I’d love to see OPEC gone. The only problem is, Hillary (not her, not anyone) could do it.
Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.
“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.
Now, from what I understand, anti-trust laws would be very difficult to use against countries – so that idea is as stupid as you’d expect. As for using the WTO – I don’t think the WTO deals in energy, correct?
It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’ It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.
Er, she doesn’t mean anything. It’s just more populism from the Hillary campaign designed to appeal to an electorate that largely doesn’t know any better, with nothing to back it up. Welcome to the Clinton fantasy world or, as we call it around here, Tuesday.
p.lukasiak
the McCain campaign would like to thank you once again for your support of Barack Obama.
I mean, if Obama was this hard nosed realist, you might have a point. But he’s an empty suit who campaigned on the populist message of ‘change’, who adopted every one of Edwards’ genuinely populist themes, and now has become the representative of the “Creative Class”.
Barack Obama and his supporters are destroying any chance that the Dems will retake the White House by giving us a rehash of everything that was wrong with Kerry, Dukaskis, Mondale, and McGovern all rolled up into one.
Ted
It’s like the sound of a fly buzzing in your ear. He just can’t stop whining.
Scrutinizer
p.huk, your pandering is breathtaking. How much is the Clinton campaign paying you? You deserve a raise, assuming you can collect from them.
Hard-nosed realist? Please. Hilary is spinning wilder and wilder fantasies every day.
drag0n
Clinton is appealing to low-information (ie idiot voters). The frightening thing is there are so many of them in the US that it seems to be working – at least as far as bringing this down to the wire goes. meanwhile Susie Madrak really distinguished herself with this idiotic post last night on the gas tax holiday by somehow trying to claim that ultra-low income down-on-their-luck types are going to be able to scrape whatever meager, incremental savings they may see from it over a month into a trip to the grocery store.
Give me a break. I have been down on my luck in the past. When you are living hand-to-mouth it’s impossible to save for ANYTHING.
p.lukasiak
oh, and (not surprisingly) the Obama campaign is lying about what Krugman said about Clinton’s gas holiday plan…
why does Obama have to lie? I expect Cole to spend as much time on this lie by Obama as he does obsessing over Bosnian snipers…
Ted
There it is again. A high-pitched buzzing noise.
Scrutinizer
Pump harder, p.huk. I love the sound of mental masturbation in the morning.
Scrutinizer
Hey, p.huk, since you’re here, how do you explain how Hillary had a margin of over 100 committed superdelegates before the primary/caucus season started, but now according to the AP Obama has whittled that down to under 18? If Hillary’s so great, why has she never had the lead in pledged delegates, the popular vote, states won, and why is she losing ground dramatically with committed superdelegates? Why can’t she close the deal?
If you need to check back with headquarters, I understand.
4tehlulz
Clinton’s a bout one or two neuron firings away from blaming everything on Jewish moneylenders and Muslim oil sheiks.
If she starts dropping the name “George Soros” in that snide tone the right uses, her transformation to right-tard will be complete.
jon
Too bad the only oil producing nations in the world are part of OPEC. Maybe we can twist the arm of that Norwegian guy, or that Canadian hoser, or the British chap, or at least the Mexican and make him do our bidding at the next meeting. And is Alaska a country? I’m not sure, since the Clinton campaign probably has it listed in some strange category based on her popularity there.
p.lukasiak
because Clinton is running for President, and not the Democratic Party nomination. Her campaign didn’t make the necessary adjustment to the new ‘conventional wisdom’ that prevailed last fall and throughout the spring — that the White House was a lock for the Dems this year. And her campaign was unprepared for Obama’s ‘gaming’ of the nomination system (Clinton won the popular vote on SuperTuesday by 86,000, but actually lost the delegate race by 14) and unprepared for the week after ST.
Obama’s strategy makes sense if you assume that the Democratic nomination is an automatic ticket to the White House — while he completely dominated the GOP states on SuperTuesday (running up a popular vote margin of nearly 20%, and 79 more delegates than Clinton in Red states) he did poorly in swing states (losing the popular vote by over 10% in those states) and lost the Democratic states as well (by about 2.5%…a margin that is deceptive because Obama put a lot of effort into GOTV in Illinois, while Clinton did nearly nothing in New York state, and as a result Obama’s margin for Illinois was 200K higher than Clinton’s combined margins for NY and AR).
