This is huge – From Fox News - “Tests may indicate significant oil discovery in Gulf of Mexico”: “Tests of a deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico could indicate a significant oil discovery, three companies announced Tuesday, in the first project to tap into a region that reportedly could boost U.S. oil and gas reserves by as much as 50 percent.” 50%! It’s like a whole new Prudhoe Bay.

Also from CNN: “Chevron and its partners have successfully extracted oil from a test well in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, an achievement that could be the biggest breakthrough in domestic oil supplies since the opening of the Alaskan pipeline.”

What’s wrong with getting rid of liberal teachers? – Oh, “liberal” in the sense that they believe the earth goes around the sun, that kind of liberal. From Fox News: “Iran’s Ahmadinejad calls for purge of liberal teachers.” It’s all Allah, all the time, baby!

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape

Cute pic in today’s Boston Globe:


Elliot McLeod, 4, pulled on the robes of the Rev. Harry Kaufman after Mass yesterday at the Sacred Heart Church school in Weymouth. A groundbreaking ceremony will be held Friday for a new church to replace the one destroyed by fire in 2005.

You say you want a replication? – At the mall today, I saw a series of Halloween costumes called “Pepper Band” featuring four men (one with Granny glasses) sporting garish, pastel-colored band suits. Any similarity to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is purely coincidental!

Must be our fault – Ex-Donkey notes that Muslims in America don’t want to assimilate and identify their religion as more important than their country. Oh, and they don’t like insensitive comments and dirty looks, broadly identified as “hate crimes.” Meanwhile, American Jews are rolling their eyes and saying “Welcome to my world.”

Everybody panic

From a Washington Times story: “Airline-security incidents seen as terrorist feints”

[Counter-terrorism consultant Laura] Mansfield said that although the terrorists pay no attention to anniversary dates, recent activity and the release of several tapes indicate that Islamic militants want badly to strike the U.S. before this upcoming September 11.

Clearly, Ms. Mansfield is just another Bush administration plant to gin up the fear machine ahead of the midterm elections, served up by that right-wing Washington Times. Pay her no mind.

B4B news - Congrats to Matt and Mark from Blogs for Bush for their book deal. “Caucus of Corruption” will not be ready for election day, but sometime next year.

The face of Australia - Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin dies while swimming with the stingrays. His producer was on the news this morning, his face streamed with tears. Crikey.

Casey on MTP – As the self-appointed Social Security guru of the blogosphere, it looks like I missed a great performance by Bob Casey on Meet the Press this morning. By a reading of the transcript, Tim Russert was incredulous at Casey’s “solutions” to the entitlement crisis. Fortunately, Tom and Betsy have extensive rundowns – check them out.

Extra – More on Casey/Santorum on MTP: “You may not agree with Santorum, but you know where he stands. Casey has zero, and I mean zero, in the way of answers and plans.” And this (!): “Casey is awful.”

Apply the “Son of Sam law” to Joe Wilson

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes presents the “PlameGate Hall of Shame.” Let’s skip down to the main instigator of this scandal:

Joseph Wilson, an ex-ambassador and National Security Council official in the Clinton and Bush I administrations, sparked the "leak" controversy in the first place by writing in the New York Times that Bush had lied in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out precisely that point, and he claimed to have debunked it. Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that nearly everything Wilson wrote or said about Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and his own trip to Africa was untrue. Wilson was a fraud. "It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously," the Washington Post editorialized sorrowfully last week.

This case goes beyond obscene dereliction of duty, which is the most generous interpretation of Wilson’s failure in Niger. There are those too-well versed in this case who believe that Wilson is the original source that revealed his wife was a covert CIA agent.

But to what end? It seems that the answer lies somewhere between treason and money.

The case for treason is that Joe Wilson arranged to have his wife send him to Niger with the deliberate intent to undermine the President’s foreign policy. When his ineptitude was made evident by the Senate Intelligence Agency, he tried to change the subject by claiming his wife was revealed as a CIA source. Now that it’s been demonstrated that the leak did not originate from the White House, Wilson only confirms his political bias by maintaining a lawsuit against Karl Rove et. al., but not Richard Armitage, the original Novak source.

But maybe the reason for Wilson’s shenanigans boil down to nothing more mundane than the almighty dollar. Once a no-name ambassador, Wilson is now the toast of the nutroots Left, with a fawning spread in Vanity Fair and a space on George Soros’s speed-dial. It’s no secret that he and his wife have been shopping publishers for a book deal and they continue to solicit cash for their legal case. For somebody who puts on the supercilious air of a diplomat, Wilson sure is grabby with the speaking fees.

