Gas

We're up to $2.95/gal at the cheapest stations out here in Santa Monica. About a $0.20 jump from the weekend. I know that pales in comparison to some of the reports in the Southeast, reports of closures, $6/gallon prices, et al.

This is the part where a leader would call for price caps. Or conservation, at the very least. Over the past year, the oil companies literally have acquired so much cash they don't know what to do with it. That's not hyperbole, read this:

Exxon's soon-to-retire CEO suddenly has a new anxiety: how to spend the windfall wrought by $55-a-barrel oil. By the end of April, Exxon will have a cash hoard of more than $ 25 billion. And if crude prices stay where they are, this geometrically growing bonanza could soon give Exxon more cash on hand than any other U.S. company...the cash is building at a remarkable rate. Each dollar jump in the price of a barrel of oil adds another half billion in earnings. Based on current prices, Exxon is accumulating more than $1 billion a month - even after allocating for dividends, share repurchases, and capital spending. If oil simply stays where it is now, Exxon's cash could approach $40 billion in 12 months. By then [Exxon's CEO] is expected to have handed off the top job--and the headache of what to do with all that cash.

The only thing the President has done (and I'm not even talking about the incompetence and slow response on the ground) is to suspend environmental regulations to increase productivity. He's actually responding to an environmental disaster by increasing pollution.

We live in a parallel universe.

UPDATE: First Presidential mention of conservation at the press event with Dubya's dad and Clinton. The governor of North Carolina was on this a day ago.