EdCone.com

Crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and washing ashore in Louisiana is exposing how ill-prepared the U.S. has been to respond to a major offshore oil spill.

In the fight to limit environmental damage from the month-old spill—which is on track to rival the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in size—BP PLC executives, government officials, and scientists are learning as they go, even though the industry has been drilling in the Gulf for decades and has 77 rigs operating there, according to ODS-Petrodata, a research firm.

So we were woefully unready for disaster, even as the "drill here, drill now" chants echoed. 

At least we know now to move slowly and...um, what?

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted.

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth--all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic.

Walker Percy on his drink of choice. Duke won that football game behind Jack Alexander's 193 rushing yards; 1935 was a long time ago.

UPDATE: In the comments, GO says the easternmost part of the blue parcel may not be included in the plan; Jeff has a suggestion on locating joint ventures with A&T.

If I understand UNCG's plans correctly, it wants to swallow much or all of the blue-shaded area on this map (click to enlarge; larger image here).

I guess that's what "urban redevelopment on the scale that hasn't been seen in Greensboro" means.

Why should Democrats have all the circular firing squad fun in NC8?

Republican Party leaders have escalated an unprecedented campaign against one of their own congressional candidates, with N.C. GOP chairman Tom Fetzer calling Tim D'Annunzio "unfit for public office at any level."

..."What he could do to the party as our nominee is secondary in my view to what he could do to the country if he got elected. If he got elected, for crying out loud, that would be a disaster."

Previously: "The fond hopes of Democrats aside, I bet he loses."

Further disgruntling progressives: "An effort by public employee unions to organize a new political party in North Carolina has fallen short."

There are two possibilities behind Mayor Bill Knight’s decision to add public prayer to Greensboro City Council meetings: either he does not understand that it’s a divisive move, or he does not care.

Neither one bodes well for a city in need of strong, unifying leadership.

You can read my newspaper column after the jump.

Media Myth Alert is a blog written by W. Joseph Campbell, author of the forthcoming book, "Getting It Wrong Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism," focused on "stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, prove to be apocryphal or wildly exaggerated."

Previously.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a knack for making statements that are at once sweeping and stupid, but he outdoes himself with this one...

Nick Carr on privacy, identity, and Dylan.

Reference material.

Fourth estateless:

The second point, which gets directly to why Rand Paul is suddenly flailing, is that the local Kentucky media--in particular the newspapers, and especially the flagship Louisville Courier-Journal--has been decimated by job cuts, as has happened across the country...candidates don't run the same kind of gauntlet they once did. They're not challenged by journalists.

You mean the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression might have actual consequences?

"By holding interest rates at zero, the government is basically tricking the population into going long on just about every kind of security except cash, at the price of almost certainly not getting an adequate return for the risks they are running. People can't stand earning 0% on their money, so the government is forcing everyone in the investing public to speculate."

"We didn't get the value out of this crisis that we should have," Mr. Klarman told the audience. "For our parents or grandparents, it was awful to have had a Great Depression. But it was in some ways helpful to carry a Depression mentality throughout their later lives, because it meant they were thrifty with their money and prudent in their investment decisions." He added: "All we got out of this crisis was a Really Bad Couple of Weeks mentality."

Left-wing loon Piedmont Publius:

I found Mayor Knight’s policy of prayer somewhat troublesome...

...[It] makes me wonder if he’s picking the right battles —prayer and speakers from the floor during council meetings—- when the city still faces serious problems.

In fairness to Rand Paul, he may be more than a libertopian with a limited grasp of history -- he's also a  shill for irresponsible corporations.

"I think that sounds really un-American in [Obama's] criticism of business."

Paul continued: The President's reaction is "part of this sort of blame game society" where "it's always someone's fault." Paul added: "Maybe sometimes accidents happen."

Meanwhile: 

The company conceded Thursday what some scientists have been saying for weeks: More oil is flowing from the leak than BP and the Coast Guard had previously estimated.

"It's anger at the people who are supposed to be driving the ship don't have any idea what's going on," said E.J. Boles, 55, a musician from Big Pine Key, Fla. "Why wouldn't they have any contingency plan?"...

..."Everything in that marsh is dead as we speak," Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said.

Guilford County's real American smackdown of Sarah Palin is recalled in this article about non-driving Jewess Elena Kagan and her place in that imaginary land.

I think I was the first to bring that tasty electoral irony to the world's attention, and I know I cite it again in my upcoming newspaper column.

Thanks to alert reader JB for the pointer.

"Stripping an elected official of his power would be a major policy change, the kind of thing you might expect Senate budget writers to notice.  They didn’t."

