Excerpts from Obama’s Oil-and-Water speech yesterday in New Orleans…

What is striking about today’s debate about oil and water mixing in the Gulf of Mexico is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s – in arguments that go back forty years or more.

In the early years of the environmental movement and opposition to the offshore drilling, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of Big Oil of being hippy tree-huggers.

Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of corporate America itself – by defacing Exxon signs; by blaming Shell Oil for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor the CEO’s who enrich us all by enriching themselves.

Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views – these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that concern for the environment does not make you a hippy tree-hugger, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America’s corporate hierarchy.

And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments – a fact most evident during our recent debates about oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, when those who opposed offshore drilling were tagged by some as eco-freaks, and a corporation providing its full resources to shut down the leak was accused of criminal negligence.

Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions.

WashPo says…

The Republican candidate for President Obama’s old Senate seat inaccurately claimed to have received the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for service during NATO’s conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.

The New York Times is even more euphemistic about this lying shit-head.

Mark S. Kirk, the Republican candidate seeking the United States Senate seat once held by President Obama, has acknowledged that his official biography incorrectly listed a prestigious military award that he never received.

Incorrectly listed? Inaccurately claimed?

“I was the Navy’s intelligence officer of the year in 1998″ is how this shameless skank described himself in a Congressional budget hearing in 2002.

But in reality it was only Kirk’s unit which receved a citation from the National Military Intelligence Association, and “the citation does not mention Kirk and instead designates the entire Intelligence Division Electronic Attack Wing at Aviano,” and although the same NMIA awards many individual citations every year, none of them went to Kirk.

This wasn’t an inaccurate claim or an incorrect listing. It was a lie about the only and unreal distinction on this chump’s résumé, but if the Times and Post started throwing around words like “liar” in Washington, there’s a small chance idiotic voters might look around for a better alternative to major parties which habitually nominate liars like Mark Kirk and stooges for organized crime like the Democratic contender for the US Senate from Illinois, Alexi Giannoulias.

Regulators have seized the Chicago community bank owned by the family of Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic nominee seeking the Illinois seat once held by President Barack Obama.

Giannoulias touted his experience as a senior loan officer there as a key credential in his 2006 bid for the treasurer’s office, though once elected he downplayed his role there after reports emerged of dubious loans and financial dealings with organized crime members and convicted political fixer Antoin Rezko.

Now Giannoulias claims that all those bad things only began to happen after he left the bank to run Illinois State Treasurer in 2006, and…

He clung to that position to deflect questions about the bank’s dealings with questionable characters, including two organized crime figures who borrowed $20 million from Broadway from 2004 to 2006.

And what state wouldn’t be delighted to have a state treasurer or US Senator whose family bank was in bed with the mob while he was a senior loan officer?

But maybe Giannoulias didn’t know anything about anything! Maybe he’s an idiot, instead of a crook!

He’s said that as VP he oversaw all of Broadway’s lending–but he’s also said he was really just the guy who serviced the bank’s loans–overseeing things like billing and payment collection– while more senior officers, including his older brother Demetris, negotiated the deals and made the final decisions. When I pressed him to specify his job descriptions at each stage of his employment at the bank, he laughed.

“You have to understand that it was the family business–I did everything there,” he said.

And now for the good news!

The Green Party candidate for the US Senate from Illinois is not a liar or stooge for the mob, and instead worked his way out of poverty with a career in journalism beginning at the tender age of 13!

LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent.

“How much money did the American economy lose because of the derivatives and the credit default swaps?” he asked. “There have been only two men prosecuted for that level of crime, Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford. How much is the drug industry worth in the United States? It is not worth $45 trillion. How many African-American and Hispanic men are incarcerated for being the same kind of capitalist? If we swap dope for derivatives there wouldn’t be a Wall Street because they would be behind bars. If we prosecute derivatives the same way you prosecute dope, which is not different in how it undermines a family, Wall Street wouldn’t exist.”

But who wants to waste a vote on a guy like LeAlan Jones, when you could vote for a Democratic scum-bag or a Republican scum-bag instead?

LeAlan Jones for US Senate from Illinois!

