“Since spill, feds have given 27 waivers to oil companies in gulf,” says the headline from McClatchy.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday – the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling.

About the Mineral Management Service, which granted the waivers for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico…

Three separate inspector general reports released last September revealed instances of wrongdoing among current and former MMS staffers who accepted gifts including tickets to sporting events and concerts from oil and gas industry representatives; allegedly had sexual relationships with subordinates; bought cocaine from fellow staffers; and arranged for hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting work upon retirement.

And now for the good news, from a “lesson plan” provided to schools by the Smithsonian.

When tankers running aground spill oil, that’s news, and currently these accidents deposit about 37 million gallons of oil into the ocean every year.

But these disasters only add about 10% to the total amount of petroleum and petroleum by-products which enter the ocean every year!

The largest amount of oil entering the ocean through human activity is the 363 million gallons that come from industrial waste and automobiles.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1000 points in ten minutes today, wiping out $1 trillion in equity values as algorithmic trading by high-speed computers spun out of control.

What passes for sanity on Wall Street was eventually restored, and after falling 998.5 points or 9.2% in only a few minutes, stocks ended the day with a relatively benign loss of 3.2%, 347 points off the Dow, in what was still its biggest one-day tumble since February, 2009.

The more or less rational fraction of this mini-panic was apparently fear that the Spanish economy would collapse along with Greece, and then…

Robot-traders ran wild!

And it wasn’t the first time.

The 1987 crash, when the Dow lost 20% in a matter of hours, was blamed squarely on program trading, in which computers are set to sell (or buy) when stocks hit a certain threshold.

But at the end of the day, nobody knows exactly what happened, or why, and our economy continues to be ruled by a tunnel-vision coalition of half-bright wonks and predatory hustlers.

This could have been a “teaching moment” for the United States.

As much as 100,000 barrels of oil, 4,000, 000 gallons per day leaking into the Gulf of Mexico!

Isn’t there a lesson in there somewhere, that any idiot could understand?

But unfortunately for all of us… and I don’t mean all of us Americans or even all of us human beings, but unfortunately for every living creature on our little blue planet…

Just a couple of weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, Barack “Offshore” Obama opened up more than 300,000,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, and now…

At an ideal time to teach a lesson about our catastrophic addiction to oil…

Our professor is dancing with Exxon, and chanting “Drill, baby, drill!”

I don’t like preaching to the choir, and mostly reserve bashing right-wing bullies for right-wing venues like the Wall Street Journal.

So now that the repulsive psycho John R. Bolton is chanting “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” at the WSJ…

Bolton’s genuinely weird excuse for supporting the war in Vietnam while he simultaneously ran away from combat is worth quoting more or less in full from Wikipedia.

“I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”[13] In an interview, Bolton discussed his comment in the reunion book, explaining that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because “by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from.”

Bolton never stopped cheering for the war, but after those goddamned liberals lost it, he “had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” as if the 58,000 American soldiers who died in Vietnam had any more “desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy” than John R. Bolton.  

But of course a few neo-con freaks objected to my ad hominem attack upon their hero.

And now it was time for some neo-con hoodoo to parade their ridiculous equivalence of Obama with Neville Chamberlain at Munich, with Obama appeasing the monster Ahmadinejad instead of Hitler, while the goddamned chicken-hawk John Bolton is cast in the role of… Winston Churchill, bravely urging resistance.

No decent person should even so much as acknowledge the existence of John R. Bolton!

And this is only an echo of Heinrich Heine’s grand anti-epitaph for the right-wing fanatic Metternich.

Nicht gedacht soll seiner werden!

Aus dem Mund der armen alten

Esther Wolf hört ich die Worte,

Die ich treu im Sinn behalten.

“Let no one ever think of him again!”

Out of the mouth of a poor old woman,

Esther Wolf, I heard those words,

which I have faithfully remembered.

Erase John R. Bolton, and the same for Bush and Cheney, and all who traveled with them!

The New York Times ran this story in two slightly different versions, on March 26, 2010…

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year.

And then on April 12, 2010…

“However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”

I don’t know exactly what to think about General McChrystal’s amazing confession, and it quickly disappeared in the usual hurricane of media noise about nothing…

But it somehow reminded me of another summation which was almost entirely overlooked by American media.

US forces were reported to have killed 106 Afghan civilians when they dropped bombs on the village of Qalaye Naizi, in eastern Afghanistan.

And of course…

Military authorities denied having mistakenly bombed a village, and said the warplanes had targeted a compound used by al-Qaeda.

