Even the Oil Companies Need Bailouts?

At least in Russia, where it seems that Gazprom is on the skids. It's interesting to ponder a bit. With oil prices at record lows and with companies not seeing it worthwhile to explore for new fields, is it so hard to believe that oil companies in say the US might eventually ask for handouts? Late night speculation brought to you courtesy of a post-Xmas party homemade cookie sugar high? Maybe not.

According to this LA Times article about oil shale:

In recent weeks, the industry was included in the $700-billion government bailout package with investment and tax incentives to help oil shale producers build refineries and other expensive infrastructure.

Is there any big business at this point without its hand in the pot?

Connecticut Company to Make Motor Oil from Animal Fat

Green Earth Technologies, Inc. claims that it can make an animal-derived product chemically identical to crude oil, and intends to use animal fat from slaughterhouses to make it. You can read about it here.

I don't even have the words to describe how disgusting this is to me on so many different levels.

This is called ''freeing the Iraqi people''?

Freeing Iraqi men to murder their daughters? This is the status quo that we're maintaining there? The treatment of women as things? A teenager falls in love with a boy, so her father and brothers brutally murder her, and get a nod of approval from law enforcement officials for having done something that it is their right to do. And by having our soldiers there upholding this status quo, we're complicit. We really are.

We all know at this point what the invasion of Iraq was really all about -- anyone paying attention has known it for years, but it's just especially deplorable to me that Western politicians are presenting Iraq as having been liberated -- as a free society -- when it's acceptable there for a woman to be murdered at any man's whim.