More:

Senate leader Marc Basnight announced the provision had come from his office.  But he said it was a mistake: “I didn’t even know it was in there.”

Basnight represents thousands of coastal homeowners who are angry about rising insurance rates, and Commissioner Goodwin is the target of their wrath...

...Senate Republican leader Phil Berger [...] says mystery provisions show up all the time, and they’re usually political.

Background and more links.

Amex data centers in Guilford County will bring some jobs (150 max projection), plus construction jobs, and tax revenue, and possibly more data centers from other companies.

And it was done without incentives, and it cements the companies interest in the GSO region.

So, hurray. Good news is good news, and in this economy, good news is great news.

But data centers are giant refrigerated warehouses for computers, not high-tech developing or manufacturing facilities, so it's not time for a home run trot.

Except, maybe...

Binker and Barron mention "well-positioned Internet cables" as one of our assets. Hey, Google, ya listening?

The U.S. Senate, bringing Congress to the brink of passing the most comprehensive regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression, approved a bill that imposes restrictions on proprietary trading by banks and creates a consumer protection agency designed to prevent lending abuses that triggered the housing collapse and the worst unemployment in almost three decades.

Well, that sounds good.

Or, not:

Historians will probably conclude that the package of reforms was surprisingly modest given the depth and severity of the 2008-09 financial crisis. A harsher historical judgment might find that the political and economic power wielded by the financial industry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was so extensive that it could weather a near total collapse of the system without having to yield its power or privilege.

Politics:

Passage of the bill would be a signature achievement for the White House, nearly on par with the recently enacted health care law...Congressional Republican leaders, adopting an election-year strategy of opposing initiatives supported by the Obama administration, voiced loud criticism of the legislation while trying to insist that they still wanted tougher policing of Wall Street. 

Knight [...] has to realize he is not president of a country club but mayor of a diverse city and he needs to make every effort to recognize and celebrate that diversity.

John Hammer (not yet online link) after the mayor "made what should have been a meaningful ceremony controversial by not having a one single [sic] black veteran in the group he recognized."

Meet the Facts fact-checks Meet the Press.

UPDATE: Paul "clarifies" his position, which is to say, he reverses it.

Segregated lunch counters of the sort made famous in GSO figure in the Maddow interview with Tea Party darling Rand Paul about his comments on the Civil Rights Act (scroll down for video).

Paul's non-racist views seem sincere to me, but he seems unable to focus on questions about his approach to legislation.

Not quite clear on the concept of "union" :

For officials in several EU capitals, the most disturbing aspect of the dispute is that it points to Germany’s willingness to act on its own in the financial crisis, albeit in what it conceives to be the general European interest.

It also underlines the difficulties that Germany and France have encountered in trying to forge common answers to the sovereign debt emergency.

One expects Nevada politics to be entertaining, and one is rarely disappointed.

In fairness, they didn't have your fancy videotaping machines back in the days of barter, so maybe Lowden thought she could just say whatever she wanted.

Cinq tableaux de maître ont été volés dans la nuit de mercredi à jeudi au Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Il s'agit d'œuvres des peintres Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque et Amedeo Modigliani, d'une valeur estimée à 500 millions d'euros.

I was nowhere near the place, I swear.

I wonder what the street value of stolen paintings might be -- it's not like you can just take them to Sotheby's to fetch the quoted prices.

If I was an unscrupulous billionaire looking to class up my dacha, I'd bid $50 million for the lot.

1) the largest category of delinquent loans are fixed rate prime loans, and 2) this is not just a "sand state" problem. Brinkmann argued the foreclosure crisis is now being driven by economic problems as opposed to the bursting of the housing price bubble - and this is showing up in prime loans and all states.

I'm sure he meant "fixed rate prime loans given to poor people after CRA forced Wall Street to go a little crazy," but it's alarming nonetheless.

"Last Night's Big Loser: National Republicans," says TPM.

There may be a forest-for-the-trees aspect to that analysis, but it does raise an interesting question about the state of the GOP, which may be more threatened than the Democrats by the tea partiers, and which, come to think of it, has earned that TPM headline several times in the past few years.

A thoughtful response to my question about the relationship between UNCG and Glenwood: communication, concerns, and "urban redevelopment on the scale that hasn't been seen in Greensboro."

Doug Klesch photographed Jennifer Dalton and Jack Benedict during a recent Get The Folk Downtown performance at Studio B (click image to enlarge).

You can hear (and purchase) tracks from live local performances at the left rail of the DMP site.

Leaders without followers:

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. 

Nate Silver breaks down the conventional wisdom and the real lessons from yesterday's races in PA, KY, and AR. Clear as mud.

