According to this view, the Paul is genuinely befuddled. He’s a man we have to respect at some level because even if he professes truly strange beliefs, those beliefs are genuine, and they spring from principles he believes in deeply. In effect, he believes not wisely but too well.

But there’s an ugly side to Rand Paul too, a side where beliefs and moral principles count for nothing before blind ambition and the be-all and end-all of getting himself elected at all costs. And this is the side that was on display after a group of Rand Paul supporters brutally attacked Lauren Valle, a female MoveOn activist, on Monday night, outside the venue of a Rand Paul-Jack Conway debate:

A group of Rand Paul supporters held down and stomped the head of a female MoveOn member just before tonight’s debate. Not ‘assault’ in the BS sense we’ve seen both sides alleging when someone nudges a video tracker, but the real thing.
[...]
Late Update: Paul supporters seem to be putting out the word that the woman fell or tripped. But look at the video. It’s hard to reconcile the ‘fell’ storyline with the two or three guys shoving her, the one guy holding her down/attempting a headlock and the other guy stomping on her head.

There is really no way to spin the attack, even though that didn’t stop supporters of the Paul from trying. Five big guys deliberately attacked a woman, attempting to intimidate her with violence, and one of them stomped on her head while she lay defenseless on the ground (with another of these big brave men holding her down while she was stomped).

The stomper was identified in short order as one Tim Profitt:

Profitt is not, it appears, a random campaign volunteer. Almost immediately after admitting his role, a picture of him and Paul surfaced.

The local blog Barefoot and Progressive also noted that the Paul campaign once touted Profitt’s endorsement in a newspaper ad.

So, confronted with this act of violent political intimidation by a man whose political support the Paul has trumpeted in the past, how did the honorable, principled candidate respond? He could only work up barely enough outrage to issue a vague and tepid statement of disapproval, a statement so vague and tepid, it’s not even remotely clear what he’s actually disapproving of:

We want everybody to be civil; we want the campaign to be about issues. I will tell you that when we arrived, there was enormous passion on both sides and it really was something where you walked into a daze of lights flashing, people yelling and screaming, bumping up. There was a bit of a crowd control problem.

I don’t want anybody, though, to be involved in things that aren’t civil. I think it should always be about the issues. It is an unusual situation to have so many people, so passionate on both sides, jockeying back and forth and it wasn’t something that I liked or anybody liked about that situation. So I hope in the future it’s going to be better.

“A bit of a crowd control problem” was a truly unfortunate choice of words. “Crowd control” was, apparently, the euphemism of choice for the five big brave men who set out to physically intimidate Lauren Valle. This is Valle’s account of the incident:

I have been at a bunch of events before, the previous debate, and the Rand Paul campaign knows me and they have expressed their distastes for my work before. What happened last night was that about five minutes before Rand Paul’s car arrived they identified me and my partner, Alex, who was with me. They surrounded me. There was five of them. They motioned to each other and got behind me. My partner Alex heard them say ‘We are here to do crowd control we might have to take someone out.’

When Rand Paul’s car arrived a couple of them stepped in front of me so I stepped off the curb to get around them to get back out front. At that point they started grabbing for me and I ran all the way around the car with them in pursuit. The footage is after I’ve run all the way around the car and I’m in front of the car and that is when they took me down. One or two people twisted my arms behind my back and took me down… It was about two-to-three second after that that another person stomped on my head. And I lay there for 20 seconds or so and my partner Alex came and got me up and that’s the point where there is the media clip of me speaking.

But it’s not just that unfortunate choice of words. Paul’s statement is kind of disapproving, vaguely condemnatory. But what exactly does he condemn? Five of his supporters ganging up to engage in physical violence on a female political opponent? Really hard to tell, isn’t it? Something happened that the Paul thinks wasn’t “civil”, but the only thing that the Paul condemns (and in such strong words too; it wasn’t something that he liked or anybody liked about that situation!) is the unusual situation of having so many people, so passionate on both sides, jockeying back and forth.

It looks very much like Rand Paul was afraid to actually condemn a clear act of totally unacceptable violence by a gang of his political supporters, doesn’t it? Afraid because it might alienate some of the crazies whose votes he’s counting on next Tuesday? And this is a man whose election is so precariously poised that Nate Silver reckons his probability of winning at only 95.8%.

