ABC anchor Charles Gibson attempted to represent the common man when he grilled Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson. With profits close to $22 billion for the first half of the year alone, many feel "Big Oil" is gouging consumers.
But here are some numbers that put things in perspective:
$1,400 profits per second
$4,000 taxes paid per second
So, who is getting rich here? Stockholders like the little old ladies in Florida? Or the recipients of "Big Government's" largesse?
Another way of looking at things that's been discussed around the net for a few weeks now:
Exxon-Mobile had an 8.5% net profit margin for the first half of the year
Disney has a 9% net profit margin over the past five years, 13.2% last year, and a 13.9% net profit margin last quarter (anyone see a trend here? That's right, Disney is raping the consumer!)
Eli Lilly posted a 15.9% net profit margin over the last five years, and an 18.6% net profit margin last quarter
Bank of America has posted a stunning 51.5% net profit margin over the last five years
Chuck Gibson and the common man need to understand that large corporations mean large numbers, even in profit. 8.5% net profit isn't all that much, but because sales are in the region of $400 billion the profit numbers seem excessive to the average Joe that thinks in terms of thousands of dollars per year when he runs his household. But Chucky should know better.
"They are not growing,'' said Philip Weiss, an analyst at Argus Research in New York who rates Exxon Mobil shares 'buy'' and owns none. "Production is becoming more and more of a concern. For these guys, access to reserves is a very big issue.''
Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson, 56, is spending $52 million a day to search for new fields after reserves fell in 2007 by the most in at least a decade. . . .
"If oil prices are going up $20 and $30 a barrel a quarter like they have been, it hides a lot of flaws,'' said Brian Gibbons, an analyst at New York-based CreditSights Inc. "The question on everyone's mind is, how do these guys expect to grow production given the restrictions on access to reserves?''
Tillerson, who succeeded Lee Raymond as CEO in January 2006, is facing increasing barriers to oil and gas exploration in Russia, Alaska and the South China Sea as governments limit access or raise the costs of tapping natural resources.
Price Impact
New York oil futures, which had never traded as high as $112 before the second quarter, surged to a record $143.67 in June.
Drill here. Drill now. Reduce prices now. Believe it.
The annual contest to write the worst opening sentence for an imaginary novel is over and the results are in. The winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest wrote a nauseating comparison of a couple's love to the streets of New York City to secure the $250 grand prize.
You can read the top entries in each category here. A few of my favorites:
Grand Prize Runner-Up
"Hmm . . ." thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish's bow ties, "time to get my meds checked."
Andrew Bowers
Spy Fiction Runner-Up
The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, "it is my whey."
David Potter Nagoya, Japan
Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions
Creeping slowly over the hill, the sun seemed to catch the small village nestled in the valley by surprise, which is a bit unusual really, as you'd think that something with a diameter of 865,000 miles and a surface temperature of 5780 degrees Kelvin, and which is more normally seen from 93,000,000 miles away, wouldn't be able to creep anywhere, let alone catch anything by surprise.
Malcolm Booth Brinsworth, Rotherham, U.K.
Watching Felicia walk into the bar was like watching two fat Rottweilers in yellow spandex and spike heels that had treed a scrawny bleach blond cat at the top of a skinny flagpole that for some reason had decided to sprout casaba melons.
Memphis, already famous for having a church on every corner (and seemingly more going up all the time), is expanding their reputation. A Memphis church has set up drive through prayer service.
Just like a drive-thru restaurant, motorists drove in the parking lot, rolled down their window and let church ministers and members know what that wanted to pray about.
"We had one lady that drove thru and her request was so important and troublesome to her we couldn't really tell what the problem was so we just prayed with her while she cried, you know," said Lee.
She doesn't have time to park and go inside to pray, but it's so "important and troublesome" that she cried. I just can't imagine.
In all, 17 cars took advantage of the prayer hour today, 'cause "not everybody has somebody than can pray with". Personally, I always thought praying was a private affair, but if you think you can find God on the run the same way you find burgers and fries, then power to you. I suppose God truly is everywhere, even in a drive through.
Boston’s Big Dig project is famous for cost overruns and poor construction, which led to a ceiling collapse in July 2006 that killed one, injured another and contributed to the death of a third. The cause of the collapse was determined to be “inappropriate use of an epoxy anchor adhesive” which caused 26 tons of concrete and associated suspension hardware to fall.
According to a show on the Discovery channel:
The cost of the epoxy used in the D Street portal construction was $1,287.60. The price tag for redesigning, repairing and inspecting all the tunnels after the ceiling collapse in the D Street connector reached 54 million dollars.
And that is why you do things right the first time. Especially where lives are concerned.
The third and final episode is up, but you only have until midnight Sunday to watch before it disappears (until it reappears on DVD, that is). In the meantime, click on the banner to watch for free:
Here’s a five-minute clip from C-Span of a speech by Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) on the “energy bill”. You wouldn’t think that a man could heap this much scorn and derision on Congress in that short of time, but he does. It becomes evident in just in the first few seconds of his speech:
Congress passed an energy bill which should have been called the anti-American non-energy bill because it punishes Americans for using energy rather than finding new sources of affordable energy. But the bill does one thing, Madam Speaker, it controls the type of light bulbs that all Americans must use throughout our fruited plains.
He goes on to question the constitutional authority of Congress telling Americans what type of light bulb to use, he pulls out actual EPA regulations on the procedures to follow if a CFL bulb is broken (3 pages, single spaced) because they contain mercury, and even points out that all CFL bulbs are made in China.
