Oil, Economy & Warfare

To understand the special “national security” status enjoyed by the oil companies, we must first consider oil’s economic importance and then its central role in war. Oil provides nearly all the energy for transportation (cars, trucks, buses airplanes, and many railroad engines). Oil also has an important share of other energy inputs – it heats many buildings and fuels industrial and farm equipment, for example. Overall, oil has a 40% share in the US national energy budget. Beyond energy, oil provides lubrication and it is an essential feedstock for plastics, paint, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. Sometime in the future, the world may switch to renewable energy and other non-oil inputs, but oil now reigns as the indispensable ingredient of the modern economy. For this reason, governments are nervous about their national oil supply.6

In a speech today on the floor of the Senate, James Inhofe (R-Okla.) blasted the news media for its bias on the subject of global warming. He also went after a completely one-sided report CNN aired on today's "American Morning" which portrayed him as a servant of the oil and gas companies with his out-of-the-mainstream views on the issue.

Below is a transcript of the CNN piece, filed by "Morning" anchor Miles O'Brien. Read on for Inhofe's remarks, including his disputation of O'Brien's assertion that the senator refused to be interviewed by CNN:

MILES O'BRIEN: In California, they're taking some tough action aimed at stopping global warming. The state imposing a cap on greenhouse gases. In the U.S., politicians have been slow to recognize global warming as a problem. Well, that is changing. An influential skeptic remains. No question, there is a political climate change inside the Republican Party. Arnold Schwarzenegger in San Francisco announcing with great fanfare, a California law to curb emissions of greenhouse gases at the root of global warming.

Citing a report to be released on Friday, ABC's World News uniquely led Thursday night by resurrecting the Abramoff scandal. Anchor Charles Gibson promised that the report, from a House committee, “will be something of a bombshell in Washington tomorrow,” a forecast the news media can make come true. Gibson asserted that the report will “show White House contacts with now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates were far more extensive than the White House has ever acknowledged. And the report will state that prime among Abramoff's lobbying targets, were the man who is now Chairman of the Republican National Committee and Karl Rove.”

George Stephanopoulos related how the report will “detail offers from Abramoff and his associates of dinners and concert tickets and other kinds of meals and drinks to White House officials” and provides “circumstantial evidence that Abramoff did get what he wanted on behalf of his clients." But while there “were 450 contacts with White House officials, including nine contacts” with Rove, the report “also shows that Abramoff tried to get 20 people hired in the administration,” yet “he was only successful, though, once.” Five percent success hardly demonstrates inordinate political pull.

Michael Moore, darling of the American left, is also a big hit in Islamic fundamentalist quarters. We already knew that Osama likes him, now, we learn that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also a big fan.

Following his infamous speech to the United Nations, Ahmadinejad held a few receptions for Iranians and Iranian-Americans as well as the media. His translator while he was in this country wrote an account of Ahmadinejad's itinerary:

The following morning, Mr. Ahmadinejad held a 7:30 a.m. breakfast meeting, again at his hotel, with American academics and journalists. Earlier, he had expressed some interest in having Michael Moore attend, and although attempts were made to reach him (even by myself, since I was asked), they were unsuccessful. I was seated between Gary Sick (of Columbia University) and Jon Lee Anderson (of The New Yorker), and three hot issues were covered: nuclear power, Israel and the Holocaust.

Is NBC News the publicity agency for CBS News? While Thursday's CBS Evening News had nothing on Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's new book, for which he sat for an interview with Mike Wallace set to air on this Sunday's 60 Minutes, the NBC Nightly News led with the “explosive new book” about the Bush administration's “deception” on Iraq. NBC anchor Brian Williams hyped: “It alleges that attacks by insurgents on coalition forces in Iraq are worse than Americans have been led to believe. It also alleges a kind of campaign of deception on the part of the Bush administration.”

Reporter Jim Miklaszewski read aloud how Woodward “tells CBS's 60 Minutes 'it's getting to the point now where there are eight, nine hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces.'” Not until the very end of his piece did Miklaszewski relay how “military officials are strongly disputing Woodwards's figures on attacks against Americans in Iraq and just as strongly deny there is any attempt to hide the truth about the war.” But that didn't dissuade Williams from presuming Woodward's accuracy, as Williams proposed to retired General Barry McCaffrey: “Is this now the accurate portrait emerging of what's going on over there?" (Transcript follows)

In Thursday’s Washington Post, deep inside a story on page B-2, the George Allen campaign provided a man named Dan Cragg, a former acquaintance of Allen’s Democratic challenger, Jim Webb. Cragg said Webb used the N-word "while describing his own behavior during his freshman year at the University of Southern California in the early 1960s...[Cragg said] Webb described taking drives through the black neighborhood of Watts, where he and members of his ROTC unit used racial epithets and pointed fake guns at blacks to scare them."

