When the federal government passes a law but has no cops to enforce it, the crooks hold a "get out of jail free" card. That's the unfortunate effect of a sweeping and successful effort by drug and insurance companies to have federal law "preempt" state enforcement. A spate of stories today (LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) on new federal rules against insurance company abuses of Medicare recipients drives home the point.

I'm not the only one skeptical of outgoing Speaker Núñez's reform credentials. A Merc...

Our legal team was in San Francisco this week fighting another unjustified insurance rate hike - this time a 6% earthquake insurance rate increase...

A national lawsuit over water pollution from a gasoline additive was more than half-settled yesterday when four of the five major oil comanies agreed to pay $423 million in cleanup and other costs. Chevron, Shell, BP, Conoco and several smaller companies did what's right, and will escape years more of litigation costs. Exxon, which can no doubt afford to litigate until the world ends, was the only major holdout.

Oil prices are in Alice in Wonderland territory. Today's new futures-market record, above $122 a barrel, occurred despite a substantial rise in both crude oil stocks and gasoline stocks in the U.S., as reported by the federal Energy Information Administration. In any vaguely normal market, both of those events would drive down oil prices. But today, the speculators just shrugged, said "what the heck," and kept the upward spike going. Pardon my suspicious mind, but I connect it to "predictions" of $150 or even $200 a barrel crude oil.

Here's what the Capitol Alert reported outgoing Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez said at his last press conference yesterday.

Here's a perfect example of why a non-medical company with no relationship to the patient should never be allowed access to patient information without permission first - as a ...

A bill passed its second California Senate committee this week that would give an ever-wider circle of companies access to Californians' private medical information. SB 1096 by Senator Ron Calderon would allow pharmacies to give...

Governor Schwarzenegger doesn’t mind when California lawmakers take lavish trips and junkets paid for by special interests. In fact, he recommends it, especially if those lawmakers are from small towns, according to ...

 
Consumers could use a friend on the Assembly Insurance Committee. I testified against two bills the committee passed this morning that will cause consumers to pay more for their auto insurance and violate voter-approved Proposition 103...

Today's $3.00 per barrel spike in crude oil was a perfect example of market traders capitalizing on hasty news. Initial reports, from military sources, said a U.S. military "contract' ship fired on boats that were likely Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Soon after, it was not so much...

I remember now why I hired armed guards to protect the voter signatures that put insurance reform Proposition 103 on the ballot twenty years ago. ...

I'm going to happy hour tonight, and the whole office is coming with me. It's a rare occurrence that anyone around here leaves the office before 5pm, let alone all of us at the same time. But we've got reason to celebrate...

Around a meeting table at the California Energy Commission today, some of us were stifling yawns. Then, in one sentence, a veteran weights and measures regulator put the "hot fuel" issue in a perfect frame: Nearly every packaged liquid, from a gallon of kerosene to a quart of milk, is poured into its packaging with the amount adjusted to a benchmark temperature, guaranteeing exactly the same amount in every gallon, quart or pint. If a penny's worth matters for milk, how can a dollar's worth of "lost gas" not matter at the pump?

 

The headlne "Bush Voices Concern About Record Oil Price." today seemed promising from a president who recently said he'd never heard a thing about $4.00-a-gallon gasoline. Then I read the whole story, twice. Bush's only idea was to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. The presidential candidates ought to be leaping forward to set Bush straight on the complete uselessness of his answer, and give much better ones. Here's an EZ kit of useful responses, even aside from the environmental ravaging:

When I look at oil company profit reports--which will soon reveal truly rabid profit increases in the 1st quarter of 2008--I just ignore the line on "alternative energy" spending. That's because it is often the opposite of renewable energy. Mother Jones magazine's latest issue has the perfect description of why:

Here's a story that's worth posting twice. Kudos to Steve Harmon of the San Jose Mercury News for asking the question. And kudos to the leaders-elect of the state Senate and Assembly for promising to hold the public trust in higher...

 

I imagine a fair number of drivers think the guy at the corner gas station is raking it in, with the price at the pump getting near--or beyond--$4.00 a gallon. But it ain't so. The Oil Express newsletter (big subscription barrier, so no link), which is aimed at fuel retailers, notes that the percentage of the sale price kept by gas station operators is down, not up: ...

The governor once again has chicken on his tail. 

Students and teachers rallied in San Diego this weekend to protest Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed budget cuts, including $4.4 billion in cuts to education spending. ...

Global warming denial  is a nearly lost cause, so its proponents have a new issue: killer biofuels. Their simple, effective message is that biofuels--all of them--are the cause of rising food costs. Thus biofuels are killing babies in the Third World. It's cynical, brilliant and mostly untrue. But it deflects blame from spiraling oil and fuel prices, which are spiking farm prices, food transportation costs and worldwide inflation.

 

There's not much chance the government is going to change the duplicitous way it calculates inflation, which is why it doesn't get written about much. So it's worth pointing out a good column by Dean Calbreath of the San Diego Union today, on the damage done by excluding energy and food prices from so-called "core inflation" rate. It's also part of why the rich got richer during the last few years, and folks who get a paycheck didn't.

