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Debt Rattle May 17 2026

May 172026
 
 May 17, 2026  Posted by at 9:58 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


René Magritte The voice of blood 1948


• Tehran Claims US Faces Escalating Economic Fallout From ‘War Of Choice’ (ZH)
• Persian Gulf Countries ‘Refused’ UAE Call For Joint Attack On Iran (Cradle)
• China Confirms Boeing Deal, Will Cut Select Levies & Expand Agri Trade (ZH)
• Vance or Rubio in 2028 Have to Be ‘the Bridge to the Future’ (Tim O’Brien)
• Attractive Young Women Are Now The New Face Of The ‘Far-Right’ (ZH)
• Colorado Governor Commutes Whistleblower Tina Peters’ Sentence (Salgado)
• A Society Without God Is a Society Without Truth (Josh Hammer)
• Everything Is Awesome About This Spencer Pratt Ad (Matt Margolis)
• Sarmat: The Missile Meant To Make Any Enemy Think Twice (Kornev)
• Trump Blasts Lauren Boebert for Campaigning with DeceptiCON Thomas Massie (CTH)
• Incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy Loses His Senate Seat in Primary (CTH)
• Supreme Court Delivers Devastating Blow to Democrats Gerrymandering (Margolis)
• Supreme Court Rejects Attempt To Revive Virginia Congressional Map (ZH)
• Republican Lead In Redistricting Race is About To Get Bigger (Ben Whedon)

 


 

 


 


The IRGC can bleed people profoundly before they squeal.

• Tehran Claims US Faces Escalating Economic Fallout From ‘War Of Choice’ (ZH)

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned Saturday that the United States would face mounting economic fallout from its “war of choice” against Iran, as both sides appear settled into a long game of waiting to inflict the most severe economic and political damage on the other. In a post on X, Araghchi said Americans would bear the escalating financial costs of the conflict with Tehran. “Put aside gas price hike and stock market bubble. Real pain begins when U.S. debt and mortgage rates start to jump,” he wrote in English. This isn’t the first time Iranian officials and state media have tried to directly appeal to the American public.


Araghchi also pointed to growing economic strain inside the United States, saying auto loan delinquencies had already climbed to their highest level in more than 30 years. “This was all avoidable,” he added, framing the start of the conflict as Trump’s ‘war of choice’ in the Middle East. Of course, the Pentagon has a big card to play too, as on Saturday US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that four vessels in the Hormuz area were “disabled to ensure compliance.” In an official statement it said that that since the imposition of a naval blockade on Iranian ports, 75 commercial vessels have been redirected and four others disabled to “ensure compliance”. There is no doubt the US naval blockade is putting immense economic pressure on the Iranian government, society, and the energy sectors as crude shit-ins loom, or are in progress…

One Saudi-funded source alleges of the tightening hardship situation inside Iran: Fuel shortages and tighter rationing are pushing drivers across Iran into a growing gasoline black market, with citizens describing long lines at gas stations and sharply inflated prices in messages sent to Iran International. The accounts describe growing frustration over restricted access to subsidized gasoline and arbitrary limits imposed by operators, leaving many motorists dependent on costly unofficial sales.

…Iran uses a subsidized fuel quota system controlled through electronic fuel cards. Every private vehicle receives a monthly gasoline allocation at discounted prices, while extra consumption is charged at higher rates. One citizen was cited in the same report as complaining: “One day there’s quota left on your card, the next day it says your quota is finished. They even steal the few drops of gasoline they give people.” The standoff drags on, amid reports the Trump administration is mulling resumption of the bombing campaign:

However, US and Gulf media reports about the economic and political crisis inside Iran have often been somewhat exaggerated, in ‘hopes’ of anti-regime sentiment being stirred enough for some kind of new anti-government uprising. But that has yet to come, after months of war launched by the US and Israel. It seems Washington is still pinning its hopes on exactly this.

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“Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman joined Saudi Arabia and Qatar in rejecting the UAE plan.”

• Persian Gulf Countries ‘Refused’ UAE Call For Joint Attack On Iran (Cradle)

The UAE tried but failed to persuade neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to take part in a coordinated military attack on Iran, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) spoke by phone with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) and other regional leaders to propose the coordinated attacks, shortly after the US and Israel launched the war on Iran on February 28, the sources said.


During the calls, MbZ argued that the states that formed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) must act as a bloc to attack Iran alongside the US and Israel. However, his fellow Gulf leaders told him it was “not their war,” according to the report. When Saudi Crown Prince MbS refused to go along with the scheme, already shaky ties between the UAE and Saudi Arabia were further strained. The Saudi refusal also contributed to the Emirates’ decision to leave OPEC and OPEC+, the oil-producing cartel, and deepen its existing ties to Israel.

The UAE ultimately carried out several strikes against Iran without support from other Gulf states in early March and in April. Iran targeted US bases and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia with drones in the first days of the war. Yet the kingdom focused its efforts on promoting Pakistani-mediated negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Qatar considered joining the UAE in an attack after Iranian missile strikes hit Doha’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, causing extensive damage and major fires, a Gulf official said. However, Doha also ultimately chose to de-escalate and throw its support behind negotiations.

Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman joined Saudi Arabia and Qatar in rejecting the UAE plan. One source said US officials were aware of the UAE effort and that Washington pushed Saudi Arabia and Qatar to join a coordinated military response. On Thursday, the Financial Times (FT) reported that Saudi Arabia had “floated” the possibility of reaching a “non-aggression pact” between Iran and neighboring states modeled on the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which eased tensions during the Cold War in Europe.

The Saudi-proposed pact for the day after the US-Israeli war on Iran ends reportedly has support from several European capitals, which view it as “the best way to avoid future conflict” and have urged Arab states to support it.The British daily cites an unnamed Arab diplomat who says that such a pact would be welcomed “by most Arab and Muslim states, as well as by Iran,” although severe concerns remain about Israel’s continued threats to reignite the war regardless of any deal.

Meanwhile, the two-day meeting of BRICS foreign ministers in New Delhi ended on Friday without a joint statement due to “differing views” on the US-Israeli war against Iran and the current situation in West Asia. The foreign ministers expressed “their respective national positions and shared a range of perspectives,” according to a statement issued by India.

The statement added that one member state had “reservations” about issues related to Gaza, as well as security in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said during the meeting that “Iran is a country that cannot be divided. The era of American dominance is over.” He also singled out the UAE for blocking the ministerial BRICS statement, and pointed out its “own special relationship with Israel.”

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Love the photo.

• China Confirms Boeing Deal, Will Cut Select Levies & Expand Agri Trade (ZH)

One day after President Trump left Beijing, following his multi-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, China’s Commerce Ministry released new details about agreements it had reached to purchaseU.S.. planes and farm goods.


CHINA, US REACH ARRANGEMENTS ON BUYING US PLANES

The exact wording “reach arrangements”s in the Bloomberg headline is important because it suggests a framework, a commitment, or a negotiated understanding, not necessarily a finalized purchase contract for Boeing commercial jets. Based on earlier reports, Trump said China agreed to buy 200 Boeing planes, with the total potentially rising to 750 aircraft. The next set of headlines shows that the Trump team and Beijing have reached a partial trade de-escalation package following the summit:

CHINA, US AGREE TO REDUCE LEVIES ON A RANGE OF PRODUCTS
CHINA TO EXPAND BILATERAL TRADE W/ US ON AGR AND OTHER PRODUCTS
CHINA VOWS TO EXPAND BILATERAL AGRI TRADE WITH US

The headlines point to a U.S.-China trade détente that is constructive for American industry, exporters, and U.S. farmers. Now the larger question is what Trump and Xi agreed to behind closed doors regarding Tehran and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.


U.S. and China Agree To Establish Trade And Investment Boards As Trump-Xi Summit Delivers Modest Wins. U.S. and Chinese leaders agreed to establish a new “Board of Trade” and a parallel “Board of Investment” during President DonaldTrump’ss two-day visit to Beijing – a summit that ended much as it began: with significant pageantry, warm personal rapport between the leaders, and modest, incremental progress on trade. The new boards aim to oversee bilateral purchases, manage trade differences, facilitate deals in non-sensitive sectors (with roughly $30 billion in goods identified), and provide a standing channel to prevent future escalations without constant high-level intervention.

The boards were a pre-summit priority pushed by U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. They build on preparatory talks in South Korea that produced what both sides described as “generally balanced and positive outcomes.” Chinese state media, including Xinhua, highlighted the agreements as part of efforts to expand practical cooperation and maintain stable economic ties.

This development aligns with Xi Jinping’s broader push to reframe the bilateral relationship as one of “constructive strategic stability” – a new guiding vision intended to provide predictability for the next three years and beyond, emphasizing cooperation as the mainstay while allowing for “moderate competition” and “manageable differences.” Xi described it as a positive, sound, constant, and enduring stability that should translate into concrete actions.

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“The MAGA wing of the party is the party now. Neither Vance nor Rubio can distance themselves from that if they try.”

• Vance or Rubio in 2028 Have to Be ‘the Bridge to the Future’ (Tim O’Brien)

People have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio if he plans to run for president in 2028, and his answer has been the same every time. Unequivocally, he endorses Vice President JD Vance, who is assumed to be the likely Republican standard-bearer. At the same time, given the way in which Rubio has been used, while rising to the occasion every time, you cannot ignore him. President Donald Trump has not shied away from praising both Vance and Rubio, but he has been substantially more effusive lately in his comments about Rubio. This has more than a few people in Washington, D.C., chattering.


Vance had the perfect response for now. But he won’t be able to say this a year from now. In addition to performing the duties of his office, Rubio has taken on any number of ad hoc jobs, knocking it out of the park every time. He knows how to demand and get every other country in the world to respect the U.S. once again. He’s seamlessly put an end to the massive grift that was USAID. Any one of his accomplishments is more than most who’ve run the State Department in recent memory, and he’s not done. Vance is in an even more unenviable position if you’re looking ahead to 2028. It’s the vice president’s job not to show up the president, while at the same time, he cannot wield power the way certain cabinet officials can. This makes it harder for Vance to remind Americans that he can be the alpha.

Over the past 250 years, only six vice presidents ran for and won the presidency. And only four won the highest office as an incumbent vice president. They were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and George H.W. Bush. Richard Nixon and Joe Biden both eventually were certified as the winners of presidential elections, but not as part of an incumbent administration. When Nixon was the incumbent, he famously ran against John F. Kennedy in 1960 and lost. Biden got pushed aside in 2016 for Hillary Clinton and never got the chance to use his office as a springboard for the presidency. Instead, he was “elected” in 2020 by getting roughly 20 million more votes than any other Democrat candidate before or after. And he did all that by campaigning from his basement, hugging children uncomfortably, and telling stories about “Corn Pop.”

If I were named head of elections, one of the first things I’d do is organize a search party for those missing 20 million voters. Kamala Harris could have used them in 2024. The last incumbent vice president to graduate directly into the Oval Office was Bush. To say that’s not easy to do is an understatement. Playing second-fiddle for four years prior to a run for the highest office in the land can allow voters to forget how strong you are as an independent candidate at the top of a ticket. These are the challenges Vance faces, specifically, but not just Vance. Both he and Rubio will have to be their own men and try to step out from under the long shadow that Trump has cast. Both will have to combat the baggage that the left has continually heaped on Trump and everyone associated with his administration.

Trump created the America First movement. He created and defined Make America Great Again (MAGA). The MAGA wing of the party is the party now. Neither Vance nor Rubio can distance themselves from that if they try. Quite frankly, it would be dumb to try. Contrary to what the legacy media and the left do to frame Trump’s years as “chaos” or a failure, he has been wildly successful, and Americans know it. If Trump can bring the Iran situation under control, get some sort of election integrity guardrails in place, energy prices would come down, inflation would stabilize, and the prospects for a Republican 2028 election victory would be easier to foresee. Who would want to distance themselves from that?

Still, neither Vance nor Rubio can be another Donald J. Trump. They have to carve their own niche, while maintaining some continuity between MAGA and the next Republican administration. Another factor to consider is Trump himself. While he would not want his underlings taking credit for what he did, he also would not want them distancing themselves from MAGA to create their own identity for 2028. That’s a delicate balance. The smartest thing a Vance or a Rubio or even a Vance-Rubio ticket could do in the run-up to 2028 is to map out a comprehensive narrative and progression from MAGA to what’s next. I mean, if you just finished making America great again between 2024 and 2028, you don’t want to use MAGA as your rallying cry now. You need something new and fresh, but you want to stay true to America First.

Former Republican Tennessee governor and U.S. senator Lamar Alexander is coming out with a new autobiography, and he’s making the book tour rounds right now. He recently talked to Politico about the book and his life in politics. To be sure, Alexander represents everything about the Republican establishment that we conservatives are working to get past. He represents a Republican era where the GOP allowed the Democrats to make the rules even when the Republicans won. Kind of like what Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is doing right now.

Still, Politico asked him if he could have beaten incumbent President Bill Clinton had he gotten the GOP’s nomination instead of Bob Dole. Alexander’s answer is debatable on whether he could have beaten Clinton, but he observed something critical that can’t be overlooked when considering what Vance or Rubio would need to do to win in 2028.

He said, “It would have been hard. I thought I could do better than Dole. I said to Dole: ‘Don’t let [Clinton] have the bridge to the future.’ And Clinton took it and won it.” For either Vance or Rubio, that’s the challenge. To be a part of the Trump administration running for the presidency, you still have to come up with your own brand that’s new and different, while respecting the Trump political lineage and embracing the Trump record.

The rationale has to be: “We need more than four years” to accomplish all the things we set out to accomplish. We can’t go backward. Most importantly, they will need to take ownership of the whole “bridge to the future” brand (as a concept, not as a slogan) before any Democrat gets to it. Trump did just that with “Make America Great Again.” Vance or Rubio can do it and needs to do it pretty soon. The Republican nominee in 2028 must be perceived by the electorate as America’s bridge to a brighter future.

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I thought about it, and I decided I’m NOT going to complain.

• Attractive Young Women Are Now The New Face Of The ‘Far-Right’ (ZH)

The Telegraph has published a piece so tone-deaf it reads like self-parody. According to the outlet, the “far-right” is no longer the domain of bald men in boots and tattoos. No, it’s now being led by “strikingly telegenic young women” who dare to look good on camera while warning about mass migration, grooming gangs, and cultural replacement. Three foreign activists – Ada Lluch, Valentina Gomez, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek – were banned from entering Britain for a Tommy Robinson rally, and the Telegraph can’t stop gushing over how “pretty” this makes the movement look. The government has banned at least seven foreign voices from attending the rally, including the women highlighted by the Telegraph.


