"Top Kill" FAILS

We were all hoping that BP's concoction of drilling mud, golf balls, and other solids would plug the deep water gusher in the Gulf, but the news is grim: the fix was effective as long as the pumps were operational, but when the pumps were turned off, the oil continued to spew into the Gulf.

BP's next idea will take four to seven days to implement, and it will not provide a tight mechanical seal.

That option: placing a custom-built cap to fit over the "lower marine riser package," BP chief operation officer Doug Suttles said. BP crews were already at work Saturday to ready the materials for that method, he said.

President Obama took time out from his basketball game yesterday for a moment of rage and heartbreak. 

"As I said yesterday, every day that this leak continues is an assault on the people of the Gulf Coast region, their livelihoods, and the natural bounty that belongs to all of us," Obama said. "It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking, and we will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimized by this manmade disaster are made whole."

Okay, back to shooting hoops.  Even Peggy Noonan has lost her glassy-eyed adoration:

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

 

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

Swish!  Nothing but net.  Excellent commentary, Noonan.

I'm cheering for the brainiacs who are working around the clock to engineer a solution.  I appreciate the gravity of the problem, and I'm grateful to them for trying.  Go baby, go!