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Thomas Sowell looks at administration cynicism on race and immigration.

… Regardless of what immigration policy anyone believes in, the government cannot carry out that policy until after it has first gained control of the borders. Regardless of what Washington politicians may say about how many immigrants should be allowed into the country, or on what basis, none of that matters when the real decision is in the hands of innumerable other people, who can simply climb over a fence along the border and come on in whenever they feel like it.

Even if they get caught, the most that is likely to happen to them is that they get sent back to try again later. In many cases in the past, they have been issued legal documents ordering them to appear in court– and were released inside the United States. Why anyone would think that people who disregarded the border and the fence would take a piece of paper more seriously defies logic.

That doesn’t mean that Washington politicians were stupid. They were political, which is worse. The point was to win Hispanic votes, even though not all Hispanics believe in open borders.

President Obama would rather have an issue with which to win the Hispanic vote than to have a bipartisan bill that would simply take control of the borders. Such a bill would help the country but that obviously takes a back seat in an election year. Even some members of Obama’s own party are uneasy with such cynicism.

Bill Kristol has advice for Charlie Rangel. Tell Obama to shove it. 

President Obama has offered this patronizing advice to Rep. Charlie Rangel:

“And he’s somebody who’s at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I’m sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.”

News flash: Our president really is a self-centered elitist (and ageist!).

Here’s my advice to Charlie: Defend yourself, make your case, fight for your reputation, and if need be accept a reprimand (or even censure)–but let your constituents render the real verdict, not the D.C. mob. If you do this, you have a good chance of extending your political career…beyond Obama’s.

In any case, do not follow Obama’s prescription of political death with dignity. “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

David Goldman looks at our current economic situation and what would help.

…The Fed and the administration claim that the problem is that small businesses can’t get bank loans. The problem, they insist, is monetary policy. Big businesses are being rewarded for laying off workers, stripping down to bare bones, and earning profits on their core businesses. They are—wisely, given the fecklessness at the rudder in Washington—hoarding cash; they don’t want to borrow.

But startup small businesses shouldn’t be financed with bank loans (except for secured financing of inventories and receivables). Most small businesses fail. This is Portfolio Theory 101. If you own the stock of 100 startups, and 99 go bust but one becomes Microsoft, you get rich. But if you are a bank, and you lend money to the 100 startups, and only 1 can pay you back, then you go bust.

Thus startups are financed with equity, not debt. This is taught to first-year finance students.

It doesn’t occur to the somnolent wizards of Constitution Avenue that the way to lure capital back to entrepreneurial activity is to increase the after-tax reward to entrepreneurs, by eliminating the capital gains tax, for example, or, even better, eliminating all taxation of capital income. Monetary policy has nothing to do the case. Monetary policy best addresses currency stability. Tax incentives best address economic growth. …

Financial Times Blog with warnings about our economy.

The ISM Survey of the US manufacturing sector (published on Monday) offers the first reliable glimpse of activity in the US economy in the third quarter of the year. It is not encouraging.

Although the headline reading was rather better than widely anticipated (an out-turn of 55.5 compared to 56.2 in June), the details of the survey showed that new orders are now slowing markedly, and inventories have started to rise more rapidly than companies may be intending. Taken together with the GDP data for Q2 (discussed in an earlier blog), the ISM survey points to a significant danger that the US economy will continue to slow sharply in the months ahead.

The ISM surveys in the US are among the few items of monthly information which are capable of moulding market sentiment in a profound way. This is because they have an excellent track record of picking up changes in trend in US activity, because they are never revised, and because they are published earlier than most other data series on the economy. …

Peter Wehner has quotes and clips of Biden, and some comments on the success of the surge in Iraq.

…One would be hard pressed to think of another person who was as persistently and consistently wrong about the surge as Biden (though Barack Obama would give him a good run for his money). Biden went so far as to advocate dividing up Iraq into three parts based on ethnicity, one of the more ill-informed and dangerous ideas to emerge among war critics.

The truth is that if Joe Biden had had his way, the war would have been lost, Iraq would probably be engulfed in something close to genocide, al-Qaeda would have emerged with its most important victory ever, and America would have sustained a defeat far worse than it did in Vietnam.

