AP: Polls show Hillary brings a mixed bag to VP slot

AP

The intense dislike for Clinton suggests that besides support from women and others she could bring to the ticket, she might make it harder for Obama to win over some independents, a pivotal swing group in the November election against Republican John McCain. It also means she might push some Republicans and conservatives to vote against the Democrats — or donate money to the GOP — who might otherwise lack motivation to do so because of tepid feelings toward McCain.

A substantial 32 percent of independents strongly dislike Clinton, 10 points more than say so about Obama, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll conducted over the last several months. Independents, a group that both Obama and McCain won during their party primaries this year, comprised a quarter of voters in the 2004 election and have been closely contested in every presidential election since 1992.

In addition, 67 percent of Republicans have very unfavorable views of Clinton, 24 percentage points more than feel that way about Obama. Among conservatives the spread is similar — 58 percent say they feel very negatively about her, 18 points more than say so about Obama....

On the other hand, Clinton is popular with other voters, which could make her an asset to Obama. According to the AP-Yahoo survey, the New York senator is viewed significantly more favorably than Obama by many white Democrats, Hispanics and Catholics. She carried all those groups decisively against Obama in this year's Democratic primaries, exit polls of voters showed.

Read More......

Do Americans want to pay for public transport?

Does anyone honestly see the US changing its public transport direction? There may be some talk today but to think that Americans are demanding change seems to be a stretch. When oil was cheap a few years ago, the problem disappeared from view so it was conveniently ignored. Sure, a little here, a little there but compared to other industrialized countries it's nothing. Should the US start investing more in public transport as the Post editorial discusses? These projects can take years and there is always going to be a new urgent problem to address and politicians love nothing more than the latest urgent problem that gets media time.

If there is a sense of "common cause" for the nation in this area, I don't see it in the US or at least not enough to move Congress towards real change. The GOP changed the debate in recent years to be focused more on the individual, or at least select individuals, at the expense of the greater good. Until we move the debate back to "what is good for the country" instead of what is good for the wealthiest Americans, public transport will remain an under-funded, often ignored bother. Read More......

Obama to make oil companies pay for windfall profits

Good. Very good.

Launching a two-week focus on the ailing U.S. economy, Obama drew a sharp contrast with Republican John McCain, his rival in the November election, accusing him of a "full-throated endorsement" of President George W. Bush's fiscal policies, including tax breaks for oil companies.

"I'll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills," the Illinois senator said.

Every week people pay for gas, for food, for plane tickets, for everything that is going through the roof. This is a smart move, defining the election as being about the economy - a topic that John McCain admits he knows nothing about. Read More......

It's the economy, stupid

Obama goes after McCain today on the issue that is going to be front and center in November. McCain has nothing new to offer because he knows nothing about the economy other than what tainted UBS lobbyist Phil Gramm has to say, which means more of the same.

On economic matters, Mr. Obama said: “John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because for all his talk of independence, the centerpiece of his economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush’s policies. He says we’ve made great progress in our economy these past eight years. He calls himself a fiscal conservative and on the campaign trail he’s a passionate critic of government spending, and yet he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq policies that have left our children with a mountain of debt.”

Read More......

McCain lied to Newsweek about Hillary and the media

But as I always say about John McCain's changing stories, be fair. Sure, he might be lying. But it's just as likely that McCain simply no longer remembers anything beyond what he had for breakfast. Read More......

Elizabeth Dole's ethics problem

I'm told that it's a violation of Senate ethics rules to use taxpayer-funded photos on your campaign site.

Elizabeth Dole's Senate site:



Elizabeth Dole's campaign site:

Read More......

Bush had stronger ties to Abramoff than he revealed

Surprise.

The White House had stronger ties to disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff than it has publicly admitted, according to a draft congressional report released Monday.

