From Karl Clark to Kyoto

It holds more oil than Iraq's proven reserves of 112 billion barrels. It even holds more oil than Saudi Arabia's 250 billion barrels. In fact, Alberta's oil sands deposit contains between 1.75 and 2.5 trillion barrels of oil -- approximately 200 billion barrels of which are recoverable with current technology. That is enough oil to supply all of Canad's petroleum needs for the next 475 years. In fact that is enough proven reserves to supply all of North America's petroleum needs for the next forty-seven years -- without using a single drop of oil from another source. The volume of recoverable oil in the sands is so large that when technological advances prompted the Alberta Energy Utilities Board to include the oil sands as part of Canada's "proven reserves" in 2002, OPEC's share of world petroleum reserves dropped dramatically from 79 to 68 per cent.

Developing Alberta's Oil Sands by Paul Chastko

September 11, 2001

In the picture on ABC News, the North Tower largely blocked their view of the plane hitting the South Tower. Still, they were able to see an enormous blast of smoke behind the North Tower and debris from the explosion falling to the ground below.

"We knew then it was terrorism," Cheney recalls.

p 331, Cheney by Stephen F. Hayes

THE STEPS - CLOSED

Today, the fundamental divisions in American society are not regional or religious but ideological. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito were not appointed because they were Catholic but because they are conservative. The base of the Republican Party -- from James Dobson and Jay Sekulow among the evangelicals to Ted Olson and Leonard Leo among the Federalists -- recognized that they could use their influence to shape the Court. They organized more, mobilized more, and cared more about the Court than their liberal counterparts. And when their candidate won the presidency, these conservatives demanded more -- a pair of justices who were precisely to their liking (and the ejection of one nominee, Harriet Miers, who was not). With admirable candor, and even greater passion, conservatives have invested in the Court to advance their goals for the country.

In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote, almost mindless task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases. As Richard A. Posner, the great conservative judge and law professor, has written, "It is rarely possible to say with a straight face of a Supreme Court constitutional decision that it was decided correctly or incorrectly." Constitutional cases, Posner wrote, "can be decided only on the basis of a political judgment, and a political judgment cannot be called right or wrong by reference to legal norms."

p 338, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

Our Executive Doesn't

After American and Cuban forces evicted the Spanish from Cuba in 1898, the United States military remained on forty-five square miles along the southern coast of the island. The American presence became official with a treaty signed by the two nations in 1903, eventually setting an annual rent at $4,085. To this day, the American government offers payment to the Cuban government every year, but during the nearly five decades that Fidel Castro has been in power, his government has accepted it only once.

p229, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin