“Gasoline prices hit $3 as refiners strain”:

U.S. gasoline prices shot above $3.00 per gallon on Friday, within striking distance of record highs, as the creaking domestic refinery system strained to keep up with rising demand.

Average retail gasoline prices in the world’s top consumer reached $3.012 a gallon, the AAA travel group said, up more than 30 cents since early April and near the record of $3.057 hit after hurricanes slammed Gulf Coast oil installations in 2005.

This year, companies struggling to retool refineries to meet new environmental standards, have faced longer, more extensive maintenance and serious outages, draining gasoline inventories ahead of peak summer demand.

U.S gasoline stocks have dropped by 15 percent in three months, with refineries now running at around 88 percent of capacity, well below the 92 percent analysts say is normal this time of year to build up summer gasoline stocks.

“By this point in the season, nationwide gasoline inventories should be building, or at a minimum plateauing,” Stephen Schork of the Schork Group said in a report.

From Wikipedia:

In the United States, there is strong pressure to prevent the development of new refineries, and no major refinery has been built in the country since Marathon’s Garyville, Louisiana facility in 1976. However, many existing refineries have been expanded during that time. Environmental restrictions and pressure to prevent construction of new refineries may have also contributed to rising fuel prices in the United States^{[citation needed]}. Additionally, many refineries (over 100 since the 1980s) have closed due to obsolescence and/or merger activity within the industry itself. This activity has been reported to Congress and in specialized studies not widely publicised. [Emphasis mine]

I really don’t need to elaborate here. Build some more frickin’ refineries. Let’s start drilling in the ANWR tundra, which is already set aside for drilling, while we’re at it.

Oh yeah, and hat tip to Drudge.

Charles Krauthammer’s latest article on the ongoing war in the Middle East responds to the recent allegations of ex-CIA director George Tenet: that those darned neocons swindled Tenet, the entirety of Central Intelligence, conservatives, liberals, old and young alike.  Krauthammer offers a good refresher on just how broad-based the support for invasion of Iraq was in 2003:

Tenet is not the only one to assume a generalized amnesia about the recent past. One of the major myths (or, more accurately, conspiracy theories) about the Iraq war — that it was foisted upon an unsuspecting country by a small band of neoconservatives — also lives blissfully detached from history.

The decision to go to war was made by a war cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Nor could the most important non-American supporter of the war to this day — Tony Blair, father of new Labor.

The most powerful case for the war was made at the 2004 Republican convention by John McCain in a speech that was resolutely “realist.” On the Democratic side, every presidential candidate running today who was in the Senate when the motion to authorize the use of force came up — Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd– voted yes.

Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard but — to select almost randomly — the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum — from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan. And the most influential tome on behalf of war was written not by any conservative, let alone neoconservative, but by Kenneth Pollack, Clinton’s top Near East official on the National Security Council. The title: “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.”

Maybe Tenet and all of his Democratic buddies running for President can resurface from their temporary amnesia and start to look forward in Iraq, not backwards.  By the way, looking forward does not mean legislating defeat.