If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

Top brass from America’s largest oil companies (mostly BP executives) testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Since U.S. Attorney General had been dispatched to Louisiana to consider criminal charges against BP, BP officials could not say very much. This was mostly an opportunity for politicians to grandstand and to express their anger and self righteousness.

President Obama delivered a speech this past week on the gulf oil spill, front-loading it with a number of military metaphors and ending it with an extended call for climate change legislation.

Kevin Costner’s centrifuges have been deployed to the gulf. I can’t help but think, he was listened to, while dozens of other scientists (with their solutions) have been ignored, simply because he is a Hollywood guy.

FNMA has the patent on a tamper-resistant outlet cover. This cover cannot be removed from the outlet without a special tool, and it will allow someone not on the premises to turn that outlet off.

It has come out that the government’s Minerals Management Service, which is charged with overseeing things like BP’s deepwater drilling, has been involved for several years drinking, doing drugs and even having sex with oil-industry contacts. They have received gifts from oil-industry contacts and have done favors for them.

The U.S. Coast Guard refused to let 16 Louisiana skimmer barges return to the Gulf for 24 hours pending confirmation the barges had life vests and fire extinguishers

Unemployed and monosyllabic Alvin Greene, who recently won the Democratic primary for Senator in South Carolina with 60% of the vote, who did not have a website or, apparently, any official speeches or meetings, has been all over cable tv as of late. Many prominent Democrats blamed his election on Republicans, mostly calling him a Republican plant.

Hillary Clinton, in a foreign nation, lets it be known that the White House is going to sue Arizona over their immigration law. Right now, they are just trying to figure out why they are suing.

U.S. ships have gone through the Suez Canal, presumably to interface with an Iranian flotilla heading for the Gaza strip.

President Obama about Republicans who refuse to spend any more money: "If this obstruction continues, unemployed Americans will see their benefits stop. Teachers and firefighters will lose their jobs. Families will pay more for their first home. All we ask for is a simple up or down vote. That's what the American people deserve."

"There's nothing that we think can and should be done that isn't being done. Nothing," Gibbs said about the federal response to the oil disaster.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said, “Let's stop talk about cutting taxes, cutting taxes, cutting taxes” and “[let’s] look to the future with a little more compassion and bipartisanship.”

James Cliburn also said this: “I saw in the Democratic primary [in South Carolna], elephant dung all over the place.” This was his evaluation of Alvin Greene being elected as the Democratic candidate for Senator.

File this under, why no one watches Chris Matthews anymore: “Throughout our history, we have disagreed passionately over the role of the federal government and of our country`s role in the world, but we are generally a pragmatic people, not given to ideological extremes.

What`s scary today is the language being thrown about. Words have consequences. You can not call a president`s policies un- American as Sarah Palin has done, or refer to the elected government as a regime as Rush Limbaugh persists in doing, or the president as a foreign usurper as the birthers do, without giving license on some day to real trouble.

This April was the 15th anniversary of Oklahoma City. It is well to consider what happens when people act on what they hear, when the hatred of our own elected government becomes explosive. I`m Chris Matthews. Thank you for watching.”

Mike Malloy, far left radio talk show host, upset that Limbaugh said millions of children will die of starvation over this summer because there are no more school lunches provided for them: “Of course, for some reason, he, uh -- this filthy, disgusting subhuman -- who never has any trouble eating -- I'm sure you're aware of that from watching this gluttonous blob of goo bounce around on his TV screen. But his ability to denigrate kids. Here we have, how many million unemployed? Not like Limbaugh; Limbaugh, who gets paid $25 million, 50 million a year to be a lying shill, a scum-sucking piece of human waste for corporate America. Millions of people unemployed with kids, losing everything; and this disgusting lard just - Oh man, when the lights go out I get this guy! I swear to God I do!”

Carrie Fisher, in an interview, answered this question:

Do you think Tea Party is just people who are pissed that there is an African American president?

Fisher: “Yup, and the fact that they chose to call themselves "teabaggers," which is slang for a certain act involving b***s. It sort of says a lot. I would say a mouthful. Looks like it's very upsetting for them, but he's brilliant. The thing is, he's half white but that's still not enough -- for them it's all white or f**k off. I think we don't deserve him and certainly teabaggers don't deserve him.”

“Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian.”

Ben Stein “I question whether Mr. Obama has the requisite credentials to advise anyone on the economy.”

Newt Gingrich on the EPA’s inability to get back to Governor Bobby Jindal in time to keep the oil from coming ashore to Louisiana: “If the corps of engineers took longer to do an environmental assessment that it took the oil to reach shore; if your environmental assessment takes long than it takes to damage the environment, then that is a bureaucracy that’s stupid beyond belief.”

Louisiana representative Joseph Cao (R) suggested to BP CEO Lamar McKay “Mr. Stearn asked Mr. McKay to resign. In the Asian culture we do things differently. During the Samurai days, we would just give you a knife and ask you to commit Hari-Kari. My constituents are still debating on what they want me to ask you to do, but that being said, the cleaning up process has been a disgrace and the claims process has been dismal...”

Erik Rush: “What’s happened with the Black community is a test tube of what the hard left is attempting to do nw to the entire country in terms of dependency, entitlements, hopelessness, government control, and people now are starting to see that.”

"One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary." Ayn Rand, 1975

11 U.S. Warships have passed through the Suez Canal as an Iranian flotilla approaches Gaza.

This is probably the toughest ad I have seen against Obama; send it to your liberal friends:

Frank Luntz forum on Arizona immigration law (and both sides are well represented):

Rick Barber is running for Congress and this is one of his ads. It brought a smile to my face. I am waiting to see if this ad will be soundly criticized for its militancy. It puts the news services in a tough position. They do not want to acknowledge this ad, because it is so good. However, they would love to use this ad to criticize the “violence” which permeates the TEA party movement.

Even Jon Stewart is giving Obama a hard time (he does manage to skewer FoxNews as well):

Even Rachel Maddox wasn’t easy on him (not a surprise, she approaches this from a far left perspective, rather than looking at this from as a crisis of competence):

In case you haven’t seen the Bob Etheridge video, a college student asked him if he supported the Obama agenda, and Etheridge went postal on the kid:

[Jon Stewart points out, this is why you don’t wake up a sleep-walking Senator].

This is a celebrity focus group that Frank Luntz did, split between conservative and liberal celebs. Surprisingly enough, these people had nothing interesting to say. This had to be the worst focus group I have ever seen Luntz do. A couple of them made some nice, flowery 2 minute diatribes, none of which contained any real specifics, and I cannot recall a specific remark made by anyone about the gulf oil crisis and Obama’s handling of same. I don’ know if this was Luntz’s fault or if these celebrities just had nothing to say.

Jon Stewart is a funny guy; this is mostly about Alvin Greene (even if you are a conservative, he’s still funny):

1) The federal government has been shown to be unable to save GM, to put FNMA and FHLMC right, to police the borders and enforce current immigration law. At what point will this president realize that, everything he federalizes is just going to be one more thing that doesn’t work.

2) I guess I just don’t really get it. Conservatives and liberals both got down on Obama for his gulf oil gusher speech. To me, it seemed no different than any other speech. He seemed earnest, sincere, with an agenda, which he was going to try to push through. Quite frankly, this speech seemed no better and no worse than any other speech that he has given.

3) Essentially, what the Arizona immigration law appears to do is, put enforcement of federal immigration law into the hands of their local police (but with more restrictions). So, logically, if you oppose the AZ law, then you must oppose the federal law (unless, of course, you support federal ineptitude in enforcing federal law).

4) I must admit to being a little disappointed with Bill O’Reilly the other day. The BP executive spoke of the small people, and Bill and his 2 guests made a big deal out of this. I understood this as, this man was contrasting BP (big) with the individuals along the gulf coast (small), and that he would not attempt to bully gulf coast residents. I am not sure that his intention was to be condescending.

5) Remember the White House party crashers, Michaele and Tareq Salahi,? What you may not remember is, a guest on Glenn Beck’s program suggested that they were probably going to be in a reality show. Turns out she was filming for a Real Housewives series at that time.

The biggest bailout in U.S. history will probably be to FNMA and FHLMC; the estimated amount to be somewhere between $160 billion to as much as $1 trillion. Right now, their tab is at $146 billion and climbing.

52¢ a share for FHLMC. Both are about ready to drop off the stock exchange altogether.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took over a foreclosed home roughly every 90 seconds during the first three months of the year.

83 bank closures so far this year, which is about double 2009 numbers at this time.

About 25 former detainees from Guantanamo Bay camp returned to militancy after going through a rehabilitation program for al Qaeda members in Saudi Arabia. Do you recall that, when Bush was in office, there were so many complaints that these were innocent men swept up by mistake in war?

Before you become ecstatic about the $20 billion escrow fund that BP set up, only 5–10% of the tobacco fund actually went to tobacco-related issues and illnesses. It was, instead, spent on higher education, fiber-optic cable, and other such items in Virginia.

The media was outraged that BP CEO at yacht race Saturday, but they did not seem to care that Obama golfed

The major networks did not cover Congressman Bob Etheridge picking a fight with a student asking him a question (there is video of this), but they did devote a fair amount of time to Carly Fiorina making a comment about Barbara Boxer’s hair while on a live mic. What is the difference between these stories? Party affiliation. Duh.

Obama addressing the nation: “You may think I have some kind of clue as what to do, but I want you to remember, I am an attorney with very little real world experience and a guest professor. All I know about oil is, it’s bad and I think it is used to make gas. So, I have no idea what to do about the gulf coast. However, since there is oil all over the place, that gives me the perfect opportunity to explain to you why cap and trade is such a good idea...”

You may recall that we will be mandated, by the federal government, to have an Obama-approved healthcare policy. If not, we will be fined. Now, the DOJ (the Department of Justice) has defined this mandate/fine as a tax.

Comprehensive immigration legislation means we want to insert unpopular things into immigration legislation. The end result is, amnesty and, more than likely, little enforcement on the border.

Misguided (as in, misguided Arizona immigration law) = no one is being given amnesty and the law is too much like the federal law, which Obama refuses to enforce.

There are skimmers all over the United States which could have been brought into the gulf; and nearly a dozen nations with expertise in this area have offered up their skimmers and expertise. Why are you not taking advantage of these offers?

Obama’s late response to the oil spill in the gulf. Obviously, in the first 2 or 3 days, it may not have been apparent just how terrible this spill was. However, within the first week, this was clear. Now, several nations have offered up oil skimming craft, but they have been refused. Obama does not appear to be willing to change his mind on this decision. When these were first offered to Obama, maybe he made a mistake turning them down, but now, in retrospect, he could change his mind. But Obama won’t. It is just not in his nature.

It turns out that we have quite a number of boats also capable of doing the same thing, but most of them are being left right where they are, in case of an emergency in that particular area.

What is being done is, skimmers are being manufactured right now! It takes 2–3 weeks to manufacture a skimmer, and—let me venture a guess here—this provides more jobs, and, perhaps more jobs to union people (I do not know this for certain). So, maybe this has entered into Obama’s thinking.

There are a plethora of solutions out there to keep the oil from destroying more shoreline, but

Obama does not seem to be embracing to any of these. Even the EPA became concerned about the environmental impact of dumping sand into the ocean off the coast of Louisiana, which would have acted as an oil barrier.

Now, I cannot read Obama’s mind. I have no idea if this emergency is designed to help him promote a massive cap and trade legislation (which would, of course, have no effect whatsoever on the catastrophe at hand); or is the President just incompetent beyond belief?

If you think that Obama has the slightest clue as to what to do about the gulf oil crisis.

Next two sections are not cleverly written; I simply list the things which Obama has done and what he ought to have done. See if you agree.

President Obama has gone down to the gulf coast 4 or 5 times and has met with people and commiserated with them.

He sent Attorney General Eric Holder down to the gulf coast area to see about either suing BP or filing criminal charges against them.

He has gotten BP to agree to set up a $20 billion escrow fund, ostensibly to be used to pay those damaged by the oil spill.

He has gotten a guarantee of $100 million (if memory serves) to reimburse the workers that Obama is, for all intents and purposes, laying off.

Obama trusted the capping of the well to BP. It is unclear whether he entrusted cleanup to BP as well.

The president has not brought in the considerable technology which is available.

The President required Governor Bobby Jindal to submit the concept of dumping sand into the ocean to the EPA before it would be allowed.

He has not allowed skimmers which are strategically placed around the US to come in and assist with the cleanup.

Obama put a panel together to investigate the well malfunction who would determine regulations to keep this from every happening again.

President Obama waited at least 50 days before actually speaking directly with any of the BP executives. When he did, it was for about 45 minutes (he apparently popped his head in twice to this White House BP meeting).

There are 2 very different but related problems facing our nation: the capping of the well and the cleaning of the oil spill.

There appears to have been a breakdown of oversight by the government, which okayed all that BP was doing. Anyone associated with the oversight of those wells should have been fired immediately.

He should have gotten together a dozen or more real oil engineers with actual experience in the field, asked them tough questions and brain-stormed capping the well. At least one person I have seen has come up with a method of capping the well which BP never tried. A subset of these men should have been closely involved with BP when it came to capping this well.

There should have been an immediate attempt to work with BP, and not to demonize them. Once it is all over, there is plenty of time to assess blame.

No matter what the numbers, Obama should have agreed to accepting help from other nations when it came to cleaning the water. These offers began to come in on day 3, and Obama should have said, “Come on in.” This would have required suspending the Jones Act (which Bush did for Katrina).

Obama should locate those who have actually been involved in oil spills, foreign and domestic, and sought their help and expertise. One of these men should be chosen to oversee this operation.

He should have mobilized a task force which would not be subject to EPA regulations who would work with the governors of the states affected, designating, saying, 5–20 miles of water under their complete jurisdiction; and putting the water further out under the jurisdiction of his own people. Reasonable resources and finances should have been provided the governors. All skimmers from anywhere should have been brought into the gulf, splitting them up between governors and taking them out further into the sea.

