The Anti-Oval Office Oil Spill Address

We've had anti-popes. Why not an anti-President?

Rachel Maddow delivers her "fake presidential address" -- the one she says Obama should have given instead of the one he did give.

There might be, as Maddow might put it in her playful way, "a wee bit of a problem" with the constitutionality of point No. 2 (commandeering BP to conduct world-wide boom training for everyone). But otherwise? Better than the one delivered from the balcony of the presidential basilica in Washington D.C.:

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Oily Profits vs. Public Safety

Escaping the Blame for the Oil Spill

There's plenty of blame to go around for the continuing catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: BP corp., Transocean, Halliburton, and the U.S. Interior Department agency known as "MMS," foremost among the guilty parties.

Last night, Rachel Maddow showed where some of the blame should be placed. She also gives us a glimpse at how the executive teams for these miscreants can gin up special stockholder distribution plans, if they have to, to avoid their own responsibility -- thus beggaring themselves before the bills comes due -- and how several Republican politicians in Washington, including Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) James Inhofe (R-OK), can enable them by misusing the dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate.

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The Stages of Oil Grief

It's becoming apparent that the BP oil catastrophe, for lovers of Pensacola Beach, among others, is going to be like a death in the family. As the smells and the toxins come ever closer, each of us is likely to experience something very much like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' "stages of grief" as first outlined in her book On Death and Dying.

A common representation of her ideas boils things down to this graphic, showing shock and denial... anger... depression.... bargaining... and acceptance:

One could quibble over the number and the exact nature of each of these stages, but the basic idea resonates with almost everyone who has lost a loved one.

Last night, to judge from his late-night blog post, the estimable Rick Outzen of Pensacola's Independent News leaped way ahead of most of us in the Pensacola Beach grieving process. Most people in Pensacola are still in denial or they're mad as hell. Rick already is plunging into feelings of depression and hopelessness:

We aren’t supposed to win. British Petroleum is a global oil company, which made $5.6 billion the first three months of 2010. We are a community recovering from three hurricanes, a depressed real estate market and national recession. I am the publisher of a weekly newspaper and creator of a little blog.
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BP will buy people off. They will run ads convincing us that all is fine. They will pay a bunch of $5000 claims, settle with the federal and state governments and continue to make billions every month. They will blame our claims and the cost of cleanup for “making” them raise the price of gas at the pump. Greedy Pensacola will pay for its claims at each fill-up.

We can’t win.

There's more, along the same lines. But his post was (as he confesses) written in the lonely hours after midnight.

Not to sound like an insipid neighbor trying glibly to help him buck up, but Rick Outzen has been doing a tremendous job sitting by the bedside of a desperately ill Gulf of Mexico. And he's been doing it for a very long time, often running extremely good and sometimes prescient articles in the Independent News calling attention to pollution of our waters and the indifference or outright hostility to the environment manifested by the voting records of too many of our elected leaders.

Lately, he's also become a regular contributor to The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast is an innovative and important news web site who writers often are guests on the razor-sharp, informative, and entertaining Rachel Maddow Show and Keith Olbermann's Countdown . Rick recently has been among them, too.

Kübler-Ross suggests that in circumstances such as we have now, friends and relatives should let those who grieve "talk, cry, or scream, if necessary. Let them share and ventilate, but be available."

You can be available for Rick by checking out his collected Daily Beast articles right here.

GOP "Nilhilists" Sink Bailout Bill

We spent some time tracking down first-hand reports from anyone who could bear witness to what really happened on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday when the bipartisan credit crisis bailout bill failed. Democrats delivered on their promise to hold their collective noses and deliver more than one-half of the total votes necessary; Republicans broke their promise to deliver the rest from their own members.

C-Span isn't permitted, by House rules, to show anything except blowhard congress-persons making wind for the camera. Most of the cable Tee-Vee political reporters, who have to travel with camera crews, customarily are kept off the House floor and had to hang around the cloakrooms. So, they could share only second- and third-hand spin stories.

But on Jim Lehrer's News Hour, the New York Times' John Shaw saw it with his own eyes:

Well, it was very interesting, because it's hard to know really how each party does their whipping operations, getting votes, but the Democratic side was much more active.

The speaker was right in the middle of it. There were swarms of people around her. They were feeding her notes. She was carefully monitoring the vote. She was sending emissaries over to the Republican side.

On the Republican side -- and, again, they may do it differently -- but the minority leader, John Boehner, was pretty much alone. It didn't seem like many people wanted to talk to him. Roy Blunt, the whip, was pretty much standing off by himself. His deputy, Mr. Cantor, was also pretty quiet.

So visually it looked like the Democrats were working harder. And at one point, Pelosi looked over and saw that not a lot of movement was going on that side. And she just said, in a very loud voice, "We're finished," which signaled that she was done trying to get more Democrats to vote for the package.

Boehner's peculiar quiescence inspired Rachel Maddow of MSNBC to ask a follow-up question -- "Who leads the Republican Party right now?" She came up with a surprising answer: the aforesaid "pretty quiet" Eric Cantor (R-Va), who is Assistant Minority Whip in charge of rounding up votes for the 'lonely' John Boehner.

Even conservative columnist David Brooks is disgusted by the Republicans' behavior:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the Republican Party.

Brooks holds out hope that some cosmetic changes might make the bill more palatable to Republicans on a second go-around to pass the bill, probably on Thursday. Possibly so, but it seems to us it will be even more difficult to talk anyone who voted "no" yesterday into voting "yes" tomorrow.

How much more embarrassing, and difficult for constituents to swallow, would it be for a congressman -- say, like the hapless Jeff Miller -- to vote for the bailout bill after voting against it? Inescapably, such a vote would mean the congressman voted at least once this week against the national interest.