JustOneMinute

Why Couldn't He Just Be A Wimp?

Kathleen Parker tries for the Big Idea but ends up with a big mess:

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

OK, it is an attention-getting lead.

It isn't that he isn't "cowboy" enough, as others have suggested. Aren't we done with that? It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense. That is, we perceive and appraise him according to cultural expectations, and he's not exactly causing anxiety in Alpha-maledom.

Well, not all guys project as alpha, but that doesn't make them girls.  My goodness, the first George Bush was a young, decorated, shot-down Navy pilot and captain of the baseball team at Yale, but Newsweek found his inner wimp (and don't even ask about Dukakis).

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting "too masculine" or "not feminine enough." In her fascinating study about "Hating Hillary," Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, "like a man."

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

OK, does Obama talk like a woman?

Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.

Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

It's a cute line, but saying it's so doesn't make it so.  Dare we look for evidence?

His lack of immediate, commanding action [in the gulf debacle] was perceived as a lack of leadership because, well, it was. When he finally addressed the nation on day 56 (!) of the crisis, Obama's speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

Granted, the century is young -- and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Obama's rhetoric would simmer next to George W. Bush's boil. But passivity in a leader is not a reassuring posture.

Are we about to be offered some study telling us that women are more inclined to use the passive voice?  Not exactly:

Campbell's research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy -- clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

I'm mystified - now Reagan and Wild Bill are women?

...negative reaction to Obama's speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

What, a woman couldn't have handled the gulf mess?  Geez, cleaning up after others is one of the many things they are good at.  Sterotypically, of course.

Well, if the idea of Obma as the first woman President takes hold Ms. Parker will get credit for starting it, but this is ludicrously slim servings.  And do let's find the bright side - Hillary can run in 2012 on a promise to put a man back in the White House.

MORE:  I am not even going to try and imagine Barack wearing the latest from Paris.  A picture is worth a thousand words, but here are a few words:

I wanted to like Riccardo Tisci’s laces for the Givenchy man. I really did. There was something interesting about the mock Victorian elegance he seemed to be working, without the reliance on literal references. And there’s a footballer’s bulk to his silhouette, which is at least a consistent point of view for him. And I certainly have no gripe with his skirts, which are actually shorts with a flap in front. Shorts that suggest skirts were a trend of the collections.

Who could have a gripe with men's skirts?

National Enquirer Back For More On Gore

The National Enquirer will hit newsstands Thursday with more on the Al Gore as sex-crazed poodle story.  I meant to pick up some milk at the supermarket anyway, so I may tap the extensive JOM research budget and pick up a copy.

Big Journalism has more and repeats the question asked by many - where are the other masseuses?  Suspenseful!

Finally, about that cover - the National Enquirer photo shows the masseuse holding a pair of pants helpfully labeled "her stained pants", and the cover promotes "DNA testing".  Que pasa?

Per the woman's extended statement in 2009, Al Gore wrestled with her for a while in the hotel bedroom.  On subsequent inspection her pants seemed to have been stained; she saved them for possible testing, although we inferred that the Portland police did not follow up on that.

So, did the National Enquirer do some DNA testing?  I doubt that had an Al Gore DNA sample, but they might have been able to confirm that some male fluid was present.

And as we have a Monica flashback, we recall that Ken Starr told Bill Clinton's legal team the results of the DNA testing on the famous blue dress before asking the President about it; no "gotcha" Perry Mason moment there.  One doubts the National Enquirer will be so scrupulous.

Now Where Did I Leave That Gingko-Bilboa?

My goodness - I was having fun mocking the echo-chamber Journolist over a year ago and completely forgot.  But Big Journalism did not!

If The Best Title Wins...

Paul Krugman sweeps the field with his post on Irish austerity titled "A Terrible Ugliness Is Born".  Two Nobel Laureates and the implicit call for an Irish uprising? The other Tom Maguire would be thrilled.

Megan McArdle finds her inner Irish and reminds us that things could always be worse.

Kagan - Agog about ACOG

Let's have at our next Supreme Court Justice.  Jonathan Adler strikes me as fair and balanced on the ACOG thing.

All Mariano!

The Times previews a magazine article on Mariano Rivera, and includes this very cool video comparing his cutter and fastball.

However, I deplore this sort of gutless, faux-objective reporting:

...Mariano Rivera, the New York Yankees star who is widely considered the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball...

"Widely considered"?  C'mon, make the call!

FLASHBACK:  Can we have a pic?  The greatest game ever to be utterly overtaken by events, to wit, the Yankees losing that Series and the Red Sox winning the next one.

HISTORY REPEATS:  How could the Times discuss great Yankee relievers and overlook Sparky Lyle, the one-pitch wonder who went, as Graig Nettles quipped, from Cy Young to Sayonara when the Yankees signed Goose Gossage?

Wright In The Times - "Huh?" And "Huh?" Again

Robert Wright explains jihad and the Cold War to the rest of us. First, keying off of the guilty plea of Times Square bomber Shazad, we learn that the attempted bombing was revenge for US exertions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere:

Here is how Shahzad explained his role in the holy war: “It’s a war,” he said. “I am part of that. I am part of the answer of the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m revenging the attacks.”

Now, for a Muslim holy warrior to see his attacks as revenge runs counter to Pipes’s longstanding claim that Islamic holy war is about attack, not counterattack.

...

Now we have Shahzad suggesting roughly the opposite — that the holy war could end if America would stop using military force. He said in court, “Until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.”

Should we really take this testimony seriously? It does, after all, have an air of self-dramatizing grandstanding. Then again, terrorism is a self-dramatizing, grandstanding business, and there’s no reason to think this particular piece of theater isn’t true to Shahzad’s interior monologue.

Indeed, it tracks the pitch of jihadist recruiters, notably Anwar Awlaki, the American sheik in Yemen who inspired not just Shahzad but the Fort Hood shooter and the thwarted underwear bomber. The core of the pitch is that America is at war with Islam, and the evidence cited includes Shahzad’s litany: Iraq, Afghanistan, drone strikes, etc.

...My point is just that, if you take Shahzad at his word, there’s more cause for hope than if Pipes were right, and Shahzad’s testimony were evidence that jihadists are bent on world conquest.

Yeah, well, it's always something with these jihadists.  All of Shazad's grievances post-date the 9/11 attacks, yet those 9/11 attacks happened.  And they were accompanied by the then-current list of grievances, which included US troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia and of course the occupation of the West Bank.

Mr. Wright then explains that these long-term misunderstandings of the enemy are part and parcel of American history:

It’s only human nature. Once you decide that some group is your implacable enemy, your mind gets a little warped. Virtually all incoming evidence is thereafter seen as consistent with that model. (In fact, there’s a more specific finding from social psychology that also helps explain Pipes’s world view, as laid out by blogger Dan Drezner in this little video clip.)

This cognitive distortion reared its head in America’s previous cosmic struggle. Just about all cold war historians agree that Americans bought into the “myth of monolithic communism.” Once we decided that the communist menace was a single, vast, implacable force, we failed to appreciate, for example, tensions between Russia and China that in retrospect seem obviously important. We had our model, and we were sticking to it.

Waddya mean "we"?  And what could explain the frequent use of the phrase "the China card", or this contemporaneous reporting of Nixon's balancing of China and the Soviets back in 1972?

More Change I Hope They Didn't Believe In

Despite Obama's campaign promises the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository lives!

WASHINGTON -- The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste plan was kept alive Tuesday when a panel of judges ruled the Obama administration does not have the authority to withdraw the project without permission from Congress.

Federal law requires the Department of Energy to apply for a waste repository license and for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate the application and rule on its merits unless lawmakers decide otherwise, according to a three-judge board that hears commission licensing matters.

...

The decision is a setback for the Obama administration, which has been moving to shut down the Nevada project in fulfillment of a campaign pledge to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a longtime Yucca foe.

The court may be able to prevent the application from being withdrawn, but they can't force the DOE to move it forward:

The program has been zeroed out of President Barack Obama's 2011 budget, and the hundred or so people remaining at work in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., are retiring, transferring or preparing to be laid off.

But the political winds may shift:

Reid's Republican opponent in their Senate race, Sharron Angle, wants to develop Yucca as a site for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for use as energy.

Angle opposes using the site as a "dumping ground" for nuclear waste -- something Southern Nevadans have fought for years -- but argues hundreds of jobs can be created at Yucca if it becomes a center for nuclear energy generation.

Tuesday's ruling by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board promises months more of legal maneuvering over the repository that seems certain to extend beyond the November elections, said Lake Barrett, a retired DOE manager who was a director of the Yucca program from 1993 to 2002.

"This is a long way from being over," Barrett said. "This was round two of a 15-rounder."

My modest proposal - Obama can fulfill two promises by transferring the Gitmo prisoners to Yucca Mountain.

The Long View In Afghanistan

Stratfor founder George Friedman reviews our thirty-year war in Afghanistan.  I am struck by the notion that what George Bush had been doing is a lot like what Biden was advocating last fall.  From Stratfor:

During the Bush administration, U.S. goals for Afghanistan were modest. First, the Americans intended to keep al Qaeda bottled up and to impose as much damage as possible on the group. Second, they intended to establish an Afghan government, regardless of how ineffective it might be, to serve as a symbolic core. Third, they planned very limited operations against the Taliban, which had regrouped and increasingly controlled the countryside. The Bush administration was basically in a holding operation in Afghanistan. It accepted that U.S. forces were neither going to be able to impose a political solution on Afghanistan nor create a coalition large enough control the country. U.S. strategy was extremely modest under Bush: to harass al Qaeda from bases in Afghanistan, maintain control of cities and logistics routes, and accept the limits of U.S. interests and power.

I don't think that is the strategy Bush articulated, but if you judge him by his actions, then maybe - in April 2008 Sec Def Gates was talking about a troop increase in Afghanistan in 2009, but numbers like 7,500 to 10,000 were being tossed around.

Let me excerpt from the section on Obama:

The Obama administration began with the premise that while the Iraq War was a mistake, the Afghan War had to be prosecuted. It reasoned that unlike Iraq, which had a tenuous connection to al Qaeda at best, Afghanistan was the group’s original base. He argued that Afghanistan therefore should be the focus of U.S. military operations. In doing so, he shifted a strategy that had been in place for 30 years by making U.S. forces the main combatants in the war.

However!

In analyzing this strategy, there is an obvious issue: While al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan in 2001, Afghanistan is no longer its primary base of operations. The group has shifted to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. As al Qaeda is thus not dependent on any one country for its operational base, denying it bases in Afghanistan does not address the reality of its dispersion. Securing Afghanistan, in other words, is no longer the solution to al Qaeda.

Obviously, Obama’s planners fully understood this. Therefore, sanctuary denial for al Qaeda had to be, at best, a secondary strategic goal. The primary strategic goal was to create an exit strategy for the United States based on a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and a resulting coalition government.

So it's back to the future:

Rather than trying to strengthen the Karzai government, the real strategy is to return to the historical principles of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan: alliance with indigenous forces. These indigenous forces would pursue strategies in the American interest for their own reasons, or because they are paid, and would be strong enough to stand up to the Taliban in a coalition. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put it this weekend, however, this is proving harder to do than expected.

The American strategy is, therefore, to maintain a sufficient force to shape the political evolution on the ground, and to use that force to motivate and intimidate while also using economic incentives to draw together a coalition in the countryside.

On the hokey-pokey surge/withdrawal plan announced by Obama:

Obama’s attempt to return to that track after first increasing U.S. forces to set the stage for the political settlement that will allow a U.S. withdrawal is hampered by the need to begin terminating the operation by 2011 (although there is no fixed termination date). It will be difficult to draw coalition partners into local structures when the foundation — U.S. protection — is withdrawing. Strengthening local forces by 2011 will be difficult. Moreover, the Taliban’s motivation to enter into talks is limited by the early withdrawal.

...Given the time frame the Obama administration’s grand strategy imposes, and given the capabilities of the Taliban, it is difficult to see how it will all work out. But the ultimate question is about the American obsession with Afghanistan. For 30 years, the United States has been involved in a country that is virtually inaccessible for the United States. Washington has allied itself with radical Islamists, fought against radical Islamists or tried to negotiate with radical Islamists. What the United States has never tried to do is impose a political solution through the direct application of American force. This is a new and radically different phase of America’s Afghan obsession. The questions are whether it will work and whether it is even worth it.

Worth it relative to what?

Demand Produces Its Own Supply

Kos alleges that its pollster has been providing non-random, probably fake results.  More on the tech side here; schadenfreude snifter here.

Next For Matt Drudge - On To England!

Matt Drudge is on fire!  Having swept the field in the US, Matt Drudge has bested the BBC and is poised to conquer the British media.

These charts and graphs attempt to discern the traffic patterns for UK newspapers.  Google drives the most traffic, providing 40 million hits per month.  Direct hits are second at 27 million, Matt Drudge is third among all sources at 6.4 million, Yahoo is next at 3.2 million, and the venerable Beeb comes in fifth at 2 million.

So Drudge is hands-down the biggest non-search referrer.

Big deal - what has he done in other languages?

No More Fuzzy Birther Math

Think Progress bemoans the failure of their ongoing faith-based push to convince people that there is nothing to the Obama birth certificate kvetching, but they engage in some fuzzy math:

24 percent of Americans believe Obama was born outside the U.S.

Long after the question of President Obama’s birthplace should have been put to rest, a new poll shows that nearly one in four Americans believe the “birther” lunacy that the president was born outside the country. The Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll found that 24 percent of respondents think Obama was born outside the U.S., with six percent saying he was born in Kenya, another two percent choosing Indonesia, and the remainder being unsure of his exact foreign origins...

I love the passive voice in "should have been put to rest".  By whom?  Obama has steadfastly refused to request the complete file from the State of Hawaii and then release it, so we are left with the current chanting from the left that amounts to "The people verifying Obama's birth are from the government; trust them".  My casual appraisal of the current landscape is that we are not in a high-trust environment just now.  And gosh, it seems like only yesterday the Thinking Progressers could have delivered an endless litany of government lies, starting with missing WMDs. moving through Gitmo, and heading off anywhere and everywhere.  Times change.

FWIW, my official editorial position is that Obama is probably not hiding anything in those files; he just hides everything, and will request the file after he signs his eight-figure book deal.

But let's Move On to the fuzzy math!   From the poll, which hit on such topics as fave foods and where do people go after they die, we see a variety of answers on the question of Obama's birth.

To get to 24%, the Thinker, Alex Seitz-Wald, added respondents who cited Kenya (5%), Indonesia (2%), "Someplace else outside the US" (5%) and "Not sure which country" (11%).

The full reported responses add to a mere 87%, so I infer that 13% chose something like "Don't know", "No idea", or "Huh?"

And what about the 11% who chose "Not sure which country"?  The Thinker included these among the 24% claiming foreign birth.  Literalists studying the questions can argue that "Not sure which country" cannot mean "Don't know" since that is a clearly different choice.  And I suppose one could argue that "Some other country" is a compilation of respondents who cited Canada, Mexico, or whatever, thereby making it distinct from a "Not sure which country, but it sure was foreign" category.

But without having the detailed questions or the wording of "Don't know" choice in front of us, it seems entirely plausible that "Some other country" is an expression of confidence in Obama's terrestial origins without taking a view on his American status - per these respondents, Obama may or may not be an illegal alien, but he is not a space alien.  That may be progress.

Pretty clearly, 13% of respondents specifically think Obama was born outside the US, and I have no doubt the Thinker would rather talk about that than the economy, or the gulf, or Afghanistan, or Gitmo.  As to what the inscrutable 11% are thinking, well, I don't know, even if the Thinker (and an uncritical Michael Tomasky) do.

I'M READY TO TELL YOU MY SECRET:  In my very long range planning I am coming back as a ghost, which will shock the 98% of poll respondents who said it couldn't be done.  You just have to set your mind to achieving your goals - they laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian, but they're not laughing now.

Another Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Chimes In On Energy

This is a bit of a jaw-dropper - Andrew Revkin of the Times solicited ideas on energy from top scientists.  Today he prominently features a chap who might have been torn from the pages of Reason or The National review:

Last week, I sent a query to a variety of smart people who’ve spent a long time assessing the tangled interface of energy technology, climate science, politics and economics to collect their “pitches” — made as if they had 30 seconds or so to present their prime points to the president at a fantasy White House energy summit. (It sure would be nice to see the White House host a real one, with varied informed voices.) One who has weighed in is Burton Richter.

A recipient of the  1976 Nobel Prize in physics, Richter was a signatory on a letter from 34 Nobel laureates to Obama last year pushing for a big and sustained rise in the  federal investment in energy research. (He told me he is unaware of any response from the White House.) He also has written “ Beyond Smoke and Mirrors,” a cogent road map for facing the daunting long-term challenge of cutting emissions of greenhouse gases even as humanity’s growth spurt crests in the next few decades.

This is an excerpt of the reply from Dr. Richter:

I would start by saying slow down.

We do not have to run everything on solar cells and windmills tomorrow to make fast progress in reducing energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. The  Waxman-Markey energy bill in the House is a huge brick of paper and seeks to do everything at once. The  Kerry-Lieberman bill in the Senate is nearly as complicated.

I would start with those parts of the economy where the way to make progress is clear, the potential gains are large, and the required regulations are relatively simple. To me this says: Start by focusing on cars, electricity generation and efficiency. The industrial sector is complicated and we should stay away from most of it until we know better what we are doing. Also, tell the private sector what you want done, not how they must do it. There is a huge amount of brain power in our society directed toward making money and tilting the playing field so that more money could be made by doing the right things will unleash it.

No one knows what technology will be like in 50 years so we should start with things that will have the biggest impact at the lowest cost based on what we know now.

Huh?  What kind of a world are we living in that I can open my Times (online) and read something other than enviro-lib cheerleading for enhanced statism?  ("What do we want?"  "Big government!"  "When do we want it?"  "Right now!")

Just a bit more from the doctor:

Here is an example. In California legislation has set a goal of “ a million solar roofs” by 2020. At 3 kilowatts of solar cell capacity on each roof that will cost $15 to $20 billion at today’s prices including all the subsidies that the taxpayer has to pay even if the home owner does not. For a small fraction of the cost I could eliminate more greenhouse gas by converting the large  Four Corners, coal-fired electric power plant in New Mexico to natural gas. Yet there are no incentives to do so comparable to the tax credits for solar (and wind).

Reading this, libs are leaping off of rooftops all over California.

And I presume that Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu has a different view.

Don't Worry, Says The White House, The Taliban Is Far From Beaten

Oh, boy.  On Saturday, the Dexter Filkins of the NY Times reviewed a bit of Afghan history and reminded everyone why a brokered peace settlement involving the Taliban could be a real problem:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The drive by President Hamid Karzai to strike a deal with Taliban leaders and their Pakistani backers is causing deep unease in Afghanistan’s minority communities, who fought the Taliban the longest and suffered the most during their rule.

The leaders of the country’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, which make up close to half of Afghanistan’s population, are vowing to resist — and if necessary, fight — any deal that involves bringing members of the Taliban insurgency into a power-sharing arrangement with the government.

...

The dispute is breaking along lines nearly identical to those that formed during the final years of the Afghan civil war, which began after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989 and ended only with the American invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 100,000 Afghans died, mostly civilians; the Taliban, during their five-year reign in the capital, Kabul, carried out several large-scale massacres of Hazara civilians.

“Karzai is giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban, and he is opening up the old schisms,” said Rehman Oghly, an Uzbek member of Parliament and once a member of an anti-Taliban militia. “If he wants to bring in the Taliban, and they begin to use force, then we will go back to civil war and Afghanistan will be split.”

If the Taliban return, can the Northern Alliance be far behind?  Both Obama and Leon Panetta gave some not-so-reassuring reassurance on this topic:

President Obama and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency both reacted with skepticism on Sunday about the prospects for an Afghanistan peace deal pushed by Pakistan between the Afghan government and some Taliban militants.

While Mr. Obama said a political solution to the conflict was necessary and suggested elements of the Taliban insurgency could be part of negotiations, he said any such effort must be viewed with caution. The C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, was even more forceful in expressing his doubts.

“We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce Al Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society,” Mr. Panetta said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Acknowledging that the American-led counterinsurgency effort was facing unexpected difficulty, Mr. Panetta said that the Taliban and their allies had little motive to contemplate a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan.

“We’ve seen no evidence of that and very frankly, my view is that with regards to reconciliation, unless they’re convinced that the United States is going to win and that they’re going to be defeated, I think it’s very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that’s going to be meaningful,” he said.

The Taliban is far too strong to want to negotiate - great.  And if we succeed in beating them down a bit, will the threatened minorities then be OK with boosting them back up at the negotiating table?

Veering afield a bit, our Presidents has us thinking about verb tenses:

Mr. Obama, speaking later after the Group of 20 meeting in Toronto, noted that as the Afghanistan war approached its 10th anniversary, it was the longest foreign war in American history, and that “ultimately as was true in Iraq, so will be true in Afghanistan, we will have to have a political solution.”

As "was" true in Iraq?  Has Iraq been solved?  I get that even though in Obama's public pronouncements the surge never succeeded in Iraq Obama wants one in Afghanistan, and that Petraeus will now oversee it since he led the secret success in Iraq.  But when was Iraq solved?

Things Could Always Get Worse... (Ongoing)

The Politico reviews "That Was The Week That Was", the wild White House week with McChrystal, the BO oil fund, and the near-passage of financial reform:

On Wednesday, the same day President Barack Obama ousted his humiliated Afghanistan commander, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs walked into the Oval Office with more grim news: The cap on the gushing oil in the Gulf had been dislodged.

“What?” Obama replied incredulously. “Well, why did it do that?” A remotely operated vehicle had knocked the cap right off, he was told, leaving oil rushing out as furiously as ever.

“Let me get this straight,” Obama later told senior adviser David Axelrod. “A robot knocked off the Top Hat? Come on, guys. Are you kidding me?"

I assume they scheduled a meeting so that Obama would know to know whose ass to kick - Top Hat's presumably.

But privately, Obama advisers talk of being prisoners to uncontrollable events and deeply uncertain about how all of this will play out. Yes, he showed decisiveness in firing McChrystal. But the White House is as uncertain as ever about whether the war can be won. Yes, he stared down BP and made sure they will pay at least $20 billion to clean up its mess. But the oil still gushes, with no end in sight for what one aide calls a “rolling disaster.” Yes, he will likely soon sign the most sweeping regulation of Wall Street since the Great Depression. But it won’t create jobs or end financial mischief.

Well, now Sen. Robert Byrd has died and the Democrats may lack the votes to move the financial regulation bill through the Senate until his replacement (appointed by a Democratic governor) can be sworn in.

The Best Is The Enemy Of The Good

Kevin Costner (seriously!) successfully promoted a slick idea for separating oil from water:

It was treated as an oddball twist in the otherwise wrenching saga of the BP oil spill when Kevin Costner stepped forward to promote a device he said could work wonders in containing the spill's damage. But as Henry Fountain explains in the New York Times, the gadget in question — an oil-separating centrifuge — marks a major breakthrough in spill cleanup technology. And BP, after trial runs with the device, is ordering 32 more of the Costner-endorsed centrifuges to aid the Gulf cleanup. 

