The BP Gulf Spill Disaster Three Months On: We Still Have Our Beach. So Far

I got a well-deserved spanking from a commenter earlier this week when I took a day off from blogging to head to our favorite Middle Atlantic beach to frolic with the dolphins, white pelicans and other shore birds.

"You still have your beach. The Gulf Coast is useless for the rest of my life," wrote the commenter.

He was right, of course, and if the projection in the map atop this post of the reach of the BP spill one year on is accurate, then the word catastrophe will take on a new meaning for those of us that have watched the spill and its consequences from afar without considering that we too may eventually be directly affected.

Long-term disasters have a way of losing their edge of awfulness for those not directly involved.

Once it became obvious that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis was lying through their teeth about Iraq, there was considerable outrage. But it ebbed in time even though Americans by the thousands and Iraqis by the tens of thousands died, and now that fool's errand has conveniently become Barack Obama's war for the very Republicans who backed it. (Afghanistan, too.)

Once the extent of the Katrina disaster on New Orleans and the inept Bush administration response became obvious, there was considerable outrage. But it too ebbed in time even though tens of thousands of people were displaced, never to return to their own homes.

And so it too has been with the BP spill, which nearly three months on has become a sort of background noise to our lives.

Yup, the Spillcam is still showing torrents of oil gushing from the damaged well head. Yup, the spill continues to work its way across the gulf and in some cases inland. Yup, BP is still lying through its teeth and the government response still seems inadequate, but . . . ho-freaking-hum.

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Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Billboard Liberation Front Strikes Again

MORE HERE.

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HARVEST MOUSE ON A MATCHBOX
(Royal Show, Bristol, England -- 1958)
By John Gay
Hat tip to Woods' Lot

Has James Imhofe's Igloo Melted Yet?

I spent much of Tuesday going in and out of air conditioning in the course of doing interviews for the expanded second edition of my book. This included a train ride during which it occurred to me as I saw a homeless person frying on a park bench in Philadelphia that global warming denialist and all-around kook James Imhofe must be feeling a bit put out during this the worst East Coast heat wave since forever.

Or not.

You might recall that the Oklahoma Republican senator's daughter and grandkids built an igloo during one of the blizzards that shut down Washington, D.C. last winter and adorned it with signs reading "Al Gore’s New Home" and "Honk If You (heart) Global Warming."

* * * * *

One conclusion from my urban wanderings was that going from air conditioning to the heat -- 104 degrees F in Philadelphia and a whole degree cooler hereabouts -- is harder on the old bod than straight heat. The adjustment from the frigid commuter train I rode on for an hour to walking up stairs to street level and then the short distance to my pied-à-terre was awful.

Another is that if you are in the heat-wave belt, there is no better time to be neighborly.

If you have elderly or infirm neighbors or acquaintances, please take the time to look in on them, especially if they don't have air conditioning.

Meanwhile, StevenD has put together one of the better Global Warming Is a Hoax elucidations here.

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Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

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UNTITLED POLAROID
By Andrei Tarkovsky
Hat tip to Woods' Lot

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Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

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WITHIN THE FOCUS POINT
By Zoltan Gyori

To Kill The Critics: Keep Your Cotton Pickin' Hands Off Of 'Mockingbird'

SCOUT AND ATTICUS

I suppose that it was inevitable in our fractious, snark-heavy society that even a wonderful classic like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is coming in for criticism as the 50th anniversary of its publication is celebrated this month, but I for one am royally pissed off.

Along with J.D. Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye, Mockingbird was the most influential book of a youth filled with reading. And along with The Big Lebowski, the movie version of Mockingbird starring Gregory Peck is one of my two favorite movies evah.

I have read Mockingbird perhaps four times. But if you are Mockingbird impaired, here's a quick plot summary minus plot spoilers:

Six-year-old narrator Scout Finch lives with her older brother Jem and widowed lawyer father Atticus in a fictional Alabama town during the Great Depression. "Boo" Radley, a recluse who lives next door, alternately fascinates and horrifies the children and their friend Dill, and the three plot how to get him out of the house. For his part, Boo leaves them small gifts like a pocket watch and thread in a tree but doesn't appear in person.

