Chicago Daily Observer

Perfectly reasonable people can’t be blamed if they suspect that Big Oil is jazzing gasoline prices.

Gasoline inventories are reportedly at a 15-year high, which, according to the laws of supply and demand, should mean that prices ought to be sinking. Instead, the national average retail price of regular gasoline has risen to a record $3.29 a gallon, which is 23 percent higher than last year, the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report said last week.

On an anecdotal level, it’s hard to imagine that someone isn’t taking advantage of the situation when, as I saw on the Indiana Toll Road last week, one oasis was selling regular grade gas for $3.70 a gallon when other stations along the highway were selling it for a more modest (?!) $3.35.

And so, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming last week called top oil company executives to account. ... Read More...

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum” (translation: “Speak no ill of the dead“).

During the contested Republican mayoral primary of 1931, the incumbent
mayor, the Honorable William Hale Thompson, Jr., was opposed by two candidates.
Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the powerful publisher of The Chicago Tribune was
a determined opponent of Thompson’s re-nomination bid. In a startling
display of bravado, a Thompson operative happened to liberate a draft copy of the
mayor’s obituary from the Tribune files. The mayor reproduced the text of the
obituary and made McCormick into a laughingstock in the process.

Thompson had undergone an emergency appendectomy during the previous autumn
and the paper had prepared an obituary. It is not an uncommon journalistic
practice to prepare obituaries in advance of a noteworthy person’s death. The
summaries are largely biographical ... Read More...