The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz has produced an execrable piece of crap called “The Birds and the Bees (via the Fertility Clinic),” in which he wrings his hands about measuring the emotional toll of a freewheeling market for sperm and eggs.  He’s doing his usual thing, quoting “large minorities” and “a substantial minority” without citing any research, study, link, or anything that could be called evidence that he didn’t pull out of his ass, other than a study from an organization with an ax to grind.  The study he quotes is from a group blog called www.FamilyScholars.org, which on its own site says “”FamilyScholars.org is the online site for engagement for the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.”  (Oh, Putzy baby, even YOU note these folks are “minorities.”  Just saying…)  Asshole.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Pain Caucus,” says less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, there is a dangerous urge to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.  Here’s The Putz:

If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout.

He’s an appalling little piece of shit.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.

When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world’s policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn’t a second Great Depression.

Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”

The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world’s advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment’s conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.

What’s particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization’s own economic projections.

Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.’s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?

The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn’t and currently don’t: We must guard against “the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection.”

A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.

Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”

The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”

Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading. And it’s already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed — and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both — and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.

And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.

Anyone who things the unemployed aren’t already suffering is a moron.

Dowd, Friedman and Rich

Mr. Kristof is off.  MoDo, in “Once More, With Feeling,” says President Obama is still learning to emote, five weeks into the heartbreak in the Gulf of Mexico.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Malia for President,” has a question:  President Obama’s next task? Shaping the public reaction to the gulf spill so that we can use it to generate the will to break our addiction to oil.  Mr. Rich, in “Obama’s Katrina? Maybe Worse,” says the president’s credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video from the gulf.  Here’s MoDo:

President Spock’s behavior is illogical.

Once more, he has willfully and inexplicably resisted fulfilling a signal part of his job: being a prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel so they know he gets it.

“This president needs to tell BP, ’I’m your daddy,’ “ scolded James Carville, a New Orleans resident, as he called Barack Obama’s response to Louisiana’s new watery heartbreak “lackadaisical.”

At a press conference, Obama said Malia had asked him, as he shaved, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?” (That hole should be plugged with a junk-shot of Glenn Beck, who crudely mocked the adorable Malia.) Oddly, the good father who wrote so poignantly about growing up without a daddy scorns the paternal aspect of the presidency.

In the campaign, Obama’s fight flagged to the point that his donors openly upbraided him. In the Oval, he waited too long to express outrage and offer leadership on A.I.G., the banks, the bonuses, the job loss and mortgage fears, the Christmas underwear bomber, the death panel scare tactics, the ugly name-calling of Tea Party protesters.

Too often it feels as though Barry is watching from a balcony, reluctant to enter the fray until the clamor of the crowd forces him to come down. The pattern is perverse. The man whose presidency is rooted in his ability to inspire withholds that inspiration when it is most needed.

Oblivious to warnings about Osama hitting the U.S. and Katrina hitting New Orleans, W. often seemed more absorbed in workouts than work. Obama, by contrast, does his homework; he conveys a rare and impressive grasp of difficult subjects when he at last deigns to talk to the news media and reassure those whose lives are overturned by disaster.

The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a No Drama rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.

Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn’t want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there’s no way to predict what your crises will be.

F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.

For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching. He’ll deal with it, but he’s annoyed because it’s not on his syllabus.

Even if Obama doesn’t watch “Treme” on HBO, it’s strange that he would not have a more spontaneous emotional response to another horrendous hit for Louisiana, with residents and lawmakers crying on the news and dead pelicans washing up on shore. But then, he didn’t make his first-ever visit to New Orleans until nearly a year after Katrina hit. “I never had occasion to be here,” he told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny, then at The Chicago Tribune.

Just as President Clinton once protested to reporters that he was still “relevant,” President Obama had to protest to reporters last week that he has feelings.

He seemed to tune out a bit after the exhausting battle over health care, with the air of someone who says to himself: “Oh, man, that was a heavy lift. I’m taking a break.”

He’s spending the holiday weekend in Chicago when he should be commemorating Memorial Day here with the families of troops killed in battle and with veterans at Arlington Cemetery.

Republican senators who had a contentious lunch with the president last week described him as whiny, thin-skinned and in over his head, and there was extreme Democratic angst at the White House’s dilatory and deferential attitude on the spill.

Even more than with the greedy financiers and arrogant carmakers, it was important to offend and slap back the deceptive malefactors at BP.

Obama and top aides who believe in his divinity make a mistake to dismiss complaints of his aloofness as Washington white noise. He treats the press as a nuisance rather than examining his own inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings.

“The media may get tired of the story, but we will not,” he told Gulf Coast residents when he visited on Friday. Actually, if it weren’t for the media, the president would probably never have woken up from his torpor and flown down there.

Instead of getting Bill Clinton to offer Joe Sestak a job, Obama should be offering Clinton one. Bill would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire. Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief. The post is open.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted:

“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have. And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair. On the other hand, I probably think to myself, ‘These are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are.’ And to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.”

And a child shall lead them. …

This oil leak is not President Obama’s fault. Stopping the spill is BP’s responsibility; it both caused it and it has the best access to the best technology to plug it. Of course, as the nation’s C.E.O., Mr. Obama has to oversee the cleanup, and he has been on top of that. His most important job, though, is one he has yet to take on: shaping the long-term public reaction to the spill so that we can use it to generate the political will to break our addiction to oil. In that job, the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would — because it is precisely that simple gut reaction, repeated over and over, speech after speech, that could change our national conversation on energy.

You see, right now our energy conversation is dominated by three voices. There are the “petro-determinists,” who never tire of telling us that we’ll be dependent on oil for a “long, long time.” That is true. The problem is, these same people have been telling us that ever since the first oil crisis in 1973, and their real objective in doing so is not to help us understand that breaking our oil addiction is difficult, but to make us think that it is impossible — so don’t bother.

Then there are the “eco-pessimists,” who argue that it is probably already too late. We are toast. Unless we rewire human beings to want less growth — not only ourselves but the millions in China and India who aspire to live like us — the end is nigh. The eco-pessimists may be right, and they are certainly sincere, but they have little respect for the power of innovation, the power of six billion minds all trying to solve one problem.

Finally, we have the “Obama realists.” These are the political pros who whisper to him every day that this is not the time to lay out a big new “Obama End to Oil Addiction Act.” The Democrats, they contend, are suffering from “legislative fatigue.” After casting a hard vote for health care, they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon — the essential first step in getting off oil. And, they rightly add, the G.O.P. today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.

The Obama realists make sure that the president is always careful to talk in vague terms about how he stands behind “Waxman-Markey” and “Kerry-Lieberman” — sterile Washington-speak for the House and Senate bills that attempt to put a small price on carbon. I am glad he is behind them; I just wish he were in front of them. I am glad the president passed health care for the nation. But healthy to do what? To go where? To grasp what dream?

Answering those questions is the president’s great opportunity here, but he has to think like a kid. Kids get it. They ask: Why would we want to stay dependent on an energy source that could destroy so many birds, fish, beaches and ecosystems before the next generation has a chance to enjoy them? Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?

That is what a child would want to know if he or she could vote. That is the well of aspiration for a game-change on energy that Mr. Obama can tap into. And he could even rip off BP for his moon shot motto: Let’s get America “Beyond Petroleum.” As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.

Now here’s Mr. Rich:

For Barack Obama’s knee-jerk foes, of course it was his Katrina. But for the rest of us, there’s the nagging fear that the largest oil spill in our history could yet prove worse if it drags on much longer. It might not only wreck the ecology of a region but capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency.

Before we look at why, it would be helpful to briefly revisit that increasingly airbrushed late summer of 2005. Whatever Obama’s failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush’s top disaster managers — the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious “Brownie” — professed ignorance of New Orleans’s humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party’s former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.

The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start — however haltingly and inarticulately at times. It was way too trusting of BP but was never AWOL. For all the second-guessing, it’s still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it’s hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama’s considerable talents do not include credible play-acting.

But life isn’t fair, and this president is in a far tougher spot in 2010 than his predecessor was in 2005.

When Katrina hit, Bush was in his second term and his bumbling was not a shock to a country that had witnessed two-plus years of his grievous mismanagement of the Iraq war. His laissez-faire response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall to big business. His administration’s posture toward the gulf region had been telegraphed at its inception, when Dick Cheney convened oil and gas cronies, including Enron’s Ken Lay, to set environmental and energy policy. The Interior Department devolved into a cesspool of corruption, even by its historically low standards, turning the Bush-Cheney antigovernment animus into a self-fulfilling prophecy and bequeathing Obama a Minerals Management Service as broken as the Bush-Cheney FEMA exposed by Katrina.

Obama was elected as a progressive antidote to this discredited brand of governance. Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.

He returned to this theme with particular eloquence in his University of Michigan commencement speech 10 days after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He reminded his audience that under both parties the federal government helped build public high schools, the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system, engineered the New Deal and Medicare — and imposed safety and environmental standards on the oil industry. Quoting Lincoln, Obama said that “the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.”

We expect him to deliver on this core conviction. But the impact on “the people” of his signature governmental project so far, health care reform, remains provisional and abstract. Like it or not, a pipe gushing poison into an ocean is a visceral crisis demanding visible, immediate action.

Obama’s news conference on Thursday — explaining in detail the government’s response, its mistakes and its precise relationship to BP — was at least three weeks overdue. It was also his first full news conference in 10 months. Obama’s recurrent tardiness in defining exactly what he wants done on a given issue — a lapse also evident in the protracted rollout of the White House’s specific health care priorities — remains baffling, as does his recent avoidance of news conferences. Such diffidence does not convey a J.F.K.-redux in charge of a neo-New Frontier activist government.

