BY ED MORRISSEY   

The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire.  However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform rather than the initial explosion.  A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to get the proper resources to fight the fire:

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

BY ED MORRISSEY   

Despite the ruling this week that temporarily suspended the most controversial parts of Arizona’s new immigration-enforcement laws, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has no intention of slowing his efforts to find illegal immigrants and smuggling operations.  Under the aegis of previously-existing state laws, Arpaio has already committed to an enthusiastic approach to immigration law enforcement, regularly conducting sweeps and busting stash houses.  The setback in federal court has hardly dampened his spirits, as CBS News reports:

Lost in the hoopla over Arizona’s immigration law is the fact that state and local authorities for years have been doing their own aggressive crackdowns in the busiest illegal gateway into the country.

By STEVE TETREAULT

What is the mood in a state where almost one in five people is out of a job or underemployed? Where you've most likely held a foreclosure notice in your hand or know someone who has? Where nobody knows when the good times will return?

In Nevada, a new poll suggests people variously are angry, pessimistic, dismayed, anxious, fearful, skeptical and cynical, according to analysts reviewing the results. And to the extent Nevadans are looking for someone to blame, it probably does not help to be the Democrats in power.

"In Nevada and in many parts of the country the mood is very pessimistic," said Stephen Miller, chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "People are frightened. That mood out there is being reflected in the responses to the poll.

By Michael O'Brien

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) finds himself in a virtual tie on Friday with GOP candidate Sharron Angle in Nevada's Senate race.

Reid led Angle by one point, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal poll released this morning, well within the margin of error.

Forty-three percent of Nevada voters said they'd opt to reelect Reid if the election were held today, while 42 percent said they'd vote for Angle, a former state assemblywoman. Two percent said they'd choose someone else, 7 percent said they liked neither candidate, and 6 percent were undecided.

By JEANNINE AVERSA

The U.S. economic recovery will remain slow deep into next year, held back by shoppers reluctant to spend and employers hesitant to hire, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists.
The latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows economists have turned gloomier in the past three months. They foresee weaker growth and higher unemployment than they did before. As a result, the economists think the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero until at least next spring.
Yet despite their expectation of slower growth, a majority of the 42 economists surveyed believe the recovery remains on track, raising hopes that the economy can avoid falling back into a "double-dip" recession.

By ANDY BARR

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced Wednesday night that he is considering introducing a constitutional amendment that would change existing law to no longer grant citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the United States.

Currently, the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to any child born within the United States.

But with 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, Graham said it may be time to restrict the ability of immigrants to have children who become citizens just because they are born within the country.

BY Noemie Emery

When he signed the health care reform bill earlier this year, Barack Obama gave progressives the prize they had aimed at for seven-plus decades, an event they compared to the passage of civil rights and of Social Security. At the same time, he destroyed the best chance the Democrats had for enduring center-left governance since the mid 20th-century, shattered the coalition that brought him to power, and dealt his party and faction a political setback from which they may not recover for years.

Only a year ago, to hear the press tell it, Obama was that rare bird, a transformational figure, the new FDR or the left’s Ronald Reagan. He was no mere presider—like the Bushes or Clinton—but a deliverer of major-league change. The alignments and mores of the past 30 years had been shattered; all that remained was to pick up the pieces and fashion them into a whole new mosaic that would run things for decades. Few doubted that this would be done.

(AFP) – The Obama administration said Wednesday it is sending its ambassador in Tokyo to a ceremony next week marking the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the first time a US ambassador has attended the event.
"Ambassador John Roos will represent the United States at the August 6 Hiroshima Peace Memorial, to express respect for all of the victims of World War II," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.
He said Roos is the first ambassador to attend the event, but could not immediately confirm if he is the highest-ranking US official or the only US official so far to join the ceremony.
Roos is expected to lay a floral wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on August 6, the 65th anniversary of the World War II bombing that helped force Japan's surrender, reports said.

Japan is the only nation to have been attacked with atomic bombs.
More than 140,000 people were killed instantly in Hiroshima or died in the days and weeks after the US attack. Three days later a US plane dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing more than 70,000 people.

By JACQUES BILLEAUD and AMANDA LEE MYERS

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona's immigration law from taking effect, delivering a last-minute victory to opponents of the crackdown.

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents - including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws.

The judge also put on hold parts of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places. In addition, the judge blocked officers from making warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants.

"Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully-present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked," U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled.

By THOMAS JOSCELYN & BILL ROGGIO

The battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan has taken a new turn in the past two months. The Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, has ordered his forces to kill or capture any civilians, including Afghan women, who cooperate with Coalition forces. Omar’s latest directive contradicts his marching orders from just one year ago, when he told his Taliban commanders to refrain from harming civilians working with the Coalition.

Omar reportedly issued his latest order in June. NATO announced that it had recovered a copy of the directive in July. Since then, Afghan press outlets have published a translation of Omar’s five-point order.

By PATRICK H. CADDELL AND DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN

During the election campaign, Barack Obama sought to appeal to the best instincts of the electorate, to a post-partisan sentiment that he said would reinvigorate our democracy. He ran on a platform of reconciliation—of getting beyond "old labels" of right and left, red and blue states, and forging compromises based on shared values.

President Obama's Inaugural was a hopeful day, with an estimated 1.8 million people on the National Mall celebrating the election of America's first African-American president. The level of enthusiasm, the anticipation and the promise of something better could not have been more palpable.

And yet, it has not been realized. Not at all.

By COREY KILGANNON

Manhattan playgrounds are serious stuff.

Swings, slides and seesaws are so 20th century, an antiquated approach to child leisure now routinely laughed out of the sandbox of learning theory. These days, child learning experts recommend playgrounds that equip children with “loose parts” and other tools to create a “child directed” play space.

So do not be surprised if there is a – child-directed – line of budding young geniuses outside the figure-8-shaped Imagination Playground when it opens Tuesday at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan.

The playground has been five years in the making, a result of tons of research in progressive learning theory and child-development research, as well as $7.4 million in financing. In smaller, portable versions, it has been tested and tweaked after trial tours all over the city.

By Donovan Slack

Senator John Kerry said today he will voluntarily cut a check to the state of Massachusetts for some $500,000 in sales tax for a yacht he purchased in Rhode Island earlier this year.

"We’ve reached out to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and made clear that, whether owed or not, we intend to pay the equivalent taxes as if the boat’s home-port were currently in Massachusetts," Kerry said in a statement released this afternoon. "That payment is being made promptly."

Kerry has been dogged by questions in recent days by questions about whether he purposely tried to evade taxes in his home state by listing the $7 million yacht's home berth as Newport, R.I., when he actually intended to use the boat at his summer home on Nantucket. His yacht purchase was first reported in the Boston Herald.

Michael Medved

If conservatives want to succeed in taking our government back, we need to drop the popular but misguided slogan about "taking our country back."

Yes, an arrogantly incompetent president has combined with a corrupt collection of nanny-state, leftist hacks to grab (temporary) control of the Washington levers of power, but that doesn't mean that America itself has been seized or stolen. Clear-thinking conservatives can never lose sight of the fact that the nation, with its free market economy and incomparably dynamic private sector, is always bigger and better and, ultimately, more powerful than the government.

Moreover, the notion that we've lost the country itself - that America is "done," as one of my talk show colleagues recently proclaimed on air- only undermines the prospects for political success. Regaining control of Washington, D.C., after all, remains a less daunting undertaking—and a vastly more achievable goal—than "taking back" an entire nation that's somehow been lost.

 By Josh Rogin

As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gets ready to vote on President Obama's nuclear arms reductions treaty, several Republican senators are now hinting that they will support the agreement and are working toward bipartisan ratification.

The key senator to watch is Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican point man on the treaty. Kyl, who is in talks with the office of Vice President Joseph Biden, isn't saying which way he's leaning -- but his friends say Kyl is getting closer to supporting ratification.

Utah Sen. Bob Bennett told The Cable in an exclusive interview Tuesday that he wants to vote for the treaty, but is holding off until he gets the nod from his leadership.

By JEFF ZELENY

Democrats added another 20 House seats to their list of targeted districts, officials confirmed Tuesday evening, raising the party’s commitment in television advertising for the final weeks of the campaign to more than $49 million.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reserved a third wave of television time, one week after announcing the selection of the first two waves that identified 40 of the most vulnerable seats in the midterm elections. The latest cluster of districts includes 14 open seats, a sign that Democrats intend to expand their sights – to a degree, at least – beyond a strict defensive match.

The districts, which stretch from Arkansas to West Virginia, include five seats currently held by Republicans. It was unclear how much advertising time was being reserved in those Republican seats and whether it signaled a real commitment or a political head fake, with Democrats hoping to entice their rivals into also investing there.

The decisions, which were confirmed by party strategists on Tuesday evening, bring even more clarity to the battlefield on which the two parties will fight for control of Congress over the next three months as Republicans work to reclaim the majority.

By Lulu Liu

Worldwide, 2010 is on track to become the warmest year on record.

Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported recently that the average global temperature was higher over the past 12 months than during any other 12-month period in history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released corroborating data, adding that the past four months, including June, have each individually been the hottest on record as well.

The NASA findings were based on data from 5,000 weather stations around the world, said scientist Reto Ruedy, co-author of the study. Scientists used temperature anomalies, or departures from the baseline, rather than absolute measurements to account for differences in the instruments of individual stations.

The average global temperature, computed over a 12-month period, reached a new record in May and held steady for the month of June, he said. This was despite the recent minimum in solar activity, which should have had a cooling effect on Earth.

By IVAN MORENO

The federal government is rapidly expanding a program to identify illegal immigrants using fingerprints from arrests, drawing opposition from local authorities and advocates who argue the initiative amounts to an excessive dragnet.

The program has gotten less attention than Arizona's new immigration law, but it may end up having a bigger impact because of its potential to round up and deport so many immigrants nationwide.

The San Francisco sheriff wanted nothing to do with the program, and the City Council in Washington, D.C., blocked use of the fingerprint plan in the nation's capital. Colorado is the latest to debate the program, called Secure Communities, and immigrant groups have begun to speak up, telling the governor in a letter last week that the initiative will make crime victims reluctant to cooperate with police "due to fear of being drawn into the immigration regime."

The US Coast Guard dispatched emergency teams Tuesday after a boat crashed into an oil well off the coast of New Orleans, reportedly sending crude spewing some 20 feet into the air.

The wellhead, located about 65 miles (104 kilometers) south of New Orleans, was ruptured when it was struck by a dredge barge being pulled by a tug.

The Coast Guard said it could not immediately confirm reports that a giant fountain of oil was now spewing from the damaged wellhead, which was situated only six feet (1.8 meters) below the surface of the sea.

A strike Coast Guard team from Mobile, Alabama had been dispatched by boat to the scene as well as a helicopter from New Orleans with a marine pollution investigator on board.

"There have been reports of oil from the elision and we are investigating those reports to mitigate any environmental concerns," petty officer William Colclough, a Coast Guard spokesman, told AFP.

"The oil spill liability trust fund has been enacted to provide monetary support for any clean-up operation."

Unrelated to the massive gusher recently capped by BP deep down on the seabed, the incident did occur in a nearby part of the Gulf of Mexico and could require clean-up vessels to be redeployed if reports are confirmed.

By HARRY R. WEBER and JANE WARDELL

The American picked to lead oil giant BP as it struggles to restore its finances and oil spill-stained reputation pledged Tuesday that his company will remain committed to the Gulf region even after the busted well is sealed.

Robert Dudley will become BP PLC's first ever non-British chief executive, the company said as it reported a record quarterly $17 billion loss and set aside $32.2 billion to cover costs from the spill.

Ending weeks of speculation, BP confirmed that gaffe-prone Tony Hayward will step down Oct. 1 as the London-based company seeks to reassure both the public and investors that it is learning lessons from the spill.

"There's no question we are going to learn things from this investigation of the incident," Dudley told reporters by phone from London after the announcement was made.

By BENJAMIN SPILLMAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Last-minute preparations were under way this morning at St. Joseph, Husband of Mary Roman Catholic Church in Las Vegas for the funeral of former Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn.

An honor guard practiced its formation in the church courtyard while law enforcement officials prepared to sweep the building for security purposes.

A previously scheduled mass was being held inside the sanctuary. Once it is over the building will be cleared and opened to the public in advance of the 10 a.m. funeral for Guinn.

Eulogies will be given by state Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, former Guinn Chief of Staff Pete Ernaut and longtime friend George Randall.

Guinn was a popular, two-term Republican governor who served from 1999 to 2007. He died Thursday at age 73 while working on the roof of his Las Vegas home.

The funeral is open to the public, but parking at the church is limited.

People who are unable to attend can watch services online or on television.

By SEAN MURPHY

An Oklahoma judicial candidate is fending off a political attack from his daughter, who has taken out a local newspaper ad urging voters: "Do not vote for my dad!"

McClain County judicial hopeful John Mantooth's daughter and son-in-law paid for the quarter-page advertisement, which features a picture of the daughter's family, highlights cases in which Mantooth has been sued and lists a website the couple started, http://www.donotvoteformydad.com.

Mantooth said the bad blood stems from his 1981 divorce from his daughter's mother.

"This is a family issue which should have been kept private," he said Monday. "I'm very sad about this. I'm very disappointed. I'm hurt, but I love my daughter, and I want things to get better, and I hope they will."

By JEFFREY KOFMAN

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there's one problem -- they're having trouble finding it.

Watch 'World News' for the latest coverage on the Gulf oil spill.

At its peak last month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.

Today, ABC News surveyed a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen.

BY JAMES W. CEASER

From charisma to populism—this is the slippery slope down which Barack Obama has been sliding over the past two years. In June 2008, Obama the candidate described his nomination as “the moment when .  .  . our planet began to heal.” In June 2010, Obama the president promised his partisans he would find an “ass to kick.”

With the peculiar magic of his presidential campaign now a faded memory, Obama is shoring up support by the cruder method of divisive appeals. Long before the current (already hugely extended) campaign season began, Obama made it a practice to target opposition symbols (“the insurance industry,” “speculators,” “a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” the oil companies), call out and assail individual opponents (Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner), and refer disparagingly to the Tea Party movement and Republicans in general (“this crowd”). More than a half-year before the midterm elections, he tried to revive his electoral base of “young people, African Americans, Latinos, and women” by taking a page from Al Gore’s 2000 campaign and embracing the shop-worn slogan, “I won’t stop fighting for you.”

By Michael Gerson

The Wikileaks document download -- illustrating Afghan corruption, Pakistani duplicity and Taliban toughness -- revealed little that is new. But it will intensify a popular kind of desperation.

A consensus is growing among foreign policy realists, skittish NATO allies and antiwar activists that the time has come to cut a deal with the Taliban. The Afghan government, they argue, is hopeless; recent elections were discrediting; nation-building has failed. The only hope is to pursue not only reintegration of low- and mid-level Taliban fighters into Afghan society but reconciliation with Taliban leaders based in Pakistan. As long as these leaders end their relationship with al-Qaeda -- the only firm, non-negotiable red line -- the Taliban could return to effective control of southern Afghanistan in a more decentralized system.

By ERIC SCHMITT and HELENE COOPER

The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war on Monday as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased pressure on President Obama to defend his war strategy.

On Capitol Hill, a leading Senate Democrat said the documents, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, would intensify Congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy.

“Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent,” said Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and has been an influential supporter of the war.

Michael Barone

Grass somehow manages to grow up through small cracks in the sidewalk. Similarly, the American private sector somehow seems to be exerting itself despite the vast expansion of government by the Barack Obama administration and congressional Democrats.
Case in point: the announcement last week by four oil companies -- Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell -- that they are setting up a $1 billion joint venture to design, build and operate a rapid-response system to contain offshore oil spills as deep as and deeper than BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Their goal is a system that can start mobilizing within 24 hours of an oil spill. They hope to have it up and running within 18 months.

