re: #20 ralphieboy

Then, quite simply, the weaker the economy and our sense of national security and personal safety, the stronger his mesasge will come across.

Count on gasoline prices to rise to record highs next summer, peaking in late October/early November, accompanied by a spate of articles about hos Obama is “dragging his feet” on developing more domestic supplies.

Count on food prices going up, and a lot of rhetoric on how Obama’s policies hurt the American farmer, etc.

That is just the sort of thing that will squeeze those at the bottom of the income scale the hardest…

Conspiracy theories, here we go. Gasoline prices rise EVERY summer. They rise because demand rises. They fall back, generally, as the driving season tails off. The overall trend is up, because supplies are getting tight and world demand grows as China, India, and others industrialize. Do you expect a conspiracy by the oil refiners, to unfold in October and November 2012, preventing the usual seasonal drop?

True or false: Obama has encouraged domestic exploration for oil, giving the go-ahead for further development of North Slope oil and offshore drilling?

True or false: requiring yet more corn-derived ethanol in gasoline diverts corn from food uses, thereby driving up the price of food.

True or false: Republicans control the weather and have it in their power to stop the drought now hammering food production in the American southwest.

True or false: Republicans control the price of tea in China, and could, but will not, stop the other droughts such as the one that’s curtailing the Russian wheat harvest to something like 60% of the previous year’s crop.

You see what camels we must swallow if we’re to take seriously your assertion that rising food prices and rising gasoline prices cannot in any way be tied to Obama, but can be tied to Republicans, who enjoy miraculous power for ill.

In reality, Obama has a little say in what happens, and Republicans have still less. Neither party gets a vote on the weather, not unless we count votes cast now that show up in results decades later.

Most of what drives food prices goes on outside the control of any president or party. There are two exceptions. The first exception is that the Fed determines the inflation rate. They can make it go as high as they like, and if they choose a high inflation rate, food prices will inflate along with the general run of prices. The president has a lot of say in this decision about inflation; Republicans know what they’d like but they don’t have much of a voice.

The second exception is that it’s a political decision how much food to burn as fuel. The moral course is to forget about corn-derived ethanol. The net CO2 effect is backwards from what we want when all sources of emissions connected to the production of corn are taken into consideration, and the human effect is to destroy food that, going by the market price of corn, would be much appreciated as food. (Directly, or by way of feedlots.) The Obama administration has decided to mandate increased use of corn-derived ethanol.

It is the accumulation of errors in this vein, and not any conspiracy, that threatens to throw the presidency to Perry, a man who shouldn’t have the office and shouldn’t have been granted an opening to a shot at it.