Long before Obama took office, the public was plenty skeptical that government could do anything right. Eight years of epic Bush ineptitude and waste only added to Washington’s odor. Now Obama is stuck between a rock and a Tea Party. His credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video from the gulf. And this in an election year when the very idea of a viable federal government is under angrier assault than at any time since the Gingrich revolution and militia mobilization of 1994-5 and arguably since the birth of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s.

This is why the more revealing strand of Rand Paul’s post-primary victory romp may have been his musings about BP, not civil rights law — although they are two sides of the same ideological coin. He called out Obama and his administration for sounding “really un-American” in their “criticism of business.” He asked that we stop the “blame game” over the disaster and instead just accept the fact that “accidents happen.” Much as Paul questioned the federal government’s role in ordering lunch counters to desegregate, so he belittled its intrusion into BP’s toxic private enterprise. But unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the role of government in corporate regulation is a continuing battle, not settled law.

Hardly were those words out of Paul’s mouth than the G.O.P. gave him the hook. He dropped his scheduled appearance on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader and Paul’s newly self-appointed minder, declared that his fellow Kentuckian had said “quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage.” Establishment conservatives have scrambled to portray Paul as either an innocent victim of a liberal media game of “gotcha” or an inexperienced citizen-politician who made the rookie mistake of conducting campaign interviews as if they were classroom seminars in Libertarian theory. We were told he really didn’t mean what he was saying, and that he certainly didn’t represent the G.O.P. or the Tea Party movement.

Whom are they kidding? Paul rightly described his victory as “a message from the Tea Party” that it was on the march “to take our government back.” And if he doesn’t represent the G.O.P., who does if not his most powerful supporters and ideological fellow travelers, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin? Aside from saying no to Obama, the Republican Party has no ideas except Tea Party ideas, Rand Paul ideas. And as The Economist, hardly a liberal observer, put it, Paul’s views are those of “a genuine radical who believes in paring government down to the bone.”

The president of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, codified the mission in apocalyptic terms last weekend. The new American “culture war,” Arthur C. Brooks wrote in The Washington Post, is not “over guns, gays or abortion” but pits “the principles of free enterprise” against the “European-style statism” he accuses Obama of fomenting. It’s a war that takes no prisoners: the A.E.I. purged the former Bush speechwriter David Frum after he broke with the strict party line.

The stakes are high. To win this culture war, the right must rewrite history — and not just that of the Bush response to Katrina. In his jeremiad, Brooks held only “government housing policy” responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown and gave a pass to what he regards as an already overregulated Wall Street. Palin has brazenly accused Obama of being in financial hock to Big Oil when it’s her own “drill, baby, drill” party that has collected three-quarters of Big Oil’s campaign cash for decades.

The Tea Party is meanwhile busy rewriting America’s early history under Beck’s tutelage by enforcing a vision of the Constitution tantamount to the Creationists’ view of Genesis. We must obey the words of the founding fathers literally — or what the Tea Partiers think those words to be. (Many Tea Partiers seem unaware that Medicare is a government entitlement postdating Tom Paine.) There can be no evolution or amendments. Any Obama initiatives are sacrilegious. All previous add-ons are un-American and must be pared away, from the Department of Education to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Michael Steele, the party chairman, attacked Elena Kagan for joining Thurgood Marshall in finding the original text of the Constitution “defective” because, among other defects, it countenanced slavery.

The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big. It’s the crunch moment for government to make its case — as Obama belatedly started to do on Thursday. But words are no match for results. As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP’s pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president’s argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks. It’s not just the gulf that could suffer for decades to come.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “Alabama Goes Viral” Ms. Collins says this has been a peculiar political year even for Alabama, where viral campaign videos are turning heads.  Mr. Blow says “Give Them Something They Can Feel,” and that when it comes to the BP oil spill, President Obama should show more emotion and less reserve.  Mr. Herbert, in “An Unnatural Disaster,” says the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest disaster to result from an unholy alliance of government and giant corporations.

Here’s Ms. Collins:

Alabama goes to the polls!

O.K., not an opening likely to maintain reader interest. Let’s start again, with the words of Dale Peterson, candidate for agriculture commissioner in Tuesday’s Republican primary:

“Listen up! Alabama ag commissioner is one of the most powerful positions in Alabama. Responsible for five billion dollars. Bet you didn’t know that. You know why? Thugs and criminals!”

This is the start of Peterson’s campaign ad. He rides into the screen on a horse that looks increasingly worried as things progress. Brandishing a rifle, the 64-year-old farmer barks at the camera about his opponent (“a dummy”), somebody stealing his yard signs and immigrants being “bused in by the thousands.” The overall effect is like being cornered at a party by an eccentric neighbor who thinks the garbage man is spying on him for the federal government. It’s extremely popular.

There is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on this campaign season. You raise enough cash to film an outrageous ad. Then you post it on the Web and pray that it goes viral, gets mentioned on the cable talk shows and draws in enough donations to put the thing on TV.

The trend goes back to Demon Sheep, the legendary ad for Carly Fiorina’s campaign for the Senate nomination in California. It had regular sheep and then cartoon sheep and then a guy crawling around the ground disguised as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He had on a cardboard mask with red light bulbs for eyes. I believe the message was supposed to be fiscal responsibility, but really, all you got was Demon Sheep. Red eyes. Carly Fiorina.

The man who made it, Fred Davis III, then took up the cause of Tim James, a deeply unremarkable Alabama businessman who wants to be governor. To separate James from the crowd, Davis came up with “Language,” a 30-second ad in which the candidate stared at the camera and demanded to know why “our politicians make us give driver’s license exams in 12 languages.” (The actual answer is: a federal court ruling.)

“This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it,” James said irritably. “We’ll only give the test in English if I’m governor. Maybe it’s the businessman in me, but we’ll save money.”

James’s staff insisted it was fiscal conservatism, not xenophobia, that put their candidate on the driver’s license warpath. But Alabama’s tests are automatically graded by computer, using federally financed software — even the approximately 2 percent that are taken in a language other than English. Given the fact that the state would probably have to defend the policy in court, James’s idea would actually be a new expense.

But I cannot emphasize how totally beside the point all that is. “Language” went viral. “This is the first election in a long time where the fate of the campaign really did change on a single ad,” said David Lanoue, chairman of the University of Alabama political science department.

James is now one of the front-runners, despite a last-minute crisis involving a rumor that he believed the state was spending too much money on the University of Alabama football coach, who makes $4.1 million a year. Which James vigorously denied wanting to cut. It’s the businessman in him.

He now has a sequel to the driver’s license ad, in which he says that as a businessman, he feels sex offenders should be required to “re-register with the state, face to face, every 90 days.”

“Some politicians think that might inconvenience the sex offenders,” James said somberly. He did not explain who those politicians were, but I suspect the same guys who keep stealing Dale Peterson’s signs.

This has been a peculiar political year, even for Alabama. James’s biggest opponent, Bradley Byrne, was attacked by a group called True Republican PAC, which ran an ad charging that Byrne supported the teaching of evolution.

Byrne, who has multiple degrees and was chancellor of the state community college system, indignantly denied the charges.

But wait, there’s more. It turns out that True Republican PAC was bankrolled by the state teachers’ union, which is angry at Byrne for trying to ban teachers from holding second jobs as state legislators. The Alabama Education Association apparently felt a good payback would be to spend $500,000 on a group that encourages people to vote against any candidate who believes there is a scientific explanation for the origin of life.

Meanwhile, over in the Fifth Congressional District primary, Les Phillip, a Republican, has an ad that features him telling a story of two young African-American men. One did great, served his country and became Les Phillip, while the other fell in with terrorists and other bad company and became Barack Obama.

So far, this is only on the Web, but the campaign is hoping to go viral.

And it’s going to get nothing but more stupid…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

There are many things at which the president is extraordinarily gifted. Emoting isn’t one of them.

Thursday, in the opening remarks of his press conference, the president said: “Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated.”

I wasn’t feeling it.

Then, as the press conference was ending, after he had meandered through an unsatisfying mix of defenses and didacticism, he tried again: “When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ ” Score. After all, whose heart doesn’t go out to a cute little girl when she worries?

People needed to be assured that Obama possessed three basic presidential traits: being informed, engaged and empathetic. As for the first trait, he was superb as always. I think amassing facts is his idea of being warm and fuzzy.

On the second, he was a bit wobbly. How is it that he didn’t know if S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, who was the director of the Minerals Management Service, an agency at the heart of the spill debacle, had resigned or been fired that morning? Maybe he would have known if earlier he had not been in the Rose Garden taking pictures with Coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke men’s basketball team.

This is the same coach who famously bristled that Obama should stick to fixing the economy after the president picked North Carolina to win the N.C.A.A. championship in 2009. Maybe the coach could have reminded him that he still had more important things to do.

On the third point, empathy, Obama came up short. That is until he invoked his daughter and saved himself. Malia for the win!

Obama is going to have to dig deep on this one. He can’t afford to repeat the messaging mistakes of his first year. He can’t afford to let the right hang the Katrina label around his neck.

The spill is not Obama’s fault. It’s the result of corporate irresponsibility, ineffective regulation and the government’s lack of disaster planning, decades in the making. But, as Obama said, the cleanup is his responsibility, and polling suggests that people are growing unhappy with his handling of it. Two weeks ago, a Pew Research Center survey found that 36 percent of people disapproved of his handling of the spill. This week, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found that 51 percent disapproved.

Such has been the narrative of his presidency: being treated like the janitor in chief — mopping up messes made by others and being chastised for leaving streaks.

Mr. President, I know that you have a self-professed aversion to appearing angry, but in this case you have every right to be angry and to openly empathize with the anger of others. Otherwise, by running from one label, you risk earning another — incompetent. You feel me?

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

“Where I was wrong,” said President Obama at his press conference on Thursday, “was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.”

With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to worst-case scenarios.

These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.

President Obama knows that. He knows — or should know — that the biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP’s profits are counted in the billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering beneath a brilliant sun. You don’t want to know what people will do for that kind of money.

