The price of oil shot up nearly $11 in just one day and settled at a record $138.54 per barrel today, “capp[ing] oil’s biggest two-day gain in the history of the New York Mercantile Exchange.” The skyrocketing prices come on the heels of a disappointing U.S. jobs report — which showed the largest monthly increase in unemployment since 1986 — and a prediction from a Morgan Stanley analyst that oil could reach $150 a barrel by July 4.

Noting that “prominent Democrats” had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what “remedy” there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

“Someone should have to pay in some way for the decisions that they made to mislead the American people,” said Clarke. He suggested that “some sort of truth and reconciliation commission” might be appropriate because, he said, we can’t “let these people back into polite society”:

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grieviously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

Watch it:

Unfortunately, as Clarke hints, most of the architects of the Iraq war are still fully embraced by “polite society.”

Some, like President Bush and Vice President Cheney, are still working in the White House. But for many of those who left, “the neocon welfare system” has been generous:

- Last fall, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was named a “distinguished visiting fellow” at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he focuses on “issues pertaining to ideology and terror.”

- After a controversial tenure as the president of the World Bank, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

- Richard Perle, the chairman of Defense Policy Board during the run up to the Iraq war, also landed on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a resident fellow.

Despite their re-emergence into “polite society,” these war architects have largely refused to admit that they lied. In fact, some, like former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, insist that the American people only feel misled about Iraq because “they misremember a lot.”

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Today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, reporter Courtney Hazlett commented on the recent fight between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee. Talking about Lee, Hazlett used the racially-loaded term “uppity” to describe the African-American film director. From this morning’s segment:

HOST: What’s going on here?

HAZLETT: What’s going on here is, during the Cannes Film Festival — I don’t know if you remember this — but Spike Lee got really uppity about Clint Eastwood and about how there were no African-Americans involved in the filming of “Flags of our Fathers” or “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

Watch it here. (via Atrios)