Lesly Clark, "Naked Politics" blog @ MiamiHerald.com
So much for party unity: As Florida Dems prepare for Saturday's Jefferson-Jackson dinner aimed at bringing the party "together once and for all," a spat over the Obama campaign's decision to replace some already-designated Florida delegates with Obama backers has intensified.
And how. DNC member Jon Ausman late Thursday e-mailed Dems (and reporters) choice sections of what he says were e-mails from Obama's Florida finance chair Kirk Wagar -- in which Wagar curses Ausman out and criticizes Sen. Bill Nelson and party director Leonard Joseph.
The highlights: "You (Jon Ausman) f&^%ed us. We are dealing with it. You need to accept the fact that you f*&^ed us."
And of Nelson: "I am getting very sick of (Senator) Nelson making a bad situation worse."
Said Ausman to Wagar: "We are at a point in time when we need to heal and come together. Help me understand how these messages, which you have sent to me in writing, help Senator Obama's campaign."
Wagar sent out an e-mail shortly after, apologizing for the profanity, but suggesting Ausman had used "out of context snippets from some ongoing and sometimes heated arguments we have had over the course of this campaign. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
06/13/2008 11:28 ||
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#1
LOL Ausman!
Big fucker but slow. I've wizzed on his car at least 4 times over the last 30 years.
Posted by: George Smiley ||
06/13/2008 11:35 Comments ||
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#2
a spat over the Obama campaign's decision to replace some already-designated Florida delegates with Obama backers has intensified.
snicker - sounds like they are saying they are not willing to give the Hillary backers to Obama yet. Ie: she's not dead yet and don't be surprised if she rises up from the bathtub like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
#3
SB9312: thanks for that iamge; menacing eyes darting about, shrill piercing screams emanating from that not-so-dainty moutn ountures nearby eardrums; water cascading from every cellulite-enhanced bulge; lethargic movement causes ripples beneath the scaly skin's surface akin to a rolling earthquake.
#5
HMMMMM, HMMMMM....
1. FASCIST ARROGANT UNCONTROLLED MALE BRUTE AMERICA > LIMITED LEFTIST-SOCIALIST, LIMITED MARXIST-LEFTIST, LIM COMMUNIST, LIM TOTALITARIAN, LIM GOVTIST, LIM GLOBALIST,...AMERIKA.
2. Year 2008-2012 > PAN-ISLAMIST NUCLEARIZATION [Nuklar-StratWeaps "Sufficiency", FIRST STRIKE? PREEMPTIVE?] vv PROTO-ISLAMIST CENTRAL ASIA/ASIA???
3. AMERICAN HIROSHIMA(S) > TOTALITARIAN COMIE-SOCIE-GOVTIST AMERIKA = USSA or UNITED SOCIALIST REPUBS OF AMERIKA.
4. COMMIEDS actually won the COld War???
Dear writers and editors of the Obama's FightTheSmears site,
I have a hot tip for you on another person describing Obama as having a "Muslim background": Malik Obama, the candidate's half-brother, in a recent interview cited in the Jerusalem Post.
Please track down this nefarious malefactor and ensure his statements are corrected.
Always happy to do my part to help,
--Jim
Posted by: Mike ||
06/13/2008 07:58 ||
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"The Nation will live to regret what the Court had done today," Justice Antonin Scalia writes at the end of his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, the case in which a bare majority of the Supreme Court, for the first time ever, extended rights under the U.S. constitution to enemy combatants who have never set foot on U.S. soil.
It's worth noting that the nation has lived to regret things the court has done in earlier wars. In Schenck v. U.S. (1919), the court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party leader for distributing an anticonscription flier during World War I--material that would unquestionably be protected by the First Amendment under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). In Korematsu v. U.S. (1944), the court held that the government had the authority to ban Japanese-Americans from certain areas of California, simply on the ground that their ethnic heritage rendered their loyalty suspect. Korematsu has never been overturned, but there is no doubt that it would be in the vanishingly unlikely event that the question ever came up again.
