Oil moved past $90 per barrel for the first time overnight, while results from Dow Jones industrial average components showed lacklustre performance and guess what? People sold! And then they bought Google! And the housing market still stinks no matter how many advertisements realty companies air saying it's great. And Bush wants to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, but Israel will probably do it first. And education is still failing. And sports figures still get paid too much. And I still can't afford a happy pill so I can be like Green Valley people.

Have a happy weekend! Zounds Out for the day.

A barrel of crude oil hit a new all-time high of $85.92, the energy sector now up 0.9 percent, while the Dow is sinking like an anchor.

What I wonder is how much the billions of dollars donated by the Federal Reserve to "poor" companies like Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, etc., which resulted in a devaluation of the dollar and saving the big boys while smaller mortgage companies folded and lost jobs, have contributed to the rise in oil prices.

We are under assault by a few corporations bent on world domination--there are only approximately eight oil companies really pumping and buying the oil, four or five pharmaceutical companies, four of five major financial institutions, four or five communication companies, the U.S. Supreme Court has recently struck down a long standing anti-trust ruling precedent, our politicians stuff their pockets with kickbacks and bribes, and the general population watches American Idol, Entertainment Tonight, and ESPN. Compare the fall of the Roman Empire concurrent with Colliseum events and the hiring of mercenaries to hold the empire together and the correlations with our own society are eerie and depressing.

Of course we have been hearing for weeks about the escapades of valued Democratic fund raiser and friend, Norman Hsu, who managed to raise some 850,000 dollars for Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign only to have it come out that Norman has been running Ponzi schemes for years and has apparently bilked investors out of several millions of dollars.

Now comes Ray Hunt, friend of the Bush family, advisor to the President, contributor to the George W. Bush Library, and owner of Hunt Oil to poison relations within Iraq.

Hunt Oil announced this month that, after secret negotiations, it had struck a deal with leaders in the country's Kurdish-controlled north to explore for oil in the Dahuk region near the Turkish border. News of the deal angered Iraqi Arab leaders, who saw it as a Kurdish power play for the country's oil resources, one that appeared to disrupt already fragile talks over a critical benchmark for peace: an agreement among the Sunni, Shiites and Kurds to share profits.

Bloomberg reports the U.S. Senate passed legislation that would overhaul car fuel economy standards for the first time in more than two decades and quadruple use of alternative fuels.

The energy bill, approved 65 to 27 last night, would force automakers to build cars that average 35 miles a gallon by model year 2020, a 40 percent increase in fuel efficiency. The measure also responds to President George W. Bush's call to boost the use of alternative fuels by requiring 36 billion gallons of ethanol and other so-called biofuels by 2022.

Automakers, including General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp., have tried to block the mileage requirements, sparring with environmental groups that favor them. Tom LaSorda, head of the U.S. operations of DaimlerChrysler AG, has said a standard of 35 miles per gallon will ``cripple our business.''
WHY?

The record gasoline prices and concerns about national security and global warming have led to increasing calls to reduce U.S. petroleum consumption. Still, Democrats failed yesterday on key pieces of their legislative effort, including the package that would have subsidized renewable energy with increased taxes on the oil industry.
Which would be passed on to the consumers so it certainly won't hurt oil companies. Might as well tax us directly instead of making us believe Congress is taking on big oil.

Posted on kxmb.com, a North Dakota CBS affiliate:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said on Monday that his party's energy bill will cut demand for gas and help lower prices at the pump.

"Our bill will save American consumers tens of billions of dollars annually, cut our oil consumption by more than four million barrels per day and reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources right away. And by the way, we might just save the planet while we're at it," Reid told reporters Monday. The Democrat from Nevada discussed the Senate Democrats' energy legislation during a speech at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank.

And how are they going to do it? By telling you what kind of cars you can drive and what fuels you can use, of course.

Reid said the Democrats' plan calls for new cars and trucks to get 35 miles per gallon by the year 2020. To cut down on imported oil, the proposal also requires an increase in the production of ethanol and other renewable fuels used by vehicles in the United States.

There are some problems with this, however, not the least of which is the idea of the government telling us what kind of vehicles we can drive. With pickups and SUV's flying off car lots while hybrid sales disappoint, it's pretty clear that not all or even most Americans want to cram themselves, their families and their belongings into a Prius. And as long as Americans are willing to buy these less efficient vehicles and pay the larger fuel bills, who are Harry Reid and his Democrats to tell them they can't?

And how is requiring the use of more alternative fuels going to save Americans "tens of billions of dollars?" Even the most wildly available gasoline alternative, E85, is still remarkably more expensive than gasoline - even when gasoline is some $0.60/gallon higher in price - due to the fact that it reduces your vehicles miles per gallon. Something that doesn't even take into account the billions of dollars in subsidies your tax dollars are spent on to prop up the ethanol industry. (North Dakota apparently has a hefty subsidy to reduce the price of E85. Also consider that it is highly inefficient to make ethanol. I believe it takes the energy of nearly 0.9 gallon of ethanol to make 1 gallon of ethanol.)

You know what the real solution to the energy situation is? For the government to butt out. Stop subsidizing all types of energy (be it alternative energy, fossil fuel energy or otherwise) and outside of facilitating greater expansion of energy production and research simply let the market choose what fuels we use in the future. When gasoline gets expensive enough, Americans will look for alternatives. And the alternative the most of them choose will undoubtedly be the one that works best in our market

But this apparently makes far too much sense for meddling liberals, who aren't happy unless they're telling the rest of us how to live our lives

Just for the record, the first time I tried ethanol my fuel mileage dropped 15 percent for a fuel with only 10 percent ethanol added. That has to make the oil companies happy--use ethanol and use more regular fuel to boot. I also have to wonder, if the fuel is less efficient, isn't less work getting done, which means more waste? But the oil companies and farmers are profiting at our expense for a subsidized energy source of questionable value.