Saturday, June 28, 2025

Trump administration fails to intimidate Canada, goes Galt and ends trade talks


 

 
 
 
 
 
 
... The first payments from Canada’s digital services tax, which was enacted last year and applies retroactively to 2022, are set to be collected Monday. The tax would hit both domestic and foreign tech companies, including U.S. giants such as Amazon, Google and Meta.

Canadian officials said this month that they would not pause the digital services tax, despite ferocious opposition from the United States.

“Obviously, we think it’s patently unfair to do it retroactively,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said later Friday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”

Bessent said the Trump administration was hoping that Carney’s government would “put a brake on” the tax “as a sign of goodwill.” ...

 

Trump's idea of good will is 50% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, 25% tariffs on autos, an overall 10% tariff on most everything else, and a 25% "fentanyl" tariff.

 

 

S&P 500 closed at a record of 6,173.07 on Friday 27 June 2025


 

Trump is the Uniparty, floats an Iran policy similar to Obama's


 

 
... The potential deal would mark a major reversal in policy for President Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 arguing in part that the sanctions relief and unfreezing of Iranian assets had provided a “lifeline of cash” to the Iranian regime to continue its malign activities. ... 

Thursday, June 26, 2025

The consensus estimate for today's GDP report was indeed for -0.2, instead it surprised at -0.5

 

First-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised lower Thursday in light of reduced consumer spending, surprising economists.

GDP contracted by 0.5 percent on an annualized basis, 0.3 percentage points lower than the last measurement from the Commerce Department.

Economists were expecting the number to stay the same at a 0.2 percent contraction. ...

More

Average yields at Treasury Note auctions this week have been significantly lower than at the immediately preceding auctions, indicating there has been a flight to safety on souring economic growth expectations.

Trump may get his lower interest rates . . . the hard way, lol. 

1Q2025 real GDP revised down 0.3 to -0.5 in third and final estimate on an increase in imports front-loaded into 1Q to avoid Trump's tariffs

 Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2025 (January, February, and March), according to the third estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2024, real GDP increased 2.4 percent.
 
The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected an increase in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, and a decrease in government spending. These movements were partly offset by increases in investment and consumer spending.
 
Real GDP was revised down 0.3 percentage point from the second estimate, primarily reflecting downward revisions to consumer spending and exports that were partly offset by a downward revision to imports. ...

More.

Sounds like Howard Lutnick gobbledygook at the end there. Paragraph two speaks of an increase in imports. Paragraph three of a downward revision to imports. 

Which is it lol? 

Nominal 1Q2025 GDP clocks in at $29.962 trillion in the third estimate. SPX was at 5612 on Mar 31, yielding a crazy high stock market valuation of 187.  

Blowhard Tommy Tuberville isn't running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, so he'll say anything now

 

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which said Iran possessed 400kg of highly enriched uranium on June 12, says they'd have to go to the bomb sites to really know the extent of the damage caused by the U.S. attacks


 

Iran’s nuclear facilities “suffered enormous damage” from the U.S. airstrikes Saturday, but more extensive evaluation is needed, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Thursday.

“I think ‘annihilated’ is too much, but it has suffered enormous damage,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Rafael Grossi told French broadcaster RFI. “I know there’s a lot of debate about the degree of annihilation, total destruction, and so on, what I can tell you, and I think everyone agrees on this, is that very considerable damage has been done.”

“Obviously, you have to go to the site and that is not easy, there is debris and it is no longer an operational facility,” he added.

More

Initial claims for unemployment in June 2025 were last higher in June 2023, but yikes continued claims were last higher in Dec 2021

4-week moving averages, initial claims monthly average, continued claims biweekly average:

 



Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Federal Reserve floats proposal to ease bank capital requirements which were increased in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Fed Governors Kugler and Barr in opposition

 

 
... The Fed board put the proposal open for a 60-day public comment window.

In its draft form, the measure would call for reducing the top-tier capital big banks must hold by 1.4%, or some $13 billion, for holding companies. Subsidiaries would see a larger drop, of $210 billion, which would still be held by the parent bank. The standard applies the same rules to so-called globally systemic important banks as well as their subsidiaries.

The rule would lower capital requirements to range of 3.5% to 4.5% from the current 5%, with subsidiaries put in the same range from a previous level of 6%. ... 

However, Governors Adriana Kugler and Michael Barr, the former vice chair of supervision, said they would oppose the move.

“Even if some further Treasury market intermediation were to occur in normal times, this proposal is unlikely to help in times of stress,” Barr said in a separate statement. “In short, firms will likely use the proposal to distribute capital to shareholders and engage in the highest return activities available to them, rather than to meaningfully increase Treasury intermediation.” ...

