I fill up my cab after each shift, three times a week. Sometimes, I drive more than 200 miles, sometimes less, but 200 miles is about average. Back in August, it cost around forty bucks to fill up at the end of each shift. Now it costs less than twenty. Let's see, September, October, November, December. Less than four months later, and gas costs half as much as it did this summer. What happened?

It's not that I'm complaining about the current price, but no one has adequately explained why the price was so high for so long. Now, the SAME GAS is worth less than half. Oil was trading at $150 a barrel, and now it's under $40. It's the SAME OIL. Remember when everyone had to raise their prices on everything because of the cost of gas? Food went up, clothes went up, services went up. Even the cab raised its rates a couple years ago, way back when the Price of Gas was creeping toward three bucks.

Now the Price of Gas is down. Way down. Prices on everything are still up. Prices never come down once they raise them.

So what happened? I don't know. We didn't drill more. No drill, baby, drill. We didn't make any shady deals with the Middle East. We didn't convert to renewable energy. We didn't do anything! Yet, Oil companies had record profits. No one held them accountable. No one successfully proved there was price gouging of gasoline, and yet, we went from four-buck gas to one-fitty gas. Could it be that the gas was never worth four-bucks-a-gallon? Could it be that the oil companies were cashing in at the end of the Bush Administration? We'll never know because no one does the dirty investigative reporting any more.

Remember Watergate? Woodward & Bernstein? Two guys effectively took down the Nixon administration on a measly little burglary charge. It inspired many young Americans to become journalists and blah, blah, blah. Well, I have come to hold the journalists, television and print, with a lot of disdain these days. They report the news just fine (when a bridge collapses, they're on the scene!), that's not my complaint. But they don't uncover anything anymore. They don't discover.

There was a golden opportunity at the beginning of this millennium to become the next Woodward & Bernstein. The president said Iraq had WMDs. They got 'em. You bet they got 'em. Well, they didn't. They never did. While the administration had no smoking gun to prove they did, no reporter could come up with the seemingly easier task of proving they didn't. Being an armchair journalist at the time and staring at pictures on the TV of a semi that could transform into a nuclear weapon, I kept asking 'Do they have any actual proof? I can draw a picture of a Transformer! Where's the U-2 pictures over Cuba? Where's the Soviet subs? Shouldn't we have a picture of something more than a building that is plenty big enough to hold a nuclear weapon?' With hundreds (maybe thousands) of "investigative" reporters in this country, no one could prove the intelligence as incorrect until Year 2 of the Iraq War. To their credit, investigative reporters have always been able to tell me when the VCR repair man has been ripping us off. Sigh.

And there's all these columnists I glance at in the paper! My goodness, they blather on about this and that! I'm on the left, so here's what I don't like about Republicans. I'm on the right, so here's how Obama is going to screw up. HEY!!!! Why not talk about something other than political people and their policies! What's the deal with this gasoline? Am I the only one in America that thinks something really fishy has been going on in the gasoline world for the last year? Remember those hearing Congress? They found nothing. They did NOTHING! I really truly believe that the rise in gas prices caused the rise in all goods and services, which caused the housing market to collapse, which caused people to start to feel the pinch, which caused them to start taking their money out of the banks and markets, which caused the recession that we're now enduring. The news kept reporting that gas was going up, but they never found out why. I don't need people to tell me gas is going up or down. That's easy to figure out. Tell me why!

Maybe I'm wrong, but since no one is asking the question about gas anymore (it's cheap again, so who cares?), nobody is looking into it. Anyone notice how the President couldn't do anything about the price of oil and gas, but suddenly, he thinks he can fix Wall Street. You'd think gas prices would be a much easier task.

Now we're discovering all the Ponzi schemes, all the swindling, all the lying. We never had as much money as we thought we did. What I do know is that I paid cash money for that four-buck gas four months ago. Four months later, that same gas is worth less than half. The oil companies profits were very real. It wasn't a scam. It was a theft, pure and simple. The politicians will never admit to price gouging because most states receive revenue from the oil companies. The more money the oil companies make, the more money the politicians and the states make. They will always conclude that there is no price gouging. Pay no attention to the oil slick. It's just a mirage.

What I have made in this column are a bunch of assumptions. I have no proof. I will not take the time to investigate. My job these days is to drive a cab and feed my family. But what of those Woodwards & Bernsteins? All those television news channels with big budgets to look into questionable affairs? Anyone care to do some real investigating? Oh, wait a minute. There's a scandal in Illinois! Which school will the Obamas send their girls? How many Christmas trees can you stick in your house? That's reporting!

Keep chasing the rabbit, you journalistic greyhounds. If you don't win, we'll just have to put you down.

Chris Jungle reads the news every day, but he's not sure what he learns.