(2)
And this is Rand Paul’s second pass at condemning the incident:

The Paul for Senate campaign is extremely disappointed in, and condemns the actions of a supporter last night outside the KET debate. Whatever the perceived provocation, any level of aggression or violence is deplorable, and will not be tolerated by our campaign. The Paul campaign has disassociated itself from the volunteer who took part in this incident, and once again urges all activists — on both sides — to remember that their political passions should never manifest themselves in physical altercations of any kind.

Funny, I could have sworn there were five men involved. The only part of the attack that Paul finds unacceptable is the head-stomping. Everything else — chasing Valle round the car, wrestling her to the ground, holding her there — sits just fine with him. (That must be the Southern gentleman in Rand Paul speaking.) I imagine that’s because Valle started it all, by some discreetly unspecified act of provocation.

Let’s hope the Paul will keep trying till he gets it right.

J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the nation’s leading banks, announced Wednesday that it will freeze foreclosures in about half the country because of flawed paperwork, a move that Wall Street analysts said will pressure the rest of the industry to follow suit.

I’m not sure which part of that statement is more astounding. That J.P. Morgan Chase (JPMC) — a bank which is “held in high regard by its peers” — has seriously flawed foreclosure paperwork in half its operations, or that Wall Street analysts are confident the rest of the industry has exactly the same problem.

What kind of flaws are we talking about? The WP‘s second para summary presents it as: “allegations of forged documents and signatures and other similar problems”.

But, obviously, for JPMC to take the extraordinary step that it did, it can’t be just a matter of unproven allegations from borrowers faced with foreclosure and eviction. It has to be clear to JPMC that there’s truth to these allegations. That must be why officials at Fitch Ratings don’t speak of allegations made by borrowers, but defects actually found in foreclosure documents:

Officials at Fitch Ratings, a credit-rating firm that measures the health of companies, said the “defects” found in foreclosure documents at J.P. Morgan are industry-wide.

However, the official spin on the paperwork problems stays far away from words like forgery. Instead, it’s just a matter of failing to properly review foreclosure documents.

The paperwork problems at J.P. Morgan mirror those uncovered last week at another large mortgage lender, Ally Financial.
[...]
Both firms are investigating whether foreclosure files were improperly assembled, and whether their employees failed to review the documents even as they signed off on them.
[...]
J.P. Morgan had declined to address the matter until Wednesday. But in a sworn deposition, one of the bank’s employees, Beth Ann Cottrell, admitted that she and her team signed off on about 18,000 foreclosures a month without checking whether they were justified.

I don’t know, it seems to me that there is a material — a very material — difference between “forged documents and signatures”, and unreviewed documents.

And JPMC is really straining the limits of credulity with some of their barefaced spokesmanship:

J.P. Morgan spokesman Tom Kelly said Wednesday that the firm “does not expect to find any factual problems or that customers have been harmed, but if we do find any cases we will take appropriate action.”

Tom Kelly’s talents, I think, are totally wasted at JPMC. He should be working for the Republican Party. JPMC has abruptly halted foreclosures in half the country because they do not expect to find any factual problems or that customers have been harmed?

Presumably, the “attorneys general in seven other states (who) have opened civil or criminal investigations related to flawed foreclosures” also confidently expect that they are just wasting their time?

And it’s not just JPMC. Ally is equally sanguine that there’s been no harm, no foul:

Ally officials on Wednesday declined to comment on any ongoing or potential investigations, but they have said that they are confident that “the processing errors did not result in any inappropriate foreclosures.”

Like the WP, I saved the really best part for last. It seems these endemic foreclosure paperwork problems in the mortgage industry have the potential to bugger up the housing market all over again:

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moodys.com, said that, in the worst-case scenario, the document-processing problems could lengthen the foreclosure process from three years to as long as a decade, especially if homeowners use the flawed paperwork to appeal their evictions.

The long holdup could have “macroeconomic consequences” as a destabilizing force on housing prices. Banks could become more unwilling to extend credit to households or to small-business owners who use homes as collateral. And investors who had been keeping home prices propped up by buying foreclosures may stop and never come back.

Then it turned out that less than 3% of small businesses would be affected by letting the Bush-era tax rates expire for the top tax brackets. For an impressive period of time, that didn’t matter a bit to Republican leaders and spokesmen. They kept on cheerfully repeating the claim that small businesses would get hammered, and the economic recovery would be jeopardized. Because, let’s face it, for a very long time now — at least since the inauguration of George W. Bush — the Republican Party has simply not cared whether the things they repeat to the American people ad infinitum are true or not. And because, let’s go ahead and face it again, they knew perfectly well — as they have known for a very long time now — the media was never going to call them on their flat-out misrepresentations.