Under ordinary circumstances, one could chalk up Obama’s loss in swing states on ST to name recognition/entropy. But given that Obama had every advantage going into Ohio, his inability to score there — or in Pennsylvania — shows that Obama really doesn’t have what it takes to win in November.
As for Obama’s ‘success’ with superdelegates — a whole lot of that has to do with cash (as did Clinton’s early lead in supers–the Clintons are/were the hottest ticket for fundraisers around.) Obama now has this massive donor base, and everyone wants his mailing list (I really feel sorry for all you folks who gave to him and gave your primary email address — you are gonna get a ton of spam from campaigns begging for cash).
As someone noted elsewhere, Obama is running for President as if he was at the Indy 500, and thought that all that mattered was being in the lead at the halfway point. But its not the Indy 250, its the Indy 500….and the car he is driving is already falling apart.
Marc
So she runs an incompetent primary campaign, which is supposed to convince people that she’ll run a great general election campaign.
Got it.
calipygian
Dubya already tried to break OPEC. It was called Operation Iraqi Liberation. If you think the Iraq War was about anything else except the destruction of OPEC, you are insane. Clinton’s vote for the AUMF makes sense in retrospect, so you can’t say that her plan to break up OPEC is the last minute pander of a doomed campaign which needs more delegates, pledged and super, than are available to clinch the nomination.
Hillary Clinton is now approaching doing Dumbya-level damage to the country by playing out the string, and by threatening to open a can of Nagasaki on Iran and continue Dumbya’s stupid oil policies, she threatens to just continue the long, wet, Republican dump on the country.
Scrutinizer
If Clinton wants to be President, she has to win the nomination first. It’s a critical path. If Clinton can’t recognize that sometimes you have to achieve critical subgoals before completing a project, what does that say about her ability as an executive?It shows a lack of strategic vision at the most basic level.
And that shows a lack of tactical vision as well. “[G]aming the system” isn’t a bad thing, in the sense that the Obama campaign sat down before before the primaries/caucuses began and said “We want to win the nomination. How do we do that against a candidate who has high name recognition everywhere, who has the support of a good chunk of the party machines, and who the CW expects will win?” The Obama campaign didn’t rely on wishful thinking, they put together a plan that is working. That says positive things to me about the way Obama might govern. Clinton, not so much.
In both states, Obama had to overcome situations that were highly favorable to Clinton’s campaign. He was never really expected to win in those states, but he did reduce Clinton’s margin of victory significantly, and that was important in keeping Clinton’s delegate total down. That was an important result of OH and PA. Sometimes not losing a lot can be almost as important as winning. If Clinton keeps Obama down to single digits in NC, that’s good for her, too, for the same reason. In her case, it’s going to be too little too late, though. At this point it’s not about winning in November, it’s about winning the nomination. The tactics are different in a Presidential run, and Obama has shown that he understands how to run a race.
And that’s bad why? The Clinton’s ability to raise funds has kept them influential in Dem politics long after WJC left office. Obama has shown that there is a new way to finance campaigns, has demonstrated his mastery of it, and has committed to continuing to build infrastructure in every state so that the DNC can benefit. If I were a superdelegate I’d have to take a serious look at that too. But superdelegates are looking at other things too—the Pelosi club is paying attention to pledged delegates and popular vote. Superdelegates are looking at McCain-Clinton McCain-Obama matchups, and Clinton has no overwhelming advantage there.
No, he’s not. He’s running for the Democratic nomination. He’ll start running for President after he wins the nomination. That’s not a minor point.
jon
If “Clinton is running for President, and not the Democratic Party nomination”, how does that explain that she is running as a Democrat? I would think that the best way to win the Presidency as a Democrat would be to win the nomination as the Democratic candidate for President. You might be able to be President of Connecticut that way, but not the whole country.
