Boob Bob Redux

During the BP Oil Catastrophe last summer, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal insisted that the construction of artificial sand berms was a sure-fire means of containing the spill. Government and independent scientists objected: No underlying science supported the project, it would expend money and resources better used elsewhere, the berms couldn't possibly be built in time to do any good, and they might well be counterproductive. Just federal bureaucrats getting in the way of state leadership, Jindal bawled, and amidst the general caterwauling to Do Something Anything, the government reversed its position and allowed Jindal's vanity project to proceed.

Well, as Rachel Maddow reports, it turns out the Obama administrations concerns were justified. The berms, reported a bipartisan commission, were of no use but did cost a lot of money (and, incidentally, were a gold mine for Louisiana dredging interests; this was really little more than Jindal acting as a bagman for special interests). Watch:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Castles in the Air

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal continues to tout his sand berm scheme as a panacea for stopping the invasion of the Louisiana coastline by the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe. Others disagree with his assessment, and the evidence to date appears to bear them out. I'll leave it to the experts to debate the merits of the berms -- although Jindal scorns scientific expertise in particular -- but the entire notion has had a castles-in-the-air aura about it from the get-go.

Software development (which I do know something about) is not civil engineering, but I'd bet an investment banker's bonus that they share two key principles when it comes to scheduling and delivering:

1. Engineers will provide an overly optimistic delivery date based on confidence in their skills (a confidence that, in my experience, is usually justifiable), a strong desire to develop the project, and the natural optimism that infuses the beginning of any endeavor. However, all of this inevitably results in initial schedule estimates that to succeed require near perfect execution with few unanticipated impediments.
2. If the project has never been tried -- and on this scale, the berms have not been -- then all bets are off, and I mean all bets. The end result, if the project actually reaches completion, is as likely to be a counterproductive boondoggle as it is to accomplish anything positive. And in any case, it will not live up to its advance billing because the decision-makers will cut corners to avoid further delay.

The optimism of the engineers proposing the project is understandable: It's the nature of the beast. But Boob Bob Jindal has an obligation to be skeptical, to drill down (as it were) on the project milestones, to understand the pitfalls and push the engineers to prepare for them, to seek outside expertise, and -- above all -- to inject a note of realism into the proceedings. On these counts, he has failed dismally (although failure implies a degree of effort not evident in Boob Bob's approach to this project).

It's not like he hasn't been warned. Marine scientist Dr. Len Bahr has publicly questioned Jindal's the berm strategy on nine grounds:

1. Absence of science
2. Questionable justification
3. Opportunity cost
4. Environmental cost
5. Changes to natural flow regime: A technical argument that the berms could well suck oil into the estuaries they are designed to protect
6. Lengthy construction time
7. Fragility
8. Dubious benefits
9. Better use of funds

Jindal originally estimated that the berms could be completed within six-month; now, I believe they are talking about nine months. No matter: This project is a minimum of two years out.

Jindal will blame delays on the federal bureaucracy as surely as a liberal governor would blame BP. But the project itself is always the primary source of delays; that, too, is the nature of the beast. In the case of the berms, the likely source of delay is predictable: Boob Bob's Glenn Beck-like disparagement of science will come back to haunt him and the Louisiana coast.

For a project like the berms, marine scientists and ecologists must play an instrumental role in helping the engineers identify and prepare for setbacks. Jindal has dismissed their concerns. When these concerns are inevitably realized, the engineers will have no contingency plan in place or expertise to fall back on. They'll be groping in the dark, with all of the missteps and delays that that implies.

By then, Boob Bob won't care much, as he'll be too busy running for president to worry about something as insignificant as sand berms.

Our Barbarous Ancestors

The right loves to quote Thomas Jefferson above all other Founding Fathers. I wonder what they'd make of his assessment of the Constitution and his own role as a founder:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in law and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

In other words, don't amend the Constitution willy-nilly but always consider it within the context of the current day. Oh, and originalism is stupid. That's as opposed to, amend the Constitution willy-nilly to require a balanced budget, ban abortion, make English the official language, bar the native-born children of undocumented workers from citizenship, allow school prayer, and repeal the 17th Amendment while otherwise keeping the law of the land rooted firmly in 1789 and in however we and only we interpret the collective mind of the Founding Fathers...

Absolute must read: D2D reveals the pet-owner relationship between Boob Bob Jindal and two powerful members of Louisiana's oil oligarchy...

Sunday Funnies & Arts

As always, click to enlarge...




















