A lot of people go overboard trying to get their number of Twitter followers up. But Steve Forbes is apparently dragooning the employees of Forbes to round up new Twitter followers to get him into Twitter following big leagues.
Colbert: “It’s BP’s well, so the only person to blame is Barack Obama.” Watch.
Oklahoma state senator proposes ballot measure to prohibit “liberal judges” from imposing sharia law in America.
The definitive Alvin Greene interview reel, presented by Rachel Slajda. Watch.
Once you look close, politics at the state level can get pretty crazy. And South Carolina doesn’t get to have all the fun. Nevada’s a pretty wild place too.
Dawn Gibbons is the first lady of the state as the soon-to-be-ex-wife of lame-duck Gov. Jim Gibbons (R), who got beat in the Republican primary last Tuesday. She has a radio show now. And despite being a Republican, she’s supporting Sen. Harry Reid (D). She also served in the state legislature with Reid’s opponent Sharron Angle and actually went head to head with Angle in the 2006 Republican primary for the state’s 2nd Congressional district. (They both lost to another candidate, Dean Heller.) And she talked with our Christina Bellantoni about the fight Reid has on his hands.
House Minority Leader John Boehner on This Week today said he’s now in favor of lifting the cap on BP’s liability in the Gulf oil spill. Though currently law makes BP responsible for cleaning up the actual oil, it limits its liability to $75 million. Senate Democrats have pushed to raise the cap to $10 billion or get rid of the cap entirely. Boehner now seems to be suggesting he’s on board with the latter option but only in the case of BP and this spill, not in general going forward.
So the US finds vast untapped oil reserves beneath the surface of Afghanistan, enough to make the perennially impoverished country one of the top two or three oil producers in the world.
Well, not exactly. Not oil. But according to this story just out from the New York Times, “a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists” has discovered vast mineral deposits in the country including iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium totaling in today’s dollars perhaps as much as $1 trillion. The big one of these is lithium, which could end being something like oil in a post hydrocarbon economy since it’s the key to making batteries for a lot of modern electronics. Read More
I’m still suspicious about that Times article. But TPM Reader SC has his own theory …
Based on my experience, the discovery of vast natural resources in Afghanistan seems perfectly normal. I lived in Mongolia from ’94 to ’99 – the period when that country was emerging from 70+ years of Soviet control and discovering itself and the world. While the Soviets controlled Mongolia, they did “extensive” geological surveys and declared that there was nothing exciting – a little coal, a little gold, a little uranium, a fair amount of copper, but nothing world class. It was not until the country opened up and Canadian and American geologists intently surveyed the almost unpeopled stretches of back country that numerous world class finds in copper, gold, uranium were announced as well as lesser finds in oil and silver and iron, etc.
One of the side bizarrenesses of the bizarre Alvin Greene senate nomination story is the ‘obscenity’ charge he was hit with late last year for allegedly showing a pornographic image to a college student at a college computer center. The facts of the case can certainly be construed as menacing or at least creepy (the context isn’t entirely clear). But the law itself is one that is almost never enforced in this way. And the new facts that have emerged make it seem like the race of the two people involved may have played into the charge Greene was hit with.
Roll Call has a good article (sub.req.) today about the role of former President Bill Clinton in the 2010 election. The gist of the piece is that Clinton is turning out to be an important asset in this cycle since there are many parts of the country where he can go and campaign effectively where Barack Obama just can’t. I talked to one candidate running in a race below the Mason-Dixon line a while back. And this person told me that where he’s running, outside of the few places, Barack Obama is just toxic. Not surprising. But it was bracing to hear it from the candidate’s own mouth.
What strikes me about the Roll Call article is that there’s not a single mention in the piece that Barack Obama is … well, black. Read More