Hotels in the Washington D.C. area, even ones pretty far out of the city, are charging incredibly high rates for the Obama inauguration. Rooms are going for anywhere in the hundreds of dollars (in the really "cheap" hotels) to the thousands in others.

Now, Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic buddies have a history of arbitrarily deciding that certain profits are "windfall profits" that are just "too high" and therefore need to be taxed more. Not to mention their long-standing war against so-called "price gouging" by gas stations and grocery stores (a war that I've rejected as economically ignorant).

So Where are they now? If oil profits are "windfall profits," why don't we hear the Democrats whine about the hotels that are hosting their constituents for such high prices? What happened to their opposition to "price gouging?"

I have a theory. Right now, poor or average Obama supporters simply cannot make it to DC for the inauguration. Paying hundreds for transportation and thousands in hotel costs is simply too much for them. Therefore, they don't even try to make it to DC. But if these high prices had been legally forced down, many more Obama supporters - possibly millions more - would be competing for the available hotel rooms priced so low. This would mean that the hundreds of Democratic legislators and thousands of Democratic operatives and staffers, who are either coming from out of town to witness the inauguration or are having friends and family guests coming in, would have an extremely hard time finding rooms and would probably lose out to the sheer masses that will have secured the rooms early on. High prices, however, ensure that the wealthy can get rooms - and Democratic leaders and their friends don't want to mess with that.

Of course, as I've explained before, what is questionably referred to as "price gouging" is not only economically good, but also necessary. So I wouldn't want the the hotels to be regulated. But it is certainly interesting to watch the Democrats turn a blind eye to their "principles" when those would negatively impact them or their buddies.