Ronald Reagan once claimed that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

But of course that senile stooge for Big Money got it wrong. The nine most terrifying words in any language are…

“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”

My update of the Reagan Doctrine (insofar as that senile stooge ever had a “doctrine,” or even an idea, except stooging for Big Money) occurred to me when Baghdad was selected as the worst city in the world on the Mercer 2010 Quality of Life Survey.

After seven years of beneficent American occupation!

And Baghdad had to beat out some real humdingers among messed up cities to win that prize!

More messed up than Khartoum?

You betcha!

This was reminiscent of some recent headlines from Afghanistan, selected by Save the Children as the worst place in the world to be born. The worst place to be a mother! The worst place to be a child!

After nine long years of American “assistance!”

Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai, above, is worth over $9 billion.

From New York Magazine…

Every day, at every Uniqlo worldwide, customer advisers repeat what are known as “the six standard phrases,” which they are expected to use while on the floor.

The first and third “standard phrases” are…

“Hello, my name is Uniqlo, how are you today?”

“Let me know if you need anything. My name is Uniqlo.”

Every office at Uniqlo displays the same poster.

ALWAYS FOLLOW COMPANY DIRECTION.

DO NOT WORK IN YOUR OWN WAY.

And from the New York Times…

A memorial for the three women Stephen Griffiths is accused of killing outside his home in Bradford, England.

In a grisly case that British newspapers have compared to the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1970s, the police on Thursday charged a 40-year-old man pursuing a Ph.D. in 19th-century homicides with the murders of three women identified by the police as prostitutes.

One victim was caught on closed-circuit television last week being killed with a crossbow shot to the head before her dismembered body was dumped in a nearby river.

At his arraignment, Mr. Griffiths replied to the standard questions…

What is your name?

I am the crossbow cannibal.

What is your address?

Here, I guess.

Engineers have stopped the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government’s top oil-spill commander, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.

Live video feed!

That’s the very good news! And now…

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 also said that, later Thursday, an interagency team would release a revised estimate of how much oil had flowed from the well into the gulf before the “top kill” effort began.

Think of yourself as a turtle on the information super-highway. It took a long, long time for you to find out anything about how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon.

But now a semi-truck full of bullshit is rolling down that highway at a hundred miles per hour, and it’s aimed at you, little turtle!

The pressure from the well was very low, he said…

And a very low estimate of total damage is on the way!

But what if BP hadn’t blocked access to the well-head for five long weeks, so nobody except BP could measure the “pressure from the well,” way back when the pressure from the well was high enough to blow down Deepwater Horizon?

What kind of estimate of total flow would some pointy-headed independent scientists have produced, when that godawful leak was young and frisky?

We info-turtles will never know.

And why did BP waste so much time with preposterous gew-gaws like the “top hat” instead of applying the “top kill” right away?

We info-turtles will never know.

Update: And now suddenly on the video feed you can see an ugly mess of mud and who knows what boiling out of the pipes!

But I might as well mention that the main subject of my diary is what comes next, in the form of low-ball estimates of the damage.

There are plenty of ROVs out there which can operate at 5,000 feet, and if anyone in the chain of command had wanted a better estimate than eye-balling a video feed allows, we would already have some real measurements, instead of a very fuzzy collection of videos.

But now it doesn’t really matter what anybody sends down to the well-head! The flow has been radically diminished, at the very least, and there’s essentially nothing left to measure.

What has been called the “signature wound” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan— the mild brain damage troops suffer from a roadside bomb — might be so unique in its destruction that it could be a newly discovered disease, scientists say.

Army field studies have shown that more than 10% of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered at least one concussion or brain injury, the vast majority of those from exposure to a homemade bomb or improvised explosive device. Five percent to 15% of mild TBI patients develop lasting problems with concentration, short-term memory, fatigue and chronic headaches.

One of those is former Army Spec. Michael Cain, who lost his right leg below the knee in a roadside explosion in Iraq in 2003. Today, he is still plagued with short-term memory loss, difficulty concentrating and irritability.

“If they tell me some important stuff, like appointments, if I don’t write it down or put it in my BlackBerry right away, I’m not going to remember,” Cain says.

Unemployed and living on a medical retirement income, Cain says he is uncertain about his future.

“I really wish that they’d go away,” he says of symptoms such as short-term memory loss and his tendency to startle easily. “I didn’t want them to tell me I had a brain problem, because I was a pretty smart person before. I had straight A’s. … It really frustrates me.”