Then, for some strange reason — which may have to do with how a prolonged orange tan affects the functioning of the human brain — House Minority Leader John Boehner unexpectedly conceded that the 3% figure was true. According to him, though, that was really an irrelevant detail:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Now let me just say this. The– the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is a– which is a non-partisan body, says that only three percent of those small business people you keep talking about all the small business people, they’re going to get taxed, only three percent would– would be affected by that. Do you quarrel with that figure? Is that a right figure or a wrong figure?

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: Well, it may be three percent, but it’s half of small business income. Because, obviously, the top three percent have half of the– the gross income for those companies that we would term small businesses.

The question that naturally arose was: if the top 3% of “small business” generated half of all small business income, then how small really could these so-called small businesses be? And Boehner seemed to underline the incongruity by using the language he did: “those companies that we would term small businesses”.

So intrepid journalists have now diligently researched the issue. Some of the results are truly surprising.

According to The Washington Post:

The thing is, some of those businesses are not particularly small. In fact, they’re quite large.

Among the firms Republicans want to protect from new taxes, according to research by House Democrats: The management team at Wall Street buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts (KKR), which recently reported more than $54 billion in assets managed by 14 offices around the world. Auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, a household name with operations in more than 150 countries. And the Tribune Corp., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun.
[...]
Added Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of House leadership who heads the committee charged with electing House Democrats: “Republicans are trying to disguise this issue as a small business issue when the facts tell a different story. Among the major beneficiaries are hedge funds, billion-dollar private equity funds, major Washington lobbying firms and other million-dollar special interests.”

Bloomberg adds:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says President Barack Obama wants to subject half of all small-business income to a tax increase, a move that he says would strike a blow at the U.S. job-creation engine.

McConnell’s numbers add up only if you consider people like billionaire investor George Soros, most movie stars and Obama himself small-business owners, tax experts say.

That’s because the lawmaker is basing his figure on a broad definition of the term that experts say includes authors, actors and athletes who employ few if any workers. It also encompasses businesses that many people wouldn’t consider small, such as Soros’s hedge-fund firm and major law partnerships.

“Every student who is a part-time Web designer, partner in a law firm with a billion dollars of revenue and investor in a hedge fund gets lumped together in the data, along with real small businesses,” said Edward Kleinbard, a former staff director of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and now a law professor at the University of Southern California. “We are being over-inclusive in our use of small-business income.”

 
(Note: The title was revised after the post was published)

House Minority Leader John Boehner says he would vote for President Obama‘s plan to extend tax cuts only for middle-class earners, not the wealthy, if that were the only option available to House Republicans.

Boehner, R-Ohio, said it is “bad policy” to exclude the highest-earning Americans from tax relief during the recession, and later Sunday he accused the White House of “class warfare.” But he said he wouldn’t block the breaks for middle-income individuals and families if Democrats won’t support the full package.

Income tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush will expire at the end of this year unless Congress acts and Obama signs the bill. Obama said he would support continuing the lower tax rates for couples earning up to $250,000 or single taxpayers making up to $200,000. But he and the Democratic leadership in Congress refused to back continued lower rates for the fewer than 3 percent of Americans who make more than that.

I can’t imagine that Boehner’s reversal was authorized by his lobbyist masters. I can’t imagine that they were even slightly amused by his performance on “Face the Nation“.

And I’m not sure I understand why Boehner hasn’t already walked this back. Robert Gibbs celebrated Boehner’s statement with:

We welcome John Boehner’s change in position and support for the middle class tax cuts, but time will tell if his actions will be anything but continued support for the failed policies that got us into this mess.

And this was Boehner’s inexplicable response:

Raising taxes on any American, and especially small businesses, in a struggling economy is the exact wrong thing to do, a position shared by not only by my Republican colleagues, and several of my Democratic colleagues, but by a vast number of economists.

If the president is serious about job creation, there’s a clear way forward, and that’s for us to come together and pass legislation immediately that cuts spending to 2008 levels for the next year and stops all of the coming tax hikes by freezing all current tax rates for the next two years. Anything short of that may selfishly check a political box for the president, but it fails the American people.

