Saudi Arabia’s efforts to get OPEC to raise production has foundered on opposition, mostly from those on the other side of the fight for hegemony of the Middle East and the world, starting with Iran. The vote came down to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and UAE against Iran, Iraq (!), Libya, Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, and [...]

We’re on our second near-record tornado this year and summer hasn’t even started. Joplin, MO and Birmingham, AL have been especially hard hit, but much of flyover country is set to spend the summer hunkering down to hide from truly horrifying weather. Yet Eric Cantor wants to hold disaster relief hostage to debt hysteria. (h/t [...]

The DNC and Midwestern state Democratic Parties are rolling out an extravaganza today, using the occasion of Chrysler paying back some of its federal loans to mock GOP presidential candidates for opposing the auto bailout. The DNC had a press conference with Jennifer Granholm, Ted Strickland, and Bob King to mock people like Mitt, T-Paw, [...]

A year after Macondo the Mouth of Hell roared in the Gulf of Mexico, forever altering the ecology and lives of those who depend on the Gulf for their existence, it is business as usual for BP and a complicit Department of Justice.

The Independent reveals what we’ve always known: the Iraq War was about oil. Or rather, there were significant discussions in Fall 2002–the period when the US and UK were busy lying us into war–about who would get Iraq’s oil. (h/t Susie) The article describes BP’s judgment that Iraq was “the big oil prospect. BP is [...]

I’m headed out to Lansing shortly–hopefully I’ll be posting updates from the biggest protest MI’s capital has seen in a long time. But I wanted to point out something funny (as in, “oh jeebus we’re all going to die” funny) about the American Nuclear Society’s talking points to try to convince Americans that nukes are [...]

I laughed yesterday when I first saw the SOTU excerpts with Obama’s description of a Sputnik moment. Mind you, he had already used–or rather, cribbed–the language before. So the language itself wasn’t funny. Rather, it was that he planned to use it as an urgent call to action on the day that Carol Browner announced [...]

For the first time since Macondo, the Mouth Of Hell, first blew out in a fiery explosion on April 20, killing eleven men in the process, BP seems to have the well under control and there appears to be no hydrocarbons leaking into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

If the Obama Administration and Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar truly believe in the propriety of their six month moratorium, and are dedicated to fighting through appeal for it, why are their lawyers not acting like it? Are they really not trying because they really don’t care, or are they just sloppy and incompetent? It is one or the other.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has voted to have its own commission investigate the BP disaster. The Committee finds that necessary, according to Mary Landrieu, because Obama hasn’t appointed a representative from the oil industry to his own commission. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted Wednesday to create a congressional bipartisan [...]