Today’s Snooze

Oil still spreading in Gulf of Mexico, wingnuts still crazy. Today’s headlines —

In crazy wingnut news, we’ve learned that Rep. Michele Bachmann is so crazy she makes Bill O’Reilly seem sensible.

By now you may have heard the rumor that Rahm Emanuel will be leaving the White House. I say “rumor” because the story seems to have been fabricated entirely out of speculation, but “Rahm Emanuel expected to quit White House” is an easier headline to write than “Anonymous Source Who May Not Know Diddly From Squat Expects Rahm Emanuel to Quit White House.”

Not that anyone I know would mind if Rahm Emanuel did quit the White House, but apparently, there’s no “there” to this story. The columnist for The Telegraph just pulled it out of his butt. That hasn’t stopped anyone on the Right Blogosphere from seizing this story as evidence that the Obama White House is on its last legs.

Regarding the Gulf — everybody screwed up. This was in the New York Times

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

Finally, today Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explains how economic growth (or not growth) happens.