June 18, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN HAS ZERO INTEGRITY

In the 2000 presidential campaign the George W. Bush campaign did "push polling" to suggest that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. They did this in the South, where racism is a very significant factor. Even after that, McCain essentially embraced Bush. Opportunism trumped principle. The behavior has continued. McCain denounced Bush's tax cuts for the rich back in the day, but now wants his own version of tax cuts that go even beyond Bush. McCain was tortured in Vietnam, but has not supported legislation to stop torture of alleged terrorists. This column by Joe Conason is at www.observer.com:

By the time Mr. McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, he had established a strong position against their regressive effects. That stance marked him as a true maverick in his own party and a straight talker who spoke for the national interest against his own personal interests. Running against George W. Bush in the 2000 G.O.P. primary, he mocked the Texas governor’s "misplaced" bonanza for the affluent.

"Sixty percent of the benefits from his tax cuts go to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans—and that’s not the kind of tax relief that Americans need," he said. Despite his wife’s inherited wealth, he criticized proposals to repeal the estate tax for the same reason, noting that such legislation "would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country."

As the chance to run for president again drew closer, however, Mr. McCain shifted toward conservative orthodoxy. In 2005 he voted for cuts in capital-gains taxes that he had previously opposed, and in 2006 voted for essentially the same estate-tax repeal he had once denounced. And today, his economic platform extends to the Bush tax cuts and renders them still more regressive—and more expensive.

THE OIL BUBBLE

Today George W. Bush was pontificating that we need to drill, drill, drill to solve our gasoline price crisis. Right-wingers have their greedy little hearts set on offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR, neither of which will solve our energy problems. We are nearing the end of the fossil fuel age, and it's time to go in a new direction. But it's interesting that lack of supply is not driving this huge inflation in gasoline prices. As the author points out, if supply was the problem we would have rationing and other drastic measures. This article by Michael Fox is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

According to Rep Peter DeFazio (D-Or), the entity that owns the most oil in the United States right now is not ExxonMobil or Chevron or Valero: it’s Morgan Stanley. So what’s Morgan Stanley doing with all that oil? Speculating on the petrofraud bonanza.

The problems with the short-sightedness of this utterly stupid investment pattern are many:

1. The faster they ratchet up the cost of oil, and, in turn, the gasoline that comes from it, the faster the public will change its patterns of consumption, the demand will go down, and the bottom will fall out of the market. That is the most logical supply-and-demand scenario, which ends in Morgan Stanley left holding billions of dollars of lost equity on the oil futures contracts. Note that Ford, GM. and Toyota – so far – have shuttered factories building large SUVs and trucks (the behemoth Toyota Tundra got axed today), thus, even the opportunity to continue buying these gas guzzlers has begun to be eliminated. GM has already hybridized the most ostentatious gas sucker of them all – the Cadillac Escalade – thus more than doubling the city mileage of that vehicle.