I was drinking my morning Joe here and, lo and behold, there is breaking news on the website of The Wall Street Journal:

Exxon Mobil Corp. sets quarterly profit record for U.S corporations at $14.83 billion. Revenue rose 35% to $137.7 billion.

   A profit record. Meaning, biggest ever. Revenue rose because millions of Americans were being hosed by gas prices. BTW, I’m not saying we should have gas prices so low that we forget that we need fuel efficient cars. But…this obscene profit should not go unchallenged.

   Want to know where we can fund some of the government? Oil companies.

   Update: here’s some more from The New York Times:

In what might be the high watermark for corporate profits, Exxon Mobil reported another blowout quarter on Thursday, as oil prices hit a record this summer and gasoline soared well above $4 a gallon across the nation.

Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, said its quarterly income rose by 58 percent to $14.8 billion, or 2.86 dollars a share in the past quarter. That figure was well above what analysts expected.

The quarter includes an after-tax gain of $1.6 billion for the sale of a natural gas transportation business in Germany. Excluding one-time items, Exxon’s profits were $13.4 billion, still a record quarter for an American corporation.