The Jed Report is currently on extended hiatus. You can find my current posts at Daily Kos TV and at Daily Kos. Now that DKTV is up and running, I hope to resume posting here in 2010.    — Jed

Posted at Daily Kos on Thu Jul 29, 2010 at 8:15 AM Pacific

Backlash against Bobby’s bluster

Bob Marshall, outdoors editor for The Times-Picayune, takes Bobby Jindal to task for Jindal’s demagoguery on BP’s oil spill:

At a press conference supporting his wish to narrow Gulf passes with rock jetties in an attempt to keep oil out of interior marshes, Gov. Bobby Jindal said this: “No one can convince us that rocks in the water are more dangerous than oil. That is absolutely ridiculous. The only people who believe that are the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who can’t see the oil, smell the oil or touch the oil.”

That’s not even close to the truth, as Gov. Jindal surely knew. But I’m not surprised.

That misinformation is in keeping with the governor’s response to this disaster, which has often been a mixture of diversion, fur coat attitude and panic — all of which is doing terrible long-term damage to our chances of survival on this starving delta.

Marshall proceeds to systematically dismantle Jindal’s response, arguing that Jindal, by combining dishonesty with a sense of panic (“screaming at cameras, raging at the federal government about this oil disaster”), has shown abysmal leadership throughout the spill.

Since the oil began spewing, Jindal has been trying to convince people the reason our wetlands are being poisoned and people are out of work is those damn feds. It’s a diversion. If he screams loud enough, maybe people will forget that he was a big supporter of risky deepwater drilling.

He is making villains of those responding to the disaster, not those responsible for it.

Marshall argues that Jindal’s response to the leak has actually weakened Lousiana’s ability to address the long-term challenges it faces with its coastline, both because Jindal has ignored science in proposing counterproductive solutions like rocks and sand berms to contain the oil and because Jindal’s manic response weakened the state’s credibility in the eyes the people who will need to invest the billions it will take to rebuild Louisiana’s coast.

I’d also add one thing: if people in Louisiana (and I’m a resident of the state) don’t help enact policies that reduce global warming, all this talk about saving the coastline will be nothing more than hot air, literally. Trying to save Louisiana’s coastline without addressing long-term climate is a fool’s errand.

Posted at Daily Kos on Wed Jul 28, 2010 at 6:30 PM Pacific

BP-funded researcher: Spill is no big deal for Gulf coast

Question: What do you get when you cross a ton of money from BP with marine “research” on the impact of their oil spill? Answer: Great news for the Gulf of Mexico!

That might have been a marginally funny joke if it weren’t true. Case in point:

Impact of Gulf spill ‘quite small’: expert

(AFP) NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Louisiana’s fragile marshes should recover from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in a matter of months and the environmental impact will be “quite small,” a leading expert said.

The upbeat assessment of the damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster came from geologist Ed Owens, a world authority on protecting shorelines from oil spills contracted by BP to lend his expertise to the response effort.

Owens, who was the technical advisor to Exxon’s clean-up teams on the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska from 1989 to 1993 and has been involved with oil spill response and research since 1970, has worked in Louisiana’s wetlands before.

“It’s a very, tiny, tiny fraction of what’s spilled has actually reached any of the shorelines in the area, which means that the environmental impact in terms of the coastal side of it is quite small,” Owens told AFP.

Owens claims that the impacts of the spill will have completely disappeared within a few months to a year, at most. His entire argument seems to be that most of the oil didn’t actually reach the shore, but that ignores (among other things) the fact that we still don’t know what the impact will be of the dispersants or of the oil that has been suspended in the water column. If BP were actually interested in figuring out the true impact of their spill, they’d fund independent scientists and grant them complete freedom to conduct their research. But BP isn’t interested in the truth, they are interested in their own profit. I guess that isn’t surprising — BP is a company, after all. But wouldn’t it be nice if they could at least leave us alone and refrain from trying to flood the debate with “scientific” propaganda?

Posted at Daily Kos on Wed Jul 28, 2010 at 3:46 PM Pacific

Economists: Government action prevented depression

The New York Times reports on a new research paper by former McCain economics adviser Mark Zandi and former Federal Reserve official Alan Blinder:

In Study, 2 Economists Say Intervention Helped Avert a 2nd Depression

WASHINGTON — Like a mantra, officials from both the Bush and Obama administrations have trumpeted how the government’s sweeping interventions to prop up the economy since 2008 helped avert a second Depression.

