Meet Wag, The Oil Dog

So today Dubya is going to do some more lip service on oil and the price of gas. He has a four point energy strategy. Unfortunately it will do little good for any of us over the summer. When was the last time Congress did anything fast? The Seattle Times does a good job explaining this.

(Seattle Times)"This is a long-lead-time business ... " said Daniel Yergin, chairman of the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "There's no switch to pull."

Which I find funny since the lead time when the oil price goes up seems to be only days before we see it at the pump. I wouldn't have a problem with the price of gas going up if Exxon wasn't turning a $36 billion profit. Maybe if when oil companies said that there was a shortage in oil because of plant shutdowns, they followed it by posting a profit that was less than the same quarter a year ago.

(AP/Yahoo)BP, the world's second-largest oil company by market capitalization, posted a first-quarter net profit of $5.6 billion, down from $6.6 billion a year earlier.

You say it's still $5.6 billion, or $22.4 billion over a year, and it's not like it's pennies. Nobody wants to stop a company from being profitable, but when the numbers don't match the words, it is hard to swallow. If you tell me that supplies and refineries are down, fine, but don't post record profits after telling me that. Also, if you are going to tell me that supplies are down, they better be down. And not because someone planned wrong.

(CNN)Oil prices rose Wednesday after a government report revealed a bigger-than-expected increase in crude stockpiles but a bigger-than-expected drop in inventories of gasoline and distillates used for heating oil.

Anyways, just thought I would remind people of what was going on before wagging of the oil dog began. NSA spying, Valerie Plame leak, immigration, making the tax cuts permanent, a womans right to chose in S.D. and this little skirmish in Iraq. Good times in America!