Glibbertysmidgeon

Next time you fill up your car, don’t blame the guy that owns the station. He’s still making an average of ten cents on the gallon, as he has for years. Instead, think about Lee R. Raymond.

Raymond is the freshly retired C.E.O of Exxon Mobile, and he walked away from that job with $167.7 million.

Lofty figures have in recent instances prompted headlines to blare the news of Lee R. Raymond’s golden parachute from Exxon Mobil (nyse: XOM - news - people )–reportedly, a $69.7 million compensation package and $98 million pension payout–and juxtapose the figure to gasoline in the U.S. hitting an eye-watering $3 per gallon at some locations.

Forbes

Raymond’s last reported salary was $38 million in 2004. What does this man do to earn $38 million a year? Is he really that much smarter, hard working, and good looking than I am?
I guess he’s getting credit for Exxon’s all time record-breaking profits.

Exxon Mobil’s first-quarter profit was nearly a billion dollars more than the same quarter a year earlier. Not as much as Wall Street wanted, but still an awful lot of money - especially to people paying $3 a gallon or more to fill their gas tanks. They’re wondering why oil companies don’t feel their pain.

CNN

Yes, that says BILLION.
And they’re not the only ones.

Today, Chevron announced that it has made four billion dollars since January of this year. This is a 49% increase over the same period last year.

Conoco- Phillips earned $3.29 billion in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 13% over last year.

The entire oil industry is generating record breaking profits, while you and I fork over larger and larger chunks of our paychecks to pay for their products. The cost of heating oil for my building rose 70% last year alone.

Since George Bush took office, the price of oil has risen from $1.46 to $2.91. That’s a 100 percent increase in five years. This is the fastest rise in gasoline prices in two decades.

In all this time, he has failed to take action- but now even FOX news polls show his popularity in the dumpster, and he is forced to make some kind of gesture.

President George W. Bush, in trouble over soaring gasoline prices, ordered a probe on Tuesday into any price gouging, called for an end to tax breaks for Big Oil and suspended putting oil into the U.S. emergency stockpile.

As a short-term measure, Bush also gave the Environmental Protection Agency authority to suspend federal clean-burning gasoline rules this summer that are forcing consumers to buy expensive new gasoline blends.

Reuters

Let’s look at his plan more closely:

1. Ordered a probe on Tuesday into any price gouging: Just for the record- the Federal Trade Commission has never investigated the oil industry for price gouging. Ever.
2. Called for an end to tax breaks for Big Oil: Strangely, he called for an end to tax breaks for big oil, then turned around and urged Congress to extend tax breaks to the industry.
3. Suspended putting oil into the U.S. emergency stockpile: Unfortunately, oil shortages are only going to get worse. With global demands increasing and supplies beginning to dwinle,this oil shortage is not going away anytime soon. This tactic is purely political. If he can drop the price by a few cents for a few months by removing one consumer, then maybe the Republicans can hold on to a few seats in the upcoming elections. This is no long term fix, and it’s a terrible band-aid because it depletes our national emergency reserve, which threatens our overall national security.
4. Suspend federal clean-burning gasoline rules: This is just blatant opportunism. If anything, using alternative fuel sources should decrease our dependence on oil. Any excuse to roll back environmental laws…

This plan has no mention of improving fuel efficiency standards for cars, but it does include a scheme to give every American a $100 rebate. Because our votes are always for sale- and cheap too! I guess it worked for him before his last election- but that time he paid $300 per person.

Bush also opposes the measures Congress is proposing to deal with the situation:

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is asking the Federal Trade Commission to monitor refiners this summer, while Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., offered a bill that would require energy companies to pay a federal royalty on all oil pumped from the Gulf of Mexico if oil prices exceed $55 a barrel. Some oil now is exempt from royalties, costing the government billions of dollars.

Washington Post

Our entire energy policy is a failure. Though that should be no surprise to anyone, since the whole lousy thing was drafted in a big, secret retreat attended only by Dick Cheney and energy lobbyists.