 

Down she goes

 


Methinks J. D. Vance doth protest too much about Jerome Powell

 







It backfired on Powell, though.
 
Yields climbed in response. 10Y went from 3.63 on Sep 16 to 4.37 by Nov 1. And core PCE inflation shot back up.
 
It's proof yet again that the Fed has next to no control over interest rates. It's one of the great myths of our time that it does, a myth Vance believes.
 
If Powell had cut and Kamala won, irrespective of what rates or inflation did, Vance might have an argument. He should quit complaining and take the win.
 
Meanwhile core PCE inflation was 2.66 in Sep 2024, same as it was in Mar 2025.
 
You'd think twice about trying that again, too, if you got burned like that, especially if you're being hectored by the tag-team wrestlers of the Oval Orifice.
 
 

 


Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Obliteration schmobliteration

 


Food items making new all time high average prices in the United States in May 2025

 All prices are FRED data from the St. Louis Fed in U.S. dollars.

 

Ground Chuck 6.018/lb

Coffee 7.931

White Sugar 1.054

Bananas 0.655

Potato Chips 6.731

Ice Cream 6.466/half gallon

100% Ground Beef 5.981/lb

All Uncooked Ground Beef 6.245

American Cheese 5.063

Beer 1.834/pint 

Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill

This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help. 

This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find. 

 
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs!
 
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline. Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion, depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
 
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost $3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is $400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...

In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...

For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...           

Update Wed Jun 25:

Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol. 

Mark Levin is right, can't understand why Trump is throwing Iran's Nazi leader a lifeline

 Because Trump is weak, Mark. It's a failure of nerve. He doesn't have the right stuff.

Iran should be forced to sign a surrender document. Unconditional surrender. They lost their nukes, they’ve lost their air force, they have no ground-to-air protection. China didn’t step in, Russia didn’t step in, not a single Arab country stepped in. The Supreme Nazi is hiding in a bunker much like Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He was going to be killed, so he committed suicide.

More.

Yeah, what a hero Trump is, they should give him the Nobel Peace Prize

 From the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics this morning:

Miranda Devine, New York Post
 

Monday, June 23, 2025

Ceasefire schmeesefire

 


Iran is now but a shadow of its former self

 Iran's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Islamist suicide bombers kill at least 20 Christians, wound many more, during mass in Damascus church a day after the U.S. attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment sites

 

At the Mar Elias Church in the Dweila neighborhood of Syria's capital Damascus on Sunday.

Mouth-breather Marco: By the time we left we were already gone lol

 He could be our Yogi Berra redivivus, but just hasn't got the C H A R M.

 



Saturday, June 21, 2025

The U.S. Senate parliamentarian still has not ruled on the GOP's wacky current policy vs. current law baseline

The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017. 

The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.

I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.

 

 GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill

... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...

Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...


It's a good thing

 



The truth is buried in the very last paragraph: Obama's war on coal did this to us

... certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online ...

Trump's been giving Putin two weeks to prove he's serious about peace with Ukraine for two months

 


The example most detrimental to U.S. and U.S. presidential stature is Two Weeks Trump's ridiculous coddling of Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine for two months


 

 ... Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.

On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: "You can ask that question in two weeks, and we'll see." He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.

Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, "I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can't say yes or no."

Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.

"I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know within two weeks," Trump said. "We're going to find out whether or not he's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks." ...

Last Wednesday marked three weeks, and still bupkis from Trump. 

It's been two months, not two weeks.

More

Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is


 

 Who's the Mad King Now?:

... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...

Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”

He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...

“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”

Friday, June 20, 2025

The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not

 

 

... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion. 

Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense. 

The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...

Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.

“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...

LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.  

“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...

 
Meanwhile, known corporate welfare, in the form of tax abatements and subsidies by states and localities to attract businesses to come and bring jobs, is presently estimated at in excess of $417 billion. The real total is probably far higher given that local data is poor relative to state disclosures.
 
The data, incomplete as it may be, shows just ten states where we're talking about only "hundreds of millions" in lost tax revenue and tax loss expenditures. In the rest we're talking about billions, even tens of billions.    

It ain't over, but 3 judge panel of Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals votes unanimously to let Trump keep control of California National Guard troops

 Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles

 
 ... In its decision, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded it was likely Trump lawfully exercised his authority in federalizing control of the guard.

It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters. ...

Thursday, June 19, 2025

So, a White House official supposedly told FOX News that use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian nuke facilities is not off the table

 The idiot who did this map didn't know that B-2 Spirit Bombers are based at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri.

Also, the idiot from the White House should be an ex-official. 




