It's the Gasoline, Stupid

10 thoughts on “It’s the Gasoline, Stupid”

1. Democrats are thrilled and elated that gas prices are high.  That’s suppose to mean people drive less and make poor people pay more money from their small budgets, especially in a large state like Colorado.  Why can’t the poor people afford hydrid cars that barely have enough horsepower to propel one person over Loveland Pass?

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2. Sorry, but this is so random. That cnn.com article referenced Reed City Michigan. My sister lives there. The town has a population of about 1500. I never would have though anyone but a Republican could have come out of there. That place is a redneck fiasco. lol. Sorry, I thought that I had a duty to share.

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3. Democrats are not thrilled nor elated that gas prices are high.  Democrats would like a President with a real energy policy besides packing the pockets of the oil companies full of money.  Oil companies have had record profit on the backs of the working class that the Republicans could careless about.  When Tom Delay was asked if rolling back taxes on gas was a priority he said NO.  Helping out the rich by rolling back the estate tax is the only “tax reform” Republicans care about.  Screw the rest of us working folk.

   http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-09-06T202400Z_01_MCC664526_RTRIDST_0_POLITICS-CONGRESS-ENERGY-DELAY-DC.XML

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4. Bush’s ratings are attributable to so many different factors all coalescing at the same time, I think looking for that one cause and beating that particular drum just misses the point.

   A strategy for energy independence has nothing to do with high prices, the latter simply gets people thinking about the former. Meaning: one doesn’t become more energy independent when prices get lower.

   But pricing fluctuates, especially when it is supply bottlenecks creating the current spike, so premising a political strategy on the prices remaining this high would be foolish.

   What matters here is less people irritated about current prices than the 52% disapproval rating. Although 70% are irritated at Bush about high gas prices, it is the lower figure that is more enduring. If it solidifies, it doesn’t matter if its 50.1% or 80%, the Republicans are in serious trouble in 2006. This means Congressional Republicans are going to be more and more likely to abandon the White House, rendering Bush irrelevant. That’s what really matters: if the part genuinely fractures in Washington, then the ability to exercise power collapses as rats abandon the sinking ship.

   Katrina has ripped the band-aid off of everything, and it isn’t a pretty site beneath. Now, when people here about chaos in Baghdad or Basra, folks will have American images that they can analogize such news with. The righteousness pandering and utopian abstractions simply won’t cut it anymore.

   But Republican control of Congress depends on running away from the White House in 2006, that’s your real test; not gasoline prices.

   At the state level, Republicans would do well to shift blame to the national level, even if their transport/housing policies incentivize consumption. But I am surprised more Democrats aren’t talking about how smart it is to plan head about forward-thinking Amendment 37 has been. Diversifying your supply, even at the margins, is above all strategically prudent.

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5. Sorry about my typos, I didn’t preview.

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6. Bush’s approval rating is 39%, Stygius, not 52%. 52% is the people who disapprove of his handling of Katrina. His overall ratings are a dismal 39%.

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7. Yup, I wasn’t careful enough.

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8. I’m a firm believer in feeding people their own words back to them, when it’s appropriate.” ? Trent Lott

   As we hurtle headlong into the silly season, a high colonic for the mind is in order. There is going to be a lot of back-and-forth between the candidates regarding who said what and when. Feast, in that context, upon this small collection:

   “Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.” – George W. Bush, discussing Kosovo, Houston Chronicle, 04-09-99

   “I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.” – Bill O’Reilley, on ABC’s Good Morning America, 03-18-03

   “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.” – Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95

   “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual gay sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family and that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. It all comes from, I would argue, the right to privacy that doesn’t exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution.” – Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Associated Press, 04-22-03

   “I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. This is not a message of hate; this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.” – Pat Robertson, speaking of organizers putting rainbow flags up around Orlando to support sexual diversity, Washington Post, 06-10-98. For the record, Orlando remains undestroyed by meteors.