NEWS OF THE WEAK

"Our message to the federal government is lead or get out of the way." Thus spaketh Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, whose lack of foresight and preparedness was exposed last week by the New York Times. If the federal government withdrew the Coast Guard and the dozen agencies working on the spill, Jindal would shit his britches, and I don't mean figuratively. The stench emanating from the Lousiana governor's office would permeate the walls of Fort Knox with the pungency of a thousand rotting nutrias. Jindal would crawl to Washington on his hands and knees to beg Barack Obama for help and publicly declare that any way the president wanted to handle the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe was fine by Bobby Jindal. Just to make sure that the message had gotten through, Jindal would call an international press conference to beg for cap-and-trade legislation, then go to New Orleans and kiss Al Gore's butt on Canal Street at high noon and swear on the Holy Bible that it smelled like roses. Talk is really, really cheap...

Although the headline allegation of "BP, feds too cozy for some in assessing damage," the actual story tells a different tale and shows yet again that, when it comes to the BP/H Catastrophe, there are a lot hard questions with no easy answers. It turns out that the administration's approach aligns with the the Oil Pollution Action of 1990, which requires that the government and the oil company involved work in tandem to evaluate damage. And it further turns out that there are good reasons for that. Which isn't to say that the concern isn't real or that Congress shouldn't monitor the process. (After eight years of Bush-Cheney, the country needs the legislative branch to reassert its independence.) But cozy? The headline misleads to the point of dissembling. And that's all that many people will read...

Charles Krauthammer, the Likud's Minister of Truth, writes that...oh, never mind...

THE WILD WORLD OF SPORTS
The Washington Nationals have signed 78-year old Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez to a minor league contract. "We're really happy for him to come back and pitch again," said brother and possible teammate 68-year old Livan Hernandez. The younger Hernandez claimed that his brother is throwing in the low-to-mid 90s, then revealed that Fidel Castro has been a CIA mole for more than fifty years...

What Could Be More American? Dept: Always on the lookout for a quick buck, Major League Baseball observed America's birthday by outfitting several teams in moronic tricolor beanies, complete with star-spangled logos, available to patriotic fans for $36.99. Ever generous, MLB is contributing a whopping dollar of each sale a veteran's organization. I'm happy to say that the Red Sox did not sully Fenway Park with this homage to avarice...

The New York Daily News reports that the Knicks expect to acquire three-time All Star PG Tony Parker (aka Eva Longoria's husband) for what amounts to a week's takeout from Mott Street and a beer at McSorley's. I've been wondering what fantasy hoops is all about, and now I know...

PHOTO ALBUM
There is a cure for the summertime blues after all...

Drivin' down the road I get a feelin' that I should have been home yesterday...

Mandina's...

Old Glory overwhelmed...

I [heart] Vermont...

Jack Johnson and the girl with the man behind the gun...

Kraaaaaakk!...

The urban art of Sandrine Estrade Boulet...

FOR YOUR BURNING DESIRE
Indigo Girls, Staring Down the Brilliant Dream: Proficiency and precision elevate -- rather than lessen -- the passion and emotional thrust of these 31 live tracks from the Indigos 2009 tour. A fan's album if there ever was one, the singalong choruses add a warm feeling of community no matter what your gender or sexuality. And in soulrock singer Trina Meade, "Kid Fears" finally has worthy substitute for Michael Stipe...Steve Poltz, Dreamhouse: The kinder, gentler side of the veteran singer-songwriter emerges on this beguiling album compromised (mostly) of ballads and a winsome cover of "The Way We Were." Poltz fans will clamor for "I Love What You've Done With This Place" (video below) from now until the day he dies. It wouldn't make for a bad epitaph at that...Happy Talk Band, Starve a Fever: A rueful, dry morning-after of an album summons its inner Lou Reed with blues, country, and indie stylings that conjure the night before. HTB pleads for a jerk to see himself for what he is and leave the woman the singer loves; wryly recognizes that the guy who mugged you on the way home is only human himself, with bills to pay and a family support; reminds a barfly to take care of herself via a rowdy Irish singalong; and tells the tale of an insomniac anesthesiologist who mercifully falls asleep at a bar. Fun, observant, and shot on location in NOLA...

NOLA musicians speak out in the best way they know how (thanks, Foxessa)...

Second line with the To Be Continued Brass Band...

FROM THE DESK OF CITIZEN K.
As some of you know, I start graduate school this fall at the ripe young age of 55. Last week, I received a long list of summer readings and on-line tutorials for completion before class begins in September. These must be my first priority, so I won't be able to blog as often as I have been. The Sunday Funnies and Arts won't go away, and I hope to write 1-2 entries a week. And, you'll no doubt be relieved to hear, I'll still leave profound observations on your blogs while exploring the wonderful worlds of statistics and hospital finance...



Happy Fourth of July!

Oh When the Fools Come Rushing In...

