JustOneMinute

National Treasure (Afghanistan Edition)

The NY Times breaks a story on Afghanistan that is a Great Gamechanger, but how?

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

So instead of chasing goats, growing poppies and paying bribes, the locals can sell mineral rights, mine, chase goats, grow poppies and pay bribes.  And now there is more for which to fight and bribe.

John at Powerline notes the resource curse:

What happens when you superimpose a trillion dollars worth of natural resource wealth on a primitive society? That's what happened in Saudi Arabia, and the results were not pretty. A Defense Department memo quoted in the linked New York Times article makes the parallel explicit by suggesting that Afghanistan could become "the Saudi Arabia of lithium." Let's hope that doesn't turn out to be true.

And for a certain segment of the anti-war left, any war where the US has a potential economic stake is morally suspect (Darfur = good, Kuwait =bad).  Spencer Ackerman has some fun with this in a post titled "Vast Deposits Of Fodder For Conspiracy Theorists Discovered In Afghanistan".

EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD AGAIN:  From a letter to the Times in 1983, explaining why the Soviets would never withdraw from Afghanistan:

Since the 1950's, thousands of Soviet geologists and engineers have probed and plumbed the extent and location of Afghanistan's enormous and untapped mineral wealth, which includes vast reserves of iron ore, petroleum, natural gas, precious stones, uranium, copper, bauxite and chrome. Already the Soviets are annually pumping more than four billion cubic meters of natural gas from north Afghan wells via a large pipeline directly into the Soviet Union.

Closer to home, this is from an April 2010 NY Times editorial:

Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it is not without prospects. It is believed to have huge mineral wealth, including copper, iron ore and rare earth minerals like lithium, used in making electric cars. Its agricultural areas can be more than self-sufficient if irrigation canals are rebuilt and access provided. Its carpets and textiles have a worldwide market.

With less corruption, better economic management and more focused international effort, it does not have to remain poor. It could begin financing its government and its further development from its own resources.

Traditional Sunday Morning Open Thread

The NY Times editors are looking for the man they helped elect.

If ever there was a test of President Obama’s vision of government — one that cannot solve all problems, but does what people cannot do for themselves — it is this nerve-racking early summer of 2010, with oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and far too many Americans out of work for far too long.

But he focused like a laser beam on health care!

They have some ritualistic, desultory Republican-bashing, but close with this:

But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.

It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP for its inadequate response and failure to inform the public about the size of the spill. (Each day, it seems, brings new revelations about the scope of the disaster.) It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.

He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world.

These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr. Obama to decisively show both.

Now It's Karzai That Is Looking For A Reliable Partner For Peace

Yike - Dexter Filkins of the NY Times reports that Karzai of Afghanistan doesn't trust Obama, the Americans, or NATO.  The feeling is mutual.

But underlying the tensions, according to Mr. Saleh and Afghan and Western officials, was something more profound: That Mr. Karzai had lost faith in the Americans and NATO to prevail in Afghanistan.

For that reason, Mr. Saleh and other officials said, Mr. Karzai has been pressing to strike his own deal with the Taliban and the country’s archrival, Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime supporter. According to a former senior Afghan official, Mr. Karzai’s maneuverings involve secret negotiations with the Taliban outside the purview of American and NATO officials.

...

People close to the president say he began to lose confidence in the Americans last summer, after national elections in which independent monitors determined that nearly one million ballots had been stolen on Mr. Karzai’s behalf. The rift worsened in December, when President Obama announced that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops by the summer of 2011.

“Karzai told me that he can’t trust the Americans to fix the situation here,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He believes they stole his legitimacy during the elections last year. And then they said publicly that they were going to leave.”

What A Whiner

Obama explains that his opponents would have fought him if he had pre-emptively cracked down on BP:

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”

Wow.  Of course,others would have criticized the President for taking his eye off of the vital effort to reform healthcare.  And speaking of which, if the goal of Obama's Presidency is to avoid criticism and confrontation (rather than, for example, advancing policies in which he believes), why didn't he just drop the push for healthcare reform?

The First Emoter also adopted an old Frank Rich talking point:

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

Let's see - BP is drilling on Federally leased site in a Gulf which borders five states and several other countries.  I see an Federal role there that is a bit different from the Feds bailing out the guy down the street who over-extended himself when he bought a house, or taking over health care, but maybe that is just me. 

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Away we go.

Back In Afghanistan

The invaluable C.J. Chivers tells us what the continuing fighting around Marja means:

A few months ago, Marja was the focus of a highly publicized assault to push the Taliban from a stronghold and bring Afghanistan’s densest area of opium production under government control. The fighting remains raw.

What does it mean?

Is the violence a predictable summer fight for an area the Taliban and those who profit from the drug economy do not want to lose; in other words, an unsurprising flare-up that can be turned around? Or will Marja remain bloody for a long time, allowing insurgents to inflict sustained losses on American units and win merely by keeping the fight alive?

As NATO and Afghan forces flow into neighboring Kandahar Province, where for the next many months the latest high-profile effort to undo the Taliban’s hold will unroll, the continuing fighting in Marja can be read as a sign of problems in the American-led surge. It can also be read as something less worrisome: a difficult period in a campaign always expected to be hard.

A prevailing assessment among officers on the ground is this: The outcome is too soon to call.

Too soon to tell?  That is a bit awkward, since Obama announced both the surge and the modified de-surge in Afghanistan:

Those directly involved caution that a few months of fighting is not necessarily a basis for grim forecasts, especially during the first summer in a former Taliban enclave. American commanders have been voicing frustration nonetheless, as was evident last month in Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s description of Marja as “a bleeding ulcer.”

The remark underscores perhaps the clearest conclusion that can be drawn thus far. Even before the last troops of the Obama administration’s surge arrive in Afghanistan, high-level American commanders appear pressed for time, no matter the complexities faced by troops on the ground.

That Was Easy!

The NY Times gets results!  On Monday the Times headlined doubts about the official government estimates of the flow rate in the leaking Gulf oil well.  By Thursday, the government had revised its estimate upward:

A government panel on Thursday doubled its estimate of the amount of oil that had gushed for weeks from the out-of-control BP well even before the latest attempt to cap it.

...

This assessment, based on measurements taken before BP cut the riser pipe of the leaking well on June 3 to cap some of the flow, showed that approximately 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil could have been gushing into the Gulf each day. That is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

Scientists say the flow rate could actually be greater now because they believe that cutting the riser to position the cap pipe may have only increased the flow of the oil and gas mixture.

