U.S. nuke summit with Iran accomplishes jack; Updated

Instead of a gas-tax holiday, Congress considers gas-tax hike

In the tank: Worshipping media to follow Obama around the world; Update & Bump: AOL Hot Seat Poll

Hillary Clinton’s campaign complained loudly that the media treated Barack Obama like a rock star instead of a presidential candidate.  Saturday Night Live made itself relevant for the first time in a generation by skewering the love affair that the mainstream media had with Obama, finally embarrassing them into asking a few tough questions of Obama — after more than a year.  Now, with Obama embarking on his world tour, all three broadcast networks will have their anchors trailing him, apparently hoping to record every bon mot that escapes from his lips:

Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.

But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party.

CBS tried to explain this away by underscoring the novelty of the trip. Paul Friedman, senior VP of CBS News, said that if this were John McCain’s first trip to a war zone, the networks would cover it similarly. Unfortunately for Friedman, that’s demonstrably false. McCain has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan, both before and after announcing himself as a candidate for the Presidency, and the networks mostly ignored his trips.

Maliki: Obama’s 16-month timetable sounds good; Update: Spiegel changes quote

Here’s the exchange from Spiegel’s English translation, duly hyped by Reuters as tacit evidence of Liberal Jesus’s foreign-policy sagacity.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. US presidential candidate Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months. Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.

The unasked follow-up question: How about the 14-month timetable that Obama wanted to set in January 2007 to start pulling troops out before those positive developments could occur? How keen does that look in hindsight? To repeat a point made yesterday, the only reason a timetable or “time horizon” is arguably a responsible strategy now is because it was properly rejected as being irresponsible then. Maliki hints at that in another part of the interview:

So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn’t the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.

Update: A commenter notes that Spiegel has rewritten the translation of the exchange about withdrawal to read as follows. There’s nothing in the article calling attention to the change; they’re trying to put one over on their readers, it seems.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

They’ve dropped the contingency about positive developments continuing, although it’s still implied by the part about potentially changing the plan. Did Maliki contact Spiegel and ask them to drop that part so that the quote would sound more assertive back home? Hard to believe the original translation would have been so off as to include a bit about “positive developments” that he never said.

A "jealous rage," Fox's Geraldo Rivera called it. Before taping a "Fox & Friends" segment, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, with...

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Jackson and his race-card-waving cohorts, derive stature, power, significance and self-enrichment by claiming that racism remains a serious problem in America.

After complaining about the lack of minority beer distributorships, for example, Jackson's sons ended up with a lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. Author Kenneth Timmerman, in his book "Shakedown," describes the Jackson modus operandi — playing the race card for self-enrichment as well as that of friends and family.

Rather than display pleasure at America's obvious progress, or pride in his role in getting us there, the anachronistic Jackson now morphs into a shrinking, petulant, self-pitying "leader" — with little left to lead.

Good news for America; bad news for Jackson.

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In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, Feinstein repeated the canard that the oil companies are sitting on 68 million acres of leases that go unexplored. If the California senator knows where they are, can she please tell House Minority Leader John Boehner and the rest of us?

On his Web site, Boehner says: "Democrats have been utterly unable to say where they came up with the claim that oil companies are sitting on 68 million acres of federal lands without drilling for oil or gas on any of it — and particularly how they arrived at the amount of oil they claim could be found on those 68 million acres."

Feinstein falsely claims that the "vast majority of the Outer Continental Shelf is already open to oil exploration." As we noted here Friday, 85% of the 1.76 billion acres of the OCS is prohibited from being developed by the congressional ban.

The senator says that "areas containing an estimated 82% of all the natural gas and 79% of the oil are today available to oil companies through existing federal leases." How does she know that, considering that 85% of the OCS is off-limits? How does she know this if the land is unexplored and the leases unused?

et, in some areas, the regulatory processes is largely done, so oil can come to market far sooner than 10 years — if Congress lets it.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told IBD oil from the Chukchi Sea, believed to hold 15 billion barrels of oil, could flow much sooner than 10 years with new legislation.

"Those areas Congress can help us with right now," she said.

According to the Institute for Energy Research, a private think tank, citing Bureau of Land Management data, protests, appeals and lawsuits over oil development averaged 1,180 per year between 2001 and 2007, a 706% increase over 1997-2000. The IER notes, for instance, that 100% of New Mexico's 78 oil leases were protested by environmental and neighborhood groups.

Evidence doesn't bare out alarmist claims of global warming - THESE are the seven graphs that should make the Rudd Government feel sick.

These are the seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has global warming now stopped?

Look for yourself. They show that the world hasn't warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years.

Sea ice now isn't melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall.

Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes and hurricanes, aren't increasing and the rain in Australia hasn't stopped falling.

What's more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago.

In fact, it's even a bit cooler. So, dude, where's my global warming? (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun)

Fabricating Temperatures on the DEW Line - Today I received an email that contained some startling revelations about the Weather Stations that were put in place on the DEW Line, a network of cold war era radar monitoring stations in Canada and Alaska, that have now been abandoned. It makes for interesting reading. I won’t reveal the name of the sender just yet, but I don’t doubt the accuracy of the report. (Watts Up with That?)

Democrats Should Let Us Drill - Now that an executive branch ban on offshore oil exploration has been lifted, the time has come for Democrats in Washington to lift their own ban on increased domestic supply. Americans are demanding that Congress do something about record-high gas prices. They recognize that prices will not go down unless supplies go up. And they also know that the only thing now standing in the way of more domestic supply is the Democratic refusal to allow it. (Wall Street Journal)

Drilling in the Offshore: Unleashing the oil companies. - After trading at a record high of $147 a barrel Friday, the price of oil saw its largest one-day drop since the 2003 beginning of the Iraq war on Tuesday, falling $6.44 a barrel. Wednesday, it fell another $3.71, to $135.03, and at one point was trading as low as $132.

So what happened? As is usually the case with markets, a variety of factors caused this dramatic drop. According to the Associated Press, the Energy Information Administration announced that U.S. crude-oil supplies rose by 3 million barrels; beleaguered banks have been selling off valuable energy contracts to pay for other debts; and there’s even some speculation that computer programs used by Wall Street may create a “cascading effect” once prices start to drop.

But bizarrely, the AP didn’t mention that on Monday — again, the day of the single biggest one-day drop in oil prices in five years — President Bush removed the executive order imposing a moratorium on offshore drilling in the United States.

To think that this dramatic and unexpected move by the Bush administration didn’t have a significant effect on oil prices is folly. Even Democrats admit that relatively small margins in oil production could have a huge impact on prices. (Mark Hemingway, NRO)