Pentagon officials estimated for the first time Wednesday that up to 360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have suffered brain injuries. Among them are 45,000 to 90,000 veterans whose symptoms persist and warrant specialized care.

The detonation of any powerful explosive generates a blast wave of high pressure that spreads out at 1,600 feet per second from the point of explosion and travels hundreds of yards. The lethal blast wave is a two-part assault that rattles the brain against the skull. The initial shock wave of very high pressure is followed closely by the “secondary wind”: a huge volume of displaced air flooding back into the area, again under high pressure. No helmet or armor can defend against such a massive wave front.

Blast waves cause severe concussions, resulting in loss of consciousness and obvious neurological deficits such as blindness, deafness and mental retardation. Blast waves causing TBIs can leave a 19-year-old private who could easily run a six-minute mile unable to stand or even to think.

“TBIs from Iraq are different,” said P. Steven Macedo, a neurologist and former doctor at the Veterans Administration. Concussions from motorcycle accidents injure the brain by stretching or tearing it, he noted. But in Iraq, something else is going on. “When the sound wave moves through the brain, it seems to cause little gas bubbles to form,” he said. “When they pop, it leaves a cavity. So you are littering people’s brains with these little holes.”

Most of the families of our wounded that I have interviewed months, if not years, after the injury say the same thing: “Someone should have told us that with these closed-head injuries, things would not really get all that much better.”

Scientists trying to understand traumatic brain injury from bomb blasts are finding the wound more insidious than they once thought.

They find that even when there are no outward signs of injury from the blast, cells deep within the brain can be altered, their metabolism changed, causing them to die, says Geoff Ling, an advance-research scientist with the Pentagon.

Military and civilian scientists worry whether a generation of servicemembers could emerge from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with some form of brain damage which steadily becomes more severe.

The microscopic damage changes brain cell metabolism, Ibolja Cernak (a brain-injury scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) says, creating a cascading effect that leads to the premature aging and death of neurons that cannot be replaced.

A new report provides evidence linking traumatic brain injury sustained by troops in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to a variety of long-term health problems including dementia, aggression, depression and symptoms similar to those seen in Parkinson’s disease.

There was “sufficient” evidence of an association between TBI and decline in neurocognitive function, long-term unemployment and problems with social relationships; Alzheimer’s-like dementia, endocrine dysfunction, depression, aggressive behavior, memory problems and early death.

Improvised bombs rattled former Army Spc. Adam Pittman a dozen times in his three tours in Iraq, most severely when his Bradley fighting vehicle ran over one hidden in the dirt in 2005.

Now, part of Pittman’s brain has gone dormant, and on most days he can’t think straight.

He leaves the room and forgets what he was searching for. He gets migraines so piercing that his right eye sometimes curls away from his left. Anger comes easily, inspiring rages that sometimes have his wife terrified for herself and their 3-year-old daughter.

And so it goes, after seven years of senseless war in Iraq, and nine years of senseless war in Afghanistan.

And on the previous page were the names of Pvt. Grant A. Cotting and Spc. Matthew M. Pollini, the first and second American soldiers killed in action after the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Matthew Pollini was serving with the 772nd Military Police Company, an Army National Guard unit from Taunton. Flags flew at half-staff in Rockland and the town posted a memorial notice.

Erica Pollini told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy her brother “was a talented, loyal person” who joined the National Guard two or three years ago. She said his unit was activated last fall and he was due home in October. Joseph Pollini told WBZ-TV his older brother “was a hero, a hands-down hero,” and said he followed his brother into the same Guard unit, a dream of service they shared.

Pollini’s 20-year-old wife Sarah, whom he married Dec. 22, told The Patriot Ledger, “we had lots of plans.”

Although Mohamed Atta and his crew of suicide bombers had been identified as al Qaeda terrorists and barred from entering the United States before 9/11, Richard B. Cheney personally issued all of them “special student visas” without further investigation.

And wouldn’t the Democrats be screaming bloody murder if George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had personally intervened to make 9/11 possible!

But after Ken Salazar personally intervened in federal court to overturn an injunction against offshore drilling, specifically for the catastrophic well at Mississippi Canyon Block 252…

Democrats just grinned their usual shit-eating grins, and blamed everybody else except Barack Obama.