President Bush met Abramoff on at least four occasions the White House has yet to acknowledge, according to the draft report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

And White House officials appeared as comfortable going to Abramoff and his lobbyists seeking tickets to sporting and entertainment events, as they did seeking input on personnel picks for plum jobs, the report found.

President Bush himself met Abramoff on at least six occasions, the report said, citing White House documents; the White House had previously acknowledged only two.

When questions were first raised about Abramoff's connection to Bush officials in January 2006, then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush had personally met Abramoff on just two occasions, both at White House Hanukkah receptions.

McClellan told reporters there had also been "a few staff-level meetings" between officials and Abramoff and his team, but declined to provide more information.

That number was significantly higher, White House lawyer Emmet Flood indicated in correspondence to committee chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., two years later, according to the draft report. Flood's letter identified six photographs of Bush with Abramoff or Abramoff's family members.

Read More......

Phil Gramm's UBS has new problems

Phil Gramm's Swiss bank client has been one of the worst hit banks in the world due to the subprime banking crash which is linked to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that the retired Texas Senator promoted before leaving the Senate and working for UBS. After showing initially profitable results, the banking world has since reminded some of why we had particular banking laws in place since the Great Depression. Gramm ignored history and thought he knew better. As the credit crisis grew Gramm, a Washington insider, was tasked with lobbying Congress to ease the pain of the problem he helped create.

The latest scandal to involve the McCain campaign co-chair lobbyist are investigations into UBS by the SEC as well as regulators from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Is there a "20 strikes and you're out" policy in the McCain team? If you thought ties to Halliburton and Big Oil were bad with Bush, that's nothing compared to Wall Street problems and McCain.

UBS Financial Services Inc. knew as early as December that a segment of the municipal bond business was in trouble, but the Wall Street firm kept selling the investments to some clients without warning them of the risk, according to documents reviewed by the Globe.

By February, the $330 billion auction-rate securities market had collapsed, locking out the nonprofits and municipalities that had used the market for years to issue inexpensive debt, as well as the investors who had purchased it. UBS brokers have said they were as surprised as anyone about the market's shutdown.

Read More......

John McCain's first wife

Huge article from the Daily Mail:

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children....

[W]hen McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering....

McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later....

'My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.

‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons....

When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.

But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’...

In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide....

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.

‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’...

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

Read More......

Live blogging Steve Jobs at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference

From a friend inside the conference:

Phone will come out on July 11.

iPhone 3G will be $199 for 8 gigs, $299 for 16 gigs (it's in black or white)

2:41 More countries: The phone is currently in only 6 countries. Initial goal of 12 countries for 3G, maybe a stretch goal of 25 countries. Gonna be in 70 countries this year.

2:38 GPS is built in.

2:37 Battery life: Standby time is 300 hours. 2g talk is 10 hours. 5 hours of 3g talk time. 5 to 6 hours of browsing. 7 hours of video. Audio 24 hours.

2:32PM Today introducing the iPhone 3G. Beautiful. Thinner at the edges, full solid glossy plastic back, really beautiful, solid metal buttons, beautiful display, camera, flush headphone jack so you can use ANY headphones you would like. Improved audio. 3G gives far faster data downloads. Browser and eMail attachments download far faster.

Demonstrating time difference in EDGE vs. 3G. Site took 21s on 3G. Still waiting on EDGE. Waiting.... Waiting... 59 second on EDGE. 3G speeds actually approaching WIFI. 59s on EDGE. 2.8 times faster. WiFi speed for same site is 17 seconds. "Amazingly Zippy". Same webpage is 35% faster than Nokia or Treo, with a full webpage rather than an approximation that other web-enabled phones do.

Something entirely new. Mobile Me. It's like Microsoft Exchange for the rest of us. Everyone can get push email, contacts and calendars sent directly to their phone, always up to date, wherever you are. So if you are on a Mac, or a PC, or an iPhone, all information is autosynced, all the time. Email goes to all devices, all have the latest devices. If I change an address in the phone, it automatically goes up to MobileMe and then down to all of your other machines or devices. Works over the air, everything always up to date. go to me.com contains a bunch of new applications. Great email, calendar, contacts, etc.