And it would have been just another story like so many others, except that was the day when…

The number of Afghan civilians killed by US bombs has surpassed the death toll of the 11 September attacks.

We passed that milestone on January 2, 2002.

Barack Obama wandered away from the teleprompters last Wednesday night on Air Force One, and engaged in “an impromptu conversation with reporters” about liberal activism on the Supreme Court.  

“It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically,” Mr. Obama said.

“And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was — is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach. What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error.”

Mr. Obama’s comments, which came as he prepares to make a Supreme Court nomination, amounted to the most sympathetic statement by a sitting Democratic president about the conservative view that the Warren and Burger courts — which expanded criminal defendant rights, required busing to desegregate schools and declared a right to abortion — were dominated by “liberal judicial activists” whose rulings were dubious.

Glenn Greenwald provided a little context around Obama’s impromptu right-wing rant.

Given that the defining rulings of those decades have long formed the bedrock of the progressive understanding of the Constitution and the judiciary, that the dominant Justices of that era (Brennan, Marshall, Douglas, Black) are the iconic liberal judges of the 20th century, and that those decades produced the most vital safeguards for core Constitutional guarantees and critical limits on executive power, Obama — as I said yesterday — should at least specify which decisions he finds “erroneous” and illegitimate.  But the imperial decree has been issued and that’s apparently all you need to know:

The White House declined to identify rulings that Mr. Obama believes relied on judicial activism.

The absolute dumbest political platitude in the vast canon of right-wing idiocies has long been the premise that courts act improperly — are engaged in “judicial activism” — whenever they declare a democratically enacted law invalid on the ground that it is unconstitutional.  That’s one of the central functions of the courts, a linchpin of how our Constitutional Republic operates.  We’re not a pure democracy precisely because there are limits on what democratic majorities are permitted to do, and those limits are set forth in the Constitution, which courts have the responsibility to interpret and apply.  When judges strike down laws because they violate Constitutional guarantees, that’s not a subversion of our political system; it’s a vindication, a crucial safeguarding of it.

It’s possible that Barack Obama doesn’t really oppose integration and abortion rights, and simply believes that the courts should have waited for legislatures to write Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade into law, instead of engaging in “judicial activism.”

But the framers of the US Constitution were notoriously unwilling to allow basic human rights to be redefined by every succeeding gang of newly-elected politicos, and they consequently embedded the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment directly into the Constitution.

So maybe what Mr. Obama means by “letting the process work itself through politically” is that proponents of abortion rights and integrated schools should have summoned a Constitutional Convention, instead of relying on “judicial activism” or transitory Congressional legislation which every succeeding Congress could reverse or re-instate.

But when the over-active Warren Court wrote its unanimous 9-0 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, for example, no less than 17 states still enforced de jure segregation of schools.

So in order to attain the necessary two-thirds majority of approval by state legislatures required for a Constitutional Convention, black Americans would have had to wait for 34 integrationist legislatures to over-rule the 17 segregationist states…

And that means they would have had to wait for the 51st state to be admitted to the Union, and that means…

They would still be waiting.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Of course Obama isn’t really trying to overturn Brown v. Board of Education, and his impromptu attack on “judicial activism” is just an unusually clumsy manifestation of unscripted Obama.

The real problem is a real possibility that the Roberts Supreme Court might overturn the “mandates” of healthcare reform as an illegitimate and unprecendented extension of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

It is true that the Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause broadly enough to reach wholly intrastate economic “activity” that substantially affects interstate commerce. But the Court has never upheld a requirement that individuals who are doing nothing must engage in economic activity by entering into a contractual relationship with a private company. Such a claim of power is literally unprecedented.

On March 21, the same day the House approved the Senate version of the legislation, the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation released a 157-page “technical explanation” of the bill. The word “commerce” appeared nowhere. Instead, the personal mandate is dubbed an “Excise Tax on Individuals Without Essential Health Benefits Coverage.” But while the enacted bill does impose excise taxes on “high cost,” employer-sponsored insurance plans and “indoor tanning services,” the statute never describes the regulatory “penalty” it imposes for violating the mandate as an “excise tax.” It is expressly called a “penalty.”

This shift won’t work. The Supreme Court will not allow staffers and lawyers to change the statutory cards that Congress already dealt when it adopted the Senate language.

Yes, the smart money is always on the Court upholding an act of Congress. But given the hand Congress is now holding, I would not bet the farm.

