Remember when W said to CNN's Candy Crowley in December 2008 that he had abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system?
We got Obama, a foreclosure crisis for six million, banks failed by the hundreds, and jobs didn't recover for six years and five months.
Why is it always the Republicans with these paraprosdokians?
He thinks this is a bargaining chip instead of a requirement.
... Powell said raising rates now could have negative effects on the economy later. He noted that Fed rate moves have a lagged impact on the economy, so tightening here wouldn’t help the inflationary impact of the Iran war.
“By the time the effects of a tightening in monetary policy take effect, the oil price shock is probably long gone, and you’re weighing on the economy at a time when it’s not appropriate. So the tendency is to look through any kind of a supply shock,” he added. ...
More.
Mistaken yet again.
We have permanently higher prices across the board as a result of the COVID shock.
... So far in March, the first full month of war, barely six vessels per day on average have traversed the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the world, in either direction. That compares with about 135 a day in normal times, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
Over that time, 80% of the small number of oil tankers exiting the strait have been Iranian — or belong to countries with which it is on cordial terms, the figures show. ...
Out of the 110 individual ships that left the gulf this month, more than 36% were sanctioned Iranian ships or part of the so-called dark fleet serving Tehran, data compiled by Bloomberg show. For oil tankers, 21 out of 35 that have exited had direct Iranian ties — but most of the remainder went to nations with whom Tehran has a friendly relationship.
Until this war, one long-held assumption around Hormuz was that Iran would never attempt to close the strait, for fear of risking its own exports, a vital economic lifeline. In fact, ship-tracking data suggest that Tehran’s oil has continued to flow — almost entirely to China — even as other ships are stranded and producers in the region have been left scrambling for alternatives or forced to stop producing as storage fills up.
Iran exported roughly 1.8 million barrels a day this month, a nearly 8% increase from its average over 2025, according to figures from data intelligence firm Kpler as of March 26. That likely facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars of oil revenue for Tehran, a Bloomberg News analysis shows. ...
More.
Persian Gulf Activity: 1.7/day last week vs. 0.3/day prior week
Red Sea Activity: 11.1/day last week vs. 18.6/day prior week
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| JMIC Advisory Mar 29 |
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| JMIC Advisory Mar 22 |
The destruction in the early hours of June 6 [2023] of Ukraine’s massive Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River is a dangerous escalation of the war between Ukraine and Russia. It risks massive human and ecological consequences to communities downstream being hit by vast floodwaters, and also threatens a potentially catastrophic nuclear accident. World leaders are also calling it a war crime. ...
Kakhovka Dam, one of the largest in Europe, was built in the late 1950s to provide hydroelectric power, irrigation water, and improved navigation on the Dnieper River which flows from Russia through Belarus and Ukraine before emptying into the Black Sea. When full—and it was full when it was destroyed—the reservoir contains 18 cubic kilometers (nearly 5 trillion gallons) of water. That’s around four times the volume of California’s largest reservoir, the Shasta reservoir, and about half the volume of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. The reservoir behind the dam also supplies critical cooling water to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and feeds water into the North Crimea Canal, delivering nearly 80% of Crimea’s water. ...
Water and water systems have been the targets of attacks from the beginning of this war. Researchers have documented more than 50 such attacks on dams, water supply systems, city water treatment plants, pipelines, and other facilities. At the beginning of the war, the Russians destroyed a small dam blocking water flows to Crimea. And civilian water treatment and delivery systems have been widely attacked by the Russians, cutting water supplies and sanitation services for hundreds of thousands of people. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians cut levees to flood areas north of Kyiv to halt the initial Russian armored assault on the capital. But until now, there had been nothing as massive or devastating as this event.
Attacks on dams are war crimes, as explicitly noted in Article 56 of Protocol I and Article 15 of Protocol II of the 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. These international laws prohibit attacks on infrastructure “containing dangerous forces” including explicitly “dams” and “dykes” if such attacks “may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.” Despite these prohibitions, conflicts over water and attacks on water systems are on the rise, with a dramatic increase in the past two decades.
There is precedent for Russian destruction of dams on the Dnieper River. In August 1941, during World War II, the retreating Soviet Army destroyed another dam on the Dnieper at Zaporizhzhia, the Dnieper Dam, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Nazis. At the time it was the largest dam in the world. The subsequent flooding reportedly killed tens of thousands of people downstream. ...
More.
Laying waste to Iran would solve a number of problems.
The point of war is to stop the enemy's ability to wage it.
That clearly has not happened in one month of operations.
The reason is because, despite all the sound and fury, the U.S. and Israel are not waging a real war.
War means destroying Iran's country utterly, depriving it of food and water, electricity and heat, shelter, income from oil, and imports of materials.
They can't bring themselves to do that. They don't have the nerve.
Worse, Iran is successfully depriving its neighbors of some of those things.
Sending in boots on the ground in these unacceptable circumstances is simply playing with more soldiers' lives.
Get serious or go home.
Trump boycotted the January 28, 2016 debate in Des Moines, Iowa.
... You understand the sacrifice that our troops make and the risk they take when they sign up. I would submit to the jury, it is not to die in a war for Israel
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I am sick of TSA's illegal searches and seizures, and of DHS' deadly incompetence in Minneapolis and at Barksdale AFB.
The author below lists four recent incidents of terrorism in the United States in support of funding DHS outside the filibuster so that this incompetence can continue!
They're not keeping us safe!
Millions of illegals remain in America who were supposed to Remain in Mexico!
Fire them all! These post-911 innovations aren't working.
Terrorism trumps America again:
Sophisticated drones attacked Louisiana’s Barksdale bomber base
... Barksdale AFB does not have air defenses, nor does it have fighter jets that can take down drones.
The airbase does have some electronic countermeasures that were designed to disable GPS and the datalinks between the drones and their remote operators. The electronic countermeasures failed to work. ...
The drones could have come from a potential adversary, China being best equipped to produce a drone of the type that flew over Barksdale. From what has been observed, the drone design surpasses almost anything in the US arsenal.
What we know is that the drones had extraordinary range, could resist broad spectrum jamming, and featured non-commercial signal characteristics. Even more provocatively, the drones used various ingress and egress routes and operated in dispersed patterns, making traceability (via trying to triangulate on signals) virtually impossible.
We do not know if the drones transmitted information while they were over the base or stored information they transmitted later, or whether the drones may have had satellite links.
... realistically the US is years away from a real domestic counter drone capability. Hot Air covered the story yesterday.
The UAE is bypassing the Strait of Hormuz with 1.9 million barrels per day now coming out of Fujairah via its overland pipeline, and Saudi Arabia's overland pipeline west to Yanbu is moving about 4.5 million barrels per day out through the Red Sea, but that's not the 20 million barrels per day lost due to the war, and no LNG is moving at all.
Pakistan and Bangladesh get two thirds of their LNG from the Gulf, Taiwan gets one third of its LNG. Taiwan says its has eleven days' supply remaining. Many others are also severely affected by the cut-off of LNG from Qatar. About 20 LNG tankers are trapped in the Gulf, half the global fleet available for charter.
Meanwhile Iran has increased export of its oil from 1 million barrels per day in February to 2 million in March, 90% of which goes to China, and Iran is now charging tolls to vessels to exit the Gulf along its coast, which occurs only under Iranian escort.
