Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Mike]

CNN and MSNBC are both prefacing their coverage of the DB article by saying they have been unable to "independently verify" the story.

So they won't be reporting on then, right? LOL

[CGVT]

Walker is toast. There is no Walker.

You all are high. Walker is going to win.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Oz is a better bet, IMO, than Walker.

And I like Trafalgar, but sometimes...I mean, Trafalgar has the NY Gov race at 2 points. LOL.

They also had a poll recently showing Patty Murray (D) only +2 in Washington. Lot of people made fun of that one.

They aren't completely transparent in how they weight their polls. Some people think they're just guessing. If so, they're pretty good guessers, but they HAVE released a fair share of really far off ones. I think they were one of the only pollsters to predict Trump would win in 2020?

[CGVT]

Meanwhile down in Florida...

FeReM_LWIAEn2hk.png

[iam416]

They also had a poll recently showing Patty Murray (D) only +2 in Washington. Lot of people made fun of that one.

They aren't completely transparent in how they weight their polls. Some people think they're just guessing. If so, they're pretty good guessers, but they HAVE released a fair share of really far off ones. I think they were one of the only pollsters to predict Trump would win in 2020?

Yeah, I mean...the NY and Washington polls remind me of the nonsense in South Carolina in 2020.

[Mike]

I had to look it up because I didn't know the basis for the joke. What... the.... fuck...

Whoever let him put those on needs to be fired immediately.

[Dr. Strangelove]

I had to look it up because I didn't know the basis for the joke. What... the.... fuck...

Whoever let him put those on needs to be fired immediately.

I don't know if it's true, but Dems online claimed the picture was taken AFTER he returned from visiting the destroyed areas. Noting his boots were still a pristine white, not a spot on em.

Again, not sure if true. White boots were a bad choice.

[CGVT]

It really should not have been as bad as it looks. Those white boots are really common with the commercial fishermen and shrimpers. I doubt he got out of the boat to get them dirty. When we took people around to see the damage after Ivan and Katrina, they never got out of the boat

They really looked silly on him though. Ha!

[Dr. Strangelove]

Yeah, I mean...the NY and Washington polls remind me of the nonsense in South Carolina in 2020.

Lot of bad 2020 Senate polls now that I'm browsing on 538. Pollsters seemed to have taken for granted that as goes Trump, so goes the Republican Party. I forgot that Joni Ernst was supposedly in "trouble" too and she won by nearly 7 points, 100,000 votes.

[CGVT]

Lot of bad 2020 Senate polls now that I'm browsing on 538. Pollsters seemed to have taken for granted that as goes Trump, so goes the Republican Party. I forgot that Joni Ernst was supposedly in "trouble" too and she won by nearly 7 points, 100,000 votes.

Yep. Polls are not worth a whole lot anymore. Saw an article on a site that had a big headline that according to a poll, it is a virtual dead heat for Boebert's seat in Colorado. At the end of the article, there was a little blurb that said that 538 says that Boebert has a 98% chance of winning.

[iam416]

Geraghty...heh

A Failure to Insulate from OPEC

Politico reports that Democrats are “seething” about the decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day.

Well, fellas, if you don’t want OPEC+ to be in a position where they can influence U.S. gasoline prices a month before the election, you need policies that minimize the U.S. market’s dependence upon the global oil markets. This means maximizing U.S. oil production and expanding U.S. refinery capacity.

It would be a mild exaggeration to declare that the Biden administration completely stopped issuing leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands and offshore, but only a mild one. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, “President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.” It’s not a complete halt, but it’s very close to one. This means that the U.S. is almost entirely dependent upon oil production from private lands.

The good news is that there’s still a lot of oil beneath private lands. As of July, the U.S. was producing 11.8 million barrels per day, an increase from the 11.1 million barrels per day produced in January 2021, the month President Biden took office. But before the pandemic hit in early 2020, the U.S. was producing 12.8 million barrels per day, and it even hit 13 million barrels per day in November 2019. We have the proven ability to produce about 1.2 million more barrels per day than we were in the most recent figures, if we wanted to do so, and our policies at the time encouraged that course of action. Now, they do not.

