Jumpin' Gas Prices! It's a Flash! Flash! Flash!

Too cold to start a fire

I'm burning diesel, burning dinosaur bones - Rusty Cage, Soundgarden 1991

In 1973, the bloated, complacent, and backwards thinking U.S. Automotive industry took a wallop when OPEC introduced an Oil embargo and took steps to wrest control of the oil market from US and European backed oil companies.

American cars of the 1970's were ridiculous monstrosities and American automakers weren't invested in the type of innovation and design investment necessary to stay competitive.  The 30 years after WW2 had led to a malaise of over-confidence.  German and especially Japanese car makers were ready to pounce on the small car market, with advanced vehicles that not only were far more efficient and better cars but, also what a large segment of the customer base in the United States wanted.

Of course, since then the sad truth is the American car industry has still not learned the lessons of 1973.  Today, gas prices across the country are reaching the highest real cost as well as the highest relative price ever.  And are drivers in the United States equipped to handle this? 

Nope.

You see American car shopper sucks or to be fairer, consistently makes the bad vehicle choice, especially when given the chance to make that choice.  Every time gas prices relax a little bit, Americans go out and buy giant gas guzzling monster vehicles.  Now maybe it's a symbiotic relationship between car makers and consumer.  As the giant land yachts of the 1970's didn't go away they were simply jacked up and retitled Sport Utility Vehicles and Trucks.  Everyone wants a big truck.  Even so-called midsized trucks like the Ford Ranger, Honda Ridgeline, or Chevy Colorado would be big trucks in an earlier era.  Of course, some really small Utes have just been reintroduced; the Hyundai Santa Cruz and Ford Maverick (also as a hybrid) but, it's way late to finally introduce these smaller more efficient models.

Additionally, while the hyper car market is tiny and geared towards the super rich, it's moving to electric vehicles.  But, the "affordable" luxury and performance market isn't getting great gas mileage either.

Brazilian Fascists love TrumPutin 
and hate President Biden and Trudeau
I guess Glenn Greenwald is having
a real impact!

So, thanks to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, energy prices are spiking across the globe.  And Americans are once again moaning about paying at the pump.

Unbelievable.  Or... in reality it isn't... because the American dream of cheap energy derived from fossil fuels is yet again another cornerstone of the endless Republican assault on the United States.   

43 years ago President Jimmy Carter, a good and decent and deeply religious man put solar panels on the White House.  President Carter called for 20% of American power to be procured from solar In Year 2000.

This was a smart, forward-thinking plan and one which would have helped usher in the electric car revolution far earlier as well as combat what executives and scientists working for the fossil fuels industry  already knew in the 1970's; that climate change was going to destroy the planet and kill millions (or more) people.

Instead, what we got in 1979 was an Iranian Revolution because the Shah of Iran, whom the United States and British had placed into power in 1953 to help the oil from Persia flow, was a brutal dictator and murderer.  The Hostage Crisis opened the doors to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave for the villainous Republican Party. 

And in 1981, Ronnie Raygun stepped into the White House with his oil-drenched hairdo, phony cowboy demeanor, and chickenhawk warmonger swagger and promptly took the solar panels off the roof and declared the United States would never break its' addiction to fossil fuels or foreign entanglements.  Reagan was already a brain-addled fraud in the pocket of Big Oil, before being shot and suffering brain damage.

So Reagan's handlers told him to open areas of the United States to exploitation and ruin and in 1986, Raygun gave a speech "crowing" about how "freedom", "the marketplace", "the entrepreneurs and businessmen and women of America" performed miracles after he decontrolled Oil from The Government.

No Eternal Allies only
Eternal Interest in Middle East Oil

What a fucking asshole.  Reagan's fraudulence set the course to tie the United States to the Middle East and for the next 40 years the American people have suffered because of it.  Reagan incited and assured Saddam Hussein the US would support him and Iraq against Iran.  Well that led to 30 years of violence in Iraq and Iran didn't it? 

And opening the United States to haphazard oil drilling ushered in disastrous oil spills via the Exxon Valdez (1989), BP Deepwater Horizon (2010), too say nothing of all the lesser spills you've never heard about, and the monstrously destructive 21st century fracking boom with all it's accompanying environmental destruction.

But, this post is already too long and I've barely touched the disastrous W(orst President Ever) Maladministration drilling policies or Former Republican Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and all his associated crimes*, misappropriation of funds, and abuse of authority.  And that's the problem; it takes a lot of reading and the acknowledgment of background information which bad actors on the Right are unwilling to engage in because they've mastered the art of the Meme and the bumper sticker and conservatives have entered an Era of having their own facts.  

They simply assert High Gas Prices Biden Fault shorthand.  So, instead of getting a fuel efficient vehicle or investing in an electric vehicle, a whole bunch of Americans who asserted it was their right to get the gaudiest, biggest, least practical, non-efficient Truck are now crying about high gas prices and petulantly pouting that mean Pete Buttigieg said they should buy an electric vehicle  

*- Career Criminal Traitor Trump showed Republicans they had been a bunch of "Suckers and Losers", when you have authority you commit crimes and you keep committing crimes non-stop because the media isn't interested in following them all up.

