Fact-esque

Obama and the Gulf

I have to thank Open Salon's Jacob Freeze for a timely reminder that Obama's lack of reaction to the disastrous Gulf oil spill and his willingness to accept BP's less-than-stellar efforts to cap the well are nothing new. This is from a 2008 campaign speech that most people ignored:

In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic.

Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.

Jacob made just a few little changes and the difference is less startling than revelatory.

Is BP Dicking Around Because They're Trying to Save the Well?

The latest of BP's ideas to stop the flow of oil, the so-called "top kill", has failed and the next one is a last-ditch cap containment system that virtually nobody is sure will work.

BP has abandoned its most recent "top kill" effort to contain its runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, a company official announced Saturday evening.

"After three full days, we have been unable to overcome the flow," said the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles at a news conference in Robert, La. ". . . This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing, or the fact that we haven't succeeded so far."

"So engineers and experts have explored a variety of alternatives to stop the leak now," President Barack Obama said in a statement Saturday evening. "They had hoped that the top kill approach attempted this week would halt the flow of oil and gas currently escaping from the seafloor. But while we initially received optimistic reports about the procedure, it is now clear that it has not worked."

I was looking at that "variety of alternatives" and something struck me about it: in none of them is the integrity of the well threatened.

"What Kind of Country Are We?"

Robert Borosage is asking the question a lot of us have been asking since we elected Tricky Dick, Ronnie Rayguns, and The Chimp twice each.

Media Quiz: Which Mainstream News Org Is In the Tank to BP?

Sometimes the dfference between a real news organization and an increasingly pretend news organization is so clear you don't even have to read the stories themselves to know which one is deep in the corporate tank. Here are two headlines that illustrate the point nicely, both of them lead stories of the hour for their respective papers.

"Jobs? Who Cares? We're Working"

Yes, one could blame it all on cluelessness and disconnection as we did with Poppy who, in 1988, obligingly proved how out of it he was by being unable to recognize a supermarket scanner when he saw one and actually had to be shown how it worked. But one can't really do that any more since one now knows without question that it isn't a matter of elitist political arrogance as it may have been with Bush I but a mere matter of political puppets hearing and obeying their Master's Voice. (As the picture shows, the Master doesn't even have to be present to get his orders across to his adoring pet.)

So it should perhaps not surprise us that nobody seems terribly interested in the parlous state of the middle class, let alone the perilous state of the underclasses.

Jobless Claims Rise As GOP Blocks Jobs Bill; Oil Spill Continues While BP Fiddles

I mean, what can you say at this point? How does one explain such suicidal behavior? Unemployment claims "unexpectedly" rise by more than the 3 previous months combined -

The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week by the largest amount in three months. The surge is evidence of how volatile the job market remains, even as the economy grows.

Applications for unemployment benefits rose to 471,000 last week, up by 25,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the first increase in five weeks and the biggest jump since a gain of 40,000 in February.

- and Republicans react by promising to kill the jobs bill?

Sestak, Critz & Financial Reform: Sense From Nonsense

A week or so ago I suggested in response to Chris Bowers that there was as yet no evidence of a progressive swing in the electorate though there were "indications".

That was last week. This week we have some real live evidence. Joe Sestak beat Arlen Specter to be the Democratic Senate candidate from PA and Mark Critz won a special election to replace the deceased John Murtha in Westmoreland County. Neither was supposed to win, neither could win, according to the Usual Pundits. Right-wing ex-Pub and avid Bush Baby Specter was welcomed into the BD Democrat party primarily on the strength of a conservative-spun rumor that nobody could beat him and it was the only way to keep PA in the Dem column. Sestak, they said, was yet another Quixote-ish librul loser tilting at windmills he couldn't possibly knock over and it was a waste of time for SERIOUS PEOPLE to work for his campaign or even talk about it.

Uh-huh.

Media (Finally) Notices That Psychotics Run the Economy

For those of us who have for 30 or so years been watching the take-over of the economy by drunken psychotics whose only touchstone is bottomless greed and a vicious drive for the power money buys to create more money, it is mildly amusing to notice that in the last few weeks the same media that spent those 30 years boosting, protecting, defending and admiring Wall Street greedheads and Corporate America Moloch-followers busily swallowing their own tails once they'd devoured everybody else's, have now begun to acknowledge that the Masters of the Universe are, like, crazy . I mean, like, clinical crazy.

Wishful Thinking on Our Labor Climate: Tulane v. US Auto Rebound

OK, so when teh shite hit teh fan (supposedly) and the auto companies were facing bankruptcy (supposedly) and the Obama Admin was putting a lot of pressure on the UAW to cut management some slack in order to save their members' jobs (supposedly), fear ran like a little rodent through the union and once again Labor sacrificed so executives could keep their McMansions and their Beamers.

OK, so now that the auto market is strengthening (supposedly) and profits are up again (quite definitely), the unions want management to remember the last their of umpteen sacrifices and give back some of the give-backs the car companies extorted under the guise of "financial difficulties" they had largely brought on themselves, assuming of course that such difficulties actually existed which isn't at all clear when you look at the offshore books.

Talx: Making Sure Laid Off Workers Don't Collect Unemployment

Wall Street loves it when a company lays off workers. To them, it doesn't mean the company is in financial trouble, it means the company obviously hired more people than it needed and is clearing out the "deadwood". They call it getting "lean and mean" and they reward companies who do it by paying more for that company's stock, which makes the executives and investors richer.

Layoffs would make execs and invests even richer than they do now if there was just some way to avoid paying those pesky unemployment insurance fees. If those damn lazy bastards they just got rid of couldn't sit around on their fat asses enjoying the easy life on the company's dime, then the company could put that money where it naturally belongs - in the pockets of its execs and invests, not paying the rents for the trashy little apartments all those bums live in. But it's such a time-consuming business, stealing thousands of penny-ante unemployment claims, that it's almost not worth the effort.

Enter Talx (pronounced "talks"), a company that promises that for a very reasonable price they'll fight all those unemployment claims and save you $$millions$$. And they do. (Via Jim Hightower)