Critics point out the blatant double standard: pro-Palestine marches with openly extremist rhetoric are often tolerated, while a native-focused demonstration drawing tens or hundreds of thousands draws preemptive visa blocks on speakers. Kier Starmer’s government waves in unvetted migrants and certain extremists but draws the line at articulate critics of mass migration. The Telegraph profiles the banned women in breathless detail. Catalan activist Ada Lluch has called out “complete invasion” of western democracies, American influencer Valentina Gomez warned about “rapist Muslims taking over,” and Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek spoke of “the rape, replacement and murder of our people.”

All three were barred from the UK, along with several other activists. Meanwhile, the government continues to wave in the very people these women are warning about. The Telegraph also warns about attractive home-grown women, including British influencer Saskia Teague. With over 100,000 Instagram followers, she mixes “happy happy happy” selfies with calls for “England for the English,” mass deportations, and an end to shame-free multiculturalism. The Telegraph acts shocked that she also praises her “Anglo-Saxon hair” and rejects the idea she’s being “used” by men.

Of course the usual suspects are wheeled out to clutch pearls. Hope Not Hate researcher Alex MacKinnon calls it a “glamorisation” effort to shed the “violent thug image.” Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Hannah Rose says looking desirable builds followers and fits the ideology that women should be “aesthetically pleasing.” The implication is that these women can’t possibly believe what they’re saying – they must be grifting or being manipulated. Because in the eyes of the legacy media, no normal young attractive woman could possibly notice what’s happening to her country.

This is the same media that files stories on “far-right” threat while ignoring grooming gang scandals, no-go zones, and skyrocketing violence against women and girls. The Telegraph even admits the shift comes from young people “profoundly disaffected with mainstream parties” and disillusioned with modern life. Yet instead of asking why that disillusionment exists, they obsess over Instagram filters and “zhuzhing” the image. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has today claimed he’s all about “championing peaceful protest” while simultaneously blocking entry to those he dislikes. Starmer declared:

“I’ll always champion peaceful protest. But the Unite the Kingdom march organisers are peddling hatred and division,” then admitting that “We’ve already blocked visas for far-right agitators who want to come here to spew their extremist views.”

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“Tina Peters, a 73-year-old woman with cancer, was given a nine year jail sentence in Colorado because she caught the Democrats CHEATING..”

• Colorado Governor Commutes Whistleblower Tina Peters’ Sentence (Salgado)

Colorado 2020 election whistleblower Tina Peters finally received some good news. Peters ended up at the epicenter of national controversy when she reportedly allowed an unauthorized person to access voting equipment in Mesa County in order to expose apparent election irregularities. Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) granted Peters a commutation and parole as of June 1, based on a May 15 press release. Peters is a Gold Star Mother who lost her son, a Navy SEAL, in 2017.


It appears that the commutation might be due to her backing down somewhat from her previous allegations and efforts to expose apparent election fraud in Colorado back in 2020, when she was an election clerk. It is worth noting that a Democrat who tried to forge a thousand ballots in New Jersey received a sweetheart deal, sparing him any prison time, while Peters received almost a decade in prison as her sentence for trying to call attention to voting irregularities.

A statement on X posted on Peters’ account thanked Polis, expressed hopes for the future, and criticized people who had tried to storm the jail in support of her case. It said: I made mistakes, and for those I am sorry. Five years ago I misled the Secretary of State when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward I will make sure that my actions always follow the law, and I will avoid the mistakes of the past…

Upon release, I plan to do my best through legal means to support election integrity and based on my own personal experiences to elevate the cause of prison reform to help ensure the detention system is more fair and equitable for people of all ages. My experiences have given me a perspective that plan to share with others to improve Colorado’s corrections system. I am grateful for a second chance and an earlier release, and I look forward to doing good in the world.

Tina Peters

President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called for Colorado to let Peters go altogether, reacted to the news on Truth Social with just two words: “FREE TINA!” In March, he strongly condemned the sentence Peters received for challenging the 2020 election. “Tina Peters, a 73-year-old woman with cancer, was given a nine year jail sentence in Colorado because she caught the Democrats CHEATING on the Presidential Election of 2020. FREE TINA!” he insisted.

A couple of days after that, Trump reflected again on the double standard Democrats impose, letting truly dangerous criminals go free while aggressively targeting their political opponents. “For years, Democrats ignored Violent and Vicious Crime of all shapes, sizes, colors, and types. Violent Criminals who should have been locked up were allowed to attack again. Democrats were also far too happy to let in the worst from the worst countries so they could rip off American Taxpayers,” he wrote.

“Democrats only think there is one crime – Not voting for them!” Trump continued. “Instead of protecting Americans and their Tax Dollars, Democrats chose instead to prosecute anyone they can find who wanted Safe and Secure Elections. Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest. Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. FREE TINA!”

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And now for something completely different.

• A Society Without God Is a Society Without Truth (Josh Hammer)

Next Thursday evening, Jews will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. This holiday, which occurs seven weeks and one day after Passover (hence the name Shavuot, which literally means “weeks”), commemorates perhaps the most transformative event in all of human history: the revelation of the Word of God to the ancient Israelite nation. It was at Mount Sinai, congregated at the base of the smoking and trembling mountain, that God promised the Israelites they would be a “kingdom of princes and a holy nation” if they accepted and maintained fidelity to His covenant. In unison, before they had even received the Ten Commandments, the Israelites responded, “All that the Lord has spoken we shall do!”


The Divine Revelation at Sinai fundamentally changed the relationship between mankind and truth. Before Sinai, mankind had understood truth as inherently subjective, subject to the ever-changing whims of the volatile gods. Now, after Sinai, there could be no such moral confusion. The one, true God — He who had created the universe and fashioned mankind in His image — had revealed His Will. Moral relativism and idolatry were now out. Moral objectivity and monotheism were now in. For the first time, there was a fixed barometer by which to judge man’s moral conduct, devise laws and political institutions, and live one’s day-to-day life more generally.

Because of the breadth and depth of its impact and lasting influence, the Divine Revelation at Sinai was the logical starting point for what we now call Western civilization. Writing thousands of years later at another inflection point in human history, Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No. 31: “In disquisitions of every kind, there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.” In the United States specifically, and in Western civilization more generally, it was long obvious what those “primary truths” and “first principles” actually meant: the Word of God Himself. Such a properly anchored and oriented society is uniquely suited to improve mankind’s lot and advance human flourishing.

Crucially, only such a properly anchored society can claim to comprehend the truth — let alone assert that certain truths are “self-evident,” as we recall every Independence Day. Because when God falls by the wayside, truth does as well. Recent events underscore the point.

In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month, Gregory Conti, a politics professor at perennially top-ranked Princeton University, lamented: “Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments, and several students didn’t know what they were.” Conti noted that Princeton students are often smart and driven, but they lack basic religious literacy — even the difference between the Old and New Testaments. In short, many of America’s future leaders do not even recognize the “primary truths” and “first principles” upon which our civilization rests.

There is a clear casualty of this ignorance: our ability to accept reality and the truth. Consider, for example, the shocking inability to do precisely that among far too many members of America’s more avowedly secularist political party, the Democrats. A whopping 42% of Democrats believe the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., in July 2024 was staged. A similarly galling 34% of Democrats believe the same about the recent attempted assassination of Trump and his Cabinet members at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. There is, of course, zero evidence to support either belief. One might as well believe in Bigfoot, or that Neil Armstrong’s moon landing was fake.

Nor is this merely a left-leaning sociological phenomenon. There are plenty of Americans who have heterodox or perhaps even nominally right-leaning political views who have also lost touch with basic reality, allowing their brains to be rotted by mass consumption of delusional conspiracies and AI-driven online slop. We call them Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson fans.

There can be nothing good down this road. Only a society that is rooted in, and oriented toward, the eternal and the transcendental can ever hope to cultivate decent, truth-seeking citizens. When a free people loses the ability to discern between truth and fiction, rightness and wrongness, justice and injustice, there can only be only misery, despair and destruction. We’re losing that because, for far too long, we’ve been missing God. There is no better time than the run-up to America’s semiquincentennial — when we will celebrate the assertion of the self-evident truths that birthed the nation — to find Him once again. Frankly, America’s survival for another 250 years depends on it.

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“..enforce the law, arrest people who commit crimes, get the crackheads off the streets, and make sure firefighters are funded and ready to do their jobs. Once upon a time, these weren’t partisan issues.

• Everything Is Awesome About This Spencer Pratt Ad (Matt Margolis)

Admittedly, I haven’t been paying much attention to the Los Angeles mayoral race, but a LEGO-animated campaign ad caught my attention, and I just had to write about it. The ad, published this week in support of Spencer Pratt’s 2026 campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, is making the rounds online, and for good reason. It’s a parody of “Everything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie, set against a LEGO-animated cityscape that tells the dirty truth about the city under Karen Bass’s leadership. It opens with a scene that cuts straight to the truth: a man assaulting a police officer on a city street.


Everything is awful; everything is hell when you’re part of the scene. Karen Bass is awful and burning down our streets. Welcome to Los Angeles, where the criminals have more protections than the cops. Then there’s the drug crisis, which the ad renders in haunting, almost absurd LEGO detail: drug zombies shambling through city streets, needles and feces littering the sidewalks, and not a city official in sight to do anything about it. And Bass herself? The ad shows the incumbent mayor flying over her burning city — laughing.

And if you know anything about Bass, you know that’s not an exaggeration for effect. It’s a pretty accurate metaphor for her tenure. While neighborhoods smoldered during the January 2026 wildfires, Bass was abroad on a “diplomatic” trip. The city she governs has deteriorating public safety, a growing homeless population, and a drug crisis that officials have been dancing around for years. The “root cause” crowd keeps hunting for some undiscovered reason people are living on the streets surrounded by needles, as if the answer isn’t staring them in the face every morning on their commute.

I don’t know much about Pratt, but he lost his own home in the Palisades Fire. He’s not running for mayor as part of a vanity campaign; he is running because he has personally experienced the consequences of Bass’s leadership. While Bass lives in a city-owned mansion insulated from the consequences of her decisions, Pratt lives in a trailer, making the case that those in charge don’t have to deal with the mess they’ve created. The second half of the ad flips the script, painting Pratt as the man who will actually do something to save the city. And the best part is that his platform isn’t complicated: enforce the law, arrest people who commit crimes, get the crackheads off the streets, and make sure firefighters are funded and ready to do their jobs. Once upon a time, these weren’t partisan issues.


You don’t need to be a Lego Movie fan to appreciate the video. Does Pratt have a chance? He might. A new Emerson College poll shows Bass at 30% support, with Pratt surging to 22% just weeks before the June 2 primary, up 12 points since March. The top two finishers advance to a November runoff, which means Pratt is very much in this race. Honestly, this is a race worth watching. Karen Bass failed her city, and if she can still get reelected, it will tell you everything about Democrat voters.

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“Heavy missiles of this class are specifically designed to launch even under conditions of an incoming nuclear strike on their deployment area.”

• Sarmat: The Missile Meant To Make Any Enemy Think Twice (Kornev)

On May 12, 2026, Russia carried out the second successful launch of its newest heavy liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sarmat. The launch marked another major milestone in the flight-testing program for Russia’s next-generation strategic missile system. Following the test, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the first regiment equipped with Sarmat ICBMs would officially enter combat duty by the end of 2026.


A ballistic missile of this class is being developed in modern Russia for the first time. The Sarmat is intended to replace the Soviet-era Voevoda missiles, which until now have remained the most powerful ICBMs ever deployed. Thanks to the immense power of its liquid-fuel rocket engines, the Sarmat is expected to carry an unprecedented payload – between 10 and 14 medium-yield thermonuclear warheads, each with an estimated yield of around 700 kilotons, or potentially up to five maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicles similar to those used in the Avangard system.

Conventional ballistic warheads can be deployed together with penetration aids designed to overwhelm missile defense systems. However, maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicles present an entirely different challenge. Modern missile defense systems are effectively incapable of intercepting such weapons, making the Sarmat a uniquely formidable retaliatory strike platform. In 2022, Vladimir Degtyar, CEO of the Makeyev Design Bureau, announced that serial production of the fifth-generation RS-28 Sarmat ICBM had officially begun in Russia. “The missile system has already entered serial production and is fully supplied with the necessary materials and manufacturing equipment,” he stated.

According to Russian officials, the new ICBM will significantly strengthen the country’s strategic deterrent capability for the next 40 to 50 years. The Sarmat is believed to have a range of at least 12,000 kilometers while carrying roughly 10 tons of payload, including its post-boost vehicle and warheads. However, the missile is also reportedly capable of striking targets by approaching from the opposite direction – flying over the South Pole and effectively circling the globe. While such a trajectory would reduce the missile’s payload capacity, it would still allow for multiple nuclear warheads to reach their targets. The missile is also expected to achieve exceptional accuracy, with a probable circular error measured at no more than roughly 150 meters.

Preparations for deploying the first operational Sarmat missiles began back in 2023 at the missile division in Uzhur, located in southern Krasnoyarsk Krai. The process of replacing the aging Voevoda missiles with Sarmat systems is expected to continue for at least four to five years, if not longer. In addition to Uzhur, Sarmat missiles are also expected to be deployed near Dombarovsky in the Orenburg region.

In total, Russia is expected to field at least 50 hardened silo launchers for the Sarmat system, making it the most powerful and lethal component of the country’s nuclear retaliatory forces – a true weapon of retaliation. Heavy missiles of this class are specifically designed to launch even under conditions of an incoming nuclear strike on their deployment area. In theory, dozens of Sarmat missiles could leave their silos while under nuclear attack, carrying a combined total of roughly 500 warheads capable of devastating any potential adversary.

Over the coming years, the Sarmat is expected to complete its full flight-test program and receive multiple payload configurations. One variant will reportedly carry traditional MIRVed ballistic warheads similar to those used on the Voevoda system. Another, more advanced configuration would deploy hypersonic maneuverable glide vehicles developed by NPO Mashinostroyenia. At present, no existing missile defense system is considered capable of reliably intercepting such weapons.

What makes these glide vehicles so difficult to defeat is their flight profile. Unlike traditional ballistic warheads, they travel along a relatively low, flattened trajectory at hypersonic speeds near the edge of the atmosphere while retaining the ability to maneuver both in altitude and direction. As a result, they are detected much later than conventional reentry vehicles and are extraordinarily difficult to intercept due to their unpredictable maneuvering. The Sarmat may be able to carry more than a dozen standard warheads, but likely no more than three to five hypersonic glide vehicles. Nevertheless, such payloads would presumably be reserved for the highest-priority strategic targets – and, according to Russian military doctrine, those targets would be struck with near certainty.

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RINOs trying without Trump endorsement are having a hard time.

• Trump Blasts Lauren Boebert for Campaigning with DeceptiCON Thomas Massie (CTH)

Thomas Massie is cut from the same Republican cloth as his dear friend, Ron DeSantis and his recent advocate Tucker Carlson. Like DeSantis and Carlson, Massie is a master manipulator who uses carefully crafted wedge points to divide the electorate and position himself for maximum benefit. Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert has been campaigning and trying to support Massie as the potential for him to lose a primary race is very real. This puts Boebert on the opposite side of President Trump on a very important matter of principle. Massie has accused President Trump of protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s enablers.