The "Waterworld" actor has invested some $20 million and spent the past 15 years in developing the centrifuges. He helped found a manufacturing company, Ocean Therapy Solutions, to advance his brother's research in spill cleanup technology. In testimony before Congress this month, Costner walked through the device's operation—explaining how it spins oil-contaminated water at a rapid speed, so as to separate out the oil and capture it in a containment tank...

The device can purportedly take in thousands of gallons of oil-tainted water and remove up to 99% of the oil from it.

But 99% is not 99.9985%, which is a problem:

In his congressional testimony, Costner recounted his struggle to effectively market the centrifuge. He explained that although the machines are quite effective, they can still leave trace amounts of oil in the treated water that exceeds current environmental regulations. Because of that regulatory hurdle, he said, he had great difficulty getting oil industry giants interested without first having the approval of the federal government.

Obviously, what we want is a machine not yet invented that separates the oil and dumps pure water back into the gulf at a high flow rate.  But for purposes of the current exercise, Costner's device ought to be better than nothing; fortunately, the Feds seems to have figured that out.

A CAVEAT:  The linked Times article includes this:

BP said last week that it would buy 32 of Mr. Costner’s machines to help clean the oil spill. But the machines work much better on fresh oil than weathered oil, so it is unclear how much of a contribution they will make.

Saturday Morning Open Thread

It's a beautiful day...

If You Are Having Trouble Becoming Pessimistic About Afghanistan...

The Times continued its drumbeat of gloom on Afghanistan:

Pakistan Is Said to Pursue Foothold in Afghanistan
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and CARLOTTA GALL.

This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Carlotta Gall.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is exploiting the troubled United States military effort in Afghanistan to drive home a political settlement with Afghanistan that would give Pakistan important influence there but is likely to undermine United States interests, Pakistani and American officials said.

The dismissal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will almost certainly embolden the Pakistanis in their plan as they detect increasing American uncertainty, Pakistani officials said. The Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, preferred General McChrystal to his successor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, whom he considers more of a politician than a military strategist, said people who had spoken recently with General Kayani.

Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.

In addition, Afghan officials say, the Pakistanis are pushing various other proxies, with General Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.

Well, maybe a negotiated settlement won't be so bad, and we always knew there might be some strange bedfellows.  Obama alluded to welcoming back some of the Taliban when he did the hokey-pokey surge last December:

We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.

Perhaps the Taliban will abandon violence after the government surrenders to them, and they will respect the right of all Afghan citizens to live under Taliban rule.

Obama's pesky withdrawal deadline is back:

Coupled with their strategic interests, the Pakistanis say they have chosen this juncture to open talks with Mr. Karzai because, even before the controversy over General McChrystal, they sensed uncertainty — “a lack of fire in the belly,” said one Pakistani — within the Obama administration over the Afghan fight.

“The American timetable for getting out makes it easier for Pakistan to play a more visible role,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army. He was referring to the July 2011 date set by Mr. Obama for the start of the withdrawal of some American combat troops.

Darn, that July deadline was meant only as a reassuring signal of weakness and vacillation to the anti-war left.  Who could have guessed that the Pakistanis and the Taliban were listening?  Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates repudiated it a day later, Obama repudiated it yesterday, and still the people in the area think Obama is edging towards the exit.  So inscrutable.

If You Can Believe This Spin...

Wow - David Sanger of the Times is peddling the notion that Obama's sacking of Gen. McChrystal was a big win for the White House:

In Week of Tests, Obama Reasserts His Authority
By DAVID E. SANGER

After two months in which an oil gusher seemed to underscore the limits of his powers, President Obama spent the last week trying to reassert control over a triumvirate of forces that almost always test a new president’s authority: the military, the markets and the lobbyists.

Mr. Obama’s remarkable victories in little more than a week, nearly a year and a half into a presidency that was saddled from the start by two wars and a terrifying financial plunge, may not prove to be lasting.

Remarkable victories!?!  People were worried about Afghanistan, but I don't think there was general concern that Obama's team was utterly divided (but obviously there should have been).  On with the celebration:

“This is a clear respite from the theme that Obama had lost control,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who wrote the definitive history of the National Security Council, the organization American presidents have used for 60 years to assert authority around the country and the world. “He sent a loud and clear message to the generals about who is in charge. And he has engineered a pivot-point in U.S. economic history, an end, or at least a big change, to the ‘leave it to the markets’ era.”

...One top national security aide noted to a reporter on Wednesday that the decision to oust General McChrystal and replace him with Gen. David A. Petraeus was “considered, decided and executed in less than 36 hours” and sent a message that the president would not tolerate what he called “division” in the ranks of his team after he had set strategy.

The president would not tolerate "division"?  What has he been tolerating for months?  And what is he going to do about civilians Eikenberry and Holbrooke, who seem to have trouble getting on board with the plan for Afghanistan?  (VP Biden is also part of the "division", but he can't be fired.)

Eventually the botox wears off and Mr. Sanger loses his straight face:

The messy encounter with General McChrystal forced Mr. Obama to reassert his faith in a strategy in Afghanistan (a troop surge, a counterinsurgency strategy that exposes American forces to significant danger, and the eventual transfer of recaptured territory to Afghan government hands) that so far has shown little signs of working. The left remains deeply apprehensive about his growing commitment to the war; the right argues that his 18-month deadline to begin withdrawing troops is a sign of absence of commitment.

When Mr. Obama declared, “I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” it amounted to an unspoken acknowledgment that his national security team remained split, and never really ended the argument over whether the current approach to the war was the right one. Even without General McChrystal, the argument seems bound to flare again in December, when it is up for a major review.

The messy encounter also forced Obama to repudiate his silly July 2011 withdrawal deadline.

A few more successes like this and Obama will be booed off the stage by 2012.

Closing Gitmo

Gitmo closing?  Don't hold your breath.  From the Times:

Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

Let's stagger down memory lane to Day Three of Hope and Change:

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

Gitmo was a deplorable symbol of this and that, until actually resolving the situation became too complicated.  Anyway, it's the thought that counts:

In any case, one senior official said, even if the administration concludes that it will never close the prison, it cannot acknowledge that because it would revive Guantánamo as America’s image in the Muslim world.

“Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”

Move on.

Widely Unremarked In The Weigel Debacle...

I would be more impressed by the many defenders of Dave Weigel if any of them would care to rationalize the obvious lying in his initial apology/explanation.  His gist was that he was having a bad day, yet the second salvo of leaked emails demonstrated that he has been blasting righties for months or years.

From the initial "explanation":

I'm a member of an off-the-record list-serv called "Journolist," founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend's wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I've come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.

Below the fold are quotes from me e-mailing the list that day -- quotes that I'm told a gossip Web site will post today. I apologize for much of what I wrote, and apologize to readers.

So he can't dance. So what?  But the Daily Caller promptly ran "venting" that preceded Weigel's failed audition for "Dancing With The Media Stars":

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv.

Har de har.  Maybe he had been having a bad day then, too.

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

Yeah, it's tough to find stories.  Bobby Jindal, Republican rising star, has been front and center in the gulf oil spill debacle.  How many posts has Weigel devoted to him in the last two months?  None.

I don't know that an honest apology would have saved Weigel's job, but lying wasn't going to work.

Ricks On Petraeus

Thomas Ricks, author of "Fiasco" and "The Gamble", explains why Afghanistan is much different from Iraq.

This week's confrontation between a senior Army general and the president of the United States may have signaled the beginning of the end of the war in Afghanistan. In a year or two, President Obama will be able to say that he gave the conflict his best shot, reshaping the strategy and even putting in charge his top guy, the general who led the surge in Iraq -- but that things still didn't work out.

Then he can begin pulling out.

This is not a vote of no-confidence in Gen. David H. Petraeus, whom the president has selected to lead the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, replacing the disgraced Gen. Stanley A McChrystal. It is a simple recognition that the conditions Petraeus enjoyed in Iraq are far from present in Afghanistan, and that the key skills he brought to bear in the first war won't help him as much in the second.

I basically agree.  If Petraeus remains committed to a continued effort, that could be politically awkward.  However, Petraeus also provides excellent cover along the lines of, if you can't win with Petraeus, you can't win (think Mariano on the mound or Michael Jordan taking the last shot).

Ricks notes that the biggest problems are above Petraeus' pay grade:

Rather, Petraeus's critical contribution in Iraq was one of leadership: He got everyone on the same page. Until he arrived, there often seemed to be dozens of wars going on, with every brigade commander trying to figure out the strategic goals of a campaign. Before Petraeus arrived, the top priority for U.S. forces was getting out. After he took over, the No. 1 task for U.S. troops, explicitly listed in the mission statement he issued, was to protect the Iraqi people.

However, the people on the same page include a lot of civilians:

Petraeus was aided enormously by Ryan C. Crocker, one of the savviest American diplomats and experienced in the region, having served in Pakistan, Lebanon and in Iraq decades prior. Early in the war, friction between Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had crippled the U.S. effort and confused Iraqis. Bremer was all about transforming Iraq politically, an inherently turbulent mission, while the U.S. Army decided on its own that its job was to produce stability.

Repelled by such persistent friction, Petraeus and Crocker were determined to coordinate their actions. Word went out to subordinates that neither of them would tolerate infighting between civilian and military officials. When the two returned to the United States to testify before Congress in September 2007, they showed a united front, key in winning them more time for the war, when congressional leaders such Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. were saying it was time to "stop the surge and start bringing our troops home."

In Kabul, alas, Petraeus will find no such useful ally in the American ambassador. Instead, the top U.S. diplomat there is Karl W. Eikenberry, who relentlessly opposed McChrystal's initiatives. Unlike Crocker, Eikenberry has no strong base in the State Department and is not steeped in the history and culture of the region. Rather, he is a retired general who in fighting with McChrystal over the past year used many of the same arguments that another American commander, John Abizaid, had used in opposing Petraeus's approach to Iraq. That is no coincidence -- Abizaid and Eikenberry have been close friends since they were West Point roommates in the class of 1973.

On top of that, Petraeus will have to deal with Richard C. Holbrooke, who seems to have achieved little as a special presidential envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the general will face a host government even more troublesome than what he dealt with in Baghdad. Indeed, the two biggest problems the United States faces in Afghanistan are the Karzai government and the Pakistani government -- and neither of those really can be addressed by military operations.

McChrystal was dismissed because of the magazine article that laid before the world the sniping and backbiting between U.S. military and civilian officials in the Afghan war. That is not going to end just because Petraeus goes to Kabul, or even because the president has said he doesn't like it. It might end only when one person is put in charge of the overall American presence in Afghanistan, with the power to hire and fire. Obama has not taken that step, so it is likely that the same nettlesome quarrels that exasperated McChrystal also will fatigue his successor.

Obama has not put together a unified team, or even a team that can present a united facade.

Ricks nearly closes with a joke:

For the second time in three years, Petraeus has come to the rescue of a president beleaguered by a faraway war. President George W. Bush came to rely enormously on Petraeus in 2007, when the general's credibility on Iraq far exceeded that of the White House. It will be interesting to witness how the relationship between the new president and his new general evolves. Petraeus is much more like Obama than he was like Bush. The Dutch American general and the African American commander in chief are oddly similar. Both are the sons of immigrant fathers; both are intelligent and ambitious; both are more cool, cerebral and distant than most of their peers.

Yes, but one of these men has made history and changed a nation with his transformative leadership; the other got a lot of the asbestos out of Altgeld Gardens.

BUT SERIOUSLY:  Since Petraeus wants to win this war, he needs to get the top civilian leadership on board.  I suggest a re-imagining of the Army Field Manual on counter-insurgency.  Rewrite it in language that will appeal to our Community Organizer-in-Chief.  Instead of “Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24”, a possible title would be "Alinsky's Rules For Third World Radicals, or, What Would Che Do".

More On Gore

Back to Al Gore's sex life!  Al Gore's side confirms that he got a therapeutic massage on the night in question, but it was all very innocent:

According to a source friendly with the Gores, Al Gore confirmed that he received a therapeutic massage in his hotel room that night, and likely from the therapist making the accusation. But, the source said, Gore remembers getting a massage without incident and the therapist leaving on good terms.

And the Gore break-up may be driving this story:

Gore's attorneys wrote to the Portland Tribune in 2007 and 2008 that the allegation was "completely false," and the paper decided against publishing a story, in part because the woman was reluctant to be identified. In a 2007 letter, Gore's lawyers wrote: "You. . . . are aware that everyone who knows Al and Tipper Gore well can and does attest to the integrity of their 37 year marriage and to his honorable character. Moreover, no allegations remotely resembling the ones made by this lawyer have been made against Mr. Gore by anyone else." Gore recently announced that he and his wife are splitting up.

And the tab:

The Enquirer's story, which [executive editor of the National Enquirer] Levine says was approved for publication just before the paper's deadline Monday night, relied heavily on documents. The tabloid confirmed that Gore, who had just released the film "An Inconvenient Truth," was in Portland at the time of the alleged incident to give a speech on global warming. The paper obtained the $540 bill -- including a 20 percent gratuity -- that the masseuse submitted to the Hotel Lucia, which retained her, along with her subsequent e-mail correspondence with the hotel. 

And where is this story headed?  Oblivion, if there is a merciful God in heaven:

Levine said he did not know whether the breakup of the Gore marriage prompted the masseuse to go public but that "you have to give her the benefit of the doubt." He conceded, however, that "this could come down to a he said/she said."

Well, it may be a 'he said/she said' but so far, she has spoken anonymously and he has not spoken directly at all.

Coffeegate! Latte To Stay, Lobbyist Rules To Go

Eric Lichtblau of the NY Times tells us how the most transparent Administration in history sidesteps some of those pesky new rules about disclosing contacts with lobbyists.

One gambit is simply to meet outside the White House:

Across From White House, Coffee With Lobbyists
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — There are no Secret Service agents posted next to the barista and no presidential seal on the ceiling, but the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House has become a favorite meeting spot to conduct Obama administration business.

Here at the Caribou on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a few other nearby coffee shops, White House officials have met hundreds of times over the last 18 months with prominent K Street lobbyists — members of the same industry that President Obama has derided for what he calls its “outsized influence” in the capital.

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

...

Lobbyists say some White House officials will agree to an initial meeting with a lobbyist and his client at the White House, but then plan follow-up sessions at a site not subject to the visitors’ log.

One lobbyist recounted meeting with White House officials on a side lawn outside the building to introduce them to the chief executive of a major foreign corporation.

“I’ll call and say, ‘I want to talk to you about X,’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, let’s talk at Starbucks,’ ” said another lobbyist who counted six or seven off-site meetings with White House officials on financial issues.

Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, has shown up several times at a closed gathering of liberal political activists and lobbyists that is held weekly at the Capital Hilton. Other Obama aides — like Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, and Norm Eisen, the special assistant for ethics — and senior aides in the Office of Management and Budget, the energy czar’s office and elsewhere have also taken part in off-campus meetings, lobbyists said.

Employees at Caribou Coffee — which many lobbyists said appeared to be the favorite spot for off-site meetings, in part because of its proximity to the White House — welcome the increased traffic.

“They’re here all the time — all day,” Andre Williams, a manager at Caribou Coffee, said of his White House customers. (He can spot White House officials by the security badges around their necks, or the Secret Service agents lurking nearby.)

“A lot of them like lattes — that or a ‘depth charge,’ a coffee with a shot of espresso,” Mr. Williams said. “The caffeine rush — they need it.”

A second gambit - game the visitors log:

Many lobbyists still get in the front door at the White House — nearly 1,000 times, according to a New York Times examination of public White House visitors’ logs and lobbying registration records.

Those logs, though, present an incomplete picture. For instance, many of the entries do not reflect who actually took part in a meeting. The “visitee” often shows up not as the White House official who was the host, but as the administrative assistant who arranged the meeting.

Just ignore those pesky email requirements (like Team Bush!):

Attempts to put distance between the White House and lobbyists are not limited to meetings. Some lobbyists say that they routinely get e-mail messages from White House staff members’ personal accounts rather than from their official White House accounts, which can become subject to public review. Administration officials said there were some permissible exceptions to a federal law requiring staff members to use their official accounts and retain the correspondence.

And if the rules are really a problem, just waive them:

And while Mr. Obama has imposed restrictions on hiring lobbyists for government posts, the administration has used waivers and recusals more than two dozen times to appoint lobbyists to political positions. Two lobbyists also cited instances in which the White House had suggested that a job candidate be “deregistered” as a lobbyist in Senate records to avoid violating the administration’s hiring restrictions.

A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that in “a small number of cases,” people might have been “wrongly” registered as lobbyists, based on federal standards. The official said that while the White House might have discussed such instances of possible “over-registration,” he was “quite confident that no lobbying shop has been instructed to deregister anyone.” 

They told me if I voted for McCain that lobbyists would overrun Washington...

Then I Apologize To My Readers, Too

Dave Weigel apologizes to his readers - apparently he has been blasting Matt Drudge, Byron York, and "Paultards" over on Ezra Klein's Journolist, an off-the record lefties-only talking points club.  The Other McCain remains in his corner; Will Collier has read enough.

Let me just cite the "Paultard" bit of the Weigel apology.  First, Weigel repeats his own email:

- "It's all very amusing to me. Two hundred screaming Ron Paul fanatics couldn't get their man into the Fox News New Hampshire GOP debate, but Fox News is pumping around the clock to get Paultard Tea Party people on TV."

And the apology:

I stand by this, although I apologize if people find the word "Paultard" offensive. It was a neologism coined during the 2008 campaign to describe fanatical supporters of Paul -- I used it in this case to convey how Fox covered those supporters in 2008.

"If" people find it offensive?  C'mon, it is intended to be offensive.  Does anyone think the "tard" ending conveys fanaticism?  In fact, I will Boldly Guess it is drawn from "retard", as in "mental retard".  As to the notion that it is a neologism, well, it is true that no one was calling anyone a Paultard back on the playgrounds I recall from my youth, but so what? 

Right then, on to my apology - from time to time I have linked to Dave Weigel, prompting some commenters to complain that I am wasting time on a poseur libtard (Ooops!  Another apology point!  IF anyone finds that offensive.)  My bad - he is, and I was. 

LATE BREAKING: Dave Weigel has resigned.  I wonder if the WaPo will look for an actual conservative to replace him.

THEN I'LL SETTLE FOR SECOND BEST.  IF THERE IS ONE:  Brad DeLong defends Weigel as a misunderstood libertarian who is still "the best reporter covering the conservative movement".

Hmmph.  Bobby Jindal was mooted as a VP possibility back in 2008, is a rising star, and has been visible in leading Louisana's response to the gulf oil spill disaster.  So how many posts on Jindal has "the best reporter covering the conservative movement" delivered in the last few months while scrambling for new angles?  That didn't take long - none.

Or here is Weigel on NJ rising star, Gov. Chris Christie:

Poll: New Jersey likes Chris Christie, splits on whether he's a 'leader' or a 'bully'

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) is winning the political press's attention for his leadership in the Gulf Coast, but Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) has, not so quietly, become probably the biggest gubernatorial hero of the right. YouTube clips (some collected by Christie's own office) that show him lighting into Democrats, teachers' unions, and journalists critical of his style.

"I'm inspired by what Governor Christie said about the teachers unions in New Jersey," economist John Taylor said last night, accepting a Bradley Prize, a stamp of approval for conservative intellectuals. "He called them bullies. 'They punch you, I punch them.'"

The latest Quinnipiac Poll, however, shows that Christie's confrontations, coupled with a steady drumbeat of criticism from unions, have voters split on whether he's doing a good job and whether he's a "bully" -- that is, by and large, they oppose the cuts he's campaigning for.

Gee, a Republican governor in a long time blue state is not universally beloved.  Let's press on:

If you're not keeping tabs on this, here's the latest quasi-viral Christie video, from a town hall meeting where he informs voters that the "day of reckoning" has come. Without being too glib about the comparison, it really is a bizzarro version of an Obama town hall in which the president takes aim at Republicans and corporate America.

So if you are an angry New Jersey voter who thinks taxes are too high and the public sector is out of control, you are in "bizarro" world? 

Weigel's role was to provide daily reassurance to libs that no matter the deficiencies of their own side, the other guys were worse.  I am sure that in that role he may have been "the best".

Meanwhile, I need to start reading the second-best reporter covering the right wing.

Not Fully Moved On. Yet.

OK, the scrubbing by MoveOn of their General Betray Us managed to be both comical and Orwellian.

However, in the course of poking around their websites, I discovered that this page survived the purge -

Don't let Gen. Petraeus convince Congress to keep the war going.

General Petraeus is using cherry-picked intelligence and misleading statistics to make the case for keeping our troops in Iraq for years more. Please write a letter reminding America and Congress not to fall, ever again, for White House lies—we need a timeline to bring our troops home.

The process is simple -- just follow the three steps below. See the tips on the bottom right of the page for ideas (click on the "Writing Tips" tab). Please report any problems you have here.

Whatever - maybe that will be gone in a day or two, maybe not.  But what held my attention was this WaPo piece from Sept 9, 2007 to which they linked as support:

Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting

Geez, infighting and dissent at Team Bush, but not in front of the kids:

For Bush, the eight months since announcing his "new way forward" in Iraq have been about not just organizing a major force deployment but also managing a remarkable conflict within his administration, mounting a rear-guard action against Congress and navigating a dysfunctional relationship with an Iraqi leadership that has proved incapable of delivering what he needs.

Although the administration has presented a united front, senior officials remain split over whether Bush's strategy will work in the long term. Bush gambled that a "surge" of 30,000 troops in the streets of Baghdad and the western province of Anbar would establish enough security to give "breathing space" to Iraq's sectarian leaders to find common ground.

But as Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker deliver progress reports to Congress tomorrow, the questions they are likely to face are the same ones asked internally: How long should the troop buildup last? When should U.S. forces start to come home? Should the United States stand by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or seek another leader? What are the hidden risks of the emerging alliance with Sunni tribal leaders? What is the best outcome Washington can hope for at this point?

Other than the presentation of a united front, does that sound familiar?

Bush apparently dug in:

Early Turning Points

While Bush played defense in Washington, he also needed to turn up the pressure in Baghdad. The strategy would never work, Bush aides knew, unless Maliki stepped up. National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had outlined in a memo last fall the deep White House skepticism about the prime minister's intentions and abilities to take on Shiite militias.

Bush instituted videoconference calls with Maliki every two weeks, prodding him to seek accord among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions. At first, the Americans noticed some change. Maliki, who previously had blocked U.S. forces from taking on the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, gave Petraeus the green light to go after anyone responsible for attacks. He also deployed three Iraqi brigades in Baghdad, as promised.

The White House also led a huge PR push:

Another new arrival in the West Wing set up a rapid-response PR unit hard-wired into Petraeus's shop. Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.

From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and last week, the office put out 94 such documents in various categories -- "Myths/Facts" or "Setting the Record Straight" to take issue with negative news articles, and "In Case You Missed It" to distribute positive articles or speeches.

Gillespie arranged several presidential speeches to make strategic arguments, such as comparing Iraq to Vietnam or warning of Iranian interference. When critics assailed Bush for overstating ties between al-Qaeda and the group called al-Qaeda in Iraq, Gillespie organized a Bush speech to make his case.

"The whole idea is to take these things on before they become conventional wisdom," said White House communications director Kevin Sullivan. "We have a very short window."

Does anyone think Obama will interrupt his golf outings for this sort of effort?  C'mon, half his aides are drafting surrender speeches and the other half are posting anonymous anti-war comments at DKos.  OK, maybe less than half.  A bit less.

Does Anyone Want An Al Gore Moment?

Al Gore may or may not have sexually assaulted a masseuse at a hotel in Portland in 2006.

The woman went to the police in 2006, then dropped away; there was some talk of a civil action, but no papers were filed and the Gore people deny any settlement.

The woman went back to the police with a detailed statement in January 2009, but the police decided there was insufficient grounds to pursue an investigation.  And now the woman is going public.

OK, I read through most of the train wreck witness statement (which answers some of Ann Althouse's questions, BTW), and have some stray thoughts.

1.  Ick.

2-5: Eeew.

6.  For righties, imagine reading this about, hmm, Dick Cheney or George Bush.  Lefties, feel free to imagine reading this about Big Al.

7.  The woman is a terrific storyteller.  And like flaws in fine leather, the holes in her story add to the authenticity - if she were making it up, why make up a violent, mercurial Al Gore utterly unknown to the rest of us?

8.  Why would she be lying?  Was this initially meant to be a shakedown in 2006 but she lost her nerve?  Are the Gore people lying when they say she never paid her?  (But then, why is she going public now?)

A guess, based on her 2009 statement - the divorce precipitated her latest appearance.  The woman is a lib, as were her friends - on p. 27 we are told she is in the "Birkenstock Tribe", she lost friends over this, and she was advised that she should just shut up to help save the planet. 

But with Al and Tipper going their separate ways, Big Al is looking a little less iconic and her story may seem a bit more plausible.

9.  I think the police were right that there was not going to be enough physical evidence to support a prosecution.  I suppose they could have tried to haul Big Al in for questioning, but what were the odds?

That said, she did claim to have made contemporaneous statements to friends, her doctor, and her therapist.  That can be of some use to a police investigator and more to a reporter.  [And a friend comes forward, claiming the woman gave a contempraneous account of an assault.]

10.  The woman says she felt sure that Big Al was on familiar ground with the masseuse/hotel room/assault scenario.  If, as she suspects, there are other victims, one presumes that the same crusading press that brought forth so many of Tiger's babes will have some success here.

11. The police interviewer does poke around the issue that some hotel guests ask for a massage when they really want a "massage" (wink), and some masseuses are happy to provide extra service for extra tips.  The woman insists that, although she is well aware of the issues, she is always very professional, older, and not that kind of masseuse. 

12.  Do I believe her?  What kind of question is that?  I believe we will be seeing her on national television in the role of Juanita Broaddrick; if we also see a parade of masseuses with similar stories, I will probably rush to judgment.  But not now.

OVER TO ANN:

If Gore really did what she said, does it suggest that he's had other massages and developed a modus operandi of requesting abdominal work, etc. etc. Is the abdomen a normal part of a legitimate massage? I've had a lot of full body massages in my time, and the abdomen was never included. But I am a woman. Maybe it's normal for a man. Or do you have to make a special request?

From the statement, it was "unusual" for a client to specifically request ab work; it can get awkward, and some masseuses consider it a no-go zone.  However, the woman is licensed in Chi Nei Tsang, which involves abdominal massage.  Do we need to talk about Big Al's irritable bowels?  I am moving back to points 1-5.

Big Al also requested a massage of his adductors, or inner thighs.  Also a red flag, but hey - this was the Vice President and near-President.  Sort of ties in to the notion that this was not his first time.

THEN AGAIN:  There is only one Frank J:

Of course, it could all be a mistake; maybe the masseuse ran into some tree branches and thought it was Al Gore groping her.

HARDLY FAIR AND BALANCED:  This AP report basically yucks it up over a massage gone south and condenses a long wrestling match into this:

She alleged he later tried to have sex with her.

How did he try - did he say "Pretty please" and bat his baby blues?  Not exactly - the allegation is that he wrestled and groped her for quite while.  And she claims Big Al went with the timeless "Come into the bedroom and listen to my IPod in its cool docking station" line - she really needed to hear "Dear Mr. President" by Pink, he insisted.  The AP lost a lot of nuance there.

Things Could Always Get Worse...

Team USA overcomes another horrendous call by the ref and advances in the World Cup.  Good!

McChrystal out, but Petraeus in.  Good!

But the oil well in the gulf is now uncapped and spewing freely, while adjustments are made.  Are you kidding me?  When are Pelosi/Reid/Obama going to put up a bill that repeals Murphy's Law?

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH:  I thought he looked Presidential enough (the overhead sunlight was a bit harsh, which may have been helpful.)  But his passage on our goals in Afghanistan was riotous.  I lack a transcript just now, but his first goal was to break the momentum of the Taliban.  Uhh, just how clear will it be when and if we achieve that?  And if we break their momentum because they decide to lay low until we leave, well, we are leaving in another year, unless we don't. 

Obama may have goals for Afghanistan, but clear they ain't.

HERE WE GO:  Obama from the Rose Garden:

We need to remember what this is all about.  Our nation is at war.  We face a very tough fight in Afghanistan.  But Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths or difficult tasks.  We persist and we persevere.  We will not tolerate a safe haven for terrorists who want to destroy Afghan security from within, and launch attacks against innocent men, women, and children in our country and around the world.

So make no mistake:  We have a clear goal.  We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum.  We are going to build Afghan capacity.  We are going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.

That’s the strategy that we agreed to last fall; that is the policy that we are carrying out, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The clear goal is to "break" the Talinban's momentum (but what if they regain it?); "build Afghan capacity" (but how much?); and "pressure" Al Qaeda "relentlessly" (but do we intend to defeat them?).

Clear goals indeed.

Big Morning!

Will General McChrystal survive the day?  Will Team USA?  

I say McChyrstal has to go - he already promised Obama not to embarrass the Administration after the debacle last fall when McChrystal took a shot at Obama and got a Presidential lecture on Air Force One.  What is he going to do now, double-promise?

This also gives Obama an excuse to re-set his obviously faltering war strategy.  Yes, the timing is awful, and all his choices are grim, but McChrystal needs to go.

VALIDATION:  The Politico quotes Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation reaching for the reset button:

“If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that the president has an opportunity to reattach himself to a new policy, fire this guy and start with something new,” Clemons said. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to reset. But he can’t do anything until he fires McChrystal.”

AS AN ASIDE: After he retires with 3,500 hits Derek Jeter needs to open a public relations school and lead the class titled "How To Be The Man Yet Never Embarrass Your Organization".  Sign up McChrystal.

And In Their Universe He Plugged The Damn Hole

I am starting my morning with an "Only At Reuters" moment: in the course of describing No-Drama Obama's problem with General McChrystal, Reuters shares this vision:

Obama has been widely criticized for not showing enough anger and emotion over the oil spill, the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history. But he won praise for his uncharacteristic comment that he was looking for an "ass to kick."

He won praise for his tough talk?  Really?  Steve Benen, a reliable lefty, was clearly defensive in responding to lefties Adam Serwer at TAPPED ("B-movie parody") and Atrios ("Bush-era fake bluster"). The NY Times editors offered this:

We cringed when he told the “Today” show that he had spent important time figuring out “whose ass to kick” about the spill. Everyone knew that answer on Day 2.

The AP saw phoniness.  NBC provided this cryptic but seemingly defensive comment:

*** Kicking 'ass': Much has already been made of President Obama’s “ass”-kicking comment in his interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer on the Gulf oil spill. But it’s important to put it in the proper context...

My recollection is that Obama was criticized as phony, un-Presidential, and annoyingly Bush-like.  And that was from the left!  Righties who could stop laughing long enough to respond went amok.  To music.

Evidently someone at Reuters remembers it differently.  I'll keep it in mind.

Back On The Border

James Alan Fox, blogging at the Boston Globe, attempts to ride to the rescue of the NY Times in their dubious story about crime and illegal immigration in Arizona.  Ultimately his spreadsheets fail him and the baddies prevail, but don't let me get ahead of the story...

Just to set the stage - the Times had told us that "the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation", and later cited FBI statistics from 2000 and 2008 to make that point.

I pointed out that the numbers didn't match the story - FBI crime stats are broken down into what seems to be bigger cities, smaller cities, and rural areas; from 2000 to 2008, the city and state-wide aggregate rate declined in Arizona, but the rural and small city rate rose.  Troubling!   My table-thumping conclusion was that the Times needed to do more work:

...these numbers do not support the case that the rural and border areas of Arizona are getting safer.  Quite the contrary, actually.  Maybe the Times can turn a reporter loose on that.

The Times may be doing just that, but meanwhile Mr. Fox has made a start.  However, since every story needs a villain Mr. Fox has decided to cast me as the heavy.  Here we go:

Adding to the state of confusion in the state of Arizona, bold blogger Tom Maguire then attempted to demonstrate that the reported decline in violent crime in Arizona during recent years is misleading -- a "statistical cover-up" of sorts.

I am not sure why those quotes are there, since I did not use the phrase "statistical cover-up".

Maguire’s calculations are flawed -- much more so than the Times figures he challenges.

Well, Mr. Fox may question my conclusion, but my calculations are flawless.

First, in examining only two different time points (2000 and 2008), a sharp increase could reflect an aberration at either end of the time interval. If one considers all the years between 2000 and 2008, a very different picture emerges.

Well, no kidding - that would tie in nicely to my point that the Times ought to do their homework before declaring the case closed.

Stepping the rate calculations back one more year to 1999 reveals even more about Maguire's erroneous conclusion.

Since my only conclusion was that the Times work was incomplete, Mr. Fox hardly rebuts me by doing their work for them.

But wait, there's more. The larger error in Maguire’s analysis comes from not seriously questioning or examining the substantial population drops between 2000 and 2008: from 304, 632 to 202,505 in non-metropolitan cities and from 314,634 to 271,734 in non-metropolitan counties. Such population changes are quite unusual, especially in the Sun Belt.

Maybe I wasn't serious enough when I wrote this:

We also note that the non-MSA population has been declining while the state has been growing.  Maybe what were once exurbs are now suburbs incorporated into growing cities, which certainly muddies any comparisons across eight years.

Now for a bit of fun at Mr. Fox's expense:

Figure 3 displays the estimated population counts used by the FBI for these two geographic composites for each of the years between 2000 and 2008. There clearly seems to have occurred between 2004 and 2005 some artificial shift in method/source of population estimation or definition of geography. And this impacted Maguire’s calculated crime rates, likely much more than did illegal immigration.

Here are the FBI reports for 2004 (252 page .pdf), 2005 and 2006.  You can only imagine my schadenfreude when I tell you that the big drop in population occurs from 2005 to 2006 rather than 2004 to 2005.  Oops!  As to what other numbers Mr. Fox has gotten wrong, well, time will tell although I cannot.  But I'll bet that if he has transcribed the population figures incorrectly, some of his crime rate statistics (which are crimes/population) have also gone south.  (Hmm, I am starting to think I could be well-cast as a bad guy...).  And while I am staring at it, my original table shows a rural crime rate of 251 per 100,000 in 2000; Mr. Fox's graph shows a rate of 200, leading to a more visually dramatic rise thereafter.  Yet we seem to agree on the other two rates for 2000.  Puzzling. 

A bit more from Mr. Fox:

While I applaud Tom Maguire for attempting to decompose aggregate state figures in search for the hidden story, he just didn't use all the tools and all the data available for the task at hand.

I appreciate the kind words, and let me churlishly add - I may not have used all the tools, but I didn't hit my thumb with a hammer, either.

Well.  I would think that eventually, a proper analysis would want to relate border-state crime to economic activity (if the jobs magnet draws illegals, does it also draw violent criminals?), the level of border enforcement (which I would guess has varied over time) and confounding factors such as the crystal meth boom.

