Friday posts from Mike Allen's Playbook (Politico). Variety of interests always the latest from those multiple fronts...Quantity of oil spill really out there beyond belief...Poor creatures trying to survive there...Maneuvering in Afghanistan has a strange ring...

 

BULLETIN: “An NPR News Investigation has found that there could be at least 10 times the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig than previously estimated. NPR’s Richard Harris asked scientists to analyze a video that BP released of a pipe on the seafloor spewing out oil. The scientists concluded that 70,000 barrels of oil are spilling into the Gulf each day, plus or minus 20 percent – 14 times higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels per day from the U.S. Coast Guard. … [T]hese estimates indicate that the oil spilling into the Gulf has already far exceeded the equivalent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident.”

PLAYBOOK FACTS OF LIFE -- From a P.R. standpoint, the worst could be yet to come: The oil hasn’t started rushing ashore.

EXCLUSIVE -- Newsweek Managing Editor Dan Klaidman has signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for his first book, out in 2012. Tentative title: “The Arc of Justice: Obama, Terrorism and the Struggle over American Ideals.” Danny calls it “a narrative that takes readers inside the administration's efforts to re-balance terrorism policies in the aftermath of Bush-Cheney-Addington-Yoo. By looking at the struggle to close Gitmo, the controversy over the KSM trial, how Team Obama handled the Zazi, Abdulmutallab and Shahzad cases and many other still-secret episodes in Obama's War on Terror, the book will explore the immense challenges of developing smart, tough, prudent and just anti-terrorism policies in an age of extreme political polarization.”

SNEAK PEEK -- Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar, who left a prestigious teaching position at Harvard to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) -- Contributor Benjamin Wallace-Wells: “The small [environmental] risks that people or companies take (in adding increments of carbon to the atmosphere or -- as in the case of the recent Gulf Coast oil spill --maintaining drilling rigs) sometimes threaten to cascade into a catastrophe. So how can the government change the framework of choices that particular people are faced with so that their own small errors in risk perception don’t expose the whole of society? … Conservatives see a Big Brother strain in Sunstein’s philosophy (Glenn Beck called him ‘the most dangerous guy out there’), while some liberals worry that behavioral economics is too immature to handle the weight of guiding policy.”

KANDAHAR RESULTS WILL TAKE MONTHS -- Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, in the Penatgon briefing room yesterday, on the Kandahar offensive: "We're not using the term 'operation' or 'major operations,' because that often brings to mind in people's psyche the idea of a D-Day and an H-hour and an attack. Kandahar is not in fact controlled by the Taliban. So it’s not a case of having to recapture an area under enemy control, as Marja was. ... [W]hen we talk about our efforts at Kandahar, this is something that's ongoing, and it's a process, not an event. … We as security forces face being very precise and very careful to try to do what we call a rising tide of security without lapsing into major fighting."

Mike Allen, Politico