Historical events, it is said, occur twice: first as tragedy and then as farce. So it is with Donald Trump, the latest Republican White House hopeful to talk tough about the price of oil. After all, with his pledge to oil producing nations that "you're not going to raise that f**king price," Trump is just […]

Over just the past few months, Republicans on Capitol Hill have defended predatory health insurers, corrupt Wall Street bankers and criminal coal mining companies. Now with word that President Obama has secured a $20 billion, independently administered escrow fund from BP to help pay for its devastating oil spill in the Gulf, leading lights of […]

From almost the moment he was elected, Barack Obama has been counseled to channel the spirit of FDR in confronting both war and economic calamity. But with for the still unfolding oil spill disaster, President Obama needs a different role model. When CEO Tony Hayward and other BP executives come to the White House next […]

Somewhere in a gated community in Dallas, a former President of the United States is laughing very hard right now. A new ABC/Washington Post poll gives the Obama administration even lower marks for its response to the BP oil spill than to George W. Bush's calamitous bungling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. And so it […]

On May 7, 2001, press secretary Ari Fleischer uttered the four words that came to define the Bush administration's approach to the U.S. addiction to oil. Asked if Americans needed to "correct their lifestyles" to address the nation's energy vulnerability, Fleischer snapped, "That's a big no." And so, a government of the oil men, by […]

Just weeks after suggesting that slavery "didn't matter for diddly," Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour similarly tried and failed to whitewash the massive BP oil spill threatening the entire Gulf Coast. After telling an audience a week ago that "A bunch of liberal elites were hoping this would be the Three Mile Island of offshore drilling," […]

California Republican Darrell Issa appeared on Fox News Sunday to continue his crusade against President Obama over the Sestak no-pay-for-no-play non-scandal, this time calling for an FBI investigation. But over the past several weeks, Issa has also been the GOP's chief messenger in criticizing Obama's response to the BP catastrophe in the Gulf. Which is […]

During the 2008 campaign, John McCain said of his running mate Sarah Palin, "She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." As it turns out, not so much. The half-term Alaska Governor literally had no idea how much energy her state produced and suffered from selective amnesia over […]

As oil was spreading across the Gulf on April 29, AP reporter Calvin Woodward did some spreading of his own. Amplifying the predictable Republican talking point, Woodward asked, "Will this be Obama's Katrina?" Now a week later, his AP colleagues H. Josef Hebert and Erica Werner have responded with an emphatic no in an article […]