June 8, 2005: Media reveals Philip Cooney — a White House official who worked for the oil industry before joining the administration — is altering government documents to downplay links between fossil fuels and global warming.

A White House official [Philip Cooney] who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

June 10, 2005: Amid controversy Cooney Resigns.

Philip A. Cooney, the chief of staff to President Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality, resigned yesterday, White House officials said.

June 13, 2005: Cooney hired by ExxonMobil.

Philip A. Cooney, the White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for ExxonMobil in the fall, the oil company said today.

In case you have any doubt about why ExxonMobil hired him, check out this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Openly and unapologetically, the world’s No. 1 oil company disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Along with the Bush administration, Exxon opposes the Kyoto accord and the very idea of capping global-warming emissions.

The headlines will read that Cooney was hired by Exxon today. The reality is he never stopped working there. The taxpayers were just taking care of his salary for the last few years.

On June 7, the Pentagon’s Inspector General revealed that the department had signed off on a deal with Boeing that cheated taxpayers out of billions:

Top U.S. weapons buyers bypassed normal procedures in an “inappropriate” rush to acquire $23.5 billion of Boeing Co. aircraft as refueling planes, the Pentagon’s chief inspector said Tuesday.

Congress killed the deal last year after Darleen Druyun, the Air Force’s ex-No. 2 weapons purchaser, pleaded guilty to negotiating a $250,000-a-year job at Boeing while still overseeing billions in the company’s Air Force contracts.

[Snip]

Schmitz said his investigation showed other officials at the Air Force, Pentagon and White House, as well as members of Congress, helped craft a deal that one Pentagon official in August 2002 described as “a bailout for Boeing.”

Interviews by the IG staff indicate that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld supported the crooked Boeing contract. Asked about his involvement in the deal at a press conference today, Rumsfeld said he couldn’t recall if he had approved it or not:

QUESTION: And can you speak to your role in approving that deal? There is some contradiction within that report about whether you were actively involved in making the decision to proceed with that deal or whether that decision was left up to Undersecretary Aldridge.

RUMSFELD: And this is in this report?

QUESTION: Yes, and in the testimony, the inspector general’s staff said that they interviewed you and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz and that their impression was, or what they understood from those interviews was that you had let Aldridge make that decision and then supported it. I’m wondering if you can give us your recollection of this.

RUMSFELD: I’d have to go back and read this and then talk to the people involved to refresh myself.

Isn’t that convenient.

Morgan Spurlock is at it again. The man who exposed the unsavory side of fast food in the popular documentary Supersize Me takes on minimum wage in his new series “30 Days.” In the show, which launches tomorrow night on FX, Spurlock will submerge an average American in a completely different lifestyle for one month. (The Center For American Progress is holding an advance screening of the show in Washington, DC tonight.) For his first episode, Spurlock decided to explore exactly how hard it is to live on a minimum wage income for thirty days. He and his fiancee, Alex, moved to Columbus, OH and lived on $5.15 an hour for a month. They found out it’s pretty impossible. Here are the facts behind minimum wage in America:

4.3 million: Number of Americans who have fallen into poverty since President Bush took office

$5.15: Federal minimum wage

26%: How much the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has eroded since 1979

0: Number of times minimum wage has increased since 1997

7: Number of times Congress has increased its own pay since 1997

$0: How much more a year people earning minimum wage earn today compared to 1997

$28,500: How much more a year members of Congress make today compared to 1997

$10,700: Amount a person making minimum wage will earn in a year

$5,000: Amount below the poverty level working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year at minimum wage will leave a family of three

7,300,000: Number of workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage

72%: Percentage of adult workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage

1,800,000: Number of parents with kids under the age of 18 who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage

11 million: Number of jobs added to the economy in the four years after the last minimum wage hike

$8.70: Amount minimum wage would have to be today to have the same purchasing power it had in 1968

2.5 years: Amount of health care for two children which could be bought by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25

86%: Percentage of Americans who support raising the federal minimum wage

This morning Bill Frist said that delaying a vote on Bolton to get more information is wrong:

[T]he other side is unreasonably and irresponsibly filibustering this nominee [John Bolton].

In November, Bill Frist — defending his vote to postpone a vote on Judge Richard Paez — said delaying a vote to get more information was OK:

Filibuster, cloture, it gets confusing–as a scheduling or to get more information is legitimate.

Today Frist emphasized that it was time for a vote on Bolton because it’s been “over 200 days ago that the position of the U.N. ambassador came open” It’s been only 99 days since Bolton was nominated. At the time Frist voted to prevent an up-or-down vote on Paez his nomination had been pending 1,156 days.

Governor Schwarzenegger is changing the nature of democracy in California by bypassing the state legislature and submitting three key bills straight to referendum in November special elections. After his election almost two years ago in the highly unorthodox open ballot format, polls show his approval ratings are at an all time low. Now, Schwarzenegger turning again to the initiative system to salvage his floundering political career.

What is so troubling about this sentiment is that California is abandoning the legislature with all its safeguards for the minority in favor of a new kind of democracy that makes it extremely costly for anyone to advocate their opinion. Groups like the California teachers union that opposes the issues in Schwarzenegger’s elections package will spend an exorbitant amount of money promoting their ideas. The teachers union is already charging its member an extra $60 in member dues in an attempt to raise $50 million that will go towards fighting Schwarzenegger’s legislation.