CBS sitcom derived from a Twitter page -- maybe a little less surprising when you remember that a good chunk of Japan's best-seller list has come from mobile phones. Also, status-update humor.

In the summer of 1984 my friend Cunningham and I were in Munich when this huge hailstorm blew in and pelted the city with monster ice-balls for a long time, busting up cars and shredding awnings and greatly impressing two guys from Greensboro, who walked away thinking, Boy, they sure do have interesting weather here in Germany.

Later we found it was a major meteorological event and not just another night in the biergarten.

And I remember reading as a kid that hail dented the armor of Coronado's men as they marched across the plains looking for the cities of Cíbola.

Anyway, this storm approaches Biblical proportions near the one-minute mark of the video.

Beck and Co. sell fear, then sell fear-related products.

Lisa Scheer took the pic below recently on East Market Street. Her show about Mill Village life, which opened last year at the Greensboro Historical Museum, is now on view at the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, along with material gathered by UNCG prof Benjamin Filene and his students; an opening reception is planned for Thurs 5/27 at 5:30 PM; more of her work is featured here.

"UNCG has enjoyed a close relationship with the Glenwood community," the N&R tells me.

How much has Glenwood enjoyed it?

Congrats on your new portfolio:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and by extension the U.S. taxpayer, owns more than 250 collateralized debt obligations that were purchased by small institutions that later failed. Although the bonds have a book value of more than $400 million, they are a headache for the agency as it grapples with the toxic assets flowing from many banks around the country.

Perverse incentives:

[T]he overall tax rate on equity finance is 36.1%, while the tax rate on debt finance is negative 6.4%. No wonder American businesses, just like American homeowners, are overleveraged.

Good luck eliminating that mortgage-interest deduction, though.

Meanwhile, on Pianosa:

They're telling editors, even if you reported it five days ago from Washington, D.C., don't put that paragraph under a Guantanamo dateline or you won't be allowed to cover this.

Fixing a hole in the tax code so wide you could fly a private jet through it.

This kind of thing drove me nuts when I got home from Belleau Wood.

Without adequately planning for trouble, the oil business has focused on developing experimental equipment and techniques to drill in ever deeper waters, according to a Wall Street Journal examination of previous deepwater accidents. As drillers pushed the boundaries, regulators didn't always mandate preparation for disaster recovery or perform independent monitoring.

I guess past successes like the Exxon Valdez just gave the industry a false sense of confidence.

"We all believe in something," says Mayor Bill Knight, explaining his decision to impose prayer at the City Council meetings.

But not everyone believes in something that involves prayer, and not everyone who prays believes in public prayer at government meetings.

Danny Thompson says he already uses the Council's moment of silence according to his own beliefs and preferences, and that he prays whenever he has the opportunity, so clearly the lack of a public prayer is not constraining him, or anyone else who wishes to pray before or during a meeting.

Bad call by the Mayor.

Copy editors needed in Raleigh, stat.

Click image to enlarge.

Chris Oynes, who oversaw oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico for 12 years before being promoted in 2007 to associate director for offshore energy and minerals management, informed colleagues in an e-mail that he will step down. He has come under fire from former MMS officials for being too close to the industry he regulated.

Interesting to see if he finds work as a lobbyist, or some other revolving-door gig.

I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it; also realizing it...

...I have the same experience with criminals.

Thnx to alert reader DB for the link.

As Ron White has pointed out, it's not that the wind is blowing, it's what the wind is blowing: "If you get hit by a Volvo, it don't matter how many sit-ups you did that morning."

Anyway, this guy stays calm (language NSFW).

Too many Muslims winning beauty pageants!

Fortunately there are places the hot blonde underclass can still find work.

Swarthy women in tiaras may not be as serious a problem as too many Jews on the Supreme Court, but they're insult to injury at time when "WASPs are being priced out of their waterfront estates and displaced on their nonprofit boards by Jewish, Catholic and other non-Protestant entrepreneurs."

So after all that (or, more accurately, before all that) a truly interesting and entertaining Stones cover:

[T]he serial contamination of balance sheets [...] is hitting the reality of scarcity.

Industrial countries are running out of balance sheets that can be levered safely in order to minimize the disruptive impact of past excesses. This lies behind the recent (warranted) concerns about the explosion of debt, and the related surge in sovereign risk measures.

Brussels can't do this forever, says El-Erian.

The ownership society belongs to people who own expensive computers and hold stocks for 11 seconds at a time.

You can start trickling down any time now: a recovery that "has seen corporations and the rich prosper while small companies and the unemployed struggle."