Why do Oil Speculators beg for our Money?

In 2007, Exxon/Mobil earned $1,300 a second.

For the second quarter of 2008, Exxon Mobil reported record quarterly earnings of $11.97 billion on total revenues of $138 billion.

That 2Q 2008 profit works out to $1,485.55 a second.

Dirty Tricks on Joe Biden

We've already seen the attack machine start on Joe Biden, bringing up charges that he committed plagarism when he described his childhood using facts from Neil Kinnick. He had mentioned Kinnick in previous speeches, but this one time he used the first person ("I") and did not credit Kinnick.

Biden had brain aneurysms at the time.

See the Biden story on YouTube.

Obama experience

"so his experience is essentially that of a lawyer and a state legislator. There hasn't been this empty a résumé for a presidential candidate since, uh, hmm. Abe Lincoln. Lawyer and state legislator. Whoa, and they're both from Illinois! It's almost as though God Himself is endorsing ..."

You might say times were simpler then, and experience less important. Do you mean times like the dizzying changes in transportation, caused by the interContinental railway, and the internal combustion engine? Like the earthquake in the labor market and racial and immigration forces, caused by the advent of tens of thousands of free slaves poised to enter the paid workforce to the dismay of the poorest paid Scotch and Irish in those dead end jobs?

It's shocking. I'm reminded of how Lincoln flagrantly lifted "a house divided against itself" from the Bible, thereby creating an inarguable moral and philosophical underpinning for the war he would wage to save America and to affirm, forever, the dignity of human freedom. It's like . . .

read more on Obama and Lincoln.

First Wives Club: John and Carol McCain

How much do you know about Carol McCain, the wife of John McCain before Cindy? She now lives in Virginia Beach.

"[T]here is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator's presidential campaign. Had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain's first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

It took Britian's Daily Mail to cover the story, while the conglomorates who own mainstream media push aside the story like McCain pushed aside his wife.

"My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25," Carol said, apparently benevolently.

"In 1979 while still married to Carol he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Carol and her children were devastated. It was a complete surprise,' says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.

Salon summed it up: "McCain's strategy worked perfectly: After chasing Cindy Hensley [and her Anheuser-Busch fortune] around the country for six months, he closed the deal late in the year, had a divorce by February and was married to Hensley shortly thereafter. Bingo! McCain was a candidate for Congress by early 1982, his coffers full, his home in the proper Arizona district purchased."

The Daily Mail story inspired Salon, Gawker, US Veteran Dispatch, even the Drudge Report covered the story this week.

The Things That Carried Him by Chris Jones

For Memorial Day:

The next day, Thursday, May 31, 2007, he sat in the heat on a distant tombstone, waiting until he could finish the rest of his work. Just after twelve o'clock, the first people arrived: a vanload of nine honor-guard soldiers up from Fort Knox, dressed in their green Class-A uniforms, with knotted ties and berets. Collins had seen them practicing and pointing at various spots in the grass when he dug the grave. Now seven of them stacked their M16's in one of those spots. Each gun held three rounds; Sergeant Aaron Huber, a broad-backed thirty-one-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, had taken care to polish his ammunition to a high shine. Six of the soldiers, including Huber, then assembled in two rows between the grave and where they knew the hearse would park. The extra rifleman remained with the weapons, and the noncom in charge, thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Kenneth Dawson, stood at attention nearby. The ninth man, Specialist Robert Leatherbee, a boy-faced twenty-six-year-old from Massachusetts, took his place about forty feet away. With his buzz cut and iron-crisp uniform, he looked like a soldier, but there seemed something smaller or gentler about him, at least compared with the others. Maybe it was just that he was holding a trumpet instead of a gun, his fingers tender on the brass.

Read more of this great story from Esquire here: