A Few Words about the Price of Gas

I flipped when CNN ran a banner a few weeks ago saying that the price of gas was the lowest it has been in years.  I KNEW that was not true, because, being on a limited income and living out in the boonies, a few cents a gallon up or down adds up.  Politicians, and organizations that represent the oil and gas industry, have been playing fast and loose with the price of gas since forever, but I have been fascinated with the way they are working the public since the price finally began to come down a few years ago.

But going back into the painfully high gas prices of the Bush era (here in SC I remember paying nearly $4/gallon before the price began its drop), the right-wingnut cry was for -- you guessed it -- more freedom for the gas and oil industry:  Drill, Baby, Drill.  If that had been the most stupid thing Sarah Palin said during the 2008 campaign, I believe history might have been really different, because promising to lower the price of gas by drilling appealed to an awful lot of Americans.

And sadly, from fracking and resultant earthquakes, to pipelines and the leaks and spills caused by poor design and maintenance, to coal mining and its risk to workers due to its inherent danger and abhorrent safety practices, it has been nearly impossible to counter the demand for more and yet more oil.  The siren song of more jobs has been magnified by Trump's narcissistic rendition of reality.  He promised 28,000 jobs as he signed the executive order allowing the building of the Keystone pipeline.  It is actually two to four thousand temporary jobs while it is being built and 35 permanent jobs when finished.  The truth comes too late; the industry pockets its profits and we are forced to deal with the environmental and human disasters.  And the price of gas doesn't go down.

Newt Gingrich bloviated about the price of gas when he ran his pathetic presidential campaign in 2012, claiming that Obama intended to get the price of gas up to $8 to $9 a gallon, and he alone could get it down to $2.50.  And yet, when the price of gas went down as low as $1.50 last year, someone in the crowd at a Hillary rally had to shout out at the President about the low price of gas, because nobody was talking about it.  Of course, Dems, unlike republicans, are reluctant to take credit for something they haven't had anything to do with.  But Obama's stealth energy policy (again, nobody bragging about accomplishments) had managed to make gas cheaper without trashing the environment.  And unemployment declined without all those dirty energy jobs being added; in fact, renewable energy has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US.

So what has been happening to the price of gas, really?  A three-year chart shows the plummeting of gas prices in 2014 and 2015, only beginning a steady rise in February of 2016, as tension mounted around the presidential campaign.

After the election which promised to shitcan environmental regulations and give a go-ahead to fuel industry rape and plunder, it seems the Wall Street speculators are ready to party.  And just as they did during the Bush years, the media is reporting the gains as though there will be no dark side, ever.  But as the price of oil goes up, the price of gas at the pumps goes up.

But here is the thing that really drives me nuts.  The price doesn't just go up and up and up.  There is a method to the madness of the oil industry.

When I check the price of gas as I leave my Wadmalaw Island home and venture out to Johns Island and civilization, I see that it has gone up TEN CENTS a gallon since the last time I passed, a couple days earlier.  The very next day it goes down four or five cents.  Well, that feels like a relief, doesn't it?  And then it goes up a couple more cents, maybe down a penny.  This goes on for a month or two, and then steadies.  Until it goes up another ten cents, and the shock is followed by relief which eventually leads to being acclimatized to the big hike and ready for the next wave.

In November, the price of gas by me was $1.59 a gallon.  Today it is $2.19.  Last week it was $2.09.

At some point, when people start complaining, the oil industry will produce some rationale for the hike.  Nobody will be there to debate whatever reason they give.  We will have pipelines producing a handful of jobs and drilling destroying our earth, and we will be tightening our belts to buy gas, just like we did in the good old days of the Bush administration.


By the way, here in South Carolina we have been waging the battle of the gas tax for years, until our roads and bridges got so damned bad they finally passed the hike.  I am sure that many of our less informed citizens will be quick to point out that the rise in the price of gas is due to the tax hike them damn liberals voted in.  Actually, the price of the gas tax in South Carolina did go up in June, by two cents a gallon.  So please feel free to poke a hole in that one when it floats by. 

Silver Lining

It occurs to me that Silver Lining is the color of the roofing tiles I am having installed this very minute, with great noise and fanfare, thanks to Hurricane Matthew.  There have been a few Hispanic men hammering away since minutes after seven, no coffee break, no stopping to talk, just hard, physical work.  I don't know if they are legal immigrants or not, and, honestly, nobody really cares if it keeps the price of their new roof lower.  All the protests are bullshit and dog whistles, shamefully attacking and victimizing good people.