Every effort should be made to keep the oil from reaching the shore, where it is most damaging

and most difficult to eradicate. Burning and chemical dispersing solutions should be used as a last resort to keep the oil from the shores.

Obviously, there needs to be interaction between the governors. If, say, Bobby Jindal finds out that sand barriers worked (or did not work), that information would be shared.

This is a time when people should have been united: governors, local officials, the feds, BP, other oil companies, and industrious and ingenious Americans. When it comes to workers, this would have been a time for Obama to assemble a huge workforce to deal with these problems.

When it comes to capping the well, we may still be in the same place we are in today. When it comes to cleaning up the oil, we would be miles ahead if Obama did his job.

Rather than closing down wells, a reconstituted oversight committee, containing people familiar with deep water drilling, will be sent out to inspect current wells, with the authority to shut any wells down when there are serious safety issues.

The meeting with BP should have commanded more of Obama’s attention, and the focus should have been on cleanup rather than on getting money from BP put into a fund. Money would be an issue, and if Obama, say, mobilized 100 skimmers (just a number I made up), it would have been reasonable to work out a situation where BP paid for that.

President Obama named five panelists to a commission tasked with finding ways to avoid a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 men and started the nation's worst oil spill. They will be led by a former Florida governor and U.S. senator, Bob Graham, and a former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, William K. Reilly.

The five are: Frances G. Beinecke, Donald Boesch, Terry D. Garcia, Cherry A. Murray and Frances Ulmer. They come from backgrounds of environmental science and engineering.

"These individuals bring tremendous expertise and experience to the critical work of this commission," Obama said in a statement issued by the White House. "I am grateful they have agreed to serve as we work to determine the causes of this catastrophe and implement the safety and environmental protections we need to prevent a similar disaster from happening again."

Frances Beinecke is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit corporation that works to advance environmental policy in the United States and around the world. Beinecke has worked at the council for 35 years, serving as executive director, associate director and deputy executive director. From 1974 through 1983, Beinecke worked as a coastal resource specialist in the councils water and coastal programs, fighting to protect marine ecosystems from the impact of offshore oil and gas development and advocating for sound coastal land use. She currently serves on the board of the World Resources Institute and the steering committees of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and the Energy Futures Coalition. She was a member of the Yale Corp. and currently serves on the advisory boards of the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science. She is the co-author of the book "Clean Energy Common Sense: An American Call to Action on Global Climate Change." She bachelor of science degree from Yale University and an master of foreign science degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Donald "Don" Boesch is the president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, where he is also a professor of marine science and vice chancellor for environmental sustainability for the University System of Maryland. Boesch assumed the position of president in 1990. From 1980 to 1990, he served as the first executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and worked as a professor of marine science at Louisiana State University. He is a biological oceanographer who has conducted research on coastal ecosystems along the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, Australia and the East China Sea. A native of Louisiana, he has assessed the long-term environmental effects of offshore oil and gas development and multiple environmental problems of the Gulf Coast. A pioneer in the study of the environmental effects of offshore energy development, Boesch edited the seminal 1987 work, "Long-Term Environmental Effects of Offshore Oil and Gas Development." He has served as science advisor to many state and federal agencies and regional, national and international programs. Boesch is also chairman of the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council and a member of the National Academies Committee on America's Climate Choices. He holds a bachelor of science from Tulane University and a doctorate from the College of William & Mary. Boesch was also a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Terry D. Garcia is currently executive vice president for Mission Programs for the National Geographic Society. He is responsible for the society's core mission programs, including programs that support and manage more than 400 scientific field research, conservation and exploration projects annually. Prior to joining the society in 1999, Mr. Garcia was assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In this role, he directed and coordinated U.S. coastal, ocean and atmospheric programs, including recovery of endangered species, habitat conservation planning, Clean Water Act implementation, development of the national marine sanctuary system and commercial satellite licensing. From 1994 to 1996, he was general counsel at NOAA and led the implementation of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Restoration Plan for Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska. Before entering government service, Garcia was a partner in the law firms of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and Hughes Hubbard & Reed. Garcia has served on various boards and commissions, including the Institute for Exploration/Mystic Aquarium, the Amazonian Center for Environmental Education and Research, the U.S. National Committee for the Census of Marine Life and the Harte Research Institute of Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University. He is also a trustee emeritus of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. Garcia has also served on panels convened by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from American University and a juris doctor degree from George Washington University.

Cherry Murray was appointed the dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong professor of engineering and applied sciences in July 2009, and is the past president of the American Physical Society. Murray's expertise is in condensed matter and materials physics, phase transitions, light scattering and surface physics, including the study of soft condensed matter and complex fluids, as well as the management of science and technology. Previously, Murray was principle associate director (2007-2009) and deputy director (2004-2007) for science and technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Murray joined Bell Laboratories in 1978 as a staff scientist, marking the beginning of a career that culminated in her position as senior vice president for physical sciences and wireless research at Lucent Technologies (2001-2004). Murray was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. She has served on more than 80 national and international scientific advisory committees, governing boards, and National Research Council panels, including chairing the Division of Engineering and Physical Science of the NRC, and serving on the visiting committee for Harvard's Department of Physics from 1993 to 2004. In 2002, Discover Magazine named Murray one of the 50 most important women in science." Murray holds a bachelor of science (1973) and a doctorate (1978), both in physics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fran Ulmer is chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, Alaska's largest public university. In addition to serving as UAA's chancellor, Ulmer is a member of the Aspen Institute's Commission on Arctic Climate Change and holds board positions with the Alaska Nature Conservancy, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Prior to her appointment as chancellor in 2007, Ulmer was a distinguished visiting professor of public policy and director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at UAA. During her more than 30 years of working in public service on the local, state, and national levels, Ulmer has helped to shape both public and environmental policy. As a state legislator, Ulmer served as a member on the Special Committee on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Claims Settlement. In addition, she was the first chair of the Alaska Coastal Policy Council, was a member of Gov. Tony Knowles' Alaska Highway Natural Gas Policy Council and served for more than 10 years on the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission. Ulmer served as an elected official for 18 years as the mayor of Juneau, as a state representative and as lieutenant governor of Alaska. Ulmer served as director of policy development for the state of Alaska, managing diverse programs, including coastal management, intergovernmental coordination, and public participation initiatives. At the national level, Ulmer served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission's State and Local Advisory Committee, the Federal Elections Commission's State Advisory Committee and co-chaired the National Academies of Science's Committee on State Voter Registration Databases. Ulmer earned a juris doctor cum laude from the University of Wisconsin Law School and has been a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government.

Fran Ulmer is an academic and a governmental type; as well as an environmentalist. No oil background.

Almost every one of these men and women are environmentalists, academic types and government types. None of them have any real experience in the oil industry, and certainly none in deep water drilling. Obama said: "...hey have agreed to serve as we work to determine the causes of this catastrophe and implement the safety and environmental protections we need to prevent a similar disaster from happening again." Prior to being named to this panel, I doubt that any of these men and women, save one, could make a guess as to how many wells were in the gulf of Mexico, nor could they tell you anything about a deep-water well. Yet, somehow, they are going to determine the causes of this oil gusher, and they will somehow figure out how to prevent this from every happening again (an impossible task for anyone).

GRAND ISLE, La. - Deano Bonano, the emergency preparedness director for Jefferson Parish, marched from a motor home being used as a command center to an office across the street filled with BP officials.

"I think they're adequate to the assumptions in the plans. I think you need to go back and question the assumptions." ADM. THAD W. ALLEN, national commander for the spill, referring to response efforts

Cleanup crews have installed both absorbent and hard boom, equipment that has become a symbol of the spill, in Port Fourchon, La., to try to prevent oil from reaching shore.

It was late May. Oil had been creeping into the passes around Grand Isle. Two fleets of fishing boats were supposed to be laying out boom, the long floating barriers to corral oil and protect the fragile marshes of Barataria Bay.

But the boats were gathered on the inland side of the bay - the wrong side - anchored idly as the oil oozed in from the Gulf of Mexico. BP officials said they had no way of contacting the workers on the boats, Mr. Bonano recalled.

For much of the last two months, the focus of the response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been a mile underwater, 50 miles from shore, where successive efforts involving containment domes, "top kills" and "junk shots" have failed, and a "spillcam" shows tens of thousands of barrels of oil hemorrhaging into the gulf each day.

Closer to shore, the efforts to keep the oil away from land have not fared much better, despite a response effort involving thousands of boats, tens of thousands of workers and millions of feet of containment boom.

From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

"The present system is not working," Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano's story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

"The information is not flowing," Senator Nelson said. "The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control."

They were supposed to be better prepared. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, skimmers, booms and dispersants were in short supply for the response, which was led by a consortium of oil companies in which BP was the majority stakeholder.

A year later, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure that plans were in place for oil spills, so the response effort would be quick, with clear responsibilities for everyone involved.

Every region of the country was required to have a contingency plan, tailored for its unique geography, for responding to a spill.

But Leslie Pearson, a private oil-spill response consultant, said federal oversight of spill contingency plans largely amounts to accepting what oil industry operators say they can do, rather than demanding they demonstrate that they can actually do it.

"Their plans don't say, `Within X amount of time it has to be controlled and industry needs to prove how the heck you're going to do that,' " she said.

She and other critics of the federal government's response point to parts of the world where they say foreign governments have stricter rules for offshore operators. In the Canadian Arctic, for example, some offshore operators are required to have ships on close standby to drill relief wells more quickly than the ones being drilled in the gulf.

While the United States requires operators to be prepared to drill relief wells, their contingency plans do not have to specify a firm timeline for how quickly they will do so, experts said.

Some states have tried to establish tougher rules within their jurisdictions. In Prince William Sound, where the Valdez ran aground, for example, Alaska requires all tankers to be accompanied by two escort vessels. Enough equipment also has to be at the ready to remove up to 300,000 barrels of oil in 72 hours.

Scott Schaefer, the deputy administrator of California's Office of Spill Prevention and Response, said his state's regulations also went beyond federal law, requiring, among other things, repeated tests of response equipment.

Mr. Schaefer, who is now in Mobile, Ala., working to fight the oil spill there, declined to characterize the level of preparation in the gulf. He did note, though, that many other experts had flown in from California, including scientists trained in gauging damage to sensitive areas and experts in aerial imaging to study the density of oil in the water.

"They've got their programs here and they're pretty proud of them," he said. "I think on the West Coast it's just much bigger and better funded."

Still, said Ms. Pearson, the consultant, states have limited tools to deal with offshore drilling in federal waters, as was the case with the Deepwater Horizon.

And by the time oil arrives at a coastline, she said, "you've lost the response."

Many experts also said that no plan could really fight this leak perfectly, and that the problem was more with the regulations that allowed it to happen in the first place.

"I don't think there's a person in the spill world who would have thought that whole thing would be contained and recovered," said Elise DeCola, a response consultant based in Massachusetts. "Whether or not you decide to drill is a policy decision, a calculated risk. Everyone at the end of the day understands that risk. It's kind of damage control from the start."

There were at least five plans governing the response to this spill, including national and regional plans drawn up by the Coast Guard and federal and state authorities, as well as lengthy plans prepared by BP. Each one either failed to consider a continuing blowout or drastically underplayed the effects of one.

"I will tell you that nobody in their plan foresaw this incident," said Capt. Roger Laferriere of the Coast Guard, who is directing cleanup efforts in Houma, La. "Nobody."

The contingency plan for southeast Louisiana, which was drawn up by a committee led by the Coast Guard and a state representative, specifically mentions the possibility of a blowout and includes a worst case of a million-barrel spill, which is significantly short of even conservative estimates of the current spill.

But like other federal plans, it does not anticipate the possibility that the leak could continue for weeks. It concludes, for example, that such a spill would require the use of 38,400 gallons of dispersant, or roughly 3 percent of what has been applied in the last two months.

The BP plans do consider an uncontrolled blowout, one that releases 240,000 barrels a day into the gulf for at least 100 days - far worse than the current spill.

In the event of such an enormous spill, according to these plans, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" to beaches, wetlands or coast-dwelling birds.

Toby Odone, a BP spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the company's oil spill response plan was "fully approved" by the Minerals Management Service.

"The plan does not, and cannot, prevent an oil spill or any impact from the spill, but it establishes the framework under which the company will respond," he wrote. "This is the framework we and the unified command have been using in what is the largest oil spill response in US history."

Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the national commander for the spill, said in an interview that shortcomings in the response did not stem from the actions described in the plans, but from the risk assessment on which those plans were based.

"I think they're adequate to the assumptions in the plans," Admiral Allen said. "I think you need to go back and question the assumptions."

Admiral Allen said that in the future, the Coast Guard would probably need to review the oil company contingency plans - which are approved by the Minerals Management Service and not the Coast Guard - "for the purpose of executability" in a response. But mostly, he said, everyone would need to re-examine the worst-case scenarios.

The potential spills contemplated in the plans drawn up by federal authorities are monolithic slicks. The spill in the gulf, Admiral Allen said, is a series of large spills spreading in every direction from Louisiana to Florida, underwater and on the surface.

"The Coast Guard will need to take a look at this new scenario, and how we are going to address this happening in the future," Captain Laferriere said. "This is the new, defining worst-case scenario."

The reason for the inclusion of worst-case scenarios in these plans is for officials to ensure that enough supplies, like boom and oil skimmers, are on hand to respond to a spill.

Now critical boom is being flown in from the north shore of Alaska and oil skimming boats are coming from as far away as Norway. Requirements for more so-called mechanical response equipment, as opposed to chemical dispersant, fell short of current needs.

A 1999 Coast Guard report recommended that a mechanical response - using equipment like boom, skimmers and absorbent materials largely marshaled by boat and from land - should be increased by as much as 25 percent.

But over the next several years, lobbyists for oil companies pushed to keep the existing standard in place and emphasized the use of chemical dispersant.

Fred Felleman, an environmental consultant based in Seattle who has worked to strengthen spill prevention and response efforts in Northwest ports, said the oil industry's preference for dispersants was driven in part by economics.

"It's very expensive to have people on the ground trained and ready to deploy, under contract," Mr. Felleman said.

