Got this email from Brendan this morning:

by now you’ve seen the NYTimes article on Stanley McChrystal:

I draw your attention to this quote:

“A senior administration official said Mr. Obama was furious about the article, particularly the suggestion that he was uninterested and unprepared to discuss the Afghanistan war after he took office. The official said that Mr. Biden, who also was criticized in the story, will attend the meeting on Wednesday with the president.

The piece, entitled “The Runaway General,” quotes aides as saying General McChrystal was “pretty disappointed” by an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama, and that he found the president “uncomfortable and intimidated” during a Pentagon meeting with General McChrystal and several other generals. ”

Sy Hersh nailed this a few months ago:

“REPORTER: You didn’t include Obama in your list of liar presidents. I’m wondering if you would include him also?

HERSH: To use a basketball or a football analogy, American football, fourth quarter – he may have a game plan. At this point he’s in real trouble. Because the military are dominating him on the important issues of the world: Iraq, Iran, Afghan and Pakistan. And he’s following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a fare-thee-well. He talks differently. And he’s much brighter, he’s much more of the world. So one only hopes he has a game plan that will include doing something, but he’s in real trouble, in terms of – he’s in real trouble.”

Hersh says he doesn’t really know what’s going on with Obama, he doesn’t have the same kind of access in this administration. But, he warns, “the world’s more frightening now” then it was under Bush and Cheney in the last year or two.

“I don’t know what Obama is about,” he said. “I don’t know who advises him. I know that the National Security Advisor General Jones, who does advise him, my friends describe him this way: I’m ‘General Jones, and you’re not.’ Which doesn’t sound good to me. And I know people in the National Security Council are frustrated.”

“Let’s put it this way: The international peril is as certainly as high as it was in the worst of Bush and Cheney.

“Objectivity means that we can’t ever discuss something that might be tough on America, but I’ll tell you, the Iranian message to us is, “Excuse me, the Cold War is over, will you explain to us why you’re in the Gulf?’ That’s what their message is to us. And I’m telling you, you have a lot of family-owned states that are in real, real panic.”

Also:

“And I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They’re being executed on the battlefield. It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. Things don’t change.

“What they’ve done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they’re Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam. If we don’t do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that’s going on now.”

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“GasLand” is the most important and politically incendiary documentary we’ve seen since “Sicko”. Kudos to HBO for showing this Sundance award winning film; do whatever you can to make sure you and everyone you know sees it. (You’ll never quite get over the shots of officials insisting there’s nothing harmful in the drinking water, juxtaposed with a scene of fire coming out of someone’s tap water. And of course, officials consistently decline to sample the water they keep insisting is “safe”.)

The film focuses on damage to water supplies done by the high-powered natural gas mining process known as “fracking,” and the shameless efforts by industry and politicians to cover it up. It’s all too resonant with what just happened in the Gulf. (The energy industry has already issued a point by point rebuttal. Fox says he’s putting together his own response.)

This story is of special interest to people like me who live in the NY-NJ-PA watershed that supplies clean drinking water to nine million people, because industry is now drilling in the Marcellus Shale in northern PA, thought to be the site of massive gas deposits.

Near the end of the film, Josh Fox interviews John Hanger, PA’s secretary of environmental protection who says look, you’re on the other side of a camera, you’re not the person who has to sit here and make these hard decisions. And he’s right — we as a nation have some hard choices to make about how we get our energy, and why. What price are we willing to pay?

(In a jarring epilogue, Fox notes that shortly after they spoke, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection announced massive layoffs.)

Here’s one review:

Narrating a first-person account, Fox relates how a natural gas company made him a lease offer for $100,000 from a natural gas company to explore on his land, which includes the house his parents built in Pennsylvania’s Delaware River Basin abutting upstate New York.Fox begins to do his own research on drilling, and leaves countless unreturned messages with natural gas drillers like Halliburton.

Congress’ 2005 Energy Policy Act, crafted by former vice president (and ex-Halliburton exec) Dick Cheney, exempts the hydraulic fracturing drilling process used by natural gas companies (known as “fracking”) from long-held environmental regulations such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Freed from customary laws, natural gas companies have drilled like wildcatters in 34 states where huge shale fields contain gas deposits.

Once Fox learns that his beloved Delaware River watershed is being targeted by drillers as part of the massive Marcellus Shale field, he goes on the road to track down residents living near drilling sites. This is seat-of-pants investigating that yields astonishing and disturbing findings, not least of which is how the residents can customarily light a flame near their tap water outlet and set the polluted water on fire. As Fox ventures west, to Colorado, Wyoming and Texas, states riddled with natural gas drill sites, he documents horror story after horror story.

The primary cause is the cornucopia of toxic chemicals, blended with water, which must be used in fracking. Infrared-camera footage records venting of polluting gases coming off drill rigs, crushing the myth that natural gas is “clean” and a greenhouse solution. In vivid animation and graphics, Fox illustrates how the continent-wide explosion of fracking projects threatens watersheds and river basins, the source of drinking water.

