BREAKING NEWS: U.S. officials say $1 trillion worth of minerals have been found in the mountains and dry lake beds of Afghanistan!

In a related announcement, U.S. officials say the new U.S. colony of Afghanistan will be renamed, Pandora, and a team from Halliburton and Massey Mining will begin immediately extracting the Unobtanium from beneath the surface.

Seriously, $1 trillion in iron, copper, gold, cobalt and lithium in Afghanistan? What could possibly go wrong?

Forget the poppies, maaaan. Everyone will want to get mellow on the lithium…while also powering our batteries!!

Curiously, enough, the cost of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have, so far, cost $1 trillion. Well, waddya know? Guess, maybe, we owe Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz an apology for doubting them.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Mexico, officials with BP say they’ve discovered gold and cobalt pouring from the undersea volcano known as the Deepwater Horizon mine…er…well.

No, just kidding about that. Its still hydrocarbons and chemicals gushing forth to kill the Gulf.

But, they, the good news is President Obama will make his fourth trip today to the Redneck Riviera where he’ll get in a little beach time (unrefined oil and saltwater make an excellent SP 15 sunscreen, or is that STP oil treatment 15?). He’ll talk to the locals, assure them he feels their pain and, maybe, get in a little golf at SanDestin, now renamed OilSandsDestin.

No, just kidding about that, too. Remember, he’s lookin’ to kick a little ass so, BP officials, I don’t think I’d mess with him right now. I think he means it.

And to show he means it, he’ll address us all on the TeeVee Box on Tuesday night when he returns from the Coast Formerly Known as Emerald. He’s gonna tell us he will demand BP immediately set up an escrow account to make sure the money is there to repay Gulf Coast residents for their losses.

BP has, by the way, $7 billion in cash. Tony Heyward carries it around in a steel briefcase. It also has the capacity to borrow $15 billion and is – or was – expecting to make $34 billion this year. It was planning to give its shareholders $10.5 billion of that cheese. They may have to take IOUs.

The President will have to take a break from kicking ass, however to hear the bitchin’ from oil industry workers about his moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Tobacco workers complained, too, about all that silly nonsense suggesting smoking kills.

Hey, Mr. President, here’s a thought: let’s retrain all those roughnecks and put them to work building solar panels and wind turbines and lithium batteries. I understand we just struck the mother lode. Just a thought.

Oh yea…and one final, little tinsy-tiny note: The National Hurricane Center center says a very unusual early season Cape Verde-type weather system half-way between Africa and South America might grow into the season’s first tropical depression.

The good news is forecast models are not – so far – giving it much chance to survive into a storm.

Jacques Yves Cousteau was born 100 years ago today.

Imagine what he might say to us as he watches one of the world’s great oceans being destroyed by the greed and malfeasance of Big Oil…with the duplicity of a U.S. government bent on deregulation of large industries over the past 30 years.

We can all grab Vuvuzelas and make a big noise…

…OR…we can do something about it.

Floridians actually have now a remarkable new tool for actually doing something about the murder of the Gulf of Mexico.

Floridians can now greatly reduce the amount of energy used in homes and buildings. Depending on which estimates is to be believed, between 50 and 70 percent of all electricity is Florida is generated by burning fossil fuels, including and especially oil.

But the Florida Legislature created a way for communities to band together to reduce electrical use.

The Florida Legislature adopted in its 2010 session a new PACE initiative allowing Florida counties and cities to develop pools of money from which property owners can borrow to make energy efficient and hurricane-hardening improvements to homes and buildings.

PACE – Property Assessed Clean Energy – is an innovative national approach to public-private partnerships enabling local governments to inspire private property owners to reduce energy use while also creating jobs.

Here’s how PACE will work in Florida:

Local governments - counties, cities perhaps even entire regions as a whole – will create Energy Conservation Districts which will then be allowed under new state law to develop a pool of money from which property owners can borrow to make energy improvements on homes and buildings.

