Gasoline has gone up 40 cents a gallon locally since Monday morning when I filled up. We’re at nearly $3.00 per gallon for regular unleaded. We will probably see gas go up above $3.00, maybe as high as $4.00 over the next week. I know that gas supplies get exhausted pretty quickly, but I suspect that this is more profiteering than actual supply and demand. Our state government appears to be content to let this happen.

I don’t have much sympathy (or outrage, frankly*) for the folks who are looting stores of TVs, DVD players, etc. Mostly, I think from a strictly pragmatic point of view, it’s a pretty stupid thing to be doing. I have complete sympathy for people who are “looting” food, diapers, fishing poles, or other supplies that are going to help them survive. Most of the major media, however, seems to equate the two and condemn them as being the dark side of human nature or some shit.

There also seems to be one tint of coverage that suggests it’s women (and on camera, the looters are always black) who are stealing to survive and men that are stealing thinks like cigarettes, beer, wine, malt liquor, and chicken. Oh wait, no they don’t say those last two. Yet. I think we’d see those reports no matter what was actually happening on the ground. Both images are direct stereotypes that white America has about blacks. I can’t believe how racist the coverage of some of this is.

*I have seen in a couple of stories where they’ve actually quoted someone as saying things along the lines of “if you oppress people all they’re lives, they’re going to take whatever chance they can get to to hit back at society” in regard to some of the looting. I can’t say that I disagree with the statement.

It amazes me that anyone would be surprised by this. 12.7 percent of the U.S. population lives in poverty, up from 12.5% last year. This is in spite of the macroeconomic growth and better than expected job numbers for most of the year. The Democratic spin on this is utterly bankrupt. This is the bargain we, as a society, struck 25 years ago and that we’ve refused to spend a minute to reconsider since. We gave up slow, steady growth, accented by brief recessions or stagnation and a very modest amount of economic security for the possibility of boom and bust, unimaginable wealth for a larger part of us coupled with deeper, darker poverty for others and damn little security for anyone. Ultimately, the neo-liberal claptrap about a rising tide raising all boats is a fantasy. I’m tired of seeing what the rising tide does to people. Ultimately, economics is a zero sum game. At any given point, there’s only so much wealth. How it’s distributed is an important measure of a society. You can’t have record numbers of of millionaires year in and year out and expect that money not to be coming from someone else’s pockets.

The following may seem obvious as hell to most of you, but it took me three or four years in my late 20s to early 30s to figure it out. I won’t bore you with the details of my personal psychology, subcultural identity, and other factors that made this less than obvious to me. But here it is: You can be shrewd and skeptical without being cynical. You can be passionate and idealistic without being naive. I struggle sometimes with finding the right balance. I think, particularly, because it’s hard to be funny (or at least my kind of funny) without seeming cynical. So even though in this early part of the endeavor, this space is a way to force some discipline on myself and try to write something everyday, I can’t promise that it’ll always be high minded, nor can I promise it’ll be catty and funny. It’ll probably be each one from time to time.

I do plan to write a little mini essay in the coming few days that will quickly cover some U.S. political history and compare some things in our past to some things we’re living through. I’m doing a bit more research, since U.S. history isn’t my specialty.

I just got around to watching Trent Lott’s recent appearance on The Daily Show. It looks like he’s pulling a Bob Dole, but doing it before he actually retires. This Trent Lott spent his time talking about how the wings of both parties need to be reigned in and other bipartisan niceties. He highlighted all of the behind the scenes working he did with Bill Clinton during the 90s. He played along with Jon Stewart’s jokes. It was an amusing interview and actually kind of made me want to read his memoir, Herding Cats

I think I’d be really irritated, though, if I got the book and it turned out to be a load of self-serving crap. I think I’ll try to find a couple of reviews.

Every time I turned on TV news this weekend, it was focused on coverage of Katrina. I really hate all the speculative crap. If the doomsday scenario plays out, it will be a major catastrophe- one of the largest in US history. Even if something less than the doomsday scenario plays out, it will be a major source of misery for the people who live there. There’s nothing remotely amusing about a major hurricane. After growing up in a part of Florida that mostly just saw category 1 storms and tropical storms in my life (Kate in 1985 being the main exception), I learned the fury that is a large, major storm last year. I’d do just about anything to avoid going through that again.

I think it’ll be a few more hours before we know just what’s up in New Orleans. I wish the folks there well. This will be my last post on the topic until we have some concrete information.

I finally decided to turn this domain into a blog. I plan to draw some kind of distinction between the content on this page and the content in my livejournal. Likely, the livejournal’s gonna go friends only and become more focused on my personal life, with this one focused more on politics, policy, musings about the world, etc.

We’ll see.