The standing offers still stand

I'm just here to remind everybody that I am still available to serve as the next Inspector General or as one of the people who gets to investigate whoever is Inspector General or.. if need be.. a tertiary investigator of the investigators which is also a thing that happens sometimes.  It says here they are down to 4 candidates, which doesn't seem like enough.  My resume must have gotten lost somewhere. Did they look under Leon's big document backload?

Meanwhile, this is happening very soon.

The special election to fill state Rep. Helena Moreno’s seat in the state legislature has been set for March — with qualifying less than a month away in January — and the newly-elected member of the City Council says she will resign from the legislature as soon as her replacement is elected so that the seat does not go unfilled during the busy upcoming legislative session.

The primary is set for March 24. Qualifying is January 3-5. That is practically tomorrow! Who wants this seat? Do you live in District 93?  Let me know ASAP. I will tell you how to win it for one million dollars. 

Also in 2018, every US House seat is up for grabs again.  Today we read that Paul Ryan is feeling a little intimidated by Iron Stache considering retirement.  And you know what that means.

Either way, the convergence of these realizations—Ryan wanting to retire after 2018, and a possible threat to his speakership even sooner—has sparked a flurry of activity in the offices of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, the two most likely successors to Ryan.

Sooo... who is ready to run against Steve Scalise? It's a congressional race so you don't even have to live in the district! All the talk now is about emboldened Democrats challenging every seat in every state. Now is the time to do this.  My fee is one million if you call now. If you wait until I win somebody that State House seat, though, I can't promise it won't go up.

Congratulations to Jason on taking down Steve Bannon

No idea why anybody want to write for David Brock's bullshit outlet but, well, the timing on this was pretty sweet.

The Washington Post focused primarily on the bizarre fact that Bannon listed the Opechee Drive house as his place of residence, despite living in California. The article lightly touched on the state of disrepair in which Bannon left the house — including a bathtub apparently destroyed by acid.

But the truth turns out to have been much worse than that.

When Curtis first saw the house, the real estate agent, Beatriz Portela, told him the previous tenants “were not very upstanding people” and had “severely damaged” the property.

They had “put padlocks on all the doors, installed video cameras, and had ruined the bathtub, kitchen counter, and floor.”

Worse, though, was that it had been a “party house,” she said, known for frequent drug use.

Carlos Herrera, who owned the house with with his wife, Andreina Morales, painted a picture of what initially seemed to be a normal tenancy but soon evolved into an almost daily parade of debauchery and drug use, including run-ins with the police.

“The conclusion is she was probably cooking meth in here,” Herrera said of Bannon’s ex-wife. That would have explained the damage done to the bathtub and kitchen sink.

The Wa-Po story he references was pretty famous at the time. And I don't think it's entirely accurate to say it "lightly touched" on the thing that became a major conversation piece for months.  But it certainly was worth following up on.  I'm still not sure Shareblue is the appropriate venue for that follow up. Anything that appears there tends to be delegitimized regardless of the intent or professionalism of the reporter. This is not because of anything having to do with "bias" or partisanship. It is because David Brock is a dishonest propaganda merchant who nobody should produce content for.

In any case I am wrong because it clearly worked this time.

President Donald Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon has been fired, multiple White House officials told CNN on Friday.


Sources told CNN that Bannon's ouster had been in the works for two weeks and a source said that while Bannon was given the option to resign, he was ultimately forced out. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Bannon's departure, but claimed the decision for him to leave was mutual.

Of course, Bannon doesn't actually have to be in the White House anymore. Having won the 2016 election by helping to pull the center of American politics even further to the ultra right than it had been, his mission is already accomplished. In fact, by leaving now and setting himself up as the scapegoat he's actually helping to further institutionalize this latest re-positioning of the window. A significant segment of the press is bound to cast a post-Bannon Trump admin as more "moderate" in some way. And this,i n turn, is bound to give a newly independent Bannon room to go stake out territory further to the right. Meanwhile Steven Miller and Seb Gorka are still there.... for now, anyway.

More importantly, though, Paul Ryan is still hanging around waiting to put your grandma on a catfood diet just as soon as everything calms down enough to pass laws again. And, thanks to all of the above, he represents the "centrist" wing now.

Show em what they've won

I mean, show us all what we've won besides a reprieve for our pretty shitty but not as shitty as their health care system.. at least for another year.  What we've probably won in addition to that is the head of Paul Ryan.

Mr. Trump has told four people close to him that he regrets going along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s plan to push a health care overhaul before unveiling a tax cut proposal more politically palatable to Republicans.

He said ruefully this week that he should have done tax reform first when it became clear that the quick-hit health care victory he had hoped for was not going to materialize on Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the act’s passage, when the legislation was scheduled for a vote.

Ideally Trump would have ignored Ryan's "pleading" for permission to pull the bill today. A failed vote might have been enough for the GOP caucus to eat him alive.  But either way, the prognosis isn't good.

Anyway they have to try again at some point. This is one of their single biggest promises for the better part of a decade now.  Otherwise the plan for Republican Congresspersons would be to run against Obamacare again in 2018. Which is a thing they can do, of course, especially if they or some of their state legislatures find one or two piecemeal ways to shitty it up over the next several months. 

This is what they've always wanted

Pierce:

There is an increased stirring among allegedly respectable conservatives to separate themselves from the president* and his more manic supporters in the Congress and out in the country. To hell with them. Like Haman, they're dancing on a gallows they spent years devising. This budget represents the diamond-hard reality behind all those lofty pronouncements from oil-sodden think tanks, all those learned disquisitions in little, startlingly advertising-free magazines, all those earnest young graduates of prestige universities who dedicated their intellects to putting an educated gloss on greed and ignorance, and ideological camouflage on retrograde policies that should have died with Calvin Coolidge—or perhaps Louis XVI.

This is it, right here, this budget. This is the beau ideal of movement conservative governance. This is the logical, dystopian end of Reaganism, and Gingrichism, and Tea Partyism, and all the other Isms that movement conservatism has inflicted upon the political commonwealth.

Any discussion of this budget that begins with the supposition that Congressional Republicans can't or won't vote for it is dead wrong.  This is the stuff of their very DNA. It's everything modern conservatives have run on since the beginnings of their "movement."  They will pass this. It is what they've always wanted. 

Will the Republicans pass the Obamacare repeal: A handy guide

1) Does the Obamacare repeal bring with it a massive tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans?

2) Yes it does.

3) Then the Republicans will pass it.

All the other stuff about unhappy Tea Partiers or differences with Trump is... not entirely bullshit... but basically irrelevant. 

Never gonna get that "Seal Of Death" to work

This is from the introduction to Matt Taibbi's book on the 2016 election. He's talking about something a colleague of his has termed the "Seal Of Death" which is the traditional exercise by which the press exploits a gotcha moment (The Dean Scream is the prime example he cites) to ritualistically murder a public figure it has judged outside the acceptable bounds of The Discourse. 

In the case of Dean, TV stations around the country played the “scream” tape a whopping 633 times in the first four days after Iowa, according to the AP. They were like piranhas skeletonizing a waterfowl. It was viral media be­fore YouTube. As Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, later put it, “The establishment wanted to stop us and they did.”

Trippi’s comment implied that reporters were part of that establishment, which was a pretty damning criticism. But it was true. And people noticed.

It’s impossible to overemphasize the toxicity of this dy­namic. Politicians and political journalists were volunteer­ing to be trapped in an endless conversation with one another about which candidates, and by extension which ideas, were and were not suitable for consumption by the American people.

Trump was different, though.  Taibbi writes that, despite multiple opportunities for the media to apply the Seal Of Death to him during the campaign, it never stuck.

America’s population of otherwise Smart People was stunned. How could the electorate not care that a billionaire admitted to not paying taxes? Why was no one troubled by the threat of a child rape lawsuit? How was the “pussy” thing not fatal? What about the mountain of extant lawsuits— 75 open cases, according to some reports— for offenses ranging from simple nonpayment for services to sex discrimination? Why did no one care? Incredibly, the popular explanation floated inside the nY- Washington- LA corridor was that this was the media’s fault, that reporters were “not calling trump out” while simultaneously overfocusing on issues like Hillary clinton’s emails. But this explanation itself was a continuation of the same original misread of the public. Here was this massive new revolutionary movement rising out of the population, and the first instinct of the establishment was to turn  other members of the establishment for an explanation of why this was being allowed to happen. As in, where’s the Seal of Death? Why haven’t you vaporized this guy yet?

