Trump could have done this months ago without spending billions of dollars mobilizing 15,000 troops and Navy and Air Force assets needed elsewhere to defend American interests in Taiwan and the Red Sea

 Exclusive: CIA carried out drone strike on port facility on Venezuelan coast

 

One man is about to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Venezuela

 The more the Uniparty changes, the more it stays the same.

Bush invades Iraq. Putin invades Ukraine. Trump invades Venezuela. 

Expect Xi to invade Taiwan at any minute.

One big happy family of invaders, carving up the world.

 

U.S. Sending Aircraft Carrier Strike Group to Waters Off Latin America

 

The devastating truth about the end of US Houthi attacks is that US forces failed after spending more than $1 billion

 The thread is here.

The limits of conventional power have been reached.

Putin has been experiencing the same in Ukraine and could have been defeated, too, had Trump not given him a lifeline with his stupid peace talks.

The future of Taiwan is in great peril.

 

 

Trump tariff math is about trade imbalances and is not about a reciprocal response to a rate, requiring a trading partner to buy more from the United States rather than just eliminating its tariff rate

In other words Trump's calculations of foreign countries' tariffs on the United States result in fictional rates.

From the story here:

... For instance, the U.S. claims that China charges a tariff of 67%. The U.S. ran a deficit of $295.4 billion with China in 2024, while imported goods were worth $438.9 billion, according to official data. When you divide $295.4 billion by $438.9 billion, the result is 67%! The same math checks out for Vietnam.

“The formula is about trade imbalances with the U.S. rather than reciprocal tariffs in the sense of tariff level or non-tariff level distortions. This makes it very difficult for Asian, particularly the poorer Asian countries, to meet US demand to reduce tariffs in the short-term as the benchmark is buying more American goods than they export to the U.S., ” according to Trinh Nguyen, senior economist of emerging Asia at Natixis.

The U.S. also appeared to have applied a 10% levy for regions where it is running a trade surplus. ...       

Futures at 7:00 AM EST:

 

Twilight Zone: Republican Senate fascists tell dictator Trump to drop dead, CHIPS Act won't be repealed

 

Republican lawmakers on Wednesday said President Trump’s call for Congress to “get rid of” the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided $52 billion for the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry, is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. ...

“I think reconstituting domestic manufacturing of advanced semiconductors is a national security and economic imperative,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), who was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted for the law.

Cornyn noted that “the whole purpose of this was national security.”

“Because if there’s a disruption between Asia or Taiwan, to be more specific, and the United States, we would plunge into a depression and we wouldn’t be able to build advanced weapons or aircraft like the F-35,” he said.

The Texas senator said “the idea” for the law came from the first Trump administration, particularly then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“I understand the president suggesting maybe there’s a better way to do this than use tax dollars as incentives … but I think the original bill was responsible [for] this trend [to bring] much greater investment here in the United States,” he added.

He said he’s open to “tweaks around the edges” but explained “the program that Congress passed — that money is essentially spent.”

More.

 

Clueless Marco Rubio appoints Taiwan surrender monkey Darren J. Beattie to State Department job

As if the nine-dash line doesn't even exist.

Beattie is a total suck-up, just like Rubio.

 

Neocon Trump is alive and well JD, lol

WaPo, May 28, 2024, here:

 . . . at one event, he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan, surprising some of the donors.

The $8.1 billion Indo-Pacific Security Supplemental Appropriation for Taiwan et alia passed yesterday 385-34-1-11, all the Nays being Republicans

 The roll call vote is here.

I would have reported in real time but Blogger had a major outage yesterday afternoon lasting several hours.

In the good old days the Republican fascists funded domestic companies, now the Democrat fascists fund the foreign companies

 Taiwan last week, South Korea this week.

The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.

The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.

More.

 

24 Republicans voted for $280 billion fascist Chips and Science Act in July 2022 even though they didn't need to, latest award goes to Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. Co.

 The July 2022 roll call vote is here.

TSMC’s Arizona subsidiary is set to receive up to $6.6 billion in U.S. government funding under a preliminary agreement announced by the Biden administration on Monday. 

