OilWhen the American media talks about oil fields in the middle east, we usually talk about them in the way that assumes that they are relatively orderly and just sitting there in all their Jurassic glory waiting for someone to come along and dig, gulp, and burn the oil out of them. Maybe you picture the oil well drills that you’ve seen in Texas or somewhere like that, languidly pumping against a sunset backdrop, carefully churning out the highway blood of the American life. But you would be wrong. Not so much about the silhouette or the blood of American life part, but about the sitting and waiting patiently part. Nations fight over oil fields the way we in the U.S. fight over street corners to sell drugs, commercial time to sell products, or ad space in a crowded terminal to push wares. There is so much money in oil that it starts wars. Think about that.

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It makes the politics go round...It’s been a while since I did one of my politics is money posts, and just today a headline caught my eye that makes me double-down on that certainty- Reuters is reporting that the senate has just approved more than $600 billion in new military spending. So the message is- if you want more than half a trillion dollars for the military, no problem, we’ll get that through without a problem. If you want something like that for health care, prepare for a drawn out debate and question marks even after that. Frustrating.

The bill also carries provisions to extend jobless aid and sends money to supplement Medicare payments and rates for another 2 months, but the thrust of it is to fund military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a pretty simple jump to say, “Where are our priorities?”

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Cheers!Yesterday I talked about Obama needing to put on the S suit on the plane on the way over to Copenhagen- he did. While it’s nowhere near what everyone had been hoping for when Copenhagen started to gather steam earlier this year, it is in fact more than everyone had been expecting as the summit grew closer. With deadlocks around emissions cut commitments and monetary contributions from industrialized nations, Obama was walking into a snakepit. But he did it anyway. "This progress did not come easily and we know this progress alone is not enough ... We've come a long way but we have much further to go," said Obama.

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Making it happenU.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met at the end of this week but did not come to an agreement on reducing Cold War era nuclear arms stocks. They did, however, say that they would continue to work to do so until the new year.

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Nuclear Power PlantAfter the Three Mile Island Disaster that took place in the United States in 1979, followed by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster just seven years later in 1986, most of the nation, and the world, began to speak out about the dangers that nuclear power posed to not only the stability of the environment but to our own lives as well. Many people realized the truth about the nuclear industry: that nuclear power is dirty, costly, and deadly, and they became quite outspoken about these facts. In fact, so dangerous is the concept of nuclear power plants that before his fall from grace, Patrick Moore wrote in the Assault on Future Generations in 1976 that "Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.

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I mean...Mark Sanford- remember this guy? He is the Republican governor of South Carolina, widely regarded as a possible presidential candidate until he got busted disappearing for an affair with an Argentine journalist. Now, the media has been skewering him as some kind of horrible entity every since- Well, it doesn’t help that he has gone on television and done tearful press conferences where he called her his soulmate (which might be true, who knows?), and then his wife told someone that it was gay marriage corrupting the purity of the idea of marriage that ultimately led her husband to lose touch with the sanctity of marriage… Point being, this has certainly produced plenty of fodder for the press. It’s a low hanging fruit you don’t even really need your eyes open to find.

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Who will be paying their salaries in the future???So the Democrats have introduced their healthcare reform bill- all 1,990 pages of it! There has been much debate and arguing over the public option, which is included and even carries a complementary tax on the rich to help pay for it. The debate over the public option has largely focused on the senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass legislation.

And White House senior advisor David Axelrod said that President Obama believes the public option is valuable. "Both the House and the Senate are going to move forward on bills that likely will have the public option," Axelrod continued.

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Obama takes his time deciding what America will do...There are 65,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan and President Obama is taking his time considering whether to send all or part of the 40,000 recommended/ requested by General Stanley McChrystal. Cheney says Obama is dithering (Does what Cheney thinks still matter?) It’s the first real decision that Obama is going to make in his role as Commander In Chief.

It brings up a few questions, all of political significance:

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Health Care Reform 

   Time Magazine recently had an article breaking down the numbers of the uninsured in the United States. Not surprisingly, the statistics about the uninsured are different than what the tea-bagging Republicans in the media are proclaiming. Basically, the American public is being lied to by the same villains who brought us the Iraq war. We can’t let them win.

The TV show Myth-busters should leave science alone for a minute and start to focus on the real problems in the United States. The myths do no just relate to the uninsured, but to the actual costs of public health care.

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Shepard Fairey's Iconic PosterThe Associated Press is suing artists now.

Remember this iconic poster? Just one year ago they were plastered on walls across America- and though many of us recognize these posters, few of us would know the background story on one of the most recognizable visuals of the early 21st century.

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