Needlenose

As Richard M. Nixon could have told Barack Obama, any time you’re on the beach in dress clothes and the press is watching, it’s probably not good news.

In this case, in an embarrassingly small-ball version of “Message: I Care,” President Obama got himself caught on video explaining to Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph how tar balls could be cleaned up manually from the beaches where they’ve washed up.

If Ms. Randolph asked the president, “Um… but what about the marshes around the corner drenched in floating oil, or the massive underwater plumes — how do we clean those up?!”, it didn’t make it into this clip.

But, to be fair, in his prepared remarks at the scene, Obama made a seemingly honest effort to recognize the grave toll of the catastrophe wrought by Big Oil, and how the government he heads is obligated to respond:

As I’ve said before, BP is the responsible party for this disaster.  What that means is they’re legally responsible for stopping the leak and they’re financially responsible for the enormous damage that they’ve created.  And we’re going to hold them accountable, along with any other party responsible for the initial explosion and loss of life on that platform.

But as I said yesterday, and as I repeated in the meeting that we just left, I ultimately take responsibility for solving this crisis.  I’m the President and the buck stops with me.  So I give the people of this community and the entire Gulf my word that we’re going to hold ourselves accountable to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to stop this catastrophe, to defend our natural resources, to repair the damage, and to keep this region on its feet.  Justice will be done for those whose lives have been upended by this disaster, for the families of those whose lives have been lost — that is a solemn pledge that I am making.

. . . To the people of the Gulf Coast:  I know that you’ve weathered your fair share of trials and tragedy.  I know there have been times where you’ve wondered if you were being asked to face them alone.  I am here to tell you that you’re not alone.  You will not be abandoned.  You will not be left behind.  The cameras at some point may leave; the media may get tired of the story; but we will not.  We are on your side and we will see this through.  We’re going to keep at this every day until the leak has stopped, until this coastline is clean, and your communities are made whole again.  That’s my promise to you.  And that is a promise on behalf of a nation.  It is one that we will keep.

Fine, Mr. President; we’ll be watching to make sure you do.

And for myself, I acknowledge that an epic, slow-motion disaster like this is a tough situation to deal with, and I’m sure President Obama feels like he’s doing the best he can within the constraints he has to operate under… just like with everything else.  It’s just painfully awkward to watch, that’s all.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Whale blubber sashimi is a dish best served cold

About fucking time somebody took Japan to court over their nasty commercial whaling.  Kevin Rudd rocks!!!

From his recent attack on the Civil Rights Act it was pretty clear that Ayn Rand Paul is pretty extreme even for wacky Libertarians.  But from Paul’s criticism of Obama over his handling of the recent mining tragedy and BP oil catastrophe, I’m beginning to suspect that he’s actually quite stupid as well:

“And I think it’s [Obama's call to have BP stop the leak] part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it’s always got to be somebody’s fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen,” Paul said.

“We had a mining accident that was very tragic. … Then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. “

Yeah, dumb-ass, accidents do happen.  That’s why we have these things called ‘regulations’ to put technology and processes in place to minimize the chance of accidents occurring, and to mitigate the effects of accidents after they occur.  ”Blame” is quite fitting when an actor such as BP actively worked to undermine additional safety regulations targeted to avoid just such an event, not to mention BP making numerous mistakes, shortcutting their own internal safety regulations and procedures.  Paul – you are a fucking nitwit!

And speaking of stupid, hypocritical conservatives, Loserman is also attacking Obama over the BP oil leak response, complaining about the government’s lack of preparedness.  WTF?  Loserman minced across the aisles during the recent 8-year Repug Reign of Error, gleefully voting against industry regulations left and right, including voting for legislation that would ‘cap’ BP’s liabilities for such a spill at $75M – petty cash, compared the billions this will end up costing in the end.

These two tragedies are perfect examples of industry lobbying, combined with pliant political tools, privatizes profits and socializes the risks of extractive industries.  And yet another compelling argument (as if we needed one) of why we need not merely to stop industry donations to political campaigns, but should also impeach frickin “Justice” Samuel Alito.

Faux News and the teabaggers keep asking “Where is all the oil?”

BP live oil spill cam

I’ve got it live on my screen at work.  Surreal.

*Update* They just moved the cam to look away from the gusher.  They must be getting ready to try their Crap Shoot, or whatever they call it.

*Update 9:23P PT* Looks like they’ve got a waldo attaching a pipe to some underseas gizmo.  Check it out, it’s really cool!

*Update 9:35P PT* I think I’m seeing a long tube that they are attaching to some type of injection mechanism.  The gushing pipe is out of view, but it’s below and to the right.  My guess is that once this is attached and secure, they’ll lower it on the pipe to prepare for the mud injection.

