Today would have been the 100th birthday of Jacques Cousteau.

So in honor of the man who brought the incredibly beautiful and fragile ocean environment to our television screens, and mindful of the terrible, generational damage being done to the Gulf of Mexico, how about a small remembrance to Cousteau's charity for the Rights of Future Generations:

" Every person has the right to inherit an uncontaminated planet on which all forms of life may flourish. "

I'm in Matewan, West Virginia, where tomorrow I'm running the Hatfield And McCoy Marathon. Here's one of my heroes Howlin' Wolf, singing about his 'runnin'shoes', shortly after a rather sharp exchange with the seminal Son House.

(Gov. Hugh Carey - a file cabinet full of painful decisions)

Hearing the news today of the impending fiscal crisis in New York and hearing the just released information that Los Angeles is a half-Billion dollars in the hole, not to mention the rest of California tipping over the brink, I'm reminded of the last time we had a City and State in Crisis. 1975 brought New York city on the edge of bankruptcy and an unwilling Ford administration offering little aid.

So, thirty five years have gone by and we're faced with pretty much the same situation, and in many ways worse. But in 1975 it was something new and the rest of the country wondered if it could happen where they lived.

The answer was, and is, a resounding yes.

So here is a hastily called address and press conference by then-Governor Hugh Carey of New York from October 13, 1975.

Gov. Hugh Carey: “There’s no comfort, no joy in what we’re doing. Because we’re going to the limits of what we can apply to the city in terms of economies and we’re being forced to set aside to some degree our hopes and aspirations for this city.”

Strange. I've been hearing a lot of those exact words lately. I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more of them in the coming days and weeks.

BP's logic seems to be that if the oil cleanup doesn't look dangerous then it must not be. The oil company has told workers not to wear respirators because it's bad for public relations, according to one human rights group.

RFK Center President Kerry Kennedy traveled to the Gulf Coast to talk to cleanup workers and found that BP was trying to repress the use of safety equipment.

"In all three states that I've visited, fishermen said when they went out to work on the cleanup, that if they tried to bring respirators they were told it was unnecessary equipment and would only spread hysteria," Kennedy told Fox News Friday.

"When I went out with eleven people, we had respirators on and within half an hour, all of our eyes were burning and our throats were closing and we all had headaches," she explained.

Kennedy was also concerned that BP was refusing to release information about the contents of the dispersant being used.

"They're basic human rights issues. The right to access of information. BP still will not say what the chemical makeup of the dispersants are so health care officials and victims can know why they're sick and what's going on with them," Kennedy said.

And the health care options for workers who have fallen ill is a problem too.

"One of the things that we were told is that BP would not allow county health officials on to their campus. They finally allowed one nurse. They told workers that if they became sick, the nurse could only give them a Band-Aid or an aspirin. If they really felt sick they had to go to the BP doctors. So BP has completely control over the health care of those workers and what's happening," Kennedy told Fox host Eric Bolling.

"And no government health care down there at all?" asked Bolling.

Kennedy found that there was government health care but workers were reluctant to accept it. "The workers are concerned that this is the only job in town and if the go outside what BP tells them to do they might lose the only job they could get," she said.

Forgive the cheap riff on Olbermann's Worst Person in the World designation, but if the epithet fits, no one wears it better than Glenn Beck.

All that apologizing for racist comments he did last year? Yeah, not so much. Now listen to the clip at the top and try to count how many dog whistles he jammed into 64 seconds.

With regard to President Obama:

BECK: When you see a typical person like the president of BP, he [Obama] has a reaction that has been bred into him.

Now that actually kind of works. It does, if you understand who his parents were, and who his grandparents were. Because they're not really the typical white people.

His mother wasn't. His mother was a revolutionary.

His father wasn't. A revolutionary.

His grandparents, they went to the communist Little Red Church just outside Seattle. They had communist friends.

So it's almost like Marxism has been bred into him.

Yep, piling scum on scum: Beck is once again viciously and falsely smearing Obama's parents. Doesn't he claim to have a rule that "you leave the families alone"?

I really hate writing about Glenn Beck because I'd like to make him a footnote on the back end of history. He's the equivalent of a two-bit carnival barker with a shape-shifting magical box, where he can put facts in and pull them out as bull.

