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Fact Check: Dick Cheney's Energy Bill Included Billions In Giveaways To Oil Companies
4/25/2008 6:24:29 PM

The AP counters the fact that Dick Cheney's 2005 energy bill contained "billions in dollars in giveaways to the oil companies" with the following:

The 2005 energy bill actually raised taxes on the oil and gas industry by about 300 million over 11 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Actually, The giveaways to the oil industry are not limited to tax breaks. They also include provisions like royalty relief that are worth billions. And many of the tax "increases" are simply extensions of exiting taxes that do not impose any additional burden on oil companies.

1. About half of giveaways were not tax provisions. For instance, the oil companies received billions in royalty waivers. For example:

Sections 344-345
Waives royalty payments for drilling for some natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico.

Section 346
Waives royalty payments for drilling in offshore Alaska.

Sections 353-4
Waives royalty payments for gas hydrate extraction on the Outer Continental Shelf and public land in Alaska.

Section 383
Allows oil companies drilling in federal land off the coast of a particular state to pay the state 44 cents ...   more »

Clinton, Obama, and the Bush-Cheney energy bill that allows LNG to threaten Oregon
guest column

By Paddy McGuire of Portland, Oregon. Paddy is a former executive director of the Democratic Party of Oregon, a former Clinton Administration appointee, and a former deputy Oregon Secretary of State.

Last week, he contributed "The Red Sox Should Have Dropped Out".

Critics of Hillary Clinton repeatedly point to her 2002 vote to authorize going to war with Iraq (if Saddam Hussein continued to stymie U.N. weapons inspectors, a resolution supported by U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix) as the primary evidence that she should not be President. Many cite this vote as a reason to oppose Hillary, despite many of those same people having earlier supported John Kerry and John Edwards for President, who voted exactly the same way.

Fast forward to 2005.

Vice-President Cheney crafted an energy bill with corporate energy pals in Congress that stripped authority from the states on the siting of power plants.

Today, the Cheney-Bush Energy bill is responsible for no fewer than 3 LNG facilities threatening Oregon coastline, rivers, forests, fish, fishermen, farmers, and neighborhoods up and down western Oregon, and most of that natural gas will ultimately go ...   more »

by Geoff Staples

Barack Obama’s “hope” is the new version of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America.” Like Ronald Reagan, Obama is a charismatic and inspirational speaker. That’s not where the similarity ends.

Ronald Reagan went to Philadelphia, Mississippi to make his notorious states’ rights speech and pander to Southern racist bigots during his 1982 election campaign. Obama claims that civil and human rights for gays and lesbians are states’ rights issues and Obama sent the rabidly anti-gay Donny McClurkin to denounce gays and lesbians from the stage of his South Carolina gospel tour.

I don’t believe black evangelicals to be anti-gay bigots, but Obama does, or he wouldn’t have sent McClurkin to do the dirty in South Carolina. All Democrats should be outraged that Obama would insult black evangelicals by assuming them to be bigots.

Obama has attended a racist church for 20 years. He claims that most whites, like his white grandmother, are afraid of blacks. Reverend James Meeks, another Obama spiritual and political mentor, has been cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a leading black partner of Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defense Fund. What are we to make of this? Obama wants us to ignore his close association with hate-mongers and bigots while he ...   more »

Turns out another one of Obama’s spiritual buddies is a racist homophobe. Are you surprised? I’m not. GS

Meet Reverend James Meeks:

Rev. James Meeks
Chicago, Ill.

The Rev. James Meeks is a key member of Chicago's "Gatekeepers" network, an interracial group of evangelical ministers who strive to erase the division between church and state. A stalwart anti-gay activist, Meeks has used his House of Hope mega-church to launch petition drives for the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), a major state-level "family values" pressure group that lauded him last year for leading African Americans in "clearly understanding the threat of gay marriage."

With over 22,000 members, Meeks' congregation was large enough to buoy his successful 2002 campaign for state senator. Last year, he ran for governor as a virtual single-issue candidate, drawing national support from Christian fundamentalists by boldly vowing to fight marriage equality at every turn. Meeks eventually dropped out of the race.

Meeks and the IFI are partnered with Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defense Fund, major anti-gay organizations of the Christian Right. They also are tightly allied with Americans for Truth, an Illinois group that said in a press release last year ...   more »

Meeks sends kids to 'hell'
Christian fright house depicts abortion, gays
October 31, 2006

BY CATHLEEN FALSANI Religion Reporter
This Halloween, Chicago's Salem Baptist Church wants teenagers to go straight to "hell." Admission is $7 and passengers arrive at its gates on a yellow school bus.

Salem's "Nights of Terror" promises to "scare the hell out of teens" by guiding them on a half-hour tour through Hades -- or at least what passed for it in the don't-call-it-a-haunted-house set up in the church's administrative offices at 109th and Cottage Grove.

So-called hell houses have become popular over the last decade among some evangelical Christian churches that want to provide an alternative to traditional Halloween celebrations.

"YOU HAVE DIED AND GONE STRAIGHT TO HELL!" a tall man wearing a long, black, hooded cloak bellowed over a bullhorn Sunday night as the first busload of about 30 teens and a handful of parents were herded through dark corridors lined in black plastic.

The group ...   more »