This war was different. Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, we began hearing dire warnings about threats to civil liberties. Five members of the high court seem to have internalized these warnings. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in his majority opinion today, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." Kennedy and his colleagues seemed determined to err on the side of an expansive interpretation of constitutional rights. And err they did. As Justice Scalia writes:
[Today's decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.
In establishing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, President Bush relied on a Supreme Court precedent of more than a half century's standing, Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), which held that nonresident alien enemy combatants had no right to habeas corpus. As Scalia explains:
Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners [to Guantanamo], but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.
This points to a key limitation in today's ruling. The majority distinguished Guantanamo from the facility at issue in Eisentrager--a U.S.-administered prison in occupied Germany--on the ground that although the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is technically on Cuban territory, America exercises "complete jurisdiction and control" over it. Thus, detainees have constitutional rights pursuant to today's ruling only if they are held at Guantanamo.
What does Boumediene mean in practice? Almost all Guantanamo detainees already have lawyers and have petitioned for habeas corpus. Those cases will go forward in the Washington, D.C., federal trial court. The judges there will have to settle on a standard of proof, and to rule on such tricky questions as how much classified material the government is obliged to provide to terrorists and their lawyers. Since the military's existing procedures are already overly lenient--Scalia lists several cases of released detainees showing up on the battlefield--it seems unlikely that many detainees will end up winning release.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain have said they want to close down Guantanamo, and this ruling makes that outcome more likely. There is little advantage to the U.S. in sending enemy combatants to a facility where they will immediately be able to lawyer up, and indeed, Guantanamo has admitted few new detainees in the past several years. A notable exception occurred in 2006, when President Bush transferred Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and a dozen or so other "high value" detainees there--a dramatic action that helped galvanize Congress to pass the Detainee Treatment Act This turns out to have been a mistake. KSM & Co. now have "constitutional rights." Had they been kept where they were, wherever that was, this would not be the case.
It's possible that Scalia is wrong when he predicts more Americans will die as a result of this ruling. It may be that al Qaeda is a weak enough enemy that America can vanquish it even with the Supreme Court tying one hand behind our back. Anyway, keeping future detainees away from Guantanamo should prevent them from coming within the reach of the justices' pettifogging. Perhaps decades from now we will learn that detainees ended up being abused in some far-off place because the government closed Guantanamo in response to judicial meddling. Even those who support what the court did today may live to regret it.
#2
Job security for the Intelligence and Homeland Security communities and the National Lawyers Guild...so Lynn Stewart (if she's not busy shaving the whiskers off her face) must be delighted since she can again secretly convey messages from her clients to the Global Jihadi community.
#3
Long past the time that the Justices, like Senators, should be popularly elected. They intentionally make law complicated so that they, and only they, as priests of their fraternal order, know the arcane but correct sequencing of invocation to evoke their god. BTW, Congress ain't too hot either as all they had to pass was a simple document suspending habius corpus for the terrorists et al being held in places not part of the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, or territories. But no, they had to get fancy themselves trying to play the game of word sequencing and eloquence that the priesthood reserves for itself.
#4
What gets me is the absolute arrogance that the leftists on the court have.
They decided that THEY could blithely overrule long precedent, the president and both houses of congress who worked hard to pass a law that would provide unprecedented due process to non-citizen illegal combatant prisoners, who by all rights can simply be summarily executed under the Geneva Convention.
And whats worse, not only did the overrule the will of the people as shown in the executive branch and both houses of the legislative branch over a military and forign policy conduct issue, the arrogantly snatch that right and haded it over to an unlected set of judges in the appeals court.
Judges making US military and Foreign policy, with NO VOICE OF THE PEOPLE.
Its called Judicial Tyranny, and if the liberals get their wish, we will see more and more of this sort of thing happening.
Until we get to the point where we have to get the guns and ropes and adminiser justice ourselves to our self-absorbed black robed masters and the weak kneed SOBs in Congress and the Whitehouse who are letting them run amok.
#5
"Until we get to the point where we have to get the guns and ropes and adminiser justice ourselves to our self-absorbed black robed masters and the weak kneed SOBs in Congress and the Whitehouse who are letting them run amok.'
-we're almost there brother; I see only more stupidity in the coming months and possibly years. The founders never intended for the Constitution to be some suicide pact that we have to suspend our God Given reason and commonsense in order to utilize it correctly. To restore our liberty it may result to no other recourse then from the barrel of a gun.
#7
Well, it looks like the Jury Box is no longer accountable (the Soap and Ballot Boxes long ago usurped by the Left), unless this situation can be rectified, and I'm not hopeful, we're pretty much left with the Ammo Box. At some near point, such action is practically incumbent upon us.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
06/13/2008 12:54 Comments ||
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#8
I respectfully disagree. Guantanamo was an aberration that should never have happened. It was devised to establish a sort of pseudo-legality for the internment of (suspected) terrorists that should never have happened.
It was like having the cake and eating it.
Either you bring people, whoever they are and whatever they have done to judgment. If you do, then do it with all the rights regular citizens and even the Nazis at Nuremberg enjoyed.
If you can't do that because you can't get the evidence and need to resort to measures which are not acceptable at a regular court of a democratic free country, then don't do it at all.
So what to do with people who are a clear and present danger? Kill them. If this is a war,then kill them. Without decorum. Kill them in their shitholes.
Gitmo just ruins morale and international prestige, and you get nothing out of it.
I am not worried about rich Arabs; its the French who worry me. This was the response from a businessman in Clovis, California, reacting to my comment that the U.S. government was concerned about the influence of foreign-owned sovereign wealth funds.
Why are you worried about the French? I asked.
They just bought the largest company here, he replied. Life will now change for all of usthat company has been an important part of this community for years. He was referring to Pelco, a Clovis-based manufacturer of video security systems that was recently acquired by Schneider Electric, a French company.
There is nothing special about Pelcos sale; foreign companies buy American ones all the time and vice versa. This transaction was far smaller than the United Arab Emirates $7.5 billion investment in Citigroup or Chinas $3 billion investment in the Blackstone Group, a major financial company. Except that this transaction is part of a trend that, though still largely unnoticed, will soon rear its head: The United States is poised to receive a massiveperhaps unprecedentedinflow of large- and medium-size European investors. Everything from corporate behemoths to family-owned companies are about to come to America on a corporate buying spree. Call it the Euroinvasion. Not only will many U.S. companies now have European owners, but the American marketplace will witness an infusion of new foreign competitors that will manufacture their products in the United States. They will use their new American base both to export to the worldincluding back to their own European marketand to serve the U.S. market from inside its borders. Such a trans-Atlantic shift will have an enormous impact on Europes levels of employment and exports. Inevitably, the move will also ignite a political firestorm on both sides of the Atlantic. European politicians will denounce the companies for exporting jobs to America, while U.S. politicians, already rattled by the threat of foreign competition, will be infuriated by what they will brand as the foreign takeover of America. CNN anchor Lou Dobbs will be foaming at the mouth.
Why is this happening now? The plummeting U.S. dollar has made the move across the Atlantic affordable for many European companies. And this may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to relocate: American companies have rarely been so cheap. Five years ago, a German or Spanish company that coveted a U.S. competitor worth $500 million needed roughly 430 million euros to purchase it. Today, it would take just 316 million euros to buy a company worth half a billion dollars.