Instead of resorting to tired old class warfare rhetoric, pitting one working American against another, the president and the Democratic leadership should start working with us this week to ensure a fair and open debate to pass legislation to cut spending and freeze tax rates without any further delay.

That’s neither affirming his statement, nor walking it back. All he does is throw up a cloud of words. It’s almost as if he really doesn’t want to do one or the other (or, at least, not yet).

However, I still think it goes without saying that Boehner will backpedal on this, and pretty soon. He accidentally articulated a perfectly sane position on the Bush tax cuts. But we really can’t expect that sanity to be anything but temporary. This year, the Republican Party just really isn’t into sane at all.

…some senior Democrats are having second thoughts about raising taxes on the nation’s wealthiest families and are pressing party leaders to consider extending the full array of Bush administration tax cuts, at least through next year.

Here’s the rationale put forward (by the WP, I should point out, not by any Democrats the WP is able to cite):

But a growing cadre of Democrats – alarmed by evidence that the recovery is losing steam and fearful of wounding conservative Democrats in a tough election year – are advocating a plan that would permanently extend tax cuts benefiting the middle class while renewing breaks for the wealthy through 2011, senior Democratic aides said.

That idea has long appealed to some conservative Democrats in both chambers, who argue that Congress should not raise anyone’s taxes until the economy is more stable. But Democrats said it has gained momentum since economist Mark Zandi, a key adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), adopted that view during a presentation at a Democratic issues conference in California in mid-August.

Zandi, an adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), later played an important role in designing Obama‘s economic stimulus package, enacted by Congress last year.

In an interview, Zandi said he supports a one-year extension of tax cuts for the wealthy – with the cuts phased out starting in 2012 – in part because election-year anxiety about budget deficits is preventing Congress from approving additional stimulus in any other form. He acknowledged that tax cuts for the rich tend not to be an effective way to pump money into the economy because they tend to save it rather than spend it.

“Normally, I would firmly agree that raising taxes on people who make over $250,000 a year would not make a meaningful difference in the way they spend money. But I worry that these aren’t normal times and that even this income group may be sensitive,” Zandi said, noting that the top 3 percent of households account for a quarter of all personal spending.

“With 9.5 percent unemployment – which is clearly going to move higher – raising taxes is a gamble that is unnecessary,” he said.

Of course, this makes absolutely no sense at all. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of the population will add an extra $680 billion to the deficit. It will do diddly-squat to stimulate the economy.

More than half of the $680 billion will go to “the richest 120,000 people in the country.” That’s the richest 0.1% of Americans; “the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year”. And they would pick up a cool $300,000 each year. These rich folk aren’t exactly going to go out and rush to spend their extra tax savings. And to have them sitting there in their counting-houses, counting out their money, doesn’t exactly stimulate the economy.

So it doesn’t matter how poor a shape the economy is in (and there’s no doubt that it’s in very poor shape; modest economic growth may once again give way to small contractions). Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy serves absolutely no useful economic purpose. In other words, Mark Zandi is talking absolute ox-crap.

The only possible reason for extending the tax cuts for the wealthy is that, if you don’t, then Republicans are going to go around fulminating about how Democrats are jeopardizing the fragile recovery by raising taxes. It’s not an economic argument, it’s a political one. Zandi is being disingenuous and dishonest pretending it’s an economic argument. The WP is being disingenuous and dishonest by peddling Zandi’s argument as if it makes sense (the story was written by Lori Montgomery).

I take heart, though, from two things. The fact that the wealthy-tax-cuts are proposed to be extended for just one year seems to underline that even the proponents understand perfectly well that it’s a perfectly bad idea. And not one single Democrat of note was willing to go on record to the WP as supporting this totally stupid plan.

As Paul Krugman said the other day:

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture …

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

(2)
Here’s just one little example of Zandi’s (and the WP‘s) dishonesty on the subject:

In an interview, Zandi said he supports a one-year extension of tax cuts for the wealthy – with the cuts phased out starting in 2012 …

Zandi’s proposing just a one-year extension. Even though, by design, it lasts much longer than one year. Because at the end of one year, what you do is you start phasing it out. And somehow the WP never gets around to telling us how many years this one-year extension will actually last.