The bottom line is that if the Democrats had enforced healthcare mandates with a tax, they could have avoided the relatively serious Constitutional challenge which attaches to an unprecendented penalty, but in that case they would have had to abandon their role as tax-cutters and in general “Republicans lite,” so they rejected the unpopular category of taxes in favor of the very possibly unconstitutional category of penalties.

Now the Joint Committee on Taxation is trying to run away from that mistake, and they can run, but they can’t hide.

US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Horace Murray

Now Dah is a very small village north-west of Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, and it’s virtually invisible on the internet except for photographs by American soldiers, distributing humanitarian assistance or “engaging key leaders,” as above, April 20, 2010.

If you look for the meat in what amounts to a vast bullshit-sandwich of Republican blather about immigration, you eventually come down to mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants.

And likewise if you swallow all the piss-and-moan Democratic hysteria about Arizona’s worse-than-the-fucking-Nazis plan “to stop people on the suspicion that they may be undocumented workers,” at the bottom of that steaming urinal you arrive at open borders.

But of course it’s always nothing definite with the major American political parties, and we citizens just have to guess at their hidden agendas on the basis of whatever stinking con-game has been calculated to deliver the most votes right now.

So which is it, Republicans and Democrats?

Mass deportation of millions of our hard-working friends and neighbors, or open borders, and de facto American citizenship for everybody in the Western Hemisphere, and beyond?

What a beautiful choice!

Or is it more like an inevitable dilemma, that all of us chose and keep choosing every time we elect yet another NAFTA-lovin’ con-man like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama?  

Obama’s critics constantly portray him as a “weak-livered pole-cat!”

But after the passage of Obama’s landmark healthcare reform, the child-like faith of Obamabots all over America was apparently justified! Although…

Hard-boiled editor Perry White wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Lois Lane, because…

Obamacare depends on $455 billion in spending cuts from Medicare!  

Two American soldiers (not yet identified by the Pentagon) died in Logar Province on Thursday, April 22, 2010, during an exchange of gunfire in an isolated family compound, on the road between Pul-e-Alam and the town of Baraki Barak.

Baraki Barak is the original homeplace of the Burki/Baraki/Ormuri, (historically also known as Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar), a Pushtun tribe now concentrated in Kaniguram. in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

Like other Pushtun tribes, the Burki (Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar) seek self-segregation from the outside world: thus the importance of Kaniguram as the historical focal point of the tribe and the continued effort to retain their native tongue (Urmar), which predates Pushtu.

The Barakis’ most celebrated chieftain was the warrior-poet Pir Roshan, who invented the Pushtu alphabet,  advocated universal education and equal rights for women, and led a rebellion against the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1582.

This rebellion continued for about 100 years, until the grandsons and great-grandsons of Pir Roshan finally made peace with the grandsons and great-grandsons of Emperor Akbar.

………………………………………….

Three days after a couple of American soldiers were killed along with three Afghan civilians/insurgents/whatevers during one of General Stanley McChrystal’s signature midnight commando raids in Logar Province, “protestors” blocked the main road through the district capital of Pul-e-Alam, and burned 16 NATO fuel tankers.

The local commander of the Afghan National Army, Brig. Gen. Ghulam Mustafa Mohseni, complained that NATO had declined to consult with local authorities before the midnight raid, and relied instead on the same kind of intel which has failed and failed and failed to track down Osama bin Laden in nearby Waziristan for nine long years.

Two American soldiers (not yet identified by the Pentagon) died in Logar Province on Thursday, April 22, 2010, during an exchange of gunfire in an isolated family compound, on the road between Pul-e-Alam and the town of Baraki Barak.

Baraki Barak is the original homeplace of the Burki/Baraki/Ormuri, (historically also known as Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar), a Pushtun tribe now concentrated in Kaniguram. in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

Like other Pushtun tribes, the Burki (Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar) seek self-segregation from the outside world: thus the importance of Kaniguram as the historical focal point of the tribe and the continued effort to retain their native tongue (Urmar), which predates Pushtu.

The Barakis’ most celebrated chieftain was the warrior-poet Pir Roshan, who invented the Pushtu alphabet,  advocated universal education and equal rights for women, and led a rebellion against the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1582.

This rebellion continued for about 100 years, until the grandsons and great-grandsons of Pir Roshan finally made peace with the grandsons and great-grandsons of Emperor Akbar.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig burning in the Gulf of Mexico

Lightening in the cloud of volcanic ash above the Eyjafjallajokull volcano

A plume of gas and dust extending approximately 17,000,000,000,000 miles (3 light-years) out of the Carina Nebula.

All three photos were originally published by the Daily Telegraph.