Now talking about the App Store. IT will be ON your iPhone. Pick your app, automatically download and install. Will also push updates wirelessly as well. Going to be in 62 countries.

Enterprises want to be able to distribute apps to their employees phones. They can authorize iPhones in their enterprise and create apps that ONLY work on those phones. And then they distribute them on their own intranet, and sync them to their phone via iTunes.

iPhone 2.0 software to be released in early July for all iPhone. iPod touch pays $9.99

New features in iPhone 2.0:
1 Contact search
2 iwork document support
3 completed support for WORD, EXCEL and now have PPoint too5
4 Added BULK DELETE AND MOVE
5 ability to save images from email attachments
6 New calculator, landscape mode becomes a scientific calculator.
7 Parental controls - turn off explicit content, limit YouTube, turn off or limit iTunes music store purchasing
8 Added lots of other languages - Chinese where you draw character with your finger. Can switch to other languages on the fly, the great thing about having a touch screen keyboard.

2:00PM Scott Forstall is now describing Push Notificaiton Service that allows 3rd party server to push notifications through, badges (indicators of new messages, etc.), sounds, and text messages - only ONE persistent connection to your phone, and the phone routes it correctly. Preserves battery life, etc.


1:54 Next up is Modality. A medical education application for medical students. Better than paper flashcards usually used by students. Highly detailed beautiful images that a student can scan over, get more info about a structure, etc. Quiz mode asking student to find a structure. Instant access to educational information for medicine, but also other K-12 and consumer reference content coming soon.

OMG this is cool. Now demonstrating medical imaging app that is showing CAT and PET scans overlayed. WOW.

1:50 Next developer... a SOLO developer. Mark Terry. Showing an application he did in his spare time called "Band". Playing piano on his iPhone. Now playing drums on his iPhone. Showing a Blues loop instrument. Crowd goes crazy. Now showing a bass guitar instrument. You just run your fingers over the screen of the device. The crowd goes nuts. You an record, overdub, or just get with your friends who have band on THEIR iPhones and just JAM. For baseball fans, MLB.com has developed a new application for iPhone, called MLB.com At Bat. You can choose a game, and monitor it live. You can also pull up real-time video highlights. It's amazing. Clips come minutes after the play.

1:45 Next up is Cro-Mag Ralley. It's a caveman racing game, kind of like the Flintstones meets MarioKart. Tilt iPhone to steer. Each game is $9.99.

1:44 Demonstrating two OS X games ported to iPhone. WOW, Enigmo, great game!!! Now touch-based on the phone. Wonderful!! Showing polygon accurate collision testing by having some 50 items bouncing around simultaenously. Incredible GPU in the iPhone.

1:42 Next up is AP (Associated Press) - 5000 news organizations.. Benjamin Moss from AP talking about MNN : Mobile News Network. The phone shows all sorts of news, but also uses your current location to show news pertinent to your local area. You can read stories, view images, and watch video from AP news network. You can also send news stories to AP directly from your iPhone if you witness breaking news.This will be a free download. Next is Pangea Software, a longtime developer of Macintosh games. Brian Greenstone takes stage.

1:38PM TypePad is the largest professional blogging service in the world. Showing iPHone application. Can post directly to the blog by editing story. Can post photos directly to blog, or take a photo taken before, select it, and bring it into the post editor. Tap to add a title, tap to add a category, and tap to add some text and commentary. Publish, and it instantly sends the post and photo up to the blog. Posts are submitted in the background. You can start a new post while the current post is uploaded. It's so amazingly easy to blog right on the phone (it's FREE when the App store launches).

