The three issues below are unrelated to each other except that they convey the rapid failure of the Biden administration.

There were state governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey and they results do not look good for the Democrats:

Tuesday’s elections left the Democratic Party reeling after one Republican won the governor’s race in Virginia and another posed an unexpectedly strong challenge to New Jersey’s incumbent governor, with the race still too close to call.
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A year after Mr. Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, failed in his quest to win back his old office, losing to the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, in a contest that was closely watched for what it could signal about voters’ satisfaction or lack thereof with the incumbent president and his party. Mr. McAuliffe conceded to Mr. Youngkin on Wednesday morning.

Atrios explains best why the Dems are again losing:

[T]he story of every Dem election win is they promise lefty stuff, fail to deliver, then they lose subsequent elections and then tell themselves that doing all the lefty stuff they didn't do was the cause. They lose power, eventually go back to running on lefty stuff, win, and then again fail to deliver.

The failure to deliver is a indeed a constant. But there is a reason behind that. The U.S. election system is basically based on bribery and thus incapable to deliver the policies most people want.

The system has little to do with real democracy. It is a sham. People around the world know this. People in the U.S. know it too and want it changed:

In the Global Attitudes Survey this spring, Pew asked 18,850 adults in 17 advanced economies, including the United States, about their views of American society and politics. Countries surveyed included Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and South Korea.

“Very few in any public surveyed think American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow,” Pew’s report said. …

Over the last days there has been a conference of the parties of the UN climate convention. U.S. President Biden had planned to 'lead' it.

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Biden then insulted the Chinese President Xi Jingping for not coming to the conference:

Joe Biden launched a stinging attack on China on Tuesday for the failure of the country’s president, Xi Jinping, to show up to the Cop26 UN climate summit, and failing to show leadership on the climate crisis.

The US president said it was a “big mistake” that his Chinese counterpart had chosen not to attend the summit, where more than 120 world leaders have spent the last two days discussing ways to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.

“We showed up,” Biden told a press conference, speaking before world leaders departed, to leave the floor to their ministers and officials for two weeks of tense negotiations.

“They didn’t show up … It is a gigantic issue and they just walked away,” he said, also criticising Russia and Vladimir Putin.

“How do you do that and claim to have any leadership mantle?”

Wearing his imaginary leadership mantle Biden then demanded to pump and burn more oil:

President Joe Biden kept up the pressure on OPEC+ to combat high oil prices, blaming it for inflationary pressure at home just two days before Saudi Arabia, Russia and the rest of the cartel meet to discuss oil policy.

“If you take a look at gas prices, and you take a look at oil prices, that is a consequence of, thus far, the refusal of Russia or the OPEC nations to pump more oil,” Biden told reporters at a news conference at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow. “And we’ll see what happens on that score sooner than later.”

The pressure on OPEC+ is unusually strong. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday to press for increased production. Other oil-consuming nations are pushing hard as well, with Japan and India wanting more production as the energy crisis threatens to undermine the economic recovery in Europe and Asia.

To demand more oil pumping at a global climate summit is probably the most tone deaf 'leading' anyone could think of.

The Iranian Republican Guards Corp revealed a rather wild story today:

The US military confiscated the Iranian tanker loaded with crude oil in the Sea of Oman, which connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz, and intended to unload its shipment to another tanker and direct it to an unknown destination.

Reacting promptly, however, members of the IRGC’s Navy carried out a heliborne operation on the stolen ship’s deck, gained control of the vessel, and directed it back toward Iran’s territorial waters.

US forces then proceeded to chase the tanker using several helicopters and warships, but their attempt at taking over the vessel for a second time was thwarted again by Iranian naval forces.

The tanker is currently in Iranian territorial waters and under the protection of IRGC’s Navy.

There is video footage available which seems to confirm all but the first part of the story. It shows the IRGC landing on the tanker, U.S. war ships coming in and IRGC fastboats putting themselves between the tanker and two full fledged U.S. Navy destroyers. But how or why the U.S. was involved with the tanker in the first place is not clear to me.

The tanker is the Vietnamese flagged vessel SOTHYS. It may have been involved in smuggling oil from Iran when the IRGC intervened.

There has been so far no statement from the U.S. side on this. But whatever it had planned seems to have failed.