The funding, under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, will support Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s more than $65 billion investment in three cutting-edge fabrication plants in Phoenix, according to the nonbinding agreement.

More.

Dunderheads Peter Meijer and Fred Upton from Michigan voted for the bill, in addition to other has-beens like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.

 

 

I'm so old I remember when politicians ran on less government, now it's less corrupt government lol

 

Less Corrupt, More Accountable Government Wanted

America's New Majority Project

 

This is so silly. Politicians buy voters with spending legislation. Right now they want to give families and businesses $70 billion in new tax credits, and to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan $95 billion in new defense aid.

You don't get $34 trillion in debt by accident.

We have the government we deserve. It's the voters who are corrupt.

Oooh, but that's a surer third rail statement than "I want to cut Social Security" ever was. You cannot insult the voters and get re-elected.

That's what pulpits used to be for, but no one goes there anymore. Somebody has to say it.

Smaller government means less money sloshing around to help your friends and hurt your enemies, which is what this is really all about.

Repent, and believe the gospel. The alternative is oblivion for the U. S. A.

Ramaswamy's endless flip-flops

 Lose yourself: Vivek Ramaswamy's 2024 presidential campaign haunted by endless flip-flops:

on: his voting history

pardons for the Biden family

drug decriminalization

foreign aid to Israel

support for Taiwan

masking

Juneteenth

 

Joe Biden is obviously not in charge: Calls Xi Jinping what he really is, a dictator, one day after his Secretary of State tries to soothe relations with Taiwan remarks

 Biden calls Xi 'dictator,' fueling Chinese anger... 

Blinken Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Does Not Support Taiwanese Independence, After Meeting To Quell Tension

The always feckless Barack Obama makes speeches abroad for $1 million, blames threat of China on Trump when he himself failed to recognize the new threat in Xi Jinping from 2012

 The vacuum was all his.

Here's Obama:

“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"

 

It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China. 

Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:

Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the “positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...

But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”

In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.

Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.

On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.

In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.

In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.

One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.

Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.

Biden repeats May statement committing US forces to the defense of Taiwan

 

Asked in a CBS 60 Minutes interview broadcast on Sunday whether U.S. forces would defend the democratically governed island claimed by China, he replied: “Yes, if in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.”

More.

Of course Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan was worth it: It wiped the story of her husband's arraignment on drunk driving charges from the news, didn't it?

Questions Mount Whether Pelosi's Trip to Taiwan Was Worth It

I hope Nancy Pelosi wears something more appropriate in Taiwan than she did in Italy, you know, maybe more like what she wore in Tiananmen Square in 1991

 

Yeah, that's the ticket

 THREAT TO SHOOT DOWN PELOSI PLANE

President Biden finally removes the ambiguity and commits the USA to the defense of Taiwan in the face of increasing Chicom military threats against the island

 

When asked at a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida whether the U.S. would be prepared to defend Taiwan if attacked, Biden replied: “Yes.”

“That’s the commitment we made,” Biden said. “We agree with the ‘one China’ policy. We signed on to it. All the attendant agreements [were] made from there. But the idea that that can be taken by force, just taken by force. It’s just not it’s just not appropriate.”

More.

A fuller account here adds this from the president:

“We support the ‘one China policy,’ we support all that we’ve done in the past. But that does not mean, that does not mean that China has the ability, has the – excuse me, the jurisdiction – to go in and use force to take over Taiwan.”

Michael Anton doesn't have a clue about the immense value of the periphery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taiwan is "peripheral" to our interests, Michael Anton says over and over again, here.

Well then, so is Hawaii.

Keep thinking like that and eventually Catalina Island becomes peripheral, too.

If you want to legitimize China's nine-dash line, something he never mentions, giving up Taiwan is the fastest way to do it. 

There is MUCH more at stake than Taiwan's relative freedom and independence. All of southeast Asia is at risk if China retakes Taiwan.

The answer isn't to accept the fact, as Anton does, that our Navy is rotten to the core and unable to defend Taiwan. The answer is to reform the Navy before it's too late.

If the Chicoms kill all our woke Navy in a battle over Taiwan, that wouldn't be the start we want, but it would be a start to the reform we most need.