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Energy Experts Expect Another Spike at the Gas Pump

At the moment, the price of oil is over $106/barrel and there is no end in sight to the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.  The Felon continues to lie and bloviate about the war ending "soon" and has manipulated both the oil and stock markets (which have seen evidence of insider trading), but energy experts are anything other than upbeat about lower prices for oil or gasoline anywhere in the near term.  Indeed, even if the war ended tomorrow, the impacts on oil prices, the global economy and gas prices at the pumps in America would likely take months to subside much less slide back to pre-war levels.  The Felon and his sycophants are ignoring expert warnings - just as the Felon ignored warnings about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz - that any recovery will take months and seek to spin a tale where everyday Americans will not be bearing the consequences of the Felon's war of choice. A piece in the New York Times sums up the current situation: 

Oil prices continued to surge on Thursday, hitting a fresh wartime high above $126 a barrel on concerns that the war in Iran could escalate, leading to a longer disruption of fuel supplies from the Middle East.

The average price of regular gasoline in the United States has followed oil higher, hitting $4.30 a gallon on Thursday, up 27 cents in a week, according to data from the AAA motor club.

Higher energy prices and the lingering effects of Mr. Trump’s tariffs are expected to keep inflation elevated through the rest of the year, Bernard Yaros, the lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note. “Inflation will get worse before it improves,” he added.

The World Bank estimated that the war in Iran would push energy prices up 24 percent this year, according to a broad index covering oil, gas and coal. “The war is hitting the global economy in cumulative waves: first through higher energy prices, then higher food prices and finally, higher inflation, which will push up interest rates and make debt even more expensive,” Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, said this week.

The Felon promised during the 2024 campaign that he'd lower prices and inflation and supposedly many working class Americans believed the lie (rather than being attracted by the Felon's racism and bigotry) yet the opposite has been the case. The latest Comey indictment and attacks on ABC will not long distract voters from the economic pain the Felon has caused.  A piece at Politico looks at the potential longer term impacts of the Felon's war of choice:

Energy experts say another oil price spike is coming — and it may be made worse by the president’s social media posts.

[The Felon] President Donald Trump has repeatedly spurred temporary dips in oil prices by claiming on Truth Social that the Iran war is near an end and that U.S. oil production would ensure sky high gas prices would soon retreat.

The jawboning has mostly worked. Even as the global price of oil has crept up over $100 per barrel on the futures market, it is significantly less than the $140 per barrel spot price, or what it would take to buy a barrel today. But the [Felon's] president’s promises can only work for so long. Supply of oil — especially in Europe and Asia — is dwindling and a price shock is coming, said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners. He said that when the summer driving season begins there will be another gas price shock that “hits people in the face.”

“There’s a day of reckoning coming,” he said. “It will be painful because I can tell you that the stock market’s ignoring this.”  Another spike in prices around Memorial Day could be a fatal blow to Republican chances for holding onto the House next year, as Americans’ confidence in the economy continues to drop.

[The Felon] Trump on Monday was reviewing Iran’s latest peace proposal, which arrived after he canceled his top negotiators’ planned trip to Pakistan for talks. He continues to maintain that a quick resolution to the war with an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is within reach.

And inside the White House, confidence remains high that markets will soon stabilize, despite U.S. gasoline prices having increased by more than $1 a gallon since the Iran war began, a major reason why the conflict is so unpopular with the American public.

Last week, [the Felon] Trump said gas prices would drop as soon as the war ends.  But Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at the libertarian-leaning Defense Priorities think tank, said the administration’s confidence that normalcy is just over the horizon is keeping American oil companies from producing more. Why, they say, invest in production when the war is about to end. The problem is if the war doesn’t end very soon there won’t be enough oil for the world, she said.

“By talking down the market so effectively, when the price spike becomes inevitable, it’s going to hurt way worse because we’ll have lost weeks or even months of time where producers could have been ramping up output,” she said.

“Our hypothesis is [that] the paper market is being manipulated,” the respondent wrote. “This will likely lead to an even worse supply and demand imbalance and higher prices in the medium term (next 12 months).”

A growing number of market analysts are reaching a similar conclusion. On Sunday, Citigroup revised upwards by $15 its expected average price for a global barrel of oil to $110 in the second quarter and $95 in the third quarter. But if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed through June, Citi forecasts a barrel of oil reaching $150.

Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February, much of the world has been using oil and liquefied natural gas loaded on tankers before the war broke out, supplemented by what’s in storage. But that will only last so long. Asia is already experiencing “steep declines” in storage, said Jenna Delaney, Rapidan Energy Group’s Director of Global Crude.

“Global refineries have already cut runs due to challenges sourcing crude,” she said. “Refined product supplies are already strained at current refinery run levels, and demand typically rises in the summer.”

Oil inventories in some countries are days or weeks away from hitting “operational minimums,” Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research at JPMorgan wrote in a recent note to investors. That could mean parts of the global energy system start to collapse, refineries will struggle to operate, energy flows will bottleneck and more.

