Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, reports that oil prices are likely to stay high for some time:

In preparing the report, Birol said he had experienced “an earthquake” in his thinking.

“China plus India are going to dominate growth in the oil markets,” Birol said during an interview at an oil industry conference. During the past 18 months, he noted, more than two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand came from China and India alone. Demand for oil in China, he added, would eventually equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia.

Partly as a result, he added, the annual report would predict that oil prices, now at about $93 a barrel, could remain at levels much higher than thought possible in the past. This, he said, heightened the risk of a serious global economic slowdown.

British military forces in southern Iraq plan to hand over responsibility to Iraqi troops “by mid-December.” Meanwhile, violence is down in Diyala, but fear and mistrust are not.

The US Army has the lowest number of recruits since the end of the draft.

Why is Turkey the most anti-American nation in the world?

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley sharply criticized Bush for threatening to veto children’s healthcare again.

BLOGS

The Agonist dissects the Turkish Question.

BitchPhD on gender balance in the presidential campaigns.

Beau Sia

Anything else out there worth reading? The blogosphere’s been boring me this week.

Two months ago I wrote about the Bushtanic. In talking about ways to measure Bush’s failures, I said:

But for me, one of the most telling illustrations of Bush’s failure is the story of his most loyal aides, the ones he brought up from Texas, dropping like flies.

When he was elected, George Bush brought a large number of long serving and trusted confidants who he worked with as Governor up to the capitol to help him run the country.

[snip]

In the cabinet, Bush appointed seven Texas Republicans. He also kept on Karl Rove as top political adviser and Harriet Miers as White House Counsel. With today’s resignation of Alberto Gonzales, only two remain, and 4 resignations have occurred after last year’s midterm defeat.

Today, one of the remaining two Bush loyalists, Karen Hughes, resigned. And so, our chart of fallen Bushies gets one more red RESIGNED mark, leaving only Alphonso Jackson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, still in office:

Karen Hughes, one of Bush’s longest serving advisers, has stepped down from her role as the State Department’s Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. As MSNBC reports, via Think Progress, Hughes’ tenure has been just as much of a failure as the rest of the Bush administration:

President Bush had asked Karen Hughes to go to the State Department and help sell America’s ideas about democracy and the war on terror around the world. Polls show that there has been no improvement in the way the world views the United States since Hughes took over. Now it appears she’s resigning.

It’s not surprising that Hughes is returning to Texas without making a measurable impact. Bush squandered his political capital with a failed war and lackluster domestic policies. He’s the lamest of lame ducks, and everyone, including his closest political allies, realizes it.

Really, the only thing that continues to surprise me about the failures of the Bush administration is why the leading Republican candidates for President don’t distance themselves further.

Anyone want to take bets on when Alphonso Jackson will resign?

Better late than never. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) died in a plane crash just over five years ago. He was a tireless advocate for the American people, and a true progressive leader.

Wikipedia:

Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was an American politician and two-term U.S. Senator from Minnesota. He was a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and was a professor of political science at Carleton College before being elected to the Senate in 1990. Wellstone was a progressive and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate in the 102nd, 103rd, 104th, 105th, 106th, and 107th congresses from 1991 until his death in a plane crash on 25 October 2002, 11 days before he was to stand in the midterm US senate election. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash. They had two other grown children, David and Mark, who now co-chair the Wellstone Action nonprofit group.

“Politics is not about power. Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives. It’s about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people.” - Paul Wellstone

Senator Wellstone, please know that your vision lives on.

A few days ago, some female friends of mine were mocking women who use Halloween as an excuse to wear lots of makeup and little clothing. They laughed about the fact that Halloween “costumes” gravitate toward the same predictable standbys year after year. Whether occupations or animals, they’re all basically the same - long on leg and short on originality. Here they are:

1. Sexy Nurse
2. Sexy Cop
3. Sexy Maid
4. Sexy Fairy/Angel
5. Sexy Librarian
6. Sexy Dancer (or any excuse to wear a leotard)
7. Sexy Celebrity (usually Madonna, pick your favorite phase)
8. Sexy Cat
9. Sexy Mouse
10. Sexy Bunny

While this list might be enough to get a lot of guys drooling, to me it screams lame. Some of us men appreciate more, ahem, sophisticated kinds of sexiness. So ladies, for this Halloween The Seminal provides some original suggestions for costumes, in case you’re still deciding. We’ve assembled our top ten, but don’t let the order fool you - they’re all winners.

For years, the music industry has operated using top-down economic structures. A&R men recruited bands for labels, who in turn asked artists to sign away the rights to their creations. The bands recorded albums using label money and these albums were promoted through mass media to the American public. Label executives played public taste-maker, deciding what kind of music was “in” and what wasn’t worth recording, let alone promoting. Labels controlled the means of record distribution and collected the vast majority of the profits. Bands were lucky if $1 or $2 of a CD’s purchase price made its way to their wallets. Money in the record industry flowed from the top and was collected at the top, while quality seemed to largely decline.

At one time, there was good reason for this structure. Creating and marketing an album was expensive. Recording studios, filled with esoteric gear operated by highly skilled professionals, were expensive to build and operate. Albums reproduced on vinyl, cassette, or CD were expensive to manufacture and package. Radio and television stations, as well as other mass media outlets, charged premium prices to promote musical products. Courtney Love put the cost to a label of recording and promoting an album at $4.4 million dollars. Steve Albini of Nirvana fame puts it at almost $1 million. No matter what numbers you use, that’s serious cash.

As Albini and Love point out, the artists themselves didn’t need to invest a lot (at least up front) to be signed to a label, but they didn’t realize the majority of the profits either. Love estimates that a band that sells a million records makes $45,000 a year, or about as much as they would have earned working at 7-11. Albini is more pessimistic, arguing that a band who sells 250,000 records (a more reasonable number) actually owes the record company $14,000 when all is said and done. Meanwhile, the label grossed $6.6 million or $710,000 respectively.

