BP Lower Than OJ, And Other Energy News

This from a diarist/commenter at Daily Kos today:

BP is incredibly unpopular -- one recent poll had it at 6% (no typo) approval rating, while OJ Simpson never got below 11%.

The diary is a keeper, about the Dems' new "Go Big Or Go Home" Congressional strategy for a blowout energy bill. Too bad we had to lose the Gulf to win the climate.

I Am Ashamed

Until today, I had never heard of Terry Pratchett or his wonderful sounding books.
I have only got to the early paragraph below of his two-part lecture on assisted suicide, but so far at least I expect him to become my new advisor on death. I think about it all the time, but it is not considered appropriate material for conversation, even among the people I know must also be thinking about it all the time. It seems to make people nervous.
Tomorrow I go to the library for as much Pratchett as I can find. Thank you once again, Metfilter denizens, without whom I would be a much poorer human being.

If you did not know there was ­anything wrong with me, you would not know there is anything wrong with me. The disease moves slowly, but you know it's there. ­Imagine a very, very slow-motion car crash. Nothing much seems to be ­happening. There's an occasional little bang, a crunch, a screw pops out and spins across the dashboard as if we're in Apollo 13. But the radio is still playing, the heater is on and it doesn't seem all that bad, except for the certain knowledge that sooner or later you will definitely be going headfirst through the windscreen.

UPDATE: The above link is to a short version of Pratchett's lecture.
This is the longer version.

Financial Regulation

They've got a bill. TPM promises more detail later. This is a biggie, folks.

Friviality Thursday

Aw, Jeez, Krugman

 I really do think we’re looking at a lost decade.

I could have waited til the end of summer to hear this. Yeah, yeah, you telegraphed your punches. It's not like I didn't see it coming.

Honorary Contrarienne? What Say You?

Tilda Swinton Julia Gillard becomes prime minister of New Zealand Australia.

McChrystal Gone, GOP Turns On Limbaugh

I'm gone for the day and look what happens, all hell breaks loose.
Thank God for Kwame Kilpatrick.
(Yoga lessons? Have you seen the guy? Built the way daily Big Macs mean you to look.)

McCrystal Resigns

Aw. I never did got around to setting up a poll. Should he resign? Should he be fired? When will he be fired? When will he resign?
A lot of blogger speculation that he did it on purpose to avoid getting stuck with his own failed Afghanistan strategy.
Anyhoo, here's a little Kos analysis of other things in the Rolling Stone story.

Josh Marshall says of course he resigned. But will they accept it?

It's being reported that Gen. McChrystal has submitted his resignation to President Obama and Secretary Gates. And that's being played in some publications as meaning McChrystal's out.
Not even close. It's entirely possible that McCrystal will be out this afternoon. But in the present circumstances McChrystal submitting his resignation is a given; it is absolutely essential for him to do that. He has no choice.
The question is whether Obama and Gates choose to accept. His submitting his resignation simply isn't the bombshell some are presenting it as.

Today's Poem

is the first one I've recommended in a while. Not even Yeats from Sunday. Hunh.

Packet
by Jamie Ross
A green light that comes when you never saw it coming, never heard it, felt it, but you knew it like the woman in the sandlot behind Abram's Grill who's just lost her lenses, on her hands and knees, her hair cut short but seems as if it's flowing, and the rush on her throat like a rise from birth, the music in the car as the engine goes silent while you fold down a seat for the stashed beam lantern with it's yellow plastic grip, six Ray-O-Vacs, the movement in the trees beyond Lake Michigan. It's a wave like that when the wind gets lost and the mail-boat from Racine, three hours late, cracks into a tanker, where the crew, like you, has waited on the decks, in the hold for two months out, to send a message home—or to get a certain scent, for just one instant, of weeds, in the dirt, the both of you groping.

Nobel Winner Explains My Entire Life

But I was too incompetent to know it.

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”