 

Yep, the price of oil keeps rising. But the price of gasoline is now rising even faster, up nearly two cents a gallon in one day to $3.418 nationally. Here's how it's done, courtesy of a few paragraphs tucked into a larger Bloomberg story:

Chevron's world headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., is less than 40 miles from San Francisco's stately opera house. So if bad thoughts could kill, last night's audience for the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize would be slumped in their seats. Two winners of the "environmental Nobel Prize" were Ecuadoran activists who have spent years battling Chevron in a mega-lawsuit against widespread oil contamination in the Amazon. Chevron has spent about as much time trying to discredit the men and the lawsuit, so the Goldman prize is the worst imaginable P.R. setback.

 

The big upside of Sen. John McCain's proposal today to suspend the 18.4-cent federal gasoline tax through this summer is that it's simple and popular: Get rid of a tax and reduce the price of gasoline immediately. Those aren't little points, with energy prices hitting new records too fast to keep track of and stoking painful inflation. It's the second level of the idea where trouble starts.

 Hundreds of Service Employee International Union (SEIU) staff and members stormed a progressive union gathering in Dearborn, Michigan this Saturday -- dispensing injuries, bruises and split heads to conference-goers at a Labor...

 

Maybe you can only afford to fill your gas tank halfway these days, but I'm sure Big Oil is thanking you. A Bloomberg survey of the 1st quarter profit landscape looks like an economic refugee zone, until the very end: "Earnings of [energy companies] probably rose 23 percent." The analysts predict Exxon's per-share profit will be up 28%, to $2.08 a share from $1.62 a year ago. If that kind of profit increase continues, Exxon's yearly 2008 profit will be $52 billion, up from 2007's record $40.6 billion.

The Capitol Alert has details this morning of Senate leader Don Perata's weekend fundraising event, the Pro Tem Cup at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara in...

Donors to the Democratic Party are getting uppity. They’ve dared suggest that the money they donated to elect people might not exactly get spent that way if Speaker Núñez gets to keep his hands on it. (Couldn’t...

 

So, did the White House "influence" the Environmental Protection Agency's decision last December to kill states' plans to regulate greenhouse emissions from tailpipes? Some of us don't doubt it for a second. But Rep. Henry Waxman today gave up on negotiating for the documents that would decide the issue, issuing a Congressional subpoena for communications between EPA chief...

Government boosts price of oil and gasoline! The actual headline today is dual records for the price of oil (over $112 a barrel) and gasoline ($3.43 a gallon, up 22 cents in a month). Some analysts blamed a decline in U.S. crude oil supplies. And buried in a pile of federal energy statistics is this: The federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve grew last week to more than 700 million barrels, 3rd-highest in history. Not only is the government wasting taxpayer money on the most expensive oil ever, it is taking oil off the market and, in at least a minor way, raising the price of oil and gasoline.

It's amazing how fast Gov. Schwarzenegger reacts when it's his wife, Maria Shriver, whose medical records are being snooped. "This kind of practice has been happening all over the state, wherever there's celebrities involved" including himself, Schwarzenegger said at an unrelated news conference today. He reiterated that his administration is "working with UCLA," where the leaks were uncovered by an excellent LA Times investigation--and hadn't even been reported  to state regulators.

Allstate made a surprise decision to release internal documents about claims handling procedures that they've been fighting to keep secret in court for over a decade. The documents...

A pair of adjacent stories on health care costs in today's New York Times illustrate the big potholes in privatizing health reform. They also point to some better paths. One article was on "huge variations" in end-of-life medical costs. More on that later. The other, by Reed Abelson, scrutinized a seemingly failed Medicare experiment in reducing diabetes treatment costs through intense case management. So far, it's been a wash at best. But the figure that struck me was the "as much as $2,000 a year" per patient that Medicare paid to private contractors to manage the cases.

 

It's hard to be shocked these days about record prices at the pump, easier to be shocked that Congress can't do more than talk about it. Today's $3.324 a gallon for regular is just another new all-time record, with prices up over the past few days at a penny a gallon or more. California rose above 3.70, highest in the nation.  As OilWatchdog predicted, refiners are cutting production--not because of a big refinery accident or Midwest tornado, but to boost the price at the pump. Oil companies already raking in record profits selling petroleum are working now to match that windfall at the pump. 

 

A wacky tale of grease rustling at a Northern California Burger King spins off a lot of threads. The police report said the wild-haired suspect was headed for a biorefinery in Atasacadero, where this "yellow grease" would net $1.35 a gallon, as opposed to only 80 cents in Nevada. Immediate question: Why the price difference? Does Las Vegas have the world's highest concentration of deep fryers?

Bigger question: If fry oil goes for $1.35, why does biodiesel sell for over $4.00 a gallon (if you can find it, but that's another story), same as regular diesel?

 

United States Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the nation's longest and hardest-fighting advocates to provide health care everyone and patient rights, hired one of the architects of Massachusetts' individual health insurance mandate today...