Across the Great Divide

Drop in the (Future) Bucket.

Via The Deets

Sorry, Tim, But Palin is Perfect.

Keeping their talent for hyperbole intact, GOP mouthpieces have hailed Gov. Sarah Palin as an experienced executive who leads "the largest state in the union."

That one's dumb on the face of it, especially since 69% of that land is federally administered.

It also had to be hard for Tim Pawlenty, a real puck head, to hear Palin lay claim to being a hockey mom.

A hockey mom may superficially look like a soccer mom, but she uses a lot more Lysol and has no oboe lesson transports in the off-season. There are other differences.

Since Palin played basketball, I wondered if her hockey momism was real or metaphorical. Number-one son Track was a good hockey player — so good, he spent much of his senior year in high school playing for a  midget AAA team in Michigan before joining the Army. Palin's claim is probably legit, although husband Todd now seems to handle most of the household chores.

It's okay though, since he's also a champion snowmobile racer who shoots moose, does some commercial fishing and scores a 1/8th on the Yu'pik Eskimo scale.

The McCain strategy here appears to be to play to Us vs. Them feelings, with Republicans portrayed as the core of America–the married couples, people with a life–while portraying the Democrats as the marginals–singles, elites, gays, underclass, etc — with the Democrats as the Party of Dying Alone.

High schol grad Todd Palin also used to work for BP, pulling down between $100,000 and $120,000 a year as a production operator in an oil-gas separation plant.

You begin to see why Alaskans love their drilling.

Oil royalties and taxes funded 80 percent of the state budget last year. Alaska ranks first among the states for corporate taxes and third for revenue from the federal government. For every dollar in federal taxes Alaskans pay, they get back $1.84.

Alaska spends more per capita for education and highways than any other state and ranks third for public welfare. Residents pay no personal state income tax. The state also has a $40 billion Alaska Permanent Fund that provides operating revenues, inflation-proofing reserves and dividends paid to residents. 

The state's national guard units respond to stranded climbers, truck rollovers and men falling off cabin roofs, a service the Army used to provide until there were too many deployments to Iraq.

Alaska is simultaneously the most ruggedly independent state and most dependent on  government and outside corporate interests for its well being. It is one of the most politically corrupt and technologically backward. It is most remote from mainstream America and closest to an unfriendly foreign power. It has the highest proportion of native people and the lowest proportion of religious people.

Plus, it has a pretty good quarter.

It is a perfectly emblematic state to carry the standard as the Republican party tries to reinvent itself for public consumption without really changing anything.

For people who like to pay attention, Palin's entry in the race could provide an education about the contradictory ways of the west.

Drilling for Words: What Energy Plan?

We've heard a lot about the Republican party's passion for an "all of the above" energy policy. Naturally, we'd expect them in an election year to talk about one of the great strategic issues facing the country. Their concern is palpable as they hold a lonely vigil during a recessed Congress, and it will be a theme in next week's convention.

And remember the famous  "addicted to oil" state of the union speech? It's Wordled here. See if you can find the words "oil," "energy" or "plan." (Hint: energy is there, but it's a lot smaller than "hope," "hopeful" and "terror.")

Democrats are accused of doing nothing on energy, and their presidential candidate is supposed to be all talk and no action. Still, even lofty talk tends to spike web searches for more information, so I wondered what kind of interest has been sparked since Pres. Bush ran for his second term.

To quote Google Trends on searches for "bush energy plan" versus "drill now":

Local Color from the Gas Fields.

[Photo: Dean Humphrey, Daily Sentinel]

A gas rig drilling about 60 miles from here (near Rifle, birthplace of yours truly) went all torchy last night. The crew escaped injury.

Further north, lightning was blamed for a fire that burned a 26,000-acre area where about 30 rigs were operating. They escaped damage, according to the AP.

So these are likely to remain local stories — certainly not anything to upset the Drill Here, Drill Now mantra. Of course, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann aren't really here, where there's nothing but brush and it's dark one-third of the time.

Former POW Votes When the Game is on the Line.

the former Navy pilot and POW e

If I were president, I'd call Congress back to into service and tell them to get to work...