PRESIDENT TRUMP – “Is anyone interested in running against Weak Minded Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District? You remember Lauren moved to the District when it became obvious that she couldn’t win in her original Congressional District (The Third!) — A Carpetbagger, indeed! Boebert is campaigning for the Worst “Republican” Congressman in the History of our Country, Thomas Massie, of the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky, and anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good Primary fight! Even though I long ago endorsed Boebert, if the right person came along, it would be my Honor to withdraw that Endorsement and endorse a good and proper alternative. Just let me know, or announce your Candidacy, and I will be there for you!” ~ President DONALD J. TRUMP

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Trump-endorsed competition.

• Incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy Loses His Senate Seat in Primary (CTH)

–Unless something remarkable changes drastically, it looks like incumbent Republican Senator Bill Cassidy has come in third place, which means he has lost his Senate seat in the primary race. The runoff will be between Trump-endorsed Julia Letlow and State Treasurer John Fleming (June 27th).


Senator Bill Cassidy has lost his seat.

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Changing maps seems to be Democrats’ only option.

• Supreme Court Delivers Devastating Blow to Democrats Gerrymandering (Margolis)

The Supreme Court rejected Virginia Democrats’ emergency appeal to revive their gerrymandered Virginia congressional map on Friday, delivering a final, fatal blow to their efforts in the state. The justices issued a brief order with no explanation. Still, the outcome was hardly surprising — the federal courts don’t typically wade into rulings made by state courts on state constitutional matters, and that’s exactly what happened here.


Virginia Democrats had passed new congressional maps through the General Assembly and pushed through a ballot referendum to lock those maps in. Voters narrowly approved it in April. But the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Democrats violated the state constitution’s process for referring amendments to voters, specifically an “intervening-election requirement” that the General Assembly simply ignored. The result? Null and void. “This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion.


Had the maps survived, they would have been a huge boon for the Democrats in the redistricting wars, giving the party a potential net gain of 4 seats. Democrats lost because they couldn’t be bothered to follow the rules they wrote. The attempt to appeal to the United States Supreme Court was a desperate Hail Mary bound to fail, and even Gov. Abigail Spanberger saw the writing on the wall and revealed she was no longer pushing to gerrymander the state.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Democrats spent years redrawing maps in blue states, systematically eliminating Republican-held districts wherever they could. For a long time, Republicans largely played defense. That changed last year when Texas made its move, redistricting mid-decade and sparking the current national battle. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, auditioning for the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, decided to respond by getting California to pass its own new map. Democrats tried to do the same in Virginia, but they cut constitutional corners and paid for it.

Overall, the redistricting wars have not gone well for the Democrats, and making matters worse for them, last month, the high court ruled that racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional, clearing the way for red states in the South to eliminate majority-minority districts that had long served as reliable Democratic strongholds. Democrats have now lost on multiple fronts simultaneously, and they’ve spent — I mean, wasted — millions of dollars in the process.

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“The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed what we always knew: you cannot violate the Constitution to change the Constitution..”

• Supreme Court Rejects Attempt To Revive Virginia Congressional Map (ZH)

Hammering the last nail in the coffin of what could have been a significant midterm factor, the US Supreme Court on Friday rejected Virginia Democrats’ request to use a new congressional district map, which was drawn to flip four House seats into Democratic control. As is typical in this kind of “emergency” ruling, the court provided no legal rationale or vote count — however no dissents were noted. The new map was expected to dramatically alter the composition of Virginia’s US House delegation, boosting Democrats from their current slim 6-5 edge to 10-1 domination. For context, in 2024 presidential balloting, Virginia voters were split 52% for Democrat Kamala Harris and 46% for Donald Trump.


On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court denied a request from Democrats and state officials to lift a lower-court order blocking certification of the April 21 redistricting referendum. Voters approved the Democrat-accommodating map by a 52-to-48 margin, but a Virginia circuit court declared the referendum null and void, saying Democrats had run afoul of state constitutional measures that exist to fend off partisan gerrymandering. After that setback, Democrats sought to salvage their new map with an appeal to the US Supreme Court, which has now failed. Two days earlier, Gov Abigail Spanberger had already waved a white flag of sorts, implying that Virginia’s May 12 deadline for map changes made the emergency request to the US Supreme Court something of a moot point.

“What needs to happen is we need to focus on the task at hand, which is winning races in November,” she said. “I believe, somewhat doggedly, that we will [gain] two to four seats in the House of Representatives. … That is my goal. That is what I know is possible.” However, after the ruling, she opportunistically lashed out at the Supreme Court: Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, criticized the decision, which she said had the effect of nullifying “the votes of more than three million Virginians.” “As Governor, I will make sure voters know when and how to cast their votes this year. Because our votes are how we choose the representation we deserve,” she wrote on X.


The lead respondent, Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican, who is also legislative commissioner for the Virginia Redistricting Commission hailed the new ruling. “The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed what we always knew: you cannot violate the Constitution to change the Constitution,” the state lawmaker wrote on X.

The Virginia battle was part of a nationwide saga that started last year, when Texas Republicans redrew their congressional map to gain seats, straying from what had been a fairly (but not thoroughly) universal norm that saw states refrain from redistricting that wasn’t driven by once-a-decade census results. Following the lead of California Democrats who undertook their own maneuvers to offset the Texas map, the Virginia leftists who gained full control of state government in 2025 responded with a constitutional amendment allowing the General Assembly to temporarily redraw congressional districts outside the normal 10-year cycle — specifically to “restore fairness” if other states gerrymandered (bases on the convoluted implication that varied wrongs against the citizenry of multiple states can add up to a national right).

Despite the implosion of the Virginia Democrats’ scheme, and the view that the net result of the redistricting war will flip seats to the GOP column, prediction-market participants lean heavily toward Democrats wresting control of the House from Republicans, who currently have a 217-212 edge over the Democrats. (One representative is an independent and there are five vacant seats owing to deaths and resignations.)

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It was mostly a Dem game in the past.

• Republican Lead In Redistricting Race is About To Get Bigger (Ben Whedon)

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais saw the justices narrow Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and disallow race-based congressional districts. With the dust on redistricting mostly settled, Republicans appear poised for a double-digit swing of House seats in their favor in the 2026 midterms, at least if all goes according to plan. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais saw the justices narrow Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and disallow race-based congressional districts. The move triggered map redraws across the South and is expected to result in more than a dozen seats moving toward the GOP, at least in time for 2028.


Democratic countermeasures, meanwhile, have hit a judicial brick wall, with the Virginia Supreme Court striking down that state’s ambitious redraw, saving four Republican seats. The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to intervene, leaving Democrats out of legal options. The collective shifts are poised to move the needle rightward and put the House in play for November, potentially handing the White House an opportunity to defy historical trends and retain control of Congress. Here’s a look at where the midterm situation stands:


Louisiana
The state’s maps have been the subject of legal scrutiny for years, leading to a challenge that culminated in the recent Supreme Court decision. Gov. Jeff Landry, R-La., has suspended elections in the meantime to allow the legislature to implement a new slate. The state Senate passed a redraw earlier this week with five Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning seat, though the House has yet to approve it.

South Carolina
Several Republican state senators joined with Democrats to vote down a redistricting plan that would have eliminated the state’s sole Democratic-leaning congressional district, which longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn represents. The measure needed a two-thirds majority to pass. GOP Gov. Henry McMaster subsequently called a special session of the legislature to reconsider the matter. At most, the state lawmakers could add a single Republican-leaning district to the state’s delegation. South Carolina now sends six Republicans and one Democrat to the lower chamber.

Alabama
Lawmakers appear poised to approve a slate of House maps that would eliminate one of the state’s two Democratic-leaning districts. GOP Gov. Kay Ivey called the legislature into special session for the redraw, despite initially indicating that she would not do so. The proposed redraw stopped shy of the clean Republican sweep that activists sought, though a later redraw could result in that outcome. Though Republicans have yet to fully approve the new slate, Ivey has also called special primaries for the districts she expects will be affected.

Mississippi
GOP Gov. Tate Reeves appeared this week to pour cold water on the prospect of the state redrawing its maps in time for the 2026 midterms, saying repeatedly that he expected the legislature to redraw the maps sometime “between now and 2027.” Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in Callais, he had called a special session of the legislature to consider redistricting, but he canceled it this week. Mississippi currently has three Republicans in Congress and one Democrat. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., currently represents a district that includes much of the Mississippi River delta and a large portion of the state’s black population.

Georgia
Gov. Brian Kemp has called a special session of the legislature, though he expects the state will only change its maps in time for 2028 and therefore not impact control of the GOP-controlled House in November. Georgia boasts 14 House seats, five of which are under Democratic control. Depending on the redraw, the state could likely see a swing of two seats toward the GOP in the long term.

Tennessee
State lawmakers successfully passed a new set of maps this month that eliminated the last Democratic-leaning district, which was centered on Memphis. Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen on Friday announced an end to his reelection campaign, citing the redraw and the changes to his district.

Texas
The Texas redraw ostensibly kicked off the redistricting fight and represented the single-largest gain for Republicans, with as many as five seats shifting toward the GOP as a result. With the court challenges to the new map largely settled, the GOP is expected to make those gains in the Lone Star state in November.

Florida
Florida passed a redrawn House map within days of the Callais ruling, shifting its 20-GOP and eight-Democrat-seat lineup to 24 GOP and four Democrats. The state has skewed heavily toward Republicans since President Donald Trump first won the battleground in 2016. It is now regarded as a reliably Red state.

Missouri
The state Supreme Court this month permitted Missouri to use its maps, which include seven Republican districts and one Democratic seat. State lawmakers managed to eliminate a second Democratic seat with the redraw.

North Carolina
North Carolina lawmakers approved a revised set of maps in late 2025 that netted Republicans one seat in their delegation. Democrat Gov. Josh Stein did not have the authority to veto the legislation. In the 1990s, Republicans struck a deal with Democrats that exempted redistricting from the governor’s authority, Politico reported.

Ohio
In October 2025, the state’s redistricting commission approved a redraw in which Republicans gain an edge in 12 districts, while Democrats led in three. Republicans now have 10 seats and are expected to gain up to two in 2026 as a result of the redraw, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

Virginia
The state Supreme Court struck down a redistricting referendum that would have seen the state shift from six Democrats and five Republicans, to 10 Democrats and one Republican. The court found that the process for advancing the referendum violated the state constitution, without ruling on the maps themselves. Though Democrats appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, opponents of the redraw were confident the Supreme Court would not take the case. Speaking on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show this week, former GOP Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli opined that the justices would speedily knock it down.

“I think the chief justice has really just asked for briefs as a courtesy. This is going nowhere,” he said. “They have no jurisdiction. And I don’t think you will even see. I don’t think you will literally get a word out of a single justice. I think it will just be summarily rejected with no comment or anything else.”He was proven right on Friday evening, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the matter.

Utah
Utah’s maps became the subject of legal scrutiny at the state level, resulting in a court order that created a Democratic-leaning district in the otherwise, reliably Republican state. Though state lawmakers have explored revisions, including a statewide referendum, to their own laws to allow for eliminating the new district, it is likely that Democrats will secure a pickup in November.

California
State Democrats reacted furiously to Texas’s redraw and organized a statewide referendum to change their congressional maps with the aim of countering Texas. The referendum was successful and Democrats are expected to gain a total of five seats from redistricting, representing their single largest gain this cycle.

The bottom line
Republicans have already approved maps accounting for a gain of 14 seats over the 2024 maps. And three states in the South may each add one in the near future. With Democrats gaining six from California and Utah, the GOP appears poised for a net swing of at least eight but as high as 11, which could prove decisive to holding the House.

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Debt Rattle March 12 2025

Mar 122025
 
 March 12, 2025  Posted by at 10:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  50 Responses »


James Ensor The intrigue 1890

 

• Ukraine Open To ‘Immediate’ 30-Day Ceasefire If Russia Agrees: State Dept (JTN)
• 30-Day Truce: US Lifts Pause On Intel & Military Aid To Ukraine (ZH)
• What Should Trump Do? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Kremlin Warns Russians Not To See Trump Through ‘Rose-Colored Glasses’ (ZH)
• Trump Moves To His Primordial Objective – The Global Reset (Alastair Crooke)
• Ontario Caves to Trump on Tariffs (Margolis)
• Musk: DOGE Will Cut $1 TRILLION in Spending ‘Unless We’re Stopped’ (Green)
• USAID Staff Rush To Shred And Burn Documents (RT)
• Brace Yourselves: The Next Media BIG LIE Is About to Drop (Green)
• The Right is Being Shut Out of Government Across Europe (DS)
• Europe Seizing Russian FX Reserves Would Reset Global Financial System (Every)
• Macron’s Napoleon Cosplay Could Come At A Grave Cost (RT)
• The French Despite Clear Warning Brought The Camp of the Saints to France (PCR)
• Hungary Accuses Ukraine Of Threatening Its Sovereignty (RT)
• Trump Finds an Epic Way to Repurpose Biden’s CBP One App for Ilegals (Margolis)
• Judge Declines Bid to Force Federal Gov’t to Restore Foreign Aid Contracts (ET)
• Moscow Reproaches Western Media For Silence Over Gonzalo Lira’s Death (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/1899243456800973262

Miller

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1899640782702723406

Stew Peters

Alina
https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/1899524695588036956

 

 

 

 

What Russia wants -at least- has been obvious forever. But Rubio has a meeting wih Ukraine and more or less tells Putin ‘take it or leave it’. Russia will not accept a short term or partial ceasefire that can be used to rearm Ukraine. Russia has the momentum. They will not squander it. Russian troops have died to achieve the present situation. Their memories will be honored.

• Ukraine Open To ‘Immediate’ 30-Day Ceasefire If Russia Agrees: State Dept (JTN)

Ukrainian diplomats signaled their willingness to agree to a 30-day preliminary ceasefire with Russia as part of their negotiations with American officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. “Ukraine expressed readiness to accept the U.S. proposal to enact an immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire, which can be extended by mutual agreement of the parties, and which is subject to acceptance and concurrent implementation by the Russian Federation,” the State Department said in a joint statement with Ukrainian officials, according to CBS News. “The United States will communicate to Russia that Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace,” they said. The United States also announced it would end a pause on military aid and intelligence sharing as a result of the talks.

After the negotiations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the effort a “concrete step” from Ukraine and expressed “hope that the Russians will reciprocate.” The Russians have not agreed to a ceasefire as of press time. They are unlikely to do so, however, without significant concessions, as the Russian army is currently making significant gains in the Kursk region against Ukrainian troops that occupied the border area. In the meantime, Russian offensives in Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas have posted modest gains in recent days and a spring offensive in expected to materialize soon.

https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/1899585186624675845

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All Ukraine troops must withdraw from Crimea and the four regions. There must be a signed (not by Zelensky!) document that says Ukraine will not be part of NATO. Only then can a truce maybe be considered.

