Recent National Debt Milestones
3/17/26 $39 trillion
10/21/25 $38 trillion
8/11/25 $37 trillion
11/21/24 $36 trillion
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Trump cooperated with Israel in attacking world's largest gas field in Iran, giving Iran an opening to retaliate against Persian Gulf neighbors' oil and gas assets
They've lit the world on fire. They're madmen.
WATCH: Iranian gas, oil infrastructure at Iran’s South Pars and Asaluyeh hit in Israeli air strike
Facilities linked to Iran’s gas and oil industry in South Pars and Asaluyeh were targeted in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday, a source confirmed to The Jerusalem Post.
The South Pars gas field is the world’s largest natural gas reserve and is jointly operated by Iran and Qatar.
An Israeli official told the Post that the attack was coordinated with the United States, adding that the target was Iran’s largest gas facility in Bushehr. ... Those Israeli strikes were coordinated with the United States, Axios reported a senior Israeli official as saying. ...
Mad King Ludwig threatens to pull out after breaking everything
We have a petulant child in the Oval, not a president.
CNBC now says inflation is a problem with February core wholesale prices up 3.9% year over year vs. 3.6% in January, Iran war effects pending
Wholesale prices rose 0.7% in February, much more than expected
... On a 12-month basis, headline PPI inflation was at 3.4%, the most since February 2025, while core was at 3.9%, according to the BLS. The Federal Reserve targets inflation at 2%. ...
None of the inflation data so far has captured the price increases associated with the war. But it has indicated that even before the attacks, inflation was a problem. A report last week indicated that consumer prices rose at a 2.4% rate in February. Separately, the Commerce Department said its main inflation gauge [pce], which the Fed uses as its forecasting tool, was at 3.1% for core and 2.8% for headline. ...
We know, Kevin
... It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about, you know, if that continued, what we would have to do about that. But that's like really the last of our concerns right now ...
Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, selectively allows a trickle of ships to pass
... The blockade has squeezed shipping traffic to a trickle, with just 21
tankers transiting the route since the war began on Feb. 28, according
to S&P Global Market Intelligence, compared to more than 100 ships
daily before the conflict. ... Iran has continued to ship millions of barrels of crude oil to China since the war began. ... From March 1 to March 15, a total of 11 China-linked vessels transited
through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence,
mostly general cargo ships ...
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Plutocracy: 73% of U.S. Senators are millionaires vs. 7% of Americans, median net worth is 70+ times higher
You have the government you deserve lol.
Millionaires Are Overrepresented in the U.S. Senate — By a Lot
... “The Senate is packed with multimillionaires, and the fact is some of them have lost touch with the real world challenges faced by Americans all over the country,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, told NOTUS in a statement. “It is part of the reason that we have a tax system that favors people who make money off of money and penalizes those who earn a paycheck through hard work. We need to change that.”
Van Hollen is one of at least 11 senators whose median net worth is less than the median household net worth of their respective states, according to a NOTUS analysis of senators’ financial disclosures and U.S. Census Bureau data. Van Hollen has a median net worth of $7,500; the median Maryland household has a net worth of $152,400. (Census Bureau data does not include median household net worth for seven states: Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.) ...
The median net worth in the Senate is nearly $4.4 million — more than 70 times the Census-reported median U.S. household net worth, which similarly excludes equity in primary residences. ...
The median net worth for members of the Senate Democratic Caucus is more than $2.9 million, while for Senate Republicans, it’s nearly $5.7 million. ...
A full table for the current Senate is here.
So, Mr. Potter doesn't need George Bailey after all
Trump slams NATO allies for not joining Iran war effort, says U.S. never needed their help
... In a Truth Social post earlier Tuesday, Trump said he was “not surprised” at NATO because he views it as a “one way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us.”
“Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID!” Trump wrote. ...
