The bottom line -- and I know this will surprise you -- is that the administration is and has been totally out of its depth. The estimate of flow rate they've been pushing is off by a factor of twenty, and the suckitude is fully on display:

Federal officials testified in hearings on Tuesday that they were putting together a crack team to get to the bottom of how big the spill really is. That effort comes a month after the April 20 explosion that triggered the unprecedented oil spill in deep waters of the United States. Experts say knowing that amount is crucial for efforts to cap the broken wellhead and to monitor and clean up the oil.

A month? And now they're putting together a "crack team"? To determine a flow rate we should have been able to figure out from Day One, if BP were sharing their data, instead of acting like a sovereign state?

I must say, the Obama Administration, and a coterie of press flunkies, have handed GW Bush a get out of jail free card into perpetuity.

The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week by the largest amount in three months. The surge is evidence of how volatile the job market remains, even as the economy grows.

Applications for unemployment benefits rose to 471,000 last week, up by 25,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the first increase in five weeks and the biggest jump since a gain of 40,000 in February.

The forecast had been for claims to fall by around 4,000 from the previous week.

Some of that old-time, race-based attitude--a Kentucky mix of romantic benevolence and cruel disdain (immortalized in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation)--has seeped into the groundwater of the Tea Party. I attended one of its first rallies, in Louisville more than a year ago, and I saw on the ground some of the anti-busing elements of old there.

If Dr. Rand Paul doesn't immediately apologize for holding his victory rally at a private club--and doesn't abandon his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act--then he will not only pollute the Tea Party, he will severely damage the GOP's chances of winning control of either the House or Senate this fall.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan expressed misgivings about the Supreme Court's ruling in the 2000 Bush v. Gore election case, according to newly released documents that provide further insight into her views on how judges should do their jobs.

In her handwritten notes for a speech she gave to Princeton University alumni in 2003, Ms. Kagan cited the decision, which held that Democratic candidate Al Gore's team wasn't entitled to a vote recount in Florida, as an example of her view that judges' reasoning "necessarily + inevitably" involves "political + policy questions."

"Bush v. Gore is only the tip of the iceberg," Ms. Kagan wrote. "It happens all over. And we know it does." Courts "should defer to political branches," she added, and "judicial review should be exercised with caution."

link

Watch your hard drives down under travelers...the man just got nosier.

Rand Paul lashed out at the "loony left" for pressing him on his view of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in an interview with Laura Ingraham this morning.

"I've never really favored any change in the Civil Rights Act," he said. "They seem to have unleashed some of the loony left on me."

Paul called the Civil Rights Act "settled" but suggested he does view federal regulation of private business on matters of racial discrimination as fundamentally unconstitutional.

A sympathetic Ingraham questioned his political judgement in appearing on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, where he was pressed on the question yesterday.

"Why the heck would you go on the Rachel Maddow Show?" she askd. "What do you think you're going to get when you go on Rachel Maddow's show?"

Paul: You know, I think a lot of things on employment should be done locally, you know, when it comes to figuring out what's right or wrong locally. Some of the things - you know, for example, I think we can come up with common sense solutions - like, for example, if you have a three-story building, when you have someone apply for a job, you might get them a job on the first floor if they're in a wheelchair as opposed to making the person in the business put an elevator in, you know what I mean?