(7/1/08)

SPORTS WITH RALPH. Dave Zirin writes: "Ralph Nader is best known as a legendary consumer advocate, a person who has touched virtually every aspect of our lives from car safety to the quality of our food. He's also a notable thorn in the side of Democratic Party activists desperate to win a presidential election and flummoxed by his quadrennial candidacy. However, few people know that Nader is also an avid sports fan. He was responsible for the launching of the League of Fans, a sports reform project, and he has also passionately pushed for a "Bill of Rights" for the American sports fan. ... See his interview with Nader.

(6/20/08)

BUSH GUSHES MISINFORMATION. With his approval ratings sinking below 30%, George W. Bush once again has lowered the bar for contempt of the nation's chief executive with his suggestion that lifting the federal ban on offshore oil exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf would bring immediate relief to high gas prices.

Bush on June 18 called on Congress to “pass good legislation as soon as possible” that would lift the ban and allow states to permit offshore oil drilling. Bush said in order to relieve the “painful level” of gas prices, “our nation must produce more oil.”

As part of his plan, Bush also reiterated his demand that Congress allow oil drilling in the Alaskan Arctic Wildlife Refuge. According to Bush, drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge will “bring enormous benefits to the American people”:

BUSH: we should expand oil production by permitting exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or ANWR. … In the years since [1995], the price of oil has increased sevenfold and the price of American gasoline has more than tripled. … I urge members of congress to allow this remote region to bring enormous benefits to the American people.

But ThinkProgress.org notes that Bush’s claim isn’t even backed up by his own administration. A Department of Energy report released in May found that the Arctic Refuge’s reserves will do little to reduce the price of a barrel of oil:

If Congress were to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, crude oil prices would probably drop by an average of only 75 cents a barrel, according to Department of Energy projections issued Thursday.

The report…found that oil production in the refuge “is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices.”

Moreover, in 2005, DoE estimated that there are nearly 18 billion barrels of oil available in the OCS, which is roughly double the reserves in the Arctic Refuge. Thus, by 2025, drilling in Alaska and the OCS would shave around $2.25 off the cost of a barrel of oil meaning “little to no impact on the price at the pump, today or tomorrow.”

ThinkProgress concluded, “At best, Bush’s plan saves mere pennies on a gallon of gasoline 20 years from now, while putting billions more into Big Oil’s pockets. Perhaps oil company executives were the ‘American people’ he was referring to.”

Brad Johnson of ThinkProgress.org adds that lifting the offshore moratorium is a boon to Big Oil and nobody else.

He notes that the federal moratorium on Outer Continental Shelf drilling was signed into law by President Reagan in 1981 and extended by President George H.W. Bush after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. Bush's justification for ending the moratorium relies on misleading and false statements, Johnson added:

Congress — which was under Republican control for most of the Bush presidency — is not blocking drilling. The number of off- and on-shore drilling permits has exploded in recent years, going from 3,802 five years ago to 7,561 in 2007. Between 1999 and 2007, the number of drilling permits issued for development of public lands increased by more than 361%.

In fact, Congress and this administration have already opened the floodgates for more oil and gas drilling in the years to come. Since 2002, the number of permits issued has greatly outstripped the number of new wells drilled. In the last four years, the Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; yet, in that same time, 18,954 wells were actually drilled. That means that companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000 extra permits to drill that they are not using to increase domestic production.

Furthermore, less than a quarter of offshore acreage open to drilling is being used. Only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased acres are currently producing oil or gas.

The vast majority of federal oil and gas resources offshore are already available for development. According to the Minerals Management Service, of all the oil (85.9 billion barrels) and gas (419.9 trillion cubic feet) believed to exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, 82% of the natural gas and 79% of the oil is located in areas that are currently open for leasing (such as areas in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Alaska coast).

Joe Romm's notes at Climate Progress that the 2007 Annual Energy Outlook from the U.S. Energy Information Administration found:

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.

And in 2030, “any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.”

Romm has more on McCain's flip-flop on offshore drilling, pandering to the oil companies, and embrace of “the exact same strategy endorsed by the man McCain is trying so hard to run away from — President Bush.”

We add that Bush was not a very successful oil executive, but he has enough background in the oil business to know that drilling in the Arctic Refuge and offshore reserves would take years to produce oil, if they are successful.

John McCain and Fla. Gov. Charlie Crist also have strained their credibility by jumping on the offshore drilling bandwagon. Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio (R) “challenged Gov. Charlie Crist and John McCain’s implication that drilling could lower gas prices anytime soon.” Rubio, an attorney involved in real estate and land use, told the Miami Herald that Crist and McCain are making a “disingenuous” and “flawed” argument:

“For anyone to represent that someone drilling off the coast in Florida is going to lower gas prices here or anywhere in this country is disingenuous and a flawed argument,” he said. “Oil drilling could take 10 years before any oil is pulled out of the ground, and there are a large number of leases held by oil companies that are not being exploited now. We can’t say we need more until we’ve exploited those.”

(See ThinkProgress.org)

(6/13/08)

TIM RUSSERT, R.I.P. We're sorry to hear that Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," has died of a heart attack at age 58.

