OFF TOPIC:

Here are a couple catches of mine from today's all-important early-morning television viewing:

1. PEAK OIL:

I caught a bit of the CEO of Shell Oil on CNBC. They were talking about the assessments of some researcher about peak oil, and the CEO of Shell said something like: He [whoever "he" is] is just looking at conventional sources, while we in the industry look at both conventional sources of oil and unconventional sources of oil. And he's just looking at one country in making his predictions, Saudi Arabia.

Then the CEO of Shell finished up by saying, and if this isn't a direct quotation it's off by only a word or so: "Will we hit peak oil sometime? Sure, but it won't be because we don't have enough oil."

Huhhh?

2. AD FOR KIDDIE GAME "MONOPOLY TOWN."

The new game that enables younger kids to join in on the game they'll be playing their whole lives long!!! Thrill while younger children can now trill the mantra, "I love to smash in the faces of the poor! Beat 'em, smash 'em, destroy 'em! Take all their money and then laugh in their faces! Ha-ha-ha!"

Oh my - a bit of snark at Matt's expense. Be careful Kevin, you don't want to do anything too controversial.

You know, I pretty rarely bother to click links from blogs, but I had to check out that piece by Brian Ross and the ABC News Investigative Unit. Thanks, Kevin!

@ 11:42 AM Anon: The first point may be true. We're fast running out of easily extracted oil, but there are major reserves of nasty, hard to extract oil in various places, most notably Canadian tar sand.

Mee-ow.

Kevin, I get your desire to spend more time on Iraq and the economic meltdown - and I agree with it. The problem, though, is that Clinton has highlighted how she will deal with NAFTA in an effort to win a lot of these states (OH, PA, WV, etc.). Shouldn't there be an examination of how truthful Clinton is being on the issue that she has pushed to the forefront? Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, many middle and lower class workers view NAFTA as partly responsible for their economic troubles - and, again, Clinton has exploited that.

Shouldn't Brian Ross go back to investigating car dealerships that install faulty air bags, or something? Seem's more his bread and butter.

Or, if he really wanted to get his Village-Cred, he could look into Barbara Ehrenreich's latest article in The Nation regarding "The Family". Creepy.

Kevin you've turned into another media hack. Do a little investigating yourself. The evidence is all over about Hilary's involvement in supporting Nafta. She basically has been lying through her teeth about this issue. Her surrogates have been perpetrating these lies as well.
Record this for posterity if Hilary gets elected Nafta will remain intact or worse.

Didn't Clinton accuse Obama of lying about her support of NAFTA? Didn't she call him out as a dirty campaigner? I pose these as questions because I did not follow it very closely. But if the answers are yes and yes, then it is edifying to know that Clinton has flip-flopped on the very issue on which she accuses her opponent of being a flip-flopper.
--RiMac

take a look at David Sirotas column on HuffPost today.

To quote ABC's Jake Tapper:
…It wasn’t a drop-by it was organized around her participation," said one attendee. "Her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA and what a good thing it would be for the economy. There was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time….

To quote David Gergan the man ABC says was Master of Ceremonies:
GERGEN: "I was actually there in the Clinton White House during the NAFTA fight and I must tell you Hillary Clinton was extremely unenthusiastic about NAFTA. And I think that’s putting it mildly. I’m not sure she objected to all the provisions of it but she just didn’t see why her husband and that White House had to go and do that fight. She was very unhappy about it and wanted to move on to health care. So I do think there’s some justification for her camp saying, you know, she’s never been a great backer for NAFTA." [David Gergen, Anderson Cooper 360, 2/25/08]

Anonymous sources from Jake Tapper who is hardly a credible media representative, versus a quoted source.

Kevin, while not as huge as Iraq, or economic issues, Clinton opened this Pandora's box. Oh, and the ABC story and other stuff talk about more than a 15-minute drop-in, like a hosted reception for NAFTA backers.

Kevin, I know you finally swung to backing Obama, but I think now you're trying to have your cake and eat it, too.

Would Obama really want to take up the NAFTA issue after the Goolsbee "wink wink" incident?

NAFTA is kind of the Democrats' version of the Republicans "Immigration" issue - you say you are against it but you don't really do anything.

I thought the same thing as you did Kevin. Big f***in' deal. I'm sure she spent 15 minutes advocating getting pets spade too.

