Bruce McQuain asks the question on the lips of everyone who wasn’t in line to buy a) an iPad, b) an iPhone, or c) whatever other hand-candy made the “news”.

It took 70 days to accept foreign help on the oil spill?

Why?

Really – I want to know. Why did the “we’ve been on the job since day one” crowd take 70 more days to decide they should accept some offers of help that began coming in within 3 days of the spill.

Bruce doesn’t make any kind of a point of it in the post, but the answer is that Obammy is much (caps, itals, bold) more concerned over protecting union jobs than he is about protecting beaches or stupid birds or a non-union livelihood or a non-union way of life.

This ain’t Obama’s Katrina. I’m trying to think of an appropriate historical analogy for this kind of aggressively benign neglect and disengagement. Waterloo suggests he got defeated on the field of battle, but this guy’s utterly absent from the field of battle. Pearl Harbor suggests he got surprised, but rallied in the end to win (cf, sleeping giant quote). Nero? He’s definitely fiddling with the golf clubs. Really, it seems more Marie Antoinette and “let them eat cake.” Maybe someone can suggest something, I ain’t no historian.

Every time I read an Iran story, I think of Big Jim Henley and Sy Hersh. For half-a-decade, every time a sailor put on a white hat* and got on a boat, Henley spent the next four or five weeks assuring the intertubes that Bush as about to Bomb Iran. And generally, he had dear old Seymour Hersh to prop him up journalistically.

Well, nowadays, Bush is in Dallas (and Laura hasn’t divorced him – another hobby-horse of Big Jim’s), far from the levers of power, and we’ve got a carrier group steaming* into the Red Sea, and so I thought I’d see what Big Jim had to say about it.

Shockingly, there’s not a peep from Big Jim. That linked Alternet story is so right up his alley, too. So, given his track record on predicting doom and hellfire for the Iranians, I’m thinking that this might actually be something that could happen.

I don’t have the life-force left in me tonight to google up Hersh. He might even be dead. Nothing about the Bush divorce, either, but that’s so ludicrously wrong I should just leave the hobby-horse up in the attic, but it’s funny, because it went on and on and on.

* I have no idea if they even still do that.

Amid growing instances of identity theft, bank account breaches and sophisticated Internet scams, the government is looking for ways to make those transactions in cyberspace more secure.

So laughy. Mewanda, Kwang Ji and Humberto are here to protect us from scams.

No, really, you’re safe as houses.

World leaders seek common ground on crises

At odds over how to strengthen the global recovery, top world leaders found common ground on foreign policy Saturday, condmening North Korea for the alleged sinking of a South Korean warship and endorsing a five-year exit timetable for Afghanistan

In a joint statement, the leading eight industrial democracies also criticized both Iran and North Korea for continuing their nuclear march and called on both to heed existing United Nations resolutions.

Wow. Condemnation and criticism. Get back, Jack. And it all lines up for common ground and a nice headline.

I hate this kindergarten participation ribbon crap, but that’s what we gots for & from full grown men and women running entire damned nations. It’s never going to work, and it’s my grandsons who are going to have to pay for the mealy-mouthed crap. That pisses me off, but short of starting a shooting war, what the hell can one man do? Nothing, that’s what, besides teach ‘em to shoot straight.

Until they hit a committee: Porn sites closer to .xxx Web address

Is there going to be an internet Porn Police that makes the porn peeps change? It all just seems so, and pardon me showing my age, Tipper Gore (available, I hear) bitching about Frank Zappa to Congress. But it will make Russians writing corporate firewalls some money to buy meth ingredients, so I’m all for it — it’s practically Stimulus III.

The sick, sad thing is that my best friends are lawyers, and this is what they do for a living, and they do it very well:

Tensions boiled over Friday in a federal courtroom in Fort Worth after a judge warned that the Texas Rangers could remain in limbo for the rest of the season.

An attorney for baseball commissioner Bud Selig, speaking later on an open phone line, reacted angrily, saying: “If he doesn’t confirm the plan we’ll just terminate the franchise. We’ll take over the (expletitive) franchise.”

