Last Call

Iran's hijinks in the Strait of Hormuz is going to cost you at the pump this week as oil is now back above $100 a barrel. 

Oil prices surged 4% Tuesday, fueled by continued anxiety over Iran's growing threat to shut down the Strait of Hormuz after the Iranian military launched a missile test.

"It's mostly about Iran right now," said Peter Beutel, analyst with energy risk management firm Cameron Hanover. "That's the most bullish factor."

Oil prices jumped 4.2% to settle at $102.96 a barrel. That's the highest closing price since May 10, when prices ended the day at $103.88 a barrel.

The Strait of Hormuz is a critical shipping lane, with 17 million barrels of oil per day passing through in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

That's about one sixth of global oil production and nearly 20% of all the oil traded worldwide. Iran itself only exports about 2.2 million barrels of oil a day.

Just last week, Iran issued its initial threat to shut the shipping lane linking the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. Iran's southern coast borders that entire area.

"If Iran oil is banned, not a single drop of oil will pass through Hormuz Strait," Iran's 1st Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi said at that time, according to the Iran State News Agency.

Recently, Iran warned that they will "severely react to any threat" if the US carrier John C. Stennis returned to the region after moving out of the Persian Gulf.  Nice to see with US oil refiners exporting record amounts of gasoline overseas that we can continue to get gouged at the pump and continue to deal with record yearly average gas prices because we're sending gasoline to other countries instead of your county.

And still, energy companies make record profits while complaining about "industry-crushing regulations" that they can't afford.  Funny how that works.

The Road To Mumbai

The newest location with a nouveau riche boomlet is India, where the kids prefer Italian sportscars in the "world's largest democracy".

From farmers who swapped fields for cash to 20-something CEOs that inherited the family business, hot new money is flooding India's luxury car market as roaring sportscar engines announce the country's growing wealth on its roads.

No senior Indian executive feels complete without his sleek German-made saloon, while Italian sportscars are the new calling cards for the country's rich young things at exclusive nightclubs that screen guests at the main gate, not at the door.

"There is a rush to luxury," says Mohan Mariwala, managing director of Auto Hangar, surrounded by gleaming Mercedes Benz sportscars in one of his four Mumbai showrooms for luxury cars.

"Farmers, tiny industrial families, the younger generation with different value systems...You can't imagine the kind of people who invest in extremely exotic cars today."

Headline growth in Asia's third-largest economy may be stuttering, but decades of growth has spawned a new upper class with global tastes and aspirations that is driving a $1 billion luxury car market expanding at 40 percent annually, say industry analysts and research firms.

With India's population reaching 1.2 billion, and half the population living on the US equivalent of about a dollar a day, it's no wonder that the "one percent" there is looking to flash some cash.  Income inequality may be awful in the US, but there are countries where it is far worse and it remains so.

An Inch Of Snow And The World Collapses

Kentucky drivers really are just absolutely terrible.

Two pileups involved dozens of cars on Interstate 75 on Monday.

Kenton County police said 41 vehicles were involved in a pileup just north of Crittenden at mile marker 167.That pileup left eight people injured.

Six people were hospitalized with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.

Officers said 23 of the vehicles were so badly damaged in the wreck they had to be towed away.

Another pileup occurred near Dry Ridge. Police said this was actually three separate crashes involving more than 30 vehicles.

Between the two pileups, Interstate 75 was closed for more than four hours.

And that's just south of here.  I'm glad I had the day off, that's all I'm saying.

This Is What Hero Looks Like

BOULDER, Colo. -- A Colorado man who was killed when a 3-foot tree branch flew through his windshield and impaled him in the chest was able to steer the car to safety before losing consciousness.

The wife of 61-year-old James Baker-Jarvis told the Daily Camera ( http://goo.gl/WsaHg ) that her husband was able to pull the Subaru Outback over to the roadside, saving her from any injury. Baker-Jarvis died later at a hospital.

