MOLDY CITY

Watching "Informed Sources" tonight, I found out that George Will is a blogger (I'm no longer interested in taking gratuitous shots at the media, but they were laying it on pretty thick tonight).

On MSNBC tonight, both Keith and Rachel have reported on the Chamber of Commerce allegedly using money from foreign corporations to run partisan campaign ads. Don't get me wrong, it's an important story, but the Chamber's leaders aren't just whores. They're also hypocrites:

"Make no mistake: When the aftermath of congressional inaction becomes clear, Americans will not tolerate those who stood by and let the calamity happen," wrote Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's vice president in September 2008, who at the time pressed lawmakers before their vote on a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street.

A few months later, Congress faced a similar reckoning — whether to pass an $814 billion economic stimulus package consisting of about one-third tax breaks and two-thirds additional government spending. Again, Josten wrote to lawmakers: "The global economy is in uncharted and dangerous waters and inaction from Washington is not an option."

Fast forward to the present. The chamber is now spending millions of dollars on ads trying to elect candidates whose campaigns are based on opposing the very bank rescue and stimulus law it once supported.

Watching last year's NFC Cahampionship, I agreed with the announcer who you can hear saying that he thought the penalty shown at the beginning of this clip was a bad call.



Also, I really didn't get the call on McCray. I'm sure I could find a clip if I looked a little harder, but I'm still not up for putting that kind of time into blog posts. Jason Cole described the play just as I saw it:

The blows weren’t cheap, but they were hard and they were constant.

McCray’s hit was flagged in the first quarter came after Favre handed off and appeared to go for a block.

I guarantee you that if Mark Sanchez had taken that hit in the Jets playoff game, the announcers wouldn't have been talking about the vicious hit, they would have called it a rookie error. They would have made a few comments about the learning curve for a rookie QB and it would have been quickly forgotten. I defy any Viking fan to tell me otherwise.

I'll try to explain the reasons why I haven't been posting much lately tomorrow or the next day. There are a few reasons why the posting became less frequent a couple of years ago, but I had hoped to pick it up a notch after my vacation last month. Unfortunately, I'm recovering from a fairly serious accident, so that's been put on hold. I'm back at work, but sleeping's difficult, so I don't have the energy for much else. Like I said, I'll explain soon.

I think most Americans need to go back and reread The Jungle, and accounts of the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire and realize that the free market didn't make industrialization benefit most Americans. In fact, for decades, it was pretty shitty for most Americans. At least America had free land (stolen land, if you prefer) to give away; things were worse in Europe. Since it took government actions and union activities to make industrialization benefit most Americans, I really don't understand why so many people believe that globalization would be any different. Accordingly, I strongly disagree with at least one paragraph in Jack Sparrow's guest post in yesterday's "Naked Capitalism." But, I wholeheartedly agree with his analysis of what's happening to the U.S. economy.

Oddly enough, Jim Cramer agrees too. I know that asking you to listen to twelve minutes of Jim Cramer is asking a lot, but please play the clip you can find on this link. He puts a happy face on it, but he's really saying something quite radical (or something that would have been considered radical not too many years ago).

Despite the damage that multinational corporations are doing to the country, the liberals at the American Prospect want us to eschew populism. Isn't that mostly a straw man argument? Not completely, because some people are advocating that Democrats, or liberals, or progressives strike a more populist pose. But, don't you hear more people arguing that liberals and Democrats need to stop being afraid of being labeled populist and need to start taking positions on economic issues that Mort Zuckerman or Larry Kudlow would call "populist"?

From The Oil Drum:

In spite of that, Many will argue for at least one more (relief)* well anyway, and I would probably fall into that camp. Wells are drilled all the time based on the chance for a big payout, and then never go into production. Hopefully another won't be needed, but the risk of not capping the well as soon as possible should be obvious to BP, and waiting until circumstances force the issue of another well will not go over well. In retrospect, they should have looked at the calendar (with the upcoming stormy season approaching), considered yet another unthinkable scenario regarding relief well success, and planned accordingly. In lieu of that happening several weeks ago, the time is now for BP to go above and beyond what they think is required. And with the deepwater drilling moratorium in place, many rigs are looking for something to do.