[I]n a best case scenario, it will be take longer than just a few months before gas prices settled to the level they were before the war, said Emma Anderson, author of “Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates” and a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign policy research institute in Washington. The real impact on Americans will be inflationary and is likely already locked in, she said.

“Prices at the pump are going to go up over time,” she said. “The costs of goods are going to go up as diesel goes up. Shipping will get more expensive. Trucking will get more expensive. The things you buy at the store will get more expensive.”

More "winning" thanks to the Felon.

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Is The Felon Being Told the Truth About Iran?

If one looks back at America's disastrous wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, a common thread is that too often the top civilian leadership from the president on down were given rosy assessments and promises of eventual victory by the military and Secretary of Defense. With the Felon's ego and temperament and desire to always be a "winner" some fear - including JD Vance for whom I usually only have contempt - are questioning whether or not the Felon is receiving fully honest and complete information on where things stand with the war of choice with Iran and the state of America's weapons stockpile. Hegseth acts as if the entire war is one big video game and is clearly desperate to maintain the confidence and support of the Felon. This obviously sets the stage for telling the Felon what he wants to hear as opposed to what he needs to hear.  As noted, I am no fan of Vance, but at least he is asking questions that need to be asked as the price of oil is currently over $100.00/barrel and there appears to be no clean exit for the USA as Iran seemingly believes it can outlast the Felon.  Here are highlights from a long piece in The Atlantic that examines what information is getting to the Felon and what reality might be instead:

In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.

Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us. The consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire: U.S. forces would need to draw from these same stockpiles to defend Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, and Europe against Russia.

Both Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and General Dan Caine, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly said that U.S. weapons stockpiles are robust, and portrayed the damage to Iranian forces after eight weeks of fighting as drastic. . . . . Vance is trying, the advisers suggested, to avoid making this personal, or to create divisions in Trump’s war Cabinet. Some of Vance’s confidantes, however, believe that Hegseth’s portrayal has been so positive as to be misleading.

Trump has echoed many of Hegseth and Caine’s positive statements about the war, declaring weeks ago that the damage wrought by U.S. forces already constituted victory and that U.S. stockpiles of key weapons are “virtually unlimited.” Some advisers suggested that Hegseth’s sanguine portrayals and at times combative approach with the press appear designed to give the president what he wants to hear . . . .

Pentagon leaders’ positive portrayals present an incomplete picture at best, people familiar with intelligence assessments told us. According to those internal estimates, Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of its small, fast boats, which can lay mines and harass traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. At least in terms of resuming stalled maritime commerce, “those are the real threat,” one person told us. . . . And Tehran brings more missile launchers back online every day; roughly half are accessible again after an initial two-week cease-fire that was scheduled to expire last Tuesday, according to people familiar with the assessments.

Officials and outside advisers told us that the use of key weapons—including interceptors that defend against Iranian missiles, and offensive weapons such as Tomahawk and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff missiles—has produced a serious shortage that erodes America’s ability to fight future wars, despite an effort to quickly manufacture replacements. Vance has raised concern about munitions shortages in meetings with the president and other national-security officials. Already, the United States may have gone through more than half of its prewar supply of four key munitions . . . . Pentagon officials have warned that the deficits jeopardized the military’s ability to prevail in a hypothetical conflict against Russia or China.

Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement that Hegseth and other Pentagon leaders “consistently provide the president with the complete, unvarnished picture.”

Vance and Hegseth both have a major stake in the war’s outcome. Several people close to Trump believe Vance now sees his political future as tied to what happens in Iran, one of the senior officials told us. Other officials and individuals familiar with those involved told us Hegseth harbors his own ambitions for elected office, even possibly for president.

Hegseth’s career depends on retaining the president’s support at all costs. . . . Hegseth has fewer fans among congressional Republicans than many other Cabinet secretaries, leaving him singularly reliant on Trump’s favor. Hegseth “strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear,” one former official told us. “I think that’s dangerous.”

People who know Vance say that he came to believe that the Afghan and Iraq Wars were flawed from the start. “We were lied to,” he proclaimed while serving in the Senate. Vance has argued that America’s interests are best served by prioritizing resources at home. Before becoming vice president, he warned that assisting Ukraine would diminish crucial U.S. weapons stockpiles. “This is not our war,” he declared.

Far from Hegseth’s predictions of a quick, decisive win, the Iran war has now drifted into a costly, indeterminate muddle. Last Tuesday, as the minute hand ticked toward the end of the initial cease-fire, Vance’s plane idled on the runway, ready to fly him to peace talks in Pakistan. But when Iran appeared unprepared to dispatch its own negotiators, Trump backed down, extending the truce indefinitely. Meanwhile, the two countries’ standoff in the Strait of Hormuz escalated last week when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized commercial vessels for the first time—a sign that its forces remain potent and that the war could again defy the upbeat assessments from the Pentagon’s leaders.