(It is, of course, not clear whether the unknown, unnamed “growing cadre of Democrats” that is “advocating a plan that would … (renew) breaks for the wealthy through 2011″ is supporting a true one-year extension or Zandi’s false one-year extension. It’s not clear because Lori Montgomery doesn’t make it clear. And maybe she doesn’t make it clear because there’s no way to do so without calling attention to Zandi’s dishonest little word game.)

For example, Muslims believe that the government can generate jobs. (Whereas the asshole contingent of the Republican Party, the largest contingent by far these days, believes that the government has never created one single job. Yes, whether you realized it or not, the world is divided into two groups of people: Muslims and the asshole contingent of the Republican Party. Or actually, to be scrupulously fair, three groups—Muslims, secret Muslims and the asshole contingent of the Republican Party.)

Muslims also believe that the government has the power to stimulate the economy.

In fact, that’s how you can tell whether someone is a secret Muslim. These beliefs give them away, and the American people — especially Republicans — are becoming increasingly more astute about recognizing this:

MR. GREGORY: Let me move on to something that seems to be related to this and has gotten a lot of attention this week, and this is the poll about the president’s own faith from the Pew Research Center. Eighteen percent of those polled believe that the president is a Muslim. Among Republicans, this is striking, 31 percent believe he’s a Muslim. Of course, he’s not. Why do you think these views prevail?

SEN. McCONNELL: Well, look, I think the faith that most Americans are questioning is the president’s faith in the government to generate jobs. We’ve had an 18-month effort here on the part of this administration to prime the pump, borrow money, spend money hiring new federal government employees, sending money down to states so they don’t have to lay off state employees. People are looking around and saying, “Where’s the job?”

MR. GREGORY: Right.

SEN. McCONNELL: The president’s faith in the government to stimulate the economy is what people are questioning.

MR. GREGORY: That, that, that’s certainly a side step to, to this particular question.

What I don’t understand is why didn’t McConnell just choose a career as a comedian?

…almost three-fourths of the crude that leaked has disappeared or soon will be eaten by bacteria. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said at least half of the oil released is now “completely gone.”

Chemist Dana Wetzel said the administration’s conclusion felt like the “closing credits of a movie.”

“It’s like they were saying ‘the end,’” Wetzel, program manager at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, said in an interview last week. “I’d say we have just gotten through setting up the plot.”

Carol Browner, Obama’s top environmental adviser, added her own celebratory rhetoric to that:

Mother Nature did some nice work for us in terms of evaporation and dissolution of the oil in the water…

The NOAA report was greeted with widespread skepticism. This week has brought two pieces of news that seem to amply justify the skepticism.

On Tuesday, we learned that scientists from the University of Georgia had strongly questioned the NOAA’s conclusions:

A group of scientists says as much as 79 percent of BP Plc’s leaked oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico, challenging an Obama administration assessment that the crude is largely gone or rapidly disappearing.

Most of the oil that leaked from BP’s Macondo well from April 20 to July 15 is still beneath the water’s surface, five scientists including Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia in Athens, concluded in a memo made public yesterday. The researchers say they drew upon the U.S. government’s study while reaching different conclusions.
[...]
Charles Hopkinson, a University of Georgia marine scientist and one of the five researchers, said plumes of oil dispersed underwater remain a danger.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” he said in a statement released yesterday. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

The University of Georgia scientists said in so many words that the NOAA’s analysis didn’t really support the conclusions they drew (and trumpeted to the public).

The same day University of South Florida scientists also reported disturbing news:

Separately, a study released by University of South Florida scientists said experiments in the northeastern Gulf where so-called plumes or barely visible clouds of oil had been found earlier had turned up oil in sediments of an underwater canyon. The oil was at levels toxic to critical marine organisms.

Oil droplets were found in the sediments of the DeSoto Canyon, where nutrient-rich waters support spawning grounds of important fish species on the West Florida Shelf, this report said.

In response to both developments, the NOAA defended its analysis and pretended that its director had never put a rosy, optimistic spin on the findings:

In a response to the University of Georgia report, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spokesman said the August 2 government calculation was based “on direct measurements whenever possible and the best available scientific estimates where direct measurements were not possible.”

“Additionally, the government and independent scientists involved in the Oil Budget have been clear that oil and its remnants left in the water represent a potential threat, which is why we continue to rigorously monitor, test and assess short- and long-term ramifications,” NOAA Communications Director Justin Kenney said in a statement.

Thn, yesterday, the respected Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts published the results of a major study in the journal Science:

A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.

