Afternoon Coffee at the Last Manatee

Drudge reports that Obama only met with BP executives for 20 minutes today. Pretty productive meeting since he got them to fork over $20 billion for an escrow fund for the region's victims. With additonal fines of $4,300 per barrel, this is looking better than the original Louisiana Purchase.

Newt told his Fox audience that in this case it was alright for Obama to use religious language during his address to the nation.

Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi, one of the states affected by the spill worried that the escrow account would affect BP's profits.

Sarah Palin said the Dutch could clean up the spill. She was referring to their skimmer technology. A little late in the day, Dutch's skimmer machines have been in the Gulf for the last few days.

The House Republicans entered an amendment yesterday to strip the health reform bill of the individuals mandates. It was defeated. Look for this throughout the next few years.

The Senate Republicans managed to block the extension of unemployment and Cobra as well as the emergency $50 billion funds for the bailout of states.

Meg Whitman put another $20 million of her personal wealth into her campaign coffers. This means she has put in $90 million of her own dough. Apparently, Meg also has anger issues, having fought an employee in 2007. The poor woman was trying to prepare her for an interview. Should be interesting if she wins the California state house.

The Christian Right is back in all its lunacy, saying that the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell would mean that God would make us lose wars. In case anyone has been watching, the United States hasn't won a clearcut battlefield victory in a long time. There has been so many statements and pronouncements by the Christian Right, you're better off checking www.rightwingwatch.com on a daily basis.

I think I've finally figured out this fascination of the Hard Right for the American revolution. It's the last "good war" in their minds that America fought. You can't embrace Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War because he was for big government, the wrong side won and the slaves were freed. You can't embrace WWII because FDR was the President and, in some minds on the right, the wrong side won again. And Vietnam doesn't do it because we lost and that was the period of the civil rights movement. And we know George W and Dick Cheney have been airbrushed out of the small government conservatives' history. The Spanish-American war is a no-no because it involves Hispanics and we want them deported.

Bill McCollum, who is running for the Republican nomination in Florida, is being successfully challenged by a hospital mongol, who has been convicted of felonies and forced to pay millions of dollars in fines. I guess the appeal is that this person was a CEO.

The final arguments for the Prop 8 trial are wrapping up today. The anti-gay lawyers are moving on another front to get the 18,000 legal gay marriages reversed. In my mind, the legal arguments have been all on the pro-gay side with the anti-gays having to invoke sociological studies done in the 1950s. But I am skeptical that the final arguments can move the current Supreme Court. Conservative lawyer Ted Olson disagrees but I believe he's naive about where the current court stands.

Jim Inhofe is doubling down on his anti-DADT repeal position. He went on the floor of the Senate yesterday saying that our armed forces simply won't fight with open gays in the military. Sort of like how it happened in Sparta and Rome.

All the polls this week except the AP poll show Republicans set to make big gains in the Congressional races. The volatility of these polls showing rapid changes in the generic congressional races and the vast ups and downs of Democrartic enthusiasm make me highly skeptical that we know anything about the state of the electorate. With jobs, the deficit and terrorism ranking as the top issues. I personally can't see how Republicans can capitalize on the jobs and deficit issue, although they talk a good game on terrorism.

Republicans have not created a job since 1990 and they have never acted as deficit hawks since Eisenhower. I can't see where they gain any credibility here, especially among independents. Unless something dramatic happens, terrorism doesn't trump the economy. As we've seen, Republicans are now embracing CEOs as their star candidates. But look at Whitman and Fiorina in California. Both of them gained their reputation by either outsourcing jobs or eliminating massive numbers of jobs nationwide but also in the very state they seek to represent.

On Taxes, Republicans claim they own the franchise in tax reduction but they opposed during the stimulus debate the largest tax cut for the middle class in history. Now they are framing the tax debate as if the financial concerns of the very wealthy are those of the rest of us. They may well pull that off with their spin machine. Most Americans don't believe Obama cut their taxes.

The fate of the free world hinges on Jack Nicholson just as it did in Mars Attacks. If Jack cheers on the Lakers well in Game 7, we will be saved. While not my favorite Laker team--Kareem and Magic--the Lakers must crush the Celtics if there is any justice in the world. As President Obama said, "the arc of history bends toward justice."

We salute Ken Griffey, who retired this past month. Finishing his career with 630 hrs, Griffey could have surpassed all homer records--natural or steroid infuenced--if his career in Cincinnati hadn't been plagued with injuries.

Yankee statisticians claim that Derek Jeter surpassed the 3,000 hit mark this week--if you include his playoff and world series hits. Hey, that's cheating. Let him do it straight. It should take two more months.

Meanwhile Nick Johnson made it another year in which he made the Disabled List. That makes every year that I have been following his career.

Shame on Brazil for only beating North Korea 2-1 in the World Cup. The North Korean team was made up of all males in the country who are given daily meals. Double shame on Spain for losing to Switzerland.

