Howard Kurtz reports that former Arkansas governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will join Fox News as a political contributor. As a McCain surrogate, Huckabee will find ample company at Fox. Fox is expected to announce the deal later today. (HT: TVNewser)

Pew reports on the National Popular Vote movement gaining steam, with NPV proposals having passed in Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois with bills on the move in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island.

The way this works is that an NPV state commits to giving its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote if and only if states possessing a total of 270 electoral votes agree to do the same. This will, if enough states sign on, provide a “backdoor” way of transitioning to electing the president via popular vote without going through the all-but-impossible Article V amendment process. Thus far, obviously, you’re seeing NPV pass in liberal states. But some cycle or other something will happen that gets conservatives worried about this. And there are plenty of right-wing states — Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina — that are too big to benefit from the electoral college’s overweighting of small states, and whose interests currently get ignored in presidential campaigns since they’re not “battlegrounds.”

In a speech before the Chamber of Commerce yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney – the former CEO of the oil services company Halliburton — called for a substantial increase in domestic drilling for oil and other natural resources.

In his speech, Cheney claimed that China is pumping for oil off the coast of Florida, noting that “even the Communists” understand the need for more drilling:

It’s my own view that we should be drilling in ANWR in an environmentally responsible way, which could increase our daily domestic oil production by as much as a million barrels a day. As for other locations, George Will pointed out in his column the other day that oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida. But we’re not doing it, the Chinese are, in cooperation with the Cuban government. Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply.

Mother Jones and the Gavel note that Reps. John Boehner (R-OH) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) have uttered the same talking points. It’s false. And they’re being called out on it by a conservative senator who knows more about the issue than they do.

Armed with maps and reports, Sen. Mel Martinez – a Florida Republican who served in Bush’s cabinet – took to the Senate floor to dispute Cheney’s claim:

Despite what is cited as fact here in the Senate and in other places, China is not drilling off the coast of Cuba. … Reports to the contrary are simply false. … So any talk of using some fabricated China/Cuba connection as an argument to change U.S. policy, in my view, has no merit.

Watch it:

Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, disputed Cheney’s prescription. “The only people who would benefit from more oil drilling are the oil companies,” he said.

The United States has less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, while consuming 25 percent of the world’s oil. Our own oil supply, without foreign imports, would last just three years. Drilling is not the solution.

As Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), the Chairman of House Select Committee on Energy Independence, said yesterday, “Even if we are able to drill every last drop of domestic reserves and are able to prod OPEC into further feeding our addition by increasing capacity, we are left with a much greater problem: Our planet will choke on all of that CO2.”

The Army public affairs office publishes a daily roundup of Army-related news, mostly linking to “mainstream media articles, Army press releases, foreign media stories and blogs.” A link in Tuesday’s round-up, however, was “unusual” for its “patent political bias.” It read: “Obama: World peace thru surrender (KDIHH).” Phillip Carter at the Washington Post notes what’s wrong with this story:

Seriously? Have any of these people actually read the Obama defense policy papers or speeches — or are they simply going on what they hear on Fox News and the Limbaugh network?

And more to the point, why is the Army’s official in-house public affairs shop linking to this kind of stuff? Just a few weeks ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told all hands to stay out of politics. … Unfortunately, the message didn’t get to through to the Army.