More on spot shortages

We were out again today driving and found that all of the stations we passed had no 95 octane. And half of the stations had no gas at all. Some of the stations had only 80 octane and it sold for a few cents less than 95. That stuff they run in the older Soviet era cars. I think you got to strain it to use it. (Must come right out of the crude oil barrel and someone spits in it for body. Or something. You can smell the cars that use it.)

The natural inclination is for people to say, "There were no shortages under Yanukovich." Yanukovich's regime had price controls too but Russia and Russian producers were only too happy to keep it going to please the Kremlin who backed Yanukovych. So the piper would eventually have had to be paid under his regime. But that may not be how the citizenry think about it. To them, there wasn't under Yanuklovych and now there is under Yuschenko.

The opposition is so weak that they probably won't take advantage of this golden opportunity to score points. But the administration is giving them a lot of ammunition to use if they could.