The Biden administration keeps insisting that it’s doing everything it can to bring gas prices down, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which is now at the lowest level in 40 years. But what’s in the SPR is oil, not gasoline. It still must be refined. You can’t just pump the stuff out of the ground and put it in your car.

U.S. refineries are running at full capacity, or just short of full capacity. This is why oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases got sent to Europe and Asia, because they had the room and equipment to turn it into actual usable fuel. The U.S. currently has no more spare ability to turn the oil from the reserve into stuff that will actually make your car move; yelling at the oil companies isn’t going to change what is fundamentally an engineering problem.

This lack of capacity is exacerbated by two policy choices. First, the U.S. almost never builds new oil refineries on U.S. soil anymore. According to the U.S. Energy Information Association, the newest refinery in the United States is the Targa Resources Corporation’s site in Channelview, Texas, which began operating in 2019 and processes 35,000 barrels per day. Before that, the newest refinery with significant downstream unit capacity was Marathon’s facility in Garyville, La. That facility came online in 1977.

The second problem is that, in addition to not creating new capacities, old ones are being taken offline and turned into biofuel-processing plants — again, in response to the contention of Democratic policymakers that fossil fuels are obsolete and “alternative fuels” are the way of the future.

I’ve been beating the drum on this issue all year, but no one in the administration wants to listen. We’re getting back to pre-pandemic levels of demand, while our refineries are pumping out about a million fewer gallons of fuel per day than they did before the pandemic. And it’s going to get worse. Chemical maker Lyondell Basell Industries announced in April that the company will permanently close its Houston crude-oil refinery by the end of 2023. That plant refines about 263,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel per day.

The cost of refining isn’t the biggest factor in the prices at your local gas station, but it’s a chunk of the cost. As of August, the cost of crude was 57 percent of the cost of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline, and the cost of refining it was 15 percent. Another 15 percent went to distribution and marketing, and 13 percent of the cost, on average, went to taxes. For diesel, 45 percent is the cost of crude, 26 percent is the cost of refining, 17 percent is distribution and marketing, and 12 percent goes to taxes.

Biden has also declared that the profit margins of oil refiners are “not acceptable.” But refinery capacity is subject to supply and demand, just like everything else. When there is great demand for refinery capacity but limited supply, prices go up. If we ever increased the number of refineries in this country, the price of turning oil into unleaded gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel would come down.

In other good news, the U.S. has an estimated 38.2 billion barrels of proven reserves, meaning that if we never imported another drop, we could operate for 5.2 years at our current level of demand. It’s a bit tougher to get a sense of what our “normal” gasoline-demand level is since the pandemic, but the range of consumption in 2022 has been lower than the range of consumption from 2015 to 2019.

This is where Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm would wag her finger and assert that it’s your own fault for not buying an electric vehicle. “People can buy electric vehicles and don’t have to ever worry about going to fill it up at the gas pump!” she declared in March. Currently, it’s estimated that around one percent of the 250 million cars, SUVs, and light-duty trucks on U.S. roads are electric.

The U.S. could be minimally impacted by the decisions of OPEC+, if we wanted to be. Back in 2018, you saw headlines such as, “How The Fracking Revolution Broke OPEC’s Hold On Oil Prices.” We choose to be dependent upon the goodwill of oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia because genuine energy independence would require us to enact policies that environmentalists don’t like.

[CGVT]

BTW, Walker is going to win for the same reason that Lindsay Graham won. Deep down, GA is still red and will vote for any R over a D.

The support for him where I live is extremely high. Lots of "Well, people make mistakes" "He has good Christian beliefs" and "I'll vote for any R over a D" shit showing up on local social media

The stupid fucks will vote for a brain damaged, lying sack of shit with very questionable morals because of his "Good Christian beliefs" instead of an actual Christian pastor.

[iam416]

Same reasons they vote fir Graham, huh? That's quite the equivalency. Only stupid people vote R. That's a definite winning message. And Walker is NOT winning.

[iam416]

Also, FWIW, the same reasons they'll vote for Tim Scott.

[iam416]

Meanwhile, in California, Gavin Newsom and his boys will start sending out $1000 checks this week to its residents in an effort to fight, yes, inflationary costs. I mean, JFC....

Goddamn geniuses running the Ds.