As of Monday, the official estimate was that cutting the riser had only increased the flow by 20%; look for that number to rise, since on Monday the Times quoted a scientist involved with the effort as saying that the flow may have increased by "multiple factors".

And Matt Lauer gets results!  Obama had no sensible explanation for not having spoken with BP CEO Tony Hayward, so now the BP top execs are on his calendar.

Now if the people who demanded that Obama get angry would declare themselves satisfied, we could get rid of this First Emoter imposter and bring Mr. Cool back.

PHONY AND ANNOYING: An otherwise dumb and unamusing column from Nick Kristof ends with this false choice:

Well, rage isn’t President Obama either. It’s not who he is any more than a monarchy is America.

So maybe we should just accept that we’re stuck with a presidential system — and with a ruminative and slightly boring president who tries to solve problems rather than fulminate about them.

I don't think people have a problem with Obama trying to solve problems; I think they have real doubts about his priorities, and real concerns that the problems out here in America are not registering on his radar.

Do remember, his approval rating was swooning before the Gulf debacle, mainly because we had spent a year worrying about jobs, jobs, jobs and he had spent a year focusing on health care, health care, health care.

The Gulf problem drifted for a week before Obama finally sprung into action.  Scientists have been critical of the government response, and some of the early decisions (such as declining Dutch oil-sweepers) look absurd in retrospect.

So let's not pretend that Obama was calmly doing a great job on this, and that an ungrateful nation was unreasonable in looking for a little more Presidential effort.

Let's Stay Together - Green(e) Candidate Wins In South Carolina

A "Random Unemployed Dude Wins South Carolina Democratic Primary", prompting James Taranto to snark that Mickey Kaus ran in the wrong state.

So who is Alvin Greene and how did he win? Who knows!  He filed no Federal forms, had no website, and apparently raised no money.  The South Carolina party chair blames that pesky alphabet:

State Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated to AP that Greene won because his name came before Rawl's on the ballot. Wexler says Greene is a "big name in South Carolina."

A Gawker reader blames that pesky Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I'll blame environmentalists.  Environmentalists who can't spell. [Late backpedaling from Ms. Fowler:

When Greene began to take a narrow lead over Rawl as returns began coming in, Fowler had first thought that it was Greene’s name appearing first on the ballot that could have been drawing votes. But with unofficial returns showing him winning by double digits, Fowler admitted that couldn’t be the main reason for his win.

“I think that ballot position might make a little difference in an election, but I don’t think it can make [a nearly] 20 percent difference,” she said.]

As to the felony charge against him, well, that is troubling.

AND SPEAKING OF STEALTH CANDIDATES:  Anything goes in South Carolina - a Dem activist and former precinct president who backed Obama two years ago ran against Republican Jim DeMint in the Republican primary.  Obviously, she didn't win:

By all accounts, DeMint should breeze through the June 8 Republican primary. His lone party opponent is Charleston lawyer Susan Gaddy, a former Democrat who doesn't seem to be gaining much traction. Even the state GOP headquarters is dismissing her candidacy.

"We can't really speak to her motivations, but we are very aware of her history as a Democratic activist," said state party Executive Director Joel Sawyer. "As far as we're concerned, Sen. DeMint is our nominee and we'll be operating accordingly."

Gaddy insists she is no stealth candidate but acknowledges her campaign is financially strapped. DeMint, meanwhile, has more than $3.2 million in the bank and a national conservative following. She has no plans for a campaign website and is running a low-key effort, calling herself "an evangelical Christian lawyer who takes my inspiration from Sarah Palin."

A glance at the FEC database tells me that no individuals or committees contributed to Ms. Gaddy, who also trails in the alphabet race.

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMEN?  Mr. Greene is described as an Army veteran.  Was he an officer?  I suppose the felony charge for lewdness answers the "Gentlemen" question.

I thought I saw that Greene was 32 years old and a 13 year vet, which means he entered at 19.  Maybe he went to OCS later, or never.

Who Is In Charge Here (My Coast Guard, They Sent Me A Letter)?

Here is a baffler from the Times on the Gulf Oil Spill:

Coast Guard Toughens Oversight of BP’s Effort
By HENRY FOUNTAIN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

With oil continuing to leak Wednesday from a runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico despite BP’s success in capturing some of the flow, a top Coast Guard official ordered the company to come up with a plan “to ensure that the remaining oil and gas flowing can be recovered.”

In a letter to Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, Rear Adm. James A. Watson, the on-scene coordinator of the unified command that is overseeing the response effort, gave the company three days to provide plans for “parallel, continuous and contingency collection processes.”

Among the requirements, Admiral Watson wrote, are that any new method to contain the leak be devised to reduce disruptions from hurricanes, when the full flow of oil would once again spew into the gulf.

What - the Coast Guard thinks BP ought to have a plan?  This is Day 52 of this debacle - a plan seems like a terrific idea, but what have we been doing so far?

I presume that this request is really intended to document the BP approach and lay the foundation for future litigation but still, why publicize the lack of oversight up to now?  And is this litigious approach really the best way to find a solution to a complicated engineering problem?  Will it really be helpful to read their Miranda rights to the BP engineers and then ask for their best ideas?

The Times returns to the possible scandal I noted a few days back - we don't know how much oil was flowing from the leak before the riser pipe was cut as part of the latest capping attempt and we don't know how much oil is flowing now, but we have a suspicion that the flow rate has increased dramatically and we wonder who approved all of this:

The letter came amid continuing questions about how much of the leaking oil was being captured by BP’s latest containment effort, a cap that was lowered over the top of the well last week, and whether the company could be collecting more but had failed to provide enough surface equipment to handle it.

BP said it captured about 15,000 barrels of oil on Tuesday, which it has said is about the daily limit that its collection ship, the Discoverer Enterprise, can process. But video feeds from the seabed continued to show oil billowing out from under the cap, and company officials reiterated that there was no way of knowing how much was coming from that source or from several vents atop the cap that remain open. Some experts have said the amount could be very high and that the leak could have been made far worse by the containment effort.

At his May 27 press conference Obama assured us 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.

And now the Coast Guard is sending BP letters.  Gosh, I hope they at least used the Post Office Express mail service for overnight delivery.

