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.

Alfonso Chardy writes for the Miami Herald, May 3 (links added):

Militant Cuban exile honored
A beaming Luis Posada Carriles hugged and shook hands with hundreds of supporters late Friday as he arrived at a club in west Miami-Dade fo a dinner in his honor.

Our April issue featured the story "The Audacity of Vagueness: Barack Obama and Latin America," by Nikolas Kozloff of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Wrote Kozloff: "Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, has not been very eager to comprehensively address Latin America as an issue. In recent years, the region has undergone a major tectonic shift towards the left, surely prompting many to wonder how the young Illinois Senator might deal with progressive change throughout the hemisphere were he elected to the White House. Would he seek to continue the rabidly hawkish stance of the Bush administration towards such nations as Venezuela, or could he be convinced to broker a rapprochement?" We have noted before Obama's alarmingly bellicose rhetoric on Pakistan. Our April Exit Poll was: "Are you rooting for Barack Obama? With or without grave misgivings?" As an Extra Credit question, we asked: "Will Cheney pull an 'October Surprise'?" We received the following responses:

Talk about chutzpah. The right-wing blogosphere is ballistic over Barack Obama's rather tenuous ties to a former member of the Weather Underground. It was Hillary Clinton who first made an issue of the fact that Obama once served on the board of Chicago's progressive Woods Fund with ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers. Hillary later pleaded ignorance when reminded that her husband pardoned one member of the Weather Underground and commuted the sentence of another. (Huffington Post, April 17) Particularly hot under the collar about the fact that Ayers has any place at all in respectable American society is Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily. After running down a litany of Ayers' and Bernardine Dohrn's rioting, bombing, travels to Cuba, juvenile rhetoric about killing your parents, etc., he fumes: