Todd Tweets LOTT

post from Crooks and Liars on 12 January 2010 12:00:28 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Todd Tweets Lott_6ac7d.jpg

Chuck Todd is incapable of seeing the difference between Lott and Reid's perspectives. This is THE problem with our media.

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http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/todd-tweets-lott

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Determining Oil & Gas Valuations

post from Jutia Group on 12 January 2010 12:00:25 PM. © Jutia Group

How do valuations get set for oil and gas companies? I ask because I’m seeing very fast-rising valuations in the junior and intermediate oil sector that I cover. I have seen junior oil producers valued at $200,000 per flowing barrel recently – more than triple the peer group average.

Industry statistics concur. A December 24th report by Peters & Co., a Calgary-based securities firm that is an oil and gas boutique, showed that the average purchase/sale price for oil weighted production in Q4 2009 was $100,000 per flowing barrel.

This is up more than 50% from the Q3 valuation of just over…

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http://jutiagroup.com/2010/01/12/determining-oil-gas-valuations/

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Bushies-Turned-Lobbyists Helped Murkowski Write
Anti-Enviro Measure

post from TPMMuckraker on 12 January 2010 11:49:00 AM. © TPMMuckraker

Two former Bush EPA officials -- now industry lobbyists -- helped Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) write a measure aimed at blocking the agency from limiting global warming emissions.

Jeffrey Holmstead and Roger Martella, Jr. helped the Alaska senator write an amendment that she intended to offer last fall, which would have prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, the Washington Post reported yesterday. Holmstead, an assistant administrator for air and radiation a EPA during the Bush years, is now a lobbyist at Bracewell & Guiliani, where his clients include Southern Company and Duke Energy. Martella, who was the Bush EPA's general counsel, now lobbbies at Sidley Austin, representing timber industry interests, among others.

Holmstead told the Anchorage Daily News, which picked up on the Post's report, that he and Martella weren't acting on behalf of any particular client, and that they weren't not the only people to look at the measure, which did not move forward.

"This is what lawyers in Washington do every day of the week, is to take a look," Holmstead said. "It happens all the time on almost every piece of legislation. Before language is introduced, it is almost always shared with people on all sides of the issue."

A Murkowski spokesman told the ADN:

While Sen. Murkowski did seek feedback on the amendment from many sources, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Democratic and Republican senators, as well as a number of Clean Air Act experts, it did not influence the substance of the amendment.

The spokesman pointed out that Murkowski had said on the floor that "some of our nation's leading Clean Air Act attorneys -- among the best and brightest legal minds -- have assisted us in [the amendment's] preparation."

The amendment would have prohibited the EPA for one year from spending money on developing regulations for greenhouse gases. Despite its failure to move forward, the senator has continued to lead Senate Republicans' efforts to try to limit the EPA's ability to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act.

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ts_helped_murkowski_write_an.php

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Dave Lindorff: Obama Shows His True Colors,
Sticking It to the Working Stiffs

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 12 January 2010 11:46:07 AM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

If you want to see the unvarnished, true nature of our latest president, you need look no farther than two issues: whether to tax health plans that are deemed "too generous" and whether or how to tax the banks that brought about the financial crisis.

In the case of the health insurance tax, President Obama, after opposing the idea as a candidate when it was proposed by Republican candidate John McCain, is endorsing the Senate bill's approach, which would levy a 40% tax on all insurance plans that cost more than $8,500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. According to the union movement, such a tax would hit one in four union members, who over years of struggle have negotiated decent medical benefits, often foregoing pay increases in order to provide members with health coverage. It would also hit employers with older workforces, smaller employers, who have to pay more for insurance, and also employers in parts of the country where the overall pay scales and cost of living are higher, such as the Northeast and the West Coast.

Obama says he thinks taxing such plans (which are hardly "Cadillac" in today's health marketplace), would help restrain health inflation. More important, he and the Senate backers of the measure, like that it is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to bring in $149 billion in revenue over 10 years. (Note that we're talking about just $14.9 billion per year -- a rather minor sum compared to the total U.S. healthcare bill of $2.5 trillion a year, or the taxpayer share of that bill -- $1.2 trillion.)

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http://blog.buzzflash.com/lindorff/312

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Warning: Very Few Laughs

post from Talking Points Memo on 12 January 2010 11:34:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

John Yoo ventures onto The Daily Show. 'Nuff said. [...]

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w_laughs.php

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Dems surge in Florida

post from Daily Kos on 12 January 2010 11:26:03 AM. © Daily Kos

One could be forgiven for thinking 2009 was a disastrous year for Democrats nationwide, yet a closer look at the numbers often betrays the CW.

Take Florida (PDF), for example.

Over the course of 2009, Floridians continued to join the Democratic Party in record numbers, ending the year with Democrats having a nearly 800,000 person voter registration advantage. According to the Florida Division of Election data, by registering 144,468 new voters last year, Democrats widened our advantage by 43,443 voters in 2009. As Democrats continued to out register Republicans every month since the 2008 election, this voter registration gap will continue to be a major advantage for Florida Democrats in 2010 and beyond.

Wait, what? Democrats increased their voter registration advantage versus Republicans? Yup.

