Under The Knife

Damn you Montreal Canadiens. Damn you.

Still recovering from the surgery, and facing an over-nighter in Detroit later this week, this update will be short and sweet. Sort of like me. Without the sweetness.

In case you're keeping score, it's oil spill 37, British Petroleum, zero. It's been over a month since the exploratory well in the Gulf of Mexico began leaking thousands of barrels a day into the water, still with no end in site. BP will attempt a "top kill" on Wednesday, forcing pressurized mud into the well in an attempt to clog it, then seal it completely. However, to this point, nothing has worked, and if this maneuver fails, which is certainly possible - if not likely, the next plausible response is the completion of the relief wells at least 30 days from now. Add that to the fact that independent analysis of the leak has determined the flow rate to be significantly higher than the 5,000 barrels/day BP has touted thus far, and we have what can only be described as a disaster of epic proportions.

There has been some grumbling suggesting the federal government should simply seize control of the clean-up and well-capping effort from British Petroleum, removing them from the equation. Setting aside the delicious irony that some of the people engaging in the grumbling could be found as recently as a few weeks ago searching out television cameras to whine about how awful it is that the federal government interferes in private business, it's pretty obvious that these people have little to no understanding of how the government actually works. Unlike say, hurricane relief, in which the government has unfettered access to its own rescue equipment, like helicopters, transports, communications and security, the U.S. Navy does not have any deep water drilling equipment. In fact, the government doesn't own any oil drilling, containment or rescue equipment at all. So demanding they take over is really what? A demand they remove BP from the operation, then hire Exxon to come in and do exactly what British Petroleum is doing right now? Come on. Despite what the right-wing talking heads would have you believe, this is not a socialist country. The government does not own the means of production. Private industry does. And when private industry screws up, we have to wait for private industry to rectify the mistake. Sometimes you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Sometime this week Congress will consider a bill to delay a 20% cut in Medicare payments to doctors for at least three more years. Said cuts were supposed to kick in several years ago to help reduce the cost of the Medicare program and save the government money. But due to a "flaw" in the formula used to arrive at the reduction amount, everyone in Congress seems to agree that the size of the cuts, and the short period of time during which they would be implemented would cripple the program and leave many Medicare patients without coverage. A reasonable person might conclude that if there was a "flaw" in the reduction formula, the smart thing to do might be to revise the formula in order to arrive at the correct scale of reductions over an adequate period of time. However, Congress is not filled with reasonable people. So instead of fixing the problem, they will, again, simply postpone them, setting up the next Congress for an even larger potential cut, combined with three years of healthcare cost escalation. Brilliant. Lest you think this is an aberrant error for Congress, they've had plenty of practice with the Alternative Minimum Tax. When it was first passed, no one thought it important to tether the trigger for the tax to inflation. So every year, more and more people are threatened with having to pay it. But instead of simply indexing the AMT to inflation and forgetting about it, Congress passes a temporary fix for it every single year, for the express purpose of claiming they succeeded in not raising taxes on a certain group of voters. At what point will the public demand our representatives actually solve problems instead of simply running on them?

Last week, new Republican senatorial candidate and folk hero Rand Paul made a complete ass of himself on the Rachel Maddow show when he aired his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, (outlawing discrimination on the basis of race) because it "interferes" with the rights of private business to conduct said business however they please. You see, Rand Paul is a libertarian. (Well, a pseudo-libertarian. A libertarian who believes the federal government should supplement 50% of the income of his private practice really isn't a libertarian.) And while libertarianism sounds fascinating in academic debates, it, like every other purist political ideology, crashes and burns spectacularly upon contact with reality. Paul sincerely believes that no business should be forced to provide goods or services to any individual, for any reason. The "free market" provides choices, and the person being denied service could always choose to patronize another business that chose not to discriminate. Of course, by that logic, a hospital emergency room staffed with misogynists could refuse to treat a woman having a heart attack, simply because they are a private hospital and don't have to treat anyone they don't want to. The lady having the heart attack could then choose to have the ambulance rush her to a different hospital not staffed morons, hopefully before she dies of said heart attack, which would render her incapable of exercising her free market choice. It's stupid, and Paul knows it. He just doesn't care. It's his ideology. Reality be damned. It's too early to know if Rand Paul and his tea party supporters will pay a political price in Kentucky for their lunacy. The smart money says they don't. But it promises to be an interesting campaign.

