Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
I believe that if Obama is reelected, we will see gas prices go up to the $9 to $10 a gallon that Obama’s handpicked energy secretary is on the record desiring. Obama’s philosophy (with its expression borrowed from his former chief of staff) is “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Which is to say that in a second Obama term when he is not burdened by an election and “has more flexibility” and is free to follow his heart, his heart will lead him to “motivate” you to buy green energy vehicles no matter how much more they cost and no matter how much the government has to subsidize said green energy because he will make it too painful for you to keep pumping gas in your car.
We can’t know how much gas will cost during a second term, but we CAN look at how much it has cost his FIRST term. And it’s been a pretty penny.
Democrats want to demonize gas prices under Bush. Well, let’s look at gas prices under Bush and then compare them to gas prices under Obama. Let’s compare all eight years of Bush to Obama’s first four years.
Average price for gas over Obama’s four years to date = $2.99/gal
And there you have it. Barack Obama costs you at least 85 cents a gallon more than Bush did. If you only consider Bush’s first four years of gasoline prices the way we’re only calculating Obama’s first four years, Bush’s average gas price was$1.68 a gallon – which is a $1.31 more per gallon that the $2.99 Obama has averaged so far his first term compared to Bush’s first term. And you aint seen nothing yet until you are fool enough to reelect him so he can go wild on your gas (that was a deliberate pun, btw).
When liberals demonize Bush for high gas prices, they attack him for the prices that went nuts in July of 2008. George Bush finally had enough of the hard-core Democrat obstructionism which they had used since taking over both the House and the Senate in 2006 and finally issued an executive order. As I document, oil prices dropped by $9.26 cents AS BUSH WAS SPEAKING when he issued that order ending the federal moratorium on offshore drilling. From that day on, gas prices took a precipitous plunge for the rest of his presidency and did not go up again until Obama began undermining Bush’s policies.
If you want to blame somebody for why we’re not lowering our gas prices by expanding our massive oil resources or building new refineries to expand our capacity (we haven’t been able to build one for 35 years due to massively expensive EPA restrictions and regulatory hurdles!!!), find a Democrat and punch him in the nose.
Obama made the American people a promise. He said he would not increase taxes on the middle class. What Obama has done with gasoline is a huge tax on the American middle class. And ObamaCare will be a giant tax on the middle class, that is now a confirmed fact by the Supreme Court ruling which justified ObamaCare ONLY if it was a “TAX.” Unless we vote his ass out this November.
Gasoline prices rise, setting California and U.S. records California’s average gasoline price of $4.129 is a new high for the third week of August, though the ascent has slowed. The U.S. average sets a similar record, and diesel prices raise concern.
By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times
August 21, 2012
California’s gasoline prices may have peaked after the refinery fire at Chevron Corp.’s Richmond facility, but they still rose enough over the last week to reach their highest level ever for the third week of August, the Energy Department said Monday.
The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in California was $4.129, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of gas stations. That was up 3.3 cents from a week earlier — and 26.1 cents higher than on Aug. 6, just before the refinery fire knocked out parts of the state’s third-biggest fuel-producing plant.
The price for the third week of August broke a state record set in 2008, when the California average was $4.037 a gallon.
A separate, daily survey sponsored by AAA found that California’s average had stabilized, slipping one-tenth of a cent from Sunday’s average to $4.118 a gallon.
The Energy Department survey showed the U.S. average for a gallon of regular gasoline rose 2.3 cents over the last week to $3.744, squeaking past the previous national record for the third week of August, set in 2008, of $3.740.
Meanwhile, Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service, said diesel prices were the bigger economic worry because they were raising transportation, construction and agricultural costs.
The average price of a gallon of diesel rose 9.8 cents to $4.313 in California and 6.1 cents to $4.026 nationwide — the highest averages since May 14.
Oil futures fell 4 cents to $95.97 a barrel in New York. The London price fell a penny to $113.70 a barrel.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a House panel Tuesday that he’d give himself top marks when asked to grade his policies’ effects on energy prices. Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked President Obama’s top energy official if he’d grade himself with an “A minus” on “controlling the cost of gasoline at the pump.”
Chu responded by saying he’d give himself a better grade than that.
“The tools we have at our disposal are limited, but I would I say I would give myself a little higher in that since I became Secretary of Energy, I’ve been doing everything I can to get long-term solutions,” Chu said.
Chu would give himself the top grade on gas prices despite that fact that the average price for a gallon of gas just hit $3.87 – the highest ever recorded in the month of March, according to ABC News.
I actually agree with Chu. He SHOULDget an A – for making gasoline the most expensive over the longest period of time we’ve ever seen. Which is exactly what he set out to do.
It was a question from John Harwood at CNBC: “So could the high oil price help us?” and Obama said, “Well, I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment, a gradual increase.”
Obama’s full statement:
OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that, ehh, this is such a shock t’American pocketbooks is not a good thing. Uh, but if we take some steps right now t’, uh, help people make the adjustment — first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers.
Just try to imagine what would have ensued if Bush had asked the mainstream media to literally scrub an already published story from their little Ministry of Truth complex. The Marxists who write our news would have a) broadcast Bush’s request and framed it in terms of a Big Brother fascist narrative; and b) blared the news Bush had asked them to scrub all over the airwaves just out of pure spite.
Now, go back to what Obama said and then allow me to explain what Obama SHOULD have said and why his answer is not only deplorable, but depraved. Obama should have said:
“Could higher gas prices help us? Absolutely NOT! High gas prices hurt the American people, it hurts the American economy and it undermines the American way of life. High gas prices are the worst form of regressive tax – by which I mean it would be a tax that afflicts poor people and particularly poor working Americans – far more than it would harm wealthier people who afford expensive gasoline. And I will do absolutely everything in my power as president to ensure that the American people are able to purchase gasoline at prices that will enable them to get to work and live their lives.”
Do you see the difference in those two statements?
And which statement do YOU prefer as you consider voting for president this November? Obama’s or the conservative’s?
Why does Obama and his energy secretary Steven Chu want oil prices to be the same (about $10 a gallon now) as Europe? It’s very simple: they have a Marxist red version of a radical environmentalist green vision of energy: they want to force the American people to “choose” the energy they WANT them to choose. And if they can’t simply mandate that “choice” like the fascists they are – which would amount to political suicide – their only option is to price gasoline out of the ballpark and force Americans to buy the little green clown cars and the electric golf cart cars that they want.
People like Barack Obama and Steven Chu sit in their limousines and see an average American driving down the road in a halfway cool car and say, “That’s unacceptable. There should be a much bigger difference between the elites who run the world and the proletariat masses.”
It’s the same damn kind of clown car with the same damn kind of radical environmentalist green clown car marketing that Obama and Chu want us in today. It’s a little tiny gutless piece of crap. And you ought to be driving one instead of something better, because frankly you’re a faceless nobody AND YOU SUCK. That’s the statist view of “an automobile for the people.”
So please reflect on the man that Barack Obama appointed to “get an A” with his current energy prices. Consider that Obama knew Chu had said:
While the national media focuses on polls from Reuters and Pew that use skewed samples to show Barack Obama’s approval rating going back up, The Hill takes a look at what might come in the future — and it’s not pretty for the President. In a survey of 1,000 likely voters in the 2012 general election, almost half expect the Supreme Court to overturn ObamaCare, with only 29% confident of its constitutional legitimacy. And that’s not the worst of the poll, either:
Half of likely voters expect the Supreme Court to strike down President Obama’s signature healthcare law, and strong majorities see other major policies coming from the White House making life more difficult for themselves and the country, according to this week’s The Hill Poll.
The poll indicated that 49 percent of likely voters said they expect a court ruling that is unfavorable to the Affordable Care Act, while just 29 percent think it will be upheld and 22 percent aren’t sure.
On economic issues, 62 percent of voters say Obama’s policies will increase the debt, while 25 percent think they will cut it, and by a 48-percent-to-38-percent margin, voters believe those policies will increase joblessness rather than put people back to work.
On energy, 58 percent say Obama’s policies will result in gasoline prices increasing, while just 20 percent expect them to cut prices — and by a 46-percent-to-36-percent margin, voters believe they will cause the United States to become even more dependent on foreign oil.
The sample in this case is a little skewed, but in an unusual direction. The D/R/I is 32/36/32 for an R+4 advantage, one of the rare occasions when a pollster favors Republicans. The four-point advantage for the GOP has low odds of becoming reality in the fall, though; the midterm elections, without a Democrat defending the White House, had a 35/35/30 split in CNN exit polling. Republicans will do well if they get to that kind of parity in November with Obama at the top of the ticket.
Even adjusting for the R+4, these numbers look very bad for the President, especially on gas prices. Overall, blame for increases in gas prices falls on Obama by 38 points, which means he’s especially vulnerable if prices shoot up this summer as they did in 2008 and 2010. Younger voters put even more blame on Obama, 70/8, as do lower-income earners ($40-60K is the worst for Obama, 75/13 but the under-$20K is almost as bad at 62/15), perhaps because they feel the loss of disposable income and capacity for independent travel even more. Independents blame Obama 61/13, while only a plurality of Democrats think Obama has made gas prices lower, 31/42.
Rasmussen also polled likely voters on ObamaCare, and finds that support for repealing it has remained remarkably consistent:
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the national health care law next week, and the number of voters who Strongly Support the law’s repeal is now at an eight-month high.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters shows that 56% at least somewhat favor repeal of the health care law, including 46% who Strongly Favor it.Thirty-nine percent (39%) oppose repeal, with 29% who are Strongly Opposed. (To see survey question wording,click here.)
Overall support for repeal is up three points from two weeks agoand is at its highest level since last September.The number that Strongly Favors repealing the law is at its highest point since July of last year. Since the law’s passage, most voters have favored repeal in nearly every survey, with support running as high as 62%. Opposition to repeal has ranged from 32% to 44%.
Strong support for repeal hit an eight-month high, but the range on overall demand for repeal in those eight months has been very steady indeed. Today’s number is 56%; the lowest it has gone in those eight months is 51%, and the high was 57%. Opposition to repeal has never gone above 42% in the past two years. At the moment, independents back repeal 57/39, with almost half (48%) strongly supporting its repeal. Even among Obama’s natural constituencies, support for repeal is strong or at a dead heat with support for ObamaCare: women (51/42), 18-29YOs (47/45 split), black voters (48/49 split), under-$20K income (50/35), $20-40K (53/39), and so on.
Given that the only real accomplishments of the Obama term has been ObamaCare, the failed stimulus bill, and Dodd-Frank, the fundamentals of this election look very bad for Obama — and will get worse if the Supreme Court throws out ObamaCare and gas prices continue to rise.
Update: I almost missed this from the Washington Post, which looks even worse:
Most Americans want the Supreme Court to invalidate at least part of the landmark health-care law that was passed in 2010, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. …
More than four in 10 — 42 percent — want the high court to throw out the entire law, 25 percent want to do away with the mandate alone and a similar proportion wants the justices to uphold the entire law.
Overall, among general population adults, 67% want the Supreme Court to partially or completely overturn Obama’s signature accomplishment. That number rises to 70% among independents, and it’s 48% among Democrats.
Hope ObamaCare goes down in flames and then Obama goes down in flames right along with it.
With gas prices now almost double what they were on the first day of President Barack Obama’s presidency, we’re left to wonder: what ever happened to all those “price gouging” investigations Democrats launched four years ago to relieve pain at the pump?
In 2006, Rep. Nancy Pelosi promised that Democrats would enact plans to bring down the price of gas. But as this GOP ad makes clear, that didn’t happen.
Then, with the presidential election heating up in May 2007, Rep. Nancy Pelosi rolled out the tried and true “blame Bush” tactic and said that high gas prices were the result of “the Bush Administration’s failure to enact a comprehensive energy strategy.” Furthermore, Rep. Pelosi said that the Democratic Congress would “take America in a new direction” and “make up for years of inaction” by Republicans. The San Francisco Congresswoman went on to tout the actions taken by the Democratic Congress within the first 100 hours of their taking power.
The day Rep. Pelosi made those comments, the national average price for a gallon of gas was $3.07. Today, in 2012, it’s $3.39 a gallon.