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Lynn kicked off the fireworks during an emergency hearing requested by prospective new owners Chuck Greenberg and Nolan Ryan.

They had asked Lynn to reverse a Thursday ruling that delayed a decision on the team’s bankruptcy plan, which was designed to help complete the sale to a group led by Greenberg and Ryan. The delay was designed to give a mediator time to work through disagreements.

Lynn agreed to return to the July 9 date, but delivered a tongue-lashing as he warned that the bankruptcy could drag on if the team’s revised reorganization and purchase plans don’t pass muster.

“You guys, not me, you guys are the ones who pushed for this,” Lynn told Greenberg and Ryan, who were nonetheless pleased by the ruling. “For the sake of the Rangers, I do not want to see this team stuck in Chapter 11 until this fall.”

Lynn didn’t stop there, and at least one attorney’s face turned scarlet as he continued.

“We will not decide based on what the fans want … what the media wants … what Mr. Ryan or Mr. Greenberg wants, or what Bud Selig wants,” Lynn thundered from the bench.

I just want to give a big ol’ Texas Up Yours to all the assholes here. Best season in a decade, and it’s corrupted by lawyers, financiers, judges, and other hangers-on looking to pick up a new Bentley for their mistresss.

I’ve been a 12-year old boy loving this baseball team since the day they crossed the Red River, and I expect and have received in my 38 fan-years nothing but disappointment. But to have it come from a damn courtroom makes me feel pretty bloody. Especially to hear a federal judge blow off fans that way. Some bailiff better hip that sumbitch that it’s the fans what pays the bills, up to and including his federal fucking salary.

Of course, it’s the dumb MFing fans like me who keep coming back and keep coming back and keep coming back that all these jackleg shade-trees are fighting over. I’d kind of like to see one of these silk-suited humpers acknowledge that in a sincere manner.

Bastards. I hope they all get inoperable jock itch and their balls fall off, or something horribly nasty that’s completely personal. This is baseball, you idiots — go screw up basketball, something nobody will miss. Leave my baseball alone.

The sooper-seekrit email distribution group, JournoList, snares another cherub-cheeked Juicebox Mafia typist, this time a faux-conservative:

I’m a member of an off-the-record list-serv called “Journolist,” founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend’s wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I’ve come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.

Poor little Weigel. Typical capitol-P Pundit. Loves dishing it, can’t take it when it’s bounced back on him. More of a capitol-P something else. And may I suggest you get rid of the tagline, which reads “Inside the Conservative Movement and Republican Party.” I can’t fathom any one with a hair on their ass speaking to you again, but then, everybody knows there are plenty of RINOs around who can tell you how mortified they are at the fringey base.

We could really use some pictures:

A drunk driver trapped after overturning his car cracked open another can of beer while he waited for emergency crews to rescue him, a New Zealand court was told.

Paul Nigel Sneddon, 47, pleaded guilty to careless driving and drunken driving after being nearly three times over the legal alcohol limit in a district court in the city of Palmerston North, the Dominion Post newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Police found Sneddon, a former baker, trapped in his overturned Ford Laser on June 1, drinking a can of beer after he failed to take a corner properly and crashed through a wooden barrier, flipping his vehicle.

Defense lawyer Peter Young said that when Sneddon found he could not open the doors, “he had nothing else to do at that point, so he had another beer.”

When asked by police how much he had consumed, Sneddon replied: “Plenty, I've been drinking for four days straight.”

Sneddon, who is estranged from his wife, told the Wellington- based newspaper that he went on a drinking binge after losing his job at a bakery on the same day that he heard his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

No word on whether the estranged wife took off his pickup truck, and that’s why he was driving what’s basically an Aussie Escort.

Binge drinking is not an answer to life’s problems, but it could be considered hemming & hawing while you work on the answer. That there’s the way I see it.

via Trapped drunk driver opens another beer as awaits rescue – Yahoo! News.

“When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start looking like nails.”

And when your only tool is a hammer, you probably know a lot of ways to use it and how to do a lot of things with it, that are not apparent to the casual, disinterested observer who’d rather sit around and flap his jaws.

