JOHN PORRETTO | AP
via huffingtonpost.com

Exxon Mobil Corp. reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest profit from operations ever by any U.S. corporation, but the results were well short of Wall Street expectations and its shares slumped 3 percent.

The world’s largest publicly traded oil company said net income for the April-June period came to $2.22 a share, up from $10.26 billion, or $1.83 a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 40 percent to $138.1 billion from $98.4 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Excluding an after-tax charge of $290 million related to an Exxon Valdez court settlement, earnings amounted to $11.97 billion, or $2.27 per share.

Analysts on average expected Exxon Mobil to earn $2.52 a share on revenue of $144 billion, according to a survey by Thomson Financial. The estimates typically exclude one-time items.

The record-setting results were largely expected, given that crude prices in the second quarter were nearly double what they were a year ago. Natural gas prices were significantly higher too. (more…)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

According to a press release sent out by Time, this Friday’s edition of the magazine will reportedly include a article that describes how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is deeply involved in an effort to “clean up [President] Bush’s foreign policy legacy.”

But one newspaper in the Persian Gulf believes the negotiations are tailored for the benefit of John McCain during the fall election season. In a Thursday editorial entitled “Negotiations for the Sake of Rice,” the UAE’s Al-Khaleej writes that leaders in the United States, Israel and the Palestinian Territories all know that no breakthroughs can be expected in President Bush’s last few months in office.

“But since the attention is focused on helping the Republican candidate John McCain in the presidential election in November, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will increase her pressures in an attempt to change some positions and facts, and sign a document – a mere document – that would be regarded as an accomplishment,” the paper claims, adding that the negotiations are “pointless.”
see original

side note: what really pisses me off about this is these same repubs went after Clinton and his aides, and unlike this admin, they went to congress and answered their questions. These retards think they’re kings. now that Congress has the backing of a US Judge, it’s time for them to follow through and get some answers! Oh, and no bitching about “run away Judges”, this guy, he was appointed by George himself.

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
via yahoo.com

President Bush’s top advisers are not immune from congressional subpoenas, a federal judge ruled Thursday in an unprecedented dispute between the two political branches.

House Democrats called the ruling a ringing endorsement of the principle that nobody is above the law.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge John Bates said there’s no legal basis for Bush’s argument and that his former legal counsel, Harriet Miers, must appear before Congress. If she wants to refuse to testify, he said, she must do so in person. The committee also has sought to force testimony from White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten.

“Harriet Miers is not immune from compelled congressional process; she is legally required to testify pursuant to a duly issued congressional subpoena,” Bates wrote. He said that both Bolten and Miers must give Congress all non-privileged documents related to the firings.

The ruling is a blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to bolster the power of the executive branch at the expensive of the legislative branch. Disputes over congressional subpoenas are normally resolved through political compromise, not through the court system. Had Bush prevailed, it would have dramatically weakened congressional authority in oversight investigations.

The administration can appeal the ruling. (more…)

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Officially, “stagflation” is a thing of the past, but a deeper look reveals a different, very current reality for most Americans.

Stagflation in America? Well, unless you’re among the wealthiest, you’re soaking in it and have been for quite a while.

But you’re not likely to hear much about that story. Officially, the U.S. hasn’t experienced stagflation — a long period of rising prices amid sluggish economic growth — since the 1970s. The word conjures up images of gas lines snaking around corners, a weary Jimmy Carter looking droopy and forlorn in the Oval Office and the general sense of “malaise” that sunny old Ronald Reagan exploited so adroitly to give rise to the New Conservative movement.

But looking beyond the official numbers — the data on growth and inflation that most economic reporters bandy about –reveals a deeper truth about the American economy. The reality is that those who aren’t at the very top or the very bottom of America’s economic food chain have been mired in a long period of painful stagflation. Bit it’s a reality that’s obscured by the ways in which we measure our nation’s economic health.

So while anyone who draws a paycheck knows that prices are rising fast and salaries haven’t kept up for a long time, the S-word is never mentioned in our economic discourse. There are two reasons for that. First, a number of government benefits like Social Security payments are indexed to inflation, and since the dawn of the Reagan era, a series of changes were made to the way the government measures it, largely as a back-door way of keeping the growth of entitlements in check without pissing off veterans’ groups or the AARP.

Second, while our overall growth has outpaced inflation, America’s income has also become much more highly concentrated at the top — the paychecks of 9 out of 10 Americans have actually declined over the past three decades. It’s been Bill Gates and his set who have done extremely well during that time.

As a result of both of these shifts, there’s now a significant gap between the economy in which most Americans live and work and the one discussed in the business pages and on the cable news blab-fests. (more…)

By Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now
via alternet.org

Wages are stagnating, but productivity keeps going up. Author Steven Greenhouse explains why things are out of whack in the workplace.

Juan Gonzalez: The federal minimum wage increased last week from $5.85 to $6.55. The increase gave nearly two million American workers a raise. The seventy-cent increase is the second of three enacted under a 2007 law that saw the first minimum wage hike in more than a decade.

But, adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage remains lower in real terms than it was forty years ago, despite record corporate profits.

A new book by the New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse examines how much of the American workforce is working more but earning less. Wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled. The book is titled The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.

Steven Greenhouse joins Democracy Now! You’ve traveled all around America, obviously, as a labor reporter for the New York Times, and you take us into all kinds — not just to factories, but the Silicon Valley jobs, the service jobs, to give us a sense of what is happening to the everyday worker.

Steven Greenhouse: We all love Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed, and I felt, I’m going to try building on that. And I really try looking across the board what’s happening to the nation’s workers. I look at, you know, farm workers. I look at Microsoft workers. I look at, you know, factory workers, whose jobs are disappearing to Mexico. And I look at, you know, software engineers at Hewlett-Packard, at some other places, you know, that have lost their jobs to India. I look at janitors in Houston who — I focus on one janitor in Houston, who, after ten years, is making just $5.25 an hour. I write about a Dominican worker in Brooklyn who works eleven hours a day for just $35 a day. You know, the whole panoply of what’s happening, to show that there’s this big squeeze on the nation’s workers, where, as you were just saying, wages have been flat, health and pension benefits are getting worse, at the same time corporate profits have gone up very, very nicely. Employee productivity has gone up 15, 20 percent, yet wages have been flat, plus companies are pressuring workers, you know, to work harder and harder. (more…)

This is crazy…..you can watch how the evil one spreads like a disease across the US. CLICK HERE TO VIEW

LiveScience Staff
via yahoo.com

A previously unknown portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh has been revealed in a high-tech look beneath another of his paintings, it was announced today.

Scientists used a new technique to peer beneath the paint of van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass.” Already it was known there was something there, likely a portrait of some sort. Van Gogh was known to paint over his work, perhaps as much as a third of the time.

Behind the painting, done mostly in greens and blues, is a portrait of a woman rendered in browns and reds.

The new technique is based on “synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy” and is said to be an improvement on X-ray radiography, which has been used to reveal concealed layers of other famous paintings. The new method measures chemicals in the pigments. Specifically, mercury and the element antimony were useful in revealing the woman’s face. (more…)

by: Laurie Kellman, The Associated Press

A House panel Wednesday voted to cite former top White House aide Karl Rove for contempt of Congress as its Senate counterpart publicly pursued possible punishments for an array of alleged past and present Bush administration misdeeds.

Voting along party lines, the House Judiciary Committee said that Rove had broken the law by failing to appear at a July 10 hearing on allegations of White House influence over the Justice Department, including whether Rove encouraged prosecutions against Democrats.

The committee decision is only a recommendation, and it was unclear whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would allow a final vote. Rove has denied any involvement with Justice decisions, and the White House has said Congress has no authority to compel testimony from current and former advisers.

The vote occurred as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on allegations of administration wrongdoing ranging from discriminating against liberals at Justice to ignoring subpoenas and lying to Congress. (more…)

side note: Lets just hope he stands by this. Because this bush admin has been so corrupt and untrustworthy that it almost feels that everything needs to be looked at. this admin has screwed us every step of the way.
JESSE J. HOLLAND | AP
via Huffingtonpost.com

Barack Obama told House Democrats on Tuesday that as president he would order his attorney general to scour White House executive orders and expunge any that “trample on liberty,” several lawmakers said.

Presidents, as head of the executive branch of government, issue such orders to direct operations of executive branch agencies, like the Justice Department and the CIA. For example, President Bush used an executive order last year to breathe new life into the CIA’s controversial terror interrogation program that allowed harsh questioning of suspects.

Obama “talked about how his attorney general is to review every executive order and immediately eliminate those that trample on liberty,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

“He indicated there would be a review in his administration,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the House majority whip. (more…)

by: David Stout and David M. Herszenhorn, The New York Times

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal corruption charges.

Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven counts of falsely reporting income. The charges are related to renovations on his home and to gifts he has received. They arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project.

The indictment will surely reverberate through the November elections. Mr. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, is up for re-election this year. Mark Begich, a popular Democratic mayor of Anchorage, hopes to supplant him. (more…)

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NY TIMES

Senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke Civil Service laws by using politics to guide their hiring decisions, picking less-qualified applicants for important nonpolitical positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times and damaging the department’s credibility, an internal report concluded on Monday.

A longtime prosecutor who drew rave reviews from his supervisors was passed over for an important counterterrorism slot because his wife was active in Democratic politics, and a much-less-experienced lawyer with Republican leanings got the job, the report said.

Another prosecutor was rejected for a job in part because she was thought to be a lesbian. And a Republican lawyer received high marks at his job interview because he was found to be sufficiently conservative on the core issues of “god, guns + gays.”

The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office, centered on the misconduct of a small circle of aides to Mr. Gonzales, including Monica Goodling, a former top adviser to the attorney general, and Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff. It also found that White House officials were actively involved in some hiring decisions. (more…)

side note: An interesting article…..especially if you live in a big city like Chicago.

Alan Ehrenhalt
The New Republic
The demographic inversion of the American city.

Will Chicago, the city of slaughterhouses and skyscrapers, soon look like haute bourgeois nineteenth-century Vienna?
Thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a snowstorm. A blizzard in January of 1979 dumped some 20 inches on the ground, causing, among other problems, a curtailment of transit service. The few available trains coming downtown from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms. African Americans and Hispanics blamed this on Mayor Michael Bilandic, and he lost the Democratic primary to Jane Byrne a few weeks later.

Today, this could never happen. Not because of climate change, or because the Chicago Transit Authority now runs flawlessly. It couldn’t happen because the trains would fill up with minorities and immigrants on the outskirts of the city, and the passengers left stranded at the inner-city stations would be members of the affluent professional class.

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be “demographic inversion.” Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.

Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us. (more…)

side note: to all you bush backers: heck of job fellas!

ANDREW TAYLOR | AP

The next president will inherit a record budget deficit of $482 billion, according to a new Bush administration estimate released Monday. The administration said the deficit was being driven to an all-time high by the sagging economy and the stimulus payments being made to 130 million households in an effort to keep the country from falling into a deep recession.

But the numbers could go even higher if the economy performs worse than the White House predicts.

The budget office predicts the economy will grow at a rate of 1.6 percent this year and will rebound to a 2.2 percent growth rate next year. That’s a half percentage point more than predicted by the widely cited “blue chip” consensus of leading economists. The administration also sees inflation averaging 3.8 percent this year, but easing to 2.3 percent next year _ better than the 3.0 percent seen by the blue chip panel. (more…)

Jason Linkins
Huffingtonpost.com

Over at the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman continues his enlightening “Rise of the Counterinsurgents” series with “A Counterinsurgency Guide for Politicos.” The Indy has obtained a copy of a forthcoming manual on counterinsurgency strategy written by David Kilcullen, a “former Australian Army officer who is now an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

The handbook seeks to provide a framework for considering whether Washington should intervene in foreign countries’ counterinsurgency operations, raising difficult questions about whether such nations deserve U.S. support; under what conditions that support should occur, and whether success is possible at acceptable cost. No systematic approach to strategic-level questions in counterinsurgency currently exists for senior U.S. government officials.

And how difficult are the questions being raised? Well, in what’s sure to be the pull-quote of the piece for those media outlets who still consider anything other than Surge Logic (TM) important, Kilcullen provides a little color:

More bluntly, Kilcullen, who helped Petraeus design his 2007 counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, called the decision to invade Iraq “stupid” — in fact, he said “fucking stupid” — and suggested that if policy-makers apply the manual’s lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future.

“The biggest stupid idea,” Kilcullen said, “was to invade Iraq in the first place.”

Wow. What an appeaser!
see original

By BRIAN MURPHY and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writers

In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners. It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.

“It’s a bit of a monument in the desert right now because it’s not going to be used as a prison,” said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office plans to release a report Monday detailing the litany of problems at the vacant detention center in Khan Bani Saad.

The pages also add another narrative to the wider probes into the billions lost so far on scrubbed or substandard projects in Iraq and one of the main contractors accused of failing to deliver, the Parsons construction group of Pasadena, Calif. (more…)