In rules formally published last August, the Coast Guard effectively overruled its 1999 report, declining to require the substantial increase in the amount of mechanical response equipment.

However, in comments published along with the rules, the Coast Guard said that it "recognizes that the amount of mechanical recovery equipment is still inadequate to address the worst-case threat."

There is no excuse for the failure in the plans to anticipate the situation now unfolding, said Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and a longtime advocate for the protection of Louisiana wetlands.

He pointed out that it has been more than 30 years since the catastrophic Ixtoc I blowout in Mexico in 1979, which lasted for 10 months and released 3.7 million barrels of oil.

But, Mr. Davis acknowledged, hindsight will not help with the operation in the gulf.

"You pull the ripcord on the parachute you packed," he said. "Not the parachute you wish you had packed."

At the very least, these plans, which devote pages and flow charts to command structure, were meant to have an efficient hierarchy in place as soon as a spill occurred. That structure has often been unwieldy, and to some, hardly evident at all.

"I still don't know who's in charge," Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said at the Senate hearing on Thursday, seven weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig sank. "Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard?"

Governance is inherently complicated by the players who are thrown together: BP officials work alongside federal officials who rebuke them publicly, and federal officials work closely with officials at the state level, who have been equally public in their condemnation of the response.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, for example, has drawn local support for his fact-filled critiques of the response plans, but every 48 hours a state representative cooperates on those same plans with BP and the Coast Guard.

"I told him, when he signs the plan he's endorsing our projects," said Captain Laferriere, adding that he and the representative sit in the same office. "Louisiana is still learning the process."

But Garret Graves, the governor's senior coastal adviser, said that the state's power was limited: the state strongly disapproves of the amount of chemical dispersant being used, he said, and feels that the supply of boom is drastically inadequate.

The main problems, many here say, have been sluggish response times and a consistent impression that no one is in charge.

Reports of oil reaching shore have been made days before any vessels were seen in the area. After squalls, booms have ended up tangled like spaghetti on the shores of wildlife-rich islands, only to remain like that for days with no response workers in sight.

"We are making adjustments every day to improve our efforts," Mr. Odone of BP wrote. "For example, we initially struggled with the logistics of getting crews to work, but have made major improvement since to make sure this happens."

Requests to the response operation, no matter how small, have required approval, a process that state and local officials said could take days or weeks. Some requests were never answered at all.

"You would throw it into the dark black hole and it might not ever come back," Ralph Mitchell, the public safety director for Terrebonne Parish, said of early requests for boom.

On the other hand, the flurry of planning on the parish and state levels meant just that: more plans, more officials and more chains of command in an effort that was already sprawling. Parish officials have taken helicopters to observe coastline shortly after Coast Guard or BP officials did, duplicating efforts out of distrust.

Admiral Allen, echoing Mr. Nungesser, said that he had had to learn the lines of authority within Louisiana, and that in recent weeks, he had adapted the centralized command structure to the "home rule economy" of the parishes.

More decision-making authority has been given to Coast Guard officers at the local level, a move that has been broadly welcomed here after weeks of growing frustration.

"The effectiveness of the effort came way late," said Forrest A. Travirca III, a field inspector for a local land trust that includes the nine-mile beachfront at Port Fourchon, La., and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it.

Until recently, Mr. Travirca said, "there was no direction. It was just chaotic. There was this group doing something, that group doing something. Nobody knowing who was doing what."

BP's growing cleanup operation, which includes more than 100 companies and has already cost $1.6 billion, has left an often dangerous vacuum of guidance and direction in one of the most fragile ecosystems on earth.

Cleanup workers on Queen Bess Island, La., have been spotted trampling pelican nesting grounds and tossing around pelican eggs.

Yellow caution tape has been strung up on beaches to keep the news media and civilians out, only to end up in the marsh, where it could harm birds and small mammals.

On the beach at Port Fourchon, Mr. Travirca said, cleanup workers left oil-soaked mops on the beach for days, where the tides buried them in the sand. The workers were finally told to pick up the mops and put them in garbage bags, which they did - but not before shaking the mops out and strewing the beach with oil again.

While officials and residents of southern Louisiana have criticized a response that has sometimes been absent, they have also often criticized the cleanup crews that do show up.

"BP could fire all their contractors because they're doing absolutely nothing but destroying our marsh," Mr. Nungesser told the Senate panel.

David Camardelle, the mayor of Grand Isle and others complained that the employees in BP's sprawling response are often outsiders who are not familiar with the fragile marshes and not local fishermen who most need the jobs.

Typically, spill cleanup workers are men and women who are found by temporary staffing agencies in unemployment lines and through classified ads, often with little education and few job prospects. They receive training and then wait to be called into action when an accident occurs.

These staffing agencies have contracts with environmental cleanup firms, which in turn have contracts with another company, in most cases the responsible party. But this spill operation is different from others because of the sheer number of contractors involved, making it difficult not only for officials demanding accountability but for the contractors themselves.

The agencies, some of them quite small, are paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, in wages, but in many cases have not been able to reach through layers upon layers of contractors to the ultimate paymaster, BP.

Several expressed concern that if the labor needs increased with the scale of the cleanup and they still did not have guarantees from BP, they may have to pull out.

"There's way too many players in it," said an owner of one of the staffing agencies involved, who did not want to publicly criticize the process. "You don't know who's getting money from where."

For now, the problem is not that people are working without pay, but the opposite. Trained workers are brought in by the hundreds to an area so that they will be in place if work needs to be done. In some of these areas, there is no work to be done. But under the contract, they need to be paid anyway.

"Our people aren't out on the beach," the owner of another agency said, lamenting the lack of organization. "They're sitting under a tree and getting paid a full day."

The cleanup operation has also been, at times, a casualty of politics. One staffing agency sent more than 150 trained workers to the Gulf Coast only to be told that in light of local and state insistence on exclusively local employment, too many of the workers were from out of state. They were all let go the next day.

One of the most vivid images in news reports on the oil spill has been boom, the lengths of orange and yellow barrier that are anchored to the seafloor and either keep oil at bay or corral it so it can be skimmed. From the earliest days, politicians have been demanding it, officials have been promising more of it and now nearly 400 miles of it is in place in gulf waters.

But it has also become a potent symbol of the problems with the response effort.

Boom, which is easily swamped by waves, provides only limited protection, something even politicians who have thundered for more to be installed will concede. It also requires constant maintenance, as squalls moving in from offshore regularly break the chains apart, and effective deployment, something officials at all levels say has been lacking.

"The boom has been a disaster from the beginning," Mr. Nungesser said, citing improper training for workers laying it out, as well as their unfamiliarity with the area's waterways.

But proper deployment also requires a thorough plan and a detailed map of effective locations, with precise measurements of passes and other waterways.

The southeast Louisiana contingency plan, which includes environmental sensitivity maps, had not been updated in seven years - a lifetime after intense coastal erosion and a series of hurricanes that have turned, by some estimates, nearly 500 square miles of wetlands into open water.

So after the spill, with no new plan forthcoming, state and parish officials gathered one Saturday night in an office tower in Baton Rouge, and drew up a new set of booming maps.

Such plans work best when they can be tested ahead of time. They also are dependent on certain kinds of boom.

But response crews have often had to make do with the kind of boom that was on hand, even when it was the wrong kind. And since everything was being concocted on the fly, "they hadn't had a chance to validate the plan," Captain Laferriere said.

Sometimes you can read a book that will change your mind on some fundamental issue. Rarely, however, is there just one page that can undermine or destroy a widely-held belief. But there is such a page-- page 77 of the book "Out of Work" by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway.

The widespread belief is that government intervention is the key to getting the country out of a serious economic downturn. The example often cited is President Franklin D. Roosevelt's intervention, after the stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its massive and long-lasting unemployment.

This is more than just a question about history. Right here and right now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must "do something" to get the economy moving again. FDR's intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way.

What is on that one page in "Out of Work" that could change people's minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s.

Those who think that the stock market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.

Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed-- and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.

This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to "do something."

What the government decided to do in June 1930-- against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it-- was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.

This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.

Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits-- and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.

If more government regulation of business is the magic answer that so many seem to think it is, the whole history of the 1930s would have been different. An economic study in 2004 concluded that New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression. But the same story can be found on one page in "Out of Work."

While the market produced a peak unemployment rate of 9 percent-- briefly-- after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment shot up after massive federal interventions in the economy. It rose above 20 percent in 1932 and stayed above 20 percent for 23 consecutive months, beginning in the Hoover administration and continuing during the Roosevelt administration.

As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up." It is all there on that one page.

Those who are convinced that the government has to "do something" when the economy has a problem almost never bother to find out what actually happens when the government intervenes.

The very fact that we still remember the stock market crash of 1929 is remarkable, since there was a similar stock market crash in 1987 that most people have long since forgotten.

What was the difference between these two stock market crashes? The 1929 stock market crash was followed by the most catastrophic depression in American history, with as many as one-fourth of all American workers being unemployed. The 1987 stock market crash was followed by two decades of economic growth with low unemployment.

But that was only one difference. The other big difference was that the Reagan administration did not intervene in the economy after the 1987 stock market crash-- despite many outcries in the media that the government should "do something."

Did you know that Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shruugged," had a hard time getting a publisher in America for her book "The Anthem"? One publisher rejected it on the grounds that the author does not understand socialism, which is particularly funny because she was born in St. Petersburg. She was 12 years old the revolution of 1917 broke out. She was there when it happened and violence took place right in front of her. She lived there until she was in her 20s. She saw the brutality of communism.

You'd think the media would love a success story like this, but Ayn Rand was soundly mocked in the media. Even after achieving success, she was still routinely bashed by critics. Here's what the media elite thought of "Atlas Shrugged":

• "Somebody has called it: 'Excruciatingly awful.' I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous." - Whittaker Chambers

• "As an instrument of propaganda, this book is a moderate success; as a work of art, it is a noble failure" - Portsmouth Star

Just how strange were the concepts in it? Let's see: The book focuses on how politicians respond to crises - many times created by themselves - by creating new government programs, laws and regulations. She wrote in "The Voice of Reason": "One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."

Is that not happening today? How many times have you heard "capitalism has failed"?

She also showed how politicians would dress their redistributive legislation in happy sounding names. Sound familiar? Tell me which ones are from the book and which one is real:

As I write this on Monday night, there are rumors around that BP will agree to President Barack Obama's demand that the oil giant "voluntarily" put about $30 billion into a fund to be administered by the government to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Now, no one disputes that this is a real disaster and that BP acted irresponsibly in commissioning Trans-Ocean and Halliburton to drill for oil in waters so deep that if a failure occurred there would be no way to fix it -- at least until major damage had been done. BP, Trans-Ocean, and Halliburton, as well as the individuals involved, have much to answer for.

But the action of the President in demanding this immense transfer of the stockholders' wealth without any legislation or court decision is extremely worrisome.

We live in a Constitutional Republic. The President's job under the Constitution is to enforce the laws made by the elected Congress. His job is not to create new laws and enforce them all by himself. His job is as magistrate under the Constitution, not as Caudillo. He is not the law. He is supposed to enforce what Congress decides.

The BP behavior is reminiscent of how, immediately after assuming office, Mr. Obama, with no Congressional authority or administrative allowance, simply made a phone call to fire the head of GM. When I called the White House press office to ask under what law or regulation Mr. Obama was acting, I was told he did not need a law. If the government put a lot of money into GM, it could call the shots at GM, I was told. But under what authority, I asked. "None needed," was the final answer.

Without any new legislation, President Obama has used returned TARP money as a political slush fund to prop up favorite industries. This is the same problem: serious executive action without legislative authority.

The same goes for Mr. Obama's demand that BP pay the lost wages of oil and gas workers suspended from work because of the moratorium on Gulf of Mexico underseas drilling. There simply was no legislation allowing this kind of specific demand. Mr. Obama's demand was in the nature of a threat, more than a Constitutional act.

Of course, every President tries "jawboning" to restrain steel company price increases or something similar. But to create specific enactments and actions without any authority -- now Mr. Obama's specialty -- is so at odds with the law of the land that it terrifies me. These are not the acts of a teacher on Constitutional law. These are the acts of a big city boss or a third world dictator. If you want to know why business has pulled in its horns and hunkered down, and why people at tea parties and elsewhere are scared, look no further than Barack "I Am The Law" Obama.

Is there anyone in Congress to stop him? Is there anyone in a black robe to stop him? Or is everyone already too scared to challenge the Duce in the White House?

Before the Obama Administration sweeps under the carpet the controversy over the drilling experts it falsely used to justify its moratorium, the incident bears another look. Not least because it underlines the purely political nature of a drilling ban that now threatens the Gulf Coast economy and drilling safety.

When President Obama last month announced his six-month deepwater moratorium, he pointed to an Interior Department report of new "safety" recommendations. That report prominently noted that the recommendations it contained-including the six-month drilling ban-had been "peer-reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." It also boasted that Interior "consulted with a wide range" of other experts. The clear implication was that the nation's drilling brain trust agreed a moratorium was necessary.

As these columns reported last week, the opposite is true. In a scathing document, eight of the "experts" the Administration listed in its report said their names had been "used" to "justify" a "political decision." The draft they reviewed had not included a six-month drilling moratorium. The Administration added that provision only after it had secured sign-off. In their document, the eight forcefully rejected a moratorium, which they argued could prove more economically devastating than the oil spill itself and "counterproductive" to "safety."

The Administration insisted this was much ado about nothing. An Interior spokesman claimed the experts clearly had been called to review the report on a "technical basis," whereas the moratorium was a "comprehensive" question. Obama environment czar Carol Browner declared: "No one's been deceived or misrepresented." Really? We can only imagine the uproar if a group of climate scientists had claimed the Bush Administration misappropriated their views.

We decided to call some of these experts ourselves. Their information, and concerns, are revealing.

The experts were certainly under the impression they were reviewing a comprehensive document, as some of the recommendations would take six months or even a year to implement. And the report they agreed to did address moratoria: It recommended a six-month ban on new deepwater permits. Yet Benton Baugh, president of Radoil, said that in at least two separate hour-and-a-half phone calls among Interior and the experts, there was no discussion of a moratorium on existing drilling. "Because if anybody had [made that suggestion], we'd have said 'that's craziness.'"

