The federal agency responsible for regulating off-shore drilling is the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. You’d think with a name like that it would be a pretty sleepy sort of place. But as longtime TPM readers know, far from it.
Back during the Bush administration the MMS had a series of big scandals tied to rampant drug use, orgies, lax or non-existent auditing and oversight. Sex for oil. When you think about it, who’s got time for auditing when there’s so much drugs and so many orgies going on at the office?
Anyway, it’s not immediately clear whether all this shagging and drugging on the job contributed to the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon. But we thought we’d run through the agency’s recent history and try to see whether that had anything to do with their apparently not considering the possibility that Deepwater Horizon could be the site of a major spill.
On second thought, the gay prostitute who Family Research Council co-founder George Rekers took with him to Europe says they did have sex. In fact Rekers was a particular fan of something called the “long stroke.”
In writing today about the folks from the American Grand Jury movement who managed to get themselves arrested in their pursuit of impanelling a grand jury to indict President Obama for treason, we’ve come up against a definitional question. Here it is. Are these folks ‘birthers.’
Unlike mainstream birthers, the folks from the AGJ don’t really care or dispute where President Obama was born. They’re happy to say he was born in Hawaii. Their theory is that because his father was a subject of the British Empire at the time of Obama’s birth, that Obama is in fact a dual citizen and not eligible to serve as president. Now, I think I’ve actually heard this from more mainstream birthers. They basically say that even if it turns out that Obama was born in Hawaii that still doesn’t get you around the implications of his parentage by one foreign national. I’ve even heard that Obama’s mother’s age plays into it. Read More
We’ve gotten a lot of good answers to our definitional question about birtherism. (And don’t tell Zack but I seem to be coming out on top.) But the most nuanced grasp of the question seems to come from TPM Reader CC …
I disagree with Zack’s assessment of natural-born-citizen Birthers vs. Kenyan-born Birthers being different entities. I read the freerepublic birther threads with great relish, and I can assure you that NBC-obsessed and Kenyan-born Birthers freely collaborate and trade ideas.
The BBC has released its exit poll and they’re predicting a hung parliament with Tories: 307 seats; Labour 255 and LibDems 59. If this exit poll proved accurate (and that’s a big ‘if’) the LibDems would actually have fewer seats in the new parliament than the current one.
It looks like the White House is learning to love Sen. Sanders’ audit of the Fed amendment.
Statement of support from Dep. Secretary of Treasury Neal Wolin after the jump … Read More
The Senate is still voting this evening on amendments to the financial reform bill. However, the “audit the Fed” amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that we were expecting to see passed tonight has been delayed after some last-minute maneuvering.
Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) wanted to be present for the vote, but he’s back in Utah fighting for his political life in advance of this weekend’s state GOP convention where he may very well lose his party’s nomination. Apparently Bennett didn’t want to miss this vote and have that used against him by his opponent in the closing hours of their campaign.
Despite that delay, the politics of financial reform have shifted significantly in recent days, and the Senate is now expected to pass a series of amendments that will significantly strengthen the bill’s reforms.
Late Update: A long-shot to pass, the amendment by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Ted Kaufman (D-DE) to put absolute limits on the size of financial institutions just went down to defeat, 33-61.
Spencer Ackerman reports from Guantanamo this evening that the Pentagon has banned four of the most experienced journalists covering the detention facility after they reported the classified name of an interrogator who testified as a witness this week in the pre-trial hearing of a detainee before the military commission.
The results of not yet complete out of today’s UK election. But the broad outlines are coming into view. And that view is messy.
It’s a big win for the Tories. But they look very unlikely to achieve an absolute majority or even come close enough to an absolute majority that they could cobble together a majority government with a mix of unionists from Northern Ireland and right-wing minor parties. That said, even if Labour and the Lib Dems could find a basis for a coalition government, it doesn’t seem like they’ll have enough MPs between them to do so. So if those numbers hold it’s sort of like a double-hung parliament. Of course, some minor shifts could change the picture significantly.
What reminds me of Bush v. Gore is the jousting and muscling for one or another to just get out. The Tories are making dramatic statements about Labour’s “humiliating” defeat and that, as David Cameron said, it’s “clear that the Labour government has lost its mandate to govern.”
Don’t get me wrong. Those statements are hard to quibble with. But obviously numbers should speak for themselves. But it’s in these cases where the actual result is unknown but also ambiguous that you’ve got these chest-thumping efforts to force the other guy off the stage, to create a fait accompli where the votes won’t quite do it themselves.
You can watch the latest numbers and BBC video feed here.
Dramatic accounts from the survivors of the Deepwater Horizon explosion.