Rep. Pelosi, however, was not alone in promising to right the wrongs of the “two oil men in the Oval Office.” Then-candidate Barack Obama promised that, if he were elected president, gas prices would plunge because he would impose a “windfall profits tax” on any oil producer who sold oil above $80 a barrel. But no sooner did he win the presidency than did Mr. Obama ditch the proposal altogether, even going so far as to remove mention of it from his Transition Team’s website.
Of course, anyone who was paying careful attention in 2008 to then-candidate Barack Obama should hardly be surprised that energy prices have skyrocketed on his watch. After all, during the last presidential election, Mr. Obama admitted that he was perfectly aware that his own energy policies would result in skyrocketing prices–and that he was fine with that.
Indeed, Mr. Obama flatly stated that he preferred that gas prices rise–albeit “gradually”–in order to reduce American reliance on oil.
But the Democratic sound and fury over removing our pain at the pump signified nothing. With just 10 months until the 2012 presidential election, gas prices are almost twice what they were when that oil-loving meany George Bush left office.
Why? Because oil prices hinge on basic supply and demand, not a price-fixing conspiracy by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the owner of your local gas station, as many Democrats would have voters believe. To be sure, OPEC has an enormous influence on the price of a barrel of oil. But Energy Forum Director Amy Myers Jaffe of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University says that so-called price-gouging investigations are just a political shell game. “That’s just camouflage,” Ms. Jaffe told CNN. “That’s just ‘I want to pretend I’m doing something even, though I’m doing nothing.’”
With petroleum analysts now predicting that the price of a gallon of gas may well reach $4 a gallon by summer, Mr. Obama’s reelection hopes may rest on whether he can make manifest the promises he made four years ago to relieve America’s pain at the pump. If so, he better hurry. Summer gas prices will soon be here–and will further underscore Mr. Obama’s failure to make good on yet another campaign promise.
So with that record of Democrat demonization, let us just point out that these people deserve to get punched right in the mouth as nobody ever deserved to get punched right in the mouth.
NEW YORK – Gasoline prices have never been higher this time of the year.
At $3.53 a gallon, prices are already up 25 cents since Jan. 1. And experts say they could reach a record $4.25 a gallon by late April.
“You’re going to see a lot more staycations this year,” says Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “When the price gets anywhere near $4, you really see people react.”
Already, W. Howard Coudle, a retired machinist from Crestwood, Mo., has seen his monthly gasoline bill rise to $80 from about $60 in December. The closest service station is selling regular for $3.39 per gallon, the highest he’s ever seen.
“I guess we’re going to have to drive less, consolidate all our errands into one trip,” Coudle says. “It’s just oppressive.”
February follows January, of course, and according to an LA Times headline, January 2012 was similarly THE MOST EXPENSIVE JANUARY FOR GASOLINE IN AMERICAN HISTORY:
Gasoline prices were higher last year in America than they had EVER been:
U.S. drivers spend record amount on gasoline in 2011 Despite lower demand, more than $448 billion has been paid so far for fuel — $100 billion more than in 2010. Consistently high oil prices are blamed.
December 09, 2011|By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times
American drivers this week broke a record that will bring them no joy.
They collectively spent more than $448 billion on gasoline since the beginning of the year, according to the Oil Price Information Service, putting the previous record for gas expenditures — set in 2008 — in the rearview mirror with weeks of driving still to go.
It’s also a huge jump over last year, when U.S. drivers spent more than $100 billion less on gas.
The major reason for the record-setting gas spending in 2011 was that oil prices were consistently high all year. And that probably brought joy at the other end of the pipeline. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is on pace to top $1 trillion in net oil exports for the first time, or 29% more than last year.
The U.S. economy perked up late last year as hiring accelerated and factories ramped up production. Unfortunately, a lot of what those factories made is still sitting in warehouses and on store shelves.
That doesn’t bode well for growth in the coming months.
At first blush, the numbers posted by the Commerce Department for gross domestic product in the last three months of 2011 looked strong. Overall growth advanced by 2.8 percent on an annual basis, a little weaker than economists had expected based on a series of other positive economic reports. That was much better than the 1.8 percent pace in the third quarter and the best showing since the second quarter of 2010.
But much of the fourth quarter growth came from businesses restocking inventories, which swelled by $56.0 billion, adding nearly 2 percentage points to GDP growth. The so-called ”final sales” number, which tracks how much was actually sold, rose a meager 0.8 percent.
“The pickup in GDP growth doesn’t look half as good when you realize that most of it was due to inventory accumulation,” said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics. “Despite the apparent improvement in some of the incoming economic data, it still looks like … another disappointing year.”
Ashworth is among a number of private economists who see the fourth quarter growth spurt easing this year. He expects to see U.S. GDP advance by just 1.5 percent in 2012.
Federal Reserve officials echoed that prediction this week, though they’re a bit more optimistic. The central bank is looking for growth of 2.7 percent in 2012, but the latest forecast was trimmed by two-tenths of a percentage point. The Fed expects unemployment to drop as low as 8.2 percent by the end of the year.
The lowered growth forecast prompted central bankers to extend their pledge to keep interest rates at or near zero for another year; they now expect to hold rates at rock bottom until at least 2014 to try to encourage businesses and consumers to borrow and spend more money.
Business investment slowed sharply in the fourth quarter after heavy spending earlier last year.
Consumers continued to do their part; consumer spending grew at a 2 percent annual rate, up a bit from the third quarter. Car sales zoomed ahead as the average age of the cars and light trucks on the road hit record levels. The replacement of those worn-out vehicles helped boost car sales by 14.8 percent.
Consumers are feeling a bit better about the outlook for the economy. A separate report Friday showed the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index edging up for the fourth straight month. But the level of confidence remains weak.
“Despite the rise, this and other confidence measures remain in recession territory due to global sovereign debt fear, Congressional dysfunction, and high food and energy prices,” said economist Mike Englund at Action Economics
Consumers have also fallen back on car loans and credit cards to maintain their spending. Consumer borrowing jumped by $20.4 billion in November, the Federal Reserve said Monday. That was the third straight increase and the largest monthly gain in a decade. Consumers have boosted borrowing in 13 of the past 14 months.
