Tuesday’s Mini-Report

May 20, 2008

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* There’s no shortage of support for Sen. Ted Kennedy this afternoon.

* Except on the Free Republic threads, which were apparently so awful, site administrators had to shut them down.

* I’m not sure if this is going to work, but Congress needs to look like it’s doing something: “The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow. The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.”

* On a related note: “Oil prices spiked to a new trading high Tuesday, sweeping toward $130 a barrel as supply concerns intensified the momentum buying that has lifted crude deeper into record territory. Gasoline, meanwhile, reached an average of $3.80 at the pump for the first time.”

* Interesting report: “Only one in five detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq are members of the main extremist groups fighting U.S. and Iraqi forces, while many of the rest can be reintegrated back into society, according to U.S. military statistics and interviews. The assessment reflects a new approach to detainees, which emphasizes isolating al-Qaeda and Shiite extremists and increasing the release of many average men caught up in the fighting.”

* The Jerusalem Post reports that Bush is intent on a war with Iran before his presidency ends…

* …but the White House strenuously rejected the article.

* This doesn’t sound good: “More than 30 sources of radiation were buried by debris from the massive earthquake in central China last week and all have either been recovered or safely cordoned off, state media reported Tuesday.”

* The White House was asked if we’d see Bush and McCain on the campaign trail “together.” The response: “I think you’ll see the President out on the campaign quite — campaign trail quite a bit. We’ll keep you posted on their events that they may have together.”

* Interesting report: “Immigrants of the past quarter-century have been assimilating in the United States at a notably faster rate than did previous generations, according to a study released today…. ‘This is something unprecedented in U.S. history,’ Vigdor said. ‘It shows that the nation’s capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong.'”

* Remember hearing about that “boy crisis”? It turns out, it probably doesn’t exist.

* How rough are things for House Republicans? They miss the disgraced Tom DeLay.

* Google doesn’t much care about Joe Lieberman’s opinions on what does and doesn’t belong on YouTube.

* Why wasn’t the 20th hijacker charged?

* It might yet be topped, but this is clearly the most offensive ad of the campaign season thus far.

* And House Minority Leader John Boehner told reporters last month that his caucus was in great shape for the fall. “I think we are going to gain seats this year. Period,” he said at the time. Is Boehner just as confident now? Not so much.

Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

Except on the Free Republic threads, which were apparently so awful, site administrators had to shut them down.

Can we remember this the next time some right-wing pundit wags an odious erect finger at left-blogistan?

  • By way of an open thread, I noticed that David Brooks is trying hard to emulate his NYT colleague, William Kristol with today’s column about the farm bill. To read the column you would be led to believe that McCain stood up courageously in the Senate last week and voted against the massive farm bill with its outrageous subsidies to millionaire farmers. And that Obama meekly went along with the large bipartisan majority and voted for business as usual. Problem is, he obviously didn’t fact check.

    The vote was 81 to 15 with four not present. Guess who wasn’t present to vote on this massive bill? McCain and Obama make two. Hillary and Kennedy make four. Now, Kennedy had a real excuse for not being present, and, since Clinton and Obama are still locked in mortal combat they can plausibly claim that their campaign schedules got in the way. But McCain has a pretty free schedule for the next three months or so, so you would expect him to make a greater effort to have his vote counted on such an important bill. If he is against all that pork, let him vote against it. Or maybe he is wary of those ads that will inevitably pop up stating that he voted against nutrition for the poor and increasing food stamp payments to the poorest of the poor. Nahh, that would be too political for the old maverick…wouldn’t it?

  • Suing OPEC? Hmmm…what about the oil companies? What about the people who are purposely and continuously devaluing the dollar? What about the people who are manipulating the markets?

    OPEC is probably last on the list of who is responsible for the oil disaster.

    And the car companies who ignored it, the refusal to do R&D, the people who bought 4 MPG Hummers to tool around their downtown areas. C’mon.

    Oil is a resource and they own it. What happened to the free market, eh?

    Fucking idiots.

  • George Carlin got it right:

    Can someone please tell me why farmers are always whining and looking for a handout? If it isn’t a drought or a flood, it’s their bad loans. I was always told farmers were strong, independent people who were too proud to accept help. But sure enough as soon as something goes wrong, they’re looking for the government to bail them out. And they’re the forst ones to complain about city people who live on welfare.

    F#ck the farmers.

    They’re worrying about losing their land? It wasn’t their land to begin with, they stole it from the Indians. Let ‘em find out what it geels like to have your land taken away by some square-headed (explitive deleted) who just came over on a boat. They wiped out the bears, the wolves, and the mountain lions; they spoiled the land, poisoned the water table, and they produce tasteless food.

    Why is it in this capitalistic society all businesses are expected to succeed or fail on their own except farming? Why is that?

  • Maria, while I am getting feisty, let’s talk about pissing off OPEC so they cut back production or sales to the US. What are these morons in our government thinking? On both sides of the aisle. This is the single most retarded concept I have ever heard of.

    Ok, maybe after Congress voting on Terri Schivo (sic).

    How did we go from being such a smart nation to being such a dumb one?

