NEW YORK (CBS)  -- WHEN WILL THE ENERGY BUBBLE FINALLY BURST?

Oil prices remain at wacky levels, and all of us pump-drunk motorists want to know: When with the oil bubble burst the way the housing bubble has?

"Unfortunately, there doesn't look like there's any end to this national nightmare," said oil analyst, Peter Beutel.

Yes, the price of gas is high, but gas price tracker Trilby Lundberg says at least it's been stable:
"The U.S. average price for regular grade is 4.11 per gallon, and it's up one-and-a-half pennies from three weeks ago."

And you might want to send flowers to your local gas retailer.

"Refiners and retailers did not pass through higher crude oil prices to us," said Lundberg

See, and you thought they all were evil.

No, in fact your retailer and refiners love you and don't want you to change your driving habits too drastically, for fear you'll fall in love with the bus and never come back.

But it can't last forever.

According to Lundberg, "It would take a drop of 10 dollars a barrel for us not to see some kind of price increase at the pump..."

Oil analyst Peter Beutel says the pressure's building, and unless there is a big drop in oil this week, well, how can I break this to you, I'll let Peter do it: "We already have 18 cents that prices rose for gasoline at the wholesale level, that has not yet made it into any of the surveys. We'll probably see at least 15 cents of that show up at the pump."

Is there any hope?

"We need the Pickens Plan, we need a number of different plans put into effect in order for us to get through this crisis," said Beutel.

Yes, last week, oilman T. Boone Pickens said he was going to spend millions to promote a plan to wean the country from oil.

He'd have thousands of wind turbines sprouting in the windswept Midwestern states, enough to generate one-fifth of the country's electricity. And he'd do this so that the domestic natural gas, which currently supplies power plants, could replace foreign oil as a motor fuel.

Wow. That sounds suspiciously like an "energy policy"...

THE LONG FIGHT AHEAD IN AFGHANISTAN.

Meet the new war, which in fact is the old war...

"Afghanistan was the 'forgotten war.' We've focused so much for the last several years on the war in Iraq," said CBS News Military Consultant, Jeff McCausland. 

It's beginning to look like the Iraq War is winding down. The Iraqi Government wants a timetable, and while the White House seemed initially resistant to the idea, the U.S. is hardly in a position to insist that U.S. troops stay if the country they liberated wants them to leave.

And CBS News Military Consultant Jeff McCausland says it's about time, they're needed back in Afghanistan. You remember Afghanistan...

"Our shifting of forces too quickly from Afghanistan in preparation for the invasion of Iraq was a serious strategic error that only now we're really suffering the consequences of," said McCausland.

On Sunday, Taliban forces, those are the guys we beat back in 2002, hit a remote U.S. base near the Pakistan border. This wasn't just a raid, this was a sustained pre-dawn attack using machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

Mike Lyons, also a CBS News Military Consultant, says this is no ragtag arm: "It seems as though the attack says: the Taliban is well-organized and fighting in a traditional military sense."

When the shooting finally stopped, a lot of the insurgents were dead, but so were nine U.S. soldiers, making this the deadliest attack in three years.

And where the Taliban take control, they're doing what they do best: imposing the death penalty in God's name. Latest victims: two women accused of providing prostitutes to U.S. soldiers and contractors. The local governor described them as innocent local people, but no matter: the execution squad dressed them in blue burkas and gunned them down.

"The fact that they've been able to keep a low profile for the past few months and now come back, recruited a few more people, they've been supplied by somebody," said Mike Lyons.

Jeff McCausland says clearly their lifeline leads straight to Pakistan.

"To be successful in Afghanistan requires for us to be successful in Pakistan, which may even be a larger undertaking than Iraq," said McCausland.

 
TALK OF TIMETABLES FOR U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQ.

Is it time to set a timetable for victory in Iraq?

"It's long overdue. We should insist that there be a timetable..." said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan - on CBS News' "Face The Nation".

Senator Carl Levin is among those who thinks it's time to let the pupil dismiss the teacher.

The word from the Bush Administration is that more soldiers can leave Iraq beginning in September. Both fans and critics of the war seem to agree that al-Qaida is on the run, and the Iraq military is ready to hold up its part of the President's bargain, spelled out back in 2006: "Our policy is 'stand up, stand down' - as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down. But if we stand down too soon, it won't enable us to achieve our objectives," said President Bush.

And that's the part that worries Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana.

"Gen. Petraeus may still have a word of caution, because he will say with all this movement, the goal of America,to have a stable Iraq, a democracy that works and so forth, might be a little bit in jeopardy," said Sen. Lugar on CBS NEws' "Face The Nation".

But while the Senator and General Petraeus worry about America's goals, there's an election coming up in Iraq. And Iraq's prime minister is thinking about Iraq's goals, and one of the biggest goals is to bid farewell to US troops.

Of course, there's also an election coming up here in the U.S., a contest between a candidate who was against the war and against the troop surge, and a candidate who back the idea of a surge even before the President did.

The President himself is on record as being dead set against a timetable of any kind, and yet here we have an interesting confluence of interests, don't we?

Iraqi politicians want to prove that they can stand up to the Americans. Here at home, the Republicans would be able to say: "See, we said the surge would get us out of Iraq sooner, and that's just what it's done."

And with high-profile Democrats like Carl Levin urging the President to let Iraq send us home...

"When they're willing to have that kind of a timeline, it seems to me why should we be resisting that? We ought to be insisting on it," said Senator Levin.

...It could take Barack Obama's biggest issue off the table.

Of course, taking the troops out of Iraq doesn't necessarily mean they're headed home.

HELP FOR TWO TEETERING MORTGAGE GIANTS.

When bankers work on a Sunday, you know there's trouble.

"The reason we're doing the bailout, or the government feels obliged to do a bailout, is because of a global panic," said Guy Cecala, editor of "Inside Mortgage Finance" magazine.

The mortgage dominoes have finally reached the nation's two largest mortgage banks: The Federal National Mortgage Association, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, affectionately, and officially, known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The names Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both start with "F" because they are Federal entities, sponsored by the Federal Government, and chartered by Congress.

Their job is to buy up mortgages so that mortgage lenders have the cash to lend more money, and therefore make more people into homeowners. Congress figured that would be a good thing. But like just about everybody else in the mortgage business, they bought up too many mortgages written to borrowers who'd financed more home than they could really afford.

Because of that "F" in their names, investors all over the world assumed that Fannie and Freddie were backed by the Federal Government, and invested over five trillion dollars in their mortgages.

That number is so enormous, and the consequences of failure so widespread, that as of today, despite what the official language says, Fannie and Freddie are about to become wards of the Treasury Department.

"The government can't let these two entities fail. Otherwise, there'd literally be global consequences," said Cecala.

Guy Cecala warns that this isn't over: "We've got another year or so to go before housing prices bottom out, before we see the full extent of defaults. And if we're getting this kind of panic a year early, God knows what's going to happen down the road."

The bottom line is that the days of the easy mortgage are gone. From now on, if you want to buy a house, you're actually going to have to save some money for it.