The announcement was made as usual at 1030 hours.
To head off a price increase in oil Trump at 1052 hours announced that the US was in the "final stages" of the negotiations with Iran, which was a load of crap.
Thursday, May 21, 2026
Middle East tanker transits per UKMTO JMIC Update 47 May 12-18, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 2.00/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 15.42/day
The tanker table for JMIC Update 48 is a mess. It has the wrong dates, and five days of data are identical to the data in Update 47.
There was also a duplicate JMIC 46 update a few days ago, just minutes apart.
It is what it is.
 |
| From JMIC 47 |
 |
| From JMIC 48 (the dates should be 14 May-20 May like the Cargo Vessels table, but somehow the exact same data for May 12-16 from Update 47 reappears!) |
Look out Maine and New Hampshire, and North and South Carolina, they'll be comin' for your lithium when they come
... Mining these deposits would involve opening giant pits and destroying wildlife habitats, affecting the landscape and regional biodiversity. It would also create harmful pollution due to waste products such as fluids and finely ground rock that can leach trace elements
into the ground and waterways. Additionally, the heavy machinery that
would be required for hard-rock mining in the Appalachians would pump
huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and extracting
lithium from those rocks would involve toxic chemicals and more greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump cuts off his nose in the primaries to spite his face
Trump’s primary push could leave him with short-term problem in Congress
... the defeated or retiring incumbents he’s targeted remain in office until the end of their terms.
Those lawmakers, who no longer face voters and have little political incentive to fall in line, could make things difficult for Trump and GOP leaders as they feel more emboldened to push back against key partisan legislation. In a narrowly divided Congress, even a handful of GOP defections can derail a party-line bill. ...
You betcha.
Bill Cassidy in the Senate is already a problem for Trump post-defeat.
So is defeated Thomas Massie in the House.
Still in the crosshairs:
Sen. John Cornyn, Rep. Lauren Boebert, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.
Already alienated and retiring:
Sen. Thom Tillis, Rep. Don Bacon.
Expect little to pass easily before November under these new intra-GOP adversarial circumstances, and even less after a Blue Wave.
Everybody's asking . . .
How low can Trump’s poll numbers go?
... The president’s average approval rating still hasn’t reached its lowest mark ever recorded. He fell to just above 37 percent in RealClearPolitics’s average in December 2017. ...
You wake up in the morning and yep, Trump has sunk to new record lows in the polling average overnight
Disapproval is at a new high 58.5% in the average.
Approval is at a new low 39.4% in the average.
Real Clear Politics polling average:
It's amazing that the answer of Donald J. Trump and now J. D. Vance to Senator John Cornyn of Texas is a crook
... Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she couldn’t understand Trump’s thinking, given that Paxton was charged with felony securities fraud and faced a lengthy prison sentence that he managed to avoid by reaching a deal with prosecutors to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution and complete 100 hours of community service.
“I don’t understand. He is an ethically challenged individual,” Collins said of Trump’s support of Paxton, who was charged of defrauding investors in a Dallas-area tech startup. The charges were later dropped after he agreed to a pretrial diversion program. ...
More.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
No Jeff, the bottom 80% should pay zero in income taxes, the top 20% should pay 100% of the income taxes
Jeff Bezos says bottom half of earners should pay zero in income taxes
The top 20% receive income in excess of $10 trillion. Taxed at 50% that will still pay for the federal government.
They can live on $100k just like the rest of us, and still have half of everything above that left over.
Pure market manipulation
U.S. crude oil falls below $100 per barrel after Trump says Iran talks in final stages
The only thing surprising about any of this is the market's 100% propensity to believe lies in order to make a buck.
Jonah Goldberg: Impeachment is still an available political remedy for Trump's serious abuses
... Contrary to thousands of hours of impeachment legal punditry going back to the Nixon administration, a president doesn’t have to commit a crime to be impeached. As Hamilton writes in Federalist 65, impeachment involves “the misconduct of public men” and “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Impeachments are “POLITICAL” (Hamilton’s all-caps) because they injure “society itself.”
It may in fact be legal for the president to be the judge in his own cause and create a taxpayer-financed slush fund for him to reward cronies and henchmen on a whim. It is already clear that presidents can launch wars without Congress or the courts unduly getting in the way. But I struggle to think of hypothetical scenarios that would be more likely to arouse in Madison and his contemporaries the — now misplaced — reassurance that impeachment was an available remedy.
Here.
Ann Coulter's favorite candidate to defeat Mitch McConnell six years ago loses again lol
Booker defeats McGrath in Kentucky Democratic Senate primary
Charles Booker is projected to win the Kentucky Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ, defeating Amy McGrath in the race to succeed retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The victory came six years after McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot, narrowly defeated Booker in the primary for the seat, winning 45 percent of the vote to Booker’s 43 percent. McGrath went on to lose in the general election by nearly 20 points. ...