• 30-Day Truce: US Lifts Pause On Intel & Military Aid To Ukraine (ZH)

An apparent breakthrough in Jedda talks between the US and Ukraine, as the United States has announced it “will immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine.” The Zelensky government has also “expressed readiness to accept the U.S. proposal to enact an immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire, which can be extended by mutual agreement of the parties, and which is subject to acceptance and concurrent implementation by the Russian Federation,” the statement said.

“The United States will communicate to Russia that Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace,” it added. This comes after a reported over eight hour-long meeting between the US and Ukrainian delegations in the Saudi port city on Tuesday. No doubt, the Ukrainians came hat in hand, ready to please Trump after relations had fallen off a cliff with the Zelensky Oval Office confrontation earlier this month. Shortly before the announced US-Ukraine agreement for a 30-day ceasefire, a TASS headline said that the Kremlin has no information on any details coming out of the Jeddah meeting.

But will Putin agree? There’s as yet little incentive for him to enact a temporary ceasefire, given as Trump recently admitted… he has all the cards (and Zelensky doesn’t). By all accounts the Russians are fast taking back territory in Kursk and advancing along front lines in the Donbas. Likely Russia fears that Kiev could simply use this ceasefire as an opportunity to rearm, rest, resupply and regroup – especially given Washington just said the US arms and intel pipeline is back on. Moscow is likely to see this is simply a matter between Washington and Kiev, and it appears to be a version of Zelensky’s ‘partial ceasefire’ which demands a halt to all air assaults.

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“Trump should immediately remove all sanctions, not only against Russia but against every country. This will boost the dollar’s role as the international medium of exchange, save the basis of American power, and reassure the Kremlin that the Cold War is indeed over.”

• What Should Trump Do? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Trump should end America’s unconditional support of Israel. To enable genoide with weapons, money, and diplomatic cover is not making America great. If under Trump Israel maintains or increases its determination of US policy at home and abroad, it is Israel, not America, that will be made great. Is that Trump’s role, to make Israel great? American Christian Zionists, none of whom are Christians as they worship Israel, not Christ, say yes. The position of Christian Zionists is that God’s purpose for America is to protect Israeli Zionism. As so many of these are MAGA Americans, who really rules America? Trump or Israel? What should Trump do about Ukraine? To end the conflict Trump doesn’t need to be holding meetings and talking about meetings with Putin, Zelensky, EU or anyone. It is extremely simple for Trump to end the conflict as far as the US is concerned.

All he has to do is to make the hold he has put on delivery of weapons permanent and withdraw all US operatives in the proxy conflict with Russia. Without the US supplying weapons, intelligence, targeting information and money to keep the conflict alive, the conflict will quickly end.This is what Trump needs to tell Putin: “I know Washington is responsible for this conflict. I am withdrawing Washington’s participation. The conflict would not have happened if the Democrats had not stolen the 2020 election. I am cancelling the sanctions. I will be accused by the Democrats and the presstitutes of selling out Ukraine to you. Your job is to be merciful to Ukraine. As the US is responsible for the conflict, the US will help you to rebuild a demilitarized Ukraine in which economic advancement takes precedent over war. You must not fail my good intentions, or the Cold War will resume.”

Can Trump do this? Or is Trump compelled by anti-Russian propaganda to force some form of submission from Putin as a demonstration of American power? If Trump can do what is required, Zelensky will then have to deal with Putin. After all, what has it to do with us? If the Europeans want to line up with a loser, let them. There is no reason for Trump, whom they hate, to rescue the Europeans. To demonstrate to Putin that the US proxy war with Russia, started by Zionist Neoconservatives, is over, Trump should immediately remove all sanctions, not only against Russia but against every country. This will boost the dollar’s role as the international medium of exchange, save the basis of American power, and reassure the Kremlin that the Cold War is indeed over.

Trump should get off China’s back. It is not China’s fault that Wall Street drove American manufacturing jobs offshore to China and to other parts of Asia and Mexico. This was the greed for profits by lowering labor costs by leaving the American manufacturing working class without remunerative employment and our former manufacturing cities without a tax base. This is what Wall Street and the corporations did to America. Is it Trump’s role to protect these American adversaries by blaming China? It has never been clear what Trump wants from China. He should tells us so that we can assess his intention. As China has jurisdiction over a large segment of US manufacturing which is situated in China, it makes little sense to provoke confrontation with China.

It is Wall Street and the greedy self-serving corporate executives and boards who received huge renumeration for offshoring the jobs of the working class. When the products of the offshored jobs come back to the US to be marketed, they come in as imports. It is the offshored production of American corporations that is the cause of the trade deficit with China. It is not the fault of China. Why is Trump picking on the wrong source of the problem? If people in the Trump administration are deceiving Trump about this, he had best replace them. Being great has moral meaning. It does not suffice to be successful in business, to make successful deals, to avoid wars. To be great you have to stand up for Truth. You have to stand up for Justice. You have to stand up for the US Constitution.

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“..Moscow is signaling it is not in a hurry – and won’t be rushing to the negotiating table just because Trump wants it.”

• Kremlin Warns Russians Not To See Trump Through ‘Rose-Colored Glasses’ (ZH)

Earlier in the Trump presidency, and especially as his spat with Ukraine’s Zelensky played out more directly and out in the open, Russian media and Kremlin officials seemed almost gleeful. A slew of positive statements agreeing with Trump were issued from Moscow – for example enthusiastically backing Trump’s words that Zelensky is a “dictator without elections”. But it seems Russian leadership wants to pull in the reigns a bit on its generally positive Trump commentary, as intense negotiations for peace settlement in Ukraine are anticipated. On Tuesday the Kremlin warned the Russian public against viewing President Donald Trump and his recent actions related to Ukraine through “rose-tinted glasses”.

This is in most immediate reference to the drastic actions of Trump cutting off military aid to Kiev, as well as most intelligence-sharing, which shocked and angered Western allies. Peskov issued the caution about not getting overly excited in remarks given before an audience of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “Don’t rush to put on rose-tinted glasses,” Peskov said. “We always need to hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. And we must always be ready to defend our interests.” He also referenced people getting too prematurely eager over this week’s reports that Elon Musk could cut off the Ukrainian military from his Starlink communications system. This was after a fierce online clash with Poland’s outspoken foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, which also drew in Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

But by the end of that brief online spat, Musk pledged, “To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals.””I am simply stating that, without Starlink, the Ukrainian lines would collapse, as the Russians can jam all other communications! We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip,” he explained. This was an example Peskov provided to his audience as to why caution is needed with the American side in any future negotiations to end the war. The Putin spokesman stressed that Russia will achieve its war aims no matter what Washington demands:

Peskov said Russia was achieving its aims on the battlefield in Ukraine, regardless of what decisions the U.S. was taking. He said the amount of weapons circulating in Ukraine was so large that Kyiv had enough to keep fighting for many months despite the suspension of U.S. deliveries. All of this seems like Moscow is signaling it is not in a hurry – and won’t be rushing to the negotiating table just because Trump wants it. Each side is of course trying to maintain as much leverage as possible before any talks begin in earnest. Thus clearly Russian officials don’t want appear too ‘enthused’ about Trump and the concessions he might press the Ukrainian government to make.

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“The Maga Right has none of the inhibitions of its predecessors. It is planning to leverage the power of a recaptured state to annihilate its enemies..”

• Trump Moves To His Primordial Objective – The Global Reset (Alastair Crooke)

President Trump wants Ukraine settled, full stop. This is so that he can move ahead quickly – to normalise with Russia, and begin the ‘big picture’ project of setting a new World Order, one that will end wars and facilitate business ties. The point here – which Europe feigns to not understand – is that the end to the Ukraine conflict simply is Trump’s ‘gateway’ to the entire rationale and platform on which he stood: The Great Reset of the Geo-Political landscape. Ukraine, simply said, is the obstacle to Trump’s pursuit of his primordial objective: The Global Reset. Starmer, Macron and the eastern wing of the Euro-élites are blind to the sheer scale of the global vibe-shift towards traditionalist U.S. politics and ethics. They miss too, the barely concealed fury in the Trump world that exists behind this nascent revolution.

“The Maga Right has none of the inhibitions of its predecessors. It is planning to leverage the power of a recaptured state to annihilate its enemies”, Allister Heath writes. The European Ruling Class is in desperate trouble and increasingly isolated, in a world shifting ‘Rightward’ at breakneck speed. “The U.S. is now the enemy of the West”, the FT proclaims. European leaders wantonly won’t understand. The reality is that the U.S. is engaged now in rolling up Europe’s foreign policy. And, is about to start exporting U.S. traditional Republican values to roll up the European wokeist belief-system. The European Ruling strata – far removed from its base – has failed to grasp the threat to its own interests (a scenario outlined here). The Trump administration is trying to rebuild the ailing Republic, and Americans in this new era do not care for the European obsession with ancient feuds and their entailing wars.

Trump reportedly views with utter disdain the UK and European boast that should the U.S. not do it, then Europe will. The Brussels class claims to be able still – after three years of losing in Ukraine – to be able to inflict a humiliating defeat on President Putin. More profoundly, however, Team Trump – committed to the task of taking down the American Deep State as the ‘inexorable enemy’ – perceives (rightly) the British security state to be co-joined at the hip with their American counterparts, as a part of its global meta-structure. And its oldest and deepest component has always been the destruction of Russia, and its dismemberment. So when Macron, in an address to the nation this week, rejected a ceasefire in Ukraine and declared that “peace in Europe is only possible with a weakened Russia”, calling the country a direct threat to France and the continent, many in ‘Trump world’ will interpret this defiant declaration (that ‘Ukraine defeating Russia is preferable to ‘peace’’) is nothing more than Macron and Starmer ventriloquising the aims of the Meta Deep State.

This notion is lent substance by the sudden plethora of articles appearing in the European-(managed) MSM to the effect that Russia’s economy is much weaker than it appears and might collapse in the next year. Of course it is nonsense. This is about managing the European public to believe that keeping the war going in Ukraine is a ‘good idea’. The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured, as Wolfgang Münchau notes, in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia: “We must help Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine,” she said.

Zelensky and his European fans want ‘to negotiate’ – though later, rather than sooner (perhaps in a year, as one European Foreign Minister reportedly told Marco Rubio privately). “This”, Münchau writes, “is what the very public disagreement in the Oval Office [last week] was all about. Peace through untrammelled victory — essentially the Second World War model — as the lens through which virtually all European leaders, and most commentators view the Russia-Ukraine conflict”. America sees things differently: It views almost certainly the European Deep State to be putting a spoke into Trump’s ‘normalisation with Russia’ wheel – a normalisation to which they are viscerally opposed.

Or, at the very least, as the Europeans chasing a “mirage that no longer exists, stubbornly hiking ‘tax and spend’, whilst doubling down on mass immigration and overpriced energy, oblivious to the flashing red lights in the [financial markets] as government debt yields rocket to their highest levels since 1998”, as Allister Heath outlines. In other words, the suggestion is that Friedrich Merz, Macron and Starmer are talking about how they are going to turn around their countries – via a massive infusion of debt – into defence superstates. Yet, at some level of consciousness, they must realise that it is not doable, so they settle instead for presenting themselves as ‘world leaders on the international stage’.

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“Also, Canada must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products..”

• Ontario Caves to Trump on Tariffs (Margolis)

Let me tell you what winning looks like. While the liberal media was busy predicting economic catastrophe from President Trump’s latest tariff moves, Canada just blinked — and blinked hard. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who thought he could play hardball with America by slapping a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to Michigan, New York, and Minnesota, just got a swift lesson in real negotiation. “Canada is a Tariff abuser, and always has been, but the United States is not going to be subsidizing Canada any longer,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social Monday evening. “We don’t need your Cars, we don’t need your Lumber, we don’t [need] your Energy, and very soon, you will find that out. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” And then, Ontario responded by placing a 25% tariff on electricity coming into the United States, but Trump didn’t blink:

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th. Also, Canada must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products, which has long been considered outrageous. I will shortly be declaring a National Emergency on Electricity within the threatened area. This will allow the U.S to quickly do what has to be done to alleviate this abusive threat from Canada. If other egregious, long time Tariffs are not likewise dropped by Canada, I will substantially increase, on April 2nd, the Tariffs on Cars coming into the U.S. which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.”

After Trump threatened to double existing tariffs on Canadian goods and announced a new 25% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum, Ford’s tough-guy act fell faster than Joe Biden on the steps to Air Force One. “Today, United States Secretary of Commerce [Howard Lutnick] and Premier of Ontario Doug Ford had a productive conversation about the economic relationship between the United States and Canada,” the pair said in a joint statement Ford shared on X. Secretary Lutnick agreed to officially meet with Premier Ford in Washington on Thursday, March 13 alongside the United States Trade Representative to discuss a renewed USMCA ahead of the April 2 reciprocal tariff deadline. In response, Ontario agreed to suspend its 25 per cent surcharge on exports of electricity to Michigan, New York and Minnesota.

The lesson here is simple: America First works. While Biden spent years letting everyone walk all over us, Trump is back to showing the world what real leadership looks like. Canada’s quick surrender proves what conservatives have always known — strength gets respect, and respect gets results. Whether Canada will budge on tariffs remains to be seen, but Trump showed who has the upper hand in these negotiations because Ontario quickly caved. The economic relationship between the U.S. and Canada might be facing a test, but with Trump at the helm, there’s no doubt who’s going to come out on top. That’s what making America great again looks like in real time, folks.

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“If Musk and the DOGE boys can cut a trillion dollars of funny money out of 2025 spending, they’ll gut most of the inflation, too.”

• Musk: DOGE Will Cut $1 TRILLION in Spending ‘Unless We’re Stopped’ (Green)

Earlier today I had to share the bad news about the economy. Now it’s time for the good news. Savings generated by DOGE during the first two months of Trump 47 “exceed $4 billion per day,” Musk told Fox News on Monday afternoon. He also said he and his team will achieve $1 TRILLION in savings “unless we’re stopped.” Hang on to that last line for a moment while I tell you why that big number is a very big deal. Aside, of course, from the outrageous bigness of a one followed by 12 zeroes. Going into this DOGE thing shortly after Trump’s re-inauguration, Musk laid out just how much work there was to do and how difficult it would be to achieve his goal of cutting our [dr_evil_voice] TWO TRILLION DOLLAR [/dr_evil_voice] deficit in half. “Reducing the federal deficit from $2T to $1T in FY2026,” Musk explained back in January, “requires cutting an average of ~$4B/day in projected 2026 spending from now to Sept 30.”

