"Watch me hand over Ukraine to Putin like I handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban."
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Monday, February 17, 2025
Ukraine should just surrender to Putin and join the East, given Trump's immoral treatment of Ukraine
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for The UK Telegraph:
Panic in Kyiv as US president demands higher share of GDP than Germany’s First World War reparations
Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
The Telegraph has obtained a draft of the pre-decisional contract, marked “Privileged & Confidential’ and dated Feb 7 2025. ...
Sunday, February 16, 2025
If you think Trump is a nutball with this Napoleon stuff, Luigi Mangione announces that in himself we have now finally achieved the classless society of which red diaper doper babies everywhere have long dreamed
The mental illness problem in America is much worse than I thought.
Friday, February 14, 2025
Former S&P sovereign bond unit executive who participated in the Obama era 2011 credit downgrade basically calls Trump's America a banana republic, and DOGE not a proper government department
WSJ: What about DOGE’s accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system?
Kraemer: We don’t have all the details of what they took and on what basis. It seems highly irregular. People from a department, which is not even a proper government department, that have gone and gotten access to data, that we have to assume is quite, I should say sensitive, which doesn’t belong in the hands of unelected individuals.
WSJ: Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Kraemer: Yes, I think I have seen this. Regimes that don’t respect checks and balances. But they tend to be more in the emerging markets. This is exactly what sets rich and poor countries apart, right? It’s the qualities of institutions, the rule of law, the transparency of decision-making.
So have I seen this? Yes. But have I seen it in an advanced economy, in an OECD member country? No, I have not.
The whole thing is here.
Three House Republican chuckleheads, but I repeat myself, want to waste everyone's time impeaching Trump's enemy judges
Pure grand-standing from:
Republican Eli Crane (AZ-2)
Republican Andrew Clyde (GA-9)
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14).
House GOP leaders have not weighed in on the calls to impeach the judges — and the chances of such an effort succeeding in their removal is close to zero.
It would take near-unanimous support from House Republicans to impeach a judge if Democrats do not support the measure, and support from Democrats would be required to clear the two-thirds threshold to convict on impeachment articles in the Senate.
More.
Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?
-- Luke 14:31
Beer-swilling surrender monkey SECDEF Pete Hegseth stands by his original comments yesterday and doubles down on them today
No return to pre-2014 borders for Ukraine.
No NATO membership for Ukraine.
No US troops for Ukraine (like Biden ever wanted that).
J. D. Vance is proving himself to be a very intelligent imbecile
Earlier in the week there were no good guys nor bad guys in the Ukraine War:
Later in the week the Russian army is invading European countries en masse:
Everyday actually:
Holy cow, a seventh prosecutor resigns over the renegade DOJ attempt to toss the Eric Adams case
A seventh federal prosecutor resigned Friday over the Department of Justice’s controversial order to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, in a blistering letter to top DOJ official Emil Bove, said “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.
“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
On Thursday, Scotten’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned in protest over Bove’s order to toss the case. ...
Scotten is a Harvard Law School grad, who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in the Special Forces. He also served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when Roberts’ fellow conservative was sitting on a lower court.
More.
The new Attorney General Pam Bondi is really working overtime to accumulate obloquy.
Banana Republican Donald Trump denies meddling in New York Mayor Eric Adams case as 6 top prosecutors quit over DOJ dismissal order
... After Sassoon refused to dismiss the case Thursday, the matter was reassigned to John Keller, the acting head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, who then also refused to dismiss the case and quit, NBC reported. ...
Acting DOJ criminal division chief Kevin Driscoll also resigned Thursday after refusing to accept the Adams case.
At least three other senior officials in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section quit after that following a meeting with the deputy attorney general. ...
Sassoon had been the lead prosecutor at the fraud and conspiracy trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was sentenced last March to 25 years in prison.
More.
US District Judge Amir Ali orders resumption of foreign aid disbursements in place before Trump took office
. . . the latest blow to the administration’s sweeping efforts to halt international aid. ...
The judge said in his ruling that the administration has not yet “meaningfully contested detailed and credible evidence of harm to countless American businesses, ranging from shutting down programs, to furloughing and laying off employees, to shuttering altogether.” ...
More.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
A libertarian wants you to know that accumulated losses in a war are "not sensible", as if war were ever sensible
"Here, let's look at this completely irrational thing and apply some logic to it now that we're down 28 points in the fourth quarter".
Their tidy little world of dollars and cents makes no sense, either.
Imagine Winston Churchill saying this after Dunkirk.
The GOP controlled US Senate has confirmed both Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr
The only Republican with the courage to say No was Mitch McConnell.
The lunatics control the asylum.
Thirteen paragraphs in we learn that last month's wholesale price headline was, well, total fiction
Which means that this headline is what then?
Producer prices report points to softer Fed inflation measure than feared:
A gauge of wholesale prices rose more than expected in January ... Over the past year, the all-items PPI increased 3.5%, well ahead of the central bank’s objective. ...
“Wholesale price growth came in slightly higher than expected for January, and the read for December was adjusted upward,” said Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at personal finance site NerdWallet. “In other words, inflation at the producer level remains high, and one concern is that this inflation could ultimately be passed along to consumers.”
Revisions to the December numbers also complicated the inflation picture, with the gain now put at 0.5%, compared with the 0.2% increase previously reported.
Last month's headline: Inflation watch: Wholesale prices rose 0.2% in December, less than expected.
As usual, the truth is under the hood of the polished headline, or maybe next month's polished headline.
Nothing looks soft to me in the measures shown below, which are the not-seasonally-adjusted ones.
Overall producer prices are up 0.7% in Jan 2025, and 3.5% year over year. Core producer prices are up 0.5% in Jan 2025, and 3.6% year over year. At least until next month.
The billionaires never say, Raise taxes now or face an economic heart attack
The word "tax" appears nowhere in this story.
Ray Dalio is worth $19 billion.
“Make sure that you really know what you’re doing and you’re practical,
and do it on … the conservative side, because you know, how much can the
cutting actually be?”
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Elon Musk is the biggest federal government teet sucker in history, the wealthiest man in the world on the backs of American taxpayers, and the biggest hypocrite about it
The hypocrite:
The grifter:
Over the last decade, Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts, according to spending data -- with SpaceX winning more than $17 billion worth of contracts since 2015.
And don't forget the benefit of the government coin in the till for every Tesla purchased:
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