It’s not as if serious people didn’t see this coming. Europe, for example, spends about half of what the United States does on energy, relative to GDP. But Europe has entirely different policies on everything from mass transit to building codes to gas taxes. Brazil makes more than half of its motor fuels from domestic renewable ethanol. Japan is far ahead of the United States in the development of efficient hybrid cars.

Had we begun adjusting to the need for a post-petroleum economy during the first and second oil shocks, three decades ago when Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for wearing that cardigan, or even 10 years ago when ”Ozone Al” Gore was mocked for taking seriously the threat of global warming, we would not be getting robbed quite so helplessly at the pump by a collusion of Mideast sheiks, oil barons, and their Republican enablers.

Boston Globe

Why is the President continuing to protect Big Oil instead of addressing our energy problems in a forward thinking manner? Why does he oppose rolling back tax breaks for the rich corporations?

Maybe it’s the $450 million dollars the oil companies have spent on lobbying in the past six years.

Over the past six years, oil and gas companies have spent nearly $450 million on politicians, political parties and lobbyists in order to protect their interests in Washington. Since 1990, energy companies have made $183 million in political contributions alone, 75 percent of which have gone to Republicans. In addition, over the past six years, nine of the top ten recipients of contributions from oil and gas companies have been Republicans. In just the last election cycle, the oil and gas industry contributed more than $20 million to Republicans, four times more than the amount donated to Democrats.

Center for American Progress Report

Or maybe it’s just who he is.
The Bush family is a proud Texas oil family. George H W Bush started the family out in oil:

Bush ventured into the highly speculative Texas oil exploration business after World War II with considerable success. Zapata Corporation was created by him in 1953 as Zapata Oil. He secured a position with Dresser Industries. His son, Neil Mallon Bush, is named after his employer at Dresser, Neil Mallon, who became a close family friend. Dresser Industries, decades later, merged with Halliburton, whose former CEOs include Dick Cheney, George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense and, as of 2005, Vice President of the United States.

Wikipedia

The Bush Administration is also loaded with oil barons. Before becoming our government:

George W. Bush ran a number of oil companies, including Arbusto Energy, Spectrum 7, and the Harken Energy Corporation.
Before joining Bush’s cabinet:

Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton.

Condoleeza Rice was on the Board of Directors member for Chevron, and headed their committee on public policy. Chevron was so fond of her they named an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice.

Former Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans: Was first a roughneck oil rigger, then CEO of Tom Brown, Inc.

It’s natural for people to want to look after their own. If my whole family made their living in jelly beans, you can bet I’d be against a jelly bean tax. But I’m not the President of the United States of America.

The President’s job is something larger than to look after his friends and family- it’s to protect everyone in this country. His job is to protect the poor and weak from the rich and powerful.

Not the other way around.

“I think The National Anthem ought to be sung in English. And I think people who want to be a citizen of the United States ought to learn English”

George W. Bush, speaking about the new release of the National Anthem, performed in Spanish, by a collection of Latino pop stars.
The song’s producers say the song is an expression of patriotism from the Latino community.

President Bush announced his new White House press secretary on Wednesday: former Fox News host Tony Snow.

CNN

As we’ve seen so many times, (Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, etc.) it pays to be one of George Bush’s pets.

The only qualification you need to get a high ranking appointment is the ability to agree vehemently with everything The President thinks.

I wonder when he’ll promote Sean Hannity to head the Food and Drug Administration.

hypocrisy:

1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
2. An act or instance of such falseness.

Dictionary.com

Veteran journalist Seymore Hersh reports that President Bush is considering a program of nuclear strikes against Iran. His aim: to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The President claims that Hersh’s assertions are, “wild speculation.”

Seymour Hersh is a Pulizer Prize-winning journalist who has spent his 47 year career exposing government coverups. His record shows that he is not prone to “wild speculation”. He is, however, prone to angering the government by exposing things they’d rather keep secret- including the recent Abu Gharib torture scandal.

