News aggregator

Checking in from sweltering El Salvador, where the family news isn't so great, and where a brief trip to the beach for my baby girl led to having half my right leg fried by a jelly fish. So a little political talk will prove a nice distraction.

Not much drama tonight, as no one expects Obama to be competitive in the state that includes the most hostile anti-Obama combination of demographics in the entire United States. Just look at the map of counties that Clinton has won with over 65 percent of the vote:

Yup, West Virginia (and Kentucky next week) will be ugly for Obama. Expect lots of talk about Obama's "white" problem, before he goes on to win white Oregon convincingly next week.

In any case, looking around for predictions, I find:

Jerome: 62C - 35O
Poblano: 67.4C - 28.6O
PsiFighter37: 70.8C - 29.2O
Al GIordano: 69C - 31O

SUSA didn't poll the race. Rasmussen has nothing recent. There's no poll available to gauge where the late deciders might be heading, and not enough polling to even come up with a decent average. So polling won't help make any guesses.

Since I've been dealing with family stuff, I haven't had a time to look at the machine element of my calculation (i.e. mayors). A quick google finds nothing of note for either candidate. Sen. Jay Rockefeller endorsed Obama, but you all know what I think of senator endorsements. They ain't worth squat. The state's governor, Joe Manchin, is sitting this race out, so whatever machine he might have (and I don't think it's much of one) isn't engaged (at least not publicly). I'll call it a wash.

Demographically, I trust Poblano's numbers.

What I have no clue about is turnout. Will Clinton partisans still turn out given that their candidate has already been declared dead? I suspect Obama partisans will turn out regardless. They're on the winning team, and that's quite the motivation. But what's left to motivate those Clinton supporters?

As you all know, I pull my predictions from you-know-where. And without any good polling, and without  having paid any attention to this race all week, my you-know-what is running even blinder than usual. So I'm going to take Poblano's numbers and make a 5-point adjustment against Clinton to account for a hypothetically demoralized base.

Clinton 62.4
Obama 33.6

Of course, this is all academic. Tonight's results don't matter to the eventual outcome of this race.

p.s. Here's Poblano on the notion that WV is a "racist state":

I do want to write a little bit more about the notion that West Virginians are racist. The longer version will have to wait until later today or tomorrow. But the short version is: yes, there are racist voters in West Virginia, but there are racist voters in every state. The primary determinant of the extent to which racism tends to be more manifest is education levels, and so the effects may be more noticeable in West Virgnia, a state with poor academic achievement. But there is no reason to believe that West Virgnians are particularly racist, relative to their education levels.

p.p.s. To all you Obama supporters tempted to belittle or insult West Virginia, just remember how annoying it has been when the Clinton camp has done that to Obama states like Idaho and Utah and Mississippi. A 50-state strategy means just that. You don't go around insulting states.

p.p.p.s. I'll be fully back on the job next week. See you guys then.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers writes: "As we mark five years of war in Iraq, I have become increasingly concerned that the President may possibly take unilateral, preemptive military action against Iran. During the last seven years, the Bush Administration has exercised unprecedented assertions of Executive Branch power and shown an unparalleled aversion to the checks and balances put in place by the Constitution's framers."

H. Josef Hebert writes for The Associated Press: "Amid daily bipartisan sniping over high gas prices, Democrats and Republicans appear to agree on at least one thing: With oil over $120 a barrel, President Bush ought to stop buying crude for the government emergency reserve. Both the House and Senate are expected to approve, with bipartisan support, legislation Tuesday directing Bush to temporarily halt the shipment of about 70,000 barrels of oil a day to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve."

Pamela Constable reports for The Washington Post: "Pakistan's fragile governing coalition cracked open Monday as one of its major parties withdrew from the cabinet, less than three months after elections that had united rival factions opposed to President Pervez Musharraf. Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, announced that his party would leave all federal posts after talks broke down with the Pakistan People's Party over how to restore the country's former chief justice and 60 other judges who had been fired in November by Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler at the time."