The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.

Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly “gone,” and it is gone in the sense you can’t see it. But the chemical ingredients of the oil persist more than a half-mile beneath the surface, researchers found.

And the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means “the plumes could stick around for quite a while,” said study co-author Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which led the research published online in the journal Science.

Monty Graham, a scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not involved in the study, said: “We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knows how long. They say months in the (research) paper, but more likely we’ll be able to track this stuff for years.”

At this point, there seems little doubt that the NOAA’s August 4 report was seriously misleading. The kindest statement that can be made about Jane Lubchenco’s upbeat pronouncements is that she made statements that are not substantiated by the facts.

The irony is that when University of South Florida researchers first announced the existence of underwater plumes in May, this is the reaction they got from the NOAA:

When University of South Florida researchers stood before television cameras and the world in May to announce they had found evidence of vast plumes of invisible undersea oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the dean of the College of Marine Science didn’t get kudos from federal officials.

Instead, Hogarth said, he got grief from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“They were concerned about the data and wanted to know if we were sure of what we were saying,” Hogarth said this morning. “They felt we were making statements that were not substantiated.”

(In a move that Sarah Palin is no doubt kicking herself for not having come up with in her own time of need, Ensign “has registered his legal defense fund as a 527 political organization”, which makes contributions tax-exempt. So now, all of us are partners in Ensign’s legal defense. Of his apparently illegal actions. In fact, Ensign’s legal defense fund is contributing — in its own humble way — to increasing the deficit. Which Ensign, like all other Republicans in Congress, cares passionately about. Or maybe I shouldn’t use the word passionately in the context of a story about the consequences of his uncontrollable libido?)

Here’s part of what Ensign wrote in his fund-raising appeal (admittedly, the best part):

As I am sure you are aware, I admitted last year to making the worst mistake of my life.

In addition to causing great pain to my family, friends, and supporters, that mistake has also resulted in a difficult legal battle.

I have taken responsibility for my actions and worked hard to become a better husband, father, friend, and senator, but I have been accused of doing things I absolutely did not do.

No, John, the adultery you admitted to last year wasn’t the worst mistake of your life. After all, that’s not what the FBI is investigating you for, is it?

For example, all of the following are much bigger mistakes: having your parents pay hush money to your ex-mistress and her husband; displaying a reckless disregard for the law by actively pimping for the cuckolded husband’s illegal lobbying activities; deciding to brazen it out instead of quietly resigning when it was clear that you had been caught fair-and-square breaking the law.

But here’s Jon’s response to the above passage from John’s fund-raising letter:

John Ensign is a man of many talents, not the least of which are his skill at twisting the truth and of putting on a false front to the world. (What is it about people with exactly this combination of personality defects that convinces them early in life that they are cut out to be politicians?)

Nevada’s junior senator has been morally superior in public while morally inferior in private, and he created a web of deceit that ensnared friends and supporters now being punished for his indiscretions. Facing an ethics probe and a federal investigation, Ensign has tried to make his scandal about a moment of human weakness (that lasted for months) and nothing more.

But it has always been about much more…
[...]
Where to begin?

That mistake — this is just about sex! — did not lead to a “difficult legal battle.” Ensign is in legal jeopardy not because he slept with his wife’s best friend and his best friend’s wife — that never sounds less grotesque, does it? — but because of how he tried to cover it up, pay off the couple through Mom and Dad and then try to hush up the cuckolded husband by importuning people he regulates to hire him.

The vast majority of people, I think, would forgive Ensign for weakness of the flesh — the social conservative base he pandered to, notwithstanding. But his manipulation of the lives of Cindy and Doug Hampton and his shameful attempt to play the victim now have outraged many who might have been forgiving.

As for “being accused of things I absolutely did not do,” I ask: Really? Do tell. All we’ve heard is “no comment” for more than a year. What is there in the past that should induce us to believe him?

As CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan points out, it seems indisputable that Ensign did all of the following:

Senator Ensign had an extended affair with a campaign staffer, who happened to be married to his chief of staff Doug Hampton, fired them both, and had his parents pay them off without properly reporting it to the Federal Election Commission. He then conspired to help Mr. Hampton to set up a lobbying business to lobby his own office, in violation of federal law.

All of that would have to filed under “Accused of doing and actually did”.