Baker-Jarvis was a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His wife said that he had hoped to one day bicycle across America.

"He loved to be outside," Karen Baker-Jarvis said.

Imagine your last thought being saving the person next to you. He was an educated man. He knew the situation, and without hesitation he did the right thing. May we all have such grace and strength if faced with such a dire situation.

The article mentions other wind-related injuries, which gives a new respect for something we usually scoff at.  Drive safe, folks.

My Cats Must Never Know This Exists

From the Too Freaking Cool files:

A man brushes his cat remotely with the help of some modern tools and a very small robot.  It's pretty cool watching him get his bearings after watching through the RoboCam, and handles the brush.  The cat seems to enjoy it (mostly).

It's not just impressive, it's something that cats all over the world would demand. Here is a link to the full article.

Classifying The Middle-Class

Reuters columnist David Rohde asks a pretty important question:  Who is the American middle class, and what does being middle-class mean?

Despite the incessant political lip service paid to the middle class, there is no official American government definition of the group. The middle class has been intensively studied but no political consensus exists over how it was created or how to strengthen it. Liberals credit government programs with helping create a thriving American middle class after World War II. They cite the G.I. bill, home mortgage interest deduction and state university system as examples. Conservatives credit unbridled, American free market capitalism with the feat. I believe it was both.

Within weeks of taking office, the Obama administration’s launched its own effort to help the group. Chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, the “Middle Class Task Force” was launched in January 2009 and includes the secretaries of labor, health and human services, education and commerce.

The closest the task force came to defining the middle class was a January 2010 report “Middle Class in America.” The study never gives an exact income level that is “middle class.” Instead, echoing academic studies on the subject, the document concludes that “middle class families are defined more by their aspirations than their income.”

The report lists typical American middle-class aspirations as “home ownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security, and occasional family vacations.” Obtaining these goals is harder for middle class American families than it has been in decades, the report argues, because the cost of health care, higher education and housing have risen far faster than wages.

In academia, various definitions of the middle class are used. Economists generally use income as the determinant. Using census data, they break the American middle class into quintiles — groups of twenty percent — and declare the middle sixty percent of Americans the middle class. As I said in an earlier column, this is the definition I use. Based on 2010 census data, the middle class would be the sixty percent of Americans with household incomes from $28,636 to $79,040 a year.

The fifty percent mark is right around $43,000 a year in income, if you're wondering.  Thirty years ago that would have been a fortune.  Now?  Considering the price of cars, healthcare, and college, that's not a lot of money at all.  Even housing, as bad as the market has bombed, still finds most Americans are priced out of a mortgage (especially with what banks now want for a down payment.)   So yeah, that payroll tax cut putting $1,000 in the pockets of those making $50,000 a year?  That's a damn lot of money to the 56% of us making that or less in a year.

No wonder the GOP backed down on it.

Iowa-nder Who Will Win?

The most useless political beauty contest of the year gets under way today, and final polling out of PPP shows a 3-way race among the government-hating bigot, the spineless millionaire, and the frothy God-botherer. 

The Republican caucus in Iowa is headed for a photo finish, with the three leading contenders all within two points of each other.  Ron Paul is at 20%, Mitt Romney at 19%, and Rick Santorum at 18%. Rounding out the field are Newt Gingrich at 14%, Rick Perry at 10%, Michele Bachmann at 8%, Jon Huntsman at 4%, and Buddy Roemer at 2%.


The momentum in the race is completely on Santorum's side. He's moved up 8 points since a PPP poll earlier in the week, while no one else has seen more than a one point gain in their support. Among voters who say they decided who to vote for in the last seven days he leads Romney 29-17 with Paul and Gingrich both at 13.

