A Global Goring 

Moscow – The nations with the world’s three biggest reserves of natural gas – Russia, Iran, and Qatar – are quietly moving ahead to form a “gas OPEC,” an organization modeled after the oil cartel.
In Tehran last week, representatives of the Russian natural-gas monopoly Gazprom met with counterparts from Iran and Qatar and agreed to [...]

(New York Times) - In case anyone was wondering if Ohio was a combat zone for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, consider that five days before the election the candidate took a 220-mile, six-stop, 12-hour bus tour across the northern breadth of the state. Along the way, he deployed his unofficial running mate, a disappearing [...]

It’s slowly killing the McCain candidacy and, like most poisons, it eventually gets around to the vital organs:
59 percent of voters surveyed said that Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up 9 percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said that the vice-presidential selection would be [...]

Asked by a third-grader what a vice president does, Republican candidate Sarah Palin responded that the vice president is the president’s “team mate” but also “runs the Senate” and “can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes.”
While aimed at a typical 8-year-old, Palin’s explanations oversimplify the Constitution’s [...]

What we have here — to borrow a line from the old movie “Cool Hand Luke” — is a failure to communicate. By all rights, we should be having a fierce debate over the role of government. What should it do, for whom and why? What can we afford? Who should pay? These questions would [...]

Cane farmers burn off at a cane farm near Sertaozinho, about 200 miles north-east of Sao Paulo. Brazil, the world’s largest producer and exporter of sugar and ethanol, is a pioneer in the use of ethanol made from sugar cane to power cars.
The apostles of biofuels would have us believe that the congested streets of [...]

Damn, that Alaskan broad  really used both barrels last night, eh? No wonder, too, with a gazillion Photoshopped babies like the one to the left being spread ’round the country faster than word the McCain/Palin is a bomb ticket. Girl just can’t get no respect.
We therefore fully sympathize with Ms. P’s perfectly lip-lined—and glossed—mouthiness. I [...]

A MoveOn.org Political Action ad plays the partisan blame game with the economic crisis, charging that John McCain’s friend and former economic adviser Phil Gramm “stripped safeguards that would have protected us.” The claim is bogus. Gramm’s legislation had broad bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Clinton. Moreover, the bill had nothing [...]

“As Alaska governor, Sarah Palin actively promotes the brutal and unethical aerial hunting of wolves and other wildlife,” the ad’s announcer says. “And Palin even encouraged the cruelty by proposing a $150 bounty for the severed foreleg of each killed wolf, and then introduced a bill to make the killing easier.”
Palin supports the aerial hunting [...]

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who touts her state’s proximity to Russia as part of her foreign policy experience, has not met with Russian leaders or delegations, negotiated any Russian issues or visited the country, according to an Associated Press review of records from the governor’s office.
The review showed that the Republican vice presidential candidate has [...]