European companies are not just being pulled to America by a cheaper dollar. They are also being pushed away from Europe by a business environment that is not as attractive as that in the United States. For many companies, moving across the Atlantic is the fastest and cheapest way to cut costs and become more competitive. The average hourly manufacturing wage in Europe is 16 percent higher than in the United States. Social insurance and payroll taxes are far steeper in Europe. As are energy costs: the average price of a kilowatt-hour for industrial usage in Europe is roughly 60 percent more than in the United States. Transportation costs are higher, too. And the cost advantages of operating in the United States dont stop there. Land is still far cheaper in the United States. An acre of rural land in the United States will cost you an average of $1,900. The same plot of land will cost you $5,700 in Germany, $6,650 in Spain, and $14,600 in Denmark.
Every year, competition in the global economy becomes fiercer. Although some European companies may set up shop in Asia or Eastern Europewhich can be even cheaper than the United Statesmost still view the United States as the corporate Mecca. As the CEO of an Italian manufacturing company recently told me, I cannot afford not to move to the U.S. if I want my familys company to survive. It will not only be cheaper, but it will also place me and my engineers in the middle of a large cluster of leading-edge technology companies and in the largest market in the world. We will keep some design operations in Italy, but everything else goes to Massachusetts.
Some manifestations of the Euroinvasion are already visible. Germanys ThyssenKrupp is investing $3.7 billion in a steel plant in Alabama. Frances Alstom, a manufacturer of high-speed trains and turbines, is building a major factory in Tennessee. Other European companies like Italys Fiat have decided to reenter the U.S. market after a 13-year hiatus, and BMW is substantially expanding its manufacturing presence. Recently, the market value of Spains Banco Santander surpassed the value of Citigroup, the standard bearer of the U.S. banking industry. It will be only natural for European banks like Santander to expand their presence in the United States by taking advantage of the fact that many U.S. financial institutions have become far cheaper as a result of the subprime crisis. But the Euroinvasion will be much more than a few headline-grabbing mega-deals. It will consist of thousands of smaller transactions in which midsize European companies swoop in to buy American companies for what will seem like a bargain.
It is going to be impossible for American politicians to stop the Euroinvasion. European politicians will be equally helpless in preventing their companies from moving to the United States. While stopping a few large investments by foreign government-owned funds in American ports, defense industries, and oil companies may be possible, preventing thousands of private companies from investing in the United States is not. Although difficult economic times always create political opportunities for demagogues and populists, America is far from ready to repeal capitalism. And stopping the Euroinvasion would require nothing short of that.
#1
It will be interesting for the European companies to be subject to American financial transparency laws. I imagine there will be lots of bribery cases brought in the next decade.
#2
Didn't we have all this 'foreigners' taking over in the last dollar dump go around but with the Japanese? Crisis, crisis [time to sell more tv time and page columns by generating the next 'crisis'(tm) and throw a little xenophobia in for the gun hugging, bible totting, rednecks as well]. Only two nations capitalized their own development, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Everyone else leveraged foreign investment. It is not only the low dollar that makes the buying enticing, but the low productivity of investing the money back home [Europe] or the long term security of existing property and corporate laws [as lacking in China]. I say welcome. And get to bribe know the state legislators who will make your stay inviting or interesting.
#3
agree Procopius2k. It is a multi-edge sword. The real estate is cheap now and paying the labor costs and travel are great while the dollar is low. But to everything a season. When the dollar goes up - so do the labor costs, shipping costs, material costs and salaries.
The dollar will always go up and down and so do these crisis. One man's ceiling....
#5
Procopius, I was just going to mention the last go-round with Japan. For awhile there people were afraid that Japan was going to own the whole country or so it seemed.
Naturally, it never happened. The Japanese econom tanked (as Europe's is doing) and ours bounced back (as we will again). When that happens a lot of the investments made by the Euroweanies will be bought back by American investors.
The real threat we have to watch out for is people like Soros who's only desire seems to be driving the American dollar down and tanking the US economy - with no apparent thought whatsoever in the fact that the world's economy follows whatever the US economy does.
#6
Foreign investment in the US is booming. So are US exports.
People point to high oil prices, real estate problems, etc. in order to forecast a recession; but the recession seems rather late in coming, and may not come at all. I think they are missing these other factors moving the other direction.
