The Obameter: Tracking Obama's Campaign Promises

The Obameter Scorecard

• Promise Kept 120

• Compromise 37

• Promise Broken 19

• Stalled 82

• In the Works 244

• Not yet rated 3

PolitiFact has compiled more than 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter.

We rate their status as Not Yet Rated, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

The report card provides an up-to-the-minute tally of all the promises.

SOURCE: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/

ONGC keen to buy BP's stake in Vietnam project

ONGC keen to buy BP's stake in Vietnam project

Credit: Reuters/Molly Riley/Files

Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:14pm IST

By Nidhi Verma and Ho Binh Minh

NEW DELHI/DALAT, Vietnam (Reuters) – Indian state-run explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corp(ONGC.BO) wants to buy BP's(BP.L) stake in an offshore Vietnam gas field, as Hanoi stressed BP must give priority to its partners in the sale of its energy assets.

ONGC has a 45 percent share in Block 6.1 in the Nam Con Son basin, off Vietnam's southeast coast, which is operated by BP with a 35 percent stake, ONGC's website shows. The rest is owned by Petrovietnam.

"Yes, we are interested," ONGC head R.S. Sharma said, when asked if his firm was interested in buying BP's stake.

Vietnam's deputy minister of industry and trade Do Huu Hao earlier said BP must give priority to its partners in sales of stakes in energy assets in Vietnam before making offers to outside parties.

A BP spokesman said the company was "exploring divestment options" for its interest in the Nam Con Son gas project, which the London-based firm says is one of Vietnam's largest foreign investment projects.

The interest, which comprises stakes in the Lan Tay and Lan Do gas fields, the Nam Con Son pipeline and the Phu My power generation project, is worth $966 million, analysts at UBS said in a research note on Monday.

BP has kicked off a $10 billion asset sale aimed at raising cash to pay for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill. On Tuesday, it said it planned to sell gas assets in Pakistan and Vietnam worth around $1.7 billion.

BP shares were up 3.2 percent by 1220 GMT in a strong market.

China's CNOOC and Sinopec, as well as Thailand's PTTEP and ONGC(ONGC.BO) were likely to show interest in BP's stake in the project, bankers and analysts who are familiar with the asset had told Reuters last week.

Hao said BP had informally approached Vietnam on the stake sale.

"They need to have a formal letter with a proposal to the Vietnamese government," he said. "After that letter (they) need to discuss with Petrovietnam and partners, Hao told Reuters and domestic media at a meeting of ASEAN energy ministers.

"In principle, priority should be given to sell the stake to partners," he said. "If partners do not buy, then they can sell to outside parties and in case of selling to outside parties, they (BP) will need to seek permission from the Vietnamese government on the supply of bidding documents."

Other stakeholders in the Nam Con Son pipeline include ConocoPhillips and Petrovietnam, while Singapore's Sembcorp Industries and Japan's Kyushu Electric Power also have stakes in the Phu My 3 power plant.

Vietnam's relatively small status as an oil producer and flat production growth over the last five years meant Nam Con Son is unlikely to attract global players such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, some analysts had said.

Analysts say Chinese oil majors could also come up against political opposition in Vietnam, where suspicion of China runs high due to the territorial disputes between the countries in the South China Sea.

BP also plans to sell its upstream assets in Pakistan comprising a number of producing fields and exploration blocks in the southern Sindh province, estimated by UBS to be worth $690 million.

(Writing by Ramthan Hussain, Editing by Anshuman Daga)

(For more business news on Reuters India click in.reuters.com)

Blue Dogs Be Dog-Gone Soon

Blue Dogs Be Dog-Gone Soon
by Tom Schaller @ 12:52 PM

A recent Roll Call piece by Steve Dennis (sorry, behind subscription firewall) examined the rising policy influence of Blue Dog Democrats within the Democratic House coalition on the issues of deficits and spending. Putting policy matters aside, what jumped out at me was a quote in the second half of the piece from somebody described as a "liberal strategist" by Dennis: "Last time I checked, the polling shows many of the Blue Dogs are poised to lose their seats. It will be tough for the Blue Dogs to drive the Democratic Caucus next year if they’re not in it." (For the record, the unidentified strategist was not me.)

The question is not whether the strategist's statement is true, but how true. Because as the two charts in this post demonstrate, whether or not they are actual members of the Blue Dog coalition or not, the Democrats whose seats are most in jeopardy this autumn almost uniformly come from the more conservative half of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's House Democratic caucus.

Let's take a look at Democratic-held seats that may flip this November. Last week I used ratings by Isaac Wood of Sabato's Crystal Ball for an online analysis and follow-up 538 post in which I examined where Republicans need to win regionally to recapture the House. To mix things up--but again in the spirit of using a second-hand source for the competitiveness ratings, rather than some index I might create--this time I turn to Cook Political Report's David Wasserman. (Who, as it happens, was Wood's predecessor at Crystal Ball.) In the June 12 issue of the National Journal (see p. 20), Wasserman ranked 64 Democratic-held seats as either "probable switch", "toss-up", or "also competitive." I then looked up the National Journal's vote rankings, published in their February 27, 2010 issue, for all 64 of these members.

For those who may be unfamiliar, a brief aside here to explain those rankings: NJ picks a series of roll call votes on economic, foreign policy and social issues, creates a score for each of these categories for every House and Senate member, also computes a composite score for all of these votes, and then ranks every member of the House from 1 to 435 in terms of how liberal [or conservative] their composite voting score is. The scores appearing in the two figures I created for this post represent the liberal ranking; in other words, a ranking of 100 means that member has the 100th most liberal composite voting score in the House in the 111th Congress (or thus far, at least).

Given that there are 256 Democratic-held seats (or recently held, in the case of vacancies) as we head into the midterms--and despite the fact that at the very middle of the distribution there are a few super-centrist Democrats who actually have slightly more conservative voting records than a few super-centrist Republicans (but very few, a consequent of the continuing bifurcation of the Congress, especially the House, of the past two or three decades)--for simplicity's sake I drew a line at ranking 128. Democrats with a ranking of 128 or lower are, we might say, in the more liberal half of the House Democratic caucus; those 129 or higher are in the more conservative half. That 128 cut point is indicated by the solid red line in each of the two figures.

And what do we see? Leaving aside the small group of dead-in-the-water "probable switch" seats,* the two figures reveal a rather astonishing, but virtually identical distribution of the voting records of House incumbents currently occupying what Wasserman ranks as either "toss-up" (27) or "also competitive" (29) seats. The mean ranking for both groups (186, 187) is basically the same--and this despite the slight weighing down of that average of a handful of liberal outliers among both groups, including four "toss-up" seats where the member has a vote rating lower than 128 and two such seats among the "also competitive" group. The pattern is clear: Some of the most conservative members of the House Democratic caucus, those with vote scores that rank them in the high 100s or low 200s of the 256-member caucus, are in trouble. Heck, Alabama's Bobby Bright is actually the 264th most liberal member in a House that only has 256 Democratic-held seats!

What can we conclude from this data?

1. Blue Dogs or other House Democrats who often vote with them are going to account for the vast majority of House Democratic losses this November, which is not a real shocker to anyone following the situation closely;

2. The voting records of those in greater jeopardy ("toss-ups") are not much different from those who are in somewhat lesser jeopardy (the "also-competitive" seat-holders). Of course, vulnerability is a function of factors other than roll call voting records, including money and strength of opponent and district demographics and seniority.

3. The House Democratic caucus, whether holding onto a thinner majority or falling into the minority, will be more liberal in the 112th Congress than it is now.

SOURCE: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/07/blue-dogs-be-dog-gone-soon.html