TAKEN BY STORM
Harvey behind gas higher prices
Dear John: Can you explain the gasoline greed? Gas prices spiked when oil dropped by almost 5 percent. As consumers, we are at the mercy of corporate greed. How does this work? J.M.
Dear J.M.: It’s more investor greed and opportunism.
Gasoline prices are rising sharply because Hurricane Harvey knocked out oil refineries in Texas. So the people in the investment community who follow future trends — and trade futures contracts — figure there will soon be less gas on the market.
Less gas means higher prices. So they boost the price of gasoline in anticipation of this.
Oil, however, wasn’t really affected by the storm, although some drilling rigs may have been put out of action for a while.
There is still way too much oil in the world. So the hurricane, as bad as it was, really isn’t going to have much of an impact on crude.
In fact, since refineries aren’t turning crude into gasoline, crude supplies are going to pile up. That’s why crude oil prices are down.
And don’t expect gasoline prices to drop as rapidly as they rose. That’s not the way things go, because suppliers are always slow to cut prices.
Dear John: Hillary Clinton’s e-mails weren’t “stolen by the Russians.”
Where do you come up with this revisionist history to fit your phony narrative? FAKE NEWS!!! W.J. Dear W.J.: Let’s get something straight, pal. If you are saying that what I wrote was WRONG!!! that’s one thing.
But how the hell would you know, because you know NOTHING!!!
If you are saying I made that up — lied, fake news or whatever you call it — then that’s a different accusation altogether.
I suggest you have your lawyer call me before you send me another libelous e-mail.
Now if you would like to get some KNOWLEDGE, here it is: according to a very reliable intelligence source of mine whom I’ve worked with for more than 20 years — and whom I’ve referred to many times on this — the Russians long ago stole Hillary Clinton’s password, and they were reading her e-mails for years.
The Russians could do that because Clinton was carelessly using her unprotected BlackBerry while on a US government plane when visiting Moscow as secretary of state.
And as usually happens, US intelligence agencies were monitoring the Russians while they were monitoring Hillary. Got that? The National Security Agency, my source told me, has a copy of all of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails (and then some) and offered them to the FBI. But ex-FBI head James Comey rejected them.
Comey’s whole investigation is now being called into question by the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Judicial Watch, a conservative organization, is now in court trying to get copies of her e-mails or to just find them.
So the question of whether the e-mails still exist should be an easy one to answer. All someone has to do is ask the NSA or the FBI whether what I was told was true. And I’m sure they already have. Maybe that’s why these investigations are continuing.
See, that’s how journalism WORKS. We have sources whom we believe are reliable tell us stuff and then the process is set into motion whereby we find out if those sources are correct.
And sources of some other journalists have proved to be wrong. But despite President Trump’s simplistic notion of the process, that doesn’t mean journalists made anything up. It doesn’t mean that’s fake news. Fake news, or misleading information, is more likely to come from political sources who have an agenda to advance.
If I’m proved wrong, be sure to get back to me. But until then, SHUT UP!!! And stop using the capitalization button, we all know where it is on the keyboard, and shouting doesn’t make you any more convincing.