A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): Is Dillard done? Hinting at a hike in gas prices could mean the answer's "yes"

I take it that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Kirk Dillard doesn’t care much about getting votes from anyone who lives anywhere near the borders Illinois shares with Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri or Kentucky.

DILLARD: Higher gas prices?!?

Why else would he suggest implementing a second state tax on gasoline to try to raise money for road maintenance? Particularly as an alternative to more gambling opportunities?

DILLARD WAS AMONG the gubernatorial dreamers who attended Conservative Summit Conference held in Burr Ridge this weekend. It was the chance for the GOP candidates to reach out to the ideologically-inclined amongst the electorate; and it worked because the group backed his campaign over that of challenger William Brady.

That was because the state senator from Hinsdale and chief of staff to former Gov. Jim Edgar (whom he felt the need to point out he’s more conservative than) took his stance – amongst many – according to the Illinois Review website that actually covered the event.

He tried to portray it as a view against gambling. He hinted he’d like to scale back the number of casinos and other gambling opportunities – rather than be pushing for a measure to expand the number of casinos. That may get the backing of the moralists who want to rant about people losing their souls (and money) at the casinos.

But I can’t think of any combination of stances that would kill his campaign chances than these two. Paying more at the gas pump? And having to drive further to get to the casino?

NOT ONLY DOES it cost him the support of everybody who wants to have a casino nearby, it will kill his chances for people who make a point of driving over the state line to put gasoline in their cars.

When one considers the south suburbs where many officials want a casino in their area AND hate the gasoline prices they pay locally compared to Indiana-based stations, Dillard becomes the guy who will finish dead-last amongst the gubernatorial dreamers.

Dillard probably figures he’s not getting much support there anyway (it’s a region where Pat Quinn gets taken seriously, largely because everybody else comes across as pathetic), so what does he have to lose? Just the respect of anybody sick of paying $4 or more for gasoline!

What else is notable these days along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan?

TURNING GRAFFITI INTO ART?: Epifanio Monarrez is taking on a task that some people are going to find pleasing and others will be bothering about – he’s trying to undermine the street-gang related graffiti that exists in his home Little Village neighborhood.

Epifanio Monarrez is trying to clean up his neighborhood, in his own way

 

Monarrez, according to the Hispanically Speaking News website, goes about altering the graffiti in his neighborhood to try to turn it into art – which also undermines the whole purpose of graffiti in that gang members use it to “mark” their territory.

However, Monarrez said he does not get hassled by the gangs for his activity – although I’m sure his biggest critics are those people who would prefer that the graffiti be erased altogether; and not treated as though it could be legitimized in any way!

For the record, Monarrez says he gets a property owner’s permission before he does anything, and he asks the owner to kick in for the cost of the paint.

THEY DON’T WANT NO STINKIN’ PERMITS: The firearms advocates are still upset that they couldn’t start “packin’ heat” the exact day that the General Assembly voted to approve a “concealed carry” measure for Illinois.

For those who need instruction

They now have their case before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in Chicago, but they’re upset that arguments won’t be heard until Oct. 3 – and that it is uncertain how long it will take the court to reach a decision.

Despite the fact that they were able to pressure the General Assembly into giving them their legal concept, and also dump on Gov. Pat Quinn’s attempts to moderate the measure (I suspect the Legislature would have dumped on Quinn just for kicks), they are still looking for something to complain about.

For the record, the Illinois State Police says it needs some time to put together the process by which they will grant the “concealed carry” permits. What really bothers the advocates is that there has to be a process at all.

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$2 for “gas” sounds like fast-food price

Michele Bachmann making promises that we will pay less than $2 for a gallon of gasoline makes her sound like a candidate for a school student council president – rather than one aspiring to be president of the United States.

BACHMANN: Running for Jr. High prez?



You know what I mean.

YOU’RE SITTING IN the bleachers of the school gym all those years ago, listening to some council wannabe say during a special assembly that if we vote for her, she’ll use her office to ensure that we get better quality food in the school cafeteria.

