In politics, every pice of news is analyzed and judged based on its potential impact on the race. And while this piece is backfiring on McCain now, there's a lot more fallout to be felt.

Looks like the video response is causing real trouble for a lot of people.

I almost feel bad for the heiress. What else is she supposed to do?

Leaked Hilton Political Video Risks Stupid Slut Image

Four years after the premiere of the sex tape that launched her career and established her reputation as a simple-minded and self-absorbed floozy, a video in which hotel heiress Paris Hilton speaks with a surprising understanding of reality leaked to the internet threatens to undermine the carefully cultivated image she has worked so hard to attain.

Ruh roh. Read on:

Yes, there is a connection.  

Reports are coming in from across the country that cases of West Nile Virus have increased.

From MSNBC.com:

CONCORD, Calif. - Standing on the edge of a swimming pool gone bad, public health worker Jeremy Tamargo scoops up a sample of murky, brown water to make sure the mosquito treatment he administered earlier is still working.

A collection of plastic toys stashed in a corner of the yard and a stuffed toy floating forlornly in the swampy water indicate a family once played here, until foreclosure forced a move.

Now the once-sparkling, turquoise jewel is a "green pool," a legacy of the foreclosure crisis — and a breeding ground for millions of potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes that have kept health officials busy in California and elsewhere.

More below the fold....

For those of us who are sick and tired of so much of this country's resources going to fight the War in Iraq - a new article in the New York Times will make your blood boil.

Here's the uptake:

Soaring oil prices will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year’s end, according to an American federal oversight agency. But Iraq has spent only a minute fraction of that on reconstruction costs that are now largely borne by the United States.

The unspent windfall, which covers surpluses from oil sales from 2005 through 2008, appears likely to reinforce growing debate about the approximately $48 billion in American taxpayer money devoted to rebuilding Iraq since the American-led invasion.

It's bad enough over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died.

It's bad enough tens of thousands of troops have been injured.

It's bad enough the hundreds of billions we have spent on this war which should have gone to more important national priorities.

But we're spending money like a drunken sailor when the Iraqis are sitting on lottery money?!?!

WTF?!

More after the jump

I would like to see Obama use the right's ridiculous tire gauge attack against them.  This is his opportunity to make saving money now his issue.  I see it done as a series of ads that go something like this:

Open on Obama in jeans and a t-shirt talking to the camera.

OBAMA
I'm Barack Obama and as President I will push to reduce dependence on foreign oil and provide a $1000 tax cut to middle class families.  But Americans like you need relief at the pump now.  Unfortunately, the current administration has failed offer real solutions, so in the mean time here are some tips on what you can do to save money at the pump.

Offer a few tips like these:

My answer to the gas price question: fix Social Security! (Not that it’s broken, mind you.)

Much has been written in the last couple of weeks about McCain’s nonsensical “solution” to high gasoline prices—offshore drilling—and many a brow has been furrowed because it seems that Democrats have yet to synthesize as pat an answer to the real hardship brought on by $4/gallon gas.

Even I, a solid opponent of off-shore drilling, subsidies to big oil, and even, truth be told, cheap hydrocarbon fuel, have been saying for many months now that first, the Democrats need a good answer for questions about rising fuel costs, second, the Democrats don’t seem to have one, and third, this is going to be a persistent problem in this election cycle. . . .

Arguments for the McCain/Bush offshore drilling plan are nonesense. The plan has no chance of passing congress or state legislatures. If new drilling is that important, the oil companies should concentrate on the 68 million acres they already hold.

As the debate on global warming rages, as the price of gas keeps rising, as I read stories about people struggling to pay for gas to get to work, I have this vague memory of a press conference about energy in the first Bush term that made me cringe when I first heard it.  

Today, I used the Google on the internets to try to find the source of something that made me so uncomfortable that I remember it seven years later.  Here is the link to the entire press conference, but the answer to the following question made me squirm way back then.

This weekend, I was talking to one of the smartest people I know on energy issues, and I thought he made some great points.  Before you read them, keep in mind that they are NOT conventional "wisdom," or what passes for "wisdom" these days. That, of course, does NOT mean the analysis is wrong; to the contrary, I believe it's right on the money. I also believe that almost everything we're hearing from our politicians and from the media today regarding energy issues is either completely wrong, highly distorted, pandering pabulum (or all of the above).  Now, let me tell you how I REALLY feel! :)

LMAO!!

The Brodershpere and the GOP are making fun of Barack Obama's recent suggestion that people (among other things) should keep their car tires properly inflated to save gas.

