Beyond the torment it has already caused in the Carribbean and the stress it places on those who are evacuating the Gulf Coast, hurricane Gustav will lead to higher prices at the pumps. That's because the majority of the Gulf of Mexico's oil production is shut down in anticipation of Gustav's force.

Exactly how much production is being shut down? CNNMoney reports that "energy producers have shut in approximately 77% of oil output and 37% of natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico." This is affecting three producers particularly hard -- Royal Dutch Shell PLC (NYSE: RDS.A), BP PLC (NYSE: BP) and Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX).

And the production shut-down is significant -- "nearly 1 million barrels of daily oil production is now shut down. The last time this happened was in November 2005, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In addition, 2.75 billion cubic feet of daily natural gas production is now shut down" according to CNNMoney.

If Barack Obama is receiving advice from "my pal Warren" then he must not be listening. There is no way that Warren Buffett, the national debt hawk, would support Obama's stupid idea of giving another $1,000 back to every family in America. It is reported that he would pay for this by creating a windfall profit tax on oil companies.

This give-away program is an attempt to buy votes plain and simple. It would add to the national debt, discourage oil companies from investing and worse it would handicap American companies more than others and mortgage more of our children's futures.

The last thing the people of the United States need is more deficit spending. If we did tax oil companies, which I am against, I would only support using the funds for expanding education, research and development in science and engineering with the goal of maintaining our waning leadership in technology.

It was a tough day across the board for oil stocks. Falling oil prices and several industry downgrades pushed stocks down hard in today's trading session.

Oil has been falling sharply over the last month since briefly passing over the $80 barrier during the Lebanese / Hezbollah conflict back in July. Today oil continued its downward spiral and currently the precious crude is trading at $67.50 a barrel. There are a lot of reasons why oil has been on the slide lately, but mainly it comes down to supply and demand. Well lately we have seen that the supply / demand picture is not quite as fragile as analyst's had been thinking. Inventories have actually been on the rise lately but I doubt anyone has been expecting to see crude oil sliding down towards the mid $60's so quickly.

Another key reason as to why oil has been falling has been the lack of any major hurricanes this season. Around the middle of the summer all we were hearing about was how this hurricane season was going to be a tough one, and possibly even worse than what we experienced last summer, and that just hasn't turned out to be the case. Not only have we yet to experience any major storms, weather experts have now reversed their opinions and are calling for a very weak season ahead of us. While that is encouraging news for the country, it has hit oil stocks pretty hard. It wasn't too long ago that most stocks were approaching or setting new highs, and now it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under us.