CAN'T WAIT TO READ THE PLAN:  Tim Dickinson wrote a devastating account of Team Obama's effort in the Gulf, which included this detail on a past BP plan (p. 2):

Nowhere was the absurdity of the policy more evident than in the application that BP submitted for its Deepwater Horizon well only two months after Obama took office. BP claims that a spill is "unlikely" and states that it anticipates "no adverse impacts" to endangered wildlife or fisheries. Should a spill occur, it says, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" for the region's beaches, wetlands and coastal nesting birds. The company, noting that such elements are "not required" as part of the application, contains no scenario for a potential blowout, and no site-specific plan to respond to a spill. Instead, it cites an Oil Spill Response Plan that it had prepared for the entire Gulf region. Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semitropical Gulf? "Walruses" and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions. The mistake appears to be the result of a sloppy cut-and-paste job from BP's drilling plans for the Arctic. Even worse: Among the "primary equipment providers" for "rapid deployment of spill response resources," BP inexplicably provides the Web address of a Japanese home-shopping network. Such glaring errors expose the 582-page response "plan" as nothing more than a paperwork exercise. "It was clear that nobody read it," says Ruch, who represents government scientists.

I bet they read this new plan.  Assuming the BP lawyers are crazy enough to release a document, that is.

The Cover-up Is Worse Than The Slick

The Times tells us that British Petroleum and the Obama Administration are limiting media access to the Gulf oil spill.  Hard to believe Team Obama is that dumb - do they really want the media to segue from "Obama Inept" to "Obama Dishonest"?

Here is an example of the Feds in action:

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

...

Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson’s office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security’s legislative affairs office called the senator’s office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.

“They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration” was given, Mr. Gulley added.

Mr. Nelson has asked the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, for an official explanation, the senator’s office said.

And some BP-bashing:

A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.

“We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ”

The Times also mentions a cover-up on the scientific side; Tim Dickinson in the Rolling Stone had more on that, including this:

From the start, the administration has seemed intent on allowing BP to operate in near-total secrecy. Much of what the public knows about the crisis it owes to Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Under pressure from Markey, BP was forced to release footage of the gusher, admit that its early estimates put the leak as high as 14,000 barrels a day and post a live feed of its undersea operations on the Internet – video that administration officials had possessed from the earliest days of the disaster. "We cannot trust BP," Markey said. "It's clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill."

But rather than applying such skepticism to BP's math, the Obama administration has instead attacked scientists who released independent estimates of the spill. When one scientist funded by NOAA released a figure much higher than the government's estimate, he found himself being pressured to retract it by officials at the agency. "Are you sure you want to keep saying this?" they badgered him. Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, even denounced as "misleading" and "premature" reports that scientists aboard the research vessel Pelican had discovered a massive subsea oil plume. Speaking to PBS, she offered a bizarre denial of the obvious. "It's clear that there is something at depth," she said, "but we don't even know that it's oil yet."

Scientists were stunned that NOAA, an agency widely respected for its scientific integrity, appeared to have been co-opted by the White House spin machine. "NOAA has actively pushed back on every fact that has ever come out," says one ocean scientist who works with the agency. "They're denying until the facts are so overwhelming, they finally come out and issue an admittance." Others are furious at the agency for criticizing the work of scientists studying the oil plumes rather than leading them. "Why they didn't have vessels there right then and start to gather the scientific data on oil and what the impacts are to different organisms is inexcusable," says a former government marine biologist. "They should have been right on top of that." Only six weeks into the disaster did the agency finally deploy its own research vessel to investigate the plumes.

They told me if I voted for McCain that the scientific process would be politicized...

If You've Lost The Rolling Stone...

Writing in the Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson pummels Obama's handling of the Gulf oil spill; the Captain provides the Cliff notes.

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. 

As a second stray thought, if Obama had any jobs, jobs, jobs strategy at all it was to hope that Stimulus One and the passage of time would be enough to get the economy back on track.  Now it is June, the election is a mere five month away, and nothing Congress does will have a notable economic impact before 2011.  Obama focused like a laser beam on passing his historic health care bill, and we await the consequences.

That Took Longer Than I Expected

CNN finally gets around to blaming Obama's cool response to the Gulf oil spill on latent white racism:

Why Obama doesn't dare become the 'angry black man'

But scholars say Obama's critics ignore a lesson from American history: Many white Americans don't like angry black men.

It's the lesson Obama absorbed from his upbringing, and from an impromptu remark he delivered last summer. Yet it's a lesson he may now have to jettison, they say, as public outrage spreads.

...

Some of the same people crying for Obama to show more emotion would have voted against him if he had displayed anger during his presidential run, says William Jelani Cobb, author of "The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress."

"It would have fed deeply into a pre-existing set of narratives about the angry black man," Cobb says. "The anger would have gotten in the way. He would have frightened off white voters who were interested in him because he seemed to be like the black guy they worked with or went to graduate school with -- not a black guy who is threatening."

Back in late May Times columnist Charles Blow was exhorting Obama to Angry Up, yours truly had wondered when the Angry Black Man topic would be raised:

Blow, who is the Times other race-grievance columnist, exhorts Obama to be more visibly angry.  But I bet if I reprised the campaign coverage I could find many articles noting that Obama had a special burden to stay cool and avoid the unfortunate Angry Black Man stereotype that lurks in our collective conscious. 

So which is it - should Obama be cool, or angry?  Beats me (although I Boldly Bet that "calm and effective" would trump "angry and impotent").  But I am disappointed that Blow missed this obvious opportunity to blame Obama's seeming detachment on the prejudices of white America.  What kind of race grievance columnists is the Times running out there these days, anyway?  Oh, well - Frank Rich can pick up this slack tomorrow.

Tomorrow?  It took nearly two weeks!

FINGERS CROSSED!  Obama really responded to the calls from the commentariat for visible anger, or at least a facsimile thereof.  What might happen if a surge of pundits suggested that henceforth Team Obama should arrive at their Gulf photo ops in clown cars, with ten or fifteen members of the Administration earnestly piling out of an environmentally sensitive Prius?

A man can dream...

If You've Lost The NY Times (China Division)

The NY Times has a puzzling "news analysis" story about the US-China relationship.  Is the relationship cooling?  They aren't sure. But some experts think that Team Obama needs to rethink their approach, so the Times dwells on that.  Other experts may think that the Obama Administration is doing a great job, but we don't hear from them.

The main takeaway is that the Times really does seem to have found a new comfort zone in gratuitous Obama-bashing. 

Some highlights:

BEIJING — If anyone ever doubted it, a testy exchange at a Singapore conference last weekend made it clear: Relations between the American and Chinese militaries are in a very deep freeze.

What is genuinely in doubt is whether that is but a burr in the two nations’ broader relationship, or a portent.

