Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Uh oh, Part I: “Oil prices shot up nearly $11 a barrel and settled Friday at a record $138.54 – driven by geopolitical jitters, a dollar decline stemming from a weak jobs report and a forecast that oil would hit $150 by July 4. Friday’s spike in the July contract for light crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange marks the largest single-day increase in oil prices on record. The contract hit an intraday record of $139.12, breaking the previous trading record of $135.09.”
* Uh oh, Part II: “The Dow Jones industrial average lost about 400 points at the close…. According to preliminary calculations, the Dow fell 394.64, or 3.13 percent, to 12,209.81. Broader stock indicators also declined. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 43.37, or 3.09 percent, to 1,360.68, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 75.38, or 2.96 percent, to 2,474.56.”
* The Senate debate over a pending global-warming bill really didn’t go well: “Apparently three days of debate was enough for what many senators called ‘the most important issue facing the planet.’ With little chance of winning passage of a sweeping 500-page global warming bill, the Senate Democratic leadership is planning to yank the legislation after failing to achieve the 60-vote threshold needed to move the bill to the next stage. After a 48-36 vote on the climate change bill, the Senate is likely to move on to a separate energy debate next week. The legislation collapsed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the poor timing of debating a bill predicted to increase energy costs while much of the country is focused on $4-a-gallon gas.”
* I’m pretty sure the media is not in the tank for Obama: “The Project for Excellence in Journalism has officially crowned Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ‘the dominant media story of the entire’ presidential campaign, ‘by far.’ Wright’s comments ‘received four times more coverage than any other theme or event throughout the campaign.’ Reports of the superdelegate role and Obama’s so-called ‘bitter’ comments were the second and third most covered stories, respectively. However, ‘[n]o other story line came close to attracting as much coverage as the Wright-Obama association, and most of it was negative.'”
* On a related note, it seems the media’s obsession over Wright has had a chilling effect among African-American pastors.
* Iraqi lawmakers are wary of a long-term U.S. security agreement. What a surprise. (thanks to R.K. for the tip)
* Did an MSNBC reporter really call Spike Lee “uppity” on national television? Yep.
* Stay classy, RNC: “J Street reader PS emails a link to the RNC’s new oppo site on Obama called ‘Meet Barack Obama.’ He notes their description of Obama’s job on the south side of Chicago as a young man is not ‘community organizer’ as the job is commonly known, but rather ‘street organizer.’ Nice. Frankly, in order to elicit the maximum degree of racial stereotyping I would have gone with ‘ghetto operative’ or ‘slum captain’ but I suppose that would have been too obvious.”
* Just what the world needs — Karl Rove to start running campaigns outside the U.S.
* Speaking of Rove, did everyone see the reports about Rove’s role in the administration’s painfully negligent response to Hurricane Katrina?
* The Obama nomination is obviously a very big deal, and a historic moment Americans can be proud of. But bigger than the Emancipation Proclamation?
* All week long, I’ve been trying to think of a good way to report on the presidential campaign with more analogies to The Simpsons, but nothing good came to mind. Roy Sekoff, thankfully, came up with a great one.
* Fascinating report: “A Tale of Two Conservaties: Comparing Bush and Hoover on the Economy.”
* Tapped did a nice job pulling together seven changes we owe to Hillary Clinton.
* Al Franken has taken a lot of heat in his Senate campaign over a racy piece he wrote for Playboy several years ago. Today, he apologized. “I’m proud of my career as a satirist, which doesn’t mean every joke I’ve ever told was funny, or, indeed, appropriate,” Franken said in a statement. “I understand and regret that people have been legitimately offended by some of the things I’ve written.”
* Anyone going to the academic Buffy conference this weekend in Arkansas?
* Clarke seems to have the right idea: “Noting that ‘prominent Democrats’ had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what ‘remedy’ there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence. ‘Someone should have to pay in some way for the decisions that they made to mislead the American people,’ said Clarke. He suggested that ‘some sort of truth and reconciliation commission’ might be appropriate because, he said, we can’t ‘let these people back into polite society.'”
* And finally, sage advice from Joe Conason: “For Democrats of all persuasions, the conclusion of the primaries should encourage reflection rather than recrimination. Now is the time to listen to the calm counsel that cannot be heard amid the roar of combat, and to think.” Read the whole thing.
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.