Okay, this is getting really embarrassing. The politicians' response to high gas prices?

1. The President goes to beg the Saudis for more production/lower prices. Saudis tell him to go take a flying f**k at a rolling doughnut.

2. The House passes legislation to allow the Justice Department to sue OPEC. (Passed 324 to 84!) Nuts. "I know, let's sue our oil suppliers! What could possibly go wrong with that plan?" At least the White House is against it.

3. Hillary and McCain propose temporary relief from part of gas taxes for the summer. Would benefit the average person to the tune of about 30 cents a day.

Middle-school essay contest entrants have done much better than the foregoing ideas, which are supposed to be from our best and brightest politicians.

People may call me an elitist snot for this, but I think gas taxes should be higher in the US. Much higher. Maybe an increase of 10 cents per month per gallon, stopping in twenty months when we get to an additional $2.00 per gallon. The money should go for public transportation, alternative energy research, and road and bridge improvements (jobs!). But it would never pass.

In Norway, an oil-rich country, gas prices are the equivalent of almost $10 per gallon. The world leader? In Sierra Leone on May 1, 2008 gas was the equivalent of $18.42 per gallon. Turkey was next at $10.13. In the US, people are already getting rid of SUV's due to high gas prices (the value of used SUV's are plummeting). And people are carpooling more and driving less. All good.

Finally, remember to be skeptical of articles you see claiming that solar-wind-geothermal get absurd subsidies that show those alternatives can never compete with oil. Oil's dirty little "subsidy" secret is the immense amount of money we spend for our military to patrol the Persian Gulf, help keep giant middle-eastern supply depots safe, etc. And although you can't allocate the whole cost of the Iraq war to an oil subsidy, if you are going to do some fair accounting, at least part the war cost should be counted as an oil subsidy.

If our invasion of Iraq had "nothing to with oil" and we invaded only because there was a nutcase dictator who was threatening the US, then we would have had much better reason to invade North Korea. But of course, North Korea isn't sitting on Iraq's oil reserves, so it's strategically less important.

When you throw in a few billion dollars here and a few billion there, it turns out we the taxpayers are massively subsidizing oil, arguably to a much greater degree than ANY alternative energy. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, petroleum-industry lobbyists who rail against subsidies for alternative energy!