More on MSNBC's hypocrisy and that Scarborough 'scandal'

As John noted today, MSNBC has banned Markos for being mean to Joe Scarborough. Good lord, those conservatives are thin-skinned and they're coddled.

Since MSNBC and Scarborough escalated this thing, we'll help pile on. First, Greg Sargent notes that Liz Cheney has run ads attacking MSNBC talent, but there have been no repercussions:

It's funny. I don't recall the chief of MSNBC publicly banning Liz Cheney from appearing on the network when she cut an entire Web video "publicly antagonizing" Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews for allegedly being too frightened to debate her about terrorism.

Nope.

And, Digby has more background on the scandal that Joe Scarborough didn't want anyone to talk about. It was the summer of 2001 when the traditional media was in a frenzy over the Chandra Levy-Gary Condit story. And, a frenzy it was. Condit lived up the street from me and the t.v. trucks were parked in front of his building 24/7. But, another intern died that summer and it barely made the news. The young woman died in the office of Rep. Joe Scarborough:

Meanwhile, that same summer, star up-and-coming Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, recently divorced under charges of infidelity, had unexpectedly decided to resign from office six months after being re-elected. Shortly thereafter an intern on his Florida staff was found dead -- in the office -- under mysterious circumstances with allegations of cover-ups by the local authorities and the quack medical examiner. And nobody in DC even raised an eyebrow. The story went largely unremarked upon and he soon found himself a lucrative perch as a highly paid celebrity gasbag.

Now I have to assume that Scarborough is either brain damaged or must want people to look at that story again because otherwise he would have let some innocuous, snarky tweet pass by. Now we all have no choice but to rehash the whole thing in order to explain why Markos has been banned from the network.

I'm guessing he's running for office again. After all, in today's GOP if you aren't picking up men in bathrooms, harassing pages by the dozen or hiking the Appalachian trail, you just aren't worth the teabag you're steeping in.

I'm not sure this is the kind of attention MSNBC and Joe Scarborough were expecting to garner after Scarborough had his hissy fit. But, again, they're the ones who decided to turn a couple of tweets into a major battle.

And, you know, tomorrow morning -- and every morning, Scarborough and his fellow pundits can commiserate about how mean everyone is to him. Read the rest of this post...

Tar balls discovered on east coast of central Florida

Local authorities are still waiting to hear if they are from the Deepwater Horizon or another oil leak. Let's hope that it is only from a fishing boat that recently sank and not Deepwater.

Tests are out on more than a dozen tar balls that have been found in a 2- to 3-mile stretch of Cocoa Beach during the past two days, according to Brevard County authorities.

Lifeguards said some beachgoers collected the tar balls in buckets. One woman said she found one that was as big as a roof shingle.

The tar balls have washed ashore at Lori Wilson Park, and also along the shore from 6th Street southward to the Cocoa Beach Pier.

Read the rest of this post...

Deepwater oil reaches Lake Pontchartrain

That's hardly a positive development.

It is threatened again after a weekend when tar balls and an oil sheen pushed by strong winds from faraway Hurricane Alex slipped past lines of barges that were supposed to block the passes connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the lake.

"Our universe is getting very small," said Pete Gerica, president of the Lake Pontchartrain Fishermen's Association.

The oil could be the second setback in five years. Hurricane Katrina knocked out seafood docks and lakeside restaurants in 2005. The lake's water quality also took a hit when the Army Corps of Engineers drained the city's contaminated floodwaters into the lake.

"So far, this stuff has been offshore for the majority of the population in the southeastern portion of Louisiana," Anne Rheams, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, said of the oil spill. "This is bringing it closer to home."

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27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in Gulf of Mexico

Now might be a good time to start investigating their status. As you might guess, the AP study has found gaps in the maintenance of the wells which are supposed to be sealed. This may explain why there were tar balls that washed ashore in south Florida that were not from the Deepwater Horizon leak. It's a free-for-all in that industry and again, self-regulation has proven to be a failure. Why do the Republicans consistently put big business ahead of everyone else?

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells — those characterized in federal government records as "temporarily abandoned."

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Obama is more pro-gay than Calvin Coolidge

Welcome to the new Obama administration talking point to explain away the grand disappointment that this President has become for so many gay people: He's done more for gays than any president in history!

Really? He's better than Millard Fillmore? Than Rutherford B. Hayes? Well then, what's to complain about? So long as the current state of civil rights in America is better than it was in 1823, then we should all be counting our lucky stars.

Of course, that's not the way you judge civil rights advancements, and it's not the way you judge presidents. They are judged by the times they live in. They are judged by what they accomplish given their current constraints. Of course Barack Obama has done more for gays than almost any president in history, since for most of American history the country has been rabidly anti-gay. Hell, even George Bush did more for gays than most any president in American history, because all the rest of them were pretty darn awful too.

What an absurdly greasy way to try to explain away the President's inability, or unwillingness, to keep his promise to be a fierce advocate to our community. Rather than touting how much better he is on gay issues than Martin van Buren, perhaps the President could simply keep the promises he made during the campaign: to fully repeal DADT and DOMA, and to pass ENDA. So far, none of those have happened.

I've written more about this over at AMERICAblog Gay. Read the rest of this post...

Hello? Any climate change deniers want to speak up about the weather?

They couldn't shut up during the winter when parts of the US and Europe experienced cold temperatures but now that it's roasting in the US northeast (and quite hot for parts of Europe) they are silent. In the winter they somehow missed other parts of the world who were well above normal winter temperatures though they did notice that the little world immediately around them was cold. We should be hearing them talk about how hot it is but we won't. They will also conveniently ignore any scientific reports on the global temperature for the year.

The deniers are conveniently absent.

Power outages in Connecticut, rail service disruptions in Washington and warnings to conserve electricity in New York City mark the second day of the Northeast heat wave.

As many as 9,000 customers of Connecticut Light and Power in Stamford were without electrical service Tuesday, according to the power company's website. A heat-related transformer failure at a substation in Stamford caused the outage, according to a spokeswoman for the utility company.

Temperatures reached 100 Tuesday in Stamford, according to the National Weather Service.

Read the rest of this post...

The Denver Post no longer wants to be linked to

Done. Read the rest of this post...

MSNBC blackballs Markos

Seriously. Markos Moulitsas, the editor of DailyKos, the largest American free-standing blog, is no longer welcome on the network because he Tweeted - yes, Tweeted - Joe Scarborough about Scarborough's own hypocrisy in complaining that the media won't cover Democratic "scandals" when Scarborough's own nothing-burger "scandal" didn't get much coverage either. Scarborough complained to the head of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, and Griffin banned Markos from the network.

Which leads to a larger question, and problem. So now, not only can you not say anything mean about conservatives and work for the major media, but you can no longer say anything mean and even be an unpaid guest on their shows. As if Scarborough, a far-right conservative, has never said anything mean? And none of MSNBC's other guests - conservative ones, to be exact - have ever said anything mean? Really?

I can't imagine MSNBC wants to go down this path, of having people scour the online, and offline, comments of every one of their conservative guests. But that's exactly what they've invited with this weird blacklisting policy that only seems to apply to liberals. And rather sane liberals, at that.

It looks as though MSNBC is a bit hyper-sensitive about its anti-conservative image, and may be trying to move more to the right. Which is a problem, since the network has done a pretty good job of being fair to both sides - 3 hours of conservatives in the morning, 3 hours of liberals at night. This move against Markos is troubling. Read the rest of this post...

Baucus blasts Obama for recess appointment

As Ezra Klein just tweeted:

You know what looks like a really good idea in retrospect? The three months Max Baucus wasted on the Gang of Six.

From the Hill:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) on Wednesday blasted the Obama administration for sidestepping Congress to install Donald Berwick atop the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Echoing the concerns of some Republicans on that panel, Baucus called Congress’s role in the appointment process an “essential” check on executive power.

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Pelosi shouldn't have to tell members to tout health care reform law

It's a truism of Washington politics that regardless of what Democrats do, Republicans will still blame them. So why not make the best of it? Democrats voted for health care reform lite, they might as well defend it, or it will be used against them by the Republicans. Pelosi shouldn't have to remind them of that fact.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doubling down on healthcare reform, betting that it will do Democrats more good than harm in November’s elections.

She and her leadership team have seized on new polls that suggest healthcare overhaul’s popularity is rising, and they are urging members of Congress to use this week’s recess to tout the new law.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the party leadership have sent lawmakers back to their districts urging them to hold town hall-type meetings to highlight the law’s benefits, in the belief it could help Democrats avoid major losses in November.