As for Biden’s claim that what was lacking in the past was a “coherent political process,” let’s be generous to the vice president: he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The then-American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, was one of its outstanding diplomats. And unlike the situation in Afghanistan under the Obama administration, in Iraq the commanding general at the time (David Petraeus) and the U.S. ambassador (Crocker) worked hand-in-glove. They were an extraordinarily effective team. In order to refresh Biden’s memory of the coherent political process that was in place, he might want to review Ambassador Crocker’s Senate testimony from September 2007, before a committee Biden himself sat on. …

In Forbes, Warren Meyer has unique experience in funds allocation. In an article that was a pleasure to read, he offers his insights on how to encourage economic growth.

…For all the talk about fiscal stimulus and jobs creation at the federal and state level, almost no one in government is doing anything about reducing the roadblocks to investment. For example, millions of people are newly unemployed, and in past recessions a large number of these folks have eschewed looking for a new corporate job and have started businesses of their own. Unfortunately, such prospective entrepreneurs will face a tangle of registration, regulatory and licensing hurdles, many of which have been backed by established businesses that want to avoid just this kind of new competition. …

…No one in government, that I have heard, has even suggested any sort of regulation holiday as a potential economic stimulus program. In fact, most of the legislative moves at the national level have made private investment less attractive. Business people making investments today have to plan for higher labor, energy and borrowing costs due to a series of 2,000-page pieces of legislation that few if anyone fully understand (or have even read). Capital gains tax reductions will almost certainly expire next year, and most business people who look at looming government deficits have to assume these shortfalls will be closed the same way they always have been closed: With new taxes on the backs of the most productive.

Rather than attempting to make investment easier, almost all government stimulus efforts to date have focused on trying to better optimize how and where investment capital is deployed. The core assumption behind all of these programs is that a few people in government can invest money more productively than the private entities from whom the government took the money. …

…To every one of the supporters of these government projects who claim to have created some number of jobs, I encourage the reader to ask a simple question–who was using the money before the government diverted it, and how many jobs were they creating?

It is always heartening to watch someone awaken to the fact that big government and its attendant coercion is not the answer. David Mamet’s essay on liberalism was featured in Pickings on March 19, 2008.  In Commentary, Terry Teachout discusses Mamet’s new book and his change of mind.

…Now Mamet has published a book of essays called Theatre (Faber and Faber, 157 pages) in which, among other things, he seeks to integrate his new way of thinking into his view of the art of drama. Although Theatre is not so much a political treatise as a professional apologia, it seems likely that those of his colleagues who write about it (to date, most have ignored it completely) will focus on its political aspect, in which they will doubtless find much to outrage them. Indeed, he offers a working definition of theater that is bound to fill the vast majority of his colleagues with horror:

“The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy. It is the most democratic of arts, for if the play does not appeal in its immediate presentation to the imagination or understanding of a sufficient constituency, it is replaced. … It is the province not of ideologues (whether in the pay of the state and called commissars, or tax subsidized through the university system and called intellectuals) but of show folk trying to make a living.”

Conversely, Mamet dismisses state subsidy for the theatrical arts as no more than a means of propping up incompetent “champions of right thinking” whose work would otherwise be incapable of attracting an audience. Such playwrights, he says, are purveyors of politically correct “pseudodramas” that “begin with a conclusion (capitalism, America, men, and so on, are bad) and award the audience for applauding its agreement.” For Mamet, such plays are the opposite of true theater, whose power lies not in its willingness to coddle our preconceptions but its unparalleled ability to shock us into seeing the world as it really is. “In the great drama,” he writes, “we follow a supposedly understood first principle to its astounding and unexpected conclusion. We are pleased to find ourselves able to revise our understanding.”…

WSJ reviewer Mark Bauerlein looks at a book exposing the rot in higher education where the customers are ignored and the people who work there are coddled and spoiled.

Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.

Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.

Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent”—that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium. …

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Charles Krauthammer discusses Ahmadinejad’s latest comment.

“They [the United States and Israel] have decided to attack at least two countries in the region in the next three months.”

– Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, July 26

…Ahmadinejad’s claim is not supported by a shred of evidence. So what is he up to?

It is a sign that he is under serious pressure. Passage of weak U.N. sanctions was followed by unilateral sanctions by the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union. Already, reports Reuters, Iran is experiencing a sharp drop in gasoline imports as Lloyd’s of London and other players refuse to insure the ships delivering them. …

Peggy Noonan tells Republicans that Chris Christie is the role model to follow.