The gradual improvement in the job market may explain some of the rise in borrowing. But many households are also leaning harder on debt because their wages are rising as fast as the price of the goods and services they need to buy.
A breakdown of the fourth quarter GDP numbers, with Mark Olson, Treliant Risk Advisors co-chairman/former Fed governor; CNBC’s Steve Liesman & Rick Santelli
Personal incomes rose at an 0.8 percent annual rate, according to Friday’s GDP report, after falling for the last two quarters. Consumer prices are climbing at an annual rate of 3 percent, according to the latest government data.
Much of that spending appears to represent people buying goods, not services. That’s a sign that households are sticking to necessities, according to Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors.
“The clearest sign that households remain cautious was in services spending,” he said. “This is the largest component of consumer demand and it fairly budged. People are not yet comfortable buying the little luxuries in life.”
With consumers tapped out and cautious, the economy faces other headwinds in the coming year. The housing industry remains stuck in the worst recession since the 1930s. A separate report Friday showed that the pace of new home sales fell in December, making 2011 the worst sales year since the Commerce Department first began collecting the data in 1963. Sales in December fell to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 307,000 – less than half the 700,000 that economists say represents a healthy pace.
Slack sales have forced builders to slash prices, which has kept many would-be buyers on the fence until they see signs that the market has bottomed. The median sales prices for new homes dropped in December by 2.5 percent to $210,300.
Though ultra-low mortgage rates have made home buying more affordable than it has been in decades, mortgage bankers remain very choosy about to whom they’ll lend. Some 12 million potential “move-up” buyers are stuck with mortgages that are bigger than their homes are worth.
Growth in the fourth quarter was also held back by big cuts in government spending, which lopped 0.9 percent from fourth-quarter GDP. That belt-tightening will likely continue.
Why did we have all of this extra manufacturing? For the same reason that Charlie Brown tried to kick the football again: somebody (in this case the mainstream media) lied to them and told them everything was looking just peachy when it really wasn’t.
We saw the same exact thing happen last year: the media assured us that happy times were here again (because the same media that unceasingly demonizes the economy in any Republican administration unceasingly exalts it in any Democrat one) in the 4th quarter of 2010. And then suddenly it wasn’t the Holiday Season anymore and things went back to sucking.
Let’s look at a couple of facts a little more closely, beginning with the fact that as Obama begins his fourth year, the housing market that collapsed in 2008 to kill the economy is WORSE than it HAS EVER BEEN:
Fewer people bought new homes in December. The decline made 2011 the worst year for new-homes sales on records dating back nearly half a century.
The Commerce Department said Thursday new-home sales fell 2.2 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 307,000. The pace is less than half the 700,000 that economists say must be sold in a healthy economy.
About 302,000 new homes were sold last year. That’s less than the 323,000 sold in 2010, making last year’s sales the worst on records dating back to 1963. And it coincides with a report last week that said 2011 was the weakest year for single-family home construction on record.
The median sales prices for new homes dropped in December to $210,300. Builders continued to slash price to stay competitive in the depressed market.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Housing prices are likely to move lower and bottom out in 2012 with modest appreciation likely in 2013, Freddie Mac(FMCC.OB) Chief Economist Frank Nothaft said in his outlook on Wednesday.
The Freddie Mac Housing Price Index is forecast to dip by 1% in 2012, marking the sixth consecutive year of declines. The index is expected to move higher by 2% in 2013.
The economist said in his report that national indexes masked sizable variation in local house-price performance. “Some markets have appreciated over the past year and are likely to gain further in 2012, while those markets with higher vacancy rates and relatively large distressed sales will continue to see downward price pressure over the next year.”
Anybody who says Obama “fixed” the economy is a liar or an idiot or a lying idiot. Because it was the housing bubble’s bursting that blew up the economy in 2008 – and the man hasn’t done a damn thing to fix it.
As for inflation, Obama has been like a curse from an angry old gypsy lady who pointed a finger at us and said, “You will vote for a fool to eat your wealth like a cancer!”
Barry Hussein can file 2011’s gasoline prices under the category “mission accomplished.” But, of course, he’s really only just getting started.
Gasoline prices were higher last year in America than they had EVER been:
U.S. drivers spend record amount on gasoline in 2011 Despite lower demand, more than $448 billion has been paid so far for fuel — $100 billion more than in 2010. Consistently high oil prices are blamed.
December 09, 2011|By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times
American drivers this week broke a record that will bring them no joy.
They collectively spent more than $448 billion on gasoline since the beginning of the year, according to the Oil Price Information Service, putting the previous record for gas expenditures — set in 2008 — in the rearview mirror with weeks of driving still to go.
It’s also a huge jump over last year, when U.S. drivers spent more than $100 billion less on gas.
The major reason for the record-setting gas spending in 2011 was that oil prices were consistently high all year. And that probably brought joy at the other end of the pipeline. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is on pace to top $1 trillion in net oil exports for the first time, or 29% more than last year.
Next week, OPEC convenes to discuss production levels. Analysts held out little hope that the group, which pumps 40% of the world’s oil, would raise output to lower prices and boost the economic recovery in the U.S. and Europe.
“They won’t do anything,” said Fadel Gheit, senior oil analyst at Oppenheimer and Co. “They can lay the blame on the banking sectors and debt and they are happy to keep providing oil at what are record prices for this time of the year.”
On Friday, crude oil for January delivery gained $1.07 to close at $99.41 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Nymex oil prices are up 8.8% so far for the year.
At the pump, gasoline prices hit a record for this time of year. On Friday, the average price of a gallon in California was $3.613, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report. That’s 27 cents a gallon higher than the record for a Dec. 9, set in 2007. It was 36.9 cents higher than last year.
Nationally, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.293, also breaking the 2007 record by 28.5 cents. Compared with last year, it was 31.8 cents higher.
Burbank resident Dan Bell, 38, said he recently turned down a job that would have paid him more because he would have had to spend too much on gasoline to get there.
“I just hate the fact that OPEC is making that much money,” Bell said. “There’s not much we can do. We still have to go to work.”
According to the Energy Department, the demand for vehicle fuel has been about 4% lower this year than in 2010. And domestic production of oil is on the rise.