She will not win the nomination, so her strategy to be the automatic candidate for President is kind of stupid. Especially when it is put to the vote against an inexperienced upstart who can’t possibly win but has somehow has managed to beat her thus far. Hillary still looks good on paper and I’d still choose her over McCain eight or nine days a week, but her campaign strategy was complete shit, got worse, and is now a flailing cockroach that is hallucinating from the toxins.
nightjar
Well, that’s a relief, since she lost the dem nomination.
Because the Bosnian snipers are as real as your assertion Obama lied.
Drat those dem primary voters, why couldn’t they see that
NixonHillary was a better choice?RWB
I’ve always wondered why we don’t impose a tariff on oil from OPEC. In other words, if we treated imports from cartel nations differently from non-cartel nations, it might encourage some of the more marginal OPEC members to reconsider their membership.
I doubt is would “break up” OPEC, but it would weaken it. Just a though.
4tehlulz
I’m surprised that p.lukasiak, MAN OF THE PEOPLE, can take time from the factory floor to post on the Internet, unlike those “Creative Class” types that just leech off the working man.
4tehlulz
Oh the Russians would kill to have that kind of power over us; trading the House of the Saud for
the KGBPutin does not strike me as an improvement.Dave L
You could break Opec up into tiny, shining pieces and it would have almost no impact on oil prices. Every Opec member except Saudi Arabia is already pumping oil as fast as they can, and the Saudis have the world’s only real spare capacity. Which is about 2 – 3 million barrels a day, or just enough to offset Iran’s lost production after Hillary obliterates it.
Prices are high because the supply-demand balance is very tight, and any idiot with a straight-edge can see that we’re only a few years away from a level of demand that can’t be met. Hillary knows this, and knows that goosing demand is exactly the wrong policy response, but she’d rather be president than right – or anything else you can name, like principled, honest, or coherent.
Chris Johnson
Since when is OPEC American companies subject to our anti-trust law???
It’s like people in other countries who have watched too much TV demanding Miranda rights when they are arrested.
If I was OPEC, I’d be like “You’ve hurt our feelings with this crazy talk. We’re not American citizens and you aren’t interested in OUR laws. Alright, everything’s in Euros now!”
Oh snap.
It is inevitable that we have some sort of crash having to do with oil and oil prices. Hell, other countries pay as much as $9 a gallon for gas. Why must Hillary, knowing the truth but trying to play well to idiots, intentionally flirt with worsening this crash?
SHE KNOWS this isn’t realistic talk. Is she that confident she can cool off OPEC and tell them it was just politics, or is she perhaps expecting an Obama presidency and trying to fuck him up as badly as possible?
Normally, individual people aren’t in a position to fuck the country up that badly by screwing up its position on a looming crisis that huge. If Hil is able to alienate OPEC enough that they all go fuck it and switch to Euros, destroying the dollar, does that count as treason?
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
Queen Hillary doesn’t bother with such little things as ‘party nominations’.
The GOP incumbent is the Most Unpopular President Ever, and the eventual Republican nominee turned out to be a geriatric blowhard who’s only redeeming quality is that the MSM breaks out kneepads and donuts whenever he shows up. I don’t know how any anyone would think the White House wouldn’t be a lock.
How dare he try to win by the way everybody else wins: By winning the most delegates!
Man, did Obama pee in your corn flakes or what. He’s setting the party up with a fundraising apparatus that could float us for a generation, and you’re even dissing that!? Talk about irrational hatred. Maybe there’s a clever term I could use for that…
Meanwhile, Hillary is calling for White Working-Class Towers to drag her past the finish line, never minding all the ‘McCain ’08’ stickers on their wrecker.
Keith
I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement that Ted McGinley is Hillary’s new campaign strategist.
chopper
waah, the mean old black man outworked and outsmarted us! we wants a do-over!
flyerhawk
I thought Hillary was supposed to be the one with the really deep understanding of issues?
I really don’t know what is worse. Hillary’s blatant pandering and willingness to say ANYTHING or her supporter’s willingness to defend her pandering. HILLARY doesn’t believe the shit she is saying so why should anyone else who’s paying attention?
4tehlulz
POTD
John Chimpo
STOP IT! BWAAAHHHHHHH hahahahahahahaha! It’s too early in the morning for such comedic genius!
Are you that deep in the Kool Aid or are you touched? Here in the Democratic Party, we win nominations by delegate count, not by the popular vote. Them’s the rules.