It's become a popular pastime among the left to bash President Obama for the contents of the financial reform bill. And there's little question that the bill, despite some useful measures, does little to prevent investment banks from once again becoming too big too fail. But is Obama really the villain here?Passage of even this modest bill remains in doubt because genial idiot Scott Brown opposes a $19 billion fee on banks and hedge funds, a fee intended to pay for the costs of the legislation. Democrats have agreed to drop the fee, which amounts to a whopping .001 per cent of a $15 trillion economy, in the hopes of attracting Brown's vote. How can Obama or anyone else even attempt legislation to break up politically powerful investment banks when the the slightest reform can be derailed by someone whose intellect falls somewhere between those of Sarah Palin and a barnacle?...

Schadenfreuede Dept: The New York Times reports that Louisiana's response to the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe has been less than impressive. Among the revelations:

1. The state's response plan is incomplete and out-of-date, in part because Governor Bobby Jindal cut its entire R&D budget;
2. Delays to the vaunted plan to construct barrier islands arose not from federal inaction but from the scale and complexity of the plan;
3. Jindal has deployed barely any of Louisiana's 6,000 National Guardsman;
4. Despite Jindal's claim that "local leaders know best," state officials are not exactly major players at command table meetings...

Regardless of the Louisiana National Guard's minimal impact, the local police have found time to serve as uniformed security for BP...

The president is doing what he said he'd do: Try. But senators are already talking about compromise before even submitting the energy bill. It's not a matter of defeatism or cravenness (even if Toadstool Joe is one of the senators), but of what Lincoln called, in a different context, the awful math. Fifty-nine votes is not sixty votes. Period. There's no way around it. Reconciliation can occur only after sixty senators have voted for a piece of legislation; anyone making noise about reconciliation doing anything else is doing just that: making noise...

Thanks to Momma Politico for the above two nuggets. Today, she also publishes a telling list of Judge Martin Feldman's personal holdings. Let's just say that the words "energy," resources," and "drilling" make repeated appearances...

JUST A SONG: Still stuck in the moment of Tennessee time...

With silver bracelets on her wrist and flowers in her hair...

Rollin' in my sweet baby's arms:

Obama Homers; Republicans Strike Out. Again.

Last night, President Obama hit the ball out of the park with the seeming effortlessness of a Ken Griffey, Jr. home run swing. In ringing, confident tones, he called on the Congress and the American people to regard the economic crisis as an opportunity to get things done, to recognize and fix the problems created and left in place by the Bush Administration, and to create a better future by ending decades of political procrastination and tackling the issues of health care access and energy independence. Obama gave a sweeping, epic performance that once again displayed his remarkable connection with the American people: CNN's instapoll showed that 92% of people who watched Obama at least somewhat approved of the speech (68% strongly approved).

Throughout, Obama linked individual accountability -- from teenagers to bank executives -- as a critical to national recovery. In this way, he involved all Americans in the success of his enterprise in a way Bush never did. At the same time, he successfully co-opted what is left of the tattered Republican mantra of personal responsibility, extending it from would-be dropouts to the conservative constituency of bankers and executives. By the time Obama finished, the message to the Republican party was clear: We the people are taking the country in a new direction. You are welcome to join us -- and he offered the Hatch-Kennedy bill promoting volunteerism as a means of getting on board -- and if you don't, that's your problem. It was a bravura performance, one that actually left T. and I clapping...

The MSM and the punditocracy has been moaning all week that Obama was not being "positive" enough about the economy. As he has many times before, Obama showed how far ahead he is of them and standard political analysis. At no time during the speech did he paint the economic challenge facing the country as anything but extreme. He was positive about the ability of his administration and the American people to meet the challenge. IMHO, that's the kind of optimism voters respond to. Claiming that things look good when they plainly do not appears out of touch because it is...

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's broadly panned response to Obama exemplifies the Republican political dilemma. First of all, the 37-year old came across as callow, glib, and insubstantial; if this is the best of the Republican bunch, then they have a mighty thin bench. But even more telling were two failed attempts at humor, the first of which taunted Democrats for including funds for volcano monitoring in the stimulus bill. As Thom Hartman pointed out on Air America this morning, the bill indeed includes money that allows the United States Geological Survey to upgrade and maintain equipment left to rot by the Bush Administration. Among many other things allowed by the bill, the USGS can upgrade equipment used to monitor volcano activity.

But here's the thing: Those of us who live in the shadow of a volcano want the USGS to have modern, functioning equipment. We don't think of it as pork; we think of it as essential. To us, Jindal's jibe came across as a typically divisive Republican remark aimed at blue states intent on wasting the hard-earned tax dollars of red states. This kind of politics went down to defeat last November, and it's telling that the Republicans can't articulate an alternative.