Robert Parry writes for The Consortium News: "If John McCain wins the presidency and gets to appoint one or more US Supreme Court justices Americas 220-year experiment as a democratic Republic living under the principle that no man is above the law may come to an end. To put the matter differently, if a President McCain replaces one of the moderate justices with another Samuel Alito as McCain has vowed to do then Justice Department lawyer John Yoos extreme vision of an all-powerful Executive could well become the new law of the land."

David Adam, of The Guardian UK, reports: "The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures, renewing fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control. Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years."

Le Monde publishes the appeal of French cooks (including some famous ones) and vintners for a change in the proposed law on the cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMO), a law, which - barring surprises - is nonetheless expected to pass as currently written.

The New York Times writes: "When Mr. Bush hasn't been busy saying no to worthy efforts, he has been endorsing Orwellian-named programs that have failed to address the problem effectively."

Yesterday, Think Progress noted that one of the Republican's pundit mouthpieces was floating the idea that they were going to attempt to get the Cheney/Rockefeller FISA bill past the House by attaching to a media shield bill that has strong bipartisan support. That effort would mean some procedural hurdles for the minority that hopefully leadership would be willing to block. This sounds like a trial balloon, but nonetheless signals the ongoing obsession the Right has with passing the Protect AT&T Act.

Meanwhile, ranking SSCI member Kit Bond told The Hill that the White House is "willing to compromise" on amnesty.

Bond said: "I think we’ve come up with some things that would involve the court, but not get to a position where it would endanger the program or the carriers."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to comment.

Bond said the language, drafted with White House consent, represented a "new provision we’ve come up with" on immunity. He would not give details other than to say that the FISA court would have a role. It is unclear whether the new approach will gain approval from Democratic leaders and negotiators....

Recently, talks have gone on separate tracks. Bond has taken his case directly to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who also has held separate talks with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). Bond said talks with a wider range of lawmakers and staff were unfocused.

Bond and Hoyer have narrowed their talks down to two areas: retroactive immunity and procedures on targeting people outside the United States in eavesdropping and minimizing communications captured incidentally during surveillance operations.

Hoyer has recently suggested revisions, including more court involvement in minimization and targeting procedures.

"There were something like 50 people, and they came up with 25 different ideas, and [Hoyer] sent the list over to me and said, ‘Thank you very much for your ideas, but you and I have talked about the two main ones,’ " Bond said of a recent meeting with all House and Senate negotiators.

Bond’s efforts might not go over well with Rockefeller, who offered his own proposal last week.

"I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but I’m hopeful," Rockefeller said about reaching an agreement.

Bond described Rockefeller’s plan as "bizarre" and said it "totally undid what we passed in the Senate."

The news that Rockefeller is totally undoing what passed in the Seante is the most encouraging news from him in months, but Bond's obnoxious dismissal of it just reiterates the pointlessness of trying to deal with Republicans. At the same time, it's not encouraging that Hoyer apparently has been working more with Bond than with Rockefeller.

One potential, and not completely disastrous, compromise they could be floating would be along the lines of the Specter-Whitehouse substitution bill, which would would allow plaintiffs to substitute the government as the defendant in the pending cases, thus dismissing the teleco defendants. What it's important it that it would ensure that plaintiffs retain full discovery rights – i.e., they can serve discovery requests on the dismissed teleco companies. It's entirely possible, as Kevin Drum and bmaz have argued that the telcos signed indemnification agreements with the government when the warrantless surveillance program began. Any such agreement would be classified, so we don't know they exist, but it seems pretty likely.

Indemnification would be acceptable, provided the cases go forward and the plaintiffs have discovery rights vis-a-vis the telcos. These cases have never been about the potential damage awards against the telcos, despite the Right's efforts to paint this as a greedy trial lawyer issue. What it has always been about is information: about the public's right to know what our government has been doing and why. Given the administration's penchant for secrecy, it doesn't seem likely that this is the kind of compromise that they'd be willing to agree to.

Anything less is unacceptable.