It’s not like all the candidates announced their intentions to run for President and then the DNC suddenly changed the rules right before Christmas and Howard Dean called a presser where he said “BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA! Gotcha, Hillarity!”
I have no patience for this bullshit. It’s weaselly, it’s cynical and it’s about as pragmatic as collecting fairy wings. If you and you candidate can read, then you knew the rules and by participating in the system you approved of them. This isn’t kindergarten recess where you get to change the rules of the game when they become inconvenient for you.
Grow the up and lose with some dignity.
Bob In Pacifica
Since late 1963 the foreign policy of the US has been to support the profits of our oil companies. If she’s really looking for enemies she doesn’t have to look overseas, just cross the Potomac.
flyerhawk
I much preferred Paul back when he was using his own brand of math to show how Hillary was in fact ahead in the delegate count.
It seems that he is becoming embittered due to the fact that Hillary continues to make his apologia more and more difficult.
I can empathize. I would be bitter too if I had to defend gas tax holidays and promises to break up OPEC.
The Grand Panjandrum
Josh Marshall wins the headline contest for this obvious pander:
I love the smell of latte in the morning.
empty
No. Historically the WTO and its predecessor have stayed away from the OPEC issue for a number of reasons, however, there is nothing in the WTO rules that prevents it with dealing with what is effectively a violation of Article XI.
Initially, IIRC most of the members of OPEC were not members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) which was the precursor to the WTO. This meant that the WTO did not have any leverage on them. However,this has been changing as more and more OPEC members have also become members of the WTO. There was an effort by Lautenberg a few years ago to develop a case against OPEC based on article XI – I think the effort is still ongoing with no support from the administration. On the antitrust laws side it is true that various efforts to use anti-trust laws against OPEC in the past have failed. However, the US congress has passed a number of laws, none of them yet tested, which would make it easier to sue OPEC.
Michael D, after all the hyperventilation about the gas tax being a gimmick I would have thought you would deal with what are actually reasonable and substantive proposals with some non-gimmicky research.
CFisher
You sure? Given that Hilary’s only about one step removed from a neocon, and that we’ve already smashed one oil producing state to ruins and are poised to do the same to a second country, maybe she’s just signaling her intentions to continue the Bush policy of bombing anyone who doesn’t do what we tell them.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Rant the first — OPEC isn’t the problem. Speculation, increasing demand worldwide, and dwindling reserves are the problem. Yeah, the oil companies are raking in record profits this year. But we’ve pretty much picked all the low-hanging hydrocarbon fruit; from now on, it will get more expensive to meet demand, and those profit margins will shrink signifcantly. Breaking up OPEC will do exactly dick to reduce the price of oil. Punishing the oil companies will do exactly dick to reduce the price of oil. Going after speculators will have some short-term affect, but the long-term trend is going to be ever-increasing oil prices Which brings us to…
Rant the second — Promising to break up OPEC, rather than addressing the real causes of high gas prices and offering real solutions, demonstrates that Clinton believes we’re a bunch of idiots. Sure, the dead-enders will swallow that bullshit, but most of us actually have a fucking clue. She’s sounding more and more like W every day, showing increasing contempt towards those of us who inhabit the “reality-based” community.
We’ve had eight years of this bullshit. Enough already.
flyerhawk
Exactly what leverage does the WTO have on these countries?
For most of the OPEC nations, oil is far and away their biggest export. How exactly do you plan on forcing them to lower their prices? Tariffs on oil?
John S.
Any verdict handed down by a US court in regards to suing OPEC will have a lot in common with your handle.
It will be empty.
Barbara
Back in the day I did work for an oil company. What OPEC has traditionally tried to do is establish supply; world markets establish price. If OPEC (usually via S.A. and Kuwait) want to try to influence price more, they withhold or ramp up capacity. Whether an OPEC nation is a price dove or a price hawk depends on the ratio of oil in the ground to people in the country. Most OPEC states have no interest in underproducing because they are, relatively, oil poor and population rich and really need the cash on a very current basis. Only two states have traditionally been interested in maintaining a reasonable price in order to forestall investment in alternative energy, and these are S.A. and Kuwait, which have relatively a lot of oil and not as many people.