Several months after the revolution, the defeated establishment faction still doesn't grasp the problem.  They're still out looking for the one magic fact that will bring down Trump.  This is why MSNBC has deteriorated into McCarthyesque obsession with rooting out perceived Russian sympathizers.  It's also why Rachel Maddow was keen to run with a "scoop" (likely leaked by the White House) that Trump paid $38 million in taxes a decade ago. But none of this stuff, not the details of Trump's possible relationships with foreign agents, nor his many obvious conflicts of interest arising from his business dealings, nor whatever might eventually come to light via his tax returns is ever going to matter and here is why. None of it has anything to do with politics.

Here's something else Taibbi observes about 2016 election coverage.  He's trying to explain that Trump benefited from an insane amount of "free media" which is true. But far more interesting is that the reason for that reveals a key blind spot of the establishment punditry.

This part of Trump’s rise really was the media’s fault.

Trump was a legitimate news story. He had to be cov­ered. He was leading a historic revolt against his own party, after all. But so was Bernie Sanders, who got nearly as many votes as Trump in the primaries. Yet Trump received some­thing on the order of 23 times more television coverage than the Vermont senator.

Long segments of Trump’s speeches were broadcast un­interrupted, which seldom if ever happened with Sanders, even on traditionally left-leaning cable networks. If we in the media asked ourselves why that was the case, we came up with some damning answers.

It wasn’t just that Trump was outrageous and sensa­tional and lurid, while Sanders dryly pushed substance over salesmanship. Nor was it just the car-wreck element to Trump’s performances that kept audiences glued to the screen, wondering what crazy thing he might say next.

It was also the content. Trump sold hate, violence, xeno­phobia, racism, and ignorance, which oddly enough had long been permissible zones of exploration for American television entertainment. And the news media was becom­ing more and more indistinguishable from entertainment media.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders talked about poverty and inequality, which are now and always have been taboo. On a level that is understood by news directors in their guts if not their minds, hate is sexy and sells, while the politics of Ber­nie Sanders were provocative in the wrong ways.

A news director who made the decision to run a Sanders speech in its entirety would worry about being accused of making a “political statement.” Meanwhile, running Trump all day long would be understood as just business, just giv­ing viewers what they want. Editorially the press denounced him, but it never turned the cameras off.

In other words, the political press establishment refuses to allow political coverage to be about actual politics.  Whether or not the tax return story can be termed a "nothingburger" by anyone is really kind of beside the point.  Maybe.. probably.. there's all sorts of things to examine in Trump's financial records, should we ever see the rest of them. But none of that is what will determine his future in office.

Or, at least, there are no revelations to be unearthed that will in and of themselves lead directly to an impeachment. Given what we know about how impeachment works, there's probably enough already anyway whenever the Congress might want to run with it.  The question, really, is what might make them want to do that?

A simmering rebellion of conservative populists loyal to President Donald Trump is further endangering the GOP health-care push, with a chorus of influential voices suspicious of the proposal warning the president to abandon it.

From headlines at Breitbart to chatter on Fox News Channel and right-wing talk radio, as well as among friends who have Trump's ear, the message has been blunt: The plan is being advanced by congressional Republican leaders is deeply flawed - and, at worst, a political trap.

Trump's allies worry that he is jeopardizing his presidency by promoting the bill spearheaded by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wis., arguing that it would fracture Trump's coalition of working- and middle-class voters, many of them older and subsisting on federal aid.

Things have gotten so weird now that the only thing standing in the way of Congressional Republicans depriving 24 million people of health care is... Donald Trump.  I don't buy the speculation that the House GOP is conflicted about this at all. Repeal of Obamacare means a big tax break for rich people. That's all they care about.  If Trump helps them deliver that, then there is no problem.  If he becomes an obstacle, though, well then we'll see if they can apply their own "Seal Of Death." But if establishment Republicans are suffering from the same lack of judgement as the establishment press, it might actually end up being their funeral and not Trump's.

Freedom

Paul Ryan just wants you to have the freedom to drop dead.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday that he doesn’t know how many Americans would lose coverage under his proposal to revise the Affordable Care Act, which is under fire from fellow Republicans, AARP and virtually every sector of the U.S. health-care industry.

“I can’t answer that question,” Ryan said in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“It’s up to people,” he said. “Here’s the premise of your question: Are you going to stop mandating people buy health insurance? People are going to do what they want to do with their lives because we believe in individual freedom in this country.”