The media response to these papers reminds me of their faux outrage that Chelsea won't grant interviews. Hillary knows that the press has ZERO interests in Chelsea's positions on the issues of the day. The only thing they want to ask her is about what she felt during her father's affair.
If I was Hillary I'd tell them to kiss my ass.

re: "...there are major reserves of nasty, hard to extract oil in various places,"

And SLOW to extract, which goes directly to this key point (to borrow from Carville's slogan):
"It's the production rate, stupid."

Peak oil isn't about total oil recovery. It's about the production RATE, specifically when the global production rate can no longer be increased quickly enough to keep up with growing demand.

Even a small gap between sustained maximum production and demand will produce big price increases if traders expect that gap will keep growing.

Quickly add enough new consumers to the demand side (especially if they're in two countries that don't have huge domestic oil reserves) and that gap can grow even if the global production rate hasn't actually peaked.

When the maximum sustained global production rate starts to decline as demand continues to increase is the point at which there will start to be really big problems - and bigger price increases than we have seen thus far.

Frankly, the absurd ABC news hilights focusing on what Hillary was doing when Monica was around just validates why she did not want to release this stuff in the first place. You could have written word for word exactly how the media would respond to the schedules and thats how they are carrying out their mission, whatever the heck that is. Its all so predictable and depressing.

"Would Obama really want to take up the NAFTA issue after the Goolsbee 'wink wink' incident?"

Yup, because a) the incident appears to have been vastly exaggerated and b) Clinton is just as implicated.

Kevin's point still stands, though: if that's the best the Obama camp has, it isn't going to be enough. Not to mention that he's absolutely right that this would be just another round of Trivial Pursuit rather than substantive journalism.

Al is an Obamapod? Damn, things have changed around here!

I keep hoping ABC will unearth the minutes of the meeting where Bill catches hell for not reaching for the http://www.tide.com/en_US/tidetogo/index.jsp

I find it disheartening that you frequently call these sorts of issues "follies" when monsters are ripping our country apart with them, as stupid as they are.

Having spent yesterday excitedly informing us that Hillary Clinton was in the White House when Bill was going at it with Monica (OMG! OMG!),

Isn't anything beneath these people? That's really not news; that's really gossip.

This helps explain why politicians can be reluctant to release dairies, personal papers, tax returns, etc. They know that the press will scour these for tidbits that can be blown up into titillating soundbites.

If only the press would subject Bush's speeches, press conferences, and official documents to the same scrutiny.

Mike on March 20, 2008 at 12:19 PM:

Anonymous sources from Jake Tapper who is hardly a credible media representative, versus a quoted source.

The quoted source being former Clinton advisor David Gergen, of course. No possible bias there.

[Clinton] just didn’t see why her husband and that White House had to go and do that fight.

Yeah, considering that the fight was mostly against members of her own party who didn't support ratification of the agreement, I can see why Hillary Clinton would say that...What's interesting is that Gergen didn't say Hillary flat-out disagreed with NAFTA, but was more upset that it came before the Clinton's healthcare initiative, which Hillary was spearheading.

Wait, isn't the template for such posts supposed to be:

Is the press finally turning on x?
The y campaign will make trivial negative attacks on x. So what? Politics ain't beanbag. x needs to toughen up and stop whining. Besides, this kind of stuff will be 1000 times worse in the general election.

I haven't been following closely lately, so I don't know what Hillary supports/rejects per se, but...

The NAFTA bill itself in 1993 was hundreds of pages long. It's not one thing. You can be for RTA's in principle, against corn trade, for elite legal immigration in certain professional fields, for trucking regulation, against transport subsidies, etc. etc. etc.

Bill Clinton was obviously highly in favor of liberalizing certain aspect of North American trade. He signed off on NAFTA. I have no idea what parts he signed that he considered concessions to Republicans, and what parts they considered concessions to Democrats.

"Al is an Obamapod"

More like an anti-ClintonPod. The real Al, as compared to this pale imitation, most likely dislikes both of the Democratic nominees.

Record this for posterity if Hilary gets elected Nafta will remain intact or worse.

NAFTA is not going away.

Anybody who thinks any candidate would seriously alter NAFTA if elected president is kidding themselves.

I'm a liberal, and I don't think our so called model of "free trade" is either free or fair, but NAFTA is not the root cause of our trade deficit or loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector.