But increasing amounts of oil produced in the U.S. are going to other countries. For the last three weeks, U.S. refineries have had a record high level of fuel exports, averaging about 2,984,000 barrels a day to markets overseas, the Energy Department said.
That was more than 600,000 barrels a day higher than last year and more than twice as much as was exported in 2008.
In 2008 when gasoline prices went up, Democrats in Congress (and one candidate for president named Barack Hussein Obama) demonized George Bush:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday blamed the “two oil men in the White House,” President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Republican allies in Congress for gas prices exceeding $4 a gallon.
Pelosi, a California Democrat, said multiple initiatives intended to lower high energy costs have passed the Democratically controlled House only to “run into a brick wall” in the Senate because they did not receive the 60 votes needed to overcome Republican filibusters.
“The price of oil is… is attributed to two oil men in the White House and their protectors in the United States Senate,” Pelosi said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Democrats think that preventing America from being able to drill for its own oil so we can bow down before OPEC is the key to low oil prices, apparently.
But my point in citing this is to ask, “Who is to blame for gasoline being more expensive than it has ever been in history of America now that Democrats are running things?”
How is this disaster NOT Obama’s fault, oh party that made everything Bush’s fault?
Other than the fact that the Democrat Party is the party of abject hypocrisy and if you get your “news” from the mainstream media you fill what little brain you have with propaganda.
Oh, btw, Obama isn’t starting 2012 so great when it comes to oil and gas prices, either:
Gasoline prices start the year at a high — and rising Gas prices are the highest ever for this time of year, and analysts predict that motorists will be digging deep in 2012 to fuel their vehicles.
January 06, 2012|By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times
Not only are we worrying about the end of the world in 2012 — thanks, Maya calendar makers — but this also may be the year of the gas-pocalypse, analysts warn. That’s because gasoline prices are the highest ever for the start of the year, and they’re on the rise, supercharged by expensive oil and changes in refinery operations.
In California, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.666 on Thursday, up 8.1 cents from a week earlier and up 33.1 cents from a year earlier, which had been a record price for this time of year, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report. Nationally, a gallon of regular was averaging $3.319, up 6.5 cents from a week earlier. That topped 2011’s record-setting start by 24.2 cents a gallon.
It’s the wrong way to kick off the new year, said Susan Sutter of Anaheim, who has seen the price of a gallon of gasoline at her local Arco station rise 18 cents, to $3.49, in the last week.
“I’m just appalled,” said Sutter, 54, who drives a Honda Civic sedan. Sutter’s ire wasn’t cooled by the fact that she was paying quite a bit less than the state average.
“I just hate these prices,” she said. “Someone is lining their pockets, and it sure isn’t me.”
Of course, current prices don’t guarantee future prices, but analysts are predicting that motorists will be digging deep this year to fuel their vehicles.
“Average gasoline prices are moving up as we enter the new year, a trend that has held since 2008,” said Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy.com, a website that tracks fuel prices. “We’re starting 2012 about 20 cents per gallon higher than 2011, setting up an ugly year for motorists.”
Energy Department statistics suggest that U.S. drivers won’t be getting any good news on prices soon.
In 2010, the year of the smallest recent gap between start-of-year prices and that year’s peak, the rise was 14.5% nationally and 10% in California. That translated into a jump of 38.7 cents a gallon in the U.S.’ average gasoline price and 30 cents in California’s.
The biggest recent start-to-peak increase came in 2009. Nationally, the average gasoline price started the year at $1.684 a gallon and climbed 60% to $2.694, a jump of slightly more than a dollar. In California, the average price per gallon soared 75%, to $3.287 from $1.874.
And 2011 showed that when prices start out high, it doesn’t take a huge percentage increase to add to consumer woes. Average prices rose 29% nationally in 2011, a jump of 89.5 cents a gallon to the year’s peak of $3.965. California prices also rose 29% last year, for a 95-cent rise to the high of $4.257.
The AAA Fuel Gauge Report mirrors the trend shown by the Energy Department’s weekly telephone survey of service stations. The averages reported by AAA are gathered daily by the Oil Price Information Service using credit card receipts from more than 100,000 outlets.
This year’s gasoline prices could be significantly higher than in previous years, said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service.
“Somewhere between the Grammys and the Oscars, the gasoline market and perhaps the crude market will trend considerably higher,” Kloza wrote in his blog, Speaking of Oil.
Kloza cited three potential causes: “International worries about a second Arab Spring will combine with domestic concerns about U.S. refinery maintenance and the closure of at least two critical East Coast refineries” to push prices higher.
In addition, U.S. refiners have been exporting record amounts of diesel fuel as they pursue profits from foreign buyers, causing an increase in diesel production at the expense of gasoline production. Tighter gasoline supplies mean higher prices.
History isn’t on the side of U.S. consumers. Kloza said that U.S. average gasoline prices have jumped in 11 of the last 12 years, to the record-high average of $3.514 a gallon for all of 2011. Oil prices are also starting the year on the move, another discouraging signal for gasoline prices, Kloza said.
The U.S. benchmark grade of oil, West Texas Intermediate, has remained above $100 a barrel in the three trading days so far this year on concerns about Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key passage for oil transport.
The price eased a bit Thursday, falling $1.41, or 1.4%, to $101.81 on the New York Mercantile Exchange after the Energy Department said U.S. oil stockpiles increased by 2.1 million barrels from a week earlier instead of declining 1 million barrels as analysts had expected. In London, the European benchmark, Brent North Sea crude, slipped 96 cents, or 0.8%, to $112.74.
Notice how the media – if they bother to talk about it at ALL (from my own searching the LA Times is about the only ones) – make sure to blame everyone and everything BUT the Fool-in-Chief.
Gas prices have been on a roller-coaster ride over the past decade, dropping to near $1 after President George W. Bush’s first year in office, crossing the $2 mark in 2005 and reaching $4 in June 2008 before Congress and Mr. Bush took action, lifting presidential and congressionally imposed moratoriums on expanding offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.
Mr. Bush lifted the presidential moratorium in July that year. The congressional moratorium expired Sept. 30, and prices fell precipitously, dropping more than $1 in October.
