Saudi Arabia Should Be Glass By Now

The evidence is overwhelming, and now it's court testimony: the autocratic assholes ruling Saudi Arabia planned, paid for, directed and took secret delight in the 9/11 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers.

And we're kissing their asses.

Think Progress:

A former Al Qaeda operative who helped plot the 9/11 terrorist attacks has claimed that he has firsthand knowledge that members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family financially supported the terrorist network in the late 1990s. Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, also said that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

“I was supposed to go to Washington and go with him…find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” the French-born Moussaoui said of a plan he made with a Saudi Arabian Embassy official while in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Moussaoui said he was arrested before he could carry out the plan.

The former terrorist’s testimony has been submitted as part of a case brought by the families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia for its alleged involvement in the terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 people. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on that day were Saudi.

Enjoy cheap gas while you can.  It's going to soar immediately up to $10 a gallon as soon as the Saudis finish wrecking the economies of every oil-producing nation that competes with them.

They redefine "vicious motherfuckers."  And they are a clear and present danger to the survival of human civilization.

Lower Gas Tax = No Road Repair

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.  Five cents less per gallon isn't going to pay for the thousands of dollars you'll spend repairing tire and undercarriage damage from unrepaired roads.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Kentucky motorists will pay less taxes for gas starting New Year's Day, but the change will mean fewer road improvements, state officials warned Wednesday.

Kentucky's tax on sales of gasoline, diesel and ethanol motor fuels will drop by 4.3 cents a gallon on Jan. 1, resulting in a loss to the Kentucky Road Fund of about $129 million on an annualized basis, according to the state Transportation Cabinet.

Kentucky's gas tax fluctuates with the average wholesale price of gas, which has dropped in recent months.

"The gas tax accounts for more than half of the revenue in the Kentucky Road Fund," state Transportation Secretary Mike Hancock said in a news release. "A loss of revenue is always concerning, but a revenue impact of this magnitude is crippling. It means less money for building, improving, maintaining and repairing our roads, streets and bridges."

A loss of $129 million would amount to about 6 percent of Kentucky's highway funding, which was forecast to collect $2.25 billion in the current fiscal year from all revenue sources, including state and federal motor-fuels taxes and a state usage tax on motor vehicles.

Somalia. That's what the anti-taxers want. A Galtian paradise with no taxes, no government, no infrastructure, just warlords rapiong and killing indiscriminately.

I say ship 'em all to their no-government paradise and let the rest of us get on with funding a government that makes life civilized.

Concern-Trolling Electric Cars

This is how repugs win issues that should be dead-bang losers for them: they hide their real agenda behind a reasonable-sounding proposal that liberals feel obligated to support because it's so reasonable.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Since 1920, Kentucky has taxed gasoline at the pumps to pay for road construction and repair. But with the advent of motor vehicles that do not use gasoline as their chief source of fuel, an advocacy group is pushing for legislation to require "next generation" vehicles to pay for road usage.

Kentuckians for Better Transportation, whose 240 members include local governments, road contractors and other businesses, wants the General Assembly to consider adding a fee to annual auto registrations for electric cars and other vehicles that run on fuels other than gasoline.

Translation: Electric cars are putting the fossil-fuel industry at risk, so let's blame them for crumbling roads and make everybody hate the dirty fucking hippies who drive them.

This nation desperately needs trillions of dollars to repair and rebuild our transportation system. The place to get those dollars is by cancelling the billions in subsidies to Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal, then levying massive taxes on their trillions in profits.

Not by punishing the electric car industry that is saving all our oil-soaked asses.

CFTC Nails First Oil Speculator

And this is exactly why repugs fight like rabid ferrets against the slightest hint of regulation: because it works.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Glad to see this kind of crackdown by federal regulators, even though it's five years after the fact. It's baffling that these people are so divorced from the human misery they caused. It's as if they're completely disconnected from their own country, and I wonder how they got this way:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. regulators claimed their first victory in a four-year old effort to crack down on oil market manipulation on Thursday, announcing a $14 million settlement with high-frequency trading firm Optiver.

