And now, the announcement that Eric Holder is looking to bring criminal charges against BP.

None of these things will actually, as the president is said to have said “plug the damn hole,” and causing BP to start considering the leaking well as both an industrial disaster and a crime scene may actually hamper the damn hole plugging.

BP has already seen its stock described as having “the smell of death” and has been contacted by 25,000 potential plaintiffs for the billions in lawsuits that will soon follow. The company has just hired a former spokeswoman for Dick Cheney to do its press. Maybe, already $1 billion down on this disaster, the new attitude from BP is going to be all out war with the White House.

The problem for President Obama is that he’s losing the Left. While Obama had been almost wholly rejected by Republicans long ago, and was out of favor with most independents, he had been able to tread water near the 50 percent job approval mark by rocking stratospheric numbers among Democrats – often near 90 percent – and then picking up enough marginal support elsewhere to stay afloat.

To find a Democratic president as consistently popular in his own party you’d have to go back to the first two years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

Obama has disappointed liberals in two substantive areas – his decision to escalate the Afghan war and his decision to rescind some of the moratorium he had placed on new offshore drilling.

Obama has been blessed by a strange national indifference to his stalled Afghan offensive, bought in part by his all-things-to-all-people sale of the surge there, but the oil spill is proof to the Left that Obama is not all he is cracked up to be.

When Maureen Dowd writes “The oil won’t stop flowing, but the magic has,” and Frank Rich thinks that the spill may be worse than Katrina, the New York Times-obsessed administration knows that it’s now time to do something, anything, to get control of the narrative.

A political team that tries to win the message wars hour by hour doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with a slow-moving, seemingly unstoppable disaster.

Charlie Crist, who we saw flitting around Obama last week like a tern looking for water bugs, is calling for a constitutional amendment in Florida to ban offshore drilling altogether in an effort to win Democratic support this fall and salvage his Senate run.

For most voters, it’s the danger from and response to the current spill that is worrisome and Obama, like Crist, doesn’t have much to tell them. But liberals may respond to promises of a crackdown, which act as an admission of error for not having been tougher in the first place.

Obama lost conservatives by being too liberal and continues to lose moderates over questions of competency. He can’t afford to lose any more of the left on claims that he is unable to swing into action with the full force of the federal government in which liberals place their confidence.

But while Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder tried to create the impression of a couple of gangbusters who would be slapping the cuffs of corporate fat cats, writers Thomas Catan and Guy Chazan explain that the process will likely be lengthy and unsatisfying.

“Over the past decade, BP has had several run-ins with the feds. In October 2007 the company settled a government investigation of a deadly accident at a refinery in Texas, a 2006 pipeline leak in Alaska and improper propane trading in 2003 and 2004.

BP pleaded guilty to a felony violation of workplace safety rules in the refinery case; pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation of federal clean water rules in the pipeline spill; and entered a deferred prosecution agreement to settle the propane price manipulation matter.

Any criminal litigation likely would take years to sort out, especially if it involves complex environmental laws, legal experts said. And by then the public pressure may be off BP and related companies.”

The Huntsville Times — Parker Griffith concedes, Mo Brooks is the GOP nominee for Congress

Down in Alabama, Democrats declined again, for the 48th time in 192 years, to nominate the party’s first black candidate for governor.

Arthur Davis had excited Democrats around the country by promising to build the kind of black-white coalition that Barack Obama had crafted in Illinois. Davis had even bypassed all of the traditional black political groups in the state and sought to communicate directly with voters.

Black voters, though, did not turn out and handed the race to person of pallor, state Agriculture Ron Sparks whose main campaign point was a plan to legalize casino gambling to balance the state budget.

If it were a Republican race, we’d have to brace for days or even weeks of “how racist are Republicans” stories, but since these are Democrats, we won’t likely be much troubled by the aftermath of the election. Sparks now stands to get his clock cleaned by any of the top-finishing Republicans now heading to a runoff next month.

The more interesting story out of Alabama’s primary was the second failure in a month of a party-switching candidate.

Rep. Parker Griffith, a physician and freshman Blue Dog Democrat who switched to the GOP in December over Obamacare, got shellacked in his first primary run as a Republican.

He lost by 20 points to Mo Brooks, a lawyer and county commissioner from Madison County, which includes Huntsville.

So far this year, the trend for party purity is holding strong. Incumbents who don’t please the base ought to worry (as Blanche Lincoln must be doing right now about next week’s contest).

The other thing that the election proves is that the national parties are poor friends to local candidates. Griffith was rewarded handsomely for his switch in the way of help from the national GOP. It’s hard to see that it did anything but hurt him.

Now, the national party will have to make nice with Brooks. He’s taking on Democrat Steve Raby, a former aide to Sen. Howell Hefflin, this fall. Raby is more liberal than the Democrats who have traditionally represented this Tennesee Valley district for more than a century, giving the GOP a clear chance at keeping seat they nabbed in December.