So the military leaders are at odds bit the larger relationship may or may not be OK.  On that sand, they build:

But there is a context: an increasing assertiveness in global economic and diplomatic affairs by Chinese leaders. Advocates of a tougher and more nationalistic China have gained influence in the past 6 to 12 months, and their impact is being felt more in both foreign and domestic policies.

To some Western analysts, that suggests that the Obama administration’s fundamental approach toward China — to make China a responsible partner in global affairs by giving Beijing a larger stake in solving international problems — needs retooling.

"Some" analysts?  Has this become a mainstream view, or are we hearing from a few right-wing cranks?

“There has been a real sea change and hardening of attitude in Chinese government thinking about relations with the United States over the past six or eight months,” said David Shambaugh, a leading expert on the Chinese military and the Communist Party at George Washington University. “Under these circumstances, Washington needs to undertake a comprehensive review of its China strategy and policy from top to bottom.”

Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, a Beijing analyst with the International Crisis Group, said the Obama administration’s hopes for cooperation with Beijing “have been more optimistic than current scenarios warrant.”

“China and the U.S. continue to have fundamentally different values, goals and capabilities,” she said, citing China’s reluctance to press for the truth in the sinking of a South Korean ship, an attack that an international investigation determined was the work of North Korea. 

David Shambaugh doesn't seem like a nut in this article from a year ago.  Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt was skeptical of Obama's ambitions with China last November (she thinks they would prefer to free-ride on the North Korean and Iranian nuclear problems), but that is hardly nutty. 

Let's get a big "Who Knows?" from one more expert:

“Many, if not all, officials of the U.S. government believe the current situation is one in which the military has the bit in its mouth and is taking the lead on this issue,” said Michael Swaine, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In their assessment, Mr. Swaine said, “the Communist Party and the foreign affairs apparatus is not terribly happy about it, but is going along with it.”

The truth is that nobody knows. Policy toward the United States — especially military policy — is concocted in a black box at the government’s highest levels, Mr. Swaine and others said.

Glad we cleared this up.  This article showed me more about the Times-Obama relationship than the US-China one.

Afghanistan - The Plan Was Never The Plan

Back in Afghanistan, the Times reports that the planned Kandahar offensive was never planned, yet has now been revised.

I get that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.  I get that we want to adjust our tactics to reality as it unfolds.  I am just a bit worried that despite our having fought there for over eight years, the perception officials had in February seems to have changed by June.

Afghanistan Strategy Shifts to Focus on Civilian Effort
By ROD NORDLAND

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The prospect of a robust military push in Kandahar Province, which had been widely expected to begin this month, has evolved into a strategy that puts civilian reconstruction efforts first and relegates military action to a supportive role.

The strategy, Afghan, American and NATO civilian and military officials said in interviews, was adopted because of opposition to military action from an unsympathetic local population and Afghan officials here and in Kabul.

There are also concerns that a frontal military approach has not worked as well as hoped in a much smaller area in Marja, in neighboring Helmand Province.

The goal that American planners originally outlined — often in briefings in which reporters agreed not to quote officials by name — emphasized the importance of a military offensive devised to bring all of the populous and Taliban-dominated south under effective control by the end of this summer. That would leave another year to consolidate gains before President Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing combat troops.

In fact, there has been little new fighting in Kandahar so far, and the very word “offensive” has been banished.

“We cannot say the term offensive for Kandahar,” said the Afghan National Army officer in charge here, Gen. Sher Mohammad Zazai. “It is actually a partnership operation.”

The commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, insisted that there never was a planned offensive. “The media have chosen to use the term offensive,” he said. Instead, he said, “we have certainly talked about a military uplift, but there has been no military use of the term offensive.”

Whatever it is called, it is not happening this month.

Was It Over When The Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor?

It's never over.  Mickey Kaus's concession reorientation statement.

Who's In Charge Here?

Is this tomorrow's scandal today?  The Times front-pages the mystery of just how much oil is leaking from the Gulf well, but includes this:

The immense undersea gusher of oil and gas, seen on live video feed, looks as big as it did last week, or bigger, before the company sliced through the pipe known as a riser to install its new collection device.

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.”

Since the flow rate is not known, "Before" and "After" comparisons are speculative.  So let's speculate!  Is Dr. Leifer delivering the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, or were there government scientists predicting a "way more" increase in the flow even before the pipe was cut?  Were these pessimists over-ruled by a larger, more vocal, or better connected group of scientists arguing the "No worries" viewpoint?  Were they over-ruled by politicos who needed to say they were Doing Something?  Was the decision to cut the riser made by BP, the Coast Guard, the White House, or by whom?  This BP press release says the plan was reviewed by the Coast Guard and the DOE experts, but where did the buck stop? 

At his May 27 press conference, Obama claimed that every major BP step was US Government approved:

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

Then make no mistake - the President had pessimistic scientists on his team who thought snipping the riser might dramatically increase the flow rate of the leaking well, or else he got advice from a group of erring optimists (or Dr. Leifer is an Erring and Lonely Pessimist).  If the pessimists were outspoken, presumably they were overruled by other Administration officials or scientists, not BP.

To take a step back, since we don't know the previous flow rate there won't be any real way to know whether or how much it increased.  But I have a strange feeling that neither BP nor the White House really want to know the new, true numbers.  Which would explain Obama's inability to target BP's derriere and get the numbers and equipment needed to find an answer.

BETTING SOMEONE ELSE'S RANCH:  The NY Times Deal Book thinks the unthinkable - a BP bankruptcy.  At current share prices BP has a market cap of roughly $100 billion, so it would take a monumental disaster and judgment to wipe them out (Deal Book throws out $40 billion as the current worst case).  However, the assumption that BP has the same incentives as the US government and the rest of us relies on the possibly flawed assumption that the cost of the disaster will not wipe them out.

For example - suppose (SUPPOSE!) that before snipping the riser and implementing the current capping plan BP did a bit of a study of their alternatives, with these results:

Plan A: Do nothing, wait until the relief wells are finished in August: At the pre-snip leak rate, the resulting damage will exhaust the company's equity, i.e., bankrupt it.

Plan B: Snip the riser, try to cap the well.  If successful, the reduced damage will allow the company to survive and the executive stock options to endure.  If unsuccessful, the flow rate will increase, thereby... what, driving the company into double-bankruptcy?  If they don't have nothing, they have nothing to lose.

It is remotely possible that an increased flow rate didn't worry BP since they may have calculated that they are financially doomed anyway unless they cap the well.  A group with essentially unlimited resources would weigh the expected net cost of successfully capping the well against the expected costs both of failure and of doing nothing before proceeding with a plan to snip the riser.  And BP may have done just that.  But in sufficiently dire circumstances, BP may have very rationally opted for the deep water equivalent of a Hail Mary pass.

