Politics and Oil

I watched a lively debate on CSpan the other day regarding a bill in the House of Representatives that would place 70 million barrels of light, sweet crude oil on the market for purchase from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and replace it over the next little bit with heavy crude oil. The rallying cry of the supporters and authors of the bill are relief from high oil prices, putting the fear of god into speculators and scaring them out of the market, and to diversify the types of oil in the petroleum reserve to augment its effectiveness towards its intended goals.
First off, It is proven that every time in the tenure of the last three presidents that when the strategic petroleum reserve is tapped, oil has a precipitous drop in price, and that price drop sustains for a good length of time. This would be a great way to provide a short-term fix for oil prices, and to allow us a little time to hammer out details to a more long term solution. I think that this is a more than acceptable compromise to the entrenched positions of both Democrats and Republicans.
Secondly, scaring the speculators out of the market is a debatable position. But it's worth a try. It goes back to the things in my last paragraph. I would venture to say that this pattern has its roots in the behavior of oil speculators, a money hungry group of people that never take possession of the oil that they are trading.
Lastly, the argument was made that the United States leads the world in technology on many fronts, one of which is refining oil, and in particular, heavy crude. In fact, to maintain refinery output, a certain amount of heavy oil should be in the reserve. Almost all of it is light, sweet crude. Besides, with today's technology, we can refine heavy oil as easily or almost as easily as light crude.