  • QUESTION: But do the president and the vice president think an attack is called for on Iran, yes or no?
    PERINO: I just said what the United States policy was, which is our preference is try to solve this diplomatically.

    Yes of course they don’t want to attack Iran, they want diplomacy. Forget all things learned the past couple of days, forget what Bush said, what McCain said, diplomacy is what they are after.

    Fork meet Eye Socket.

  • MsJoanne @ #6, in answer to your question, I quote the inimitable 90’s one-hit wonder Harvey Danger:

    “Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding, the cretins cloning and feeding . . . “

  • We are seeing “free markets” for oil:

    The administration’s current “blood-for-oil” policy will not sustain us. The next great “breakthrough” will be a growing appreciation of the efficiencies that result from the burning of humans as fuel. This process allows the body’s organic matter to directly contribute to the economic growth of society without the thousands of years that are needed to convert organic matter into oil reserves.

    The neocons are looking out for our well-being. The future is in burning the bodies of “undesirables” to allow the rest of society to prosper. Not only will there be benefits from harvesting the poor, infirmed, or elderly that result from the laws of thermo-science, the economic benefits and economies of scale that will result from consumption of humans for fuel adds more value to the administrations policies.

    Until people become useless to the ruling class, they participate in our economic system, adding to the creation of wealth. When their economic usefulness no longer serves the needs of the ruling elite, we convert the surplus value of their labor into an energy commodity. The powerful economic interests that will benefit from this economically efficient production cannot be stopped.

    Just consider it another example of “the-invisible hand” that guides our economy slapping you in the face.

  • I am with MsJoanne.
    Is the plan to take OPEC to court for a kazillion dollars ? Enforced by who ?
    Funny how we seem to think American law is world law. OPEC could put us back into the 1800’s should they decide to not only reduce production, but refuse to sell to America.

    If there is an group we should be going out of our way to literally appease, it’s OPEC. Sure they are playing Bush for a fool, and he is, but even that nitwit knows better then to mess with the golden goose. Idiots.

  • While Attacking Obama, Romney Forgets That Bush Met With Putin ‘In His First Year Of Office’

    On Fox & Friends this morning, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney added to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) and President Bush’s attacks against Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) over his openness to engaging with the leaders of rogue states like Iran. Romney said that “without precondition, in his first year of office,” no president should “sit down” with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or former Russian President Vladimir Putin:

    The question is should the president of the United States, without precondition, in his first year of office, sit down with Ahmadinejad, with Putin, Chavez, Kim Jong Il, with Assad, with the world’s worst actors, and the answer is, obviously, no. No president would suggest such a thing.

    Not only did chimpy meet with pootypoot, he was drunk off his @ss

  • Sources of radiation are usually hospital tools – old xray machines, radiation therapy – and scientific tools. But sometimes they’re objects d’art, historical artifacts, garbage or just some rocks someone found that needs to be sequestered.

    After even the hospitals collapsed, I’m thinking it’s all pretty much garbage now.

    While my adopted home town banned radiation sources from the city limits, I know that outside the city limits there are a dozen sources of radiation at the state U and the hospital.

  • That “most offensive ad” looks just like something that would come from The Onion. This stuff really works on some people? It was the most humorous thing I’ve come across all day. I love the 3 dancers that are exhibiting “San Francisco values”.

    Good ideas MsJoanne. This whole OPEC thing is a red herring.

  • While I sympathize with MsJoanne, only about 10 percent of our oil supply is directly produced by big oil (i.e. extracted from the ground). 90 percent comes from OPEC or other sources. Big oil buys it and refines it, and they make a hefty profit margin off being the middle man (and certainly they can play games with pricing by taking refineries off-line for “maintenance”). But bottom-line most of the price of a gallon of gasoline comes from cost a barrel of oil that OPEC sells to us. And I despite all the rosy forecasts from analysts, the truth is that there aren’t any more big undeveloped oil fields waiting to be tapped. So suing OPEC is akin to King Canute shoveling against the tide. Expect a gallon of gas to $5 mid-next year. $6 or more the following year, as demand from China and India continues to ramp up (and the US dollar continues to devalue as we pump our dollars overseas to pay for oil).

  • The following is “an alternative” to our oil addiction:

    http://hometown.aol.com/metrafan/maptinoh.html

    If you click on the link, you’ll see a map layout of all the primary “interurban lines” (electric rail systems) that once existed in Ohio. some of them were up and running prior to 1900; most were going before WW-1, and all were in full service by 1920.

    The map doesn’t include the “lesser” (secondary and offshoot) lines.

    Simply run two sets of rail next to each other, and put switches at tech end to move the trains from one set to the other.

    The technology is already more than a century old; it’s safer than gasoline, and cheaper than oil—and there’s more than enough scrap metal in America’s junkyards to provide all the materials to do this with.

    Right now.

    If the Obama administration were to make this a “crash” priority, we could easily see a federally-subsidized “mainline” interurban system connecting all main points from coast to coast within five years—for less than the five-year cost-to-date of the Iraq War.

    We can keep fighting for the world’s ever-swindling oil reserves—or we can kick the habit and tell OPEC to “drink the damned stuff and die….”