Now, two leading economists wielding complex quantitative models say that assertion can be empirically proved.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

Blinder and Zandi argue that despite their political unpopularity, both TARP and the stimulus package were relative bargains, saving the country from even worse economic performance than we’ve experienced. Of course, even if their analysis is right — and it’s not the final word on this topic — the fact that things could have been worse probably will not be very reassuring to the 8 million people who lost their jobs.

Even though this research might not ultimately make a great campaign slogan (“It could have been worse” won’t be the centerpiece of Democratic campaigns this fall), it bolsters the case made by economists like Paul Krugman that we need more, not less, stimulus from the government and it points to the types of policies Democrats ought to be fighting for to help strengthen the economic recovery.

Posted at Daily Kos on Wed Jul 28, 2010 at 11:22 AM Pacific

Federal criminal probe focuses on oil firms and their regulators

WaPo:

A team of federal investigators known as the “BP squad” is assembling in New Orleans to conduct a wide-ranging criminal probe that will focus on at least three companies and examine whether their cozy relations with federal regulators contributed to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to law enforcement and other sources.

The squad at the FBI offices includes investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal agencies, the sources said. In addition to BP, the firms at the center of the inquiry are Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon rig to BP, and engineering giant Halliburton, which had finished cementing the well only 20 hours before the rig exploded April 20, sources said.

The investigators are looking for any improprieties involving MMS:

One emerging line of inquiry, sources said, is whether inspectors for the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency charged with regulating the oil industry — which is itself investigating the disaster — went easy on the companies in exchange for money or other inducements. A series of federal audits has documented the MMS’s close relationship with the industry.

…

One law enforcement official said criminal investigators will look for evidence that MMS inspectors were bribed or promised industry jobs in exchange for lenient treatment. “Every instinct I have tells me there ought to be numerous indictable cases in that connection between MMS and the industry,” said this official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is unfolding.

(Emphasis added.)

According to the article, it will probably take at least a year for any indictments to flow from the investigation. Although that may feel like a year too long, holding people who broke the law accountable for their actions will be well worth the wait.

Posted at Daily Kos on Wed Jul 28, 2010 at 10:20 AM Pacific

Oil vanishing from surface, but remains in Gulf

It’s been nearly two weeks since a cap has stopped the flow of oil from BP’s damaged well and as the New York Times reports, oil in the Gulf is rapidly disappearing from view, though concerns remain.

The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.

Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.

John Amos, president of SkyTruth, an environmental advocacy group that sharply criticized the early, low estimates of the size of the BP leak, noted that no oil had gushed from the well for nearly two weeks.

“Oil has a finite life span at the surface,” Mr. Amos said Tuesday, after examining fresh radar images of the slick. “At this point, that oil slick is really starting to dissipate pretty rapidly.”

Despite the disappearing slick, the NYT reports that concerns remain, particularly among Gulf fishermen who worry about toxicity of dispersants and whether oil has settled on the seafloor, both of which could pose a danger to the food chain including shrimp and crab larvae.

According to the Washington Post, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that while oil is biodegrading, it remains in the water column — though NOAA also says that not much oil has settled on the seafloor.

“The light crude oil is biodegrading quickly,” NOAA director Jane Lubchenco  said during the response team daily briefing. “We know that a significant amount of the oil has dispersed and been biodegraded by naturally occurring bacteria.”

Lubchenco said, however, that both the near- and long-term environmental effects of the release of several million barrels of oil remain serious and to some extent unpredictable.

“The sheer volume of oil that’s out there has to mean there are some pretty significant impacts,” she said. “What we have yet to determine is the full impact the oil will have not just on the shoreline, not just on wildlife, but beneath the surface.”

But much of the oil appears to have been broken down into tiny, microscopic particles that are being consumed by bacteria. Little or none of the oil is on seafloor, she said, but is instead floating in the gulf waters.

Her conclusions come from the work of several NOAA boats now collecting water samples, as well as the analysis of academics brought in to help study the spill effects. The goal, she said, is to get a scientifically sound assessment of the overall environmental effects of the spill.

