BartBlog

This may be a boring topic, but I do have to write some local articles. You may have heard about the urologist in Mt. Dora, which is near where I am in FL (for now), who posted an anti-Obama sign in his office. The local Orlando Sentinel made a huge deal out of this and totally obscured it to the right, citing their push polls as an example of Florida voters turned off by “Obamacare.” The truth is, I don’t think anyone really gives a damn around here.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

The Mt. Dora urologist, Dr. Jack Cassell, who posted a sign stating that, “If you voted for Obama…seek urologic care elsewhere,” was interviewed by Fox New’s Alan Colmes on Friday.

The Orlando Sentinel made much ado about Cassell’s sign, running stories last week and touting polls that showed support of the urologist. It appears, however, that it did not occur to any reporters or editors for the paper to ask Dr. Cassell how much he actually knows about “the changes to your healthcare [that] begin right now.”

In the Colmes interview, Dr. Cassell revealed the extent of his knowledge of the changes in healthcare when he said, “I can’t tell you exactly what the deal is.”

Colmes: But if you don’t know what the deal is why are you speaking out against something you don’t know what the deal is?
Cassell: What I get online, just like any other American. What I’m supposed to understand about the bill should be available to me.
Colmes: It is; it’s been online for a long time; it’s also been all over the media…

It may be rare when anyone from Fox News gets anything right, so Colmes must be given credit in that he pointed out to Dr. Cassell that the Home Care Association of Florida praised the new healthcare legislation and that the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been posted online since at least August of ’09 for any American to read.

Aside from an assertion, of course, that common sense may suggest that anyone or anything like Dr. Cassell and his sign do not deserve national media attention….Would common sense tell you to trust a doctor that is opinionated about anything that he admittedly knows little about, with information at hand that he failed to research?

I hope for the sake of all the patients that continue to purchase services from Dr. Cassell that he was able to find and read his medical textbooks, journals and online publications with more aptitude than he was able to find and read the health care bill.

And thanks to the Orlando Sentinel for more remarkable journalism – the kind that is used is universities as an example of how journalism should not be done. Nice work! Getting scooped by Fox News is not a great selling point.

Read more here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-38220-Orlando-Independent-Examiner~y2010m4d6-AntiObama-Orlando-urologist-interviewed-by-Colmes

Excerpt:
Gas prices at the pump are slowly creeping up wards. A barrel of crude oil traded at a price of $85.31 today, April 2, 2010. Yet the demand for gasoline in the U.S. has dropped in the past two years.

President Obama recently opened up approximately 500,000 square miles of previously protected off-shore areas to oil exploration and drilling, including areas off the coast of Florida, thereby increasing potential supply.

There are no new wars in the middle east, nor have there been any hurricanes in the gulf that would drive oil prices up. Refiners that turn crude into fuel are operating at well-blow capacity.

Surging trade figures in China and a weaker dollar can have an effect in offsetting lower demand and helping drive prices up, but that effect is minimal at worst.

Anyone who believes in free market capitalism and markets regulating themselves through supply and demand should also believe that today’s economic circumstances would be a recipe for lower gas prices. But it is not.

So, what’s driving the price up? The same players that brought the American people $4+ gasoline in 2008: Wall Street speculators.

A report published by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies puts it this way:

The first layer [of oil price discovery] is based on price assessments produced by oil reporting agencies. These prices are derived from relatively illiquid physical markets which lack transparency and are dominated by a few players. The second layer is the futures market which is more transparent, highly liquid and characterized by a large number of players with diverse expectations. A key issue in need of further analysis is the nature of the relationship between these two layers of price discovery.

In other words, the actual market, determined by supply and demand and based on actual production of gasoline from crude has little to do with how much Americans pay at the pump. An oil contract’s price today has nothing to do with free market concepts. The people who buy and sell oil on their PC screens do…and chances are, you’re not one of them.

A June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on “The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices,” noted, “…there is substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.” The Senate committee staff documented in the report a gaping loophole in U.S. Government regulation of oil derivatives trading so huge an oil tanker could sail through it. That seems precisely what they have been doing in ramping oil prices through the roof in recent years.

The Senate report was ignored in the media and in the Congress.

So, what can be done now?

The CFTC is weighing a proposal to put global limits on how many oil contracts any one market player can buy or sell, and legislation to revamp financial regulation that’s expected to pass Congress this year could force greater disclosure by oil traders to regulators.

Any regulation of big business, however, is perceived by the corporate media and the people that believe anything they see on TV or read in the paper as socialism or fascism, or whatever the talking heads tell them to think. There may be tea parties against regulating speculators, while the people that attend them pay more at the pump to attend them.

For the rest of us in America, there will be no imminent relief at the gas pump. Thanks to Wall Street, plan on spending more at the gas pump this summer.

Read more here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-38220-Orlando-Independent-Examiner~y2010m4d2-Why-is-price-of-gasoline-rising-while-demand-in-US-is-down