Santorum's net favorability of 60/30 makes him easily the most popular candidate in the field. No one else's favorability exceeds 52%.  He may also have more room to grow in the final 48 hours of the campaign than the other front runners: 14% of voters say he's their second choice to 11% for Romney and only 8% for Paul. Santorum's taken the lead with two key groups of Republican voters: with Tea Partiers he's at 23% to 18% for Gingrich, 16% for Paul, 15% for Bachmann, and only 12% for Romney.  And with Evangelicals he's at 24% to 16% for Gingrich, and 15% for Paul and Romney.

It seems the anti-Romney with the best timing is indeed Santorum, who could very well win this thing.  Of course, four years ago Mike Huckabee won in Iowa, and he promptly crashed and burned as everyone threw their support behind John McCain after his win in New Hampshire.  On the other hand, Barack Obama won Iowa in 2008, and that ended up putting him on the map...and eventually in the White House.  You can't say Iowa is meaningless, although for Republicans, South Carolina is the primary that seems to flag down the eventual winner.  The Palmetto State has picked the eventual GOP nominee every year since Reagan in 1980.

And Newt Gingrich had a commanding lead there before Christmas.  Now?  Who knows.  But today at least, we'll find out if Romney can win...and what the GOP base's reaction will be if he does.  If he doesn't win (and the polls show he could end up third or even fourth behind Gingrich) things get very interesting going into New Hampshire, where Romney has a 26 point margin.  If Romney doesn't win in Iowa, and finishes worse than second (very, very possible) and whoever does win in Iowa comes in second in New Hampshire, things get really crazy.

We'll see what happens today.  My gut says Romney won't win here.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama returns to Washington after his holiday vacation as he plans to address Iowa Democrats tonight by teleconference.
• Montana's Supreme Count has ruled that the Citizens United decision from the US Supreme Court does not overturn the state's 1912 ban on corporate political expenditures.
• A new study shows that high-fat foods can actually damage the hypothalamus, the area of the brain that regulates metabolism.
• The amount of sovereign debt coming due in 2012 for the nation's leading economies is close to $8 trillion, $2.8 trillion in the US alone.
• A North Carolina man has been arrested for trying to by a microwave with a one million dollar bill at a Lexington Wal-Mart.

Last Call

It's the last call indeed for Glenn Greenwald's credibility after this weekend, and he finally just couldn't control his blind hatred for the President.  This time, he went too far.  Zerlina Maxwell at The Grio explains:

Greenwald has been one of the loudest and harshest critics of the Obama administration, and while not actually a liberal or an Obama supporter, he is frequently identified as a blogger who is "disappointed with President Obama" over what he sees as serious violations of civil liberties. The debate over the NDAA (and U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan) has been ongoing and frequently gets lively between Greenwald and his supporters, and pro-Obama bloggers like Imani Gandy, of AngryBlackLady.com and Balloon Juice (Gandy also contributes to theGrio.)

In a particularly heated exchange on Twitter Saturday night, a blogger named "DrDawg" tweeted about Gandy: "Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you'd say we weren't seeing what we were seeing." In response, Greenwald chimed in, "No - she'd say it was justified [and] noble - that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape."



When twitter exploded in attacks on Greenwald for making a "rape joke," instead of apologizing for the comment, Greenwald doubled down, tweeting that the reference to rape was not a metaphor and in fact Obama supporters would defend the president in the face of "ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape violent crime like rape."

It gets worse from there.   Not only is Imani a personal friend of mine, but Greenwald's absolute dismissal of women, survivors of sexual abuse, and people who know them and support them is pretty much unconscionable in any context.  That he chose to make the situation worse by saying President Obama's supporters would in fact support him if he raped someone is the kind of vile, awful idiocy you expect from the worst examples that humanity has to offer, and yet as of today, Greenwald has refused to apologize.

I wonder how his employers at Salon feel about this.  They're well aware of the incident now.  I don't care how passionate your argument is, you cross this line, you deserve to be shitcanned so fast that neutrinos have trouble catching up.

We'll see what happens.  I'm betting Greenwald's not long for his current employment.