Douglas Feith is a fascinating character. Dubbed by General Tommy Franks as the “stupidest f*cking guy on the planet,” he is one of the neocons who still goes on TV like he did nothing wrong, when he should be hiding under a rock and having trouble sleeping at night. On Monday, Feith stammered and stuttered his way through the widely discredited laundry list of reasons why — despite conventional wisdom and reality — the administration’s case for war was completely honest and forthright.

Here is just a small taste of Feith’s deceit and the money quote from Stewart:

 Download | Play  Download | Play (click here for the full 22-minute, unedited interview)

“You removed the ability for the American public to make an informed decision. Once you have removed that, then you no longer have the authority. You told us what part of the argument is appropriate to know about.”

Although Stewart did a solid job of holding Feith’s feet to the fire, I think he missed a couple of opportunities to really nail him. Rumsfeld’s flunky maintains that everyone involved really did weigh the pros and con, and that they frankly conveyed both sides of the argument to the public.

Well, I would love to hear his predictably laughable response to any one of these:

The reinsertion of the infamous sixteen words into the SoTU.

The Downing Street Memo that confirmed “facts were being fixed around the policy“ to remove Saddam Hussein.

Why was Powell’s entire UN speech based on the claims of someone named Curveball — an informant who the CIA repeatedly warned was entirely unreliable and a drunk.

Why was the opinion of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who unequivocally concluded the aluminum tube and centrifuge angle was bogus, suppressed?

Why weren’t we told that Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, reached out to the CIA and debunked every myth about their non-existent weapons programs.

And on and on and on…

Feel free to add your own examples in the comment section.

Bears.  You know 'em, you know the threat they pose.  But I'll bet you didn't know that bears are to blame for high prices at the pump.  Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute explains why providing endangered species protection to polar bears is a threat to mankind.

The first is the possible wide geographic reach of the global warming argument. The snail darter almost killed a single dam. The polar bear could, in theory at least, stop everything. ...

The second impact of this ruling is that it will likely end all Arctic exploration for oil and gas, at least in the U.S. Given surging world demand for oil, increased supply is the only thing standing between us and $200-a-barrel oil.

You hear that?  It's not conflict in the Middle East, instability in US financial markets, or the rapid growth in India and China that's causing your gas bill to go up.  Hand over the bears, or prepare to pay one million dollars to fill your SUV.  

But wait!  There's really no conflict.  Hassett and his fellow AEI fellow, Kenneth Green, don't believe that the polar bear is in danger at all.  Granted, both of them are known for backing oil drilling at all costs, and couldn't be counted on to say a bad thing about drilling if it used nuns and orphans as lubricant.  And Hassett admits that biologists are convinced the polar bear is in decline because of melting ice.  But they have a professor on their side, as well.

For example, professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently told Science Daily that "the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions."

There you go.  Scientific evidence that the polar bear is doing great, from J. Scott Armstrong, Professor of Marketing.  Plutonium Page predicted that Armstrong's already well-debunked baloney would become the go-to "study" for those who can't wait to destroy the last tiny fragments of wilderness.

My forecast is that it will be quoted over and over again throughout the deniersphere.  

As the saying goes, "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with..," well, you know the saying.

It was obvious that AEI would be at the front of the line since being the firstest with the mostest BS is their standard practice.  It's less obvious why the mainstream media keeps providing AEI and their unsubstantiated nonsense with a platform.  Does even a business-friendly publication like Bloomberg's really benefit from associated with such noxious fiction?

Hassett's last appearance in the pages of Bloomberg was when he warned that it was bad for business when CEOs weren't allowed to "defend themselves" by spreading unsupported rumors rather than making testable public statements.  At least AEI seems to live up to that standard.  "Rumor" is the nicest word for any evidence that Hassett puts forth.

Oh, and as McCain starts to put forth his environmental recommendations today, it's well worth noting that Kevin Hassett is an adviser to the McCain campaign.  So there you go.  The "straight talker" gets his environmental and economic advice from this guy.

It was only a few years ago that Arnold Schwarzenegger recalled a sitting governor, promising the end of massive budget deficits. Guess what we have in California this year? Oh, just a measly $20 billion deficit.

