On May 19 the Cuban government accused Michael Parmly, outgoing head of the US Interests Section in Havana, of supplying opponents of the government with money from Cuban American right-winger Santiago Alvarez Fernandez-Magrinat, who is currently serving a 46-month prison sentence in the US for illegally stockpiling weapons.

On May 21, as oil prices leaped to an unprecedented $133 a barrel, Big Oil's biggest executives got grilled on the Senate floor. "Where is the corporate conscience?" Sen. Dick Durbin asked execs from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP America, Shell Oil and ConocoPhilips. Together the five companies earned $36 billion during the first three months of 2008. Their answers trotted out all the usual propaganda tactics...

Barack Obama just can't win with some people. Either he's too Muslim, or not Muslim enough. In a bizarre op-ed in the New York Times May 12, "President Apostate," Edward Luttwak warns :

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is "irtidad" or "ridda," usually translated from the Arabic as "apostasy," but with connotations of rebellion and treason...

In a piece ominously entitled "The Oil Nonbubble," Paul Krugman in the New York Times May 12 astutely calls out both right-wing optimism that the "oil bubble" would burst—and right-wing scapegoating now that it hasn't:

"The Oil Bubble: Set to Burst?" That was the headline of an October 2004 article in National Review, which argued that oil prices, then $50 a barrel, would soon collapse.

Get this. The Senate fails to pass the new FAA reauthorization bill—because of "non-aviation provisions" that would have doubled the tax on oil spills, using the revenues to replenish the strapped Highway Trust Fund! And this is deemed so un-newsworthy (even with the headlines full of the Clinton-McCain gas tax holiday hoopla) that the only media outlets that even make passing note of it are aviation trade journals like Helicopter Association International (May 2). Now, surely this tax must be onerous, a true burden on the oil industry, right? Well, a Petroleum Marketers Association of America report of March 24, 2006 (when the tax was re-instated after a ten-year lapse) informs us that the current tax is...five cents per gallon (as opposed to 18.4 cents per gallon that consumers pay Uncle Sam at the pump). And with a significant reduction for "petroleum products" and "alternative fuels" such as ethanol and bio-diesel. Additionally, the oil companies are allowed to "pass on" the tax to consumers at the pump.

Never mind the silly Canadian angle. The really sinister thing here is the embryonic hybridization of man and machine—a phenomenon we have already predicted. From the Canadian Press, May 5:

Canadian military looking for Iron Man-type suits for overburdened soldiers
OTTAWA — Iron Man Canuck may be appearing soon at a theatre near you. The Defence Department posted a contract tender Monday asking companies for proposals for high-tech body suits that could help Canadian soldiers carry bigger loads into battle.

The US administration has finally seen fit to release another group of prisoners from Guantánamo, including the Sudanese AlJazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. Despite claims from within the administration that it was hoping to scale down operations at Guantánamo, no prisoners have been released since December 2007, when two other Sudanese, 13 Afghans, ten Saudis and three British residents were released. Instead, one prisoner died—of cancer—and another prisoner was actually transferred into Guantánamo from a secret prison run by the CIA. (AlterNet, May 2)

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.