The San Francisco Citizen

According to the airlines, via that lapdog of the Air Transport Association of America known as Stop Oil Speculation Now, there is a:

…force at work that, like gravity, is invisible yet powerful. This force is rampant speculation. Every time you buy products such as food or gas, you are impacted by unregulated, secretive and often foreign commodities futures markets. Speculators in these markets are increasingly buying and selling commodities such as oil even though they have no intention of using the product.

First of all, who wrote this copy? Bob Shrum? Second of all, Hillary Clinton didn’t intend to use all that sugar and eat those cows when she speculated in the commodities markets and nobody complained about that, right? Speculation is now supposed to be a bad thing?

Our corporate overlords are worried:

Could there be a more likely explanation for high prices for avgas? CBS News offers a few. Is it possible Bill O’Reilly might be wrong? Or, maybe all this talk of speculation being the cause of high fuel prices is just a Nixonian Fallacy.

Check it out and decide for yourself. Maybe you’ll agree that both you and the airlines are being victimized by those invisible, powerful, secretive, foreign forces.

The airlines have to come up with something to explain all those fees and surcharges, right?

I shift the blame
To the worm in the bottle
I shift the blame
To anyone standing before me

The whole Cosco Busan deal  is hotting up these days. Check out the federal charges against Captain John Cota posted by KPIX here.

Here’s the rant part. The Busan hit the Delta Tower of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It didn’t hit the “Delta Span”, despite numerous accounts reporting it that way.  A “span” is the more or less horizontal part of a bridge where you might see cars zipping by. A tower is the up and down part that helps support the spans.

Yet, we still hear about the span, even from the official federal paperwork:

“The M/V Cosco Busan departed the Port of Oakland in heavy fog and struck the Delta span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge…”

It’s very possible that Cota mistakenly reported to authorities that the ship “touched” the Delta Span. He was under a lot of pressure. The point is that whether you’re trying a case in real life or just in the press, it’s nice to get these small details correct. If half of the reports of what Cota said over the radio are incorrect, what other reported details are incorrect?

Lastly, take a look at today’s headline, below. It’s very possible that Cota could be found to have some or most of the responsibility for the oil spill, and yet not serve any time behind bars. So he might not be heading for “the brig” after all

Only time will tell.