In a few months, Californians will vote on Proposition 87, a ballot initiative that aims to reduce gasoline usage by 25 percent over 10 years. Specifically, the initiative creates an alternative energy fund by making oil companies pay extraction fees for drilling in California, much like they do in Louisiana, Alaska, and Texas.

Not surprisingly, the oil industry-funded opposition campaign is misleading the public about its impact:

Raising the cost of California oil will make companies more willing to import foreign oil into the state, which could raise pump prices, said Al Lundeen, a spokesman for the anti-Prop. 87 forces.

“We think it will very clearly impact consumers,” he said.

The initiative also would create a new state bureaucracy to administer the tax money, he said, and while California is one of few oil-producing states without an oil severance tax like this one, the other taxes it charges oil producers more than make up for that.

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In recent weeks, Focus on the Family has mailed brochures to more than 90,000 Missouri homes, arguing that stem cell research under the Missouri ballot initiative would exploit women by luring them into dangerous egg donations. The brochure, “Women’s voices against cloning,” quotes several women’s organizations to show “the risks that this measure [Missouri ballot initiative] poses to women’s health.”

Women’s organizations quoted in the brochure tell ThinkProgress that Focus on the Family has misrepresented their positions and that they actually oppose the organization’s aims to ban stem cell research.

Judy Norsigian, author of Our Bodies, Ourselves, said that while she has some concerns about the somatic cell nuclear transplant (SCNT) technique, she is actually “very supportive of most embryonic stem cell research.” She also said Focus on the Family was “obfuscating [her] language” to support its own political purposes.

Focus on the Family also quoted Sujatha Jesudason from the Center for Genetics and Society. We spoke to Emily Galpern from that same organization, who also said that her organization supports some stem cell research. “One of our concerns is that conservative folks are co-opting feminist language to suit their cause,” Galpern told the St. Louis Dispatch. Galpern told ThinkProgress that groups like Focus on the Family are “taking women’s health advocates language for their larger goal of trying to stop embryonic stem cell research.”

At a press briefing moments ago, Tony Snow claimed that last night’s Connecticut Senate primary gave voters the chance to answer the question, “Do you take the war on terror seriously?” Snow said that Connecticut voters who backed Ned Lamont (and the 57 percent of Americans who support his position on Iraq) were choosing to “ignore the difficulties and walk away.” That is the same approach, he said, that led Osama bin Laden to the conclusion “that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course and that led to September 11th.” Watch it:

Digg It!

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With the Bush administration refusing to hold direct talks with Syria, Col. David Hunt, military analyst for Fox News, appeared on Hannity & Colmes last night to offer some advice to the president: “I think we can talk to them when we line them up and kill them.” Stating that “the only reason to talk to some of these guys is to just do that,” Hunt went on to argue that America should “absolutely, 100 percent” seek regime change in both Syria and Iran if they’re “not going to cooperate.” Watch it:

Strangely, after his tirade, Hunt acknowledged that in some cases, “we have to directly talk to these guys to find out what they want.”

– Scott Keyes

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ABC’s George Stephanopoulos reports, “According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President’s political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: ‘The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do.’”

has led Shiite leaders to push a “radical plan to partition the country as a way of separating the warring sects. Some Iraqis are even talking about dividing the capital, with the Tigris River as a kind of Berlin Wall.”

Scott Winship has more up on the Prospect website about the ideological proclivities of the netroots. It occurs to me reading his article that it’s worth keeping in mind that what “the netroots” is is, at this point, almost certainly something of a moving target.

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Bonner Cohen is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, where he is paid by the fossil fuel industry to distort the facts about global warming and other environmental issues. He works closely with Steve “Junkman” Milloy, who is one of the leading promoters of misinformation about global warming through his website, junkscience.com.

Today, as a guest on C-SPAN’s National Journal, Bonner claimed that the “vast majority” of climatologists are “agnostic” on global warming. Bonner explained that meant they weren’t convinced “there is a causal relationship between emissions of greenhouse gases and [warming] the climate.” In the end, climatologists might conclude the impact of greenhouse gases is “the exact opposite.” Watch it:

This is completely false. Thousands of scientists — participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — have agreed that global warming is real and humans are responsible for much of it.

In the video above, a caller challenges Bonner to name climatologists who dispute that greenhouse gas emissions warm the climate. He fails to name a single one.

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