But other than the coincidental title of this post, that is not what I need to talk about today.  Today I'm not quite through my period of mourning, for Hillary, for our country, for all the mean and ignorant or just naive and foolish voters who hammered their own nails into all our coffins on Tuesday.  But I have been commiserating with friends, and posting on facebook, and talking to my kids, and just as with George W. Bush in 2000, there is a day after this one too.

In fact, I have started to compile a list of all the things we have to look forward to during the "presidency" of He-Who-Just-Cannot-Be-Named.

For one thing, once they have worked through their own mourning, our wonderful comedians will have far better fuel than they would have had with Hillary in the White House.  I imagine Samantha Bee has only just been getting warmed up during the election season.  And Alec Baldwin, after working so hard to nail Trump, surely will be willing to show up (or call in) to SNL from time to time.  After all, we did miss Tina Fey's Sarah Palin once we didn't have the original around anymore.

I am also thinking that, given Trump's failure to grasp economics and his need to continue to be adored by those undereducated and underpaid workers, it is just possible that those of us liberals who work hard for too little will also reap the benefits, at least till the crash.  And as long as Donald doesn't insist on an ideological test for us white Americans, I should be okay for awhile.  It occurs to me with some relief that when the Bush years started I was on the low end of the wage scale, so when they ended I hadn't lost anything.  And now that I am attempting to live on Paul Ryan's social security, it seems not that much has changed.

Let's be honest, Donald Trump is a hoot.  He is every bit as stupid as W., but without the charm.  I am looking forward to those 365 day calendars of Trumpisms, and for a couple of reasons.  Not only were those idiotic gems ("More of our imports come from overseas.") something to brighten the dark days, but at the end of the Bush years I had stacks of scrap paper, perfect for phone messages and grocery lists.  And I am running low.

The younger generation, those we have been falsely accusing of being disinterested in politics, are infuriated.  They have truly had it with people trying to legislate their bodies, and sexual and marital choices.  They are sick to death of big corporations getting handouts from the government while they are spending their young lives trying to pay back student loans while failing to get a job that pays what they are worth.  They are not going to tolerate intolerance of race or religious choice.  The riots and protests over racism aren't going to stop, and women are not going to be forced to choose between an unwanted  pregnancy or a backroom abortion.  My son, who could be safely ensconced in his Ph.D. program, has told me that as he has become an activist, he knows he may someday be arrested, and it is a risk he is willing to take, a sentiment that fills me with pride even more than fear.

It will be fun to see the reaction of Trump supporters when Congress finally succeeds in repealing Obamacare.  They apparently had forgotten that before the ACA insurance premiums rose precipitously each year.  That will be a happy thing to watch, for me anyway.  As long as the Democrats are ready to yell loud and long when the right wingnuts try to blame it on Obama -- and probably Hillary as well.

And while they are targeting others for their failures, let us also remember that our new "president" gets bored with people when they have outlived their usefulness.  I can only imagine that it won't take long for the smugly pious Mike Pence to get under Donald's skin.  Imagine the name calling, followed eventually by the inevitable tweets.  And wouldn't it be fun at some point to hear that Pence has been "fired."

Of course, once Pence is gone it will be safe to impeach Trump.  And wasn't that clever of whichever brains-behind-the-boss manipulated Trump into choosing the white-haired Satan for his running mate?  Anyway, point being, nothing lasts forever in Trumpworld.

Along the way, it isn't going to take long for these characters to put the economy into the toilet.  And once it is there, I would say by 2018, the voters will be ready to appeal to a Democratic Congress to get us out of the toilet.

Again, though, let us not forget the Bush years.  And Trump's reigning philosophy.  When some lose, others win.  For a couple of years I had been able to afford amazing timeshare rental vacations, weeklong getaways at resorts for $500 a week, the cost of the annual maintenance fee for those who needed to recoup the cost more than take the vacation.  That ended with the resurgence of the economy (thanks, Obama).  Now, the vacations that went for $60 a night are up over $300 a night.  But when the economy tanks, and until they take away my social security, I'll be able to get in on a couple of weeks a year of vacations on the beach once again.

I honestly can't believe that here we are, doing the Bush years over again.  But our electorate truly does have a short memory.  And they are gullible, easily manipulated.  It takes the pain of an interminable war and the tanking of the economy to the point of loss of jobs and homes before they realize that those sugar-spun fantasies of cutting taxes in order to make us rich are just fantasies.

On Tuesday afternoon, before the end, it occurred to me that this race was more like Nixon than Bush.  The Trump crowd that adopted "lying Hillary" as their mantra and made excuses for Trump's blatantly illegal and immoral behaviors could have been the same hardhats that chanted that they would rather have a crook in the White House than Hubert Humphrey.