It's up to you. You can choose the live saving cancer treatments, or you can have your 218 iPhones.  That's what America is all about. Ryan says this is about freeing us from the yoke of the individual mandate. But actually he means to replace it with one that insurance companies can collect on.

The individual mandate — the loathed requirement that nearly everyone get health insurance or pay a penalty — would be eliminated in the GOP repeal bill introduced Monday. But House Republicans have come up with their own cudgel to compel healthy Americans to purchase coverage, with the goal of offsetting the costs of insuring sicker patients.

Their plan would require individuals to maintain “continuous coverage” — or pay a penalty. People who let their coverage lapse would face a 30 percent surcharge on their monthly premiums for one year when they next buy coverage. The idea, like Obamacare's individual mandate, is to prevent people from purchasing insurance only after they get sick.

I do not know if you can get out of it by buying your insurer an iPhone. I am amused, in the meantime, about the ongoing parlor game over guessing whether the "principled conservatives" in the congress will sink the repeal over issues they may pretend to have with these replacement bills.

Of course Republicans will pass the repeal. Why? Because it does the one thing they actually care about. 

Two of the biggest tax cuts in Republican proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deliver roughly $144 billion over the coming decade to those with incomes of $1 million or more, according to a congressional analysis.

Will the Republicans pass the Obamacare replacement?

Well, let's see, is it a big tax cut for rich people?  Yes, it is.

4) Taxes repealed

Finally, Ryancare repeals almost all of the other Obamacare taxes, meaning it probably won’t pay for itself. Repealing the Obamacare taxes on the rich is just a big giveaway to the rich.

That's really the only criterion that matters here. Yes, they will pass it. 

Movie time

Via the Wa-Po, we present, Git Yer Gubmint Hands Off Mah Medicare starring Donald Trump.



And yet, here they come for your Medicare.

The end of the democratic social contract

The Trump years are gonna be fun. Which of these are we going to decide we're no longer going to even go through the motions of attempting to provide for people?

Health care?

If House Speaker Paul Ryan has his way, the 115th Congress won’t just repeal Obamacare, it will dramatically reform Medicare, turning the program into a form of private insurance.

Ryan has long supported the controversial idea and, immediately after the election, he suggested that any Obamacare reform should include Medicare reform. Another key player, House Budget Chairman Tom Price, said Medicare reform was a top priority for the unified Republican government.

President-elect Donald Trump has yet to commit to further privatization of Medicare—which could cause a tidal wave of unease among senior citizens—and a Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. At a minimum, though, Ryan’s Medicare plans are a topic of negotiation between the speaker and the president-elect.

It's hard to know if we should even count health care given the sorry state of what even our puny somewhat public programs actually provide. But it's clear we're not moving that ball in the right direction.

How about public education? 

Donald Trump’s choice to be secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a woman who never went to public school, nor sent her children to public school, nor worked for public schools. She does, however, come from a wealthy family that has donated millions to the Republican Party. And she would be terrible for public education in this country.

As AlterNet explained in a 2011 profile on the DeVos family, the DeVos family is a prominent right-wing donor. Betsy Prince DeVos’ father-in-law co-founded Amway, while her brother, Erik Prince, founded the notorious private military contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater USA).

While many wealthy campaign donors have pet causes, the DeVoses have been particularly driven to promote school vouchers.

In 2000, the DeVoses launched one of their most ambitious campaigns, spending millions of dollars on an unsuccessful effort to convince Michigan voters to support a voucher initiative, which would have let parents steer tax dollars to private schools instead of public ones.

The 2000 ballot initiative was voted down by 68 percent of Michiganders.

After the loss, the DeVoses shifted gears, focusing instead on pushing voucher bills through state legislatures, which they have been doing ever since. They founded a group, All Children Matter, devoted to pushing vouchers. In 2013, the group, now known as the American Federation of Children, was fined $5.2 million in Ohio for breaking campaign finance laws, which it has not yet paid. The PAC was never registered in Wisconsin, where it was hammered by the press.

American Federation for Children has worked closely with Religious Right groups that can motivate voters from their homes and churches. It also coordinates its planning through the Council for National Policy, a secretive right-wing group that meets several times a year and gives members of the Christian right access to sympathetic donors.

Betsy also serves on the board of the Acton Institute, which merges corporate interests with dominion theology, or the belief that Christians should take control of political and social institutions. Earlier this month, the Acton Institute published a blog post titled, “Bring back child labor: Work is a gift our kids can handle.”

