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‘A slap in the face’: Saudis spurn Biden’s request to boost oil output
Ariel Zilber and Steven Nelson
President Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia was deemed a failure by analysts after oil-producing states announced Wednesday that they would boost output by just 100,000 barrels a day starting next month — a drop in the bucket compared to America’s vast energy needs.
The Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies announced the modest increase in supply following a policy meeting held via videoconference.
The Biden administration had held out hopes that its diplomatic overtures to the de facto Saudi ruler — Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman — would yield a bigger boost in supply.
Americans consumed an average of 19.78 million barrels of oil per day in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration — meaning Wednesday’s production increase would meet between seven and seven-and-a-half minutes’ worth of nationwide demand.
Biden reversed his campaign pledge to treat bin Salman as a “pariah” due to widespread Western intelligence assessments that the Saudi royal masterminded the murder of US-based Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The president was photographed giving bin Salman a “fist bump” during their meeting in Jeddah last month.
Despite the diplomacy, the cartel opted to keep supplies tight while prices remain high. The 100,000 barrels a day boost is a far cry from the 648,000-barrels-a-day increase that was announced in June.
The Saudi-led OPEC+ cartel of petroleum producing states will raise its output by just 100,000 barrels a day beginning next month -- a modest increase and far short of what the Biden administration hoped for, according to experts. Biden met last month with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.The Saudi-led OPEC+ cartel of petroleum-producing states will raise its output by just 100,000 barrels a day beginning next month — a modest increase and far short of what the Biden administration hoped for, according to experts.AP
The OPEC+ meeting’s participants put out a statement on Wednesday acknowledging that “the severely limited availability of excess capacity necessitates utilizing it with great caution in response to severe supply disruptions.”
Analysts said the OPEC+ announcement amounted to a failure by the president.
“It’s a slap in the face for the Biden administration,” Matt Smith, a lead analyst at trade analytics firm Kpler, told CNN.
“This trip, meeting with MBS, just didn’t work.
The US hoped that the Saudi-led cartel would boost production and send gas prices down even further in the run-up to the midterm elections.
Americans have experienced some relief at the pump in recent weeks as gas prices have gradually retreated from record highs earlier this summer.
As of Wednesday, the average cost of a gallon of regular unleaded fuel stood at $4.16 nationwide — down from $4.81 a month ago, but up from $3.18 at this time last year.
In the last 10 days, the price of gas has fallen some 20 cents.
But analysts warn that the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as a surge in demand could easily reverse that trend.
Robert Yawger, vice president of energy futures at Mizuho Securities, agreed with Smith.
Americans are being weighed down by record levels of inflation that are exacerbated by high gas prices.AFP/Getty Images
“I must say I am surprised they only threw in 100,000 barrels per day,” Yawger said.
The White House on Wednesday acknowledged that the announcement will not have a noticeable impact on gas prices.
When asked if Americans can expect the OPEC+ move to make gas prices fall precipitously in the near future, Amos Hochstein, the White House’s top energy adviser for energy security, told CNN: “Well, no it doesn’t.”
Last month, Hochstein said he was “pretty confident” that OPEC+ would significantly boost production “as a result of the president’s conversations.”
Hochstein said on Wednesday that the OPEC+ move was a “step in the right direction,” but he declined to answer when asked if Biden was disappointed.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted, however, that Biden’s trip could still be counted as a success because it coincided with a Saudi decision to open airspace to Israeli planes and because Riyadh continues to honor a truce in Yemen’s civil war that has been in place since April.
“We think that the trip was certainly worth it,” the press secretary said.
When a reporter pressed Jean-Pierre about whether Biden “got what he wanted” from the trip, the press secretary referred to a chart that showed gas prices trending downward after hitting all-time average highs of more than $5 per gallon in mid-June.
“If you think about it, this is a one month increase,” Jean-Pierre said of the OPEC+ decision. “But the president’s gonna continue to do the work… When it comes to gas prices and oil production and meeting supply, we’re going to continue to work on that.”
