You gotta give the Republicans credit for not going down without a fight. They are basically attaching Obama now for having the EXACT position as John McCain, look:
WTF?
From The Nation:
Myth 1. It’s a dangerous world. We face an array of serious national security threats that require an experienced Commander in Chief.
Myth 2. The surge has worked. To withdraw from Iraq now would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and embolden Islamic extremists.
Myth 3. We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists. We therefore must redouble our military efforts there or face another terrorist attack.
Myth 4. Iran is responsible for much of the violence against US forces in Iraq; by using its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, it threatens to dominate the Middle East.
Myth 5. To talk to the leaders of “rogue” states like Iran and Cuba without conditions legitimizes their position and weakens American leverage.
Myth 6. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian state pursuing an anti-American agenda aimed at reconstituting the Soviet Union in the form of a new Russian empire.
Myth 7. Because the American military is stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must increase the size of our conventional armed forces.
Myth 8. A League of Democracies would create a global coalition for peace and freedom and would enable the United States and its democratic allies to intervene to solve humanitarian and other crises when the UN Security Council is paralyzed.
Myth 9. Globalization has strengthened the economy, and we cannot avoid it by hiding behind protectionist walls.
Myth 10. The world needs American leadership.
Interesting myths, no? To find out more about why they are myths, click and read The Nation:
Russia’s naval fleet is lining up alongside Syrian waters, to both defend Syria and block off any Israeli jets flying towards Iran. More here and here, via WRH:
The Russians are making clear their intentions of using the large Russian naval presence in Tartus as a deterrent to Israeli air strikes against Syria using the powerful anti-air missiles on-board the Russian naval warships. These missile systems can sweep the sky over most of Syria and knock down Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighters. This changes the balance of power in the air over Syria.
(…)
Ten Russian warships have been deployed at the Syrian port of Tartus based on an accord reached by the two sides after the August south Caucases conflict.
Rear Admiral Andrei Baranov, head of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s operations directorate, said Friday the Russian engineering crew was at Tartus to expand the capacity of the harbor to host additional fleet vessels.
The teams will also be working on expanding Latakia, another Syrian port, possibly for aircraft carriers or guided missile cruisers, said Baranov.
When Israel egged on the USA to attack Iraq, it was hoping that the new American-installed puppet regime in Iraq would open up the Haifa-Mosul oil pipeline. It was also doing it to use Iraqi airspace to strike Iran. But now that the clueless and myopic neoconservatives managed to remove Sunni leader Saddam Hussein and replace him with a Shiite leadership loyal to Iran, using Iraqi airspace won’t be a “slam dunk”.
This is why Russia’s decision to shore up Syrian waters and create a buffer against Israeli missiles and places is a big deal. You might want to look at a map to understand why this is a big deal:
You know the warmongers in Washington DC are throwing around chairs. The only way now would be to fly north, via Turkey… which is not an obvious bet either. This might explain why in addition to having forces in Afghanistan, the US is now making forays into Pakistan.
Washington Post’s latest article takes Governor Palin to task for inflating Alaska - and her own - contribution to the US’ energy landscape.
The woman touted by John McCain as the most knowledgeable person in America on energy issues has been having a lot of trouble getting her basic energy statistics straight. Last week, Sarah Palin told Charles Gibson of ABC News that her state, Alaska, produced “nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.” On Monday, she told a campaign rally in Golden, Colo., that she had been responsible for overseeing “nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas.” Both claims are way off.
THE FACTS
While Alaska is a leading producer of crude oil, it produces relatively little natural gas, hardly any coal and no nuclear power. Its share of oil production has been declining sharply, and the state now ranks lower than Texas and Louisiana. Alaska is the ninth-largest energy supplier in the United States, accounting for a modest 3.5 percent share of the nation’s total energy production.