In the last seven-plus weeks, DOGE has exceeded its seemingly impossible goal, though only barely. This is maybe the best news you’ll read all week, even though the legacy dinosaur media insists that it’s all doom and gloom and starving uneducated children who can no longer get their nads hacked off at taxpayer expense. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but cutting [dr_evil_voice] ONE TRILLION DOLLARS [/dr_evil_voice] wasn’t some nice-sounding number picked at random. I’ll keep this as brief and light as I know how. Prices rise and fall all the time according to changing market conditions. But inflation is special. It’s when the government prints additional dollars faster than the economy grows extra value. More dollar bills chasing around the same amount of goods and services causes a rapid and general increase in the price of everything, AKA inflation.

So far, so good? Barring a recession, the economy is expected to grow by about 2.2% this year — a roughly $638 billion increase in the size of the economy. Barring DOGE cuts, Washington is expected to borrow [dr_evil_voice] TWO TRILLION DOLLARS [/dr_evil_voice]. That’s inflationary funny money printed up out of nowhere. Again, roughly speaking, the difference between those two yuge figures is the inflation we’ll suffer. If Musk and the DOGE boys can cut a trillion dollars of funny money out of 2025 spending, they’ll gut most of the inflation, too. They might even get us under the 2% inflation that the Fed targets because the Powers That Be — the ones who politically benefit from spending money we don’t have — long ago decided that 2% annual inflation is good for us, ackshully. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Back to today’s news: DOGE cutting $4 billion a day “would still result in a ~$1T deficit,” Musk said several weeks ago, “but economic growth should be able to match that number, which would mean no inflation in 2026.” A trillion dollars in growth looks unlikely this year but that’s something I’d dearly love to be wrong about. The point is that there is a trillion dollars at stake, “unless we’re stopped,” as Musk put it Monday, and people have been murdered for a lot less than a trillion dollars.

https://twitter.com/joeroganhq/status/1899254896081469715

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“The acting executive secretary of the US Agency for International Development”.. should do some stiff jail time.

• USAID Staff Rush To Shred And Burn Documents (RT)

The acting executive secretary of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Erica Carr, has directed remaining staff to destroy sensitive documents stored at the agency’s former headquarters in Washington, DC, according to an internal email. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who leads the recently established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have repeatedly accused USAID – the primary US agency for funding political projects abroad – of misusing taxpayer money and fostering corruption. As part of broader efforts to cut federal spending, the agency was forced to lay off 2,000 employees and place most of the remaining staff on leave. In an email first obtained by ProPublica,

Carr instructed the remaining staff to convene on Tuesday for an “all-day” effort to clear out classified safes and personnel documents at the Ronald Reagan Building. She advised employees to prioritize shredding documents and to use burn bags sparingly. “Shred as many documents as possible first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” the email read. “The only labeling required on the burn bags is the phrase ‘SECRET’ and ‘USAID/(B/IO)’ in dark Sharpie if possible. If you need additional burn bags or Sharpie markers, please let me or the SEC InfoSec team know.”

The email did not specify a reason for the destruction of the documents. However, the building is being vacated following mass layoffs, as US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently rented 390,000 square feet of office space in the facility. The directive has raised concerns among former USAID staff and legal experts, who argue that it could violate federal record-keeping laws and potentially hinder ongoing lawsuits challenging the agency’s restructuring. “Destruction of evidence is a crime,” Musk wrote on X in response to reports of the latest document purge. The billionaire previously called USAID a “criminal organization,” while Trump has claimed it was mismanaged by “radical lunatics.”

The handling of documents at USAID has already been under scrutiny. Last month, two of the agency’s security officials were placed on administrative leave after allegedly refusing to grant a team of DOGE auditors access to classified materials. The Trump administration plans to eliminate 90% of USAID contracts, amounting to $54 billion, AP reported last month, citing an internal White House memo and court filings. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has also had its government funding frozen. Although officially a US State Department-funded nonprofit that distributes grants to pro-democracy initiatives abroad, the NED has long faced allegations of acting as a CIA front for regime change operations.

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“All of our “growth” for the last five years is due to unsustainable deficits that will haunt generations of Americans yet to be born..”

• Brace Yourselves: The Next Media BIG LIE Is About to Drop (Green)

Before I tell you about the legacy dinosaur media’s next BIG LIE, I need to show you how they’ll sell it. It starts, as these things always do, with the Left attempting to control the language to alter your perceptions about how the economy performed under Presidentish Joe Biden and will perform under President Donald Trump. We might be done with Biden but he isn’t done with us, as you’re about to see. There was a recession in late 2021/early 2022, commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage. Except the “non-partisan” National Bureau of Economic Research decided to change the commonly understood definition. In 2022, wouldn’t you know, it turned out that “many factors go into that calculation,” and that the Biden recession wasn’t a recession at all when you looked at the “many factors” that nobody had ever looked at before.

The White House got into the game, too, with the White House Council of Economic Advisors citing a “holistic look at the data,” instead of playing by the established rules. The press played along and pretended the recession never happened. Convenient, eh? I’d also add that if you take away Biden’s monstrous budget deficits, any economic growth that happened on his watch was an illusion. We entered a government-engineered recession during the lockdowns of 2020 and, thanks to epic economic mismanagement under Biden, we never left it. Budget deficits are a drag on future growth and should be subtracted from our GDP figures. But the same government that spends more than it takes in — currently by trillions of dollars — pretends that deficits are growth and, again, the press plays along. So convenient.

Private sector jobs and wages stagnated under Biden because everything was driven by Big Government and sold to you by Big Media. It was a helluva party that Biden threw for his well-connected buddies. Now comes the hangover, and some on the Left already have a word for the recession that hasn’t happened yet: Trumpcession. Assuming we do end up with a recession, they’ll probably call it the Trump Depression or something along those lines. I might be exaggerating but not by much. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton claimed that President George H.W. Bush gave us “the worst economy since the Great Depression,” even though the 1991 recession was mild, short-lived, and over for a year before Clinton won the Democrat nomination.

The press helped him get away with it, too. The conveniences keep piling up. Here are the facts, as dreadful as they are. All of our “growth” for the last five years is due to unsustainable deficits that will haunt generations of Americans yet to be born. Economic decisions are increasingly driven by growth-killing mandates and regulations imposed by Biden and the Democrats during 2021-2022. Consumer spending is driven in large part by cheap imports from a country that hates us.

Getting over our addiction to new debt will be painful. Undoing the Biden regulatory binge comes with political risks that some so-called Republicans in Congress refuse to take. Homeshoring — or at least friendshoring — comes with the shock and pain of tariffs. The last time a new president faced an economic crisis like this one was Ronald Reagan in 1981. The recession he engineered with Fed Chair Paul Volcker that year genuinely was one of the worst since the Great Depression, but it was the price that had to be paid to wring Johnson/Nixon/Carter stagflation out of the system. It was a helluva risk they took but it paid off with 20 years of almost uninterrupted and unprecedented growth. So hang on tight because the so-called Trumpcession is in reality the final price to be paid for four years of Joe Biden.

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“Right” has become the equivalent of “far right” and “extreme right”. Simply a convenient -because often legal- way to get rid of normal right wing opposition. Incoming train wreck.

• The Right is Being Shut Out of Government Across Europe (DS)

Right-wing politicians are being shut out of Government across Europe, says Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator, as so-called ‘progressive’ elites in politics and the judiciary effectively rig what are supposed to be democratic elections. Here’s an excerpt. “Alarm grew as opinion polls indicated [Calin] Georgescu would win the second round [of Romania’s Presidential election]. Something had to be done, and it was. A couple of days before the decisive vote, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round because of alleged Russian interference. The court had perused some declassified intelligence documents that claimed 800 TikTok accounts had been activated shortly before polls opened. There was no evidence of voting irregularities in the election itself but the fact Russia had been active on social media was enough for the court to intervene.

At the time, Georgescu likened himself to Donald Trump: an anti-system candidate who was the target of Establishment ‘lawfare’. The Trump administration has subsequently cited Georgescu as an example of the EU’s creeping illiberalism. In a speech at last month’s Munich Security Conference, Vice-President J.D. Vance expressed his astonishment “that a former European Commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian Government had just annulled an entire election… these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears”. The Commissioner in question was Frenchman Thierry Breton, who in a television interview in January boasted that “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary”. He was referring to the upcoming German election and the possibility that the Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) might win.

As it turned out, simply annulling Romania’s Presidential election didn’t derail the Georgescu bandwagon. Quite the opposite. He picked up momentum and polls showed that he would romp to victory in May’s re-run election. As I predicted in January, Romania’s elite wouldn’t allow this to happen. And they haven’t. At the end of February, Georgescu was detained by police as he drove through Bucharest to file his candidacy in the election. He was indicted on six counts, among them false funding sources and false information in his last campaign. He was also barred from leaving the country and creating any new social media accounts. Now he is barred from standing for President, a decision he has called a “direct blow to the heart of democracy worldwide”.

It’s part of a disturbing illiberal pattern, says Gavin. In Germany, the AfD came second on 20% of the vote but has been shut out of Government in favour of the Left-wing Social Democrats, despite having had their worst performance since 1945. In Austria, the anti-immigration Freedom Party won the election last October but still finds itself shunned by the other parties who have colluded to keep it side-lined. And in France on March 31st a court will rule whether Marine Le Pen will be barred from office for five years over a charge of “misusing EU funds”. This doesn’t end well. The issues that these politicians represent – and simmering public anger about them – obviously aren’t going away, least of all while Left-wing parties cling to power despite losing elections and refuse to address them.

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“An economy that ‘must’ grow at 5%, and via more supply, not demand, necessarily makes too much, exports it, and… dominates global supply chains..”

• Europe Seizing Russian FX Reserves Would Reset Global Financial System (Every)

Yesterday saw the Nikkei -2.2%, the Dax -1.7%, the S&P -2.7%, and the Nasdaq –3.8%, while the US Treasury 10-year yield the White House is now focused on was -5bp to 4.16%. As the headlines put it, markets were “swooning”, first on China drifting back to deflation, then on President Trump’s comments that refused to rule out a US recession. Frankly, that commentary managed to be both very shallow and deeply myopic at the same time. China is “struggling” with deflation due to mercantilism. An economy that ‘must’ grow at 5%, and via more supply, not demand, necessarily makes too much, exports it, and… dominates global supply chains. Many Western economies could do with that right now – as Trump implied.

He made clear he wants to reset the US, and by extension, global economy: “I hate to predict things like [a recession]. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing. And there are always periods of – it takes a little time… But I think it should be great for us… What I have to do is build a strong country… You can’t really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can’t go by that. You have to do what’s right.” Vice-President Vance put the same thing another way: “President Trump’s economic policies are simple: if you invest in and create jobs in America, you’ll be rewarded. We’ll lower regulations and reduce taxes. But if you build outside of the US, you’re on your own.”

Markets, which presumed Trump 2 would retain Trump 1’s monomania for stocks, just want what’s right for them. However, anyone who thought shifting the US to production-based mercantilism from asset-based financialisation via economic statecraft over economic policy could be done without assets falling didn’t understand either ‘ism’, or statecraft. Hence the sell-off. Of course, this attempted US reset could go horribly wrong; or right. Either way, markets will be dragged along behind it. We are also seeing a matching US global foreign policy reset via political statecraft:

The US and Ukraine are to meet in Saudi Arabia today to discuss ending that war, as Senator Graham threatens to sanction Russia aggressively if they don’t come to the table; the US wants a deal, not war between Israel and Hamas, and it, not Israel, is now seen in charge of hostage negotiations and the end game; the US is also getting tougher on Iranian oil, as the Houthis reportedly get ready to attack things again; Trump seems set for a June ‘two birthdays’ summit with China’s Xi despite the escalating trade war; and the FT’s Gideon Rachman claims Trump is “Making Europe Great Again” after decrying all the actions that led to that outcome.

Again, this attempted US reset could go horribly wrong; or right. Either way, markets will be dragged along behind it. So, do try to keep up. Moscow is now blaming the UK for instigating global wars – a Russian obsession and a good way not to blame the US, helping build détente, perhaps. However, that flatters the UK as much as recent comparisons between PM Starmer and Churchill. The looming UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR) reportedly states the military is so weak after 25 years of hollowing out that it will take ten years to become “match fit”, and require “much more” investment, and “industrial policy” to onshore production, tech, and jobs, as well as a recommendation this is done without the US. Oddly for military thinkers, the SDR seems to assume an economics-style static backdrop when it will be dynamic and antagonistic.

What if Russia, China, or even the US make the UK’s “industrial policy” or military decoupling more difficult and expensive via grey-zone sabotage, supply chain ‘shocks’, or economic statecraft countermeasures? At the very least, anyone thinking “much more” investment was covered by the recent policy shift away from foreign aid to defence spending, or that this is going to take only ten years, or that the government has a shovel-ready plan for military protectionism to allow it to happen is likely mistaken. The same applies to Europe: will the new “four-year” loosening of the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact, or the 1.5 percentage points of GDP, be all we get as it rearms? Half a Euro tank or a Euro combat aircraft to replace US systems like the F-35 for fear of built-in ‘kill switches’ –so requiring even more complex new supply chains to be built from scratch, and economies of scale, i.e., larger orders, to make it affordable– is no use to Europe at all.

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“France has been eyeing a defense spending boost for a while now – because nothing says sophisticated economic strategy like just cranking out piles of missiles..”

• Macron’s Napoleon Cosplay Could Come At A Grave Cost (RT)

French President Emmanuel Macron is currently completely absorbed in cosplaying Napoleon, leading the charge to put French and European boots on the ground on Ukraine’s side against the Russians. His costume needs to be taken in for resizing – downward. Sharing the stage with “Dollar General Napoleon” is British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the role of “Wish Wellington.” This sweatshop mail order version of the legendary British Duke of Wellington and military strategist sounds like he was knocked around and damaged during the shipping process, and has been keen to use his predecessor’s Iraq War tagline of a “coalition of the willing” for marketing purposes. Because that worked out so great the first time that reminding people of it will surely make them want to have yet another go. This time against Russia.

“Wish Wellington” seems rather keen to repeat the logistic challenges of the actual Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War of 1807 to 1814 in Spain and Portugal. Only this time the modern-day Napoleon knock-off would be fighting beside him rather than against him. Good luck stretching your logistics to Ukraine for battle when your stated opponent only has to travel from right next door.Macron doesn’t want to go in right away though, he says. He needs for everyone to stop fighting for a bit first – a month to be precise – so the French and Brits and their posse can safely get to the VIP room with the bar service without having to worry about getting mixed up with guys throwing punches in Club Ukraine. Macron has since explained that the French wouldn’t be on the front line, but would be hanging out to guarantee “peace” – by repeating the same NATO troop presence that sparked the conflict’s escalation in the first place.

So there’s no way they could possibly ever find themselves in the middle of punch-ups because Macron envisions that velvet rope separating his fantasy stage play from any real-life consequences remaining intact. A modern-day Maginot Line. In the meantime, he’s been taking to TV to tell French citizens, “Who can believe today that Russia would stop at Ukraine?” Well, the French, for one – 65% of whom currently oppose French troops in Ukraine, according to a new CSA Institute poll. Guess they don’t really see it as the pressing issue that Macron portrays. Neither do other EU members, apparently – contrary to their own hyperventilation on the issue. Why else would they have held their Ukraine defense summit in London and not ensured that the Baltics were there, if they were really that concerned about the EU’s frontline countries.

Obviously this is about something else. And one of those other things is trying to literally scare up as much taxpayer cash by fear-bombing their electorate, using the “Russian threat,” to boost their own industrial base. Germany’s economy has been in the dumps since 2022, but there’s nothing that now can’t be fixed with a trillion-euro blank check from the German taxpayer, as the top establishment parties on both the right and left now want – and a good excuse to have to transfer a big chunk of that cash to the country’s defense industry. Some analysts are saying that the plan could boost the country’s GDP by 2% – in the long run. And well, hey, even if it doesn’t, those responsible probably won’t be around when accountability comes knocking, anyway.

Meanwhile, France has been eyeing a defense spending boost for a while now – because nothing says sophisticated economic strategy like just cranking out piles of missiles. With French manufacturing about as sturdy as a baguette left out in the rain – declining output, sluggish new orders, and job cuts since 2023 – Reuters points to skyrocketing energy prices, fuel costs, and raw materials as the culprits. But hey, at least sticking it to Putin by messing with those things has totally, definitely worked… right? So who’s going to actually pay for all this? Sounds like the French government spokesperson already has an idea: dipping into the interest on French citizens’ savings. Pretty sure that people invest in savings so they can buy themselves nice things – not so Brigitte Macron’s former junior high school drama student can gear up for his “little emperor” era.

All this talk of war with Russia for peace has already sent European defense stocks through the roof. According to the Financial Times, Germany’s Rheinmetall is up 14%. A boost of 15% for France’s Thales and Italy’s Leonardo. BAE systems – 14%. Saab – 11%. Because nothing says ‘safety and security’ like a bunch of investors and establishment cronies getting rich off the backs of the average working stiff.

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“Why are Americans supporting an alien culture in Europe to the point of possibly having nuclear war with Russia, a law abiding Christian nation that protects its citizens?

• The French Despite Clear Warning Brought The Camp of the Saints to France (PCR)

France is dying. It is a piecemeal death. One business district at a time. One neighborhood at a time. A restaurant, a business, a theater, a hotel here and there. Each death so sad but survivable. But as the piecemeal deaths mount, they become an aggregate, and now France is dying. Jean Raspail warned the French in clear language in 1973 that the open borders acceptance of immigrant-invaders meant the death of France. Enoch Powell warned the British. It proved to be impossible to warn insouciant moronic populations imbued with racist guilt from decades of propagandistic indoctrination. Enoch Powell was denounced and Jean Raspail ignored. Marine Le Pen, the only politician in France who stands for the French people, seems headed to prison for stranding up for French ethnics against the immigrant-invaders.

The same destruction of nation is happening all over Europe, especially in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and the UK, countries in which the white ethnic female population has no protection against gang rape by immigrant invaders. White women are discouraged from reporting their gang rapes, because it is considered racist for a white to initiate action against a black. This is Europe today. A cultural dead zone or a rising new culture based on African and Muslim mores. All of my European and English friends tell me: “Don’t come back. It will break your heart. It is not like you remember it.” But still the tourists go. They are shown around the still safe areas and kept from seeing the encroaching barbarity. It is like a sponsored trip to Israel. You are not shown the bad stuff, only the good stuff. Trump is right. Europe is a basket case.

Why are Americans supporting an alien culture in Europe to the point of possibly having nuclear war with Russia, a law abiding Christian nation that protects its citizens? The United States should align with the rising powers–Russia and China–not with the decadent and declining countries, none of which are any longer ethnic nations, in Europe. European governments, who refuse to protect their women from immigrant-invaders, want instead to go to war with Russia. Well, Trump should let them. The war won’t last long, and we will be rid of Europe. Europe is dead just like the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico or is it the Gulf of America where the Mississippi River dumps the chemical fertilizer runoff from commercial agribusiness and other pollutants. The United States has the same anti-Western intellectual class as Europe. How can Trump address our vulnerability from our internal enemies, which is where our vulnerability lies?

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“..an overnight drone strike on the Druzhba oil pipeline..”

• Hungary Accuses Ukraine Of Threatening Its Sovereignty (RT)

Hungary has accused Ukraine of threatening its sovereignty after Kiev launched an overnight drone strike on the Druzhba oil pipeline on Tuesday. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said shipments of Russian crude via the pipeline have been temporarily halted following the attack on a metering station. In a video posted on Facebook, Szijjarto stressed that the Druzhba pipeline is a critical component of Hungary’s energy infrastructure, pointing out that if it ceases to function, oil deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia would be “physically impossible.” “We consider these attacks against our energy infrastructure targeting Hungary to be unacceptable,” the foreign minister said. “Hungary’s energy supply is a matter of sovereignty and we expect everyone to respect this,” he added. Szijjarto noted that he had spoken to Russia’s deputy energy minister, who has assured him that crude oil deliveries will likely be resumed within the next 24 hours.

The diplomat recalled that Budapest had repeatedly raised the issue of the safety of its energy infrastructure multiple times in Brussels, and had been given assurances by the European Commission that there would be no attacks on such facilities. “Unfortunately, this is already the umpteenth time when the EC’s guarantee is violated,” Szijjarto pointed out. According to media reports, three Ukrainian fixed-wing drones attacked the Druzhba terminal in Bryansk Region on Tuesday night. No injuries were reported. The attack was part of a larger raid on Russia, which reportedly involved more than 340 UAVs, nearly a hundred of which were brought down near Moscow. The falling debris from the destroyed drones near the capital reportedly caused the death of at least three people, while over 20 civilians have been injured.

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“The CBP Home App gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream.”

• Trump Finds an Epic Way to Repurpose Biden’s CBP One App for Ilegals (Margolis)

The days of using government technology to roll out the welcome mat for illegal aliens are officially over. The Trump administration has just launched the CBP Home app, replacing Biden’s disastrous CBP One system that essentially served as a concierge service for illegal immigration. Remember how Biden used CBP One to usher in over a million illegal aliens? Those days are done. The new app has one crystal-clear message: It’s time to go home. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t mince words about the change. “The Biden Administration exploited the CBP One App to allow more than 1 million aliens to illegally enter the United States,” she declared. “With the launching of the CBP Home App, we are restoring integrity to our immigration system.”

The app’s primary feature is a “Submit Intent to Depart” function, which lets illegal aliens report their planned departure. It’s like an RSVP system for self-deportation. How sweet is that? It can also allow users to verify that they have left the United States. According to Fox News Digital, this feature is “limited to those who were paroled into the U.S.” Noem laid out the options in terms nobody can misunderstand: “The CBP Home App gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream. If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.” The Trump administration isn’t just talking tough; it’s backing it up with action. On day one, Trump killed the parole function that Biden abused.

ICE has now expanded its authority to cancel existing parole statuses, and those previously cherished TPS extensions? Gone for many nationalities. Even domestic travel is getting a reality check. The CBP One system will now only help facilitate one kind of journey — the one that leads out of the country. Since Trump has taken office, border crossings have plummeted. Essentially, he secured the border in a matter of weeks. As President Trump told Congress with his characteristic directness, “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.” This is a complete reversal of Biden’s open-borders disaster. While the Biden administration used technology to welcome illegal immigration, Trump is using it to restore law and order.

The automatic update of all existing CBP One apps to the new CBP Home version sends an unmistakable message: the Biden-era immigration free-for-all is over. The choice for illegal aliens is simple — leave voluntarily now and preserve the possibility of legal return or be deported and face permanent exclusion. This is what actual border security looks like. No endless processing of bogus asylum claims, no more humanitarian parole abuse, just straightforward enforcement of our immigration laws. It’s amazing what can happen when an administration actually wants to solve the border crisis instead of enabling it.

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Judges seeking to make policy; it is a peculiar sign of our times. Luckily, it’s not all of them.

• Judge Declines Bid to Force Federal Gov’t to Restore Foreign Aid Contracts (ET)

A federal judge on March 10 declined to compel President Donald Trump’s administration to restore foreign assistance contracts that it had canceled. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said that Trump’s administration must spend money allocated by Congress on foreign aid, but that it is up to the Executive Branch as to which projects it funds with the money. “The separation of powers dictates only that the Executive follow Congress’s decision to spend funds, and both the Constitution and Congress’s laws have traditionally afforded the Executive discretion on how to spend within the constraints set by Congress,” Ali said in a 48-page ruling. “The appropriate remedy is accordingly to order Defendants to ’make available for obligation the full amount of funds Congress appropriated’ under the relevant laws.”

Officials have canceled about 9,900 of the 13,100 USAID and State Department agreements, according to court filings. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media this week that the canceled contracts “did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.” The ruling came in response to a lawsuit from organizations that had agreements with the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) when Trump paused foreign aid spending to let the State Department review agreements to make sure they furthered his agenda. After Ali previously ruled that USAID and the State Department must fund contracts that predated the Trump administration but were paused under the freeze, the U.S. Supreme Court directed the judge to clarify which obligations the government must meet to comply with his order.

Ali set a March 10 deadline to issue payments to the organizations, while promising further instructions concerning groups that are not parties in the case. In the new ruling, Ali said that the Executive Branch unlawfully impounded congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds and ordered the Trump administration to pay committed funds for work completed before Feb. 13. The administration must pay nearly $2 billion in total, issuing around 300 payments a day until the organizations that had agreements with the government are recompensed for their work, the judge said.

Ali said that he concluded that government lawyers defending the withholding of foreign assistance funds, which were allocated by Congress, “offer an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected—a view that flouts multiple statutes whose constitutionality is not in question.” However, he also said that courts are restrained in the relief they can offer in such disputes. “The Court must be careful that any relief it grants does not itself intrude on the prerogative of a coordinate branch,” he said. “The Court accordingly denies Plaintiffs’ proposed relief that would unnecessarily entangle the Court in supervision of discrete or ongoing Executive decisions, as well as relief that goes beyond what their claims allow.”

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“Has anyone else talked about Gonzalo Lira? An American journalist, He had a US passport. Has anyone talked about him besides Russia? Try to remember. Nobody did,”

• Moscow Reproaches Western Media For Silence Over Gonzalo Lira’s Death (RT)

The fact that only Moscow cared about the fate of US blogger Gonzalo Lira, who died in a Ukrainian prison last year, is a sign of the “deepest crisis” affecting the international bodies that are supposed to protect journalists, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. Lira, a Chilean-American citizen, passed away behind bars in Ukraine in January 2024, while awaiting trial for “systematically justifying the Russian aggression.” Zakharova recalled the ordeal of the US journalist during a conference on the development of modern media at the Moscow School of Economics (MSE) on Tuesday. “Has anyone else talked about Gonzalo Lira? An American journalist, He had a US passport. Has anyone talked about him besides Russia? Try to remember. Nobody did,” she insisted.

When asked about Lira’s incarceration, the White House and the US State Department replied with “strategic silence, generously paid for by USAID, an American agency that supposedly promotes international development. It is ridiculous,” the spokeswoman stressed.The international institutions that are supposed to protect journalists are currently in “the deepest crisis,” Zakharov said. “Waiting for them to resuscitate or for them to be resuscitated by someone else is unnecessary and useless” as Russia, which has “an amazing and diverse” journalistic community, has the potential to correct the situation on its own, she noted. Lira, who was married to a Ukrainian woman and had resided in the city of Kharkov since 2010, got in trouble with the Kiev authorities for his coverage of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on YouTube, which was critical of the government of Vladimir Zelensky.

The blogger, writer and filmmaker, who had Hollywood experience, was first detained by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in early 2022, but released after a week without any charges being pressed against him. Lira was arrested again in May 2023 and released on bail three months later; he claimed he’d been subjected to torture while in prison. He ended up in custody again in late July that year after jumping bail and attempting to flee the country to seek asylum in Hungary. At that time, his father, Gonzalo Lira Sr., suggested that the administration of then-President Joe Biden gave “at least tacit approval of Gonzalo’s arrest.” The journalist’s family later blamed Kiev for his death in prison. In February, US President Donald Trump’s close ally Elon Musk also claimed that Zelensky had “killed” the American journalist. When asked about Lira during a press conference last month, the Ukrainian leader replied: “I do not know this man. I never knew him.”

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Rogan98

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1899473449409552461

 

 

https://twitter.com/buitengebieden/status/1899474006811537804

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle June 24 2024

Jun 242024
 
 June 24, 2024  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  65 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Van Gogh painting sunflowers 1888

 

• “Falling Gently Away:” The G–7 in Italy (Patrick Lawrence)
• Evil Is Now the Dominant Power in the Western World (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Myth of the European “Far-Right Surge” (Thunder)
• It Won’t Be The End Of The World, But Of Europe (SCF)
• Macron May Trigger France’s Exit From EU, Says EU’s Barnier (Sp.)
• The Prigozhin Paradox: What Was Russia’s Wagner PMC ? (RT)
• Ex-DoD Analyst Derides Bid to Upgrade Outdated B-52s With Nukes (Sp.)
• Scott Ritter: It’s Direct Attack on Russia by US and NATO (Sp.)
• Ex-White House Physician Demands Biden Drug Test Before Trump Debate (RT)
• Snopes Finally Admits Trump Never Called Neo-Nazis ‘Very Fine People’ (ZH)
• No Way Financial System Survives – Bill Holter (USAW)
• Wales Moves Forward With Plan to Punish Politicians for Telling Lies (Turley)
• Judge Dismisses Nevada Alternate Electors Case On Jurisdiction Concerns (ET)

 

 

 

 

Kim

 

 

Can’t sue them all, there’s too many

 

 

 

 

Elon

 

 

Kash

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Conversing with a hang-glider rather than the French president, the German chancellor, or the British prime minister is just what “the leader of the free world” should get up to at a G–7 summit.”

“..If many of us have worried for some time that no one seems to be driving the bus, maybe we can take cold comfort now in the thought that not many seem to be on it..”

• “Falling Gently Away:” The G–7 in Italy (Patrick Lawrence)

That Group of 7 gathering on the coast of the Adriatic June 13–15 was truly a doozy, I have to say. Readers might think it a waste of column inches to devote any linage to it, as many will surely have forgotten about it by now—not to mention those many others who did not know of it in the first place and so could not get as far as forgetting it. But this just is my point: The seven people claiming to be the world’s most powerful assemble for a summit and it is not worth our attention? Say whaaa? The significance of this year’s G–7, I mean to say, lies in its insignificance. Considering the mess these very folk have made of the world, this bears consideration. Giorgia Meloni seems to have given some thought to the “non–” aspect of the event she hosted at the Borgo Egnazia, a resort hotel in the town of Savelletri di Fasano, “where the hills of the Itria Valley fall gently away to the Adriatic Sea.”