And I would love to see that analysis come from the NY Times, since they seem to have undertaken this assignment.

SINCE YOU ASKED:  Peering at the FBI reports for 2004, 2005 and 2006, I get these results for the violent crime rate per 100,000.

First, the big cities: 518 (2004); 529 (2005)  513 (2006).  From the Fox charts, I see a dip below 500 in 2005 - that could be trouble.

Next, the smallish cities over those three years: I get 439 (2004), 413, 452; from the Fox charts, I see a surge above 500 in 2005; flag that, too.

And for the rural areas, I get 352 (2004), 364, 301; Mr. Fox seems to have roughly 350, 360, and 225 in 2006, so someone is askew.

And I still question his number for rural areas in 2000.  Actually, feel free to infer that I question all his numbers.

PRESSING TO MY TECHNOLOGICAL BORDER: This would surely look better as a graph, but here are the figures I am gleaning from the FBI reports of 2004-2008 in table form.  I further note that Mr. Fox and I differ wildly on the 2007 figure for rural crime rate.  The FBI report is a bit odd there; only 75% of counties reported, so they gross up the raw figure from 991 to 1,315 (In 2006, they grossed up from 77%; in 2005, from 88%).  My *guess* is that Mr. Fox got his lower rate by using the lower figure.  Be that as it may, that 2007 rural figure is a real outlier on my table.  IF it is accurate, 2007 was the year that the border was the Wild West.  Before the housing collapse in 2008, BTW, although far be it from me to imply causation.

 

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:  Mr. Fox has presented revised charts, acknowledging "a transcription error".  The rural figure for 2000 has come up to about 250; the rural figure for 2007 has come up to about my figure; and the population break has been noted.  That was all one error?

Anyway, let's see the before and after pictures.  First, before, saved for posterity:

And the revised chart:

 

The rural crime rate for 2006 has moved up by about 75 and the 2007 rate has moved up by about 100 while the big city rate is relentlessly dropping, yet per Mr. Fox, "There was no change, however, in the overall conclusion".   OK...

McChrystal Watch

Will General McChrystal survive this Rolling Stone profile?  Should he?

The timing is awful, since we are slated for a big December review and McChrystal has only been in charge in Afghanistan for a year. 

Reasons he might stay include:

 - The article was kind to Hillary!

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.' "

 - The Biden bashing, in context, was just hypothetical kidding around:

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 fuck 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?"

One might argue that they are mocking McChrystal's own penchant for self-destruction.  As to the Obama-, Holbrooke- and Jones-bashing, I am out of ammunition.

 - Obama is too busy failing in the gulf to divert his (and our) attention to failing in Afghanistan.

 - How much history does Obama want to make?  From the RS, describing Obama's first surge in March 2009:

Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he [Obama] 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.

Hard to blame Bush for that.

As to why McChrystal has to go, well, are you kidding?  Even if he (and his aides) are saying what everyone is thinking, he is not in a position to be saying it.  And where will McChrystal's credibility be if other soldiers start publicly undermining him, or the civilian leadership, and he tries to rein them in?

So - should he stay or should he go now?  I say he is out - the December review was going to be a minefield anyway, since the anti-war left should be in full Vietnam/Iraq flashback mode by then (and their Iraq flashbacks end with the surge in January 2007).  Obama won't want to admit that Bush was right in not trying to put a big army into Afghanistan, which is a logistical nightmare.  But Obama won't want to back a general who has alienated everyone and is delivering results that are at best uneven.

Get rid of McChrystal and hand the ball to a new general who just might engineer a face-saving de-surge for Obama, or at least buy time for a delay in the review - that will be the ticket.

SINCE YOU ASK:  I was a surge skeptic last fall, "partly because of the difficulty and expense of achieving something like success and partly because we clearly do not have leadership committed to this".

Afghanistan - Yikes!

The effort in Afghanistan continues to circle the drain.  Gen. McChrystal somehow agreed to a Rolling Stone profile which will hit the newsstands Friday; it includes sniping by McChrystal and his aides at Obama ("photo-op"), Biden ("Biden? "Bite me"), White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones (a "clown"..."stuck in 1985"), special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke ("Like a wounded animal"), and, of course, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.  Marc Ambinder has more on that special relationship, which apparently went sour in 2005. 

And if a total breakdown in Afghanistan team unity isn't enough to worry about, the AllahPundit adds this to the mix from McClatchy News Service:

WASHINGTON — Private security contractors protecting the convoys that supply U.S. military bases in Afghanistan are paying millions of dollars a week in "passage bribes" to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to travel along Afghan roads, a congressional investigation released Monday has found.

The payments, which are reimbursed by the U.S. government, help fund the very enemy the U.S. is attempting to defeat and renew questions about the U.S. dependence on private contractors, who outnumber American troops in Afghanistan , 130,000 to 93,000.

So we are bribing the Taliban to let us bring in supplies to fight them? The good news is that they seem to have team unity problems, too.

The report (86 page .pdf) is at the House subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.  And we are mindful of the possibility of McClatchy hype - the cover letter from Chairman Tierney mentions

... a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.

The Taliban is notably absent from the cover page, although perhaps they are picked up by the "perhaps" inside.

OK, that pdf file froze my tired old laptop, but here we go from the Wapo:

U.S. indirectly paying Afghan warlords as part of security contract

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2010; A01

The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.

Right, then - let me unthaw my files and maybe I can see for myself.

WHERE IS THAT BLOOD PRESSURE MEDICATION?  OK, now I have two frozen computers...

FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

3.  Protection Payments for Safe Passage Are a Significant Potential Source of Funding for the Taliban. Within the HNT contractor community, many believe that the highway warlords who provide security in turn make protection payments to insurgents to coordinate safe passage. This belief is evidenced in numerous documents, incident reports, and e-mails that refer to attempts at Taliban extortion along the road. The Subcommittee staff has not uncovered any direct evidence of such payments and a number of witnesses, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, all adamantly deny that any convoy security commanders pay insurgents. According to experts and public reporting, however, the Taliban regularly extort rents from a variety of licit and illicit industries, and it is plausible that the Taliban would try to extort protection payments from the coalition supply chain that runs through territory in which they freely operate.

Point 1 is important (clever numbering scheme they have!) - the Taliban notwithstanding, payments to local warlords work at cross purposes to our goal of creating a strong central government.  One recalls a similar tension during the surge in Iraq, where we empowered Sunni militia that were not likely to embrace (or be embraced by) the central government.

BACK TO THE ROLLING STONE:  Unless printing presses have ears, people don't talk to "The Rolling Stone" - they talk to reporters.  Michael Hastings did the RS story; from his apparently outdated bio:

Michael Hastings spent two years reporting in Iraq as Newsweek's youngest-ever war correspondent. He has written four cover stories for Newsweek International and been published in Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, filing stories from such locations as Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, Kurdistan, Vietnam, and Afganistan. He is now a contributing editor at GQ and lives in Vermont.

This GQ piece from April 2009 covered Obama's first surge.  In that piece he includes vignettes from his time embedded with front-line troops.  I infer that Mr. Hastings is a progressive war skeptic with much about which to be skeptical.

GETTING HIS WISH:  The Rolling Stone piece opens in Paris with General McChrystal, a Bud Light kind of regular guy, getting ready to go out to a fancy dinner.

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

Well, maybe he will find the ass-kicking room in Washington.

Oil Not Sticking To Obama

Obama's overall approval rating continues to hold up in the latest CBS/NY Times poll.  However, he is widely viewed as a Man Sans Plan on the gulf oil spill, energy policy, and job creation.

Overall:

The president's overall approval rating stands at 47 percent, unchanged from one month ago. The percentage who disapproves of his performance has also held steady and now stands at 43 percent.

Clueless:

Most Americans do not believe President Obama has a clear plan to deal with the oil spill in the Gulf, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll.

Just 32 percent say Mr. Obama has a clear plan to deal with the oil leak, while 59 percent (including 64 percent of Gulf coast residents) say he does not.

The numbers are not much better among those who watched the president's Oval Office speech on the spill last week, with 35 percent of that group saying he has a clear plan and 56 percent saying he does not.

The spill isn't the only issue on which the president is seen as lacking a plan of action: Just 41 percent say Mr. Obama has a clear plan for developing new sources of energy, while 45 percent say he has no clear plan. And when it comes to creating jobs, just 34 percent say he has a clear plan; 54 percent say he does not.

Rahm-bo To Go?

The Torygraph reports that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel will quit after the midterms.  He denies it.  But is there anything lamer than a lame-duck chief of staff?  And why are so many Dems so willing to participate in this whispering campaign?

On The Border

[UPDATE: A much more detailed response to Mr. Fox is here.  Briefly, my point is that statistics offered by the NY Times do not support the claims they made; Mr. Fox's rebuttal is that the Times was wrong, but if I had looked at it differently I would have seen that the Times was still wrong, so therefore I am wrong.  Yeah, I found him to be confusing, too.]

The NY Times pushes to the border of statistical incoherence and tells us that in Arizona, crime is down even if the perception of crime is up:

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol. While thousands have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

That Mr. Krentz’s death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Interesting.  I would have hoped that Arizonans had a better grip on the reality in their own state than some NY Times reporter.  Let's cut to the stats:

For instance, statistics show that even as Arizona’s population swelled, buoyed in part by illegal immigrants funneling across the border, violent crime rates declined, to 447 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2008, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available from the F.B.I. In 2000, the rate was 532 incidents per 100,000.

Nationally, the crime rate declined to 455 incidents per 100,000 people, from 507 in 2000.

Let's see - here is the 2008 FBI Table 5; the 2000 counterpart is an Excel file available here.

What we see that Arizona is broken into three categories - Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Cities Outside of MSA, and rural counties.  Most people reside and most crime occurs in the MSAs.  On the other hand, a glance at a map tells me that the Arizona border itself is not near what to the eyes of this former Manhattanite looks like any major city.

And the stats reprinted below tell a different story - measured by violent crimes per 100,000, the non-MSA portion of Arizona has seen a dramatic increase in crime.

 

We also note that the non-MSA population has been declining while the state has been growing.  Maybe what were once exurbs are now suburbs incorporated into growing cities, which certainly muddies any comparisons across eight years.

But whatever the explanation, these numbers do not support the case that the rural and border areas of Arizona are getting safer.  Quite the contrary, actually.  Maybe the Times can turn a reporter loose on that.

FYI:  Times Public Apologist Clark Hoyt couldn't care less; bore him with your whinging at "public@nytimes.com".

When The Going Gets Tough...

Obama goes golfing; the BP CEO goes yachting.  Don't they have any idea how this looks to the small people?  And don't you hate it when those corporate obese cats are so insensitive?

But we can take solace in this - if we can believe the First Emoter, Malia greeted him this morning with "Happy Father's Day, daddy - did you plug the damn hole"?  Or something.

The Weather Will Arrive, Tomorrow

I am still loving this quote from Obama about how we don't know where we're going, but we are making good time, but comparing it to Churchill is a low blow.  Let's have it one more time:

What has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny—our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there.

I need to ask one of the kids to run Obama's speechifying through that software that sets it to music.  I am already hearing "The weather will arrive, tomorrow.  Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun, or rain, or something...".

Oh, well.  Happy Father's day, all.

Saturday Morning

Is anyone rooting for Tiger this weekend?

In Which I Buck Up Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is in Europe beating his head against the intellectual walls put up by German deficit hawks:

Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.

...

Here’s roughly how the typical conversation goes (this is based both on my own experience and that of other American economists):

German hawk: “We must cut deficits immediately, because we have to deal with the fiscal burden of an aging population.”

