Below The Beltway

President Bush is back in Saudi Arabia meeting with our “friend” King Abdullah:
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — With the price of oil hitting record highs, President Bush will use a private visit to King Abdullah’s ranch here Friday to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudi government to increase oil production so that American […]

The real price gougers work at your local post office.
H/T: Club For Growth

Last week, when presented with the reality that not a single economist thought the gas tax holiday scheme was a good idea, Hillary Clinton said she didn’t listen to what economists had to say.
Apparently, Carla Fiorna, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and prominent McCain surrogate, doesn’t care about economic reality either:
STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you defend that […]

Everyone’s complaining about the high price of gasoline, but in the end there really isn’t much that any President can do about it:
[W]hat can the White House, Congress or competing presidential candidates do to reduce gas prices in the near term? The short answer, alas, is not much.
No industrialized economy is as reliant on oil, […]

That’s what everyone is wondering about oil prices, which just keep going up:
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Oil prices hit a new record high above $125 Friday as a weaker U.S. dollar drove investments into commodities.
U.S. crude for June delivery rose as high as $125.12 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange […]

Apparently, the House Republican leadership has signed on to the phony gas tax holiday idea:
[T]he gas-tax relief idea just won’t die. On Thursday, House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he’s supporting a bill by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., to suspend the gasoline tax this summer.
“The common sense plan unveiled today by Rep. Ryan helps […]

I don’t always agree with Glenn Beck, but he hits the nail on the head in this segment about the phony arguments being raised on the campaign trail about the allegedly massive profits being made by oil companies:

H/T: Mises Economic Blog

This one comes straight from our politics-as-bullshit department:
Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every […]

Use this handy little calculator to figure it out.
We own a 2007 Honda Accord, which averages about 20-22 miles per gallon in the rush hour traffic that my wife faces getting to work. For that car, we’d “save” about $ 32.86 over the entire summer.
We spent more than that filling the tank of that car […]

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain are advocating the idea of a suspension of the Federal gasoline tax during the summer driving months as a way of helping consumers deal with high gas prices.
Would it accomplish anything ?
Not really, no:
When gasoline prices hit a shocking $2 a gallon in Illinois in the summer of 2000, […]