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Goldfish

When someone - the president, other politicians, people in The Discourse generally - showes themselves to be a bad faith and dishonest actor, you are allowed to remember that. If you are a journalist, it should impact how you cover those people going forward. As an editor or producer, whether you go to them for quotes or appearances.

This should not be controversial.

I've written before that one problem with DC (government and government-adjacent DC, including journalism) is that almost everybody is paid to lie. Some of those lies are mostly harmless - puffing up your boss a bit, spinning something - and many of them are less harmless. If there were social and professional sanctions for people who bullshit in their bullshitting jobs, then the entire social system would collapse.

Go to a random dinner party and you're going to find people who work as lobbyists for Evil Corp, or people whose spouses and friends do.

That's the glorious "bipartisan" Washington.

If you are a journalist, you should be allowed to remember things. You certainly shouldn't be encouraged to pretend you don't.

Federal Gas Tax Cut

It's always on the table when gas prices rise, which I suspect leads to people thinking that it's a significant amount when it's only 18.5 cents/gallon.

It's an action which will make people more mad, because it's inevitably swamped by the actual price increase. You promised help! You said you'd cut the tax but gas is still 5 bucks a gallon!

Not At Any Price

The below is a joke, but so often that is the level of The Discourse. Anyway, fun things happen when the supply curve goes vertical, especially for a good which tends to have pretty close to just-in-time delivery AND which is an input in, well, everything through its role in transportation (including transporting itself!).

Even if there aren't lines at the gas station, $100 gas would reflect, by any colloquial understanding, a "shortage."

But of course in practice, those pumps would go dry, in places, in such a scenario.

I'm not predicting gas shortages, I'm just saying that people will have ridiculous things to say about them if ever they are looming.

Shortages

Me, dumb: We could have shortages soon.

You, smart, after two Econ 101 classes: Prices adjust to equate supply and demand so shortages are impossible.

Capacity

I'd still bet on Trump ramping up the violence soon and if he does there will be more long term impacts.

UAE won’t resume full gas production until 2027 after Iranian attacks

The United Arab Emirates’s main gas-processing complex, which was hit in Iranian attacks during the war, will not reach its full production capacity again until next year.

ADNOC Gas said the Habshan site, which is one of the world’s largest gas production facilities and supplies gas across the UAE, is now operating at 60 percent capacity and “the company is currently working towards achieving 80 percent restoration by the end of 2026 with full capacity restored in 2027”.

In a statement sharing its first-quarter results, the company reported $1.1bn in net income, a 15 percent decrease compared with the same quarter last year.

Why Did Sleepy Joe Do This

Impressed by Trump's ability to make messes.

US prices rose in April at their fastest rate since May 2023 as the impact of the war in Iran was increasingly felt by consumers.

A jump in the cost of gasoline and groceries pushed the consumer price index (CPI), the amount prices jumped by in the past 12 months, to 3.8%.

It is the highest level since inflation hit 4% three years ago.

Morning

TACO Tuesday.

Happy Hour

Get Happy

Coming to America

Just got off the phone with @realDonaldTrump ... he told me he is seriously considering a move to make Venezuela the 51st state... pic.twitter.com/cofs12dhUS

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) May 11, 2026

I guess all the ones whose Temporary Protected Status he eliminated will just become citizens and can stay, and many more will arrive!

Fine with me.

Are you a natuaral born citizen if you were born in Caracas?

Looks Like Marco And Pete Can't Do Anything Right

Mr. Trump, sir, you need to hire better people!

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the Cuban government’s ability to maintain power despite months of sustained U.S. pressure and has been pressing his advisers about why his administration’s efforts to tip the regime into collapse have not yet succeeded, according to two U.S. officials, a former U.S. official and three people familiar with the discussions.

The Bad News Keeps Coming

And the stocks keep floating!

One possible explanation is the Big Money assumes they (not necessarily you, of course) will always be bailed out if there's a crash, so why worry their pretty little brains about it.

These people won't be bailed out, but their creditors likely will be!

The strain from this increasing debt load is starting to show, with the percentage of after-tax income that households spend paying down debt ticking up since early 2025, according to Federal Reserve data.

Banks say they are not seeing signs of serious distress. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, said late last month that consumer borrowing habits looked “fundamentally healthy.”

But across all consumer debts, the share that is delinquent rose to 4.8 percent, the highest tally since 2017. For the first time in more than a decade, the national average credit score dipped last year, according to data from Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus.

Kneel

The US record on "winning" wars has not been especially awesome in the way we like to define that, which is unconditional surrender by the opposition, but we usually don't lose them quite this hilariously.

Iran’s demands for U.S. war reparations, recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and an end to American sanctions were among the conditions that President Trump has deemed “unacceptable,” Iran’s state-owned broadcaster reported on Monday.

Morning

 MACHO MONDAY

At Least The War Is Over

Oh well.

Two Takes

The New York Times has two types of pieces it loves to run about Democrats. The first is:

Dems should do this thing that they are already doing.

I think Tom Friedman wrote a dozen of those in the Obama years.

The second is:

Dems should stop doing this thing they aren't doing.

We have that one today:

Without even getting into the argument about whether they should or shouldn't, most of them don't! This issue is not front and center at all! 

Ride The 'D'

I spend some time in LA for family reasons and I usually don't rent a car because (depending) you can actually get around pretty well on public transportation. 

Sure, public transit can take longer and be more inconvenient than transit. I don't expect everyone in LA to ditch their cars and follow the lead of Ed Begley, Jr. But driving in LA does suck, in part because parking is a pain in the ass almost everywhere. It's a big streetcar city/region that lost its streetcars, not a big parking lot-paved suburb.

I do find tremendous personal resistance from people who love using transit in fancy European cities but who never consider using it in their own city. For example, I have friends who live a couple of miles from downtown, on regular bus routes, and it never occurs them to take the bus and in fact find it weird that I would take it (from downtown) to their place. Parking in DTLA really really sucks! 

My favorite DTLA thing is there are metered parking spots you can use until (I think) 3pm and then they become car lanes for rush hour. Tow trucks come out to make it happen! No I was never towed.

Anyway, one more piece.

This week, Metro is set to unveil the first part of a nine-mile subway under Wilshire, one of the most dynamic and traffic-clogged stretches of Los Angeles. Public transit experts say the $9.7-billion D Line extension, which will connect Koreatown to the Westside, is a landmark achievement in L.A. public transit history.

$10 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it probably shouldn't cost that much, but my take on such things is it's actually the useful spending that gets scrutiny and derision, not dumb spending. We're gonna blow a few hundred billion, easy, because of Iran.

A few hundred billion buys a lot of 'D's.

At Least The War Is Over

How long can THE MARKETS soar on these fumes?

Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained throttled on Saturday, after naval skirmishes between U.S. and Iranian forces in recent days heightened tensions in the vital shipping route.

For weeks, the narrow passage between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea has been choked by two competing blockades enforced by each side in the conflict. About 1,600 ships are bottled up in the Persian Gulf.

Morning

Sunday funday.

We Hide In The Dunes By The Seaside

It's all very confusing.

Russia is shipping drone components to Iran via the Caspian Sea, U.S. officials say, helping Iran rebuild its offensive abilities after losing roughly 60 percent of its drone arsenal during recent fighting. The officials spoke anonymously to divulge private military assessments.