Headline: 10 Places Where a Gallon of Gas Is More Expensive Than in the US

Media hacks certainly weren’t as charitable to Bush back in the day gas prices were lower, but I digress. From the headline story on Yahoo Finance [emphasis my own]:

If it’s been a while since you filled up, you might be in for a rude awakening the next time you visit the gas station. Prices have been rising steadily in the past few weeks on skyrocketing crude oil prices; the cost of a gallon of regular gas stands at $3.57, up 19 cents from a month ago. The rise has given fodder to Republican presidential candidates seeking an angle of economic attack on President Barack Obama and put another wrinkle in Americans’ tight budgets.

Dammit, what can we do?! Assuage their angst! No, deflect their anger! Make ’em thankful they’re paying $4 a gallon!!

We can’t tell you things are going to get better in the near future, but we can tell you things could be a lot worse. While gas prices seem high in the U.S., other countries are saddled with prices at the pump that would give an American driver a heart attack.

Surreal.

What they  won’t tell you: Obama wishes gas were as expensive here as it is in Eritrea. He’s said so as has his Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Wonder where that free Obama gas is flowing now?

I do wonder why we’re not all being told how this is a teachable moment. Via Allahpundit, David Harsanyi:

Gas prices are spiking. That’s great news, right? We have to wean ourselves off the stuff. At least that’s what we’ve been hearing for years. Oil is dirty. We import it from nations that hate our guts (like Canada!). And moreover, we’re running out. Oil is “finite.” Finite much in the way water is finite.

So why aren’t Democrats making the case that the spike in prices is a good thing? Isn’t this basically our energy policy these days? How we “win the future”? If high energy prices were to damage President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects, it would be ironic, considering the left has been telling us to set aside our “dependency” — or, as our most recent Republican president put it, “addiction” — for a long time.

As Allahpundit cynically puts it, all is fair in an election year:

And yet, despite this being a golden opportunity for a “teachable moment” on why America needs to transition from fossil fuels to algae or whatever, some House Democrats are urging O to tap the strategic reserve to keep prices down and Obama’s whining about Republicans making political hay of it all. I wonder why. “$8 a gallon: Now more than ever” would make a nifty campaign slogan, but I suppose they don’t want to add any drags on the economy while it’s still recovering. Better to wait until it’s back to full blast and then start adding drags.

It cost nearly $50 to fill up my tank yesterday at Costco, and that’s after travelling a few weeks and seeing higher gas prices everywhere. Who says PCS moves can’t be fun with $5-a-gallon gasoline? Hooah!

Team Obama challenge: Neutralize the only job growth in the country (and Rick Perry, too)

We can’t have private sector jobs. That leads to less welfare! Fewer bodies on the food stamp rolls! All beneficence should flow only from our liberal hands! 

Texas accounts for 45% of job creation in the entire country. Just let that sink in: we can blame one big old bubba red state for nearly half of the job growth. Figures, doesn’t it?  Something must be done. Quickly. Before that big hair smooth talker decides to run for President. We don’t want people getting any ideas.

Change: Americans won’t be able to use the a/c. Or the dryer. Or lights after dark.

How hot is it where you are? Hope you enjoy one of the last summers with air conditioning. Obama has fulfilled one of his campaign promises: skyrocketing electric prices. Of course he won’t mention it that way before the ’12 election. He’ll just say he’s doing his part to reduce our collective carbon footprint in the name of Mother Earth!

Via Hot Air, your bill will rise 40 to 60%:

Thanks to new regulations from the Obama administration, power companies will shut down a significant number of coal-fired plants by 2014, and without any other reliable sources of mass-produced electricity, consumers will see their bills go up as much as 60%

Better get used to hanging your laundry and candlelight, too, since taxpayers will have to cover the price increase for government as well. Hope! Change! We hear now that rising gasoline costs bankrupt school districts. Soon we’ll hear how districts need more money to keep the lights on, and liberals will resort to scare tactics including cold lunch and unsafe, dark hallways to grab more money. Keep your kids at home.

Read the rest of Ed Morrissey’s post and mine last week.

You can find the bargain laundry line here.

A hopeychangey graph

As someone who won’t receive any of that touted “Obama money,” I cringe every time I gas up the car.

But as Mark Hemingway notes, Obama shrugs:

Now obviously turmoil in the Middle East has something to do with our current astronomical gas prices, but keep in mind that by this point in the Bush presidency 9/11 had happened and we were on the verge of invading Iraq. So while the president can’t be entirely responsible for global commodity prices, it’s still worth asking what Obama’s doing to make things worse.

After all, this is the President who told us “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”

This is the President that appointed a Secretary of the Interior that famously said he didn’t mind if gas hit $10 a gallon.

He doesn’t, after all, gas up the limo or pay for it himself. No wonder.

Famed pollster Charlie Cook noted yesterday that the economy should work in Obama’s favor and mentioned the danger of “turmoil” in the Middle East derailing the potential GDP. What amused me, however, was that Cook failed to figure Obama’s no-more-oil-for-us policy into the mix; the president’s own policies will derail any real economic recovery. Even though we’re not treated daily to the media barrage of Gas Alert 2011 as we would were a Republican in office, people aren’t that stupid.

