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Who put out the hit on van Heerden?

Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to blow — months and years before Katrina did the job.

For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with ... getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst]

But I've been in this investigating game long enough to know that van Heerden's job didn't die of natural causes or academic issues. This was a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced — for good.

So who done it?

Here are the facts.

Dr. van Heerden has lots of friends, mostly the people of New Orleans, those who survived and cheered his fight to save their city. But he also has enemies, many of them, and they are powerful.

First, there is Big Oil. More than a decade ago, van Heerden pointed the finger at oil drilling as a culprit in threatening New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with flooding.

"Certainly he was critical of what the oil companies did to the coast," Louisiana engineer HJ Bosworth told me. "Seeing what kind of bad citizens they were. Dozens and dozens of pipeline canals just carved the living daylights out of the coast just to find some oil."

Well, we need oil, don't we?

True, but Bosworth, who advises Levees.org, a non-profit group that birddogs hurricane safety work, explained the connection between flooding New Orleans and oil drilling quantified by van Heerden's research. "Takes a million years to build (the protective coastal marsh); once you carve it up, it's just like bleeding a wild animal, hang it up, carve some holes in it, and the juice just drains out of it. Saltwater and tide invade. You make [the state] susceptible to flooding from coastal and tidal surges."

So I was amazed to learn that, shortly after van Heerden, wetlands protector, was given the heave-ho by LSU, a group calling itself "America's Wetland" gave the university a fat check for $300,000.

After a little digging, I found that it wasn't really "America's Wetland," the group with the oh-so-green name and love-Mother-Nature website, that provided the money. One-hundred percent of the loot, in fact, came from Chevron Oil Corporation. Chevron had merely "green-washed" the money through "Wetlands."

Was this Big Oil's "thank you" to LSU for canning van Heerden? The University refuses to talk to me about van Heerden's firing ("It's a confidential personnel matter").

Bosworth notes such a grant to the University "doesn't come without strings attached." And this "Wetland" grant appears to have some tangled threads. LSU will monitor the coast's environment, guided by a committee of what the school's PR office describes as "experts" in coastal infrastructure and hurricane research. But the school is pointedly excluding its own expert, van Heerden. Instead of van Heerden, LSU announced it will rely on representatives from Chevron — and Shell Oil.

You can't challenge Shell's expertise on coastal erosion. The Gulf Restoration Network has calculated that the oil giant, "has dredged 8.8 million cubic yards material while laying pipelines since 1983 causing the loss of 22,624 acres."

Shell too is a sponsor of "America's Wetland."

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I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed by John Harwood and he told him on CNBC I believe that " we missed the iceberg." No we didn't. The budget is a disgrace and Californians are going to learn the hard way what has happened in our state. Jobs and services will be slashed at an incredible rate and we;ll all suffer for it. Even if Arnuld thinks we missed the iceberg, the state is going to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Calitics has more:

So the Assembly is wrapping up their budget session, and it turns out that the Assembly came up $1.1 billion dollars short of the Senate's solutions. Oil drilling failed, and the local government raid on HUTA (gas taxes) failed as well.

So where does that leave us? These bills will go to the governor, and since there isn't concurrence, it will be roughly a $23 billion solution rather than $24 billion. But, the Governor has a line-item veto. He can make various cuts with his blue pencil. But $1.1 billion? Who knows. That seems like a tall order.

Considering what Schwarzenegger did the last time a partial solution was handed to him, I guess there's an outside shot that he'll just say no and open a new extraordinary session. But he'll probably just line-item some, and maybe make up the difference by eating into what is now a $900 million dollar budget reserve.

Is everybody ready to be back here in October?

...We'll have a couple days for final analyses, but let's remember that this is a terrible budget and a dark day for California.

...Let me clarify. The Governor can make line-item cuts but he doesn't necessarily have to, because this is a budget revision. He can also shift around the size of the reserve. In the end, he doesn't actually have to be in balance for a revision; that's a Constitutional need at the beginning of the process, as I understand it, not now. Clearly from the Governor's remarks, he's not going to veto the whole thing, so this is the "solution," for now. There also may be Constitutional problems with some of the stuff passed.

  Whenever you're looking for some disingenuous flip-floppery, there's no better place to turn than Jon Stewart and the Republican party.

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Stewart: As you know, our country, America, is having a robust discussion right now about energy --  we're addicted oil, black gold, Texas tea, dinosaur love juice. Basically there's two schools of thought. Some people think offshore drilling is the answer...

McCain (Aug. 6): We have to drill here, and we have to drill now, and we have to drill immediately.

Stewart: Other people are against drilling. Think it's just a band-aid....

McCain (May 28): It will only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels.

Stewart: Boy, I'd like to be fly n the wall when those two run into each other.

Today President Bush lifted the executive ban on off-shore drilling first enacted by his father is 1990, and had the audacity to blame Democrats for the high price of gas. No, I'm not kidding.

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Bush's cynicism on this issue is simply breath-taking. He's trying to exploit the anger Americans are feeling over the crushing price of fuel by blaming Democrats and challenging them to allow a vote on a bill that would have ZERO immediate impact on fuel costs, but would be very difficult (politically speaking) to oppose. Just like the Republicans do with every possible issue, they feed off voter resentment and play cynical politics with a very serious and complicated problem.

The fact that opening up off-shore drilling sites won't yield more resources for at least a decade doesn't matter. What matters is that Republicans can use the issue as a political bludgeon to bash Democrats with, all the while just prolonging our addiction to foreign oil. Shameful.

Nicole adds: And for all the talk that drilling would provide a psychological boost and drop prices, it's noteworthy that oil is slightly up today at more than $145/barrel. You'd think such a presidential announcement would provide a nice drop -- even if short-lived -- if there was a psychological element to this. Nope.

Senator Obama:

If offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks.  But most experts, even within the Bush Administration, concede it would do neither.  It would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for thirty years. 

Check below the fold for more responses and a thorough debunking on this farce George Bush and John McCain call an energy policy. 

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  About a month ago, as the debate over coastal drilling began in earnest, Dick Cheney pushed the rhetorical envelope a bit, telling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that "oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida. We're not doing it. The Chinese are in cooperation with the Cuban government ... Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply. Yet Congress has said ... no to drilling off Florida."

It has been a common Republican talking point, but it's patently false -- the Chinese are not drilling off Cuba's coasts. The day after Cheney made the bogus claim, the V.P.'s office acknowledged that he was mistaken.

And yet, for some reason, high-profile Republicans can't stop repeating the claim that's already been debunked. Maybe conservatives have decided that they can't win a debate on energy policy on the merits, so misleading people about communists stealing our oil is the better strategy. Here's failed presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani talking to CNN's resident right-winger, Glenn Beck, Wednesday night:

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Giuliani: "You look at Cuba. Cuba is going to allow China to drill for oil within 80 miles of Florida. And Florida had a 300-mile limit. So in essence, we have China drilling for American oil."

Maybe it's my imagination, but it almost seems as if high-profile Republicans have been repeating the false claim more now that it has been debunked.

Looks like even Senator Norm Coleman is getting in on the fun.

TPM has been keeping track of all the examples, and there are some real doozies in there. Some Republicans have altered the myth a little -- I think Giuliani is the first to suggest that the Cubans and the Chinese are taking our oil -- but they're all repeating a charge that isn't remotely true. Either they don't know what they're talking about, or they know the claim is false and repeat it anyway. At this point, it's hard to know which is the case.