I certainly don't know enough to say that is the case (and I would be surprised if it was), but if I were with Team Obama I would want to be very sure that it was not the case.

They Want To Believe (He Dazzled Them With Science!)

Morale continues to sag on the left as the Best and Brightest, led by the Bestest and Brightestest of all, continue to be stumped by a leaking oil well and the First Emoter continues his descent into parody.

Yesterday Ezra Klein led a brief rally around Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu (the other Nobel Laureate on Team Obama!  I mean, how great are these guys?!?) as the man who would lead us home.  His post, titled "It's Useful To have Geniuses Around" gushed over this bit from a WaPo story on the oil debacle:

Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Chu at one point pushed the unusual idea of using gamma rays to peer into the blowout preventer to determine if its valves were closed, a technique he experimented with in graduate school while studying radioactive decay.

The suggestion at first elicited snickering and "Incredible Hulk" jokes. Then they tried it, and it worked. "They weren't hot on his ideas," a senior White House official said of BP's initial reaction to Chu's suggestions. "Now they are."

The Hulk!  Gamma rays!  Oh, whoa, dude - there hasn't been this much screaming and swooning since The Beatles hit the Ed Sullivan show.

So, why all this excitement based on a self-serving leak from a White House spinner?  Well, they want to believe.  Josh Green of The Atlantic interviewed Dr. Chu about this on May 13; to his credit, Andrew Leonard at Salon was able to keep his blood pressure under control:

Sure, I agree with Green, it's great that Chu assembled a team of top scientists to brainstorm with BP, and it is super-cool to hear him discuss the process...

However, Green and Chu are awfully short on details as to exactly what BP accomplished with the gamma ray tech they borrowed from Sandia National Labs. The planet has not been saved, yet.

Planet not saved?  Any day now!  Since we are fortunate to have a genius amongst us, let's see what Dr. Chu had to say to the Times back on May 12:

“Things are looking up,” Dr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, told reporters after the meeting. “Progress is being made.” He cautioned that the situation was still not under control and declined to detail the reasons for his optimism. But when pressed, he said, “I’m feeling more comfortable than I was a week ago.”

Yup, we are moving from triumph to triumph.

And let's come back to the self-serving White House story that the BP people scoffed at Dr. Chu's gamma rays, but are not scoffing now.  Per the Green interview, Dr. Chu got involved on the first Sunday in May, when Obama scrambled down to Louisiana to show his commitment and escape the shadow of Katrina.

Yet this is from the Times on April 29, Day One of Obama's enhanced involvement and before the Chu flash of brilliance:

Doug Suttles, the chief operating officer for exploration and production for BP, said the company had asked the military for better imaging technology...

Better imaging technology?  What does the military do with imaging technology?  Well, the Department of Homeland Security has been working on containerized cargo scanning since 2002; the Defense Department also has an interest, and has contracted for a militarized version of the scanners made by Science Applications International Corporation.  And did I mention that since the containers and trucks being scanned often include thick steel, these are gamma ray scanners?

From which I infer that the idea of using gamma ray imaging to peer through thick steel is not exactly a cutting edge contribution.

Now, maybe BP hoped the Navy had some gamma-ray scanners rigged for deep-water work (and maybe they do!).  Or maybe BP scoffed at the idea that a gamma-ray scanner developed for dry land use could be dropped into 5,000 feet of water after a bit of tinkering with baling wire and chewing gum.  (I can hear myself in that meeting - 'Geez, if we drop some radioactive Cobalt 60 to 5,000 feet and the pressure cracks the unit open, the good news is that people will forget all about the oil leak...').

Well.  Since BP was already looking for imaging ideas and equipment, I wonder whether they scoffed at all.  And nearly a month later I would say that Ezra Klein and White House spin notwithstanding, Dr. Chu's genius has not revealed itself to be useful.

On the other hand, the NY Times reported today that the government brain trust charged with figuring out how much oil is leaking from the will has not been able to do so.  The Best and Brightest do not lack for chores.

We Help Obama With His Ass-Targeting

President Obama is having daily meetings on the gulf oil spill "so I know whose ass to kick".

The NY Times provides a clue - maybe the First Emoter should start with British Petroleum, which seems to have lawyered up and may be sitting on the data which might reveal the actual rate at which oil is leaking:

The success of the containment device has cast new doubts on the official estimates of the flow rate, developed by a government-appointed team called the Flow Rate Technical Group. Before the riser pipe was cut, the group made estimates by several methods, including an analysis of video footage, and the overlap of those estimates produced the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day that the team reported on May 27. That was two to four times as high as the government’s previous estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, a number that had been widely ridiculed by scientists and advocacy groups.

Yet the scientists who produced that new range emphasized its uncertainty when they presented it. In fact, a subgroup that analyzed the plume emerging at the wellhead could offer no upper bound for its flow estimate, and could come up with only a rough idea of the lower bound, which it pegged at 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day.

The Flow Rate Technical Group is scheduled to release a new estimate this week or early next, though it is not clear whether that report will take into account the changed circumstances of recent days.

Some scientists involved in the Flow Rate Technical Group say that they would like to produce a better estimate, but that they are frustrated by what they view as stonewalling on BP’s part, including tardiness in producing high-resolution video that could be subjected to computer analysis, as well as the company’s reluctance to permit a direct measurement of the flow rate. They said the installation of the new device and the rising flow of oil to the surface had only reinforced their conviction that they did not have enough information.

“It’s apparent that BP is playing games with us, presumably under the advice of their legal team,” Dr. Leifer said. “It’s six weeks that it’s been dumping into the gulf, and still no measurements.”

Maybe at one of the daily emergency meetings Obama could go all Chuck Norris on this.  Of course, the Goldman execs seem to be able to sit down just fine after their ass-kickings.

Obama To Leaking Well - Bring It On

The First Emoter finds his inner George Bush and tells us he is out looking for "ass to kick" on the BP Gulf oil spill.  Gosh, its reassuring to see our President enraged and engaged.

Thanks to Ann in the comments we have a photo of Obama taking in a few ass-kicking martial arts pointers:

I am really hoping that the conventional wisdom shifts soon to "Obambi needs to be more Presidential"; I can't take much more of the faux outrage.

Those Who Do Not Understand National Income Accounting...