The special elections are also going to cost the state of California. In a state that already spends $1.10 for every dollar of state tax money, Schwarzenegger’s November special elections will cost the state an additional 45 million dollars. Many have called the elections a horribly “wasteful” use of money considering there is no real reason to move up a vote on the ballot issues. Schwarzenegger’s new form of democracy certainly gives a new meaning to the phrase the cost of doing business.

- Andrea Dinneen

Rev. Bill Banuchi, head of the right-wing extremist group the “New York Christian Coalition,” thinks gays should have to wear warning labels.

We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we ‘celebrate’ a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average lifespan.

Banuchi is basing his hateful claim on a “study” done by the anti-gay Family Research Institute. Their crack research consisted entirely of reading a few obituaries from gay newspapers and averaging the ages. (The Family Research Institute is the same group which is attacking macaroni-and-cheese giant Kraft Foods because the company is a sponsor of next year’s Gay Games, an annual Olympics meant to promote tolerance, acceptance and understanding.)

What’s next, Rev. Banuchi? Forcing homosexuals to wear pink triangles?

Some of our “allies” in the War on Terror have been in the news as of late. Let’s take stock of how President Bush’s “friends” are doing:

Uzbekistan: “Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government’s shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.”

Pakistan: “No wonder the Pakistan government can’t catch Osama bin Laden. It is too busy harassing, detaining – and now kidnapping – a gang-rape victim for daring to protest and for planning a visit to the United States.”

Saudi Arabia: A recent State Department report states, “Saudi Arabia is a destination for men and women from South and East Asia and East Africa trafficked for the purpose of labor exploitation, and for children from Yemen, Afghanistan, and Africa trafficking for forced begging…some fall into conditions of involuntary servitude, suffering from physical and sexual abuse, non-payment or delayed payment of wages, the withholding of travel documents, restrictions on their freedom of movement and non-consensual contract alterations. Read more

In an interview taped for MSNBC’s Hardball tonight, host Chris Matthews asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whether she recalled having the meetings with the British officials that were discussed in the Downing Street Minutes. Here was her response:

SECRETARY RICE: “Well, of course David Manning is a fine public servant, and an extraordinary foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Blair, and we had a number of conversations. I don’t remember this one in particular ” [MSNBC Hardball, 6/13/05]

So let’s recap. When asked about the Downing Street Minutes, the White House Press Secretary first said he hadn’t read it, and then later urged people to “go back and look at all the public comments over the course of the lead-up to the war in Iraq.” When Bush was asked, he said he too hadn’t read the full memo but did not dispute its authenticity nor the charges contained it it. And now, Secretary Rice claims not to remember the conversations at all. These are hardly the types of answers that should put the charges to rest. But that’s in fact what Chris Matthews tried to do in the interview last night:

MATTHEWS: Before we go on, that second memorandum that has been talked about, the one that was originally dubbed the “Downing Street Memo,” said that the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy. What do you make of that word “fixed”? Is that an assertion that we were “fixing” the argument, making a case for intel that said there was a connection with al-Qaida, a connection with WMD, just to get the war started?

RICE: Well, I don’t understand. I can’t go back and judge what was said.

MATTHEWS: What happened with that word “fixed”, which is like “fix the World – fix the World Series”-

RICE: Right.

MATTHEWS: There’s a British sense, which means just put things together.

RICE: Put things together.

It’s a pretty hard-hitting interview when you ask and answer your own questions. The newly-revealed British Briefing Papers yesterday showed that the British had grave doubts about pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and they lend further support to the idea that “fixed,” as stated in the Downing Street Minutes, meant the U.S. was manipulating the intelligence to make the case for war.

UPDATE:Vice President Cheney was asked about the Downing Street Minutes yesterday as well. He claimed not to have read the two-page document.

Cheney: “I haven’t seen the so-called Downing Street memo.” [Remarks at Ford Journalism Awards, 6/13/05]

It’s no shocker that, as today’s Wall Street Journal points out, ExxonMobil continues to balk at any effort to curb emissions linked to global warming.

But it is appalling to learn that BP, which even incorporated the color green into its logo, is lobbying just as aggressively against Senate efforts to limit global warming pollution. The Independent newspaper in the UK reported over the weekend that BP is showing “two faces” — marketing itself to the public as an environmentally progressive company, while “privately lobbying in Washington to block legislation to introduce a mandatory curb on greenhouse gases in the US.”

The oil companies are uniting to focus special fire on what is considered a “moderate” plan on global warming, modeled on recommendations of the National Commission on Energy Policy, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) has suggested he may introduce the plan as an amendment to the energy bill on the Senate floor this week and next. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s lobbying arm, has denounced the Energy Commission plan in a series of increasingly frantic e-mails distributed on Capitol Hill.

The Energy Information Administration recently reported that the commission plan, which would set a limit on global warming pollution, would have little negative impact on the economy, despite the claims of the oil companies.

– Frank O’Donnell, Clean Air Watch