Speaker Emerita: Nancy's iPhone

Washington Post has a new profile on Nancy Pelosi's difficult transition back to Minority Leader and ambitions to win back the Speakership. It's basically just an update about a political personality that we already know well. And if the anecdotes about Pelosi's storied personal touch in politicking and her aggressive defense of her record sound familiar, it's because they're vintage Pelosi. The only real news is buried at the end of the story: Pelosi got an iPhone and plays Angry Birds. That, and DCCC fundraising completely dried up during the scandal over Anthony Weiner's predilections for hot, raunchy, and gratuitously political cybersex.

Obama "exercises" Strategic Petroleum Reserve Option

The Obama Administration announced today that it is releasing 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The reserve is intended for emergencies and severe oil shocks only, but the last administration also released millions of barrels when Hurricane Katrina severely disrupted domestic petroleum refineries along the Gulf Coast. This is a political acknowledgement that the weight of sky-high gas prices are a drag on an economy that, according to almost all indicators, has stalled since May. Contrary to the snake-oil economics that Donald Trump has been peddling, near term gas prices are largely out of policymakers' control, especially if your remedy is giving OPEC a good talking to. It's a function of simple supply and demand: developing countries are consuming more and more oil, and the war in Libya has reduced global supplies by roughly 1.5 million barrels a day.

All this talk of Obama exercising the reserve option to lower gas prices has gotten my finance juices flowing and I think you could not only make the case that the augmentation in supply might soften the worst of summer gas prices, but also that the administration's calculation is similar to taking a macro short position on oil futures - that is, it expects the price of oil to decline, and by insulating consumers from the oil shock now while price pressures are most acute, it is exercising a sort of derivative financial option to stimulate the economy as a whole given that the reserve bought the oil at a lower price in the past for release at a higher price. This means the government sells its commodity investment at a higher return than what it initially paid to buy it, while injecting capital into the economy by artificially lowering the price of a core good. And it might even get to buy back petroleum at a (hopefully) lower price in the future. Talk about "priming the pump."

Best (Worst) Nicknames in Politics

Hillary "The Nutcracker" Clinton
The same vendor also sells kitchenware in the likeness of Bill Clinton except with a corkscrew for a penis

Tom "The Hammer" DeLay

Snarlin' Arlen Specter

Ted "The Lion" Kennedy

Rick Santorum
Santorum giving his concession speech after losing reelection, his goody two shoes children weeping in the foreground

Weinergate

House Minority Leader (our Speaker Emerita) Nancy Pelosi has called for a formal ethics investigation into Anthony "Aptly Named" Weiner's after he owned up to the tweet depicting his throbbing hard penis . Ethics panel investigations have traditionally been used to buy time for embattled members in hopes that a serious scandal blows over by the time the committee issues its report. However, for Weenie's own floor leader to fan the flames at such a difficult moment really ramps up the pressure for him to resign immediately, and suggests the Democratic leadership considers it cleaner to nip this scandal at the bud.

The Weiner story has legs, and the Dem leadership is giving him a little nudge in front of a barreling bus.

Belated Non-DILF News

By now, anyone with an internet connection has gotten wind of Congressman Anthony "Aptly Named" Weiner's (D-NY) Twitter flap. A suggestive image of his bulge was broadcast from his Twitter account to a young girl. Weiner says his account was hacked by someone giving him a hard time for his name. Even though he's not a DILF in the strictest sense of the word, and I initially dismissed the whole episode as a non-story, this thing has picked up steam as Weenie's explanations went from opaque to downright suspicious. After refusing to comment on the Weinergate scandal, he inexplicably made a 180 and hit the press circuit. Asked by Rachel Maddow and Wolf Blitzer if he could deny that he was the man in the photo, Weenie dug himself deeper and deeper, ducking the question and then suggesting that the photo was doctored.

Bizarre behavior for a veteran spokesman of the national Democratic Party and a NYC mayoral aspirant.