The one thing that Ensign absolutely did not do in the course of his extended and ongoing sexual-shenanigans-and-cover-up scandal is tell the truth about actively aiding and abetting Doug Hampton’s career as an illegal lobbyist.

And last I checked, no one has actually accused Ensign of telling the truth about that.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

The White House, constantly under fire from expected enemies on the right, has been frustrated by nightly attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for abandoning the public option in healthcare reform; for not moving faster to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay; and for failing, so far, to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

Liberals have criticized Obama and his staff for moving to the middle and bargaining on healthcare reform, as well as the financial regulatory overhaul and even the $787 billion economic stimulus package, which some liberals said should have been larger.

Just last week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow described Obama political adviser David Axelrod as a “human pretzel” for his explanation of the administration’s position on gay marriage. Axelrod had explained that Obama opposes same-sex marriage but favors equal benefits for partners in gay relationships.
[...]
While visibly frustrated, Gibbs did not specifically name any of the White Houses’s (sic) liberal detractors by name.

So was this a Robert Gibbs tantrum or a White House tantrum?

The Hill went with this paragraph as their lede:

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

Perhaps because of that lede, some bloggers are assuming that Gibbs’ remarks represent an official White House position. But I can’t imagine that he was actually authorized to sound off in those terms. Even if he was, there’s undoubtedly going to be a strong reaction from the professional left, which will probably lead the White House to disavow Gibbs’ remarks.

(For some reason, this isn’t yet a story at ThinkProgress or TPM, although there was a brief mention in TPMDC‘s morning roundup.)

With BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone’s lips is: where is all the oil?

For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge.

A cap stopped the flow on July 15 after between three and 5.2 million barrels (117.6 million and 189 million gallons) had gushed out. Roughly one quarter of that was picked up by BP’s various collection and containment systems.

After frantic efforts to skim and burn the crude on the surface — some 34.7 million gallons of oil-water mix have been recovered and 411 burns have been conducted — the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up.

Dozens of reconnaissance planes fly constant sorties from Florida to Texas noting any oil sightings, while flat-bottomed boats trawl the marshes for lumps of tar too large to biodegrade.

“What we’re trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it,” said US spill response chief Thad Allen. …

The figures speak for themselves. Before the cap went on, some 25,000 barrels of oil a day were being skimmed from the thickest part of the slick near the well site.

By the time Tropical Storm Bonnie arrived last week, the take was down to a pitiful 56 barrels, begging the question of what to do with the fleet of 800 skimmers, many of them run by disgruntled fishermen.

Jane Lubchenco, the head of the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said Tuesday that a lot of the oil had been broken down naturally.

“We know that a significant amount of the oil has dispersed and been biodegraded by naturally occurring bacteria,” she said.

“Bacteria that break down oil are naturally abundant in the Gulf of Mexico, in large part because of the warm water there and the conditions afforded by nutrients and oxygen availability.”

“We are currently doing a very careful analysis to better understand where the oil has gone,” she added.

With no more oil to be skimmed, BP’s CEO designate Bob Dudley talked about scaling back the clean-up effort:

BP’s incoming CEO said Friday that it’s time for a “scaleback” of the massive effort to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but he added that the commitment to make things right is the same as ever.

Tens of thousands of people – many of them idled fishermen – have been involved in the cleanup, but more than two weeks after the leak was stopped there is relatively little oil on the surface, leaving less work for oil skimmers to do.

That “very careful analysis” that Jane Lubchenco was speaking about? The NOAA was pleased to release the results yesterday:

With a startling report that some researchers call more spin than science, the government said Wednesday that the mess made by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is mostly gone already.
[...]
U.S. officials announced that nearly 70 percent of the spilled oil dissolved naturally, or was burned, skimmed, dispersed or captured, with almost nothing left to see — at least on top of the water. That declaration came on the same day they trumpeted success in plugging up the leaking well with drilling mud,

The report, incidentally, “was based on findings from government and non-government scientists”. In case you’re wondering where you’ve heard that phrase before in the context of the BP oil spill, it was the phrase used to describe the Flow Rate Technical Group, the U.S. government expert panel that decided, after very careful estimation, no doubt, that the rate at which oil was spewing from the well was 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day (which, if you remember, turned out be exactly the gross underestimate BP executives had been praying for every night).

The funny thing about the NOAA’s very careful analysis of what happened to all the oil is the masterful way they club things together.

…government scientists reported that most of the crude that gushed from it for three months has dissipated or been removed from the water.