#7
"The side benefit if you are a Euro businessman is you can eventually move your headquarters state-side if Eurabia gets too bad"
Also true. The US is the ultimate "safe haven" for capital flight - if push comes to shove in any sense whatever, eventually, this will be the last place standing if any is. Its cheap to do so now. Get in while the gettings good.
#8
NO surprise here . as argued times before, WOT > AMERICA TAKES OVER THE WORLD versus WORLD TAKES OVER AMERICA. among other premises.
Espec now wid IRAN + RADICAL ISLAM "GOING FOR BROKE" IN CENTRAL ASIA, etc. VV PAN-ISLAMIST NUCLEARIZATION + STRATEGIC WEAPONIZATION, FOR POST-2010 OR 2012 RESURGENT JIHAD-TERR [Nuklar].
VLAD PUTIN make like the idea of A "MULTIPOLAR" WORLD, but OSAMA + RADICAL ISLAMISM THINK OTHERWISE TO SAVE THEIR JIHAD.
JIHAD > OSAMA + ISLAMISTS > BIPOLAR = US-ALLIES versus NUCLEAR ISLAMIST CENTRAL ASIA/ISLAMIST ASIA???
#9
FYI, CHINESE MIL FORUM Poster > claims that many citizens of EUROPE, which he refers to as the "EUROZONE" in anti-OWG OWG-speak, are moving from said Eurozone and settling in THAILAND???
DETROIT Even in northern Wisconsin, where midsize sport utility vehicles are as common as deer, people are starting to abandon them because of high gasoline prices.
It's one of the last places to back away from the class of SUVs, which includes the once-popular Ford Explorer and Chevrolet TrailBlazer. Some industry analysts are already declaring the midsize SUV extinct. "They're dinosaurs. Put a fork in them," Erich Merkle, vice president of auto industry forecasting for the consulting company IRN Inc. in Grand Rapids, Mich., said in an interview.
It's no secret that drivers are flocking to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars as the cost of gas marches higher. And midsize SUVs are built on the same frames as trucks, which add extra weight and drink more fuel.
Continued on Page 49
#1
"There are a lot of perfectly normal families who were driving their kids around in these things who now feel the need to show up in your driveway to apologize," he said.
Apologize for what? I don't give a flying if gas goes to $20/gal. The cars I drive and what gas mileage I get are nobody's business but mine. This lib needs to be on the receiving end of several major-league dope-slaps. They just might give him a clue as to how little his opinion means to non-Kool-Aid drinkers.
Posted by: Thaimble Scourge of the Pixies4707 ||
06/13/2008 11:07 Comments ||
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#2
Mixer has hers on the market, asking $27,995.
That's Mrs. Mixer's problem right there. The Kelly Blue Book puts the value of her vehicle, were it one of the 5% in excellent condition, at $16,000-20,000 depending on which package she got with it. A fool and his money, and all that.
#7
Gas prices wouldn't be that bad if we still had local jobs in my state. You pretty much have to drive to Cincinnati or Lexington to find a job that will pay enough to keep you off the food stamps though. By the time you get there you have gone 40 to 50 miles from the house each way. The few businesses that were in our little town were bought be European competitors and sent to Mexico.
#9
Four kids in a Volkswagen Beetle. I think I may out-suffer you there, Scooter. ;-) Of course, my family runs smaller than the average American, so it may even out.
#10
Four kids plus the parental units in a 1960 Ford Falcon. It actually had a metal dashboard -Guarenteed to bust your lip wide open should you hit it; ask me how I know.
After that, the ever popular 1968 Galaxy - you really can stuff eight kids, two adults and a dog in one. But you need to put the babies in a laundry basket on the floor.
Makes me want to fight with my sisters just thinking about it.
#11
The irony here is that the first few generations of George Jetson's OWG FLYING CARS are as big as SUVS anyway, or larger, and just as OFF-ROAD capable and beyond, espec as the world moves toward NUCLEAR MICRO/NANO-MOTORS.
