While the muse is on vacation, a few quotes.

First, a few snippets from Enron energy traders caught in the act of gaming the energy market to drive up revenues:

For example, in one transcript a trader asks about "all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California."

To which the Enron trader responds, "Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot." ...

In another, an Enron trader identified as David discusses shutting down a steamer from a generating unit to increase prices.

"I was wondering, um, the demand out there is er ... there's not much, ah, demand for power at all and we're running kind of fat. Um, if you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?

"Oh, it's not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let's put it that way," another trader says.

"If we shut it down, could you bring it back up in three-- three or four hours, something like that?" David asks.

"Oh, yeah," the other trader says.

"Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down, then, if that's OK," David says.

And now, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine, a flashback to the halcyon days of the Enron bankruptcy, in which a Republican blogger explains to stupid liberals why this couldn't possibly be happening:

EARTH TO STUPID: THE MARKET WORKS! This may seem like it was years ago, but who remembers this precious quote?

I would love to personally escort [Enron CEO Kenneth] Lay to an 8 by 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.'

That was California's Democratic attorney general, Bill Lockyer, speaking out about his solution to the energy providers' "gouging" of California's electricity consumers. Well, Lockyer must be positively thrilled about what has happened to Lay this week. The final verdict on whether Enron "gouged" California consumers has just been delivered. It turns out that Enron was so good at extracting predatory profits from the market that it is now a complete laughingstock: near-bankrupt, its' issues trading for pennies on the dollar, downgraded to junk-bond status. The energy "crisis" that some festooned as the work of rapacious price gougers has, in a matter of months, transformed itself into an energy glut, with some libs now complaining that oil prices may go too low. When will these people ever learn about supply, demand, and markets?

When indeed?

Dug this out of archive.org because the blogger in question is remodeling his site, and his own archive is gone...