1:36PM Sam Altman. Loopt is a social network. Shows you where people are, what they are doing, and when they are close to you. You could be at a restaurant, and find that you have a friend close by. You can see a friend's journal, look at their photos, call friend, text them, whatever. It is like Twitter with location. Next up is TypePad. It's native Mobile Blogging for the iPhone.

1:32 Ken Sun introducing an application for iPhone that allows rapid integration with eBays web services. They can search for eBay items, bring up the details, bid, check status, add things to watch list, etc. eBay app available for free when App Store launches. Next up is Loopt.

1:30 PM Were able to create four stages in only 2 weeks. They now have completed 110 stages. The 3D is unbelievable, and responding to tilt controls. This is amazing.

Games will be sold in same store as music and movies, available for $9.99 upon launch of iPhone apps store. Next up is eBay.

1:25 He then proceeds to graphically wire things up by drawing links via his mouth from his code controllers and models represented in interface builder, to the user interface elements. He runs the complete app on the simulator. Then he builds it and it pushes it out to his connected iPhone. He has created a cool and useful iPhone application without writing a line of code. It is fully featured... even rotates with accelerometer. David Pogue says "We are witnessing the birth of a third major computing platform: Windows, Mac OS X, and now, iPhone."

1:21 Scott is now demonstrating the ease with which an application can be built. He is doing a quick application that filters his address book, and just shows people within 10 miles of his current location. He goes into interface builder, and drags out a canvas. From a palette, he drags out the various controls and drops them into the canvas. It snaps into place. Laying out the user interface is just like using a high-end page layout program. He now simulates the interface by running it in the simulator. Amazingly functional without a line of code having yet been written.

1:20PM Code is written using the free XCode system. Interface Builder allows you to graphically construct your user interface, and connect it to your code. There is an iPHone simulator that allows you to run and test your software. Finally a performance and debugging tool called "Instruments" completes the suite.

1:17pm If you lose your phone, you can do a secure wipe of the device remotely.
All the expectations of an enterprise-level smartphone have been answered with iPhone 2.0. Packing the power of a laptop into the size of a smartphone.
Next topic: The SDK (Software Development Kit). Scott Forstall, Vice President of Platform Experience. He is describing the API's and frameworks on the iPhone. They have a lot in common with Mac OS X. They use the exact same kernel as what forms the basis of OS X; the same source code.

Core Services provides such thing as database services, Preferences, Location services, etc.
Media layer includes screamingly fast implementation of hardware accelerated Open GL.
1:18 Finally on top is Cocoa Touch, which provides the multi-touch development experience.

1:10PM Introducing iPhone 2.0: Developer program started on March 6. 250,000 people have downloaded the free SDK to develop iPhone software. 20,000 people have applied to the paid program. Only 4000 have been accepted so far.

iPHone 2.0 consists of the following parts:

1. SDK

2. Enterprise support: Microsoft Exchange, push email, remote wiping of info on phone, calendar and address sync, etc. Worked with Cisco to implement the high security requirements of enterprise applications. 35% of Fortune 500 have participated in the beta for iPhone 2.0 enterprise support. Thre has been phenomenal participation of higher education organizations in beta program as well. Now showing a video of testimonials of enterprise beta users of iPhone 2.0.

1:09PM The topic this morning is iPhone. Bertrand Serlet will discuss OS X after lunch, with a peek at the next version, Snow Leopard.

Three parts to Apple. The Mac business, the music business (iPod and iTunes) and third part is the iPhone.

1:07 Steve says we have been working very hard on some great stuff that he can't wait to show to us. A record 5200 attendees. We sold out. 147 sessions. 85 Macintosh sessions and 62 iPHones. 1000 Apple engineers on site to help developers with their projects.

Applause starts, and Steve is walking onto stage.

1:03 The program will start in a few minutes, we have been asked to turn off all cellular phones, PDA's, etc. This is huge. Much larger than MacWorld keynote. This supposedly is the largest Worldwide Developer Conference (WWC) ever. They actually sold out, and had to turn developers away

The crowd is piling into the keynote room at Moscone. It consists of a large number of press, developers some Apple engineers and execs. Lots of cameras going off. And there is Al Gore!!!! Read More......

