Today while driving to a client’s office I noticed a few gas stations the price per gallon has topped $4.00. Unfortunately, the mileage reimbursement rate hasn’t gone up along with gas prices, so those of us traveling for work with our own cars are barely getting our gas covered, let alone the cost of wear and tear on our automobiles.

Later I went to the grocery store  and the store-brand orange juice was almost $6.00 per gallon. Milk was on sale, but it was still over $2.00 per gallon. They had medium eggs on sale for $.79, but they were gone, so I had to buy jumbo eggs for $2.09 a dozen. A 12-pack of Diet Coke was on sale for $5.00, plus the nickel deposit per can. I didn’t even buy meat this time because it was so expensive. The price of everything keeps rising, while wages remain stagnant. We’re middle class, so we aren’t going to starve, but we still feel the squeeze. There’s less money to spend on other things, so we aren’t really doing much to stimulate the economy. I can only imagine how tough things are for lower-income workers.

So, what is President Obama doing? A “don’t blame me” tour. I’ve never seen a president spend so much time trying to avoid blame. Does he do any real work? All he does is travel around the country passing the buck to everyone else. Today he blamed the billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on Solyndra on Congress and the Chinese. Seriously.

Then he claimed that drilling every drop of oil from US soil wouldn’t do a thing about gas prices. He’s blamed his administration’s decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline on Republicans, then lobbied the Senate to kill an amendment which would have green-lighted the project. Now he says he’ll expedite only the southern portion of the pipeline, which was already underway and won’t do anything to speed along the rest of the project.

The White House announcement will have little impact on building the second half of the pipeline, which was scheduled to start in June and designed to ease a distribution bottleneck in Oklahoma’s oil refineries.

Republicans ridiculed Mr. Obama’s action regarding just the southern leg of the pipeline.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, said the approval for the Cushing leg was “so minor and routine that only a desperate administration would inject the president of the United States into the process.”

“This is like the governor holding a press conference to renew my driver’s license, except this announcement still leaves American energy and jobs behind,” he said.

Well, who needs energy when we have scum?

To top things off, on the second anniversary of the signing of Obama’s rotten health care law, I heard back from a trade group on my inquiry into health insurance pricing. I thought their group rate might be better than my husband’s payroll company. (Now that I’m part time with my other employer, our insurance is no longer covered, so we’ve been paying for Cobra.)  I have to look at things a little closer, but the cheapest plan either entity offers is just under $1200 per month for family coverage. Better plans cost as much as $1700 per month. So much for the promise to bring down the cost of health insurance. I guess that’s someone else’s fault, too.