ExxonMobil tells Trump that Venezuela is uninvestable [sic], Trump stiffs ConocoPhillips, Chevron, already there, is ready to go go go

 What the Big Oil executives told Trump about investing in Venezuela

... “We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here,” Woods told Trump at the White House. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela today, it’s uninvestable.” ...

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance congratulated Trump on ousting former President Nicolás Maduro. He said the banking sector will need to help restructure Venezuela’s debt and provide billions of dollars in financing for the restore [sic] the country’s infrastructure. ... Trump told the Conoco CEO that the U.S. government is not looking at recovering the assets the company lost during the 2007 nationalization.

“We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump said. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.” ...

Vice Chairman Mark Nelson said Chevron has a way forward to rapidly ramp up its production, which currently stands at about 240,000 barrels per day.

“We have a path forward here very shortly to be able to increase our liftings from those joint ventures 100% essentially effective immediately,” Nelson told Trump. “We are also able to increase our production within our own disciplined investment schemes by about 50% just in the next 18 to 24 months.” ...

Trump gaslights America about affordability in last night's speech, says it only became an issue during the Biden administration

 I've been talking about affordability until I'm blue in the face right here ever since the Great Recession wrecked America and Obama did nothing about it.

There's even a label for it, with over 120 posts about it going all the way back to the beginning.

Affordability has become an even bigger problem because of the recent episode of inflation, no question about it.  

For example in 2025 the average sales price of a single family home in my county has been $433k, 87% higher than it was in 2019.

For that to be affordable, an income of $166.5k is necessary (2.6x = 433,000), but 94% of individual wage earners didn't make that much in 2023.

But in Trump's America in 2019, when the average sales price of a single family home in my county was only $232k, 85% couldn't afford it because they didn't make the necessary $89.2k a year.

Same shit, different day. Illegal aliens weren't to blame in 2019 any more than they are in 2025. 

Millions of Americans lost their jobs in 2009 and never got them back. Many of them lost their homes, too, and much else. Zero interest rate policy for a subsequent decade is what made housing unaffordable then, and Trump is calling for more of the same now.

People like me voted for Trump in 2016 because we thought that finally we had someone who meant business about stuff like that, but his failure to prioritize illegal immigration in 2017, his signature campaign issue, indicated that he wasn't a serious person, and the rest of his tenure proved it.

And he still isn't serious. 

He's wasting billions of dollars rounding up illegals whom he now laughably says number 25 million when he should be rounding up their employers and passing legislation which puts the screws to THEM instead of to some grandma with a sign at a protest rally.

He's also wasting billions going after Venezuela, which hasn't paid ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips about $10 billion for expropriating their oil assets in 2007. Fighting this small potatoes matter is also costing us a fortune.

He also wasted $9-$12 billion in the Red Sea trying to stop the Houthis, but cut and ran when it got too expensive, leaving shipping the sitting duck it was in the first place, so it still goes around Africa instead. Transits through the Suez are down 50% and tonnage is down 66% compared with 2023.

America is no longer the guarantor of freedom of navigation on the seas. It doesn't care about freedom in Ukraine, and it certainly doesn't care about economic freedom at home. If it did it wouldn't spend the country into oblivion, and would tax the bejeebers out of the billionaires and leave the rest of us alone. 

We do not have a serious president.

It's all theatre.  

Democrats simply hate big oil and are oblivious to the windfall profits of their pals in tech which dwarf those of the oil industry

 

To Richard Brookhiser of National Review, illegal immigration isn't even a thing, and conservatism's biggest hypocrites are among the Religious Right

Here, where strong national defense, cultural and New York intellectual conservatives, and free-marketeers all receive his scorn:

Trump’s conservative admirers have had to abandon and contradict what they once professed to hold most dear.

The most egregious example is the religious Right. The religious Right is the latest version of an old model of American politics, variously incarnated by Puritans, abolitionists, and William Jennings Bryan. It, like its predecessors, has argued that America and individual Americans need to have a godly or at least moral character to thrive. Now the religious Right adores a thrice-married cad and casual liar. But it is not alone. Historians and psychologists of the martial virtues salute the bone-spurred draft-dodger whose Khe Sanh was not catching the clap. Cultural critics who deplored academic fads and slipshod aesthetics explicate a man who has never read a book, not even the ones he has signed. Followers of Harry Jaffa, the most important Lincoln scholar of the last 60 years, rally round a Republican who does not know why the Civil War happened. Straussians, after leaving the cave, find themselves in Mar-a-Lago. Econocons put their money on a serial bankrupt.

Poor fella. No one listens to him anymore.