The Holidays End With A Bang

The UK Telegraph is reporting that if the number of background checks are any indication, November and December were record setting months for firearms sales in the US.

"I've sold probably four times as much in the last six months as I have in 20 years combined," said Cliff Hunter, owner of Tommy Bronson Sporting Goods in Memphis. "Hand guns and the tactical weapons, they're absolutely off the charts."

Most of his gun sales used to be for hunting, or personal protection in a city riddled with crime. But just before the November election, anxiety that Mr Obama would win and enact a radical programme of curtailing gun rights began drove business right up.

"Obama's a liberal socialist and I think he's proven quickly how extreme he is," he said. "When they get through healthcare, guns are on the table. They're not talking about it but it's going to happen."

The FBI recorded a 49 per cent rise in gun background checks during election week compared to the same week a year earlier. 

"Sales have been up 50, 60 per cent sinces Osama got elected," said Jay Hill, owner of the Classic Firearms gun store in Cordova, just outside Memphis, smiling as he deliberately mixed up the name of the US president with the leader of al-Qaeda. 

It's that last part that of course should concern people.  It's been three years and no "Obama gun ban" has even been "talked about" as Cliff here admits, but people aren't buying guns and ammo to hunt deer and elk.

They're buying it for use on other types of "game".  And it's not the recession, they've been doing this since before things got really bad in 2008.  The entire thought of a black President has made people not just buy guns then, but continue to buy guns now, and at a record pace.  Not a whiff of a gun ban has been seriously introduced.  They expect it anyway.

But the "mix-up" there gives it away.  They don't think he's President, you see.  And they're arming themselves as a result.

What happens if President Obama gets re-elected?  Steve M. lays out the groundwork:  Republicans see America with a black President, and see their America as over.  Society is dead.

To the average American wingnut, there are individuals and families -- and also affinity groups. There are fellow believers in "gun freedom." There are fellow "regular Americans" who aren't repulsive cosmopolitan liberal elitists. There are fellow Christians. There are fellow white people. These groups are worth defending. Society isn't. Any old SOB can become part of society -- Muslims, gays, people on welfare, you name it.

I suppose this harks back to Tom's point about the links connecting Ron Paul's present-day libertarianism and the racist states' rights movement. I agree that it's about race to some extent, but I don't think it's just about race. It's more flexible than that. It's about reserving the unilateral right, or the affinity-group right, to decide who belongs here and who doesn't. It's about deciding, if you choose, that "society" is just you and your guns, and everyone else can just stay the hell off your land (though with the definition of "your land" extended to the creche in the town square and the vacant lot the local Muslims have purchased so they can build a mosque on it).

The people that elected Barack Obama?  They are nothing less than the enemy.  And the right is arming themselves to "take the country back" from them.  There's a reason they want to kick out all the "illegals" and the Muslims and the gays and the "bad minorities" and the "welfare queens".  They don't want them here anymore, because they've gained so much power, they've elected a black Kenyan Muslim atheist terrorist sympathizer socialist.  Their "America" is changing.  They will fight it every step of the way.  Resisting that change is now the raison d'être of the Republican Party.

It's war to them.  And so, they arm themselves for battle.

Expanding on this point, you can now see the entirely of Republican foreign policy:  with the singular exception of Israel,  the rest of the world can bugger off our lawn and go blow themselves up.  Everyone else on the planet is taking America's resources, and is just another source of aggravation, violence, crime, terrorism, and most importantly, non-Americanism.

GOP domestic and foreign policy?  "If you're not one of us, go screw yourselves.  And if you press the point, we're the ones with the guns.  Remember that."

It really is that simple.

Stumbling Into The Playoffs

Even with their ugly loss on Sunday, the Cincinnati Bengals managed to fall into the last AFC wild card spot with, well, everyone else who could have gotten the spot losing too (including Tebow and the Broncos).

