The first minute is in Spanish and basically provides background on the race. The interview starts just past the one minute mark.

Remembering Harvey Korman.

That’s my monthly transportation cost plus an occasional cab here and there. I can do this because I live in San Francisco and the city has a relatively decent mass transit system. Most American cities do not. It’s time you join citizen’s committees in your local city and start affecting local transportation policy. I serve on San Francisco Citizen’s Bus Rapid Transit Committee and we do have an impact.

Atlanta Regional Commission
Dallas Transportation Management Systems
Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization

These groups exist everywhere. If you need help finding one in your community, just ask and I will track it down for you.

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This weekend, the By The Weekend Reader looks at Iraq and its oil. Iraq has the world’s second largest proven oil reserves. According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce. The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. During the final years of the Saddam era, they envied companies from France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, who had obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions (kept in place by the US and the UK) kept those contracts inoperable.

Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, much has changed. In the new setting, with Washington running the show, “friendly” companies expect to gain most of the lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in the coming decades. The Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies. Negotiators hope soon to complete deals on Production Sharing Agreements that will give the companies control over dozens of fields, including the fabled super-giant Majnoon. But first the Parliament must pass a new oil sector investment law allowing foreign companies to assume a major role in the country. The US has threatened to withhold funding as well as financial and military support if the law does not soon pass. Although the Iraqi cabinet endorsed the draft law in July 2007, Parliament has balked at the legislation. Most Iraqis favor continued control by a national company and the powerful oil workers union strongly opposes de-nationalization. Iraq’s political future is very much in flux, but oil remains the central feature of the political landscape.

This past week, the Economist Intelligence Unit put a brief on the price of oil and if Iraqi production might be able to stem the seemingly perpetual climb in the price of a barrel of oil. The brief is entitled Iraq economy: Oil supply saviour? Here’s their overview:

The growing concerns in the world energy market about the risks of a supply crunch have been a critical factor behind the recent surge in oil prices to a new record of US$135/barrel. Speculators are betting huge sums on the assumption that the oil market (and other primary energy markets) will remain tight for many years to come, owing to the inelasticity of demand and to the constraints on long-term supply. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is doing its bit to allay these concerns, but has acknowledged that once its current crop of oilfield projects is complete in around 2013, there will be little scope for further capacity increases. Similar strains are evident in most of the other major oil-producing countries. One significant exception is Iraq, which holds (at least) 10% of the world’s proven reserves, but accounts for only 2.5% of total production. Iraq has the potential to furnish a long-term solution to the oil market’s long-term supply problem, but it will need to improve dramatically on its recent performance before buyers of oil futures will be convinced that it can deliver.

The Battle for Iraq’s Oil

Interview with Antonia Juhasz
Here’s an interview of a good friend of mine, Antonia Juhasz, who writes on corportatism and has a forthcoming book on the oil companies arguing that they should be broken up to encourage competition. I disagree, they should be allowed to consolidate or they should be nationalized. Economies of scale are needed in energy. See my post What Cash Cows Do for how oil companies are buying back their stock and likely to take themselves private.

Iraq Energy Outlook
Experts agree that Iraq may be one of the few places left where vast reserves, known and unknown, have barely been exploited. This is a report from the US Department of Energy.

A History of Oil in Iraq
The Global Policy Forum, a United Nations policy monitoring NGO, has a brief overview of the history of the Iraqi oil industry.

Iraqi Public Opinion Polls
The Global Policy Forum also has series of Iraqi Opinion Polls. It is, after all, their country.

The Pew Research Center released a survey today. Among its findings:

Obama’s favorable rating among voters has slipped eight points since late February, from 59% to 51% in the current survey. When those who express an unfavorable opinion are asked what they do not like about Obama, most (54%) cite his political beliefs. But nearly a third (32%) either mention the kind of person Obama is, or say their unfavorable views are influenced both by the kind of person he is and his political beliefs. White working class voters are among the most likely to mention the kind of person Obama is as a reason for their unfavorable opinion of him.