Our schools are closing and social services have already been slashed to the bone. And it is just the start of budget season in California. Unfortunately, because Democrats do not hold a two-thirds majority in the state legislature, a small minority of Republicans are able to hold Californians hostage, refusing to raise taxes, no matter how ridiculous the loopholes.

Even, get this… a sales tax loophole for purchasers of yachts and private jets. The Republicans have very much earned the moniker bestowed on them by the Calitics crew: The Yacht Party.

The Courage Campaign has teamed up with the California Nurses Association to create “Yacht Party 2″, the second in a series of TV ads designed to re-brand the California Republican Party. This spot is not your traditional political ad. In fact, it’s quite non-traditional. And it’s got a lot of people talking. In fact, the response to Arianna Huffington’s message announcing the ad to Courage Campaign members was so strong, we have already authorized an ad buy in Sacramento. See what you think….

To increase the pressure on Republicans in Sacramento to close this yacht tax loophole, we need to make this “Yacht Party” brand stick. If you like the ad, please contribute to help us expand our buy across California.

 Download | Play  Download | Play (h/t Heather)

Bill Moyers, host of PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal, is one of the few remaining REAL journalists left in American media. We’ve covered many of his PBS segments and it was a great pleasure to cover his appearance with Keith Olbermann on Monday’s Countdown.

Moyers and Olbermann touch on the corporate media, their biases and the way they are shaping, and in many cases, damaging our country and its politics by ignoring critical issues and grinding information into sound bytes and bumper sticker-type messages:

Olbermann: “…Clearly the tendency is towards truncating everything, condensing everything into that eventual black hole of information where nothing escapes. How does it apply as you look ahead towards this general election campaign? How does it apply to each of the candidates, in turn?”

Moyers: “I think it means for all of them that they won’t really get to the deep, profound structural problems that we face as a country. We’re not going to have a discourse in this campaign over the fact that the great American wealth machine is benefiting only those at the top. We’re not going to get to the fact that 10% of the people own 60% of the wealth and 70% of the people have no net worth. We’re not going to get to the issues of how do we rebuild the infrastructure, the sewer, the water, the highways, all that. We’re just going to be constantly in this battle of bumper stickers.”

A handful of the world’s largest agricultural biotechnology companies are seeking hundreds of patents on gene-altered crops designed to withstand drought and other environmental stresses, part of a race for dominance in the potentially lucrative market for crops that can handle global warming, according to a report being released today. Three companies — BASF of Germany, [...]

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Dry, windy weather fueled several wildfires on Florida's central Atlantic coast Monday, damaging more than 50 homes and driving hundreds of residents away as the governor declared a state of emergency. Fires in Palm Bay in Brevard County damaged about 50 homes and scorched 3,500 acres, or about 5 1/2 square miles. Palm Bay spokeswoman Yvonne Martinez said all 18 schools in Palm Bay, including charter schools, would be closed Tuesday.

Surveillance. Rendition. Torture. By many measures, the Bush administration has been bad for civil liberties. Yet the past seven years have been particularly good for the American Civil Liberties Union. National membership in the organization, which fights for freedom of speech and religion, equal protection, due process and privacy, has doubled since Bush took office in 2001 [...]

The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees. Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and [...]

Bush's official statement for Mother's Day.

Laura and I want to wish everybody a happy Mother's Day. It's just a special day to give thanks to our Moms; appreciate the hard work that Moms do. And I understand that for some, however, Mother's Day is a sad day for those who lost their lives in Oklahoma and Missouri and Georgia because of the tornadoes, are wondering whether or not tomorrow will be a bright and hopeful day.

Well, if you lost your life, you might have good reason to not be all that hopeful, but I suppose today isn't going to get any worse.

Claim Pope's knowlege, and advanced age as factors for needed testimony.

BERLIN - About 5,000 activists marched through the German city of Bonn on Monday to protest against genetically modified food at the start of a U.N. conference to discuss risks linked to the technology.Campaigners, many waving colorful flags and banners with slogans such as “Biofuel Creates Hunger” and “Good Food Instead Of GM Food”, walked [...]