Just as “clean air” means “pollution like you’ve never imagined” and “healthy forests” means “clear-cutting and four-lane highways with convenience stores,” so “banning oil drilling near Florida” means “Go for it!”

Presidential Brother Jeb Bush has apparently had it all explained to him since yesterday, when PR reported even he didn’t know what his slimeball sibling was up to. Now he’s on board with selling out Florida shores to Big Oil.

Tallahassee Democrat:

The governor said he will seek a pact with the U.S. Department of the Interior to establish a 100-mile ban on oil drilling off Florida’s shores, diminishing the importance of the oil and gas inventory, which is part of the new energy bill speeding through Congress this week…

“Our goal would be to have a moratorium 100 miles from Jacksonville to Pensacola,” Bush said, adding that the section of water adjacent to the Florida line into Alabama should be included in the 100-mile buffer zone.”

Sounds good, right? Well, no.

Critics immediately seized on the governor’s comments as backpedaling, accusing him of playing into the White House’s goal of opening the eastern Gulf of Mexico just beyond the 100-mile buffer to new drilling.

“That’s a complete retrenchment,” said Dan McLaughlin, spokesman for U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who has led the fight against the administration’s push for new energy development in the Gulf.

“A 100-mile buffer off the Gulf Coast of Florida would probably be the biggest sellout in modern state history,” he said. “It would give up the entire Eastern Planning Area.”

…[McLaughlin] said he believes the governor’s position is evidence that he will not oppose the administration’s effort to support a 100-mile buffer in the gulf and then open the rest of the region to drilling. The distance between Tampa Bay and the Alabama line is 285 miles, 185 miles of which would now be open to drilling, he said.

And throwing in that “Jacksonville to Pensacola” comment is like saying Sprite is fat-free. Duh. No one’s talking about drilling in the Atlantic.

McLaughlin also chided the governor’s attempts to portray Florida’s southeastern coast as being under threat to oil drilling…

Because the Florida Straits surrounding the Keys are in a marine sanctuary, drilling will not occur there, he said. If oil exists beyond the southeastern coast of the state, the drop-off in the continental shelf is too steep to drill. And for decades the areas along the central and northern Atlantic coast have not been under consideration because the federal government cannot allow oil rigs along the area used for NASA’s shuttle launch.

“It would be no great achievement to push for protections on the East Coast and the Keys,” McLaughlin said. “It’s the eastern Gulf area that’s up for grabs.”

I can almost see the rigs from here.

I don’t know how widely this is being reported in the news, but we’re all pretty shook up by it down here in Miami.

Yesterday at around 6 p.m., longtime Miami politician Arthur Teele walked into the Miami Herald’s lobby, told a security guard to give a message to columnist Jim Defede (“Tell my wife I love her.”) and then, as Miami police arrived at the scene, fatally shot himself in the head. Teele, who was under 26 federal indictments for a variety of alleged misdeeds, including kickbacks from Miami International Airport contracts, was the subject of an especially nasty cover story in the Miami New Times that appeared on newstands yesterday.

The 14-page New Times story covered in minute detail the 15-year course of Teele’s political career, but the most devastating revelation was Teele’s alleged relationship with a transvestite prostitute.

Teele had spoken with Defede twice earlier in the day, and one of the conversations went on for nearlyt an hour and a half. As Teele became more unbalanced on the phone, Defede recorded one of the conversations without informing Teele, a felony in Florida. While they were still mopping up the lobby, Defede confessed to the illicit taping to his bosses, who summarily fired him and spiked the column based on his conversations with Teele.

In typical Defede pique, he told his co-workers that he had confessed, expecting to receive a suspension or other punishment, “but they decided to go for the death penalty.”

As of this morning, the Miami homicide detectives were still trying to locate Defede to question him about his conversations with Teele.

The whole sordid affair only raises questions: Why did Teele kill himself in the Herald lobby? Why did Defede decide to tape the conversation? Did Teele indicate he was in a self-destructive mental state? Should the Herald have punished Defede rather than fire him? Where does a 350-pound columnist whose photo is regularly published in the Herald hide? And who pays $450 a pop to a transvestite prostitute?

It’s all sad. Teele did some good things for the black Overtown community, and while he undeniably did some bad things, too, this still was an ignominious end to a checkered career. Defede was a popular columnist, but he did a bad thing, and now he’ll probably have to go back to the New Times from whence he came, where journalistic standards are looser.