Clinton’s statements are not only stupid, they are basically out of date, because the conventional OPEC thinking (like in the preceding paragraph) really dates to the 1970s/80s. My understanding is that OPEC is actually a lot less influential than it used to be, now that demand is basically outstripping supply and every nation is pumping about as fast as it can. Once upon a time, S.A. tried to artificially keep the price of oil down for various reasons and all it did was reduce it’s own revenue. Oil is basically fungible, and someone down the line, not consumers, got the benefit of the Saudi’s price manipulation.
Not every oil producing nation is a member of OPEC. Venezuela and Ecuador are members, but Mexico and Norway are not. You can go here for more information: http://www.opec.org/aboutus/history/history.htm
Andrew
You forgot to use the GOP dogwhistles “sushi,” “latte,” and “Volvo.”
“Creative Class” is a good term though. It’s a quick and dirty way to say that gay and college educated voters don’t count all at once.
Birdzilla
lets break up the UN instead lets just get ourselves out of this wretched nest of vultures and vipers
Jon H
I’d give my left nut – literally – to get a recording of Clinton’s people assuring the Saudi ambassador that this is just a bunch of politics and she loves OPEC, really she does.
Josh E.
Fuck you! You think those mushrooms stuff themselves?
ThymeZone
I have a new and intense love for pie!
Can anything be better than pie?
Blue pantsuit, pickup truck posturing, good old rhubarb pie?
AkaDad
That was all part of Hillary’s cunning plan to give Republicans a false sense of security.
p.lukasiak
there was nothing incompetent about here campaign. She’s got her eyes on the prize, not the halfway point.
see, the “conventional wisdom” that prevailed among democrats last fall and winter (i.e. that the Dem nomination was a key to the White House) was wrong. The way that Clinton ran, she had positioned herself for the General Election — Obama has not done that, and is pretty much unelectable at this point.
Clinton could have easily won the Democratic nomination had she spent the last seven years pandering to the “activist base” — but that would have left her vulnerable in November 2008. Instead, she spent her Senate career building a “center-left” record — making her as much of a sure thing for November as is possible.
The question is whether the Democratic Party is going to do the smart thing, and nominate Clinton, or whether its going to pander to the “creative class” and nominate another McGovern. Hillary Clinton is running the exact same campaign her husband did — and he won twice.
As for Obama’s ‘planning’….you may not have noticed, but he’s not going to be reaching his predicted targets. Reality is setting in… he’s gonna lose Indiana (where he was well ahead of Clinton in February) and he’s not going to blow out North Carolina (like he’s done with every other state with a large percentage of African American voters.)
p.lukasiak
you think gay people are supporting Obama? After the McClurkin episode? get real.
the sheer stupidity and arrogance of Obama supporters was summed up in Cole’s statement above….
its this attitude that loses elections.
Pb
empty,
So what you’re saying is, if Sen. Clinton really cared about this specific issue, and isn’t just pandering to get votes, then we should be able to find some evidence of this in the Congressional record? Well, she should have thought of that before, because she didn’t co-sponsor Sen. Lautenberg’s bill — neither S. 752 in the 109th Congress, nor S. 2964 in the current Congress, which was introduced less than a week ago. On the other hand, I don’t think Lautenberg has announced his support for either candidate yet, so this could be an even more direct form of pandering.
Pb
Dear Hillary hacks and shills:
You don’t need to keep telling us how creative you really aren’t–believe me, we know, we know already…
Rick Taylor
Odd. I would have thought that part of positioning oneself to win in the general election would have been to win the primary election first, preferably decisively. As it is, she’s probably going to loose the primary contest, and if she is, it’s going to be under circumstances that anger a large number of Democrats (using super-delegates to overturn the pledged-delegate count). How this constitutes a competent campaign in which she was positioning oneself for the general election is beyond me.
And to add, one thing I appreciate about Obama’s determination to campaign heavily in all the states (except the one the DNC asked the candidates not too) is even if he won’t win some of them in the general, he’s still energizing Democrats and raising turnout that will help those states in the local elections; this isn’t just about the Presidency. When Hillary hardly even campaigns in a number of caucus states, and then dismisses them because they’re not likely to vote for the Democrat in November, it pushes the perception that for her this election is only about “me me me me me”
Rick Taylor
Ack. Sorry there was a typo in that.
nightjar
Pluk, your just so full of shit today your fast becoming a parody of yourself. But then, that often is the face of desperation. Eyes on the prize. What’s that Pluk, because it surely isn’t the 08 dem nomination, from whence her not incompetent campaign has left her a tad short of victory.
So the prize can only be to ensure Obama can’t win this year and she can come back in 2012. Your tactics pluk are just pathetic as are your propagandist ravings. Go fuck yourself pluk, go now and be an idiot somewhere else.
Svensker
Yes, I get this from a center-left Dem friend of mine all the time. He thought Hillary was very smart to be a war hawk, and not “pander” to her base, because that would bring in votes from the right, while even leftist/peacenik Dems would hold their noses and still vote for her. Win/win for Hillary.
But there are a whole bunch of us out here, Pluk and my friend, who are fucking sick of “going along to get along”. It’s one thing when it’s a road here, or a bridge to nowhere there. But when you’re talking about war and torture, nope, sorry, not gonna do it. Don’t wanna candidate who will do it, either.
Unfortunately for your candidate, that bunch of people has gotten a lot bigger and a lot noisier in the past few years. And we want a leader, not a triangulator.
Both sides believe the other side is delusional and full of shit. One side is right.
caleb
So, basically, Hillary is saying when she becomes President she will, essentially, tell OPEC, “This is how it is and how it’s gonna work from now on” now that she’s in town?
Why does this sound awfully familiar?
MBunge
“Hillary Clinton is running the exact same campaign her husband did—and he won twice.”
And even though he was running against historically weak Republican opponents, Bill Clinton still couldn’t get 50% of the country to vote for him. Even after a reasonably successful first term, he STILL couldn’t get 50% of the country to vote for him.
That’s the biggest black mark against the Hillary campaign. At a moment when Democrats are poised to win an electoral landslide of historic proportions, she’s still running a campaign that assumes you have to be more like a Republican in order to win.
Mike
Tax Analyst
Oh, yeah…I remember that movie. “Help meeeeeeee, Help meeeeeeee….” (“The Fly”, 1959, Al Hedison and Vincent Price).
Recommend same ending as movie; squish fly-guy with brick (metaphorically speaking).
ThymeZone
BJ is a haven for spoof, as we all know. But we have never seen spoof as over-the-top funny and innovative as the crap that lukasiak posts here.
The sad part is, the poor sonofabitch is serious. The sorry motherfucker will never be taken seriously here again.
Nobobody in his right mind at this juncture can support the HBeast simply because of the kind of people who are supporting her. The lying, the distortions, the complete abandonment of all intellectual integrity. When you have serious tv journalists openly laughing at and mocking your arguments on the air and making fun of you, you have crossed several lines, and jumped three sharks and at least one octopus.
Hillary has now established herself as the GeorgeAnn W. Bush of the Democratic Party. All she needs is the little shoulder jiggle when she wants to do the fake laugh, and she’s a member of the Bush family.
Scrutinizer
Obama unelectable? Please, Paul. National polling shows them both capable of beating McCain, and Obama brings some states into play that Clinton can’t touch. That’s before any serious campaigning for the GE. Even if you continue to push the “Obama can’t wing because he’s a
niggerblack man” theme that you were pushing not long back, it doesn’t wash.You know that Obama can’t/won’t push back against Hillary with a tenth of the stuff that the GOP would hit her with in the general. It would be suicidal. He’s not going to have that kind of problem against McCain. Clinton, on the other hand, is spreading so much silly shit around that she’s become a sad parody of herself. She’s made herself even more vulnerable in the general—she’s either started to run close to McCain positions (this silly gas-tax stunt or her hawkishness on Iran), or she’s made herself look like a blithering idiot (Bosnia). She’s not only making Obama more vulnerable in the general, she’s hurting herself, and the party in general.
Jon H
Hey, Pluk,
If Clinton’s such a ‘woman of the people’, why’d she steal a bunch of the people’s furniture from the White House on the way out in 2001?
