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The conflicts that are erupting in the Middle East are being blamed for the rising costs of gas at the pumps — notably the biggest two-week jump ever. Republicans are on the warpath to find anything to attack President Obama with, so now they are pulling out their dusty 2008 playbook tactic of crying to America that we need to “Drill, Baby Drill,” as if that could solve anything. They are so deep into the pockets of big oil that the only solution they can come up with is a meaningless slogan that does nothing to solve our energy problem. On MSNBC earlier today, Republican talking head Doug Heye, who used to be at the RNC and was involved in their damage control over Stripper Gate, used that tactic along with their age-old assault on the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to try and spin what’s happening. To me this signals new attacks to try to open up the ANWR region to oil drilling, a fight they’ve been losing for years and which is inconsequential in the great oil debate. But reality doesn’t really matter to them anyway. Contessa Brewer was the host and Heye’s opening shot was both revealing and typically stupid. Brewer: We’re talking about production shutting gown there, how can you blame the president for that? Heye: I think the blame goes back 30 years — goes back longer than we are in talking about getting off foreign oil, but we know what we need. We need to drill. We need to explore. You look at what we see in the Gulf right now, it’s not really a moratorium right now, it’s an Obamatorium because we’re not allowed to go in and press for new oil. We’ve been talking about this for so long and if you keep talking about doing something and don’t do it. Nothing gets done. I remember In 2003, I was in ANWR. Democrats said we couldn’t explore for oil in ANWR because it wouldn’t be ready by 2011. Yes, Heye, Jimmy Carter approached the subject about getting off of oil, but was rebuked by the Republican Party and everyone else who was on the Big Oil dole. Everyone knows ANWR doesn’t have enough oil to do anything except upset progressives. When oil prices rose to 5 dollars a gallon under George Bush, there wasn’t an outbreak of revolution throughout the Middle East, so why was there an incredible rise in price back then? John McCain and Sarah Palin shouted “Drill, Baby Drill,” but that had nothing to do with gas prices. Oil speculators, on the other hand, did — and it’s happening again. Jamie Court: Speculators & Oil Cos Are To Blame For Gas Prices, Not The Middle East While skirmishes in Libya and uncertainty in the Middle East are nice cover for outrageous gasoline prices, the fact is the same old suspects are making a killing from sky-high gas prices approaching $4 dollars per gallon in California: big oil companies and greedy speculators. The speculative market may have driven crude oil prices up, but that’s not the price oil companies pay for the crude oil that goes into our gasoline. America’s big oil companies use crude oil that they have harvested from the ground or bought much cheaper on long term contracts to refine into gasoline. You’ll see the results in next quarter’s profit statements: big profits from both crude oil sales and refineries that make gasoline, what’s called “upstream’ and “downstream” operations in profit reports. Consumer Watchdog has for years both tried to curb the opaqueness of the volatile speculative market for oil and to regulate supplies at gasoline refineries because oil companies game both systems, creating artificial shortages in the markets to jack up prices or exploiting historical events to justify obscene profits. Today’s sky high gasoline prices are the result of oil companies shutting down refineries and playing the speculative markets for big gains… read on Will the GOP use ANWR as a bargaining chip to try and get President Obama to make a deal with them as the year progresses? Americans get angry when gas prices rise, and it would be helpful if the administration called out Big Oil and Wall Street instead of letting Republicans once again win the war of words.