I always warn that when the US Senate votes unanimously on something outside of national security, Americans should beware.

Congress voted overwhelmingly to suspend putting 70,000 barrels/day (the US consumes about 21 Million/day) of oil into a strategic reserve facility. This reserve allows the US to operate for a short period of time should oil deliveries cease for some reason or demand increases exponentially for some reason.

The measure is likely to be one of the few Congress approves this year in response to public angst at the pump. Democrats and Republicans agreed on little else Tuesday to bring down prices.

Senators approved the measure by a veto-proof majority of 97 to 1. The two Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, returned to the Capitol from the campaign trail to vote for the measure. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive GOP nominee, supported the measure but was absent for the vote.

The House later followed suit, approving it 385 to 25.

Since everyone is campaigning, they want to be seen as people who make it better for the American people. This move is likely to impact fuel prices by about a nickel a gallon. However, the average fuel price is expected to rise more than that over the summer. So, the real impact to your pocket is going to be nil, zilch, nada. The government is going to tell you that you saved money that you will never see. We are talking about oil that represents less than 1% of consumption. This is the most expensive possible way to save Americans money because it actually does nothing of the kind.

Rather than do something significant - maybe actually act toward some smaller level of foreign oil dependency, these knuckleheads are going to risk our ability to use stored fuel if some disaster (earthquake, hurricane anyone?) impacts the flow of oil to the US.

Vote-mongering.

Barak Obama doesn’t think the American people need relief from government - he opposes a temporary hold on gas taxes to help folks get through the summer. John McCain called for a suspension of the government taxes on fuel, which was quickly parroted by Hillary Clinton. Despite the media making it sound like Hillary and McCain are in agreement (which would pull Hillary closer to the center), there is a big difference between their plans for a gas tax holiday.

Again, John McCain wants the government to provide relief to Americans by getting out of the process for a few months. Hillary’s plan is to punish “Big Oil” by having the oild companies pay for the “tax holiday”. This means that Hillary is not proposing a tax holiday at all, but is tying back into Nancy Pelosi’s plan of cutting into oil company profits.

“We have a choice,” Clinton told a crowd in Hendersonville, N.C., ahead of Tuesday’s primary. “We can choose to have you continue to pay the federal gas tax this summer or we can choose to try to make the oil companies pay it out of their record profits.”

She proposed an “excess profit tax” on oil companies, although she did not name which companies should be taxed.

“(Oil companies) have record profits that they frankly are just sitting there counting because they are not doing anything new to earn it; they are just taking advantage of what’s going on,” Clinton said. “We ought to say, ‘Wait a minute, we’d rather have the oil companies pay the gas tax than the drivers of North Carolina, especially truck drivers, or the farmers, or other people who have to commute long distances.’”

What this all boils down to is actually very simple. Hillary calls her plan a tax holiday, but the plan is actually a mirror of Barak Obama’s plan - while sounding like she agrees with John McCain. We called William Jefferson Clinton, “Slick Willy”. We need to call Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Slick Hilly”.

Now, the insidious part of this whole thing is what Hillary and Nancy know that you might not have thought of yet. People “poo poo” the idea that the liberals in our country are little more than communists. Meaning they want a strong, authoritarian government that supplies most of the people’s needs and they want to redistribute wealth from everyone except the political elite. Here is another example.

When Pelosi, Obama, and Clinton talk about punishing “Big Oil”, they are talking about punishing the millions of people who have a mutual fund, a retirement fund, or a 401k.

78% of Conoco Phillips is owned by investment and mutual fund holders.

53% of Exxon Mobile is owned by investment and mutual fund holders.

Less than one percent in each of these companies is owned by insiders.

So, who pays for Hillary’s gas tax holiday? You do.

Some holiday - but that is Slick Hilly for you. She will give you an apple for free, if you will pay her for the priviledge of taking it from her. What a sham.

Nancy Pelosi is sending President Bush a letter.

WASHINGTON, April 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent the following letter today to President George W. Bush urging him to sign into law legislation that Congress has passed to help American families with the rising price of gasoline.

“I respectfully ask you again to work with the Congress to allow the Justice Department to pursue oil cartel price-fixing, allow the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the authority to investigate and punish price gougers, end taxpayer subsidies to Big Oil and invest those funds in renewable American energy. Lastly, your Administration must use the authority given to it by the Congress to end market manipulation. We cannot wait to act in the face of these prices increases,” she wrote.

Big Oil! Boy they are just soaking us, are they not?

The US Consumes 388,600,000 gallons of gasoline per day. This is 141,839,000,000 gallons per year.

Big Oil and Retailers markup represents about 9% of the cost of a gallon of gasoline. About 32 cents per gallon profit at $3.50 a gallon. The Federal Government gets about 19 cents per gallon in taxes and the states average about 23 cents per gallon in taxes.  So taxes represent 42 cents per gallon. Now, you tell me who is gouging.

Out of a cost per gallon of $3.50, Big oil makes 32 cents. The rest is cost of oil, refining, transpertaion and distribution, and taxes.

Both John McCain and Nancy Pelosi have called for legislation to help Americans struggling with fuel prices. Notice the differences in approach. With John McCain’s model - the price of gasoline can be reduced almost instantly and push money into the economy almost immediately. With Nancy Pelosi’s model, oil companies will start cutting costs - which always means cutting jobs - which takes money out of the economy. Yet, with her way the government will get paid at the detriment of Americans.

The difference is Pelosi wants the oil companies to give the fuel away, and John McCain wants the government to stop gouging Americans.

What proponents of a lot of these green energy initiatives don’t often get is that mother nature is not a constant. Everything is cyclical - everything.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather, triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday.

You have to have a “toolbox” approach to life. Trying to build a house with just a hammer is short-sighted. Wind turbines fail, the conditions which make the successful are not constant, and the enviromental cost of wind turbines is far from ideal.

It is nice to know you can create energy that is renewable, but to put people in a position where a lack of wind means they get no service is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Another thing I find appalling is that in many places you used to be able to enjoy vistas of enormous natural beaty, now what you see is this. I think I’ll take a .5 degree Celsius temperature change over ruining the landscape of every windy place on earth.

In the State of the Union address, President Bush spoke about investing in technology that produces coal-fueled energy, while capturing (sequestering) the CO2 emissions of the coal-fired power plant. the project this refers to is FutureGen - a joint venture between the US and China, which is slated to be built in Mattoon, Illinois.

However, only a day later, Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman made statements in a closed-door meeting with Illinois state and federal lawmakers that he was considering pulling the funding for the project.  He cited soaring construction costs and new technology, but was not specific on either. He was also quoated as stating he inherited FutureGen and did not believe in it.

If these statements are true, I am curious to know if he shared these beliefs with the President prior to the SOU. It seems like the worse kind of blindside - assuming the president himself believes in a manifestation of a policy he has been supporting since 2003.