   “Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.” – Rep. Don Young (R-AK), Alaska Public Radio, 08-19-96

   “When you strip it all away, Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs. And yet he’s being honored, like some godlike figure. Our priorities are out of whack, folks.” – Rush (currently under investigation for drug use) Limbaugh, on the death of Jerry Garcia, 08-20-95.

   “I don’t understand how poor people think.” – George W. Bush, confiding in the Rev. Jim Wallis, New York Times, 08-26-03

   “Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him.” – Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton, as reported by journalist Steve Miner of KSUB radio who overheard his conversation, 11-01-98

   “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.” – Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95

   “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.” – Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02

   “Homosexuals want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers.” – Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-18-95

   “And there is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into the bombing campaign.” – Donald Rumsfeld, defenselink.mil, 04-09-03

   “Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.” – Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), House Majority Whip, during a debate on increasing the minimum wage, Congressional Record, H3706, 04-23-96

   “Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past – I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble – recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’ In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.” – John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

   “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.” – Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-08-92

   “Probably nothing.” – Jeb Bush, during his losing 1994 bid for Florida Governor, when asked what he would do for black people, quoted by Salon on 10-05-02

   “The homosexual blitzkrieg has been better planned and executed than Hitler’s.” – Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA), The New Republic, 08-01-94

   “When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.” – Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-21-93 “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.” – Lt. General William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, New York Times, 10-17-03

   “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.” – Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02

   “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” – Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, NPR Morning Edition, 05-25-01

   “I don’t agree that you need an enormous number of American troops. Saddam’s army is down to one-third than it was before, and I think it would be a cakewalk.” – Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board, to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, 12-06-01

   “The fact of the matter is that this (increased American casualties) is a sign of the success of our operation, not its failure.” – Ralph Reed, GOP strategist, on MSNBC’s program ‘Hardball,’ 10-28-03

   “There are some who feel that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring ’em on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.” – George W. Bush, Chicago Tribune, 07-03-03

   “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” – Paul Wolfowitz, quoted by Tim Russert on ‘Meet The Press, NBC, 06-01-03

   “Quit looking at the symbols. Get out and get a job. Quit shooting each other. Quit having illegitimate babies.” – State Rep. John Graham Altman (R-SC), addressing African-American concerns about the ‘symbol’ of the Confederate Flag, New York Times, 01-24-97

   “Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.” – State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01

   “NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you’ve got to be a lesbian.” – Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 12-03-97

   “My biggest fear is going to be going to the funeral of some young Iowa man or woman who dies in this conflict and having their mother or father come up to me and ask whether or not their son or daughter died for America, or died to save Bill Clinton’s presidency. I don’t know what I would say to those grieving parents. For that reason I believe the President must resign immediately.” – Rep. Jim Nussle (R-IA), Congressional Record, H11963, 12-18-98

   “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” – Barbara Bush, said on ‘Good Morning America’ the day before the Iraq war started, New York Times, 01-13-03

   “I’m the commander – see, I don’t need to explain – I don’t need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” – George W. Bush, Washington Post, 11-19-02

   These quotes, and about a thousand others equally as preposterous, can be found in a new book by Bruce Miller and Diana Maio titled ‘Take Them At Their Words.’ The next time our valiant conservative leadership bemoans the “corruption and fall of the nation,” remember that, by and large, these bemoaners are the clowns who have been running the circus for the last several years.

   A few are also up for re-election in 2006. Bear that in mind.

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9. Very selective memory you have.

   Here are a few you forgot:

   “The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.” — Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), October 9, 2002

   “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.” — Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), 1946, Grand Kleagle of the Klu Klux Klan

   “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”  — Bill Clinton (D), President of the United States

   “Hiccup!  What bridge?” — Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

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10. It amazes me how few Democrats understand basic economics.  I hear Dem Senator’s and U.S. Rep’s all the way down party hacks spouting off about gasoline prices rising and not realizing that the rise and fall of prices is part of capitalism.  It is all about supply and demand.  Please read the Wealth of Nations, or any one of a hundred economic books and you can see how the economy works before they start attacking the free market system that has allowed the U.S. to become the great nation it is.

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