The Daily Background

Here’s some food for thought: of the top ten most profitable corporations during 2006, nine were either oil corporations or auto manufacturing corporations (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, General Motors, Chevron, DaimlerCrysler, Toyota, Ford, and ConocoPhillips). The tenth? Wal-Mart, which brags of having “one of the largest private trucking fleets in the world.” Just something to think about. [Source]

Libby Trial
Today, Tim Russert will testify and the prosecution will rest. Russert will tell the jury that contrary to Libby’s grand jury testimony from 2004, Libby and he never discussed Plame’s identity. It is extremely hard to see how the Vice President’s former Chief of Staff gets off without any prison sentence at this point, because Team Libby will have little to show for itself come Thursday and they get to start calling witnesses and making their case.

Cheney won’t take the stand to defend Libby even though he was earlier put on the witness list, and it is unlikely that Libby will take the stand either, as I discussed yesterday.

David Sanger of the New York Times will be called to testify either late this week or sometime next week and tell the jury that he and Libby never talked about Plame (Sanger had resisted testifying because he didn’t want anything to do with the case but was subpoenaed and the Times was unsuccessful in fighting it).

Team Libby’s crazy logic is that since Libby didn’t leak Plame’s identity to Sanger, then he wasn’t leaking it to anyone. Needless to say, this is argument is about as flimsy as a cardboard bomb shelter.

Still no word on whether or not we’ll be able to hear actual audio recordings of Libby’s grand jury testimony, but they seem to have already done their damage and impacted the jury, benefiting the defense.

Congress/Iraq debate
The Senate will take up non-Iraq matters today and for the rest of the week, having failed to debate Iraq because of successful Republican procedural blockage. In short, I am extremely pissed at one of my Senators, Judd Gregg (R-NH), who served as the Republican point-man for obstructing the debate after his party scuttled the McCain-Lieberman resolution.

Meanwhile, the House will take up the Iraq debate next week and the Senate will revisit it probably after the House passes a resolution of some sort. Per Schieffer, 30+ Republicans are expected to side with Dems on the House side. The only question in the lower chamber is, how strong will the resolution be? The House had been waiting for the Senate, but since the Senate has stalled, the House will go first.

2008
Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt ‘I was for gays before I was against them‘ Romney courts the midwest today, visiting Detroit. Romney will announce on Tuesday February 13 of next week (see our special political calendar for more upcoming political events), from Michigan.

Senator Obama will preempt Romney by formally announcing on Saturday February 10th in Springfield Illinois.

Information that I got ages ago suggested that McCain will formally announce sometime soon (instead of just being in exploratory committee mode), but I haven’t been hearing any buzz about this recently.

Iraq
3,103. And the escalation tactics begin.

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