Prominent among the diversions the Italian premier arranged was a squad of hang-gliders who descended on the group, each trailing the flag of a G–7 member. Is this gravitas or what, 21st century statecraft at its most elevated—especially with a genocide, as supported by every one of these people, proceeding exactly 1,147 miles across the Mediterranean? The lasting image of the G–7 2024 summit has to be that viral video of President Biden wandering away from the others with, per usual at this point, the demeanor of a sleepwalker (which seems to me about right). No! the Democratic machine and its clerks in the media protested. That video was unfairly cut. Biden wasn’t drifting into nowhere: He went to talk to one of the hang-gliders as he, the hang-glider, packed up his harness and airframe. That changes everything. Conversing with a hang-glider rather than the French president, the German chancellor, or the British prime minister is just what “the leader of the free world” should get up to at a G–7 summit.

It was, of course, more worthwhile than talking to Justin Trudeau, I will give Biden this. One of the oddities of this year’s G–7, remarked upon here and there in the media coverage, is the low standing the seven had among their electorates. Axios had a wonderful headline on this, “World losers gather at G–7 summit.” Meloni was the enviable star, with a 40 percent approval rate, but Meloni was the odd one out: She has populist tendencies in a group of neoliberal authoritarians. Biden was second, with 37 percent, but this puts him behind Donald Trump in the American polls. The rest we can count among the walking wounded: Trudeau arrived at Savelletri with a 30 percent approval rate, Olaf Scholz with 25 percent, and then the hanging-by-fingernails group: Rishi Sunak (25 percent, about to be turned out of office), Emmanuel Macron (21 percent, tipped to lose in snap elections), Fumio Kishida (13 percent).

These people are by dint of the offices they hold the leaders of “the West.” If many of us have worried for some time that no one seems to be driving the bus, maybe we can take cold comfort now in the thought that not many seem to be on it. Can what remains of the West now fit into an Italian resort? I pose this as a serious question. Those ever-courteous but mercilessly direct Chinese went straight at this in their official comment on the summit. “The G–7 does not represent the world,” Lin Jian, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, remarked after the group issued its communiqué. Lin referred to the G–7’s share of global GDP: It is now roughly 10 percent and declining as the non–West’s rises. But, viewed from the Atlantic world’s perspective, it is just as significant, I would say, that those purporting to lead the West enjoy a similarly declining share of their population’s support.

The New York Times had an entertainingly contorted take on all this. Shared political weakness, along with high anxiety as the West’s major investments go bad—the proxy war in Ukraine, the Israelis’ savagery in Gaza, the attempt to isolate Russia—combined to make this year’s summit “unexpectedly smooth,” as Steve Erlanger wrote from Savelletri—“another example of unchallenged American leadership of the West.” Leave it to The Times, ever ready to find roses in the desert if it makes the imperium seem a good and welcome thing.

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“Can People Cope with the Challenges of Life when so Much of their Culture has been Destroyed?”

• Evil Is Now the Dominant Power in the Western World (Paul Craig Roberts)

Depression, the meaninglessness of life and spiritual depravation engulfs so many people today, because they no longer have the cultural knowledge gained from familiarity with their classic literature and religion which teaches how to deal with the challenges of life and how to grapple with inner demons. This knowledge has been lost. It has been excised from education as outdated, racist, not inclusive, judgmental, and white. Hanne Herland reminds us of the importance of culture to survival and a moral life. She gives us hope for our revival by pointing out that Russia is again Christian despite decades of enforced communist atheism, which was also enforced on Americans by liberals and Jews. For example, no prayers in school, no Christian symbols in public places. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, was a hero in America as a Soviet dissident until his speech at Harvard University at which he said that “men have forgotten God,” and that this forgetfulness is the explanation for the numerous crises and social and personal maladies of our time.

Instantly, Solzhenitsyn became person non grata. If you are a Christian, a real one and not a worshipper of Israel, you can understand what has happened to us in terms of Satan squeezing the good out of Western civilization and replacing it with evil. When I challenge this thought, I am confronted by the facts that it wasn’t Russia, China, and Iran who on the basis of totally false accusations overthrew the governments in Iraq and Libya and murdered the leaders. It wasn’t Russia, China, and Iran who tried to do the same in Afghanistan and Syria. It is not Russia, China and Iran who are providing the bombs and aircraft and money and diplomatic cover to Israel to exterminate the Palestinians. It is not the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians who are provoking more war. It is Washington and its EU Empire. If you consider the bare-faced facts, it is evil flowing from the Western World that is operating in the world. Russia, China and Iran think they are confronting governments that have lost their senses. They are relying on the threat of the breakout of a world war to bring the West to its senses.

They do not understand that they are confronting evil with whom no negotiations are possible. This means that the halting, hesitant, insufficient responses of Russia, China, and Iran to evil are too weak to be effective.The liberals, the left-wing, the Woke are the ones who destroyed the cultural knowledge of the West, thereby depriving the people of the ability to confront evil. For the liberal-left-Woke destroyers of civilization, spiritual evil is incomprehensible. For them the only evils are Trump, “white racism” and “Putin’s aggression.” In the liberal-left-Woke matrix there are no other evils. The West no longer rests on a Western culture. It rests on sexual perversion and the promotion by governments, corporations, and universities of transgenderism and critical race theory. Western nations have been replaced with Sodom and Gomorrahs and towers of babel. Enemies are necessary to justify the US military/security complex’s massive budget and power. The more enemies the larger the budget and power.

There is not much more hope in American conservatives than there is in the liberal-left-Woke contingent. Conservatives confuse their country with the government. As Albert Jay Nock and Thomas Jefferson clearly explained, the two are entirely different. But it is an important distinction that is over the heads of many conservatives. Solzhenitsyn told us that when respect for religion, traditional values, family, and religious faith are stripped from a society, society has been disarmed and no protection remains against the triumph of evil. As the liberal-left-Woke contingent has stripped away these protections, evil is now the dominant power in the Western World. Russia, China and Iran do not confront Western governments capable of reason. They confront unbridled evil. Putin puzzles why the West is so unreasonable. The answer is that evil is unreasonable. You cannot make a deal with it.

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“the term has degenerated into a cheap label used to discredit political conservatives..”

• The Myth of the European “Far-Right Surge” (Thunder)

The term “far-right” should be reserved for political groups that oppose constitutionalism, are rabidly racist, or want to institute an authoritarian State akin to fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. But instead, the term has degenerated into a cheap label used to discredit political conservatives. This label is being attached willy-nilly to people who take political positions that are not in vogue among those who self-identify as “Woke” and/or “progressive,” even if these same positions were considered fairly conventional a couple of decades ago: People are labelled “far-right” if they defend the idea of a national identity, want an orderly immigration process, advocate for laws that are tough on crime, believe in traditional marriage and biological markers for gender; or believe that civil rights like informed consent are still relevant during a pandemic.

If you really want to understand why new parties are emerging on the right, throwing around the “far-right” label will not get you very far. What is really happening is that the traditional right-wing parties, many of which are represented by Europe’s largest political group, the European People’s Party, have jumped ship on a lot of traditional right-wing commitments, creating a vacuum to be filled by the “new right.” For example, rule of law and limited government have been replaced, under the watch of mainstream “right-wing” parties, with vaccine passports, lockdowns, intrusive hate speech laws, crippling “green” taxes and regulations, and the Orwellian idea that we should clamp down on “disinformation,” lest citizens be exposed to “dangerous” ideas. The old right has overseen a Europe of uncontrolled and disorderly immigration, with no proper vetting of migrants and little consideration for the impact of large-scale migration on local communities.

And the old commitment to the right to law and order has given way to a palpable complacency and inaction in the face of a growing crime problem in Europe’s cities. This has created a pent-up political demand for parties prepared to avow traditional right-wing commitments, such as law and order, orderly immigration, freedom of speech, pro-family taxation and welfare policies, and limited government. In some cases, this political vacuum has been filled with egregiously xenophobic, racist, and authoritarian rhetoric. But in many other cases, parties dismissed as “far-right” are simply questioning the wisdom of open border policies, exposing abuses of the refugee system, defending free speech, and trying to moderate the green agenda so that it is not so oppressive for farmers and ordinary citizens.

If having serious concerns about immigration and being opposed to far-reaching environmental regulations is considered “extreme,” then it appears that being “extreme” is now pretty normal in Europe: one recent opinion poll shows that immigration is one of the leading concerns for European voters, after the economy and war. In addition, the abysmal performance of the Greens in these EU elections—dropping from 71 to 53 seats—suggests that the Greens’ enthusiasm for ambitious climate regulations is not shared by many voters. In short, two of the central concerns of the new right—uncontrolled immigration and excessively burdensome environmental regulations—are actually shared by a sizeable number of European voters. Finally, there was no “surge” to speak of among the new and emerging parties on the right: more like a moderate consolidation.

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“..there are many domestic priorities for the U.S. that make Ukraine increasingly less important..”

• It Won’t Be The End Of The World, But Of Europe (SCF)

Since the start of NATO’s proxy war against Russia, Europe still appears to have not understood its role in the conflict. By irrationally adhering to all measures imposed by the U.S., such as unilateral sanctions and unrestricted arms shipments to the Kiev regime, the EU appears increasingly closer to a true collapse, given the negative social circumstances and high security risks. In the end, the European bloc, like Ukraine, is just another proxy in this war. For obvious reasons, Europe has always been dependent on good relations with Russia to maintain its economic and social well-being and the balance of its regional security architecture. However, European countries seem to have forgotten the basic principles of geopolitics, betting on a futile attempt to “isolate” Russia through irrational sanctions that only harm Europe itself – without generating any impact on the Russian economy.

Without Russian gas, Europe has rapidly deindustrialized, increasing levels of poverty, unemployment and inflation. The most rational thing to do in this type of situation would be to avoid unnecessary spending and invest heavily in economic recovery projects – but, apparently, no European attitude is based on rationality. Instead of acting strategically in pursuit of the best for their people, European decision-makers committed themselves to a policy of systematically supplying weapons to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime, spending billions of euros on manufacturing and exporting weapons for the war against Russia. Obviously, the European people are dissatisfied with so many harmful policies, which is why in the last European elections voters reacted by voting massively for right-wing politicians and parties, trying to find an alternative against the unpopular Russophobic madness of liberal regimes.

Retaliating against the popular will, liberal governments are already beginning to take authoritarian measures, such as President Emmanuel Macron, who decided to dissolve the parliament and call for new elections. It is possible that many more similar dictatorial measures will be taken in the near future, which will only further worsen the serious legitimacy crisis of EU member countries. To make matters worse, some of these European governments are even thinking about going a step further in their support for Ukraine, with advanced discussions about sending troops on the ground. Apparently, European nations have lost their fear of escalating the war into a global, nuclear conflict, during which they would be easy targets for powerful Russian strategic weapons.

In parallel, in the U.S. there is great instability in the electoral scenario. Donald Trump promises to end the war, but the liberal establishment wants to prevent him from running. Biden promises to continue the conflict with Russia, which will certainly also be the guideline of the Republican candidate who replaces Trump. However, both domestic politics and the international scenario are extremely complicated for Washington. Having to deal with a pre-civil war atmosphere, social polarization, Texas separatism and mass migration, in addition to a severe economic crisis, there are many domestic priorities for the U.S. that make Ukraine increasingly less important.

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“They are still anti-European..”

No, they just don’t like your idea of Europe. Not the same thing.

• Macron May Trigger France’s Exit From EU, Says EU’s Barnier (Sp.)

French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve the country’s parliament and hold snap elections could trigger France’s exit from the European Union, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said. Barnier said in an interview with The Telegraph newspaper that Macron’s hopes of beating the right-wing National Rally (RN) party in the elections are very risky, the report read on Saturday. “I don’t think Ms [the leader of the RN’s parliamentary faction, Marine] Le Pen and Mr [president of RN party, Jordan] Bardella changed their minds. They are still anti-European,” Barnier said. On June 9, Macron announced the dissolution of the French parliament’s lower house and holding of two-round snap parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7. The decision was made in the wake of the European Parliament elections in which the National Rally party emerged victorious, finishing with over 15 percentage points ahead of Macron’s centrist coalition.

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“Prigozhin had a very tenacious intellect, huge ambitions and no brakes.”

• The Prigozhin Paradox: What Was Russia’s Wagner PMC ? (RT)

On June 23, 2023, one of the most mysterious events in modern Russian history kicked off. Units of PMC Wagner – at the time a highly combat-ready but also historically unusual component of the Russian Armed Forces – withdrew from the theater of operations in Ukraine. The story of the Wagner mutiny cannot be told without the story of the people behind the creation of the PMC. The main figure is Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg businessman who rose from humble beginnings to become a wealthy tycoon. His youth was turbulent, and in the early 1990s, as the USSR collapsed, he went into business, far removed from military affairs. Prigozhin was a restaurateur. He started by selling hot dogs, but quickly acquired money and ambition and began to open restaurants in St. Petersburg to suit all tastes and budgets.

By the end of the 1990s, Prigozhin ran a chain of restaurants and a catering company, and was well known to the establishment of the city on the Neva. When Vladimir Putin, also from St. Petersburg, became president of Russia, Prigozhin found more success. He was involved in organizing catering in schools and then in the army, construction and other projects. The businessman tried to keep a low profile, but in the 2010s became increasingly involved in politics. In 2013, he created a media network that included online resources as well as a large, shadowy social media group. This media outlets were characterized by its sharp tone and assertiveness. Then, in 2014, he was asked to set up a private military company. Prigozhin was involved in organizational matters. The PMC received orders from official structures and was financed by them. It was commanded by Dmitry Utkin, a veteran of special military intelligence units.

One of his call signs was Wagner, so when information about the creation of the unit leaked to the media, it was referred to as the Wagner Group or PMC Wagner. Hence the informal name of the unit, ‘Orchestra’, and its fighters, ‘Musicians’. Initially, its fighters were recruited from retired Russian military personnel and participants in the war in Donbass. The fighters were attracted by good salaries and an informal management style: private soldiers were expected to produce results without worrying about army drills and the need to sign multi-year contracts. Wagner’s first operation was to storm the airport in the city of Lugansk, which had been occupied by Ukrainian troops. The Ukrainians were driven out and the beginning was made. Prigozhin, a non-military man, suddenly turned out to be an exceptionally suitable person to lead the PMC. Energetic and extremely rude, he had very little education, but quickly learned everything he needed to know. Prigozhin had a very tenacious intellect, huge ambitions and no brakes.

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They still can’t make hypersonics…

• Ex-DoD Analyst Derides Bid to Upgrade Outdated B-52s With Nukes (Sp.)