The 4-week moving average of continued claims for unemployment also popped to the highest level since November 2021

 


The 4-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment popped close to 250k again, as in the summer of 2023

 


These guys want to talk about the 802k foreign born who left in April, not about the 1.6m who arrived in January lol

 

 
There is nothing remarkable about the recent decline in foreign born population in comparison with the immediate past under Biden, when 945k left in April 2024 and 896k left in June 2023.
 
The numbers are noisy if nothing else, and go back only to January 2007. 

That said, the January surge is probably more about the revisions of the data for the previous year than about anything else. 
 
About 6.1 million foreign born entered the country in 2021 through 2024 in this data, after about 629k left in 2020. In 2025 through May, about 849k have left, but May is notably flat from April.
 
You could just as easily say the May numbers indicate Trump's policies have been a complete failure. 
 
I would be more sanguine about attributing an exodus of foreign born to the new Trump policies if the leavers were much larger in number than recently, but they are not. 
 
In my book, Trump needs to get the foreign born population back down to 43.5 million, his 2019 peak. Anything less is not a victory. 
 
 

 


Ted Cruz reminds everyone Tucker Carlson used to be for the annihilation of Iran in 2012 when Mr. My Muslim Faith was in charge lol

 


Elon Musk's hair sample for fentanyl, ketamine, etc. comes up negative

 George Floyd wouldn't have died with such results.

 


 


Only five months in lol

 

Mike Waltz is also missing lol.

To be fair, only Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz worked in an official capacity, and they remain in official positions. 

In 2017 seven people got the ax by June, eighteen by the end of the year.

This report sounds like there's wiggle room for Israel to take out Iran's Supreme Leader after missile strike on Israeli hospital

 Dozens of Iranian missiles strike major Israeli hospital and residential buildings — as Israel hits nuclear sites 

... Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to hit back even harder at Iran following the strike.

“We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran,” he vowed in an X post.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, backed up Netanyahu’s threat.

“These are war crimes of the most serious kind — and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes,” he tweeted.

“The Prime Minister and I have instructed the IDF to increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime.” ...          

And there it is:


 

 

Real Clear Politics runs post by a comedian telling us Iran never invaded anybody and Donald Trump would ruin his presidency by starting a war against it

 In Rob Schneider's world Iran never funded Hamas which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, never built and launched wave after wave of ballistic missiles at Israeli civilians, never enriched enough uranium to build over a dozen nuclear weapons, never promised over and over again death to Israel and death to America. 

Truly hilarious.

 


 

The world's population of everyday normal millionaires heh since the year 2000 has more than quadrupled to 52 million

 ... There is not much data on individuals in the $50 million to $1 billion range, which distorts the picture, according to Mazeau. He also said the wealth growth among middle and lower wealth brackets is underappreciated. For instance, the number of individuals with $1 million to $5 million, whom UBS dubs “everyday millionaires,” has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52 million.

“They have more wealth collectively than all the billionaires in the world,” he said. “It is often overlooked how much wealth is rising and is going towards the middle of the pack.”

The middle of the pack. Yeah right.

It takes $33 million in 2025 to be a 1913 millionaire. 

More in "The U.S. added a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024: Report".

Meanwhile . . .

 


 

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

What Kristi Noem's "allergic reaction" incident did was focus attention on yet another lab shutdown at Fort Detrick, apparently on-going since April 29th

What we have here is a DHS secretary who on her own admission can be incapacitated by an allergic reaction, which doesn't seem very "secure" to me.

Maybe we need someone else on the job.

And what we also have here is yet more drama from the actors at Fort Detrick. Somebody needs to clean that place up once and for all, or shut it down permanently.

Will that someone be RFK Jr.? 

 

 Kristi Noem discharged from hospital as ICE Barbie's sudden illness sparks conspiracy theories

... According to its website, the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick studies viruses 'causing high-consequence disease' like like Ebola or COVID.

One of its major focus areas is to 'mitigate major public heath events related to emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases or biological weapons attacks.'

But Kennedy's Department of Health and Human Services ordered an indefinite work stoppage at the facility in April.

'NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick,' HHS officials said at the time.

'This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause.'

They added: 'During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.' 

Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials. 

Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed to Fox News that the shutdown came after one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'. ... 

 

Lying whopper from Newsweek, says Fort Detrick was created and built by DHS as a federal response to anthrax letter attacks in 2001

 I mean, holy crap.

The 2001 anthrax letter attacks CAME from anthrax STORED at Fort Detrick, which was the government's bioweapons research facility from way back in 1943 during WWII, until it became politically suicidal to say that and they snapped their fingers and presto!, it became a biodefense research facility.