  • On C-Span this afternoon Republican Representative John Duncan of Tennessee made an astonishing speech about the global terrorism threat. In a nutshell, he called America’s response to this threat hysterical and unbelievably wasteful. Billions upon billions are flowing into the coffers of the terror profiteers while dozens of vastly more important problems are being ignored. We’ve been had, in other words. Music to my ears. From a Republican? And yet Ron Paul has been the most caustic critic of the Iraq war, too.

    Who is this guy John Duncan?

  • I would so love to have the option of grabbing a train. These days, I’m sort of bi-coastal with me in CA and Mom sick in NC but I loathe airports and flying anymore, and would rather take the 5 days to drive than go through the humiliation of being treated like a Gitmo detainee at the airport. Of course it’s costly but I just can not stand the treatment, by TSA and the airlines. It’s just damned un-American!

    Trains rock! I’d be first to join any movement which advocated your ideas.

  • I tried watching CNN but had to turn it off before I threw something at the TV. I absolutely cannot take another talking head referring to liberal elites. When did “elite” become a negative synonym for “educated people who know what they’re talking about”? I understand the mindless Republican base believing they know better than the experts. It’s stupid journalists who believe the same thing that drive me nuts.

  • 99% of the posts on Free Republic were for wishing Ted Kennedy the best. (Nice try though)

  • Why is elite a bad thing? Because there has been a dumbing down of the American populace for decades. Bush nailed that coffin shut with NCLB. There is little ability to think for oneself. We, as a nation, lack the ability to critically think and/or think for ourselves.

    What happened with Rush Limbaugh this week, tearing down some 10th grade paper – and calling it something that a Harvard professor taught, because all colleges do nothing but teach off of Google, is a reinforcement for the uneducated that education is bad and not to be trusted. Worse, it reinforces that you are better off if you are uneducated.

    And that is the gooper base. Ignorant and uneducated and unable to discern bullshit from truth.

    Repeat after me: We. Are. Screwed.

  • TheTruth…after comments had been removed. Look at the threading. You can see people responding to comments that are no longer there.

    Nice try though.

  • hark: Duncan is one of only 2 Rep congressmen to vote against the AUMF. Paul was the other. He’s from Knoxville (Go Vols), is mostly a libertarian like Paul, and has been in Congress just about forever.

  • TPM has reported a Hillary victory in Kentucky. Her percentage is 54% so far, although the exit polls indicate a 2-1 margin for Hillary. But if 54% should hold, that has to be a great result for Obama.

    CB – if you’re still around, how about another election-night thread?

  • I don’t think 54% will hold, Okie. The western part of the state, which is still coming in, is strongly pro-Hillary.

    I don’t know if I can stay up late enough for Oregon. Sleepy tonight. What time’s Obama speaking in Iowa; anybody know?

  • The “Truth”: I roamed over there and to McCain’s site and I must say, I’ve never seen more angrier mean-spirited words on the net, and those were from the posts that were allowed! The deletions must have been hideous. Don’t they arrest people for saying things like that?

    Calling DHS.. one ringydingy.. two ringydingy..

  • He is supposed to be speaking right now (original schedule was 6:30), but I have not seen or heard anything yet suggesting that is the case. There are a lot of police tactical folks in a lot of interesting places, however. I don’t think they are here to make it safe for me to work into the evening.

  • UPDATE: They are now not planning to open the gates onto the blocks around his speaking location until after 7:30. As of a bit after 6:00 it was estimated 2,000 people were in line.

  • Yeah, Ms J.,it figures. So I’ve been educated: They don’t want us to just go away, they want us dead as doornails too. Wowsa. Sorry I ventured out now.

  • I browsed the first and last 50 comments on that Freeper thread, and all I could find were prayers and well-wishes for Kennedy. Frankly, I’m shocked. I didn’t know they could actually be human.

  • About that oil… No sense in suing OPEC; much better to send our negotiator:
    http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/analysis/toons/2008/05/19/mitchell/

    The only way Boner and his goopers will gain seats is if they build more public toilets.

    I second (third?) Steve @ 16 and MissMudd @18; I too, would love to see more trains. 35 yrs in this country and I still miss them. Though I must say that, having taken a couple train rides in this country, I think it’s more than lack of rails; your trains are *weird*. The only thing better here than in Europe are the views.

  • And that is the gooper base. Ignorant and uneducated and unable to discern bullshit from truth.

    And white? I have seen in these threads (and heard kkkarl rove himself say) that these folks are shillary’s base and that they are the key to winning in 2008.

  • The only way Boner and his goopers will gain seats is if they build more public toilets

    Won’t work – the “wide stance” crowd fills them up and, after they get done tappin’ their toes, aren’t actually sittin’ anymore anyhow.

  • I have the misfortune of being a constituent of the producer of the “most offensive ad”. He must really be desperate to resort to tactics like this at this stage. For the first time since he’s been in office he’ll be facing a popular, well-financed opponent. I’ll be happy to see him go.

  • I know I should be offended by that ad, but I can’t stop laughing long enough to muster up some outrage.

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