Quote Originally Posted by Roy Karrde View Post
Yet it all depends on which is more energized, Catholics who see this as a attack against their church are going to be far more energized about it than your everyday woman off the street.
Yes, I said that mobilization is important. But you can see from the polling data that women find women's issues more divisive than Catholics - it is more important in their voting preferences, and it is a much larger overall group, and so small changes have larger electoral effects.

Speculative worry over gas prices is not that complicated. Here is a graph:



We can see two things:

- upcoming seasonal shifts
- a gradual return to pre-crash values (then shifted upwards by commodity speculation), and coordinate retail price increases

Why the gradual rise? Overall economic recovery, probably. Blame Obama for that, if you want? Why the rush for this commodity now? Panic over Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. You can blame Obama for foreign policy blunders (though the population is evenly divided on his successes in the field), but unless one is expecting price controls or nationalization of the oil industry, nothing can immediately alleviate this problem on the consumer level (and neither of these things will happen).