*added for clarification, David. I'll finally start posting again tonight, BTW.

updated

You ever put two and two together and get...the impression that nobody in charge, and nobody who reports on anybody in charge, is bothering to put two and two together?

Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn't it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.

In practice, there's a reason the best booming schools last weeks. Different types of shoreline, different shapes, require different configurations. Your numerous anchor points (for this spill those would be 1-yard cement blocks with tie-off buoys) need to be chosen so the boom-tenders (you) can adjust the ropes, slanting the booms this way and that to account for changes in wind and current. Booms are tended 24/7, by the way. BUT... just having learned what you've learned here today, DKos Boomer, you know enough of the CONCEPT to figure it out. You get it. You could go out there and watch how the ping-pong balls (your test-oil) glide along the boom. You could see where they miss the catch basins and you could adjust and re-configure and you could perform fucking proper fucking booming. By the third day of actual booming, no one on this planet would be better than you. So if you understand it, and all these production employees understand it (we're talking tens of thousands of people here), then why is most or all of the booming along the Gulf... being done wrong?

I don't normally take Daily Kos diarists seriously, but this guy Fishgrease really seems to know what he's fucking talking about, so you might want to go read his entire fucking diary from last month.

Then you might want to try to figure out why there are fucking rumors of fucking boaters moving fucking boom:

“We're getting reports of people in boats moving boom so they can get through,” said Terrebonne Public Safety Director Ralph Mitchell.

Public officials say recreational boaters and fishermen keep moving, cutting or running over boom that's been deployed to protect the parish.

Spill responders are asking for the public's help in monitoring boom along the Gulf Coast.

WTF? Shouldn't the people tending the boom 24/7 know for sure whether it's going on? Seems like somebody would if the boom were there for any useful reason.

Update: Silly me, I didn't take into count that even improperly used, ineffective boom has sociological value. Since a limited amount of boom clearly wouldn't go as far if laid out properly, useless boom is more useful than useful boom, sociologically speaking.

More update: Rachel Maddow pretty much comes out and says it -- they, fucking BP and/or the fucking federal government, are just throwing out impressive sounding amounts of fucking boom to fucking impress us. They're not fucking putting the fucking effort and fucking manpower into it to make it do any fucking good:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lewis Lapham on Tim Russert:

To an important personage Russert asked one or two faintly impertinent questions
...
the reply was of no interest to him, not worth his notice or further comment. He had
sprinkled his trademark salt, his work was done. The important personage was free to choose from a menu offering three forms of response—silence, spin, rancid lie. If silence, Russert moved on to another topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if rancid lie, he swallowed it.

Embedding has been disabled on these two videos (alternate links) of Norman Robinson interviewing the heads of Richards Disposal and Metro Disposal, but he didn't ask any of the follow up questions that I would have asked.

Now read Bob Somerby

Yep, Russert can really be a bulldog when handed a story his cohort approves of. He pummeled Biden with six straight questions about Kerry’s deeply troubling vote. But when Miller attacked Kerry’s vote—two times—the bulldog crawled under his desk and died. According to Russert, his job on Meet the Press is to “learn everything you can about the guests and their positions and then take the other side on the air” (page 308). But somehow, Russert forgot “to take the other side” when Miller slammed Kerry’s troubling vote. Voters are hearing this “position” from every steeple. But Russert forgot to challenge it.
...
Tim hammered Biden with six straight questions on one single topic. With Miller, the bulldog wandered around, trying to find an old steak.

I didn't count, but on this clip (again, not embeddable), it sure seems like even more than six questions on one single topic. Norman Robinson asks absolutely no follow up questions of either Alvin Richards or Jimmie Woods, but several of James Perry. Tim Russert would be proud. I suppose we can at least infer that Helena Moreno was well-liked by her former colleagues at WDSU.