Wednesday Open Thread

Welcome to Wednesday open thread. How are you spending this delightful Wednesday? I’m doing the same-old, same-old. Anything new in your world?

If there’s not enough keeping you up at night — we may be about to return to the oil roller coaster.

Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs is pessimistic about world oil supplies. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph reports:

Assumptions that OPEC has added 1.9m bpd over the last two years are wishful thinking. These new fields have been “largely offset” by attrition in old fields.

“We believe that OPEC spare capacity has already dropped below 2m bpd. The question therefore arises how much spare capacity is left to absorb potential supply disruptions in other countries,” he said. If this picture is broadly correct, spare capacity is already close to the wafer-thin levels that led to wild price moves in mid-2008.

….Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, said the long-denied oil crunch is starting to bite. “We cling to the comfort blanket that spare capacity exists, but it is mostly fictional, or inoperable. If you take 2m bpd off the figure, the whole dynamic of global oil supply changes,” he said.

World oil prices are largely driven by spare capacity these days. When it gets down to around a million barrels a day, where it seems to be now, prices can gyrate wildly based on very small supply shocks. Libya isn’t a huge supplier of oil on the global market, but the loss of their production probably removes whatever small cushion we’ve been operating with. Even a very modest disruption in another OPEC country could send oil prices skyrocketing.

“Drill baby drill” isn’t going to get us 2 million barrels a day spare capacity. It sure would have been nice if we were trying to find alternatives to oil dependence but that’s something liberals want so it won’t be done.

Olympia Snowe looks like she’s on the road to defeat in a Republican primary in 2012. All she lacks is a well-known challenger, but that didn’t stop some Republicans from getting defeated in 2010.

It’s been clear for a long time now that Maine Republicans want to swap out Olympia Snowe for someone more conservative. Our newest poll in the state finds that hasn’t changed: only 33% of primary voters in the state say they would support Snowe next year to 58% who prefer a generic ‘more conservative candidate.’

The gripe with Snowe is pretty straight forward. 58% of primary voters think she’s too liberal to 37% who think she’s ideologically where she should be. Most GOP voters don’t really think Snowe belongs in their party- 34% think she ought to be an independent, 33% think she should be a Democrat, and only 27% feel that the GOP is indeed her rightful place.

Snowe’s approval rating with Republican primary voters is a narrowly positive 47/44 spread. It may seem surprising that her generic reelect numbers are so bad when she’s above ground on approval but to keep those numbers in perspective Lisa Murkowski’s approval with Republicans in January of 2010 was 77/13 and Mike Castle’s in March of 2009 at an identical point in the cycle was 69/24. Their far superior numbers didn’t prevent them from being taken out by the Tea Party.

Snowe is already in much worse shape than Murkowski and Castle were at equivalent times in 2009. It doesn’t look good for her right now, but in politics a year is a long time away.

This excerpt from Lillian McEwen’s memoir about Clarence Thomas is NSFW and it will want to make you gouge your eyes out. Don’t say you weren’t warned!