There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?

The idea of relying on the assurances of these corporate predators that they are looking out for the safety of their workers and the health of surrounding communities and the environment is beyond absurd. Even after the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon site, BP officials were telling us (as their noses grew longer and longer) that about only 1,000 barrels of oil a day were escaping into the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly a month into the disaster, BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, was publicly offering the comforting assessment that the environmental damage resulting from the spill would likely be “very, very modest.”

They were somewhat wide of the mark (as reputable scientists were telling us day after day after day). We now know, of course, that this is the worst spill in U.S. history, that instead of 1,000 barrels a day, something in the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day have likely been spewing into the gulf. And the environmental impact can fairly be described as catastrophic.

The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.

President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

Mr. Hayward of BP was on television on Friday referring to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent fouling of the Gulf of Mexico as a “natural disaster.” He was wrong, as usual. Like the unholy alliance of government and big business, this tragedy set in motion by Mr. Hayward’s corporation is a grotesquely harmful and wholly unnatural disaster.

Brooks and Cohen

Prof. Krugman is off today.  Bobo says the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reminds us of the difficulty of predicting disaster in complex technological systems.  Bobo seems to believe that ignoring safety regulations and having a “company man” overrule a drill master has nothing at all to do with this catastrophe.  Bobo is a moron, as usual.  Mr. Cohen, in “Hell in the Islamic Republic,” tells of one young Iranian’s nightmare and the enduring need for dialogue.  Here’s Bobo:

In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.

But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.

In the first place, people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters. At the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a series of small systems happened to fail at the same time. It was the interplay between these seemingly minor events that led to an unanticipated systemic crash.

Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.

Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.

On the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a Transocean official apparently tried to close off a safety debate by reminding everybody the blowout preventer would save them if something went wrong. The illusion of the safety system encouraged the crew to behave in more reckless ways. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in a 1996 New Yorker essay, “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”

Fourth, people have a tendency to match complicated technical systems with complicated governing structures. The command structure on the Deepwater Horizon seems to have been completely muddled, with officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton hopelessly tangled in confusing lines of authority and blurred definitions of who was ultimately responsible for what.

Fifth, people tend to spread good news and hide bad news. Everybody wants to be part of a project that comes in under budget and nobody wants to be responsible for the reverse. For decades, a steady stream of oil leaked out of a drill off the Guadalupe Dunes in California. A culture of silence settled upon all concerned, from front-line workers who didn’t want to lose their jobs to executives who didn’t want to hurt profits.

Finally, people in the same field begin to think alike, whether they are in oversight roles or not. The oil industry’s capture of the Minerals Management Service is actually misleading because the agency was so appalling and corrupt. Cognitive capture is more common and harder to detect.

In the weeks and hours leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests. They were forced to make these decisions without any clear sense of the risks and in an environment that seems to have encouraged overconfidence.

Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”

So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.

This isn’t just about oil. It’s a challenge for people living in an imponderably complex technical society.

Go eat a bowl of weasel shit, Bobo.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

A year ago, in the weeks before the tumultuous June 12 election, Iran was a nation of festive hope and vibrant debate.

Charges and counter-charges filled the airwaves as large crowds, for and against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, filled the streets. A late Green wave surged behind Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition candidate.

Then night descended and horror. Ahmadinejad’s “victory” was celebrated with brutality worthy of a putsch. Thugs prowled, armed with the license of the Islamic Republic to beat women.

Lofty clerics bound by those beautiful words — “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate” — showed no mercy, no compassion, in unleashing the forces who reduced the pre-electoral vitality to a hallucination and thoughtful intellectuals to whimpering wrecks prepared to “confess” to plotting velvet revolution.

Never have I seen a nation’s mood so transformed overnight nor a generation’s aspirations so gratuitously crushed.

Behind the walls of Evin Prison, and in shadowy detention centers like Kahrizak, thousands were detained, beaten, abused; and dozens lost their lives. We will have to wait for the full accounting. Meanwhile we have this testimony:

“The man intones, ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. …’ Mohsen braces himself. There is a terse whisper and the instrument comes crashing onto the soles of Mohsen’s feet. An unimaginable pain shoots through his body to his temples, a pain to drive one mad. Mohsen is dimly aware that he is screaming. His wrist and ankles are being cut up as he thrashes against his bonds.

“The beating continues. Before each blow, the man calls, ‘Ya! Hossein!’ After a while he stops to catch his breath. He speaks to Mohsen. He calls him a Hypocrite and a traitor to God. Then he starts again.”

The above passage comes from an important book, “Death to the Dictator!”, written under the pseudonym of Afsaneh Moqadam. The book, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, plunged me back into Tehran in the harrowing days after June 12, 2009.

It recounts a fairly typical story: A young man named Mohsen Abbaspour (not his real name), who moves from apolitical apathy to action in the weeks before the vote, is outraged by the outcome and joins massive street protests, before being grabbed by goons and “disappeared” into an unspeakable labyrinth of violence.

The intensity of the account put me in mind of Bernard Fall’s “Hell in a Very Small Place.”

I know the author, who agreed that the true identity of Ms. Moqadam be revealed to me. The author is reliable, knowledgeable and assiduous. After speaking to the author, I have no doubt the events related in the book took place as described.

Mohsen is broken by the Islamic Republic, snapped like a twig. He is forced to name his “seditious” friends. His nightmare culminates in rape:

“Tied down as for a bastinado. The heavy man on top, panting. ‘Here! Have your vote back.’

“He loses consciousness from the pain. He is dead.

“Back in a different cell. All like him. No blindfolds in here. The floor is covered in blood and flies. They do it to them once a day, sometimes twice.”

One of the most shattering scenes comes when, after his release, Mohsen asks his mother to take him to a doctor — “not the family doctor.” The doctor, having conducted an examination, “looking at the picture on the wall behind her,” tells a sobbing Mrs. Abbaspour of the injuries to her son’s rectum and less visible ones to his psyche. As she leaves, the doctor says, “May God help you, Mrs. Abbaspour.”

It is impossible to describe the shame. It is a miracle that Mohsen spoke. I asked the author how many such cases there might be. “Hundreds, not thousands,” was the answer. Selective rather than wholesale brutality characterizes the Islamic Republic.

“Orders were given,” the author said. “No Revolutionary Guardsman behaves like that without being told he can.”

Since June 12, U.S. realists and idealists have had an Iranian field day. The realists have dismissed the Green Movement, proclaimed a stolen election fair, and urged President Obama to toss aside human rights concerns and repair relations with Tehran in the American interest.

The idealists have rained renewed fury on Ahmadinejad, called for his overthrow and urged Obama to bury outreach and back Moussavi.

Both are wrong. I told an old Iran hand, a former U.S. diplomat, about “Death to the Dictator” and Mohsen’s rape. “Oh, yes,” he said, “That was an old Savak technique.” The Savak was the shah’s brutal secret police.

If you believe that Iran is not eternally condemned to veer from a monarch’s to a theocrat’s repression, and that its centennial quest for pluralism is unquenchable, speak out about abuse but pursue engagement because isolation only serves the horror merchants. Shun the realist and idealist bravura for the gray area where things get done.

Iran is weaker now than before the election. Its renewed interest in Brazilian-Turkish mediated talks is worth skeptical consideration. If you believe Mohsen — in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate — deserves a future.

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins has a question:  “Who Wants to Elect a Millionaire?”  She says contempt for political insiders and lust for the self-financed candidate have created a win-win for the wealthy. Just look at Connecticut.  Mr. Kristof, in “Sister Margaret’s Choice,” says the recent excommunication of a nun who saved a mother’s life underscores a perception problem of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Today, let’s play Political Kingmaker.

Pretend you’re the Republican leadership in a smallish state with an open United States Senate seat. The opposition is running a popular, longtime officeholder whose sense of inevitability was shaken by recent revelations that he had referred to himself as a Vietnam War veteran when he isn’t one.

Your own options are:

A) A well regarded former congressman who is a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

B) A political novice who made her fortune building up an entertainment business that specialized in blood, seminaked women and scripted subplots featuring rape, adultery and familial violence. In which the candidate, her husband and children played themselves. Also, the family yacht is named Sexy Bitch.

Well, obviously, you go for the yacht owner.

Yes, this week the Connecticut Republican Party chose Linda McMahon, the former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, to be their Senate candidate. Her main opponent, the former Representative Rob Simmons, packed up his war medals and went home.

“You can’t argue with arithmetic,” he told The New London Day.

The math in question is $50 million, the amount McMahon claimed she was prepared to spend on her campaign. Connecticut has just under two million registered voters, so maybe she’ll just invite everybody in the state to a nice dinner at Red Lobster.

So far this season, the Republicans have offered two new models of their future. One is the Tea Party vision, in which outsiders full of spirit and excitement overthrow the old order. In North Carolina, there was so much spirit and excitement that voters gave the top spot in a Congressional primary to a former drug addict who, according to court documents, once referred to the United States government as the Antichrist and claimed to have personally located the Ark of the Covenant.

Meanwhile in Kentucky, primary voters nominated Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, for the Senate, ignoring the pleas of party leaders to go for somebody less spirited and exciting. Paul promptly got into trouble over his lack of enthusiasm for requiring restaurants to serve black people and his criticism of Barack Obama for being disrespectful of oil-drilling companies.

The other model is the one on view in Connecticut: richest bidder wins. For governor, the Republican convention endorsed Tom Foley, a longtime party fund-raiser who was once George W. Bush’s ambassador to Ireland. Foley, whose 100-foot yacht makes the McMahons’ 47-footer look like a dinghy, instantly identified himself as an “outsider.”

Both Foley and McMahon are what political pros like to call “self-financers.” And while McMahon doesn’t dwell on her willingness to pay all the campaign freight, her sales pitch is all about financial success.

