China's View...

"Indeed, Sen. Barack Obama does not at all represent the white Anglo-Saxon protestants (WASP), those who belong to the group of middle- and upper-class Americans descended from the British or Northern European settlers, generally regarded as the traditional dominant or privileged group in the U.S. His success, nevertheless, is because he does not underscore his racial features, and has even intentionally drawn a clear line with those radical blacks. So, it can be said that Obama triumphs either because of his skin color or not because of it. He has a different skin color (with whites) but shares the "same American background".

Obama represents a superb talent or gifted graduate from a top-rate American university, and he is the representative of the racial merging rather than a symbol for assimilation. So his rise has not done away with privileges for the white Americans but reinforces their privileges on the contrary," For the full read Bounce 2 China's People Daily

Note: The class comments by the Communists Chinese and that American business (Walmart) has tied the American economy to China along with past administrations from Nixon to Bush 43. Should say Made in China by the Communists....

Tiger Eyes 14th Major

What a Father's Day it would be for Tiger Woods to earn his 14th Major Championship...Tiger's highlights from his third round at Torrey Pines.

Sandbagging

Obama filled some sandbags in Southern Illinois yesterday, a moment his campaign was careful to avoid over-hyping as a photo-op, which it inevitably was.
Comments from Andrew Sullivan:

Very deft p.r. from the Obama camp. This is the kind of thing a president would do - and the contrast with Bush after Katrina is powerful:

So was this an obvious photo-op? Yes, but where was President Bush after Katrina, the largest natural disaster in US History...in the White House. Perhaps President Bush is just a cut above all the canned photo-ops or he just prefers the military photo-ops, remember, May 1, 2003 USS Lincoln

Woods' Second Round 68

Impasse in US-Iraqi forces talks

Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has said that talks with the US on a long-term agreement allowing US forces to remain in Iraq have "reached an impasse".

Speaking in the Jordanian capital, Amman, Mr Maliki said the American demands infringed Iraqi sovereignty.

With the UN mandate for US forces to be in Iraq expiring at the end of 2008, the White House wants a deal by July.
Bounce 2 BBC News to read more.

Where Gasoline Prices Hit the Hardest

Click on map to enlarge
“This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast,” said Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, a fuel analysis firm. “These are people who have to decide between food and transportation.”

A survey by Mr. Rozell’s firm late last month found that the gasoline crisis is taking the highest toll, as a percentage of income, on people in rural areas of the South, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.

With the exception of rural Maine, the Northeast appears least affected by gasoline prices because people there make more money and drive shorter distances, or they take a bus or train to work.

But across Mississippi and the rural South, little public transit is available and people have no choice but to drive to work. Since jobs are scarce, commutes are frequently 20 miles or more. Many of the vehicles on the roads here are old rundown trucks, some getting 10 or fewer miles to the gallon. Courtesy The Oil Drum

Olbermann: McCain should know better

NBC/WSJ Poll Shows Tight Presidential Race

Bush to Iran: 'All options' are open over nukes

President urges diplomacy over uranium enrichment during European visit
President Bush threatened Iran on Wednesday with more sanctions if it fails to stop enriching uranium and said all options were on the table to thwart Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

"Both the chancellor and my first choice of course is to solve this diplomatically," Bush told a joint news conference with Merkel.

Does this hurt McCain or Obama?

The 101 on Oil Supply

Here is just a snippet:
The oil production of Saudi Arabia and OPEC has been sufficiently variable over time that it is difficult to make predictions, simply based on trends. OPEC's production, and in particular Saudi Arabia's production, is down in both 2006 and 2007. It is hard to know exactly what this means.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, Saudi Arabia's highest oil production was in 1980, when it produced 9.9 million barrels a day. Its recent peak was in 2005, when it produced 9.6 million barrels a day. In 2006, Saudi production dropped to an average of 9.2 million barrels a day. In 2007, production from February to August was only 8.6 million barrels a day.

When OPEC agreed to raise quotas near the end of 2007, Saudi Arabia did in fact raise its production. Its highest single month of production in 2007 was 9.1 million barrels a day, in December 2007. This represented a 500,000 barrel a day increase over its earlier low production of 8.6 million barrels a day, but still left production below both the 2006 average of 9.2 million barrels a day and the 2005 average of 9.6 million barrels a day.

One question too is whether this increase will continue, or if it is just temporary. It is sometimes possible to squeeze out a little extra production for a while, but then production drops back to a more normal level. Saudi Arabia originally planned to have an upgraded field (Khursaniyah) on line by late 2007, which was expected to produce an extra 500,000 barrels a day of oil. It may have thought it could make a spurt of extra production until this field came on line. Now the Khursaniyah field upgrade has been delayed until late 2008. Will Saudi Arabia be able to continue the increase, without the assistance of the Khursaniyah field?

Another question is why OPEC refused to raise its quota further on March 5, 2008. Is Saudi Arabia now really at the peak of what it can produce? It claims to have more production available in reserve. We know that Saudi Arabia has some poor quality oil off-line because the oil requires special processing which is not yet available in any refinery. Is this the only Saudi production off-line? Are other OPEC countries also unable to produce more? To read more Bounce 2 The Oil Drum

Midwest Weather

The Joshua Generation

A source close to the Obama campaign tells The Brody File the following:

"The Joshua Generation project will be the Obama campaign's outreach to young people of faith. There's unprecedented energy and excitement for Obama among young evangelicals and Catholics. The Joshua Generation project will tap into that excitement and provide young people of faith opportunities to stand up for their values and move the campaign forward."

