Thursday, June 19, 2008 - Posts
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It’s only fitting that the most bizarre press conference of
this political season had an equally bizarre coda. Larry Sinclair, the man who
claims to have had a naughty encounter with Barack Obama back in 1999, stood at
a podium at the National Press Club, rattling off a litany of increasingly detailed minutiae
about the incident before taking questions and exiting the building. He was arrested
on his way out.
Sinclair’s rap sheet is well-documented.
He has been charged with everything from larceny to theft to forgery, and drew
a 16-year prison sentence in Colorado
in 1987. He was released in 1999. Now it looks like he’ll be facing a new
charge: Larceny, this time in Delaware.
Two members of the U.S. Marshals’ Regional Fugitive
Task Force took him into custody after the press conference was over, says
his lawyer, Montgomery
Blair Sibley. The extradition hearing was scheduled for late this
afternoon. If Sinclair gets bail, he can travel to Delaware himself to turn himself in to
authorities. If not, he’ll have to travel in federal custody.
Sibley said he believes someone tipped off the Delaware authorities. “Obviously,
Larry’s presence in D.C. was not a surprise or secret,” he said. “They put two
and two together.”
He said he didn’t know the specific charge, but was told it
was some form of larceny.
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John McCain is taking heat right now for reversing his
position on the federal ban on coastal oil drilling, as if flip-flopping itself
were the cardinal sin here. But the biggest problem is the notion that lifting
the ban will affect gas and oil prices in the short term.
With gas prices topping four dollars a gallon, McCain
explains his switch as an attempt to give Americans relief at the pump. Florida
Gov. Charlie Crist justified
his late conversion in similar terms: “Floridians are suffering.” A Rasmussen
poll released today showed
that 61 percent of Florida
voters agree drilling would bring down the cost of oil and gas.
The problem is, it won’t—at least not
for the next seven years. Here’s the reason, per the Wall Street Journal:
With the disputed areas long off-limits even to exploration,
neither government nor industry experts know exactly how much oil and gas is
there, how best to get at it, or even where it is. And although the industry's
environmental record is much improved since headline-grabbing oil spills of
earlier eras, risks remain, and addressing those risks could delay production
for years.
So the notion that it’s going to affect oil prices in the next
few months is pretty outlandish.
But even long-term, drilling doesn’t fix much. America’s
coastal regions have an estimated 19 billion barrels’ worth of oil. The biggest
prize—California’s
southern coast, with an estimated 5.6 billion barrels of oil—has been declared
off-limits by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The next-biggest score, in the Gulf of Mexico, is estimated at 3.7 billion barrels. The United States
consumes 20
million barrels of petroleum a day, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Which means even the maximum amount of drillable oil would only get the U.S.
about two and a half years’ worth of fuel. Realistically, we’d get a lot less.
Even Karl Rove has dissed
McCain for spouting "economic nonsense." (Rove goes after Obama, too.) McCain’s
rationale for drilling doesn't inspire either.
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Now that Barack Obama has opted out of public financing for the general, it means John McCain is the only one taking cash from the public coffers. So if you checked off the $3 donation box on your tax returns—the source of national public campaign financing—your money is going to McCain and McCain alone. What happens to the cash Obama would have gotten?
It stays in the coffers. The Treasury maintains a Presidential Election Campaign Fund that rolls over from year to year. When you select the $3 check-off option on your annual tax returns, it goes directly into the fund, which gets allocated to primary candidates, general candidates, and the party nominating conventions. The amount each candidate receives in public funds depends on the amount raised. This year, each general-election candidate is eligible to receive $84.1 million in public funds.
So how much money is left over now that Obama is out? The fund’s balance at the end of May was $192.6 million, according to FEC spokesman Bob Biersack. That means the FEC will have more than $100 million left over to fund this year’s conventions and future campaigns.
In other words, taxpayers don’t have to worry (or celebrate) that their money is going only to John McCain. He’s not getting a larger portion of the $3 donations—the extra cash just gets allocated to other areas.
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