Monday, March 16, 2026
This is completely unpatriotic because it helps China, just like Mad King Ludwig's Ukraine policy is completely unpatriotic because it helps Russia
Michael Savage used to warn us about the enemy within. Unfortunately America elected him.
80-90% of Iranian oil is bought by China, the proceeds from which Iran uses to buy raw materials from China to make ballistic missiles.
Trump is insane.
U.S. is allowing Iranian oil tankers through Strait of Hormuz: Bessent
Sunday, March 15, 2026
The Middle East Maritime Region threat level remains critical as of 3/15/26 with zero attacks in the Arabian Gulf or Strait of Hormuz in the last 72 hours and next to no transits
Historical transits is approximately 138/day with just 3 observed in the last 24 hours.
Reported here.
Trump urges allies he's been insulting for over a year to send help to get oil flowing again from the Persian Gulf
... This should have always been a team effort.
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Ann Coulter believes in an anti-war myth of her own making, says an anti-war Trump won a huge majority in the 2016 Republican primary in pro-war South Carolina when 67% voted for anybody else
... Waging pointless wars around the world and being the world's policeman. How many times do we have to vote on this?
I mean, Trump was attacked for the things he said in 2016. Remember, he
said, Jeb's father lied us into war. The Wall Street Journal and New
York Post assured us that that was going to kill him in South Carolina,
biggest military state in the country.
That was in the South Carolina primary. Next day, primaries hold. Who
wins? Huge, huge majority. Donald Trump. We have voted on this over and
over and over again. Now what? We've already had how many? Seven
Americans die, not to mention 166 school children in our name for a war
that does not make one American safer.
Here.
Even today, strong approval of Donald Trump is only a 30% proposition at Rasmussen Reports.
SPX/GDP, then vs. now
SPX(average annual)/GDP(trillions of dollars), then vs. now
1938: 131
1942: 52
1964/1965: 118
1982: 35
2000: 139
2009: 65
2019: 135
2025: 202
Median 1938-2019: 81
This ratio has been above 139 for six consecutive years 2020-2025, which is unprecedented for the era shown. Even so, return places third because dividends are puny in the age of obscenely overpaid dirty rotten CEOs and management.
Return: nominal/real, average per annum, dividends fully reinvested
12/1942-12/1965: 15.43%/12.30%
12/1982-12/2000: 16.66/12.97
12/2009-12/2025: 14.09/11.23
Ronald Reagan didn't make America great again, and neither has Trump
Ronald Reagan didn't make America great again, and neither has Trump.
Real GDP Compound Annual Growth Rates
1947-1984: 3.652%
1984-2017: 2.675%
2017-2025: 2.416%
Friday, March 13, 2026
That right there is a stagflation headline
Fourth-quarter GDP revised down to just 0.7% growth; January core inflation was 3.1%
Economic growth was much slower than expected in the final three months of 2025 while core inflation rose to start 2026, the Commerce Department reported Friday. ...
The first revision of the GDP reading was a sharp step down from the previous estimate of 1.4% and well below the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 1.5%. It also marked a considerable slowdown from the 4.4% gain in the prior period. For the full year, GDP posted a 2.1% increase, or one-tenth of a percentage point lower than the previous reading. In 2024, the economy rose at a 2.8% pace. ...
On the inflation side, readings for January were mostly in line with estimates, though they showed price increases running well ahead of where the Federal Reserve would like. ...
Core pce inflation has been range-bound around 3% since Dec 2023. For 2009 through 2020 it averaged half that, 1.5%.
The compound annual rate of real GDP growth since 2017 has been 2.416%, almost 34% lower than the post-war rate for 1947 through 1984 of 3.652%.
The rate for 1984 through 2017, also using today's data, was 2.675%, also higher than the rate since the Trump tax reform eight years ago.
Trump has not made America great again, any more than Reagan did.
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Trump's voting legislation faces defeat in the U.S. Senate next week
Trump is convinced illegal aliens vote in large enough numbers to prevent Republicans from winning even though he and the Republicans swept into office in 2024 and control the executive and legislative branches of government.