Globalization is inevitable. The question is how we can mitigate the negative impacts and amplify the positive impacts.

I'm sure she spent 15 minutes advocating getting pets spade too.

But did she do it under threat of sniper fire?

You're right about this, Kevin. People keep criticizing Clinton because she was slow to change her position on the war in Iraq, but now the same people think that it is a gotcha because after 15 years she feels NAFTA needs some tinkering? That is ludicrous.

lobbygow on March 20, 2008 at 1:17 PM:

Globalization is inevitable.

I dunno. Given the current rate at which we are depleting our fossil fuel reserves - and not pushing alternative energy resources to take their place - I can imagine that the cost of the cheap crap made in China will begin to approach the cost of cheap crap made here in the good ol' US of A...

Then there's that whole Phantom GDP thing, a reflection of what's really happening in the world of offshoring:

Paul B. Toms Jr., CEO of publicly traded Hooker Furniture Corp., (HOFT ) recently closed his company's last remaining domestic wood-furniture manufacturing plant, in Martinsville, Va. It was the culmination of a wrenching process that started in 2000, when Hooker still made the vast majority of its products in the U.S. Toms didn't want to go overseas, he says, but he couldn't pass up the 20% to 25% savings to be gleaned from manufacturing there.

Yet no matter how hard you look, you can't find any trace of the cost savings from offshoring in the import price statistics. The furniture industry's experience is particularly telling. Despite the surge of low-priced chairs, tables, and similar products from China, the BLS is reporting that the import price of furniture has actually risen 6.7% since 2003.

So, again, I dunno if globalization is inevitable; the pendulum swings back eventually.

Quote: "it would certainly raise the level of debate in the campaign, wouldn't it? We could get away from trivial stuff like race, Iraq, and our economic meltdown"

Actually, it would raise the level of debate -- because, if you'll notice, Kevin, we're not currently talking about race, Iraq and our economic meltdown, we're talking about whether Obama actually agrees with Rev. Wright. So, a discussion about whether Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA at the time it was passed, given that she has said in this campaign that she did not, would actually be, as you put it, an elevation.

Could people please read Sen. Obama's speech on the cost of the war in Iraq? In 9 pages he lays out an intelligent, coherent strategy for dealing with the threat of terrorism - the best I've seen from anyone since the whole thing started. It is a very serious substantive piece of work, and much more worth spending time on than Bill's philandering, or Hilary's minute by minute schedule as First Lady.

While the NAFTA thing my get some more play, I think the hits to her "foreign policy experience" are going to be more severe. She claims to have played significant roles in opening Macedonia's borders to Kosovar Albanian refugees, and bringing peace to Northern Ireland....

She was accompanied on her trip to Macedonia with Sinbad and Sheryl Crow, and Macedonia had already opened its borders before her arrival.

And in Northern Ireland, Nobel Peace Prize winner calls her claim of playing a significant role "silly" and "exaggerated". She didn't meet with any of the players involved in the negotiations, and did little else except accompany Bill to various locations.

That's not to demean her btw, she was doing what First-Ladies are supposed to do. But the claims she's making now are ridiculous.

I imagine these papers will only expose more of these dubious claims.

Well, as first lady, she could hardly go out and say I hate NAFTA, could she? Can you imagine the firestorm that would have caused? Do you remember the criticism Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Bush1 got for daring to have a different views on policy matters than their husband's? She was still living down the I don't bake no cookies fiasco.

Live by blowing up the trivial into a Major Issue, die by blowing up the trivial into a Major Issue.

Hillary deserves having her nose rubbed in her pro-NAFTA 15 minutes in return for all the stunts she's pulled, like Barack is not a Muslim "as far as I know."

Where are all the cries about her being pro-NAFTA as a political "attack"? I want to hear what those posters consider now. Really. Do please tell.

Hillary blatantly lied about her stance on NAFTA. She claims experience for her time as first lady, thus during the NAFTA full-court press, she was a willing shill. And she claimed she was not. And she used Canadian surrogates to taint her opponent with her ACTUAL beliefs and record. That is the embodiment of a craven hypocrite.

And now the photo of Bill Clinton talking with Jeremiah Wright at a WH ministerial conference in 1998. That should take a bit of steam out of the anti-Wright crowd.

Nothing?

We've only got about two more posts until this thread passes into the archives...no response?

(crickets chirping)

As we thought.