The PACE legislation also allows for hurricane-hardening measures to be installed with these funds.

The cost of these retrofits – the home improvement loans - will then be repaid as small additional payments on annual property tax bills. The loans will run with the property, be transferred to successive owners and be spread over 20 years.

The bottom line: PACE loans will not cost property owners any additional money and won’t put the local government further into debt.

Savings from reduced energy use will more than offset the cost of the home improvement loan while at the same time increasing the value of the property which, then, accrues to the benefit of the local government in the form of increased tax base.

PACE is modeled on traditional land-secured financing of improvements such as storm water utilities, road and sewer construction projects and other public improvement projects.

One of the differences, however, in the PACE initiative is that participation by property owners is completely volunteers. Property owners will sign up & enter into an agreement with the county before accepting the home improvement loan. They will pay only for improvements on the homes and buildings they own and the improvements must be permanently attached to the home (solar systems, for example, window/door treatments, wind turbines).

Loans to property owners are secured by statutorily authorized non-ad valorem special assessments; a tax parity lien on the property.

Because the PACE program is new and participation in it is voluntary, the Legislature sees unique funding opportunities for participating counties.

The Florida PACE legislation allows local governments to seek interim financing through a third-party lender – a bank or group of banks – which would float the county a line of credit to implement the project.

Once the number of loans and the value of loans reaches a certain threshold, the “warehoused” loans can then be bundled and sold on traditional bond markets.

PACE in Florida will give Floridians a way to fight back, to reduce the need for oil in the Sunshine State.

Learn about PACE here: www.PACEnow.org and learn what one county is doing here: http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/jun/08/collier-county-takes-tentative-step-start-energy-s/

Big Oil is still kicking the Gulf of Mexico’s ass but it was another primary election day across ‘Murka, yesterday, and that bright shiny object has everyone’s attention. Whomp, there it is…

So, what the hell?

In a clear sign voters prefer candidates who don’t campaign, raise no money, don’t even put up a campaign site on the InnerTubes, for God’s sake, unknown political novice Alvin Green garnered 100,000 votes to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina.

This simply proves, as all pundits will point out today, that 2010 is THE year of the low key, if not downright invisible, campaign that wastes no money and does not bother anyone.

And, please, no Al Green jokes. The Democratic nominee for Senate in South Carolina doesn’t even live in Memphis!

It was the Republican “Let’s Spend the Night Together” race for the goobernatorial nomination in South Carolina that received all the pre-election press and spotlight where front-runner Nikki Haley, an attractive woman of Indian descent, was accused of sleeping with nearly every political consultant in the state.

She didn’t win. She faces a run-off with a dude who did not claim to sleep with her and only managed to get 21 percent of the vote. Maybe just one more alleged paramour mighta done the trick.

Lord help us if a woman of Brazilian descent ever seeks elected office in South Carolina.

Up in Arkansas, voters disappointed headline writers across the nation who were poised to print, “Halter Tops,” when state AG Bill Halter easily bested incumbent Blanche Lincoln in the senate run-off. He didn’t. Much to everyone’s surprise and disappointment, Lincoln won and headline writers were forced to remove Halter Tops to stay abreast of election results.

Out in California, rich, right-wing business women won in both the senate and gubernatorial GOP primaries. Pundits across the nation will loudly today proclaim 2010 to be the year of rich, right-wing Republican women. And this is good because rich, right-wing Republican women have never gotten a fair shake from anyone, let alone voters and the press.

Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman will now face Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, respectively, in a beach volleyball game to become California’s next senator and governor, respectively.

And in Nevada, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got the GOP opponents he wants in November. Sharron “two Rs” Angle won the GOP nod and will continue her chicken-in-every-pot-to-pay-the-doctor health care reform campaign.

Finally, voters in Florida suggest in a Quinnipiac University poll they now oppose offshore oil drilling by a 51 to 42 percent majority. That’s a 48-point swing from an April poll which suggested Floridians favored offshore oil drilling by a 66 to 27 percent majority.