It was nonsense talk some three decades ago when I heard it, and we all knew it then. So why does Bachmann think we’re now supposed to believe it when she makes an equally-absurd political promise?

Which she did earlier this week during a campaign appearance in South Carolina. Apparently, winning that straw poll in Iowa really went to her head, in that she’s now speaking with authority on issues upon which she has little to no influence.

What she’s going to realize is that the people who voted for her in that straw poll had probably just sniffed a little too much livestock excrement and were a little giddy when they dropped their bean into a jar.

THE BULK OF us are a little more rational. We’re going to see this as the cheap political talk that it truly is.

What this really amounts to is a petty attempt by the candidate to take a pot shot at Barack Obama on an issue that hits us right in the gut – as well as in the wallet.

We’re sick of having to pay so much for gasoline – remembering well the days when a gallon of gas was about $1 in some places, and we thought it ridiculously expensive that gasoline stations near downtown were charging rates as exorbitant as $1.40!!!

Now, that’s a price that’s pure fantasy. Even Bachmann won't promise it.

BACHMANN WANTS US to think “It’s Obama’s fault!” every time we have to fill up our automobile’s gasoline tank (which in my case takes place about once a week – some have to do it more often).

So she says she can bring the price down significantly from its current area level of just under $4 per gallon (the last time I filled up, I paid $3.839).

Not that she really can do that. If anything, gasoline prices are determined by factors related to the crude oil market. There is little any federal government official could do to pressure the price to drop significantly.

Bachmann, whose campaign rhetoric says she’d push for increased oil drilling in the United States and reduced regulations on the shale gas industry, wouldn’t have the impact she thinks she would have.

WHICH TO ME sounds more like she’s interested in benefitting business interests that want to think they’d be completely profitable IF ONLY they didn’t have to comply with regulations that largely are in place to protect the public safety and the environment.

If Bachmann is going to go around promising $2 for a gallon of gas, perhaps she ought to also go around blaming the “tree-huggers” for causing the problem. Those pesky environmentalists!

Such a statement would make about as much sense as any promise made toward the price of gas.

Of course, when she would fail in her effort, I have no doubt she’ll also blame “foreigners,” particularly OPEC and Arabs in general. She’ll create the stereotype that they are the ones who are benefitting from the high gas prices we’re now paying.

WHICH I’M SURE many of the ideologues who take her presidential aspirations (Or should I say fantasies?) seriously would be more than willing to believe. It’s somebody else’s fault!

If there is anything that we, the people of this nation, could do to have an impact on gasoline prices, it probably would be to reduce the amount of driving we insist upon doing.

Using less gasoline would impact the industry to the point where they’d have to drop prices ever so slightly to encourage us to by more. After all, the time for someone to “jack up” the price of a good is when demand for it is at its peak.

But I’m sure there are some ideologues who are reading this and gnashing their teeth right about now. Telling them that they should use their automobiles more responsibly is going to be interpreted by many of these Bachmann supporters as somehow interfering with their personal liberty.

I MAY EVEN very well get some response about less driving that is reminiscent of the late actor Charlton Heston’s “from my cold, dead hands” quip to the National Rifle Association about firearms. Bachmann herself would probably offer up such a response, if she thought she could score a few political points off of it.

So where should we go from here? Bachmann has the right to make cheap statements as part of her campaigning. We just have to be sure to be responsible enough to acknowledge them for the ridiculous rhetoric that they are.

Unless you are the type who really believed that your junior high vote was going to be a factor in getting a better-quality slice of pizza for lunch.

Then again, perhaps lunch at discount-oriented fast-food places is the appropriate place to think of now. For $2 worth of items at, say, a White Castle is about the only place you’ll get gas for that price.

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Chicago’s “Elite Eight” for ‘08

I enjoy this old postcard image of downtown Chicago, from before the days when the Sears Tower and Hancock Center dominated the skyline. Image provided by Chicago Postcard Museum (http://www.chicagopostcardmuseum.org/).