(6/9/08)

WHY CLINTON LOST (AND OBAMA WON)

Contributing editors at DailyKos.com focused their Sunday essays on one question, Why Clinton Lost (and Obama Won) in the first-ever Sunday Kos Symposium in which we all focused on one topic, but came at it from different angles, for a full day. The essays were as follows:

(1/26/08)

BRAVE NEW ELECTION COVERAGE. After watching the right-wing pundits on CNN and MSNBC commenting on the Democratic primary election in South Carolina it was a pleasure to find Brave New Films presenting live election coverage with Cenk Uygyur and Michael Shure of the Young Turks and Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films as well as guests from Firedoglake, Alternet, The Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars and other progressive organizations analyzing election results from a left point of view. BNF also plans coverage of the “State of the Union Party” on Monday, Jan. 28, from 7 to 10 p.m. ET and “Super Tuesday” -- the 22 states that will be holding primary elections on Tuesday, Feb. 5, from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET.

(1/23/08)

LIES THAT LED TO WAR: The Center for Public Integrity has compiled at least 935 false statements made by President George W. Bush and seven of his top aides to promote the invasion of Iraq. Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith write:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric. ...

Check out the overview and the database of 380,000 words of Iraq-related misinformation and sdisinformation by top Bushy administration officials.

WHAT'S IN A LABEL: Heartland Labor Forum at KKFI 90.1-FM in Kansas City did a show on the difference between populism and libertarianism on Jan. 17, interviewing John Henry, professor of economics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Randy Langkraehr of the Missouri Libertarian Party; and Jim Cullen of The Progressive Populist. The audio is now online.

(1/10/08)

HAVE FUN IN MICHIGAN: Kos proposes that Michigan Dems cross over to the Republican primary next Tuesday, Jan. 15, to vote for Mitt Romney and repay Michigan Republicans fofr years of mischief.

(1/4/08)

OUR TAKE ON THE IOWA CAUCUSES: On the Democratic side, Barack Obama is for real. Hillary Clinton is not inevitable. And John Edwards is the progressive populist in the race.

Now that the Democratic presidential race has practically narrowed to those three candidates, Edwards remains the progressive populist choice for change. Many progressive voters would be proud to vote for a black candidate or a female candidate with a solid chance to occupy the Oval Office, but while Obama and Clinton have been occupying the middle of the road, Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who comes from a working-class background and made his bones as a trial lawyer challenging reckless and abusive corporations, has been challenging the status quo. Although he has been derided by some for his wealth, he made his fortune by winning verdicts for his working-class clients who were injured by those corporations that are unregulated by the Republicans and lightly regulated by the D.C. Dems.

(Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa Republican caucuses, also has earned the contempt of the GOP establishment with his focus on economic inequality and his appeal to class-based populism, but the former Baptist preacher and Arkansas governor is no friend of workers, as he showed Jan. 2 when he crossed a union picket line to appear on NBC's "Tonight Show" on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.)

Since the 2004 campaign, Edwards has pursued a progressive populist agenda, working with labor unions and grassroots organizations such as ACORN to address the growing divide between the working class and the wealthy. Edwards has proposed a plan for universal health care that takes on the insurance and drug companies, and promises to cover every man, woman, and child in America with better care at lower cost. It isn't single-payer national health care, but it would be a good start if he could get any traction with it. His plan requires businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their workers' health insurance. It makes insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, reforms insurance laws to stop insurance companies from "cherry picking" healthy customers and it creates regional "health care markets" to create competition and help Americans find affordable health care.

We would prefer an expansion of Medicare to cover everybody, as Dennis Kucinich, among others, has proposed, but if congressional Democrats sent Edwards a national health care bill, we bet he'd sign it.

Edwards has outlined an ambitious agenda of economic justice and fairness. He has proposed a rural recovery plan and he will reverse Bush's tax and trade policies that have given multinational corporations and investors advantages at the expense of American industry and working people.

The D.C. pundits are still mocking Edwards for paying a lot for hair styling -- as if those TV blowhards ever darkened the doorway of a SuperCuts. Edwards also has been criticized by the D.C. Dems for not showing deference to the party establishment. More admirable, as David Mizner noted at MyDD.com, Edwards has "little discernible support" on K Street in Washington, and his moves in recent months have done nothing to change that. "Edwards has never taken money from federal lobbyists, and this summer he went one better, calling on all Democrats, including Hillary, the national party, and the congressional committees to join him in rejecting K-Street cash. If you're trying to anger the establishment, this is a good way to do it."

Edwards has all the right enemies, but he beat the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, in Iowa. Obama, who gets full credit for bringing an unprecedented number of young and independent voters to the caucuses, is an appealing progressive candidate but for all his rhetoric about change we don't hear him taking on the vested interests that control both the major parties the way Edwards has.

Edwards has described the choice facing the country as "the establishment elites versus the American people." He points out that the system is "controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed."

Make no mistake: Dennis Kucinich is still a more progressive candidate and he appears to be carrying on with his campaign, but Wall Street is not worried about Kucinich reaching the White House. However, if John Edwards starts moving toward the nomination, in a year where the Republican base is fractured, expect the corporate media to repeat the character assassination that sidelined Howard Dean in 2004. The mainstream media won't give Edwards any breaks. Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, hit the nail on the head on MSNBC's Hardball a few months ago when he called Edwards Wall Street's "Public Enemy No. 1."

That's a ranking Edwards can be proud of.

Don't wait for November to complain about the lack of choices. Do something now by supporting John Edwards.