But after reading Over the Cliff and previewing Bill Press' new book, the emerging trend is too scary to ignore.

With each passing day the rhetoric gets more violent, more ridiculous, loaded with even more hyperbole and scary images, with the sole intention of stoking fear, anger, and loathing into those with ears to hear.

If they win the propaganda war, it will be because we didn't call it out when we saw it and call it what it is: bare, naked racism blended with a scary witches' brew of long-standing key terms, fears, and biases.

This is why law student Angelo Carusone listens to four hours of Glenn Beck every day and then pushes advertisers to drop their ads from his show. It's his mission: to make it more and more difficult for Beck to have a platform to spew this nonsense.

He's successful, too. He's gotten hundreds of advertisers to drop their sponsorship. In the UK, Beck's show has NO advertisers. None. While this might not cause Fox to drop his show entirely, it does expose the Murdoch agenda quite clearly. After all, any businessman without an agenda would have dropped him like a hot potato when the revenue to support the show dried up.

But no. Beck is such a lowlife scumbag that he just ramps up the nasty a few more notches and carries on, while all the time claiming to be a patriot.

What he is is a whore. Plain and simple.

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson has written a stunner of an article called "The Spill, The Scandal and The President." It's damned heartbreaking to learn that yes, at least in Interior, this really is the third Bush term:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

The administration's response to the looming threat? According to an e-mail to a congressional aide from a staff member at MMS, the agency has had "zero contact" with Atlantis about its safety risks since the Deepwater rig went down.

Excuse me, I think I have to go scream now...

[...] Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their "royalty" payments – the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource – not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. "This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling – that's his thing," says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling." As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of "a few rotten apples" at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. "The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks," says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. "In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture." One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words "Drill, baby, drill."

Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes – a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this f*ckup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling – a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.

"Employees describe being in Interior – not just MMS, but the other agencies – as the third Bush term," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents federal whistle-blowers. "They're working for the same managers who are implementing the same policies. Why would you expect a different result?"

[...]"People are being really circumspect, not pointing the finger at Salazar and Obama," says Rep. Raul Grijalva, who oversees the Interior Department as chair of the House subcommittee on public lands. "But the troublesome point is, the administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling – yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't hesitate to blame the Bush administration for issues facing this country and that isn't going to change until the problem he created are solved.

In an interview that aired Friday on MSNBC, Chuck Todd asked Pelosi if there was a statute of limitations on placing responsibility on President George W. Bush.

"Well, it runs out when the problems go away," Pelosi replied.

As Karl Burkart at Mother Nature Network says, if Anderson Cooper is ticked off, something must really be wrong.

COOPER: There is this yellow line up there. And they literally will not get you within 20 to 30 feet, where you can actually get a picture of an oiled bird being brought in.

Why? They say they don't want to upset the birds, and they don't want to interfere with workers. But, I mean, I can assure you, one cameraman is a trained professional at CNN, and they're not going to interfere with workers.

As -- as for BP, they have promised transparency on a number of occasions. Most recently was a letter that we just obtained yesterday. It was actually sent out a couple days ago. And, in the letter -- it is from BP Doug -- COO Doug Suttles -- they say -- quote -- "BP has not and will not prevent anyone working in the cleanup operation from sharing his or her own experiences or opinions with the media."

That's from, as I said, BP's Doug Suttles to company employees and contractors. Now, the "has not" part, that they haven't done this, is patently false. I mean, that's a rewriting of history. Many reporters from many news organizations over many weeks have been blocked and stiff-armed and given the silent treatment or told flat- out, BP said we would lose our jobs if we talked.

And this isn't just one news organization. This has been going on for weeks. As for the "will" not part, that they're not going to prevent anyone from cooperating with the media, well, maybe not everyone has gotten the memo. We put it to the test today.

Karl's post suggests this goes beyond the possibility of simply covering for BP, though. While he's not revealing specifics, he refers to a text message he received from a friend in the cleanup zone:

At first I thought it was because the government was somehow backing for BP, supporting them in their attempt to keep the story from getting out of hand. Now I’m not so sure...

This afternoon I received a text message sent on a borrowed phone from someone who had recently returned form [sic] the cleanup operation. The contents of that message were so mind-numbingly horrific that I cannot publish them here.