I know who I trust the most.

Some administration officials claim that the plan is just part of “normal contingency planning.” This argument shows that the administration assumes that we’re all too stupid or disinterested to actually read and understand the meaning of Hersh’s article.

For those of you who do not subscribe to the New Yorker, here’s Hersh himself, speaking to Wolf Blizer:

There’s been a lot of planning going on. It’s more than planning, it’s operational planning. It’s beyond contingency planning. There’s serious, specific plans. Nobody’s made a decision yet. There hasn’t been a warning order or an execute order. But the planning’s gotten much more intense and much more focused.

…

When the JCS, the Joint Chiefs, and the planners wanted to walk back that option, what happened is about three or four weeks ago, the White House, people in the White House, in the Oval Office, the vice president’s office, said, no, let’s keep it in the plan.

CNN

In typical Bush fashion, the President publicly claims to be interested in diplomacy, but secretly- and against the strenuously worded advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff- he continues to plan nuclear strikes against Iran.

There is so much about this that I could rant about:

That the president is planning to launch yet another war- we’re in a record setting budget deficit paying for his current wars, and we don’t have enough troops to support Iraq, let along Iran.

That the experts admit that they have no more confidence in our intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program than they do in the intelligence that got us into Iraq in search of Weapons of Mass Destructions that didn’t exist.

That all experts agree that Iran is at least 10 years from achieving a single nuclear weapon. Is he rushing simply because he only has two years left in office?

The most galling thing in all of this is the complete hypocricy of this policy.

Nuclear weapons are bad- aggressive nations like Iran should not have them. So let’s use nukes ourselves to launch our second war of choice.

If we want to be the ‘good guys’ we have to act like the good guys.

If nukes are bad, we can’t use them.
If torture is bad, we can’t use it.
If spying on your own people and taking awy their civil rights is bad, then we can’t do that either.

What part of “good” don’t you understand, Mr. President?

Scooter Libby has requested a series of confidential documents to back up his claim that the President himself authorized him to leak confidential information to the press. Among other things, Libby leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to the press.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide testified that President Bush authorized the release of parts of a classified report on Iraq to rebut criticism of the case for the 2003 invasion, federal prosecutors disclosed in documents released Thursday.

CNN

Valerie Plame, of course, is the wife of Joe Wilson. Seven days before the Vice President’s Chief of Staff outed Mrs. Plame, putting her life and the lives of her fellow operatives in jeopardy, Mr Wilson had embarrassed the White House.

Plame’s husband, a former U.S. ambassador, said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.
…

After a 2002 CIA-sponsored trip to Africa, Wilson said he had concluded that Iraq did not have an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Mercury News

Wilson’s report was filed well in advance of the famous State of the Union Address, in which the President claimed that there was proof that Hussein was buying yellowcake from Niger in an attempt to build nuclear weapons. After hearing the State of the Union Address, Wilson released the findings from his Niger trip to the press.

Wilson’s account of a 2002 trip to Niger to investigate the Iraqi uranium allegations “was viewed in the Office of Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq,” special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wrote.

CNN

President Bush has long condemned the practice of leaking information:

There also is the issue of Bush’s numerous previous statements, now making their way across the Internet at the speed of a DSL line, about leaking. One of the most popular is from Sept. 30, 2003: “Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

Christian Science Monitor

There is no evidence that the President specifially authorized the leak of Plame’s identity (though the same cannot be said of Vice President Cheney, who appears to have instructed Libby to make the disclosure) but an even larger issue raises its head with this revelation.

While the President does have authority to de-classify information, there is no evidence that this information was officially de-classified, and certainly no indication that releasing it had any productive purpose for the American people.

Instead, the President seems to be leaking our national intelligence-and putting our national security at risk- for his own political gain.
This from a President who claims to be tough on national security.