Sanity Restored? Lace Up the Gloves and Get Back to Work

I watched the “Rally to Restore Sanity” without expectation of a political satori or anything other than a good time. I was a little disappointed with the comedy, I expected more but realized that in order to tone it down and balance it out in the spirit of the day they just managed to make it slightly lame.

I’m not a fan of rap or hip hop but Kid Rock and Sheryl Crowe turned out a couple of great moments and Bonnie Whitmore, the backup singer and bass player with Hayes Carll was fantastic.

I woke up this morning and cable was filled with campaign ads so I hit the mute button while I made coffee. Thinking to myself that the ads would stop in a couple of days and we could begin suffering from the post election analysis I fired up the computing beast.

The Old Republican Fiscal Piety Blues

In my experience the same Republicans who preach so loudly about fiscal responsibility and living within ones budget are nearly always at the front of the line at the great American public appropriations buffet. They address the cameras with carefully powered faces twisted into expressions of shock and concern, their mouths dripping with pecuniary piety and repeat the same mantra over and over again.

They accuse the Democratic Party of being the party of “tax and spend” and pontificate about the way they will save America by cutting taxes on the wealthy, cutting services to those who need and deserve them, then, with open grasping palms, flee into the back rooms with their lobbyist masters and grovel for their cut of the loot.

In his column at the Miami Herald, Carl Hiaasen offers a lovely and touching example of this in a tale of appropriations largess in Tallahassee, Florida:

A Sickening in the Gulf Stream

[Editor’s note: This began as a comment this morning to “Oil spill: The nightmare becomes reality” a Carl Hiaasen piece on the arrival of BP’s poisonous gusher of crud on the shores of Pensacola.]

Carl,

You’re right; it is difficult for people living far from our coasts to feel the horrible weight of this disaster.

I live in Ohio but have lived on the coasts of California and North Carolina. I have also lived through and helped clean up an oil spill near San Francisco in 1970 or thereabouts. I have friends and family though who have never seen or at least never lived near the sea and had it become, as seems inevitable to me, a part of them.

If you sit on a hill overlooking your local harbor or coastal area (a fat dune will do) and watch the ebb and flow of the ocean, its cycle of life, through days and nights, its tides, the winds shifting from onshore to offshore, the ceaseless march of crabs and gulls of all the limitless life of the sea you will soon notice another ebb and flow.

Now you don’t trust BP, but it’s too late

By Carl Hiaasen The Miami Herald

"You fucked up, you trusted us" Otter

Every time a BP executive appears on television, I think of the garage scene from the movie Animal House.

An expensive car belonging to Flounder’s brother has just been trashed on a drunken road trip, and the smooth-talking Otter comforts the distraught Delta pledge with these cheery words:

“You f—– up! You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it.”

If only the BP guys were half as honest.

Incredibly, almost eight weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the company that caused the disaster remains the primary source of information about it.

Predictably, much of that information has been stupendously, tragically wrong, starting with the low-ball estimates of how much crude was leaking into the sea.

BP didn’t know the answer when the rig went down, and it doesn’t know the answer now. Nobody does.

Every day we see streaming underwater video of that mile-deep gout of oil, billowing and unstaunched. The image is only slightly less sickening than the pictures of dead sea turtles and gagging pelicans.

Read more at The Miami Herald

Contact Carl Hiassen: chiaasen@MiamiHerald.com