Democrats Independents Republicans Total FL Voters 5,199,964 2,867,672 4,406,370 12,474,006 Newly Reg'd 144,468 141,621 101,025 387,114 in 2009

Democrats outpaced both Republicans and Independents, not exactly the sign of a moribund and flailing party. And the party's voter registration advantage is now almost 800,000 larger than Republicans, and Democrats retain dominant numbers among the fastest growing demographic segments. Among the newly registered:

Democrats Independents Republicans Total African-Am 36,626 11,826 1,713 50,165 Hispanic 28,158 24,468 9,483 62,109 Caucasian 71,659 93,480 86,124 251,263 Other 8,025 11,847 3,705 23,577

While there's no way of knowing for sure, that 93K in white Independents probably has a heavy dose of teabaggers, and overall, among white voters, Democrats still do poorly. In fact, they got just 29 percent of new white voters. But their strength in the fast growing non-white communities more than offset that gap. And those Hispanic numbers are particularly noteworthy in a state in which Cuban-Americans have held disproportionate sway -- only 15 percent of new Latino registrants are opting for the GOP.

It's not just voter registrations, either.

In 2009, the Florida Democratic Party raised a record $6,764,946, almost twice our historical average for a non‐election year.

More importantly however is the amount of money the Florida Democratic Party saved in the off year in order to have the resources needed to elect Democrats across the Sunshine State. By being fiscally responsible with our party’s donations, we enter 2010 with $2,630,067 cash on hand. After the [Republican Party of Florida] announced that their party entered 2010 with just $1.59 million on hand this past weekend, we now know that the Florida Democratic Party has an eye‐popping $1.04 million cash on hand advantage.

Florida Dems think the national climate, rather than being anti-Democratic, is actually anti-incumbent, a real benefit in a state in which it holds deep minorities and few statewide elected offices. Statewide gains in Florida wouldn't just have the immediate benefit of helping the state's residents escape Republican mismanagement, but would shore up the ground game ahead of the 2012 elections.

Democrats would have to pick up 17 seats in the 120-member state House, or seven seats in the 40-seat Senate to take those chambers, so that's a tall order for this cycle. Unfortunate, since the deep Democratic holes are in large part due to the state's gerrymandering, and that legislature will draw new districts after the 2010 elections. But majorities are built over time, and while the noise in 2009 all came from the teabagger side, fact is Democrats aren't down and out. Rather, the opposite is true.

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/iPpyXcHF5uA/-Dems-surge-in-Florida

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Vigil Witness: Worthington on Democracy NOW!

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 12 January 2010 11:24:29 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Andy Worthington guests on on Democracy NOW! Jan 08, 2010: After Years in Guantanamo Prison Without Charge, Future Even More Uncertain for Yemeni DetaineesANDY WORTHINGTON: You know, and the Pentagon consistently produces these kind of-this kind of[...]

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n-on-democracy-now

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Obama administration braces for reports of bank
profits by weighing new financial tax

The Harry Reid scandal probably is not going to hurt overall Democratic electoral and legislative[...]

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tion-braces-for-reports-of-bank-profits-by-weighing-new-financial-tax

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Let me count the ways ...

Milking it for so much more than its worth:

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-...

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95% of Blacks View Obama Favorably, Says Pew Poll

Citing a Pew Poll that's 112 pages long, the WaPost says:

Thirty-nine percent of blacks -- nearly twice as many as in 2007 -- say that the "situation of black people in this country" is better than it was five years earlier. That view holds among blacks of all age groups and income levels. Similarly, 56 percent of blacks and nearly two-thirds of whites say the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks has narrowed in the past decade. Still, when asked about the problems facing black families, a majority said there were not enough jobs and there were too many problems with drugs and alcoholism, crime and poor public education.

Meanwhile, there is a clear difference between the poll numbers and what Black bloggers are saying online, as reported by the WaPost:

Don Scoggins, president of Republicans for Black Empowerment, asked, "Where do we go from here?" on the blog Booker Rising. "Skin color aside, which within the Black community has perennially been a controversial topic, Senator Reid's apology . . . only confirms the unsaid feeling among many liberals who think they own everything related to civil rights and that the black community should be forever grateful yet [they] appear incredulous that an African American can speak proper English and actually embody what are regarded as white attributes even better than some of 'them'. "

Jill Tubman, a blogger on the liberal African American political site Jack and Jill Politics, said Reid's comments won't get a full airing because it is not a topic Obama wants to discuss. "I don't know what serenity prayer Obama says each day or what zen meditation allows him to breathe deeply with confronted with this kind of thing but he's going to need to share it with the rest of us African-Americans if he expects us to go along to get along like he does," wrote Tubman, who pronounced herself "deeply disappointed" by Reid.

If you read the WaPost article, Pew reports that 36% of voters say "race relations" have improved since Obama's election (and so 64 percent DON'T say that skin-color-associated issues have changed). Over the last year, there's been a twenty percent drop in Black's belief that Obama's election would improve color-associated American issues.

Only 13 percent of whites said Obama is paying too much attention to the concerns of blacks, and most blacks said Obama was paying the right amount of attention to their concerns. WaPost

Obama's got to be happy about that, because it means he's been successful in talking and doing sufficiently little specifically about Blacks that whites don't think we've been a focus of his attention. That bodes well for his re-election efforts, at least among whites.

Still, support for Obama among African Americans is even higher: 95 percent view him favorably. Among whites, 56 percent have a favorable view of the president and 38 percent of whites say their opinion of him is unfavorable, including 21 percent with a very unfavorable view. Last year at this time, 76 percent of whites gave Obama positive ratings. Pew's study attributed Obama's downward slide among whites to partisanship. Among white Democrats, nearly nine in 10 have a favorable view of Obama.

Read The Full Article:
http://francislholland.blogspot.com/2010/01/95-of-blacks-view-obama-favorably-say
s.html

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