Their attack on Obama is similar to attacking Michael Dukakis for his suggestion that financially struggling farmers plant a desirable cash crop such as Belgian Endive to make up their shortfall. [More after the terorist fist jump]

OK, with all the hand-wringing and speeches and late-nite, GOP-only, in-the-dark House sessions and Al Gore slide shows and airlines going under and commercials about Barack Obama with the word "foreign" too close to his face and international summits on global warming and detailed comparisons of placebo gas tax holidays and demands to start drilling all over America's beaches and Rush Limbaugh Crowd's moaning about how Obama and other Democrats use private jets to get around and $4.00 a gallon gas and restaurants that have stopped serving bottled water to save oil and demands that we drill in the ANWR and Oprah plugging energy efficient light bulbs next to Leo DiCaprio plugging Priuses....

With all that, why why WHY does the cheapest ticket from Indianapolis to Seattle in the entire week that I can travel have to be the one that stops over in North Carolina?

Or the cheapest ticket from NYC to Indianapolis the one that stops in Georgia?

The Democrats always let the Republicans frame the issues.  Once that is done and the press is suckered into the frame then the Democrats are dead meat.  It has happened again with the offshore drilling.  The framing created by the Republicans is that we need to drill for oil to get relief for high oil prices and to improve our independence from oil sheiks.

It is already known by all the intelligent people that, while additional oil supplies might minimally help in the future, this near term argument is nothing less than stupidity on steroids.  The Republicans do not wish to address the intelligent people.  They want to address enough of the stupid people to win an election.  And if the Democrats can't figure out a way to make an argument that will encompass the less intelligent then they will get their butts kicked exactly as they are doing.

If you're like most everyone else I know, gas prices are taking a noticeable bite out of your wallet. Have you found yourself altering your old habits? I sure have!

No filling up the tank - just serious calculations on just how much to get to last til the next paycheck.

So I got this email after a recent diary:

It started when Bush called for offshore drilling. Live with it.
So the fact that immediately after Bush announces a repeal of the exec order to ban offshore drilling and prices drop for three straight days from $147 to $129 has nothing to do with offshore drilling. Yeh? Try getting an education outside this 3rd grade loon site.
(Second email):
(This is where the email actually starts, the periods are not mine). .  .  .  . and now we are down to under $125 per barrel. Now they are predicting $100/per barrel by the end of the year and $3.50 per gallon by Labor Day. And the "Dream Team" (Pelosi and Reid) are still trying to go after speculators.

Senator McCain, President Bush, and some of their oil industry friends are urging Americans to support overturning a 26 year ban on offshore drilling as a way to bring down gas prices. Of course, it's snake oil designed for what the Joe Lieberman campaign affectionately called "low information voters."

As Dean Baker and Nichole Szembrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted in a June 2008 paper ,

the Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects that Senator McCain's proposal would have no impact in the near-term since it will be close to a decade before the first oil can be extracted from the currently protected offshore areas. The EIA projects that production will reach 200,000 barrels a day (0.2 percent of projected world production) at peak production in close to twenty years. It describes this amount as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices.

This morning, on my commute to work (in ‘red state’ NE), I again made the mistake of turning on the radio to a popular local AM radio station.  The hosts were taking a small diversion into the political arena and played a heavily edited sound bite from one of BHO’s recent events.  To paraphrase, it intimated that more gas could be saved in the US if people would just properly inflate their tires that would be gained by offshore drilling.  The show’s host then, in disgust, stated that Obama was obviously "spectacularly under qualified" to be President.

Follow below the jump..........

From the Op-Ed pages of this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Hell -- otherwise known as Congress -- has officially frozen over. For the first time since the 1950s, Members will skip town today for the August recess without either chamber having passed a single appropriations bill. Then again, Democrats appear ready to sacrifice their whole agenda, even spending, rather than allow new domestic energy production.

Or even a mere debate about energy. The Democratic leadership is stonewalling any measure that might possibly relax the Congressional ban on offshore drilling. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid know that they would lose if a vote ever came to the floor, and they're desperate to suppress an insurrection among those Democrats who are pragmatic about one of the top economic issues. Behind this whatever-it-takes obstructionism is an ideological commitment to high energy prices. The rulers of the Democratic Party want prices to keep rising.

It’s time to change fundamentally the dynamics of the energy industry.  America's future depends on clean, affordable energy from a variety of sources. In the 1970s America faced a similar challenge to today's energy crisis.  A small group of countries had threatened the prosperity of the entire world. The United States Congress led the way to reducing our nation’s reliance on foreign oil, requiring new technologies to reduce home and automobile energy use.  Instead of the disaster the doomsayers predicted, consumption fell and the economy bounced back.  A wise energy policy makes a stronger America.

Short diary but this just pisses me off but I guess I'm not all that surprised these days.

But here we are again, faced with $4.00/Gas and while we're getting screwed day in and day out, we're helping make the oil companies just that much richer.

Here's the link

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...