Ugly American: “But that doesn’t make sense. Even if you manage to save 80 billion euros — which you won’t, because the budget cuts will hurt your economy and reduce revenues — the interest payments on that much debt would be less than a tenth of a percent of your G.D.P. So the austerity you’re pursuing will threaten economic recovery while doing next to nothing to improve your long-run budget position.”

German hawk: “I won’t try to argue the arithmetic. You have to take into account the market reaction.”

Ugly American: “But how do you know how the market will react? And anyway, why should the market be moved by policies that have almost no impact on the long-run fiscal position?”

German hawk: “You just don’t understand our situation.”

First of all, he is looking for logic.  But let me toss out two related thoughts:

First, we are seeing the failure of "Trust Us" governance:  The fiscal stimulus plans on offer in Europe and the US amount to the following - the governments intend to embark on massive, unsustainable spending on projects that would never be approved in a normal environment.  This spending will be maintained until the political winds shift, the economy recovers, or (in the case of public sector unions) forever.

And "later", this spending will be paid for by a hodge-podge of spending cuts and tax increases which will be guided more by political influence than economic logic.

And in response to this good news and firm leadership, businesses and consumers are meant to experience new confidence and commence hiring and spending.  Uh huh.

Second, not that I favor wars in general or WWII in particular, but viewed (coldbloodedly) as a fiscal stimulus program, WWII had an important feature - the spending was linked to a specific rule (the defeat of the Axis) which could be relatively easily monitored by the public.  In 1941, the public knew the spending would go on for years; by July 1944, the end of major combat operations was visible on the horizon.  People could plan accordingly.

I imagine that economists have mooted the merits of a fiscal stimulus rule (in addition to the automatic stabilizers) that would have a similar role to monetary rules.  Burt I also notice that we have never formally adopted any monetary rules.  People still sorta kind trust the independent Fed to manage our money supply (maybe!) but I sense a loss of confidence in Congress and the Executive. 

We don't want a big war and we don't have a fiscal rule, so it is hard for anyone to plan with any confidence for a future which will include an unpredictable spending and taxation.  That may not mean the fiscal hawks are right, but it implies that any new stimulus will bring so little confidence as to be much less useful than past history would suggest.

ALTHOUGH I LACK A NOBEL PRIZE IN PSYCHOLOGY:  I guess Krugman's target audience laps this psycho-babble up, but honestly - this analysis of the deficit hawks is silly:

So the real motivations for their obsession with austerity lie somewhere else.

In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple: They’re eager to slash benefits for those in need, but their concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can’t afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion.

A lot of the Bush tax cuts in 2001 were not for the wealthy, and in the summer of 2001 we didn't have deficits as far as the eye could see, two wars and a recession (That we knew about!  The economy peaked in March 2001, we were told in November 2001).  Much later, we were told the recession ended in Nov 2001.)

Ben Nelson was also a player in the 2003 Bush tax cuts, but by then Republicans controlled the Senate so a Dem like Ben was just useful cover.

Bringing The 'Epic' To 'Epic Fail'

If you are going to accuse someone else of being close-minded, you really ought to listen to their arguments first.

Conor Friedersdorf, of epistemic closure fame, puts out a new recruiting post:

I've lately been pushing the idea that within the conservative movement, a combination of epistemic closure and a willingness of media elites to mislead their audience is producing a rank-and-file with a skewed view of reality. If you doubt that thesis, this single example is likely enough to persuade you to reconsider.

And perhaps this very post will win you over to my side.

High hopes and bold talk!  Mr. Friedersdorf then utterly ignores the argument actually being made by Mark Steyn and sets out to rebut some other point entirely.

What did Mr. Steyn write? 

When you look at all the formulaic sludge that wins the Pulitzer Prize for Most Unread Multipart Series, it is striking that not one of the major newspapers has done an investigative series on the proliferation of "honor killings", not in Yemen or Waziristan but in the heart of the western world. Instead, as Phyllis Chesler writes:

The mainstream media rarely covers them. More often, local media does, but even local media does so walking-on-eggshells, careful to quote from at least one apologist and one know-nothing. Usually, the (hardcopy) mainstream media covers such events weeks later, only briefly, or as a way to “spin” any possible prejudice against the perpetrators involved. Sometimes they are mentioned, but only in passing. Rarely do follow-ups appear. Usually, a wire service piece is used, and no original reporting is done. Sometimes, the newspaper’s blog might refer to a piece which first appeared in another newspaper which, in turn, has mentioned the subject only in passing.

And lest you are not sure where the heart of the western world might be, a click on the link to Ms. Chesler includes this as her second paragraph:

I am talking about how rarely the American mainstream media covers honor killings committed in North America.

Could that be more clear?  I guess so - Mr. Friedersdorf then regales us for many paragraphs with NY Times coverage of honor killings in the Middle East, the Near East, and Berlin.  Fascinating, but hardly on point.

As a further suggestion that he is not actually reading any of the material in front of him, Mr. Friedersdorf finally comes home to North America and includes as an example of hard-hitting Times coverage their absurd piece on a beheading in Buffalo in Feb 2009.  Here is the Times, cutting to the heart of the honor killing controversy:

The gruesome death of Ms. Hassan prompted outrage from Muslim leaders after suggestions that it had been some kind of “honor killing” based on religious or cultural beliefs.

Dr. Sawsan Tabbaa, a Muslim community leader who teaches orthodontia at the State University at Buffalo, said, “This is not an honor killing, no way.”

Dr. Tabbaa added, “It has nothing to do with his faith.”

Mr. Friedersdorf brings this all together for us:

Let's recap, focusing on the New York Times alone. Over a period of roughly a decade, the newspaper ran everything from major internationally reported stories on honor killings in its glossy magazine to a crime story about a local honor killing on its New York regional page. It covered honor killings in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

The topic garnered attention from magazine editors, freelancers, staff reporters in the newspaper, writers on the book review and arts pages, and multiple op-ed columnists from across the ideological spectrum. One of those columnists wrote multiple items about honor killings across several years (and even mentioned them in a couple columns that won a Pulitzer Prize!). Considering the magazine stories on honor killings alone, the Times must have spent tens of thousands of dollars at minimum covering the subject in its Sunday glossy. Honor killings were also deemed important enough to frequently appear in the World Section briefs.

So what on earth is Mark Steyn talking about? Having reviewed the incomplete summary of honor killings coverage in the New York Times alone, could any rational, informed person honestly characterize American newspapers and their handling of this issue as he did?

Having reviewed the Times coverage as presented by Mr. Friedersdorf, I don't think any rational person could conclude that Mr. Steyn is wrong in claiming that the Times, as a proxy for the MSM, has waltzed away from the coverage of honor killings in its own backyard.

However, Mr. Friedersdorf was so excited that he demanded a correction from Mr. Steyn.  That went well!

Now he was at a crossroads!  Mr. Friedersdorf could either actually read what Mr. Steyn had written and try to respond, or he could just bash on.  Bashing on it was!  From his follow-up:

On The Corner, however, Mr. Steyn objects that his post was only talking about the "silence" of American newspapers when it comes to honor killings in the United States -- apparently their proclivity for dishonoring the dead, being politically correct, and bowing to multiculturalism stops at the water's edge.

Is that a mysterious notion?  The Times is comfortable writing about all sorts of deplorable practices being done Far Away, but the idea that the Muslim Next Door is anything other than an oppressed, sympathetic figure prepared at any moment to belt out a chorus of 'Kumbaya' is not one the Times would care to explore.

Mr. F presses on:

What Mr. Steyn neglects -- beyond stories cited in my original post, like the Denver Post column titled "Honor Killing Comes to US" and a USA Today story titled "Honor Killings in US Raise Concerns" -- are two facts: 1) newspapers are covering the issue abroad more than at home because it is relatively rare here, unlike in Syrian or Turkey or even Germany; 2) but even if we restrict our analysis to cases he mentions, his original item is still wrong.

As an example, take Noor Almaleki, whose father ran over her with a car near Phoenix, Arizona. Were American newspapers silent? Let's take a look at The Arizona Republic to find out. The Gannett paper, the largest in Arizona, published the following coverage about the case:

Uh huh - the Arizona Republic is my benchmark for MSM coverage.  Apparently the authorities labeled it an honor killing (sensibly enough) so that is how it was tagged in subsequent coverage, including this analysis that I assume Mr. F did not read:

I was talking Wednesday with Joshua Rubenstein of Amnesty International when I stumbled into the connection between the Iraqi immigrant from Glendale accused of running over his daughter for being too “westernized” and the Civil War general who got away with murdering his wife's lover.

It has to do with culture. With history. With changes in values over time.

...Americans should not be complacent about this. Look at our past. Americans justified slavery and segregation in the name of cultural heritage. We had issues.”

We don't like to look at history.

We prefer to think of ourselves and our culture as fully evolved from the get-go. But the fact is we can draw a line from Faleh Hassan Almaleki back to someone like Dan Sickles, a congressman from New York in the years before the Civil War.

Yeah, yeah.  And Jimi Hendrix had a big hit with "Hey, Joe" so really, we are all brothers under the skin, right?  Kum-bay-yeah, yeah, yeah.

If Conor Friedersdorf wants to hector others about their close-mindedness, he will have more impact if he first listens to what they are saying.

HOW DO WE SCORE THIS:  What is the baseline for the "correct" level of coverage of honor killings in North America?  Who knows?!?  This NPR story mentions a global problem and links to two stories about honor killings in North America.  Hey, that is big-time coverage in defiance of the Steyn Assertion.  On the other hand, the second NPR story describes four honor killings in North America, including two in New York State; the NY Times, in accordance with the Steyn Assertion, does not mention either of those.

TRACKING THE CHIEF OBSTETRICIAN:  From Mr. Steyn we learn the the "Chief Obstetrician" of The Atlantic has chimed in on the Friedersdorf side.  So what did Sully say?  Since he obviously knew the Steyn post was wrong without even reading it, who cares?

But on a related point, four years ago Sully believed the press went far too lightly on the problems posed by Muslims in Europe - that would be the Danish cartoons and the murders in the Netherlands of Fortuyn and van Gogh.  Oh, well - maybe the MSM have found their spine since then.

I'm Rubber And You're Glue...

Keith Olbermann explains to the Kossites that they are no longer a source of solace and courage.

The best pictorial coverage is at Hit&Run.

Back In Afghanistan

Back on the topic of Afghanistan, the Senate grows restless - Sen. Levin wants assurance that Obama's July 2011 troop drawdown date actually means something, and Sen. McCain wants assurance that it does not:

“I am glad to hear General Petraeus express his support for the decision to begin U.S. troop reductions in Afghanistan in July 2011,” Mr. Levin said. “I strongly believe it is essential for success in Afghanistan that everyone understand the urgency with which the Afghans need to take responsibility for their own security.”

But Senator John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the committee, continued to argue that the decision to announce a withdrawal date in advance “does not bode well for success in Afghanistan.”

“If we sound an uncertain trumpet, not many will follow,” Mr. McCain said. “And that’s what’s being sounded now.”

We can put the WaPo editors in the "uncertain trumpet" camp:

... it's clear that the confusion in U.S. policy is damaging the mission. Only one person can fix it -- and that is President Obama. It's time for him to make clear whether the United States is prepared to stay long enough to ensure a stable and peaceful Afghanistan.

Max Boot also calls for more Presidential will, but not with much optimism:

The question is whether President Obama will have the will to see this through as President Bush did in the face of much greater public opposition.

Hmm.  First of all, betting on Obama to be a vigorous war leader seems foolish (although I have pre-cognitive flashes in which Obama spends two more years as Lyndon Johnson promoting an unpopular war in defiance of his base, and then declines to seek re-election.  Only flashes!)