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Biden failed:
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The Only Dangerous Thing About Pelosi’s Taiwan Visit is Her Boss’s Cowardice
China picked a fight over Pelosi to test Biden. And he failed
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
If you believe the Biden administration and its media allies, members of congress visiting Taiwan is a shocking and unprecedented event. Except that Senator Tammy Duckworth visited Taiwan in May. Senator Richard Burr, Robert Menendez, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse and Robert Portman came in April. Along with Rep. Ronny Jackson
Senator Dan Sullivan and Chris Coons flew over last summer. In the fall, Rep. Nancy Mace, Sarah Jacobs, Mark Takano, Elissa Slotkin and Colin Allred saw the sights.
Thanks in part to the Taiwan Travel Act, which passed with no opposition and was signed by President Trump in 2018, Taiwan is Grand Central Station for congressional delegations.
Pelosi is higher-ranking only in that she’s the outgoing lame duck leader of a vanishing majority.
China was not threatened by Pelosi’s visit. It chose to exploit it as an opportunity to intimidate the Biden administration and blackmail its weak enemies. And whatever else happens, it succeeded in exposing once again how worthless Biden’s tough talk about Taiwan is.
“Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan?" Biden had been asked at a press conference with the Japanese prime minister.
“Yes,” he assured. “That’s the commitment we made.”
"We made a sacred commitment to Article 5 that if, in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our Nato allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan," Biden had promised.
NATO, Japan and South Korea must be feeling pretty good now that the Biden administration announced that it doesn’t recognize the existence of Taiwan after spending a week trying to pressure his own party’s House Speaker out of paying a visit to the independent nation.
But this is the same administration whose secretary of state had tweeted, "We stand with the people of Hong Kong & continue to support their human rights & fundamental freedoms".
And then deleted it.
Last year, Secretary of State Blinken warned Communist China that an invasion of Taiwan would result in "terrible consequences".
"We’ve been very clear and consistently clear, over many years that we are committed to making sure that Taiwan has the means to defend itself," he vowed. "We will continue to make good on that commitment."
The Trump administration had approved nearly $1 billion in arms sales to Taiwan in its first year in office comprising everything from coastal defense systems to submarine torpedoes to drones and aircraft parts. The Biden administration's approval of arms sales has currently focused on a much narrower sale of artillery. There's a $14 billion backlog in delivering equipment that Taiwan already purchased including 66 F-16 jets that are crucial for defending against China's aerial incursions.
Pelosi's visit resulted in reports of China's SU-35 jets crossing the Taiwan strait and military exercises, which the brutal Communist dictatorship refers to as "military operations", entering Taiwan's territorial waters. While the Biden administration had put on a show of talking tough last year, Chinese pressure immediately sent Biden and his cronies into a cowardly panic.
Biden claimed that “the military thinks it's not a good idea right now”, as if the military sets foreign policy and tells elected officials what to do, instead of the other way around.
Administration officials began working the phones, calling every reporter in D.C. and Manhattan to dish on what a terrible idea Pelosi's trip would be. And the more Communist China threatened, the harder Biden appeased.
In the days before the visit, the media was filled with administration hit pieces aimed at the woman who is third in line for the presidency. Pelosi was getting the Trump treatment.
"The damage from Pelosi’s unwise Taiwan visit must be contained," the Washington Post's editorial board warned. The board's position was understandable considering that the paper is owned by Jeff Bezos whose vast fortune comes from Amazon's third party Chinese sellers ripping off American products and then dumping them in this country.
But the Post was also closely echoing the Biden administration.
At the New York Times, Paul Krugman launched his attack headlined, "Why Pelosi's Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless". Coincidentally, "reckless" was how China's Ambassador Qin Gang had described the visit to CNN. Or maybe not so coincidentally after all since so many of America’s headlines are actually translated from the original Chinese.
There’s nothing reckless about the visit.
American politicians regularly visit Taiwan. Six senators have visited just this year. Neither of the major papers campaigned against the Taiwan Travel Act. Nor did they condemn the series of congressional delegations that have been visiting the Republic of China. Until now.
But when China exercised its heckler’s veto, the Biden administration ran to duck and cover. And the media suddenly decided that visiting Taiwan was suddenly very dangerous business.
Communist China is likely to invade Taiwan. It will do so irrespective of whether a daffy California congresswoman sets foot in it or not. Beijing knows that Pelosi doesn’t set foreign policy. It has too many spies here and has corrupted too many of our officials, from Biden on down, not to know how the game is played on this side of the ocean.
China chose to pick this fight over Pelosi because it could make Biden blink. And he blinked.