For all of its engaging information, the film itself is a piece of beautiful cinema, rough-hewn and poetic, often musical in its rhythms and about as far from the “professional” doc that’s the stock-and-trade of Sundance, where “GasLand” is vying in the U.S. competish. The marriage of sound and image (Fox joins Matthew Sanchez on lensing, and Brian Scibinico on sound) veers between nightmarish moods and lyrical reveries, even while the camera peers into the faces of government and corporate officials.

A combo of fest and grassroots exhibition, with viral networking, is part of the pic’s goal to push for new federal controls on fracking (now being considered in Congress). But if a film can ever enact social change, which is rare, the potency of “GasLand” suggests that this may be that film.

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Let’s say I can relate. Sheryl Crow:

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Diane Birch’s “Bible Belt” is the best album I’ve heard in a long, long time:

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A prominent conservative Catholic priest and founder of the Legion of Christ, accused of sexually abusing seminarians also abused his own children, according to a man who says he’s his son.

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Oh God, I wish it would rain.

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While this shows at least some level of awareness, it doesn’t go far enough:

One thing that’s accepted as a given in D.C. is that there’s nothing amiss when people constantly cycle back and forth between raking in big bucks consulting for private-sector clients and going on the air to share ostensibly independent political commentary.

While people constantly obsess about the revolving door between government and lobbying, this other revolving door — between consulting and on-air commentary — gets almost no attention at all, even though it’s widespread.

But now comes a situation that’s focusing a bit of attention on it: The case of two CNN contributors, Alex Castellanos and Hilary Rosen, and their work for BP.

This morning’s Washington Post reports that BP has retained the services of Rosen, a Democrat who heads the Washington office of the Brunswick Group, to help out with BP’s lobbying and public relations offensive inside the Beltway.

Rosen has contracted out some of this work for BP to Castellanos, a Republican consultant who’s perhaps best known for the racially charged Jesse Helms ad showing white hands ripping up a resume.

In a statement, CNN says that neither Rosen nor Castellanos will be invited on the air to discuss topics relating to BP. “Both Alex and Hilary are contributors used primarily to comment on political issues, and they are not being used to discuss the oil disaster story,” CNN spokesperson Edie Emery emails me.

That’s all very well and good, but there’s an interesting larger issue here: Should networks ever turn their airwaves over to analysts whose selling point to clients is that they have influence with lawmakers currently in power?

The question is whether consultants whose livelihood depends on maintaining good relations with lawmakers should ever offer political commentary on the networks, even on topics not directly relevant to their clients.

One analyst who’s frequently on CNN said the answer is No.

“When contributors on the networks have agendas before the government they’re analyzing, it is a blatant a conflict of interest,” this analyst grouses to me. “The networks should not let contributors — whether they’re lobbyists or advocates — analyze the White House and Capitol Hill on the air if they are simultaneously representing clients of any kind before the government.”

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Back during the age of Reagan, I was working on a story about the popular meme of “running government like a business.” I interviewed one management consultant who explained to me an important difference between government and the private sector. He said that business was focused on getting something out to market that was “good enough” quickly, something they could improve later. He said that government’s priority wasn’t speed or cost, but compliance with federal regulations, and everything else came second – not a bad thing when dealing with safety issues.

That’s why he confidently told me that “no one in their right mind” would ever apply “just get it done” business mentality to safety regulation:

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

“What happened to all the stakeholders — Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government — all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security,” David J. Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview.

Even in one significant instance where the Minerals Management Service did act, it appears to have neglected to enforce a rule that required oil companies to submit proof that their blind shear rams would in fact work.

As it turns out, records and interviews show, blind shear rams can be surprisingly vulnerable. There are many ways for them to fail, some unavoidable, some exacerbated by the stunning water depths at which oil companies have begun to explore.

But they also can be rendered powerless by the failure of a single part, a point underscored in a confidential report that scrutinized the reliability of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. The report, from 2000, concluded that the greatest vulnerability by far on the entire blowout preventer was one of the small shuttle valves leading to the blind shear ram. If this valve jammed or leaked, the report warned, the ram’s blades would not budge.

This sort of “single-point failure” figures prominently in an emerging theory of what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon’s blind shear ram, according to interviews and documents. Some evidence suggests that when the crew activated the blind shear ram, its blades tried to cut the drill pipe, but then failed to finish the job because one or more of its shuttle valves leaked hydraulic fluid.

These kinds of weaknesses were understood inside the oil industry, documents and interviews show. And given the critical importance of the blind shear ram, offshore drillers began adding a layer of redundancy by equipping their blowout preventers with two blind shear rams.

Shorter version: For eight years, we had conservatives doing what conservatives do — namely, ignoring regulations, taking businesses at their word and doing everything possible to help them maximize profits at the expense of the public good. But appointing Ken Salazar was highly unlikely to reverse that trend.

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Had too much caffeine yesterday, tossed and turned last night and got up late today. Will post eventually…

Oh, and happy solstice!

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Frank Sinatra with one of the best saloon songs ever:

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