In the history of Chicago, 2008 won’t go down quite as adventurous a news year as, say 1968, 1929 or 1871.

But the year that will be complete in just a dozen more days did have its share of stories worth remembering. Considering this weblog began its existence one year ago today with a promise to “help people better understand what is happening on the shores of Lake Michigan between Evanston and East Chicago, Ind.,” today is as good a day as any to review the year’s top stories.

8 – MILOROD GETS BUSTED: Some people are going to disagree with me and claim I’m downplaying the legal predicament now faced by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

I will be the first to admit that moving forward with impeachment of an Illinois governor is unprecedented. So is the degree to which a Chicago public official is accused of such crass (how else do you describe trying to “sell” the former post held by the biggest-name goo goo in politics today?) public behavior.

But I rank it at the bottom of this list for one reason – the real saga is going to come when the legal process progresses to the point where a trial takes place in U.S. District Court (or when Blagojevich enters a “guilty” plea to some sort of lesser charge).

In all likelihood, that will take place some time in 2010 (or 2011, or some year thereafter, if attorney Ed Genson gums up the legal works with enough procedural motions like he did with the criminal case of rapper R. Kelly, whose case took five years to go to trial).

When that happens, I will gladly proclaim the Blagojevich trial the Number One story of the year. Until then, I’ll have to agree that Genson’s characterization earlier this week of the Illinois House committee’s impeachment hearings as “stupid” has an element of truth to it.

7 – SKY-HIGH PRICES GIVE ME GAS: The times I have pumped gasoline in my car this week, I have paid somewhere in the area of $1.60 per gallon It wasn’t all that long ago that the only Chicago-area motorists who paid that much for gas were those stupid enough to use those overly-taxed pumps at filling stations in and near the Loop.

But it comes off as sounding like a bargain basement rate when compared to the more than $4 per gallon we were paying back in the summer months. At one point, Chicago-area motorists were paying an average of $4.24 per gallon (with those downtown pumps charging rates dangerously close to $5 per gallon). We had the highest average in the United States – even higher than isolated places like Alaska and Hawaii.

The end result of this gas price fiasco is that we are now used to paying ridiculous rates for petrol, and are inclined to think of the current price as some sort of bargain for which we should feel grateful. It also has many of us wondering how high gas will go come the summer of 2009.

If it weren’t for the steadily increasing rates (combined with service cuts) for mass transit, I’d be inclined to junk my automobile once and for all.

6 – BASEBALL IS MORE THAN A GAME: It’s a nerve-wracking ordeal.

In one sense, Chicago baseball in 2008 was historic. For the first time in 102 years, both of the major league teams representing the city made it through their six-month regular season ordeal to finish the season in First Place.

Both ball clubs will hold rituals in April to raise banners over their respective ballparks declaring themselves to be “Central Division Champs” of their respective leagues. And the way the White Sox managed to win that division title by winning a string of end-of-season games (with a loss in any one of them bringing their season to a Second Place conclusion) is something that ought to be remembered for decades to come.

Yet what is going to be remembered is the way both the White Sox and Cubs managed to lose the first round of their playoffs (I still see merchandise for sale touting the idea that the Cubs were destined to win the World Series this year). While the Sox managed to be competitive and win a game, the Cubs got swept in such humiliating fashion (for the second year in a row) that many of us wonder what was it about this team that made anyone take it seriously to begin with?

5 – AUCTIONING OFF THE ASSETS: Much has been made of the idea that Rod Blagojevich was selling off a U.S. Senate seat to the highest political bidder. But in a sense, Richard M. Daley did the exact same thing with some of the city’s assets that (if managed properly) can bring in revenue.

I’m talking about the deals made to turn control of Midway Airport from the Chicago Aviation Department to a private company, and another deal to let a private company oversee the parking meters on city streets.

Much has been made of the fact that parking along downtown streets could someday (by 2013) reach a rate of $6.50 per hour.