The researcher there responsible for the anthrax attacks committed suicide as investigators finally got close to him.

James Comey and Robert Mueller infamously tried to frame the wrong guy for the crime. You know those guys, the guys who relentlessly went after Donald Trump. 

DHS didn't even exist until March 2003.

I mean, c'mon Newsweek.

Fort Detrick is also suspiciously close to the location of a facility where elderly people came down with an unknown respiratory illness and died in summer 2019, which I think might have been a precursor to COVID-19. Most people now believe the Chicom lab at Wuhan was the lab from which coronavirus leaked, but I think Fort Detrick and Wuhan were cooperating at the time because bioweapons research was technically forbidden in the USA but they farmed it out to Wuhan on the sly, perhaps through Peter Daszak and Ecohealth-Alliance which got grants connected with Anthony Fauci. I speculate something leaked into the USA in summer 2019 from Fort Detrick.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people in America and abroad that there was a very severe flu-like illness already on the loose in the second half of 2019 which they commonly describe as the worst flu they ever had. 

Meanwhile Fort Detrick has been perennially notorious for failing inventory protocols for the HAZMAT stored there, for shoddy maintenance and record keeping, and for leaking waste water into the local environment.

That ICE Barbie fell ill after a visit to Fort Detrick is really one hell of a coincidence. 

 

Kristi Noem Visited Biohazard Lab Day Before Allergic Reaction




Mad King Ludwig restarts agricultural deportations, says the real illegal alien problem is the criminal ones in the big cities


 

Trump yanks brief reprieve for immigrants he said are ‘good, long time workers’

The Trump administration has reopened arrests of immigrant workers at hotels, restaurants and agricultural businesses, backtracking on the brief reprieve they got after President Donald Trump stated they were necessary, good, longtime workers whose jobs were almost “impossible” to replace. ... 

The announcement backpedals on Trump’s statement last week on social media that “changes are coming” after farmers and hotel and leisure business employers had complained that “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

Just six days ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement paused arrests at worksites in agriculture industries, including fisheries and meatpacking plants, restaurants and hotels, according to an internal policy memo obtained by NBC News last Thursday. ...

Asked about the change during a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from the G7 summit, Trump said: “We’re going to look everywhere. But I think the biggest problem is the inner cities.” ... 

Trump said cities are where “the really bad ones are, the murderers.”

“We’re going to get them out,” Trump said. “There are far more in the inner cities, Democrat-run cities, sadly, and I’m just giving you, there’s far more in there than you have on a farm or someplace.”

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Daily Beast reporter demotes Stephen Miller to deputy press secretary, still can't spell feud after correcting story lol

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The White what?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-and-ice-barbie-kristi-noem-in-bitter-west-wing-civil-war-over-round-ups/

The more things change, the more they stay the same

 


Trump says we have control of the skies over Iran lol

 



Corvette chief engineer speak English goodier then evah


 

... “It brings performance, electrification and all-wheel drive to further enhance the unthinkable ZR1,” said Josh Holder, Corvette chief engineer. “It brings learnings from the ZR1 and the E-Ray, and combines them to create an unbelievable driving experience.” ...

Moar

Another silly alarmist headline for clicks from CNBC: Retail sales year over year were just fine, up 3.3% in May 2025

 

 
 

 

Total bs about Tesla from CNBC relying on Business Insider, lying by omission

 

... The pause, which is for maintenance on production lines, would be the third such shutdown at the Austin facility in the past year, according to BI. ...

Death toll from Iranian ballistic missile attacks in Israel rises to 24, reinforced safe room bunkers in the centers of high rises all across the country prove vulnerable to direct hits

An Emad missile on a launcher at a parade in Tehran, 2019


 

 Bunker-busting missile strike shakes Israelis’ faith in their safety 

... Rather than detonating its roughly 700kg warhead on the external walls of the residential block, the Iranian ballistic missile travelled right into the heart of the structure.

It exploded only when it struck the reinforced bunker nestling in the core of the building.

Four people were killed, two of them inside the shelter. ...

Following the tragedy in Petah Tikva, the Home Front Command was forced to state that the reinforced concrete shelters were not designed to withstand “direct hits”, after conceding that the Iranian missile “breached” the structure, causing it to collapse. ...




 

Like the soul of the tyrant himself, Trump's administration is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions, including on immigration enforcement, reversing last week's pause on deportations

 All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles.                       

-- Plato, Republic 

Story


Meanwhile Sean Davis' The Federalist is ground zero for the anti-war right, still ignoring what der Führer says

There isn't a single story on the front page right now at The Federalist about the Israeli-Iranian conflict, like it's not even news.