The Post noted that Lubchenco was careful to reject arguments advanced by BP-funded researchers that the impact of the spill would be minimal, saying that “anyone who classifies the results of the accident as anything less than catastrophic has not been watching.”

Or, as is the case of BP, they hope nobody else is watching.

Posted at Daily Kos on Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 8:00 PM Pacific

TN-Gov: GOP Lt. Gov. opposes First Amendment for Muslim-Americans

Talk about ironic: Tennessee Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey, running for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, says he doesn’t support religious freedom for Muslims…because he doesn’t want to live under “Sharia Law.”

At a recent event in Hamilton County, Ramsey was asked by a man in the audience about the “threat that’s invading our country from the Muslims.” Ramsey proclaimed his support for the Constitution and the whole “Congress shall make no law” thing when it comes to religion. But he also said that Islam, arguably, is less a faith than it is a “cult.”

…

“Now, you know, I’m all about freedom of religion. I value the First Amendment as much as I value the Second Amendment as much as I value the Tenth Amendment and on and on and on,” he said. “But you cross the line when they try to start bringing Sharia Law here to the state of Tennessee — to the United States. We live under our Constitution and they live under our Constitution.”

That sounds about as rational as arguing that women should be forced to cover their bodies from head to toe to protect them from being forced to wear a burqa. I mean, the whole point of the First Amendment is that not only does it prohibit discrimination against all religions, including Islam, but it also prohibits the imposition of a theocracy, whether rooted in Sharia Law or the religious extremism of American Taliban figures like Ramsey.

Ramsey trails Rep. Zach Wamp in the nomination battle, but before you start wondering whether Ramsey’s little burst of extremism might give his campaign renewed hope, Wamp may still have the edge on Ramsey when it comes to conservative lunacy: Wamp says that if health care reform isn’t repealed, Tennessee ought to secede from the United States of America. I guess Ramsey ought to get behind Wamp’s proposal, because if that happens, they won’t have the First Amendment — or any of the others — to worry about anymore.

Posted at Daily Kos on Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 7:20 PM Pacific

Lord: Screws had legal authority to murder Hall

You know you’re in trouble when this is how you begin an explanation of why you were right:

Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines…

At issue: Jeffrey Lord’s self-defense from criticism by fellow conservatives of his claim that Shirley Sherrod was a liar because she described the brutal slaying of her relative Bobby Hall by Sheriff Claude Screws as a “lynching.”

Lord tries to argue that the murder couldn’t have been a lynching because the dictionary’s definition of lynching reads: “to put to death, esp. hanging by mob action and without legal authority.” He argues in part that Screws was not part of a mob. Given that Screws was one of a gang of three murderers, Lord’s argument is absurd, especially because the definition he cites does not require mob action nor does it require hanging, but it gets worse. Lord also argues that because the Supreme Court — on narrow, technical grounds — overturned Screws’ conviction of violating Hall’s civil rights, that Screws did in fact have legal authority to murder Hall.

Second, the Supreme Court specifically said the Sheriff and his deputy and a local policeman acted “under color of law.” Which means they had legal authority.

Of course, there’s always the fact that the State of Georgia refused to indict Screws for homicide, even though everybody knew he’d killed Bobby Hall in cold blood. I guess in Lord’s strange little world, this means Screws had the proper legal authority to murder Bobby Hall. But that tells you more about what’s inside Lord’s mind than it does anything else.

Posted at Daily Kos on Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 5:18 PM Pacific

Late afternoon/early evening open thread

Funny or Die presents Tim Geithner’s secret thoughts on Elizabeth Warren:

Posted at Daily Kos on Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 4:10 PM Pacific

In defense of the media

I never thought I’d write a post with this title, but Mark Halperin has driven me to it. Blaming the media-at-large for amplifying the Fox/Breitbart smears of Shirley Sherrod, he says:

The Sherrod story is a reminder — much like the 2004 assault on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — that the old media are often swayed by controversies pushed by the conservative new media. In many quarters of the old media, there is concern about not appearing liberally biased, so stories emanating from the right are given more weight and less scrutiny. Additionally, the conservative new media, particularly Fox News Channel and talk radio, are commercially successful, so the implicit logic followed by old-media decision makers is that if something is gaining currency in those precincts, it is a phenomenon that must be given attention. Most dangerously, conservative new media will often produce content that is so provocative and incendiary that the old media find it irresistible.