Writer Challen Stephens:

“Throughout the campaign, Brooks had repeated a similar theme of America at risk due to budget deficits and a drift to socialism. But most of his best lines were aimed at his chief opponent, as he labeled Griffith ‘arrogant,’ an unprincipled ‘chameleon’ and a poll-driven ‘parrot.’

Griffith, who had fired back that Brooks was a ‘career politician,’ instead campaigned on various Republican talking points, arguing for a reduced rate of corporate income tax, a moratorium on the capital-gains tax, the repeal of recent healthcare reforms and the repeal of the estate tax.”

New York Times — Taliban Attacks Shake Afghan Peace Gathering

The Karzai government in Kabul had made a big show of holding a “peace jirga” in an effort to bring some Taliban-friendly (or even Talibani) tribal leaders into the Western-backed political process.

Just so there was no confusion where their allegiances lie, the real live Taliban used rocket attacks and suicide bombings to disrupt the start of the jirga.

(I highly recommend D.B. Grady’s piece in The Atlantic on the state of the war through the eyes of uber correspondent Michael Yon.)

Writers Alissa Rubin and Rod Norland were on the scene in Kabul:

“In his speech, which was interrupted by a rocket that exploded close by and an exchange of gunfire, forcing Mr. Karzai to tell his audience not to worry, he spoke directly to the Taliban, calling on them to join the government.

Within minutes, a larger explosion from another rocket shook the large tent where the gathering, known as a jirga, was being held. The jirga took a scheduled 10-minute break, but did not resume until an hour and a half later, after the shooting had stopped.

At least one suicide bomber blew himself up near the Takya Khana mosque, close to the jirga site.”

New York Times — Israel Begins Expelling Activists After Raid on Flotilla

It seems all but certain that the Israelis will be forced to abandon their blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip after a botched commando raid on a convoy of wacky humanitarians and actual terrorist sympathizers. Egypt has already dropped its blockade to the South, rendering the effort almost useless.

Meanwhile, the first rocket attack from Gaza in retaliation has already happened, prompting the IDF to counterattack. This is setting up to be another long, unhappy engagement.

“Egypt’s decision to temporarily open its border with Gaza was a victory for Hamas, the Islamic militant group that holds sway in the Palestinian enclave and has sought to raise pressure on Egypt to stop cooperating with the Israeli embargo. The opening of the border caused thousands of Gazans to stream toward the crossing at Rafah.

Israel also will face a fresh test in coming days of its policy of intercepting sea shipments, which it tightened after the 2008-2009 Gaza war. The pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement is planning to send a 1,200-ton cargo ship, the Rachel Corrie, to challenge the naval blockade as early as next week.”

Politico — Gibbs: ‘I’d refer you to the memo’

Writer Matt Negrin provides the video and transcript of the tortured response from Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to questions about the Sestak affair. Watch it and you’ll see how far out on a limb the White House is on this whole thing.

It boils down to this – when asked about inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the memo dumped by the White House on Friday about the Sestak bribe claims, Gibbs only refers reporters back to the memo itself.

As Examiner colleague Byron York points out that reporters can smell blood and Gibbs has no good answers.

The big problem for the White House with the story line is that Sestak would not have been eligible for the job on an unpaid advisory committee that the administration claims Rahm Emanuel asked Bill Clinton to offer Sestak.

The White House could clarify and say that it was another job that sounds more plausible, but it might then run afoul of the criminal statute that forbids offering any federal job for running or not running for office.

“Gibbs said the advisory post at issue ‘was an unpaid position and didn’t constitute a lot of what you hear,’ but he didn’t say precisely what the position offered was.

Pressed on how a widely discussed scenario — where Sestak serving on the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board could have been possible while Sestak continued to serve in the House, which is forbidden by the board’s rules — Gibbs said simply, ‘I’d refer you to the memo.’

Arizona Republic — Brewer, Obama to meet in Washington

Arizona’s governor asked for a meeting with President Obama to talk about federal immigration policy, and to her surprise, got one. The two foes will meet Thursday at the White House.

Obama has expressed disdain for the law Brewer signed in April that will require Arizona police to check the immigration status of criminal suspects they detain on other charges.

Brewer has slammed Obama for pronouncing on the legislation without having read the bill (which unlike the ones in Congress is only about 12 pages long) and for insisting that he will not support sealing the border until there is “comprehensive” immigration reform.

Writer Dan Nowicki:

“Earlier this year, Obama appointed Brewer to a bipartisan 10-governor council created to share information and give advice to the federal government on homeland-defense issues. Brewer went to Washington for a preliminary planning session with the other governors.”

Morning Might Read

New York Times – Steven Rattner Fights Effort to Bar Him from Wall Street

Former Obama car czar fights SEC for his right to manage Bloomberg’s billions

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