Ken Arnold, an engineer and consultant, said the changes went beyond just the drilling moratorium. The Interior draft he looked at included timelines for each safety recommendation. The "bulk" of those recommendations, he explained, were all ones that could be done within 30 days. And most of the longer-term provisions would result in only "marginal increases in safety."

Yet when the final report came out, the timelines he saw had been removed, no doubt because they argued against the necessity of a six-month moratorium. Mr. Arnold adds that the Administration's decision to allow industry to continue drilling "gas injection wells"-which, he says, are no more risky than production wells-only shows the moratorium makes "no sense."

"This was a political call; this was not a technical call," says Mr. Arnold. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has since testified that the call was his. But Robert Bea, from the University of California at Berkeley, who also reviewed the report, told us Interior had sent him a letter that "stated clearly that [the moratorium] had been inserted at the request of the White House." Mr. Bea pointed out that the Department of Interior is more than equipped to target and shut down specific Gulf operations that might offer safety concerns. There was no call for a moratorium "for industry as a whole."

Ford Brett, managing director of Petroskills and also a reviewer, notes that the experts first went to the Interior Department with their concerns. "All they had to do was put out another press release-one sentence long-clarifying that we hadn't reviewed the drilling moratorium. . . .That didn't happen." Only then did the experts go public.

Matthew Kaminski and Joe Rago of the WSJ Editorial Board discuss the challenges in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, the Left's panning of Obama's BP speech, and the early-retiree fiasco.

As for Ms. Browner's claim that no one was "misrepresented," Mr. Brett disputes that. Several reviewers said they had, in fact, received "apology" notes from the Interior Department acknowledging the misrepresentation. "We did not mean to imply that you also agreed with the decision to impose a moratorium on all new deepwater drilling," read one.

All of this matters because it offers proof the moratorium was driven by politics, not safety. The drilling ban was not reviewed by experts, and was not necessary to satisfy most of the safety recommendations in Mr. Salazar's report. It was authored by political actors so Mr. Obama could look tough. A cynic might argue the ban was only added after review precisely because the Administration knew experts would refuse to endorse it.

A big reason why those experts would have balked is because they recognize that the moratorium is indeed a threat to safety. Mr. Arnold offers at least four reasons why.

The ban requires oil companies to abandon uncompleted wells. The process of discontinuing a well, and then later re-entering it, introduces unnecessary risk. He notes BP was in the process of abandoning its well when the blowout happened.

The ban is going to push drilling rigs to take jobs in other countries. "The ones that go first will be the newest, biggest, safest rigs, because they are most in demand. The ones that go last and come back first are the ones that aren't as modern," says Mr. Arnold.

The indeterminate nature of this ban will encourage experienced crew members to seek other lines of work-perhaps permanently. Restarting after a ban will bring with it a "greater mix of new people who will need to be trained." The BP event is already pointing, in part, to human error, and the risk of that will increase with a less experienced crew base. Finally, a ban will result in more oil being imported on tankers, which are "more likely" to spill oil than local production.

All this is even before raising ban's economic consequences, which already threaten tens of thousands of jobs. This is why Louisiana politicians are now pleading with the Administration to back off a ban that is sending the Gulf's biggest industry to its grave.

"Mr. President, you were looking for someone's butt to kick," said Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph, recently. "You're kicking ours." The sooner the Administration climbs down from this pointless exercise, the better for a Gulf that needs real help.

On October 13, 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the CEOs of the nation's largest banks into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department just a stone's throw away from the White House. Each CEO was then handed a one-page document that said their company would agree to sell hundreds of billions worth of equity to the federal government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). "We plan to announce the program tomorrow - and that your nine firms will be the initial participants." In case anyone missed the subtle message, Paulson added, "We don't believe it is tenable to opt out, because doing so would leave you vulnerable and exposed." Sure enough, just like a certain fictional band land leader once did, all nine CEOs signed their respective contracts.

Yesterday, history repeated itself. This time it was the executives of BP who were summoned directly to the White House to have a little chat with the President and Attorney General Eric Holder (who has threatened BP with criminal prosecution). The exact conversation may never be known, and by the end of their "no-nonsense business meeting" BP emerged from the Roosevelt Room to announce that they would "voluntarily" place $20 billion into an escrow account to begin covering claims associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and contribute another $100 million to a foundation that will support oil workers made unemployed by President Barack Obama's indefinite ban on offshore oil drilling.

Don't buy for a second any of the mainstream media's line about this being good for BP. The White House made clear yesterday that the $20 billion was just a down payment and in no way represented a cap on BP's liability. In fact, the President explicitly said that the fund would not preclude individuals or states from pressing claims in court, and that it would remain separate from BP's liability for the damages to the environment. And these damages may include the costs of cleanup for damage far beyond what BP caused. The Washington Post today reports that a gulf restoration plan of the sort promised by President Obama could cost as much as $30 billion. That's $50 billion in damages so far. And that does not include any future money, on top of the existing $100 million donation, the White House may press BP to pay to cover the unemployment caused by President Obama's offshore drilling ban.

Yes, BP did get the White House to say they do not want to see BP driven into bankruptcy. But who does that promise really serve? Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General turned BP lawyer Jamie Gorelick explains: "We know what it looks like when a company is driven into bankruptcy. The claims that come first are the creditors, then the employees, then the environmental claims, and then the likes of shrimpers. This would not be a good result for anyone." Now look at how the deal between the White House and BP is structured. BP is not handing over a $20 billion novelty check tomorrow. Instead they are set to pay $3 billion in the third quarter of this year, $2 billion in the fourth, and then $1.25 billion per quarter thereafter. In the meantime, BP has identified $20 billion worth of assets in the United States that the federal government now has a lien on. In the event of a bankruptcy, guess who gets to jump in line and have their claims honored first? Still guessing? Then ask Chrysler's secured creditors.

Yesterday's "voluntary" deal between BP and the Obama administration was nothing less than a continuation of President Barack Obama's ongoing assault on the rule of law. Capitalism only succeeds if it is a profit and LOSS system. Well-managed firms should have every right to keep their profits, but mismanaged firms must be allowed to suffer losses. By all accounts of what transpired on the Deepwater Horizon, BP is a terribly mismanaged firm. If the damage they caused is great enough, they should be allowed to fail. Failure is a necessary component of capitalism. But this administration refuses to allow the rule of law to work. From Fannie Mae to Freddie Mac, from GM to Chrysler, from AIG to Citibank, our government continues to subvert the established rule of law. This lawlessness creates uncertainty in the business environment, and it is a huge reason why our economy is not recovering as it should be.

Last night on CNN former Clinton Administration message man James Carville said: "It looks as if President Obama applied a little old-school Chicago persuasion to the oil executives." Making "offers you can't refuse" may be a great way to run the mob, but it is no way to run a country.

It's a safe bet that most Americans' first exposure to the concept of carbon trading or cap-and-trade legislation came during the most recent presidential campaign when both candidates advocated the need to make protecting the environment a government mandate instead of the moral obligation it's always been. In the past few months President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that a comprehensive energy/environmental law, including cap-and-trade, is an absolute priority of his administration.

Simply put, the idea behind the cap-and-trade plan is this: The federal government would set limits or cap the amount of pollutant a business could create. If the business chose to emit levels exceeding the cap they would have to find a business not using its full allotment and purchase the surplus from them. Needless-to-say, for the concept to work there would need to be a highly centralized infrastructure to facilitate the transactions, matching buyers to sellers.

For people like Richard Sandor and former Vice-President Al Gore the focus on "green politics" represented the culmination of years of planning and a giant step towards a massive payday.

With a big helping hand from then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, Sandor's brainchild, The Chicago Climate Exchange, opened for business in 2003 billing itself as "North America's only cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases..." In other words, the facilitator for a scheme not quite hatched. Sandor, a long-time economist turned environmentalist shared his vision during a 1990 interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying, "Air and water are no longer the free goods that economics once assumed. They must be redefined as property rights so that they can be efficiently allocated." The statement didn't get a lot of attention back then but today seems prophetic. Sandor claims his idea of efficient allocation, also known as carbon trading, will develop into a $10 trillion industry.

During 2000 and 2001, the Joyce Foundation, a progressive trust with assets near $1 billion, known for funding groups like Center for American Progress and Tides Foundation, provided grants to CCX totaling $1.1 million. State Senator Obama served on the foundation's board of directors during that time and was instrumental in awarding the grants.

Shortly after the first grant was approved, the president of The Joyce Foundation, Paula DiPerna, left to join the executive team of CCX. Other notables with familiar names soon followed.

• Former Vice-President Al Gore became part-owner of CCX when his company, Generation Investment Management, made a sizeable investment. Gore brought with him his senior partner at GIM, David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, along with a company chalk full of former Goldman Sachs' executives

• Goldman Sachs itself soon joined the team buying a ten percent interest in CCX

• Maurice Strong, once linked to Tongsun Park, the central figure in the United Nation's oil-for-food scandal in 2005 and one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol, joined the CCX board of directors

• Carlton Bartels was one of the first, and perhaps most important, additions to the CCX roster. As CEO of a company called CO2e, Bartels developed and delivered the actual guts of the exchange - a system for facilitating and managing the actual carbon trades

Just three weeks after filing for a patent for his carbon trade system, Bartels was killed during the attacks of 9/11. Bartels' death opened the door for a new partner to join CCX, easily the oddest fit of them all: Fannie Mae. In a move still unexplained, the quasi-governmental mortgage agency, led by CEO Franklin Raines, purchased the rights to the system from Bartel's widow. A patent on the invention was granted to Raines and Fannie Mae on November 7, 2006, ironically, the day after the Democrats regained control of Congress. According to Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, the patent covers both the "cap" and "trade" parts of Obama's top domestic energy initiative and gives Fannie Mae proprietary control over the automated trading system used by Sandor's CCX.

When asked about the patent recently Fannie Mae communications director Amy Bonitatibus told the Washington Examiner, "Fannie Mae earns no money on this patent. We can't conjecture as to the cap-and-trade legislation." A source close to Fannie Mae, however, says a plan is in place to funnel future earnings from the patent to a non-profit housing organization called Enterprise Community Partners. Ironically, Raines, who left Fannie Mae in 2004 amidst allegations that he inflated earnings reports in order to collect higher bonuses ($52 million in bonuses over 5-years; $90 million in total compensation), serves on the board of trustees at Enterprise. In a continuation of theme, Goldman Sachs also has a representative on the board in the person of Alicia Glen.

In December 2009 The Joyce Foundation awarded Raines and Enterprise a $200,000 grant to launch Emerald Cities Collaborative. According to its website, "The Emerald Cities Collaborative (ECC) is a start-up, national coalition of diverse groups that includes unions, labor groups, community organizations, social justice advocates, development intermediaries, research and technical assistance providers, socially responsible businesses, and elected officials."

Emerald Cities' goal is "the greening of our nation's central cities and the creation of a "new vital economic sector." The collaborative is headed up by Joel Rogers, widely recognized as the "man behind the curtain" of today's progressive political movement. Rogers founded the powerful Apollo Alliance, the group recognized as having shaped much of the Obama administration's stimulus bill. Former White House green jobs "czar," Van Jones, described Rogers influence this way: "The best thinking that he represents. is now represented in the White House."

Also represented on the Emerald Cities board of directors, Gerald Hudson, executive director of SEIU (also on the Apollo Alliance advisory board); Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All (created by Van Jones), and Doris Koo, CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, along with a collection of other union and community activist regulars.

The "environmental movement," once the bastion of peace loving hippies and Earth mothers, is potentially the booming business of the 21st century. Billions of dollars currently change hands each year in the name of the environment and, by all accounts, the surface is only scratched.

To date the missing piece of the puzzle has been a government mandate, something cap-and-trade legislation will remedy. Those already in the game stand to reap a fortune on the backs of average Americans who will see their energy bills "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama explained, as businesses pass along the new cost of doing what they do in a "green America."

It's interesting to note that without the specter of a government mandate, the Chicago Climate Exchange would hold no value. Likewise Fannie Mae's patented trading system and Emerald Cities' prospects for "a new vital economic sector" would be nothing more than fool's gold.

Equally troubling is the blatant acknowledgement by those involved in this high stakes green rush that power and profit are the only real benefits to be had. The words of Joel Rogers: "I hope you all realized that you could eliminate every power plant in America today and you can stop every car in America. Take out the entire power generation sector and you still would not be anywhere near 80 percent below 1990 levels. You would be closer to around 60 percent... it would be around 68 percent and this is with bringing the economy to a complete halt. basically."

Crime Inc. - what do they know and when did they know it. and how much will it cost the American people?

The Minerals Management Service, which is charged with regulating offshore oil drilling, was a deeply troubled agency when Barack Obama inherited it from George W. Bush. Top MMS officials had been caught drinking, doing drugs and even having sex with oil-industry contacts. More prosaically, they accepted gifts from industry representatives and did favors for them.

The cleanup had already begun in the last months of the Bush administration, but President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar still had their work cut out for them. Not only did they have to enforce ethics rules, they had to ensure responsible management of the offshore oil platforms that are a key part of the MMS portfolio, a huge contributor to the national economy, and a continuing environmental risk.

The problem was, Obama and Salazar were more interested in pursuing their vision of a clean energy future. Under Obama, the Minerals Management Service, driven by a strongly ideological commitment to green energy sources such as wind and solar power, chose to stress "renewables" while de-emphasizing the tough and dirty work of managing the nation's existing offshore oil wells.

"What they did essentially was divert the attention of the agency away from regulating offshore drilling and focus it on the expansion of offshore renewables," says one well-informed Republican House aide.

It started early in the new administration. Salazar's first departmentwide order, issued March 11, 2009, was to declare "facilitating the production, development, and delivery of renewable energy top priorities for the Department."

Salazar chose Elizabeth Birnbaum to head the MMS in large part because of her record of environmental and green-energy advocacy. "We have changed the direction of MMS," Salazar told the Senate last month, "by balancing its ocean energy portfolio to include offshore wind and renewable energy production." Given the considerable size of the existing offshore oil industry, "balancing" the MMS portfolio meant putting a heavy emphasis on new offshore wind projects. "They were more into renewables offshore than they were into oil and gas," says a GOP Senate aide who works in the area.

Birnbaum, who is so far the only Obama administration official to lose a job over the Gulf oil spill, spent an enormous amount of time working on the controversial Cape Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. After years of regulatory wrangling, it was approved April 29 -- nine days after the oil-rig explosion that set off the Gulf spill.

Birnbaum came in for heavy criticism of MMS' handling of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Gulf oil project. The general tone of the critique was that MMS had not paid enough attention to regulating such environmentally sensitive undertakings. What received less attention was why that attention wasn't paid, and that was because Interior and MMS were busy pushing offshore renewable energy projects.

Shortly after Birnbaum was fired, her defenders told the trade publication Environment and Energy Daily that "she had not been ordered to clean house at the scandal-stained agency, but to promote renewable energy." When Salazar paid half-hearted tribute to Birnbaum the day she left, all he could come up with was that she had helped Interior deal with "the very difficult issues on standing up offshore wind in the Atlantic."

Wind, not oil, was the MMS offshore energy priority. Even when MMS addressed oil industry problems, it seemed only half interested. For example, on June 17, 2009, MMS began a procedure for coming up with new rules that would "require operators to develop and implement a safety and environmental management system for their oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf." Nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers were fighting the last war. After the sex, drugs and influence scandal that rocked MMS in September 2008, senators and representatives came up with plans to reform the agency. They proposed to turn the director of MMS -- currently appointed by the secretary of the interior with no input from Congress -- into a position nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Other proposals involved cleaning up the way MMS handles the enormous amounts of revenue it collects from oil companies.

All were good ideas and would have improved MMS had they been enacted. But they would not have addressed the problems that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And they would not have awakened an administration that, dazzled by the dream of renewable energy, neglected the dull but crucial work of keeping watch over the nation's offshore oil industry.

Representative Joe L. Barton had to be truly sorry by the time he apologized for his apology on Thursday.

In the four hours between his televised apology to BP - for what he called a $20 billion "shakedown" by President Obama for loss claims in the gulf oil spill - and his apology for that apology, Mr. Barton, a Republican from Texas, had been pummeled in the blogosphere, assailed by Democratic Party operatives and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and, in the blow that landed, threatened by Republican leaders with being yanked from the party's top seat on the powerful House energy committee.

By day's end, the Barton sideshow had become the main show in Congress, eclipsing the much-anticipated grilling of BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," Mr. Barton said in his opening statement. "I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown - in this case a $20 billion shakedown."

Democrats, smelling blood in an election year, sought to make Mr. Barton an exemplar for Republican ties to "Big Oil." House Republican leaders, fearing that trap, rushed to contain the damage.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip, summoned Mr. Barton and he "was told to apologize, immediately, or he would lose his spot, immediately," a senior aide said. "We'll see what happens going forward."

When Mr. Barton soon did issue a statement of contrition, Mr. Boehner's office also distributed it, for added effect. Then Mr. Boehner, Mr. Cantor and another party leader, Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, together publicly rebuked their colleague.

Mr. Barton, in his statement, apologized "for using the term `shakedown' " to describe the $20 billion escrow account that BP and the White House announced Wednesday. He also retracted the apology to BP and said the company "should bear the full financial responsibility for the accident on their lease in the Gulf of Mexico" on April 20 and "fully compensate those families and businesses that have been hurt."

Of the five Gulf Coast states, Mr. Barton's Texas is the only one whose beaches, fisheries and tourist haunts are not threatened by oil spewing from BP's ruined well. Republican lawmakers from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida quickly disavowed Mr. Barton's apology to BP, and one was the first to call for stripping Mr. Barton of his committee seat.

The Democratic National Committee quickly produced a YouTube video that repeatedly shows Mr. Barton, in a split screen with the BP chief, saying, "I apologize." The White House piled on. The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, issued a statement calling Mr. Barton's comments "shameful" and later wrote on his Twitter account: "Who would the G.O.P. put in charge of overseeing the energy industry & Big Oil if they won control of Congress? Yup, u guessed it - JOE BARTON."

"It's insisting on responsible conduct and a responsible response to something they caused," he said.

The shakedown, in the eyes of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaign contributions to lawmakers, is actually the pitches by lawmakers for oil industry donations.

Individuals and political action committees in the oil and gas industry have been Mr. Barton's biggest source of campaign money, it reported, contributing $1.4 million since the 1990 election cycle.

A new bill rocketing through Congress would give the president sweeping powers to police the Web for national-security reasons. Could this be a way to block WikiLeaks?

Confronting threats ranging from Chinese superhackers to the release of secret documents on WikiLeaks and other whistleblowing websites, the Obama administration may be on the verge of assuming broad new powers to regulate the Internet on national-security grounds.

The powers are granted to the White House under a bipartisan bill that was introduced in the Senate only last week but is already moving quickly through Congress toward passage. The legislation has generated considerable buzz on tech blogs-but drawn little notice so far by major news organizations.

The bill would grant President Obama the power to declare a "national cyber-emergency" at his discretion and force private companies tied to the Web, including Internet service providers and search engines, to take action in response-moves that could include limiting or even cutting off their connections to the World Wide Web for up to 30 days.

While the bill's sponsors say it is intended to create a shield to defend the United States and its largest companies from the growing threat of cyberattacks, civil-liberties activists tell The Daily Beast they fear the bill could give the White House the ability to effectively shut down portions of the Internet for reasons that could prove to be politically inspired.

"We have seen through recent history that in an emergency, the Executive Branch will interpret grants of power very broadly," said Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that promotes Internet freedom. He said the bill, which he described as moving "at lightning speed in congressional terms," was too loosely worded in its definition of which companies would be regulated and what they would be required to do in an emergency.

Wayne Crews, vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-enterprise think tank, said he believed the bill was so broadly worded that it might even allow the White House to take aim at whistleblowing websites that were believed to pose a national-security threat, such as WikiLeaks, in the guise of a "cyber-emergency."

"That would be a concern of mine," Crews tells The Daily Beast. "The way it seems to be worded, the bill could easily represent a threat to free speech."

WikiLeaks, which is nominally based in Sweden and promotes itself as a global resource for whistleblowers, announced this week that it is preparing to post a classified Pentagon video depicting an American airstrike in Afghanistan last year that left as many as 140 people dead, most of them children and teenagers.

The Protecting Cyberspace Act was introduced last week by Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the panel's ranking Republican. Counterparts in the House Homeland Security Committee have endorsed identical legislation, meaning that a final bill could be adopted by the full Congress within weeks. The White House has not taken a stand on the legislation so far.

Lieberman said the bill was intended to prevent a "cyber 9/11" in which "cyberwarriors, cyberspies, cyberterrorists and cybercriminals" take aim at the United States and try to shut down infrastructure that is dependent on the Internet-a list of targets that include everything from nuclear power plants to banks to Pentagon computer networks.

"The Internet may have started out as a communications oddity some 40 years ago, but it is now a necessity of modern life and, sadly, one that is under constant attack," he said. Lieberman and the bill's other sponsors cited the massive cyberattack several months ago on the search-engine company Google-an attack believed to have been organized by the Chinese government-as an example of the sorts of attacks that could be routine in the future.

Lieberman's committee spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, said the bill was an effort to defend the nation's most important electronic networks, "the networks that are most central to our daily lives," not at attacking anything. She was particularly agitated at any suggestion that the bill might give the White House the opportunity to try to shut down individual websites on national-security grounds.

"In no way is the senator's cybersecurity legislation directed at websites-WikiLeaks or anyone else's," she said. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did not reply to a request for comment via email.

The bill would create a new federal agency, the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, within the Department of Homeland Security, with a director who would require Senate confirmation.

The center would work with private companies involved in what is described in the bill as "critical infrastructure"-a list including companies involved with electric grids, telecommunications networks and the Internet-to come up with emergency measures in the event of a crisis. Under the bill, the White House could demand that the emergency measures be put into place, including restrictions on their access to the Internet, if the president declared a national cyber-emergency.

An interesting thing about Barack Obama is that he chose, on two occasions, to live in Chicago -- even though he didn't grow up there, had no family ties there, never went to school there.

It was a curious choice. Chicago has a civic culture all its own and one that is particularly insular. Family ties and personal connections are hugely important. Professionals who have lived and worked there for a quarter-century are brusquely reminded, "You're not from here."

Nonetheless Obama moved upward in the Chicago civic firmament with apparent ease. The community organizer joined the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church in search of street credibility in the heavily black South Side. The adjunct law teacher made friends around the University of Chicago from libertarian academics to radical organizer William Ayers. The young state senator designed a new district that included the Loop and the rich folk on the Near North Side.

Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America's boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation's railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.

The Mayors Daley have maintained Chicago's centrality in commerce by building and expanding O'Hare International Airport and by fostering a culture of crony capitalism with the city's big employers and labor unions. Chicago survived the Depression and recessions to thrive once again. Sure, small businesses and some outfits lacking political connections fell by the wayside. But the system seems to go on forever.

So it's natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation's private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder.

Crony capitalism also comes naturally to a Chicago Way president. Use some sweeteners to get the drug companies and the doctors to sign on to the health care plan. If the health insurers start bellyaching, whack them a few times in public to make them go along. Design a financial reform that Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase can live with even while you assail "Wall Street fat cats."

The big guys will understand that you have to provide the voters with some political theater while you give them what they want. As for the little guys, well, hey, in Chicago we don't back no losers.

If in the process you've written legislation full of glitches and boondoggles, well, they can be fixed later. The typical vote in the Chicago City Council is 50-0. Republicans don't count for nothing. Down in Springfield they're outnumbered 37-22 and 70-48.

Anyone who has spent much time in Chicago knows the city has impressive civic and business leaders, talented and cultured people who creatively support charities and the arts. But they also play team ball.

One measure of that is the $25.6 million that the 2008 Obama campaign raised from metro Chicago. An even more meaningful measure is the $5 million that Hillary Clinton's campaign raised there -- a virtual shutout in a city where the Clintons once raised huge sums. The word obviously went out: You back Barack and you don't back Hillary.

Now the Clintons are part of the Chicago Way team. As witnessed by Bill Clinton's willingness to dangle some sort of job to Joe Sestak to get him out of the Pennsylvania Senate race.

To some it may seem anomalous that Obama, who began his Chicago career as a Saul Alinsky-type community organizer, should have taken to the Chicago Way. But Alinsky's brand of community organizing is very Chicagocentric.

It assumes that there will always be a Machine that you can complain about and that if you make a big enough fuss it will have to respond. And that the Machine can always get more plunder from the private sector.

The problem with Obama's Chicago Way is that Chicago isn't America. The Chicago Way works locally because there is an America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay for an America run the Chicago Way?

OK let's get real about the GOM oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in the GOM.

As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there...

First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.

So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:

That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...

This was probably our best and only chance to kill this well from the top down. This "kill mud" is a tried and true method of killing wells and usually has a very good chance of success. The depth of this well presented some logistical challenges, but it really should not of presented any functional obstructions. The pumping capacity was there and it would have worked, should have worked, but it didn't.

It didn't work, but it did create evidence of what is really happening. First of all the method used in this particular top kill made no sense, did not follow the standard operating procedure used to kill many other wells and in fact for the most part was completely contrary to the procedure which would have given it any real chance of working.

When a well is "Killed" using this method heavy drill fluid "Mud" is pumped at high volume and pressure into a leaking well. The leaks are "behind" the point of access where the mud is fired in, in this case the "choke and Kill lines" which are at the very bottom of the BOP (Blow Out Preventer) The heavy fluid gathers in the "behind" portion of the leaking well assembly, while some will leak out, it very quickly overtakes the flow of oil and only the heavier mud will leak out. Once that "solid" flow of mud is established at the leak "behind" the well, the mud pumps increase pressure and begin to overtake the pressure of the oil deposit. The mud is established in a solid column that is driven downward by the now stronger pumps. The heavy mud will create a solid column that is so heavy that the oil deposit can no longer push it up, shut off the pumps...the well is killed...it can no longer flow.

Usually this will happen fairly quickly, in fact for it to work at all...it must happen quickly. There is no "trickle some mud in" because that is not how a top kill works. The flowing oil will just flush out the trickle and a solid column will never be established. Yet what we were told was "It will take days to know whether it

worked"...."Top kill might take 48 hours to complete"...the only way it could take days is if BP intended to do some "test fires" to test integrity of the entire system. The actual "kill" can only take hours by nature because it must happen fairly rapidly. It also increases strain on the "behind" portion and in this instance we all know that what remained was fragile at best.

Early that afternoon we saw a massive flow burst out of the riser "plume" area. This was the first test fire of high pressure mud injection. Later on same day we saw a greatly increased flow out of the kink leaks, this was mostly mud at that time as the kill mud is tanish color due to the high amount of Barite which is added to it to weight it and Barite is a white powder.

We later learned the pumping was shut down at midnight, we weren't told about that until almost 16 hours later, but by then...I'm sure BP had learned the worst. The mud they were pumping in was not only leaking out the "behind" leaks...it was leaking out of someplace forward...and since they were not even near being able to pump mud into the deposit itself, because the well would be dead long before...and the oil was still coming up, there could only be one conclusion...the wells casings were ruptured and it was leaking "down hole"

They tried the "Junk shot"...the "bridging materials" which also failed and likely made things worse in regards to the ruptured well casings.

"Despite successfully pumping a total of over 30,000 barrels of heavy mud, in three attempts at rates of up to 80 barrels a minute, and deploying a wide range of different bridging materials, the operation did not overcome the flow from the well."

80 Barrels per minute is over 200,000 gallons per hour, over 115,000 barrels per day...did we seen an increase over and above what was already leaking out of 115k bpd?....we did not...it would have been a massive increase in order of multiples and this did not happen.

