If I were voting in either the Indiana or the North Carolina primary I would be voting for Hillary Clinton, just as I did in the California primary but that vote would be cast despite her recent stand on a "gas tax holiday" not because of it.

Senator Clinton's critics have labelled her call for a "gas tax holiday" as pandering of the most obvious sort, her supporters call it a new take on an old idea and insist that it shows she - like her husband - "feels the pain" of the working class.  Yes - unlike Senator McCain - HRC's plan doesn't strip away the much needed funds that gas taxes provide and I have no doubt that she understands the financial burderns of the blue class worker in a way that Senator Obama does not.  Still, as burdensome as $3.61 a gallon gas is to most of the population, high gas prices are the only proven way to decrease demand and a sharp decrease in demand is the much needed first step toward increased U. S. energy independence.

Every night I can lie in my bed and hear high powered cars jack rabbit start and stop between the two stop signs that mark my block.  Every day I can sit on the freeway (that's interstate to you folks in Tennessee) and watch car after car after car speed by at least ten miles over the speed limit and with the driver as the sole occupant.  Granted Los Angeles is a hard city to get around in without a car but there seems to be little true effort to encourage mass transit or even to encourage more cost efficient individual transit.  As long as getting a car is a rite of passage to adulthood and just a plain right as an adult, we will make no inroads toward using less oil.  And I don't care how you feel about drilling in ANWR, whether oil supplies are shrinking or whether oil company profits are obscene, at some time in the forseeable future oil will cease to be easily discovered, easily brought to the surface and therefore even more dear than it currrently is. 

We must begin to seriously develop other means of powering our vehicles and those vehicles must become more energy efficient no matter how they are powered.  A "gas tax holiday" only puts confronting these issues further in the future and we've already done that with enough of our other serious problems.  I support you, Hillary, from now until the convention and beyond but please put your tremendous intellect and proven tenacity into real solutions, not a "gas tax holiday."