It is hilarious that in retrospect, Nixon doesn't look that bad.  It is criminal though, that our memories have been so thoroughly wiped of all the damage done in the Reagan years that Democratic and republican politicians alike would no sooner fail to mention Ronald Reagan than walk onto a stage without a flag pin.

And then there were the Bush years, as we went from a growing economy to the brink of disaster.  Bad choices made by a gullible president at the behest of the evil Dick Cheney.  And surrounded by a cabinet of ideological idiots.

And finally, here we are again, with a growing economy, a strong military, better foreign relations than we have had for quite a while, more jobs and even wages slowly rising.   Instead of Bill Clinton, we have the most admirable couple to grace the White House maybe in my memory.  And instead of Al Gore, we have Hillary Clinton.

Instead of the evil capitalist Dick Cheney behind the wheel, we have the evil religious fanatic Mike Pence.  And then we have the proposed cabinet of deplorables:  Chris Christie, the guy who claims he didn't know about "bridge-gate;" Newt Gingrich, the man who ended his marriage at his wife's hospital bed, and last but truly least, Rudy Giuliani, whose contact with reality is so completely shot that he believes the US was not attacked on George W. Bush's watch.  That same Giuliani by the way, who giggled like a madman a couple of weeks ago when he alluded to his knowledge of the FBI re-opening the investigation into Hillary's emails as another surprise.  Yeah, he's going to be the next attorney general.

So, lots of reasons to weep, and hopefully lots of comedy potential as well.  And lots of reasons to get fired up to fight.  It is true that we will be fighting two branches of government rather than just congress.  But with a cast of characters as shady and corrupt as this bunch, as long as we fight as fearlessly as did Bernie and Hillary for what is right, as long as we don't let the bullies intimidate us, we can not only survive but win this thing.  And by "this thing" I pretty much mean our country and our freedoms. 

Hypocrites on Parade

I have been pretty quiet lately, letting the insanity speak for itself.  But this morning I heard from Mark Sanford, and, well, I just had to share just how bizarre this was.

Mark Sanford, who I believe has been himself keeping a fairly low profile this election season, came out in protest of Hillary being found not guilty of criminal charges.  We all expect the biggest liar in the country to call people liars, but when Mark Sanford contended that that not guilty verdict is "frightening," I did a double-take.  For so many reasons.

Mark Sanford, if you have forgotten (as so many red-blooded South Carolinians apparently have), paid fines of $74,000 for ethics violations, in which he used state funds to pay for travel and misspent campaign money.  We don't really have to go into the sordid affair in which he lied to his wife and sons while he was spending government money to see his gal.  But we should never, ever forget that while he was presumably "hiking the Appalachian Trail," the state of South Carolina was without a leader.  He not only took off to follow his heart and lied about his whereabouts, he left no way to contact him and no one in charge for five days.

Paul Ryan had the gall to call the courageous sit-in by House Democrats a publicity stunt.  It was apparently interfering with real  house business, like the bill that would block limits to financial regulations that would protect our retirement funds from Wall Street sharks.  Even worse than forcing Ryan to call this fake House session during the sit-in just to show who was boss was the fact that these damned Democrats were keeping republicans from beginning their 4th of July recess.  That was truly a shame because the House calendar mandates a whole 111 days of work for 2016.

Meanwhile, folks like Newt Gingrich are stepping up to kiss ass in order to get a piece of the political pie.  I do believe that a Trump/Gingrich ticket would be as close to the candidate being able to look into a mirror as possible, except that Gingrich uses bigger words.  They do both have the narcissism, cruelty and greed thing going on.  Gingrich I believe will actually challenge Trump in the category of deceit and treachery.  They both enjoy calling Hillary a liar in the most absurd terms, much like the posters of Obama with a Hitler moustache that turned up in '08 and the accusations by both that he was born in Kenya.  And they are both incredibly greedy.  I mean, incredibly greedy.  Always wheeling and dealing, book deals, consulting deals -- I don't think Newt sells meat, but he rarely engages in an activity that won't show a profit.  Together, a Trump/Gingrich administration will leave the White House and the American people with nary a silver spoon in the cutlery drawer.

The insincere bombast of Newt Gingrich will cause us all to miss the zany brainlessness of Sarah Palin.

