That’ll power hope and change in this country.

Instead, we have a Speaker of the House who believes that natural gas is not a fossil fuel.

Well… What to say? This *is* an open thread, after all!

In trying to divine why Helen is LOL’ing herself into silliness, I thought she must have read something at that link that gave her hope. So I read it, too. And I found that Ms. Palin *would* in fact campaign for democrats.

Or, as she put it:
even Democrats who share her views on limited government, national defense and energy independence _ and build a right-of-center coalition.

I believe this means that Helen wants:
- limited government
- a strong national defense
- energy independence, to include coal, nuclear, oil, and natural gas
- the emergence of a right-of-center coalition

Welcome Home, Helen! Indeed, there is, always, Hope.

That’s cause Nero, the guy said to be fiddling, was the one that ordered the fires set.

He needed a catastrophe to buy up the property for himself.

Obama could learn a thing or two from that manufactured crisis.

Whoever Sarah Palin ends up helping get elected, won’t be a Democrat for long, Helen. Because people like you will be given orders to shun them, at the cost of your soul. And who wouldn’t you sacrifice for your soul, Helen.

Did oil cause the downturn?
The implication that almost all of the downturn of 2008 could be attributed to the oil shock is a stronger conclusion than emerged from any of the other models surveyed in my Brookings paper, and it is a conclusion that I don’t fully believe myself. Unquestionably, there were other very important shocks hitting the economy in 2007-08, most notably the problems in the housing sector. But housing had already been subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3, when the economy did not appear to be in a recession. And housing subtracted only 0.89% over 2007:Q4-2008:Q3, when we now say that the economy was in recession. Something in addition to housing began to drag the economy down over the later period, and all the calculations in the paper support the conclusion that oil prices were an important factor in turning that slowdown into a recession.

There is also an interactive effect between the oil price shock and the problems in housing. Lost jobs and income were an important factor contributing to declines in home sales and prices, and the biggest initial declines in house prices and increases in delinquencies were in the areas farthest from the urban core, suggesting an interaction between housing demand and commuting costs. Once house price declines and concomitant delinquencies reached a sufficient level, the solvency of key financial institutions came into doubt. The resulting financial problems turned the mild recession we had been experiencing up until 2007:Q3 into a much more severe downturn in 2008:Q4 and 2009:Q1. Whether those financial problems were sufficiently insurmountable that we would have eventually arrived at the same crisis point even without the extra burden of the recession of 2007:Q4-2008:Q3 is a matter of conjecture. But it seems to me that oil prices indisputably made an important contribution to both the initial downturn and the magnitude of the problems we’re currently facing.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3664
Anybody wonder why oil prices started rising recently even when the US economy was still retracting?
We need a grown-up energy policy in this country more than ever. Rome is burning. We’re fiddling.