Hockey Stick Update

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Tony Heller

On January 20, President Obama took credit for a drop in gas prices which he didn’t want to see and did everything he could to prevent.  Since then, gas prices have shot upwards in a hockey stick.

ScreenHunter_6820 Feb. 06 07.19

GasBuddy.com – Find Low Gas Prices in the USA and Canada

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8 Responses to Hockey Stick Update

  1. au1corsair says:
    February 6, 2015 at 12:57 pm

    Our President has mastered the art of following from the front. Don’t confuse following from the front with leadership. He still has his own agenda–and that is furthered by taking credit for things people like.
    Fortunately, the President doesn’t realize that fully embracing his radical agenda publically and openly would win him friends and influence people. Stab-in-the-back sneaky alienates his base–and loses respect of the uncommitted. Following from the front requires honest and accurate gauging of the most popular attitudes of the moment–and polling industries tend to tell their customers what the customer wants to hear. This makes the President look both sneaky and waffling, which may not be the best image possible.

    Reply
    • Gail Combs says:
      February 6, 2015 at 1:19 pm

      A column from the past:

      Op-Ed Columnist
      The Big Test
      By DAVID BROOKS

      “We cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them.”

      Barack Obama, Feb. 21, 2009

      When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book…..Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.

      Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point…. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

      These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

      Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.

      Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

      President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

      If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

      Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.

      I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.

      All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

      It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.
      LINK

      I wonder what Brooks has to say now about the mess Obummer has made or will he be deaf, dumb and blind to what the rest of us see just like the majority of Progressives?

      David Brooks, is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, who writes about politics, culture and the social sciences.

      Reply
      • philjourdan says:
        February 6, 2015 at 1:28 pm

        He also like neatly pleated pants.

        Reply
      • DD More says:
        February 6, 2015 at 7:51 pm

        When Brooks says – President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

        If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

        I would ask the following “You do know that when CNN wrote –

        Let’s first look at what Gruber actually said: He was defending the fact that the law was written behind closed doors and he said Democrats intentionally made the law confusing to mask the fact that the law instituted a new tax to pay for health reform. Why’d the Democrats do this? Voters don’t like new taxes. Gruber said it was more important to get health reform than to be up front.
        “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber said at the Honors Colloquium 2012 at the University of Rhode Island.

        And: “They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference,” he said at Washington University at St. Louis in 2013.

        http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/14/politics/obamacare-voters-stupid-explainer/

        they where talking about you.”

        Reply
  2. Centinel2012 says:
    February 6, 2015 at 1:41 pm

    Reblogged this on Centinel2012 and commented:
    Great Chart 🙂

    Reply
  3. Gail Combs says:
    February 6, 2015 at 1:59 pm

    Another interesting tidbit from the same place:

    “The article below is about the importance of free and independent press in shaping opinions and strengthening governance and democratic processes.” — kmaherali [Who posted the article]

    February 14, 2009
    Editorial | Editorial Observer
    What Newspapers Do, Have Done and Will Do
    By EDUARDO PORTER

    Outside the shrinking guild of scribblers, it’s disappointingly hard to find much sympathy for the beleaguered newspaper industry. Only 18 percent of Americans believe all or most of what The New York Times publishes, according to a poll last year by the Pew Research Center. If the Internet is putting us out of business, who cares? [Major applause!]

    It matters. The argument that if newspapers go bust there will be nobody covering city hall is true. It’s also true that corruption will rise, legislation will more easily be captured by vested interests and voter turnout will fall. [Rolling on the floor laughing…]

    In 1981, the Indian economist Amartya Sen argued that the famine caused by China’s Great Leap Forward could never have happened in India because the government could not have ignored the plight of its people. “Newspapers play an important part in this,” he said. [Talk about NAIVE!…]

    From the poorest country to the richest, a welter of academic research since then points to the importance of an independent press — mostly newspapers — in disseminating hard-to-get information, mobilizing the public and putting pressure on government and businesses in favor of the public good. [WHAT independent press? Both academia and the press are bought and paid for!]

    During the Great Depression, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration doled out more money in counties with more radios. Today, Hispanic voter turnout is higher, relative to the non-Hispanic vote, where there is a local Spanish-language TV station. [The USA a couple years ago uncovered Russian Agents including Vicky Pelaez who wrote pieces highly critical of U.S. policy in Latin America as a columnist for one of the United States’ best-known Spanish-language newspapers, El Diario La Prensa. Why is it this time the US traded ten spies for four?]

    Companies in countries with a larger daily newspaper circulation are fairer to minority shareholders and have a better record responding to environmental concerns. And a 2000 study by Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess of the London School of Economics proved Sen to be right: governments in India provide more public food and disaster relief in hard times in states where newspaper circulation is higher. [We are suposed to believe the Fabian London School of Economics, the group dedicated to the overthrow of our country?!?]

    It’s easy to forget the role of an independent press in the development of democratic institutions in the United States. Through much of the 19th century, newspapers were mostly partisan mouthpieces. But as circulation and advertising grew, they shed political allegiances and started competing for customers by investigating shady deals and taking up populist causes. [YEAH, RIGHT, investigating WHAT shady deals? All I have seen is censorship, protection of crony capitalism not to mention spreading lies and propaganda. ]

    Claudia Goldin and Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago found that between 1870 and 1920, the share of political dailies that claimed to be independent rose from 11 percent to between 40 percent and 60 percent. Corruption, measured by an index of articles mentioning the topic in The Times, plummeted by four-fifths over this period. [Seems this guy never bothered to see who actually OWNS the press. ]

    From the creation of the Food and Drug Administration to limits on working hours, a lot of progressive-era reforms might have failed without an independent press. Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, Alexander Dyck of the University of Toronto and David Moss of Harvard Business School analyzed muckraking magazines of the period, like McClure’s and Collier’s. [And the country would have been a heck of a lot better off!]

    Analyzing Congressional votes on regulatory legislation related to issues covered in these magazines, the researchers found that representatives in districts in which the magazines had larger circulations became more favorable to the populist causes exposed in their articles. Cosmopolitan’s 1906 series “Treason in the Senate” pushed many senators in 1911 to vote for the 17th Amendment, which mandated that senators be elected by popular vote rather than chosen by governors. It had been soundly rejected in 1902. [All that does is prove the Progressive/Banksters propaganda machine worked. The result was transfer of power from the states to the Federal government.]

    These days, even the harshest newspaper critics admit that citizens need information. They argue that the Internet will empower ordinary people to do the task themselves, better.

    I’m not so sure. In a recent study, Mr. Gentzkow concluded that the introduction of television in the 1940s and 1950s was responsible for between a quarter and a half of the decline in voter turnout since then, as Americans cut back on local newspapers and radio, which had more political content.

    Some alternatives, like Politico.com and ProPublica, an investigative reporting outfit financed by philanthropy, do original journalism. But they are tiny. Cash-strapped TV stations depend on newspapers for much of their local news coverage. Cable news is increasingly commentary. And rather than a citizen reporter, the Internet has given us the citizen pundit, who comments on: newspaper articles.

    Reporting the news in far-flung countries, spending weeks on investigations of uncertain payoff, fighting for freedom of information in court — is expensive. Virtually the only entities still doing it on the necessary scale are newspapers. Letting them go on the expectation that the Internet will enable a better-informed citizenry seems like a risky bet.[IF the news papers actual started to do their job of investigative reporting instead of functioning as the propaganda arm of the elite, perhaps people might start reading them again]

    Reply

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