In a ruling that came just two days after U.S. President Barack Obama proposed a renewed campaign against illegal oil trading schemes, the Amsterdam-based company agreed to disgorge $1 million in profits and pay a $13 million civil penalty over allegations it used a rapid-fire tool nicknamed "The Hammer" to influence U.S. oil prices in 2007.

It was the first case brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in its 2008 effort to curb market malfeasance, launched as prices soared toward a record near $150 a barrel in the middle of that year.

The case alleged that traders in Optiver's Chicago office reaped a $1 million profit by engaging in a practice called "banging the close", in which the firm attempted to move U.S. oil prices by executing a large volume of deals during the final moments of trading.

While far from the agency's largest fine, the case was viewed as an important milestone in the CFTC's efforts to get more aggressive over market manipulation - a charge that has historically been difficult to prove, despite mounting political pressure to take rogue traders to task.

"The CFTC will not tolerate traders who try to gain an unlawful advantage by using sophisticated means to drive oil and gas futures prices in their favor," David Meister, the CFTC's enforcement chief, said in a statement.

[...] The CFTC case revealed emails and phone recordings showing efforts by traders at Optiver's Chicago branch to "move," "whack" and "bully" oil prices.

According to a CFTC background sheet, van Kempen told an Optiver trader on March 19, 2007: "You should milk it for right now because you never know how long it's going to last."

The CFTC complaint said Optiver and van Kempen made false statements to New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) compliance officials in an effort to conceal the manipulative scheme.

The defendants had attempted to manipulate NYMEX U.S. crude oil, gasoline and heating oil contracts on the 19 separate times during 11 days in March 2007, according to the complaint.

"Those who seek to manipulate oil or other commodity markets should know we aren't messing around," said CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton. "You manipulate, we are going after you."

Brooksley Born is smiling.

Gas Prices Are Global

And the New York Times has the graphs to prove it.

Joe Romm at Think Progress:

America produces 200 times as much oil as Germany, but our gas prices rise and fall in tandem (we pay far lower gas taxes). Source: Energy Information Administration and NY Times.

The public understands Obama isn’t to blame for high gasoline prices, as recent polls make clear. Even the Wall Street Journal and Cato Institute agree: “It’s not Obama’s fault that crude oil prices have increased.”

But as the NY Times pointed out Sunday, facts don’t stop the GOP:

The issue of gas prices has not only been misunderstood but thoroughly distorted by relentless ideological spin from industry and its political allies, mainly Republican. Hardly a day goes by that some industry cheerleader somewhere — be it Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana or Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma — does not flay President Obama for driving up oil prices by denying the industry access to oil and gas deposits and imposing ruinous environmental rules. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, said last week that Mr. Obama should be held “fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline.”

The Times put together some great charts using EIA data. They make clear 1) oil prices are set on a global market and 2) the strategy of “Drill, Baby, Drill” adopted by the GOP and President Obama has succeeded at increasing production and decreasing dependency on foreign oil — but it has unsurprisingly failed at affecting global markets.

Read the whole thing.

"All-of-the-above strategy" Guaranteed to Fail

Sigh. We know what you think you're doing, Mr. President. But while you're trying - and failing - to outflank repugs who have no right flank, just insanity to infinity, civilization speeds closer to a climate catastrophe dystopia.



Full transcript here.

Speculating Kochs to Blame for High Gas Prices

Matt Taibbi has already documented how commodities speculation, unleashed in 1999, led to both the housing bubble and to the Wall-Street-caused economic crash of 2008, from which we continue to suffer.

Any surprise that commodity speculation is behind our recovery-killing gas prices, too?

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

Lee Fang has been on a roll lately with his expose´ of the Koch empire and the various tentacles of the Kochtopus. But his latest may be the one with the most pain attached. It seems that not only does Koch Industries avail itself of the profit-taking available by speculating on oil prices, but they were the authors of the whole damn scam.

