Who's Responsible? BP Says, "Not Me!"

Appearing today before a Senate panel investigating the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf, BP America's Chairman Lamar McKay was asked, essentially, "Who screwed up here?" McKay summoned up all of his business ethics, channeled the Family Circus cartoon, and replied, "Not me!" He said it was the fault of TransOcean, which owns the oil rig and did the drilling. For their part, TransOcean blames Halliburton for poor installation of the blowout valve, a safety feature which went kaput.

Nice try, Mr. McKay, but your kite won't fly. BP is the operator of the well and owns the rights to the oil. Like any manufacturer subcontracting this part or that, BP may have farmed out certain portions of its operation, but it's still by far the biggest turd in this particular punch bowl. They're gonna pay. Probably will need to sue the shit out of 'em to get 'em to do it, but they're gonna pay.

Anybody else for a moratorium on off-shore drilling?

A Weak Cup Of TEA

USA Today reported that, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the total tax burden on the average American in 2009 was the lowest since 1950. Total tax means income tax, property tax, sales tax, etc., net of all deductions and credits. It does not include Social Security taxes. Certainly, it's a different world today than in Harry Truman's time, but the BEA said last year's total tax of 9.2% of income is well below the historical average of 12%, and has been falling for the past 2 years. Some of this recent decrease results from stimulus bill tax cuts, drops in personal incomes, and fewer retail sales, so the BEA report is not all beer and skittles. Still, it ain't all bad either. So tell me again what those idiot TEA Baggers are so fuckin' mad about?

Limbaugh: Oil And Water Do Mix

On Real Time this week, Bill Maher took on conservatives for dismissing the Gulf oil spill and the climate change movement.

"Texas Governor Rick Perry says it was an act of God. I think it was an act of Dick Cheney," Maher said, referring to the Bush administration's energy task force. "And it shows the disastrous results of having lobbyists write laws."

Later in the program, he slammed Rush Limbaugh for dismissing the oil spill as "natural."

Said Maher, "Here's Limbaugh's quote about the oil spill 'The ocean will take care of this. It's as natural [the oil] as the ocean water is.' That's right, a petrochemical stew is very natural to wetlands. You know what, you dipshit? Mercury's natural too -- you don't put it in your Cheerios."

The (Almost) Crash of Wall Street

by Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor
Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
posted 5/7/10 on the Huffington Post

Ninety minutes before the end of the trading day Thursday, the U.S. stock market almost melted down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 1,000 points. The market regained ground before the end, like a giant 747 narrowly averting a crash landing, but the questions of the day are: What happened? And what does it mean?

At this point no one knows why. Some say it was sudden burst of worries about Greece's debt and the increasing possibility of a default that might cause a run by global investors. Others point to a "trading error." Giant high-speed computers generate millions of trades based on instructions embedded in computer programs designed to move fast enough to beat everyone else. So when there's a glitch in one of them it can immediately spread to all the other programs designed to move just as fast. Some say it was an erroneous trade entered by someone at a big Wall Street bank who mistyped an order to sell a large block of stock, and that the big drop in that stock's price (Procter & Gamble?) triggered "sell" orders across the market.

Regardless of why it happened, it's further evidence that the nation's and the world's capital markets have become a vast out-of-control casino in which fortunes can be made or lost in an instant -- which would be fine except for the fact that most of us have put our life savings there. Pension funds, mutual funds, school endowments -- the value of all of this depends on a mechanism that can lose a trillion dollars in minutes without anyone having a clear idea why. So much of the market now depends on computer programs and mathematical models that no one fully understands, so much trading is in the hands of a few people whose fat thumbs or momentary carelessness might sink the economy, so much of global wealth now depends on who can move their money quickest at the slightest provocation -- that we are toying with financial disaster every day. The luck or foolishness of a few traders, and inside knowledge and information that some possess and others don't, combined with ultra high-speed computers, put us all at the whim of a system whose risk is way out of proportion to any public benefits.

The financial reforms being considered on Capitol Hill are steps in the right direction. But the "systemic risk" now embedded in our capital markets is higher than ever, and will require far greater understanding and vigilance than now being considered.

Cross-posted from RobertReich.org.

Who You Gonna Call? Mythbusters!

(Hold the presses and get me Re-write, quick! What follows is a greatly abridged version of the original ill-conceived post, which was published for about 5 minutes before I took it down. One of the many benefits of having a good wife is that she's not shy about calling me out when I'm really out of line. Thank you, dear!)

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Man, I love the internet more and more all the time. There is literally nothing you can't find out there somewhere on the web. Of course, this includes a lot of rumor, legend, and outright lying. And some of this misinformation goes viral (and is occasionally shared and spread by people I know). Facebook speeds the process along.

Regarding two current internet rumors that are seemingly everywhere all of a sudden, it's Mythbuster time, True or False-style:

TRUE or FALSE? President Obama has allowed Islamic prayers to be read to open the daily proceedings in the U.S. Senate. FALSE. Just hasn't happened. Wouldn't hurt a doggone thing if it had happened, but it hasn't. And it isn't the President's call anyway. The Senate Chaplain does organize regular prayer meetings for a variety of faiths, including Christian, Jewish and, yes, Muslim. These groups meet in the Senate office building and other government offices. Nobody's kneeling and facing Mecca on the floor of the Senate. Now, back in July 2007 the Senate opened its day on one occasion with a Hindu prayer, and some redneck Christian soldiers got all chap-assed about it. That was when Dubya was top dog, not Obama. And by the way, the U.S. has no official religion.

