I spent a part of my weekend catching up on the CNN/YouTube debates. Seems as though they felt it was best to ask the hardest questions (What are you going to do about Global Warming? How will you fund your proposed programs now that the US is practically bankrupt?) of the marginal candidates. Nothing against Kucinich, Gravel, Richardson or Dodd; but if the media is primping Obama, Clinton, and Edwards for a win, you'd think they'd get the big puzzlers. They got more face time overall, but the treatment was softer.
Another thing I noticed was Edwards' grousing about the Iraqi Parliament taking a vacation. Edwards tried to put this on the White House, indicating they had allowed the Parliament the time off. What went unquestioned was why the Iraqi Parliament would be in a position to have to ask the White House's permission to conduct its business in the first place. Edwards hinted that the vacation would lead to further deaths of American soldiers. Yesterday, American leadership's dismay over this vacation was all over the news. Edwards and many, many others--Democrat and Rupublican alike--would like to see the Iraqis pass some key pieces of legislation before they will consider removing American soldiers from Iraq. Just what is on the docket for the Iraqi Parliament when they return in September? The oil law, of course, the proposal to distribute up to 75% of Iraqi oil revenues to multinational oil companies for the next 30 years. NPR yesterday uncritically reported the White House is saying this law needs to be passed to cut funding to the insurgents.
The Democratic front-runners have so far been silent about this law, while being dodgy about when or why American soldiers would be removed from Iraq. If this law passes without a peep from the Democratic party, they will have been complicit in perhaps the largest heist in the history of the world.
Anything They Say has a good round-up of the recent state of affairs vis a vis the oil law.
But I'll leave the last words to the workers of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, who have been fighting the passage of this law from the beginning, and who have the broad support of the Iraqi population to do so.
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