More lies the GOP told you

[Guns Guns Guns]

The debate about rising gasoline prices is generating a lot of fuzzy math.


Hence the cloud of murky, misleading or downright inaccurate rhetoric flying around nowadays — including claims that gasoline prices are the highest they’ve been since 1918 (they’re not), or that oil prices are at a 150-year peak (ditto).

Gasoline prices have approximately doubled since Barack Obama became president — but they’re still below what they were in the final summer of George W. Bush’s administration.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal jumped feet-first into this misleading statistic Wednesday on “Fox & Friends,” when the Republican governor said the Obama administration has seen the “highest prices for oil and gasoline in 150 years.”


The reality: Gasoline prices are still below the peaks they reached under Bush in June 2008, when the inflation-adjusted monthly average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even at $107 a barrel, crude oil is still well below that summer’s high price of $145 a barrel.

Prices more than doubled under Bush before the financial crash. The summer 2008 peak was 127 percent higher than the inflation-adjusted price of $1.88 a gallon when Bush was inaugurated.

The Bush-era price hikes included double-digit increases for each year from 2003 to 2006, and again in 2008.



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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74120.html#ixzz1pSRPNKT2





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[Guns Guns Guns]

Romney is contradicting basic economic facts on the campaign trail this week.

He has adopted Gingrich’s demagogic strategy of blaming President Obama for rising gas prices.

Romney told Fox News there is “no question” Obama’s policies are responsible for prices at the pump. “He said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views, and he selected three people to help him implement that program. The secretary of energy, the secretary of interior and EPA administrator. And this gas hike trio has been doing the job over the last three-and-a-half years, and gas prices are up.”

Romney repeated those comments at campaign events.

Romney, of course, is pulling a bait-and-switch when he claims Obama stated a goal of raising gas prices.

Obama did say that his cap-and-trade proposal would raise prices of electricity, which Romney conflates with gasoline by collectively lumping them as energy.

But cap-and-trade did not pass.

Romney fails to specify which policies Obama has enacted that have raised the price of petroleum, because there aren’t any.

The only argument Republicans such as Romney and Gingrich can muster is that Obama has rejected some proposals to drill for oil or build pipelines in environmentally precarious locations.

Aggregate domestic oil drilling has actually risen under Obama.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/166912/romney-joins-gas-price-pander