Day: May 11, 2007
My First $50 Tank of Gas
And the tank wasn’t even completely empty. Fortunately for me, I don’t drive often, maybe once or twice or week, and rarely go more than 10 miles even then. (And, yes, I live in the Los Angeles sprawlplex.)
What is really going on here is a multi-billion-dollar shakedown of the American people by Bush’s cronies.
It’s tempting to think that high gas prices in 2007 were part of the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton agenda when they invaded Iraq in 2003. But like most conspiracy theories around these clowns, that idea gives them way too much credit.
I doubt they invaded hoping to lower gas prices, but the fact that we’re on the brink of $4 a gallon is just another result of their incompetence at both war-making and domestic governance — combined with the fact that George W. Bush doesn’t give a damn.
Rightly or wrongly, Americans used to blame their presidents for high gas prices, and normal presidents would take action, or at least appear to, as a signal of solidarity. But Bush is impervious to public opinion — not just because he’s not up for reelection but because he was born into the aristocracy, and fancies himself a business tycoon. As such, he sees suffering by the little people as simply collateral damage to the greater good of corporate profitability.
Profitability is the salt in the wound, of course. Big Oil’s profits are through the roof. What is really going on here is a massive shakedown of the American people by Bush’s cronies.
The ultimate irony is that Republicans who hate paying taxes don’t feel a similar sense of outrage over paying extra to Big Oil for no reason other to line the pockets of fat cats.
Iraqi Parliament Majority Favors U.S. Withdrawal
Our Liberal Media seems desperate to bury this story. Via BuzzFlash.com, I found it buried inside the Washington Post site:
A majority of members of Iraq’s parliament have signed a draft bill that would require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq and freeze current troop levels. The development was a sign of a growing division between Iraq’s legislators and prime minister that mirrors the widening gulf between the Bush administration and its critics in Congress.
The draft bill proposes a timeline for a gradual departure, much like what some U.S. Democratic lawmakers have demanded, and would require the Iraqi government to secure parliament’s approval before any further extensions of the U.N. mandate for foreign troops in Iraq, which expires at the end of 2007
