By Maura Reynolds, Michelle Quinn and Ronald D. White
The Los Angeles Times

When asked about the possibility of the price going that high, president says, “That’s interesting, I hadn’t heard that.” He also says a tax hike on oil companies would drive the price up further.

The prospect of sharply higher fuel prices, including $4-a-gallon gasoline, may not have made it into Oval Office briefing books, perhaps explaining why President Bush was surprised Thursday when a reporter mentioned what energy analysts are saying could happen soon in many parts of the country.

“Wait, what did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?” Bush responded to a reporter who said some analysts expect prices to soon climb that high. “That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that. . . . I know it’s high now.”

The price of oil set another record Thursday, jumping $2.95 to close at $102.59 a barrel in New York futures trading. (more…)

side note: building upon the last story, In case you think $2.5 billion could bankrupt the company, The Salt Lake Tribune points out that Exxon Mobile’s profit in the last quarter of 2007 was $11.7 billion, and that “the award represents less than three weeks’ worth of Exxon profit.”

http://thinkprogress.org

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on how much money ExxonMobil should be forced to pay as damages for its Exxon Valdez oil spill 19 years ago. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes that Chief Justice John Roberts appeared “bothered” that Exxon might have to pay for its destruction:

What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion — roughly three weeks’ worth of profits — for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.

“So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?” Roberts asked in court.

The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. “Well,” he said, “it can hire fit and competent people.”

The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused.
see original

side note: Soon i’ll be posting what our Chief Justice Roberts had to say, and i think it’s pretty clear who he’s concerned about. Oh, and just in case you weren’t aware, Exxon Mobile is the world’s largest company by REVENUE, at 404.5 billion for the fiscal year of 2007.
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
NY TIMES

The Exxon Valdez oil spill, which caused a 3,000-square-mile oil slick and still affects Alaska’s fisheries after nearly 19 years, was a “tragedy,” Exxon’s lawyer told the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

But the company has been punished enough by $3.4 billion in criminal fines, cleanup costs and compensation payments, the lawyer added, arguing that the $2.5 billion in punitive damages approved by a federal appeals court served no additional “public purpose.” (more…)

side note: come on Pelosi, they didn’t show up after being subpoenaed. And i love how these repubs talk about “a waste of time”. yeah, it’s a real waste of time when people who were directly involved of the politicization of the US Dept of Justice, who basically, on behalf of the executive branch (but without the president knowing, according to them) fired a bunch of US Attorney’s and then lied to congress about why they were fired. Yeah, sounds like a waste of time to me. And, we can’t point this out enough. They claim the president didn’t know about any of this, and that he wasn’t asked. If true, then how do they have executive privilege?

LARA JAKES JORDAN | | AP

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked the Justice Department on Thursday to open a grand jury investigation into whether President Bush’s chief of staff and former counsel should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.

Pelosi, D-Calif., demanded that the department pursue misdemeanor charges against former White House counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to testify to Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors in 2006 and against chief of staff Josh Bolten for failing to turn over White House documents related to the dismissals. (more…)

Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
SPACE.com
yahoo.com

Venus is made of the same stuff of Earth, but is bone-dry, hot enough to melt lead and has a chokingly thick atmosphere. It even spins backwards.

Astronomers have spent decades trying to explain Venus’ mysterious properties. Now one scientist thinks the planet’s formation may explain all: Two huge, protoplanetary bodies collided head-on and merged to form our planetary neighbor, but obliterated nearly all water in the process.

“The probability that two protoplanets collided to form Venus is not at all implausible,” said John Huw Davies, a geodynamicist at Cardiff University in the U.K. who developed the idea. (more…)

side note: i apologize for the delay in getting this to everyone. but here it is in its entirety. It is “A Position Paper of the American College of Physicians, entitled, ‘Supporting Research into the Therapeutic Role of Marijuana’ “.
Download the entire paper here
I want to briefly share a few sections of the Executive Summary:

“Position 1: ACP supports programs and funding for rigorous scientific evaluation of the potential therapeutic benefits of medical marijuana and the publication of such findings.
Position 2: ACP encourages the use of nonsmoked forms of THC that have proven therapeutic value. (NT Editor note: that means Vaporizing, or for those who are familiar, the Volcano!)
Position 4: ACP urges review of marijuana’s status as a schedule I controlled substance and its reclassification into a more appropriate schedule, given the scientific evidence regarding marijuana’s safety and efficacy in some clinical conditions.
Position 5: ACP strongly supports exemption from federal criminal prosecution; civil liability; or professional sanctioning, such as loss of licensure or credentialing, for physicians who prescribe or dispense medical marijuana in accordance with state law. Similarly, ACP strongly urges protection from criminal or civil penalties for patients who use medical marijuana as permitted under state laws.
American College of Physicians website

side note: with so many states (including my home state of Illinois) having medical marijuana on the agenda to discuss this year, it is important for people to not only call their representatives, but to finally learn what so many of us have known for a long time, that Marijuana has many, many uses, and it should be legal for doctors to prescribe to their patients without the government arresting them. And as you’ll read, it’s just not for people who are in severe pain, but it has many therapeutic values, that could be extremely beneficial and much, much less toxic then the typical pharmy drugs. Shortly, I will be putting up the full paper from the American College of Physicians

http://www.mpp.org

In January 2008, the American College of Physicians (ACP) — the largest medical specialty
organization and the second largest physician group in the United States, representing over 124,000 members — released a landmark position paper calling for legal protection for medical marijuana patients, reconsideration of marijuana’s federal classification as a Schedule I drug (banned for medical use), and expanded research. Entitled “Supporting Research into the Therapeutic Role of Marijuana,” the paper cites extensive evidence for the clinical safety and efficacy marijuana and its active components, called cannabinoids.

ACP is one of the world’s most prestigious medical societies and publishes Annals of Internal Medicine, the most widely cited medical specialty journal in the world. ACP joins the Institute of Medicine, American Public Health Association, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, American Nurses Association, American Academy of HIV Medicine, and dozens of other medical and health organizations that support medical marijuana access. Key excerpts from the report are below. (more…)

VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

wired.com

side note: These are some new, fucked up photos from Abu Ghraib. If you remember, we were not privy to see all of the photos when Sy Hersh originally broke this story in The New Yorker. A few members of Congress, on the other hand, saw them all, including some videos. They came out of the viewing room disgusted…..

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE NEW PHOTOS

side note: Shocker to find out that the people who own this station are huge GOP contributers and former business partners with dubya!

The New York Times
Editorial

In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: “Sorry, Cable Trouble.” Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a “60 minutes” segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama’s former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.

The report presented new evidence that the charges against Mr. Siegelman may have been concocted by politically motivated Republican prosecutors – and orchestrated by Karl Rove. Unfortunately, WHNT had “technical problems” that prevented it from broadcasting a segment (the problems were resolved in time for the next part of the show) that many residents of Alabama would no doubt have found quite interesting. (more…)

side note: If anyone thinks this Barack’s middle name is an issue…fwd this article to them!

By Juan Cole
Salon.com
The attacks on Barack Obama’s middle name have begun, but the likely Democratic nominee joins a long line of famous Americans with Semitic names, from Benjamin Franklin to Omar Bradley.

In Cincinnati, Bill Cunningham, according to the Los Angeles Times, introducing presidential candidate John McCain at a rally Tuesday, “ridiculed Democratic contender Barack Obama for his intention to meet with ‘world leaders who want to kill us’ and pointedly referred to the Illinois senator as ‘Barack Hussein Obama.’” John McCain repudiated Cunningham’s low tactics and said that using the middle name like that three times was “inappropriate” and would never happen again at one of his rallies.

I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama’s name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

Christian, Western heroes have often been bequeathed Middle Eastern names. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the medieval Spanish hero, carried the name El Cid, from the Arabic al-Sayyid, “the Lord.”

Barack and Hussein are Semitic words. Americans have been named with Semitic names since the founding of the republic. Fourteen of our 43 presidents have had Semitic names (see below). And American English contains many Arabic-derived words that we use every day and without which we would be much impoverished. America is a world civilization with a world heritage, something Cunningham will never understand.

Barack is a Semitic word meaning “to bless” as a verb or “blessing” as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22 — “And God blessed (ḇāreḵə) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”

Here is a list of how many times barak appears in each book of the Bible. (more…)

By David G. Savage
The Los Angeles Times

Nearly 19 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill fouled Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether the world’s largest oil company must pay a record $2.5 billion in punitive damages.

The eight justices who heard the case appeared closely split, although several of them said they were looking for a way to reduce the size of the award. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sat out the case because he is an Exxon stockholder. His stock holdings could prove costly to the company: A tie vote would have the effect of affirming the $2.5-billion verdict.

No one disputed that the oil spill was an extraordinary disaster. The company’s lawyer described it as “one of the worst environmental tragedies in U.S. maritime history.” (more…)

By Steve Lannen
McClatchy Newspapers

Iraq’s three-man presidency council Wednesday announced that it’s vetoed legislation that U.S. officials two weeks ago hailed as significant political progress.

Also Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he hoped that Turkey’s incursion into northern Iraq to fight Kurdish rebels would last a “week or two” but “not months.”

Turkish news agencies reported that as many as 77 guerrillas were killed the night before in the most violent night of the week-old incursion on Iraq’s northern border. A rebel spokesman said fighters for the Kurdish Workers Party, known as the PKK, had killed 18 Turkish soldiers. (more…)

By Mike Soraghan
The Hill

Liberal House Democrats are pushing for a closed session to discuss the legal underpinnings of President Bush’s intelligence surveillance program.

They believe that the more members know about it, the less likely they will be to support Bush’s wish to make it permanent.

“I haven’t heard anything in closed session that makes me think we need the Protect America Act,” said Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), an Intelligence Committee member, referring to a White House-backed interim wiretapping bill that lapsed this month. “Or that FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], with modest modifications, isn’t the way to go into the future.” (more…)