However, McCain — whose mobility is restricted by the wounds and torture he suffered as a war detainee —  has not shown up for the last eight votes on renewable energy bills.

McCain was in his Senate office when one of the bills was being voted upon, but — just as when he refused to leave his prison cell when others were due to go home ahead of him — his policy is to show up when his vote will affect the outcome.

 In other news, Patriot Randy Moss announced his support for the former warrior but stopped short of saying he would vote for McCain.  "I vote when I want to vote," said the New England wide receiver.

Looking for Change? Don't Start with Gas Prices.

It seems only yesterday I was sparring over whether a gas tax increase of a few cents per gallon would create a hardship for Minnesota drivers. Actually, it was last February, when a gallon of gasoline cost about 65 cents less than today.

I said the impact of such a small increase is primarily emotional — especially on people who hate taxes.

This week, some Cato Institute thinkers have adopted a similar line that prices hovering around four bucks really aren't a big deal — presumably as long as government isn't responsible for the increase.

Gasoline is more affordable for American families now than it was in the days of the gas-guzzling muscle cars of the early 1960s. Prices are beginning to come down somewhat, but this was true even when the national average was at its summer peak.

They go on to make the point that the perception of an increase (as with the gas tax) is having an impact on consumer attitudes.

But perception is not reality where gas prices are concerned. By June of this year, disposable income had risen by an average of $1,627 per person over 2007's figures, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, while the average person's real expenditures on gasoline increased by about $490. Our incomes are still outpacing gasoline price increases. The problem is that our incomes aren't outpacing the increase in gas prices lumped together with increases in everything else -- air conditioning, food, etc. Our homes, meanwhile, are losing value.

Well, yes, the disparity between a rising cost of living and income growth is the real problem. Gas prices are merely a convenient target that allow us to ignore a larger meltdown. Politicians can fiddle over pennies while home prices burn and incomes for most Americans stagnate.

And that's where free market economists like to chime in with how we're really better off than the Cleavers if you just look at the big picture. Productivity and cheap international goods have increased our buying power, if not our earning power.

I always get suspicious when people use average income to make their point about comparative prosperity, since income growth in this decade has been mainly at the top. That raises the "average," but average people don't see anywhere near the average increase. Meanwhile, the savings rate as a percentage of income has dissolved from 7.3 percent in 1960 to 0.6 percent in 2007, and households have added entirely new expense categories to the household budget, like cable and cellular services.

Ozzie and Harriet may have paid an equivalent amount for gas in the station wagon, but fuel isn't the only cost to consider when making the comparison.

To their credit, one of the Cato authors has put up a post explaining why they used average income (total income divided by people) instead of median income (what the person in the middle earns). And they've noted other factors, such as better mileage and greater miles traveled, that also come into play when comparing fuel costs today and yesteryear. They say the adjustments don't change their conclusion.

A substantial number of Americans are surely better off than our parents. In same-dollar terms, fuel costs may be a wash, and Americans on average may be spending about the same percentage of disposable income on transportation. 

But the world has changed in ways the numbers don't begin to capture and skirmishes over gas prices miss altogether.

Weekend Reader Updated.

Company's in town. Since these guys get the big bucks, I'll let them provide the weekend reading.

Thomas Friedman:

Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that “the accumulated experience of older people is not as valuable as before,” said Rosing. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on Aug. 1 didn’t show up.

Paul Krugman:

[K]now-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

Adam Serwer:

In a dispute about race, the McCain campaign knows it will end up with the larger half. For the most part, most white people's experience with race isn't one of racial discrimination. They can only relate to racial discrimination in the abstract. What white people can relate to is the fear of being unjustly accused of racism. This is the larger half. This is why allegations of racism often provoke more outrage than actual racism, because most of the country can relate to one (the accusation of racism) easier than the other (actual racism). For this reason, in a political conflict over race, the McCain campaign has the advantage, because saying the race card has been played is actually the ultimate race card.

[ via Full Court Press]

$4 Gas and $8,000 Shipping Containers.

As usual, Americans and the politicians who pander to them are focusing on the obvious, while the global  economic consequences of rising energy costs sail right over their heads. The costs of shipping materials, parts and products around the world to exploit cheap labor are starting to count in the price.

Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.

For example, some containerized overseas freight costs have more than doubled and take longer to reach port — sending one container from Shanghai to the U.S. now costs $8,000, compared to $3,000 earlier this decade, according to the New York Times article. Consumers may be able to discount unseen environmental impacts, but when logistics costs start pushing up the cost of goods sold, manufacturers will take notice.

Many economists argue that globalization will not shift into reverse even if oil prices continue their rising trend. But many see evidence that companies looking to keep prices low will have to move some production closer to consumers. Globe-spanning supply chains — Brazilian iron ore turned into Chinese steel used to make washing machines shipped to Long Beach, Calif., and then trucked to appliance stores in Chicago — make less sense today than they did a few years ago.

Just as gas prices have made Americans start to rethink where they work, shop and play, some industries may start rearranging supply chains. Beyond keeping down prices and emissions, this may have a positive impact on local employment, quality of goods, food freshness, etc.

Customer service and professional work that depends only on the transport of information will still flow to countries where education levels are high and labor costs are low, however. That's a problem no amount of domestic drilling can solve.

"Drill Here. Drill Now." Coming to a Senate Race Near You?

I heard from a Republican "Victory in 2008" caller yesterday who wanted to know:

In the current economic downfall [sic], do you support raising taxes or cutting spending?

Are those my only choices?

Do you support domestic drilling?

Oh, no. I prefer sending as much money as possible to terrorist-coddling, oil-producing nations. In fact, the sooner we shut down our domestic oil industry the better!

Would you describe yourself as pro-life, pro-choice...

Sigh. I can't recall if we got into gay marriage, too.

I wonder if Sen. Norm Coleman's position on drilling in ANWR is about to become more, um, nuanced?

Postage Stamp on a Football Field? More Like a Pile of Horsepuckey.

Six Republican Congressional candidates just returned from their western energy tour with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann as lead mouthpiece. The major newspapers in Colorado apparently didn't bother to report the leg of their visit where they supposedly learned all about oil shale, and Bachmann didn't wow the newspaper in Fairbanks with her newfound knowledge, which was basically the same stuff she was spouting before she left Washington. 

In fact, they were all speaking in remarkable unison the same old comparison, which has been around since at least 2001:

The total footprint for drilling in ANWR would be less than two thousand acres out of almost 20 million acres — the equivalent of a postage stamp on a football field.

I've already questioned the metaphor and its misleading way of adding up scattered areas into one contiguous space this way: If your butt takes a load of birdshot, do you add up the surface area of the pellets or measure the area of the wound?

But I haven't seen anyone drill into that stamp-on-a-football-field image from the perspective of an information design editor. You know, someone who might actually check the math before they draw the picture.

Because it's wrong on that basis, too.

When you visualize a postage stamp on a football field, you're imagining something about an inch square on an expanse of grass that covers 8,289,216 square inches. Pretty darn tiny. Hardly worth thinking about.

But that's not a "GOP Stamp." Can't be, because 2,000 acres divided into the roughly 19 million acres of the entire wildlife reserve gives you 9,500 2,000-acre sections. Therefore, a GOP Stamp is 1/9,500th of the area to which it's being compared.

Measure out 1/9,500th of a football field, and you get a "postage stamp" that's slightly larger than 2 feet by 3 feet, or about the size of a one-yard slab of your kitchen counter. That's enough to bury 872 real postage stamps like the tiny one the drill-in-ANWR propagandists wanted you to visualize.

Next time you hear that postage-stamp-on-a-football-field reassurance, just remember they're understating the amount of acreage affected by a factor of 872. And that's before you even take into account the other ways they're fudging how they count the 2,000 acres.

Bluestem Prairie goes into more detail and the Minnesota Independent wraps up some of the other holes in the larger "oil just waiting to flow into the gas pumps" story.

Kind of makes you wonder what other numbers are being distorted for public consumption, doesn't it?