"The whole purpose is to get the kill mud down," said Wells. "We'll have 50,000 barrels of mud on hand to kill this well. It's far more than necessary, but we always like to have backup."

Try finding THAT quote around...it's been scrubbed...here's a cached copy of a quote...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WDj-HORTmIoJ:www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/7006870.html+%E2%809CThe+whole+purpose+is+to+get+the+kill+mud+down,%E2%80%9D+said+Wells.+%E2%80%9CWe'll+have+50,000+barrels+of+mud+on+hand+to+kill+this+well.+It's+far+more+than+necessary,+but+we+always+like+to+have+backup.%E2%80%9D&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

"The "top kill" effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting."

"Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well had run out of the fluid, or "mud," and that a second ship was on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress."

Later we found out that Allen had no idea what was really going on and had been "Unavailable all day"

So what we had was BP running out of 50,000 barrels of mud in a very short period of time. An amount far and above what they deemed necessary to kill the well. Shutting down pumping 16 hours before telling anyone, including the president. We were never really given a clear reason why "Top Kill" failed, just that it couldn't overcome the well.

There is only one article anywhere that says anything else about it at this time of writing...and it's a relatively obscure article from the wall street journal "online" citing an unnamed source.

"WASHINGTON-BP PLC has concluded that its "top-kill" attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico may have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor.

The disk, part of the subsea safety infrastructure, may have ruptured during the surge of oil and gas up the well on April 20 that led to the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP officials said. The rig sank two days later, triggering a leak that has since become the worst in U.S. history.

The broken disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into the well last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome the pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP's findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have escaped from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore.

As a result, BP wasn't able to get sufficient pressure to keep the oil and gas at bay. If they had been able to build up sufficient pressure, the company had hoped to pump in cement and seal off the well. The effort was deemed a failure on Saturday.

BP started the top-kill effort Wednesday afternoon, shooting heavy drilling fluids into the broken valve known as a blowout preventer. The mud was driven by a 30,000 horsepower pump installed on a ship at the surface. But it was clear from the start that a lot of the "kill mud" was leaking out instead of going down into the well."

There are no "Disks" or "Subsea safety structure" 1,000 feet below the sea floor, all that is there is well bore. There is nothing that can allow the mud or oil to "escape" into the rock formation outside the well bore except the well, because it is the only thing there.

All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP's actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from "BP officials" confirming the same.

I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to.

It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot...the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?...the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?...it doesn't leak so bad, you close the nozzle?...it leaks real bad,

same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off...or tried to anyway...but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks "down hole". I'm sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed...because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.

Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed.....and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.

There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the "system" including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil "Product" rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it's way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?...no one really knows....However now?...there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation.

This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer's immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?...we are beginning to the results of the well's total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.

The first layer of the sea floor in the gulf is mostly lose material of sand and silt. It doesn't hold up anything and isn't meant to, what holds the entire subsea system of the Bop in place is the well itself. The very large steel connectors of the initial well head "spud" stabbed in to the sea floor. The Bop literally sits on top of the pipe and never touches the sea bed, it wouldn't do anything in way of support if it did. After several tens of feet the seabed does begin to support the well connection laterally (side to side) you couldn't put a 450 ton piece of machinery on top of a 100' tall pipe "in the air" and subject it to the side loads caused by the ocean currents and expect it not to bend over...unless that pipe was very much larger than the machine itself, which you all can see it is not. The well's piping in comparison is actually very much smaller than the Blow Out Preventer and strong as it may be, it relies on some support from the seabed to function and not literally fall over...and it is now showing signs of doing just that....falling over.

If you have been watching the live feed cams you may have noticed that some of the ROVs are using an inclinometer...and inclinometer is an instrument that measures "Incline" or tilt. The BOP is not supposed to be tilting...and after the riser clip off operation it has begun to...

This is not the only problem that occurs due to erosion of the outer area of the well casings. The way a well casing assembly functions it that it is an assembly of different sized "tubes" that decrease in size as they go down. These tubes have a connection to each other that is not unlike a click or snap together locking action. After a certain length is assembled they are cemented around the ouside to the earth that the more rough drill hole is bored through in the well making process. A very well put together and simply explained process of "How to drill a deep water oil well" is available here:

The well bore casings rely on the support that is created by the cementing phase of well construction. Just like if you have many hands holding a pipe up you could put some weight on the top and the many hands could hold the pipe and the weight on top easily...but if there were no hands gripping and holding the pipe?...all the weight must be held up by the pipe alone. The series of connections between the sections of casings are not designed to hold up the immense weight of the BOP without all the "hands" that the cementing provides and they will eventually buckle and fail when stressed beyond their design limits.

These are clear and present dangers to the battered subsea safety structure (bop and lmrp) which is the only loose cork on this well we have left. The immediate (first 1,000 feet) of well structure that remains is now also undoubtedly compromised. However.....as bad as that is?...it is far from the only possible problems with this very problematic well. There were ongoing troubles with the entire process during the drilling of this well. There were also many comprises made by BP IMO which may have resulted in an overall weakened structure of the entire well system all the way to the bottom plug which is over 12,000 feet deep. Problems with the cementing procedure which was done by Haliburton and was deemed as "was against our best practices." by a Haliburton employee on April 1st weeks before the well blew out. There is much more and I won't go into detail right now concerning the lower end of the well and the troubles encountered during the whole creation of this well and earlier "Well control" situations that were revieled in various internal BP e-mails. I will add several links to those documents and quotes from them below and for now, address the issues concerning the upper portion of the well and the region of the sea floor.

Well...none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact...it's about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.

Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? ...it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.

All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.

It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said.

Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can "get there first"...us or the well.

We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.

The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come.

Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it....I sincerely hope I am wrong.

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.

The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens...

On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP's use of cement "was

An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices, this time saying that a "severe" gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully.

Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of collapsing.

Mark Hafle, the BP drilling engineer who wrote plans for well casings and cement seals on the Deepwater Horizon's well, testified that the well had lost thousands of barrels of mud at the bottom. But he said models run onshore showed alterations to the cement program would resolve the issues, and when asked if a cement failure allowed the well to "flow" gas and oil, he wouldn't capitulate.

Hafle said he made several changes to casing designs in the last few days before the well blew, including the addition of the two casing liners that weren't part of the original well design because of problems where the earthen sides of the well were "ballooning." He also worked with Halliburton engineers to design a plan for sealing the well casings with cement.

The information from BP identifies several new warning signs of problems. According to BP there were three flow

1. Before or during the cement job, an influx of hydrocarbon enters the wellbore.

4. After 16.5 hours waiting on cement, a negative test performed on wellbore below BOP.

(~ 1400 psi differential pressure on 9-7/8" casing hanger packoff and ~ 2350 psi on

5. Packoff leaks allowing hydrocarbon to enter wellbore below BOP. 1400 psi shut in

6. Hydrocarbon below BOP is unknowingly circulated to surface while finishing displacing

7. As hydrocarbon rises to surface, gas break out of solution further reduces hydrostatic

pressure in well. Well begin to flow, BOPs and Emergency Disconnect System (EDS)

I used to cover the energy business (oil, gas and alternative) here in Texas, and the few experts in the oil field -- including geologists, chemists, etc. -- able or willing to even speak of this BP event told me early on that it is likely the entire reserve will bleed out. Unfortunately none of them could say with any certainty just how much oil is in the reserve in question because, for one thing, the oil industry and secrecy have always been synonymous. According to BP data from about five years ago, there are four separate reservoirs containing a total of 2.5 billion barrels (barrels not gallons). One of the reservoirs has 1.5 billion barrels. I saw an earlier post here quoting an Anadarko Petroleum report which set the total amount at 2.3 billion barrels. One New York Times article put it at 2 billion barrels.

If the BP data correctly or honestly identified four separate reservoirs then a bleed-out might gush less than 2 to 2.5 billion barrels unless the walls -- as it were -- fracture or partially collapse. I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. They are just rumors but it is time for geologists or related experts to end their deafening silence and speak to these possibilities.

All oilmen lie about everything. The stories one hears about the extent to which they will protect themselves are all understatements. BP employees are already taking The Fifth before grand juries, and attorneys are laying a path for company executives to make a run for it.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was "only a few dozen experts," he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

"Claims such as `2,500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous," the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered "the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism."

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia - the university of Climategate fame - is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK's most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC's co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on `Climate scenario development' for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well. But he is one of those people who believe that the world was born with the word and exists by means of persuasion, such that there is no person or country that you cannot, by means of logical and moral argument, bring around to your side. He speaks as a teacher, as someone imparting values and generalities appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon, not as a tough-minded leader. He urges that things "must be done" and "should be done" and that "it is time" to do them.

Coast Guard temporarily shuts down skimmer barges in the gulf off the coast of Louisiana:

RUSH: The Wall Street Journal today on the op-ed page: "The drilling experts speak out on the Obama Deepwater moratorium." Now, what this piece does is explores yet another ugly facet of the Obama regime, namely its daily load of lies. Now, the case in point here is the use of the names of a number of drilling experts who the White House claimed were in support of its drilling moratorium. In fact, the experts were not asked about the wisdom of such a moratorium. They have said forthrightly that they oppose it. Using their names was flagrantly dishonest. They signed the recommendations and Obama's goons added the moratorium ban after they signed it. They were not informed that they were being asked to endorse a drilling moratorium. But what's a little thing like intellectual honesty when you have ideas that will, ahem, save the world?

"Before the Obama Administration sweeps under the carpet the controversy over the drilling experts it falsely used to justify its moratorium,

the incident bears another look. Not least because it underlines the purely political nature of a drilling ban that now threatens the Gulf Coast economy and drilling safety. When President Obama last month announced his six-month Deepwater moratorium, he pointed to an Interior Department report of new 'safety' recommendations. That report prominently noted that the recommendations it contained -- including the six-month drilling ban -- had been 'peer-reviewed' by 'experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.' It also boasted that Interior 'consulted with a wide range' of other experts. The clear implication was that the nation's drilling brain trust agreed a moratorium was necessary," following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Well, as the Journal has noted, "the opposite is true. In a scathing document, eight of the 'experts' the Administration listed in its report said their names had been 'used' to 'justify' a 'political decision.' The draft they reviewed had not included a six-month drilling moratorium. The Administration added that provision only after it had secured sign-off. ... The Administration insisted this was much ado about nothing." So the Journal decided "to call some of these experts ourselves. Their information, and concerns, are revealing. ... And the report they agreed to did address moratoria: It recommended a six-month ban on new deepwater permits. Yet Benton Baugh, president of Radoil, said that in at least two separate hour-and-a-half phone calls among Interior and the experts, there was no discussion of a moratorium on existing drilling. 'Because if anybody had [made that suggestion], we'd have said "that's craziness."'"

Can I translate this for you in simple language? The Obama administration gets hold of some oil experts via the interior department, and they said, "We're talking here, we think we oughta temporarily have a moratorium on future new rigs and drilling offshore until we figure out what happened here." These experts said, "That's a good idea," and they signed it. The Obama administration then puts out a different document, saying that they had agreed to a moratorium on existing rigs. They've said, "We never saw that, that was not in the document they asked us to sign. They are using our signatures for a political process." Folks, I don't know how to characterize this. And what are these experts going to do? They're doing as much as they can do here by going public in the Wall Street Journal with it, but they see what's happening to Hayward. They see what's happening to British Petroleum. Sorry, BP. They see what's going on here.

So this administration, operating as organized crime, as a thugocracy, is basically intimidating any opposition into silence and just shutting up. I'm not naive enough to think this stuff hasn't happened before, but the scope that it happens in this administration, every day on everything they touch turns sour. Everything they say they're trying to fix gets broken worse than it was. But to lie to oil drilling experts and reissue a document that they actually didn't sign to buttress your indefensible position, this is the kind of gang stuff they make comedy movies out of, except this isn't funny. This is for real.

RUSH: It was last June 11th, by the way, there was a story on how these moratorium drilling experts were totally exploited and misused. They were defrauded, essentially. The story was all out there last week, but we have a one-party media as well so no big deal was made. About all that happened was the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, apologized to these experts for having mistakenly, accidentally put their name to a document they had actually not signed. We're sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it now!

RUSH: Yes, Snerdley, I'm going to be talking about Alvin Greene. Now the Democrats in South Carolina are trying to get the guy thrown off the ballot. They suspect a Republican trick here. This is hilarious. So here is yet another black liberal that the Democrat Party is trying to throw overboard. This is hilarious. Yu got Helen Thomas, too. Liberals are showing us exactly who they are each and every day. The Politico today on June 3rd. This is still is relevant to today. "White House Political Team Stumbles, Bumbles -- They toppled Hillary Clinton, crushed John McCain and managed to get the first black man elected president of the United States. But now a series of recent missteps just keeps getting worse for Barack Obama's political operation, already under fire from inside the party for losing its golden touch.

"The second-guessing of the White House political shop -- which is coming in part from top House Democrats -- was sparked anew late Wednesday by news that the White House tried and failed to coax another Democratic Senate candidate out of making his race by dangling administration jobs in front of him." So here's two felonies. The first one was overlooked. Now we've got this one. This was the guy out in, I think, Colorado. (interruption) Romanoff, that's right. Romanoff. This poor Alvin Greene. Why can't Alvin Greene be like Nancy Pelosi's idea of legislation? You only find out about him once he's been elected. (laughing) Folks, this takes the cake. This is just fabulous. I mean, even Robert Byrd must be embarrassed by this level of out and out racism coming from the Democrat Party here. If a white politician referred to a black primary winner as "elephant [dung]" like Jim Clyburn did... Jim Clyburn, House majority whip, member of the Congressional Black Caucus, called this guy elephant dung.

Wouldn't the news media be outraged if a Republican had used that term? Where are Sharpton and Jackson on this? In fact, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if we get a new Justice Brothers ad from Sharpton and Jackson over this. omebody told me... Oh, I'm not going to make this public, how to get an iPhone. If I do this, I'll destroy it for everybody else. I'm going to try it. Somebody just sent me a tip here how to do it. I almost blurbed it. I'll do it after. I'll try it in the next break and see if I succeed. So anyway here's poor old Alvin Greene. All he needs to do is file a complaint with the Civil Rights Commission charging racial discrimination, violation of his civil rights. As for the rumor campaign that he's somehow a Republican, this is a standard page out of the old Stalinist playbook: "If you can't suppress your political enemies by any other means short of shooting them then you make 'em out to be mentally ill," which is what they're trying to do.

They're trying to make this guy mentally ill. "He's a nutcase!" He's a black liberal and the Democrat Party is out to destroy him. Where are Sharpton and Jackson, here? Now, the last time I checked -- you know, I check constantly -- the Constitution doesn't say anything about elected representatives' mental capacity. If it did a whole hell of a lot of them that are there now would be disqualified. But mental capacity does not show up in the qualifications. Now, there's supposedly some criminal charges against Alvin Greene, but wasn't Democrat Marion Berry elected as mayor of DC after being convicted? And doesn't the House have oversight of the DC elections? And isn't it true that the Congressional Black Caucus is trying to get Pelosi to get rid of the ethics committee in toto, because so many of them may be ensnared by ethics violations? (laughing)

And they have the audacity to run out and say that poor Alvin Greene faces criminal charges when the whole black caucus is trying to shut down the ethics office? (laughing) What about Alcee Hastings and who knows how many others who have gained office despite a criminal record? Greene hasn't even been convicted of anything yet! Alcee Hastings was out there making deals with criminal defendants to get 'em acquitted if they would pay him off, and now he's an elected Democrat in the House of Representatives from Florida. As for the charges that the Republican Party was somehow involved in a conspiracy to get Alvin Greene elected, Jim DeMint would be the prohibitive favorite down there no matter who was the Dem candidate.

Why would the South Carolina GOP risk doing anything to screw it up? DeMint can't lose. Why would they do this? (laughing) But, folks, you know what's happening here. They're literally throwing another black liberal overboard in the book Democrat Party, and yet who is it that are the racists? It's us, the conservatives, they say. You know what I think? I suspect the truth is that Alvin Greene was a real sleeper candidate, nobody noticed on either side. The Democrat candidate, Vic Raul, probably wanted to save his campaign money for facing DeMint. He didn't brother to advertise. So he didn't have the name recognition he needed. So more of the votes just went to the first guy on the ballot in alphabetical order, which is Alvin Greene. He did spend $10,000. That's another thing that's got 'em all ticked off. (laughing)

He won the election spending ten grand or some such thing and he can't even tell 'em where he spent it! (laughing) He doesn't even know. (laughing) I guess, ladies and gentlemen, these kinds of things have probably happened in primaries before, especially in off-year elections, but the party bosses just kept their mouthes shut. In this case (laughing) he got 60% of the vote and they're trying to reverse it, in an election they don't have a prayer of winning anyway. Oh, my God, what an opportunity! Every day we wake up theism tell us who they really, really are. "Let every vote count," except for the black guy Alvin Greene. Where is all the sympathy for this poor guy? You know, part of the left's compassion is based on sympathy for all of the discrimination and racism and even slavery that has occurred as heritage black people, and yet none of that matters for Alvin Greene.

Where is the sympathy for the poor guy? I mean, even William Jefferson when he was caught cold handed with 90 grand in his freezer they said, "Well, you know, he grew up a sharecropper's son! He never had any money. We have to understand where these people came from and give him the benefit of the doubt." Well, where's that kind of thinking for Alvin Greene? He doesn't have 90 grand in a freezer or anywhere else. He didn't steal it. He hasn't committed a crime anybody can convict him of. Yet the Democrat Party cannot wait to rid itself of this guy. It's still funny to see them running around trying to overturn the results. Now they're even seizing on the electronic voting machines. You know, this is funny, too, because Democrats for years have fought to get rid of the paper ballot since they know it's easier to rig elections when there's no paper trail. Now they want to seize the voting machines! (laughing) Why does...? The only reason this party is anywhere is because they are totally propped up by a media that people think are objective.

RUSH: Mark in Saluda, South Carolina. It's great to have you on the program. Hello.

RUSH: No reason. You don't even sound nervous. So no reason to be. You're going to look back on this experience as something you'll love very much. You're going to want to repeat it over and over again.

CALLER: Me, too. I'm telling you, bro. I'm telling you. I was calling about this Alvin Greene situation.

CALLER: I wanted to call you last week or so when it happened. This guy... (laughs) I don't know. They've had the actual lady that's the Democratic chairman for South Carolina -- Fowler, I believe her name is. She actually said, "Well, you know, we took his money, but he really couldn't say anything and tell what had you seen platform was or anything like that," and I'm serious: This guy cannot put a sentence together. He is just... Ugh. It's terrible. But I saw earlier on Fox that they had a Rasmussen poll, and he's still getting 21% of the vote up against Jim DeMint with like 56. (chuckling)

RUSH: That's the whole point here. No matter who they nominated nobody is going to beat DeMint, particularly this year. Now, this guy came up with 10 grand for the filing fee.

RUSH: Look, this guy makes more sense than Joe Biden does. I mean, this is puts sentences together better than Joe Biden does. This guy has never said to a guy in a wheelchair, "Hey, Chuck, stand up!"

CALLER: Well, maybe. I don't know. He might pull it out. I might vote for him myself, I don't know. I might switch over and vote for him --

RUSH: Oh, this poor guy. I just... You have to appreciate here. You talk about the guy can't put two sentences together. So? I mean, Democrats can't do that, either, unless they lie -- and this guy apparently doesn't have the ability to lie.

RUSH: I saw him on TV. He was interviewed and they asked, "Who's your opponent?" He had to consult his notes. (laughing)

CALLER: Especially when it comes, like Snerdley said, "the alleged porn charges."

CALLER: I think Mr. Snerdley needs to give us the black perspective on that situation.

RUSH: You know it is time for Obama Criticizer segment. Not on Alvin Greene, but we do need to revive the Obama criticizer.

RUSH: It's been awhile since the Official Obama Criticizer -- that's a good idea.

RUSH: I think... Look, you give this guy, Alvin Greene, a teleprompter and I'm sure he can come off like Obama does. You know, could be that the only difference between Alvin Greene and Barack Obama is... I mean, Obama went out there and said he was going to visit all "57 states" and they're harping on Alvin Greene? Obama's put his foot in I don't know how many times. He's said stupid, crazy things, and they just give him a pass 'cause everybody knows he graduated from Harvard. But Alvin Greene, somehow, has to be some kind of big idiot.

RUSH: Folks, I don't know how many times I've told you this, do not doubt me. From a June 11th Washington Post article: "The University of South Carolina confirms that Greene graduated in 2000 with a degree in political science. The Pentagon confirms that he served in the Army, and in the Army and Air Force national guards. Although Greene has not boasted of winning awards, the Pentagon says he was granted the Air Force Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and Korean Defense Service Medal." This guy has been active. Korean Defense Service Medal, the Washington Post, June 11th, confirms all of this.

From a June the 9th ABC News article: "Greene has been unemployed and living in his rural hometown 60 miles south of Columbia. He doesn't own a cell phone and there is no computer in his house. He returned home last August when he was involuntarily forced out of the Army after a 13 year career because 'things just weren't working ... it was hard to say.' He had served as an intelligence specialist in the Air Force and later as a unit supply specialist in the Army." So there you have it from impeccable sources, the Washington Post and ABC News.

RUSH: The BP oil spill, the Obama administration and Obama's personal reaction to it. Folks, I hope you remember that about a half a week, maybe a week before I left, I told you they want this disaster. I told you that this is something that's going to play right into their hands. He's gonna use this thing to push cap and trade. He has devastated the Gulf oil business by eliminating all offshore drilling until the so-called cause for this thing is found. It's a disaster in and of itself the way the president of the United States is dealing with this. It's a crisis and they are gonna make full use of it.

This speech from the Oval Office tonight is not about the oil spill. It's not about BP. It is about Obama. The whole purpose for this is Obama's plummeting approval numbers and an attempt to get them back up. We have learned so much about early offers of assistance from foreign countries that were rejected 'cause the paperwork wasn't done correctly or so forth and so on.

RUSH: Okay. Let's get down to the matters at hand regarding the future of the United States of America. We are a great nation at risk in a dangerous world. Our threats have always come externally. They have always come from outside our borders. Today the greatest threats facing our country come from within our own borders. It is simply unconscionable how this president and his administration, his regime, have used this oil spill, this natural disaster, to advance a political agenda. And you're going to see the culmination of it tonight in his address to the nation as the AKOTUS, the Ass Kicker of the United States. No longer is he POTUS. He's got his Bay of Rigs out there, he has shut down the Bay of Rigs, he is going to destroy a way of life in the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, the Brazilians are continuing to drill with US financial aid off their coast. The Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Mexicans are continuing to drill in association with the Cubans in the Gulf of Mexico. We are going to shut down by order of the president of the United States. Let me ask you a question. When a passenger airplane crashes, do we cancel all flights? Do we stop building jet airplanes? We do not. And yet we have shut down offshore drilling. Everybody says Obama has delayed his response, he doesn't know what he's doing, he's a little incompetent. That may well be. But, folks, and I know this is hard to believe, I know people don't want to get their arms around this and don't want to believe this. I'm telling you, I told you many times before I left here last week, this disaster is a fortuitous opportunity for this regime. The more oil on the beaches, the better. The more video of birds dying because of oil, the better.

Put your thinking caps on. We know this administration hates conventional energy sources. Despite the job losing and expense aspects of it, they want to go so-called green energy with wind and solar and all of this, and now to take the occasion of this disaster to further wreck the US economy and add a BTU tax. This is essentially what Clinton wanted to do when he was first inaugurated in 1993. He went after a BTU tax, which is a carbon tax, which is what Obama's going to do here. It's what he's going to propose. You couple this with the massive tax increases that are coming on January 1st, 2011. I saw a story the other day, folks, the airline industry -- this may shock you -- the airline industry as a whole is reporting profits this year of two-and-a-half billion dollars. The airline industry as a whole has rarely posted a profit. Individual airlines have. Now, it matters to me not what the reason for the profit is. Maybe it's because they're charging for carry-on luggage or charging for the peanuts, it doesn't matter. They're reporting the profit in this year and they're going to take it in this year, do you know why? Because of the tax increases coming next year on investments, investment income; capital gains is going up.

Everybody who can, every business, every individual who can is going to take as much money that is due them in 2011 and beyond in this year. It's much like when Clinton raised taxes retroactively in 1993, I'll never forget, Michael Eisner who was at the time running Disney sold $192 million worth of Disney stock in December prior to the new year to escape the new taxes. That's going to be happening throughout this country. Individuals, businesses, people who can accelerate their income to this year are going to do it, which is going to depress economic activity even more next year with the increase of taxes that's coming, health care and otherwise. It's just unconscionable what is being done to the once great engine of freedom that was the United States private sector. Now we've gotta request another $50 billion bailout for teachers. You know, in the federal government when they talk about the various -- like the Department of the Interior, if they're facing budget cuts, they'll always trot out the Washington Monument excuse. "Well, budget cuts, we'll have to close the Washington Monument." And of course citizens, "No, you can't close the Washington Monument. Why, give 'em their budget." The same thing that locals do. "Gosh, budget cuts, have to cut the fireman budget, have to get rid of policemen, might even have to get rid of some teachers."

We don't have the money to be bailing any of these institutions out, and many of the institutions and groups of people that we are bailing out are one of the reasons why we're in the mess that we're in. They are in the public sector producing nothing. They're siphoning off the productivity of people in the private sector via their taxes, and, meanwhile, there's no end in sight for this unemployment. You saw that home sales are down; consumer spending surprisingly plummeted in May. Not surprising to anybody keeping their head above water and looking at this. I'll tell you what, you know, it turns out back in the 2008 presidential campaign that Hillary Clinton was right, her ads were right. Obama was not ready on day one. Obama was not able to answer the phone at three a.m. How many months did he have to dither over sending the requested troops in Afghanistan? How many months has he dithered on the oil spill? When has he ever answered the phone?

You know what I'm hearing? I'm hearing people say, "Well, you know, Obama is such a big thinker that these small things like the oil spill, they're beneath Obama. He's focused on big changes, big things." Yeah, I know the big things he's focused on: cutting the United States down to size, eliminating it as a superpower in a dangerous world. But to say that the oil spill is beneath Obama, he's so more qualified than to deal with just that, make no mistake about it, whether he's dithering out -- well, he is dithering on it. The question is, is it due to incompetence or is it due to a purposeful stratagem to advance the political agenda? And I choose the latter. You know, we got this live feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico on the oil leak. Why don't we have a live feed of what Obama is doing to cap the well? We have Obama walking the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico, leaning down and doing what? Gathering rocks off the beach and perusing them, "Ooh," people standing by, "Why, this man, he's really on the case, he really cares."

It reminds me of Clinton at Normandy. Somebody put some rocks on the beach, there aren't any rocks there. He puts them in the shape of a cross with a lone battleship on the horizon. Everything is for show. What they are interested in doing here is getting approval numbers up because they are plummeting. Gallup has him as low as he's ever been. So here's Barack "Whose Ass" Obama, known now as AKOTUS, the Ass Kicker of the United States, with his Bay of Rigs. And you notice, folks, how the very same people who are enraptured because Obama's now talking tough guy, they wanted him to talk tough. These are the same people who were appalled when George Bush spoke tough after 9/11. He said that enraged the world, that cowboy attitude of Bush, it caused the rest of the world to hate us, but now these same people want the weasel Obama to sound tough, and Obama has responded. He's going to kick ass, he's going to look around to find some ass to kick and he's going to do it, call in that inner cowboy and they finally got Obama's inner cowboy. In fact, didn't Obama even complain about George W. Bush talking tough? But of course, folks, it makes far more sense to talk tough to an oil company that's trying to provide more energy for our country's needs than to be tough on terrorists who are trying to destroy us.

