Friday Night Links

• The December 2022 contract offers oil for $81.48 per barrel. That's $20.96 cheaper than the front month price! That's an IRR of -2.7%, if you buy a barrel of oil today, short a futures contract, and wait for delivery. Another way to put that: the oil futures market says that a dollar will buy 2.7% more oil every year, compounded, from now through December 2022. The treasury yield for 8.5 year paper is 2.3%, so the combined rate of return is 5%!Who says yields are low? Sitting in treasuries can be expected to buy you 5% more oil - more BTUs - every year from now through 2023, compounded! [CBS]
• Looking at states no one expected Trump to lose, his overperformance is even more stark. The polling average for West Virginia was Trump +17; he won it by 39. Kansas was estimated at +9; the result was +15. Throughout the day the president was also outperforming his expected result in key states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He even, for a time, looked like he was within striking distance in Virginia, a state Hillary Clinton won by five points in 2016. At one point the New York Times’s “meter” had Trump’s chances in North Carolina at 92%. The needle was also sliding in the president’s direction in Arizona and Georgia, among others. And then, suddenly, the counting stopped in at least five states (or parts of states): Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; all but one with a Democratic governor (coincidence, surely!). When has that ever happened? [American Mind]
• Elections have worked this way in big cities for as long as America has had big cities. Boss Tweed never ran for office because why bother? He controlled the vote-counting, so he could hire and fire elected officials at will. City-dwellers tolerated machine politics because they were rootless folks who had moved to the city in search of opportunity. If Tammany Hall became too incompetent to keep the streets safe for business, people could just pack up and leave, voting with their feet. [Jim]
• We have one party in America that openly wants to fundamentally change our entire form of government into a one-party totalitarian state.  They plan to add several states to gain permanent control of the Senate.  They pitched adding enough justices to the Supreme Court to change it into a leftist legislative body of last resort.  They said the filibuster was toast. If this is what these people want to do, and they said it, who among us thinks they plan to play by the rules when counting votes?  Is there anyone on the planet who doubts that when a Democratic state government in a critical electoral state stops counting votes when their party’s opponent is ahead will open the morning discovering thousands of “found” votes? [American Thinker] 
• Every statewide race in Montana went Republican this week, with record voter turnout: president, Senate, House, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditor. And both houses of the state Legislature retained a Republican majority. Come 2021, for just the fourth time since 1921, Republicans will hold Montana’s house, senate and governorship. [NYT]