“The reason that it dropped is because the U.S. sent a signal to the markets, by dropping the moratoria, that we’re going to drill on our lands. Obviously, we never followed up, and thus you see the crisis gradually rising,” said Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, the ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee.
He said the solution is the same for both the short-term and long-term prices: Assure the markets that the U.S. will pursue domestic exploration.
You can see the impact that America drilling for its own oil has on prices – and how despicable the mainstream media can be in covering up the truth – in the following CBS piece entitled “The Immediate Benefit Of Offshore Drilling” from July 17, 2008:
After trading at a record high of $147 a barrel Friday, the price of oil saw its largest one-day drop since the 2003 beginning of the Iraq war on Tuesday, falling $6.44 a barrel. Wednesday, it fell another $3.71, to $135.03, and at one point was trading as low as $132.
So what happened? As is usually the case with markets, a variety of factors caused this dramatic drop. According to the Associated Press, the Energy Information Administration announced that U.S. crude-oil supplies rose by 3 million barrels; beleaguered banks have been selling off valuable energy contracts to pay for other debts; and there’s even some speculation that computer programs used by Wall Street may create a “cascading effect” once prices start to drop.
But bizarrely, the AP didn’t mention that on Monday – again, the day of the single biggest one-day drop in oil prices in five years – President Bush removed the executive order imposing a moratorium on offshore drilling in the United States.
To think that this dramatic and unexpected move by the Bush administration didn’t have a significant effect on oil prices is folly. Even Democrats admit that relatively small margins in oil production could have a huge impact on prices.
The price per barrel of crude oil – which was at an all-time high the day Bush signed the moratorium that ended the ban on offshore drilling after going up and up and up to that point – continued to drop and drop. By September, it was below $109 a barrel. By October it had dropped even more. And it kept dropping.
But now in the age of Obama, it’s going up and up and up again. We have had a 55% increase in the price of our gasoline during a terrible recession. Obama’s energy policies have hurt this nation badly at an incredibly vulnerable period, without so much as a peep from most of the media.
Prices were at an all time high in 2008, thanks to Democrat policies. Bush lifted the ban on offshore drilling, and all of a sudden those sky-high oil prices that Democrats demagogued plunged dramatically. And continued to plunge for the rest of 2008 until we elected a fool.
“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
He told just enough lies and half-truths to get coal-state Democrats such as West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller to get them to believe he wouldn’t destroy their economies. But now that he’s elected he’s free to break those promises and pursue ruinous policies. Rockefeller is now saying of Obama that:
“he’s beginning to not be believable to me.”
But it’s like, “Sorry Sucker.” When you vote like a fool, you receive a fool’s fate.
Anyway, maybe you thought, “Well, I’m not in a coal producing state,” or “I’m not in a coal-fired electric grid,” so you thought Obama’s shockingly bad energy policies didn’t matter.
But you’re still going to have to put gas in your car, and Obama’s going to see to it that it costs you a pretty penny to do it.
It wasn’t long ago that Barack Obama was saying that high fuel prices would be good for the country as long as they rose slowly enough that your stupid brain wouldn’t notice:
John Harwood asked then-Senator Obama, “Could the high prices help us?” And Obama responded:
OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that, ehh, this is such a shock t’American pocketbooks is not a good thing. Uh, but if we take some steps right now t’, uh, help people make the adjustment – first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers.
But as long as Obama – and probably as long as any Democrat – occupies the White House, you will not see America bothering to harness it’s own abundant natural resources no matter who gets hurt.
Who’s fault is it that oil and gas and energy prices are so shockingly high? The mainstream media will never honestly or accurately report it, but you have Barack Obama and the Democrat Party to thank when you can’t fill your gas tank or pay your energy bill.
Right now the Keystone oil pipeline is in front of Obama – and he is just as determined to kill domestic oil and the domestic jobs that come with it as he’s ever been.
The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:
WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.
Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.
After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.
Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.
[…]
But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:
— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.
— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.
— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.
[…]
Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.
[…]
Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.
“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”
Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.
The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.
How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.
Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:
“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”
The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???
WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s? WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?
And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama??? And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:
Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
[…]
”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared. So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.
These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums. Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology. There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.
I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather. And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.
Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???
It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure. It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.
The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein. The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.
The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”
The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.
There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading. Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements. The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford. And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes. Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs. Folsom provides the official data to back it up.
In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%. Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues. By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%). Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected. Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits. And they created millions of jobs in doing so.
And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN. Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations. They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money. And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone. Just like they did with FDR.
That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left. If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS. They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda. They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.
And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.
The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America. Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example. What did she say of the oil companies?
“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”
THAT’S what Hitler did, too. Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.
I stand by that sweeping statement. People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people. As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:
The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Timespointed out:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.
And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM. It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.
The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.” It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.” Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are. But Wallison is nonpartisan
That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle. This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office. And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.
Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:
Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.
I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.
Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.
Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations for their own industry because they know that they can handle all of the rules and paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can. After all, a large corporation with an accounting department can easily handle filling out a few thousand more forms, but for a small business with only a handful of employees that kind of paperwork is a major logistical nightmare.
When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has made the process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses that it is hardly worth it anymore. Things have gotten so bad that more small businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or independent contractors.
So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time employees.
And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help? Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.
A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011
In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.
That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.
The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.
While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.
“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.
“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.
So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?
And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.
An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs. That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits. And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden. Just to name a few. The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.
Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too. Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008. Did Obama make it better? Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.” Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.
The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job. Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.
What does hope and change mean entering the third year of Obama? Does it mean a) I hope I don’t starve as food prices skyrocket? Does it mean b) I hope I don’t freeze as heating oil prices skyrocket? Does it mean c) I hope I can afford the gas to drive to work as gasoline prices skyrocket? Or does it mean d) I hope I don’t go broke as the value of my dollars dwindle away.
The answer, of course, is e) all of the above.
The answer is always e when bad things are happening and you’ve got an idiot ruining the country.
WASHINGTON—Global food prices continued to climb sharply in recent months, forcing millions into poverty and potentially exacerbating already tense conditions in the Middle East, the president of the World Bank said Tuesday.
