[An open letter response to Kevin Phelan, Sr. Vice President, Sales & Marketing, BP Products North America]

Thank you for writing to me about how your company is doing everything possible to stop the leak and protect the shoreline. I had a feeling you’d be writing me; I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get around to it.

I pass several BP stations regularly here in South Florida. I’ve noticed there’s rarely a car or truck in them, and the tone of your letter tells me that you’ve noticed that too. Maybe the number crunchers in your department believed that things would blow over. Maybe you figured we were so pissed off it was prudent to wait. Or maybe you just don’t give a damn.

My money’s on “don’t give a damn,” because your letter is just another attempt to hide behind yet another group of people whom your negligence and reckless disregard is slowly destroying. I’m talking about the “vast majority of [BP] stations [that are] locally owned and operated and employ more than 50,000 people across the United States.”

I do feel sorry for these folks, but I also wonder why they believed in you when your history as an oil company is one disaster after another, and the investigations into those disasters reveal that you knew better but preferred to try and save a buck. A close look at the refinery fire in Texas City or the tundra along the Trans-Alaska pipeline should have predicted what happened on the Deepwater Horizon.

If your independent gas station owners had been taking care of business themselves, they could have already done what thousands of Citgo independent resellers did when their brand became tarnished by its association with Venezuela. They rebranded their stations with a logo that helped sales rather than hurt them.

Yes, Mr. Phelan, I have a BP credit card, but don’t count on my support. I haven’t bought more than a tankful of gas from your stations in several years, and that probably won’t be changing at least as long as you keep hiding behind hollow words on form letters trying to drum up sympathy for people you’ve hurt. They didn’t hurt your brand: you did.

You know how to solve this, because you’ve promised to mend your ways each time you’ve been caught. You can start gushing money in the gulf like your hapless well; you can start selling gas to your resellers at tremendous discounts; you can really put safety first, even though that delays production in ways you once thought unacceptable.

All these things will be a magnificent departure from what everyone expects from you; the story will tell itself, and you won’t need to send weasel-worded letters to your customers.

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I’m a pretty avid reader of Bob Sullivan, who writes the Red Tape Chronicles blog over at MSNBC, so when I got an unsolicited phone call last week offering me $1,500 if I’d just answer a few online questions, I thought about his online diary of Internet scams, frauds and free lunch offers. I was able to record most of the scam call in a way it could be shared, I shared it with Sullivan, and he shared it with his readers.

On the surface, the recording is just two people lying to each other. I literally made up a CV as I went along, taking the middle and last names of the turn-of-the-century booze-bashing evangelist Billy Sunday as my own. On the other end of the line, a parade of South Asian accents trying to convince me that $1,500 in free money was “not for everybody” but was certainly within my grasp. I suspect it was lost on them that when one of them chose “Jack Daniels,” as a supervisor’s name, it meant that Jack Daniels was still tempting Billy Sunday.

Beneath the surface is the complicated multiple threads of communication that make this scam possible. From the strength of the scammer’s accents, I suspect the boiler-room is in South Asia, the call transported as voice-over-IP and dumped on the US switched network through a portal in Seattle, WA. The victim is urged to upload the sensitive financial data to a website on a Denver-based Internet provider, which the scammers have access to.

To the Internet-challenged, the scammers spin a tale that the website and boiler-room aren’t connected; I bet some of their victims never fully understand the exact method of their victimization, and even if they do, the modern ability to connect nearly everything with nearly everything else on a worldwide scale makes it almost impossible to track down and prosecute the people responsible.

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Helen Thomas was writing for UPI when newspapers still used linotypes and when teletypes delivered her stories nationwide at speeds we would no longer accept for devices we carry in our pockets. It was this explosion of connectivity that ultimately ended her career: an intemperate remark made into a pocket video camera, amplified by the international reach of the worldwide web.

Helen Thomas

She was a veteran of the gatekeeper days of media; when JFK could philander in the White House and the press corps would give him a free pass. People could say intemperate things as asides and expect to do so with impunity; the gatekeepers would keep the snarky one-liners on background. As media became more prolific, and connectivity became ubiquitous, everyone suddenly became a press photographer merely by owning a phone with a camera; everyone with a camcorder and a website is their own TV news operation.

I had a vested interest in seeing Helen Thomas in the emeritus seat at press conferences. I think all of us who are refugees from dying or dead media took comfort in her longevity and perseverance; she provided at least a tenuous link with our shared journalistic past.

Just as she has outlived most of the ink-stained wretches from newspaper’s late golden age, she outlived the old media she once wrote for. She resigned from UPI when it became the mouthpiece of Sun Myung Moon; finally ending her career as a columnist for Hearst, which today sees its newspapers as only a small part of a diversified media company buying its way into the digital age.

