Top Kill Is A Mudder, Security Strategy Potential, In Uma We Trust

Dana Milbank
Mitchell Bard
Leslie Gelb
Marwan Bishara

"Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?" - Malia Obama

"It just looks like he's not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this." - James Carville

"One of the big gambling Web sites published odds on what species would be the first to become extinct from the oil spill. Unbelievable. You know the odds-on favorite? Democrat." – Jay Leno

"Sarah Palin has now weighed in on the gulf oil spill. Finally, the voice of reason. She said that President Obama should grasp the complexity of the situation. Sarah Palin giving advice on complexity. What, was Snooki from 'Jersey Shore' unavailable?" – Jay Leno

"Oh man, and the stock market. Another bad day. The market is so bad, BP had to lay off 15 senators." – Jay Leno

Yesterday the Internet was so slow in my area that it often took 20 minutes to load my blog page. Thank you Comcast, for the job you are doing in upgrading my service...

i'm sooooo sorry...

President Obama has been getting slammed for making some apologies during his press conference about the oil spill. Dana Milbank makes comment on this, though I think we are falling into the John Wayne Syndrome, expecting our President to always act tough, as if he is a fictional character instead of a human being. For those who never have had therapy or spiritual development, one of the first things that you must do is to acknowledge your mistakes and identify your weakness. Then, you can take responsibility for the consequences of your mistakes, and then learn to forgive. As a nation, we are still stuck in a shark-like predator mode, where we can only move forward and devour our enemies... And Obama has to learn from his mistakes in handling the BP oil spill, it is proving to be quite a teaching moment. Too bad they never have college classes in how to be a leader through a national disaster, or even have a manual given to you once you win a seat in Congress...

"In case you were wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility." - Barack Obama

An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor makes the point that in order: "to prevent unexpected, human-caused natural calamities in the future will take something more: a demand for higher qualities of thought, such as a greater sense of obligation to others, a respect for one another’s views, and a longer-range regard for the collective good and the environment.


Those lessons aren’t new but they must be in greater demand as the pace of environmental problems requires more vigilance over virtues needed to run the complex worlds of oil rigs, chemical factories, nuclear reactors, and resource mines. It is not enough for one nation like the United States to simply tighten its own regulations after each disaster only to then import products from countries that don’t have such regulations. Oil spills in places like Nigeria might only increase if the US now ends offshore drilling without also cutting its oil use. Saving forests in the US without also helping other nations save theirs is only environmental NIMBYism – not real environmentalism.

Stewardship of the earth isn’t just an aesthetic imperative or a self-serving desire for sustainable use of natural resources. It is also a spiritual exercise in how people get along and define progress for their society. After the plugging of the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher – and after all the anger, blame, and fear over the Gulf oil spill – the deeper lessons of this disaster must be learned." We are still in the anger and blame stage, may not get past it until we see the extent that BP, Transocean, and Halliburton pony up and take fiscal responsibility. Our fear is that they will actually be able to weasel their way out of it because of the weak and corrupt government officials that were placed there by the Bush administration... The head of the MMM resigned, time for the domino effect to get going...

The criticisms of Obam's national security strategy has begun, with the ink barely dry on the page. Leslie Gelb rates it as if it were a college term paper, points out a few things it lacks in way of structure. Marwan Bishara writes about what the possibilities may mean for the Middle East. Make no mistake about it, Bush and Cheney and their ilk were stooges, and their policies did more to piss off potential allies than to make friends and build cooperation. So, we are paying with two stupid wars that never should have been started and that has pushed our national debt into the trillions. Dear free market promoters, its those damned wars and not Obama's spending that has gotten us where we are, suck it up and acknowledge that your ideas don't work in the real world...

God help us if more right wing wackos get elected to Congress, they will try their hardest to put us on the wrong tracks to derail our economy and foreign policy again, all in the name of some antiquated ideals not worth the paper they are printed on. Let's hope that all of the tea party candidates are like Scott Brown, who has voted all over the place. He's turning out to be more moderate than the candidate he defeated, even if he's a pretty-boy-dumber-than-a-stump type. At least he's learning how to use his brain, unlike our dear Sarah Palin, who must have a reading disorder, or that not-so-rare foot-in-mouth disease...


in uma we trust...

In case you think you saw Wesley Snipes delivering your morning paper, or that it was Sylvester Stallone cleaning out the Slurpy machine, you might have been right. An investment manager who catered to the vain and naive Hollywood crowd was arrested this morning for scamming with a ponzi scheme, and was found hiding in a closet after agents noticed his shoes poking out from underneath the closet door: "Much like Bernard L. Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence for bilking tens of billions of dollars from his closely knit network of clients, prosecutors say, Kenneth I. Starr of Manhattan cultivated business at charity events and lavish parties, bridging the worlds of New York and Hollywood to build a star-studded client list of socialites, financiers, philanthropists, A-list actors and Hall of Fame athletes.

“Starr had an M.O. that has become unfortunately familiar in recent times,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said at a news conference on Thursday. “He used his access to famous and powerful clients to burnish an image of trustworthiness, inducing them to entrust him with management and control of their financial affairs.” It seems that Uma Thurman was one of the first to find out that something fishy was going on, her and the efforts of two others are listed in the arresting report. After getting a financial statement that said she lost a lot of money, she confronted Starr in his office and demanded over a million dollars be restored to her account. She was told it was in someone else's account, so she called that person. Her money was restored, but it came out of yet another person's account, so these three people went to the DA's office with the story and the ponzi scheme was unveiled. Mr Starr used their money to buy himself a lavish lifestyle to rival anything that can be seen in the HGTV show Selling New York...


Now that the top kill attempt has been suspended for a second time, perhaps BP is waiting for Mother Nature to sweep in and help disperse the oil...