Atticus is appointed by the local court to defend a black man named Tom Robinson who is accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. Although many of the town's citizens disapprove, Atticus agrees to defend Tom. Taunts that his children's father is a "nigger lover" escalate into a lynch mob that is shamed into dispersing by the children.

Because Atticus does not want them to be present at trial, Scout, Jem, and Dill watch in secret from the colored balcony. He establishes that Mayella and her father have lied and that the lonely Mayella made sexual advances toward Tom . . .

* * * * *

To Kill a Mockingbird more than earned the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and is considered the most widely read book dealing with race in America, while Atticus has to be the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism.

Lee wrote with a warmth and humor despite the serious issues Mockingbird explores, which in addition to racial injustice include rape, gender, class, the destruction of innocence and the integrity of lawyers.

Typical of the 50th anniversary critics is Malcolm Gladwell, who nit-picked Lee's masterpeice (which in fact is the only book that she ever published) in the New Yorker, whining that that Atticus' explanation to Scout of the Ku Klux Klan was simplistic:

"Finch does not want to deal with the existence of antisemitism. He wants to believe in the fantasy of Sam Levy down the street, giving the Klan a good scolding."

Yeah, and if the explanation had been about rape, should he have discussed vaginal penetration with a mere six-year-old?

As Hadley Freeman notes in The Guardian, much of the carping is sour grapes because Lee has doggedly remained a recluse practically since the publication of Mockingbird and therefore has hurt the massive egos of the critics who expect her to open the door of her Mississippi home to them.

So screw the critics, I'm with Harper.

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Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

Coming Conflict In The Canadian North

Don't tell climate change deniers, but with the polar ice cap melting the fabled Northwest Passage, it could be the locale of future conflict as Canada exerts its territorial rights against all comers, including the U.S.

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THE FAIRBANKS FAMILY
(1964)
By Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

It's A Beach Day Today, Baby

BACK TOMORROW. ARF, ARF!
Illustration by Jeff MacNelly

Happy Independence Day 2010

WATCHING FIREWORKS
Coney Island, New York (1962)
By Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

You Can't Live With It. Or Without It.

It's difficult to know where to put one's oar in the water on Facebook's privacy practices because there's going to be an oil slick everywhere you do.

It's bad enough that any pervert with two brain cells to rub together can track down a comely lass through her Facebook profile, but now comes word that when Facebook users clicked on ads appearing on profile pages, the site would at times provide data to advertisers such as the username behind the click, as well as the user whose profile page from which the click came.

Facebook has regularly revised its privacy settings and made them more difficult to use in an obvious effort to stay ahead of its critics, although it seemed to have retreated somewhat to placate its critics. But the larger issue is not the laissez faire attitude of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his crew to privacy concerns but how little the vast majority of Facebook's nearly 500 million active users care losing their own privacy.

This is because social networking is the coin of the realm and not being on Facebook for many people -- and not just naive and impressionable teenagers -- is akin to wearing hoop skirts and riding around in a horse and buggy.

I resisted the siren call until the webmaster for my new book said that a Facebook page -- for the book, not me -- was essential.

Ahem, he was right.

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Clay Jones/Free Lance Star

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KEESHA PERFORMS
(2010 Much Music Video Awards, Toronto)
By Sam Javanrough

Right Angle: Why God Loves Rape

The word wingnut does not do Sharron Angle justice, but will have to suffice until a better one comes along.

The hyperventilating paranoiac Tea Partying Republican candidate aims to capture Harry Reid's U.S. Senate seat in November but recognizes she has a wee problem in attracting voters who are not certifiably loony.

And so after running from men and women with notebooks and cameras for weeks, she appeared on a TV forum this week with Nevada's leading political commentators.

Angle did walk back from her repeated admonition that people might have to arm themselves and take to the streets if they were thwarted at the polls, saying that "I admit it was a little strong to say."

But in a deft appeal to woman voters -- whom she has repeatedly dissed by telling them that they shouldn't work if their husbands do and repeatedly claimed that abortion leads to breast cancer -- she stuck to her . . . er, guns in arguing that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape.

"You know, I’m a Christian," Angle explained, "and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things."

