Here are a few of the things oil companies aren't bragging about in the massive "It's not our fault" advertising blitz they're running that includes full-page ads in the nation's major newspapers:

The industry is not touting its decision to use some of its vast windfall profits to help the poor heat their homes. It opposes the idea, which was proposed by Sen. Charles Grassley, a conservative Republican.

The industry is not talking about the low-interest loans it is willing to make to help underwrite consumer purchases of new, fuel-efficient vehicles and furnaces.

It is not talking about its investment in public transportation.

Oil companies are making profits of 40, 50 and 60 percent, yet they are fighting attempts to end needless tax breaks that cost taxpayers billions each year and add to the nation's debt. The companies are rolling in cash. They had a combined profit of more than $155 billion last year, according to the Congressional Research Service. The companies don't need taxpayer subsidies to search for oil and investigate alternative sources of energy.

Oil prices hit a record high of $126.40 per barrel last week before falling slightly when the value of the vastly shrunken dollar bumped up slightly. The weak dollar gets some of the blame for high prices at the pump. So does speculation by hedge funds and other investors. But, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out Monday in The New York Times, speculators are only a minor factor in a run-up that has seen the price of oil increase five-fold since 2003.

Speculative bubbles inflate and burst. That's not what's going on with oil. It is more expensive and will continue to become so unless demand drops precipitously. The remaining supply is harder to get out of the ground and many more people - namely major players like India and China - want oil and can afford buy it even if it goes to what some analysts say will be $200 per barrel by year's end.

The cycle is likely to worsen. The more money people spend to drive to work and to heat their homes, the less they have to spend on all the other things that keep an economy humming.

To complicate matters, the higher the price of oil, and the more certain the increase in future demand and prices, the less incentive oil-producing nations have to pump more of it. Oil is, after all, a finite resource, and many oil-producing countries fear they'll go broke when they run out.

The ad campaign trumpets the oil industry's quest for cleaner, greener energy and the massive investments companies must make to find and extract oil. The companies designed the ads to pacify the public enough to protect their subsidies and prevent the imposition of a windfall profits tax like the one enacted a generation go.

A windfall profits tax - especially one whose revenue would be used to subsidize conservation efforts, alternative energy research, public transportation and the like - sounds good. But it would almost certainly lead to even higher prices and penalize companies for doing what they're supposed to do, make as much money for their owners as they honestly can.

The subsidies are a different story. They must go, and the sooner the better. And the money taxpayers now spend on them should be used to do all the good things the oil companies aren't bragging about in their ads.