“People call Linda McMahon a C.E.O., job creator, business leader. But I just call her Mom,” says daughter Stephanie in a much, much repeated TV ad. W.W.E. fans all remember Stephanie from the day she slugged Mom in a spat over the Wrestlemania fight card, but we are not going there anymore. In fact, the McMahon organization has been busily scrubbing the Internet of every embarrassing clip it can claim a copyright on.

The McMahons made a mint off the formerly seedy, small-town entertainment known as professional wrestling by adding heavy doses of sex, more spectacular violence and a raw tone that bordered on pornography. Linda McMahon now likes to brag that she’s “created a product that is one of America’s greatest exports,” as if there’s no question that bringing half-naked women wrestling in pudding to 145 countries was one of America’s greater accomplishments.

You can overlook a lot of sleaze for $50 million. Simmons distributed a video of Vince McMahon, Linda’s husband, standing in the ring and telling a weeping female wrestler to take off her clothes, get down on her knees and “dammit, bark like a dog.” Nobody paid attention.

On the plus side, ever since Linda McMahon developed political ambitions, the W.W.E. has attempted to clean up the more outrageous elements in its act, sparing millions of impressionable children from the old hints of necrophilia, the abundance of gore and the side stories in which Stephanie lost her blouse in the ring, Vince ran off with a floozy and Linda was sexually assaulted by a competing promoter.

“One good thing has come from her run: Vince McMahon putting out an edict that there will no longer be any cutting of your foreheads with razor blades,” said Superstar Billy Graham, a retired wrestler who contracted hepatitis from a bloody competitor. “He has actually stopped wrestlers from cutting their heads with razor blades. This is a big deal!”

We take progress anywhere we can get it.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.

But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life. Doctors describe her as saintly.

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy. I hope that a public outcry can rectify this travesty.

Sister Margaret was a senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. A 27-year-old mother of four arrived late last year, in her third month of pregnancy. According to local news reports and accounts from the hospital and some of its staff members, the mother suffered from a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension. That created a high probability that the strain of continuing pregnancy would kill her.

“In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy,” the hospital said in a statement. “This decision was made after consultation with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee.”

Sister Margaret was a member of that committee. She declined to discuss the episode with me, but the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmstead, ruled that Sister Margaret was “automatically excommunicated” because she assented to an abortion.

“The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” the bishop’s communication office elaborated in a statement.

Let us just note that the Roman Catholic hierarchy suspended priests who abused children and in some cases defrocked them but did not normally excommunicate them, so they remained able to take the sacrament.

Since the excommunication, Sister Margaret has left her post as vice president and is no longer listed as one of the hospital executives on its Web site. The hospital told me that she had resigned “at the bishop’s request” but is still working elsewhere at the hospital.

I heard about Sister Margaret from an acquaintance who is a doctor at the hospital. After what happened to Sister Margaret, he doesn’t dare be named, but he sent an e-mail to his friends lamenting the excommunication of “a saintly nun”:

“She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago,” he said in the e-mail message. “The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated.”

“True Christians, like Sister Margaret, understand that real life is full of difficult moral decisions and pray that they make the right decision in the context of Christ’s teachings. Only a group of detached, pampered men in gilded robes on a balcony high above the rest of us could deny these dilemmas.”

A statement from the bishop’s office did not dispute that the mother’s life was in danger — although it did note that no doctor’s prediction is 100 percent certain. The implication is that the church would have preferred for the hospital to let nature take its course.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy is entitled to its views. But the episode reinforces perceptions of church leaders as rigid, dogmatic, out of touch — and very suspicious of independent-minded American nuns.

Sister Margaret made a difficult judgment in an emergency, saved a life and then was punished and humiliated by a lightning bolt from a bishop who spent 16 years living in Rome and who has devoted far less time to serving the downtrodden than Sister Margaret. Compare their two biographies, and Sister Margaret’s looks much more like Jesus’s than the bishop’s does.

“Everyone I know considers Sister Margaret to be the moral conscience of the hospital,” Dr. John Garvie, chief of gastroenterology at St. Joseph’s Hospital, wrote in a letter to the editor to The Arizona Republic. “She works tirelessly and selflessly as the living example and champion of compassionate, appropriate care for the sick and dying.”

Dr. Garvie later told me in an e-mail message that “saintly” was the right word for Sister Margaret and added: “Sister was the ‘living embodiment of God’ in our building. She always made sure we understood that we’re here to help the less fortunate. We really have no one to take her place.”

I’ve written several times about the gulf between Roman Catholic leaders at the top and the nuns, priests and laity who often live the Sermon on the Mount at the grass roots. They represent the great soul of the church, which isn’t about vestments but selflessness.

When a hierarchy of mostly aging men pounce on and excommunicate a revered nun who was merely trying to save a mother’s life, the church seems to me almost as out of touch as it was in the cruel and debauched days of the Borgias in the Renaissance.

Dowd and Friedman, better late than never (well, maybe…)

My computer’s battery backup decided to shut everything down and demand to be fed a new battery this morning, hence no interwebz for me until now.  MoDo writes “Of Top Hats, Top Kills and Bottom Feeders,” and says all those acronyms from Wall Street to Washington to the wetlands — and crises abound.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “As Ugly as It Gets,” says it’s shameful for Brazil and Turkey, nascent democracies, to embrace the Iranian president, who crushes democracy.  Geez, Tommy, are they making your war boner soften?  Cripes…  Here’s MoDo:

It’s unnerving, disorienting. A particularly noxious blend of helplessness, fear and fury that washes over you when you realize the country has again been dragged into a costly and scary maelstrom revolving around acronyms you’ve never heard of.

Our economy went in the ditch while traders got rich peddling C.D.O.’s and C.D.S.’s. Even many bankers — much less average Americans who lost their shirts — were gobsmacked by the acronyms, and scrambled to figure out how collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps worked.

And now a gazillion gallons of oil have poisoned the Gulf of Mexico, thanks in part to unethical employees at a once-obscure agency known as M.M.S. — the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. M.M.S. is charged with collecting royalties from Big Oil even as it regulates it — an absurd conflict right there. So M.M.S. has had the same sort of conflicts of interest as ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s had with Wall Street.

Consorting with the industry intensified once two oilmen took over the White House. Dick Cheney, Duke of Halliburton — responsible for the cementing of the calamitous well, now under investigation — had his aides conspire with BP America and other oil companies to draw up an energy policy.

As when derivatives experts had to help unravel the derivatives debacle, now the White House is dependent on BP to find a solution to the horror it created. The financial crisis and the oil spill are both man-made disasters brought on by hubris and avarice.

With poignant scenes of oil-soaked birds and out-of-work fishermen on TV, the White House is still scrambling to get on top of this latest catastrophe. The laconic president is once more giving too much deference and trust to rapacious corporate scoundrels and failing to swiftly grasp and articulate the alarm of Americans.

One West Wing official admits that, even with all the crises they were juggling, they should have acted more urgently to re-examine the dark legacy of Cheney in the Energy and Interior Departments.

Monitoring the plume of doom — a symbol of national impotence — we’re learning another whole new vocabulary from Top Hat to Top Kill. We are trapped in a science-fiction nightmare we can’t wake up from, possibly because of a dead battery in the control pod connected to a dead man’s switch for the blowout preventer, whatever that means.

We’re glued to a House energy subcommittee’s “spillcam” Web site and Google Earth pictures of the spreading slick, nauseated by the news that once more, government officials charged with protecting us were instead enabling greedy corporations.

As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, there is growing suspicion that the money concerns of the companies involved with the well created “an atmosphere of haste” that may have spurred the spill.

In a report released on Tuesday, Mary Kendall, acting inspector general of the Department of the Interior, described an agency that followed Cheney’s lead in letting the oil industry write the rules.

Just like those S.E.C. employees who were watching porn and ignoring warning signs while Wall Street punks created financial Frankensteins, some M.M.S. employees were watching porn, using coke and crystal meth and accepting gifts like trips to the Peach Bowl game from oil and gas companies, the report said.

Regarding outrageous behavior prior to 2007, one confidential source told investigators that some M.M.S. inspectors let oil and gas company staffers fill out inspection forms using pencils “and MMS inspectors would write on top of the pencil in ink and turn in the completed form.”

Larry Williamson, the M.M.S. Lake Charles, La., district manager, told investigators: “Obviously, we’re all oil industry. We’re all from the same part of the country. Almost all of our inspectors have worked for oil companies out on these same platforms. They grew up in the same towns. Some of these people, they’ve been friends with all their life,” hunting, fishing and skeet-shooting together.

The tragedy is that M.M.S. eerily presaged the disaster in the draft of a May 2000 environmental analysis of deep-water drilling in the gulf. The agency noted that “the oil industry’s experience base in deepwater well control is limited” and that given the prodigious production rates, “a deepwater blowout of this magnitude in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could easily turn out to be a potential showstopper” for the Outer Continental Shelf program.

But M.M.S. got rid of those caveats in the final report, just as they deemed a remote-controlled shut-off switch an unnecessary expense for drilling companies several years ago.

As we watch a self-inflicted contamination that has no end in sight, consider this chilling arithmetic: One oil industry reporter reckoned that the 5,000 barrels a day (a conservative estimate) spewing 5,000 feet down in the gulf counts for only two minutes of oil consumption in the state of Texas.

Anyone who believes that 5,000 barrels a day figure is a moron.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I confess that when I first saw the May 17 picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms — after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think of was: Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?

No, that’s about as ugly as it gets.

“For years, nonaligned and developing countries have faulted America for cynically pursuing its own interests without regard for human rights,” observed Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment. “As Turkey and Brazil aspire to play on the global stage, they’re going to face the same criticisms they once doled out. Lula and Erdogan’s visit to Iran came just days after Iran executed five political prisoners who were tortured into confessions. They warmly embraced Ahmadinejad as their brother, but didn’t mention a word about human rights. There seems to be a mistaken assumption that the Palestinians are the only people that seek justice in the Middle East, and if you just invoke their cause you can coddle the likes of Ahmadinejad.”

