Of course Bush is hiding the truth, as usual. He wants us all to believe everything's going to be OK, that we don't have to change our lifestyle, etc. -- we can keep wasting and they'll find more gas somehow.

There was an interesting juxtaposition today in that, when the President was asked about energy, the exchange went (from the transcript):

Q Thanks. Mr. President, what do you say to people who are losing patience with gas prices at $3 a gallon? And how much of a political price do you think you're paying for that right now?
THE PRESIDENT: I've been talking about gas prices ever since they got high, starting with this -- look, I understand gas prices are like a hidden tax. Not a hidden tax, it's a tax -- it's taking money out of people's pockets. I know that. All the more reason for us to diversify away from crude oil. That's not going to happen overnight. We passed law that encouraged consumption through different purchasing habits, like hybrid vehicles

-- you buy a hybrid, you get a tax credit. We've encouraged the spread of ethanol as an alternative to crude oil. We have asked for Congress to pass regulatory relief so we can build more refineries to increase the supply of gasoline, hopefully taking the pressure off of price.

And so the strategy is to recognize that dependency upon crude oil is -- in a global market affects us economically here at home, and therefore, we need to diversify away as quickly as possible.

The response seems to feed to the Saudi position that they have plenty of oil, if only we users would provide the refineries that could use it.

At the same time Darwinian and Totoneila draw attention to the strange case of the Shrinking Refinery. Apparently the BP Refinery at Texas City, which pre-hurricanes had a capacity of 460,000 bd, will no longer produce at more than 300,000 bd.