The NOAA would have you believe that there’s no meaningful distinction between removing the oil from the water and “dissipating” it into the water. (Isn’t that like saying there’s no meaningful distinction between pissing in the pot and flushing to remove it from the bathroom system, or just pissing all over the floor and letting it dissipate into the bathroom system?)

Continuing with the official NOAA rhetoric:

In a summary of the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the White House said a third of the oil released in the spill was “captured or mitigated” by recovery operations, “including burning, skimming, chemical dispersion and direct recovery from the wellhead.” It said 25 percent “naturally evaporated or dissolved, and 16 percent was dispersed naturally into microscopic droplets.”
[...]
The summary said the “residual amount” of 26 percent “is either on or just below the surface as residue and weathered tarballs, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments.” It said dispersed and residual oil eventually breaks down through natural processes and that “early indications are that the oil is degrading quickly.”

Evaporated or dissolved, equally good? (Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it in just a moment.)

Clearly, we are being invited not to lose sleep over the residual amount of 26%. And why should we? It’s only five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. And, hey, it’ll eventually break down.

According to NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco, the report actually indicates that “At least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system”. That comes from “adding up the amounts that were recovered, burned, skimmed, evaporated or dissolved.” Lubchenco, clearly regards dissolved oil as “completely gone from the system”. Perhaps, she can be persuaded to drink a glass of dissolved oil on live TV, just to reassure the country that dissolved oil is in fact perfectly safe, and quite harmless to man, woman or child?

Even if you let Lubchenco off the hook for the dissolved oil being lumped with recovered, burned, skimmed and evaporated, the oil that’s hiding out as residual oil (26%), naturally dispersed (16%) or chemically dispersed (8%) adds up to 50%. (Apparently, when Lubchenco said that “At least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system”, she didn’t mean 50% or more, she meant exactly 50%. This lady has a way with words, doesn’t she? A way that might be described by an innocent bystander as “fast and loose”.)

This 50%, the report assures us, “is currently being degraded naturally”. And at this point we’re only talking about roughly 10 times the oil that was spilled by the Exxon Valdez.

In any case, here are some of the early reviews of the NOAA report:

Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post:

The underlying measurements and methodology were not made public, however, leaving much of it looking like so much guesswork.

NYT:

Some researchers attacked the findings and methodology, calling the report premature at best and sloppy at worst. They noted that considerable research was still under way to shed light on some of the main scientific issues raised in the report.

“A lot of this is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions,” said Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia who has led some of the most important research on the Deepwater Horizon spill. “If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces.”

The AP:

“This is a shaky report. The more I read it, the less satisfied I am with the thoroughness of the presentation,” Florida State University oceanography professor Ian MacDonald told The Associated Press. “There are sweeping assumptions here.”
[...]
“There’s some science here, but mostly, it’s spin,” he said. “And it breaks my heart to see them do it.”

MacDonald pointed out that NOAA spent weeks sticking with its claim the BP well was spewing only 210,000 gallons a day. Now, after several revisions, the federal government said it really was 2.2 million gallons a day. So he has a hard time believing NOAA this time, he said.

There is also the reassuring fact that the NOAA can’t even make up it’s mind whether or not a long-form report actually exists. Plus, the report doesn’t cite any scientific references.

The scientific report, which has four pages of text followed by one page of credits, is small compared to other similar reports. Initially, NOAA said there was a fuller, 200-page report, but then retracted that. There is a second report that is 10 pages. The initial report cites no scientific references — those, (NOAA emergency response senior scientist Bill Lehr, an author of the report) said, are in his head.

Meanwhile, here’s one answer to the question of where the oil is hiding:

According to WVUE correspondent John Snell, local officials dispatched a dive team to a barrier island off of southeastern Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish to scan the sea floor for oil. The team, however, could barely see the sea floor, due to the current murky state of the area waters. But when the divers returned to shore, they made a rather remarkable discovery: Tiny holes that burrowing Hermit crabs had dug into the ground effectively became oil-drilling holes. When the divers placed pressure on the ground near the holes, oil came oozing up.

“It’s [like] Jed Clampett‘s oil,” P.J. Hahn, the Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Director, told Fox8. “All we need is the theme song to ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’ “

Relax, guys! It’s only residual oil. And it’s all properly accounted for. And it’s currently being degraded naturally. So, before you know it, it’ll all be gone.