Turkey and Brazil are both nascent democracies that have overcome their own histories of military rule. For their leaders to embrace and strengthen an Iranian president who uses his army and police to crush and kill Iranian democrats — people seeking the same freedom of speech and political choice that Turks and Brazilians now enjoy — is shameful.

“Lula is a political giant, but morally he has been a deep disappointment,” said Moisés Naím, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and a former trade minister in Venezuela.

Lula, Naím noted, “has supported the thwarting of democracy across Latin America.” He regularly praises Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator — and now Ahmadinejad — while denouncing Colombia, one of the great democratic success stories, because it let U.S. planes use Colombian airfields to fight narco-traffickers. “Lula has been great for Brazil but terrible for his democratic neighbors,” said Naím. Lula, who rose to prominence as a progressive labor leader in Brazil, has turned his back on the violently repressed labor leaders of Iran.

Sure, had Brazil and Turkey actually persuaded the Iranians to verifiably end their whole suspected nuclear weapons program, America would have endorsed it. But that is not what happened.

Iran today has about 4,850 pounds of low-enriched uranium. Under the May 17 deal, it has supposedly agreed to send some 2,640 pounds from its stockpile to Turkey for conversion into the type of nuclear fuel needed to power Tehran’s medical reactor — a fuel that cannot be used for a bomb. But that would still leave Iran with a roughly 2,200-pound uranium stockpile, which it still refuses to put under international inspection and is free to augment and continue to reprocess to the higher levels needed for a bomb. Experts say it would only take months for Iran to again amass sufficient quantity for a nuclear weapon.

So what this deal really does is what Iran wanted it to do: weaken the global coalition to pressure Iran to open its nuclear facilities to U.N. inspectors, and, as a special bonus, legitimize Ahmadinejad on the anniversary of his crushing the Iranian democracy movement that was demanding a recount of Iran’s tainted June 2009 elections.

In my view, the “Green Revolution” in Iran is the most important, self-generated, democracy movement to appear in the Middle East in decades. It has been suppressed, but it is not going away, and, ultimately, its success — not any nuclear deal with the Iranian clerics — is the only sustainable source of security and stability. We have spent far too little time and energy nurturing that democratic trend and far too much chasing a nuclear deal.

As Abbas Milani, an Iran expert at Stanford University, put it to me: “The only long-term solution to the impasse is for a more democratic, responsible, transparent regime in Tehran. It has been, in my view, a great con game successfully played by the clerical regime to make the nuclear issue the almost sole focal point of its relations with the U.S. and the West. The West should have always followed a two-track policy: earnest negotiations on the nuclear issue and no less earnest discussion on the issues of human rights and democracy in Iran.”

I’d prefer that Iran never get a bomb. The world would be much safer without more nukes, especially in the Middle East. But if Iran does go nuclear, it makes a huge difference whether a democratic Iran has its finger on the trigger or this current murderous clerical dictatorship. Anyone working to delay that and to foster real democracy in Iran is on the side of the angels. Anyone who enables this tyrannical regime and gives cover for its nuclear mischief will one day have to answer to the Iranian people.

What is it about pudgy men with moustaches who have never served in the military that makes them so hot to send other people’s sons off to war?

Brooks, Cohen and Herbert

Bobo is prostrating himself at the shrine of Edmund Burke again.  In “Two Theories of Change” he gurgles that America has never settled whether its governing form of reason is one of radical abstraction or humility and gradualism.  Well, the alternative to Burke, according to Bobo, is Decartes who just won’t do.  French, you know…  Mr. Cohen, in “Toilets and Cellphones,” says we want our freedom unhitched to responsibility — until we need Big Brother to rescue us.  Mr. Herbert is in Old Shell Beach, LA.  In “Following BP’s Lead” he says BP has been an environmental menace since before the recent gulf disaster. Federal regulation and oversight have been weak, and the president must take action.  Here’s Bobo:

When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment — thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire and Condorcet.

These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.

Their great model was Descartes. He aimed to begin human understanding anew. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past and build from the ground up, erecting one logical certainty upon another.

What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

They put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that.

These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”

As Levin shows, Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again.

Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Burke also supported the American Revolution, but saw it in a different light than Paine. He believed the British Parliament had recklessly trampled upon the ancient liberties the colonists had come to enjoy. The Americans were seeking to preserve what they had.

We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

God, he’s tiresome.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I was intrigued to learn the other day that there are now more cellphones in India than toilets. Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.

This can be seen as skewed development favoring private networks over the public good. It can be seen as an example of markets outstripping governments: Nimble cellphone companies profit while lumbering Indian authorities are unable even to stop the propagation of water-borne disease through defecation in the open. Or it can be seen merely as the choice Indians have made about their priorities.

What is certain is that those half-billion Indians with cellphones — and they will be a billion within the next decade — have begun to inhabit parallel universes. There is their mental community, perhaps including regular contact with far-flung family members in London or Louisville. Then there is their physical community, with its tattered village poverty and bureaucratic inertia. Texts fly. Sanitation dies.

In some measure this duality is the modern condition. It brings an attendant schizophrenia about the state and government.

On the one hand people who are increasingly autonomous — linked globally through technology, able to choose their own real or virtual gated communities, outstripping controls and taxes in their frenzied networking — feel contemptuous of the government and the state.

As Mark Lilla has noted in The New York Review of Books of America’s Tea Party movement, a toddler-tantrum expression of individualism run amok, they have “only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.”

On the other, aware that our globalized little earth has come very close of late to complete financial meltdown and is still hovering near the brink, noting that there are drawbacks when mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, perhaps even glimpsing that shared institutions are essential to any society, people clamor in moments of crisis for the reviled state to step in and save them. Or at least save the homes bought with the very financial instruments they now decry.

At some dim level the words of John Stuart Mill still resonate: “The idea is essentially repulsive of a society only held together by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interests.”

But that’s the kind of idea — and the kinds of societies — that have tended to dominate over the past two decades. The great leaps forward of China and India came after the immense post-war Social Democratic and Christian Democratic achievements in Europe had begun to be taken for granted. After 1989, people were more inclined to attack the cumbersome welfare state than recognize how social entitlements and neo-Keynesian economics have insured the Continent against renewed fracture.

China and India grew to the beat of a globalized get-rich-quick generation and financial masters of the universe rather than social responsibility. The consequences are now before them.

In post-Cold War Europe — with Thatcherism still resonating, a market-knows-best consensus spreading, and the loss of the common purpose that came with having a common enemy — political and social cohesion eroded.

The crisis of the euro today is in many ways a crisis of stalled integration. The common currency was supposed to be the capstone of a united Europe, in turn the ultimate insurance against 20th-century horror, but instead came into being just as the European ideal fell victim to easy-money hedonism, consumerism, atomization and anti-immigrant populism. It remains to be seen whether the euro’s plight can revive any convictions about the shared European governance necessary to sustain it.

In the United States, the rapid growth of the Tea Party movement represents what Lilla calls a “populist insurgency” against government and regulations in virtually all forms. It’s the “politics of the libertarian mob.”

Yet this mob is driven in large part by fury over a financial implosion whose root lay in a murky universe of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that escaped all government control — and served in the end as a reminder that some problems are so big they do demand a collective response.

This is the schizophrenia I alluded to above: I want my freedom undiluted, and unhitched to responsibility, up and until the moment I need Big Brother to rescue me.

We have entered what Tony Judt has called “an age of insecurity.” By any measure, at least in the West, we are living a crisis of the market economy, or at least of the pure market-driven individualism (with the spiraling debt that accompanied it) that predominated in the first two decades of the post-Cold-War period. The binge has reached its limit and the tabs are in.

But some new balance between state and market, one that provides toilets as well as cellphones, awaits definition. Dignity should not be incompatible with opportunity. We don’t need to look too far back in time to see the violent consequences of financial collapse and social disaggregation. The Garbo retreat is not an answer. Private networks alone cannot salvage the commonweal.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

I asked the sheriff of St. Bernard Parish, Jack Stephens, if he was at all optimistic about BP stopping the gusher of oil that is fouling the Gulf of Mexico in time to prevent a long-term environmental catastrophe in the southern Louisiana wetlands.

The sun was high in the sky, and the day was hot. The sheriff was in a small boat, patrolling the waterways that wend their way through the delicate marshes. He thought for a long moment. Oil was already seeping into the marshes, getting into the soil and plant life and coating some of the wildlife.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” said Mr. Stephens. “It may already be too late.”

Traveling along the Gulf Coast, past idled boats with names like Big Shrimp and Blessed Assurance, past dead trees and hurricane fortifications and other signs of the area’s perpetual vulnerability, you can’t help but wonder how a company like BP, with its awful record of incompetence and irresponsibility, was ever allowed to drill for oil a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s not as if we didn’t know that BP was a menace. On March 23, 2005, a series of explosions and fires at the BP Texas City refinery killed 15 people and injured 180 others in what was described by investigators as “one of the worst industrial disasters in recent U.S. history.” John Bresland, the chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, reminded us in March, on the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, that an intensive investigation by the board had “found organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation.”

The Texas City conflagration was just part of BP’s execrable pattern. On Oct. 25, 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice issued the following announcement:

“British Petroleum and several of its subsidiaries have agreed to pay approximately $373 million in fines and restitution for environmental violations stemming from a fatal explosion at a Texas refinery in March 2005, leaks of crude oil from pipelines in Alaska, and fraud for conspiring to corner the market and manipulate the price of propane carried through Texas pipelines.”

Nice outfit, this BP. Anyone who thought this London-based wrecking crew gave a rat’s whisker about harming the Gulf of Mexico or threatening the environment of the Louisiana wetlands — or the livelihoods of families living here — has been inhaling way too much of BP’s toxic fumes.