In fact, if a US soldier had done to a murderous terrorist what Bob Etheridge did to this student, that soldier would be court-martialed. He would be facing a trial. We had it happen. Navy SEALs on trial for giving a bloody lip to a terrorist. And here's Bob Etheridge and the Dems excuse it, he was being harassed by zealous members of the right wing. It's just amazing. So we're supposed to believe here that Obama knows whose ass to kick, when he doesn't even have the guts to name the enemy in the war on terror. Oh, yeah, we can make an enemy out of BP, damn right we can, that's easy. The left knows how to make an enemy out of private sector companies. Isn't it a damn good thing -- I'm dead serious about this. We have heard for decades about obscene profits in the oil business. We have heard about how they have milked the consumer with ungodly high gasoline prices. Isn't it a good thing that the oil companies sometimes make such windfall profits? Otherwise how could BP pay for all the damage done to the Gulf? You've seen the numbers, they're going to have billions here, hundred billion there, they gotta pay this liability -- where are they gonna get the money?

Isn't it a good thing that they have some profits here to deal with this? Or does Obama want to put them in a receivership; does he want them to go bankrupt? Has anybody in government suggested using any of the taxes that they have gotten from oil windfall profits to clean up the spill or pay for reparations? I mean the government has been one of the largest beneficiaries of oil company success via high taxes. Do we hear Obama promising an escrow account from US financial institutions, from taxes generated by the taxes on oil companies? I don't know, folks. It's just maddening to watch all this take place. I know I keep saying this, but it needs to be repeated. To see a media that has totally abandoned its constitutional role to now just openly become advocates and defenders of a particularly dangerous left-wing regime. As for the damage in the Gulf, I think the politicians, the news media, are largely to blame for the downturn in the Gulf's economy. When you've got Obama, who doesn't even like capitalism, when you've got Obama down on the beach urging people to come down, what does that tell you about the job the media has done in poisoning the well?

RUSH: Elizabeth in Pensacola, Florida, you're first as we go to the phones. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you so very, very much for taking my call. I've lived in Pensacola for 17 years. The way of life down here is dying, Rush. Our bayous are dying. Our estuaries are dying. The pelicans we see on the beaches are dying. The cleanup is there, but it's rather funny and pathetic while these beaches are not being cleaned up, and there's no reason on God's green earth why this oil -- I hope I don't start crying -- should ever have made it to our shores. It is an environmental disaster that I don't think people who don't live here can grasp what this looks like, what it smells like and feels like. I've been out to Perdido Key which is out a little bit west of Pensacola, and you see these tarballs and you touch them and you're thinking, "My God, this made it to our shores."

RUSH: Now, Elizabeth, is anything you're hearing anybody at any level of authority saying making you feel better about it or more hopeful?

CALLER: No. Actually, when he was here today -- he came in yesterday and it was an absolute traffic nightmare because they did not inform people as to what roads were being closed. People are mad, Rush. They're sad. It's almost a state of mourning when you talk about the beaches here and the estuaries. I live very close to a bayou, and we have one boom that we've been provided. There are people going around and cutting...

RUSH: You know, the Dutch offered us a bunch of ships and booms three days after the spill was discovered and we rejected it. Their paperwork wasn't right.

RUSH: So Obama tonight is gonna make a push for cap and trade. Are we actually supposed to believe that taxing our remaining energy supply with a massive carbon tax is gonna somehow cause us to grow the economy? Remember, now, Obama said that passing health care was going to lower health care costs, was going to lower insurance premiums. None of that is true. I have news stories and headlines here that will

probably not shock you, but they're our proof. Oh, how about this South Carolina Democrat Senate nominee, this Greene fellow? This is hilarious to watch, the left react to this. It's delicious. It is delectable. So we'll be talking about that. But I've got some of these headlines. This is from June 11th, Friday night news dump: "White House Says 51% of Company Health Care Plans Will Not Meet Obama Guidelines."

We told you this. We told you this before the law was voted on, which means these companies are going to have to dump them. They're going to want to dump them anyway. This is how the public option is going to be created. Yet Obama told you, "You like your company, you like your doctor, you like your plan? You get to keep it." No! "Fifty-one percent of employee plans do not meet the guidelines" in Obamacare. From the AP on June the 14th: "Employers Expect Medical Costs to Jump in 2011," along with tax increases and everything else. Now, I'm confused here, folks. Taxes and costs are going up? I mean, I thought national health care was going to save all of this money and bring the debt down to zero and make people healthier and make everybody wealthy! I thought all of these magical things were going to happen with this new health care plan.

And here from IBD, Investor's Business Daily on June 11th: "Keep Your Health Plan Under Overhaul? Probably Not, Gov't Analysis Concludes," and this is again: 51% of private plans, business plans will not meet Obama guidelines. We are told that the economy is finally rebounding. Yeah? June 11th, last Friday: "Retail Sales Show Surprise Slump as Consumers Struggle." What's the surprise? Somebody show me where disposable income is up. Somebody show me where wages are up. Somebody show me where employment is up. Why would anybody with half a brain think that retail sales were gonna explode? We don't have any genuine good employment news. :Temporary census hires were accounting for 90% of the jobs in May. So now we're being told that taxing our energy supply with a massive carbon tax is gonna cause us to grow the economy. Yeah, just like health care overhaul was going to lower premiums, let us keep our doctors, bring down the deficit.

Let me ask you this: If the majority of Americans come to truly believe such nonsense -- that cap and trade, taxing carbon emissions will actually grow the economy -- then we are in dangerous times. Voltaire said many things. Of the many things that Voltaire said, the French philosopher: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Now, I'm also hearing people say Obama isn't doing anything. Folks, I don't know how people can say that Obama's not doing anything. He's up to his ears. He's over his ears in this! Some people said, "He's up to his ears." He's over his ears, not just his head. He's over his ears in this whole thing. But to say that he's a doing anything... Look, his ban on oil drilling is estimated to be killing at least 40,000 jobs in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. Anybody think this is just stupidity, ignorance?

The Brazilians are going nuts. In fact, their oil company, Petrobras, is doing great. Buy their stock, folks. That's an oil company going to go through the roof. We're paying federal money, George Soros money to help 'em drill. Mexico is still drilling. And this ban, this ban is indefinite. This oil drilling ban is indefinite. So all that high-tech equipment, the rigs, the top personnel, they're going to have to go someplace else for jobs -- like Brazil or Mexico or Venezuela. And it will be years before they come back. Do not think this is accidental, and tonight tell me he's not doing anything. He is marching on toward one of his immediate objectives which was the destruction of the US private sector. Now, maybe I'll cut him some slack. Maybe he doesn't think he's going to destroy it. The Chicago way... (interruption)

No, no, no. The Chicago way -- Barone's written about this. The Chicago way is that you go ahead and you just savage the private sector, and you beat 'em up. You make under-the-table deals with them. You tell 'em, "The voters want theater, so I'm going to be ripping you a new one each and every day but under the table we're going to make deals and you're going to be fine." There was also America to bail out Chicago. Well, the Chicago way has been brought to Washington. Who's going to bail America out? This guy... I think liberals always think, for whatever stupid reason, that the golden goose is always going to be golden. They think that a rich people are always going to be rich despite their efforts to tax them into poverty and that therefore there's always going to be money to get when there isn't any money.

We're printing it. We're borrowing it. The ChiCom share of our national debt is at an all-time high now, news as of this morning. There's no reason to shut down oil drilling all over the Gulf and in Alaska just because of this. As I said, we don't stop making airplanes because one crashes. We don't ground and put the airlines out of business because an airplane crashes. That's the equivalent of what we're doing here. Has anybody suggested, by the way, that the Obama administration's federal inspectors might have gone easy on BP with their safety inspections in exchange for the massive campaign contributions BP gave to Obama and the Democrats? I mean, it's hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of months, millions of dollars BP campaign contributions. Just like Goldman Sachs and all these Wall Street firms were giving big, big donations.

But under the table, "You work with us. Voters want theater. I gotta beat you up in public but I know you helped me out. I'll be here for you at some point when nobody's watching." I'm going to tell you: If this were a Republican president during this oil spill, and he and his party had been the top recipient of BP's largesse, don't you think the theory would have been mentioned a few hundred times by the watchdog media that maybe one of the reasons the Obama administration hasn't been really tough on BP and has dithered around here is because all the campaign cash they got? Imagine if this were Bush and BP had donated to Bush-Cheney. Oh, folks! It would be banner headlines in red all over every newspaper and television network daily.

Here's Raymond in Livermore, California. Raymond, you're next on the EIB Network. Great to have you here, sir.

CALLER: Congratulations on your wedding. You mentioned the president's talk tonight. The mouthpiece of this administration has said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste," and as you

have played on this show: Obama, when he was a senator, said he wasn't bothered by three-dollar-a-gallon gas. He was just unhappy that it went up so fast.

RUSH: Four dollars. Four-dollar-a-gallon. He wasn't unhappy with four dollar. He just he didn't like it going there so fast. You're right.

CALLER: So we keep hearing about renewable energy, we keep hearing about green energy, about CO2-free energy. What we don't hear about is abundant energy and inexpensive energy, which is what drives a great nation. It's why we have grown so quickly in a short amount of time.

RUSH: Well, no. There's no abundance of anything. There is no more American exceptionalism. Our salad days are behind us. It's time for us to pay the piper. We got rich by stealing from everybody else around the world. We made the rest of the world poor while we got rich. No, no, no! It's time we got our heads chopped off a little bit here to cut us down to size. Abundance? American exceptionalism? Positive things about America? It doesn't compute with this administration. When do you hear it? When do you hear wonderful things about this nation from anybody in elected office, particularly on the Democrat side? You don't.

RUSH: A friend of mine sends a note: "I defy you to find any good news anywhere." The only person out there who has good news is Jimmy Carter. He's about to be supplanted as the worst president of the century by Obama. Other than Jimmy Carter having good news, nobody has any out there. It's like I said when I opened the program. Obama is giving Marxist professors a bad name because reality always spoils a leftist rant in a class brimming with young skulls full of mush. They can talk about all the theory, and then reality hits and beats 'em upside the head, and all this theory of the brilliance of Marxism is going up in oil.

RUSH: Richard in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, I have about a minute and a half here, sir, but I wanted to get to you. Hello.

CALLER: I just wanted to talk about, you know, it seems like Obama is falling back on his attorney skills, because it seems like he's ambulance chasing every issue that's out there, from the Gulf where I'm at right now which is getting worse by the day, to the financial situation.

RUSH: Wow. You know, it's a good point, it's a good point, chasing the ambulance, making sure the unions are protected. I just saw, by the way, they've had to suspend -- I hope this is temporary -- they've had to suspend the oil collection efforts 'cause there's a fire on the surface aboard one of the ships that they're using to collect some of the oil that's being skimmed from the leak. Here we are on the verge of Obama's Oval Office speech, provided he can find it. I think it's been such a long time since he's been in the Oval Office, it will be interesting to see if he actually gets there tonight for this address to the nation about how he intends to further damage our energy sector.

A crisis of confidence (this is Conn Carroll, and his articles are nearly always excellent):

Here is a news flash; a recent study recently confirms that teenage boys eat a lot:

Friday night news dump: White House says 51 percent of company health plans won't meet Obamacare guidelines

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

Janine Turner’s website (I’m serious; and the website is serious too). This is if you have an interest in real American history:

Since this will be with us for a long time, the timeline of the BP gulf oil spill:

This is cool: a continuous timeline of the spill, with the daily info and the expansion of the oil, and the response:

Do you want to watch what is happening on our border? These are actual videos of observations cams along the border:

Celebrity Jihad (no, really). The headline to one story: Heroic Helen Thomas Tells Jews to "Get the Hell Out of Palestine," Go Back to Germany, Poland. Under the heading harlots, there are bunches of photos of starlets showing cleavage or wearing bikinis. This site appears to be deeply tongue-in-cheek.

Legendary White House reporter and founding member of the Muppets Helen Thomas made a heroic stand against the Zionists late last month, telling Jews to "get the hell out of Palestine" and to go home to "Poland and Germany."

Before the Jews sink their devilish claws into Helen, we want to show our solidarity by calling on all Jews to leave Zionist Occupied Hollywood by the end of June, or we shall begin "Operation Gevalt," which will disrupt all shipments of Nova lox to the west coast.

The Freedom Project (most a conservative news and opinion site which appears to concentrate on matters financial)

Weekly poll, asking you to identify what we ought to cut in governmental spending:

Are you tired of all the unfocused news and lame talking heads yelling at one another? Just grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and see what is really going on in the world:

Judith Miller is one of the moderate and fairly level-headed voices for FoxNews:

Conservative New Media (it is so-so; I must admit to getting tired of seeing the interviewer high-fiving Carly Fiorina 3 or 4 times during an interview):

Army Ranger Michael Behenna sentenced to 25 years in prison for 25 years for shooting Al Qaeda operative

Maybe the White House does not need to hold press conferences? It releases exclusive articles daily right here:

This is quite helpful; it is a list of all leftist groups, with links to background information on each of these groups (when I checked, 879 groups were listed). This is a fantastic resource.

One of the more radical people from the right, calling for the impeachment of Obama:

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a free enterprise site (there are several videos on the flat tax):

This is a pretty radical site which alleges that Obama is a Marxist hell-bent in taking over our country:

1982 interview with Larry Grathwohl on Ayers' plan for American re-education camps and the need to kill millions

This is an interesting site; it seems to be devoted to the debate of climate change:

This is a news site which I just discovered; they gave 3 minute coverage to Obama’s healthcare summit and seemed to give a pretty decent overall view of it, without slanting one way or the other:

I have glanced through their website and it seems to be quite professional and reasonable. They have apparently been around since 1942.

This is fantastic; Florida (the Sunshine State) is now putting its state budget online:

Suzanne Somers s supposed to be older than Bill O’Reilly? He interviewed her this week, and she looked, well, hot. She is big into vitamins and human growth hormones.

The National Journal, which is a political journal (which, at first glance, seems to be pretty even-handed):

And I am hoping that most people see this as non-partisan: Citizens Against Government Waste:

This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.

This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:

Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:

On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.