A Better Way To Lower The Price Of Gas

Try to bring peace to a war-torn gas supplier. Seriously. (h/t Ben Smith):

Rebels who have stepped up attacks on Nigeria’s oil industry in the last month said on Sunday they were considering a ceasefire appeal by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has launched five attacks on oil facilities in the Niger Delta since it resumed a campaign of violence in April, forcing Royal Dutch Shell to shut more than 164,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd).

“The MEND command is seriously considering a temporary ceasefire appeal by Senator Barack Obama. Obama is someone we respect and hold in high esteem,” the militant group said in an e-mailed statement.

If Obama can pull this off, he’ll have done more than Bush could to lower the price of gas — and saved a few thousand lives in the bargain. (Remember how Bush said we should vote for him because he could talk the Saudis into lowering gas prices? How’d that work out, eh?)

Hoo Boy

Not sure if this is Karl Rove’s and Rachel Paulose’s revenge, or a legitimate bust of guy abusing his Hatch Act oversight authority — or Rove taking advantage of a legitimate investigation to take out a threat to Rove. The FBI raid on OSC chief Scott Bloch’s DC offices is still big news:

The Inspector General for the Office of Personnel Management has been investigating Bloch for more than two years. He allegedly retaliated against career employees and obstructed an investigation.

He also admitted hiring the company “Geeks on Call” to purge his computer and two of his deputies’ computers. Bloch claimed the computers contained a virus; however, investigators are believed to suspect that he meant to destroy evidence.

The warrant to seize the computers apparently was part of an investigation of whether Bloch violated a Congressional mandate known as the Hatch Act. The act prohibits employees from using their offices for partisan political purposes.

The Office of Special Counsel was created by Congress after the Watergate scandal to protect federal whistleblowers.

Bloch has been a controversial figure since he was appointed by President Bush in 2004. One of his first official actions was to refuse to investigate claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Career employees in his office say Bloch blamed them for leaking the story and retaliated by creating a new field office in Detroit and forcing them to accept assignments there or relinquish their jobs.

Much blood in the water, obscuring the vision. Turf war, or something more?

Regarding Bill Richardson

If Obama promises the VP slot to Richardson, I can all too easily see the press trying to bring up the ancient allegations about Richardson and women, so Richardson needs to do a pre-emptive strike with this to show that the vetting on him has been done in 1992 and in 2004 and he got a clean bill of health both times:

The usually well-respected Politico Web site devotes its top story today to speculation about Gov. Bill Richardson’s supposed women trouble — is he too touchy, is there a scandal in the background, you know, the usual. It keys on Richardson’s recent statements that he was vetted for vice president by the Kerry campaign and finds some unnamed Kerry aides who say he didn’t go through the final-phase “definitive” vetting. (Very, very sadly, an earlier edition of the story incorrectly said he didn’t receive “any” vetting.)

To Richardson’s credit, the story says:

Richardson’s campaign manager, Dave Contarino, told The Politico that (Jim) Johnson (a veteran Washington lawyer and Democratic insider) told him last fall that Richardson’s 2004 vetting had covered allegations of “things with women,” and that Johnson told him he’d made two dozen calls on the matter and been convinced “that there was no there there.” …

Lanny Davis, a former Clinton aide and spokesman for the White House legal counsel, also called The Politico, on the prompting of the Richardson campaign, to aver that when he vetted Richardson for a Cabinet position in 1992, Richardson passed the detailed scrutiny.

“I ended up 100 percent convinced that Bill Richardson was not a womanizer, had not had an affair, had not done anything that had embarrassed him,” he said.

There you go.