Yet there was our government not only giving BP’s reprobates the go-ahead to drill for oil a mile deep in the gulf but also handing them a waiver, allowing them to avoid a detailed analysis of the effect of their operations on the surrounding environment. Giving an environmental waiver to a company as contemptuous of the environment as BP shows just whose side the government is on in the face-off between predatory giant corporations and the interests of ordinary American citizens.

BP got off much too easy with the fines it agreed to in 2007. And for some odd reason, it’s being treated much too deferentially now. This crisis has gone on for more than a month, and neither BP nor the Obama administration seems to know what to do.

No one has a handle on how much oil is gushing out of control into the gulf. No one understands the environmental impact of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants that BP is injecting into the gulf. No one has any idea how far this awful stain on the environment will spread.

President Obama should have taken charge of the response to the oil spill — which he called a “potentially unprecedented” environmental calamity — from jump street. He should have called in the very best minds and operatives from the corporate and scientific worlds and imposed an emergency plan of action — to be carried out by BP and all others who might be required. Instead, after all this time, after more than a month of BP’s demonstrated incompetence, the administration continues to dither.

Incredibly, until The Times blew the whistle in an article on Monday, environmental waivers were still being offered for oil drilling in the gulf. What will it take for sanity to prevail? How many people have to die or face ruin, and how much of nature has to be despoiled before we rein in the cowboys of these runaway corporations?

Steadily increasing numbers of anxiety-ridden coastal residents are watching not just their livelihoods but an entire way of life slip away. Even as BP’s lawyers are consumed with the task of limiting the company’s liability, the administration continues to insist it has little choice but to follow the company’s lead in fighting the spill. That is dangerous nonsense.

President Obama has an obligation to make it unmistakably clear that BP’s interests are not the same as America’s interests. He needs to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who are taking the brunt of this latest corporate outrage. The oil has now stained nearly 70 miles of the Louisiana Coast. No one can say what terrible toll the gusher is taking in the depths of the gulf. And spreading right along with the oil is a pervasive and dismaying sense of helplessness from our leaders in Washington.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz has decided to investigate “The Principles of Rand Paul.”  No, really…  He says just days after the Kentucky primary, the great paleoconservative hope marginalizes himself.  He proceeds, in the course of this thing, to list just about every whackaloon position he can think of that “paleoconservatives” have held and then to say “In an age of lockstep partisanship, there’s a lot to admire about this unusual constellation of ideas, and its sweeping critique of American politics as usual.”  Prof. Krugman, in “The Old Enemies,” says the Obama administration is facing grass-roots anger, but that anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests.  Here’s the Putz:

No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous intellectual consistency.

This was all that Rand Paul needed to admit, after his victory in Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary, when NPR and Rachel Maddow asked about his views of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “As a principled critic of federal power,” he could have said, “I oppose efforts to impose Washington’s will on states and private institutions. As a student of the history of segregation and slavery, however, I would have made an exception for the Civil Rights Act.”

But Paul just couldn’t help himself. He had to play Hamlet, to hem and haw about the distinction between public and private discrimination, to insist on his sympathy for the civil rights movement while conspicuously avoiding saying that he would have voted for the bill that outlawed segregation.

By the weekend (and under duress), he finally said it. But the tap-dancing route he took to get there was offensive, tone deaf and politically crazy.

It was also sadly typical of the political persuasion that Rand Paul represents.

This persuasion shouldn’t be confused with the Tea Party movement, whose inchoate antideficit enthusiasms Paul rode to victory last Tuesday. Nor is it just libertarianism in general, a label that gets slapped on everyone from Idaho milita members to Silicon Valley utopians to pro-choice Republicans in Greenwich.

Paul is a libertarian, certainly, but more importantly he’s a particular kind of a libertarian. He’s culturally conservative (opposing both abortion and illegal immigration), radically noninterventionist (he’s against the Iraq war and the United Nations), and so stringently constitutionalist that he views nearly everything today’s federal government does as a violation of the founding fathers’ vision.

This worldview goes by many names, including “paleoconservatism,” “the old right” and “paleolibertarianism.” But its adherents — Paul and his father, Ron, included — view themselves as America’s only true conservatives, arguing that the modern conservative movement has sold out to both big government and the military-industrial complex.

Instead of celebrating the usual Republican pantheon, paleoconservatives identify with the “beautiful losers” of American history, to borrow a phrase from the paleocon journalist Sam Francis — the anti-imperialists who opposed the Spanish-American War, the libertarians who stood athwart the New Deal yelling “stop,” the Midwestern Republicans who objected to the growth of the national security state after World War II. And they offer an ideological synthesis that’s well outside either political party’s mainstream — antiwar and antiabortion, against the Patriot Act but in favor of a border fence, and skeptical of the drug war and the welfare state alike.

In an age of lockstep partisanship, there’s a lot to admire about this unusual constellation of ideas, and its sweeping critique of American politics as usual. There’s a reason that both Rand and Ron Paul have inspired so much visceral enthusiasm, especially among younger voters, while attracting an eclectic cross-section of supporters — hipsters and N.R.A. members, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives, and stranger bedfellows still.

The problem is that paleoconservatives are self-marginalizing, and self-destructive.

Like many groups that find themselves in intellectually uncharted territory, they have trouble distinguishing between ideas that deserve a wider hearing and ideas that are crankish or worse. (Hence Ron Paul’s obsession with the gold standard and his son’s weakness for conspiracy theories.)

Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.)

And like many self-conscious iconoclasts, they tend to drift in ever-more extreme directions, reveling in political incorrectness even as they leave common sense and common decency behind.

It isn’t surprising that two of the most interesting “paleo” writers of the last few decades, Francis and Joseph Sobran, ended their careers way out on the racist or anti-Semitic fringe. It isn’t a coincidence that the most successful “paleo” presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, opposes not only America’s interventions in Iraq, but the West’s involvement in World War II as well. It isn’t surprising that Ron Paul kept company in the 1990s with acolytes who attached his name to bigoted pamphleteering.

And it shouldn’t come as a shock that his son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

So here’s how it is: They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations.

Much reporting on opposition to the Obama administration portrays it as a sort of populist uprising. Yet the antics of the socialism-and-death-panels crowd are only part of the story of anti-Obamaism, and arguably the less important part. If you really want to know what’s going on, watch the corporations.

How can you do that? Follow the money — donations by corporate political action committees.

Look, for example, at the campaign contributions of commercial banks — traditionally Republican-leaning, but only mildly so. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 63 percent of spending by banks’ corporate PACs has gone to Republicans, up from 53 percent last year. Securities and investment firms, traditionally Democratic-leaning, are now giving more money to Republicans. And oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their largess on the G.O.P.

These are extraordinary numbers given the normal tendency of corporate money to flow to the party in power. Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in “a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury” toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What’s going on?

One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.

Now, don’t cry for these people: they’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s. Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry.

Nor are taxes the whole story.

Many Obama supporters have been disappointed by what they see as the administration’s mildness on regulatory issues — its embrace of limited financial reform that doesn’t break up the biggest banks, its support for offshore drilling, and so on. Yet corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.

From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.

So what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.

If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security. It comes as no surprise to learn that American Crossroads, a new organization whose goal is to deploy large amounts of corporate cash on behalf of Republican candidates, is the brainchild of none other than Karl Rove.

But won’t the grass-roots rebel at being used? Don’t count on it. Last week Rand Paul, the Tea Party darling who is now the Republican nominee for senator from Kentucky, declared that the president’s criticism of BP over the disastrous oil spill in the gulf is “un-American,” that “sometimes accidents happen.” The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations.

So where does that leave the president and his party? Mr. Obama wanted to transcend partisanship. Instead, however, he finds himself very much in the position Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous 1936 speech, struggling with “the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Roosevelt turned corporate opposition into a badge of honor: “I welcome their hatred,” he declared. It’s time for President Obama to find his inner F.D.R., and do the same.

From your keyboard to God’s eyes, Prof. Krugman…

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

In “Lies as Wishes” MoDo says the truth about lies is that they’re sometimes aspirational truths.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Bumper to Bumper,” says we’re driving bumper to bumper with every other major economy today, so misbehavior or mistakes anywhere can cause a global pileup.  Mr. Kristof is in Mont-Belo, Congo Republic.  In “Moonshine or the Kids?” he addresses being on the annual win-a-trip journey, and finding families without enough money to pay school fees, but with plenty for booze and cigarettes.  Mr. Rich, in “The ‘Randslide’ and Its Discontents,” says the Democrats need a compelling response to the populist rage of the Tea Party movement.  Here’s MoDo:

T. S. Eliot wrote about when memory mixes with desire. Politicians get in trouble when desire nixes memory.

They know they are misrepresenting an experience, but can’t help themselves. Their desire to be the person they describe is too overpowering.

Politicians are actors trapped in the same part, and some occasionally feel the need to punch up the script. They are salesmen engaged in the hard sell, and some occasionally get carried away.

Consider Richard Blumenthal. The 64-year-old attorney general of Connecticut, who is running for Chris Dodd’s seat in the Senate, had a fine résumé that needed no sprucing up. He has degrees from Harvard and Yale Law School, clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court, and spent six years in the Marine Corps Reserve.

But like other politicians, Blumenthal added a filigree here and there, not because he needed them to win, but perhaps because those more heroic actions fed his innermost desires.

He copped last week to “a few misplaced words” that indicated he served in Vietnam when in fact he received five deferments before joining the Marine Reserve stateside — only after pulling a low draft number. (He had desk jockey duty and organized a Toys for Tots drive.)

These cases, however, are never merely about words. They’re more profoundly about identity.

“I think that lies are like wishes,” said Bella DePaulo, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “So when you wish you were a certain kind of person that you know you’re not, and maybe you’re not willing to do what it would take to become that person or can’t go back, then it becomes very tempting to lie.”

