McCain’s Oil Money
The latest campaign kerfuffle is the shocking fact that John McCain is receiving significant donations from the oil industry. A new Obama ad says the amount is $2.1 million; FactCheck.org says it's a mere $1.33 million. Either way, it's about triple what the industry is giving to Obama. More damning, critics say, is that there has been an uptick in oil ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 5, 2008 08:31
Congressional Approval at Record Low, Republicans More Likely than Democrats to Approve
President Bush isn't alone in being unpopular: Congress is down to 14 percent approval, the lowest in the history of the Gallup poll. While the approval numbers are the worst ever, there is a silver lining: "The 75% currently disapproving of Congress is just shy of the record-high 78% in March 1992" Lydia Saad calls these numbers "extraordinary." Approval ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 16, 2008 09:07
Gas Stations Charging More for Credit Card Users?
Some gas stations are secretly charging credit card users more, ABC News reports. (Video here.) Many Americans have taken up a new hobby -- hunting for the gas station with the lowest prices. But the hunt has gotten exponentially harder as the price of oil has skyrocketed and the posted price may not even be advertised, especially if the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 10, 2008 13:22
McCain on Gas Prices: ‘I Don’t See How it Matters’ (Corrected)
In a recent interview with the Orange County Register's Martin Wisckol, John McCain said that, not only doesn't he know how much gas costs, it doesn't matter. (Tangentially related: "Nothin' Matters and What If It Did" was an excellent album title. The album itself was so-so.) When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 29, 2008 08:28
McCain Proposes Prize for Battery Breakthrough
John McCain has proposed offering a $300 million dollar prize to the developer of "breakthrough battery technology."Senator John McCain on Monday proposed the creation of a $300 million prize for anyone who developed breakthrough car-battery technology and he recommended greater tax incentives for buyers of nonpolluting autos, saying that only a combination of increased oil production, conservation measures and ingenuity ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 23:17
Subsidizing Home Ownership
Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it. He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today's NYT that it's time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. While everyone stresses the advantages of owning ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 13:32
Obama Has 15 Point Lead in Newsweek Poll
A Newsweek poll of registered voters shows Barack Obama with a whopping 15-point lead over John McCain, 51 to 36. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh is stoked. Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 21, 2008 08:38
5 Reasons to Love $4 Gas
The gang at Foreign Policy wants you to know that, "Sure, it’s ruining the global economy and making everyone miserable, but there’s an underappreciated upside to the high price of oil." They'd have to be awfully good to offset ruining the economy and making everyone miserable, no? Well, here they are: Slightly more people may be taking mass transit. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 20, 2008 07:24
Were There No Oil Spills From Katrina?
In the comments to my latest post on domestic oil production, in which I continue my skepticism over the benefits to more domestic oil production, a number of claims were made in the comments that raised some interesting issues. So I thought it might be worthwhile if I went ahead and investigated some of these claims and presented the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 20, 2008 02:31
Is it Worth Drilling For More Domestic Oil?
Newt Gingrich's American Solutions group has mounted an online petition designed to persuade Congress to open up domestic sites that are currently closed to oil and natural gas exploration. That's certainly an understandable sentiment, given the skyrocketing increases in the price of oil over the past couple of years. But opening up for exploration is not going to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 11, 2008 10:39
