The media and chattering classes are busy creating their own reality of the Obama administration

First "Obama's Katrina," Now "Obama's Watergate"

It appears that the Republican Party and the conservative chattering classes are determined to identify Barack Obama with every famous conservative disaster of recent history. BP's Gulf Oil spill, we are told incessantly, is "Obama's Katrina," presumably because of the common geographic location, and now we hear that the silly, contrived "scandal" over alleged job offers to Democratic primary candidates will be "Obama's Watergate." What's next: Obama's Iraq? Obama's U.S. Attorney Scandal? Obama's Plamegate? Obama's Illegitimate Election? (Oh, sorry, I forgot, Republicans have already used that one!).

In any event, the "Watergate" analogy is insane, unless maybe you are too young or too poorly read to remember what Watergate entailed. As Joe Conason explains at Salon:


The allegations against the White House today involve alleged discussions of administration jobs for Democrats running in two Democratic primaries, who turned them down without consequences. Does that sound like Watergate in any way, shape or form?

But that even assumes there was anything wrong with the discussions, other than their political clumsiness. Yes, one defense is that the same thing has been done by federal, state and local executives from time immemorial, but even that concedes too much to the critics. The federal statute being invoked by conservatives in this situation makes it a crime to offer a job in exchange for "a political act." But in this case, "the political act" is simply taking the job. If that's illegal, then it's illegal to offer appointments to anyone who is or might be running for office.

May 11, 2010 Oil spill science: The jellyfish graveyard

...Here at MC118 we found much more of the dispersed oil and occasional clumps of thick, gooey, intact oil. Beyond that the most striking thing is the presence of countless small dead jellyfishes known as by-the-wind sailors, or Velella vellela, and known to be susceptible to oil. Normally these animals, about the size of two fingers together, are blue and float on the surface with a triangular sail rising above the water t. But those we see here are transparent and floating upside down, many stained with oil.

After finishing here late tonight, we'll move nearby to drop a device called the high-frequency acoustic recording package, or HARP, to the seafloor, about 1600metres below. There it will sit and record marine mammal sounds in the region before retrieval by other researchers a few months from now....

More: http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/05/oil_spill_science_the_jellyfis_1.html