Whether out of some residual guilt about avoiding Vietnam or not, Blumenthal became a fierce advocate for veterans’ rights. He slipped from merely saying “I served during the Vietnam era” to saying “In Vietnam, we had to endure taunts and insults, and no one said, ‘Welcome home.’ I say, ‘Welcome home.’ ” He failed to correct many news reports that printed his spurts of hyperbole.

It may have had something to do with what David Halberstam called the “patriotism fault line running through this country.” Writing in Vanity Fair in 2004 about the right’s scurrilous smear on John Kerry’s bravery in Vietnam, Halberstam said, “We require Democrats to work a little harder to prove that they’re really patriotic and not somehow in league with our enemies.”

Dan Quayle supported the Vietnam War that he avoided when his family pulled strings to get him into the Indiana National Guard. Yet he called himself a “Vietnam-era veteran” in campaign literature when he ran for the Senate in 1980.

Pete Dawkins, the Republican former Heisman Trophy winner at West Point, lost a Senate race in New Jersey in 1988 after being ensnared in a web of overstatement. The worst was a fund-raising letter to West Point graduates in which Dawkins, a decorated retired Army brigadier general, falsely claimed that he had been wounded in Vietnam and served two tours there instead of one.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page compared Blumenthal’s stretching on Vietnam to Eliot Spitzer’s stretching out with call girls, and called his character flawed. But chronic puffer-uppers can have impressive public service careers.

When Joe Biden aped the British politician Neil Kinnock to boost his own presidential chances in 1988, he clearly overidentified with Kinnock’s life: two scrappy, working-class Celtic kids with a talent for gab who rose without privilege in coal-mining territory. Sometimes Biden credited Kinnock and once he didn’t, speaking at a debate in the first person, which created a problem when facts from Kinnock’s life and Biden’s diverged.

But Biden is obviously a decent guy. He went on to become a truth-teller on Iraq, succeeding the vice president who was anything but.

Al Gore was criticized during the 2000 campaign for a tendency to heighten the truth, but it was innocent compared with the vile exaggeration that W. and Cheney employed to trick the country into going along with an invasion of Iraq.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton got caught burnishing her résumé twice. She worried that her time as first lady was not substantive enough, so she built up some foreign trips to sound more presidential.

She had to concede she “misspoke” after saying she had run head down to evade sniper fire after landing in Bosnia in 1996, when actually she was met by a little girl who read a poem. Hillary also hyped her role in the Irish peace process.

But like the veterans who surrounded Blumenthal shouting “Ooh-Rah!” at a news conference, the Irish were so grateful to Hillary for her support that they did not mind the blarney. She’s gone on to become a respected secretary of state.

With political kleptomania, DePaulo notes, “your lies often reveal who you wish you were.”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

The veteran global investor Mohamed El-Erian, who runs Pimco and has lived through many a financial crisis, recently issued a report describing the new, perilous state of today’s global economy. He described it like this: “The world is on a journey to an unstable destination, through unfamiliar territory, on an uneven road and, critically, having already used its spare tire.”

I like that image. America used its spare tire to prevent a collapse of the banking system and to stimulate the economy after the subprime market crash. The European Union used its spare tire on its own economic stimulus and then to prevent a run on European banks triggered by the meltdown in Greece. This all better work, because we’re not only living in a world without any more spares but also in a world without distance. Nations are more tightly integrated than ever before. We’re driving bumper to bumper with every other major economy today, so misbehavior or mistakes anywhere can cause a global pileup.

And that leads to the real point of this column: In this kind of world, leadership at every level of government and business matters more than ever. We have no margin of error anymore, no time for politics as usual or suboptimal legislation. But what does that mean, “leadership”?

When El-Erian says we have no spare, he means we have a much diminished pool of resources, whether to moderate the impact of markets when they go haywire or to fund better health care, schools and infrastructure for growth. So leadership today is all about taking innovative actions that generate new capabilities and resources — and being smart and disciplined about every dime we spend and invest.

We just emptied our Treasury for a bailout. Did it merely provide a needed short-term jolt to the economy, or will it end up making us much fitter and more competitive so we can drive our economy farther and faster? I am still not sure. We just passed a health care bill. Will that increase our leverage and resources as a society or just add another set of liabilities that will require new credit lines from China? I am still not sure. We’re passing a new financial regulation bill. Are we just pretending to solve the problem or will this new law add to our capacity to generate the resources to cushion the next crisis and fund the next start-up? I am still not sure. A lot will depend on the execution.

Similarly, in Mother Nature we are also losing our margins for error. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday that the planet’s average temperature for April was 58.1 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest for any April on record. The more we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the more we expose ourselves to a sudden, unpredictable climate disruption. The more we blithely remain addicted to oil, and not face up to all its negative geopolitical and environmental consequences, the more we invite sudden catastrophes like the gulf spill.

I think many Americans understand this at some intuitive level. In this economic climate, people know they need to be smarter, more frugal and make tougher choices in their private lives. They know they can’t fake it or fool themselves anymore, so they have much less tolerance for politicians who want to do that in our public life.

And I don’t think they are alone. I was in Britain for the recent election there, and I was struck at how easily they put together a rare coalition government, bringing together Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to generate the broad political base needed to make the sacrifices and hard choices they can’t avoid. German lawmakers on Friday voted to fund the Greek bailout. Greeks are protesting the austerity being imposed on them, but they are also taking their fiscal medicine — for now.

Writing about the recent U.S. elections, the Politics Daily columnist Walter Shapiro noted: “The hopeful message buried in all these election returns is that voters are tired of being toyed with. The problems afflicting America are too grave to tolerate the cynical, cling-to-power-at-all-costs cynicism of Arlen Specter and other Capitol Hill Machiavellis. The choices voters make in their desperate quest for authenticity are not always wise or well grounded in reality. But politicians and pundits — obsessively calculating partisan advantage like Scrooge counted shillings — will ignore at their own peril the stirrings of idealism among voters in both parties.”

I really hope he is right. Winston Churchill famously observed that, “You can always trust the Americans. In the end, they will do the right thing, after they have eliminated all the other possibilities.” Is that still true for our generation? We’re going to find out. The time for bluffing ourselves is over. Are we going to do what it takes to fix our country, or are we going to be remembered as the generation that received more poker chips from their parents than any other and then had to turn around and toss a single chip to their kids and tell them to put it on “Lucky 21” — and hope for the best.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it’s been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)

We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.

“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.

But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.

“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.

Traditionally, a young man here might have paid his wife’s family a “bride price” of a pair of goats. Now the “bride price” starts with oversized jugs of wine and two bottles of whiskey.

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that.

Another approach is microsavings, helping poor people save money when banks aren’t interested in them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful part of microfinance isn’t microlending but microsavings.

Microsavings programs, organized by CARE and other organizations, work to turn a consumption culture into a savings culture. The programs often keep household savings in the women’s names, to give mothers more say in spending decisions, and I’ve seen them work in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Well-meaning humanitarians sometimes burnish suffering to make it seem more virtuous and noble than it often is. If we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.

Last but not least, here’s Mr. Rich:

If there is one certain outcome to recent American elections, it’s this: The results will invariably prove most of the Beltway’s settled political narratives wrong.

Tuesday’s pre-midterms were no exception. We were told that all incumbents and Washington insiders were doomed, but Exhibit A, the defeat of Arlen Specter, was hardly a test case. The sui generis opportunist Specter lost to another incumbent, a congressman who has been a Democrat far longer than he has. We were also told — as we were, incessantly, in 2008 — that blue-collar white men in western Pennsylvania would flee the Democrats. But in the special House election there — Tuesday’s only Republican-vs.-Democrat battle — a million G.O.P. dollars and countless anti-Obama-Pelosi ads proved worthless. Not only did a Democrat win big, but that winner was a Washington insider’s insider, a longtime aide to the seat’s previous occupant, the quintessential pork baron John Murtha.

That said, it would be a mistake to overinterpret these results to spawn new, and equally bogus, narratives about rekindled Democratic prospects for November. The 2010 election was and is up for grabs. The only race with genuine long-term implications last week was Rand Paul’s victory by a margin of some 24 percentage points in Kentucky’s Republican senatorial primary.

The “Randslide,” in the triumphalist lingo favored by Sean Hannity at Fox News, was the Tea Party’s first major election victory. As Charles Hurt, another conservative commentator, wrote in another Rupert Murdoch organ, The New York Post, this was no “qualified” win by a moderate with Tea Party support, like Scott Brown in Massachusetts. “What we saw Tuesday night in Kentucky,” Hurt enthused, “was a pure, unalloyed victory for the Tea Party” in which “the son of the quirky congressman from Texas trounced the establishment candidate who had been groomed and supported by leaders at the highest levels of the Republican Party.”

Ain’t that the truth. The opponent whom Paul humiliated, Trey Grayson, was the protégé of Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s senior senator and the G.O.P. Senate leader. Grayson was also endorsed by Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and John Cornyn, the Texas senator who presides over the Republicans’ Senate campaign committee (and its purse strings). But Paul had the supporters who matter, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the tag team that nowadays runs the conservative movement for fun and profit.

Unlike Scott Brown, whose Tea Party cred consisted mainly of opposition to the health care bill and a pickup truck, Paul is one of the movement’s card-carrying founding fathers. From the start, he openly defined himself as a Tea Party tribune, and its followers embraced him (and contributed to him) as their uncompromising avatar. Now, after months of debate about what this movement is and isn’t, Paul’s victory provides clear-cut answers.

The Tea Party is not merely an inchoate expression of a political mood, or an amorphous ragtag band of diverse elements, or a bipartisan cry of dissatisfaction with the supposed “government takeover” of health care. The Tea Party is a right-wing populist movement with a specific ideology. It resides in the aging white base of the Republican Party and wants to purge that party of leaders who veer from its dogma. But divisive as the Tea Party may be within the G.O.P., it’s hardly good news for President Obama and the Democrats either.