The bank’s food price index rose 15% between October of last year and January, up nearly 30% from the same period a year ago, and only 3% below the 2008 peak. The increases, which have included sharp price spikes in the cost of wheat and maize, have driven an estimated 44 million people into poverty since last June, the World Bank said.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick told reporters on a conference call that food prices are at “dangerous levels” and said there is reason to worry that it could lead to further unrest in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where there is political unrest.
“I’m concerned that higher food prices add to stress points and could add to the fragility that is already there anytime you have revolutions and transitions,” Mr. Zoellick said, acknowledging bank officials are in close contact with interim authorities in Egypt.
The warning from the World Bank comes days before finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations are scheduled to meet in Paris to discuss a wide range of issues. Food prices, as well as inflation more broadly, is already a growing concern for international officials, but Zoellick said it needs to play a larger role in the high-level discussions this week. “The G-20 has to put food first this year,” Mr. Zoellick said, adding later that “this is a broad-based problem and it’s going to need a comprehensive solution.”
The World Bank said the rise in prices in a number of key staple crops was partially mitigated by only a modest increase in global rice prices, as well as good harvests in many African nations. Still, Mr. Zoellick warned that the World Bank remains concerned about global food-stock levels and predicted there could be increased price volatility if extreme weather conditions persist.
But don’t spend all your time worrying about starving to death; because under Obama, you have to worry about being able to afford the heating oil for your home or the gasoline to drive to work, too. Oh, yeah, and your money is now worth a heck of a lot less thanks to your community organizer’s policies:
NEW YORK, Feb. 27, 2008 U.S. Gasoline Prices Skyrocket Pain At Pump Increases As The Cost Of Crude Oil Hits $102 A Barrel
(CBS/AP) The rapidly rising cost of crude oil has prompted a big spike in U.S. gasoline prices, with some experts saying the cost of regular gas could hit $4 a gallon.
The AAA reports that the average cost of regular gasoline in the nation was $3.14 a gallon – up 19 cents a gallon in the past two weeks, according to The New York Times. The cost of gasoline was $2.35 a gallon a year ago.
AAA spokesman Geoff Sundstrom told the Times it was possible gasoline prices could hit $4 a gallon this summer.
“We’ve gone from a worrying situation for gasoline to one that is quite alarming,” Sundstrom told the newspaper.
Driving the increase is the cost of crude oil, which hit an intraday high of $102 a barrel Wednesday as a slide in the U.S. dollar prompted investors to pump more money into energy futures as a hedge against inflation.
The dollar sank to a record low against the euro after the release of three disheartening U.S. economic reports Tuesday that show that the economy is slowing as prices for consumer goods rise. The dollar’s decline prompted investors to seek a safe haven from turmoil in the financial markets and the threat of inflation.
“Crude has cracked through the $100-level again and that’s driven by financial investors moving money into commodities markets,” said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
“The U.S. dollar weakened against the euro and the economic data also indicated that inflation in the U.S. rose in January, and commodities are generally considered a hedge against inflation,” Shum said. “We are therefore seeing these strong prices that have really little to do with oil market fundamentals.”
Light, sweet crude for April delivery spiked as high as $102.08 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange before slipping back to $101.23, up 35 cents.
The contract on Tuesday jumped $1.65 to settle at $100.88 a barrel, a record close.
In London, Brent crude added 33 cents to $99.80 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange, below the intraday record of $100.30 a barrel set earlier in the session.
The U.S. Labor Department said wholesale inflation rose by 1 percent in January on soaring oil and food costs. And Standard & Poor’s also reported that U.S. home prices fell 8.9 percent in the last three months of 2007 from a year earlier.
A report by the Conference Board, a business-backed research group, that its Consumer Confidence Index fell to the lowest since February 2003, far below what analysts had been expecting, indicated that consumers might continue to curb their spending in the coming months.
Quote : “We’ve gone from a worrying situation for gasoline to one that is quite alarming.”Geoff Sundstrom, AAA spokesman
But traders in both the energy market and the U.S. stock market, which also advanced sharply, seemed largely unfazed. Oil has risen in recent days amid an increase in speculative buying, with some traders believing that global demand will be high enough to support higher crude prices even if the American economy is slowing.
Analysts expect the U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration to report later Wednesday that the nation’s crude oil stocks rose last week by 2.4 million barrels, which would be the seventh straight week of gains.
Gasoline inventories are expected to rise by 400,000 barrels while supplies of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, fell by 1.8 million barrels last week, according to a Dow Jones Newswires poll of analysts.
Also supporting prices were concerns about supply disruptions from unrest in Iraq, a major oil exporter. Turkish ground forces pushed their offensive against Kurdish rebels deeper into the north of Iraq, seizing seven guerrilla camps, officials said Tuesday.
But blame Bush!
Why? Because Bush built a time machine, traveled into the future, screwed up the world and then returned to 2008. So that even though Obama is well into his third year as president, he’s not actually responsible for anything.
I think of FDR and the poisonous toxic impact that fool had on our economy and our way of life. FDR prolonged the devastating human suffering of the Great Depression by seven miserable years with his ruinous policies, according to studies by economists. It would have been longer, but FDR – who was one of the worthless and weak leaders of the West who empowered Hitler to keep pushing until there was a world war – was able to get men out of the bread lines by sending them into machine gun fire. Liberalism = death back then, and liberalism = death now. The only thing that has changed is the name of the idiot in the Oval Office.
The mainstream media will continue to largely ignore what’s going on even as they blame anybody and anything but Obama for what the have to cover, because leftwing propaganda is what they do.
I hate to tell you this, but if you were stupid enough to vote for a community agitator as your president, you fully deserve to freeze to death while you starve to death. It’s called winning the Darwin award, and under Fool-inChief Obama, America has hit the Darwin Award mega-lottery jackpot.
Let’s take them in alphabetical order. First, How’s Obama doing in Afghanistan?
Not so good. Our foreign policy is so deteriorated there that Obama is refusing to even acknowledge whether or not the leader of the country we are fighting in is an ally:
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs would not say Tuesday if the Obama administration considers Afghan President Hamid Karzai an ally.
Gibbs criticized the Afghan president after Karzai took a shot at Western leaders and the United Nations for election fraud in his country during last year’s presidential contest.