Not gonna spend our education dollar on your poor kids anymore unless they pray real good the way we tell them.  Failing that, it's send them down into the mines or whatever.  Doesn't matter anyway since we aren't expecting to develop an informed and educated citizenry anymore. Who needs that when we're not going to let anybody vote anyway? Which brings us to...

The basic right to vote? 

Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional law scholar at Yale University, tells me he worries it could all amount to the “beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction.” This is the name some historians use to describe the sustained 20th Century effort to codify civil rights and full equality for African Americans after decades of voting and institutionalized discrimination, just as the original Reconstruction period tried to expand democracy after the end of slavery — an effort that was followed by the sort of retreat that could conceivably happen again.

“The rest of the Voting Rights Act will become a dead letter,” Ackerman suggested, adding that he expects nothing less than a wholesale rollback of “the fundamental achievements of the Second Reconstruction."

One memory I have from the (later) heyday of the Rush Limbaugh radio program comes from  Election Day 2004.  Those of you who were alive back then might remember some mid-day exit poll reports being circulated which seemed to suggest that John Kerry could maybe possibly have been in the process of ousting George W. Bush.  Turns out these must have been "fake news" or something.  It's a good thing everyone avoids these errors today by just using Facebook.

Anyway, Rush, under the impression that Kerry might win, was in full panic mode and launched into a long loud diatribe about the need to seriously consider bringing back the property requirement for voters.  It was funny at the time because 1) that's crazy and 2) I was as hopeful at that point in the day as Rush was despondent and was getting a kick out of listening to him whine.   But it's also an indicator of where the right wing mind goes when it decides the democratic process needs "fixing."

And when a radical right wing party controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and very nearly enough state houses to amend the Constitution, this stuff gets less funny and more scary.

Maybe this is the "pivot"

So the word of the week is "normalize."  Various politicians of either party and media outlets large and small are said to be normalizing Donald Trump's behavior out of their own craven instinct for self-preservation. And, of course, the normalizers are those who can afford to be.

Oprah Winfrey, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, said Trump's recent visit to the White House gave her “hope” and suggested he has been “humbled” by the experience. The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins told his readers to “calm down” and that Trump wasn’t the “worst thing.” His college, Nouriel Roubini, insisted the Oval Office will “tame” Trump. People magazine ran a glowing profile of Trump and his wife Melania (though a former People writer accused Trump of sexual assault). The New York Times’ Nick Kristof dubiously added that we should “Grit our teeth and give Trump a chance.” The mainstays—Washington Post, New York Times and CNN—while frequently critical, are coving Trump’s transition as they would any other. President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have all issued statements recognizing Trump’s legitimacy and pleading we give him a chance.

Overall there’s a creeping sense that we’re stuck with Trump and we should make it “work” in some type of do-goody liberal appeal to patriotism.

But this is wrong, both tactically and ethically. Trump isn’t normal and he should never be treated as such, regardless of what President Obama and Clinton and Sanders say. These people are politicians, bound by a different covenant. The media, namely progressive media, is subject to no such charge. The overall message of normalizing Trump is that you can steamroll women, LGBT people, the disabled, Muslims, and people of color, yet everything will be okay so long as you win. Indeed, when asked if he thought his rhetoric had gone too far, Trump responded, “No, I won.” This is the logic of a fascist, and liberals are acquiescing to him by pivoting to “Trump as our kooky uncle” normalization mode.

As long as it isn't you they're coming for, you can afford to be smarmy.  Oprah has all the money in the world, can "retire" from whatever it is she does, and will probably live for as long as medical science can keep a person breathing. The rest of us have to worry about Medicare going away. 

Paul Ryan has been pushing to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance for several years. But now it's real with unified Republican government. He just said he will try to rush it through early next year while repealing Obamacare.

But hey let's "give him a chance," right?  If only you poors would observe the same rules of civility that your betters can afford to put on, none of this would have happened.  That was basically the theme of the Clinton campaign anyway.

And now they can even afford to take the random pronouncements of the unstable con man at his word. 

NEW YORK—President-elect Donald Trump said he would consider leaving in place certain parts of the Affordable Care Act, an indication of possible compromise after a campaign in which he pledged repeatedly to repeal the 2010 health-care law.