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Trump Lost Badly in Iran

The distraction of the shooter at the White House Correspondent Dinner over the weekend will likely be short lived and soon the mainstream media's focus will return to the Felon's war of choice in Iran and, of course, the Epstein files.  The former is likely the Felon's biggest concern at the moment as he finds himself in a mess of his own creation that now seemingly has no likely good solution that can somehow be spun into a "win."   The leadership in Iran seems to realize that the Felon has put himself and America in an untenable position where the longer the conflict goes on the more damage that will be done to America economically and the Felon's party of self-prostituting Republicans.  A piece at Salon looks at how badly the Felon miscalculated his Iran adventure while ignoring warnings that Iran would do exactly what it has done: block the Straight of Hormuz and send oil prices soaring (oil is just shy of $97.00/barrel at the moment). Meanwhile, the Felon finds himself faced with a proposal by Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the USA lifting its blockade and ending the war - something that would provide no "victory" to the Felon.  Here are highlights from Salon:

There is no way to sugarcoat the epic scale of America’s humiliation in Donald Trump’s disastrous and irrational war with Iran, or the damaging global effects that will endure years or decades into the future. With the “stable genius” and “extraordinarily brilliant person” in the White House visibly decompensating into impotent rage and erratic burst of mania, there is no obvious exit strategy that will allow him to declare victory (as he must, for interwoven and deeply unfortunate psychological and political reasons).

This war has accomplished exactly none of its stated objectives — even with those constantly shifting and being defined downward — and has almost certainly strengthened the regional power and global reputation of the Iranian regime, despite weeks of bombing and the deaths of much of its leadership. Trump’s options would seem to be a negotiated settlement that might, at best, approximate the pre-war status quo; a potentially catastrophic military escalation favored by literally no one except Lindsey Graham, the Israeli government and a handful of right-wing Iranian expatriates; or an indefinite continuation of the current phony war over the Strait of Hormuz, in hopes that the Iranian economy will suffocate before global recession sets in (an outcome that may be unavoidable no matter what else happens).

That’s a doubleplus-ungood list of options, and while it’s easy to say that the first one presents the most rational outcome for all sides, it’s not clear that even matters. . . . [the Felon] Trump is “quite fed up” with this war and eager to make a deal, reports Amos Harel of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but is trapped between Benjamin Netanyahu on one side and Iran’s new war-hardened governing faction on the other, both of whom are more than willing to fight on.

We know Trump wants something he can sell as a big win to his dead-ender congressional loyalists and his declining support base, and that Netanyahu still hopes for an all-out U.S.-led war of destruction (although Harel reports that the Israeli leader now understands that’s unlikely). Opinions about what Iran’s new leaders want are all over the map, but in the words of Foreign Policy columnist Michael Hirsh, they now seem to be “calling the shots.”

From the beginning of this conflict, the Iranians identified the fundamental weakness of U.S. strategy, which was based on a litany of false assumptions, starting with the premise that total victory could be achieved with air power (something that has never happened in the history of warfare) and that killing Iran’s senior leaders would cause the regime to surrender or collapse.

Hai Nguyen, a Vietnam War scholar at the Harvard Kennedy school, told Hirsh that he saw history literally repeating itself. Like the Viet Cong of 50-odd years ago, the Iranians have perceived the American superpower’s Achilles heel: “They understand that the U.S. could drop thousands of tons of bombs, but it does not possess the patience to withstand a prolonged war.” . . . . the Iranian regime is observing a time-honored principle attributed to Napoleon: Never interrupt your opponent when he’s making a mistake.

Tucker Carlson . . . . is probably correct to describe the Iran war as the worst single decision made by any American president in his lifetime. It brings together all the worst tendencies of U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s — overconfidence, bad intelligence, inflated bluster and outright lies as a cover for irresolution and incompetence, xenophobic hubris, a misguided reliance on technical superiority and outmoded strategy, and a fundamental failure to understand the nature of asymmetrical warfare — as implemented by a team that not only failed to learn from history but proudly proclaimed that history was woke and for girls.

Whether or not this war will outdo the long-term destructive consequences of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq is a question for future historians to sort out (should there be any). But these military misadventures 23 years apart already appear as aspects of the same historical phenomenon, despite the ardent claims of the Trump administration and its defenders that everything is different now because real men are in charge. Both these wars represent desperate, doomed efforts to reverse the inexorable process of imperial decline that’s been underway for several decades, and has constrained or dictated the actions of at least the last five American presidents.

Let’s come back around to Tucker Carlson, whose self-serving reverse heel-turn feels partway between the old saw about rats leaving a sinking ship and a harbinger of the apocalypse. Two years ago, Carlson conducted a very long and very strange interview with Vladimir Putin, who seemed almost visibly to conclude that America wasn’t sending its top talent. It’s worth watching the whole thing, if you’re exactly the right kind of sicko. Toward the end of their conversation, Putin says that this era of history will be determined by one question: Whether America will decline in a gradual and orderly fashion, or catastrophically and all at once. We don’t have to hand it to him either, but it’s a good question and the answer is now becoming apparent.