Sometime today, the US Army Corps of Engineers will open the Morganza Floodway in Louisiana for the second time in its history. The object is to divert some of the huge flow of water coming down the Mississippi away from the usual path that streams past Baton Rouge and New Orleans into the Mississippi delta, and into a largely agricultural region of Louisiana instead. It’s a Hobson’s choice, where agricultural fields and various small towns will be flooded in order to help save many the lives and livelihoods, and communities of millions of Louisiana residents nearer to the Mississippi’s regular pathways.

This is Katrina in reverse, with the water coming from the north rather than from the Gulf. Let’s hope the lessons learned from flooding in the past that led to the creation of the floodways will help, and that the post-disaster recovery efforts that failed so spectacularly with Katrina have been improved this time around.

I’m reminded of Bobby Jindal scoffing in his response to the State of the Union in 2009 at money to be spent on “volcano monitoring,” when not but a few weeks later a massive volcano erupted in Alaska. Silly as it may seem, the government has a role to play in actually preparing for contingencies to protect its people. And traditionally, the US government has played a role in providing humanitarian and disaster relief to allies harmed by natural disasters. There are major cuts in those areas as well.

We had a massive solar flare this week, starting on Tuesday — the biggest since December 2006 — and the chart you see here indicates the possibility that some auroral activity may be visible tonight as far south as Indianapolis, Indiana. You might not get a spectacular light show, maybe just a shimmer you can’t define, but it will be more than I can see under this cloud cover.

The White House, the FDA and the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board are teaming up with a group of celebrity chefs to promote the eating of Gulf Seafood.

While it’s a pretty bad year in the Gulf of Mexico already, due to the Horizon well blowout, this year it seems the Dead Zone is worse than ever, too. Being a great neighbor doesn’t seem to be a characteristic of the U.S. in so many ways, so this one should come as no surprise.

Yesterday, Time magazine published a disgusting screed telling us all to calm down about the hundreds of millions of gallons of crude oil BP has released into the Gulf of Mexico and then even sent the author to push his drivel on Hardball. In starting the corporate media’s push-back against the level of damage arising from BP’s irresponsibility, Time has joined a team that previously consisted of BP, Thad Allen, EPA and NOAA.

As you can see from the illustration where I have superimposed the location of the Macondo Well (link is pdf; 28.4 deg. North, 88.2 deg. West ) on the latest (2 am Eastern, July 23) wind speed probability map from the National Hurricane Center, Tropical Storm Bonnie is on a course that is expected to take it directly over the blown out well.

There is a hole in the middle of the Gulf. It is a hole of death, starting with the eleven oil rig workers killed in the initial explosion, and continuing with the marine life of the Gulf. The National Marine Fisheries Service has been closing ever-larger portions of the US Gulf waters to fishing — now up to 32% of them — because the oil still flows from that hole of death.

The federal government and many local agencies have been working with BP to limit access to information and scientific analysis of the oil spill in the Gulf. The time has come to place the entire response in the hands of an independent commission with access to BP and government resources to implement its response.

Dr. Samantha Joye, professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, whose research team first spotted evidence of vast undersea plumes of oil near the BP oil disaster, was on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night to explain the theory of how plumes form and the steps they were taking to confirm and plot the plumes’ size and reach.