The Brody File said awhile back that the Obama campaign would be making a concerted effort to attrack Evangelicals and Catholics to their campaign.

Yes, the Obama campaign understands that the issue of abortion is a problem for some voters of faith. They respect that and understand if some just simply can't come on board because of that. However, they look at this project as a way of broadening the values discussion. Poverty, Darfur, Climate Change and yes, even the war are issues younger Evangelicals may be able to see eye to eye on with the Obama campaign.

Whatever you think of the "Joshua Generation Project," you have to give the campaign their due because they are making concerted efforts to NOT ignore faith voters. In my reporting, I can tell you this is not a contrived effort.

The folks behind this believe in not only the mission of winning over faith voters to Obama but the larger mission of not ignoring faith voters when it comes to politics.

Obama spoke about the "Joshua Generation" in a speech he gave in Selma, Alabama in March of 2007. It will give you an good idea of where the Obama campaign is heading with this effort....

Barack Obama: The winner

I wonder if Americans have yet fully absorbed what they have just done. This past week - 41 years after the Supreme Court struck down the last bans on interracial marriage and only 40 years after black America exploded in riots after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated - a black man became the favourite to be the next president of the United States.

His convention acceptance speech, a date scheduled long before Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, will occur by exquisite timing 45 years to the day after King’s “I have a dream” speech. The states that were critical to his nomination were Illinois, Lincoln’s home state, and the four southern states most associated with slavery: South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of how Obama’s rise changes America’s relationship to the rest of the world. What has been less appreciated is how deeply Obama’s victory alters America’s relationship to itself.

There is no deeper division in America than race. Slavery was America’s original sin. Even after its abolition, America was effectively in large swathes an apartheid society until the 1970s. It was race that bloodily tore the country apart a century and a half ago in the civil war, killing nearly 2% of the population (only 0.3% of Americans died in the second world war). It was race that convulsed America in the last deep internal crisis in the 1960s. And last Tuesday night, Obama’s first words were a tribute to his grandmother, a white woman who had effectively raised him.

Obama is not just potentially America’s first black president. He would be America’s first bi-racial president, in many ways a more integrative event. The cynics demand that we cease this kind of historical hyper-ventilation. It is deemed a function of drinking the Obama Kool-Aid, of insufficient scepticism, of Obamania.

But you have to have a heart of stone not to see what this has already done to race relations in America. Finish the reading after the Bounce 2 Times Online

Bipartisanship and Obama

The notion that Barack Obama has no bipartisan achievements in the Congress is untrue and unfair, as Hilzoy has definitively demonstrated. Senators Lugar and Obama witness the process of munitions elimination at the Donetsk State Chemical Product Plant(2006).

She Finally Did It...

The Bush Presidency

Rogers Says the Crude Bull Market Has `Years to Go'

Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said the increase in the price of crude oil has ``years to go'' as known sources of petroleum are dwindling.

``I know that unless someone discovers a lot of oil, it can go to $150, $200'' a barrel, Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview. ``The facts are the world is running out of known oil reserves.''

Crude oil for July delivery rose $1.62, or 1.3 percent, to $123.92 a barrel at 9:51 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after earlier dropping to $121.61, the lowest since May 15. Futures, which reached a record $135.09 a barrel on May 22, are up 89 percent from a year ago.

Rogers said he bought airline stocks around the world today, saying bankruptcies show the sector may be nearing a bottom. ``Bankruptcies are signs of bottoms, not signs of tops,'' he said

Click Video Here

Mugabe's goons threaten to burn U.S. diplomats alive

Apparently you don't have to be an opposition leader seeking democratic reforms to get arrested in Zimbabwe -- just being a foreign diplomat can be enough. U.S. and British diplomats were seized by Zimbabwean police today while visiting victims of political violence carried out by the government of President Robert Mugabe, whom human rights groups accuse of creating famine and starvation for political purposes.

Here's James D. McGee, the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, describing the incident to CNN:

Police put up a roadblock, stopped the vehicles, slashed the tires, reached in and grabbed telephones from my personnel, and the war veterans (Mugabe's supporters) threatened to burn the vehicles with my people inside unless they got out and accompanied police to a station nearby."

McGee added that his embassy felt the orders were "coming directly from the top." Whoever gave the orders, threatening to burn foreign dignitaries alive is a step beyond the usual Mugabe bullying. It's sickening.

Will this be the moment when Thabo Mbeki finally stops covering for the crazy man next door? As the leader of the powerhouse, a country with a long history of friendship and cooperation with Mugabe, the South African president has unique leverage on Harare, but he has, if anything, shielded Mugabe from accountability. It's time for President Bush to pressure Mbeki and other African leaders to handle the mess in their own backyards, and if that doesn't work, take matters to the Security Council. The apologetics need to end now. Courtesy Foreign Policy Passport

For The First Time In Her Adult Life ...

"The United States of America is an extraordinary country. It is a country that has overcome many, many, now years, decades, actually a couple of centuries, of trying to make good on its principles. And I think what we are seeing is an extraordinary expression of the fact that 'We the People' is beginning to mean to all of us," - Condi Rice.

Beginning to mean? Where's Hannity?