From No Quarter, learn the real price of 'Cheap Oil'.

It appears that not only do we have the official cabinet and advisors to the pResident. We also have a bunch they don't want you to know about, a' la' Cheney's energy advisors.

From Walter Shapiro's Salon review of State of Denial by Bob Woodward:

[Sen. Chuck] Hagel's original warning to Bush that he was being "bubbled" (a wonderful verb) on Iraq fits with the familiar portrait of a dangerously out-of-touch president.

But, elsewhere in his narrative, Woodward provides compelling evidence that the real problem may be worse -- the rogue's gallery of outside advisors who do have regular unmediated access to the president. It is not accidental that "State of Denial" begins with a reprise of the Bush family's intimate relationship with a former Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar. At the instruction of his father (Bush 41), Bush (soon to be 43) met with Bandar in 1997 and confided, "I'm thinking of running for president ... And I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international foreign policy." You do not have to be a Michael Moore-style conspiracy theorist to find it worrisome that a Saudi prince is put in charge of giving a future president his worldview.

Continue reading