Then there was the bizarre lesson Jindal drew from the Bush Administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina, namely, that the federal government cannot be counted on to deliver on anything at all. Now, one might suppose that the actual lessons lay elsewhere: That Republicans can't be counted on to respond successfully to a crisis requiring massive federal intervention, and that the government's ability to respond to crisis must be continuously monitored and maintained. Oh, and that the head of FEMA probably ought to be someone with experience in disaster response and not a political flunkie with a background in horse breeding. Just saying, is all.

And there's another level to consider as well. Many political analysts have concluded that the Republicans lost the 2008 election in September 2005, when the Bush Administration responded so poorly to Katrina. And yet here's the governor of the state most harmed by the Katrina fallout using this catastrophe as fodder for a lame attempt at a right-wing joke. How out of touch can you get?

The Republican party is in trouble, and the full dilemma of their self-made predicament is not well understood, most of all by them. There has been no shortage of helpful statements of the obvious -- I could tell them that they are short on cash and need to attract minority and younger voters while moving to the center. For that matter, so could my grandmother, who died in 1979. But how do they get there when their base regards Arlen Spector as a flaming liberal? Or when a majority of the electorate regards them as both out of touch and incompetent? And when their every action confirms that they in fact are out of touch and incompetent? (How many people who saw Bobby Jindal last night would be comfortable with him running the country? One, two, three...that looks to be about it.)

Last month, for Oklahoma congressman and original Heritage Foundation fellow Mickey Edwards -- who represents the shrinking Republican intelligentsia as well as anyone -- penned a self-serving op-ed piece in which he cloaked himself and those like him in the mantel of Ronald Reagan and then washed his hands of the hard-right base of the Republican party. The party, he wrote accurately if hypocritically, 

that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

In other words, "Don't blame me. It isn't my fault." And wouldn't it be pretty to think so. 

Except that Edwards and Reagan and the rest of the Heritage Foundation ilk are culpable. After all, it was Reagan who began the practice of bringing ideologues into the executive branch. It was Reagan who encouraged ridicule of the opposition. It was Reagan who opened the GOP to the Christian right, encouraging the assumption that these people could always be controlled. It was in the Reagan Justice Dept that the careers of John Roberts and Samuel Alito took off.

The GOP of today did not spring out of whole cloth. Its genesis lies in the tactics of Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich, and it first expressed itself in a major way with 1995 government shutdown and the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. I don't recall the Heritage Foundation jumping up and down to oppose either.

Its supposed noble heritage of classic European liberalism notwithstanding (Edwards actually claims this), the GOP's ugly secret is that it has been a haven for yahoos and know-nothings since the days of Joe McCarthy. (BTW, The Coldest Winter, David Halberstam's excellent book about the Korean War, successfully captures this period in GOP history.) This crew has finally taken over, ruined their party, and left the likes of Mickey Edwards wringing their hands from the ivory towers of Harvard while Rush Limbaugh cheers for Obama to fail.

Which brings me to the final horrid Republican miscalculation: They've gone all in hoping for the failure of a president that the country wants and needs to succeed. This is too much for even a mossbacked, theocratic stegosaurus like Pat Robertson, who pointed out the obvious:

That was a terrible thing to say. I mean, he's the president of all the country. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And if he doesn't, it hurts us all. Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally.

This is what the Republican party has come to: Pat Robertson is the voice of reason...

A film is in the works about the last days of Hank Williams. IMHO, the indie approach gives it a better shot at honesty and empathy than a full-blown Hollywood treatment...

More on Bobby Jindal's brutal performance here. My personal fave:

Fortunately he has a lot of time to improve his delivery. In the year 2040 he will still be younger than McCain was in 2008.

NOLAmotion remembers Antoinette K-Doe...

Her morning elegance...

Who Do You Love?

Him--


or this man who looks like he's talking through a hole in his throat:


The man who would be Vice-president...


Emmylou Harris, All That I Intended To Be
Who do I love? I love Emmylou Harris, that's who I love. While she doesn't live on the high end of the soprano range any more, her voice has become richer and fuller. It's perfectly suited to this autumnal, elegiac set about the hard lessons gathered from loss, sacrifice, and roads not taken. Harris wryly savors the irony that this wisdom accumulates as we near the end, leaving us  with only enough time to apply all of this hard-won learning to the past. As usual, she sings with great beauty and insight, often assisted movingly by the likes of Dolly Parton and Kate and Anna McGarrigle.  Highly recommended...

Septuagenarian Bill Moyers punks an "O'Reilly Report" producer:



Outraged by the 74-year old Moyers' aggressive violation of the producer's physical space, Bill-o retaliates:



Keith Olbermann explains it all: