In order to defend our candidate from those who would smear him, it is essential we understand how the Left views Barack Obama, and adjust our arguments and defenses to advance our Centrist agenda.

What's to blame for high oil prices?  Republicans blame failure to open up ANWR and other off limit areas to drilling.  Democrats blame oil company price gouging and failure of BushCo to have a comprehensive energy policy.  Both of them blame commodity market speculators.  

New York Times columnist and Princeton professor of economics Paul Krugman explores the popular view that market speculation is a major reason why oil prices increased from $25 per barrel to $125 per barrel over the past several years.

Krugman writes

Now, speculators do sometimes push commodity prices far above the level justified by [supply and demand] fundamentals. But when that happens, there are telltale signs that just aren’t there in today’s oil market.

Back in March 2005, when I was still working as an international oil markets analyst at the US Energy Information Administration (and  oil prices were about $50 per barrel), Goldman Sachs came out with its first "super spike" analysis.

UPDATE: My former colleagues at EIA are out with their latest short-term forecast.  As usual, they've got prices falling back slightly in coming years ("WTI crude oil prices, which averaged $72 per barrel in 2007, are projected to average $110 per barrel in 2008 and $103 per barrel in 2009."), mainly because of a tendency to believe that high oil prices will result in slowing demand and also a supply response.  We'll see, but honestly I've got to go more with Goldman Sachs on this one, as I see the supply curve as close to vertical and demand in places like China and India responding much more to income elasticity than price elasticity.

Detective Robert Davis at 360-473-5361 is deeply troubled, and urgently needs your help. Banks in Bremerton Washington have been vandalised, but nothing was taken from them as they stood open to the four winds.
Watch the Video.

We all have one. Some do come with an inherent degree of warmth and generosity and some are as dry and chilly as a winter in Upper Mongolia. Two nights ago, after putting our three daughters to bed, my partner and I repaired into the conservatory and listened to Neil Young's Harvest. Heart of Gold came up and we sat there motionless, holding hands. At the end of the song she turned to me and said "the only thing that ever matters in life is the weight of pure gold in one's heart." Truer words have not been spoken, to me anyway. Zelda Fitzgerald, who knew a thing or two about heavy hearts said

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold

Follow me for a closer inspection of the heart's content or lack thereof.

I ran across this post by Dave Lewis over on iTulip, in which he concludes that the raiding of Social Security is ultimately more responsible for our persistently low long-term interest rate environment than any other factor.

If he's right, it would mean that Greenspan helped create his own infamous conundrum. As if we need another reason to dislike the guy.

Quotes from the post, and some thoughts of my own, after the bump.

The people who run Burger King may be the worst human beings on the planet.

No, I am not exaggerating.  

They are the greediest, least compassionate, and most despicable corporate actors I have heard of in a long, long, long time.

What was at stake for them?  A single goddamn penny.  

More below the fold.

Today, the Dow Jones dropped by 2.6% (or 360 points), so you'll have the usual talk about volatile markets, and the just as usual dismissals that the Dow is just a few percent off its all time high.

But what's happening in the credit markets, and on the balance sheets of the banks is in fact a lot more worrying. In particular, smart players are now focusing on so-called "Level 3" assets. And they are, there is no other word for it, panicking. Let me take you through it.

(from the European Tribune, with a plug to Calculated Risk

As we head into what looks to be an... ummm... exciting news week, it seems like a short review of last weeks frantic attempt to salvage US financial markets is in order.

First up:

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which had more than $100bn (€70bn) of buyout financing pending this summer, was theoretically the private equity firm most at risk from a debt market collapse.

But while most firms waited for the debt markets to regain their strength after the credit crunch, KKR pushed through financing for UK chemist group Alliance Boots and US commercial payments processor First Data. Next week, it is scheduled to complete on US power generator TXU.

KKR, which manages more than $53bn in funds, is hardly out of the woods, a reality it has acknowledged by talking to US bank Citigroup about creating a holding company to buy orphaned leveraged loans.

