It’s unsatisfactory for me to say that the lesson we’ll eventually learn from this oil spill is that next time the response will be faster, or that next time there will be greater controls in place to reduce the impact on the environment and our communities. It avoids the fact that the consequences of such a spill are so great and irreversible that we can’t really afford to have “the next one.”

Unfortunately, this seems to be the direction we’re headed in.In a move to get in good with the folks over at Minerals Management Systems, who will be under much more scrutiny and pressure following the Gulf spill, Shell wrote them a letter to assuage any fears they might have about the oil giant’s future plans– specifically a controversial drilling project off the coast of Alaska

If you’re in the mood for some incredibly lazy political reporting, check out this piece by Suzi Parker in the Christian Science Monitor, lamenting the supposedly precarious state of “centrist politics.”

Please welcome Steven Gillon, author of The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation, the topic of today’s special FDL Book Salon.

Mark Souder, GOP Congressman from Indiana who easily won renomination last month for a ninth term, will resign this morning after revelations of an affair with a staffer in his local district office. This career-ending dalliance is especially ironic given Souder’s witch-hunts, fake audits, and harassment of AIDS prevention agencies in San Francisco early this century, which diverted scarce resources and may have cost lives.

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou told Jason Leopold in an interview that torture victim Abu Zubaydah’s use of multiple voices in his diaries was the work of a creative mind and not mental illness. But the creation of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) was something studied for use in relation to CIA interrogation for decades. If Zubaydah had DID, we need to look closer at this entire episode to know what exactly was going on.

On Saturday, the New York Times brought the world’s attention to the discovery by a team of researchers on the the vessel Pelican that there are large underwater plumes of oil emanating from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Remarkably, the response of the government to the attention focused on this discovery has been to tell the researchers to stop granting interviews with the press. At the same time, the blog on which the researchers had been providing updates has also fallen silent since Saturday.

Depending on how the elections go today, the spinmeisters will work their story-telling magic in various ways.

• Will the bell toll for Arlen and Blanche?
• Guess bragging about killing the public option was unwise.
• Ay-yi-yi.
• How to read today’s tea leaves.
• Why do Republicans hate the troops?
• Lou Dobbs, Teabagger.
• The Pantload, birther.

It’s Primary Day in many places — so don’t forget that first coat.

Featuring new videos by The Drive By Truckers and Good Old War.