Jesse's Favorites

Performing his function as the neocon id, Charles Krauthammer gets down to what the Iraq withdrawal debate is really about: McCain, like George Bush, envisions the United States seizing the fruits of victory from a bloody and costly war by establishing an extensive strategic relationship that .. read full article »

I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on a new online show called Meet the Bloggers. Here's the introduction post I did yesterday all about Meet the Bloggers. Also on the show was Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), someone who has been trying very hard to tackle .. read full article »

Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. This June, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) fully embraced the Big Oil agenda he once called “irresponsible” and “disastrous.” Three years ago, Sen. John .. read full article »

McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin responded yesterday to a recent report by the Tax Policy Center, which found a $2.8 trillion gap between McCain’s public economic proposals and what his advisers had been telling tax experts in private. Slate reports: Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief .. read full article »

It does our heart good to see an oil tycoon spend his money to tell the truth. There’s too little of that today. But T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire, is investing $58 billion on a television ad campaign (Youtube) to explain that we can’t drill our way out of the current energy .. read full article »

A vote on the issuance of a subpoena for the draft endangerment finding on global warming emissions rejected at the highest levels in the White House was stymied when Republican members boycotted the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works business meeting, preventing a .. read full article »

Well, besides good looks and charm, both the Senate Majority House leader, Harry Reid and yours truly will be panel guests on a new show tomorrow called Meet the Bloggers. The show is a production of the legendary onliner, Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films fame and the host is none other .. read full article »

The American Future Fund, a shady right-wing front group incorporated as a 501 c(4), is running a radio ad in Colorado criticizing Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) for “blocking American energy.” The ad, promoting an offshore drilling bill sponsored by 87 House Republicans, is replete with .. read full article »

Can Andy Grove light a fire under America’s sleepy electric car effort? At the first annual Plug-In 2008 Conference, the former Intel chief called on America to convert ten million of its clunkiest, most gas-hungry SUVs, pickups and minivans into plug-in electric hybrid vehicles .. read full article »

Speakers Congresswoman Yvette Clarke (D-NY) Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI), Chair, Congressional Black Caucus [tentative] Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA), Chair, Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Congresswoman Hilda .. read full article »

Yesterday, during an event at the Tax Policy Center, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin repeated the false claim that McCain’s economic proposal has “no tax cuts anywhere for the wealthy”: And what Sen. McCain has tried to do is to keep the kinds of .. read full article »

Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, Research Associate at the ENOUGH project. This weekend, human rights contrarian David Rieff’s op-ed in the LA Times castigated activists for “human rights triumphalism” after the International Criminal Court’s move to indict Sudanese President Omar .. read full article »

I'm not going to pull punches:  The Oregonian ran an opinion piece on climate science, penned by columnist David Reinhard, that simply isn't up to the standards of responsible journalism.  Not only does it get basic facts wrong, it displays a disturbing arrogance, coming from someone who's .. read full article »

At a summit on good jobs and clean air in Oakland, CA, yesterday, Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa told labor and environmental activists that his union — representing 1.4 million workers across a broad array of careers — is rejecting the drill-drill-drill rhetoric of the conservative .. read full article »

Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Nine months after it was released, we still aren’t sure whether John McCain’s health care plan would raise taxes on the middle class or blow up the deficit. McCain’s health care plan would .. read full article »

Witnesses Kathy Fredriksen, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Department of Energy Didier Houssin, Director of the Office of Oil Markets and Emergency Preparedness, International Energy Agency Dr. David Victor, Director of the Program .. read full article »

E&E News: A new U.S. EPA proposal that would govern the underground injection of carbon dioxide by power plants and other industrial pollution sources will be the subject of a House Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee hearing Thursday. EPA’s proposed rule is aimed at protecting .. read full article »

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy “was beaten and shot to death for allegedly whistling at a white woman in segregated Mississippi. An all-white jury took 67 minutes to acquit two white men of the murder; months later, they admitted the crime and spent the rest of their lives in .. read full article »

The brass ring for solar energy has long been "grid parity," or delivering electricity to the grid at the prevailing local price. But the solar photovoltaic (PV) march toward parity has been delayed, ironically, by the sector's own surging popularity. The main reason? Supply of the raw .. read full article »

Lorne Gunter, part of the National Post climate change denier team (see also Terry Corcoran, Larry Solomon), has revived the fraudulent claim that advancing world glaciers demonstrate an end to climate change. Gunter claimed in a National Post opinion piece on Monday that "worldwide, there are .. read full article »

ConocoPhillips, the third largest American oil company, and Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, both announced tremendous second-quarter profits today: – Oil giant ConocoPhillips said Wednesday that record crude prices helped its second-quarter profit dwarf year-ago results, .. read full article »

Senator John McCain has been offering opposing policies to different audiences. In its last report on the candidates’ tax plans, the Tax Policy Center had focused on a series of private assurance from the campaign. Today, the Tax Policy Center surveyed what McCain tells the public. It was .. read full article »

Draft is here:http://www.ecy.wa.gov/climatechange/WCIdocs/072308_wci_draftdesign.pdf Just the major points: Transportation is in. Sort of.It appears that transportation fuels – the region’s largest source of carbon pollution – will be delayed until 2015, the second “compliance period.” .. read full article »

As Ilan Goldenberg, Spencer Ackerman, and others have made clear, John McCain is very mixed up about the chronology of the Anbar awakening phenomenon. Specifically the fact that the troop surge occurred after the Awakening had already begun, something that makes McCain’s contention that “the .. read full article »

Tomorrow, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will “share his cancer plan and answer questions” at the 2008 LIVESTRONG Summit, a cancer awareness event headed by LIVESTRONG founder Lance Armstrong. But as CAPAF senior fellow Elizabeth Edwards points out, McCain, a cancer survivor himself, would be .. read full article »

