The Only Game in Town

WASHINGTON -- There is no mystery or manipulation behind the recent fall in gasoline prices, analysts say. Try telling that to many U.S. motorists.

Almost half of all Americans believe the November elections have more influence than market forces. For them, the plunge at the pump is about politics, not economics...

According to a new Gallup poll, 42 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." Fifty-three percent of those surveyed did not believe in this conspiracy theory, while 5 percent said they had no opinion.

Almost two-thirds of those who suspect President Bush intervened to bring down energy prices before Election Day are registered Democrats, according to Gallup.

Tony Snow addressed the issue Monday, telling reporters that "the one thing I have been amused by is the attempt by some people to say that the president has been rigging gas prices, which would give him the kind of magisterial clout unknown to any other human being.

"It also raises the question, if we're dropping gas prices now, why on earth did we raise them to $3.50 before?" Snow said.

I dunno. Maybe it has to do with lining the pockets of your cronies with cash?

...The plunge in prices, Halff said, is the result of growing domestic inventories of fuel, slowing economic growth and toned-down rhetoric between Iran and the United States, which has been critical of Tehran's uranium enrichment program.

At the start of summer, oil analysts were worried about rising demand, the threat of hurricanes and the nuclear standoff between the West and Iran, OPEC's second-largest producer. But by summer's end, these fears had largely dissipated.

On Monday, November crude futures settled at $61.45 a barrel...

That, and most price speculators are Republican, and realize what kind of damage a Democratic Congress might do to their monopoly on energy.

Lowering energy prices, keeping a lid on the interest rate hikes, these are the kind of things designed to take the wind out of the sails of a lot of DINOcrats who don't have the desire to tell the Reptilicans off to their face, because they get their money from pretty much the same sort of corporate donors.

We can't all be a Clinton... okay, so Clinton kept his mouth shut for 6 years about Bu$hCo tactics in the War on Terra, until it became obvious the Bu$hCo minions were looking to scapegoat him for their own failures. Still, he finally seems to be taking a stand whatever his motivations.

We can't all be an Olberman, who's really put himself on the line at MS-GOP opposing the Party line.


Of course, the fact that the drop in energy prices seems to have bankrupted certain hedge funds and created easy pickings for certain private equity groups might have something to do with the phenomenon, too.



Funny how networked these boys are, how well positioned they are to profit on so many fronts when there's a change in the weather.

Of course, they burned Martha Stewart for that, but she left records and didn't own the watchdogs...

Still, some things are just a little too coincidental to be totally unrelated.