The media and John McCain are finally starting to turn against poor Barack Obama.  Even Obama admits it, warning that, what Bush and McCain “[are] going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said.  “You know, `he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, `he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.‘”

McCain and ABC’s Jake Trapper have rightly pointed out that this is Obama playing the race card.  No person speaking on behalf of Senator McCain or President Bush has even remotely mocked or referred to Obama’s appearance, skin color, the phonetics of his name or his racial history.  What they have done is criticized his woeful lack of experience.

Not one to ever stick to a statement, when questioned, the Obama campaigned feigned surprise, claiming, incredulously, that Obama was not saying anything about race:

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said “What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs said. “There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

Really? There are 8 U.S. presidents on currently circulated currency.  Only two of them have more than 10 years of political experience in washington (and only then if you count Jefferson’s Ambassadorship to France as time he spent as a “Washington insider”):

Arguably, the $2 bill and the silver half dollar are not even in common circulation.  I have excluded military service, as I don’t think anyone could reasonably call Washington, Ike, Grant (or their equivalent in General Patreaus) “Washington insiders” simply because they commanded the military in war time.

Of course, the flip side of the coin is that, if Obama (God forbid), is elected president, he will have served 4 years in the Senate, making him more of a Washington insider than any president on currency (other than JFK and Thomas Jefferson).

Jim Gereghty at the Campaign Spot points out Obama’s flimsy New Math on tire pressure.  I agree with Jim in general, but I think there’s an easier way to make the point.  First, Obama’s connecting this with offshore oil drilling is ridiculous.  That’s like a doctor telling a man with a cold, if you lay down part of the day, you’d cough less and you won’t need so much cough syrup.  Okay, but why don’t I do both, would that be better?

In any event, Obama is claiming that properly inflating tires would have a significant impact on gas prices.  Let’s take Jim’s assumptions and see:

Assuming:

• The average commuter commutes 33 miles per day;
• The average car gets 24 mpg (unlikely, but okay);
• Improper tire pressure decreases efficiency by 2.5 mpg (average of 2-3 mpg);
• And 1 out of 3 commuters has improper tire pressure.

Take three random commuters: two travel 33 miles each at 24 mpg (1.375 gallons per day) and the other at 21.5 mpg (1.53 gallons).  The evil, unAmerican commuter is wasting .16 gallons per day.

To put into perspective, this means that uninflated tires increase domestic demand by .16 gallons for every 4.125 gallons.  (All three commuters with properly inflated tires would use (1.375 * 3 = ) 4.125 gallons.)   Put another way, this is an effect of less than 4% (.16 / 4.125).

Assuming you believe in the law of supply and demand, a 4% decrease in demand should correspond to at most a 4% decrease in price.  This ignores effects like stockpiling and the cost of the federal beauracracy needed to ensure compliance.  If the average price of gas is now roughly $4.00 per gallon, a 4% decrease would make it $3.84, saving $.16 per gallon.

To sum up, forcing every motorist to properly inflate their tires would save, at most, $.16 per gallon.

In contrast, the federal tax on gasoline is $.184 per gallon.  Wasn’t there a candidate who said that eliminating this tax was a “typical Washington gimmick” that wouldn’t amount to any real savings?

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain met with the Dalai Lama of Tibet today.  Senator McCain hoped to come away with an endorsement, but the Dalai Lama declined to give any endorsement.  When asked about an endorsement, the Dalai Lama said “Oh, uh, there won’t be any endorsement, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So McCain has that goin’ for him, which is nice.

My wife and I adopted a puppy a few months ago.  As my wife works from home, she has been doing most of the training and she’s done a fantastic job.  Our dog, Sedona, at five months knows how to sit, lay down, fetch, give, bring and drop.  She never begs for food…well. That’s where I come in.  She never begged for food until last Friday.

