A flatulent discussion about unfair gas prices

Now, let me get this straight. When oil was trading for $140 a barrel about three months ago, the gas prices were averaging $4 a gallon.

Today, oil’s down below half that and gas is about $2.69 a gallon.

Now that oil’s down to half of what it was six months ago, wouldn’t it stand to reason that a gallon of gas would cost an equivalent $2? Can anyone explain that so it’ll make sense to me? It looks like we’ve been getting screwed on both the up and the down.

And can anyone explain why we’re so happy about it? Why people are skipping around with more spring in their step when, if the market and common sense are any indication, we’re still being overcharged by nearly $10 for every fill up?

No, of course you can’t. No one can. Even the best experts, the people we rely on to ensure the engines of commerce run smoothly, have no clue what they’re talking about.

For heaven’s sake, if even a steady, experienced hand like George W. Bush, a man who earned a master’s degree in business from Yale, one of the most elite and prestigious business schools in the world, a man of steely resolve, looks confused and frightened by what’s happening on Wall Street, then what are common simpletons like the rest of us supposed to think?

Okay, bad example. But you get the picture. Economics has been made so deliberately complicated in the pursuit of an easy buck that the system’s broken. No one can understand it.

It’s one of the reasons why I’m defiantly proud to have earned an F in Economics 101 at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, a place one popular T-shirt declared to be “The Fountain of Knowledge Where We’ve All Come to Drink.”

And drink we did. We drank until we ran out of money. Then we called home for more. And it didn’t stop us from drinking when even that was gone. It was all thanks to a then-groundbreaking new business model.

Yes, those were the days of the magical Blue Key Card. It was the early 1980s before they were so reckless about giving credit cards to drunken unemployed students. That’s where the promoters of Blue Key Card saw their opening.

The Blue Key Card was offered for free to fiscally casual college students around the midwest. It could only be used at bars and restaurants.

So when you ran out of your money and Dad got wise to what you were doing with his, you simply, hallelujah, deployed the Blue Key Card. I still remember the euphoria that would erupt at the bar when me or one of my buddies decided to extend the inebriation by pulling out the BKC and brandishing it at the surly bartender the way gallant King Arthur unsheathed Excalibur in defense of some fair maiden.

“Pour us goblets of your finest brandy, you drink-schlepping scoundrel! Our night has just begun! Bring us your finest meats and cheeses! Tonight we live like noblemen! It’s not costing any of us a dime! And if your mood improves toward our drunken revelries, we might even toss in an extra farthing for you, so step lively!”

Of course, as we knew from bitter experience the next day would bring the inevitable hangover. What we didn’t foresee was the mailman bringing us an inevitable bill. Who knows how many of these transient students simply skipped on the bills before they folded? (I’m still kicking myself for having responsibly paid mine off, damn it.)

That’s when I learned all I ever needed to know about economics. Talk all you want about supply, demand and things like decreasing elasticity. None of it matters. I learned it’s better to pay as you go. The good times will eventually result in a bill, not to mention a skull-popping hangover.

And what happened to the enterprising gang who ran Blue Key Card? You’d think they would have wound up bankrupt and disgraced, but who knows? Perhaps they went on to run mega-billion dollar companies with sterling reputations. You know, places like Enron, Bear Stearns or Freddie Mac.

Which brings us back to the artificially inflated gasoline prices. Just today, Exxon reported a $15 billion quarterly profit.

It’s clear they’re screwing us. I don’t know how they’re getting away with it, but I know this much.

If they keep it up, I’m going to start looking around for a mini-mart that accepts the Blue Key Card.

Van Palin & The Monsters of Crock Tour

I thought on Saturday about getting up and dashing off an blog entry about McCain VP pick Sarah Palin. I was going to write about a slim silver lining of McCain winning would be the eventual commercial fisherman-out-of-water reality show that would soon feature her regular guy husband Todd awkwardly mingling with Washington muckety-mucks.

I was going to note that policy-wise, she’s a Dick in a dress (Cheney, that is). She’s just like him. Coincidentally, one of my all-time very favorite songs is “Lola,” by the Kinks, a catchy tune that addresses that very scenario so anytime I can use a line like “a dick in a dress,” count on it, I’ll not shy from the task.

And I was going to note that Alaskans must spend those dreadful months where the daily sun shines for about the length of your standard NFL commercial break procreating and dreaming up offbeat names for their many children. The Palin’s have Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig Paxon Van.

Serious journalists have many questions for the Palins these days, but the one I’d most like to ask is why they gave their 5-month-old son a second unnecessary middle name -- and can a second “middle” name even be considered middle? -- when they’d given him a perfectly useless one already.

I suspect the husband grew up rocking out to Van Halen and thought it would be cool to call their kid Van Palin in rocking tribute to a great band (and I’m talking about the Sammy Hagar years). I like it, but I sense the wife put the kibosh on it and let him add it as his three-quarter name.

I was going to write about all that, but my laziness got the better of me. And, besides, I thought, “nothing newsworthy’s going to happen over the next two days.”

That turned out to be a slight miscalculation on my part. Sure, I’ve made more consequential ones.

For instance, years ago I should have declared myself to be a staunch religious right conservative. Had I done that I’d be skating through life with essentially a get-out-of-jail free card. As long as you say you believe in the absolute right to life, guns and God, the reliably religious conservatives will forgive any number of your sins.

That became evident when it was revealed that the Palin’s 17-year-old daughter Bristol is 5-months pregnant with a child they’ll probably name Mesa Glacier Dokken Palin. Conservatives said this was great, galvanizing news. I wonder if the newly famous father of the baby feels the same.

Now the same crowd that went apoplectic with predictable scolds when 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears announced she was pregnant is saying this is a wonderful family situation. The movement that gave us Ken Starr and Linda Tripp says personal lives should be off limits.

This was typical of the wrong-headed thinking we’ve come to know from the political movement that was founded in America by Benedict Arnold.

It’s true. America’s most famous traitor was a religious conservative who thought America should remain a British colony and was hanged in devotion to that far-right cause. He was bitterly opposed to the Massachusetts liberals he and his hero King George considered radical extremists.

Go through the entire history of the United States, find the side the most conservative people favor and watch it be proven a complete failure. A sampler:

* Conservatives who favored everlasting slavery for 20 percent of the population left the Union and instigated the bloody Civil War because they were furious that radical liberals wanted to abolish slavery. Ditto for female suffragettes and civil rights.

* Conservatives like the disgraced Charles Lindbergh thought opposing Nazi Germany was bad for business while liberals like Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized fascism as a tyrannical threat to the entire world.

* Sen. Joe McCarthy, a man many staunch conservatives wanted to see become president, used baseless innuendo to ruin the lives of thousands of men and women he wrongly suspected were Communist sympathizers. He died at the age of 48, a lonely, maligned alcoholic who was already beginning to sense that history would claim his name for anytime flag-waving “patriots” trample the rights of Americans who disagree with their First Amendment opinions.

* Conservatives thought escalating the war in Vietnam was a swell idea while radical liberals died at places like Kent State saying, no, it’s not.

* They thought Richard Nixon was a great president who should not have resigned in spite of mounting evidence of criminal activity, but that Bill Clinton should go because of a private indiscretion with a consenting female adult.

* Conservatives were bitterly opposed to the man they now hail as their greatest leader ever, Ronald Reagan. It was in 1987 when Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus called Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda” for initiating Glasnost with Mikhail Gorbachev.

* They thought that George H.W. Bush was a war wimp while still supporting his clueless son though two calamitous terms as a historically failed president. And just think for a minute of what a bloodless, weeks-long cakewalk the conservatives ensured you the invasion of Iraq would be.

* They think the stuff that you’ve just read is stupid liberal nonsense that contains not a shred of intelligent fact.

Wrong again.