She sips nitro... with Phase 4 heads! 600 horsepower through the wheels! She's meanness set to music and the bitch is born to run!

Forgive me if I'm less than excited that the "Cash For Clunkers" bill passed the House.

The bill awards cash vouchers of $3500-$4500 for those willing to trade in a vehicle rated at an EPA estimated 18 mpg or less for a vehicle rated at a marginally better MPG.

If you can hear my cynicism bleeding through this writing then that would be because I consider this bill poor social engineering if you're trying to get more fuel efficient cars on the road. A better use of these limited federal funds would be to renew now defunct tax credits for the purchase of the most popular Toyota and Honda hybrids.

It seems to me that the environment would be better served by getting more city folks from marginally good MPG cars into excellent MPG hybrids than it would getting rural folks from sucky MPG trucks or SUVs into slightly less sucky MPG trucks or SUVS.

I realize that a big part of the push behind this bill has nothing to do with the environment. The idea is to give the U.S. auto industry a boost by moving some of the surplus sitting on lots as soon as possible. Great.

But if you REALLY wanted to help the U.S. auto industry long term then wouldn't this 4.5 billion be better spent on developing a hybrid or electric car that's affordable (i.e NOT a $40k Chevy Volt?)

Take a loss on the crap sitting on lots at the moment by drastically discounting it and selling it. Then start actually working to position itself for the rest of this century by focusing on inexpensive, environmentally sound cars.

But then I'm just some poor schlub blogging on the internet and not a politician. What do I know?

Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass.

I'm not happy that Barack Obama went on Fox this last weekend.

Who the hell is his audience here? Certainly not the base of the party which is PISSED that he broke the Democratic Fox boycott. Check out Markos' comments today raking Obama over the coals.

Along those lines Hillary Clinton is once again off her nut.

"My opponent, Senator Obama, opposes giving consumers a break from the gas tax," Clinton said at a firehouse. "I understand the American people need some relief," she added, implying that Obama doesn't get it.

Gas tax? Are you fucking kidding me?

The biggest reason progressives like myself think McCain's cut the gas tax idea is stupid is that there's absolutely no guarantee that will transfer to a price cut at the pump. The current tax is 18.4 cents/ gallon. Does anyone really believe that cutting that temporarily will mean the price of gas will drop accordingly?

Gas companies will drop the cost of gas by a couple of cents and pocket the difference. And the deficit will grow...

Hillary/ Barack please, I'm begging you - STOP PANDERING TO THE GODDAMNED RIGHT WING FRINGE OF THE COUNTRY!

The dead-enders that make up the FOX viewership (Dick Cheney) and the knuckleheads who think cutting the gas tax will really help consumers represent the radical extreme of American politics today. You don't need to suck up to those crazies. They'll never vote for you anyway.

Please bring you respective campaigns back to a focus on actual, red-blooded Americans.

Conservatives don't count.

Update-

Spirula points out in the comments that Shell and BP just posted records profits. Amazing that they can do that with gas taxes as high as they are.

Arkonbey linked to another blogger's take that a federal gas tax holiday sends the wrong signal to consumers and is "tantamount to feeding chocolate bars to a fat kid to make him feel better about his weight." Crass, but true.

We're going to pump YOU up!

As someone who commutes quite a ways to work the subject of gas prices has been something very much on my mind. This weekend I paid about $6.00 more than the week before to fill up my tank. I think that's outrageous. I can't see how the consumer's pain at the pump won't translate into Republican's pain at the ballot box come November. But then I'm not a paid internet columnist like MSNBC's Elizabeth Wilner.

Having never been exposed to MSNBC's First Read I can't really speak to any bias on her part other than what I read in her piece on the politics of gas prices, but that seems to be more than enough to see that she has an axe to grind.

The gas war has begun

President Bush and members of Congress are still making their way back to Washington, but the war over who's to blame for skyrocketing gas prices is already simmering and is expected to reach full-boil status by tomorrow. There's little Bush can do about current high gas prices -- and if Democrats were running part of the government, they would find their hands similarly tied. But they're doing what they can to encourage voters to blame the majority party, and they are increasingly focusing their attacks on Bush's energy policy, the drafting of which, they remind everyone, energy companies were invited to participate in. Republican lawmakers are doing their best to deflect those efforts by taking up the cause of alleged price-gouging themselves and, now, by firing back at Democrats directly.

There is little Bush can do? Come again?

Why not tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and alleviate some of the pressure on supply?

Better yet- why doesn't Bush just get oil company executives on the phone and lay down the law threatening them with a justice department review of their business practices up to, and including, price gouging?

Why not open major diplomatic front on Iran instead of strutting and crowing to alleviate fears in the energy markets?

The questions are obviously rhetorical but the point is Bush's hands are hardly tied when it comes to gas prices.

Wilner then conveniently leaves out the accusations from actual Democrats in her piece about accusations from Democrats but does do a whole paragraph on the Republican response:

The Republican Senate campaign committee issued a detailed release accusing Democrats of trying to change the subject away from a strong US economy by focusing on gas prices. "These are the same Democrats who accomplished nothing in terms of an energy policy during eight years with President Clinton at the helm... These are also the same Democrats who obstructed a bi-partisan comprehensive energy bill for four years in Congress," the release snipes. A Senate GOP aide advises, "We expect Democrats to blame us as all summer... We expect there to be hearings, Democratic calls for 'windfall' taxes on oil company profits, tapping the strategic petroleum reserve, claims of price gouging by the oil companies, VP Cheney’s ties to the oil industry, and other nonsensical theories."

If the Democrats wanted to subscribe to sensical rather than nonsensical theories they'd join Republicans in blaming the oil crisis on the failure to dispossess Alaskan Caribou by drilling for oil that may or may not be there ten years from now.

The Republican Senators are employing an interesting strategy here: list out all the reasons they've failed in leadership on this issue then claim their opponents can't use those reasons because, well, they're Democrats and everybody knows how smelly and wrong THEY are.