Those who do not understand national income accounting our condemned to be heckled by those who would rather be doing anything else.  By way of Memeorandum we encounter Matt Yglesias writing on the "No stimulus" economy.  Matt draws inspiration from the "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative", which has this to say about the current US fiscal position:

There has been much talk of the size of the US federal stimulus, and much debate about whether or not it has been an effective counter-cyclical policy instrument.

But it's important to remember that the proper measure for fiscal stimulus is not spending by the federal government; it is spending by all levels of government. And when you look at the contributions to US GDP growth (Table 1.1.2 at the BEA site), total government spending has been a drag on growth over the past two quarters. The increases at the federal level have not been enough to compensate for the spending cuts at the local and state levels.

Well, well.  I will accept that total, rather than Federal government spending is the relevant measure.  However, the BEA has a specific concept of government spending in mind in performing their GDP calculations (see below, or here, p. 10), and it does not include transfer payments or tax reductions. 

Consequently, one wonders about the statement that "it's important to remember that the proper measure for fiscal stimulus is... spending by all levels of government".  Since a lot of the government stimulus (such as unemployment payments, income tax cuts, cash for clunkers, and the housing tax credit) won't appear in the "Government expenditures" line, one might infer that this BEA measure of government spending is not the be-all and end-all measure of government-inspired fiscal stimulus.

And one might wonder whether Matt is fully reality-based with comments like this:

...all the Obama administration’s efforts plus the automatic stabilizers have done is mitigate the contractionary impact of state and local policy:

or this:

Looked at comprehensively, what the country has been implementing is a mild version of the conservative policy prescription for boosting growth—fire bureaucrats and trim spending. And it’s not working very well.

Conservatives would have welcomed more tax cuts; that said, a lot of the transfer payments favored by libs and adopted by Obama didn't show up in the government expenditures line on which Matt is focusing.  These BEA numbers just don't provide a basis for sweeping statements about whether the net government fiscal impact has been stimulative or not, since they do not include the automatic stabilizers or the tax stimuli.

A parting thought - if the Democrats had cut income and payroll taxes in half but held government spending (as characterized by the BEA) constant, would that have been widely considered to be fiscally expansionary?  If so, how would that be squared with the assertion that "the proper measure for fiscal stimulus is... spending by all levels of government"? 

THE BEA AND GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES:  From their guide on national income accounting:

The value of government production, that is, government’s gross output, is measured by the cost of inputs: Compensation of employees, CFC (a partial measure of the services of government capital), and intermediate goods and services purchased.20 Therefore, government consumption expenditures is measured as the sum of these costs of production less sales by government of goods and services to other sectors (which are classified as PCE, if purchased by individuals, or as intermediate inputs, if purchased by businesses) and the value of software and construction that are produced by government for its own use (that is, own-account investment, which is classified as part of gross government investment).

Gross investment consists of purchases of new structures and of equipment and software by both general government and government enterprises, net purchases of used structures and equipment, and own-account production of structures and of software. Government consumption expenditures and gross investment does not include current transactions of government enterprises, current transfer payments, interest payments, subsidies, or transactions in financial assets and in nonproduced assets such as land.

AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM:  Ezra Klein joins in with the same uncritical spin [and adds an unlinked correction].  From Ezra:

As everyone knows, the federal government is still spending a $700 billion stimulus package passed at the beginning of 2009. As most people know, state and local governments have had to sharply cut spending because the recession has decimated their tax revenues. But as fairly few people know, these two forces are canceling each other out.

Hmmph.  From Obama's Recovery.gov, we see this summary of the stimulus bill:

The Recovery Act intends to achieve those goals by:

Providing $288 billion in tax cuts and benefits for millions of working families and businesses

Increasing federal funds for education and health care as well as entitlement programs (such as extending unemployment benefits) by $224 billion

Making $275 billion available for federal contracts, grants and loans

The $288 billion of tax cuts won't be in the BEA figures as presented above.  Increased funding for education would be if it represents teacher's salaries, but not if it is taken up by student scholarships and grants; unemployment benefits won't be in the BEA figures, since they are a transfer payment.

I would guess that the $275 billion for " federal contracts, grants and loans" would mostly be included in the BEA analysis as a government expenditure, but I won't make any promises.

So unless Ezra has some other $700 billion of Federal stimulus in mind, his comment about federal expansion being offset by state and local contraction is not supported by the evidence on offer.

EZRA'S UNLINKED CONNECTION:  Ezra does not update his original post but seekers will find this new one:

A friend writes in to complicate my post yesterday that used data from the national income and product account data to look at total governmental spending, and thus total governmental stimulus:

As per your post yesterday on how state/local policies are cancelling out federal policies, beware that the BEA's National Income and Product Account tables (the source for the graph) doesn't take into account transfer payments, such as UI or TANF. Those instead show up as boosting spending in the consumer expenditure category. Also, NIPA tables don't measure the extent that federal tax cuts have expanded fiscal policy or tax and fee increases from state and local governments have cancelled out federal expansionary policy because it's just looking at the spending side.

Uhh, does that "complicate" Ezra's post,or obliterate it? 

The BP Oil Cap Is Actually Working - Imagine Their Surprise!

Here's one for the "Are you kidding me" file - the new cap on the leaky Gulf oil well is actually working, but now British Petroleum is collecting so much oil they cannot process it.  From the NY Times:

After two days of trying to gradually close the four vents on the capping device, engineers on Sunday decided to keep some open when they realized that more oil was being captured than could be processed on a drill ship floating in the gulf above. In a statement late Sunday, the company said it “may leave some” of the valves open “to ensure system stability.”

Engineers had feared that the volume and velocity of oil escaping might create so much friction on the new pipe that it might force it entirely off the cap. All day Saturday they worked to shut two of the vents, and they spent the afternoon measuring the results, mindful that if they closed the vents too quickly, water could rush in and form the kind of icy hydrates that doomed a previous containment effort.

But while the cap remained snugly in place and there were no signs of significant hydrate formation, by nightfall Saturday the engineers suddenly were forced to deal with another problem: the Discoverer Enterprise drill ship can only handle 15,000 barrels a day, and the capping device was trapping almost that amount without the vents shut.

“We’re maxed out,” said the technician, who is working on the operation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. He said the capping device was capturing 10,000 to 15,000 barrels a day.

“There is no chance to close the vents when you are at maximum production,” he said. “You wish desperately you could capture it all, but it depends on the volume coming out of well. And you know how people are arguing about that.”