It is symbolic that Helen Thomas ended her career in a way being mirrored by the institutions she spent her life working for; she didn’t see the subtle changes in the way information permeates society until it was too late to change. Public figures are always tempted to say intemperate things and in another day, the gatekeepers would laugh then suppress the direct quote. Now that we’re all journalists, that’s a courtesy that died with the linotype and the slow news ticker.

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AT&T no longer offers an “unlimited” data plan for mobile users. It’s not a surprise; AT&T hasn’t had the capacity it needed for its early-adopter-heavy mobile uses for several years. You saw it in the fractured and nearly unusable connectivity where geeks gather, like during the South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, or during any of the tech-hip conventions like the NAB in Vegas.

3G coverage falls apart, downloading anything more than a few KB can fail for hours. As AT&T piles more early adopters onto its network adding new Windows 7 Mobile devices later this year, plus the faster multitasking iPhones almost certain to come out this month, it faces a burgeoning crisis.

So I can’t blame them for making the change, but I can chastise them for offering unlimited connectivity in the first place. Since these plans are in fact limited by the ability of the network to handle the traffic, they have never really been unlimited at all.

What is changing is consumers are expecting quality of service. The new devices are much better at eating bandwidth than the old ones, and much more likely to appear to misbehave when the underlying connection is the thing that is failing. We can only hope that if the new charges don’t curtail usage, the new revenue will be plowed back into capacity increases.

From the beginning, we talked a good game but never really planned that everybody would be using the Internet to the extent they are. When it was just the geeks passing the HD video files back and forth we could be bandwidth pigs and the folks reading plain-text email barely noticed the lag we caused. Those days are over, and with it, the AT&T “unlimited” data plan.

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Nearly forty years ago, I participated in an energy summit. I was young, inexperienced, hadn’t found my voice, and my job was merely to be a journalist at the most base level; to record and catalog what was said. I could have done more, but what I heard intimidated me. It was the first time I realized there are some problems that can’t be solved, so I organized my tapes, turned them in with a comprehensive index, and said nothing.

The summit was held at the beautiful Ventana Inn at Big Sur. Its participants included executives of oil companies, the Sierra Club, public policy institutes and regulators. The concept was we all sit down and have a freewheeling discussion about the problems. What we discovered was we all pretty much agreed on what the problems were; and that there was no politically viable solution. So we all did what I did: nothing.

We could solve this problem tomorrow with something as simple as a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. The primary function of this tax would be to reduce consumption, so revenue would be far from a straight line computed from current consumption. We would still, however, raise a shitpot full of money.

This money could be plowed back into paying the people whose livelihoods were taken away by the spill to clean it up, and to promote new methods of energy production. We’d still hound BP into bankruptcy, but any revenue we’d get from them in fines or damages could be plowed into green energy technology too, or go back into the economy in the form of debt reduction.

But the public outrage over millions of gallons of oil in the gulf would quickly turn to public anger at the imposers of the tax. There would be rumors of corruption; that the money was lining the pockets of the energy companies. The energy companies themselves would scream bloody murder and sue everybody in sight to stop it. Cheap energy long-term alternatives are unwanted competition, artificially inflated short-term prices simply cut into their bottom line.

Most socially responsible liberals would be outraged over the terrible effects on the poor. This solution is a progressive tax run wild because it makes energy inefficient systems worthless and within the reach of the poor, which amplifies the inequity.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a vision of energy independence that has been worn away by the refusal by the right to pass a truly robust recovery package; one that not only bails us out, but helps us build a future. Until we do that, until we do something truly dramatic, we will simply repeat past mistakes.

Withdrawing from an addiction is painful, and until we are willing to walk through the pain, we will keep electing politicians who either promise cheap energy or promise alternatives but who know or learn the American people simply aren’t interested in solving the base problem.

That problem isn’t the oil in the gulf, that’s the symptom. It’s our denial of our cheap-energy addiction that put that damn hole in the sea floor in the first place without any Plan B to plug it.

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Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul (R-TX-14) developed a tremendous following on the Internet, and swayed a pretty significant number of young net-hip professionals to profess a belief in Libertarianism. It’s not surprising; political neophytes could guess the whole marketplace of ideas concept of the early Internet might just work for politics as well.

So I’m not surprised Rand Paul thought he could use the Rachael Maddow show on MSNBC to mine the liberal base for new voters. What he didn’t count on, is that libertarianism itself got a fair hearing. Paul had 18 minutes to answer Maddow’s question about the public accommodations clause of the civil rights act, and he couldn’t, because he knows Americans don’t like “letting the marketplace decide” people’s rights.