After nonpartisan Factcheck.org pointed out Palin’s error in her interview with Gibson, the governor revised her statement somewhat, limiting it to oil and gas. But data compiled by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) contradict her claim that she oversees “nearly 20 percent” of oil and gas production in the country. According to authoritative EIA data, Alaska accounted for 7.4 percent of total U.S. oil and gas production in 2005.
It is not even correct for Palin to claim that her state is responsible for “nearly 20 percent” of U.S. oil production. Oil production has fallen sharply in Alaska during her governorship. The state’s share of total U.S. oil production fell from 18 percent in 2005 to 13 percent this year, according to the EIA.
The McCain-Palin campaign did not respond to a request for an explanation.
THE PINOCCHIO TEST
The Republican vice presidential nominee continues to peddle bogus statistics three days after the original error was pointed out by independent fact-checkers.
Source. Yes people, the lies continue… Why, from Republicans themselves:
While the media is slowly starting to call the McCain campaign on their dishonest tactics, McCain’s staff boasts that they don’t care. As a McCain spokesman told the Politico, “We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”
Enough said!
“It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue — including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters and no matter how much it might weaken America.”Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
[…]
Now McCain, who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.
In order to disguise the fact that the core of his campaign is to continue the same Bush policies that have led 80 percent of the country to conclude we’re on the wrong track, McCain has decided to play the culture-war card. Obama may be a bit professorial, but at least he is trying to unite the country to face the real issues rather than divide us over cultural differences.
Unlike the onset of the Iraq war where mainstream media was muzzled out of fear of being perceived as non-patriotic, 2008 will be remembered for the year that all reputable news sources came out and highlighted the fact that Sarah Palin was a sham, full of hot air, and whose mere proximity to the White House could be disastrous (after all, the top of the ticket, John McCain admits to being clueless about the economy).
The problem? America has enough people who don’t exactly read Time or WSJ etc., and who are too busy listening to wackos like Palin on Sundays.
From Time magazine:
Sarah Palin thinks she is a better American than you because she comes from a small town and a superior human being because she isn’t a journalist and has never lived in Washington and likes to watch her kids play hockey. Although Palin praised John McCain in her acceptance speech as a man who puts the good of his country ahead of partisan politics, McCain pretty much proved the opposite with his selection of a running mate whose main asset is her ability to reignite the culture wars. So maybe Governor Palin does represent everything that is good and fine about America, as she herself maintains. But spare us, please, any talk about how she is a tough fiscal conservative.
Palin has continued to repeat the already exposed lie that she said “No, thanks” to the famous “bridge to nowhere” (McCain’s favorite example of wasteful federal spending). In fact, she said “Yes, please” until the project became a symbol and political albatross.
Back to reality. Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 2 1/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska’s government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it. Although Palin, like McCain, talks about liberating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, there is no evidence that being dependent on Alaskan oil would be any more pleasant to the pocketbook.
Alaska is, in essence, an adjunct member of OPEC. It has four different taxes on oil, which produce more than 89% of the state’s unrestricted revenue. On average, three-quarters of the value of a barrel of oil is taken by the state government before that oil is permitted to leave the state. Alaska residents each get a yearly check for about $2,000 from oil revenues, plus an additional $1,200 pushed through by Palin last year to take advantage of rising oil prices. Any sympathy the governor of Alaska expresses for folks in the lower 48 who are suffering from high gas prices or can’t afford to heat their homes is strictly crocodile tears.
As if it couldn’t support itself, Alaska also ranks No. 1, year after year, in money it sucks in from Washington. In 2005 (the most recent figures), according to the Tax Foundation, Alaska ranked 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434) but first in federal spending received per resident ($13,950). Its ratio of federal spending received to federal taxes paid ranks third among the 50 states, and in the absolute amount it receives from Washington over and above the amount it sends to Washington, Alaska ranks No. 1.
Under the state constitution, the governor of Alaska has unusually strong powers to shape the state budget. At the Republican National Convention, Palin bragged that she had vetoed “nearly $500 million” in state spending during her two years as governor. This amounts to less than 2% of the proposed budget. That’s how much this warrior for you (the people) against it (the government) could find in wasteful spending under her control.