The problem may be only a temporary one. The limitations of the Discoverer Enterprise to handle oil are mainly due to the size and capacity of the machines it has on board to separate the oil, gas and water for storage. The ship has the capacity to store 139,000 barrels of oil, a quantity that may be reached in a matter of days. Shuttle barges carry oil from the ship to storage tanks on shore.

Not to sit here and take cheap shots from thousands of miles away, but surely it dawned on the BP executives and the bright lights in the Administration that (a) this new cap might actually work and (b) there was tremendous uncertainty about the volume of oil being leaked.  One wonders whether this additional processing and storage capacity could have been put into place during the period when the riser pipe was being cut, the diamond saw was jamming, and so on.

Oh, well - I will leave the head-banging and forehead-slapping to our First Emoter.  The live feed of the BP Spill Cam is pretty cool.  To my untrained eye there seems to be less leaking than a few days ago but what do I know?

Obama Set To Nuke The Whales

The politics would shift instantly if a whale or two would swoop into the Gulf and cap the leaky BP well, but right now Obama is backing a plan to end the 24 year old moratorium on killing whales.

Enviros are enraged, and rightly so - Rich Lowry explains that Japan has been a rogue state for decades on this topic.

But can we blame Bush?  Yes we can!  Or at least, the Brit Independent can:

The deal which may do away with [the ban], which has been on the table for three years, was first thought to be merely a diplomatic compromise to end the perpetual confrontation at IWC meetings between the whaling nations and the anti-whaling countries. But recently it has become clear that it had a different purpose, and was cooked up in the US – by leading figures in the Bush administration, among them being Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, until his conviction for taking unreported gifts in 2008, was the longest-serving Republican senator in American history.

One of the most powerful figures in US politics, Senator Stevens sought a deal with Japan after the Japanese caused problems for the US by objecting (as a bargaining counter in IWC negotiations) to the whale-hunting quota for Alaskan Inuit peoples, who have a traditional hunt for about 50 bowhead whales.

Senator Stevens is believed to have put pressure on the then-US Whaling Commissioner and IWC chairman, William Hogarth – whose budget, in the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr Stevens controlled as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee – to open talks with Japan, which Mr Hogarth duly did at the 2007 IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

Mr Hogarth's proposals, which would have allowed the Japanese and others to restart whaling commercially, were eventually thrown out by the IWC. Yet the deal now back on the table is essentially a modified version of his original plan, which is even more favourable to the whaling states. 

It is notable that the US, which used to have to negotiate its Inuit bowhead quota every five years, will get a 10-year quota if the new deal goes ahead.

Blaming Bush and the Eskimos - I knew it.  But if a ten year respite is all the payback we get, I am surprised. 

And can we find a flip-flip quote from Obama?  Yes we can! 

As a candidate, President Obama said, “As president, I will ensure that the U.S. provides leadership in enforcing international wildlife protection agreements, including strengthening the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Allowing Japan to continue commercial whaling is unacceptable.” (March 16, 2008 - Greenpeace candidate questionnaire)

Yeah, well, that was more than two years ago, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and no one thinks Obama has a little mind.

MORE:  Even more background at The Economist, which blames General MacArthur:

Japan’s critics say that by using a loophole in the IWC charter to practise “scientific” whaling, the country is violating the spirit of the document. Japanese officials counter that the 1946 convention never anticipated a moratorium on all commercial whaling. Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Japan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw America’s occupation. The aim was to provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation.

Hmm - this history has it somewhat differently, although post-war scarcity is mentioned.

If You're Losing Frank Rich...

A second consecutive Obama-basher from Frank Rich.  And unlike last week, this one does not even pivot to Palin-bashing in order to reassure Times readers about the real evils in the world.

IT turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point.

The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf.

Rich then explains that our professorial Prez has too much faith in experts and meetings.  Who could have guessed?

We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills. But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado.

One of Obama's few job-related skills is his ability to run a meeting in which a wide variety of viewpoints are aired and a consensus is forged.  Unfortunately, one might worry that his typical experience is in forging a consensus related to relatively abstract ideas.  Bringing a Harvard Law Review meeting together on some legal question (e.g., capital punishment) is ultimately a matter of exposing the participants to a range of facts and opinions in order to change minds.  If views are fairly aired, people's minds are changed, and people who once disagreed leave in agreement then the meeting is a success. 

However, problems like the Gulf oil well are impervious to Obama's well-formed opinions and judgments, and physical reality takes over.  The consensus answer to capping a leaking well is irrelevant - what counts is the right answer.  Good meeting management skills will still be helpful, but there are important differences. 

Back to Rich:

By now, he also should have learned that the best and the brightest can get it wrong — and do. His economic advisers predicted that without the stimulus the unemployment rate might reach 9 percent — a projection that was quickly exceeded even with the stimulus and that has haunted the administration ever since. Other White House geniuses persuaded the president to make his fateful claim in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a particularly specious (indeed false) plank in the argument for his spectacularly ill-timed expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

Ouch.  Where were the meeting management skills then?  And a bit more:

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector.

Obama trusted BP and he trusted Goldman Sachs, but, per Rich, Obama needs to save his Presidency by becoming a new Teddy Roosevelt, bashing Big Business at every opportunity.  Yeah, that will restore business confidence and create jobs.

Sunday Morning Open Thread

Let's emote.  Sorry, LET'S EMOTE!  Ahh, that is so much more Presidential.

Keeping That Special Relationship Special

Nothing promotes the special relationship between Britain and the US quite like fluffing the celebration of the Queen's birthday:

An official statement from the US foreign policy chief [link] paid tribute to the "Queen’s life and legacy,” despite the fact that the Monarch does not celebrate her official birthday until next weekend.

The diplomatic faux pas, sent on behalf of President Barack Obama and the American people on Friday, also celebrated the "special relationship" between the British and US governments.

Better early than late, as the State Department press flack explained.  I, of course, deplore these false choices - why can't we get the time right?

Fortunately, we have the smartest woman in the world as Secretary of State.  Unfortunately, no one called her at 3 AM to ask about the Queen's birthday observance.

SINCE YOU ASK:  I can't find any State Department press release noting the observance in June 2009.  Nor does a search of the State Dept. site show any from the Bush era.  One might infer this was a new, well-intentioned bit of outreach that went sadly awry.  Odd, given the many geniuses involved.

With Obama's Luck...

The way Obama's luck has been running on this oil leak, BP will actually manage to (mostly) cap it just as he commences his 'emote and denounce' campaign against BP.  I suppose the White House will be able to spin that - obviously it was fear of ongoing (and visible!) Presidential rage that sent the leaking oil scurrying up the siphon pipe.