The Post puts this in the eighth paragraph of a Michael Shear story on the front of Metro headlined "Webb Denies Ever Using Word As Epithet." The subhead was "Racial Slur Overshadowing All Else in Contest."

What's worse:

A. telling a story in which the n-word is liberally used, or

B. driving through a black neighborhood, flaunting rifles and yelling racial epithets?

I'm going with 'B.'  So why did Chris Matthews devote the first half of this afternoon's "Hardball" to the n-word story, and not one second to the driving-through-the-black-neighborhood story?

You don't suppose, do you, that it could have anything to do with the fact that 'A' concerns Republican George Allen, and 'B' his Dem challenger, James Webb?

Matthews opened Hardball with an extended segment featuring Patricia Waring, who in 1978 was apparently the wife of the coach of the University of Virginia rugby club team.  She claims that, attending one game, she overheard George Allen telling a story in which he repeatedly used the n-word.  She says she confronted him about it, asking him not to use the word.

It's always interesting in a fall election season to see what your taxpayer dollars are buying at the Public Broadcasting Service. Some might call it an "in-kind contribution" to your friendly local Democratic candidate. Liberals would never favor a McCain-Feingold-style bill that made PBS political programs go off the air in the last 60 days of an election cycle. A colleague sent this notice from TV Guide:

Wednesday, October 4

MOYERS ON AMERICA (new series) PBS 9/8 Central (time may vary by area)

"The always-cerebral Bill Moyers looks at diverse topics in this three-part series. The first explores corruption in politics by focusing on the Jack Abramoff scandal."

This new miniseries will air on the first three Wednesdays in October. Screening the videos on the Moyers site, the first episode, titled "Capitol Crimes," focuses on Abramoff, with a heavy emphasis on the lobbyist in pictures with Ronald Reagan and Tom DeLay. Is there anything more mind-numbingly predictable than Bill Moyers raging against lobbyists? (Unless they're lobbyists for PBS fat cats.)

New York Times columnist (and former Times reporter) Maureen Dowd appeared on the "Tavis Smiley" show on PBS on Wednesday night with her typical take on the news: Bush and Cheney are suffering from testosterone poisoning, and she urged the media to keep pushing because "checks and balances is what Dick Cheney is trying to destroy." But Hillary Clinton is too cautious, "fetches coffee for older male Senators," and needs to be more outspoken: "I would love to see Barack Obama and Hillary speaking out more."

Smiley asked Dowd about if it was tough to write her column: "The first couple of years I had the column, I was curled up in a ball on the floor of my house, crying a lot." (Like Linda Greenhouse? Is this a standard practice for New York Times reporters?) She continued: "But as a student of literature and Shakespeare, you know that power can be poisonous. And in the case of Bush and Cheney, testosterone can be poisonous. And it’s just my job to tweak them and say before the Iraq war, we should not be ginning this case up to go to a war unless we’re sure that we understand the culture, and we didn’t.  So I feel that journalism has a really important place in checks and balances, without being corny about it. And checks and balances is what Dick Cheney is trying to destroy. So I feel that it’s important that we keep pushing."

With one of his inimitable montages, Rush Limbaugh documented today the way in which the MSM got hung up on a handshake - one the media reported didn't come off between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf during their recent White House visit.

Though WH spokesman Tony Snow has reportedly indicated that the pair did shake hands off-camera, the media tea-leaf readers seemingly imbue The Handshake That Didn't Happen with dire implications for the achievement of US goals in the region. Ironically, on the very same day, the MSM has yet to report on a major, positive development in the region - one that would bring a smile to the lips of even a Nancy Pelosi or a New York Times editorialist - were they not solemnly sworn to ac-cen-tu-ate the negative from now till Election Day.

Last night all three network newscasts did story's on a proposed ban on trans fats in New York City restaurants. Katie Couric practically made out trans fat to be a lethal lipid stalking the stainless steel kitchens of the Big Apple's finest eateries

“New York, New York is getting ready to lead the nation in evicting a killer from restaurants,” teased Katie Couric at the intro to the “Evening News.”

Yet oddly enough, it was her correspondent's report that was the most balanced of the three networks, as correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reported the price tag accompanying the ban for any restaurants holding on to offending cooking oils: $2,000 per violation.