Trump-backed SAVE America Act will get a Senate vote next week, Thune says
The legislation is expected to fail unless a change is made to the filibuster, which requires 60 votes on most measures considered by the Senate. ...
For months Trump, GOP hardliners and online influencers like Elon Musk have railed against opponents of the bill and called repeatedly for a change to the Senate filibuster rule to ensure passage in the upper chamber. Thune supports the legislation but has rejected those calls, saying changing Senate procedure could have unintended consequences. Speaking from the Senate floor Thursday, he made no mention of changing the chamber’s rules, all but assuring the proposal will not pass. ...
Anticipating the bill’s failure in the Senate, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who introduced the legislation, and other proponents have engaged in a pressure campaign to revert back to a “standing filibuster,” which requires dissenting members to actively hold the Senate floor to block legislation and could, in theory, allow for the passage of the bill with a simple 50-vote majority. ...
Fox News on Mar 11 was still letting a former NSC staffer repeat the false assertion in Energy Secretary Chris Wright's Mar 10 erroneous and quickly deleted post
Energy Secretary Wright says U.S. ‘not ready’ to escort oil tankers through Strait of Hormuz yet
... Wright’s comments come after a post on his social media account wrongly claimed on Tuesday [Mar 10] that the Navy had escorted a tanker through the Strait. The post was quickly deleted from his account, but it sent oil prices plunging more than 17% at their lows Tuesday.
President Donald Trump promised on March 3 that “the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible.”
Tanker traffic through the Strait remains at a standstill as ship owners fear attacks by Iran. The closure of the Strait has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history, according to analyses from consulting firms Rapidan Energy and Wood Mackenzie. ...
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Mad King Ludwig to release 172 million barrels of oil from SPR lol
That will take the level below 250 million barrels, enough to last the country just twelve days in an emergency.
Iran war: Trump will release 172 million barrels of oil from Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Cornyn is the scoundrel Texas deserves
Sen. John Cornyn flips on the filibuster to pass SAVE America Act as Trump weighs endorsement
Cornyn, who spent years defending the filibuster, is locked in a competitive GOP runoff in Texas against Ken Paxton, who has aligned with Trump on the issue. ...
You will not be any wiser for having read it
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.
The dumbasses at Fox don't know the meaning of decimates, showcase an NSC liar THIS MORNING who says U.S. Navy escorted ships through Hormuz yesterday when they did not
To be fair, they're just repeating what our ignoramus in chief says.
Core cpi inflation still 2.45% year over year not seasonally adjusted, down from 2.50% yoy last month, Assembly of Experts expects higher next month
A little Iran humor for ya there.
Consumer prices rose 2.4% annually in February, as expected
... The data predates the recent surge in oil prices tied to the war with Iran, meaning any impact from higher energy costs will likely show up in the months ahead. ...
Outside the pandemic, we were last higher than this in Sep 2008.
Iran attacks vessels in the Persian Gulf but ships its own oil to China, threatens to mine the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. littoral combat ships prove inadequate as replacements for legacy minesweepers decommissioned last year
... The UKMTO said it had received 17 reports of incidents affecting vessels operating in and around the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman between Feb. 28, when the war began, and March 11. These include 13 attack reports and four reports of suspicious activity. ...
Iran sends millions of oil barrels to China through Strait of Hormuz even as war chokes the waterway
... Iran has sent at least 11.7 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began on Feb. 28, all of which were headed to China, Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers, told CNBC on Tuesday.
The firm monitors vessel movements with satellite imagery, allowing it to capture vessels that would otherwise go undetected if their tracking systems are switched off. Many vessels have “gone dark” after Tehran threatened to attack any vessel attempting to pass through the waterway. ...
