Sotomayor: Do You Want to 'Unnaturalize People?'
... Sauer replied, “No, we believe the court should do what it did in Sessions v. Morales-Santana, where there was a ruling that would have deprived people who are already citizens of citizenship, and the court said this applies prospectively only. We think that’s the appropriate course here. ..."
Drudge version:
Rubio's parents were subject to the jurisdiction of Cuba, and therefore so was he, making none of them citizens.
Same was true of Native Americans, none of whom were made citizens by the 14th Amendment. They were subject to The Nations, which the federal government recognized by treaties as nations within the American nation. Native Americans received citizenship by law passed in 1924.
14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens ...
It is high time that "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" be treated seriously and not superfluously.
... With nuclear weapons in hand, Iran could threaten the global order with impunity. ... Tehran would recover, build atomic weapons, decide who may pass safely through the Strait of Hormuz, and slowly strangle the global economy by demanding tribute for access to precious Gulf oil and LNG.
Very odd essay.
Here.
Trump says Iran’s president asked for ceasefire, but U.S. wants Hormuz Strait open first
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said Iran’s “New Regime President” has asked the U.S. for a ceasefire. ...
There is something deeply insane about all this.
Only Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pipelines which can by-pass the Strait of Hormuz and replace a part of the lost export capacity. Production will have to be curtailed because there's nowhere to go with it. And everyone in the world will be poorer for it.
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. ...
Trump lashes out at UK and France, telling allies ‘the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore’
... “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!,” he concluded. ... For its part, Tehran continues to demonstrate its ability to dominate and derail maritime traffic in the strait, hitting a fully laden Kuwaiti oil tanker in the anchorage area of Dubai’s port earlier Tuesday.
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
 |
| JMIC Advisory Mar 29 |
 |
| 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.