Today at 2 PM, the entire House GOP caucus is holding a Capitol rally to support their drill-drill-drill bill, dubbed the “American Energy Act” (H.R. 6566) and being promoted as an “all of the above” approach to energy policy. Their memo, acquired by the Wonk Room, reveals their plans to .. read full article »

So take Virginia, the old Commonwealth, the birthplace of some of the most esteemed leaders of American history: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and television’s the Waltons. Where are Virginia’s leaders now? On today’s political front, you have politicians such as potential VP .. read full article »

Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Representatives John Boehner (R-OH), Roy Blunt (R-MO), and their gang of petro-conservatives have spent the last two months vigorously bellowing that oil .. read full article »

Witnesses John Paul Woodley Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) Brigadier General Michael J. Walsh, Commanding General, U.S. Army Engineer Division, Mississippi Valley read full article »

Citizens opposed to National Coal Corporation mining the Sundquist Wildlife Management Area Yet another action from Mountain Justice in Defense of the Appalachian Mountains! Please Support Fellow Activists. CAMPBELL COUNTY, Tenn., July 20 - Residents of coal-impacted communities throughout .. read full article »

The past three presidents, including President George W. Bush, have successfully used the SPR to reduce oil prices during times of crisis. Witnesses C. Kyle Simpson, Policy Director, Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck Dr. Joe Romm, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress James May, .. read full article »

Back in March, in his first major foreign policy address since securing the Republican presidential nomination, McCain declared his view that Russia should be kicked out of the G8. Writer Fareed Zakaria called this “the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in .. read full article »

You've thrown the worst fear... that can ever be hurled... afraid to bring children... into the world... and for threatening my baby... unborn and unnamed... you ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins... Let me ask you one question... is your money that good... will it buy you .. read full article »

I thought this was interesting.  The Texas highway department – Texas, no less! -- says that roads simply don’t pay for themselves. … no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and .. read full article »

Our guest blogger is Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law at University of Michigan Law School. For a while, Senator John McCain has been advocating letting corporations expense (currently deduct) the cost of purchasing business equipment. This is touted as a way of helping .. read full article »

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) took to the floor to protest Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) attempts to overcome conservative holds on popular bipartisan legislation by wrapping “many of the bills into one large measure to be voted on by the Senate.” Coburn, who currently has holds on about 80 .. read full article »

This title grabbed our attention: Top Rocket Scientist: No evidence C02 causes global warming. And it should. It is a pretty bold statement and the implications would be pretty big news.So we decided to compile a backgrounder on 'The Top Rocket Scientist." Here's the research database entry: No .. read full article »

Last week, the U.S. EPA released a grim, 284-page study (pdf) that concluded that climate change will cause "substantial" threats to the health of the American public. And yet, one week prior to the report’s release, the agency ruled that it will not regulate harmful greenhouse gases under .. read full article »

Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, conservative Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens explained his plan to dramatically decrease oil usage by greatly expanding wind power electricity. “World oil production, I believe,” Pickens explained, “has .. read full article »

Hot on the heels of the news that Washington is once again home to wolves, the Oregonian today reports that biologists have confirmed wolf packs in Oregon. ...Oregon's first reproducing pack of wild wolves since the predators were exterminated from the state decades ago. State biologist Russ .. read full article »

On Thursday, at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Al Hubbard, an architect of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health care plan, compared “Americans’ use of the health care system to shoppers who indiscriminately buy caviar while someone else foots the bill”: When .. read full article »

Time to head back into my pillow fort: Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) can be called the missing greenhouse gas: It is a synthetic chemical produced in industrial quantities; it is not included in the Kyoto basket of greenhouse gases or in national reporting under the United Nations Framework .. read full article »

Witnesses Jason Burnett, Former Associate Deputy Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Climate and Global Dynamics Division Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, .. read full article »

Panel 1 T. Boone Pickens , Founder and Principal , BP Capital, L.P. Panel 2 Gal Luft, Ph.D. , Executive Director , Institute for the Analysis of Global Security Geoffrey Anderson , President and Chief Executive Officer , Smart Growth America Habib Dagher, Ph.D. , Director , .. read full article »

Let’s face it: The Bush Administration has made a mess of things. It is now clear, if it hasn’t been all along, that by the time George Bush leaves office, the White House will have wasted eight years of leadership on the Mother of All Issues. If those eight years are a profound .. read full article »

The Think Progress mothership reports that Glenn Beck “will guest-host CNN’s Larry King Live tonight,” the same time his 7 PM CNN Headline News show repeats. This means: In inviting Beck to host Larry King, CNN is granting Beck a monopoly over its programming for a full prime-time hour. .. read full article »

The UK's Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific bodies in the world has released this statement today on the Ofcom ruling that the "Great Global Warming Swindle" television movie misrepresented the views of some of the world's most distinguished scientists:Martin Rees, .. read full article »

Just wanted to let folks know that we have an updated and corrected version of our grizzly bear range-map. The former version of the map incorrectly showed that grizzly bears no longer live on the southeast Alaskan Islands of Chichagof, Baranof, or Admiralty. In fact, grizzlies are still present .. read full article »

Just wanted to let folks know that we have an updated and corrected version of our grizzly bear range-map. The former version of the map incorrectly showed that grizzly bears no longer live on the southeast Alaskan Islands of Chichagof, Baranof, or Admiralty. In fact, grizzlies are still present .. read full article »

With the Iraqi government clarifying its call for U.S. troop withdrawals by 2010, there can no longer be any doubt that a strong Iraqi political consensus exists in favor of the U.S. leaving sooner, rather than later. Needless to say, all of this puts John McCain in a very tough position. Having .. read full article »