Give Rep. Poe a listen, and then thank God for good old southern boys that will go to Washington and tell it like it is. If only there were more of them.
Japan hung (hanged?) three convicted murderers, bringing the number of executions performed this year to ten. In contrast, Texas has only executed one prisoner in 2008.
Japan is making their move this year, as it only executed 9 in 2007, while Texas dispatched 26.
And here I am living in a whimpy state that hasn’t killed anyone this year, and only 2 last year.
Disclaimer:Before y’all go and get mad at me, I must admit that I am actually against the death penalty. Just havin’ a bit of fun, here.
Billionaire and presidential race spoiler Ross Perot is back. During the 1992 race Perot was famous for making economic charts and graphs part of his political process as he attempted to explain in clear terms the economic trends of taxation, government spending, GDP and national debt, and why he thought we were headed towards disaster.
Now Perot has launched a web site, Perot Charts, which is just stock full of charts and graphs highlighting America’s “economic crises” due to deficit spending.
In a statement Monday, Perot said the nation's debt reached $9.4 trillion in April and is rising more than $1 billion a day.
"We are leaving our children and grandchildren with debt they cannot possibly pay," he said. "The economic crisis facing America today is far greater than anything since the Great Depression."
There’s also a blog with some additional materials. I rather like this chart:
It clearly shows that the top 10 percent of earners pay an astounding 69.7 percent of the taxes in this country. Add in “earned income tax credit” and what we have here is wealth redistribution (can you say “socialism” children?).
The presidential candidate told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax "on every dime they make," while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only "a very small percentage of their income."
This would be the largest expansion of FDR’s “New Deal” since LBJ’s “Great Society”. Obama would be turning something that was originally intended to be a pensioning program for retirees into yet another liberal wealth redistribution scheme. It’s bad enough that the government takes my money and returns it years later with a fraction of the interest that I could earn in the private sector. Now he wants to take money and flat out give it to people who didn’t earn it.
To further complicate matters, Obama is proposing a “Doughnut Plan” in which income between $102K and $250K would still be immune to Social Security tax. Any doubt that once in place, the hole of this “doughnut” would gradually shrink until it completely disappears?
McCain, on the other hand, would not consider an increase “under any imaginable circumstance” (something Obama would never promise). Then again, he is mangling the presentation of his Social Security plan to the point of appearing to be flip-flopping on the word that frightens liberals so much: “privatization”.
Hey McCain, when you allow younger workers to choose the accounts they want to put their retirement savings into it is in fact partial privatization, so don’t be afraid of calling it that. Old people will understand as long as you guarantee their retirement income too. We have to get out of this hole. Lead us there, and maybe even libertarians like me will follow.
The man who would be National Security Advisor thinks Winnie the Pooh is a “fundamental text on national security”:
Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.
Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.
Seems that someone took this book a little too seriously.
It's good that Obama is going to Iraq and Afghanistan. And he would be wise to articulate a national security policy that relied more on personal meetings with Gen. David Petraeus and less on reading Winnie the Pooh.
From being able to tag bookmarks to resumable downloads to faster speed and better memory management, Firefox 3 is a definite improvement over previous versions. It will be available Tuesday.
I’ve been running the candidate 2 release for a while, and like it. Except for that whole not being able to see YouTube because of problems with the Flash plugin thing, of course. Hopefully they will have that fixed by tomorrow.
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, …
Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.
Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don't get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.
Professor Reno persuasively argues that removing all religion from the political arena actually reduces liberty:
In other words, in the old system, the state presumed the existence of a substantive, natural reality that required legal adumbration: the union of a man and a woman, and the children resulting from their sexual relations. Now the Canadian government sees that it must intervene and redefine marriage and parenthood in order to give fixed legal standing to otherwise fluid and uncertain social relations. When the gay friend donates his sperm to the surrogate mother hired by a lesbian couple, the resulting “family” is a purely legal construct, one that requires the power of state to enforce contracts and attach children to adoptive parents.
The result is the opposite of the libertarian dream of freedom. As Farrow observes, with gay marriage we are giving over the family to the state to define according to the needs of the moment. The upshot, he worries, will be a dangerous increase in the power of the state to define our lives in other realms once thought sacrosanct. “Remove religiously motivated restrictions on marriage,” he writes, “and it is much easier to remove religiously motivated restrictions on human behavior in general, and on the state’s power to order human society as it sees fit.” The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare. Who can or cannot be a spouse? That’s for the state to decide. To whom do children belong? It’s up to the state to assign parents as its social workers and judges think best.
2006 was a record year in terms of known lawbreakers. Two million offenders were either in jail or prison, 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole. for a total of 7.2 million people in the American criminal justice system.
The cost to taxpayers, about $45 billion, is causing states such as California to reconsider harsh criminal penalties. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, California is now exporting some of its 170,000 inmates to privately run corrections facilities as far away as Tennessee.
"There are a number of states that have talked about an early release of prisoners deemed non-threatening," said Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. "The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You're paying a lot of money here. You have to ask if some of these high mandatory minimum sentences make sense."
Meanwhile in Ohio, Joseph Groth has been sentenced to eight years in prison for attempted murder and felonious assault after he stabbed his wife multiple times, hospitalizing her for over a month. Groth was paroled in 1983 after serving one year for the killing of his first wife, Eva, in 1981.