Obama’s slipping image is in some measure a negative reaction from frustrated Clinton supporters. Currently, just 46% of those who support Clinton for the nomination say the party will unite behind Obama if he is the nominee. In March, 58% of Clinton supporters said the party would rally behind Obama if he is the nominee.

Recent declines in Obama’s image have been pronounced among whites - especially white women. Currently, just 43% of white women express a positive opinion of Obama, down from 56% in late February.

While Obama lost eight percentage points of support among white women between April and May, that’s not his only problem. Obama lost nine percentage among voters that earn under $30,000 and he lost seven percentage points among those without a college degree.

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ProgressivePunch is a non-partisan searchable database of Congressional voting records from a Progressive perspective. True blue Democrats won’t be surprised that Clinton ranked as more progressive than Obama. The rank represents their rank among their Senate colleagues.

Senator Clinton ranked in the top fifth of the Senate in ten of the 13 categories while Obama ranked in the top fifth of the Senate only four times. Senator Clinton achieved two number one rankings Corporate Subsidies (that is toughest on) and on Housing issues where Hillary was ironically tied with Obama, his only number one ranking.

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Here is the Friday May 30th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.

The Rome Summit, Part IV
In advance of next week’s Summit in Rome of world leaders at the headquarters of the FAO, the UK Guardian is exploring the global food crisis. In Part IV, the series looks at the rising demand for meat in China and its impact.

In 1980, when the population was still under one billion, the average Chinese person ate 20kg (44lbs) of meat; last year, with an extra 300 million people, it was 54kg. The country as a whole now chomps through more than 60m tonnes of meat a year, roughly equivalent to 240 million cows, or 600 million pigs, or 24 billion chickens. It is a worldwide trend that is taking grain away from the world’s poor. The consumption of meat in developing countries is rising by more than 5% a year.

Sarko & Sarko
Two quick stories from Fistfulofeuros on France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy. The first, Sarko the Euro-Populist covers Sarkozy’s plan to put a cap on the VAT as it applies to fuel; the second, Sarko Tlits at the Trente-Cinq, looks at Sarkozy’s not so clear plans for France’s 35-hour work week.

The Unwinnable War in Afghanistan
Forty nations are embroiled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Anyone who travels through the country with Western troops soon realizes that NATO forces would have to be increased tenfold for peace to be even a remote possibility. More on this from Der Spiegel.

Forgotten Northeast India Stirs
It’s is one of the most remote corners of the world and one of the poorest. India’s remote northeast region has been both blessed and cursed by its geography. The region is rich in natural resources but is landlocked and surrounded by China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan, leaving it impoverished. The eight-state region may finally get a chance to start living up to its economic potential with several projects to enhance connections with Southeast Asia and to increase outlets for such commodities as organic foods, orchids, tea, coal and oil. The Los Angeles Times has coverage.

Clashes in Kathmandu
The BBC reports that demonstrators celebrating the abolition of the centuries-old monarchy in Nepal have clashed with police near the royal palace in the capital, Kathmandu.

Mass Evictions in Myanmar
The New York Times reports that Myanmar’s junta started evicting destitute families from government-run cyclone relief centers on Friday, apparently out of concern the ‘tented villages’ might become permanent. This is not the first time that Myanmar’s generals force thousands from their homes. More from Reuters.

TICAD
A record 40 African heads of state and government, almost twice as big the 2003 number, are in Japan attending the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) which is now wrapping up. Here is some assessments on the event: Kigali’s New Times urges that African parliaments have a greater say in the distribution of aid (Rwanda’s Parliament is made up more of women than men); the Associated Press reports that African leaders, Japan and development organizations agreed Friday that there is an urgent need to boost agricultural productivity in Africa and pledged to tackle the widespread impact of soaring food prices; and Monsters and Critics finds that the attendees of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) agreed for the continent to aim to double rice production in a decade and to expand irrigated land by 20 per cent in five years with assistance from Japan.