Among many other recent innovations, including a “featured advertiser,” Pheedo, which showed up like news on their RSS feed today, the Washington Post has been calling the war in Afghanistan “Obama’s War” for the past few months, and in case you wonder what that never-ending mess is all about, they add a helpful sub-title…

Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan

So we were apparently “combatting extremism” in Marjah when we reduced that primitive hamlet to rubble, and the very bad new news on top of all the other very bad old news about that brutal operation is that it was…

A total honking failure!

Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines.

Firefights between insurgents and security forces occur daily, resulting in more Marine fatalities and casualties over the past month than in the first month of the operation, which began in mid-February.

Firefights every day! More and more US casualties!

It’s like some kind of nightmare joke! A Marine blogger at Military Times calls Marjah a petting zoo in Hell!

And that’s a scene from Marjah! Look at it! One shack, one Marine, and one crazy dog!

So this total honking failure has finally inspired General Stanley A. McChrystal with some second thoughts about running the same kind of operation in Kandahar.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is finding himself squeezed between a ticking clock and an enemy that won’t go away.

On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.

And meanwhile Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was extending another deadline…

“All of us, for our publics, are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway,” Gates said Wednesday during a visit to London to meet with British leaders.

Is our strategy “on the right track?”

We won’t “know” until the end of the year!

Harharharhar!!!

President Obama, speaking from Louisiana today, criticized BP for spending big money on television advertising and shareholder dividends, suggesting the company was prioritizing its own interests over those of Gulf residents.

Every day it’s something different! Yesterday it was TV ads, last week it was crime!

“We have an obligation to investigate what went wrong,” Obama said. “If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice.”

If our laws were broken?

BP was cited by OSHA for 760 egregious willful violations between June 2007 and February 2010!

Egregious! Meaning “flagrant, outstandingly bad!”

Willful! Meaning it wasn’t some sort of “oopsie, we didn’t mean to do it!”

760!

That’s 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years!

My solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice.

So what are you waiting for?

Round ‘em up! Lock ‘em up in Guantanamo! Throw away the key!

BP also killed 15 people in Texas in 2005, and the case was still pending when Obama walked into the Oval Office in 2009.

In 2009, the British-based company paid $87.43 million for a single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violation for willful negligence that led to the deaths of 15 workers in a 2005 explosion at a Texas refinery. BP handed over $50 million to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the same crime.

BP paid Obama a couple of fines for the criminally negligent homicide of 15 workers, and the $137 million total of those fines amounted to BP’s profits for two whole days, at $6 billion per quarter, $2 billion per month, $66 million per day!

So Barack Obama isn’t exactly a hanging judge when it comes to punishing corporate criminals, even for homicide, and I guess it isn’t suprising that all he does is bitch, bitch, bitch, while the Gulf of Mexico fills up with oil.

But wasn’t this a perfect time to turn around the Republican meme that the federal government is always the problem, and never the solution for any problem?

Wasn’t this a perfect time to put the best and brightest in one big room, and keep them locked up until they solved this goddamned problem?

The federal government of the United States put a man on the moon!

And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?

The federal government of the United States defeated two enormous industrial and military powers in WWII!

And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?

Most of the cops I know don’t use language from the Book of Revelation to describe a crime scene, but P.J. Hahn, a candidate for Chief of Police in Kenner, Louisiana and currently director of coastal zone management for Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, somehow rose to the occasion as an enormous orange slick washed up on his local beach.

The oil has reached the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. It has turned marshlands into death zones for wildlife and stained beaches rust and crimson. Some said it brought to mind the plagues and punishments of the Bible.

“In Revelations it says the water will turn to blood,” said P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. “That’s what it looks like out here — like the Gulf is bleeding. This is going to choke the life out of everything.”

And meanwhile in Afghanistan, let me introduce you to Matiullah Khan!

Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster — and sometimes even supplant — ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.

His main effort — and his biggest money maker — is securing the chaotic highway linking Kandahar to Tirin Kot for NATO convoys. His company charges each NATO cargo truck $1,200 for safe passage, or $800 for smaller ones, his aides say. His income, according to one of his aides, is $2.5 million a month, an astronomical sum in a country as impoverished as this one.

In some cases, these strongmen have restored order, though at the price of undermining the very institutions Americans are seeking to build: government structures like police forces and provincial administrations that one day are supposed to be strong enough to allow the Americans and other troops to leave.

This is a full-tilt protection racket, on the model of Al Capone’s “safe streets” in Cicero Illinois, where nobody would mess with you, as long as you played ball with Big Al.

A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a criminal group or individual coerces other less powerful entities to pay money, allegedly for protection services against external threats (usually violence or property damage, and sometimes perpetrated by the racketeers themselves).

In this case, the “other less powerful entities” include NATO and the United States.

Since both the Obama administration and BP have an obvious interest in under-estimating the amount of oil which Deepwater Horizon has already dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t surprising that everything these partners in crime produce for public consumption is bullshit.

On Thursday, U.S. Geological Survey director Marcia McNutt announced that the Flow Rate Technical Group — a panel of scientists from government and academia — had determined that the overall best initial estimate for the rate of flow from the leak was between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil per day.

But it was impossible for members of the team that analyzed the oil plume video to estimate the upper boundary of the oil spilled, according to the Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Steven Wereley, a researcher at Purdue University.

Wereley and Leifer were both members of that team, and Leifer participated in the satellite image analysis as well. Both researchers say that the seven minutes of video that BP provided to the plume team was not sufficient to estimate the upper boundary of the amount of oil — only to give a lower-end estimate.

“What everyone on the panel agreed was that due to the low-quality data BP provided to us, it would be irresponsible and unscientific to estimate an upper bound to the emission,” said Leifer. “So what we presented in the [plume team] report is a range of expert opinions on what the lower bound is.”

Wereley said he was surprised to see the estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels and was “disappointed” with the way that the press release was phrased.

“I was really confused when I read the press release yesterday,” he said. “I had to read it several times.”

So the figures which are quoted all over the media with the phony appearance of upper and lower bounds, “between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil per day,” really only apply to the lower bound, and the best independent estimate of the upper bound remains the figure which Professor Steve Werely provided for NPR on May 20:

100,000 barrels per day, and at 42 gallons per barrel, that’s….

4,000,000 gallons per day.

If we split the difference between that upper bound and the lower bound from the USGS, we arrive at a middle-of-the-road estimate…

60,000 barrels per day, and that’s…

2,400,000 gallons per day.

And that produces a middle-of-the-road estimate that the total amount of oil which Deepwater Horizon has already dumped into the Gulf of Mexico in 42 days is about…

100,000,000 gallons already!

That’s almost ten times as much as the Exxon Valdez, but what the heck!

Who’s counting?