*Update 10:12P PT* looks like they are dropping underwater buoys around the site.  Is that to help them orient their approach?

*Update 5/26/10* oil still spewing, they must have called the top kill off for some reason.

*Update 11:47A PT* They are doing stuff again, looks like they are adjusting stuff on what I believe to be the injector mechanism.  ROV cam keeps panning around the hardward, very interesting again.

*Update 2:02P PT* I think they are injecting mud.  Not too exciting to look at, and they say it could be a couple of days.

*Update 5/27/10* BP declares victory on the ‘top kill’ effort.  Cam view is kinda dull, ROV just seems to be sweeping across the apparatus, presumably looking for leaks or whatever.

*Update 11:02A PT* Cam is back on the injector thingie, looks like they are pumping more mud again?

Let there be life!

Science scores another milestone with J. Craig Venter Institute’s first critter with ‘synthetic’ DNA.  When we last left our hero, Venter had scored two much ballyhooed accomplishments.  First, he transfered the complete genetic material from one bacterium to another, effectively transforming the recipient cell into the species of the donor.  He also managed to completely synthesize the genome of an existing bacterium.

In this latest milestone, he took the synthetic genome and implanted it into another bacterium (whose genetic material had been removed), and voila – he ended up with a living bacterium of the donor species whose genome had been synthesized.

As with any significant new development of this magnitude, all the usual bloviators are out there, from boosters claiming how this will create a cure for British Petroleum, to skeptical peers saying that this is really nothing new, from doom-sayers warning that this will be used by so-called bio-terrorists, to self-appointed ‘moralists’ who claim that only God can create life.

It’s that last bit that I find so fascinating.  Think of the Herculean nearly two centuries-long attack on Evolution by Troglodytic Creationists – just to justify some cockamamie back-of-the napkin calculations of the world’s age made by some drunken Anglican Minister back in the day!

The Creationists (and their misshapen offspring, the Intelligent Designer crowd) have created torturous arguments against gradual speciation driven by natural selection.  My first thought, upon hearing of the Venter achievement, was that this would really blow their minds.  If humans can completely synthesize an existing genome, and implant that into a bacterial cell ‘shell’ to create a synthetic clone, it will be fairly trivial for us to design and synthesize a completely novel genome – carrying out an act that, according to the countless dress-wearing, bearded hierarchs of fundamentalist orthodoxy – can only be done by God.

You might argue that since Venter used the de-genomed cell body of the recipient bacteria to host his creation, rather than creating a cell body ‘from scratch,’ that we haven’t fully succeeded in creating life.  And indeed, it may be some time before scientists can ‘synthesize’ a usable cell body.  However I won’t be surprised on the day when Venter or some similar pioneer does just that – and it will be impossible to argue that humans can not only create a novel species, but in fact can quicken organic matter.

But at the end of the day I don’t think the Troglodytes will have any trouble dealing with this or future events.  In fact, I’m guessing that this will just add fuel to the fire of their crazy reasoning – if a person can design and create a living creature from scratch, surely (they will argue) that is evidence that God did so for every living creature.

In the article Designing Minds, Edward Wasserman  has an interesting argument about the whole Creationist concept of the God as Watchmaker.  He takes a close look at very human inventions, from complex tools to various behaviors such as how a high jumper does a Fosbury Flop or a modern jockey does the monkey crouch, and points out that most human ‘inventions’ really come about through an evolutionary process and not whole cloth from the genius of the lone ‘Edison’ toiling in the lab.

I would imagine that artificial life will most likely ‘evolve’ in the context of the marketplace, with critters that provide wonderous humanity-benefiting boons getting tossed in the crapper, while critters providing solid commercial attributes rising to the top to reproduce in their quintillions to produce  money-making pharmecuticals, junk-food additives and other things that will separate the consumer from his/her Euro or Yuan.

And in the meantime, the Trogs will continue to joust at evolution curriculums and abortion doctors and give Big Pharma a pass at Being God.

Note how Ayn Rand Paul uses weasel words to imply that he is against Civil Rights when it applies to the private sector without having the balls to actually say that he supports the right of a private party to discriminate.  Private Sector sounds so innocuous until you consider what that applies to where you could work, live and shop – pretty much how we spend 50% of our lives.

You can see why I despise fucking Libertarianism and extremists like Ayn Rand Paul.

Tip of the ‘Nose to Movie Critic Buddy

The Huffington Post , among other sources, reported a couple of days ago that

“Fair Game,” the film about former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and the Bush administration’s leaks about her identity, is set to premiere May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Doug Liman, the producer behind the Bourne franchise, directed “Fair Game.”

Based on Plame’s 2007 memoirs “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,” “Fair Game” is the only U.S. film in the running for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.

The film’s trailer hasn’t made it online, but the clip below was posted to the festival’s web site.

