A little perspective is in order: the reason this is such a shocking disaster is precisely because this sort of thing is so rare. I’m not insensitive to how it’s going to affect the Gulf Coast. I live here. I’ve got shrimpers and fishermen in my family. And I promise you, in spite of this awful accident, we don’t want drilling shut down. Most people want it expanded. We need the jobs, the country needs the oil, and the federal government, with its massive spending binge, would surely like to have the revenue. A little known fact: other states split drilling revenue 50-50 with the federal government. Louisiana, on the other hand, has never received that. We’re fighting just to get to 37.5%. And even that doesn’t start until 2017.

Conservatives chant “Drill, baby, drill!” because we know that right now, oil is the most cost-effective form of energy available. We think it’s great that research is being done into green energy. We’d love it if hydrogen fuel cells, the wind and the sun could power how we live. But they can’t right now. So we need to continue drilling for oil, because these sort of accidents are part of the cost of doing business just as Chernobyl was part of the cost of nuclear energy.

At some point soon they’ll stop the thousands of gallons of oil per day from spilling into the Gulf. Some fish, birds, and assorted critters will die – others will be saved with the help of volunteers, just like they were after the Exxon Valdez disaster. The coastline will be cleaned, and the tourism and fishing industries will eventually come back and wildlife will return to the affected areas. We’ll figure out what caused the explosion on the rig, and try to prevent it from happening again. We’ll learn new lessons about how to prevent spills and how to mitigate the damage when the do happen. And we’ll keep drilling – or we should. Because the last thing we need in this train wreck of an economy is higher energy prices.

ADDED: Politics of fear – AP plays the otter card and Ace sums up:

It’s the childishness of this all though that bothers me, the refusal to accept the simple proposition that in life, there are choices, and choices have consequences, and sometimes it’s necessary to accept some downside to get a lot of upside. People don’t seem to acknowledge the upside of petroleum — like being able to drive places, or having heat and electricity in their homes, and so on — because it “just happens,” by magic, I guess.

On the other hand, show them a dying otter and they want to stop this all.

Added: The Anchoress links in one of her excellent roundup posts – thanks!

Added: Breitbart provides a smackdown, via Jeff G:

“This is an attack on the American people, this is who the left is in this country, this is why they want to fundamentally change it because they think we’re inherently terrible and we need to be socially engineered.”

That is how they behave. I guess some “original sin” concepts are more equal than others.

As for Helen’s concerns that “They can ruin lives, reputations, and once you send something into the air, it’s going to land, and there’s nothing that can curb them from saying anything they want,” tell it to the Tea Partiers falsely accused of racism.  Tell it to John McCain after the NYT published ridiculous, false rumors of his infidelity during the campaign.  Tell it to “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher.  Tell it to Sarah Palin as you uncritically publish whatever her daughter’s ex-boyfriend vomits up.  Tell it to the scientists who are ostracized because they think “consensus” is not science.  Tell it to all of us who know what Pallywood is. Tell it to Toyota, which actually makes really safe cars.   Tell it to insurance and pharmaceutical and oil companies, all of whose “obscene” profit margins are a fraction of Google’s apparently acceptable 27%.  Tell it to the parents of children who died because of other people’s unvaccinated children – while Jenny McCarthy has enjoyed hours of uncritical airtime to dispense her medical advice.

I could go on listing examples for hours.  For decades, journalists have presented themselves as unbiased, fair, impartial arbiters of the facts.  And until fairly recently – since technology has wrestled away their exclusive possession of news delivery – people believed it.  To whom much is given, much is expected, and that people are angry at the betrayal of the trust they invested in the media is entirely expected.  The problem is not that journalists are liberal.  It’s that they are liars and their whole profession is a sham.

Check out Henry Neufeld’s response – some very good points.

*Okay, there are a handful of journalists who are honest brokers of information; people I really admire.  But in general, the profession is dying because it deserves to die.

A few favorite stops – The Anchoress joins Ed Morrissey in wondering if and when the press will smarten up, but the answer is sadly predictable:

The self-recrimination of the press on its failures to ask questions or do investigative work only applies in one direction. And if we ever see another GOP president, the press will go full-jackal on him or her, using both Iraq AND the Obama presidency as justification for their their fervent displays of doubt and skepticism.

However, even then, they will never accuse themselves regarding Global Warming; they will never say “we failed to ask questions,” because on that issue, it is personal for them, much in the same way that passing something called Health Care Reform has become “personal” for Obama and for Speaker Pelosi.

The press is always happy to run with “J’accuse!” when the accused are not their fellow progressives.  But on the topic of their own reporting, “I confess” is limited to weak tea admissions on minor issues by ombudsmen who keep their fingers in the dam of reader outrage.  Contrast that with bloggers, who when they make mistakes, tend to promptly correct them – and who make no effort to hid our bias.  The media deserves to die, and if bloggers and the public in general is indulging in a little schadenfreude, well, who can blame us?

However – I’m going to enjoy the rest of my break – here’s something funny I found on Facebook, and I heartily recommend it:

Call the Nestle Hotline @ 1-800-295-0051. When asked if you want English or Spanish, wait quietly for about 10 secs & you will smile. Keep going & press 4, then press 7. If you comment on this, don’t give the secret away!! If the line is busy try again, it is worth it!

What’s been done to him is akin to rape.  He’s victimized, helpless, abused by his attacker – who, together with the state prosecuting him – hold his very life in their hands.  Even if it doesn’t go so far as to send him to prison, his reputation is forever harmed as potential employers and others Google his name and learn of the arrest.  And if he goes to prison, he may well be the victim of an actual rape.  False rape accusations are as much a life-destroying crime as committing an actual rape.  It’s unjust that she was only sentenced for a maximum of three years – even less time than the man she accused actually served.

Why did she do this terrible thing?  She got drunk, made her friends angry, and invented the rape to make them feel sorry for her.  I made some people angry when I suggested that women should be held more accountable for what they do when they’re drunk.   Sending this woman to prison is a good start.

Added:

They have so impressed even Bill Clinton that he was moved to say (at Davos), “Shimon, I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital at Haiti. The Israeli hospital was the only operational facility which was able to perform surgery and advanced tests.”

Carl in Jerusalem has more on how the IDF learned to administer medical care in such challenging circumstances.

And in response to this? A weird convergence of Truther loons and Muslim antisemitic conspiracy loons accuse them of doing all this good to gain access to steal organs. (Yes, seriously. No link to those jackasses; if you really want to have a dip into that sewage you can google it.)  No good deed goes unpunished.

A proud Democrat, she said that “I want to deliberately talk to the enemy” and “people deep, deep in the red states.”

Except, even this much appears to be a lie, because apparently “Ellie Light” wasn’t Barbara Brooks, but her husband, Winston Steward.  Barbara Brooks told Gawker,

“I’m not Ellie Light,” she told us. “My husband is. I never told anybody that I was Ellie Light. Winston wrote every single letter. He’s been doing it since he saw that the Gulf War was being fought under false pretenses. I told him from the beginning that he shouldn’t write letters under phony names, but he wanted to get them out there.”

So why did she tell the Plain Dealer, in the clearest possible terms, that she was, in fact, responsible for the Ellie Light correspondence? “That wasn’t me,” she says. “I don’t know how they got that. Maybe my husband was impersonating me.”

Is there some reason it was impossible for Ellie Light Barbara Brooks Winston Steward to just write his own opinion under his own name?  Why pretend to be a woman?  Why lie like this?  Was “proud Democrat” Winston so ashamed of his views that he couldn’t bring himself to say them openly?

Added: The Cleveland Plain Dealer provides this update, wherein Winston lies about, well, pretty much everything else.  Of course, it’s all because he’s terrified of the “right wing crazies” which I find extremely amusing from a Californian, where “right wing crazies” who have the temerity to oppose same sex marriage have their names, addresses, and job information posted on the internet so they can be hounded and stalked from public life.  As always, more projection from the left.

Strung up on a crucifix?  Sure!  Just like Madonna!

Bees, wasps, hornets, dead or dying animals, mixing pots of acid, operating antiquated heavy machinery, and as for the lit phosphorous, Bring It On!!

There’s no parents like stage parents… no parents I know, anyway. Video below the fold.

h/t Failblog, many of whose commenters fail to appreciate that people run websites for money and object to the ad for the movie. Go figure. I don’t recommend the movie, not having seen it (and I don’t intend to.) Nevertheless, the Fail content of this movie clip is substantial.

In no particular order: eight years of Chimperor, Bushitler and worse; the disgraceful racial attacks on Colin Powell and Condi Rice; countless f-bombs; millions of dollars of property damage at recruiter’s offices and the Vietnam monument and in Olympia, WA hindering troop support; literally tons of trash left on the ground after Obama’s inauguration (while the tea partiers left it spotless); Obama flipping the bird at Hillary like a seventh grader whose teacher assigned extra homework; about a third of the Democratic party is willing (via insane 9/11 conspiracy theories) to call the Bush administration mass murderers of Americans, not to mention what they say about civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan…

I could go on, but why?  Do these people actually believe the crap they print or are they willfully propagandizing the public?

The really funny thing is conservatives haven’t even taken off the gloves.  Yet.