Paul is articulate and hard-line. When he says he is antigovernment, he means it. Unlike McConnell, he wants to end all earmarks, including agricultural subsidies for a state that thrives on them. (He does vow to preserve Medicare payments, however; they contribute to his income as an ophthalmologist.) He wants to shut down the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve. Though a social conservative who would outlaw all abortions, he believes the federal government should leave drug enforcement to the states.

It’s also in keeping with this ideology that Paul wants the federal government to stop shoveling taxpayers’ money into wars. He was against the war in Iraq and finds the justification for our commitment in Afghanistan “murky.” He believes that America’s national security is “not threatened by Iran having one nuclear weapon.”

No wonder he didn’t get Cheney’s endorsement; Paul also opposes the enhanced government surveillance mandated by the Patriot Act. The Tea Party is a rolling rebuke to the neocons’ quarter-century dominance of the G.O.P. Only three months ago, Ron Paul, who shares his son’s un-Cheney national security views, won the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, ending Mitt Romney’s three-year winning streak.

With Rand Paul, we also get further evidence of race’s role in a movement whose growth precisely parallels the ascent of America’s first African-American president. The usual Tea Party apologists are saying that it was merely a gaffe — and a liberal media trap — when Paul on Wednesday refused to tell Rachel Maddow of MSNBC that he could fully support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But Paul has expressed similar sentiments repeatedly, at least as far back as 2002.

His legal argument that the federal government cannot force private businesses to desegregate is the same used by Barry Goldwater, a frequently cited hero of Paul’s, when the conservative standard-bearer voted against the Civil Rights Act at its inception. It’s all about the Constitution, not race, you see. Under fire, Paul ultimately retreated from this stand — much as the new Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, finally withdrew his April proclamation saluting Confederate History Month. But not before both men’s messages reached their intended demographic.

Still, it’s Paul’s brand of populism, not his views on Jim Crow or Iran, that are most germane to the Tea Party’s birth and its future — both within the G.O.P. and as a force that will buffet Obama and the Democrats. Paul most abundantly embodies the movement’s animus when he plays on classic American-style class resentment. His campaign loved to deploy the full name of his opponent, Charles Merwin Grayson III, a Harvard-educated banker’s son. In his victory speech Tuesday night, Paul said the voters’ message was to “get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everybody else” — or, as he put it on an earlier occasion, the establishment who “from their high-rise penthouse” look down on and laugh at the “American rabble.”

That Paul gave his victory speech in a “members only” country club is no contradiction to white Tea Partiers. Their anger is directed at a loftier club that excludes them as well: the big-government and big-money elites partying together in that high-rise penthouse. At the Utah state G.O.P. convention this month, the mob shouted “TARP! TARP! TARP!” as it terminated the re-election bid of the conservative Senator Robert Bennett. It was Bennett’s capital crime to vote for a bailout of Wall Street’s high-flying bankers.

Mitch McConnell, long a go-to Republican for corporate interests in Washington, didn’t just vote for TARP but called it “one of the finest moments in the history of the Senate.” That’s why he’s running around now claiming that the Senate’s financial reform bill is another “bailout” catering to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. In fact that bill is an attempt, however flawed, to police those whose reckless and possibly criminal behavior brought down the economy. McConnell has zero interest in curbing Wall Street. He just hopes that if he keeps screaming “bailout” in a crowded Capitol, the Tea Party crowd will forget that he (and a Republican president) helped engineer the mother of all bailouts. John McCain, who also voted for TARP, may need a similar subterfuge to save his neck in Arizona.

It’s far-fetched to Democrats that Tea Party populists could possibly believe that the party of McConnell and Romney and Murdoch will in the end be moved to side with the little guy against the penthouse powers that are the G.O.P.’s traditional constituency and financial underwriter. Some Democrats also find it far-fetched that Paul could repeat his victory this fall, given how extreme his views are even for a state as reliably red as Kentucky.

But the enthusiasm gap remains real. Tea Partiers will turn up at the polls, and not just in Kentucky. Democrats are less energized in part because even now the president has not fully persuaded many liberal populists in his own party that he is on their side. The suspicion lingers that a Wall Street recovery, not job creation, was his highest economic priority upon arriving at a White House staffed with Goldman alumni. No matter how hard the administration tries to sell health care reform and financial reform as part of the nation’s economic recovery, these signal achievements remain thin gruel for those out of work.

The unemployment numbers, unlikely to change drastically by November, will have more to say than any of Tuesday’s results about what happens on Election Day this year. Yes, the Tea Party is radical, its membership is not enormous, and its race problem is real and troubling. But you can’t fight an impassioned opposition merely with legislative actions that may bear fruit in the semi-distant future. If the Democrats can’t muster their own compelling response to the populist rage out there, “Randslide” may reside in our political vocabulary long after “Arlen Specter” is leaving “Jeopardy” contestants stumped.

Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow, in “City of Tears,” says Detroit is down, but Motown is not out.  Mr. Herbert, in “More Than Just an Oil Spill,” says th disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening an ecosystem the same way that big corporations like BP threaten our political system.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Sometime Saturday, the lifeless body of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 7, will be lowered into a grave in Detroit, and that beleaguered city will shed yet more sorrow into its ever-expanding pool of tears.

The circumstances surrounding Aiyana’s death represent a tragedy within a tragedy, much like the story of the city itself.

Aiyana was asleep on a sofa when police raided her home. They were looking for a man suspected of shooting and killing a 17-year-old boy. A shot was fired. The bullet tore through the little girl’s head and neck. Sadly, she could not be saved.

Little Aiyana is the latest victim of a city in free fall — unable to find the bottom and, therefore, unable to rebound.

Mayor David Bing said Thursday of recent killings: “It’s very demoralizing, very painful. Don’t know how to stop it, quite frankly.” So the hapless become the hopeless.

That’s not what that city needs to hear from its mayor. Detroit is fighting real crime and the even more corrosive and debilitating perception of crime.

Last year, Forbes dubbed Detroit the most dangerous city in America. Last month, CNN upped the ante and crowned it one of the 10 most dangerous cities in the world.

But, according to data released last week by the Detroit Police Department and published by the Detroit Free Press: “Homicides are down, so far, from 138 this time last year to 108 this year.” Progress, yes. But that’s hardly solace when innocents continue to be killed, and the mayor sounds as if he’s throwing up his hands.

In a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University poll released in January, Detroit-area residents were asked what word came to mind when they thought about the area. The word most mentioned was “depressed/depressing” followed by “unemployment/joblessness” and “crime.” And only 13 percent of respondents said that they felt “very safe” in the city.

The combination of personal insecurity and financial insecurity has led many to give up on Detroit. Not me.

No, Detroit will never be the city it once was. It will forever be haunted by the ghosts of lost grandeur. But it needn’t slip into the chasm of lawlessness and despair.

I lived in Detroit for nearly two years, and I learned this: It’s filled with indomitable spirits of gritty, determined Americans. They’re fierce, proud and unbreakable. They believe in that city.

In fact, the January poll found that despite all of its problems, 63 percent of people felt optimistic about the future of the Detroit area. Call me silly, but I agree, as soon as they stanch the violence and raise a new civic identity from the ashes of the old one.

You can do it, Detroit. Let the sad end of Aiyana’s life spark a new beginning of the city’s life.

Here’s Mr. Herbert, writing from Hopedale, LA:

The warm, soft winds coming in off the gulf have lost their power to soothe. Anxiety is king now — all along the coast.

“You can’t sleep no more; that’s how bad it is,” said John Blanchard, an oyster fisherman whose life has been upended by the monstrous oil spill fouling an enormous swath of the Gulf of Mexico. He shook his head. “My wife and I have got two kids, 2 and 7. We could lose everything we’ve been working all of our lives for.”

I was standing on a gently rocking oyster boat with Mr. Blanchard and several other veteran fishermen who still seemed stunned by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Instead of harvesting oysters, they were out on the water distributing oil retention booms and doing whatever else they could to bolster the coastline’s meager defenses against the oil making its way ominously and relentlessly, like an invading army, toward the area’s delicate and heartbreakingly vulnerable wetlands.

A fisherman named Donny Campo tried to hide his anger with wisecracks, but it didn’t work. “They put us out of work, and now we’re cleaning up their mess,” he said. “Yeah, I’m mad. Some of us have been at this for generations. I’m 46 years old and my son — he’s graduating from high school this week — he was already fishing oysters. There’s a whole way of life at risk here.”

The risks unleashed by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig are profound — the latest to be set in motion by the scandalous, rapacious greed of the oil industry and its powerful allies and enablers in government. America is selling its soul for oil.

The vast, sprawling coastal marshes of Louisiana, where the Mississippi River drains into the gulf, are among the finest natural resources to be found anywhere in the world. And they are a positively crucial resource for America. Think shrimp estuaries and bird rookeries and oyster fishing grounds.

These wetlands are one of the nation’s most abundant sources of seafood. And they are indispensable when it comes to the nation’s bird population. Most of the migratory ducks and geese in the United States spend time in the Louisiana wetlands as they travel to and from Latin America.

Think songbirds. Paul Harrison, a specialist on the Mississippi River and its environs at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me that the wetlands are relied on by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbird species. The migrating season for these beautiful, delicate creatures is right now — as many as 25 million can pass through the area each day.

Already the oil from the nightmare brought to us by BP is making its way into these wetlands, into this natural paradise that belongs not just to the people of Louisiana but to all Americans. Oil is showing up along dozens of miles of the Louisiana coast, including the beaches of Grand Isle, which were ordered closed to the public.

The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.

The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it’s important. The 11 men working on the rig were no more important in the current American scheme of things than the oystermen losing their livelihoods along the gulf, or the wildlife doomed to die in an environment fouled by BP’s oil, or the waters that will be left unfit for ordinary families to swim and boat in.

This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.

No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.

It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.