Conservatives are False Patriots who hate Real Freedom and True Liberty

Like cafeteria patrons they pick and choose from their narrow bigoted idea of Freedom and then seek to subjugate and oppress other Americans who do things they don't like.

An Identification card is not required to live in America. It just isn't; no matter how much the right wants to belabor the facts and bring up non-arguments like air travel and bank accounts. Identification cards are nowhere to be found in the Constitution and have always been ruled as unnecessary for day-to-day life but, are part and parcel of autocratic regimes who wish to subjugate their citizens.

So, conservatives hype a fake problem, Voter Fraud, because their true intention is to restrict the liberty of Americans voting in ways they don't like.

Conservatives hype the threat of muslim extremists and terror attacks while ignoring the massive damage caused by Corporations. Many of which owe no allegiance to the United States.

Al Qaeda could only have dreamed of causing the damage BP did to the Gulf. Freedom Industries poisoned the entire water supply for 300,000 Americans in West Virginia an incident akin to a plot device in a Tom Clancy novel. But, the gall to file for Bankruptcy protection to avoid financial responsibility while, obscuring the true depth of the toxic spill speaks to their comfort in their corporate criminality. Because they knew they could count on Speaker John Boehner crying to the Media to blame that Too Much Regulation and... President Obama were to blame.

Freedom Industries wasn't the only Corporation to pollute with reckless abandon. I've written before about the dumping of petcoke all over the poor residents of Detroit and Chicago by the Koch Brothers. But, during the Republican Government Shutdown, Tesoro Logistics spilled 20,000 barrels of shale oil in North Dakota.

The amount of oil spilled in the U.S. in 2013 surpassed the last four decades combined;

Altogether, 800,000 gallons spilled from US railroads in the years from 1975 to 2010. That data, which comes from the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, does not include records of Canadian spills, some of which are thought to surpass one million gallons spilled on their own. 

In part because of major derailments in Alabama and North Dakota, over 1.15 million gallons of crude oil seeped from train cars.

Why? Because fuck regulations that's why. Because conservatives are so duped/ignorant/uncaring that when Republicans say Regulations are bad and liberals like regulations... You don't want to be a liberal? Do you? Liberty-loving conservatives bristle and swell up with false ideals of freedom ignoring the clear and present danger Corporations pose to all Americans.

But, lest one think conservatives are only false patriots when it comes to large macro issues fear not! Conservatives hate freedom and personal liberty of Americans even after your death.

In Texas, there is the case of a woman, Marlise Munoz, who passed away two months ago and who has detailed end-of-life instructions if she is in an inoperative brain dead state. But, her rights and wishes are nothing to conservatives because she is pregnant and conservatives view women as nothing more than husks for growing the next generation of conservatives. Her corpse is being re-animated to be an incubation chamber for a "distinctly abnormal" fetus which is months away from being viable and which is expressly against the wishes of herself, her husband and her family.

This is an extreme example, no doubt, but conservatives love extremism because it helps them in their goals to restrict the liberty and freedom of Americans who do things conservatives don't like.

Conservatives really, really, really hate Sexual Freedom for Americans. They have undertaken a decades long war on Americans, which continues today, in order to dominate and dictate what consenting adults can and can not do.

Conservatives main two targets have been women and homosexuals (as the Duck Dynasty Grifter Bigot episode showed) but, their goal is oppression of All Americans. But, they've been having setbacks as over the last decade oppressive conservative laws have been struck down by the Courts (esp. the 2003 SCOTUS case of Lawerence v. Texas)and legislatures have passed laws mandating equality and liberty for Americans who conservatives don't like.

Mike Huckabee, Faux News luminary, former Governor of Arkansas, and 2016 Presidential hopeful declared conservatives want to give Women freedom from their "libido" by restricting their access to birth control.

"[T]he Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing or them a prescription each month for birth control."

Huckabee suffered from a mental linguistic error combining the terms 'Uncle Sam' and 'Sugar Daddy' resulting in the portmanteua of "Uncle Sugar". Of course, his comments aren't directed at winning over Women but, telling conservatives they are right to Oppress and Subjugate Americans for their sluttly ways.

And when that fails they fall back on the 1st Amendment and complain that "their" religious liberty is being harmed.

What conservatives mean when they cry about their religious liberty is the Freedom to Oppress and Subjugate other Americans who are engaging in activities they don't like. The Religious Freedom conservatives want is the freedom to impose their beliefs onto others.

The 1st Amendment is not an edict for right-wing religious supremacy and with the Government enforcing an Evangelical Inquisition, but that is precisely what Conservatives want.

And then when all their legal rigamarole fails, all their electoral shenanigans are unmasked conservatives implicitly and sometimes explicity indicate they will use the 2nd Amendment to advance their goals of Oppression and Subjugation.

Conservatism is Terrorism.