I am earnestly attempting to confirm what I was told, and I will be tweeting about my findings on @greendig. If true, it would explain WHY the government won’t let even the New York Times fly over the original site of Deepwater Horizon. And it would also explain why Obama has done a 180 on his policy of government transparency, risking his entire political career by deceiving the American people.

Now Karl is a pretty level-headed blogger. He doesn't routinely don a tinfoil hat and start writing about undisclosed text messages that appear to be harbingers of doom, or worse. So I'm inclined to take him seriously, and am watching to see if he receives confirmation of what he suspects.

All I can say is this: I hope whatever it is that has him so concerned isn't related to that munitions dump due west of the Deepwater Horizon. Because it would explain a lot, if it does.

The hardest part about trying to follow the increasingly eliminationist -- and dangerous -- wingnuttery of Glenn Beck, beyond the unpleasant work of actually having to watch the entirety of his Fox News shows (so you don't have to), is trying to figure out new ways of saying that he's nuts.

On yesterday's show, he really just continued his freefall into incoherent babble, attacking progressives (again) by claiming that they are planning street violence this summer in order to push President Obama to enact their nefarious agenda.

He found his "evidence" for this by culling clips and Website info on the America's Future Now conference in Washington this past week. John and I were both in attendance, and the only "radicals" we saw in attendance were the Code Pink people who invaded and harassed Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday morning. In other words, they were outsiders. Otherwise, the conference was all about mainstream progressive causes, and largely attracted people who work well wit

Typically -- as he did with Anita Dunn -- he truncated the clips to distort what people actually said. This was especially egregious in this bit:

BECK: The CEO of Green for All, here she is. She's a big player in Crime Inc. She sits on the board of Emerald Cities. She spoke at this America's Future Now. Here's what she had to say when she brought up my name.

ELLIS-LAMKINS [video clip]: When Glenn Beck started talking about me, someone said, "Are you angry?" And what I said to him is, "Absolutely, we have a plot to take over this country. Absolutely we do." It's not a hidden agenda.

BECK: Nope, it's not. It's not. Nope. It's right out in the open. And she's just like you. She is. She's just like you. Yeah. She's just like the American family of the 1950s. See, this is what it is. The crazy people, the people, the people just like you, and the man. See what's happening? They do have a plot, a plan to take over the country. And the mask is coming off. But will anyone join us in this conversation out in the light of day?

Well, as Media Matters points out, Lamkin's remarks in context are very different indeed:

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Are British fans really as confident in their team as they say they are? They can get a little out of hand now and then, but drinking warm beer can do that to anyone. The 2010 World Cup is here and I'm psyched. Vegas has England picked as the third favorite to win it all behind Spain and Brazil. The USA is considered a middle of the pack team out of 32. Losing Charlie Davies really hurts, but after coming in second to Brazil in the Confederations Cup after shocking Spain and the extra experience some of their key players have received overseas makes them a little better than they are ranked. I hope so anyway. And how does my Italian brother Giuseppi Rossi feel now after being cut from the Italian team? He was born in New Jersey and would have been a very important player for the US if he had played for us.

Here's my challenge. If England wins, I'll buy their jersey, put it on, take a photo and post it on C&L as soon as I can. (Hopefully within a week) If the US wins, then all you Brits have to do the same, only wearing a US shirt of course and email your mugs to C&L at crooksandliars@gmail.com or sitemonitor1@gmail.com
it's a simple bet, but could be fun. Both teams should get out of their groups to the death match brackets either way.
Are you up for it? I hope there will be a rematch somewhere down the road if the US plays like they did in South Africa once before.

UPDATE: And our heart goes out to Nelson Mandela and his family for the tragic loss of his thirteen year old great-granddaughter. She died in a car crash coming home from a Thursday night kick off concert for the World Cup.

(Photo via Reuters)

What a guy... John Boehner, man of the little people. I guess Republicans only like bailouts when they're for multi-billion dollar foreign oil companies. After realizing he stepped in it, it John Boehner is now walking back his comment that the taxpayers should help bailout BP.

Boehner: Government--i.e. Taxpayers--Should Help Pay For Oil Spill:

Congressional Democrats and the White House are toying with different ways to force BP to cover the costs of damages from the Gulf oil spill. But they face stiff opposition from industry...and it seems leading Republicans. In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he believes taxpayers should help pick up the tab for the clean up.

"I think the people responsible in the oil spill--BP and the federal government--should take full responsibility for what's happening there," Boehner said at his weekly press conference this morning.

Boehner's statement followed comments last Friday by US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue who said he opposes efforts to stick BP, a member of the Chamber, with the bill. "It is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game," he said. "Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it. We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that."

And then the backtrack. Boehner spox: No taxpayer money on Gulf spill cleanup or damages:

House GOP leader John Boehner does not believe any taxpayer money should be spent on the cleanup of the Gulf spill or on any damages caused by it, his spokesman confirms to me.

"No taxpayer money for cleanup or damages -- period. BP pays," Boehner spokesman Michael Steel emails.

...Boehner's office subsequently clarified, saying he'd misheard the question. His aides pointed to this previous Boehner quote: "Not a dime of taxpayer money should be used to clean up their mess." And Boehner has also said we must "hold BP accountable for the clean up costs."

Those quotes are pretty clear. But the problem is that the Chamber's position is that while BP is on the hook for the cleanup, its liability for damages should be limited, meaning inevitably that taxpayers should bear some of that liability.

...Perhaps, but the distinction between cleanup and damages is clearly important to the Chamber and to BP. Boehner's office, however, insists that his position on this has been clear throughout.

Either way, asked for more clarification, Boehner spokesman Steel says that when Boehner said no taxpayer money should be spent on the cleanup, that does also include damages.

"No taxpayer money for cleanup or damages -- period," Steel emailed. "BP pays. If the current law doesn't guarantee that, we are happy to work in a bipartisan way on reasonable new legislation."

Who wants to take a bet Boehner and the Republicans still won't vote for lifting the cap on damages? Olbermann reports BP is also desperate to protect their stock prices. As he noted it's too bad they're not attacking stopping the oil destroying the Gulf with the same amount of concern.

BP offers dividend olive branch to U.S.:

BP is seeking a deal with the White House under which it would sacrifice its dividend in return for a calming of the political hysteria over the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Chief executive Tony Hayward will proffer the olive branch in meetings over the coming days in the hope of quelling the increasingly vicious invective in Washington.

Options include scrapping the payout for one quarter or until the Macondo well is capped; putting the payment in 'escrow' - i.e. deferring it - until BP's liabilities are clearer; or paying it in shares rather than cash. Read on...

'Sadly, No!' nails Jonah Goldberg, the Doughy Pantload.

James Wolcot issues the ultimate Pantyload smack down and sums it up like this:

“Yes, but Jonah speaks fluent Simpsons, which is why he’s so popular with campus conservatives as he goes about entertaining and mentoring the maroons of tomorrow.”

The only reason Goldberg's travesty of history, Liberal Fascism, hit the bestseller list was that thousands of conservatives rushed out to their bookstores and their Amazon pages and bought up lots of copies. Otherwise, this lying mediocrity would be buried in the obscurity he deserves.

Are you going to let the conservative movement get away with supporting lunatics like that? Just a few other reasons out of a gazillion to support real authors...

And buy this book.

Checking the box score, in the Major League Props: Hall & Oates hit a grand slam as they joined in on the "Sound Strike," tour, errr, I mean 'cancel tour' of musicians standing in solidarity and vocalizing their feelings against Kris Kobach's Arizona hate bill.

The Arizona Diamondbacks announced that Daryl Hall and John Oates have canceled their post-game concert at Chase Field that had been scheduled to follow a game against the Dodgers on July 2.

Hall and Oates issued the following statement:

"In addition to our personal convictions, we are standing in solidarity with the music community in our boycott of performing in Arizona at this time. We would like to emphasize that this has nothing to do with the management of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who have been professional and cooperative throughout our dealings with them. This is our response to a very specific action of the state."

Since both of us have backgrounds in the music industry, Howie Klein and I have been trying to persuade artists not to perform in Arizona since SB1070 was passed. Zack de la Rocha is really a hero here.

Howie has much more:

Other artists who have joined suit include Cypress Hill, Pitbull, Rage Against the Machine, Kanye West, Sonic Youth, Carlos Santana, Willie Nelson, Joe Satriani, Tenacious D, Shakira, Massive Attack and Hall & Oates (who were supposed to play at a July 2nd Diamondbacks game). Rage's Zack de la Rocha was organized an Arizona sound strike.

