Still editing photographs from the trip. Nothing new on this page, but if you look at the Photo Gallery or the Honeymoon section you’ll see some cool new stuff.
I’m not halfway through yet.
The good news is that I don’t have to pet the cat anymore. I’m sitting on the sofa and she’s sitting next to me, sitting up on her hips, not in the way you normally think of cats, and is now content just putting her paws on my hand. This makes editing photographs challenging.
I’m reminded of the old LBJ line about Walter Cronkite’s shift on Vietnam. This isn’t exactly that, but the premise is similar. When President Obama loses Rolling Stone, he’s got problems:
Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.
What’s happening in the Gulf is heartbreaking. It is economically, environmentally and culturally devastating. And there’s enough blame for everyone. And a lot of people deserve it. But the fingers are starting to point to the administration and, let’s be honest, this group isn’t that good at image or body work. Oh they’ve benefited from an admiring media, but now that a few journalists on the beat are doing journalisty things this is going to get ugly, in a hurry.
And a lot of people deserve the blame. And none of it will fix these precious, delicate, important places. Now that Rolling Stone has come around to that others will soon follow. Working in this White House won’t be much fun, I’d guess.
I’d like to contribute an idea on how to stop the leak. By taking all of Hollywood’s tapes of the upcoming Twilight movie reels and stuffing the film in the hole we might be able to slow this thing down to a trickle. We’ll also have the added bonus of not having to see the movie later this month. And just think of the positive publicity for the franchise. And we wouldn’t have to watch the movie!