Also:
The Poynter Institute is hosting an on-line discussion of Defede’s firing by the Miami Herald here. Issues of privacy, whether Defede actually broke the law or whether the Herald was simply looking for a reason to fire a gadfly who purloined local polittcians and businessmen are being discussed.

If you’ve been under the same rock as me (doubtful – mine is pretty remote), then you also missed it when our esteemed and sure-footed military leaders ordered American troops in England to hide like George Bush from an unscreened crowd after the London subway bombings.

They didn’t miss it in England. Columnist Brian Reade, in London’s Daily Mirror had some really choice words for us.

One thing you learn when disaster strikes is how right you were about the dodgy specimens in your midst…

How typical was it that all of its 12,000 servicemen stationed in Britain should be banned from travelling within the M25 for five days, as Londoners tried to show the terrorists and the wider world that life goes on as normal?

Once again we saw, as we have in the numerous deaths through “friendly fire”, when the heat is on, the US military operates like a selfish shower of headless chickens.

It was the same back home, where the Gibbon-in-Chief used the bombings to convince a sceptical electorate that soldiers may be dying in Iraq, but hey, they’re doing so to stop your local subway being blown up.

The American Press, largely a gutless shower of sycophants, have demonised the UK for its tolerance of Muslims.

Commentators labelled “Londonistan” the single biggest threat to American security, and demanded all Britons get a visa before entering their airspace.

Thanks buddies. It’s good to know you’re right behind the people who foolishly stuck their heads above the parapet with you in Iraq.

[…]

TomDispatch has posted an interesting “Letter from Ground Zero” that synthesizes a lot of the coverage of the Rove leak and puts it in the context of the Cold War. TomDispatch received special permission to reprint Jonathan Schell’s “The Bomb and Karl Rove” from The Nation.

Here’s an excerpt:

Like every important government crisis, the outing of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame by the President’s chief political adviser, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, perhaps among others, must be seen in many contexts at once. (As all the world knows, Rove’s aim was to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly disproved the administration’s claim that Iraq was buying uranium yellow-cake from Niger — a key element in the Administration’s justifications for the Iraq War.) Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Sidney Blumenthal of Salon point to the broader story of Rove’s habitual practice of defending his political clients by smearing their competitors and detractors. Blumenthal titles his piece “Rove’s War” and Fineman speaks of “The World According to Rove.” Frank Rich of the New York Times, on the other hand, suggests that the most important war to look at is the one in Iraq. He says that the injustice to the Wilsons and even to the CIA is secondary: “The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds.” In other words, what’s important is not the “war” but the war.

Surely, they are all right. It’s true that the harm to the Wilsons cannot be compared to the deaths of thousands in the misbegotten conflict, but it’s also true that the resolution of the scandal is likely to have a lasting impact on American politics, and even on the American system of government. Perhaps the most important political question is whether the Bush administration is to be held accountable for any of its actions, or whether it now enjoys complete impunity and a free field of action to do whatever it likes — from waging war to designing and presiding over systems of torture to breaking domestic law. There are other contexts to consider, too.

Read the rest here (second article).

As the story has emerged so far, we have learned that White House staffers Karl Rove and Scooter Libby leaked the identity of a secret CIA agent to various reporters in the July 2003. Here at Pensito Review, we have also expressed our suspicion that former Bush flying monkey Ari Fleischer was also a leaker involved in the campaign to smear White House critic Joe Wilson by revealing the secret identity of his wife Valerie Plame.

Today the New York Times is reporting that, indeed, a third White House staffer gave up Plame’s identity to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus:

In the same week in July 2003 in which Bush administration officials told a syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter that a C.I.A. officer had initiated her husband’s mission to Niger, an administration official provided a Washington Post reporter with a similar account.

The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.

In that exchange, Mr. Pincus says, “an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention” to the trip to Niger by Joseph C. Wilson IV “because it was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, an analyst with the agency who was working on weapons of mass destruction.”

What is interesting – if that’s the right word – about this is the fact that Pincus is one of the two Washington Post reporters who are covering the Bush CIA Leak investigation. Here we have two MSM journos covering a story interviewing each other.

Curiouser and curiouser…

Karl Rove (right) and Bob Novak “off the record” in 2003.

On CNN’s “Inside Politics yesterday, Candy Crowley interviewed Robert “Bob” Novak about the Valerie Plame case, or, as I like to think of it, the Leaking Rove case:

CROWLEY: I wanted to talk to you about the CIA leak story, because a couple of things have come out that I wanted to see if I could get you to talk about. The first one is that there is a story out there that Karl Rove testified that you were the one that told him that Valerie Plame was at the CIA.

NOVAK: Well I can’t talk about anything that I have done. But I would say that it’s, to me, very interesting that all these leaks on the grand jury are not coming from the grand jury, or — as far as I know — or from the special prosecutor. They are coming from lawyers for various people who are participating in it, or the participants themselves, which is a little bit on the unusual side.

The question is, really, political question, is Karl Rove in serious trouble because of this? And you get all kinds of views, but the consensus in the Republicans I talked to is that the word is coming out from the White House he doesn’t have any legal problems, he’s not going to be prosecuted. If that’s right — I have no idea whether that’s right — I think he’s going to be OK. He’s not going to be popular with the people who are attacking him anyway.

I noticed that this has revived the whole story which is the reason I haven’t been on television very much lately. And so all things might have a happy consequence, but it has revived the story and the Democrats are trying to make a lot of it. But I think this is a hard story to keep alive until the grand jury and special prosecutor came up with something.

CROWLEY: Well outside whether you testify — I assume you can’t tell us whether you testified at the grand jury or still won’t tell us. Outside of that, can you tell us whether you ever told Karl Rove about Valerie Plame’s status?

NOVAK: I can’t tell anything I ever talked to Karl Rove about, because I don’t think I ever talked to him about any subject even the time of day, on the record.

Personally, if either Rove or Novak told me the time of day, I’d get a second opinion.

The folks who brought you the, “we’ll act if someone committed a crime” distinction as well as the constantly morphing justification for war in Iraq now have a whole new standard in sleight of hand.

They’re calling Florida Louisiana for purposes of drilling for oil.

Anyone doubting that George Bush is just a money- and power-grubbing sham should come on down to the Sunshine State. And check with his brother, Jeb and loyal minion, Sen. Mel Martinez, while you’re at it. The “honesty” president didn’t bother to clue them in on his end run.

St. Petersburg Times:

With final negotiations over the massive federal energy bill almost finished, the Bush administration caught some of its most loyal Florida supporters by surprise with a last-minute attempt to open more of the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling…

Martinez said Tuesday that both he and the governor were upset the White House hadn’t warned them about the proposal. Gov. Bush declined to comment about what he knew in advance.

Martinez first learned of it late last week from Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., a strong proponent of gulf drilling. Landrieu showed him a memo detailing Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s plan to redraw the state boundaries, to give more of the eastern gulf to Louisiana and open it to drilling.

The plan – which only a Republican could love – involves redrawing state boundaries to make the area just east of Tampa Bay part of the Big Easy. Still, Sen. Mel’s perplexed quote is one for the record books.

“I was surprised the administration took this position so aggressively,” Martinez said. “…The question is how you really define Florida.”

Yes, how DO you define Florida? After all, both Louisiana and Florida have alligators. They both have shrimp boats. And there’s really not much difference between Ybor City and the French Quarter, accents aside. What the hey, Louisiana, you can have Tampa!

Martinez was so moved by the deceit that he actually uttered a negative word about a Republican initiative – to “inventory” oil reserves – in public.

Miami Herald:

”Florida’s coastlines are in danger,” said U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida. “The inventory tarnishes the entire energy bill, and I think this is a precursor to drilling.”

Strong stuff for the guy who up to now was considered an administration flunky all the way.

The plans are truly a bummer. Besides the certainty of oil spills once drilling starts, the exploration process itself is a disgrace.

… powerful air guns send explosive shock waves into the seabed, emitting high-frequency and low-intensity sounds into the water.

The sound waves that bounce back…can be deafening for fish, and can destroy the air-filled bladders that help them navigate and disrupt the migration of marine mammals such as whales and dolphins.

The tests are expected to, “harm marine mammals and fisheries from the Keys to Apalachicola Bay.” And that’s pretty well the entire Florisiana coast.