Last night Bill O'Reilly had on Democratic activists James Carville and Paul Begala. The two guests engaged in Fox News-bashing for the entire segment. The exchange got testy at one point when O'Reilly said "you're both stupid" for relying on left-wing blogs for conspiracy material.

O'REILLY: With us, two close Clinton confidants, James Carville and Paul Begala, the co-authors of the paperback book right now, "Take it Back: A Battle Plan for the Democratic Party". Look, you have been running around hot-shotting this FOX News and you're empowered or you're thrilled or whatever you are. We're fair to Bill Clinton here. Wallace worked for ABC for 25 years. He didn't turn into a werewolf when he was hired over here. OK?
You want to pick on somebody, pick on me or pick on Hannity, but not Chris Wallace, OK? This is ridiculous. There were legitimate questions. Wallace grills Rumsfeld. I grilled Rumsfeld. And come on.

It's good to know where your friends are. Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter denounced the detention of Iraqi AP photographer Bilal Hussein. (Michelle Malkin has more on the Hussein case.) He is accused of aiding terrorists and for doing activities one would not expect from a mere photographer.

Reports the AP on Rep. Slaughter:

A Democratic congresswoman on Wednesday cited the case of an Iraqi Associated Press photographer imprisoned by the U.S. military during debate on a prisoner treatment bill that she considers too harsh.

In a House speech, Rep. Louise Slaughter referred to Bilal Hussein, who has been detained in Iraq for more than five months.

David Reinhard writes in the Oregonian that the New York Times' leak of the National Intelligence Estimate report on terrorism is suspicious for several reasons. All the sources are anonymous, the leak was timed right before the election, and the Times only released a "paraphrased" version of what was in the report, not any actual words.

One was the fact that all sources in the story were anonymous. Maybe it's too much to expect named sources in such a story, because anyone leaking classified material is committing a big no-no. But the fact that the sources were all anonymous raised questions that they may be leaking -- and giving a slanted view of the report -- for political reasons. So did the fact that the leaks are coming a half-year after the report's completion -- and a half-year closer to November's election.

Another red flag was the lack of any actual quotations from the NIE. The paper just used characterizations by people who had either seen the final draft or helped produce earlier drafts.

The bottom half of today's Style section front page of the Washington Post screams "Hopelessly Transparent Liberal Newspaper." The goo-fest is at its most gooey in "The Democrats Charisma Doctor," David Montgomery's latest left-wing valentine, awarded to "superstar" Sen. Barack Obama and his "seductive lassitude."

There's "Bill Clinton's 60th Birthday Benefit Blowout." by Dan Balz. It's a "charitable fundraising extravaganza." And Chelsea is helping!

There's "Jim McGreevey's Night Out With His New Constituents" by Darragh Johnson. The poor gay ex-governor commiserates with other gay men who left the wife and kids.

If you see a fellow walking down the block on his hands today, you can be pretty sure he's a Democrat. For, at least from now till Election Day, Dems inhabit a topsy-turvy world in which good news is bad and bad news is good - unless the bad news is very bad, which would be bad. Got it?

By now we're all familiar with BDS - Bush Derangement Syndrome. In recent weeks, a new, virulent strain has mutated: GPDS. No, not a virus affecting the positioning gizmo in your car permitting men to achieve nirvana - never again having to ask for directions. We're talking about Gas Price Derangement Syndrome in which Democrats - depressedly deranged by dropping gasoline prices - blame the good news on a diabolical plot concocted by Karl Rove and carried out in the covens of Exxon-Mobil and company.

ABC hired reporter Jake Tapper from the partisan left-wing website Salon.com in 2001. On Wednesday night's World News, Tapper patted his old employers on the back by publicizing their unsubstantiated charges "by at least five" accusers that conservative Sen. George Allen used the word "nigger"  in his college days at the University of Virginia. (He made no mention of the old signers of his paycheck.) Tapper let Allen deny it, but Allen's accusers weren't rebutted by Allen's first wife or college teammates. Mimicking all the other liberal reporters, Tapper recounted it as part of a weeks-long narrative about racial and ethnic gaffes, and professed that the best Republicans "can hope for is that he survives this November's election."

Since the other threads got full on tonight's posts, I'm opening up another thread for comments. I also want to point everyone to a new project: the NewsBusters FAQ. It's the place to go to get all your questions answered about NB. It's nowhere near complete so please post your thoughts.

As NewsBusters continues to expand (fast approaching 10,000 registered users and averaging 80,000 daily visitors), I think it's time we started compiling a FAQ for the site. Below, I've started a list of some of the questions that I believe should be in it. Feel free to post your suggested questions and answers.