And that’s the real story.

Obama/Salazar intervened last year to allow BP to drill at Mississippi Canyon Block 252, where tens of millions of gallons of oil are now polluting the Gulf of Mexico.

The actual exploratory drilling was approved by the Obama administration on April 6, 2009.

Within days of the 2009 approval, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies won a court order vacating the Bush Five-Year Offshore Drilling Plan. Rather than use the court order as a timeout on new offshore oil drilling to develop a new plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar filed a special motion with the court to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically identified BP’s operation as one that should be released from the vacature.

So the system actually worked, and offshore drilling had been shut down around Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but then…

Obama/Salazar intervened in court to start drilling again, in April 2009, without further evironmental review, exactly where Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank.

And just because this is exactly the aspect of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that so many Democrats want to forget, I’ll connect those two dots one more time.

1. The federal courts shut down offshore drilling in April 2009.

2. Obama/Salazar intervened to get BP a permit to drill its famous goddamned well.

So why aren’t the Democrats outraged about Obama’s catastrophic irresponsibility?

Let’s ask the most famous Democrat of them all, who once explained a similar conundrum.

“Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.“

Barack Obama, May 22, 2010

Today in the New York Times…

President Obama previewed a new national security strategy rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he essentially repudiated his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage preemptive war.

So what does Obama mean by “diplomatic engagement?”

An Afghan soldier weeps over the body of his wounded friend as an American medic tries to save him.

An American soldier examines the charred remains of the Humvee hit by the IED.

And in Pakistan…

US drone attack kills 10 in North Waziristan

A Pakistani tribesman stands beside his family members, who were injured in an overnight suspected U.S. missile strike, at a local hospital in Miran Shah, main town of North Waziristan.

And last week…

There was a massive drone attack in Pakistan today — one involving multiple unmanned aircraft and “up to 18 American missiles,” according to the Associated Press. 14 people are dead.

This second robotic strike in three days is the latest sign that the American drone war in Pakistan has reached a new peak. There have been 34 reported attacks in Pakistan in the first 19 weeks on 2010. That’s almost as many as the 36 strikes carried out in all of 2008. And these strikes are no longer against specific, named terrorists. Signs of militant activity are enough to bring in the drones.

Meanwhile, in Kabul…

U.S. casualties in Afghanistan hit 1,000 with massive Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul.

An Army colonel based in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., was among five U.S. soldiers killed by the powerful blast in Kabul on Tuesday, Pentagon officials have confirmed. Two lieutenant colonels from Fort Drum, N.Y., and two Germany-based enlisted soldiers also died when a vehicle loaded with explosives hit a NATO convoy near government buildings.

Col. John M. McHugh, 46, of New Jersey, is the second colonel to die in combat in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. He had been in the country for a short time with representatives of the 10th Mountain Division, helping that unit prepare to deploy.

Also identified were Lt. Col. Paul R. Bartz, 43, of Waterloo, Wis., and Lt. Col. Thomas P. Belkofer, 44, of Perrysburg, Ohio, both assigned to headquarters of the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum.

Based in Germany were Staff Sgt. Richard J. Tieman, 28, of Waynesboro, Pa., and Spc. Joshua A. Tomlinson, 24, of Dubberly, La., who were assigned to Special Troops Battalion, V Corps, Heidelberg. Tomlinson was based in Kaiserslautern.

Why is this man smiling?

Suppose your household sits exactly in the middle of net worth in the United States, meaning that 50% of households are worth more and 50% less, exactly at the median of net worth. What is YOUR net worth?

According to the most recent (2007) Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve, YOUR net worth is…

$120,300.

Now suppose that all the wealth in the United States were distributed equally among all the households, so that everybody had exactly the average (mean) amount of wealth.

What would YOU get?

$556,300.

YOU would gain $436,000!

It might also surprise middle-class Americans to learn that the middle class is not in the middle.

Suppose you’re exactly in the the middle of the middle class, exactly in the middle of the middle quintile of wealth, which is wealthier than the bottom 40% but poorer than the top 40%.

Then YOUR net worth is only…

$88,100.

But if all the wealth in the United States were distributed exactly equally among all the families…

Then YOU would gain $468,200.