So the news-and-information conveyor belt moves stories like the Sherrod case from Point A to Point Z without any of the standards or norms of traditional journalism, not only resulting in grievous harm to the apparently blameless, such as Sherrod, but also crowding out news about virtually anything else. The endless obsession with the Simpson story was absurd and gluttonous, and the pattern has been reproduced countless times since (the death of Anna Nicole Smith, the Gary Condit–Chandra Levy mystery, the ongoing Rod Blagojevich soap opera), but the Sherrod story may be the low point of this phenomenon because of its illegitimate origins. Andrew Breitbart, a conservative firebrand with a record of selectively editing video for partisan advantage, used a misleading snippet to produce a chain reaction that embarrassed the old media, the NAACP and the President of the United States — all of which led to even more content generated, rehashed, debated and mulched.

At a time when the country faces real challenges, with major elections coming up in November, did the nation really want to spend a week on this? Presidential advisers, including Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod, who have earned virtual Ph.D.s in such political-media complexities, were on one level as seemingly powerless to stop the whole mess from spiraling out of control as were their predecessors in the Clinton and Bush White Houses. But the Obama Administration took the critical and alarming step of bowing to the expectations of the right and forcing Sherrod out of her job before completing even the most cursory investigation.

Gibbs and other officials publicly stopped short of saying it was all the media’s fault, but they certainly suggested something very close to that. There is enough blame to go around. The new-media genie is not going back into the bottle; there are no easy solutions for how to end the dynamic unleashed by Orenthal James Simpson and his motley band of abettors, accusers, analysts and voyeurs. But all of us who are involved in politics and media should take a moment to recognize that we have hit a low point. And let all of us resolve that, having hit bottom, it is time to start climbing out of the pit.

Halperin is certainly correct to say the Sherrod smear originated with right-wing media, and he’s also correct to describe her firing as “craven” as he does earlier in the article. But his central thesis — that the Sherrod case represents a low-point for American media — is sorely lacking.

The Sherrod smear began with Andrew Breitbart and quickly spread to Fox News. Based on Breitbart’s video and Fox’s relentless promotion of it, the NAACP’s Ben Jealous tweeted his condemnation of Sherrod. By the end of the day on Monday, July 19, Sherrod had been sacked.

As best I can tell from searches on Nexis, neither CNN nor MSNBC covered the Sherrod story until she had been canned. CNN did a quick story on the fact that Vilsack had canned her, but didn’t dwell on it. I saw nothing on MSNBC.

By Tuesday, however, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had ripped apart Breitbart’s smear and that morning Sherrod appeared on CNN (which is based in Atlanta) to debunk the smears. From there, MSNBC picked up the story, also exonerating Sherrod, as did newspapers and progressive blogs. That evening, each of the national news broadcasts aired stories pointing out that Sherrod had actually been telling a story of racial redemption. By Wednesday, excellent reporting by media outlets not named Fox had saved Sherrod’s reputation, caused the administration to admit it had been wrong, and even forced Fox News to hilariously claim that it was the White House and the White House alone that had overreacted. (Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has posted a comprehensive timeline illustrating exactly how things unfolded.)

Obviously, in a perfect world, Breitbart and Fox never would have smeared Sherrod, but they did. And once they did, and once the USDA fired Sherrod, it became a big story. Sure, the media could have ignored it, but if they had ignored it, they’d have been lending their tacit approval to Fox’s new brand of McCarthyism. I wish they hadn’t been put in the position of needing to debunk Fox’s lies, but they were. And from the AJC and CNN on down, they did a damn good job of it. It wasn’t a low-point — it was a high-point.

Posted at Daily Kos on Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 3:30 PM Pacific

Republican voters want Bush economic policies

Check out these numbers (from Pew, conducted July 22-25):

Q: What do you think would do more to improve economic conditions in the country over the next few years?

