Pufferfish

Progress

Here's to the hope of a silver lining in this corporate-sponsored, free market disaster. Perhaps yet another junk punch to our collective groins will make people more agreeable to the notion that greater regulation is the clear alternative:

Just a quarter of Americans back expanding offshore drilling in the wake of the BP oil spill, and most fault federal regulators for the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

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Some 63 percent point a finger at inadequate enforcement of current regulations, and 55 percent see an overall weak regulatory structure. Even more, 73 percent, blame BP and its drilling partners for the accident. And the same number now call the spill a major environmental disaster.

With the Bush and Obama-led feds disintersted in regulating, here's how BP failed to plan for the worst:

NEW ORLEANS – Glaring errors and omissions in BP's oil spill response plans have exposed a slapdash effort to follow environmental rules, outraging Gulf Coast residents who can see on their beaches how unprepared the company was.

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

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. 

Republicans, as one should expect, are trying mightily to turn an indictment of their ideology into a opportunity to place blame on liberalism. A stronger central government, John Boehner would tell you, isn't the answer and poor federal regulation isn't the exception but the rule.

I'm reminded of what the late, great David Halberstam wrote in the dark days following Katrina:

I never expected to see my government fail so completely when high professionalism would have meant saving lives by the hour. I suppose that if you have a formidable political movement which for 25 years has pushed the idea that government is the enemy—that is, if you have a government run by people who do not believe in government—things like this will happen. The service agencies inevitably atrophy, ever less capable people man them, and they have less and less leverage with which to gain their necessary share of the annual budget.

What Republicans don't want Americans to do is think beyond their flimsy rationale and ask what the appropriate response should be. Because their answer is what we've already got. What you see is what you get. 

It's The Science, Stupid

Couldn't have typed this better myself:

I can't say that I really have any sophisticated understanding of the science of climate change. I don't think that most people I know who are pro-cap and trade do either. For me, the fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me.

Put baldly like that, perhaps it suggests a certain incuriousness. But I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all.

I would not be terribly shocked if the predictions we're getting today about the climate turned out to be dramatically off. (Of course, it could be dramatically worse as well as dramatically better.) For political reasons, because there's so much nonsense in the air, you're not supposed to say that I guess. But there's inevitable uncertainty about how such a complex system as the global climate functions. But in our own lives, in the real world, we live in a science based world.

Well, not exactly. There's lots of people who refuse to admit we live in a science based world and presumably figure airplanes achieve flight and missiles find their target by happenstance or the answering of whispered prayers. It's all about who you put your faith in. Which gets us to the CHRISTmas tree and some fool mixing up the death of Jesus with the birth of Santa. Or whatever:

World's Stupidest Argument

Someone spiked Joe Klein's Metamucil:

Bush flunkies trying to argue that Obama is more polarizing than Bush was. Given the fact that Obama had to take dramatic action, at home and abroad, to start lifting the country from the mess Bush made almost everywhere--and also begin to turn the country away from the myopia and greed of the Reagan era--it's amazing that he hasn't raised more dust or teabags. And, I should add the fact that the alleged polarization mostly results from the fact that Obama gets extremely low ratings from self-identified Republicans, who constitute an extremist shard of a party at this point, is a badge of honor. (Commenter sgwhiteinfla points out that the polarization is also the result of overwhelming--88%--support from Democrats.)

In the long run, it's a safe historical bet that Bush will prove more polarizing than Obama because he was such an abject failure in the job--I doubt we'll ever see Obama submerge to approval ratings in the mid-20s, or launch wars peremptorily without cause or purpose. The constant sniping from Rove, Wehner and the others during Obama's first 100 days is a deeply neurotic reaction to the enormity of their own cockups in office. It shows a profound lack of class or grace, but then, that's no surprise with these guys, is it? They ran the country like thugs, and thugs they remain.

Thugs? Well, yeah.