California voters were supposed to see a gubernatorial debate this evening (well... early evening -- for some reason it was scheduled to run at 5:00 P.M., when most people aren't even home from work yet, but whatever...), but it has now been cancelled. The University of Southern California announced this morning that it was cancelling the debate due to criticism over who would have been allowed on stage and who would have been excluded.

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It's a sad sort of commentary on the times we live in when the leaders of a country we are at war with sound more believable than the American president... but here we are. Donald Trump continues to flail around and issue blustery statements, but as always you have to wonder how much of it is bluster, how much of it is wishful thinking, and how much of it is just sheer delusion.

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Donald Trump seems to be determined to break as many campaign promises as he possibly can, in the shortest period of time possible. Conveniently (for Democrats), he is doing all of this right at the start of the midterm campaign season, as the first states conduct their primaries. This seems like a rather spectacular way to commit political suicide, but then again Trump is a master at avoiding consequences, so who really knows how it will all play out?

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In assessing how Donald Trump's war of choice is proceeding, we turn once again to the metric most Americans are using as their chief measurement: the average nationwide price of a gallon of gasoline now stands at $3.91. That is up $1.16 from the mid-January lowpoint of this year, and it is up 97 cents from the day before the bombing started. It is also only nine cents away from the psychological "four bucks a gallon" milestone (which the media is likely to prominently feature, when we do hit it). And currently, there is absolutely no end in sight to the high prices -- which still have yet to peak.

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As every day of Trump's War progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that Trump and his entire administration are completely clueless about what they are doing. Which (it will come as no surprise to learn) they truly have no one to blame for but themselves. Six months ago, as NOTUS reports, "the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts... the administration laid off staff who would have been responsible for gaming out possible scenarios if the Strait of Hormuz was closed."

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After two weeks of war with Iran, gas prices in America have now reached a national average of $3.65 per gallon. That is 71 cents higher than they were before Donald Trump started this war, and 90 cents higher than the average was in mid-January. And prices continue to climb -- oil is now trading worldwide at over $100 per barrel.

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What if they held a government shutdown and nobody noticed?

That is admittedly a facetious way to put things, but the phrase has been popping into my mind over the past month. Democrats in Congress have partially shut the federal government down, but the issue has all but disappeared from the news, even though the shutdown is now about to enter its second month. There has been no progress whatsoever on any sort of deal or compromise, but the whole thing isn't being treated as any sort of crisis or emergency at all.

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Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to be finally realizing that they might just be in some trouble, heading into the midterm elections. Their policies are unpopular, most Americans think things have gotten worse over the past year, and they don't have any new ideas (unless you count launching a war with Iran for no apparent reason). So the party has seemingly decided to attempt dressing up the ugliness of their agenda by slapping some lipstick on a pig.

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It has been interesting (to me, at least) to hear how both the media and politicians are speaking about the price of gas these days. The mainstream media seems to be somewhat downplaying the continuing rise in the price at the pump, but (to be fair) this could be because of the editorial process taking so much time that by the time the story runs, the price has risen even further. Politicians, of course, have their own biases -- Republicans want to downplay the rise as much as they can get away with, while Democrats want to make it sound as alarmist as possible. But even Democrats aren't really using the right scale.

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Worldwide oil prices went on a wild ride today. On Friday, the last day the oil markets were open, the price of a barrel of oil rose above $90. Today, the price spiked all the way up to $120 per barrel, before coming back down again. The reversal began when the Group of 7 nations indicated they were considering various interventions to stabilize the market and bring the price back down. They didn't actually make any of these moves, they just publicly discussed their options. That was enough to make the price retreat to around $100 a barrel, though. Then Donald Trump made an offhand comment to a reporter about the war effort in Iran, saying: "I think the war is very complete, pretty much," and that the U.S. is "very far" ahead of his initial timeline of the war lasting four to five weeks. The prospect of the war ending soon sent oil prices even lower, and they closed the day just under $90 a barrel, right back where they had started.

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