In other words, this would mean Trump is going to cut and run from the Persian Gulf just like he cut and ran from the Red Sea on May 6, 2025

 Trump Tells Aides He’s Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz: Administration officials assess that forcing the waterway back open would mean extending the military mission

WASHINGTON—President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said, likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.

In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said. ...

 

If we already won in Iran why is this still happening?

 

Iran Resumes Hanging Protesters

Wall Street Journal

The Trump administration learned nothing from its fight to a draw with the Houthis last year

... Iran is still believed to have a vast stockpile of mines, cruise missiles on trucks and hundreds of undamaged boats in hidden facilities with deeply dug tunnels along the coast and on islands, said Farzin Nadimi, an expert on Iranian defenses at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“I think it will take weeks to reach a point where there can be safe operations in the strait,” he said. “Even then, a lot of the Iranian assets will survive.” ...

Houthi militants in Yemen, who are aligned with Iran, waged a two-month campaign last year with missiles, drones and unmanned boats against international shipping that parallels Iran’s closure of the strait. The U.S. struck more than 1,000 targets in Yemen, but never succeeded in halting Houthi attacks fully until the two sides declared a truce in May. ...

More. 

Senator Ron Johnson, who is implicated in Trump's fake elector scheme, is a fake conservative

 

Move To End Filibuster Now--Before Democrats Do

Sen. Ron Johnson, Wall St. Journal

You will not be any wiser for having read it

 

FLEX? Global Elite Give Up on Spelling and Grammar..

The best part was the professor who lamented Epstein's typos while he himself misused the word disinterest:

“It was nihilistic almost in its total disinterest in communicating,” Bessner said.  

China expected to expand submarine fleet to 80 by 2035, up to half nuclear-powered, from 60 now, more than half of which are diesel-powered

 

China Building Subs That Can Strike USA From Closer to Home, Navy Warns...

... Brookes cited a Pentagon projection that China’s submarine force will reach 80 vessels by 2035, about half of them nuclear-powered—up from the current estimated fleet of more than 60 subs, most of which are less capable diesel-powered vessels that have a shorter range of movement and must surface more frequently than nuclear-powered ones. This projection has appeared in past Pentagon annual reports on China’s military power. ...

The editor at large for The Wall Street Journal recoiled at the number of falsehoods in Trump's State of the Union address

 

How much will he ask for it?

 

Trump to Sell Economy During State of the Union Address

Meredith McGraw, WSJ

The U.S. state capitalist EV boondoggle comes to an end, shape-shifting automakers take well-deserved $50 billion hit

 

 Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit as EV Bubble Bursts

... Following years of investments into EV technology, the Detroit Big Three ... have announced more than $50 billion in combined write-downs.

EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter, after a $7,500 federal tax credit that had juiced U.S. sales expired in September. ... 

Automakers’ retreats and massive write-downs have come as Republican lawmakers abolished a lucrative federal tax credit for EVs last fall, while also doing away with federal fuel-efficiency mandates. Even with federal support, EV demand was below expectations. ...

Border Czar Tom Homan is so full of shit

 Tom Homan’s Bid for Minnesota Reset Begins With Series of Demands

MINNEAPOLIS—Tom Homan, the White House border czar, arrived here with a series of demands for Minnesota’s Democratic leaders. Topping the list: an agreement from them to turn over more immigrants from the state’s prisons and jails, people familiar with the matter said. ... Walz has said the premise of the demand is false. “They’re taking credit for people that we’ve had in jail for a long time,” he told reporters Sunday. “We always hand them over.”

Oh, so that's why Border Patrol was in front of Glam Doll Donuts on Saturday. They were just looking for inmates.

 

 

OMG, Walter Russell Mead for The Wall Street Journal is ENTERTAINED by the tyrant's show

I'm told the band on the Titanic played well right to the very end. 

 

Trump Captivates the Globe

Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal

... It is not merely that his high-wire act supports and intensifies the drama and excitement that made him the dominant figure in American and then global politics for the past decade. It is also that his ability, real or perceived, to change the course of world politics on a whim increases his leverage at home and abroad. When a man can make war or peace, promote or block trade, make you rich or freeze you out, other people do what they can to stay on his good side. ... 

As usual Trump puts the cart before the horse: If you don't already have total access, you're not in charge

And you don't put protective tariffs on trade when you have nothing to protect.

 

“We’re in charge,” he told reporters. “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”

More. 

They're licking their chops over Venezuela's $17 trillion worth of crude oil

 

U.S. in Prime Position To Unlock Venezuela's Vast Oil Reserves

Eaton, et al., WSJ

In 2018 The Wall Street Journal was still defending China's admission into the WTO, today it pretends it wasn't part of that bipartisan folly

 Then: "The U.S. properly worked for China's inclusion".

Now: "An era of folly began in the new century. Leaders of both political parties supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization".

I can't wait for the Wall Street Journal to admit that America's decline actually began under Reagan forty years ago, not twenty-five, because at this rate I'll be dead before they do.