In his first interview since his election earlier this week, Mr. Trump said one priority was moving “quickly” on President Barack Obama’s signature health initiative, which Mr. Trump said has become so unworkable and expensive that “you can’t use it.”

Yet, Mr. Trump also showed a willingness to preserve at least two provisions of the law after Mr. Obama asked him to reconsider repealing it during their meeting at the White House on Thursday.

Mr. Trump said he favors keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies.

How? He doesn't know. More to the point, he doesn't give a shit. 

Trump is going to govern the way he campaigned. He's just gonna say random shit. One day he'll be for something. The next day not so much. If you remember watching the debates he sometimes managed to change positions multiple times within the span of a single sentence. It's weird that we're suddenly reporting on the random contradictory shit Trump says from minute to minute as if it has real policy implication. That's what comes with "giving him a chance," I guess.  Maybe this is finally the "pivot."

Nothing he says makes any sense. That isn't going to change. So it doesn't make any sense to watch him for cues as to what the policy will actually be. Today he's not so much gonna repeal Obamacare. Yesterday he definitely would. Tomorrow he'll tell us he's going to give us a big beautiful thing called Trumpcare. You will love it. It will be Medicare privatization, though, because nothing Donald Trump says means anything. He's not "flip flopping" he's just running his asinine mouth.

Congressional Republicans will figure this out soon enough. And they'll just go ahead and pass whatever. They can repeal all of Obamacare, some of it, or just pass a bill changing what it is called. Trump will sign whatever they give him, probably while simultaneously telling us he's against it that day.

Donald Trump is an idiot game show host who doesn't actually give a shit about anything. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress  and most state governments and, soon, the Supreme Court can do whatever they want now. All the while the media and your beloved "opposition" leaders will congratulate themselves on having given the con man a chance.  This is the circus we're signed up for.  Good luck everybody. 

Now is not the time to punch the hippies

If you find yourself talking about the need for "unity," stop.

If you find yourself saying there are any circumstances under which you are ready to "work with" the con man, you are already failing.

If you are going through the motions of delivering empty platitudes about healing "the divisions"  you are not helping.

If you are smugly talking down to the outraged kids in the street, please shut the fuck up.

Basically if you are setting up any sort of narrative that involves the notion that anyone should "give the new President a chance" you are a garbage human.  Or at least you are someone comfortable enough to not to have to worry about, say, the end of Medicare.  See also, this entire list.

Now is not the time for "healing."  Don't punch the hippies. Let them fucking march.  If they topple a few confederate monuments along the way, that's all the better.

Slow day, though not a slow news day

Laid up most of the day with a cold/flu type whatever. Turns out that, for some reason, there continues to be news anyway. Here is some of it.

• Yesterday at the BP trial was a geology lesson from Aberdeen University professor Andrew Hurst. The Gulf sea floor where the Macondo well was drilled is characterized by "rubble" deposited by landslides at the end of the last ice age. Because the rubble is unstable and prone to shifting, Hurst's testimony suggests that drilling there was a risky proposition for which BP had not adequately prepared.



Hurst also testified that an examination of a BP technical memorandum outlining the potential risk of drilling the well showed the expected temperature of the rock formation expected to hold oil would be 236 degrees, or at the higher-risk bottom of his Golden Zone.

Asked why the pore pressure issue was so important, he said, "Well, the fear is that the bore hole wall completely loses integrity, which means that, for example, if you try to cement it, there's nothing for cement to bind to ... because you're trying to cement geological mush."

That drew an objection from BP attorney Matt Regan, who pointed out that Hurst is not a cementing expert. Regan also pointed out that most companies drilling in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico do not agree with Hurst's contention that temperature provides a key to understanding pore pressure.

Several studies of the failure of the Macondo well have suggested that a failure of the cement used to block gas resulted in the blowout that caused the explosion and fire aboard Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig at the surface, killing 11 workers and causing the rig to sink.

Nice job by Mark Schleifstein to remind the reader of the consequences of BP's negligence at precisely that point in the narrative.  Well done.

Also, Hurst's characterization of the Gulf floor reminded me that during the height of the spill crisis, there were people wondering out loud whether or not the well should have been nuked shut. One wonders what the seismic effect would have been.. let alone any other fallout.

By the way, if you're interested in looking over any of the written depositions in the BP trial, they can be downloaded at this link.

Paul Ryan is still a liar

Hugo Chavez died today of cancer.