I know I am merely scratching the surface of sleazy hypocrites in this post, but there is only so much time, and so many, many hypocrites.  So finally, I turn to the legacy of Henry Hyde.   There is a push these days from our women's rights leaders to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which was sponsored by Representative Henry Hyde in 1973 and prohibits Medicaid funding of abortion.  This was just the beginning as it was followed by a number of other prohibitions on government funding of abortion services.  Remember Henry Hyde?  He was the family values guy that was all revved up to impeach Bill Clinton when it surfaced that he had had a lengthy extramarital affair when he was serving in the Illinois legislature.  The Newt Gingrich House rejected his offer to step down from the Judiciary Committee that was investigating impeachment, and he went on to serve in the House for many more years.  It will give me great pleasure to see his hateful amendment repealed.

Unlike Hyde who at least offered to resign his post, these characters today, they are unable to be shamed.  Calling Hillary dangerous and a liar while they have their dirty secrets and flaunt their dirtier public lives.  Pretending to care about women's health and gun violence while serving only those masters that might get them re-elected.

I believe that the state of falsehood in our politicians is so ballsy, so egregious, that it is absurd.  You would have to laugh, but alas, Jon Stewart is no longer here to help us find the humor.

What we can do, however, is fact-checked every damned thing these creeps say, including the weather and what day it is.  The situation has become so blatant, I am happy to say, that even many of the more level headed on the other side are seeing the Risk in voting "R."  But when you hear falsehoods often enough, and from enough different people, it becomes harder to see the truth.  That is why you need to remember where they come from.  And next time Mark Sanford goes on about Hillary, ask him how safe South Carolina was when he was hiking his paramour.

I would like to leave you with this amazing tribute to "the Newt" by the Austin Lounge Lizards.

              

Racism and Reverberations

First thing I want to do (as do we all) is vent.  The republican party has had big balls and they have been bouncing them around since Obama's landslide six years ago.  We all laughed when Boehner said, "Hell, no," but it worked, and it has worked ever since.  Today I heard Michael Steele say that Obama should just try to approach the new Congress, nicely, regarding immigration.  Really???  Did this image occur to anybody else:

Whenever they say "hell, no" they reinforce their power and confidence, and when we waffle, we are seen as unsure of what we think will work and maybe even a little shady.  It began with health care when Obama backed off from the public option; our Blue Dogs added a few nails to the coffin when they failed to throw their support behind the Affordable Care Act.  And with a few exceptions we have been seen as cowards that will do anything to survive ever since.

Worse is the slurs and insults directed at the President by the opposition, and the Democratic flight to safety in response.  When Bill Clinton was kicked around, we can say he gave Newt and his gang the ammunition, not only by his sexual misadventures, but by dancing around the truth and outright lying about everything from not inhaling to whether he had sex with that intern.  Barack Obama has had no such dark deeds in his background; he has an enviable family life and was frank about past casual drug use and even his cigarette habit.  Unable to dig up any hidden bodies, the idiot brigade resorted to making up racist nonsense about a Kenyan birth.  But once they did, the noise reverberated for years.  The racism that has accompanied this president's years in office has been overt more often than not, and barely masked at other times.  And the Democratic Party predictably failed to stand together confidently to back our President.

And we can thank the media from both sides and in the middle for helping to keep the echo going.  Anything for a story.  Anything, that is, but the issues.

Speaking of which, if we were to talk honestly about the issues, this president has done some heroic things against great odds, including the auto bailout, handling terrorists with intelligence and calm and making gains with sustainable energy that have been too little publicized.  He has also made some serious mistakes by siding with Wall Street over Main Street, stepping up deportation of undocumented immigrants and excessive border control,  and  giving the NSA a free hand with domestic spying and failing to protect whistleblowers.  But there has not been a president who has done great things who has not also shown a tragic flaw, as did LBJ with civil rights juxtaposed alongside the Vietnam war.

Sadly, we have been hearing the media talk about Obama's unpopularity for some six years, almost through his re-election.  We have all believed it because it has been said so often by so many.  Rather than simply and rationally disagree on certain of the issues, we Democrats have allowed ourselves to reject the President on the whole, to the delight of the republican party.  And I have to say, it has not just been us red staters.  And the midterm election disaster was what we ended up with. 

Barack Obama is a great statesman and an admirable politician.  I believe that if he were to run a third term, he would once again be re-elected, and he could do it on all the good things he has done during his time in office.

So it was tragic when Alison Grimes, once running ahead of McConnell, chose to refuse to admit that she voted for Obama.  So many ways she could have said he was and is the best man for the job, although she disagreed with him on energy and would always vote what was best for her constituents.  Instead, she bumbled and looked embarrassed.  The media ran with it, and the republicans did not need to do anything other than look smug.

And the absence of the President during the campaign -- noted often and loudly by the media -- was what was wrong with these midterm elections.  Yes, there are other factors that affected the outcome, and I would like to talk more about those at another time.  But had we stood proud and tall with the leader of the country, who has after all, done some amazing things with a country that his predecessor had pretty nearly flushed down the toilet, we would no doubt be on the other side of history these next two years.

Killing Democracy, One "Rule" at a Time

Over the last -- I don't know it seems like forever -- couple of years, we've heard a lot of talk about the "Hastert Rule" in the dysfunctional belly of the House of Representatives.  When I hear it, I usually snort derisively and mutter something like, "And who the hell made that a rule?"

The "Hastert Rule" means that a bill can only be introduced in the House if a majority of the majority (read, republican majority) supports it.  This idiocy was the brainchild of the evil Newt Gingrich, who managed to alienate his House and lose the Speakership after he brought the government to a shutdown in 1995.  Hastert was chosen to be Speaker of the House when the other options were too sleazy even for the republicans (I'm sorry, my disgust is showing.)  Hastert was considered more moderate and reasonable.

Enter George W. Bush and his peaceable bunch of thugs.  Next thing, in 2004 Hastert makes this "rule" the official policy of his speakership.  Can you hear Democracy crying?

Well, today's wild bunch could not have wielded the wrecking ball quite so effectively without Boehner's insistence on following this nasty policy.  Except when public pressure got to be too much, like on votes for relief from Hurricane Sandy, the "fiscal cliff" deal, and reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.  I imagine the Tea Party brats were in such a frenzy over not being able to throw their weight around that Boehner had to promise them, "You can have the Hastert Rule again next time."

So last week when the republicans were starting to get the feeling that the American people maybe didn't like them anymore, for example blaming them instead of the president for the shutdown, and the bullies in the backroom were having a good laugh over the wrecking of the government, Boehner caved and let that old Hastert Rule go.

But before that happened, the Speaker changed House rules just a little bit to prevent a Democrat from bringing up a vote to pass the Senate bill that would reopen the government:





This amazing piece of sleaze should make alarms go off throughout the country.  But if Representative Van Hollen had not sent it out on youtube, we probably would have no idea.

We really need to ask ourselves why the media did not pick this up, and why every Democrat (and the occasional patriotic Republican) is not screaming bloody murder about this.

Not only have the republicans gotten away with a gerrymandering that prevents a majority of voters from choosing their representative, and then successfully made laws to limit voting by those groups more likely to vote Democrat, but with the "Hastert Rule" and House Resolution 368, they have taken steps to make certain that elected House Democrats are unable to participate in the workings of the House.

We need to know this is going on, and let others know whenever it happens.  This is the sound of our Democracy getting flushed down the toilet in the interest of power.

The Deafening Silence

I remember -- it wasn't all that long ago -- when the likes of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were screaming about Obama creating high gas prices that could be cured by cutting taxes and approving immediately the Keystone Pipeline.

And let us not forget Newt and his campaign photo ops:

BUT WAIT!  Did I really just pay $3.03 per gallon?  Could the price of gas really be plummeting?  Without the pipeline???

In fact, Reuters just predicted lower prices into 2013.

So apparently that means that, if Obama was responsible for the high price of gas, it must be time for him to take a bow.

Yet, not only have I, not surprisingly, heard nothing from the Republican herd, I have heard nothing from the Obama camp.  This would be the time for a few well-placed wisecracks about the president being responsible for the price of gas...

...wouldn't it?

Not a Great Day in South Carolina

When I moved to South Carolina some 12 years ago, I was delighted by how welcoming all y'all were.  I was loathe to believe all those nasty things we Yankees had assumed about racism and closed-mindedness.


Of late I have come to understand those negative stereotypes.


It is here in South Carolina that primary voters raced to the polls to support a man who believes poor parents are lazy and do not provide good work models for their children.  While no longer openly advocating work houses and orphanages for the children of the poor, he proudly presented his solution to the problem of raising lazy children:  put them to work in the schools as janitors.


I don't know about you, but when my children were small, I was busy finding every learning opportunity I could get my hands on for them.  I had dreams of violinists, writers, scientists -- award winners both of them.  And when Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, he allowed people mired in poverty to begin to have those dreams for their children again.


So I don't blame Newt for being ignorant and manipulative, he is who he is.  What I am offended by is the voters of this state who applauded those ugly ideas, and who look forward to a day in this country when the poor are put in their place and when we middle class whites can get back to comfortably being in control.