Drill, Baby, Dri … Ooops!

Quite frankly I don’t know what to say about this. Watching an oil spill whose size makes the Exxon Valdez accident look like somebody dropped a stick of butter as it gets closer and closer to the shores that still haven’t recovered from the devastation of Katrina is a little like watching a train wreck. A train needs a certain amount of time to brake to a stop–and that means several miles in the case of a heavy freight train or a fast passenger train. Any attempt to stop quicker is just simply not going to work because it’s against the laws of physics. So you step on the brake in the hope of minimizing the damage and wait for the inevitable crash, watching in horrified fascination as the train gets closer and closer.

In the meantime, the blame game has started. The Obama administration has blamed it on BP. BP has blamed it on the contractors in charge of the drilling and on faulty equipment. Blame the tools! The media and the right wing have begun blaming Obama for not doing enough to stop the crisis, despite the fact that the federal government had offered help, been turned down and told that the situation was being managed. They should have stepped right in and taken over, say the people who normally howl over any sort of government interference. And Sarah Palin has spun on the proverbial dime and has become sooooooo concerned about the environmental issues that you’d think she’d never even heard the phrase, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” that she led her supporters in chanting throughout the 2008 presidential campaign.

Clearly there is more than enough blame to go around, and I’ll not exempt the Obama administration for not acting quickly enough. Sometimes, you need to step up to the plate. Sometimes, acting quickly is more important than making sure all the p’s are p’s and q’s are q’s. But even if it HAD acted faster–is there anything that really could have been done? Or was this truly like the train wreck that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, no matter how fast you act, that collision is just going to occur and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

Obama says that BP is going to pay for it. No. The one certain thing in every disaster that has occurred as long as I can remember is that BP will wriggle out of it and pay off at best a token amount that seems big only if you do not take into account the amount of damage this accident will cause. But it will be paid for… and the people who will pay for it will be? US.

Help is On the WAY–in a few days…

Well, we’re finally doing something over in Haiti, but, sad to say, we got beat to the punch. Rescue teams from … Iceland … were despatched almost immediately after the earthquake struck. Sniffer dogs arrived from … China … within 48 hours. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the President of the Lumbering Giant of America said that we could get the first 2000 Marines to Haiti–a mere 700 miles from Florida and a hop, skip and jump from Puerto Rico–in a few days. A few days means a lot to a victim still buried under rubble. Or someone sitting on the roof of their submerged house as we found out from Katrina. But Haiti is not New Orleans. It’s simply the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Greg Palast has a remarkable precis of the screwy US response. I don’t want to copy what he’s said, but what it boils down to is that instead of treating the Haitian tragedy as an EMERGENCY, our response has been to treat it as a military operation. Secretary Gates said he would not send in food and water immediately because there was no security apparatus in place. OF COURSE NOT, an entire country has been devastated. The proper response in an EMERGENCY is to send in rescuers first, followed up by relief and security. But America is so hamstrung by both its muscle-bound state and its security paranoia that instead of doing the right thing first, we started out with the back end of the horse.
Our first operation appears to have been to secure the Port-au-Prince airport and try to take over rescue efforts in a way that had French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet complain that we seemed to be more concerned with occupying Haiti rather than helping it. Indeed, we secured the airport so well that we refused landing to an aircraft from “Doctors without Borders” carrying supplies and an inflatable surgical hospital, forcing them to land in the Dominican Republic and truck in the supplies over the mountains, delaying their arrival for 24 hours. Danny Schecter on Media Channel suggests that our overweaning focus on security may be driven more by a desire to keep US-deposed President Aristide out of Haiti than on anything to do with the safety of the country.
We’ve heard a lot about things being “too big to fail” in recent months–the banks are too big to be allowed to go under after they’ve screwed up the economy, the health insurance industry is too big to be allowed to be given competition from a single payer health plan. And even when the leading political party is in agreement on something in general, it can’t agree with itself about what it wants. Could it be that the US has become too big to act effectively? Man, if so, we better get some streamlining in pronto before we choke to death on our immensity.

Happy New Year … it should be better than the Old one?