Following economic policies of Obama administration:
All: 46% | Dem: 84% | Ind: 43% | GOP: 13%

Following economic policies of Bush administration:
All: 29% | Dem: 7% | Ind: 20% | GOP: 63%

So despite Democratic control of the White House and Congress during the worst economy since the Great Depression, most voters still have a clear preference for Democratic economic policies. Twelve times as many Democrats prefer Obama’s economic policies than prefer Bush’s and more than twice as many independents prefer Obama’s economic policies than prefer Bush’s. Only among Republicans are Bush’s economic policies popular: 5 times as many of them support Bush’s policies than support Obama’s.

Despite these numbers, there’s no question that Democrats have a huge challenge to face this November. But here’s the point, revealed by these numbers: Republicans have serious political problems as well. Most Americans may think the country is headed in the wrong direction, but given the choice, they’d rather follow President Obama’s policies than go back to the Bush-Republican prescription for the economy. The GOP has yet to show they can overcome this hurdle.

Interestingly, even though Republicans favor Bush’s economic policies, a sizable chunk of them — 40% — would like to at the very least let the tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Indeed, while 52% of them support extending all the tax cuts permanently, 21% of them believe all the tax cuts should be canceled. That suggests that at least among some Republicans, the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility has come home to roost. So we now have a GOP that pretty much uniformly doesn’t support any sort of government action to strengthen the economy, but a significant faction of the party also supports fiscal austerity in the form of across-the-board tax increases and nearly half the party supports at least increasing taxes on the wealthy.

Hopefully, numbers like these will remind Democrats that the real challenge in 2010 isn’t to blur the distinction between themselves and the GOP because the last thing people want are GOP economic policies. Republicans might want Bushonomics, but just about everybody else wants to see aggressive government action to get this economy back into shape.

Posted at Daily Kos on Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 8:16 AM Pacific

Survey documents BP spill impact on Louisana tourism

Not exactly a shock:

Seventeen percent of potential regional tourists have indicated they have canceled or delayed a trip to Louisiana because of the ongoing oil spill and pollution problems resulting from the Deepwater Horizon-BP rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a study commissioned by the state’s tourism agency.

Melody Alijani, director of research and development for the tourism office in the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, said the survey was taken among 903 residents of the state’s regional tourist markets that stretch from San Antonio, Texas, to Pensacola, Fla.

The survey, taken by Market Dynamics Research Group of New Orleans, said that before the spill, 44 percent of those surveyed indicated they planned to visit the state. After the rig accident, 17 percent canceled or postponed plans because of the spill, and 83 percent indicated they still would travel to the Pelican State.

These findings mirror a national survey cited by the Times-Picayune which revealed that the spill had caused the cancellation or delay of about one-quarter of planned travel to Louisiana. So far, BP has paid the state’s tourism agency $15 million to help boost numbers.

Given that the annual economic impact of tourism to Louisiana is $8.3 billion, $15 million doesn’t seem nearly enough to help the state rebuild it’s battered image. Nonetheless, when it comes to making good on its promise to pay for the damage it has caused, BP continues to drag its feet.

Posted at Daily Kos on Mon Jul 26, 2010 at 6:10 PM Pacific

RNC fundraiser to feature Andrew Breitbart

TPM busts open the latest embarrassment for the Republican National Committee: the RNC is now touting Andrew “The Race-Baiter” Breitbart as a special guest at a fundraiser next month with Michael Steele.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has a party fundraising event coming up in August that is scheduled to feature a very special guest: Conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart, according to a copy of the invitation exclusively obtained by TPM.

According to the invitation, Steele and Breitbart will appear together at a reception on Thursday, August 12 at 6:00 PM. From the invite:

Thursday, August 12:

6:00 p.m. Welcome Reception featuring Andrew Breitbart and RNC Chairman Michael Steele

The fundraiser has ambitious goals, seeking contributions as much as $60,800 per person. The minimum donation to attend the Breitbart-Steele reception is $5,000.

The RNC’s decision to hold an event with Breitbart in the wake of his attempted smear of Shirley Sherrod reminds of of something Michael Steele said earlier this year:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them.

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”

At the time, Steele was trying to argue that the GOP needed to move past its race-baiting Southern Strategy. Just a few months later, it’s clear that Steele’s argument fell on deaf ears. Race-baiting is alive and well in the GOP. In fact, it’s retaken center stage.