Posted by
Bill Crawford on Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:29:21 AM
The first batch of craziness (and the most amusing) comes out of Chicago. Rahm Emanuel gets to be Mayor, after all. He proved that he was a "resident" by furnishing pictures of his luggage sitting in the basement of a rental house. That's right: proved-residence-luggage-rental. Hell, folks, it's the Windy City. Nobody follows the rules forever, not even the ones they make up.
At any rate, Obama now has a dependable, go-to guy in his political root basin. No longer must he depend on Blago-type flakeboards to get things done. Rahm will serve as the ringmaster of the first billion dollar Presidential campaign next year. That's not a combined total, the billion dollars is Obama's campaign alone. You think you've had enough of him on TV now? You wait.
At least things are relatively peaceful in Illinois, where the Democrat Governor is balancing the budget the RIGHT way, by raising taxes on everybody in sight. This means also that he is a safe bet not to sic the Troopers on outside Legislator's holing up at the Red Roof, so it is now a sanctuary state for visitors from Wisconsin and Indiana.
The circus is just getting started in Indiana- Governor Daniels has just been sworn in. In Wisconsin, they are playing hardball. If they don't come back and form a quorum soon, they will lay off the 5000 or so that it will take to balance the budget. Governor Walker has also cut off direct deposit for the Legislature. If they want to get paid, they will have to come home. There is much more to this story, and it will be the center of my next entry here.
The third story is the scariest. Egypt has made a garden party out of an overthrow, but in other areas of the Middle East and Africa, the grass roots uprisings are meeting more classic government reactions. In Libya, Khaddafi has strapped himself to the ship of state for life ("I am the revolution!") and has ordered air strikes on his own people. He is threatening to sabotage his oil pipelines and cut off his exports.
I will not rip Obama for his inaction here- I don't think there is anything he could do, even if he tried. His smaller failure on this will be his military response, if one is needed there. I'm fairly sure he is still not comfortable with the projection of military power, and will thereby take his usual two or three days to mull things over when RFN (right now) is called for.
Here is where it will affect us all. The price of oil starts with events and filters through commodities brokers, who tend to hedge- which is why sweet crude is north of $100 a barrel right now. If oil flow slows or stops, if the Suez Canal or the Strait of Hormuz become battlegrounds, if any half-wit moron (like Iran maybe) tries to take advantage of the chaos, oil could easily start heading for $150 a barrel, and we will be choosing between dinner and driving a lot more than we will want to. $4 a gallon gas ended in a couple of months in 2008 because the Chinese stopped hoarding it after their Olympics ended. This could go on a lot longer, and we will have to learn to live with $5 a gallon and up.
The fact that this would all be unpleasant is not news. The reconnection in everyone's mind to Obama's extention of the drilling moratorium in the Gulf (still ongoing) will be a bigger albatross around his neck than anything he will be dragging now into the 2012 campaign. If that disaster happens this year, his list of Primary challengers will be a long one.
I, for one, hope it doesn't come to pass. I'd love to see him get fired after one term, but not that way. That's crazy.