Breakthrough in the oil spill? Or not.

Christian Science Monitor:

BP reported Sunday that its containment cap is now collecting 420,000 gallons a day, saying that was a 'majority' of the oil. But the flow rate in the Gulf oil spill is still uncertain, and BP has failed to live up to its optimistic predictions in the past.

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More than half of federal judges in Gulf region have ties to Big Oil

Surely they wouldn't let money cloud their judgment, would they?

More than half of the federal judges in districts where the bulk of Gulf oil spill-related lawsuits are pending have financial connections to the oil and gas industry, complicating the task of finding judges without conflicts to hear the cases, an Associated Press analysis of judicial financial disclosure reports shows.

Thirty-seven of the 64 active or senior judges in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have links to oil, gas and related energy industries, including some who own stocks or bonds in BP PLC, Halliburton or Transocean — and others who regularly list receiving royalties from oil and gas production wells, according to the reports judges must file each year. The AP reviewed 2008 disclosure forms, the most recent available.

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GOP South Carolina state rep calls GOP governor candidate (and Obama?) a 'f'g raghead'

Free Times:

With a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face outside a Columbia bar, Republican S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts called Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley, an Indian-American Republican woman running for governor, a “raghead” several times while explaining how he believed she was hiding her true religion from voters.

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.

“We got a raghead in Washington; we don’t need one in South Carolina,” Knotts said more than once.

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End of an era in Spain?

I've never been to a bullfight and don't have any plans to work it into my schedule. Apparently others are feeling the same about these events as Catalonia, Spain moves to ban bullfights.

Ten years into the 21st century, it seems extraordinary that a phenomenon like this still has a place at the cultural heart of a modern European nation. There is no underestimating the staying power of a spectacle that some would say forms part of the Spanish national DNA. Yet even in this most tradition-addicted society, the tectonic plates of custom are gradually shifting, and public opinion over the corrida de toros is polarised as never before. On one hand, the Spanish anti-bullfight movement, virtually non-existent 20 years ago, has made huge inroads into a society for whom the notion of animal rights was until recently a puzzlingly alien concept. A proposal is currently going through the Catalan parliament which, if and when it is finally approved this summer, will abolish the corrida once and for all in the region. On the other hand, the news value of the corrida has taken a surprising leap in the past decade, thanks mainly to matador José Tomás – front-page news across the world when he was nearly gored to death in Mexico in April, requiring 17 pints of blood after a bull called Navegante ripped a 15cm hole in his thigh. Not for decades has a matador captured the imagination of bullfight fans like this enigmatic and reclusive man, acclaimed as the saviour of bullfighting for the new dose of glamour he has brought to this most controversial and, some say, anachronistic of sports.

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Some excellent advice for the President and his team from Frank Rich

It would be great if the White House staff would read Frank Rich's column today and take heed. But, since they're the smartest people in the world (and they know it), it's hard for them to take the advice of others. But, if they could listen to someone outside of their bubble, this column would be a good place to start:

[Obama's] most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado.

By now, he also should have learned that the best and the brightest can get it wrong — and do. His economic advisers predicted that without the stimulus the unemployment rate might reach 9 percent — a projection that was quickly exceeded even with the stimulus and that has haunted the administration ever since. Other White House geniuses persuaded the president to make his fateful claim in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a particularly specious (indeed false) plank in the argument for his spectacularly ill-timed expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector. His default assumption seems to be that his peers are always as well-intentioned as he is. The single biggest mistake he has made in managing the gulf disaster was his failure to challenge BP’s version of events from the start.

One has to understand one's problems before those problems can be addressed. And, Rich does an excellent job of laying out them out.

As someone who supported Obama for President, I couldn't agree more with Rich's conclusion:

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

That doesn’t require a temper tantrum. Nor does it require him to plug the damn hole, which he can’t do anyway. What he does have the power to fix is his presidency. Should he do so, and soon, he’ll still have a real chance to mend a broken country as well.

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Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

So, no surprise, the talk shows are almost all about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (except NBC, which has the men's final of the French Open between Rafael Nadal and Robin Soderling.)

You'll see the man in charge of the Government's response to the crisis, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, on ABC, CBS and CNN. There are also a smattering of Senators (Kerry, Cornyn and Bill Nelson) and one Governor/wannabe Senator: Charlie Crist.

But, if you're going to watch anything on the talk shows this morning, watch the roundtable on ABC's This Week: Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas versus George Will and Liz Cheney. My money is on Arianna and Markos.

Also, the Democratic candidates in Tuesday's Senate primary runoff in Arkansas, challenger Bill Halter and incumbent Blanche Lincoln, are on CNN.

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The Clash - One More Time, One More Dub

Give it a moment to go past the intro which is not One More Time. Great song, but maybe a bit of a shock compared to the actual selection. A few glimpses of William Burroughs inside. Read the rest of this post...

British Conservatives go back to their roots - exclude underprivileged in schools

Once again, the ugly, elitist side of Tory rule comes forward. The Guardian:

The government's education plans have been criticised after it emerged that hundreds of schools being offered a fast-track to academy status are the most socially exclusive.

An analysis by the Observer found that secondary schools judged as "outstanding" by Ofsted are taking 40% fewer poor pupils than the national average. Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, has written to all schools inviting them to apply to become academies, a move that will free them from local authority control.

However, he is particularly urging "outstanding" schools to join the scheme and has approved them all in advance. "We specifically want to provide opportunities for outstanding schools to open as academies as early as September 2010," he wrote to headteachers.

Campaigners are warning that the policy risks creating a two-tier system in which resources and attention are focused on the most middle-class schools.

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Six mega-banks made $51 billion, remaining 980 lost money in 2009

The pinko left of the left at Fortune magazine really are too harsh. Can't they embrace change and accept that the Wall Street elite knows what is best for America? Oh sure, maybe there is less competition and the proprietary trading systems have rigged the system but that's what progress is all about. Then there are those who might suggest that it was anything other than chance or good luck that the big trading houses managed to avoid any losses on any day in the opening quarter of 2010.

Well, some were jealous of Barry Bonds homerun records or Floyd Landis winning the Tour. I'm just glad we have an administration that knows how to let Wall Street be Wall Street without hassle.

Wall Street's gravy train is in danger of being hijacked. Investors beware; the Volcker rule is the single biggest threat to the share price of the oligopoly. Another threat is the cap on future growth of the oligopoly.

The bill requires Federal Reserve approval for bank holding companies with assets over $50 billion before they can acquire a wide range of other nonbank financial companies, like asset managers with more than $10 billion in assets. Just how big a threat is clear from first-quarter 2010 earnings: Trading revenue at Goldman Sachs increased by 61% to $9 billion; Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase saw their trading revenue more than double from 2009.

Even more amazing, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase did not lose money during any single trading session of the 2010 first quarter. This astonishing performance underscores the casino the oligopoly has become. It bears testament to the payoff from the Wall Street bailout of 2008, which resulted in the elimination of competition and the concurrent strengthening of the few giants left standing.

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