Gasoline prices in the US

are more demand-sensitive inside the US. (Gasoline remains subject to the vagaries of being a global commodity. The "national security" argument conservatives make in favor of Keystone XL fails on the understanding that most of its gasoline will be sold to China and other overseas markets.) Gas prices has been falling for a few months now due to decreased demand; that demand recently kicked up, reducing inventories, so the price has followed.

US refineries are running at peak capacity also, so if one should have a fire or an unexpected shutdown (routine maintenance is usually not performed in the winter) then you would see a spike in gas prices.

There's more to it, of course, but in short... the price of a barrel of oil and the price of a US gallon of gasoline have both related and unrelated sensitivities.

I don't think he'd be running as a Democrat.

So does that cue up the Nader Haters if Clinton were to lose?

(I personally don't think Clinton can lose... and I especially think this is true if she selects a Latino from Texas as a running mate.)

This was funded by wealthy angry white Dallasites

Dallas — with no river, port or natural resources of its own — has always fashioned itself as a city with no reason for being, a city that triumphed against all odds, a city that validates the sheer power of individual will and the particular ideology that champions it above all else. “Dallas,” the journalist Holland McCombs observed in Fortune in 1949, “doesn’t owe a damn thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is ... because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.”

Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China. The country musician Jimmy Dale Gilmore said it best in his song about the city: “Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye ... a rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.”

For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination.

The wives of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme. (After all, there’s a reason Carol Burnett pulls a gun on Julie Andrews at the end of the famous “Big D” routine the two performed before the assassination in the early 1960s. “What are ya,” she screams, pulling the trigger, “some kinda nut?!”)