Administration officials said Tuesday that they will continue to “evaluate” remarks made by Karzai, and that the evaluation could result in Karzai’s May invitation to the White House being revoked.
President Barack Obama extended an invitation for Karzai to visit the White House on May 12, but that could be in jeopardy if Karzai continues to make “troubling and untruthful” comments.
Asked at the daily press briefing if the U.S. considers Karzai an ally, Gibbs said “Karzai is the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.”
Pressed on the issue, Gibbs said that “the remarks he’s made I can’t imagine that anyone in this country found them anything other than troubling…when the Afghan leaders take steps to improve governance and root out corruption, then the president will say kind words.”
Gibbs added that the administration will continue to use “stern language” with Karzai if it doesn’t take steps to root out corruption and questioned the rationale behind Karzai’s controversial statements.
“Whether there’s some domestic political benefit that he’s trying to gain, I can’t say,” Gibbs said.
So Karzai defends his country’s elections, and his own political credibility, from foreign attacks and demagoguery, and as a result Obama snubs him in what seems like a rather petty emotional response.
Maybe Karzai should start meddling in Obama’s election-status by pointing out that Obama’s own wife strongly suggested Obama was not born in the United States when she remarked that she and Obama visited “his home country in Kenya.” Which of course is what the birthers who say Obama was not an American-born U.S. citizen have been saying all along. Even the Associated Press at one point described Obama as “Kenyan-born” before it became inconvenient to so-describe him.
Given that Obama is becoming unglued over Karzai defending himself over attacks regarding the legitimacy of his election, it would be interesting if we could see how Obama would handle attacks over the legitimacy of his election.
In any event, things aren’t going so well when we have hundreds of thousands of troops fighting in a country while our president openly doubts whether the leader of said country is an ally.
That was the first thing that went truly, truly wrong in Vietnam, you know.
How’s Obama doing in Iran? Really, really bad. It has become abundantly obvious that Iran WILL have nuclear weapons under Obama’s watch.
And what is Obama’s reaction to this intolerable and incredibly dangerous development? Try acceptance.
I know, I know. Iran was supposed to reflect upon the sheer, transcendent wonderfulness of Obama, and agree that Obama’s empty words really were more important than reality, and abandon it’s nuclear weapons program. But somehow something went wrong in Obama’s calculation that Iran and the ayatollahs would decide to embrace Obama’s narcissism.
In another August 2008 article predicting that “President Obama” equaled “nuclear Iran,” I wrote:
This is the question that will effect – and possibly haunt – American foreign policy for generations to come.
If we elect Barack Obama, we are tacitly choosing to allow Iran to develop the bomb. Any of his tough-sounding rhetoric aside, you need to realize that Barack Obama has already repeatedly philosophically condemned the very same sort of preemptive attack that would be necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Heck, I can go back to April 2008, when I was already explaining why electing either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton over John McCain guaranteed a nuclear-armed Iran.
When Iran obtains nuclear weapons, the world will dramatically change. We will not be able to control this rogue terrorist nation – a nation with a radically apocalyptic view of the world – which has repeatedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” When Iran develops the bomb, they will be able to block the Strait of Hormuz and shut off the oil supply, skyrocketing gasoline prices to over $14 a gallon. When Iran gets nukes, it will be able to launch a global terrorist jihad without fear of being attacked. When Iran has the bomb, it will result in a nuclear-arms race in the craziest region in the history of the world.
Ultimate Armageddon will be guaranteed when Iran gets the bomb. And it will get the bomb because of Barack Hussein Obama.
How about Iraq? Well, things are hardly looking up there under Obama, either.
A few weeks ago, Joe Biden was ridiculously asserting that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” What was asinine about that statement was that it utterly ignored the Bush administration, that deserves all the credit, and instead assign credit to two men who foolishly tried to undercut everything that Bush did which led to the success we attained in Iraq.
But things were clearly going well in Iraq, such that Joe Biden tried to steal credit for it.
BAGHDAD — Deadly blasts shook Baghdad for the second time in three days on Tuesday, deepening fears of a new outbreak of insurgent and sectarian violence.
At least seven bombings of residential areas of the Iraqi capital, both Shiite and Sunni, killed 35 people and wounded more than 140. The violence came against a backdrop of continuing political instability after March 7 parliamentary elections left no single group able to form a government, forcing a scramble to form coalitions.
A similar political void after the 2005 parliamentary vote preceded Iraq’s bloody sectarian warfare of 2006 and 2007, from which the country has only begun to emerge.
There are also new concerns that Iraq’s army and police may drift back into sectarianism.
It’s logically impossible for the Obama administration to one day say Iraq will be one of their “greatest achievements,” and the next day blame Bush for the failure of Iraq. That said, I guarantee you that that is precisely what Obama will try to do if Iraq turns sour on him.
ALLAWI: The process of democracy where you would have a stable Iraq is being hijacked. And because it’s being hijacked, it’s going to throw this country into violence. And once this country is thrown again into violence as before, then this will spill over to the region and vice versa. Problems around the region will be transferred here also.
I bold and red-font the statements that it is “being” hijacked. It is something that is beginning to happen just now. And Iraq is being “thrown again into violence as before.” Obama can’t blame Bush for this increasing violence. He can only blame himself (not that he ever actually WILL blame himself).
We are beginning to escalate our withdrawal out of Iraq, and lo and behold, the Islamic jihadists are determined to make it appear as though we are withdrawing with our tails between our legs. They are also making it rather obvious that when we leave, they will be present to fill the newly created vacuum with their poisonous presence.
Allawi is pleading with the United States to discontinue the timetable for withdrawal and remain through this difficult period. But the report by correspondent Dominic Di-Natale concludes by saying, “Ayad Allawi’s call for a troop withdrawal suspension will fall on deaf ears for the time being even if it is a serious plea for help. ”
One of the fears is that Obama is tunnel-vision focused on getting the hell out of Iraq, and is ignoring the delicate state-of-affairs there.
So how’s Obama doing in Afghanistan, in Iran, and in Iraq? Pretty darn horrendously.
An article that encapsulates the Obama disaster of a foreign policy is “The Karzai Fiasco” by the Wall Street Journal.
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