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BP won't use peat moss for clean-up because it can't resell the oil it soaks up

From Robert Kennedy Jr, we learned that BP has huge economic dis-incentives to clean up the oil. Let's say that better — it has huge economic incentives to keep the seas dirty. That story is here.

Now, thanks to Keith Olbermann on Countdown, we learn that dehydrated peat moss is an excellent way to soak up oil:

[D]ehydrated peat moss [is] not only capable of soaking up crude, which does not leak out afterwards, but microbes inside the moss break down the oil as well.

But BP won't use this solution, which has been around for years:

The owner of the peat moss company [told The Globe and Mail newspaper that] BP has informed him it cannot use peat moss because the oil giant would not then be able to retrieve the oil afterwards. And you may translate that as: the oil giant would not be able to sell the oil afterwards.

Money, folks. The beast wants only money.

The full Keith is below. The peat moss comment starts about one minute in. Then he discusses the subsidies that BP is still getting from the U.S. government.

Team Change — can we have some now please?

GP Read the rest of this post...

Selling hate with a green message (Front Groups: Part Deux)

Turns out old dogs don't learn new tricks, they just replay the old ones, in new(ish) ways.

As is the case with Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), an "organization" posing as an environmental group trying to convince young hipsters that to reduce America's carbon footprint, America needs to restrict its immigration.

It is connected to John Tanton, widely recognized as the godfather of anti-immigration movement.

As Mother Jones reports.

The argument isn’t new: John Tanton...kicked off his efforts in the 1970s by presenting himself as an environmental conservationist who was “concerned about what an unstemmed tide of refugees will do to the nation's resources.” Tanton helped launch a network of anti-immigration organizations that are now the core of the movement, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

And the American Prospect drills down even further on Tanton's work.

According to the Center for New Community, which monitors the white nationalist movement, Tanton has fostered over a dozen groups that work to reduce immigration. Six of these organizations, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), have been cataloged as "hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but Tanton doesn't seem bothered by his critics. He even framed a copy of the center's 2002 investigation of him (titled "The Puppeteer") and hung it in his office.

PFIR has tried to downplay its ties to Tanton -- I guess to lend itself a speck of credibility -- but the head of the group is a former lawyer for FAIR, just one of many connections explored in the American Prospect piece.

Both stories explore why PFIR is having a hard time gaining traction.

The environmental argument for immigration controls failed to gain much traction the first time: the links between overpopulation and immigration were tenuous, and anti-immigrant activists found they got farther by presenting immigration as "an affront on American culture [that] contributes to rising crime rates, and steals jobs from American workers," according to the American Prospect....

And PFIR activists are facing the same hard sell this time around, as environmentalists have accused them of finding a convenient scapegoat for environmental hazards when immigrants actually tend to consume and drive less than the average American citizen.

Adam Werack, the president of the Sierra Club in 1998, explains why the argument just doesn't work.

Immigration control is a foolish way to create an environmental perspective. It attacks people who are suffering, it allows people who are rich to be unaccountable, it's out of touch with the realities of changing demographics, and it's terrifically unpopular.

According to Rachel Maddow, for years FAIR was supported by a dubious funding source.

The Pioneer Fund describes itself as based "in the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement." For the last 70 years, the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the racial superiority of white people. The group's original mandate was to promote the genes of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution."

And, for the cherry on top, FAIR claims credit for drafting Arizona's anti-immigrant law.

What more can you ask for from a tired, racist, front group? Read the rest of this post...

Loan delinquencies rising again

Geithner remains confident (publicly, at least) that the economy is OK but there are plenty of signs out there that say otherwise. More housing problems and loan issues do not suggest a healthy environment or a move in the right direction. After the credit bubble excesses, it's not realistic to assume rapid recovery to the housing market. That process will take years. The good news in this report is that foreclosure rates are stabilizing. They're at very high numbers but leveling off is still a decent sign. CNBC:

Because the report also finds that the "cure rate," which is the rate at which bad loans actually get better, i.e. the borrowers start to pay again, is getting worse.

After a two-month decline, deterioration ratios increased, with 2.5 loans rolling to a "worse" status for every one that has improved. The number of delinquent loans that "cured" to a current status declined for every stage of delinquency, except in the "greater than six months delinquent" category. This improvement was likely the result of trial modifications made through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that transitioned into permanent status.

Oh good, so the HAMP program is helping "cure" those 6 month+ delinquencies. No, they're just delaying them yet again, since we know that the re-default rate on HAMP is only rising. Forget cure and think remission.