Writing on his political blog, an attorney working for Koch’s law firm angrily replied to our initial investigation by claiming that Koch is solely a bonafide hedger, meaning that it only participates in speculative markets to reduce risk for the oil the company refines (he also bizarrely argued that speculation has no relation to the price of oil). The spin obscures reality: much of Koch’s oil trading business is actually akin to a hedge fund, buying and selling financial products based on oil with little interest in the actual delivery of the product. In fact, Koch pioneered the risky speculation industry that dominates the world’s oil markets today, first by inventing oil derivatives back in the ’80s, then by working to kill off regulations. ThinkProgress has delved into the history of Koch’s oil speculation business and the following timeline spells out Koch’s leading role:

Read the rest

The timeline is particularly interesting. In a nutshell, the very first oil derivatives were born in 1986, during the Reagan presidency. With the help of Phil Gramm in the Senate, and his wife Wendy Gramm, oil speculation was deregulated and the Kochs were laughing all the way to the bank. Wendy deregulated oil derivatives on the very last day of the George HW Bush administration, just before Bill Clinton took the oath of office.

This is so representative of how Republicans and their corporate masters conduct themselves. In public, they cry out about how rotten government is while in private they work hard to create proof for their claim, with voters' help.

Rick Perlstein wrote a great article recently about the corrupt media and how it has evolved into one that not only overlooks right wing lies; it actually perpetuates them. As I considered that article against the revelation that the Kochs were the architects and authors of oil speculation, I heard all the various "pain at the pump" stories echo through my head. They didn't come only from Fox News. They were on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN.

Not one of them paid more than a casual nod to speculators' dirty business and the effect on gas prices. Not one. Instead we get garbage like this Washington Post headline, "wondering" whether President Obama is intentionally driving up gas prices (the author answers the question with a big "no", but the link bait was enough). Or we get Rick Santorum whining that it's all that mean Democrat's fault that we're paying more at the pump, and the media just nods and drools while writing it all down on their little notepads.

While I give Lee Fang a ton of credit for the outstanding work he's doing unmasking the Kochs' malfeasance, where is our media in this? When do they start to do even a modicum of investigative reporting. For that matter, why the heck isn't Andrew Breitbart all over it, now that he thinks he has been forever inducted into the "legitimate media" category?

And what are we going to do about it? That's really the question.

Here is Down with Tyranny's take, including Sen. Bernie Sanders' bill to cut costs to install 10 million solar roofs.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

On Gas Prices, the Real Fraud is What's Legal

You don't need a whole task force to investigate gas prices, Mr. President, just round up all of Timmy Geithner's Wall Street buddies. They're pulling the same commodity speculation stunt that ruined millions of people in 2008.



Full transcript here.

Way Too Much Fun With Gas Prices

Wonkette posted about gas prices, and commenters anniegetyerfun and SayItWithWookies got carried away.

anniegetyerfun

$3.76! Luxury! It costs a minimum of $4 a gallon in the Seattle area, and we have to refine it ourselves, using nothing but bendy straws and a filter from a goldfish tank.

SayItWithWookies

Bendy straws? Luxury! Here we use two rusty tomato cans and a sterno, and we do it by a light powered by three potatoes strung together. And we like it that way.

anniegetyerfun

You can afford string for your potatoes? We have to shave our heads and weave our own rope on a loom constructed from the rusty car parts from the autos we can no longer afford to drive. But do we complain? No.

SayItWithWookies

You have a loom? Oh, pardon me you highness -- when we need twine we make it by rubbing cat hair between our palms, in spite of our terrible allergies and the constant pain from when the cat scratches us because we're shaving it with a rusty Bic disposable. But we're a proud people and that's how it's always been done.

anniegetyerfun

Oh, I didn't realize that you lived in an area where keeping pets was the norm. That must be nice. We ate all of our cats last winter, of course, as well as our rusty Bic razors. We really had to chew to get those down, but it was filling, and we gave thanks, like we were taught, for our bounty.

SayItWithWookies

Well we only keep the cats because they prevent the rats from following us home from the dump where we forage for banana peels and okra stems for our Sunday dinner. Ever since little Billy's nose was eaten off by the rats one night we've had to keep them. Of course they're feral, and possibly rabid, but we wouldn't have it any other way.

It's probably still going on ....

Your Photo of the Day

Taken in Hazelton, British Columbia: