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Published: March 19 2012

Buzz Fleischman - Columnist Page. Our topic today is of vital importance to anyone who has filled their tank with gas.

I don't want to say that some elected officials in Washington revere the oil lobby for its bucks, but if the oil lobby were the Pope, then they'd only have to kiss its ring! Big oil would probably keep that ring in their back pocket. Big oil; that's BO and just as smelly!

Lately, prices at the pump have escalated faster than a commitment to form another committee to study it.

In the past few years the gas companies experienced unprecedented profits on the backs of working America. Their profits have risen faster than the blood pressure of a network censor at '30 Rock' with Tracy Jordan at the microphone.

Throttle back you fat cats, because you're starting to look like next year's budget deficit; phony and inflated.

Anything you say to justify the prices we pay will be more self-serving than a political promise. The only time the oil cartel holds back supply is when the price inches down below $75 a barrel; and that's only because the greed is spread out among the oil ministers and sheiks who have too many palaces to maintain. Talk about ostentatious; there is probably more marble in the head sheiks bathroom than there is in all the quarries in Italy. In other words, they've got more money than I've got metaphors!

We can pump more gas per day from existing American sources than a billion campfire scenes in Blazing Saddles and we can be energy independent if Detroit will continue to produce quality 'gas stingy' vehicles.

One thing I never understood is that if it takes so much time to pump the oil from the ground, move it to a processing facility, send it in a pipe line to a port, load it onto a ship, cruise across the ocean, transfer it to a refinery, refine it, truck it to a distributor and store it until it gets delivered to your gas station, then why, whenever there's a perceived threat to the oil supply and we hear it on the news, we can go to the window see an attendant run out and raise the price at the pump. Hello; that's not the gas in the pipeline; it's more like the gas pipe they're giving us.

But let the price of a barrel of Saudi light crude go down due to market pressure and we may have to wait weeks to see a drop of a tenth of a cent. Let's figure out this supply and demand thing.

The Middle East has a lot of oil. More than they can use in the next 500 years. They've got to sell it. How else will they make a living? Unless they develop a world market for sand, they're at the world's mercy!

Let's see, what do they need, that we can supply, that they can't get anywhere else. How about this; we continue to protect you from every bad guy on the planet and you make our gas pipe a little more user friendly.

We've got sources we haven't even tapped yet and I'll bet that by the time our own personal supply is used up, El Nino, La Nina and all the rest of the changing weather patterns will leave us with all the sunshine we need which we will harness and convert into energy to sell to you when those wells run dry.

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