Second of all, Presidential will was important in promoting the surge, but it was also important in promoting the Vietnam effort (as noted at the Democracy Arsenal).  Where there is no will there is no way, but the opposite does not follow (or, as I sometimes mutter when gloomily channeling my inner Tug McGraw, "It begins with believing.  Sometimes it ends there, too, but it always begins there.")

The Small Wars Journal has a cogent recap of the debate - Anthony Cordesman and Andrew Exum, both of whom contributed to Gen. McChrystal's review last year, provide the centerpieces.

Obama's Oil Spill Speech

Obama launched Operation Blame BP from the Oval Office in an attempt to project command of the gulf leak debacle.  I did not watch the speech myself.  Here's the reason.  Because my experience is, when you listen to a guy like a professional politician, he's gonna say all the right things to me.  I'm not interested in words.  I'm interested in actions.

The NY Times editors are also a bit more interested in actions:

On Tuesday, in his first address from the Oval Office, he vowed to “fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes” and declared that “we will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused.”

Mr. Obama and his team will have to follow through — with more energy and dedication than they have shown so far.

We know that the country is eager for reassurance. We’re not sure the American people got it from a speech that was short on specifics and devoid of self-criticism. Certainly, we hope that Mr. Obama was right when he predicted that in “coming weeks and days,” up to 90 percent of the oil leaking from the well will be captured and the well finally capped by this summer. But he was less than frank about his administration’s faltering efforts to manage this vast environmental and human disaster.

The speech was panned even by Obama's base at MSNBC:

Olbermann: "It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days."

Hm, my presumption that Obama would say all the right things to me may not have been valid.

WOULD IT HAVE HELPED?  With all the things that have gone wrong in the gulf, I was expecting Obama to ask Congress to repeal Murphy's Law.

I DON'T KNOW WHERE WE'RE GOING, BUT WE'RE MAKING GOOD TIME!  Peter Wehner of Commentary highlights "one of the worst sections from an Oval Office address ever"; he includes Obama's refutation of skeptics who doubt that we landed a man on the moon, and this deathless passage:

"Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny — our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how to get there. We know we’ll get there."

Tomorrow is later, but it is scheduled for arrival any day now.

IF DAN RIEHL IS WITH ME,WHO WILL STAND AGAINST ME?  Via Glenn, we see this from Dan on the speech:

But given that the reviews are so overwhelmingly bad, it occurred to me - it's what we aren't hearing that's most significant. You can call Obama incompetent and no one is accusing you of racism, any more. Now, that's change!!

Ah hah! Just a few short days ago, I noted that Obama had lost the Rolling Stone and said this:

As a stray thought, we have spent months reading about the racist Tea Partiers, and for months it has seemed obvious that come the fall, desperate Dems would start screaming that everyone opposed to them was racist.  That strategy would not be intended to change minds, but it might rally the base a bit.  On the heels of the Gulf debacle (and the perceived civil liberties debacle), the race card will be a lot harder to play.

Big Tuesday Night Open Thread

We have the Yankees versus the Phillies at 7PM, Barack versus BP at 8, and the Celtics versus the Kobes at 9.

I am backing the Yanks, the environment, and the Celtics (reluctantly).

GREAT MOMENTS IN RHETORIC:  Obama falls back on that old stand-by, they said it couldn't be done:

But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.

The same thing was said when George Bush proposed a surge to victory in Iraq...

LEFTIES WEEP:  Obama's Big Finish:

The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again. What sees us through – what has always seen us through – is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it. Tonight, we pray for that courage. We pray for the people of the Gulf. And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day. Thank you, God Bless You, and may God Bless the United States of America.

All that God talk...

The BP Escrow Fund

As part of Operation Blame BP, the centerpiece of his Gulf rescue effort, Obama is reportedly set to demand that BP set up an escrow fund to compensate victims of the Gulf oil spill.  The WaPo says that, properly structured, this could be a good idea.  The WSJ thinks that this will inevitably become an extra-legal slush fund driven by politics rather than law.  Gee, would a politician from Chicago think that way?  What the WSJ does not mention is that it would be a bi-partisan slush fund, since Republican governors in the Gulf states would presumably benefit as well.

Al Greene In South Carolina - Many Theories But Missing An Obvious One

The WaPo reviews many theories explaining Al Greene's victory in the South Carolina Democratic Senate primary but they overlook an obvious guess - Greene was talked up in black churches. 

Back in 2008 when Hillary and Barack stumped the state, reporters knew that black church leaders were influential in moving the vote.  Yet in 2010, when a black candidate with no website, no public appearances, and no radio or television spots wins against a white opponent, churches aren't mentioned.

I still like the "Let's Stay Together" explanation (and Al Green is still touring!), but shouldn't a reporter quiz a few church leaders to see whether they talked up Al Greene?

IN DEFENSE OF LOW-INFORMATION VOTERS:  First, a black veteran beat an old white judge on the Democratic side in South Carolina - is that really so shocking?  OK, no one knew the vet was an inarticulate alleged felon, but so what?  The Dems in South Carolina were simply picking a lamb to be sent to slaughter in November, since Republican Jim DeMint is going to win easily.  How much research should an individual voter put into that choice?

Chaos In The Gulf

The NY Times has a long story panning the poor coordination of the oil spill battle in the Gulf:

Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

...From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

“The present system is not working,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano’s story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

I don't know how the Commander-in-Chief can stick that exclusively on BP.  But I know he'll try!

The Coast Guard gets dragged in:

A 1999 Coast Guard report recommended that a mechanical response — using equipment like boom, skimmers and absorbent materials largely marshaled by boat and from land — should be increased by as much as 25 percent.

But over the next several years, lobbyists for oil companies pushed to keep the existing standard in place and emphasized the use of chemical dispersant.

...

In rules formally published last August, the Coast Guard effectively overruled its 1999 report, declining to require the substantial increase in the amount of mechanical response equipment.

However, in comments published along with the rules, the Coast Guard said that it “recognizes that the amount of mechanical recovery equipment is still inadequate to address the worst-case threat.”

So the Coast Guard finally scuttled the plan in August 2009?  Clearly, that will be blamed on Bush.

Your government in action:

The main problems, many here say, have been sluggish response times and a consistent impression that no one is in charge.

Reports of oil reaching shore have been made days before any vessels were seen in the area. After squalls, booms have ended up tangled like spaghetti on the shores of wildlife-rich islands, only to remain like that for days with no response workers in sight.

...

Requests to the response operation, no matter how small, have required approval, a process that state and local officials said could take days or weeks. Some requests were never answered at all. 

The Times article does not include in its chaos the long delay before the Feds began accepting offers of foreign assistance. Over to the WaPo:

Four weeks after the nation's worst environmental disaster, the Obama administration saw no need to accept offers of state-of-the-art skimmers, miles of boom or technical assistance from nations around the globe with experience fighting oil spills.

"We'll let BP decide on what expertise they do need," State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told reporters on May 19. "We are keeping an eye on what supplies we do need. And as we see that our supplies are running low, it may be at that point in time to accept offers from particular governments."

That time has come.

In the past week, the United States submitted its second request to the European Union for any specialized equipment to contain the oil now seeping onto the Gulf of Mexico's marshes and beaches, and it accepted Canada's offer of 9,842 feet of boom. The government is soliciting additional boom and skimmers from nearly two dozen countries and international organizations.

In late May, the administration accepted Mexico's offer of two skimmers and 13,779 feet of boom; a Dutch offer of three sets of Koseq sweeping arms, which attach to the sides of ships and gather oil; and eight skimming systems offered by Norway.

The Dutch sweeping technology had been offered three days into this debacle.

COVERING FIRE FOR OBAMA:  Anne Applebaum of the WaPo provides cover for a helpless (but never hapless!) President Obama:

The oil spill isn't Obama's Katrina

...It is an ecological disaster. It is a economic nightmare. And there is absolutely nothing that the American president can do about it. Nothing at all.

Here is the hard truth: The U.S. government does not possess a secret method for capping oil leaks.

For heaven's sake - capping the leak would be great, but responding sensibly to the leak would be helpful, too.  Or was George Bush expected to stop the wind from blowing?  No, actually, he was expected to coordinate the response:

Other than proximity to the Louisiana coast, this catastrophe has nothing in common with Hurricane Katrina: That was an unstoppable natural disaster that turned into a human tragedy because of an inadequate government response. This is just an unstoppable disaster, period. It will be a human tragedy precisely because no government response is possible.

"No response is possible"?  Wow.

Not satisfied with having nailed down the gold medal for Dumb, Ms. Appelbaum bids for silver and bronze as well:

Given that he cannot stop the oil from flowing, why has President Obama decided to act as if he can? And given that he is totally reliant on BP to save the fish and the birds of the Gulf of Mexico, why has he started pretending otherwise -- why is he, in his own words, looking for someone's "ass to kick"?

Let's see - officially, BP is operating under the supervision of the Coast Guard and every major decision is approved by the Administration.  For example, it was Team Obama, not BP, that initially rejected the Dutch offer of oil sweeping equipment which could have saved some birds.

No one expects Obama to dive to 5,000 feet and personally seal the leaking well.  But it is within the President's power to rationalize the lines of command to deliver a coherent, cogent response.  My goodness, even Rachel Maddow has figured that out, almost:

Part of the problem, the paper reports, is that it's not clear whose in charge, the Coast Guard or BP.

Not quite - per Obama, the Coast Guard and the Administration are unequivocally in charge:

But make no mistake: BP is operating at our direction. Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance.

Or from another perspective, why is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wasting his time ordering the Louisiana National Guard to build sand barriers? Hasn't he been informed that "no government response is possible"?

Waiting For The Oil To Hit The Fan

Last week, following criticism from the NY Times and Rolling Stone, the official estimate of the oil leak in the Gulf was doubled.

New Estimates Double Rate of Oil Flowing Into Gulf

By JUSTIN GILLIS and HENRY FOUNTAIN

A government panel on Thursday essentially doubled its estimate of how much oil has been spewing from the out-of-control BP well, with the new calculation suggesting that an amount equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days.

The new estimate is 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day. That range, still preliminary, is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

However, we eagerly await more revisions.  The new figures apply to the rate of flow before BP implemented its plan to snip the riser pipe and try to cap the well at the wellhead on the ocean floor.  Before, oil had been flowing through a kinked riser pipe; afterwards, the consensus was that oil would flow more quickly straight the well head (that's bad) but BP would be able to put a better cap on the clean break (good!)

So how much faster is oil glowing now?  Well, that is the revised figure the world awaits.  The previous government estimate was that cutting the riser pipe would increase the flow by 20%.  However, the Times had this last Monday:

At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.

Dr. Leifer said in an interview on Monday that judging from the video, cutting the pipe might have led to a several-fold increase in the flow rate from the well.

“The well pipe clearly is fluxing way more than it did before,” said Dr. Leifer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By way more, I don’t mean 20 percent, I mean multiple factors.”

Yike!  It is possible that sometime this week we will have a press announcement the gist of which will be that the old estimate was that 12,000 to 19,000 barrels were leaking each day, which increased to 14,000 to 23,000 barrels after the riser was cut.  However, the new revised estimate will be that the flow of 25,000 to 30,000 has been increased to 75,000 to 90,000 barrels per day.  The good news is that BP is capturing  15,000 barrels per day of the new flow with their improved cap.  The bad news will be that 60,000 to 75,000 barrels per day are not being captured.

Obviously, if the well was leaking 30,000 barrels a day before it was re-capped and is now leaking a net of 60,000 barrels a day, the decision to cut the riser will be subject to some vigorous second-guessing.

Obama made clear at his May 27th press conference that he was in charge:

But make no mistake: BP is operating at our direction. Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance.

I hope we get lucky and the revised figures are not this grim.  But there may be howling this week.

Temper, Temper

A Democratic Congressman feels the heat, shows off his wrist lock and side hold.