Where's the Rage?

At my local Arco station the price of regular at the pump hit $3.26 this past week, and nobody seems to notice anymore. It's become a matter of common wisdom in California that the cost of gas leaps upward in the summer months and then drops for the winter months. The gas industry tells us it has something to do with additives mandated by law and the cost of changing over, but that doesn't make sense. They could perfectly well average the cost out over the year. Even though the TV news gasbags keep reminding us of the reason, they never explain why the prices are higher year after year. It also doesn't explain why summer keeps coming earlier and earlier, and winter gets shorter and shorter. They throw other reasons at us as well. A refinery fire in Texas, for example. Yeah, sure. A couple million bucks worth of damage and the oil companies rack up another few billion in profit. It's not that these are the same guys taking us to war in the Middle East that bothers me, it's that we're the same people who keep falling for their lies. You'd think we were busy with other important stuff, like is the self-annointed King of Radio Howard Stern going to succeed in sabotaging American Idol by actively campaigning for Sanjaya while Rush Limp-paw does yet another fluff interview with the Vice-President.