ThinkFast: May 9, 2008
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 10th, 2008 4:30 am by HL
ThinkFast: May 9, 2008
As gas and crude oil costs jumped to record highs yesterday, USA Today has released a survey showing that these increasing costs are pushing “Americans to drive less for the first time in nearly three decades, squeezing family budgets and causing major shifts in driving habits.” Seventy-one percent say gas prices are a “financial hardship,” […]
As gas and crude oil costs jumped to record highs yesterday, USA Today has released a survey showing that these increasing costs are pushing “Americans to drive less for the first time in nearly three decades, squeezing family budgets and causing major shifts in driving habits.” Seventy-one percent say gas prices are a “financial hardship,” up from 47 percent in March 2004.
The American Petroleum Institute, Big Oil’s main lobbying group, “has embarked on a multiyear, multimedia, multimillion-dollar campaign” to convince voters that “rising energy prices are not the producers’ fault and that government efforts to punish the industry, especially with higher taxes, would only make pricing problems worse.”
The Senate Democrats unveiled the Consumer-First Energy Act of 2008, a bill to address the root causes of high gas prices. Major oil companies “are getting away with murder” and “gouging” consumers as the price of oil continues to soar, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said.
Two months after “the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan,” the military “has quietly canceled the assignment. General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran, “was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”
“Hezbollah fighters seized control of rival pro-government strongholds in Beirut on Friday as gunbattles rocked the Lebanese capital for a third day, propelling the nation dangerously close to all-out civil war.” Hezbollah has also forced the shutdown of all media forced the shutdown of all media belonging to the family of parliamentary leader Saad Hariri. (more…)
