Hi, I'm new to the forums.

I just can't get over how Cheney and Bush have both come from Oil-friendly interests and now we're in the mess we face. I'm from Texas, and I knew that G.W.B. was a governor that was keeping his head down and being "groomed" for the presidency. I also knew that Halliburton was super-powerful in Texas politics.

What boggles me is that, when it comes to Bush, he seems like a nice guy but Cheney seems to be in control of the "back office," so to speak. Looking back, I can think of lots of times when it seems like G.W.B. got played; probably by Cheney, or maybe with him and G.H.W.B. in concert.

On an aside, I had someone tell me that Halliburton didn't benefit much from Iraq because their stocks didn't move all that much. When I looked -- and this was a couple of years ago -- I noted that the share price of their common stock was not hugely different; but the stock had split 2-for1 something like Five times. This is a five times exponential increase, not just an extra five shares. You know, like bacteria multiplying. What a coincidence.

And I'm a lifelong Republican, and I've been in my own business for over 20 years!

Anyway, now we're faced with the government holding hearings on speculators, etc., and it seems like a red herring because we can control speculation in the U.S., but we can't do that overseas. All we can do is tie our own hands. After all, O&G is a global commodity.

Our country now provides enough output to not have to worry about our military's fuel reserves. Warfare doesn't require so much fuel nowadays, anyway. So what our government should do is, with their ability to control large spot quantities of oil and gas, they should act like "market specialists" and simply start selling large contracts on the short side to drive down the attractiveness of speculation. Or in other words, sell cheap on the bid side at crucial times and dates.

If we're going to run as a free market economy, it's incumbent upon our government to behave as part of that system. This strategy could really help empower the government for controlling inflation in many levels of life. It would be a leavening effect, I guess you could say, because they could cap peaks and minimize troughs in the economy, on many levels -- like corn, for example.

Does that make sense, or am I the only idiot that thinks so?