Last November, a supervising nun at Saint Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, signed off on an abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old pregnant patient. Last week, news of her excommunication came to light. I don't care about the excommunication, one's relationship with a particular organization has nothing to do with the well-being of one's soul. What raised my ire was the reason given for the excommunication by the medical ethics director of the Diocese of Phoenix. When asked what actions the nun should have taken instead, the director replied, "...there are some situations in which the mother may in fact die along with her child..." Excuse me? The "right thing to do" would have been to allow the mother AND the fetus to die? That sounds so ridiculous it can't possibly be true, right? But according to Lisa Sowle Cahill, professor of Catholic theology at Boston College, "...The official church position would mandate that the correct solution would be to let both the mother and the child die..." Wow. I do not have the vocabulary necessary to express how ludicrous that statement is. I have always been baffled at the juxtaposition between the pro-life movement's reverence for the unborn and their lack of concern for the "post-born," but now I'm just angry. Life is precious. Even if it exists outside the womb. If this is what the Catholic church is offering, I don't want any part of it.

Finally, American researchers have developed what they are calling synthetic life. Doctor Craig Venter has taken an existing cell "blank" and implanted it with a completely synthetic, "home-made" strand of DNA. Yeah. In the words of Bartok the bat, this can only end in tears. Oh sure, at first this might be used to replicate vaccines much more quickly and cure diseases on a cellular level. But how long until someone holds up in a secret basement lab somewhere designing an army of perfect, superhuman embryos to implant in unsuspecting women in a plan to take over the world 20 years later? We are going straight to hell in a handbasket. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

There's A Hole In The Bucket...

...dear Liza a hole.

Okay, so the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is still leaking. More than 3 million gallons have leached into the water so far, with no end in sight. Over the weekend the steel dome British Petroleum planned to lower over the leaking pipe filled with a mixture of sludge and methane ice crystals, clogging the line to the surface and rendering the dome useless. BP now plans to try another, smaller dome to cap the pipe, and if that doesn’t work, fill it with a mixture of cement and shredded rubber. In other words, they have little to no idea what they are doing. Over the past decade the oil industry managed to convince a lot of people that deep water exploration and drilling were “perfectly safe,” that the chances of an accident were slim to none. Unfortunately, as everyone should have known then and certainly knows now, nothing is perfectly safe. BP assumed they could simply adapt shallow water clean-up techniques to deep water - that there was no real difference between the two. That proved to be a faulty assumption. It wasn’t the first, and certainly won’t be that last faulty assumption made throughout this process. Fossil fuels will remain as essential part of this country’s energy mix for at least the foreseeable future. But let’s not continue to pretend there is no risk and are no consequences associated with their retrieval. There are millions of people living on the Gulf coast who understand different.

Following heavy rains last week, Nashville, Tennessee found itself partially submerged by a swollen Cumberland River. There were complaints and questions regarding the fact that the Nashville flooding did not receive the level of media attention - positive or negative - that was given to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Seems to me that the relative lack of attention is a direct result of the vast improvement in disaster response over the past four years. If the Tennessee flooding was an unmitigated disaster, we would have heard of nothing else for the past ten days.

The big news of the day (Monday) was the nomination of Solicitor General Elana Kagan to the Supreme Court. By most accounts the former dean of Harvard Law School is a brilliant legal mind, a student of the law, and a consensus builder, able to sway others to her way of thinking. She lacks judicial experience, something her opponents played up even before she was nominated. But the idea that a Supreme Court justice needs to have judicial experience is relatively new. Prior to the 1980’s it was fairly common for justices to have little or no judicial experience. In fact, former Chief Justice Renquist spent no time on the bench prior to his selection to the court. Of course, little things like facts and precedents matter little in the modern ideological grandstanding exhibition that passes for confirmation hearings these days.