Looks like my long-time favorite, Justin Trevino, has himself a new album out. You won’t hear a more gorgeous voice, and he’s heartily endorsed by Johnny Bush.

It makes me crazy that those Nashville fags get so much press, and here’s a dang Pavarotti, right in my back yard. People are weird, but mostly you can blame it on women, who buy that ghey-ass Chesneyish crap. What are you gonna do? Idiot men are perfectly happy listening to Boston and Journey again for the four gajillionth time.

Go get the damn thing and quit spending all your time with your damn 450th edition of the damned Rolling Beatles.

Will Obama Be the ‘Jimmy Carter of the 21st Century’?

Sucks, yea, verily, to have the Krauts pointing out the obvious. Jimmy Carter was, at the very least, a nuclear submarine cat. The current Clown-In-Chief never did nothing above the pay-grade of pulling together a passle of grievance mongers, is just skating through his stewardship, lining up whatever enrichment is down the pike.

It’s getting really tiresome and boring to even talk about this Marx/Commun/Corporat/Statist fool, and the damn Barnum * Bailey bit players he’s surrounded with. Pray, friends, that his failures mount to the heavens.

Here’s America in 2010. Stop sucking up oil — we need to see your life vests.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Death by a hundred-thousand, regulations — that’s how you kill a superpower. That and electing a damn community organizer to run your country…he can help you a long way down the path, that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch.

via BP Oil Spill: Against Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Wishes, Crude-Sucking Barges Stopped by Coast Guard – ABC News.

The little TCU Horned Frogs knocked out Leviathan in the Super-Regional yesterday, and will advance to the College World Series for the first time ever. Longhorn fans are understandably inconsolable, believing that a CWS spot is their birthright. The few remaining fans who remember the Southwest Conference fondly rejoice. Managers at Academy Sports, Dick’s, and Sports Authority are scrambling for floor space to sell jerseys, hats, t-shirts and tank tops in purple and white with a lizard on them…not.

I used the early start time for the US-England tilt as an excuse to go have an early-afternoon booze-up. England’s goalie (keeper, to the purists) pulls an utter Bill Buckner. Jeez – can’t anyone here play this game?

I played the game in high school (right wing), coached my daughter through many years of it, have watched the game on the teevee every now and then, and I’m still bamboozled by the popularity of the stupid game on a world-wide basis. I love it as a sport, but that’s like saying I love roller-blading as an exercise. As a watching sport, it’s deathly dull. And they still have (and LOVE) ties, which is just stupid. And they have all the Academy Award-winning dives, which is just even more stupid, but that’s about the only event that can generate any drama, since an actual score is generally light-years in the past or future.

Well, I’m glad all the goofy non-USA countries get to have their little Soccer Super Bowl. I hope nobody’s family gets kidnapped and murdered because of what happened on the field of play. I wish they’d get some cheerleaders, though — that might help bust up those 80 minutes of midfield back-and-forthing that sends one off to la-la-land.

Go, USA! Beat…who, Slovenia? Really? Slovenia? I can’t take any pleasure from beating Slovenia. It just seems wrong.

Really, I’d much rather we put our soccer money into cricket, and field a USA team there. 1000 times more exciting than soccer, and it has in-game specialization, week-long matches, pitchers and hitters and fielders, high tea…

HERE WE ARE WITH THE GOODNESS PART OF SPORT:

Really, the guy’s an American treasure:

Seems to me what the left should be asking is not if Sarah Palin’s pair has grown, but when their president plans to grow a pair.

I have to admit to giggling when I saw the fauxntroversy over at Liborandum this aye-emm.

Funny Digression Goes Here: Ken Layne runs Wonkette these days, and back in the early days of the blogs, I respected Ken as a man who was truly committed to Journalism, as a capitalized profession. Then he took the Wonkette job, and he sources things like this garbage as such: “Wonkette operative “Laura,”” They broke this story, such as it is. Well, we all got to make a living. I’ve always wanted to sit and drink with Ken with a decent jukebox in reach, but I just don’t know, I reckon I’d get my ass beat for making him defend that kind of bullshit and ignoring all the things I thought he was telling me back in the day when we thought this blog bullshit was going to be something worthwhile.