So now Paul and his lukewarm supporter Sarah Palin are trying to float the theory that Paul somehow got ambushed, even though that question had become a major problem for Paul in previous newspaper and radio interviews where he tried to make his case.

Blaming MSNBC is not an avenue available to a libertarian. As the conservative media group AIM pointed out, he chose to go on Maddow’s show, it’s a privately owned channel on a non-scarce distribution system, which its viewers watch as an act of free-market capitalism.

The free market doesn’t always work, but it worked this time. It pointed out what’s wrong with libertarianism as a 21st Century political philosophy. If Rand Paul were truly committed to his belief system, he’d be happy that it worked so well in practice.

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Kendrick Meek delivered a stump speech and answered questions in Delray Beach, FL, Friday to a standing-room-only crowd. He’s the only legitimate Democratic candidate for the Senate seat vacated by Mel Martinez, so he has my support. His heart is in the right place, but his rhetoric isn’t. He’ll have to improve that dramatically to have a shot at winning the general election.

He should ace the primary;  two of  his opponents are wildly underfunded and the third is self-funded candidate Jeff Greene, a billionaire who cleaned up betting against the housing market through credit default swaps. If that’s not enough, he’s a former Republican who ran for a San Fernando Valley, California congressional seat in the 1980s.

Kendrick Meek in Delray

Meek’s chances were never good; though Florida went for Obama in 2008, it was an uphill battle helped by a tanking economy that beat this red state blue. But things got a whole lot better when Republican hopeful and current Governor Charlie Crist turned independent, unable to out-teaparty his Republican challenger Marco Rubio. So its a three-way race.

Kendrick had good logic for his campaign plans. He’ll tar Crist with all the nutjob stuff he said when trying to out-conservative Rubio and then finish him off by calling him out as a affiliation-changing opportunist. His lack of name-recognition will be solved by non-stop campaigning and some aggressive advertising. With all the self-funded candidates, the tea-party independents, and the three way race, it should be a good year for Florida TV stations.

But Meek is not fast on his feet on the stump, especially in the Q and A. Obama raised the bar. The first three sentences after a question should be a direct answer, and that’s what Meek should be emulating. Asked a question about Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Meek meandered and never directly answered the question, when he easily could have. His mother (who represented his district before he did) voted against DOMA. He could have said, “We tried to stop this before it started, and the next best thing to do is repeal it.”

Instead, Meek emulated Joe Biden. He just talked, until his words led him into the canned “I’m a supporter of gay people” predigested spiel. That isn’t going to fly against a seasoned campaigner like newly-independent Crist, who helped Meek greatly when he went independent, but helped himself far more.

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Liberty Counsel, the right wing religious legal group famous for amicus briefs in “10 commandments in the courtroom” cases, says they’ll back George Rekers should he decide to sue, reports today’s Washington Times. The article quotes Matthew Staver, dean of Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Since Mr. Staver’s private practice took place primarily in Orlando, Florida there is a distinct possibility should there be an action, he’d be involved.

I’m not an attorney, just an old news guy fascinated by communication law, but I see two problems here.

First, there is a strong possibility that George Rekers is a public figure. Since New York Times v. Sullivan, public figures have had a tough time suing for defamation. The theory is that robust public debate trumps the rights of an individual who is an actor in that public debate.

“Sullivan” was the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama and though he wasn’t even explicitly named, he believed he was held up to ridicule because of an advertisement in the NYT Times that attempted to raise funds to defend Dr. Martin Luther King against a trumped up Alabama perjury indictment.

Rekers was a founder and member of the board of a high profile organization that took an extreme position in an area of great controversy. Much of his income came from expert testimony in widely publicized cases that were extensively written about in the press. In two of these cases he was excoriated for testimony that was worthless and biased. This too was widely reported in the press.

When his activity, most of which he does not deny, became public knowledge, he was further elevated to prominence as the subject of the opening monologues on nearly every late night show, from Colbert to Craig Ferguson.

Should he file a case, that too will be newsworthy, and will have the additional protection that, because it’s litigation, it can be publicly discussed with impunity.

Second, we are now starting to see “he called me queer” cases being thrown out of court on the grounds that an imputation of homosexuality is not defamatory.

So once again, “poor” Mr. Rekers finds himself in the damnedest position. If he sues, the very defense in the case is going to highlight the struggle of a minority to even find a level playing field to argue its oppression against the person fueling that oppression. Rekers will find himself compared with the police commissioner of racist Montgomery, Alabama in the day of MLK.

In claiming he’s injured by being called gay, he will unwittingly call his own life’s work into question, because the very injury he’s claiming is one he has spent his professional life fostering.

He’ll serve himself up on a platter for every op-ed writer in the country that needs to fill 14 paragraphs with topical edginess, and they’ll be able to do it under the doctrine of qualified privilege.