“Fans of our music, our stories, our films and our words can be pulled over and harassed every day because they are brown or black, or for the way they speak, or for the music they listen to,” de la Rocha said. “People who are poor like some of us used to be could be forced to live in a constant state of fear while just doing what they can to find work and survive. This law opens the door for them to be shaked down, or even worse, detained and deported while just trying to travel home from school, from home to work, or when they just roll out with their friends.”

The law-- SB 1070-- takes “racial profiling... to a whole new low,” the singer went on. “When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, they arrested her. As a result, people got together and said we are not going to ride the bus until they change the law... What if we got together, signed a collective letter saying, ‘We're not going to ride the bus,’ saying we are not going to comply. We are not going to play in Arizona.”

I'm not pushing for a strike against the Diamondbacks players, but Jerry Colangelo and their ownership has been complicit in helping pass SB 1070 and have been big-time Republican shills.

After hours and hours of debate, the Senate voted down Senator Lisa Murkowski's (R-AK) amendment to reverse the EPA's finding that greenhouse gasses harm the environment, 53-47. This amendment was also known as the "Big Oil Bailout" because if it had passed, greenhouse gasses would no longer have been considered a pollutant and we could blithely skip down the garden path burning oil, polluting more wetlands with spilled oil, and killing more animals.

It was enormously frustrating to me (but not surprising) to see six Democrats vote with Republicans. For the record, Senators Bayh, Lincoln, Rockefeller, Nelson (Neb), Pryor and Landrieu all voted for the amendment.

One of the more remarkable moments in the debate leading up to the vote was Senator Lindsey Graham, who twists like a pretzel in his efforts not to deny the science while still supporting ending the EPA's authority to make this finding and enforce it.

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This is pretty important - not just because they need to know how much oil they have to clean up, but because any fine levied against BP will be based on the number of gallons. (Of course, that assumes they don't file for bankruptcy.)

The Deepwater Horizon well is most likely spewing at least 25,000 barrels of oil a day, and may be producing 40,000 or even 50,000 barrels a day, according to preliminary research from two teams of scientists appointed by the federal government to study the flow from the dark geyser at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Another scientific team, however, using a different methodology, estimates a somewhat more modest flow of 12,600 to 21,500 barrels.

The numbers are all over the place, acknowledged U.S. Geological Survey director Marcia McNutt in a news conference Thursday announcing the findings. Several other teams are preparing their own figures in what has been a protracted and often frustrating effort to get a handle on exactly how much oil is surging from the Macondo reservoir three and a half miles below the surface of the gulf.

One group, the so-called "plume team," examined video of the leaking riser pipe before it was sheared on June 3. The team concluded that 20,000 to 40,000 barrels may be flowing, with 25,000 to 30,000 barrels being the most likely rate. If that estimate is correct, and the flow has been more or less consistent, approximately 1.3 million to 1.5 million barrels -- or 53.6 million to 64.3 million gallons -- of oil have emerged from the well since the April 20 blowout. That is roughly five to six times the amount spilled in Alaskan waters in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez.

[...] The flow rate is significant on several fronts. First, it gives the government and BP a sense of how much capacity they'll need among surface ships to handle all the oil gushing out the well and up a pipe to the Discovery Enterprise drillship, which is capable of processing only about 18,000 barrels a day. Other ships are being added to the effort. The site above the blown out well has become crowded with 25 to 30 different vessels at any given time, Allen said Thursday.

Rolling Stone says the spill is even bigger, and notes the White House is doing its best to lowball the estimates:

"The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high," says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government's team. "That's why they had resistance internally. We're talking 100,000 barrels a day."

The median figure for Crone's independent calculations is 55,000 barrels a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every five days. "That's what the plume team's numbers show too," Crone says. A source privy to internal discussions at one of the world's top oil companies confirms that the industry privately agrees with such estimates. "The industry definitely believes the higher-end values," the source says. "That's accurate – if not more than that." The reason, he adds, is that BP appears to have unleashed one of the 10 most productive wells in the Gulf. "BP screwed up a really big, big find," the source says. "And if they can't cap this, it's not going to blow itself out anytime soon."

(Graph courtesy of Enviroknow.)