By Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, Nov. 12/13, 2012

The United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil producer by about 2017 and will become a net oil exporter by 2030, according to a new report released on Monday by the International Energy Agency.

That increased oil production, combined with new American policies to improve energy efficiency, means that the United States will become “all but self-sufficient” in meeting its energy needs in about two decades — a “dramatic reversal of the trend” in most developed countries, the report says.

“The foundations of the global energy systems are shifting,” said Fatih Birol, chief economist at the Paris-based organization, which produces the annual World Energy Outlook, in an interview before the release. The agency, which advises industrialized nations on energy issues, had previously predicted that Saudi Arabia would be the leading producer until 2035 [....]

The report predicted that the United States would overtake Russia as the leading producer of natural gas in 2015.

The strong statements and specific predictions by the energy agency lend new weight to trends that have become increasingly apparent in the last year. [....]

By Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2012 issue

Excerpt:

But to speak of the “Hispanic population” is an oversimplification, akin to collectively describing the waves of immigrants that arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as European-Americans. In Florida, Cuban-Americans tend to vote for Republicans and Puerto Ricans tend to vote for Democrats. In Texas, the Tejanos have deep roots in the state and tend to be more open to the Republican Party; the more recent immigrants from across the border are known simply as Mexican-Americans, who largely came to the United States after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when Mexico established a robust welfare state, and are more commonly Democrats.

While Cruz and Canseco embrace a Tea Parry approach to the G.O.P.’s Hispanic problem, elsewhere in Texas a different strategy is being tested. One afternoon, I met with Art Martinez de Vara, the mayor of Von Ormy, a town of thirteen hundred residents, southwest of San Antonio, which dates to the eighteenth century. His ancestors arrived in San Antonio, from colonial Mexico, in the seventeen-nineties [....]

In 2008, Martinez de Vara co-founded the Latino National Republican Coalition of Texas, now called the Texas Federation of Hispanic Republicans. “A lot of people don’t like the word ‘Latino,’ ” he said. “They find it offensive, or too Californian.” The group recruits and supports Hispanics to run at the local level in South Texas. In our conversation, he criticized both Cruz’s and Canseco’s approaches to their campaigns. When I asked whether Cruz’s Latin surname was enough for him to win over Hispanics, one of Martinez de Vara’s friends, Gina Castañeda, a political activist who manages local campaigns, interrupted us. She said, “In the Hispanic or Mexican community, there’s some—” She hesitated. “How can I say it nicely? They don’t like Cubans. Or Puerto Ricans.” Martinez de Vara agreed. “Even within Mexico, they look down upon Caribbean Hispanics,” he said..

With friends like this....

You know, there's another national election in two years and whites are still a majority.  But go ahead, energize opposition voters.  Make it even harder for Obama to accomplish things you would like.

Pffft.

By Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight @ nytimes.com, Nov. 10, 2012

Analysis at length; here's the first of two charts included:

By Krishnadev Calamur, The Two-Way @ npr.org, Nov. 11, 201

For the first time since the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel fired warning shots into Syria on Sunday – just days after a Syrian mortar shell hit a target inside the Israel-occupied Golan Heights.

Here's more from the Israel Defense Forces: [.....]

Also see:

Thomas Friedman's Sunday Op-Ed  currently rising fast on the New York Times' "Most Popular" lists:

My President is Busy

ISRAELI friends have been asking me whether a re-elected President Obama will take revenge on Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the way he and Sheldon Adelson, his foolhardy financier, openly backed Mitt Romney. My answer to Israelis is this: You should be so lucky.

You should be so lucky that the president feels he has the time, energy and political capital to spend wrestling with Bibi to forge a peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I don’t see it anytime soon. Obama has his marching orders from the American people: Focus on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not on Bethlehem, Palestine, and focus on getting us out of quagmires (Afghanistan) not into them (Syria). No, my Israeli friends, it’s much worse than you think: You’re home alone [.....]

In the end, though, what really makes it hard for me to dine with gusto at the schadenfreude buffet is that the grieving faces on the other side of the partisan divide aren't those people, they're my people -- the middle-class neighbors of my Southern childhood, the kids I went to school with, my redneck uncles and cousins, my own mother and father.

Huffington Post, Nov. 9, 2012 (and local ABC News video report)

Authorities are searching the person who left a pig carcass wrapped in a Mitt Romney T-shirt at a Southern California Republican Party office.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the dead animal was found early Thursday morning at the GOP office on Highland Avenue in Manhattan Beach.

Manhattan Beach Police threw the remains in a nearby trash can, but not before it was caught on video. [....]

I was on an airplane last night as the election was decided. As the plane landed after midnight on the East Coast, I confess that my hand was shaking as I turned on my phone for the news. I did not want to see dishonesty and divisiveness and raw political hackery rewarded. It is hard enough for anyone to actually address the problems, to move this country forward, to make the intransigent American ruling class yield even a yard of the past to the inevitable future. But going backwards last night would have been devastating. I read the returns in silent elation; a business trip had me traveling in business class and the gnashing of corporate teeth all around precluded a full-throated huzzah on my part. I abhor a gloat. 

The Economist, Nov. 10, 2012

Hectic diplomacy and preparations for a UN-backed war against a branch of al-Qaeda in the Sahara desert are both proceeding apace [....]

BY THE end of this month an array of Western and African governments and regional bodies is supposed, according to a resolution passed unanimously last month in the UN Security Council, to have drawn up a detailed military plan to save the northern chunk of Mali from a clutch of Islamist rebel groups with ties to al-Qaeda. [....]

The basic UN plan is for African leadership and manpower to combine with Western muscle and know-how to swat the rebels. It has been mooted that a force of 3,000-plus soldiers from Mali’s lousy and demoralised army plus another 3,000 or so from the other 14 countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional club that is expected to lead the fray, will be backed by a contingent of a few hundred Western specialists, mainly from France and the United States, to provide intelligence, logistics, aerial firepower and surveillance (including drones), and perhaps small contingents of special forces. ECOWAS is ill-equipped to beat the jihadists on its own. The UN may need to beg for troops from elsewhere. Few expect an assault to begin before next year, despite the UN’s demands for urgency. [....]

Excellent arguments on both sides.

As a community organiser Obama was well aware that it was only by making demands on the powerful that the powerless could further their interests. As president he must be delighted to realise that all too few of his progressive supporters have grasped that reality.

The CIA Director resigns!

We shall receive a bunch of noise on this one!