In front of a sold-out crowd at Paul Brown Stadium, the Bengals fell 24-16 to the Ravens as Ray Rice ran for 191 yards and two touchdowns. But with the Dolphins defeating the Jets and losses by the Broncos and Raiders, the Bengals secured the second and final wild card spot and will face third-seeded Houston at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday at Reliant Stadium.

The Bengals and Titans both finished 9-7 but by virtue of Cincinnati’s Week 9 win at Tennessee, the Bengals won the head-to-head tiebreaker. All seven of the Bengals losses are to teams in this season’s playoff field, including the Texans, who rallied for a 20-19 win at Paul Brown Stadium on Dec. 11.

While there was joy in making the playoffs, the feeling was muted by the loss.

“It’s kind of weird,” said quarterback Andy Dalton, who was 22 of 44 for 232 yards. “We obviously didn’t get it done today, but we still have a chance. It’s what we wanted at the beginning of the season. We wanted to come in and make the playoffs, because once you’re in the playoffs, records up to this point don’t matter. Win you’re in. Lose you’re out. We’re here.”

It's the fact that all seven losses have come to teams in the playoffs that makes me believe the Bengals will probably have been run out of their game next week against the Texans by the 2nd quarter, but it could happen.  But considering this is just the 3rd winning season for the Orange and Black in 21 years, we'll take it.

Of course, the Bengals haven't won a playoff game since 1990.  They're due eventually, right?

Ron Paul Is A Homophobic Bag Of Dog Crap And Other Revelations

WASHINGTON -- Despite recent accusations of racism and homophobia, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) stuck to his libertarian principles on Sunday, criticizing the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it "undermine[d] the concept of liberty" and "destroyed the principle of private property and private choices."

"If you try to improve relationships by forcing and telling people what they can't do, and you ignore and undermine the principles of liberty, then the government can come into our bedrooms," Paul told Candy Crowley on CNN's "State of the Union."

Now wait just a damn minute.  "If you try to tell people what they can't do," he starts off.  You mean like telling gay people they can't get married?  "Then the government can come into our bedrooms," he finishes.  You mean like telling gay people they can't get married?

"I'm the true civil libertarian when it comes to [race relations], and I think that people ought to, you know, look at my position there, rather than dwelling on eight sentences that I didn't write and didn't authorize and have been, you know, apologetic about," he told ABC's Jake Tapper on Sunday. "Because it shouldn't have been there, and it was terrible stuff."

Wait another damn minute. Which is it? Did he not write it? Because if so, that means all the rest is a bunch of fluffy bullshit. And if he did not write it, why be, you know, apologetic about it? Wouldn't you be a white hot nugget of nuclear pissed if you were accused of something to disgusting and had nothing to do with it?  He reeks of lies.

Barkin Up The Wrong Tree

Ellin Barkin had a tweet from the wee hours of the morning on New Year's Day:

Just threatened on my street by NYPD,cop shoved me,both hands,onto sidewalk..Is it a crime 2 stand in the street in NY?WTF is going on here?

TMZ and Huffington Post both ran posts filling us in on what went on. Basically, Barkin states a lifelong respect of police until that night, when several reports came in of police bullying and threatening people on the sidewalk. People who were not necessarily intoxicated or causing any problems (until they were approached and harassed by cops).

We are seeing this more often, and we have to continue to hold our officers accountable. Cops deserve our cooperation but there are times like this when abuse of power comes into play.  This was recounted by someone who seems to be fair and unbiased.  To call it like it is, Ellen Barkin is no crybaby and she's not the type to cry wolf.  I believe her account, including her assessment that it was unnecessary.

It sucks to feel helpless, attacked by the people you are supposed to trust.

What The Frack Is Going On Here?

In the wake of the EPA finding that hydraulic fracturing of rock to obtain natural gas -- fracking -- may contaminate groundwater and cause other environmental issues, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has discovered he has a soul after all and has put a hold on four new state fracking projects in the wake of multiple earthquakes in the drilling area.