McCain running negative ads juxtaposing Obama and the nutjob leading Iran

I just noticed that McCain is running what are probably Google Ads showing Obama's face next to the face of Irani leader, and nutjob, Ahmadinejad.



Kind of scummy for McCain, who likes to claim he's really a nice guy and doesn't go for that nasty brand of politics. But of course he does go for nasty, as we already know by McCain having defended Bush's comparison of Obama to Hilter appeasers. Not to mention, McCain's famously explosive temper. McCain is becoming pretty expert at saying one thing and doing another. As Joe has repeatedly pointed out, McCain, who claims campaign finance reform as his signature issue, is a campaign finance criminal. McCain says one thing and then does another.

Whether he simply can't keep facts straight anymore - like when McCain claimed falsely that the surge was over (in fact, 2/3 of the surge troops are still in Iraq), or when he claimed that Al Qaeda was a shia group (it's not), or when he claimed on three different occasions that Al Qaeda was getting assistance from Iran (it's not) - or due to an actual intent to deceive, John McCain is no longer a maverick. He's now just a liar. Read More......

Why doesn't McCain have a national energy strategy?

John Lloyd of Drexel College Democrats wrote me yesterday, asking why people weren't making a bigger deal about John McCain not having a national energy strategy. It's a good question:

I'm trying to raise the profile of what I consider an important fact: John McCain doesn't have an energy policy. He's spoken and speechified about reducing our dependence on foreign oil and increasing renewables, but he hasn't put forward ANY specific policies or a platform that he supports, with the horrible exception of the gas tax holiday.

I think it's important because in 2000, G. W. Bush said much of what McCain is saying now, and he put forward his energy policy 38 days before the election. His energy policy never really got the scrutiny it should have, and this cycle I don't want McCain to get away with that.

You'll notice that on McCain's issue page he has no page for "energy" (its not under environment). I have scoured the internet and his speeches, and he has put forward nothing more than platitudes and rhetoric. Considering how Obama is often criticized (unfairly) as all talk and no substance, i'd really like to see people start to attack McCain for trying to run without putting forward an energy policy.

We've started a "McCain Energy Policy Watch" on our blog that tracks how long he's been running without putting forward a platform addressing that crucial issue. We made a Flash widget that counts the days, hours, and minutes that he's been running without putting forward an energy policy, you can find it at the link below.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

We're actually doing a series of posts examining specific polcies that Obama has proposed that McCain is silent on. First is the introduction/overview, day 385 compares their respective cap-and-trade proposals (McCain put his out seperately from any energy plan), and day 410 examines revenue decoupling. More will follow.

Read More......

Only hope for McCain is for Republicans to "finance sustained negative ads" against Obama

Republican operatives are freaking out -- and the only "hope" is to put a lot of money into an attack on Obama. It'll be vintage Karl Rove: lies, smears, fear-mongering. That's all the Republicans have to offer America in 2008.

Tom Edsall at Huffington Post has been talking to GOP operatives -- and they're petty open about the need for negativity:

In not-for-attribution interviews, a number of Republicans were neither optimistic about his chances nor positive in their assessment of his campaign so far.

"I think we've got a world of problems," said one Republican strategist with extensive experience in presidential campaigns. He said this came home to him with a thud when he watched Obama and McCain give speeches last Tuesday, with the Democrat speaking before "20,000 screaming fans, while John McCain looked every bit of his 72 years" in a speech televised from New Orleans. This Republican cited the liberal blogger Atrios' description of McCain's speech with a green backdrop that made McCain "look like the cottage cheese in a lime Jell-O salad."