Happy New Year–Happy New Decade! Good Riddance to the Old one(s)! What a pile of manure the new century has turned out to be so far (as Bess Truman said to the people who complained about Harry saying “you need some ‘manure’ on these roses”, “What? It took me 25 years to get him to say THAT!”) Let’s start things off right with a really funny but hard-hitting cartoon. What’s been happening?
Hmmm, we’re still talking about the airliner bomb FAIL, the security FAIL and the “no intention of invading–I mean, sending troops to Yemen” (I hope) not-yet FAIL. That’s two weeks old and I posted an oldie-but-goodie over Christmas to cover it. Timmy Geithner and his magic “shhhh-let’s keep this a secret” emails? Not funny enough, that can wait for Thursday. Health Care? SOOoooo last year! Besides they’re hashing it out behind closed doors, contra Obama’s promise that it will be televised on C-SPAN. Transparency is becoming more opaque every day. What else?
All righty then, let’s check and see if Lindsay Lohan is having a meltdown. Oh wow, Lindsay had to fly–COMMERCIAL! How sad. Casey Johnson died–who was she again? Some rich heiress who was Tila Tequila’s ‘wifey’? Whose biggest claim to fame previously was turning down Paris Hilton’s offer to start a TV program called “The Simple Life”? And who’s Tila Tequila again? Let’s call this one too sad for SO MANY reasons and decide not to start off the new decade with such a bummer!
AH-HAH! I have it–someone’s exhibiting a sexbot at the Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo! Now there’s something you could get your teeth into! errrrrrr… Oh, she’s not REALLY a sexbot. Inventor Douglas Hines says “The sex robot thing is marketing – it’s really about making a companion.” Um-hum…sure. Well, not in its present state, she can’t even walk yet–has to be carted around in a wheel chair so far. And she kind of has the expression of the girl in the bar who’s had one too many when you passed that marker two hours ago. Actually from her rather limited set of capabilities, she looks like a “stripped-down” version of Aiko, the “not a sex bot” gynoid that Le Trung is making up in Canada. Although designed to eventually service as a maid, (Everybody ought to have a maid…) Aiko’s name is actually a Japanese word meaning “love child,” and she looks a heckuva lot more sophisticated than Roxxxy, the new robot, tho not as realistic as the computer generated photos from RealDolls (bet the real dolls don’t look half as good), life-sized dolls that are actually SUPPOSED to be sexbots. Oh, brave new world…
Anyway, since Roxxxy is actually supposed to have conversations like a real woman, I thought I’d give my take on one of the many discussions that might come up. Happy New Year

Great, now I can solar power my refrigerator box…

I am still recovering from my bout of whatever crud I have, though now it’s more had than have. I should really not be working at all, but it’s so near the end of the year and my Christmas break that I can’t see not keeping to schedule. In any case, my last cartoon of the year will be next Thursday’s, and I will begin again on the 11th of January.
President Obama did present his Main Street recovery plan, and I can only hope that this is just a warm-up to use up the moneys that were left over from the bank bailout. Seriously, falling to 10 percent unemployment from 10.2 is not a necessarily a sign that things have turned around, especially with so many underemployed. As Robert Reich said in HuffPo, the real October story wasn’t the dip in unemployment but the number of people who dropped out of the labor force. And Obama’s proposals are such a hodge-podge–a few initiatives to make it easier for small businesses to get loans–not that the banks have started making them yet since after they shored up their bottom lines, they paid themselves bonuses. Some green-incentive thingies–which, of course, mean you can AFFORD to go green before you can get any benefit from the incentives. And finally, $50 billion in infrastructure building–something that actually may produce some jobs.
The Republicans, on the other hand, have suddenly waxed wroth on the deficit–something that hardly mattered to them when George Bush was President. Paring down that deficit is more important than creating jobs. After all, the banks were saved, we’re already in recovery, right? Obama’s anemic jobs initiative can be seen as another one of his compromises, trying to spend just enough to stimulate employment while trying to please the Republicans by not spending too much and thus running the risk of not spending enough. Whether he spends enough or not, it won’t help matters before the end of ‘09, a year that will be ended without engendering much nostalgia by its passing.

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ABOUT MEH

Cartoons and text by Greg Uchrin (aka Gregorius alexandrinus), with the able assistance of Fred and Bert Squirrel, with special appearances by George Dymme. Published once a week on Mondays.

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