OIL FUTURES: Crude Ends Lower, Even As Pipeline Outage Continues

Crude-oil futures eased lower Tuesday as uncertainty about the status of a major Canada-U.S. oil pipeline weighed on the market.

Light, sweet crude oil for October delivery settled 39 cents, or 0.5%, lower at $76.80 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude oil on the ICE futures exchange was recently up 11 cents, or 0.1%, at $79.14 a barrel.

Oil prices are being supported at their current level by the continued shutdown of Enbridge Inc.'s (ENB) Line 6a pipeline, which can carry up to 670,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude to U.S. refiners. A long outage could begin to drain bloated U.S. oil inventories, which, when combined with fuel stockpiles, sit at their highest point since the early 1980s.

Futures are still more than $2 a barrel above where they stood before Enbridge announced the shutdown after discovering a leak late Thursday.

On Tuesday, however, futures took a small hit on reports that Enbridge could restart the pipeline without the prior approval of U.S. regulators, potentially resulting in a faster return to service. But the company later told Dow Jones that regulators would need to give the go-ahead for a restart.

"It was a little bit of noise in the market; there were no major shifts," said Tim Evans, an analyst with Citi Futures Perspective, speaking about the pipeline's shifting restart prospects.

The latest U.S. oil and fuel inventory data, for the week ended Sept. 10, are due out Wednesday from the Energy Information Administration. Oil inventories are expected to drop 2.5 million barrels, while gasoline stocks are seen falling 1.1 million barrels, according to a Dow Jones survey of analysts. Distillate stocks, including heating oil and diesel, are seen rising 200,000 barrels, while refinery utilization is expected to decline 0.7 percentage point to 87.5% of capacity.

On Tuesday after settlement, the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, reported a 3.3-million-barrel increase in oil inventories, a one-million-barrel drop in gasoline stocks and a 1.5-million-barrel decline in distillate inventories. Refinery utilization was estimated at 85.6% of capacity.

Oil prices were also under pressure from evidence of sluggish growth in Germany's economy. The ZEW economic research institute cut its closely watched expectations index for Germany's economy to -4.3 in September, from 14.0 in August. The index represents a "flattening" of activity in Germany's economy, Europe's largest.

The index served as a reminder that not all large economies are growing at the rate of China's, where a 13.9% year-on-year jump in August industrial production sent crude-oil futures as high as $78.04 a barrel on Monday.

U.S. retail sales data for August failed to provide a boost, with the 0.4% increase slightly exceeding expectations.

Front-month October reformulated gasoline blendstock, or RBOB, settled 1.16 cents, or 0.6%, lower at $1.9690 a gallon. October heating oil settled 0.61 cent, or 0.3%, higher at $2.1288 a gallon.

President Obama's religion: does your president's faith matter?

A Pew Research Center survey showed that nearly 20 percent of Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim (he is not), and only one-third of Americans believe he is a Christian (he is).

Once upon a time, President Obama was criticized for his association with controversial Chicago Christian Pastor Jeremiah Wright (note: not a Muslim). Wright married the president and his wife Michelle and baptized their two daughters, but Obama later distanced himself from Wright when the pastor's aggressive, politically-charged sermons became political fodder.

After he won the election and moved to Washington, Obama admitted that, having learned a lesson from the Wright debacle, he hoped to worship privately:

"We were pretty affected by what happened at Trinity and the controversy surrounding Reverend Wright. That was deeply disturbing to us, and it was disappointing for us personally. It made us very sensitive to the fact that as president, the church we attend can end up being interpreted as speaking for us at all times."

Last October, the Washington Post's religion reporter at the time, Jacqueline L. Salmon, wrote a story about Obama's decision to worship privately at Camp David with Navy Chaplain Carey Cash. According to Salmon's reporting, "The White House declined to make Cash available for interviews, saying it wished to keep the president's religious worship at Camp David private."

The White House may be now regretting that decision to keep Obama's spiritual life out of the public eye.

Chris Cillizza Thursday reported, "Religion humanizes a president for many people, allows them to identify on a very basic level with the most powerful man in the world. For a president whose detractors have scored political points by painting him as aloof and uncaring, religion could be a bridge by which he connects to the average person. "

And in an age of Internet rumors and empowered bloggers, the Pew study shows that most Americans don't understand some basic facts of Obama's life, including his spirituality. Although President Bush also worshiped privately, the public expressed little doubt about the importance of his religious beliefs.

Do you care about your president's religious beliefs? Why do you think so many Americans believe (falsely) that Obama is Muslim? (See Colin Powell's important take on this question.) Why do you think that only one in three Americans know that President Obama is Christian?