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This is disturbing. KHOU.com's interview with a Houston BP call center employee exposes the empty PR operation that is supposed to be sincerely concerned with ideas for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf.

According to the employee, the operators are supposed to take down the information from callers and enter it into a database. Because employees believe the information stops with them, some aren't even bothering to note the information given by callers or enter it into the system.

This call center is not responsible for claims. That responsibility has been assigned to third-party risk manager and claims administrator ESIS, Inc. ESIS has field offices in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The Houston call center's responsibility, according to KHOU.com:

They answer phones from the hotline number designated for the Vessel of Opportunity Program and for cleanup ideas.

I can understand the overwhelming nature of the calls coming into BP from around the globe, but if I were BP, I'd be thinking hard about the wisdom of ignoring calls in about cleanup suggestions and even containment suggestions, given the White House's order to BP to step up their game and stop more of this oil from pouring into the Gulf.

If this operator's allegations are true, it is another nail in BP's strategy to do whatever they please while appearing to care. Might be time for them to actually DO what they pretend to do.

This is horrible:

A devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, toppling homes, collapsing bridges and spawning a tsunami that threatened every nation around the Pacific Ocean — roughly a quarter of the globe.

Chileans near the epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant. It was the strongest earthquake to hit the country in 50 years and one of the strongest ever measured anywhere. President-elect Sebastian Pinera said more than 120 people died and the toll could climb higher.

Local radio reported up to 150 could have been killed or hurt in a collapsed 14-story building in the hard-hit Concepcion, where firemen were working to put out fires throughout the city. One fire was in the science department in the local university.

Chile was the site of the strongest earthquake ever recorded -- a 9.5 shaker in 1960 -- and its infrastructure is reasonably well prepared for a quake. Hopefully, the death toll will not climb too much higher.

Meanwhile, they're watching carefully for a possible tsunami in Hawaii.

(h/t Andy K)

Erik Prince's company Blackwater (now known as XE) has been embroiled in controversy for years. Company employees have posted videos online of their own ruthless behavior and abuses against Iraqi citizens, and can be heard laughing off camera. We're now finding out that this brutality most likely came from the top, down from Prince himself -- former employees are finding their consciences and telling horrifying stories about their former boss:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Read on...

On the campaign trail, John McCain likes to brag that he went after corrupt uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff as some sort of high-minded reform crusade. Well, according to a new book by Boston Globe reporter Gary S. Chafetz, McCain's war against Abramoff was motivated more by revenge than any sort of noble principle.

Politico:

A new book released the day after Sen. John McCain accepted the Republican presidential nomination attacks one of his trademark political successes: his investigation of now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2004 and 2005.

“The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff,” by former Boston Globe freelancer Gary S. Chafetz and put out by small independent publisher Martin and Lawrence press, aggressively puts forth the case that McCain’s investigation into Abramoff wasn’t the high-minded reform crusade he has made it out to be on the campaign trail, but rather was pure political payback.

ThinkProgress has more.

Zaius makes his Presidential Race predictions...Here Huckabee guards the globe against illegal immigration. See the rest here.

Open Thread below.

Des Moines Register endorses McCain and Clinton. Boston Globe endorses McCain and Obama.

McCain? Are these papers sucking up because their readers are of his demographic? Just asking....

UPDATE: Oh Judas Priest. Word is out that Lieberman is going to endorse McCain today as well? I thought Joe was an Independent. Pffft. Does he think we forgot this?

So says Quigo! Oh, this keeps getting better. Poor Michelle Malkin is playing the victim again, but this time she's fighting back. She's placing ads against her FOX colleague Geraldo Rivera. He's been trying to fight the racist---anti-immigration positions that his network is promoting and he finally had enough of Malkin's routine. He couldn't have made his feelings any clearer in the Boston Globe and on H&C.

Malkin placed some Google ads against Geraldo and also placed it on the FOX Noise website and Quigo. The funny still keeps coming as she received an email telling MM that her content was offensive and the account was blocked.

Only in Malkinworld.

comment 65:

On September 1st, 2007 at 1:10 pm, TMoney said:

I’m beginning to wonder about Geraldo’s immigration status. Maybe his middle name is ‘Anchor’.

For all his many, many flaws, at least Rudy Giuliani has always supported civil unions for gay couples, right? Wrong.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to discard the moderate and liberal positions of his past. The latest is civil unions for same-sex couples, which the Republican presidential candidate has been backing away from in recent months.

A campaign aide told the Globe this weekend that Giuliani favors a much more modest set of rights for gay partners than civil union laws in effect in four states offer. [...]

"It's really disappointing he's stepped back from his position on civil unions," said Joe Tarver, spokesman for the Empire State Pride Alliance, a group that advocates for gay rights in New York state that worked with and against Giuliani on a number of issues during his eight years as mayor.

Calling the former mayor's shifting stance "pretty un-Giuliani-like," Tarver said: "It's quite obvious he's playing to the people whose votes he needs to get the Republican nomination."

The man is shameless. Strategically, it doesn't even make sense -- the far-right will see it as pandering, and what's left of the GOP center will be offended by the shift to the right.

The Boston Globe puts it into perspective for us.

While there is some disagreement on the idea of troop deadlines for US soldiers in Iraq, all sides seem to be on board with the amount included in the bill to fund the war.

Including the $124.2 billion bill, the total cost of the Iraq war may reach $456 billion in September, according to the National Priorities Project, an organization that tracks public spending.

The amount got us wondering: What would $456 billion buy? Go view the slideshow here.

Any other ideas?

No, not Michael Weiner Savage's lesser known brother. Charlie Savage is the Boston Globe journalist that broke the story on presidential signing statements.

Glenn Greenwald has a nice write up of the significance of Savage's reporting: (watch a short ad for site pass)

...as I've noted many times, Savage was one of the very few journalists in the country who understood, investigated and reported on the radical theories of executive power embraced by this President. And once he began reporting on those abuses, he was relentless in his efforts to draw public attention to the administration's conduct.

On March 24, 2006, Savage published an article -- entitled "Bush Shuns Patriot Act Requirement" -- which was the first article to report on Bush's issuance of a signing statement in connection with Congress' renewal of the Patriot Act. It was in that signing statement where the President expressly proclaimed the power to ignore legal requirements imposed by Congress requiring the FBI to report on its use of National Security Letters -- the very provisions which, it was revealed just last month, the FBI has been systematically ignoring as it spies on American citizens. As Savage wrote in that article: "The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law."