cowardice when it comes to discussing race? And who can forget Obama’s weird defense of his pal Louis Henry Gates from “racist” Cambridge, Massachusetts cops? If the American Revolution had never occurred and the Queen had appointed Obama Royal Governor (after his distinguished service in Kenya), a trusted locally attuned aide would have first whispered in his ear, “Mr. Governor General, here in America, we do not automatically assume that the police were at fault,” and the day would have been saved.

And then there’s the “we are sorry, we’ll never be arrogant again” rhetoric seemingly designed for a future President of the World election campaign. What made Obama’s Cairo utterances so distressing was how they grated on American cultural sensibilities. And he just doesn’t notice, perhaps akin to never hearing Rev. Wright anti-American diatribes. An American president does not pander to third-world audiences by lying about the Muslim contribution to America. Imagine Ronald Reagan, or any past American president, trying to win friends by apologizing. This appeal contravenes our national character and far exceeds a momentary embarrassment about garbled syntax or poor delivery. Then there’s Obama’s bizarre, totally unnecessary deep bowing to foreign potentates. Americans look foreign leaders squarely in the eye and firmly shake hands; we don’t bow.

But far worse is Obama’s tone-deafness about American government. How can any ordinary American, even a traditional liberal, believe that jamming through unpopular, debt-expanding legislation that consumes one-sixth of our GDP, sometimes with sly side-payments and with a thin majority, will eventually be judged legitimate? This is third-world, maximum-leader-style politics. That the legislation was barely understood even by its defenders and vehemently championed by a representative of that typical American city, San Francisco, only exacerbates the strangeness. And now President Obama sides with illegal aliens over the State of Arizona, which seeks to enforce the federal immigration law to protect American citizens from marauding drug gangs and other miscreants streaming in across the Mexican border.

[…]

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this “foreigner in our midst” mentality is the name given our resistance — tea parties, an image that instantly invokes the American struggle against George III, a clueless foreign ruler from central casting. This history-laden label was hardly predetermined, but it instantly stuck (as did the election of Sen. Scott Brown as “the shot heard around the world” and tea partiers dressing up in colonial-era costumes). Perhaps subconsciously, Obama does remind Americans of when the U.S. was really occupied by a foreign power. A Declaration of Independence passage may still resonate: “HE [George III] has erected a Multitude of new Offices [Czars], and sent hither Swarms of Officers [recently hired IRS agents] to harass our People, and eat out the Substance.” What’s next?

The good news is that all this “discomfort” has nothing to do with race or ideology. It’s just that Obama — and presumably all of us from foreign places like San Francisco, Chicago, New York — are foreign occupiers. That certainly clarifies things for me.

I appreciate the president’s call to listen to one another, I really do. But for some reason, I just have a sneaking suspicion that people who consider the current Democratic majority and African American president to be a foreign occupation might not speak the same language.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Krill, baby…krill

By Dennis Hartley

Disney’s Oceans: Straight outta Fantasia

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
-Rachel Carson, author of The Sea Around Us

We forget that the life cycle and the water cycle are one.
-Jacques Yves Cousteau, author of Silent World

Oops.
-Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez

In their magnificent documentary, Oceans, directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud don’t need to hit us over the head with cautionary rhetoric about mankind’s tendency to perennially poison the precious well of life that covers three-quarters of our planet with pollution, overfishing and unchecked oil exploration. Any viewer, who becomes immersed in the film’s stunningly photographed portrait of the delicately balanced aquatic ecosystem, yet fails to feel a connectedness to the omniverse we cohabit with it (and a resulting sense of shared responsibility) surely has something missing in their soul.

More aqueous 2001 – A Space Odysseythan Discovery Channel nature romp, the film follows a narrative path reminiscent of Perrin and Cluzaud’s previous effort, Winged Migration; which is to say, a decidedly non-linear approach to their subject. In that 2001 film, the directing team (along with Michael Debats) introduced audiences to a whole new paradigm in the nature doc genre. The innovative, state of the art cinematography conveyed a bird’s eye view of, well, a bird’s world, that literally made you feel like a member of the flock, completely disaffected by gravity and those other pesky laws of physics which conspire to keep we bipedal types earthbound. The narration was sparse, poetic, at times approaching stream of consciousness. As corny as it may sound, I felt like I had truly bonded with the avian “protagonists” by the end of the film. Ditto for Oceans.

Not that one normally “bonds” with a cuttlefish or a mantis shrimp in a conventional sense, mind you. However, if your contemplation of marine biology rarely extends beyond schlepping the occasional Mrs. Paul’s Breaded Fish Filet from the freezer to the microwave, this film will be a guaranteed eye-opener for you. Granted, some of the scenarios have been covered in other nature documentaries (orcas snatching seals right off the beach, newborn sea turtles making a desperate break for the surf through a gauntlet of predators, and the requisite footage of everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic Antarctic marine animals-although the wacky penguin antics are kept mercifully brief ).

