swimming freestyle

Bill introduced to require preemptive relief wells

Having gone, unsuccessfully, from "top kills" to "junk shots" to domes to "top hats", BP finally threw in the towel and admitted their gushing well would (hopefully) be fixed when they had completed the relief wells they began digging following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.  Best case, it will be late August when the relief wells are complete.  That's over four months of leaking oil spewing into the Gulf.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg just introduced legislation that would require oil exploration companies to dig relief wells concurrent with the primary well on all new offshore drilling sites, insuring that a means of fixing a leaking well is in place before a leak occurs.  

The legislation, strangely enough, doesn't require already existing and operating offshore sites to provide relief wells.

"My bill takes a common-sense step to contain damages that come with the inherently dangerous drilling business. If relief wells had been in place before the BP rig explosion, the gushing oil could have been stopped in weeks instead of months," Lautenberg said in a statement sent to the Huffington Post. "Clean energy that will reduce our dependence on oil is the long-term solution - but while offshore drilling continues in the Gulf and Alaska, this bill provides a proven way to contain oil spill drilling disasters. I will also continue to oppose any energy proposal in the Senate that does not protect New Jersey from oil drilling in the Atlantic."

Gosh, this seems like the most basic common sense.  But between calls to immediately lift the deepwater ban on oil wells and the libertarian wing's chanting "government interference" at every attempt to regulate, I don't have a bunch of hope this legislation will ever end up on the president's desk for signature.

Sharron Angle says Harry Reid needs to be 'taken out'

Sharron Angle is the Republican nominee for Nevada's U.S. Senate seat.  Ms. Angle just won the state's primary and will face off against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in November.  For most Republican primary winners, there's a dance that follows the win: the one where you have to back away from all the bat shit crazy stuff you said to get nominated by bat shit crazy Republicans but everyone else finds repugnant.

Angle has been trying to tiptoe around her calls for eliminating Social Security and Medicare, dismantling the Department of Education, and a U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations.  She's gotten some big assists recently from Fox News, but I wonder how she'll be able to spin her call to assassinate Harry Reid.

From Greg Sargent:

Asked by the host, Lars Larson of Portland, Oregon, where she stands on Second Amendment issues, Angle replied:

"You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

There are, undoubtedly, lots of Republican candidates who say all kinds of crazy shit during a campaign that they either don't really believe or wisely decide to chuck in order to appeal to the voters who don't appreciate crazy shit. 

Ms. Angle doesn't appear to be one of those Republican candidates.

Alvin Greene for Senate

Ridiculous?  Oh yeah.  Fishy?  Way fishy.  But could Alvin Greene be a worse senator than Jim DeMint?

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Dems bow to NRA again

Remember the Democrats indignation following the recent Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to determine who would or wouldn't be elected?  President Obama called out the Supreme Court during his State of the Union address and Democrats developed a legislative strategy that they vowed would undo the Citizens United ruling requiring corporations and their CEO's to identify themselves in campaign advertisements and require the identify of all a campaigns financial donors.

But then the Democrats found out they would have to go up against the NRA.

Bowing to pressure from the National Rifle Association, House Democrats agreed Monday to exempt the powerful gun owners' lobby from key portions of legislation imposing new disclosure requirements on campaign advertising and other political activity.

Democratic attempts to bring the measure to the floor faltered last month when the NRA objected, and hurried negotiations on a compromise resulted.

Democratic aides said the leadership hoped the revised legislation could be brought to a vote before the end of the week. (Link)

Not exactly profiles in courage, are they?

'How big' will Obama go tonight?

President Obama has now done it often enough that it seems to be his strategic approach.  When tackling big issues, racism and health care are good examples, he allows the problem to fester for a while, throws a Hail Mary pass that's full of pragmatism and common sense late in the fourth quarter, and ultimately settles for a compromised solution that's often less than satisfying for all involved.

The president is scheduled to speak from the Oval Office tonight to address the Gulf oil spill and will presumably turn it into one of his fourth quarter speeches, this time about energy and climate change.

The question is "how big" will the president go tonight?

If the Center for American Progress really is pulling the strings on the President's energy policy, then POTUS will Go Medium Big: check out this memo from Dan Weiss, CAP's director of climate strategy: 

President Obama must use this moment to rally Americans to support a sweeping oil reform agenda that permanently changes the way big oil does business. This means building public demand for standards and investments that deeply cut the $1 billion per day spent on foreign oil, ending tax loopholes for big oil companies, and beginning to crack down on global warming pollution. 

If "Go Big" means a strong push for carbon pricing, then this would be the middle ground -- a speech that focuses on the oil industry, pollution reduction (including renewable standards and CAFE standard enhancement), lots of money for relief and reconstruction, and an assumption of responsibility for the clean-up. (Link)

It struck me that one of the tactical failures during the health care debate was going in with a compromise position right from the get go.  Rather than begin with a single payer system and negotiating down to a public option, President Obama and Congressional Democrats had no room to negotiate and ended up handing over the entire country's insurance needs back to the same private insurers who'd mismanaged it before.

I hope they don't repeat those same mistakes here.

The U.S. government STILL allows suspected terrorists to buy guns

We (well, the collective we anyway) are fine with lining up in airports, taking our shoes off, having our toiletries checked, and passing through x ray machines, all in the name of security and without anyone ever challenging whether those precautions violate the unreasonable search and seizure clause of the Fourth Amendment.  I suppose that it's our collective judgment that those actions are "reasonable" searches, and in our best interests as passengers.