Pundits across ‘Murka will point out Floridians are sharp like that.

It’s Monday, all you oil-soaked peeps and beaks, we’re now at 50 days into the killing of a major ocean.

The bad news is we’re now officially under siege by a foreign oil corporation and being held hostage by its greed, incompetence and general disdain for humankind and Mother Earth.

But the good news is…oh, wait, there isn’t any good news.

“This is a siege across the entire gulf,” said U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen over the weekend on the TeeVee Box. “This spill is holding everybody hostage, not only economically but physically. And it has to be attacked on all fronts.”

So, would someone PLEASE attack it? AND the corporation responsible for it?

“This is the most messed up thing I’ve ever seen,” said another astute observer.

Yes, it is quite possibly this will be the most messed up thing we’re likely to see it our lifetimes.

“This is worse than the financial meltdown,” continued the astute observer. “We can overcome money disasters.”

So, let’s take stock.

The Gulf of Mexico contains 2,434, 000 cubic kilometers of water or 642,994,775,444,240,000 gallons.

It now also contains between 30 million and 117 million gallons of oil plus another 1 million gallons of chemicals intended to, um, disperse the oil.

So...carry the 1…sin(ax)sin(bx) - k cos(ax)cos(bx)… let’s see…that means roughly 1.807723911257192e-10 percent of the Gulf of Mexico is now filled with oil and cancer-causing chemicals.

One is legally drunk is Florida when one’s blood alcohol content reaches .08 percent. Just sayin’.

But not to worry, the “drill-baby-drill” crowd has it all under control.

Why just this past weekend, Drill-Baby (otherwise known as Sarah Palin) posted on her Facebook page the root cause of this catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Yes, you guessed it: the “extreme environmentalists.”

“With your nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you’re doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet,” wrote the half-term governor of Alaska.

“Your hypocrisy is showing. You’re not preventing environmental hazards; you’re outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous.

“Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country’s energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It’s catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.”

How could we have been so wrong to oppose offshore oil drilling?

Finally, noted carnival sideshow barker and human cartoon Rush Limbaugh got married over the weekend to his fourth wife. Newt Gingrich was there with his third wife.

It’s good to celebrate life-long commitments and family values.

Politics in the US of A inherently brings out the best and brightest – but also the gross, ignorant and insipid.

It is the yin and yang of it.

I see this tweet, yesterday. (A tweet, for you great unwashed and disconnected, is a 140-character message posted on Twitter, the micro-blogging social medium which – like politics – offers both concise brilliance and enormously short-sighted inanities.)

So, I see this tweet yesterday.

“Obama hates Jews,” it read. WTF, I thought. That’s just stupid.

Doesn’t President Obama make a big deal of celebrating an official White House Passover Seder?

Not being able to simply let such obvious moronic thoughts pass without a rebuttal, the message was re-tweeted with this note: “this is simply a bald-faced lie.”

Turns out the original tweet was sent by a fervent believer in all things inane and right-wing conspiratorial. The poor woman couldn’t help herself.

“You disagree with me?” she wrote back. Being busy, I didn’t see that tweet for way too many minutes in her mind.

“I want proof that he does not hate Jews,” she insisted. “Give me some facts, quotes, etc.”

And in just a few minutes more:

“Have you come up with a response for your ass-kissing, pathetic president? It doesn’t matter if you’re gay.”

A quick check of this troubled tweeter’s profile revealed her to be “conservative, mom of 2 wonderful boys, politically savvy, real estate agent, creative, marketer and MU Tiger.”

With a heavy sigh – and realizing one never wins a Twitter battle with a stone wall twit – the response finally went back out, in good Southern manners: “Bless your heart. It must be difficult to carry around so much hate.”

But, you see, hate has become the currency of the simple minded wading into the oil-soaked waters of politics.