In other words, a rape victim who gets pregnant shouldn't want or need an abortion because God wants her to have that beautiful baby.

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Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Your Cowardly News Media At Work

From the first comprehensive study of how the news media rolled over on using the world "torture" during the Bush-Cheney interregnum, via Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

Motherforkers.

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SUMMER CAMP
By Mark Steinmetz

Ruskie Spies In The Suburbs: 'But Look What She Did With The Hydrangeas'

ANNA AND THE COOKIE MONSTER FROM HER FACEBOOK PAGE

I grew up during the Cold War, an era thick with Soviet and American espionage intrigues, Boris and Natasha and, of course, Bond . . . James Bond.

So as logical as it seems to harken back to those dark days of the 1950s and 60s in digesting the news that the FBI has taken down 11 members of a Russian spy ring operating in the U.S., the comparison just doesn't wash.

The biggest reason for this disconnect is less that Anna Chapman and her comrades were so bloody incompetent, which included leaving passwords laying around their homes because they had trouble remembering them.

While they did employ some of the tried-and-true methods of spycraft, including switching bags at a train station and burying pots of money, they blew their backyard barbecue covers by communicating with Russian intelligence officers at the U.N. and Russian consulate in Manhattan through easily decrypted messages hidden in digital images and wireless network text messages sent over the Internet.

No, the biggest reason is that the information that they were trying to glean for Moscow was so inconsequential that none of the 11 could be charged with espionage.

You see, their interest apparently was not in nuclear weapon blueprints or the other kinds of goodies that spies usually try to arrange for government officials to provide, but rather gossip through infiltrating "policy-making circles." No matter, they were busted before any PTA bake sales or Little League games could be compromised.

Joking aside -- at least for the moment -- Chapman and other ring members were "illegals," spies who adopt the identities of real or dead Americans and not the spies of yore who typically posed as diplomats.

Some of the spies' communications read like a script from a Coen brothers movie, including this exchange between ring members Juan Lazaro and Vicki Peleaz:

Lazaro: "They tell me that my information is of no value because I didn't provide any source . . . it's of no use to them."

Peleaz: "Really?"

Lazaro: "Yes. They say that . . . without a source . . . without stating who tells you all of this . . .It isn't . . . your report isn't."

Peleaz: [Interrupts] "Put down any politician from here."

In another intercepted message, the handlers at Moscow Center were disturbed that Richard and Cynthia Murphy, one of three married couples in the ring, had bought a house in North Jersey.

"We are under the impression that C [Russia's External Intelligence Service] views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of the mission," replied Cynthia Murphy. "It was a convenient way to solving the housing issue, plus 'to do as the Romans do' in a society that values home ownership."

Chapman, who has become the femme fatale darling of the tabloids because she posted sexy photos of herself online, at least had the brains to smell a rat when a Russian-speaking undercover FBI agent posing as a contact instructed her to deliver a fake passport to another supposed spy using this password exchange: "Excuse me, but haven't we met in California last summer?"

"No, I think it was the Hamptons," Chapman deadpanned, and soon was packing her bags for a one-way trip to Moscow.

The FBI waited three days after Russian President Medvedev's so-called Cheeseburger Summit with President Obama had concluded before pouncing.

The response to the arrests by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was tepid in the extreme and left one yearning for a vintage Cold War fist-pounding rant: "They haven't explained to us what this is about. I hope they will. The only thing I can say today is that the moment for doing that has been chosen with special elegance." To which another Russian official added: "This will not effect our relations with Washington."

Neighbors of the Murphys in leafy Montclair, New Jersey were, of course, shocked. Just shocked.

Said one:

"They seemed so normal. They couldn't have been spies."

And another:

"But look what she did with the hydrangeas."

IMAGES (Top to bottom): Pelaez, the Murphy home with praiseworthy hydrangeas; Chapman; Suspects Chapman, Peleaz, the Murphys and Lazaro in court; Medvedev and Obama have a nosh.

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Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

This Just In! Journalists Are Human

MORE HERE.
Illustration for the Columbia Journalism Review

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THE FINGER POINTS TO THE WEST
By SeekingFocus