Within short order, police officers and soldiers were highly visible as people ran through the streets, calling loved ones on cellphones, rushing to get home. Caracas, the capital, which had just received news that the government was throwing out two American military attachés it accused of sowing disorder, quickly became an enormous traffic jam. Stores and shopping malls abruptly closed.

As darkness fell, somber crowds congregated in the main square of Caracas and at the military hospital, with men and women crying openly in sadness and fear about what would come next. In one neighborhood, Chávez supporters set fire to tents and mattresses used by university students who had chained themselves together in protest several days earlier to demand more information about Mr. Chávez’s condition.

“Are you happy now?” the Chávez supporters shouted as they ran through the streets with sticks. “Chávez is dead! You got what you wanted!”

Well, it's what some people wanted anyway. Chavez, of course, was a flawed figure but he did make a lot of the right sort of enemies.  John Lee Anderson has published what will be one of the more fair obituaries you'll see in The New Yorker.

Dambala has been busy.  His his latest on the Wisner Trust land includes a bit on how it could become an issue in the Governor's race, should Mitch Landrieu enter as a candidate.

But the real juicy part that I want to point out is that Chaisson stated that the only reason the Wisner land has any real value to it is because of the Port itself.  He then went on to say that if it went up for sale the Port would most likely be forced to act but...and this is a really big but....they would not expect to purchase the land at market value because the Port is the only real catalyst that drives the value of the land in the first place.

What does that mean?  I'm not exactly sure but I have a hunch.  I think he was suggesting the State of Louisiana may be forced to exercise eminent domain over the property if the City of New Orleans is intent on carving it up and selling it.  That could get interesting...especially if Mayor Landrieu makes a run at the Governor's office.  If eminent domain is invoked, it most likely would make the sale of the land a losing proposition to all the parties involved.

In Part 1.5, Ryan Berni stated that the City was exploring its options on what their intent for the land is and they would make no decision until they got a valuation on the land.  But that valuation may be useless if the State invokes eminent domain.

Shocking traffic news: Soon you may, in fact, be allowed to turn left on Tulane Avenue.

The proposed changes include reducing traffic lanes from six nine-foot lanes to four eleven-foot lanes to make room for improvements. Though the number of traffic lanes will be reduced, the new lanes will be wider and the neutral ground will also expand to 15 feet, allowing for protected left turn lanes at select intersections, Brooks wrote.

Even more shocking traffic news: CCC toll renewal nullified.

Opponents of the tolls, and the resulting close election, argued that provisional ballots handed to more than 1,000 voters who said they were registered, but were not on the registrar's rolls on election day, amounted to denying them a right to vote on the tolls. Provisional ballots allow voters to vote only in federal races, but not in state and local elections.

Morvant ruled that since the tolls issue was a local election, the people forced to cast provisional ballots were effectively disenfranchised by the election.

The new election is set for May 4. I don't think the tolls are going to survive this round.

The regular mayhem: Fires, shootings, buildings collapsing, police beating people they've handcuffed. But, hey, the water's safe to drink. At least, that's what they tell us.

GOP 2012 closing musical number

Romney Blames Loss On Obama’s ‘Big Gifts’ To Minorities, Women

According to reports in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, the former Republican nominee said during a call with donors on Wednesday that Obama had been “very generous” in doling out “big gifts” to “the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people” as well as to women throughout his first term. Benefits such as access to “free health care,” guaranteed contraceptive coverage, more affordable student loans, and “amnesty for children of illegals,” all combined to give the president a decisive edge in popularity.


“The President’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things,” Romney said. “Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”

Paul Ryan: I Didn’t Lose Because Of The Issues, I Lost Because Of The ‘Urban’ Vote 

In his first interview since losing the election, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wouldn’t admit that voters rejected his economic vision and instead chalked up President Obama’s victory to a large turnout of the “urban vote.” “I don’t think we lost it on those budget issues, especially on Medicare, we clearly didn’t lose it on those issues,” Ryan to local station WISC-TV. “I think the surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race.”

One more thought on the VP debate

Taibbi:

Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms.

But he should have! He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called "objective" news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, "Come back when you're serious."

Put the whining from FOX and from Limbaugh aside for a second.  We know who they are and why they say the things they're going to say.  The real danger to democracy lies in our timid, smug mainstream political press and its insistence on "civility" over substance in our politics.

