I believe it’s April Fool’s Day here on the floor of the House.To hear the members of the GOP – the Grand Old Oil Party – talking about how they’re there for the consumers, they want to do something to help American consumers. The same party that benefits disproportionately from massive campaign contributions from the oil and gas and coal industries.The same party that holds the White House, with two oil men in the White House.The same party, on the Senate side, defeated our energy provisions because they would have God forbid, made the oil and gas companies pay taxes like other members of the corporate committee.It would have taken away subsidies.They’re crying crocodile tears about the massive profits that their buddies are making, their campaign contributors, their sponsors.And the president, the oil man.And the vice president, the oil man supply services company.
Q:Will the gentleman yield?
No, I won’t yield.Thank you very much.
Now, there’s a few things we could do.Now, the president’s a big free trader, right?He’s trying to push us into more free trade agreements.They say they work great.He wants “rules-based trade.”Well, we’re in the WTO, they have rules. The rules say you can not restrict the supply of a commodity simply to drive up the price.That’s what OPEC’s doing.Now five members of OPEC are in the WTO.Will this president – the oil man –- the friend of the Saudis and the others – will he file a complaint in the World Trade Organization against OPEC?No.I wrote to him three years ago, asking him to do that.The answer was no. If the Saudis and the OPEC countries want to get together and collude to drive up the price of the oil, that’s just fine with George Bush. He’s all for free trade, and rules-based trade, except when the rules might hurt some of his buddies.And then, the oil industry just piggy backs on top of that.
Now, there is another thing they could do. They can help us with a provision we put in the Farm bill, which is stalled in the Senate, which would close the Enron loophole. Remember Enron? Ken Boy, the President’s favorite guy? He just died before he went to jail. Well, the Enron boys convinced the Republican Congress to give them a special loophole, to deregulate energy commodities, to allow for massive speculation. And there is widespread agreement in the financial community that about 50 cents of the price that’s being paid at the pump today is being paid purely because of speculation brought about by the Enron loophole. You really want to do something about the high price of oil?Help us close the Enron loophole. Get your president to file a complaint against OPEC for colluding to drive up the price of oil. Help strip out the taxpayers’ subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industry. You are taking out of their wallets while you are taking it out of their pockets at the pump.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of being untruthful over remarks made about his controversial meeting with the Islamist Hamas group.
Rice had chided Carter for meeting with Hamas, saying U.S. State Department officials had told him such talks would not help the Middle East peace process.
But a statement from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which speaks on the ex-president’s behalf, said no one from the U.S. government told him not to meet with exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal or other leaders of the group.
“President Carter has the greatest respect for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and believes her to be a truthful person,” the statement said.
“However, perhaps inadvertently, she is continuing to make a statement that is not true,” it said.
According to the statement, “No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President Assad or leaders of Hamas.”
Rice had said Tuesday that the United States would not deal with Hamas and “we certainly told President Carter that we didn’t think meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians who (are) actually devoted to peace.”
Following his talks with Meshaal on Monday, Carter said Hamas told him it would recognize Israel’s right to live in peace if a deal is reached and approved by a Palestinian vote.
But Meshaal said later that Hamas would not recognize the Jewish state and would insist on the right of some 4.5 million Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.
Before leaving on his Middle East trip, President Carter placed a telephone call to Rice to describe his itinerary and to inform her of his intended conversations, the statement from the Carter Center said. Rice was in Europe and her deputy returned his call, it added.
“They had a very pleasant discussion for about fifteen minutes, during which he never made any of the negative or cautionary comments… He never talked to anyone else,” the statement said.
Max and the Marginalized has a new tune out that I did some video work on. Let me know what you think.
Since Bush’s bankshot into the Friday evening news dumpster that he had signed off on torture and that the top echelon of his administration had all sat in a closed room to learn about and rubber stamp all the details of our illegal and unsavory interrogation techniques, the press has continued to ask how Barack Obama should answer for preferring orange juice to coffee, not how Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, et al should answer for committing crimes against humanity after years of statements to the contrary.
ABC News, which originally broke the torture story ended its very short streak of un-patheticness when George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson dragged us through a debate filled with loaded questions that spoke to their Sunday morning circle jerks far more than to the concerns of the American people, and did not mention the torture issue once.
If that sounds like a good idea to you, go sign the ACLU’s petition to demand an independent prosecutor to investigate this, and hop on the letter-writing campaign asking local papers to cover this since the nationals have proven useless.
Sorry about the tome, sometimes it’s necessary. Here is our song (not our first on this matter) called “Now That We Know That They Knew”, about how we’d like to see some proof that no one is above the law and that the phrase “and justice for all” includes people at the top as well.
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
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