Biden didn’t just turn on Republicans when China bellowed, he went after one of his closest allies in a desperate bid to do Beijing's bidding. And the media, which joined Xi’s chorus, showed that its only allegiance is to protecting the Biden administration and kowtowing to China.
Speaker Pelosi certainly didn’t set out to demonstrate all that. Unintentionally she did.
The otherwise forgettable trip became another warning that America could not be counted on and that any of the assurances coming out of the White House are worthless. Taiwan can’t count on American military intervention. It can’t even count on the delivery of the arms that it already purchased and needs in order to defend itself against Hunter’s business partners.
Many protest that the United States shouldn’t be in the business of defending Taiwan. There’s a legitimate debate to be had there, but just as with Ukraine, Biden is in the business of talking tough until the shooting starts and then he runs away. And that’s the worst of both worlds.
If China believes that American military intervention is a possibility, it would be much less likely to invade Taiwan. The Biden administration repeatedly threw away the country’s strategic ambiguity, talking tough about militarily defending Taiwan, only to panic at China’s threats.
America’s enemies keep testing Biden. What appear to be crises are often just tests by China, Russia, Iran, and other enemies to see how far the United States can be pushed. And the latest answer is that Biden can be pushed by China into turning on his closest allies.
If Biden won’t even defend Pelosi from China, what are the odds he’ll defend Taiwan? None.
Communist China isn’t afraid of Pelosi and it certainly isn’t afraid of Biden. The Communist dictatorship is testing our nation’s leaders to see if it has any reason to fear America.
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Great article, speaks for itself:
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Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class
By Victor Davis Hanson
Elite experts and degreed professionals massaged and warped their knowledge to serve ideological masters rather than the truth.
For years, European policy makers had assured the world that the relatively rapid “transition” to “green” energy was the world’s preordained future—regardless of the costs.
Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to “renewable energy.”
Most citizens were afraid to object that in cloudy, cold Germany solar panels were not viable methods of electrical generation—especially in comparison to the country’s vast coal deposits and its large, model nuclear power industry.
As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood—the dirtiest of modern fuels—to endure the cold. And there is further talk of “warm rooms,” where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive.
Sri Lanka may be the first modern nation to adopt deliberate policies that have led to mass hunger and bankruptcy. The government for a variety of reasons listened to foreign advocates of back-to-nature organic farming, specifically outright abandonment of highly effective synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
The result was endemic crop failure. Cash crops for export failed. Widespread hunger followed. Without foreign exchange, it became impossible to import key staples like food and fuel.
Sri Lanka once had a per capita income twice that of nearby India. Now it cannot feed or fuel itself.
Unfortunately, its incompetent government trusted radical environmental advisors, many of them foreign experts. Sri Lanka believed it could become the woke darling of the “Environmental, Social, Governance” movement, and that way draw in unlimited Western woke investment.
Instead, it has embraced a policy of national suicide.
Recently, a group of 55 distinguished pro-administration economists assured us that Joe Biden’s massive borrowing and new entitlements agenda were not inflationary. In September 2021, these economists with 14 Nobel prize winners among them declared that Biden’s inflationary policies would actually “ease” inflation.
Last month, inflation spiked to an annualized rate of 9.1 percent. None of these “blue-chip” economists have offered any apologies for lending their prestige to convince Americans of the absurd: that inflating the money supply, spiking new government spending, incentivizing labor non-participation, and keeping interest rates artificially low would not cause inflation.
In late July 2021, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that the Taliban takeover “was not a foregone conclusion.” He bragged that 34 provincial capitals were still in Afghan government hands.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nodded in approval. Less than a month later, the entire Afghan government collapsed. The American military fled in its most ignominious retreat in over 50 years. Milley had been parroting Biden’s earlier prompt that a Taliban victory after the American evacuation was “highly unlikely.”
On the eve of the 2020 election, news accounts revealed some of the lurid contents on Hunter Biden’s lost laptop. Emails and photos began to incriminate the entire Biden family for leveraging millions of dollars from foreign grandees for access to a bought Joe Biden.
Fifty retired intelligence officers, however, without evidence, swore that the laptop’s appearance could be due to “Russian disinformation.” Yet after authentication—Hunter himself never denied the lost laptop was his—few if any of those marquee “experts” apologized for their election-driven dissimulation.