The bank has been one of KKR’s largest arrangers of leveraged finance and, at one point this summer, had underwritten $50bn of debt that had yet to be syndicated.

Uh oh.

When names like Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas and UBS Warburg start reporting major losses in hedge funds invested in mortgage-backed securities, and the central banks of every major industrialized country begin to intervene in the credit markets, it's increasingly evident that a financial emergency may be starting to unfold across the world.

Day by day, the situation grows insensibly worse. Follow me below the fold for more exploration on this topic which touches all of our lives.

Meanwhile, reported everywhere else except in the US, China makes threatening noises about dumping dollars on the market.

I just found this article on a Market Watch. It's author,Mr. Paul Farrell, who works at Goldman Sachs discusses an often assumed though infrequently mentioned fact that the United States national security is very dependent on sound fiscal policy. The link to the story is below

http://www.marketwatch.com/...

Cross posted at Huffington Post.

If you were booking panelists for a fair and balanced Sunday show discussion of the nation’s political news, would your panel look like  this?

George Will, movement conservative.  Victoria Clarke, Republican  staffer for Bush 41, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Fareed Zakaria, a neoconservative reporter described in The Nation as a "junior Kissinger."  And ABC reporter Jake Tapper.

While many Americans would expect such a rigged lineup from a Republican mouthpiece like Fox,  today it was served up to us by This Week with George Stephanopoulos (who you can send your feedback to at the link below).

As could be predicted, viewers got an alternative view of reality.

The New York Times and New York's political class are often attacked as bastions of wealthy, out-of-touch elites whose world view is completely divorced from that of most middle-class Americans. This is not a fair characterization - but every now and again it's obvious why the characterization has come to be part of the political lexicon. Check out these three examples in the extended entry to see what I mean.

The mask is off NJ Democratic Governor Jon Corzine's economic agenda.

The mask is torn off and the agenda revealed by an important story in the January edition of Mother Jones:

The Highwaymen - Why you could soon be paying Wall Street investors, Australian bankers, and Spanish builders for the privilege of driving on American roads.
By Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway
January/February 2007 Issue

http://www.motherjones.com/...

The Mother Jones story describes the privatization scam driven by Corzine's former Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs, the same firm that now dominates his Cabinet.

Timing is everything: the MJ story arrives precisely at the moment the NJ press corp is about to blow the lid off:

Measure to privatize Turnpike is due soon
Sponsor foresees $10B windfall for state
Wednesday, December 20, 2006

http://www.nj.com/...

"

[continued on the other side]

                 (earlier version cross-posted at Huffington Post)

As a New York City taxpayer, I want a refund from Goldman Sachs. And you deserve one, too, before the company cuts checks to shower $16 billion in bonuses throughout its executive suites. We are all paying for the enrichment of the investment bankers and rainmakers who are going to pocket tens of millions of dollars. It might be one of the more subtle corporate rip-offs of taxpayers, and, most troubling, it’s all legal.

The year-end bonuses are coming in fat and heavy this year - the 6th year of the most corporate friendly administration since records have been kept.

Over at Goldman-Sachs, the holidays will be replete with gold and and diamonds.  Bonuses there are averaging $600,000 and the highest paid performers will see as much as $100 million extra in their check before Father Time flips us into 2007.

"Greed is good" - the famous and trite line from Gordan Gecko in the movie Wall Street.  Gecko has nothing on the executives of Goldman-Sachs, who are triumphantly announcing their record profits.  What work has Goldman done which earns them this fortune?

While Republican corruption scandals are becoming somewhat mainstream, this one seems so transparent I'm having a hard time believing no one has posted about this but a small search has indicated no diaries in the past week that I could find.  Please correct me and I will delete this.

Here is the link:  http://today.reuters.com/...

Incoming U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was awarded an $18.7 million cash bonus for a half year of work as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s chief executive, the investment bank said on Monday.

That's really a good bonus.  $3.125 million per month approximately.  But that really is just the tip of the iceberg.

More incredible shit below.