Take South Carolina – please. (No, wait…sorry…twist on an old Henny Youngman joke.)

The front runner for the GOP nomination to succeed Appalachian Trail hiker Mark Sanford as governor is a woman, Nikki Haley. Because she’s a woman, she’s been accused of sleeping around by a right-wing blogger and former political hack for Sanford and, as it turns out, Haley.

But there’s more. Haley is now Christian – a Methodist, even, which some say is just barely Christian. But she was raised by her Indian parents in the Sikh faith and given the name, Nimrata Randhawa, at birth…in South Carolina.

So along comes her GOP primary opponent, a fellow state senator named Jake Knotts (no relation to Don), who loudly and flatulently proclaimed yesterday, “We already got one raghead in the White House. We don’t need another in the governor’s mansion.”

If you’re keeping track, mark another one down in the column of gross, ignorant and insipid.”

Here to throw out the ceremonial first pitch is international energy conglomerate, British Petroleum!! Or – as its marketing campaign once told us – “Beyond Petroleum.”

That’s right: Beyond Petroleum all the way into destroying one of the world’s great oceans. But all this is really stressing out BP CEO Tony Hayward. He wants his life back. But, at $8 million a year salary & bonus it’s all in a day’s work.

Hurricane Season 2010 could be a very active season; or it could be an also-ran in the history of great hurricane seasons. We always hope for the later but prepare for the former.

As an expert hurricane watcher and emergency management director once said, “it only takes one storm to make it a really bad year.”

Maybe the National Hurricane Center should suspend the normal alphabetical listing of storm names and call the first Gulf storm, “Hurricane Toxic Stu.”

‘Cause that’s what it’s gonna be.

Estimates suggest the Gulf of Mexico now contains between 44 million and 100 million gallons of oil, just sloshing about on the surface and in large undersea plumes. Add to that nearly 1 million gallons of potentially deadly chemicals have been added to the noxious mash by BP in an effort to break up the oil. (Can you spell, Corexit?)

In short, the Gulf of Mexico has become a poisonous gumbo just waiting to be served up hot and with gusto by a hurricane churning its way up the suffering sea. Crude oil and potentially cancer-causing chemicals are not something we want to see added to the already deadly potential of hurricanes.

Devastating wind, 8 to 10 foot storm surge, oil-soaked battering rain and toxic chemicals could make any land falling storm in the Gulf even more deadly than usual – and potentially for many years to come. Way beyond petroleum.

Oh sure, the chemicals are safe enough – says BP, the EPA & the Coast Guard.

Corexit, one of the main chemicals being poured into the oil to break it up into smaller, less obvious chunks, is absolutely safe according to its manufacturer, Nalco of Naperville, IL.

Prompt deployment of Nalco COREXIT® oil spill dispersants is one very effective and proven method of minimizing the impact of a spill on the environment,” says the Nalco website. “When the COREXIT dispersants are deployed on the spilled oil, the oil is broken up into tiny bio-degradable droplets that immediately sink below the surface where they continue to disperse and bio-degrade.”

Wait…what? Biodegrade? Molecules that once made up dinosaurs and have laid deep in the earth’s crust for millions of years only to be sucked out again and used for fuel? Biodegrade? Really?

Whachu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?

Ah, yes, but the EPA says the shelf life of the chemical is unlimited. The EPA also suggests taking great precautions when handling the stuff.

“Avoid prolonged breathing of vapors. Use with ventilation equal to unobstructed outdoors in moderate breeze. Avoid eye contact. Avoid contact with skin and clothing. Remove contaminated clothing, including shoes, after flushing has begun. If irritation persists, seek medical attention. For open systems where contact is likely, wear long sleeve shirt, chemical resistant gloves, and chemical protective goggles.”

Okay…no problem. Oh, and one last comment from the Nalco website:

“By keeping the oil from adhering to wildlife COREXIT dispersants effectively protect the environment.”

Hurricane Toxic Stu.