Frankly, I’m a little tired of the whole charade surrounding Supreme Court nominations. The process is so formulaic it’s boring. The President makes the announcement, his party praises the nomination, the opposition claims they’ll keep an open mind. Then the Senate convenes a hearing, both sides insist there will be no “litmus test” the nominee must pass in order to be confirmed, one side claims the nominee in a capable, intelligent moderate who respects the Constitution and will apply the law accordingly, while the other side insists the nominee is so far outside the “judicial mainstream” he/she couldn’t see that mainstream with binoculars and should never be allowed near the bench. Abortion always makes headlines, and Republicans always make a fuss about “activist judges.” Any justice nominated by a Republican president will be cast as “outside the judicial mainstream” by Democrats, and any justice nominated by a Democratic president will be cast as a “judicial activist” intent on shredding the fabric of America. It’s pathetic and it’s beneath us, and I wish we could just get on with it. There’s no need for a twelve week confirmation process, every single Senator knows right now how they intend to vote. The dog and pony show is unnecessary and insulting to the intelligence of people who actually give a crap about the Supreme Court.

In a situation straight out of Brewster’s Millions, Great Britain held an election last Thursday and voted for... none of the above? David Cameron’s Conservative Party captured more seats in Parliament than either current Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party or third party challenger Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. But since no party won a clear majority of seats, there is quite possible that Cameron will not receive the keys to 10 Downing Street, and not impossible that Clegg could wind up Prime Minister. Being the party in power prior to the election, Labour has the first opportunity to try to form a coalition government. Both they and the Conservatives have reached out to the Liberal Democrats in hopes of reaching some sort of consensus. The primary sticking point is Clegg’s demand for electoral reform of the sort that might prevent this type stalemate from recurring in the future. UPDATE: As of Tuesday afternoon, Cameron and the Conservatives have reached a deal with Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats involving a referendum on electoral reform, an “emergency budget,” and the seating of David Cameron as Prime Minister with Clegg as his deputy. Pundits expect this coalition to last anywhere from six months to a year before another election is called. Should be an interesting year in the UK.

In response to global investors’ panic and riots in the streets of Athens last week, the European Union committed to a trillion dollar financial bail-out package over the weekend for any country in the Euro Zone in danger of impending financial collapse. Currently that list is limited to Greece, but Spain, Portugal and Italy have also been put on notice. In order to be eligible for their portion of the money, Greece will still have to go through with the wildly unpopular austerity measures passed by their parliament. It is obvious that Greek citizens either do not understand the situation they are in, or they don’t care. My money is on the latter. This is a country in which almost half of those required to pay taxes, choose not to. The government employs far too many people, with far too generous benefits and far too little fiscal responsibility. Yet the Greek people seem to think that the rest of Europe should pay their debts while refusing to change their irresponsible behavior. They are acting like children, and therefore probably deserve to be treated as such.

Oh, and before someone starts bitching about how the Greek debt crisis is merely a precursor to what we will face here in Obama’s socialist America, a few important notes of distinction. The U.S. economy is the largest in the world, 42 times the size of the Greek economy. We have substantial margin for error. Most of the people in America required to pay taxes, actually pay them. A novel concept apparently. When the rest of the world panics, they don’t run to Greece for security. Frightened investors always flock to U.S. stocks, currency and Treasury bonds. That provides us with access to quick capital at reasonably low rates. And because we maintain control over our own currency, we have the ability to print, extract or devalue our currency if necessary to increase the value of our exports and extricate ourselves from the kind of debt trap Greece worked itself into. It wouldn’t be pretty, but we could do it. Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, all far higher up the “socialism” scale than we are with their national healthcare and free higher education. None of them are in danger of economic collapse. Neither are we.

And now for lighter fare.

Seattle Seahawks perennial Pro Bowl left tackle Walter Jones announced his retirement last week. If you’ve never heard of him, it’s probably because while the offensive linemen are the most important players on the field, they receive the least amount of glory. But for the past 10 years, Jones was easily the best player on a team with four straight division championships and a Super Bowl appearance, and has been widely regarded as the best offensive lineman in all of football. One staggering statistic of how good Jones was at the most difficult position in the game is this - in his 12 years in the league, Jones was flagged for only nine holding penalties. Nine penalties over the the course of 188 games. That’s the basketball equivalent Shaquille O’Neal committing only nine fouls in about two-and-a-half seasons! He should be a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame as soon as he is eligible. Others at his position have made it in on far lighter credentials.