What, she’s too good to shop at Wal-Mart or IKEA, or Bob’s Discount Furniture? She had to strip the taxpayer-owned furniture out of a mansion?
Jon H
“there was nothing incompetent about here campaign. She’s got her eyes on the prize, not the halfway point.”
Yeah, Uma Thurman’s stalker had his eyes on the prize too.
Jon H
p. luk,
Why are you using ‘creative class’ as an epithet, when Hillary had a fundraiser featuring a concert by Elton Fucking John?
ThymeZone
Hillary Cinton, the complete asshole who tried to stick a shiv into Barack Obama for suggesting that he might make public statements during a campaign that didn’t represent his actual policy intent if he were elected (cough Nafta) …
Is now going around talking about “suing” OPEC and breaking up their “cartel.”
That will surely have a positive effect on energy futures if she managed to get elected, wouldn’t it? OPEC is probably already preparing for their first meeting with her and extending their hands so that she can kiss their rings.
Not even president and she is already single-handedly wreaking havoc on foreign affairs and the Middle East.
Good job. Really.
Also I like the “don’t listen to those elite experts” talk that she is blowing out her ass right now. Those “elite experts” can get you into wars you don’t need and stuff like that, right HRC? Or how else do you explain your AUMF vote from 2002?
Nazgul35
I see…
Get rid of OPEC but keep the G8…
mmmmkay
Jon H
“Or how else do you explain your AUMF vote from 2002?”
Even worse, she was no doubt listening most to ‘elite expert’ Mark Penn on that, and making a morally degenerate, politically calculated vote in order to appear tough and appeal to the right wing.
Grumpy Code Monkey
To win the prize, she sort of has to be the nominee. To be the nominee, she has to win 2025 delegates. To do that, she has to win all of the remaining primaries by 70% or better and she has to sway almost all the remaining uncommitted superdelegates. And that is simply not going to happen.
I’m not sure how botching the primaries (which, given the whole “inevitability” thing last fall, she pretty much has) counts as an argument in favor of her being the nominee, unless we’re claiming the majority of American voters are mouth-breathing troglodytes who will vote for anyone who can out-stupid McThuselah.
Jesus, it’s like reading Lewis Carroll, with myiq as the White Queen believing six impossible things before breakfast and p.luk as Humpty Dumpty redefining the words “win” and “lose” on a minute-to-minute basis.
Clinton will not catch Obama in delegates by the end of the primary process; barring some major catastrophic meltdown that isn’t going to happen, he will wind up with the plurality of delegates. That is the one metric that actually counts in this whole fucking process, and that result will most likely be validated by the remaining uncommitted supers because they are neither deluded nor idiots. At that point people like p.luk and myiq will have to make a decision; they can either suck it up and support Obama and all the downticket races, or they can engage in petty revenge and actively work against him, potentially handing the next election to the GOP, who will happily continue down the path of destroying the country beyond repair.
Shygetz
That’s funny; while Clinton was running for President instead of the nomination, Obama was out-performing her in the match-up polls and beating McCain easily. Only now that she’s formed the circular firing squad in her struggle to win the nomination she already crapped away is she catching up in the national race with Obama. But she’s not doing it by making herself more electable; just by making Obama less electable. So, in short, when she “positioned herself for the General Election” (in your opinion) she was losing not only the primary but also the General. When she changed gears, she made sure that not only was she losing, but Obama as well. And you wonder why Democrats are getting angry…
ThymeZone
Yes, the same right wing that smoked the bone of GW Bush twice, a man whose energy policies are the EXACT OPPOSITE of the ones being falsely touted now by this fucking BITCH candidate lying sack of shit …. and she does this in the name of something called “electability.”
And if that isn’t twisted enough for you, we have supposedly sane Democrats sitting here rooting for this fucking insanity!
Un-fucking-believable. This whore is truly a dangerous and destructive force right now. Seriously, endangering this country at this point.
PeterJ
Obama has been vetted by Clinton, so he’s ready for the GE. But since the ungrateful Obama never vetted Clinton back, she’s not ready for the GE.
