sharkair.... just a little heads up on the venenzuela deal....they have no sway on opec....most of their oil production is domestic.... in the last 20 years their socialst government has been very deliberate about keeping forign intrests out of their country.....in the late 90's a large large amount of oil was discovered there.....basically they got lucky......just the kinda lucky we could be if enviromentalist would stop freaking out about the baby seals in alaska and let us explore there...... weve been drilling in the gulf of mexico for years and had little if no impact on the ecosystem.....we could easily do the same in alaska and off the coast of california......so whats it gonna be??? i 1 in 1000 chance that we acidently kill a few baby seals, or we all lose our jobs......personally ive done enough hunting in my life to really not think tiwice about that choice.....guess its all about priorities


PS... if you think that the president of the united states lines his own pockets with the high price of oil you really need to do some research outside of what you read on the internet...... to directly answer and respond to the previous comment by papacharlie....... papa your right on....when bush took office oil was cheaper.....the main reason that it was cheaper is that the worlds largest consumer of oil (the united states) had a large domestic surplus of oil.....thus driving the world market for oil down..... this surplus of oil came from the clinton administration.... clinton sold off much of the united states strategic reserve of oil off to the civilian market...thus flooding the market and making oil cheaper to the consumer.....if your not an economist this sounds like a great idea.....sell the oil gas price goes down...everyone is happy.....but in reality this is a poor selfish decision because the government and the military must have a strategic stockpile of oil for national security reasons.....now we have to buy all that oil back at a higher price per barell which = even more unessacary government spending and debt= poor economy