State leaders have ordered that four fluid-injection wells in eastern Ohio will be "indefinitely" prohibited from opening in the aftermath of heightened seismic activity in the area, an official said.


Ohio Department of Natural Resources Director James Zehringer had announced on Friday that one such well -- which injects "fluid deep underground into porous rock formations, such as sandstone or limestone, or into or below the shallow soil layer," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency explains -- was closed after a series of small earthquakes in and around Youngstown.

Then on Saturday, a magnitude 4.0 earthquake struck that released at least 40 times more energy than any of the previous 10 or more tremors that had rattled the region in 2011.

Andy Ware, deputy director of Ohio's natural resources department, told CNN on Sunday that Zehringer and Gov. John Kasich subsequently ordered that four nearby injection well projects will not open in the coming weeks, as had previously been planned. They 'll be inoperational until a determination is made in an investigation of a possible link between the earthquakes and the fluid-injection wells, he added.

"They will (not open) until we are satisfied that the process can be safely resumed," said Ware.

Kasich's approval rating is already in the toilet after his huge Senate Bill 5 disaster.  One whiff of anything going wrong with Ohio's fledgling fracking industry in an election year in a battleground state like this and it's lights out for him, and he knows it.  Suddenly in the last month, he's become Ohio's "environmental champion" on assuring that fracking is safe, vowing tough regulations and oversight on the industry.

The promised regulation will affect issues such as gathering lines, high-pressure pipelines, the kinds of chemicals used in the exploration and extraction process, "I mean, it's from A to Z," Kasich said during the news conference, which was streamed on the web.

"And let me also be clear that the biggest companies want strong regulation," he continued. "We don't want yahoos coming into Ohio and damaging the environment, and we are working on that every day. We want to be on top of everything because if it pans out, if it works out the way it looks like it will, it could bring an economic resurgence to all of Ohio, not just the eastern part." 

The Youngstown quakes are literally threatening to rip Kasich's little game apart here, and he damn well knows it.

Nuked Gingrich, Part 14

As Newt continues to self-destruct, it's funny to note that the further behind he falls in Iowa, the more desperate he gets for votes.  At this point, we've finally gotten to the "ACORN will steal the 2012 election!" nonsense.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., used a stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to accuse the Obama administration of trying to "steal elections" in the wake of the Justice Department's rejection of South Carolina's voter identification law.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division determined that the state's law requiring voters to show photo ID at polling places was discriminatory against minorities.

"...You have to ask, why is it that they are so desperate to retain the ability to steal elections and I think that what it comes down to," Gingrich said.

Because of course no black President could ever legitimately win an election in the first place, so of course he's going to steal re-election too.  Who will stop this evil, evil man before he destroys the country with left of moderate policies and common sense governance?

The larger problem of course is that the only possible explanation that Gingrich can find for opposing a law designed to disenfranchise voters is a massive conspiracy to steal elections, because all Republicans know that Democrats only win by stealing elections.  No actual living Christian Americans would ever vote for a Democrat, and America is a Christian country, so really the only way Republicans can lose is if Democrats steal the contest.

It's complete nonsense, of course.  But Newt won't pay any price for accusing the President and all Democrats of stealing elections and defrauding the country.  Hell, it'll help him in the primaries.  That's why he's doing this.

And because Virginia Republicans don't want to get tarred with this same brush, Virginia's GOP Attorney General will of course seek to drop the state's primary ballot requirements that excluded most of the GOP candidates, including Newt.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) announced today that he will intervene to ensure that more Republican presidential candidates will appear on the state’s primary ballot.

 Thanks to newly stringent enforcement of rules requiring 10,000 valid signatures, only Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney made it onto the ballot for the state’s March 6 primary. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry both cried foul, with the latter suing in federal court. Gingrich, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman all signed onto that effort on Saturday.

So to recap, when a Republican changes the election rules for a state, it's liberty and freedom and justice and apple pie.  When a Democrat does it, it's stealing elections.

That's how the game is played.