One thing Barack Obama and McCain disagree on is an oil windfall–profits tax. McCain is against it, on the theory that it is a tax and therefore bad, and also that it would discourage domestic production. Obama is for it, on the theory that if oil companies can make a nice profit when oil sells for $50 per bbl., they can still make a nice profit when it sells for more than $100, even if the government takes a bit and spreads the money around to those who are hurting from higher oil prices.
Although Palin’s words side with McCain in this dispute, her actions side with Obama. Her major legislative accomplishment has been to revamp Alaska’s windfall-profits tax in order to increase the state’s take. Alaska calls it a “clear and equitable share” tax. The state assumes that extracting oil from the tundra costs about $25 per bbl. and takes as much as 75% of the difference between that and the sale price.
Why is a windfall-profits tax good for Alaska but not for the U.S.? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? People in Alaska are better than people in the rest of the U.S. They’re more American. Although there are small towns and farms and high school hockey teams in the lower 48, there are fewer down here, per capita, than in Alaska. And there are many more journalists and pollsters and city dwellers and other undesirables who might benefit if every American had the same right to leech off the government as do the good citizens of Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
God help America…
In what can only be described as a direct response to America helping Georgia (a country about half the way around the world), Russia will now be aiding Iran even more (a country that sits firmly below it on a map).
America’s misguided imperialistic zeal and delusions of remaining grandeur and might will now open a new war - hot or cold - it will not be able to win.
What’s the cost of the Iraq war at now? In the meantime, read more about the strengthening Russian/Iranian bond.
Well, it’s not $100B, as some are saying. But there are some reports that peg Iraq’s war torn economy with a surplus of $100B:
From CBS News:
Iraq could finish the year with as much as a $79 billion cumulative budget surplus as oil revenues add to leftover income the Iraqis still haven’t spent on national rebuilding, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office made public Tuesday.
Technically, I would not trust the GAO, these are the same people that said the war would pay for itself and cost a paltry $50-60B, after all.
It has now cost nearly $600B… and adding $12B per month! See this tracker for the rising cost.
The $100B figures you hear are in fact cumulative 2007 and 2008 oil revenues, with a surplus of around $6.5B, according to this CNN article, and the following comments: Last week, Sens. Carl Levin, a Democrat, and John Warner, a Republican, asked GAO to investigate what Iraq is doing with its oil revenue. The senators estimated that Iraq will realize “at least $100 billion in oil revenues in 2007 and 2008.”
Any way you dice it, America is being fleeced, and it only has itself to blame, see more in this video:
From Business Week:
The sudden war in the Caucasus brought Georgia to heel, reasserted Russia’s claim as the dominant force in the region, and dealt a blow to U.S. prestige. But in this part of the world, diplomacy and war are about oil and gas as much as they are about hegemony and the tragic loss of human life. Victory in Georgia now gives Russia the edge in the struggle over access to the Caspian’s 35 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas. The probable losers: the U.S. and those Western oil companies that have bet heavily on the Caspian as one of the few regions where they could still operate with relative freedom.
At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.
But after the mauling Georgia got, “any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead,” says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage in Greenwich, Conn. The risk of building a pipeline through countries vulnerable to the wrath of Russia is just too high.
The Russia-Georgia war thus may have dealt a blow to 15 years of American economic diplomacy. Back in the mid-1990s, Clinton Administration officials looking at a map of the recently dismantled Soviet Union grasped a singular fact about its southern perimeter: The newly independent countries there were overflowing with oil and natural gas but had to ship it via Russia to reach customers. Without pipelines of their own, the Caspian states would never fully develop their energy industries, or be politically independent of Russia. The lack of pipelines also curbed the export potential of companies like Chevron, which owns half of Tengiz, the giant Kazakhstan oilfield. After first resisting, BP and Chevron backed the American pipeline strategy.
PLAY