 

Grand Rapids, Michigan billionaire Doug DeVos admits America hasn't made all that much progress since 1976

... On the eve of the 1976 election, President Gerald Ford wanted to hold a motorcade parade in Grand Rapids, where he grew up ... filled with boarded-up buildings ... a downtrodden place ...  

America on the eve of 2026 feels an awful lot like Grand Rapids in 1976. There’s a palpable sense that the country is struggling, if not starting to fail. It isn’t only the sorry state of big cities. It’s the state of the nation’s schools as kids fall behind in basic math and reading. It’s the state of the body politic as division and violence spread. It’s the sorry feeling that we’re a nation without a rudder, drifting toward inevitable decline. According to Pew Research, about half of Americans say the U.S. can’t solve many of its important problems. ...

More here. 

Trump says inflation has stopped in last night's speech, but what stopped was their collection of the inflation data

 Do you remember when COVID hit and Trump said we should just stop testing to make it go away?

Trump on coronavirus: ‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’

 

So fast forward to today where we get another chart crime, this one for the consumer price index which omits the month of October, and another dose of skepticism about the Trump Regime's honesty about government data.

 

They warned us they would do this, too, even though during the first Trump Regime they collected both the employment and the inflation data during the 2018-2019 government shutdown.

 

This is all deliberate obfuscation. 

 

... Because the October CPI was canceled, Thursday’s report did not have all the usual data points of a typical CPI release. The BLS said it was unable to retroactively collect the October data, but did use some “nonsurvey data sources” to make the index calculations.

Economists may be hesitant to read too much into this report as the start of a downward trend in inflation because of the lack of October comparison data in the release. ...

More here. 

 

 

Trump isn't interested in Venezuela because of the drugs, it's the oil

This entire drug war is a charade. 

Trump, April 2011: "I'm only interested in Libya if we take the oil".

He just pardoned the former Honduran president sentenced to 45 years over cocaine, but he's going after the Venezuelan president over drugs?

Venezuela has 4x the proven oil reserves of the United States, tops in the world, and it's right in our backyard.

Trump isn't interested in peace and freedom in Ukraine, either. All he wants is a piece of action.

All that lizard brain cares about is money. 

 

 

Imagine sitting in the dark to save on electricity when you make $115k

 Reported here:

... The effort to keep up with higher prices feels relentless to Teri Kopp, who lives in Southbury, Conn., and works as an administrator at a synagogue. “I’m tired,” she said.

Kopp and her husband Bill, an HVAC technician, earn a combined $115,000 a year. They often sit in the dark with only strings of LED lights on to save on electric costs. She is considering painting rocks to send to friends as Christmas gifts. Their biggest vacation this year, a road trip to Maine, was mostly covered by cash back from a shopping-rewards program.

Kopp, 59 years old, doesn’t see any way to quickly pay off the $15,000 in credit-card debt the family took on largely to cover medical bills for knee surgeries. She also has $30,000 in debt from her daughter’s undergraduate degree in biology, which has yet to yield any job offers in a tough labor market for new graduates.

Kopp voted for Trump last November in part because she wasn’t happy with how Biden handled the economy. She approves of the job Trump is doing but is skeptical that it will lead to any relief on costs soon. “I think Trump has a hard nut to crack to bring all this stuff down,” she said. ...

Do the two Rachels at the Wall Street Journal who write this sob story about the middle class "buckling" realize that about half the country makes $45k or less? What about those people? Well, they don't read the Journal anyway, right?

You have to be in the 64th percentile to be like Teri and Bill, the high end of the middle 33-66%. 

 

Sandwich guy acquitted in assault trial

 ROFLMAO.

 

 

Will Trump be tried for murdering drug traffickers like former Philippine president Duterte is being tried?

 

... Duterte was arrested in March by Philippine authorities on a warrant issued by the ICC. He is now being held at an ICC facility in the Netherlands.

Supporters of Duterte criticized the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's political rival, for arresting and surrendering the former leader to a court whose jurisdiction his supporters dispute. ...

More. 

I suppose it depends on a future president giving Trump up to arrest by the International Criminal Court somehow.

... The strikes on Venezuelan narcoterror smuggling boats provide one possible avenue. Shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the first such vessel, Ken Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch, endorsed ICC intervention. “Trump just did what the International Criminal Court has charged former Philippines Pres. Duterte with doing—ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers,” Mr. Roth tweeted. Venezuela is a Rome Statute party, which in the court’s thinking gives it jurisdiction over U.S. officials and servicemen involved in the attacks. The ICC has already launched an investigation against a nonmember state (Israel) based on a single boarding of a vessel flagged by a member state, so it has all the precedents it needs.

Mr. Trump has thus far taken an incremental approach to the ICC. He revived a first-term executive order authorizing sanctions against the court and applied it against four ICC officials. None of this has significantly reduced the risk to the U.S. or led the ICC to change its ways.

The ICC’s supporters don’t see the existing sanctions as an “existential threat.” The tribunal can easily ride it out by lying low until a Democratic president lifts the sanctions, as Joe Biden did. The court takes a long view—its prosecutors and judges have nine-year terms, and its other staffers are part of a global deep state who can expect to remain at their jobs indefinitely.

International lawyers are already developing multiple lines of attack against the administration and its officials. ...

More.