Political Quotes

“it is time for the Bush administration to end its campaign of inaction on gasoline price hikes. Tomorrow, OPEC will vote on whether there should be additional production cuts, and this very morning, the Saudi oil minister said OPEC should go ahead with its scheduled production cut in the month of April. If they do, that is going to take 1 million barrels of oil off the market per day, when U.S. private oil supplies are already millions of barrels low and when U.S. gasoline prices are at record highs. Folks on the west coast of the United States are getting clobbered by these gasoline price hikes. People in California pay considerably more than $2 a gallon. Folks in my home State of Oregon are close behind, paying an average of more than $1.80 in some of our towns. There is a perfect storm coming with respect to these gasoline price hikes. The combination of the Bush administration filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at the wrong time, the fact we have these refinery cutbacks on the west coast that seem as much to boost profit as anything else, the Federal Trade Commission turning a blind eye to anticompetitive profits, and the shenanigans of OPEC are the factors that are coming together to create what I think could be a perfect storm with gasoline prices of $3 a gallon.”