Rolling Stone has the article The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom.

It’s not only toxic – it’s driven by a right-wing billionaire who profits more from flipping land than drilling for gas.

Here is a hint at some of the financial risk involved.

The company is now the largest leaseholder in the United States, owning the drilling rights to some 15 million acres – an area more than twice the size of Maryland. McClendon has financed this land grab with junk bonds and complex partnerships and future production deals, creating a highly leveraged, deeply indebted company that has more in common with Enron than ExxonMobil. As McClendon put it in a conference call with Wall Street analysts a few years ago, “I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or 10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 per million cubic feet.”
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In recent years, the company has also sold off the future proceeds it expects to receive from thousands of wells – a complex financing deal that enables it to borrow cash now without counting the debt it will owe when it has to drill the wells later. The very first deal, made with Deutsche Bank and a Swiss investment firm, brought Chesapeake more than $1 billion in return for 15 years of future production from 4,000 wells. “It’s not illegal, but most gas and oil companies don’t do it,” says Bob Brackett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “Chesapeake’s poor credit rating pushes them to turn to unconventional financing.”

There are other parts of the article that may be more horrifying, but it is just to hard to pick out the worst part.

While I am a big fan of Elizabeth Warren’s understanding of the plight of the middle-class, I was wondering what were her thoughts on other matters that might concern a U. S. Senator.

Foreign policy might be one area where she could extend her fight for the little people against the giant predators.  Unfortunately the United States is the giant in this case, and Warren does not give even a hint at knowing about the needs to rein in our predatory instincts.  She actually seems to have fallen for and is promoting our worst propaganda.

Being a Warren fan, perhaps I shouldn’t encourage you to read her web page on National Security / Foreign Policy.  However, I don’t believe in hiding from reality.  If she said it, you might as well know what she said.

Iran is a significant threat to the United States and our allies.  Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran could be a threat to the United States if we continue to pursue our saber rattling strategy and our sanctions against them without first having tried honest diplomacy.  Despite what President Obama is saying in public, he knows our own intelligence agencies have said that they know of no proof that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.  I have posted a number of articles on this blog that report what our intelligence agencies really believe.

This current wave of hysteria over Iran puts us in the same position the Bush war mongers got us into in Iraq before we started the war.  In Iraq, we insisted that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Every time we inspected and found no WMD, we claimed that it was because they were hiding them.  The more we couldn’t find any evidence of WMD, the more we insisted that it was because they were too devious.  There was no way that Iraq could possibly do or say anything if we were going to insist that lack of evidence of WMD was proof that they were hiding WMD.  It was a convenient heads I win, tails you lose situation that  Bush set up so that he could have the war he so desperately wanted.

Perhaps it is a shame on Bush that he deceived us (although it didn’t require much deception to have the masses fall into lockstep behind him.)   Who should we blame if the same forces deceive us again into fighting a needless war that will do nothing but help destroy our own country?

It takes a little less than 20 minutes for Rachel Maddow to get around to explaining exactly what Rush Limbaugh fails to understand about sex.

Now, I am a guy, too, if you hadn’t noticed, but I knew exactly the mistake Limbaugh made as soon as he started spouting off about it. Maybe nerd engineers know more about female biology than most people give them credit for. How many guys are going to be embarrassed if they have female significant others or have sisters or mothers who have to explain the birds and the bees to them?

Watch the whole thing to see what Mitt Romney, with all his children, doesn’t seem to know either. I guess it is like driving a car. You don’t really need to know how cars work to be able to drive one.

Do you suppose there are many guys in Limbaugh’s audience that understand the gaffe that he made without Rachel Maddow having to explain it to them? Maybe there are even some women in his audience that don’t know how to take a birth control pill either. And some people say we don’t need the Planned Parenthood organization to explain stuff like this.

In a “conversation” with a “pro” Elizabeth Warren troll on her Facebook page, the troll asked the question:

How exactly do you expect the campaign to compete with a candidate that has twice as much money already on hand?

Now, that is a very good question that should merit a lot of strategic thinking among the top leaders of the Warren campaign.  I can think of some do’s and dont’s. (I bet you can come up with ideas to add to these lists.)

Dont’s

• Expect to raise money among the middle-class to compete against the likes of billionaires such as the Koch brothers and the Wall Street crowd
• Try to raise money at the expense of attracting adherents, volunteers, and voters.
• Run a campaign that depends on outspending your rival. As a manager I once worked for said, “That is not a business plan, that is a going out of business plan.”

Do’s

• Improve efforts to raise the connection in voters’ minds between the name Elizabeth Warren, her photograph, and the office she is seeking.
  • Change the logo on all bumper stickers, web sites, social media sites, and printed material to say “Elizabeth Warren for U.S. Senator” instead of saying “Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts”
  • Use every opportunity to put her name next to her photo and the office she is seeking.
    
• Do not duck controversy, but head it off before it takes on a life of its own. See my post Elizabeth Warren Explains the Intellectual Foundation She Provided for more details on the ad prototype below.

• Work smarter, not harder
• Use lower cost guerilla marketing techniques. This is something your volunteers can help you with that won’t extract their hard earned money from them.
• Fire campaign workers that do not seem to be working in the best interest of the candidate and the voters of Massachusetts

If something doesn’t change in this campaign, I have this worry that Sharon expressed to me:

What if Warren wakes up the day after the election and has to think, “I worked my a** off. What the he** happened?”

Or maybe worse if Warren wakes up and has to say:

I won, but now I owe my soul to the very forces I pledged to fight. How can I face the middle-class voters that expect me to fight for them? Did I let my desire to win overwhelm my desire to govern?

I believe the question for Elizabeth Warren is not, “Do I win, or do I stick to my principles?”. A better question is “How do I win while sticking to my principles?” She could even openly engage the citizens of Massachusetts in this conundrum. After all, she needs their help in accomplishing this.

If Elizabeth Warren sees no way of winning and sticking to her principles, then she has gotten herself into the wrong business. Instead she should just get behind another candidate that wants to try. There is such a candidate, but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out who that is. (if you cannot figure out who that is, then you see the problem that other candidate has.)

The New York Times has chosen to publish the op-ed piece, Israel’s Last Chance to Strike Iran.

I won’t bother to quote anything from the op-ed.  You can read it yourself if you are so inclined.

I don’t know why the newspaper doesn’t just change its name to The War Mongering Times.

I suppose publishing such pieces would be a service in the name of balance if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t think The War Mongering Times ever missed a chance to goad and lie the U.S. into some war.

The Tucson Citizen carried the story Obama heckled over Iran war threat from USA Today.

“Use your leadership!,” a woman yelled at Obama. “No war in Iran!”

There is not much to the story, but I note it as perhaps the first public protest that has come to my attention.

It seems like yelling at public figures at public appearances is the only thing we have left to do to get their attention.  Obama’s defenses against hearing a message are well honed.  Maybe he was hoping the deep bass of the rumbling drums of war would be inaudible to most people and he could silence the few people who can see what is going on.

Readers of this blog might be able to think of another public figure whose attention I have been trying to grab without any success.  It makes you wonder if a person has to go through an operation to disconnect the auditory nerve (if there is such a thing) before they can run for office.

I was disgusted with the other news channels yesterday, so I happened to surf to the PBS News Hour.  I caught the tail end of this “debate”.  It just confirmed why I never watch the PBS News Hour.  The woman in this debate is nuts, bonkers, absolutely off the wall.

I watched the first few minutes of the video below to see what I missed, but had to turn it off after the woman in the video uttered a few sentences.

If anyone is brave enough to watch the whole thing, let me know if the woman says even a single sentence that is truthful or makes sense.