Assuming it’s all about the Benjamins for Wilson & Plame, what recourse is there against a man who purposely undermined U.S. policy, leading to a Senate rebuke and a costly two-year investigation by Patrick Fitzgerald? Perhaps it’s time to revisit the “Son of Sam” law:

A Son of Sam law is a law designed to keep criminals from profiting from their crimes by selling their stories to publishers. Such laws authorize the state to seize all money earned from such a deal and use it to compensate the criminal's victims.

It would be a delicious denoument to the whole Wilson/Plame affair (if that darned Supreme Court didn’t rule it unconstitutional). Then again, it might be fun to see how many weeks it would take for Joe Wilson’s book to hit the bargain bins.

Roundtable roundup - I missed all the Sunday morning shows, but Mark Kilmer didn’t. You can read his review of all the chatter on Red State.

So…what happened while I was gone?

From Fox News: “Al-Qaeda’s #2 in Iraq arrested”

Iraqi and coalition forces have arrested the second most senior figure in Al Qaeda in Iraq, Iraq's national security adviser announced on Sunday, saying the group now suffered from a "serious leadership crisis."

Meanwhile in Afghanistan:

NATO and Afghan forces killed more than 200 suspected Taliban guerrillas with air strikes and artillery fire in a major offensive in a volatile province in southern Afghanistan, the alliance said Sunday.

Being the #2 Al-Qaeda guy has to be the worst job. It seems like U.S. forces killed dozens of them before Zarqawi.

Measuring with a micrometer – We’re heading out camping for Labor Day weekend, back on Sunday. Will my page visits plunge while I’m gone? Almost assuredly, because people expect high quality and they won’t stand for a guest blogger. I beg of you, dear reader, try to make it through the next couple days.

Still strong – From Fox News “Economy Adds 128,000 Jobs in August, Unemployment Dips to 4.7% as Economy Shows Lingering Strength”: “Hiring perked up in August as employers added 128,000 jobs, pulling down the unemployment rate to 4.7 percent, sending a Labor Day message that the economic expansion still has staying power.”

Do they still have music on MTV? – Here’s a quote from an AP story about the sleepy MTV Video “Music” Awards starring Al Gore: “When does the phrase "here's a photo of a glacier melting" ever fit into an awards show?” Outrageous!

The end of the affair

The WashPost is the first major paper to come clean and declare that the whole Plame investigation is a farce:

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue.

And who’s to blame? Plame’s lying husband Joe Wilson:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Boy, it’s awfully quiet over there at the New York Times:

The Post editorial says the paper was "reluctant" to revisit the whole Plamegate affair. Certainly other commentators, some of whom pushed the story very hard, now don't want to talk about it. The New York Times editorial page, which was positively hysterical about the matter, still has not commented on the Armitage matter. But this was a serious matter. It has to be reckoned with.

I’m sure they’re busy drafting a long and heartfelt apology. And when it comes out, it won't be equivocal or self-serving in any way. You'll see.

Audio feed - From Wizbang: Kyra Phillips top 10 excuses. #5 – “I was set up by those bastards on Fox News.” Tell, it sister!

Let’s get adequately prepared to rumble

Labor Day is almost upon us, signaling the start of the silly political season. One political party is measuring the curtains (at least in the House of Representatives) while the other party is depressed. Let’s see where we stand in the polls:

Republicans have moved closer to the Democrats in a congressional voter-preference poll just as the election campaigns near the official Labor Day starting gate.
The surprising findings in a little-noticed Gallup Poll that were ignored by most of the national news media shows the Democrats barely leading the Republicans by just two points -- 47 percent to 45 percent.

So it’s all even from the start. Who has more gas in the tank?

But the flare-up underscores one of the Democrats' biggest worries about this fall's elections: money. Top party officials are fretting that the GOP will dominate the ad wars in September and October. "My greatest fear is there will be a wall of money coming in at the end," said David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist working on some of the House campaigns. House Democrats actually have almost the same amount of money as House Republicans, $33 million to $34 million, but the Republican National Committee has $43 million, compared to $11 million for Dean's DNC.

Plus, you can bet that Americans will be unnerved by the thought of “Speaker Pelosi” as we approach the five-year anniversary of 9/11. Then there’s this final twist from USA Today: “Gasoline prices could keep falling”

"The only place they have to go is down," says Fred Rozell, gasoline analyst at the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS). "We'll be closer to $2 than $3 come Thanksgiving."

It’s gonna be interesting.

The new Oracle has spoken! – Ben Bernanke says four percent. This means something.

Surely this is some kind of Onion-type spoof: “Biden’s Iowa visit shows he’s a viable candidate.” Sure, sure he is.