But what gets to me is why city officials think such income-producing resources are better off in the hands of private companies. While I appreciate the short-term benefit of millions of dollars being pumped into the city coffers, the long-term harm is that there will be nothing left for city government to oversee.

If that’s the case, why don’t we just auction off control of the City Council and Mayor’s office to a private management firm that could do all the actual work of government management? Then, Daley & Co. could sit back and do nothing, which some smart-aleck observers might think is an improvement.

4 – LANE BRYANT BANDIT REMAINS AT-LARGE: It was back in early February that a would-be robber at a Lane Bryant store in southwest suburban Tinley Park got carried away and killed five women (including some who were nothing more than customers).

The senselessness of the slayings caught the national mindset, and people across the country were paying attention to us for a time. It also inspired some of the craziest conspiracy theories (such as the idea that the robber/killer was some sort of homophobe who picked a Lane Bryant store because of the perception that transvestites shop there).

I even remember a few religious fanatics trying to turn the funerals of at least one of the women killed at the store into an excuse to protest against gay people.

But when one puts the mindless nonsense aside, the fact is we still don’t have a clue as to whodunit, or what the motivation for the slayings was (even though we’re pretty sure it will turn out to be something trivial).

3 – SCOTUS BANS FIREARMS BANS, CHICAGO SAYS “NO”: It was earlier this year that the Supreme Court of the United States gave gun nuts their jollies by issuing a ruling that struck down the stringent bans on firearm ownership in the District of Columbia.

The activists who can’t envision life without their high-powered rifles (and view ownership of an AK-47 or an M-16 as the equivalent of the car collector who likes to drive fine sports cars) immediately started filing lawsuits against other cities that try to restrict firearms ownership – including Chicago.

Many of those towns (such as Morton Grove, Ill., the suburb that enacted the original firearms ban) decided to avoid litigation by eliminating their bans, or amending them so as to make them pointless.

But Chicago stood firm, refused to make any changes, and recently got a federal judge to rule that the city’s ban is constitutional. That ruling is now susceptible to challenge in appeals courts, and it is possible that a higher court will try to overturn the local judge’s ruling.

But in my mind, that merely confirms that the high court’s action was a politically partisan move on behalf of a conservative constituency – rather than any serious reservation about the legitimacy of gun bans.

2 – I CAN HEAR THE OLYMPIC MARCH ALREADY: The next summer Olympiad is to be held in 2012 in London, with the next one after that in 2016 still in search of a site.

And there’s a chance that Chicago will become that site, bringing the eyes of the world to our city similar to how the presidential campaign of Barack Obama kept showing off aspects of Chicago life to the nation.

The U.S. Olympic Committee made it official when they officially chose Chicago to be the focus of their efforts to get the Olympics in the United States, rejecting a proposal by Los Angeles.

Now I suppose it’s possible that the International Olympic Committee could be delusional enough to think Madrid, Tokyo or Rio de Janiero is a nicer city than Chicago. Of course, that would mean they’re the same kind of people who think Britney Spears has legitimate musical talent.

The Olympics in our city would have the opportunity to give our city a grand new image, while also pressuring city officials to finally get off their duffs and fix some of those problems (ie., mass transit) that confront our daily lives.

As for those people who claim the headaches of staging the Olympics are not worth it, all I have to say is, “pipe down.” You probably think the Illinois State Fair is a grand old time, instead of the most overrated excuse for a corn-dog fest ever derived.

1 – YES, WE DID: The rise of Barack Obama from the obscurity of Illinois politics to being able to work in the Oval Office without causing the Secret Service to arrest him could very well turn out to be the “Chicago Story of the Decade.”

I can remember after his loss to Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., for a seat in Congress that political people were wondering if the Obama intellect was destined to fizzle out before it ever rose to new levels.

Even at the beginning of ’08, people figured Hillary R. Clinton (the suburban Park Ridge native-turned-Arkansan-turned New Yorker) was the shoo-in for the Democratic Party’s nomination, and Obama was just a pretty face who could give good oratory.

