A Good Year for the Outlaw

Here we go again. Highest gas prices in the country are in Chicago.
Illinois’ state average are at the top. Weirdest thing?
Folks in the Quad Cities can get gas for $2.11 on one side of the river (in Davenport) and can SEE signs that say “$2.49″ on the other side of the river (the Illinois [...]

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Hey, big congrats (snark) to Exxon Mobil for surpassing Wal Mart atop the Fortune 500 this year.
Scariest fact of all? Exxon Mobil’s PROFITS of 45.2 billion dollars would place them around 150 on the list of REVENUES. Sickening. Absolutely sickening.
Oh, by the way, Number 2 on the “profits” list? Chevron, at 23.93 billion dollars. [...]

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Ready for gas prices to spike for no apparent, and certainly no good reason? At the same time this morning, gas was being reported at $1.88 per gallon of unleaded in Decatur, but just a few miles up the road in LeRoy, it spiked to $2.28 after being $1.99 the night before.
First of all, [...]

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Hmm. Gas has jumped anywhere from 20-30 cents in the last week or two, but I see no reason for it.
Just because it isn’t four bucks a gallon doesn’t mean they still aren’t ripping us off.
Oh, and when did the “normal” price jump become 10 cents per gallon? What happened to a couple [...]

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Gas prices have come down drastically since late summer/early fall. Good. Are they were they should be yet? No. But $2.19 or so is a helluva lot better than $4.19.
While thinking about it this morning, though, I tried to think of how things have changed to make prices come down so much.
Must be [...]

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Area gas prices I’ve seen today: $2.19 in Bartonville. $2.25 all over Peoria. $2.34 in Canton. $2.33 in Chillicothe.
Gas price in Kewanee? $2.68.
Somebody needs to go to jail. Robbery is a crime.

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Many folks have purchased “flex fuel” vehicles in recent years, so they could use E85 – a viable alternative to regular or E10 fuel. The beauty in E85 is that it is always sold…or at least ALMOST always…cheaper than other fuels.
But to be really effective, E85 needs to be 20% or more less than [...]

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As of 1:40 PM on Friday, gas shot up 40 cents per gallon in DeKalb to $4.19, and as of 2:20 PM, two stations in Willisville, IL (west of Carbondale) just went up to $4.30. All because of another hurricane threatening, perhaps?
Well, maybe not…Texas gas prices have FALLEN today by a penny or two [...]

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Let me first state I think Phil Luciano is a great columnist, and I am always entertained by his writing style, and “get it” when it comes to Phil’s sense of humor. He’s damn good at what he does in the paper.  But I take, shall we say, significant umbrage at yesterday’s baloney-filled column about speeding [...]

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I remember a time a decade or two ago where “convenience stores” were willing to mark their gas prices as low as they could to still make a minimal profit (2 or 3 cents per gallon was all my grandfather profited towards the end of his run as a store owner in the early 80’s), and then [...]

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I was stunned with delight this week when CNN asked the question, “Which candidate’s plan regarding removing the gas tax for the summer months is the best?” 
Of course, John McCain has pandered to his base by suggesting a simple removal of the Federal Gas Tax for the summer. Hillary Clinton’s idea (which, if I’m not mistaken, [...]

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Friday, 9pm, March 7th. Gas in Kewanee and Peoria: $3.29 per gallon. A Shell station in Pekin is at $3.30. See the high (and low, for that matter) prices here.
I just got gas in the Quad Cities. It was $2.99. Yet 35 miles away in Kewanee it’s $3.29. In Bloomington right now, it’s $3.07, but Peoria [...]

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Gas was $2.95 per gallon at noon yesterday (87 octane unleaded, in Canton). It was $3.19 five hours later.
What the hell?!?!?!
A 25 cent per gallon increase…what is the given excuse this time? The explosion at a refinery? A refinery that, btw, produces 70,000 barrels per day?
70,000 barrels per day. How big is that? Well, a [...]

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I am still a tad miffed about the whole “booming economy” discussion a couple of weeks back on Billy’s Blog, on a post originally written by Anon E. Mouse.
While visiting Iowa and my kid this weekend, I grabbed a couple of local papers (Waterloo Courier/Dubuque Telegraph-Herald) while traveling. Saturday’s Courier reported that Iowa’s poverty level is [...]

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Here in Kewanee, we’ve just lost our “Murphy USA” gas station, located, like all Murphy stores, on Wal Mart property. At first, I thought it may have been a failure for Wal Mart, which would bring great joy to most of the world. But it turns out that Murphy, starting in May, has begun purchasing the [...]

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Billy, Billy, Billy – are you trying to say you educated me?  First of all, if you think for one second the price will go down when they open up new oil fields, your world is more Pollyannaish than mine!
And since my car has an onboard computer to tell me my gas mileage, along with [...]

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Between seeing “$3.12″ per gallon of unleaded and seeing heating bills this past winter, it’s obvious that “gas” of any kind is not cheap anymore. This, of course, despite record profits for the greedy friends-of-Bush in the oil industry.
So one of my employees had an idea this morning…from now on, every time he’s in a [...]

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