Michael Smerconish's crazy, unfactual sympathy for BP and the oil spill

Michael Smerconish isn't joining a boycott of BP -- because if the boycott succeeds, maybe BP will go out of business. And if they go out of business, who will provide the money and expertise to fix the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

I intend to drive out of my way to fill up at a BP pump.

Why? Because it's imperative that the company doesn't tap out before plugging the leak and cleaning up the tens of millions of gallons of crude oil marring the Gulf of Mexico.

If BP goes under before either of those tasks is complete - or if the company can't afford to complete them itself - the federal government will be sucked into picking up the tab. Or worse, actually taking the lead in trying to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf and mop up the mess.

Here's the thing: the mess is proving very costly to BP -- both in terms of its stock market value and in terms of how much it's spending. And yet those enormous costs pale in comparison to how much money BP still has left over. Tuesday's New York Times:

One analyst calculated that in a worst-case scenario, BP’s cleanup liability would be around $14 billion, which would account for the entire loss of all fishing and tourism revenues for coastal states closest to the spill, said Kevin Book, a managing director at ClearView Energy Partners. Even then, Mr. Book said, the market overreacted, and BP can easily handle the cleanup bill.

BP remains a formidable corporation, with the ability to withstand penalties that would easily bankrupt most companies. On April 26, a few days after the Deepwater Horizon rig that it had rented from Transocean sank, BP reported first-quarter profits of $6.2 billion. Because of its considerable profits and size, it does not buy outside insurance for such disasters.

The market drop means that while BP is not at risk of bankruptcy, the crisis could potentially turn it into a takeover target if the slide continues.

So the worst that can happen to BP right now -- aside from the unlikely scenario of the federal government deciding to take it over -- is that some other capitalist will take the company over, not that the company will go under. And honestly: Why should I care if some other Richie Rich is making profits and assuming liability for the oil spill? It's too bad Michael Smerconish didn't decide to use some actual facts in his column, instead of indulging in baseless speculation.

Michael Smerconish is wrong about Fred Phelps

I really don't want to be in the position of continually defending professional homophobe Fred Phelps. He's an evil man with an evil belief system who has brought added grief to hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people by picketing funerals with his "God Hates Fags" message.

But I believe that the First Amendment give Fred Phelps the right express those views -- no matter how odious, no matter how provocative the time and place of his expression. Michael Smerconish, writing in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, disagrees.

By picketing Lance Cpl. Snyder's funeral, didn't Westboro Baptist infringe upon family members' First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion? Which on March 10, 2006, took the form of a burial service at St. John's Catholic Church in Westminster, Md.

And because the Westboro demonstrators weren't protesting on a street corner or in a public park, it could also follow that they infringed upon the Snyders' right to peaceably assemble for that private funeral.

The point is that while Phelps and his flock may believe they have a constitutionally protected right to protest at a funeral, that right should not come at the expense of the Snyders' right to peaceably gather at a Catholic funeral. Especially when that practice involved mourning the death of an American hero.

"When the Fourth Circuit decided in favor of Phelps against Mr. Snyder, implicitly they decided that Mr. Phelps' rights were more important than Mr. Snyder's rights," Sean Summers, the York, Pa., lawyer representing the Snyder family, told me in a phone conversation last week. That should not stand.

Get past Smerconish's troubling implication that Fred Phelps' rights -- and by extension, our rights  -- are somehow less valuable when they come in conflict with the desires of a military family. Smerconish's argument is that the Snyder family was less able to exercise their own rights to religion and peaceably assemble because of the Phelps protest.

And I don't think that's true. The funeral still happened. The Snyders still assembled. They still gave their son a Catholic service. It appears that they exercised their Constitutional rights fully -- but want to deny Phelps the opportunity to do the same. And I don't blame them -- Phelps' protests truly are execrable -- but that doesn't make them right.

It bears repeating at every opportunity: The First Amendment protects all variety of assholes, troublemakers, demagogues and rabble-rousers. It doesn't just protect popular speech because, well, popular speech doesn't really need protecting does it? The First Amendment protects even Fred Phelps. Because of that, it protects us all.