But he gained an advantage with an early win in the Iowa caucuses (where participants don’t view Chicago and Illinois as some alien land), and he ran up a string of primary victories despite the aspects of Chicago culture (Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Antoin Rezko, etc.) that may seem alien to those people not fortunate enough to live in the Second City.

Insofar as the general election, Obama won because a majority of the people decided they liked political newcomer Barack and didn’t care much for the other newcomer – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

In the end, Honolulu-native Obama (who like many others adopted Chicago as his home when he started his adult life) caused people from across the country to converge Election Night on Grant Park to celebrate the fact that he will become the first U.S. president with significant Chicago ties (Abraham Lincoln was a Springpatcher, while Ronald Reagan ditched Illinois for California, and Ulysses Grant didn’t live in our state long enough to qualify, in my mind).

And come Jan. 20, when Obama takes the oath of office to become the 44th U.S. president, this country will have a chief executive with an innate knowledge of all things Chicago, including why it is totally absurd to think one can root for both Sox and Cubs come the Cross-town Classic.

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Gasoline price dropped “below” $3 right before my very eyes. Will it last?

Gasoline prices are on the decline these days, and I had the strangest example of getting “ripped off” at the pump.

I was driving Wednesday afternoon around the area south of Chicago, and I happened to notice I could use gas in the car when I approached a Speedway station/convenience store on Lincoln Highway at Harlem Avenue (I’m not sure if I was IN Frankfort, Ill., or just outside of it).

BECAUSE THE STATION was on the Will County side of the street (literally, Cook County was just a few yards away), the taxes configured lower, so I paid $3.03 a gallon. I was able to fill up my car (a Saturn SL2) for just over $20.

As I pulled away from the station, I felt good. That was the lowest price I had paid in gasoline quite possibly all year. So I went about my business in the land where Joliet is just a short drive away.

About a half-hour later, my business was complete, and I was retracing my route to return to the civilized land of Chicago when I passed the same gas station. During that time, the price dropped.

It was now $2.999 per gallon. Admittedly, that gets rounded off to $3 when it comes to paying the cashier. But seeing that price gave me a jolt – both in that it was the first time in a long time that I had actually seen a gas station offer gasoline for a price starting with a 2 and because I felt a second of disgust that I had missed the chance to pay that lower price.

JUST OUT OF curiosity, I stopped, went back into the gas station/convenience store and asked, and was told by the manager that he had just finished resetting the pumps. He had literally in mid-day been given the approval to lower the price yet again.

Now I understand that gasoline is NOT the significant part of the business for these local franchise operators who have gas pumps as part of their store.

Offering me cheap gas was supposed to entice me to come into the store and buy some of the junk food, overpriced office supplies and other goods that he was peddling (and in fact, I bought a newspaper – the Joliet Herald News, out of curiosity as to what was happening locally).

For all I know, the store made more of a profit off my $0.75 for the Herald News than it did off my $22.36 I paid to fill up my gas (which considering that at the worst point I was paying nearly $40 to fill up was a good price).

I HAVE ALWAYS realized that it was not the gas station operators who were getting rich in recent months, as gasoline prices soared over $4 per gallon, and even had some people speculating that we would someday see the $5 per gallon price at least in downtown Chicago proper (where gas always costs more), if not in all of Illinois.

All this came soaring to my mind when I read a Chicago Sun-Times account Thursday about the price of a barrel of oil dropping below $67, which is resulting in some stations being able to price gas at as little as $2.81 per gallon (the metropolitan area average is $3.22 per gallon, according to the Chicago Motor Club, and I know a Shell gas station located one block from where I live was charging on Thursday $3.19).

Could Alaron Trading Group really be correct when it told the Sun-Times that gas prices could be as low as $2.80 average across the Chicago area? That could mean the cheaper gas price places could be charging as little as $2.50 per gallon (perhaps more, if they’re really determined to get you inside their convenience stores to buy those rubbery hot dogs or greasy pizza slices that no one with sense should ever eat).

