Thursday’s Mini-Report

Keep an eye on this one: “The Federal Trade Commission

If that link doesn’t work (it didn’t for me) try this one:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/35520.html

Personally I can’t get to excited about Congress giving the FTC power to investigate, and then insisting that they actually do it. Kind of like EPA investigating carbon emissions.

* In the latest Gallup Daily Tracking Poll, Clinton now leads Obama by four, 49% to 45%. It’s her biggest lead since mid-March, and is the latest evidence that Jeremiah Wright has done some very serious damage to Obama’s campaign.

Is it Wright doing the damage, or is it the constant TV news drumbeat that Obama is on the ropes barely holding his campaign together? I am so sick of hearing that he has to do something miraculous to maintain his lead. He is still the prohibitive favorite based on the actual delegate count and every other measure that matters, something they always neglect to mention. It’s disgusting to watch how they twist reality.

“Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said the best way to bring down the price of gasoline at the pump is for the administration to start seriously policing the oil industry.”

I commented on this yesterday, after seeing her speech on C-Span 2 during my afternoon treadmill session. Just Google the senator and oil prices and you’ll find plenty of material.

Today, in a repeat, I caught most of Senator Bernie Sanders’ talk on the same subject. His analysis suggests that more than half of the price of crude today is simply due to market manipulation and speculation. That is, we are being robbed to line the pockets of greedy fat cats. There is no question in my mind that Bush and Cheney are well aware that their oil cronies are and have been looting billions of people around the world.

It’s about time the sleeping American people woke up and demanded something other than American Idol. Because if we don’t, the middle class will dry up, drained of all its wealth. Congress won’t do a damn thing if we don’t rise up, nothwithstanding the efforts of heroes like Senators Cantwell and Sanders.

Universities have a well established record of ejecting professors from acedamia who don’t have degrees, or don’t use data in their research.

Gas tax holiday? In view of the recent, staggering revelations by Cantwell and Sanders???

See comment #7.

Where’s the outrage among our presidential candiates? Yes, Obama rejected the gas tax holiday nonsense, but where is he on the huge story of the Enronization of the oil industry?
What’s the matter with these people? And the media?

Somebody get mad.

Assclowns of the Week #69: Omission Accomplished Edition, is out, if anyone’s interested.

If you thought Keith Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Fox NewsProlefeed, the Fox network and the New York Post wasn’t good enough for journalistic depravity, study this example from his British Sunday franchise known as the News of the World–which, come to think of it, is probably the most ironic name of any gazetta in the English-speaking world.

Libra, Exxon Mobil’s $10.9 Billion profit may have disappointed Wall Street, but combined with Shell and BP, in the first quarter of this year, the three made almost $24 billion dollars in profit.

$24,000,000,000 PROFIT in Q1 2008.

Thanks for the link. I am going to go bang my head against the wall, much reminiscent of my time spent after calling Durbin, Obama, Feingold, Reid and Pelosi on a weekly basis. How I don’t have a massive concussion by now…or maybe I do for as they say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I have to stop calling my elected representatives…they are all bloody useless.

From the Nation, this says it all:

Betsy Reed: How Hillary Clinton’s campaign played the race card–and drove a wedge into the feminist movement.

“what is most troubling–and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement–is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival’s race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior “electability,” she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right–in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country–seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. .. There were references by Clinton campaign officials to Obama’s admission of past drug use; the tit-for-tat over Clinton’s tone-deaf but historically accurate statement that Martin Luther King needed Lyndon Johnson for his civil rights dreams to be realized; and insinuations that Obama is a token, unqualified, overreaching–that he’s all pretty words, “fairy tales”
More than any single thing, that moment with Bill Clinton in South Carolina represents the rupture that was coming,…when the former President compared Obama’s landslide win, in which he received a major boost from African-American voters, to Jesse Jackson’s victories there in 1984 and 1988. Because the former President offered the comparison unprompted, in response to a question that had nothing to do with Jackson or race, the statement was widely read as chalking up Obama’s win to his blackness alone and thus attempting to marginalize him as a doomed minority candidate with limited appeal. Obama was now “the black candidate,” in the words of one Clinton strategist quoted by the AP.
…The toxicity is further heightened in this post-9/11 atmosphere, in which an image of Obama in Somali dress is understood as a slur and e-mails claiming that he is a “secret Muslim” schooled in a madrassa spread virally, along with rumors that he took the oath of office on a Koran. The madrassa and Koran canards have been thoroughly debunked, but still they persist–and few have been willing to stand up and say, So what if he was a Muslim? For her part, Clinton, asked on 60 Minutes whether Obama was a Muslim, said, “There is nothing to base that on, as far as I know.”
A mere three days after Obama spoke [a bout Wright], Bill Clinton made this statement in North Carolina about a potential Clinton-McCain general election matchup: “I think it’d be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.” Whether or not this statement constituted McCarthyism, as one Obama surrogate alleged and as Clinton supporters vigorously denied, the timing of the remark made its meaning quite clear: controversies relating to Obama’s race render him less fit than either Hillary or McCain to run for president as a patriotic American. A couple of weeks later, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen went so far as to call on Obama to make another speech, modeled after John F. Kennedy’s declaration in 1960 that, despite his Catholicism, he would respect the separation of church and state as President–as though Obama’s blackness were a sign of allegiance to some entity, like the Vatican, other than the United States of America.
In the Democratic debates, enabled by the moderators, Hillary Clinton has increasingly deployed issues of race and patriotism as a wedge strategy against her opponent. First, in the debate in Cleveland on February 26, she pressed Obama not only to denounce but to reject Louis Farrakhan–to whom he was spuriously linked through Reverend Wright, who had taken a trip with the black nationalist leader in the 1980s. In style as well as content, that attack was a harbinger of things to come. In the most recent debate, ABC’s George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson peppered Obama with questions such as, “Do you believe [Wright] is as patriotic as you are?” and, regarding former Weatherman Bill Ayers, a Chicago neighbor and Obama supporter, “Can you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?” Time after time, Clinton picked up the line and ran with it. “You know, these are problems, and they raise questions in people’s minds. And so this is a legitimate area…for people to be exploring and trying to find answers,” she said, seeming to abandon her argument that these issues are fair game now only because they will be raised by Republicans later and thus are relevant to an evaluation of Obama’s electability.
The Wright, Farrakhan and Ayers controversies have been fueled by a craven media, and ABC’s performance in the debate has rightly been condemned. But given that Clinton is the one who is running for President and who purports to represent liberal ideals, her complicity in such attempts to establish guilt by association is far more troubling. While she has dealt gingerly with the matter of Wright in the wake of his recent appearance at the National Press Club–accusing Republicans of politicizing the issue–she also took pains to remind reporters that she “would not have stayed in that church under those circumstances.”
It’s disappointing, to say the least, to see the first viable female contender for the presidency participate in attacks on her black opponent’s patriotism, which exploit an anxious climate around national security that gives white men an edge both over women and people of color–who tend to be viewed, respectively, as weak and potentially traitorous. Says Paula Giddings, “This idea of nationalism and patriotism pulling at everyone has demanded hypermasculine men, more like McCain than the feline Obama, and demanded women whose role is to be maternal more than anything else.”

Not yet a president and already creating international incidents… Bravo, Mrs 35-yrs-of-foreign-policy-experience! Bravo!
http://thepage.time.com/2008/05/01/iran-complains-to-un-about-clinton-comment/
Given that her “obliterate Iran” remark was made in the daytime, while she was fully awake and (presumably) mentally alert, one tends to shiver a bit when one wonders what intemperate words might pass through her dainty lips at 3AM…

MsJoanne, @17,

I *thought* that would get your goat :>) Me, I just concentrated on the truly wonderful headline… Who says NYT’s writers have no sense of humour?

And, um… May I suggest that you keep your fires banked instead of letting them consume you? I, for one, would miss your comments, were you to shake your brain loose with all that banging, or if you got an ulcer (how good is your healthcare insurance?) from all the stress. File it all for future use. Write letters to your representatives (much better than phoning, because you can hone your argument till it’s really sharp. Besides, it catches their attention more). Bide your time… President Obama will need you, come January ’09. He’ll need all of us to help him clean house.

Cmac @14 and ROTFLetc, @20,

Go read the most recent Stanley Fish’s (the opinionator) column in NYT. The guy’s a tad more to the right than I’d like but I read him (if I have the time), because I like to know what other people are thinking and saying, even if they’re on the other side of the fence. Will “pour honey over your hearts” (to use my Mother’s expression). A preview: McCarthy, Swiftboating, McCain’t and Clinton all used in one sentence… :>)

Mr. Bush is the most disgraceful person at the moment. He is the best friend of OPEC and its sponsors, mostly speculators and hedge funds of US. He is simply smiling when poors of the wolrd are facing hunger and death due to his love for devils of the present world. If we are paying high prices of crude, wheat and rice, these are all due to Mr Bush and his dummy FED.

Not only US but the entire world want this person out of White House immediately pending election. The Wolrd will support US, if this person is thrown out of White House immediately.

Factcheck – mclame is the chamber’s worst member, BIGGEST flip-flopper, not that you would let any documentable, verifiable facts get in the way.

You know, it would spoil your moniker.

mercenaryscookbook is a genius. Even I get the jokes, and I’m the densest person here. Almost.