Washington is abuzz with the Rookie pitcher Stephen Strassburg, who struck out 14 in his first start and 7 of his last 10 and at one point 7 in a row. So far, he's won his first two games in the big leagues and won every start at all levels of the minor leagues. Unfortunately, the Nationals still blow.

The German austerity package if passed will trigger another Great Depression. So far the euro is barely hanging on with defaults in Greece and upcoming defaults in Spain and Portugal. As European commentators have mentioned, austerity does not necessarily lead to prosperity. So far we have been insulated from this stage of the European crisis but we can't be for long. With deficit hawks in the ascendency in the United States and Britain, these austerity programs may be this century's equivalent of protectionism in the 1930s.

Sunday Grab Bag

I may have to cave and become a Yankees' fan. A lifelong Dodger fan, I got a kick out of the World Series and seeing the Yankees this past year at Camden Yards. But now that Nick Johnson is going to be the DH, I may have to go all in. For years, I always picked an obscure player to root for. When I was a kid, this person was Ron Fairly, the short first baseman for the Dodgers. A fairly solid hitter, my bet was always on whether Ron would bat .300. I think he did once. I have been following Nick Johnson since his days as an Expo and then when he was here in D.C. with the Senators. The interest has always been that Johnson has never played a whole season while healthy. A natural .300 hitter and potential gold glover, I've always wanted to see him play a whole season to see what his real numbers would look like. Whenever I've watched him, he always has gotten a hit and made great plays. So now with Nick and my hero Mariano Rivera, the Yankees may be my team. It also looks like the Yankees have about two years before they will have to clean house again.

Will I have to invoke the Doug Payne principle now with Henning Mankell? This principle affects all cutting-edge writers when they finally get reviewed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. I remember Doug would turn off on a series of writers we both loved--J.G. Ballard, Tom McQuane, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy. Once they were accepted by the Times their day was done as far as Doug was concerned. I thought this was a mistake. As a consequence, he missed out on DeLillo's Underworld and James Ellroy's political trilogy. J.G. Ballard retained his glory but his later novels went unread. Now with Henning Mankell I may be forced with the same dilemma. People are now supposed to "talk" about The Man From Beijing. I hoped to keep him as my own secret. I feel the same thing is happening with Ian Rankin.

Yesterday Barack Obama adopted the McColm solution to Social Security--tax higher levels of income. In his remarks, he said Social Security has only 20 years left at the current expenditures. That means that the Bush Adminisration actually ran through 17 years in the last year and a half to cover the deficit.

At least we are now free of the CPAC madness. Christopher Buckley ,writing in the Daily Beast, slams his first cousin Brent Bozell for a lackluster job on the Mount Vernon Declaration,comparing the prose of the Sharon Statement written by Bill Buckley and Brent's father with the boilerplate drudge of the contemporary conservatives. Conservative Mickey Edwards wrote that not only would he not go to CPAC but neither would Ronald Reagan--ouch. But at least we have a new form of conservativism--Conservative Constitutionalism. After the last administration shredded the constitution, conservatives have rediscovered the document now that a black man is President.

One of the interesting sidebars to CPAC was the the issue of gays. Liberty University threatened to boycott the conference if a gay GOP group attended. The group did and Liberty University pulled out. The one speaker who went gay-bashing was booed from the floor. Liz Cheney after a stint cheerleading for torture voiced support for dropping Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I found this all somewhat puzzling but understandable. Libertarians dominated the conference as Ron Paul's triumph in the straw vote showed and the younger generation of conservatives like their liberal counterparts could care less about gays. But it also marked the diminished power of social conservatives, a subject I will get to in another post.

Tim Pawlenty introduced a series of new principles for conservatives. The only one I remember is that God is in charge. Over the last two years, Pawlenty has increasingly been courting the fundamentalist vote. He now is a creationist, while in his entire previous life he wasn't. Perhaps he picked this up hanging around John McCain, who blurted out in the 2008 campaign that America was "a Christian nation", even though John never believed that either his entire life. With Glenn Beck about to resurrect the Christian revisionists, we should hear more about this. One question I would have for Tim is that if all our civil liberties come from God,what does the recent Supreme Court case on corporate donations to campaigns say about God's views about corporations?

For the record, the last real Christian Republican I knew was former Senator Danforth of Missouri. But that didn't do us much good since we got Clarence Thomas from him.

This week is the Health Care Summit--which should be a non-starter. Republicans have virtually no interest in health care reform or anything else the President wants. If some form of health care passes in the next two months, look to the 2010 elections being less of a Republican victory as has been advertised by our corporate media.

Looking at the ballot for the CPAC presidential preferences I noticed a lot of House members and a couple Senators on the ballot. You can forget anyone like Mike Pence or John Thune. No Republican member of Congress has a chance in 2012. First, because they will have virtually no record of achievement since they are the Party of "No" and you can't very well argue how good your ideas are if you never offer them up as legislation. The other reason is that 2008 was as rare an election as 1960 when a sitting Senator or member of Congress was elected. It won't happen again for quite sometime.