BY LAURA CURTIS   

Obama isn’t letting the oil spill go to waste. Dissatisfied with how his repeated attempts at job killing drilling moratoriums are being smacked down in court, he’s recycled his coal plant bankruptcy plan and broadcast his intent to drown drillers in regulation. He’s also using it to promote his shiny new National Ocean Council.

Clearly, a “coordinated Federal effort, proactively guided by a senior-level interagency body” will finally protect us from oil spills, overfishing, pollution, coastal development and the impacts of climate change. And reorganizing a lot of smaller agencies and departments under one big one is a great idea. It’s worked out so well at the Department of Homeland Security!

After all, what can’t government agencies do? (Besides basic functions like building adequate levees, securing the border, providing safe health care to veterans, and getting oil skimmers into the Gulf in a timely fashion.)

BY ED MORRISSEY   

Of all Fridays to conduct a news dump, last Friday may have been the best.  The conservative grassroots and the progressive organizations busied themselves in Las Vegas, and the political media turned its attention to Sin City.  The Wall Street Journal minded the store, however, and noticed the late release of the White House’s semi-annual budget review.  It’s easy to see why the Obama administration didn’t want to draw any attention to it (via Instapundit):

Democrats have been running Congress for nearly four years, and President Obama has been at the White House for 18 months, so it’s not too soon to ask: How’s that working out? One devastating scorecard came out Friday from the White House, in the form of its own semi-annual budget review.

The message: Tax revenues are smaller, spending is greater, and the deficits are thus larger than the White House has been saying. No wonder it dumped the news on the eve of a sweltering mid-July weekend.

 

(AP)  President Hugo Chavez threatened Sunday to halt oil sales to the United States if Venezuela is attacked by its U.S.-allied neighbor Colombia.

Chavez said during a speech to thousands of supporters that if there were an "armed aggression against Venezuela" from Colombia backed by the U.S., "we would suspend shipments of oil."

Chavez said "we wouldn't send one more drop" of oil to the United States, which is the top buyer of oil from the South American country.

The Venezuelan leader cut off diplomatic relations with Colombia on Thursday after outgoing President Alvaro Uribe's government presented photos, videos and maps of what it said were Colombian rebel camps inside Venezuela.

by Tina Brown

Shirley Sherrod’s firing isn’t a teachable moment. It was a wake-up call for the White House gang that can’t shoot straight.

Let’s NOT have a conversation about race. The calls for Obama to now make the Shirley Sherrod debacle a teachable moment fills me with panic that the president will retreat to the Oval Office and craft a soaring piece of oratory, instead of getting on with the humdrum business of firing the stumbling, bumbling members of his own team who, as the saying goes, can’t find their ass with either hand.

It doesn’t take much imagination to know how much the president must have seethed to be derailed from his policy agenda by this Republican attack mutt, Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart’s genre of dirty tricks were old news even in the Whitewater era. Public figures know from the daily incinerated reputations that any time you open your mouth near a Twitter feed, your career can go up in smoke. It remains amazing that USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack didn’t even accord Shirley Sherrod the kind of pause a minor executive in a corporate human resources department would have felt obliged to offer and have someone—anyone—listen to the full tape of Sherrod’s NAACP speech or even read the text.

by Tunku Varadarajan

The WikiLeaks files make it plain: Islamabad is the Taliban’s faithful ally. Tunku Varadarajan argues it’s time for the U.S. to stop paying money to Pakistan so they can help our enemies kill us. Plus, the seven most shocking secrets from the WikiLeaks files.

The latest gaudy gush from WikiLeaks will leave the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department soggy and irritable for many days. But one aspect of the leak—that concerning Pakistan’s brazenly unstinting support for the insurgency in Afghanistan—should be news to absolutely no one.

In fact, one might say that the one good thing to come out of this latest leak—a thing so good that it is worth the “collateral damage” to the U.S. from everything else—is that it could spell the end of Pakistan’s repulsive double game. This is a game in which that country takes billions of dollars of our aid money (money paid, in part, in taxes by the kin of American soldiers killed by the Taliban) and then blithely, devilishly, mendaciously stabs us in the back by arming, protecting, financing, hiding, and advising the same forces against whom this country is at war. We pay them money so that they can help our enemies kill us.