While serving in Congress in August 2006, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) slammed the Bush administration for its response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Jindal said the state suffered “trauma” from the “widespread incompetence of the federal, state and local government response.”

But yesterday on Fox News, it was Jindal who was displaying Katrina incompetence. Making a push for expanded offshore oil drilling, Jindal repeated the myth that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused “no major” oil spills in the state. Jindal called it a “great unwritten success story”:

Q: Real fast, Governor, the price of oil went up five bucks a barrel today. You’ve been drilling off the coast of Louisiana for a number of years. Any oil spills to worry about?

JINDAL: You know, that’s one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills.

Watch it:

Jindal is clueless about the reality in his own state. As noted in the Wonk Room, the Hurricanes caused offshore oil spills so large that they could be seen from space (check out a picture here.) The Minerals Management Service reported that 113 oil platforms were “totally destroyed” — a total of 124 offshore spills.

In fact, oil seeped onshore into southeast Louisiana, which saw 44 onshore and offshore oil spills. The EPA called the spills “worse than the worst-case scenario.” Even oil industry representatives admitted: “nature can always topple you.”

It’s hard to see how this is a “great unwritten success story.”

Recently, the Bush administration announced it would build an additional 670 miles of border fence by the end of the year. But the fence would “slice through” the University of Texas, Brownsville, which borders Mexico, cutting off the school’s golf course from the rest of the campus. The AP reports that school officials are saying the fence would undermine the university’s mission of fostering cooperation with Mexico:

The university — built close to the Rio Grande on land where the United States and Mexico traded cannon blasts during the Mexican-American War 160 years ago — recruits Mexican students, offers government and business classes in English and Spanish and turns out sorely needed bilingual teachers. [...]

“To slice off and fence off the `bi’ part of `binational’ violates the essence of this university,” said university President Juliet V. Garcia, whose office is situated in what was once the thick-walled, tan-brick hospital at Fort Brown, built shortly after the Civil War.

In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun released yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) praised himself for sponsoring the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform legislation of 2006, which failed to pass the Senate last year due to conservative opposition:

I haven’t won on every issue. I didn’t win on immigration reform, but I’ll go back at it. And I’m glad I did it.

McCain’s praise for comprehensive reform is a reversal of rhetoric he used when speaking of his own legislation when seeking the GOP nomination. In fact, in a Jan. 30 GOP debate, McCain said he would not vote for his own bill today:

Q: At this point, if your original proposal came to a vote on the Senate floor, would you vote for it? [...]

McCAIN: No, I would not, because we know what the situation is today. The people want the borders secured first.

McCain maintains he has not changed his position on immigration reform, claiming his policy is still “secure the border first.” But in a scathing op-ed today, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), whose district borders Mexico, notes that McCain once thought “securing the borders” was a secondary consideration to comprehensive reform:

On the floor of the United States Senate in September of 2006, Sen. McCain praised that the Senate had “rejected the argument for an ‘enforcement first’ strategy that focuses on border security only, an ineffective and ill-advised approach.” He went on to add that, “the only way to truly secure our border and protect our nation is through the enactment of comprehensive immigration reform.”

As Reyes noted, McCain can’t have it both ways. Being for “securing the borders first” and also being pro-comprehensive reform “are two very different approaches.” This weekend, McCain will address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials “and will have a chance to clarify which position he holds. It can be only one,” Reyes pressed.

Only in McCain’s world of regular immigration flip-flops is it possible to be “glad” to have championed legislation that he wouldn’t support today.

According to a new Pentagon report released today, “the Taliban has regrouped after its initial fall from power in Afghanistan. The new report offers a rather dim view of progress in the nearly 7-year-old war, declaring that the Taliban has ‘coalesced into a resilient insurgency’”:

Noting that insurgent violence continues to climb, the report said that despite efforts to capture and kill key leaders, the Taliban is likely to “maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008.” At the same time, the Afghan Army and national police are progressing slowly, and still lack the trainers they need.

The report comes as the “number of foreign forces in Afghanistan killed in June has reached 39, the highest monthly toll of the war,” as CNN reported yesterday. More on Afghanistan in today’s Progress Report.

I’m heading off this afternoon to Chicago for the weekend where Sara’s going to be speaking at the DLC National Conversation and I intend to return believing that only spending cuts and endless war can save the Democratic Party from the McGovernite wilderness (actually, surely liberals and centrists alike can agree on the national popular vote), so expect weekend blogging to be perhaps lighter than usual.

Then after that, I’ll be continuing my jetset lifestyle by going directly from Chicago to Aspen, Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival co-sponsored by The Atlantic (or as we like to think of it, the Atlantic Ideas Festival in Some Town in Colorado) so expect a lot of posts about what the famous people say. Also stuff about how you should make Allstate, Altria, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Chevron, Ernst & Young, JP Morgan, Mercedes Benz, and Thompson Reuters your choice for fine insurance, tobacco, aerospace, government contracting, oil, accounting, financial services, luxury cars, and “intelligent, information-based solutions, software tools, and applications” products respectively.

Photo by Flickr user cesposito 2035 used under a Creative Commons license

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) issued a subpoena today to the Department of Justice for documents related to a variety of Bush administration scandals, including the Valerie Plame leak investigation, the U.S attorney scandal, the politicization of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Read the full subpoena here.