Wouldn’t surprise me if he does sue. It’s the worst possible thing a man in his position can do, and he’s never failed to take the worst option before.

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I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed harder, and I doubt in my lifetime I ever will again. When I die, I hope one of my last memories is the three of us, me, my partner, and our friend Patrick Paul riding the moving sidewalk out the front of Bally’s Las Vegas, barely able to stand, doubled up with laughter. A lot of that laughter was from Patrick’s rapidfire wit eviscerating the Vegas-show Donn Arden’s Jubilee.

Jubilee is still playing at Bally’s; a dinosaur of a show from the days where bare-breasted women bearing feather-laden headdresses was edgy, and a chorus line of men in tophats, tuxedos and tails was a big-time production. I guess if you’re trying to relive the Vegas “lido” period, you can overlook the toupee on the lead song-and-dance man that nearly flies off his head with every step-kick, the sappy patter that seems just a degree away from vaudeville, or the “art poses” of nude women that predated the stripper pole.

Patrick Paul was a bartender at a gay bar in Key West; he knew class and elegance when he saw it, and he didn’t see one bit of it on the Bally’s stage. The way he pointed it out, with an economy of stinging, well-chosen words, made Patrick unique. He could have written monologues for any of the late night shows.

Patrick Paul & friend

But Patrick lived life completely on his terms, choosing a profession that allowed him mood elevation 24/7, and a place to practice it that kept him warm and tan year round. When AIDS came to our community, he was on the leading edge, both in acquiring it, and in helping start a funding and support system that proved the Conchs of Key West took care of our own. So it wasn’t surprising that when he died on the morning of one the biggest annual fundraisers, one that he helped found and supported for over two decades, he received a 20 minute standing ovation.

We saw a lot of bad things in the 30 years we knew Patrick. We saw hundreds of people in our community die of a disease that most people wouldn’t speak of above a whisper. But we saw Patrick persevere with a wry humor that even in our desperation was always wickedly funny. Even when he was given grim chances for survival because the way he lived had worn away his heart, he took the long-odds bet and chose aggressive surgery. I don’t know what he’d say about it if we could have him back for just a one-liner, but I’m sure it would be funny as hell.

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The week-long party that ensued in the LGBT community after the lead expert witness against Florida gay adoption was caught in a compromising situation has ended. The cleanup has begun, and so have the thoughtful blog and video pieces that are pointing out the fall of George Alan Rekers was different than all the others.

Right wing and/or religious leaders whose anti-gay rhetoric belie their own bisexuality has become a meme. Craig Ferguson based a bit on it in his opening monologue Wednesday: “If you’re really, really anti-gay…you’re probably gay.” The unfunny Jay Leno even got a laugh out of it. Jimmy Kimmel piled on. Stephen Colbert gave Rekers his Alpha Dog of the Week award, Jon Stewart mocked him using a piece from CNN.

But now that the laughing is dying down, we’re starting to explain how this scandal is different, and why it represents a turning point in the struggle for gay equality. The affair of Ted Haggard was most like that of Rekers; a pay for sex/companionship arrangement that went bad when the sexworker exposed him.

It differed because the escort initiated the expose, and because Haggard had steered clear of anti-gay rhetoric except for a sermon which was his karmic moment: If you don’t want to be caught doing something, he preached, you shouldn’t do it.

But the media and much of the public, LGBT and otherwise, turned on Haggard’s accuser too, and a plea to not repeat that mistake this time: “Let’s Not Chew This One Up and Spit Him Out” by Dan Savage is one of the best thoughtful overviews. As is Rachael Maddow’s piece on Friday, on why the Rekers story is newsworthy beyond the titillating.

Throughout the scandal, the blog Joe My God has provided the best overall coverage linking blogs and news sites that carried all facets of the story. He also did one of the best interviews with the escort, even though CNN had better access but did a poorer job.

Now, the morning after the week long party, there is a sadness expressed on twitter and in the comments on the hundreds of blog pieces that covered this. The more one studies the Rekers/escort relationship and Rekers testimony, the more profound the sadness becomes.

When a 20-year old boy explains that his john appears to not understand his own sexuality, and when that john bases his “expert” testimony in a gay-adoption case on the higher levels of suicide, substance abuse, depression and affective disorder in the LGBT community, the closed loop becomes obvious.

George Alan Rekers is a victim of the very belief system he perpetuates through the self-fulfilling prophesy of using statistics that demonstrate oppression to justify continued oppression. That is why the specific facts of this scandal have lasting value when those before it do not. It shows the so-called “experts” of the anti-gay right have far less understanding of the psychology of LGBT people than the escorts who carry their luggage.

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