Last week, the Oakland Raiders cut ties with former first overall draft selection JaMarcus Russell. Russell was, to say the least, disappointing. Over the past three years the Raiders paid Russell $39 million, and for all that money reaped a grand total of seven wins. An average of $5.6 million per win. I’m tempted to feel bad for them. It’s not often a team squanders such a massive amount of money on a single player. But I’m only tempted. Russell was selected first overall on the strength of a single game against an inferior opponent, instead of on his body of work at LSU. The Raiders should have seen this coming. There’s a reason that team has been so bad for so long.

Failure of the NHL to come to an agreement with the city of Glendale, Arizona has cleared the way for the Phoenix Coyotes to return to Winnipeg, where they belong. That’s right, I said it. Long live the Winnipeg Jets! Of course, nothing has been finalized yet, but unlike 1996, the NHL seems willing to place higher value on the integrity of the game than the potential size of the market, and there is a billionaire businessman in Winnipeg ready and willing to make it happen. Despite the increase in American viewership during this season’s playoffs, the league’s experiment with the sunbelt has been disappointing at best. Ice hockey teams should play in places where people love hockey. Canadians love hockey. More Canadian teams will be good for hockey. Let me know when I can order my Jets jersey?

The Chicago Blackhawks crushed my dreams of a Vancouver vs. Montreal Stanley Cup final tonight. Damn you Chicago! Damn you! Now I have to rely on the Canadiens - following a grueling seven-game series against the best team in the league - to defeat Sidney Crosby and the Penguins in game seven tomorrow night, then beat the Boston Bruins in seven games, before losing to those cursed Blackhawks in seven in the final. Sigh. It could be a long three weeks.

It feels like I’m forgetting something. Oh that’s right, the failed car bombing in New York City last weekend. (How the heck did that idiot find a parking space in Times Square on a Friday night?) I don’t have much to say about this other than the fact that it seems as though the quality of Al Queda’s operatives has deteriorated significantly. It’s almost as if this moron wanted to be caught. I guess a stupid terrorist is better than a smart one, right?

Finally, co-founder of the Family Research Council and noted anti-gay activist George Alan Rekers took a two week vacation with one Jo-vanni Roman, a male escort Rekers hired from a website called Rentboy.com. Confronted with the story, Rekers claimed that due to his recent surgery, he is unable to lift his luggage and needed someone to carry it for him. The trouble with this explanation - aside from the obvious oddity of a conservative christian activist hiring a male escort for a European vacation - is that in a series of photos taken of the pair at the Miami International Airport, Roman can clearly be seen standing nervously next to Rekers, carefully not handling the cart full of luggage. Anyone who reads this blog regularly understands that I have very little patience for people who make a living condemning certain individuals for the very same behaviors they themselves indulge in. Men like Rekers are among the lowest form of humanity, hypocrites, preaching one thing while doing the opposite. I’m sure his followers will accept whatever explanation he provides for them, regardless of how ridiculous they are, because they can’t afford to have the “liberal media” tear down another “good conservative.” But these clowns are a cancer in our society. It is perfectly acceptable for good people to have honest disagreements. But they should be honest disagreements, not charades.

Spill Baby Spill

I was supposed to go back to Detroit this week. Looks like I’ll be heading to Gary instead. I don’t think that’s an upgrade.

Last week, the Governor of Arizona signed into law the most stringent immigration bill in the nation. Among the changes is a provision requiring state and local police to stop anyone of whom they have a “reasonable suspicion” of being in the United States illegally and ask them for proof of citizenship. If any Arizona resident then feels the police are not demanding proof of citizenship from enough “reasonably suspicious” people, that resident will have the right to sue the police department.