TRUE or FALSE? President Obama has cancelled National Prayer Day. FALSE. This internet legend popped up last year and it's back again. National Prayer Day was started in the late 1940's by Harry Truman, as a symbolic gesture. It's traditionally in early May. This year it will be May 6th. Since Truman, all Presidents have acknowledged the day in some small way. Until George W. Bush, that is. Dubya saw fit to turn it into a big White House ceremony -- a dog and pony show for the religious right celebrating (endorsing?) conservative, fundamentalist, Evangelical Christianity. Holy shit, it was a wonder they didn't start handling snakes and speaking in tongues! All Obama did was end the White House ceremony and return the thing to the way it always was before -- we'll note the day and then let everybody be as spiritual as they care to be in their own personal fashion, privately. Nothing was cancelled.

OK, that's two internet myths shot down, and about two hundred million to go. Stay tuned.

". . . And The Role Of Sgt. Schultz Was Played By John Kasich."

Remember the old TV show Hogan's Heroes? It was a comedy set in a German POW camp. It featured Bob Crain as Colonel Hogan and Werner Klemperer as Commandant Klink. Richard Dawson played one of the prisoners. It was a good show and ran for several years. It was one of my favorites when I was a kid.

Evidently John Kasich watched a lot of Hogan's Heroes too. Because when he was recently asked about what role he may have played in the failure of his former employer, Lehman Brothers, Kasich immediately went into Sgt. Schultz mode:

"Nein! Nein! I know nothing! I hear nothing! I see nothing!"

Dangerous Douchebags

Campaign Advertising: Where Truth Goes To Die. This has always been the case across the political spectrum, but it's especially prevalent these days among Republicans trying to curry favor from the TEA Partiers:

Steve Stivers is again running against Mary Jo Kilroy for a seat in Congress. A Stivers flyer stuck in my door informed me that Kilroy still "isn't listening to us." This is a big theme with the far right: "They don't get it. They aren't listening." This refrain confuses listening with agreeing. We're listening. We hear you just fine. It's just that we think you're full of shit and we disagree with all your crackpot ideas. The flyer goes on to tell me that Stivers is "our only hope to stop the radicals in Washington" (radicals?), that he'll work to stop Nancy Pelosi (oh, that radical 70-year old grandmother), and to stop "job-killing" measures like health care mandates and environmental legislation, and he'll cut taxes, repeal taxes, and vote no to taxes. So I guess he wants us to be uninsured, sick, with an underfunded government, but somehow we'll all be magically working and polluting our way to prosperity. Sounds like a plan, Steve-O!

Then we have the Jon Husted TV ad in his campaign to be be Ohio Secretary of State. He's currently a State Congressman and Speaker of the Ohio House. His original TV spot was a meaningless puke-up of boilerplate buzzwords: He's a "Conservative family man" (good job on the sperm donation, Stud!) and a "fighter" (everybody's a fighter) who "took on Liberal ACORN for election fraud." (Timeout. Husted is himself the very embodiment of election fraud. He represents Ohio's 6th District, where a vacant house in Kettering serves as his "residence". Meanwhile, he and his wife and kids live most conveniently in Upper Arlington.) He worked to "preserve Statehouse prayer because our rights are God-given." (Our rights are what? Well then, fuck the Constitution and the Amendments and the Ohio Revised Code. Who needs 'em? We can just check with God. Got his phone number?) If elected, Jon-Boy will also "stop immoral government debt to protect our children's liberty." (Wow! Where to begin? I don't think the Secretary of State has much influence on debt levels. Debt is not a person or a belief, it's a noun, a condition. As such, it's neither moral nor immoral. And what the hell does it have to with our children's liberty? Is debt going to throw our kids in jail? A big load of B.S. in one short sentence!) These days, Husted's ad has been trimmed to just the last part about debt and liberty. Amazingly, this is not enough for the TEA Partiers. In the more-conservative-than-thou contest, the TEA Baggers actually prefer some unknown named Sandra O'Brien.

And the most dangerous douchebag of the bunch and the country's craziest football coach? It's Dave Daubenmire! Years ago, it was my misfortune to attend Otterbein College at the same time as Daubenmire. He was a self-important little pissant then, and has gotten nothing but worse ever since. He's now a full-blown religious zealot running on the TEA Party ticket for U.S. Congress in Ohio's 18th District. Do a web search on him, and you'll find a whole bunch of crazy-scary shit. He first gained notoriety as the football coach at London High (where he ran the wing-nut formation!). He required that his players kneel and pray before, during and after all practices and games. As a public school, London told him to quit this shit. He refused and was fired in 1999. He's now coaching at the private Fairfield Christian Academy where he can preach and pray and proselytize with wild-eyed abandon. He's been a staunch defender of Marysville teacher John Freshwater's right to burn crosses into the arms of his students. Little Dave's "Man Of God" persona did not prevent his son from being arrested and charged with possession of child pornography a while ago. Little Dave's websites have articles and links with titles like Hollywood's War On God and Have You Received God's Mercy?, together with his political rant which is always cast in religious terms. Daubie The Dipshit is running as a TEA Partier because the Republicans are far too liberal for his tastes and we don't have an American Christian Taliban . . . yet. Happily, he has no money and a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected.