Click the image below to watch the video of Senator Biden’s appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

This morning, Senator Biden weighed in on the report that a secret surveillance program has been building a database of hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls. Click the image above to watch video of the interview.

On Sunday, C-SPAN’s “Road to the White House” aired the speech Senator Biden recently delivered in Galivants Ferry, SC. The speech has been generating a lot of positive coverage, including this column from Lee Bandy on Sunday in The State.

U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., scored huge points — if not critical support — for his possible White House bid during a high-profile visit last week to the Galivants Ferry stump meeting.

It was a stellar performance that won Biden rave reviews.

“A terrific speech,” said Inez Tenenbaum, state superintendent of education, who lost a 2004 U.S. Senate bid to Republican Jim DeMint of Greenville.

“We just saw the next president of the United States,” State Treasurer Grady Patterson said.

Never before had a potential presidential candidate addressed or visited the 130-year-old gathering along the banks of the Little Pee Dee River.

Biden didn’t disappoint. He had the crowd of 2,500 on their feet waving banners and punctuating the air with shouts of, “Tell ‘em, Joe!”

Read the full column here.

Oil company executives testified before Congress that they didn’t need the $2.6 billion in tax breaks that were given to them in last year’s energy bill. Click the image below to see the video.

If you haven’t already done so, please click here to sign our petition supporting Senator Biden’s stand to repeal these tax breaks.

On Monday, in the New York Times, Senator Biden and Leslie Gelb moved the debate on Iraq by laying out a new 5 point plan for success.

A decade ago, Bosnia was torn apart by ethnic cleansing and facing its demise as a single country. After much hesitation, the United States stepped in decisively with the Dayton Accords,which kept the country whole by, paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations, even allowing Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies. With the help of American and other forces, Bosnians have lived a decade in relative peace and are now slowly strengthening their common central government, including disbanding those separate armies last year.

Now the Bush administration, despite its profound strategic misjudgments in Iraq, has a similar opportunity. To seize it, however, America must get beyond the present false choice between “staying the course” and “bringing the troops home now” and choose a third way that would wind down our military presence responsibly while preventing chaos and preserving our key security goals.

The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests. We could drive this in place with irresistible sweeteners for the Sunnis to join in, a plan designed by the military for withdrawing and redeploying American forces, and a regional nonaggression pact.

It is increasingly clear that President Bush does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq. Rather, he hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor. Meanwhile, the frustration of Americans is mounting so fast that Congress might end up mandating a rapid pullout, even at the risk of precipitating chaos and a civil war that becomes a regional war.

As long as American troops are in Iraq in significant numbers, the insurgents can’t win and we can’t lose. But intercommunal violence has surpassed the insurgency as the main security threat. Militias rule swathes of Iraq and death squads kill dozens daily. Sectarian cleansing has recently forced tens of thousands from their homes. On top of this, President Bush did not request additional reconstruction assistance and is slashing funds for groups promoting democracy.

Read the full article here.

You can download the plan, Iraq: A Way Forward (.pdf), here.

It’s time to end the double-talk on oil. People from Wilmington and Los Angeles aren’t paying $3 a gallon for gas because of our “addiction to oil.” They are paying $3 a gallon because this administration’s national energy policy is written by the big oil companies.

Since President Bush took office, the price of gas has doubled - increased 100 percent.

High gas prices that make us queasy at the pump have been very good for the major oil companies. They are flush. Prices went up during Katrina. Six months later we learned that these oil companies made record breaking profits — $111 billion in 2005.

Click here to support our efforts to repeal tax breaks for oil and gas companies that don’t need them.

Last year Exxon Mobil reported the highest annual profits — $36 billion — of any corporation in US history. Those are profits approaching twice the return earned by the average American corporation.

The CEO of Exxon Mobile received a $400 million retirement package. His paycheck went through the roof, while the rest of us were left watching dollars tick up at the gas pump.

Since the 1990’s, there have been over 2,600 mergers in the petroleum industry. Today, the Big Five - Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, BP, and Shell - together control 48 percent of domestic production, 50% of domestic refining capacity, and over 60 percent of the retail market. That means market power, pricing power.

It is time for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to get tough with their big oil friends.

Last year, they gave them $2.6 billion dollars in oil and gas tax breaks in the energy bill. Guess what? It turns out they don’t need them.

I know - because I asked them.

The CEOs of the six largest oil and gas companies came in to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.

So I asked them, under oath: Do you need these tax breaks? And they said: No. Each one agreed. No. They don’t need them.

So I have a simple, common sense proposal. Let’s repeal them. Let’s do it immediately. Let’s not give them billions in tax breaks that they clearly don’t need. It is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Click here to support our efforts to repeal tax breaks for oil and gas companies that don’t need them.

This is a nonpartisan, no-brainer decision. We have the word of the oil companies themselves - they don’t need them.

Let’s take the first step in taking control of our national energy policy. Let’s show the oil companies that the days of handouts from the Bush administration are over.

Thank you,

Joe Biden

On Friday, Senator Biden appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Watch the panel discussion that everyone is talking about.

Senator Biden appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews this week. You can watch video of his remarks by clicking on the image below. (There may be a short pause while the video loads.)

Senator Biden will appear on Hardball with Chris Matthews this evening at 5pm ET.

Also, C-SPAN is airing video of the Senator’s recent speech to the Spartanburg County (South Carolina) Democratic Party Convention on Sunday. It’s part of C-SPAN’s “Road to the White House” series, and airs at 6:30pm ET and again at 9:30pm ET. Visit C-SPAN for more details.

Senator Biden spoke extensively about the war in Iraq this week at an event coordinated by the Center for American Progress. You can watch video of his remarks by clicking on the image below. (There may be a short pause while the video loads.)