Or are they?

Shades of Jimmy

Headline says it all: Obama will go down in history as the president who lost Egypt.

Jimmy Carter will go down in American history as “the president who lost Iran,” which during his term went from being a major strategic ally of the United States to being the revolutionary Islamic Republic. Barack Obama will be remembered as the president who “lost” Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, and during whose tenure America’s alliances in the Middle East crumbled.

The superficial circumstances are similar. In both cases, a United States in financial crisis and after failed wars loses global influence under a leftist president whose good intentions are interpreted abroad as expressions of weakness. The results are reflected in the fall of regimes that were dependent on their relationship with Washington for survival, or in a change in their orientation, as with Ankara.

America’s general weakness clearly affects its friends.

Really.  Who would’ve thunk it, right?  The stakes are high. We’ve funded the Egyptian military for decades. It’s very well equipped as a result.  Pray for the Coptic Christians.  Pray for Israel.  And yes, pray for the Egyptians who will end up wondering how it all went wrong.

Oil disaster and what does he do?

Appoint a gaggle of lawyers and environmentalists, of course.  They’ll have all the answers. (One, primarily: no more drilling! Let them suffer and walk!)

On Obama’s BP Commission Sham:

there are two scientists, no engineers, and no real representatives of the oil and gas industry. The panel is primarily made up of lawyers, environmentalists and career politicians.

 One of the members is president of the National Resources Defense Council, one of five environmental groups that has filed an appeal to Judge Feldman’s ruling against the deepwater drilling moratorium

Head over to RedState  to count the lawyers and find out who should have manned the commission.  It’s shameful. (Not that shame could ever stop the Chicago way).  A few Republicans are crying foul, though not loud enough.  Remember in November.

For a reality check of what’s going on in the Gulf, head over to And So it Goes in Shreveport.  Great reads here and here on why Thad Allen needs the boot (not Salazar’s) and the criminal negligence of the Obami.

60

Days, that is.

Unbelievable pictures here, h/t Instapundit.

Meanwhile, Dear Leader kicks ass on the golf course for five hours.  Of course, yachting is out. 

Michael Barone: Obama’s thuggery useless in fighting spill.  He writes:

Then there is Obama’s decision to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf. This penalizes companies with better safety records than BP’s and will result in many advanced drilling rigs being sent to offshore oil fields abroad.

The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly “peer reviewed” by “experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn’t include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more economically devastating than the oil spill and “counterproductive” to safety.

This was blatant dishonesty by the administration, on an Orwellian scale. In defense of a policy that has all the earmarks of mindless panic, that penalizes firms and individuals guilty of no wrongdoing and that will worsen rather than improve our energy situation. Ineffective thuggery.

And what about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn’t and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren’t really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It’s the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf’s surface. Can’t do that until we see if they’ve got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: “The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport.”

Finally, the $20 billion escrow fund that Obama pried out of the BP treasury at the White House when he talked for the first time, 57 days after the rig exploded, with BP Chairman Tony Hayward. It’s pleasing to think that those injured by BP will be paid off speedily, but House Republican Joe Barton had a point, though an impolitic one, when he called this a “shakedown.”

For there already are laws in place that insure that BP will be held responsible for damages and the company has said it will comply. So what we have is government transferring property from one party, an admittedly unattractive one, to others, not based on pre-existing laws but on decisions by one man, pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.

Feinberg gets good reviews from everyone. But the Constitution does not command “no person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law except by the decision of a person as wise and capable as Kenneth Feinberg.” The Framers stopped at “due process of law.”

Obama doesn’t. “If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so,” write the editors of the Economist, who then suggest that markets see Obama as “an American version of Vladimir Putin.” Except that Putin is an effective thug.

Never in my life could I have imagined someone comparing our President to a Russian thug.  But thug is as thug does. 

 

(Next thing you know, Obama will pose à la Putin with hunted tigers to show how good at kicking asses other than his own he truly is.)

 

And that trifling detail–due process, or the lack thereof in Obama’s shakedown of BP–begs investigation.  Thomas Sowell wonders if we’re on the road to tyranny.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what the hell, right?  I’m sure Putin would approve.

 

Even coffee won’t help at this point tab dump

Three cups in and the fog hasn’t lifted.

Some Steyn to get you going, h/t Jen-Ru: The lessons of a Jewish Cemetary.  Steyn witticisms, eloquently written, and profoundly moving, all rolled into one.

No dead cat bounce: Obama approval drops to 41% in Rasmussen.  Ed Morrissey writes that if speechifying won’t save Obama, nothing will.

Say it ain’t so, Gray Lady: Even the NYT notices (that Obama’s moratorium “fix”) is the wrong solution.

Depressing: No, We can’t (just plug the hole).  Excellent summation of why the oil will keep spewing for a while.

More depressing: if the government were trying to screw this all up, would it be doing anything differently? 

Never let a crisis go to waste: $7-a-gallon-gas

Hilarious parentheticals: Sally Quinn gives Hilary a merit badge.

More later, once fog has cleared.

Friday various and sundry

First, for your viewing pleasure via Hot Air:

Allahpundit links to a damning Obama cause-and-effect from Byron York who explains why O found “asses to kick” when he did. 

Also via Hot Air, guess who plans to sue Arizona over the immigration law?  Oops.  Hilary let the cat out of the bag overseas.

Re British pensioners picking up the tab for the oil spill at Obama’s unconstitutional behest, Pundette points to two must-reads from American Spectator: Our Caudillo President and The Oilers vs the Stealers by Ben Stein and George Neumayr, respectively.

Stein writes:

We live in a Constitutional Republic. The President’s job under the Constitution is to enforce the laws made by the elected Congress. His job is not to create new laws and enforce them all by himself. His job is as magistrate under the Constitution, not as Caudillo. He is not the law. He is supposed to enforce what Congress decides.

The BP behavior is reminiscent of how, immediately after assuming office, Mr. Obama, with no Congressional authority or administrative allowance, simply made a phone call to fire the head of GM. When I called the White House press office to ask under what law or regulation Mr. Obama was acting, I was told he did not need a law. If the government put a lot of money into GM, it could call the shots at GM, I was told. But under what authority, I asked. “None needed,” was the final answer.

Without any new legislation, President Obama has used returned TARP money as a political slush fund to prop up favorite industries. This is the same problem: serious executive action without legislative authority.

Most Caudillos wear uniforms.  I wonder when Barry O will assume his.

I wonder how much of the extorted $20 billion will fund Democrat campaigns rather than line the “little people’s” pockets.  Michele Bachmann warns that it’s another BarryO slush fund.   Professor Jacobson makes a salient point:

The amount of money BP has committed over a multi-year period is roughly the equivalent of what the federal government will spend on ObamaCare in one week.  […]

But don’t kid yourselves, this is not about money. If the federal government wanted to get aid to people right away, it could have used some of the unspent Stimulus Plan money, and then sought reimbursement from BP through the legal process.

How interesting that the President who cares not about running up trillion dollar deficits to fund his social vision now cares so deeply about saving the federal government what amounts to an ObamaCare rounding error.

This was a pure political power play, in which the President could create a demon, and deflect attention away from his own failing conduct with regard to the Gulf.

Rush just pointed out that part o’ the pot of money from the “little people” in England will go to fund a foundation to help the folks made unemployed by Obama’s disastrous and unnecessary moratorium on drilling.

Pundette’s fear:

He’s got two years left. How far will he go?

God only knows.

Need a laugh?

I do after another oily Obama evening.  I lucked out, though, and just read commentary of the abysmal speech because I didn’t realize it wouldn’t air live in a different time zone. Lesson learned.

He had a tough row to hoe to start: PPP released a poll before the speech in which a majority of voters think W handled Katrina better than O is workin’ the oil spill.  Ooops.  That has to sting, no?

If you’re in the mood, go here, here, here, here, here or here for excellent analysis of O’s speech. My favorite? Pundette’s nicknames for Olbermann and Matthews.  Priceless. 

In a nutshell, even the uber-libs thought the speech was pathetic.  Heh.  Jimmy Carter’s name came up a few times, too. 

Oddly enough, the trashing of the president on MSNBC didn’t make me chuckle.  It’s sad to see the minions who worshipped the fool start to turn on him.  Why?  I’ve known the man was a miserable leader.  But seeing proof positive on an hourly basis as millions in the Gulf lose their livelihoods due to his inaction (and action via the moratorium) isn’t funny.

Neither is the realization that 2012 is a damn long way away.

So.  Need a giggle?  I do.  Courtesy a Catholic writer I admire at Conversion Diary, here it is: 

When I recounted the story to my dad, he nodded like I was telling him that I went to the store to get some milk. Then he remembered that I had that hang-up abut scorpions, and dutifully put a very kind and sympathetic look on his face. You could just see his mind in overdrive to think through all the angles to try to figure out what bothered me about this. You could tell he wanted to comfort me with some fatherly advice. So finally he offered: “They’re no worse than tarantula bites.”

I just kind of stared at him, wondering if there’s an official repository of Most Epic Encouragement Fails to which I could submit that statement.

He tried again: “Remember that time I woke up to that scorpion stinging me on the knee? ”

“Yeah…” I said, eagerly waiting to hear the part about how it didn’t hurt or the sting ended up giving him superpowers or something.

“I didn’t die,” he said. Sensing that that might not have caused my quirky phobia to instantly dissipate once and for all, he tried another angle: “Plus, it’s not like that time Uncle Benton had one fall off the ceiling and sting him on the face while he was sleeping,” he added, pointing to the bedroom about five yards away from where I was sitting, where my uncle had been staying when he was stung. “His eye sure did swell up!”

And to think, if I had been in my dad’s situation of waking to a scorpion attacking my knee, I might have thought my glass was half empty! It was nice to have that little helping of Chicken Soup for the Texan Soul to inspire me for the rest of the evening, especially as I was falling asleep.

I think I need a copy of Chicken Soup for the Texan Soul, don’t you? I bet W has a copy ; )