The GOP’s chances of taking control of the Senate in this year’s elections were never great, but just a few weeks ago they still had a chance. A slim chance, but a real chance. But the party’s nomination of weak candidates in key races has even Republicans conceding that they blew that opportunity.
The government’s new estimate of the amount of oil being spilled into the Gulf every day is dramatically up since the estimate released on Friday. Now the estimate is 35k to 60k barrels a day, a 50 percent increase on the high end of the range.
Obama’s first Oval Office address, on the Gulf oil spill disaster, begins at 8 p.m. ET. We’ll be here, so join us and watch it live here.
After Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle made a mad dash for the exits in the Capitol today to avoid reporters, we asked Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, how long until Angle is ready to face the press: “I don’t know, I mean I just think it’s going to take a few weeks,” Cornyn admitted.
It turns out that after Sharron Angle was a Republican and before she joined a small extremist right-wing party in Nevada she was actually a Democrat for about four years. She left in June 1984 which sort of suggests she probably didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan the second time around, though she claims that she did.
When President Obama declared from the Oval Office that the Deepwater Horizon blowout “is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” he was giving this crisis historic stature and perhaps also missing the point (watch it here).
The Gulf is not a pristine environment. If your only exposure to the Gulf has been on the beaches of Florida, you might convince yourself that the Gulf is a deep blue aquatic wilderness. But as you travel west, the beaches give way to the marshes of the Mississippi delta, which are crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines, manmade canals, and flood control levees. Further west, in Texas, the beaches reemerge, but shipping canals, giant refineries, and petrochemical factories persist. Over the horizon, in the Gulf itself, thousands of oil and gas wells pump night and day. Read More
I tend to think of making fun of Sarah Palin as pretty old hat. I mean, she has to say something pretty silly at this point to make me take notice. But last night she went on O’Reilly to rail on the president for not getting the oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico stopped. And when pressed on just how he was supposed to do that by all of people Bill O’Reilly, Palin said Obama had really blown it by not reaching out to the Dutch since they proved themselves so good at building dikes and sluices and dams to reclaim land from the sea. Which when you think about it is pretty much the same thing as capping an oil gusher a mile underwater.
Video after the jump. Read More
The brother of the American detained in Pakistan on a solo mission to off Osama bin Laden not only knew about his brother’s plan, but he drove him to the airport and “felt he had a good chance.”