For McCain to stand a chance of winning, the operative contended, the campaign, the Republican National Committee, or an independent group will have to finance sustained negative ads developing a broad assault on Obama's credibility as a national leader at a time of terrorist threat. McCain, however, has gone out of his way to aggressively discourage such activity, the operative pointed out, which, he argued, may kill McCain's chances.

McCain already showed he couldn't control -- or didn't want to control -- the GOP state party leaders in North Carolina and Tennessee when they started racist attacks on Obama. McCain won't stand in the way of the attacks on Obama. Read More......

McCain's Web site talks about the anti-Christ being 'a Jew,' Hillary being a 'bitch,' Obama being a 'Muslim fag,' and America bringing 9/11 on itself

UPDATE: Jed finds more on other McCain sites, including a reference to Obama as a n*gger.

Some folks on the right thought they'd pull an "I gotcha" on Obama by trying to find kooky things visitors have written on Obama's blog. So, I thought I'd take a look at John McCain's campaign Web site and do a search for words like "fag," "bitch," and "Jew," for starters. What I found wasn't pretty. It's interesting to note that each comment has a "flag as offensive" button next to it, so that readers can inform the moderator that the comments are offensive. Either McCain's readers don't find any of this offensive, or McCain's staff was informed and didn't care.

The Anti-Christ will be a Jew (this was posted in order to prove that Obama wasn't really the anti-Christ (more on that below)):



Obama is the anti-Christ (there's a long debate on this page of McCain's site as to whether Obama really is the anti-Christ):



Obama is the devil and the anti-Christ:



Hillary as "bitch." This one is particularly odd as it seems to be something posted by McCain's own staff - they quoted an article calling Hillary a "bitch":



Obama is a "Muslim fag":



"I wipe my ass with the Muslim book of hate, the Quran":



America's "Jewish TV and press" are in McCain's pocket (here's a guy who could really get into McCain if it weren't for him being so close to those Jews). This post on McCain's site also seems to suggest that we got what we deserved on 9/11:



Obama's "deep resentment" of whites:



There's also an entire page of some nut going after AIPAC and Israel, and no one at JohnMcCain.com seems to mind (this guy has tons of messages about AIPAC and Israel on this particular page):

Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The news this morning was all about numbers -- skyrocketing gas prices, tanking stocks and soaring temperatures. I can attest to the latter. It's been brutal here in D.C. -- way too early for this kind of heat and humidity.

The general election campaign is getting into full swing. That happened fast after all the events of last week. What a week.

Let's get it started... Read More......

Oil impact across the world

The BBC has a brief overview of how the increasing cost of oil is impacting various regions in the world. I rarely drive though I do all of the grocery shopping and can see a difference there. In August, I will get a better sense of the gas prices when I drive for vacation. Three summers ago I borrowed a family car (a Citroen XM which is a mid-sized, no less) and it cost 130 euro to fill the tank back when the exchange rate was closer to 1:30 - 1 as opposed to nearly 1:60 - 1 as it stands today. That was enough to keep me on public transport the rest of the year.

What will be interesting to follow moving forward are the changes (or not) in places such as China and India. US consumers are slowly cutting back but until we see the same in the other big oil consuming regions, prices will remain high. Read More......

Afghanistan continues to crumble during Laura Bush visit

Forget her talk about blaming Karzai for the problems, George Bush seems to be standing front and center here. He's the one who had to have his war in Iraq, taking away money, military, resources and focus. Did he really think that a country that had been at war for a few decades could just somehow spring into action with the wave of a magic wand? Now we're treated to another Laura Bush drive in Afghanistan as Bush asks the world to step in and help out even though he abandoned the country long ago. During her visit, it was just another normal day with a journalist murdered, a suicide bomb killing three British soldiers along with the routine deadly attacks on government and civilians. As the season goes on we will surely be hearing more about the poppy fields and their rapid growth as the Bush administration abandoned the country.

Laura Bush can save her breath and talk to her husband the next time they meet. He's the one who ignored Afghanistan, claiming another victory before the job was done. Read More......