Be prepared to pay more the next time you fill up the family car. A whole lot more.
The next 24 hours will see staggering increases at the pump for both gasoline & diesel. Fuel margins have yet to catch up with previous wholesale hikes. Watch for huge increases in Great Lakes and Rocky Mountain states in particular.
That's industry expert and Gulf Oil Chief Energy Adviser Tom Kloza, one of several analysts who've been warning that all of the slack in world oil markets has now been un-slacked and from here on in prices are going to spike and supplies are going to fall.
After Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline, the nation's primary alternative to exporting oil through the still-closed Strait of Hormuz, was attacked by Houthi forces aligned with Iran, the Saudi government is now saying that that pipeline won't be back to capacity for 3-5 weeks.
That leaves the nation with precious few ways to get oil out, no matter how much customers might be willing to pay; as a result, Saudi Arabia has now also cancelled some September oil shipments to European countries. The resulting European scramble to find other contracts is one of the reasons oil prices are again spiking.
In the meantime, we're also learning that the Trump administration has wildly downplayed the damage Iran has been able to inflict on U.S. bases in the region. Photos sent to CBS News by anonymous active service members show destroyed planes, vehicles, and buildings.
"These are not 'squirters' getting through," the service member added, referencing language used by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after the deadly March 1 attack on Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait that killed six U.S. troops. "We're not defending these bases. We're just watching them get destroyed."
"If Biden or Obama had started a war that led to attacks like these on American bases—and then covered it up for months—the political backlash would eclipse Benghazi," noted journalist Frederick Deknatel.
The leak of base photographs follows on the heels of a Defense Department inspector general report identifying at least $33.4 billion dollars in estimated war expenditures, including at least 60 damaged or destroyed aircraft. And if bases are going undefended, it may be because Pentagon stocks of critical missile interceptors like the Patriot are now dangerously low.
That lack of defensive missiles, as well as frustration from the "allied" nations hosting the bases, are just two of the reasons the United States is now expected to permanently shut down most or all of its bases in the Persian Gulf region.
So gas prices are soaring today as world stockpiles bottom out, the bond markets are withering due to worldwide skepticism over the nation's future, and the Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday a quarter-point interest rate hike—likely the first of several—in attempts to rein in steep recent inflation that will likely get steeper as high diesel prices result in soaring delivery costs for food and everything else, and there hasn't been even the shred of a plan proposed as to how the administration is going to extricate themselves from these multiple catastrophes of their own making.
That's the fiasco that led Rep. Thomas Massie, a hard-right Republican, to introduce articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, condemning the bumbling Hegseth as causing "manifest injury" to Americans and "a threat to civilians and the laws of war, the integrity of US diplomacy, and the Constitution."
Even in an administration filled with obvious incompetents, Hegseth stands out. He is widely despised in the Pentagon, has continued a purge of top military leaders that reeks of white supremacism and a seeming delight in doing war crimes, has proven vapid and ignorant in his reams of public statements about what does and does constitute good "warfighting," and has overseen a war against a regional power so poorly premised, prepared for and executed that it will likely lead to his military fleeing that region for the indefinite future.
Under the rules of the House, Massie's move for an impeachment vote would require House action by Thursday. And so, as the House contemplated the collapse of the military, spiking inflation, soaring gasoline costs, new worldwide instability, the gouging out of American anti-missile capabilities worldwide, and the specter of potential fuel rationing, the House ...
... bravely ran the fuck away, of course.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday announced he is sending members home from Washington early for their seven-week campaigning recess ahead of the midterm elections, a move that will stave off a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
House Republicans had planned to remain in session until Thursday, but will now take their last votes Wednesday evening on a major White House priority — a Russia sanctions bill — and then leave town. The next time House lawmakers are expected back in Washington will be after the November elections.
If it seems to you that House Speaker Mike Johnson has only one move, it's because House Speaker Mike Johnson only has one move. He lives his days groveling at Donald Trump's feet, either pretending that whatever Donald last said is brilliant and plausible or, when that case can't be pretended at, boldly announcing that he hasn't seen whatever it is you're asking him about.
But when the rules of the House require Johnson to take a vote that threatens to anger the increasingly deranged and incoherent blowhard in chief, Johnson pulls out his signature move: He adjourns the House and sprints for the airport. You won't be hearing from him or most other Republicans for weeks.
And really, we're allowed to be astonished by this. Again. There has never been a more corrupt, incompetent, buffoonish waste of oxygen than the House Republicans that have allowed a bare handful of fascists working for one compulsively crooked halfwit to strip Congress of every bit of its power. There is no point in appropriating money anymore; the administration claims the right to repurpose it however it sees fit. There is no point in oversight anymore; a string of alcoholic Fox News celebrities now amounts to the best and brightest government can hope for, and when each of them shows up with a three-ring binder of insults to dish out at their "honorable" congressional overseers then it, too, is considered to be something that the heads of government agencies just do now.
I don't believe Mike Johnson has been paid off for his role in destroying government capabilities, military capabilities, U.S. diplomatic power, the pillars of our economic strength and previous generations' expectation that the leaders of government should try to at least pretend at having morals or a basic sense of decency. No money has changed hands here; Johnson and his Trump-era Republican Party genuinely just cannot do any better. This is all they are capable of, and even as they parade around pretending at being statesmen without a state it likely does not enter their heads that the damage they have done will take a half century to fix.