…National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”

That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. …

…What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.” …

…Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. …

Jennifer Rubin doesn’t think much of Senator Lindsey Graham’s latest idea on illegal immigration.

Lindsey Graham is second to none when it comes to shameless pandering and preening. … But nothing quite tops this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he’s talked with other senators about crafting a constitutional amendment that would deny American citizenship to illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States.

Even the most aggressive figures on immigration reform think this is idiotic. Although we agree on practically nothing concerning this issue, I fully concur with Mark Krikorian on this one:

…“I’m exactly against changing this,” he said. “I think it’s sort of a stupid thing. You would end up with lots of U.S.-born illegal immigrants. There’s something like 300,000 kids born here to illegal immigrants every year.”…

And we have two posts from Mark Krikorian on the subject. Here are some of his thoughts:

Would it be cynical of me to think that McCain’s “little jerk” is just trying to burnish his tough-on-immigration bona fides?: …

…So the guy doesn’t want to do what’s necessary to actually stop illegal immigration, but he wants to make sure that the children born to all the illegals he helps bring here become U.S.-born illegal aliens? I’m afraid, though, that his rationale, whether he actually believes it or not, is in fact one shared by a lot of immigration hawks:

“People come here to have babies,” he said. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”

I don’t like illegals having U.S.-citizen kids any more than anyone else, but there’s no evidence suggesting that this “drop and leave” stuff is true — anything’s possible, I suppose, but it’s just an assertion at this point. My own sense is that most illegal alien women who have kids here (accounting for nearly 10 percent of all children born in the U.S. each year) didn’t come for that purpose; they came for jobs or to join relatives, and one thing led to another, birds-and-bees style, and they had kids. There are no doubt some people who dash across the border illegally to have kids, but they just can’t amount to a large share of the problem. Nor does the problem of “birth tourism” require a change in the Constitution — we just need to permit (and require) our consular officers to reject visa applications from pregnant women, inviting them to re-apply once they’ve given birth in their own countries. …

And here’s the second post, where Krikorian hears from US citizens whose jobs bring them into contact with women coming to the US to have children.

…And finally this:

Our daughter is an OB/GYN Doc here in Texas. You are correct in that citizenship for illegal’s babies is a symptom of the problem, but it is a real incentive for illegals to come and stay in this country. A couple of anecdotes. A few years ago an illegal walks into the ER on my daughter’s night on call. Mother (of 8 at the time) is in distress, as is the baby at 5 or 6 months. Have to put the mother in the hospital on bedrest for the rest of her pregnancy. Due to good care from our daughter and the hospital nurses, plus entire time in hospital, mother delivers 9th healthy baby a few months later. Disappears, walking out on tens of thousands of dollars, if not a couple hundred thousand, of doctor and hospital bills. Hospital is stiffed, our daughter is stiffed and of course the 9th US citizen is born . . .

I guess my point is I am somewhat in favor of not granting citizenship to the children of illegals, but really prefer sealing the border. If an illegal isn’t here, the citizenship issue isn’t an issue. I fear Graham’s bill is just a grandstand play to pump up his bona fides and not driven by any strong conviction—given his waffling/consorting with the Dem’s on so many other liberal issues. The illegal’s baby citizenship issue is just another bit of smokescreen to hide the real problem and NOT get serious about controlling our borders.

This is exactly my point, though expressed better and more concisely than I did.

David Harsanyi has exciting news about public schools in Washington D.C. and Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor.

…In 2006, 8 percent of eighth-graders in Washington, D.C., could perform minimal math, yet not a single teacher was fired for stinking up the place. In fact, as D.C.’s chancellor, Michelle Rhee, points out, for years over 90 percent of teachers in her district were evaluated as having “exceeded expectations.”

All of this makes Rhee’s decision to fire 241 Washington teachers — after they failed a new (real) evaluation system — a precedent-setting moment. Another 737 teachers could face a similar fate unless they significantly improve their performances. Does anyone doubt many of them will?

Rhee — appointed by a liberal mayor in the bluest of American cities — is a radical in the best sense of the word. Bureaucrats succeed through a devotion to risk-aversion. But Rhee came into the job and immediately commissioned an outside audit of the entire school district, laid off scores of administrators and non-essential staff, and closed more than 20 underperforming schools. …

Jonah Goldberg comments that Obama’s policies are the real environmental disaster.