Two little straws in the wind from the Times coverage - first, Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu seems to have had a non-admirer in the control room during the capping operation:

The technician said that shortly after the cap was successfully placed, Dr. Chu wondered aloud why oil was still spewing from around the bottom. Engineers had to tell him that the leaks were expected, at least initially.

After so many meetings, I guess the plan had become a blur...

Secondly, other firms are involved in the capping effort, but from a PR perspective this will be a BP headliner until there is a success to point to:

The technician said the assembled crowd, which included workers from BP and other companies involved, was in “pretty good cheer” after the cap was successfully placed.

“But you have to temper all that right now because you don’t know the final result,” he said.

Finally, let's not overlook the fine work of our First Emoter:

Mr. Obama also met with local residents and business people on Friday. He did not do so last week after his meeting with local officials went for more than two hours, and was criticized for it. Separately, the president’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said Mr. Obama had written to the families of the 11 men killed when the Deepwater Horizon exploded, inviting them to the White House on Thursday.

In Grand Isle, La., Mr. Obama met with the owners of a marina, convenience store and bait shop, and with a shrimper and oysterman. People lining the roads were generally welcoming, waving and snapping photos. One family held a sign saying “Help Us!”

Somebody should hand Obama a soapy rag and an oily sea gull for a real photo-op.

Obama Cancels Asian Trip, Will Emote At Gulf

Obama has cancelled his trip to Asia so he can go to the Gulf and empathize with the locals.

This from the Times coverage is a bit poignant:

The White House is counting on a strong jobs report on Friday to reassure Americans that its programs are bolstering the economy.

Well, that strong jobs report will have to wait until July.

Spike Lee Urges Obama To Get Red-Faced And Scream At The Oil

Spike Lee wants to see some Presidential rage abut the Gulf oil spill, because nothing says "Presidential" like anger combined with powerlesness.

But wait!  Obama is not powerless!  Eric Holder is meeting with state Attorneys General to discuss lawsuits.  The good news is that if the Administration can drag someone into court, at last our activist-turned-lawyer-turned- President can attend a meeting where he will understand the issues being discussed.

Whether BP will move faster and cooperate more closely with the Feds if they feel obliged to bring a lawyer to every meeting is a separate question.

The Freedom Flotilla

Biden supports Israel, but "Administration officials" tell the Times that Israel's blockade policy has to change.

Tipper And Al

I was overcome by reality (home networking division) yesterday, but let's have a Tipper and Al thread.  I am not Al's biggest fan, but I was sad to hear they are splitting up.  Perhaps an enterprising journo can rent the house ext door and research the story. 

I For One Welcome Our New Non-Human Regulatory Overlords

David Leonhardt of the Times writes about risk assessment, but he forgot to turn off the Auto Rebut feature on his word processor.  After explaining that people do a miserable job of estimating improbable events he lauds the superhuman government regulators in which libs place their faith:

When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so.

Uhh, are we talking about government of the people and by the people?  If so, why are these regulators immune to normal human psychology?  

The answer - they're not - was offered by David Leonhardt a mere two paragraphs earlier:

Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before. 

Well, yeah.  So why is it government's job to do what people cannot, and how do they manage that feat?  I don't know.  

Apparently Actions Do Not Speak Louder Than Words

Per the AP account of the latest Supreme Court decision, a suspect can not invoke his right to remain silent by doing something so humdrum as remaining silent.  No, the suspect has to speak up!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights ''upside down.''

A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

I assume, or at least hope, that it sounds a bit less wacky in the opinion.  The story does include this:

Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering ''yes,'' ''no,'' ''I don't know,'' nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for ''shooting that boy down,'' Thompkins said, ''Yes.''

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

If the police felt the suspect was not being utterly unresponsive, then one can see why they would continue the interrogation.  Near-silence is not silence.

And I guess there could be a real problem with implementing a rule that equated silence with an assertion of the right to end the interrogation.  Would ten seconds of sullen silence be enough?  One minute?  Ten minutes?  When does the clock start, and who plays scorekeeper?

The SCOTUSBlog has lots.

The Oil Plume As Metaphor

David Brooks explains the Gulf oil spill:

And, at this particular moment, we are confronted by the picture of an uncontrolled gusher of oil spewing destruction into the gulf. This image could be with us for another few months, searing into the national consciousness and becoming the defining image of 2010.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.

The plume taps into a series of deep anxieties. First, it taps into the anxiety that the people running our major institutions are just not that competent. Second, it feeds into the anxiety that there has been an unhappy marriage between corporations and government officials, which has had the effect of corrupting both. Most important, the plume exposes the country’s core confusion about the role of government.

Skip, and:

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.

On the other hand, they demand that the president “take control.” They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.

They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn’t control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn’t want cuts, wants change and doesn’t want change.

Brooks is mostly describing the President's liberal base, but of course that is Obama's problem - conservatives don't have a magical faith in Big Government and are not surprised to see it faltering.  It is Obama's side (and, pardon my redundancy, the media) which routinely looks to Washington for miracles and is experiencing some disillusionment.  It seems unkind to reprise this, but this is from the surprise NY Times endorsement of Obama back in October 2008:

In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

I assume Sasha and Malia are rigorously testing toys, but not all of our water is looking so pristine right now.

THEY'RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND THEY ARE THERE TO HELP:  A classic window into the liberal mind was provided by this recent NY Times correction of a Freudian editing error:

Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the top 10 choking hazards for children omitted some steps to take if a child is choking and seems unable to cough out the obstruction. Besides having someone call 911, the health authorities recommend acting quickly to remove the object.

What?  You mean, if my child is choking I don't just stand around waiting for government assistance?  Why did we even elect Obama?

Richard Cohen Bumps Into Reality

Tear out the front page - crime is caused by criminals!  Richard Cohen, another droning lib at the WaPo, reports back from the intellectual frontier:

This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation -- in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty -- my view at one time -- have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.

So street thugs are not all Jean Val Jean - who knew?  Why this is bad news (other than lefty embarrassment) is not explained - surely the reality-based community is delighted to encounter reality.

More insight:

Whatever the reasons, it now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims.

Breakthrough stuff.  Jennifer Rubin of Commentary is so excited by Cohen's journey to wisdom that she gets a bit carried away:

This revelation might suggest that liberals re-examine other premises that have proved dangerous... The possibilities in foreign policy are endless. (Let’s start with, “The problem with our policy toward Iran, China, Syria, etc. is that we haven’t tried to engage them.”)

That'll happen.