This kind of numbers game reminds me of the debunked theory once called trickle down economics. Money is collected and concentrated at the top of the economic food chain (the record label) and as these titans of industry reap enormous profits, the money will eventually “trickle down” to the lower rungs (the artists), enriching everyone. As JFK (unfortunately) once said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Of course, this kind of business friendly, supply side economics hasn’t resonated well with the working class, and it certainly fails to light a fire under artists as it provides them no incentive to produce great music. More importantly, the artists are the ones who create the music in the first place. Without them, major label profits like the ones described above would never be possible.

For decades, musicians put up with this unfair system. Why? For one, it was the only game in town. You could either play ball with the labels or be legally blacklisted from the music business, as Albini ruefully points out. Second, musicians needed the label to put up the capital. After all, making records wasn’t cheap.

Today, as many realize, this is all changing. Basic economics are working against the established record industry because the product, the records themselves, are now much cheaper to record, reproduce, and market.

While Marcy Wheeler explains how Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and his Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have drafted a law on warrantless surveillance that not only gives retroactive immunity to the telecoms for their illegal complicity in White House supervised domestic spying, but immunizes President Bush and then WH Counsel Alberto Gonzales for their intentional violations of US Code and DoJ guidelines, as well, Studs Terkel, a plaintiff in one of the suits against the telecoms, puts the whole program in chilling context.

Terkel, writing in the New York Times, details a history of government transgressions that color his long life. From the Palmer raids, through the Red Scare, and on past protests for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, Terkel’s humanitarianism landed him on many lists, including the blackest one:

In the 1950s, during the sad period known as the McCarthy era, one’s political beliefs again served as a rationale for government monitoring. Individual corporations and entire industries were coerced by government leaders into informing on individuals and barring their ability to earn a living.

I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in television and radio after refusing to say that I had been “duped” into signing my name to these causes.

In this week’s poll, have the RIAA lawsuits changed your behavior? But first, last week’s results:

Last week, we asked you to make a gentleman’s bet: Who would make war with whom first? Will Turkey invade Iraq? Will the U.S. bomb Iran? Or will neither come to pass? 62% of you said Turkey will invade Iraq before the U.S. bombs Iran. 22% thought cooler heads would prevail and prevent war, while only 16% thought the U.S. would bomb Iran first. I wonder if this reflects an actual cooling off of relations between Iran and the U.S., or just the fact that Turkey’s saber rattling has gotten more media attention than ours lately.

This week, we want to know if the RIAA’s lawsuits again file sharers have deterred you from using peer to peer music downloading applications. Voting begins in the sidebar at right.

The drinking game for the Biden-Palin debate on October 2nd 2008 can be found here.

In anticipation of tonight’s debate, and as a followup to Jake’s piece in May, I offer the following suggestions for a Democratic Debate Drinking Game.

Clinton defending her vote on the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment: Tequila shot (it’s going to be a long night)

Obama/Edwards attacking Clinton’s vote on Lieberman-Kyl: Cherry Bomb shot (red bull and cherry vodka)

Front-runners refuse to promise troops out of Iraq by end of first term: Chug cheap merlot, straight from the bottle

Israel’s attempt to cut electricity to the Gaza Strip as part of economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled territory has been harshly thwarted by its own attorney-general as well as the international community, who are citing the unacceptability of such indiscriminate punitive measures.

Revealing the dodgy side of humanitariansim — a French NGO is under intense diplomatic fire for allegedly trying to export over 100 Chadian and Sudanese children to Europe, after falsely claiming they were sick and orphaned.

Argentina has elected its first female president — Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the wife of the incumbent.

“Foreign fighters are coming from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, various Arab countries and perhaps also Turkey and western China…[they] are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies.” — Disquieting news on the influx of foreigners who’re arriving in Afghanistan to join the Taliban.

Da Blogs

What every American should know about Rudy Giuliani’s prostate.

The American Bar Association is calling for a nationwide moratorium on the dealth penalty, citing deep systemic flaws that include “persistent racial disparities that make death sentences more likely when victims are white.” (Well, no shit.)

Grist focuses on Ron Paul’s environmental platform. Turns out he rides a bicycle.

Shocked and awed? Though rarely discussed, the war in Iraq is having disasterous environmental consequences.

Over the weekend, thousands of anti-war protesters gathered to call for an end to the war in Iraq. Serious Change represent’d in six cities, and Josh was interviewed in New York. Although they didn’t quote me or E-Lho, we were in Chicago for a march that was over 5,000 strong. There will be more news and pictures on Serious Change soon.

In more egregious war news, the AP has learned that the State Department promised Blackwater guards immunity from persecutions of the incident occurring last month. Pissed off yet?

The famed $100 XO laptop has officially had its first order by Uruguay and plans to have a laptop for each child by 2009.

Da Vinci’s Last Supper gets a little better defined with a new 16 billion pixel scan. You can see it for yourself.

A very pissed off Sarkozy storms off the set of 60 Minutes after the journalist asked him about his marriage. I, for one, applaud this. Stay out of the man’s goddamn private life, damn American media.

Speaking of damn American media, Colbert’s Facebook group has had over one million people join it! If you’re on Facebook, check it out (and join the group, why the hell not).

In The Blogs:

Matt Stoller analyzes Obama’s anti-gay snafu and what it means for his politics and who he is appealing to.

The HuffPo wonders why a strengthening of the War Powers Act has gone unnoticed.

Ian Welsh at The Agonist reports why NATO is going to lose the battle in Afghanistan.

And what you can do TODAY about FISA.