They like it. They like the constant humiliations. You'll never convince me that Mike Johnson doesn't like Donald Trump, Russell Vought, Steve Miller and Pete Hegseth wiping their shoes across his back; that man's fetishes can be seen from space.
What's different about this Congress, compared to even the most loathsome past incarnations, is that they cannot be roused to care about anything.
We just learned, as just one example among dozens, that the president's adult son and business partner's lavish private-island-and-fireworks wedding party was funded by a Putin-backed Russian oligarch tied to the trafficking of stolen Ukrainian children.
Which is a sentence you can say, in the most brazenly corrupt presidential family to ever, ever, ever exist in this country. And yet there will be no firestorm of coverage, on the frontpages of newspapers who decide what counts as a scandal and what doesn't, because if Republicans don't care then the press thinks they're not allowed to care either. And you can't ask Congress to investigate any of it, because Congress has fucked off to the hills and won't be back until they find out how many of their members have survived the public's wrath and get to keep their offices for another two years.
Why do they want the offices? Bragging rights, apparently, because it's not like the House of Representatives has any actual duties in the new regime. There's nothing there that they won't willingly give up the next time the president's Russian-tied son or his Saudi Arabia-funded nongovernmental pseudo-secretary-of-state son in law needs it, anyway.
I mean, just look at this.
Umar Kremlev is known as the highly controversial president of the International Boxing Association (IBA). He reached that position after rising through Russia’s own boxing world, reportedly thanks to his links with key Kremlin security figures, and has since come to be widely seen as an instrument of soft power for Putin through the sporting body. [...]
Kremlev also has strong ties to a pro-Putin organization, “Healthy Fatherland”, which Ukraine has sanctioned for its alleged role in the mass abduction of Ukrainian children from occupied areas during the war. Ukraine has also sanctioned Kremlev personally for his public support for the war. [...]
During that period, Kremlev began taking part in meetings of the ultra-nationalist pro-Putin biker gang, the Night Wolves, which were later sanctioned by the United States for their role in Russia’s invasion of Crimea. It was through the biker group that Kremlev reportedly met Putin’s future bodyguard, Rubehznoy, according to Proekt.
That's the thing we're supposed to think of as the new normal now?
I'm sorry, is this just what Palm Beach is like nowadays? Can any Floridians weigh in here? The assertion from Donald Trump Jr. and his bride, who is the daughter of Jeffery Epstein's former banker because of course she is, is that the Russian "security"-linked paramilitary biker gang battlefield child trafficker just happens to be a friend they met, tee-hee, in their normal course of being rich world-traveling stains on humanity. Nothing untoward about having your wedding party paid for by a new foreign friend, tee-hee.
Is this how Palm Beach rich people roll, Floridians? Can we get confirmation of that? If you're in the upper crust in Florida, is it just a given that a certain number of your friends are going to be child abductors and/or have decades of ties to Russian paramilitary and "security" ops? Can't throw a caviar spoon without it hitting a child trafficker? To the point where sure, it's perfectly reasonable that the Russian child abductor guy is going to be financially back you when you marry Jeffrey Epstein's banker's daughter but are too cheap to write the checks yourself?
The hell?
I mean, I'm willing to accept it. We've seen Matt Gaetz. That Lutnick guy, he's pretty certain that trafficking kids is no big deal. Given what we've already heard from this crowd, none of us would be too surprised to learn that Eric Trump has ten kids chained up in his basement and is eating them one limb at a time. The only thing we know for sure is that if it proves true, Mike Johnson will say he hasn't heard about it.
This is the same Congress, plus or minus a few members, that had absolute meltdowns about "Hunter Biden's laptop," and "Hillary Clinton's emails," and were red in the face at the thought that a president's son might sell a painting for more money than a president's son's paintings ought to be worth. These guys are in absolute fits over the idea that some ten year old might play on the wrong soccer team. These are the guys that now don't particularly care if the United States runs out of missiles while incompetently fighting a war that, as near as anyone can tell, was premised solely on The Dementia-Addled President Was Bored That Day.
In normal circumstances, the House premises pre-election absences on the notion that everyone needs to go home and—hang on, that CNN story has the bog-standard quote on this:
“It’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make the case to the American people,” Johnson told reporters.
But few of them have ever gone home to actually make their case, during these recesses, because whenever they try they get heckled by irate constituents who rightly thought that members of Congress were supposed to Do Things. So far the Republican campaign strategy has been for Donald Trump to broadcast a two-day Tribute To Himself while every other Republican scurries home to hide in their closets and pretend they've been there for the past two years.
Oh, and postcards about New York's mayor, who is apparently has more power than Mike Johnson, House Republicans, Senate Republicans, and every American oligarch combined? Who knew?
Oil markets are collapsing, the strategic oil reserve is down to its last barrels before the threat of physical collapse sets in, the president's family members are using their non-governmental proximity to government to solicit funds from international groups that might need favors done, there is no plan whatsoever for how to win the war or how to restore oil markets and Mike Johnson and House Republicans just fled town like they were on fire.
Amazing. And this is what they consider their so-called jobs to be.
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