We live in an environment where Paul Ryan can propose destroying Medicare, lie about it, and get away with that so long as he doesn't seem particularly agitated.   The trick to keeping the big time professional punditry on your side is to avoid acting like any of this actually matters to anyone.  It doesn't matter to them, after all.  Why should the rest of us care?

America's Crazy Drunken Uncle

I know I'm skipping out on my homework by not watching all the post-debate spin but I'm pretty sure I know what they're going to say and I don't care.

Joe Biden crushed Paul Ryan tonight.   We expected Biden to have the edge in foreign policy but it was especially important for him to call Ryan on his bullcrap with regard to tax policy and Social Security and Medicare. And on those points Biden didn't concede a thing.  Unlike Obama in his debate, Biden actually appeared to participate in the event.

To a certain point, I agree with Josh Marshall here.

Biden made the whole Democratic argument — on policy and values and he hit Romney really everywhere Democrats wanted him to. He left nothing unsaid. You can agree with those points or not. But this was exceedingly important for recovering the damage from last week’s debate when many Obama supporters simply felt that Obama wasn’t willing or able or something to make the case Democrats around the country are hyped up to make. Why didn’t you say this? Why’d you let him get away with that?

Biden said it all. And for Democrats around the country that was extremely important.

For reasons that are complicated and juvenile, during his vice presidency a caricature has emerged of Biden as some sort of Crazy Irish Uncle, gaffetastic and corny, a risible figure. That left people unprepared for what they saw tonight. Ryan was unprepared too. Biden’s actually one of sharpest guys in Washington and has been for decades.

That second paragraph, though, I don't understand at all.  I've always loved The Onion parody of Joe Biden.  Obviously there's humor in emphasizing buffoonish characteristics but I don't think anyone who pays attention takes that stuff at face value.  In fact, the buffoonish Biden scans very near to similar perceptions of President Clinton who was also viewed as a competent wonk.  So I don't think it follows that the "Crazy Uncle" Biden isn't also understood as "one of the sharpest guys in Washington."

Furthermore, you really don't get or care about the joke Biden if you don't already know something about the actual Biden in the first place.  So not only is it a fun joke,  it is also not a very damaging one.  If anything it helps to give an otherwise stale consummate "Washington insider" a patina of authenticity.

This isn't to say I think Joe Biden (or Bill Clinton, for that matter) is anything other than a big careerist phony.  Only saying that it's possible to know this about them, appreciate their intelligence, and also enjoy their character foibles all at once.

Grr Biden Smash

Too many things going on tonight to keep track of. But I'm staying in to watch the VP debate. Not because I think it will matter much but because it's likely to be the most entertaining event remaining in the 2012 campaign. Apart from the inevitable voter suppression and voter fraud lawsuit derby we'll be watching for the following several months, I mean.

Anyway, here's my favorite pre-game analysis I've seen this week.

You have a brittle prick who's coping badly with the media falling out of love with him, going up against a guy who embraces being a goof and plays the role well. Ryan has three superpowers—smug disdain, shameless prevarication and ducking the issue—and he's going to be locked for 90 minutes, in front of the entire nation, next to a dude with working-class bona fides, a subtly strong command of foreign and domestic policy and every incentive to wring Ryan's pencil neck.

And he likes to sing along

Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello on the fact that Paul Ryan is apparently a fan of his band.

I wonder what Ryan's favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of "Fuck the Police"? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!

Where's Bobby?

Can we get a camera crew to wherever in not Louisiana Bobby Jindal happens to be tonight? We need a real time reaction shot when Mitt doesn't pick him.

Update: Ohh that leaky leaky internet.  No need to wait until tomorrow.  Jindal loses out tonight. NBC says Mitt is going with the other freakishly hollow ideological kiss-ass.  You know, the white one. 

So hey, sorry it didn't work out, Bobby.  Since it's not so important anymore, does this mean we can have all our schools and hospitals and stuff back now?

Upperdate: Suddenly I'm having visions of Bobby Jindal committing dramatic suicide by drowning himself in the Gulf of Mexico like Kate Chopin's heroine at the end of The Awakening.  Only he wouldn't be the first pathetic creature to try that this week.  Oh well. Runner-up again, it seems. 

"Zombie-eyed Granny Starving"

Charles Pierce on Paul Ryan's latest masterpiece of dickery. Just go read.