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White House: No quick fix for oil - USA Today (3/11/08):

The White House says that soaring oil prices are “not going to be solved overnight” and that “it would be wrong” of President Bush to promise otherwise.

[Dana Perino] said that the White House is concerned about the impact on consumers and small businesses. But she said, “It would be wrong of the president to provide false hope to people to think that we are going to be able to have an immediate impact to reduce gas prices. This is something that we’re all going to have to work through.”

Yeah, we’ll apparently have to “work through” it for a while longer.

I wonder who Perino thinks she’s protecting from “false hope.” Oil prices have done nothing but rise since The President’s Excellent Iraq Adventure, and his administration has at every opportunity stymied research in alternative energy. Hell, they even gave tax breaks to businesses that bought Hummers and pickup trucks for a while. It’s hard to picture anyone looking at this mess and thinking “Bush will save us from further pain at the pump, and he’ll probably do it any day now.”

While I’ve written about energy prices here a number of times, it’s only recently that I’ve been more than peripherally affected. Of course everyone pays when gas prices rise whether they drive or not, through higher prices on just about everything. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the official inflation rate, but there’s plenty of evidence that we’re paying more and more.

However since I bought a car in January (Subaru — the official car of lesbians and 1115 writers), I’ve been watching with closer interest. And when I filled up last week on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, paying $3.65/gallon for regular was a shock, but one quickly topped when I pulled off the freeway back in the Bay and found that my corner station was asking $3.99. With convenience out the window, I went onto one of those sites that track local gas prices and found one a few miles away that was $3.59. And as I was driving there last night, I passed a very empty gas station, obviously caught in some kind of temporal vortex:

(Look Ma, no Photoshop!)

For once, La Perino wasn’t lying.