There is nothing I can say about this bill that hasn’t already been said. So, I will revert to reiterating the obvious. This is the most ridiculous piece of legislation to come out of Arizona since the “birther bill” requiring anyone running for president to submit a birth certificate—about three days prior to the passage of this bill. I know it gets hot in the desert, and sometime the heat makes people do stupid things. But it’s not THAT hot. Not yet. Setting aside the material fact that the bill is clearly unconstitutional, (since immigration is the sole jurisdiction of the federal government, per Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution), is there a single honest human being on the face of this earth who could look me in the eye and tell me, with a straight face, that the phrase “reasonable suspicion of being in the United States illegally” is not simply thinly veiled Orwellian newspeak for, “Let’s pull over some brown people and send ‘em back to Mexico.” Seriously. It’s like they’re not even trying anymore. In order to be “suspicious” of whether or not an individual is a U.S. citizen, one would have to have some idea, or standard of what an “American” might look and/or act like. How many white Anglo-Saxon women do you suppose will be pulled over in Phoenix this summer and asked for their birth certificates? And don’t tell me white Anglo-Saxon women don’t enter and/or remain in this country illegally. I attended one of the most internationally diverse universities in the nation, I know for a fact that it happens. It just doesn’t matter to anyone in Arizona. White people are American. Brown people aren’t.

Seeking to score points with angry Republican primary voters in his home state, a now depressingly pathetic Arizona Senator John McCain voiced his support for the law this week, saying that since President Obama had “refused to protect the border,” the people of Arizona had been forced to take action to protect themselves. Last I checked, Obama has been in Washington barely three years, and President only 15 months. McCain has been tottering around the Capitol building for 28 years now, and has so far managed to “protect the border” by…. Yeeeaaah. In her column for the Daily Beast this week disagreeing with the content of the bill, Meghan McCain asked her readers to hate the law, not Arizonans. Ordinarily I would agree with her. The actions of a small group of people do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the larger body. However, in this case, that small group of people, the Arizona legislature, was elected by and to represent a much larger constituency—the Arizona voters, who have been shown to support the paranoid xenophobia of their elected representatives by more than 60%. Makes it difficult to separate Arizonians from this law. There’s something in the water down there. Must be the lawn chemical run-off from all those golf courses.

On Tuesday afternoon, representatives of Goldman Sachs lined up for a tongue-lashing before a Senate committee. In my favorite exchange of the day, when Michigan Senator Carl Levin asked Goldman CFO David Viniar if he felt anything when he read Goldman traders describing several of the company’s security products as crap, Viniar responded, and I quote, “I think that’s very unfortunate to have on e-mail.” That’s right. He’s not sorry he sold gold-painted lead to his clients and ripped them—and the taxpayer off on the other end. He’s sorry somebody was stupid enough to write it down.

In a related story, the government released documents last Friday detailing what was going on at the Securities and Exchange Commission leading up to the financial crisis. Turns out that several top officials, in addition to more than a few underlings, were spending far more time watching porn at work than they spent watching Wall Street. One regulator spent up to eight hours a day visiting triple-X websites, filling the taxpayers’ hard drives with lonely housewives and naughty college co-eds, then transferring them to DVDs to make room for more once the hard drives filled up. If we assume nobody at the SEC was working overtime leading up to the crisis, then it becomes painfully obvious that if this genius was spending eight hours—of an eight-hour workday, surfing for porn, he certainly wasn’t doing any work. And for this recreational privilege he was paid over $200,000 a year. Not a bad racket.

The oil spill that began with the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig last week now covers more than 600 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, and is seeping dangerously close to the Louisiana coastline. Eleven crewmembers are still missing and presumed dead. After initial reports indicated the actual drill segment of the rig might be intact, it has since been confirmed that the rig is leaking crude at a rate of about 42,000 gallons a day. Geologists involved in trying to contain the spill have indicated that in addition to blackened beaches and birds, the slick is likely to wipe out the oyster farming industry in that area of the Gulf for years to come. This may be overly simplistic, but when a windmill malfunctions, the worst thing to happen is the rotor fails to spin the turbine. When a solar cell malfunctions, it becomes a useless sliver of silicon. When fossil fuel production malfunctions, all hell breaks loose. At some point, the human and environmental costs of our addiction to fossil fuels must be taken into account in the cost benefit analysis of our energy matrix.

Finally, in a feat of wordsmithery that would make Frank Luntz proud, Spirit Airlines is introducing “pre-reclined seats” on all of its flights. And buy “pre-reclined,” they mean fixed, and upright. No word yet on whether the “upgrade” extends to the pricing, but Spirit could be poised to change the way we think of air travel in this country. Your plane didn’t crash. It merely landed pre-assembly.