Read the rest of this post...

BP & Obama continue to block basic scientific research on spill

Shouldn't knowing the basics of the oil leak be a good place to start? After watching the Bush years push away science it would be a pleasant change to see the Obama team insist on at least knowing information such as how much is leaking. Is it really asking for too much? More from Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post:

A group of independent scientists, frustrated and dumbfounded by the continued lack of the most basic data about the 77-day-old BP oil disaster, has put together a crash project intended to definitively measure how much oil has spilled and where and how it is spreading throughout the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

An all-star team of top oceanographers, chemists, engineers and other scientists could be ready to head out to the well site on two fully-equipped research vessels on about a week's notice. But they need to get the go-ahead -- and about $8.4 million -- from BP or the federal government or both. And that does not appear imminent.

The test is designed to provide responders to future deep-sea oil catastrophes with valuable information. But, to be blunt, it would also fill an enormous gap in the response to this one.

Read the rest of this post...

Wednesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

You can expect to hear a speech from the President today on the subject of exports and how exports create jobs. Besides that, the White House will make another recess appointment. This time it is Dr. Donald Berwick, who will be named as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). GOPers have been blocking Berwick's appointment, like they've done for so many others.

Last night, Hawaii's Governor Linda Lingle insured her legacy as a hater and a homophobe when she vetoed civil unions legislation. Yeah, civil unions. I listened to her remarks and wanted to hurl. See, she gave the issue so, so, so much thought. But, you know, marriage is such an important institution. Lingle should know. She's been married twice and divorced twice. If anyone is wondering why the LGBT community is cranky, this is just another example. We're not equal. We have to Get EQUAL.

Weather.com tells me it's only going to hit 102 today. And, we still have the heat advisory.

And, I am so sick of seeing these BP ads on my t.v. They're ubiquitous. And, they're beyond annoying given the magnitude of the crisis that BP has created.

Let's get it started.... Read the rest of this post...

Venice debates demolition of Nazi pavillion

Should a building be destroyed because of its links to the Nazi era? It's true that Nazi-era architecture left much to be desired in terms of aesthetics but razing the building sounds so extreme. The building in question was built decades before Hitler and Mussolini and the symbols of Nazi Germany were removed in 1945. As unattractive as it may be, it also represents a certain era of design. Personally I enjoy seeing different eras in a city and don't have to see only one look.

When I am working in London, I often stay in a neighborhood (Lancaster Gate) that has a fairly consistent look except for a handful of buildings that were obviously slapped up post-WWII. (I've always assumed the originals were destroyed during the war.) They all have that typical post war look (that you might also find in parts of DC from the same era) but that's fine. Leveling a building for the sake of leveling a building sounds a bit extreme. Besides, leveling the building is not going to change the history that everyone already knows.

The call for the pavilion's demolition has come from the German architect, Arno Sighard Schmid, the influential president of the Federal Chamber of German Architects. "The pavilion is neither suitable for art, nor architecture," he declared in a recent interview. "It has no connection with the Venetian skyline," he added, insisting that the structure be torn down.

Mr Schmid's calls have since been echoed by a number of leading German architects and artists. Werner Schaub, the chairman of Germany's creative artist's association, wants the pavilion to be rebuilt. "One does not have to hang on to everything just because it's old," he said, arguing that the building was problematic because of its Nazi history and its internal design, which made it difficult to use as a place to exhibit art. "It would be good to knock it down and start again," he said.

German Biennale artists have also thrown their weight behind the demolition campaign. "It is one of the nastiest clichés about Germany around," an artist, Tino Sehgal, told Germany's 3Sat television channel. "It creates an image of Germany that has nothing to do with the reality of today."

Read the rest of this post...

British Conservatives now looking at NHS for budget cuts

It didn't take them long to eye the health care system. So far it's only talk but this crowd is only happy when they are destroying the system. It won't be a surprise if their next idea is to privatize the health care system as they're planning to do with the London airports. Because privatizing always works out so well for consumers in terms of higher costs. The Independent:

The announcement of £1bn of cuts in education on Monday has reignited a simmering debate inside the Conservative Party over whether the health budget should continue to be a "no-go area" at a time when other departments face reductions of up to 40 per cent.

One Tory backbench leader said yesterday: "MPs are getting a reaction in their constituencies about the cuts to the school-building programme. They are wondering why the NHS should be protected when the future of our children is apparently not."

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