That being said, there are some truly unique, exquisitely rendered sequences in the film as well. A pod of humpback whales, breaching majestically in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. A vast army of spider crabs (seemingly numbering in the tens of thousands) scuttling about the ocean floor en masse. A massive ball of sardines, becoming decimated simultaneously from above and below by lightning-fast dolphins and dive-bombing sea birds. And in the film’s most sublime moment, an unexpectedly balletic display of maternal tenderness by a walrus, gently coddling her calf through his first undersea swim.

I would dearly love to see the European cut of the film, which apparently runs 14 minutes longer than the U.S. release; mainly because I’m quite curious to see what Disney has excised. According to some reports, the chopped footage concerns our negative impact on the marine ecosystem. There is some extrapolation along those lines (endangered species entangled in tuna nets, satellite photos that clearly reveal ominously dark tentacles of pollution snaking the globe through every major body of water, etc.) but it does seem perfunctory in the U.S. cut. The narration by Pierce Brosnan, while competent, doesn’t carry the gravitas that this type of meditation cries out for. Those few quibbles aside, I feel that this film is well worth your time. And as that huge oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico continues unabated, this rumination about what is at stake could not be much timelier.

Previous posts with related themes:

Darwin
Ponyo, on the Cliff by the Sea

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Guest Post — my friend debcoop sent me this email and I thought her point was important so I asked permission to post it.

Whose door does this oil spill darken?

by debcoop

The NY Times thinks that President Obama has not responded aggressively enough to this spill. Let’s be clear:
No way is this oil spill Barack Obama’s fault.

The fault lies with the ideology and mores of the Republican party and its theory of government. Their solution to this country’s energy’s future is to drill anywhere and everywhere. In their theory of government, government has no right to control who, what, where and how the natural resources of this country or this planet are exploited or not exploited, resources that are needed by us all and are needed to protect us all. Like my friend Jim Gilliam said in a private email, government is supposed regulate corporate behavior not just be their willing partner/follower. This is a lesson that we all need to keep in mind and that includes the president.
In the Republican theory of government, government regulation is inherently evil or at least counterproductive. So under George Bush et al, the only regulation in the Gulf has been self regulation. This oil spill is the fault of Republican ideology.

And the Times is wrong again in saying that if BP lied to Barack Obama and misled him that is not his fault. The spill itself and even, at the moment, the seemingly futile attempts to stop the spill is the result of Republicans, down to using Halliburton’s technology over another technology that is more successfully employed in Europe.

However, I think this is Barack Obama’s burden and ultimately the Democratic party’s burden. A month ago, Barack Obama embraced (or he thought he cleverly “co-opted”) Republican ideas for how to solve our energy future. Most progressives bemoaned this, especially because he had seemed to learn the lesson of health care. He is wrong on the merits. And on the merits I think there is little disagreement. It was supposed to be another clever way to disarm right wing arguments. But it has boomeranged back into the President’s face and the face of the Democratic party.

This is now the recurring riff of this presidency. And I hate to say it, but it is political malpractice.

Once again the president embraced Republican ideas to be/look bipartisan and open minded. But being Republican ideas, they have all the weaknesses of Republican ideas – just like with the health care bill being a system built on Republican ideas of the health care system – a LOOSELY REGULATED PRIVATE SYSTEM. Now the president has endorsed offshore drilling, which he still had the opportunity to repudiate clearly yesterday…but he merely temporized with an appeal to a temporary moratorium until “safe” ways are found.
Are there any safe ways? If this takes even 90 days to cap, that is 18 million gallons of oil filling the Gulf of Mexico. (I can’t do the math but does that fill the Gulf —what is the visual of that from space???)

Barack Obama is not just the President of the US, he is also the head of the Democratic Party. I hesitate to be political, especially since this is potentially an ecological disaster of vast proportions, but a Gulf full of oil through the summer, a Gulf that voters would have seen endlessly on their TV screens, would have been enough to beat the Republicans back (as well as over the head) in the midterm elections. They would have been crucified on their oil rigs.

But now is that possible? I don’t think so. The Democrats running in the midterms are now hobbled in their ability to trash the Republicans, because they have to tiptoe around their own President’s position. He has handcuffed them, he has almost forced them to zip their mouths shut on the issue. Indeed the inchoate anger will wrongly accrue to him, and the only thing the Democrats running may be able to do is either defend him or run away from him.

He is redefining the positions of the Democratic party in ways that many of us progressives are unhappy with on the merits. But in this case he is also losing the political benefits of being on the right side for all of us.
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