Inflating Tires Does Beat Drilling

Coastal and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling combined will save you six of these in 2030, that's a plan!?

I couldn't have said better than Bill Scher who wrote this on The Huffington Post:

Yes Conservatives, Inflated Tires Beats Coastal Drilling

Posted August 4, 2008 | 01:01 PM (EST)

The latest conservative lie -- regarding Sen. Barack Obama and fuel efficiency -- actually has a great amount of truth to it.

On Thursday, conservative radio host Sean Hannity claimed Obama said, "All you need to do is inflate your tires. That's all you need to do. If every American would join in this effort, of inflating one's tires, then it's all going to be fine. And we can still import 70% of our oil from Saudi Arabia. Just keep those tires inflated."

Conservatives -- lovers of childish mockery over substantive ideas -- later today are apparently planning to distribute tire gauges at an Obama energy event.

And earlier today on MSNBC's Morning Joe, conservative hack economist (who does not hold an economics degree) Larry Kudlow, a very loud advocate of coastal drilling, said of Obama's comments about tires, "That's not really much of a policy."

No, it's not. That was Obama's point.

Obama's actual comment last week was:

...we could save all the oil they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires, and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.

He was decidedly not saying "all you need to do" is inflate your ties, or "my entire energy policy" is inflating your tires.

(Obama has a much larger energy plan -- articulated in a sweeping speech today -- centered on investment in renewable energy and fuel efficiency technology. Similarly, it would not be fair to say Sen. John McCain's "entire" energy policy is coastal drilling, when he is also advocating loosening regulations on nuclear power and a contest to promote battery technology.)

Obama was observing that coastal drilling would save us so little oil and so little money even twenty years from now, that you can actually save more money immediately by doing "simple things" such as keeping your tires properly inflated.

Where did he get that crazy idea? From George Bush's Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency. (hat tip: Get Energy Smart! Now!)

Their joint site fueleconomy.gov is loaded with fuel-saving, money-saving tips. Keep your tires properly inflated, for example, and you can save up to 12 cents a gallon.

Compare that immediate savings from that single tip, with what coastal and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling combined would get you two decades from now: 6 cents a gallon.

And that's being generous, because Bush's Energy Department says we can't expect any impact on prices from coastal drilling until the year 2030.

In their knee-jerk mockery, conservatives are flying closer to the truth then they intend to.

Inflating your ties does not amount to an energy policy. It's just more of a policy than coastal drilling, since unlike drilling for a tiny amount of oil, it would at least save us some money now.

A real energy policy would provide us consumers with a energy choice besides buying huge amounts of increasingly expensive oil. Maybe if conservative Senators stopped filibustering every proposal that would help provide such choices, and force their Big Oil donors to face some competition, we could get somewhere.

Check out Campaign for America's Future Making Sense alerts on coastal drilling and gas prices for more.

Freedom Juice for Saudi Arabia

At Least Someone in Congress is Doing Their Job

Thanks to Jeff at Blogging for Kucinich for passing this along to me.

Paris Hilton for President

I have been receiving some of the most ridiculous videos attacking Barack Obama from conservative relatives of mine (NeoCons, not fiscal conservatives. Those are other relatives of mine). One went on and on about Barack's middle name, Hussein (hope none of these NeoCons drink Coors beer. It was invented by Adolph Coors). Is that the best these petty aggressors can do?

John McCain recently made a ludicrous attack advertisement comparing Obama to Paris Hilton. Guess McSame forgot that Paris Hilton's parents have donated a fair amount of money to his campaign. Now he has made another enemy.

Here is McCain's attack ad.

And lets remember, Obama is a 'celebrity' because the people like him. McCain tried to be a celebrity by making cameos in movies like Wedding Crashers and TV shows like 24.

This is the Candidate of the 'Family Values' Party?

John and Cindy McCain

In a Mail Online article By Sharon Churcher (Last updated at 1:45 AM on 08th June 2008), I learned a little about McCain's past that my conservative friends aren't talking much about. I believe this British newspaper, the second most popular in the UK, is tabloid like, so take this with a grain of salt. That said, this is shocking, even to someone like me who doesn't subscribe to the Family Values crap politicians love to spew in place of real issues.

Excerpts from the article:

McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

[McCain’s first wife, Carol,] was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Carol McCain, John McCain's first wife

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

He was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.

Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was regularly tortured and mistreated.

It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend’s house.

It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windscreen.

After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him.’

H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.

When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.

But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’

McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. ‘John started carousing and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.

McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.

In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t forget his treatment of his first wife.

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.

‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

John McCain with second wife, Cindy

McCain's Racism

US General Talks of Bush War Crimes

I receive forwards from a group of conservatives every day- many, many forwards. One thing I have learned is the fact that they love to quote military people. If a military person says something, it is close to the word of God, it can't be questioned.

Here is something retired Major General Antonio Mario Taguba of the United States Army has to say:

There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

Found this in a great article on Alternet.org. Here is an excerpt (link to full article below):

The evidence confirming not only a deliberate policy of torture, but of conspiring in an illegal war of aggression and conducting a criminal occupation, continues to pile ever higher. Bush's own press secretary Scott McClellan has revealed in his book, What Happened, how deliberately the public was misled to foment the attack on Iraq. Philippe Sands' new book, Torture Team, has shown how the top legal and political leadership fought for a policy of torture -- circumventing and misleading top military officials to do so. Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, reveals that a secret report by the Red Cross -- given to the CIA and shared with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice -- found that U.S. interrogation methods are "categorically" torture and that the "abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

Full article here.