Tuesday Afternoon Update

It’s just a Tuesday afternoon in July, but there is lots of news today!

The Senate has finally voted to end the debate on the bill to extend unemployment benefits to millions of out-of-work Americans. Some of these people are now getting by (if you can call it that) on nothing but food stamps.

An estimated 2 million Americans have seen their benefits run out over the past two months while the legislation has been stalled in the partisan impasse.

“Finally, finally, finally,” said Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland. She called the unemployment insurance program a social compact with American workers that meant “when you hit a speed bump and have to be laid off through no fault of your own, there will be a safety net so that you do not fall.”

Republicans said they backed the idea of extending benefits, but were determined to prevent the costs from being piled onto the mounting deficit.

“We believe the federal debt has grown to an alarming level, where it is threatening the future of our children and grandchildren,” said Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate.

That makes no sense. I guess the Republicans want to starve a lot of children today to save some money for rich children in the future. Or something.

As expected, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to sent the Elena Kagan nomination for SCOTUS to the floor for a vote.

Just one Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, broke ranks with his party to support Ms. Kagan.

In a lengthy speech supporting her, Mr. Graham questioned the Senate’s approach to judicial confirmations, taking colleagues — including President Obama when he was a senator — to task for basing their votes on philosophy rather than a nominee’s qualifications and character.

Mr. Graham said that Ms. Kagan was not someone he would have chosen, “but the person who did choose — President Obama — I think chose wisely.”

Yeah, he chose another DINO who thinks just like him. Big whoop. No wonder Lindsay Graham likes her. I guess the rest of the Republicans were hoping for a Clarence Thomas clone.

Naughtymonkeys linked to this story in the comments on the morning post. There were lots of tweets yesterday that BP had been caught doctoring photos on their website. I thought the story was pretty far fetched, but it has now reached the Washington Post, so it might be legit.

An enlarged version of the photograph reveals flaws in the editing job. One of the 10 images sticks down into the head of one of the people sitting in front of the wall, while another piece of the image is separated from the other side of the head by jagged white space. The right side of the same image also hangs down below the area on which the video feeds were projected.

John Aravosis pointed out the alterations Monday evening on his Americablog.com and observed, “I guess if you’re doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center.” The photo doctoring comes as BP has promised transparency in a bid to regain the public’s trust.

BP claimed this was no big deal, but John Aravosis has an extensive response to the BP spokesman’s claims. I don’t have enough tech expertise to tell if Aravosis is right or not, but this seems in character for BP based on the experience of the past three months.

Guess what? More leaks have sprouted around the BP containment cap: 5 small leaks have been identified in Gulf well, Thad Allen says

“We’ve found nothing that would be consequential,” said Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander overseeing the spill, in a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

Supposedly the Feds have authorized BP to keep going with the test for another day, despite the leaks. I still think BP is running the show. At this point, it’s a game of chicken. Neither BP nor Allen wants to be bad guy who loosens the cap and starts the oil gushing into the Gulf again.

British PM David Cameron is visiting DC today. He says he feels our pain: British PM says he understands the anger ‘across America’ for BP

“It is BP’s role to cap the leak” and compensate people affected by it, he said during a visit to Washington to meet with President Obama. Cameron said he is in regular touch with the leadership of BP, a British-based company.

Too bad he doesn’t tell BP to start being fully transparent about what is really going on down there at the site of the blowout.

There are some reports about the joint Congressional hearings going on today. I wasn’t able to find a live feed this morning.

Gulf well regulators accused of failure

The number of inspectors at the US government agency that oversees oil production in the Gulf of Mexico has barely increased in the past 20 years, while the number of deep-water wells they supervise has risen almost ninefold.

The agency now has only 60 inspectors to examine nearly 4,000 facilities, a congressional hearing heard on Tuesday.

Obama, Bush Faulted for Lax Offshore Drill Regulation

The Obama administration continued a decade-long pattern of lax U.S. regulation of offshore oil and natural gas drilling that led to BP Plc’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico, lawmakers investigating the incident said.

Regulators during George W. Bush’s presidency failed to protect safety and the environment, and actions by President Barack Obama’s Interior Department were “more cosmetic than substantive,” Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, said today at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.

Decisions dating to the start of Bush’s administration played a role in the BP spill, the worst in U.S. history, Stupak said at the hearing examining the April 20 explosion on a drilling rig leased by BP. Congressional investigators said the Interior Department under Bush offered incentives for drillers without imposing safety standards.

Andrew Leonard has a new post up at Salon on Obama’s Elizabeth Warren mess

Nobody has a better claim to be the first director of the CFPB than Warren. She dreamed up the idea of such an agency in the first place, and she has been a tireless consumer advocate her entire career. Her tenure as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel looking into TARP has been dogged — and certainly put her at odds with Tim Geithner on several occasions. Never mind the quibbles; nominating Warren would make a bold statement that Obama’s intent to ensure bank reform will have teeth.

But make no mistake — the appointment will almost undoubtedly be filibustered by Republicans, and it is a tough call as to whether Warren would ultimately be confirmed. Too much of the coverage of the Warren controversy assumes that if Obama just has the guts to nominate her, it’s a done deal. But it’s not. As with bank reform in general, the power to confirm Warren resides in a handful of so-called moderate Republicans. It’s a sad and depressing commentary on the state of affairs in American politics today, but even with 59 Democratic senators, Scott Brown, R-Mass., has more power to decide a Warren appointment than Obama.

I’m in the camp that says appoint her anyway — and if the GOP won’t confirm her, then make a unilateral recess appointment at the first opportunity. I don’t think you could ask for a better narrative backdrop to the midterm election campaign than the sight of a united Republican Party filibustering the appointment of a consumer advocate ready to run an agency devoted to protecting Americans against the depredations of Wall Street. I would love to watch the likes of Republican senators Jim DeMint and Richard Shelby lay into Warren during televised hearings. And I would love to see Obama stick it to them by pushing her appointment through regardless.

I haven’t been following this story closely, but Dee talked about it on the previous thread. Shirley Sherrod: White House Forced My Resignation

Shirley Sherrod, the USDA’s former director of rural development in Georgia, said USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her Monday and said the White House wanted her to resign, the Associated Press reports.

“They called me twice,” Sherrod told the AP, noting that she was driving when she received the calls. “The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”

Sherrod…became the focus of scrutiny from Fox News and conservative blogs over remarks she gave at an NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet on March 27. A video of a portion of her remarks were posted on a conservative blog, giving the impression that Sherrod admitted to discriminating against a white farmer as an employee of the USDA.

The comments were taken out of context, however. In her remarks that day, Sherrod was recounting a story that pre-dates her tenure at the USDA by more than two decades. Sherrod says in her story that Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted; Chapter 12 was instituted for family farmers in 1986, while Sherrod was appointed to head the USDA’s Rural Development office in Georgia just last July. Furthermore, the point of Sherrod’s story is that race is not an issue.

Sherrod has said the video excerpt did not include the full story of her relationship with the farmer, with whom she says she became friends after helping him avoid foreclosure.

As I said, it’s a busy news day. So far I can’t find anything about BP employees who testified at the Congressional hearing. I know at least one of them claimed he can come because of “health problems.”

Please feel free to discuss these or other stories in the comments. What are you hearing?