It used to be said that Democrats cannot run an election and the GOP cannot govern — I guess it can still be put that way.

Yosemite Sam clips set to George Thorogood and The Destroyers — Yosemite Sam Is Bad To The Bone.

So rumors abound that Al Gore did some extra-marital global warming. Gore and the most-likely lady–Laurie David, who produced An Inconvenient Truth (can you hear the jokes now?)–both deny having an incandescent liaison.

Way to jump on the extra-marital bandwagon, Al. Actually if the affair story is true, Gore handled it with far more discretion than Edwards, Ensign, Sanford…But still, extra-marital affairs just seem so de riguer nowadays.

Wow. Sarah Palin was on Bill O’Reilly to comment on Obama’s address tonight, and it’s every bit as crazy-stupid as you’d expect – even BillO seemed amazed by her performance.

Hello, and welcome to the liveblog of tonight’s Oval Office address from President Obama about the BP Oil Disaster. It’s scheduled for 8pm EDT and should last 18 minutes. We have the live video stream embedded in this post, which should play automatically when the address begins. I’ll provide a real time transcript, and offer some commentary at the end. Discuss the speech in the comments here, and stick around after for more from FDL on the speech.

I think it’s fair to call this a bad day for BP. Lightning struck a drilling ship used in their containment operations and started a fire, delaying oil processing for about five hours. Then new government estimates showed another increase in the flow rate of the oil spill, up to 35,000 – 60,000 barrels from 20,000-40,000. It turns out that the riser cut increased the flow of oil by over 50%, more than the amount of oil they are taking in through the containment dome. As if that wasn’t enough, Fitch downgraded BP’s stock and their shares fell to a new low.

Here’s the wrapup schedule, essentially what to expect on Wednesday in the last inning of the federal trial in San Francisco on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 that made marriage equality illegal.

Our liveblogging will resume tomorrow (Wednesday 6/16) at approximately 10am pacific time; we’ll have posts for you at The Seminal (Teddy) and at Emptywheel (Marcy and Bmaz). For your reference, here’s what we expect the schedule to look like (all times pacific/FDL, so please don’t expect any liveblog posts before 1pm eastern time!):

In tonight’s address to the American public, will President Obama call for a round of on-the-margins clean energy measures (along with big subsidies for nuclear and clean coal)? Will he come down with some solid, progressive measures to reduce millions of gallons of fuel consumption a day, similar to Jeff Merkley’s proposal yesterday? Or will he go big, and demand a price on carbon to mitigate the catastrophic potential effects of climate change?

In case the White House hasn’t noticed, no one is fooled or satisfied with the arrangement that has BP nominally in charge of protection and cleanup of the massive damage they’ve caused while claiming the Coast Guard is “overseeing” their efforts. We’re talking about fundamental government functions, and BP is not our government.

The conference committee for Wall Street reform finally got around to the title on credit rating agencies, and we saw a lot of unanimity on the House side for the offer written by Barney Frank, which would retain the language removing references to credit rating agencies from the regulatory code, but which would cancel out the Franken amendment, which would change the issuer-pays model to one where an SEC office would assign initial ratings. The House offer passed on a voice vote with almost no opposition.