Now a part of me wants to be optimistic. Prices are going down. Perhaps a sense of rationality is returning to the market.

PERHAPS THOSE ANALYSTS who offer lofty opinions are correct when they say that oil companies saw how much people hated paying prices in the $4 range for gasoline that they learned to “drive smarter” and use less gas.

Oil companies are realizing that more gasoline will be sold, which results in more of a profit for the oil companies – if not necessarily for the local gas station owners.

But then I wonder what yet-to-occur event will trigger a paranoia that will result in gas prices soaring again. I can’t help but see the lesson being that people in this country are so dependent on their automobiles and other motor vehicles that they WILL knuckle under and pay up.

Plus, we as a society have now been put into a mental place where we think gasoline for less than $3 per gallon is cheap.

I CAN REMEMBER when people were outraged to pay more than $2 per gallon, although a part of me is lodged enough in the past that I think paying anything much over $1 for a gallon of gasoline is ridiculous. I’m just like those old-timers who remember when “penny candy” cost one cent.

So where do I go from here?

There are times when I’d love to be able to scrap my car altogether and rely on public transportation. There’s a certain convenience to not having to worry about gas prices or finding parking spaces that I enjoyed back in the times of my life when I did not have an automobile.

But then I look at the funding cuts to mass transit and the rising fares that result in lower ridership, which means more service cuts. The whole thing becomes an endless cycle, which means I’m stuck with the need for a car.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: People purchasing gasoline at stations in downtown Chicago were paying (http://www.suntimes.com/business/1237603,CST-FIN-gas23.article) $3.99 per gallon earlier this week.

Dominick’s supermarkets are working with BP to offer gasoline discounts to people who shop (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/transportation/chicago-gas-dominicks-oct22,0,245367.story) at the two stores. It’s too bad I carry a card for Jewel supermarkets in my wallet.

Tensions in the Middle East, or even another hurricane in this country, could send (http://www.nwherald.com/articles/2008/10/22/news/local/doc48fef58389185909062465.txt) gasoline prices back on the rise again.

Gas prices make my wallet less bloated

I can remember not all that long ago when I would actually make a special trip southeast whenever I wanted to fill my automobile’s tank with gasoline – I justified it on the grounds that a drive across State Line Road into Indiana could get me gasoline for under a dollar a gallon.

I was being a tightwad in making the drive – since I didn’t want to pay the “ridiculous” rate of about $1.20 per gallon, or up to $1.40 if I were to get gasoline at a station near downtown Chicago.

NOW, OF COURSE, it seems like an Impossible Dream (cue “Camelot”) that gasoline was ever that cheap. On Sunday, for the first time in my life, I paid over $4 for a gallon of gasoline. The $15 that once would have nearly filled my car’s gas tank got me barely more than a quarter of a tank, which will keep me moving for a little while.

And today, I learned that the $4.09 per gallon I paid makes me the norm for a Chicago-area motorist – the Lundberg Survey says $4.07 per gallon is the average in Chicago, which makes us the most expensive metropolitan area in the continental United States.

At that price, a trip to Indiana for gasoline comes to a waste of time, particularly since I don’t really notice any significant difference anymore between gasoline prices in Cook County and Lake County, Ind. I’m certainly not going to drive deep into rural Indiana in search of cheap gas. I’d use up more than I’d save.

To "dream, the impossible dream" that gasoline will ever be as cheap as these once-outrageous rates is the status of our automobile-dominated society.

This is just absurd. What logical reason is there for gasoline to be so expensive?

I DON’T WANT to hear about other countries where the price of gasoline has been higher than the equivalent of $4 per gallon for so long that they would dream of gas so cheap. Nor do I want to hear about places like Alaska or Hawaii, where basic commodities have to be shipped in and everything costs more.

I figure anyone who willingly lives in such an isolated place obviously gets so much pleasure from the locale that they accept higher gas and food costs as the price of living in “paradise.”