OWG GLOBAL CONSUMER NUCLEARIZATION > means BIGGER IS BETTER = "IT". The Cold War JAPANESE ECONOMY CAR ISN'T GONNA DO IT ANYMORE.
GOOD FOR COMMIES BUT NOT FOR SPACE TOURISTS + "MUUULLLTTTIIIPAAASSS" FIFTH ELEMENT SPACE-ALIEN BABES.
#13
I had a Pinto station wagon, took the automatic out and put in a 5 speed, it got 25 MPG and had factory AC to boot, Had enough power to cruise the Blue Ridge Parkway, Bring them back.
(I don't give a damn if it's PC or not.)
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
06/13/2008 22:32 Comments ||
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#14
My old man was a Mopar Man - Plymouth Fury, so us 4 boys all fit in the back seat, and he'd drive like a maniac on the Blue Ridge Parkway (Bedford Mountain) and up at the backroads on the way from Roanoke to Smith Mountain Lake - we slid all over the back seat (not belted in) and played "slam the kid in the corner/middle"
As I said on the Hewitt show tonight, I feel as if Bizarro World is slowly leaking into ours, and one day we will see Superman and note he has that ugly grey faceted skin, and wonder when that happened. Well, we just didnt pay attention to the signs. In Bizarro World, illegal foreign combatants are granted constitutional rights; in Bizarro World, people react to high gas prices and energy shortfalls by refusing to boost domestic capacity. You have John McCain nixing ANWAR drilling and lending his sonorous monotone to cap-and-trade; you have Obama noting that gas prices rose too quickly, which presumably means he would have favored a gradual rise to ninety-buck-a-tank fill-ups; you have Speaker Pelosi vamping on the popular memes:
1. We have oil men in the White House. Perhaps she meant to imply that theyre more concerned with their old industry connections than the consumer, the rate of inflation, the impact on the economy, their legacy, and the health and status of the United States. Goes without saying, I guess. It is a hardy perennial. Remember, there are three men in Texas who have a lever that controls the price of oil, and they should be brought in for a stern grilling before Congress. On an unrelated note: Hugo Chavez is a puckish figure whose appeal to the downtrodden is understandable, given American meddling in the region; Iranian state oil production is irrelevant to everything, Saudi Arabia can only be discussed in context to its ties to the Bush family, and Mexico's oil industry is off-limits as well, lest it somehow bolster the arguments of xenophobic racists who oppose unlimited immigration. Pay no attention to the oligarchs behind the curtain. Look at the cartoon figure with the ten-gallon hat and the steer-horns on his stretch Cadillac. Boo! Hiss! Goldstein!
2. We have 2 percent of the reserves and use 25 percent of the reserves. Perhaps she meant to imply that the oil should be distributed across the globe by population, and the most dynamic, elastic, productive economies should be starved to satisfy some happy hand-holding UN-approved kumbaya concept of transnational fairness, and YOU should be putting gas into a bottle and sending it to Zimbabwe. As Ive said before: its as if a world government was formed 20 years ago, and the United States has not only failed to live up to its moral obligations, it has actively thwarted and disregarded the law. Weve seceded. Internationally speaking, were Dixie.
3. We cannot drill our way out of this. We cannot, in other words, deal with shortages by increasing the supply. Presumably because it wouldnt have an immediate effect? Well, then, theres no point doing anything about global warming today or tomorrow, is there. Because it wont forestall the inevitable day when we run out. Granted. So why eat today? Youll be dead eventually. Because it wont be enough in the end to depress prices enough. Yes, three-buck-a-gallon gas, five-buck-a-gallon: six of one, nine dozen of the other, especially if youre being limod everywhere. Because we have oilmen in the White House boo hiss. Well: lets look at whos making out bandit-wise. According to this page, the profit in California on a gallon of gas is 51 cents which includes, for some bizarre reason, refinery costs. Only government can make a chart that lumps costs into profits into the same wad. Total California taxes and fees: 52 cents. Add the Federal tax, and its 60 cents.
Lets go back to that refinery costs and profits part: the site defines it thus:
The costs associated with refining and terminal operations, crude oil processing, oxygenate additives, product shipment and storage, oil spill fees, depreciation, purchases of gasoline to cover refinery shortages, brand advertising, and profits.
If youre lumping profit in with the costs associated with government mandates, like oxygenate additives, well its almost as if theyre trying to separate profits from costs to make the former look bigger.
And theres another category:
Distribution Costs, Marketing Costs, and Profits: The costs associated with the distribution from terminals to stations and retailing of gasoline, including but not limited to: franchise fees, and/or rents, wages, utilities, supplies, equipment maintenance, environmental fees, licenses, permitting fees, credit card fees, insurance, depreciation, advertising, and profit.
So Im guessing the profit isnt 51 cents. But whatever it is, its too much! Ive heard some people yearn for a windfall profits tax that would reinvest the money in alternative energy, or rebate it back to the consumer. Fine. Apply that to your business. Heres the acceptable profit level. You dont get to make any more than that. If you do, the state will confiscate the property and divide it among your competitors, or give it back to your customers. Have a nice day. But oil is different. Its necessary! So is food. Farmers are doing well. Let us therefore set the acceptable level for corn farmers, take away the excess profits, invest it new forms of sweeteners or biofuels farmers cannot yet produce, and give people rebates for Splenda to compensate for the price of high fructose corn syrup.
Its not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not. We should not drill 50 miles off shore on the chance someone in Malibu takes a hot-air balloon up 1000 feet and uses a telephoto lens to scan the horizon for oil platforms. Also, there are ecological concerns. (The ocean is a wee place, easily disturbed.) Theres something else that may well be my imagination, but I cant quite shake the feeling: high gas prices and shortages of oil make some people feel good. This is the way it has to be. Oil is bad. Cars are bad. Cars make suburbs possible. Suburbs are the antithesis of the way we should live, which is stacked upon one another in dense blocks tied together by happy whirring trains. So some guy who drives to work alone has to spend more money for the privilege of being alone in his car listening to hate radio?
Good.
Yes, I know, projection and demonizaton and oversimplification. But this is true: theres a side of the domestic political structure that opposes expansion of domestic energy production, be it drilling or nukes or more refineries.
The long-term upside seems indistinct, and the short-term downside seems rude and obvious.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/13/2008 06:32 ||
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#1
Duh! The oil industry is worried that Iran may soon be in a position of dictating oil prices. Why? They no longer trust President Bush. The distancing has already begun. Fortunately, Sen. McCain is likely to be tied into sensible policies.
#4
There was an interesting discussion on Hanity and Colmes about the increased presence of Hedge fund investment in the oil futures. I think it was Morris who was expounding on how that has increased the price of oil. Also, Beck said that the profit margin for the oil companies was 8.5%, while the profit margin on hedge fund investments was 80%, and perhaps they should have a windfall profit tax. I am starting to believe that there is manipulation in the oil market, rather than a lack of supply.
#5
Morris on H&C said that the rules regarding speculation on oil futures were relaxed in 1999 and the amount of money chasing the futures has increased from $16B in '99 to $260B recently. Hannity cut him off before he could make the very important point that hedge funds, by and large, are investing money given them by public employee retirment systems, union pension managers, and the like. When those implode and can't meet their obligations they'll dump them back onto the taxpayers as they've done in the past. Morris' sources were a couple of oil specialists at large investment banks.
Further the low-margin parts of the oil business (refining, transport, wholesalers) who utilize futures to smooth their cycles will be at risk of being wiped out when the bubble bursts but Morris did't go into that.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
DETROIT Even in northern Wisconsin, where midsize sport utility vehicles are as common as deer, people are starting to abandon them because of high gasoline prices.