At the height of the massive 2020 enforced quarantine and lockdowns, some 1,200 medical and health “professionals” signed a petition claiming that thousands of left-wing protestors should be exempt from the very quarantine they had insisted on for others. The experts absurdly claimed that denying tens of thousands the right to break quarantines to protest in the street was a greater health threat than COVID-19.
FBI Director James Comey doggedly pursued the “Russian collusion” hoax. At one point he hired the discredited Christopher Steele to supply the FBI with information from his fantasy dossier. Once called to account, on some 245 occasions before Congress, Comey swore that he could either not remember or had no knowledge about the questions asked of him.
His successor FBI interim Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal officials. Special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller himself swore under oath that he knew nothing either about the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts for his entire investigation.
FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith admitted to altering a federal court document in efforts to convict an innocent suspect.
All these depressing examples have one common denominator. Elite experts and degreed professionals massaged and warped their knowledge to serve ideological masters rather than the truth.
In the process, they caused untold damage to their country and fellow citizens. They disgraced their profession. They tarnished the scientific community. And sold their souls to ideologues.
Is it any wonder why the Western public has lost confidence in their degreed and credentialed elites?
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Biden will be remembered for wrecking the country!
Opinion by Peter Lucas - Wednesday
Joe Biden could have been a good president.
All he had to do was leave things alone.
Instead, he blundered into the office and wrecked the country.
He is like the guy on a Boeing 747 high over the Atlantic Ocean who breaks into the cockpit and says,
“I can fly this thing.” “You don’t have to, Joe,” the pilot says, “It’s on autopilot. It flies itself. You know, computers.”
Undeterred, Joe presses buttons and flips switches. The plane goes into a nosedive.
Which is where we are today. You don’t put a guy like this in control.
He took an energy-independent country and turned it into a nation begging Saudi Arabia and Venezuela for oil. Gasoline prices hit the roof and inflation soared. But it is not his fault.
He forgot how he preened on Day One of his presidency, launching his war on domestic produced energy in favor of his Green Dream of a fossil fuel free world.
Biden, John Kerry, his climate change czar, and the progressives would have you believe that the world will come to an end unless their anti-fossil fuel agenda adopted.
Yes, the world may come to an end. But the chances are the end will come sooner from the unleashing of nuclear weapons then it will come from the use of fossil fuels.
But you do not hear politicians like Biden or Kerry talk much about doing away with nuclear weapons. On the contrary. Biden is reopening nuclear negotiations with Iran which will eventually lead to the Iranians having a nuclear bomb.
This is the country where its religious fanatics have promised to use its first nuclear weapon on Israel and the second on the United States.
If I were to bet, I would wager on the world ending in a nuclear bang before closing out in a fossil fuel whimper.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world keeps pumping away, and the American people suffer.
But it is not Biden’s fault. It is Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine who is to blame, not Joe Biden.
Joe Biden took a working and strict border policy left to him by Donald Trump and turned it into a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from countries around the world are pouring into the United States and nobody is stopping them. And many of them are dying along the way.
Bidens’s decision to do away with border enforcement has also greatly facilitated the smuggling tons of drugs into the county, including deadly fentanyl from China that is killing many unsuspecting Americans.
But that is not his fault either. It was Trump’s racist border policy that caused all the problems. Besides, he assigned Kamala Harris to get to the root of the problem.
Biden also authored the ill-conceived and humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, causing the unnecessary death of 13 Americans at the chaotic Kabul airport, leaving hundreds of Americans, abandoning thousands of Afghan allies, and throwing he country into the chaotic hands of the Taliban.
Naturally, he blamed Trump, which nobody bought.
The next thing you know Joe Biden will be blaming Putin for the Supreme Court’s decision to send the abortion issue back to the states. Putin somehow must have gotten Trump to appoint three conservatives to the court in order to roil the country.
According to Biden, the “one thing” that has destabilized the country under his leadership has not been soaring gasoline prices, inflation, the open border, the shameful retreat in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, the frightening rising crime rate or the pandemic, but “the outrageous behavior” of the Supreme Court on the abortion issue.
The court did not destabilize the country. Joe Biden did.
This man does not belong in the cockpit.
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- How ISIS is re-establishing itself in Syria, who's responsible & what needs to be done to fight it -
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