Besides, as of Monday, the average gasoline price in Anchorage was $3.89 per gallon, with some places selling it for as little as $3.83 per gallon. That’s the price we in much of the Chicago area were paying as recently as the end of last week.

Now some people will argue that these ridiculous gasoline prices are evidence that we ought to rely more on public transportation – which I have no problem with in theory. I am a big fan of the convenience of elevated trains and the Metra suburban commuter trains, which I have used whenever possible during my times living in Chicago proper and some of its surrounding suburbs.

BUT THERE ARE large swaths of the Chicago area to which public transportation is just not convenient (the stations are too far away, or the trains and buses run too infrequently).

Expanding service also isn’t a political reality, because there are too many people who perceive the issue of mass transit as some sort of liberal plot to take away a person’s automobile (just like some suspect the liberals want to take away their guns too!).

We are a car-based society. Why else have these ridiculous gasoline prices not caused a significant drop in the number of motorists?

People still have to get to work and to other places that are a part of their lives, and very few people live in communities where everything is within walking distance or a short bus ride away. I personally am working a job these days requiring me to make about a 20-minute drive, but would require something like two hours and three bus transfers to complete each way if I tried to do it with existing Chicago-area public transportation.

IT’S NOT PRACTICAL. For many people, it’s not possible – even if they wanted to take the bus (which many do not).

We’re hooked on cars, meaning we’re going to keep paying and paying these ridiculous prices (which don’t even make profits for the gas station owners – who are dependent on us buying overpriced slurpees, chips and lottery tickets in significant quantities in order to make a profit) for gasoline.

How about $5 per gallon? It’s not a ridiculous nightmare – it will be a reality, and the gasoline manufacturers know we will do little more than grumble every time we dig into our wallets to pay it.

We need serious relief on this issue. And I mean real relief, not some political hack spewing out rhetoric that amounts to nothing.

THAT IS WHY I actually gained a bit of respect for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama when the whole issue of gasoline prices came up during the campaign a few weeks ago and he was getting smacked around by his opponents for refusing to support talk of easing the federal government portion of the gasoline tax.

In theory, that would reduce the price of gasoline by a few pennies, and some people want to have dreams that those pennies would add up into significant dollars that would remain in the consumer’s wallet.

In reality, the amount is so small, that (based on the Obama campaign’s calculations) the total savings for a “typical” motorist would be about $20 – over the course of the entire summer of 2008.

In my car at the current gas price, $20 is about half a tank. For people who drive those SUV monstrosities to lug their kids around from activity to activity, $20 is as little as a quarter of a tank.

THAT PLAN, PUSHED in slightly different forms by Democrat Hillary R. Clinton and Republican John McCain, would not have offered serious tax relief, but the political people would have spun it to make it appear as though they were doing the American people some great favor.

What impressed me about Obama was that he remembered the “gasoline tax holiday” (that’s the political-speak way of making it sound so cute) that the Illinois General Assembly approved back in 2000 when gas prices were so out of control in this state that they were “threatening” to go over $2 per gallon (remember that?).

Obama voted for it, only to see the gasoline manufacturers boost their own prices so bolster their profit while keeping gas prices overall at the same level. He said he wishes he could have taken that vote back

This was probably one of the few times a public official (particularly one running for president) opening admitted to making a mistake. It is perhaps the only time that a public official appeared to have learned from his mistake – and hopefully will not repeat it again.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: A lot of good it does me to know that gasoline in Tuscon, Ariz., goes for $3.48 per gallon, since I (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-gas-prices-web-may19,0,7796647.story) have no intention of moving there anytime soon.

For those of you willing to make a drive (and use up existing gasoline to find slightly-less expensive new gasoline), here is a place (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-localgasprices-map,0,2994228.htmlpage) to find the current gas prices across the Chicago metropolitan area.

Some “experts” seem to think that gasoline prices nationally will “top out” at about (http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080519/OPINION01/805190316) the level we here in the Chicago area are paying now.