It just seems like the craziest paradox that we're just fine with all that and yet allow suspected terrorists to buy guns.  It's as if there's been a collective judgment that the Fourth Amendment is, somehow, less important than the Second Amendment.  Or it's more likely that the Second Amendment just has a way more well funded and influential lobby.

Louis Klarevas takes a stab at pointing out the obvious; the sheer stupidity of a policy that fails to provide safeguards that would have prevented someone like Major Nidal Malik Hasan, under investigation by the FBI for ties to radical clerics, from purchasing the guns to go off and kill 13 and wound 43 at Fort Hood. 

...while the federal government has taken steps in recent years to improve airline security, enhance domestic intelligence, and clamp down on access to materials needed for explosive devices, it has done little to stop suspected terrorists from getting their hands on guns. These weapons remain cheap, readily available, easy to use, and deadly.

So what's to be done? It’s simple. Just as there is a no-fly list that keeps suspected terrorists from boarding planes, Congress should pass legislation that creates a no-buy list to prevent suspected terrorists from purchasing guns.

This seems like such a no-brainer.  A recent poll conducted of NRA members showed that 82% supported prohibiting suspected terrorists the right to freely buy guns.

The NRA claims a membership of just over 4 million.  So, 3.3 million of the NRA's members disagree with the NRA leadership position to give suspected terrorists gun rights, and only 700K agree.

It's crazy that those 700,000 could overrule the other 3.3 million NRA members, yet alone the 300 million Americans who think this policy is insane.

About those vast mineral reserves...

It turns out the reserves are fairly common knowledge.  The Soviets knew about the reserves in 1985 and, in 2007, the Bush Administration discovered a whole new reason for committing U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

From Marc Ambinder:

A former senior State Department official said that regular discussions between the U.S. and the Karzai government over how to best exploit the resources for potential future use were ongoing when he was privy to those discussions around 2006.

By 2009, the government had already begun to solicit bids for various mining opportunities. Jonathan Landay of McClatchy was on to the geopolitical importance of Afghanistan's mineral reserves in 2009, writing that China's thirst for coal might be the key to regional stabilization. 

Already, there are accusations that the REAL reason the US is in Afghanistan is because WE want to exploit those mines. That's a passable but facile interpretation of what's going on here.

Ambinder also wonders whether the sudden appearance of the story today might not be a way to convince increasingly skeptical Americans that, despite plenty of bad news coming from the Pentagon, Afghanistan is something the U.S. can't give up on.  

Matt Yglesias has a good post on Bolivia's failure to capitalize on it's lithium reserves and some potential issues facing a mineral rich Afghanistan. 

On the one hand you have a “foreigners come in to exploit resources in partnership with corrupt local officials” model and on the other hand you have the “socialist president scares off foreign investors so you can’t run the mines” model. Neither quite gets you what you’re looking for. Meanwhile, 80 percent of Afghans are working in the agricultural sector and there’s a risk that an influx of foreign dollars to invest in mining operations could lead to currency appreciation that makes agricultural exports uncompetitive. Of course if funds from mining operations are invested in ways that improve the productivity of Afghan farmers (better roads? irrigation?) then you’ve got a win-win. But if not, you’ve got a bonanza for whoever captures the revenue stream (corrupt officials, most likely) that could actually make most people worse off.

George W. Bush is on Facebook...

...and he's hawking his book (On the bookshelves November 9th! Reserve your copy now!) and promoting economic growth policy (no, seriously).

Vast mineral deposits discovered in Afghanistan

This will definitely change things for Afghanistan.  U.S. military personnel and geologists have discovered nearly a trillion dollars in untapped mineral reserves in a country that had previously depended on opium poppies as it's most valuable export.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. (Link)

Of course, everyone is going to want a piece of this.  From the Karzai government (just imagine the level of graft and corruption now possible!) to the Taliban to the U.S. to China. 

With friends like Karzai, the U.S. hardly needs an enemy

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has been an unreliable ally for the last several years.  Just a couple months ago, Karzai threatened that he might align himself with the Taliban.

There have been rumors for nearly a year that Karzai's government was negotiating with the Taliban, ostensibly to broker a peace deal that guarantees the Taliban a limited role in governing in exchange for ending their insurgent activities.  According to this NY Times article, Mr. Karzai may have another motivation for negotiating with the Taliban.

People close to (Karzai) say he began to lose confidence in the Americans last summer, after national elections in which independent monitors determined that nearly one million ballots had been stolen on Mr. Karzai’s behalf. The rift worsened in December, when President Obama announced that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops by the summer of 2011.

“Karzai told me that he can’t trust the Americans to fix the situation here,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He believes they stole his legitimacy during the elections last year. And then they said publicly that they were going to leave.”

“(Karzai) doesn’t think the Americans can afford to stay,” General Hilal said.

By most accounts, Karzai is an incompetent and corrupt president and disloyal to both Afghan and U.S. interests.  But he may have a point here.  Gen. McChrystal has already begun walking back the idea that the U.S. has a feasible exit plan.  American public opinion overwhelmingly opposes U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.  Add the recession and mounting U.S. debt, the recent news the Iraq/Afghanistan wars price tag just passed one trillion dollars and U.S. deaths in Afghanistan just passed the 1,000 mark and it's easy to see a consensus finally develop that this whole U.S. adventure in Afghanistan is unwinable, unending and ill conceived.