The defense policy bills for fiscal year 2025 in both the US Senate and House include funding to enhance the nuclear weapon capabilities of approximately 30 B-52H Stratofortress bombers. However, the Pentagon is not enthusiastic about the proposal and instead favors a more expensive option of investing in a next-generation nuclear-capable bomber. Congress’ bid to restore the B-52 bombers’ nuclear capabilities comes in the wake of repeated disappointments in developing US hypersonic standoff weapons, retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik. “Putting nukes back on the upgraded B-52 is a band aid that covers that,’ said the former analyst for the US Department of Defense. “It is important to note that Congress and the Pentagon have already approved and funded engine, avionics and radar upgrades for the nearly 60-year-old B-52 airframe. The B-52H models will be designated B-52J’s, upon upgrade. This was justified several years ago with the B-52Js as a delivery mechanism for planned AGR-183 hypersonic missiles – a missile tested by the Air Force, but one that is no longer being funded in the FY2025 defense budget,” she underscored.

Dozens of the Pentagon’s hypersonic missile projects for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and DARPA have suffered setbacks, despite a desperate race to catch up with Russia and China in this field. The hypersonic weapon that was in development by the Pentagon, the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), had been mired in delays and test failures. The weapon was to be fired from beneath the wing of a B-52 Stratofortress bomber and also contain a glide vehicle. The ARRW program, launched in April 2018, was to achieve operational deployment in 2022. However, in November 2023, after conducting two test flights in August and October 2023, the Fiscal Year 2025 budget provided no funding for procurement or further research and development of the AGM-183, effectively ending the project.

“The initiative will be costly and profitable for the defense industry, and in practical terms it keeps the B-52 in the game for tax-payer dollars. It is somewhat practical, as nuclear re-arming of the new B-52J model, as it completes other B-52 upgrades, fits well in the Boeing and Northrup Grumman industrial base,” noted Kwiatkowski. It’s really all about the Congressional lobbyists, the ex-DoD analyst pointed out, clarifying that in the House, “Congressman Mike Rogers is the second-highest recipient of defense lobby money; In the Senate, Deb Fischer’s top donor is Northrup-Grumman a major missile developer, and Boeing, the maker of the B-52, is her fourth-largest donor.” The conventional B-52H Stratofortress bombers had been part of the US nuclear triad close to a decade ago. However, under the New START treaty with Russia, the planes were stripped of these capabilities.

With the treaty set to expire in February 2026, there is a drive to “beef up the US nuclear arsenal”. Congress has been advocating making the old bombers nuclear capable again, but the idea does not appear to be viewed favorably in the Pentagon. “The treaty expires in 2026, and… We need to be prepared to face a nuclear environment without any treaty limitations,” said House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., as he introduced the amendment to the passed FY25 defense policy legislation. In line with that bill, the Air Force would start upgrading the bombers within a month after the accord expires. Accordingly, it is hoped that the restoration of the B-52’s nuclear capabilities might be completed by 2029.

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“..this is an act of terrorism by the United States against Russia..”

• Scott Ritter: It’s Direct Attack on Russia by US and NATO (Sp.)

On Sunday, the Ukrainian armed forces attacked Russia’s Sevastopol, using US-made ATACMS missiles with cluster warheads, four of which were shot down and one deflected and exploded over the city. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter commented on Ukraine’s terrorist attack on Sevastopol. “The Ukrainians made a decision to use ATACMS missiles equipped with cluster munitions against a city, a civilian city. This is an act of terrorism,” Ritter emphasized. “Ukraine since 2014 has been bombarding Russian civilian sites, cities, villages, towns for the sole purpose of inflicting death and destruction on Russian civilians. This is an act of terrorism and given that the ATACMS missiles cannot be deployed by the Ukrainians without extensive intelligence support by the United States, this is an act of terrorism by the United States against Russia,” the analyst said.

Commenting on the terrorist attacks in Russia’s Dagestan, Ritter said they were “deliberately designed to disrupt the civil life of the Russian Federation”. He highlighted that the CIA has historically made attempts to “engender a split between the Muslim and non-Muslim segments of Russian society” and failed. “That effort failed and the effort in Dagestan will fail, too, but it doesn’t absolve the parties involved of their guilt in launching what is a direct assault on the Russian Federation,” Ritter insisted.

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“..his aides are fine-tuning the dosages for the drugs he will be taking on debate night..”

• Ex-White House Physician Demands Biden Drug Test Before Trump Debate (RT)

A former White House doctor has argued that US President Joe Biden should be subjected to drug tests at this week’s debate with Republican challenger Donald Trump to check whether he’s taking performance-enhancing substances to cover up his allegedly declining cognitive health. Dr. Ronny Jackson, who served as White House physician in the Trump and Obama-Biden administrations, said he has reason to believe Biden will be drugged to boost his mental sharpness in Thursday’s presidential debate. The doctor, now a Republican congressman representing Texas, added that he suspected Biden took drugs before his State of the Union speech in March. “It’s really embarrassing, as a former White House physician, to have to do something like this, but we don’t have any choice, based on what’s going on,” Jackson said on Sunday in a Fox News interview.

“But I’m going to be demanding, on behalf of many millions of concerned Americans right now, that he submit to a drug test before and after this debate, specifically looking for performance-enhancing drugs.” At 81, Biden is already the oldest president in US history, and he would be 86 by the end of his second term if he wins reelection in November. Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly mocked Biden’s frequent mental gaffes and physical stumbles. A New York Times poll released in April showed that 72% of US voters, including over half of Democrats, believe Biden is too old to be an effective president. Jackson has repeatedly sent letters to the White House demanding that the president take a cognitive test to prove his mental fitness for the job. He said Biden and his staff ignored those demands. The congressman administered such a test to Trump in 2019, and the then-president passed the exam.

Biden is reportedly spending a full week at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland to prepare for the debate. Jackson said he believes part of the reason for the president’s long absence from the White House is that his aides are fine-tuning the dosages for the drugs he will be taking on debate night.

“They have to treat his cognition, they have to give him something to help him think straighter, they have to give him something to wake him up, for his alertness,” the doctor claimed. “And then, you know, he’s been agitated. We see that all the time, and that’s a common symptom, or sign, of this cognitive disorder that he seems to be suffering from. So, they’re probably going to give him something to take the edge off that as well.” The Biden campaign has denied that the president uses any drugs, calling accusations by Trump “a bizarre outburst.” Speaking at a political rally on Saturday in Philadelphia, Trump joked that Biden is sleeping at Camp David to rest up for the debate. “They want to get him good and strong, so a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass,” Trump told the crowd. “I say he’ll come out all jacked up, right? All jacked up.”

Read more …

7 years.

• Snopes Finally Admits Trump Never Called Neo-Nazis ‘Very Fine People’ (ZH)

One of the more common lies peddled by top Democrats, including of course President Joe Biden, is that former President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis ‘very fine people’ during his press conference following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. Except, anyone who watched the full clip knows it’s bullshit, which is why anyone peddling the hoax has been operating in bad faith. Now, after seven years, and days before the Trump-Biden debate in Atlanta, Snopes has finally admitted that Trump never called neo-Nazis ‘very fine people.’

“While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and White supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False,” wrote Snopes. Of note, Biden launched his his 2020 campaign based on this lie. “The president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden claimed in his campaign announcement video. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”

Amazing…

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“..They have to kick the table over. They cannot allow the table to fall over on its own..”

• No Way Financial System Survives – Bill Holter (USAW)

Financial writer and precious metals broker Bill Holter has been documenting all the unpayable debt that has been building up in the financial system like cancer. The latest black hole of default is coming from a big bank in Japan. Norinchukin Bank is selling $63 billion in Treasuries and other sovereign bonds to stay afloat. Then there is recent news announced by the FDIC that 63 US banks (the names are being kept secret) have more than $500 billion in losses, and let’s not forget about the trillions in losses sitting on the books of European banks ready to suck the world into a black debt hole. This is just a few of many on a long list of destabilizing problems that can tank the entire over-indebted financial system. Holter warns, “The list is so long…” “it could be a banking problem. It could be a derivatives problem. It could be a derivatives problem in the stock market, the bond market and you could see a failure to deliver in silver. Some type of warfare could crash the system. You could see warfare in Ukraine, Israel or Tiawan.

The system is so unstable, at this point, it could be anything that could bring it down. Unpayable debt is not just a US problem. This is all over the world. Central banks are having to issue huge amounts of debt because we are in the exponential decay phase. We are exactly where Richard Russell said we would be 20 years ago. It’s inflate or die, and the only way to inflate is to create more money supply.” Add to that the $10 trillion in debt the US Government has to roll over by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the US government piles on $1 trillion in new debt every 100 days. What could go wrong? Holter said the last time he was on USAW that there was a little less than a 50% chance we would even have an election. Now, he predicts it is more likely there will be no 2024 Presidential Election. Holter says:

“There is no way the system, as it is now, survives. It’s mathematically impossible. So, if it is mathematically impossible, are they going to blow smoke . . . up until the day it blows up? Or are they going to do something to blow it up and then say our programs and policies were working except for XYZ this or whatever. They have to kick the table over. They cannot allow the table to fall over on its own because then there is going to be finger pointing. To avoid the finger pointing, they have got to kick the table over.” Holter also thinks gold is going to exponential numbers to back all the debt the USA has.

If you go with the 8,030 tons of gold the government claims is in Fort Knox, you will need a dollar price of gold at “$125,000 per ounce for 100% gold backing of the dollar.”Holter also says, “The dollar is being pushed out of the global financial system…” “Demand for dollars is shrinking at a time when borrowing demand is rising.” This is a going to be a disaster for America and anyone holding dollars in the future. In closing, Holter says, “The financial collapse that is coming will be worse than anything we have ever experienced…” “This is going to be far worse than the Great Depression simply because society itself is far worse. . . . Back in the Great Depression, you had neighbors helping neighbors. Today you will have neighbors picking on other neighbors like vultures.”

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Sounds good until you realize what will be called ‘lies’.

• Wales Moves Forward With Plan to Punish Politicians for Telling Lies (Turley)

Will Rogers once said that “if you ever injected truth into politics, you’d have no politics.” In Wales, it appears that the government is challenging that assessment. However, if the new legislation criminalizing political lies is successful, the Welsh are likely to find themselves with the same abundance of lies but little free speech. A proposal in the Welsh parliament (or the Senedd) would make it the first country in the world to impose criminal sanctions for lying politicians. Adam Price, the former leader of the liberal Plaid Cymru party is pushing for the criminalization, citing citing a “credibility gap” in UK politics. Astonishingly, this uniquely bad idea was received support from a key committee. Once on track for adoption, this is the type of law that can become self-propelling through the legislature. Few politicians want to go on record voting against a law banning political lies. The free speech implications are easily lost in the coverage.

The new law would make it a criminal offense for a member of the Senedd, or a candidate for election to the Senedd, to wilfully, or with intent to mislead, make or publish a statement that is known to be false or deceptive. There is a six-month period for challenges to be brought. The law allows a defense that a statement could be “reasonably inferred” to be a statement of opinion, or if it were retracted with an apology within 14 days. If guilty, the politician would be disqualified from being a Senedd member. The defense is hardly helpful. It creates an uncertainty as to what statements would be deemed an opinion and what would be treated as a statement of fact. It invites selective and biased prosecutions. After all, what does it mean to accuse a politician of trying to “mislead” the public?

Winston Churchill said “a politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.” It is a standard heavily laded with subjectivity and potential selectivity in prosecution. It is more likely to determine not whether lies can be told but which lies can be told. The government and the majority of the public are likely to hold certain “misleading” claims of politicians to be true or opinion while holding a harsher view of the claims of the opposition. Consider the massive censorship system in our own country. During Covid, you were labeled a liar, conspiracist, or racist for holding views now viewed as credible. For example, academics joined this chorus in marginalizing anyone raising the lab theory. One study cited the theory as an example of “anti-Chinese racism” and “toxic white masculinity.”

As late as May 2021, the New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory as “racist.” Mandavilli and others made clear that reporters covering the theory were COVID’s little Bull Connors. She tweeted wistfully “someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” Now federal agencies have stated that they believe that the origin of the virus was indeed the Chinese lab. If this law were in place, politicians could have been charged with lying and barred from the legislature — only serve to diminish dissenting views further in the government. Politicians have long been accused of lying to the public.

In this country, presidents routinely lie on matters great and small. Many of those lies cost citizens dearly, from “keeping your doctor” under ObamaCare to losing your life in Vietnam. Criminalizing lies in campaigns because of the spread of disinformation or disorder is a slippery slope that vests unprecedented power in the Justice Department. There is obvious an abundance statements from politicians that could be deemed as intentionally misleading. Officials can then simply pick and choose what politicians they want to tar with the allegation and potentially bar from office.

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Cherry picking courts. Insane.

• Judge Dismisses Nevada Alternate Electors Case On Jurisdiction Concerns (ET)

A Nevada judge on Friday dismissed the alternate electors’ case against six Republicans who were alleged to have submitted fraudulent certificates to Congress in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Clark County Judge Mary Kay Holthus issued a bench ruling on Friday during a hearing at the Clark County District Court that dismissed the case, according to courtroom reporters. The judge said she was not convinced by state prosecutors’ arguments that Clark County was the proper venue to hear the case, appearing to side with defense attorneys who said the signing of the certificates occurred in Douglas County. “You have literally, in my opinion, a crime that has occurred in another jurisdiction,” Judge Holthus said at the hearing. “It’s so appropriately up north and so appropriately not here.”

In dismissing the case, the judge called off the trial, which had been scheduled for next January. The defendants included state GOP chairman Michael McDonald; national party committee member Jim DeGraffenreid; national and Douglas County committee member Shawn Meehan; and Eileen Rice, a party member from the Lake Tahoe area. Each was charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, felonies that carry penalties of up to five years in prison. Defense attorneys contended that Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford improperly brought the case in Las Vegas instead of Carson City or Reno, which are cities located near where the alleged crime took place. After the hearing, Mr. Ford told reporters at the court that “the judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately.” He did not provide any more details.

Margaret McLetchie, an attorney for one of the defendants, told news outlets that it’s unlikely the case will proceed. “They’re done,” she said. She said that the attorney general would have to now bring the case to another grand jury in another venue such as Nevada’s capital city of Carson City, which would violate a three-year statute of limitations on filing charges that expired in December 2023. Earlier this year, attorney Richard Wright, who was representing the defendants, argued that prosecutors made a “politically expedient” move by bringing the case in Clark County. “The venue that’s appropriate is Carson City and Minden,” he told the Nevada Independent in January. “That’s a Republican area, so I’ll be anxious to hear why the attorney general chose [Las Vegas] as the convenient forum. To me, it’s painfully obvious. Because it’s Democratic.”

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Miami shark
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804865710130147758

 

 

Turtle
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804771449309126737

 

 

Good human

 

 

 

 

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