He should have run a couple of ads attacking her for telling a tale about when she went to Bosnia. He didn’t, and that wasn’t because he wants to run a clean campaign, it was because he wanted to deny her the vetting needed for the GE. The voters know this and that’s why Clinton isn’t going to win the nomination.
It’s all Obama’s fault.
—
Will Clinton do a purge when if she gets elected? All those intellectuals, elitists and those of the creative class really need to go. I bet the Bush administration got some good ideas from Red Khmer regarding torture, I think she should get in contact with any surviving leaders, they know what to do about that purge.
Jon H
Do we really want healthcare policy laid out by someone with contempt for the “elite” and willful ignorance of economics?
Isn’t that what we already have?
p.lukasiak
Obama can’t win the nomination either, under your theory. Neither of them can.
Especially if Clinton does the smart thing, and insist that ALL the rules be followed — especially the ones concerning states responsibility for ensuring that the rules regarding caucuses are followed.
Any state that didn’t fully and completely follow and enforce its own rules should be stripped of its delegates. That’s why there are rules….
unless the Obots want to back off that 2025 number, and go with 2209.
Andrew
Shorter lukasiak, and I’m really trying to boil it down here:
“Math + elitism = misogyny.”
KRK
You can keep repeating this, but that won’t make it true.
At the end of primary season, Obama will have the majority of the delegates. FL and MI will be resolved by the DNC committee in a way that gives them a voice in the convention, denying Clinton her last flailing argument. And Obama will be the nominee.
KRK
That’s good, but I’m thinking it more basically be:
“Math = elitism + misogyny”
RWB
Dave L said “Every Opec member except Saudi Arabia is already pumping oil as fast as they can, and the Saudis have the world’s only real spare capacity.”
Well, sort of. I think a case could be made that Venezuela and Nigeria are not pumping at full capacity–not from choice, but from sheer inefficiency. In Venezuela’s case, it is because PDVSPA has become a shadow of its former self and many Western oil companies and oil service companies are choosing not to work there anymore out of fear of nationalization. In Nigeria’s case, continued troubles with violence in the oil producing regions, combined with an inefficient state kleptocracy, has reduced production.
The thing is, of course, they are pumping as much as they can now because the price is so high. Where OPEC hurts us is when the price drops, and they enforce price discipline among their members to keep it higher.
Now imagine five or 10 years from now. The new jumbo fields in Brazil and the Gulf are on line and producing. Possibly a new jumbo in Indonesia, too, as well as sizable fields in places like Ghana and Uganda. At the same time, new CAFE standards and technological innovations have made it so that super-high mileage cars (and non gasoline burning cars) are far more common in the US and Europe (and indeed all over the world) than they are now. So the price of oil starts dropping. (I know this is hard to imagine, but almost the exact same thing happened in the mid 80s.)
It is at this moment that OPEC is dangerous. They will, if possible, manipulate the prices so that they are low enough to slow investment in energy innovation by consuming nations and slow conservation-oriented legislation in those consuming countries, but high enough to maximize their revenue as much as possible.
So OPEC now is not a threat, but it could be again in the future, and that’s why tariff measures to weaken it now would be beneficial.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Read for comprehension, Paul. To repeat:
and
The remaining uncommitted supers are most likely going to validate the primary results by supporting the candidate with more pledged delegates. It’s the easy way out, and let’s face it, most of these people are politicians who’d sooner gouge out an eye than take a principled stand on anything. The only reason the remaining uncommitted supers haven’t come out and supported one candidate or the other is that they’re waiting for primary voters to have their say.
Goddammit, there goes another one. Irony meters aren’t exactly cheap, you know?
Calouste
Fixed.
Even Ford makes a car that does about 40 mpg on average that is sold the world over except in the US.
Xenos
A friend of mine drove a Festiva from Toronto down to Boston to visit and I was astonished she arrived alive. Until more SUVs are off the road, I am not getting into a sub-subcompact.
Soylent Green
The classic self-fulfilling prophecy.
RWB
“A friend of mine drove a Festiva from Toronto down to Boston to visit and I was astonished she arrived alive. Until more SUVs are off the road, I am not getting into a sub-subcompact.”
If oil stays above $100/bbl, I don’t think you’ll have that long to wait.