…But now it increasingly appears that “the worst environmental disaster in American history” wasn’t all that bad. Yes, the loss of human life was tragic, and the loss of animal life was regrettable — but it also wasn’t that dramatic. Some birds were oiled and died, always a sad sight. But according to Time, the number of birds killed is — so far — less than 1 percent of the avian casualties of the Exxon Valdez. And to date, only three oiled mammal carcasses have been recovered. Three.

…The greatest damage from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (and yes, even with the hyper-deflation, it’s still a disaster) has been from the federal government. The drilling ban imposed by the administration, against the counsel of the sort of “sound science” Obama usually sanctifies, has been devastating to the region, costing thousands of jobs and untold millions in lost revenues and taxes. …
Meanwhile, if Obama is serious about driving America forward to a green economy “even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there,” he will take the Gulf region’s devastation on the road, destroying good jobs across the country (the oil and gas industry pays twice the national average) and replacing them with bad ones. He will replace cheap energy with expensive energy. (During the campaign, he promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket.”) He will place bets on unproven technologies while discarding proven ones. In short, he will nationalize a disastrous disaster policy. …

In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia says that the energy bill is a lot more vanilla now that the global warming hoax has been revealed. But do the Dems have any parliamentary rule tricks left? Will cap-and-trade magically reappear if the energy bill gets to conference?

Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid’s energy legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!

…Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax–oops, cap-and-trade–scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation’s fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.

…The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy) and gas companies (BP) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. …

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In the Telegraph, UK, Simon Heffer comments on Obami ineffectiveness in governance.

The shock about coming to America after an absence of four months is how, in that time, respect for and confidence in President Obama has slumped. It wasn’t good in March; now the effect of what one blogger has called his apparent “impotence” has taken hold. It is not clear what Mr Obama actually does. He isn’t engaged with the economy; he certainly isn’t engaged with foreign policy; he has abandoned hope of a climate change bill this year (and probably for ever); he has seen his health care bill into law, but America awaits news of how it will be implemented; he is under attack for a casual approach to illegal immigration, notably from the Mexican narco-state. He has only just girded himself to go campaigning for his party in the mid-term elections. Last Sunday was the 100-days-to-go mark, and the talk in politics here is of little else. Joe Biden, the vice-president, has been nominated as “campaigner in chief”. Why? What is the President doing?

He appears to be reading the newspapers and the blogs and watching television. Last week, a twisted opponent put out a selectively edited video of a black Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, apparently admitting discriminating against a white farmer. Mrs Sherrod had done nothing of the sort – either the discrimination or, therefore, the admission of it – but was immediately sacked, for fear that Fox News was about to broadcast the video. This outrageous act was followed by an even more outrageous apology by the president the next day  …

…This immediate proof of mismanagement adds to the cumulative feeling on so many other fronts that Mr Obama and his team simply don’t understand governance. Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.

Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. …

Noemie Emery sees the same things as she catalogs the rise and fall of the Left. It is hard to think how Obama could have played his hand more poorly.

…What happened? Obama may have begun believing there was a coalition in place for the changes he wanted, but, for at least six different reasons, he and his friends were wrong. First, bad as it was, 2009 was no 1933, a perilous time when the country was not only strapped, but teetering on the raw edge of a social implosion. Second, Obama was no FDR, a political master who with one major exception—his court-packing plan after his 1936 landslide—had near-perfect pitch for what the country could take at each given moment, and seldom moved past these parameters. Third, when FDR became president, the crisis had already gone on for three years with no improvement; Obama’s crisis had gone on for just four months, and the first steps to check it had already been taken. Fourth, this crash had been caused largely by leverage and debate, which made people averse to more borrowing and spending. Fifth, when FDR came on the scene, the country arguably was undergoverned, with few regulations, and no safety nets. In 2009, this was hardly the case. Sixth and last, FDR and his voters hadn’t lived through a sorry decade like the 1970s, which had shown that while no regulation and no safety nets did not work well, too much of both didn’t work either. If trust in markets was no longer unbounded, neither was trust in the state. Those 60-plus years of experience made a very big difference. The era of big government being over was a whole lot more durable than Obama had thought.