We were having Chinese takeout Friday night and Sedona was peacefully sitting in her bed across the room. After we had eaten, the wife asked me to give her a biscuit. Thinking she meant the fried lo mein noodles, I grabbed one and handed it to the dog. Several “what did you just do”’s later and ever since, we realized that Sedona seemed to be silently singing her new lament:

Some–times, I get fed at the ta-ble.
Not ev’ry time, but it happened one night.
I’ll wait here, as long as I’m a-ble.
And when they feed me, I’ll know I was riiight.

There are two conflicting views of reality fluttering through the Democratic Congress and both involve the effects of speculation.  On the one hand, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are absolutely convinced that speculators are driving up the price of oil.  On the other, Chuck Schumer is equally convinced that his open and public speculation about the financial health of a bank had no effect on its immediate collapse and takeover by the FDIC.  The terrible truth is that, like Democrats on most issues, they are both provably wrong.

When a market participant decides to buy (or sell) a futures contract on oil, they are betting that the future price will rise (or fall).  These “evil, manipulative speculators” are people who use oil or gas and need to manage their risk.  For example, if you run an airline, a large portion of your cost is the cost of fuel.  Unfortunately, there is no market for managing the risk of refined Jet-A fuel, so you have to rely on the proxy of crude oil.  For example, let’s say the price of oil on July 1, 2008 was $140 per barrel.  You believe the price will go up in a year, so you buy several contracts that will, theoretically let you buy oil in a year at today’s price.  If, on July 1, 2009, the price of oil is $200 per barrel, you have a piece of paper that allows you to buy a barrel for $140 and the other party makes up the difference.  If, on the other hand, the price goes down to $100 per barrel, you have to pay $140 (in reality, you pay $40 to the counterparty and no oil changes hands).

So, if your company uses a lot of oil, and you’re worried the price will go up, you would buy a lot of these contracts.  If the price does, indeed go up, you have the “profits” from the future contracts to offset the increased cost.  In other words, you enter into 10,000 of those contracts, your cost of jet-A goes up by $400,000, you can offset that cost by the $400,000 you receive from the futures contract.  As you (hopefully) can tell from my description, no where in the futures market is the price of oil manipulated.  People are speculating (that’s a Harvard word for guessing) about whether the price will go up or down, but no oil changes hands.

This is very similar to betting.  I can assure you from personal experience that betting on a team to win will in no way effect their chances of winning.  If Harry Reid were right about this, the favorite would win every sporting contest.  (And his home state of Nevada would lose a ton of legal and illegal revenue).  There is no economist that I’m aware of who has ever said that speculating has an impact on price.  Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, when the federal government banned commodity trading on onions the result was a disaster.  When market participants could not manage their risk, prices became more volatile, not less.  Learning from history, it seems, is not a part of the Democratic agenda.

Separately, Chuck Schumer (D-umbass) and senior senator from New York, decided he wanted to collapse a bank, apparently to prove he could do it, or more cynically, to advance the leftist anticorporate agenda.  His public letter questioning the solvency of Indymac led to two weeks of frantic withdrawals by depositors.  After the federal government needed to step in on Saturday and take over the bank, Schumer, surprising no one, tried to blame Bush.  after causing the bank collapse, Schumer charged that president Bush had “blamed the fire on the guy who called 911.”

This is how stupid or dishonest Chuck Schumer is.  Either he is so dumb that he doesn’t realize that openly questioning the solvency of a bank would cause its depositors to withdraw their money, or he is so dishonest, he believes that you are so stupid that he can get away with it.  When a sitting U.S. senator (frequently referred to as a failed lawyer) on the senate banking committee openly questions the solvency of a major bank, there are consequences.  People who either (1) still have faith in their goverment or (2) realize who monumentally stupid such a thing is to do; will rush to their bank and take out their money.  As Mr. Schumer appears immune to any real facts, he might want to re-watch “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as this was a major plot point.

Mr. Reid is the kind of idiot who thinks gamblers have an impact on the game.  Mr. Schumer is the kind of idiot who, when hiding with the Franks in the attic, sees nothing wrong with shouting “DO YOU THINK THE NAZIS CAN HEAR US?!?” in the middle of a ghestapho raid.