Over the years, China has built up large crude stockpiles, accumulating an estimated 1.2 billion barrels of inventory as of January, which could fulfill demand for 3 to 4 months, according to Atlantic Council. ...
U.S. forces sink 16 Iranian minelayers as reports say Tehran is mining the Strait of Hormuz
... A CNN report Tuesday said that Iran had started laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, albeit not extensively. Sources that CNN spoke to said only a “few dozen” had been laid in recent days.
The report also said that Iran still retains more than 80% of its small boats and minelayers, and could feasibly lay hundreds of mines in the waterway.
Located between Oman and Iran, the strait saw roughly 13 million barrels of crude per day passing through it in 2025, representing about 31% of all seaborne crude flows, according to energy consulting firm Kpler. ...
CBS News, which reported that Iran “may be getting ready” to deploy naval mines, said the country was using smaller crafts that can carry two to three mines each to lay them in the strait. While Iran’s mine stock isn’t publicly known, estimates over the years have ranged from roughly 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines, the report said. ...
... the U.S. had decommissioned four Avenger-class minesweepers that were stationed in Bahrain in late 2025.
The replacement vessels for the Avenger-class, the Independence-class littoral combat ships, have “struggled to meet the requirements of operational mine countermeasures missions,” according to global naval publication Naval News.
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Monday, March 9, 2026
The panic-mongers on X are out in full force this morning saying Trump must do something about oil this week, all ignoring that Trump said on day one the Iran operation would take four to five weeks
It's been one week.
Oil is currently trading at $93, falling from above $115. NASDAQ is in the green.
Sunday, March 8, 2026
The Chicoms have been the primary source for Iran's sodium perchlorate for twenty years, without which its ballistic missile program would not exist
Iran ships most of its oil to China, and China sends back the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction.
Laden Iranian ships depart Chinese port tied to key military chemicals (March 7, 2026)
... “China could have held these vessels at port, imposed an administrative delay, invented a customs hold — any number of bureaucratic tools, but didn’t,” said Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to The Post. “That’s a deliberate policy choice made during an active war in which Beijing publicly calls for restraint.”
Although IRISL operates as a large commercial carrier, Kardon said the circumstances of these shipments strongly suggest the cargo is sodium perchlorate. “Given the track record, the most parsimonious explanation is that they’re loading the same commodity they’ve been shuttling for the past year-plus,” he said. ...
The U.S. and Israel strikes have hammered Iran’s missile storage bunkers and underground depots. “Tehran’s need for propellant precursors just went from urgent to existential,” Kardon told The Post.
Western intelligence says Iran is rearming despite UN sanctions, with China’s help (October 31, 2025)
... European intelligence sources say several shipments of sodium perchlorate, the main precursor in the production of the solid propellant that powers Iran’s mid-range conventional missiles, have arrived from China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas since the so-called “snapback” mechanism was triggered at the end of September.
Those sources say the shipments, which began arriving on September 29, contain 2,000 tons of sodium perchlorate bought by Iran from Chinese suppliers in the wake of its 12-day conflict with Israel in June. The purchases are believed to be part of a determined effort to rebuild the Islamic Republic’s depleted missile stocks. Several of the cargo ships and Chinese entities involved are under sanctions from the United States. ...
The critics ignore that Kristi Noem's DHS ad campaign was all Trump's idea and that she was saying so already in February 2025
... Self-dealing played a direct role in Noem’s defenestration.
The department approved a $220 million contract — funneled in part through firms run by Noem and Lewandowski allies — for an ad campaign encouraging illegal immigrants to go home.
The ad starred — who else? — Kristi Noem, on horseback and in chaps.
The implicit message was that if illegal immigrants didn’t leave on their own, she’d immediately form a posse and run them over the border.
It was a production worthy of a spaghetti Western, or — more to the point, given her political ambitions — a commercial for a 2028 presidential campaign.
Noem couldn’t defend the sketchy spending decisions, or the blatantly self-glorifying ad, or much of anything else in the brutal back-to-back House and Senate hearings that precipitated her doom.
She’d already been taken down a notch after the Minneapolis ICE operation went sideways. ...
 |
| https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-dhs-secretary-kristi-noem-describes-ad-campaign/5195580 |
U.S. Federal Debt continues to be a very popular investment with foreigners who owned $9.2484 trillion of it at the end of 3Q2025
As of early 2026, the average interest rate paid on all outstanding U.S. federal debt is about 3.35%.
This rate represents a significant increase from the roughly 1.5%
average seen in early 2022.
The chart was updated on Mar 4, 2026.
The $9.248 trillion owned by foreigners in 3Q2025 was about 24.5% of the total public debt outstanding at the time.
The latest data available from the U.S. Department of the Treasury indicates that in Dec 2025 foreigners owned $9.2709 trillion.
In the desert, on a horse with no name
Iranian projectiles continue to strike Gulf countries; Tehran says new leader appointed
... Iranian media said a new leader has been appointed, replacing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening salvos of the war. ...
Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Alam al-Huda as saying Sunday elections have been held to replace Khamenei and that a new leader has been appointed. It did not give a name. “All the rumors and news that tried to pretend that the Assembly of Experts has not yet made a decision are pure lies,” al-Huda was quoted as saying. Iranian state media reported on Saturday that two influential Iranian clerics have called for the swift selection of a new supreme leader. ...
The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday it would “pursue every successor and every person who seeks to appoint a successor.” ...
Saturday, March 7, 2026
If Daniel McCarthy were a conservative who understood history and human nature, he wouldn't issue embarrassing pronunciamentos like these
Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. ...
That's what we thought in 1991 about the victorious George H. W. Bush. And then somehow we lost our minds and elected blow-job Bill with his Sunday-go-to-meeting Bible under his arm, big enough to choke a mule.
The state of mind – and the state of the world – that made possible the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has passed, never to return. ...
There wasn't a single state of mind from 1991 to 2003.
We didn't choose 9/11. It chose us and changed our minds. And the lunatics in Tehran are crazier and far more dangerous than Osama ever was.
Hell, we didn't even choose the Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and set it on fire as it withdrew in January 1991.
We didn't choose this Iran War, either. Iran chose it for us when its proxies invaded our ally Israel in October 2023.
The state of mind and the state of the world . . . hasn't changed at all, except that Trump's a little slow on the uptake.
The passions that involve us in foreign conflicts in the future will be those of a younger cohort. ...
Yes, it isn't just about a state of mind, is it? Things happen which we can't control. You can't predict "no more wars" anywhere, even though you can pretend for a long time, for example from the summer of 1939 to late 1941, and then something forces your hand.
... if the Iran war goes badly – as badly as the Iraq War did for Bush – Trump’s new style of interventionism will be repudiated by voters as thoroughly as Trump’s own election repudiated the neoconservatives.
Bush 41 was popular because he won the Gulf War and suddenly wasn't because of the economy. And Bush 43 was re-elected convincingly in 2004, hello. If America didn't support his Iraq War, it had a funny way of showing it. There is no comparison with Trump.
Trump's economy already sucks and unsurprisingly right out of the box polling indicates Americans are against his attack on Iran. We're blowing up $1 billion a day over there and can't afford a lousy hamburger at home. We don't have to wait for Iran to go badly for the voters to repudiate Trump.
The only thing Dan is probably right about is this, unfortunately:
. . . what comes next will be an even more radical phase in domestic politics. ...
Here.
Friday, March 6, 2026
Trump makes America 1969 again
February 2026 might as well be July 1969, when the percentage of Americans working hit 59% for the first time.
America does not even come close to working up to its potential.
(geek note: population estimates get updated at the beginning of each year, which means current percentage calculations and comparisons such as this one will not exactly match previous ones posted here in 2025, 2024, 2023, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera)
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