Had Obama really been FDR, this would not have surprised him, as transformative leaders are always in touch with their times. …

…As Henninger concluded, “Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party .??.??. and emptied it.” Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions poll, conducted in the second week of July, showed that only 11 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. “Half of Americans now say they have ‘very little’ or ‘no’ confidence in Congress, up from 38 percent in 2009—and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973.” Talk about change, if you care to. And as for health care, Obama’s major achievement, when the bill passed, it was opposed by a 20-point spread by the general public, and since then it has only sunk lower. In some polls, around 60 percent of respondents say that they want it repealed. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on two governors who are bucking the big-government-is-the-answer trend.

Gov. Chris Christie continues to earn kudos from conservatives and liberals alike. Gov. Bob McDonnell has a 64 percent approval after less than a year as Virginia’s governor. Both Christie and McDonnell are garnering praise for doing what inside-the-Beltway Democrats refuse to do — cut spending, resist calls to hike taxes, and stand up to public-employee unions. … They provide a vivid contrast to Obamaism and to the notion that only by a massive increase in the size of government and corresponding tax increases can we pull out of our economic tailspin. …

RealClearPolitics.com has some wonderful quotes from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie on “Morning Joe”: This teacher complaining, they’re getting four-to-five percent salary increases a year in a zero percent inflation world; they get free health benefits from the day they’re hired–for their entire family–until the day they die. They believe they’re entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who have lost their homes, had their hours cut back, and all we asked them to do was freeze their salary for one year and pay one-and-a-half percent of their salary for their health benefits. For the average teacher in New Jersey, you’re talking about $750 a year for full-family health coverage. Now, I don’t think that’s a lot to ask, and I don’t think we can continue anymore to be having the good people of New Jersey who have been laid off and all the rest–as much as I love teachers–you know, everyone’s got to be part of the sacrifice.

…

Sorkin: Are you not worried though about spending in your state in terms of those teachers who are actually going to be taking these cuts, whether they are going to be able to keep spending in the state and what that means for the economy?

Christie: First of all, they’re not taking any cuts. I asked them to take cuts, and they said no. So, what cuts are they taking? These teachers are still getting their four or five percent increases. That interplay that you just saw was about me trying to convince people that they need to take a freeze, but, in the end, they didn’t. The state teachers union said–they had a rally in Trenton against me. 35,000 people came from the teachers. You know what that rally was? The “me first” rally. “Pay me my raise first. Pay me my free health benefits first. Pay me my pension first. And everybody else in New Jersey, get to the back of the line.” Well, you know what? I’m not going to sit by and allow that to go unnoticed, so we’ll shine a bright light on it, and we’ll see how the people react. But I think we are seeing how the people of New Jersey are reacting, and that’s how you make it politically palatable in other states in the country. Just shine a bright light on greed and self-interest.”

Michael Barone looks at polling numbers and what similar numbers have meant in the past.

…To see why, take a look at the generic ballot question — which party’s candidate will you vote for in elections to the House? The current realclearpolitics.com average shows Republicans ahead by 45 to 41 percent. …

…So the Republicans’ current lead in the generic ballot question suggests they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when they won a 245-188 margin in the House — larger than any they’ve held ever since.

Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.

…Today a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the past seven weeks. …

Almost two months ago Pickings first featured some articles on the lack of long-term damage from oil spills. We featured Abe Greenwald’s piece on May 31st and a Popular Mechanics list of largest spills on June 5th. We have two pieces today that indicate the environmental problems from the Deepwater spill are already less than originally predicted.

Now it is Time magazine’s turn to display some common sense. It looks like Michael Grunwald is going to have to turn in his Liberal card. In Time, he writes about the oil spill and its minimal effects on the environment. Grunwald does slap Limbaugh around before saying Rush has a point. So maybe he’ll keep his liberal bona fides.

…Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana. …

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. …

…The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska’s Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden’s assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I’ve ever seen that were actually black. …

Even Vanity Fair sees the light. Julie Weiner posts on the search for spilled oil. If only environmentalists could find the oil, they could secure more government grants.

Scientists and government officials are currently on the hunt for much of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, reports The Washington Post. While experts remain positive that the oil is still in the Gulf—“That stuff’s somewhere,” a researcher hypothesized to the paper—most of it is AWOL. According to the Post, “[u]p to 4 million barrels (167 million gallons), the vast majority of the spill, remains unaccounted for in government statistics. Some of it has, most likely, been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water, but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.” …