The clip (posted above), though, raises questions about just how faithful the adaptation was.  As summarized by Greg Mitchell for the Nation:

It finds the couple–Naomi Watts and Sean Penn–in a playground with their kids running about, as Penn angrily confronts his wife over what he has just learned: that she may have written something that got him “sent” to Africa on that famous uranium fact-seeking mission related to Iraq WMD.

In the scene, she denies that she did that as he claims that if this gets out his career is ruined, and asks her to speak out. She suggests that maybe he did not think of his family first when he wrote that New York Times op-ed that drew so much attention…

Curiously, I don’t remember any of those moments being recounted in either Valerie or Joseph Wilson’s memoirs (on page 139 of her book, Valerie writes, “at no time did Joe or I ever consider that my cover and work at the CIA  would be compromised by the submission of the op-ed“) — but they do happen to be exactly in line with common, if false, Republican talking points during the controversy:

1. Valerie Plame Wilson sent her husband on the trip to Niger.
2. His wife’s role is an embarrassing fact that undermines Joseph Wilson’s credibility.
3. Joseph Wilson more or less invited the outing of his wife by publicly criticizing the Bush administration.

As many people, including Joseph Wilson, noted repeatedly during the past few years, these assumptions are absolute nonsense.  Why on earth would Valerie Plame Wilson think it would help her husband’s business to send him on an unpaid trip (except for reimbursing his expenses) to beautiful, scenic the bleak desert of Niger?  And how was Joe Wilson’s consulting business somehow dependent on a trip that he didn’t talk about until it was revealed in news reports a year and a half later?

Similiarly, as Plame herself notes in passing in her book (see the quote above), the idea that a career CIA officer working on vital nuclear-security issues would be exposed by her own government for the meager purpose of political retaliation was utterly unthinkable to most people… except, unfortunately, the cutthroat, politics-is-everything sociopaths who populated the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney White House (and their unquestioning acolytes).

Or, I guess, the amoral denizens of Hollywood studios, who are more interested in emotionally-driven conflict than accuracy.  As Fair Game’s director, Doug Liman (known previously for The Bourne Identity), said in an interview, the focus of the Plame movie was “story and character, and not… politics.” And I can see why people in “the industry”  might prefer a story about a CIA spy who secretly tries to help her husband’s career, but is inadvertently exposed by his media self-promotion, to the less combative, politically correct truth.

Besides, Valerie Plame Wilson herself is going to Cannes to promote the film, so I guess she and her husband have made their peace with whatever factual detours Liman & Co. may have taken in adapting their autobiographical accounts.  But maybe the need to accept personally insulting, false narratives just for the sake of getting their story told in some form is the depressing moral here… the Republicans make up a bogus version of events out of thin air, and it winds up being perpetuated because it serves the interests of certain moneyed factions (like Hollywood film backers) more than the actual truth does.

And everyone else has no choice but to accept it, and make the best of things.  And so it goes.

It seems like only yesterday when politicians were shouting Drill, Baby Drill to a growing chorus of SUV-drivin’ whiners.  Frankly, given the history of oil spills, I couldn’t help but wonder how politics in the U.S. could have shifted so sharply in my lifetime from a moratorium on new drilling to supposed Totalitarian Liberals like Obama and a ‘moderate’ Repug like Schwarzenegger pushing for renewed coastal drilling.

What a difference a multi-million gallon oil spill off wetlands, fisheries and resort beaches makes.  Now, thanks to BP’s fuckup and the failure of an oil rig that was supposedly spill-proof, it looks like additional coastal drilling may be off the table…at least while this is still in the news.

It really comes down to this – I don’t believe Americans can really remember stuff that happened before the current news cycle.  Seriously, just watch – somebody will discover some politician or celebrity’s reproductive organ lodged somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, the oil spill will fade from memory (along with countless threatened and endangered spills in the Gulf of Mexico), and Palin et. al. will be out screaming Drill, Baby Drill with renewed vigor.

It’s like all that talk a few years ago about how nuclear power was gaining new support. Obama even included building a few new of the unstable light water reactors in his energy plan.  What the hell will it take to take that option off the table, another Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl (history of those nuclear power accidents, in case you too have amnesia)?

The Teabaggers whine about paying taxes and not increasing social services…but to their credit, they pay their taxes.  Meanwhile, in Greece the protesters are whining and even burning people to death because of threats that their high level of social services will be cut…while not paying their taxes:

Income under-reporting is estimated at 10%, resulting in a 26% shortfall in tax receipts.

So I guess there are worse things than Teabaggers out there.

I’m probably poaching on Green Boy’s turf with this, but…

Q: What do you call a southern state allowing concealed weapons in churches?

A: Natural selection at work.