Elections have consequences as Mad King Ludwig eats his own narrow majority in the U.S. Senate and further alienates it
Trump's self-destructive alcoholic personality will only make him more legislatively unsuccessful this year than he has been already.
Cassidy becomes fourth GOP senator to back Iran war powers measure limiting Trump
Sen. Bill Cassidy, who lost his bid for a third term in Saturday’s Louisiana Senate Republican primary, on Tuesday became the fourth Republican senator to vote to advance a war powers resolution directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. armed forces deployed against Iran.
Cassidy joined Republican Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) in voting Tuesday for a motion to discharge the war powers resolution sponsored by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The motion passed by a vote of 50 to 47, setting up a future vote to proceed to the motion on the Senate floor.
The resolution is privileged under the 1973 War Powers Act, allowing it to pass the Senate with a simple-majority vote instead of having to clear the 60-vote threshold required for most legislation.
Cassidy kept his plan to vote to advance the resolution secret until the last moment. He declined to reveal how he would vote on the measure when asked about it Monday.
Murkowski broke ranks with Senate Republican leaders last week to vote to advance the war powers resolution. ...
Trump’s ouster of Republican senator sends shock waves through Senate GOP
The resounding defeat of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) in Saturday’s Louisiana primary has sent shock waves through the Senate Republican Conference, underscoring how Republicans who look to distance themselves from President Trump and his low approval ratings will have to think twice about paying a political price for perceived disloyalty.
Cassidy’s ouster came a few weeks after Trump and his allies helped defeat five state senators in Indiana who defied Trump’s desire to redraw the state’s congressional map, sending a loud message to any Republican on Capitol Hill thinking about clashing with the president. ...
[Republican Senator Thom] Tillis, an outspoken critic of some of the Trump administration’s actions this year, reacted angrily to Cassidy’s loss, sending an email to Republican colleagues on Monday threatening to block a budget reconciliation package from moving on the Senate floor later this week — even though it’s a top Trump priority.
Tillis expressed his disappointment over Cassidy’s loss on Saturday and urged Republican colleagues to delay action on the reconciliation bill so as not to force Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), another Republican colleague facing a tough primary on May 26, to stay in Washington until late this week to vote on the budget bill, according to a source familiar with the email’s details. ...
Senate GOP expresses frustration, anger, sadness as Trump snubs Cornyn in Texas
President Trump’s decision Tuesday to snub Sen. John Cornyn and endorse state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate Republican primary was met with frustration, anger and even sadness by Senate Republicans.
The move likely sinks Cornyn’s hopes of winning another Senate term, and Republicans warned it could make it tougher to defeat Democratic candidate James Talarico in November.
Republican senators exuded pain for Cornyn, who served as Senate Republican whip during Trump’s first term and is deeply respected by his Senate GOP colleagues. ...
Some Republican senators saw Trump’s treatment of Cornyn as a snub of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), who had worked behind the scenes for months to persuade the president to back him.
The NRSC invested in Cornyn through a joint fundraising committee, and One Nation, a fundraising group affiliated with Thune’s political operation, has spent more than $10 million helping Cornyn. ...
Trump’s endorsement of Paxton and his attacks against Cassidy won’t make it any easier for him to muster GOP votes for his ballroom funding or for the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund to compensate MAGA allies who believe they were targeted by the government. ...
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Attention all you weak dollar lunatics
Nominal broad dollar index average values
Obama II, first year // 1Q second year // April 2014: 92.75 / 94.51 / 93.99
Trump II, first year // 1Q second year // April 2026: 122.75 / 119.01 / 119.03
Thank you for attention to this matter.
The total value of all foreign-owned U.S. Treasury securities is up 3.25% year over year in March 2026, and CNBC says Japan and China retreat from owning them
The big retreat was actually in the BRICS.
The value of Japanese-owned UST is up 5.4% year over year in March, lol.
Meanwhile the value of official China-owned is down 14.8% yoy, but China notoriously owns UST through stealth mechanisms, often in the UK and Belgium where ownership is up 19% and 12.9% yoy respectively.
Hard to say what's going on there with the most trusted name in nothing.
Month over month in March 2026 the total value of all foreign-owned is barely down 1.5%, which is neither unusual nor indicative of much of anything.
On a year over year basis, there were just five net "sellers" among the major foreign holders: China, Taiwan, Switzerland, India (down nearly 24%!), and Brazil (down 19%!).
Officially anyway, BRIC of the BRICS raising hard currency for some reason lol oil.
Japan, China lead foreign government retreat from U.S. Treasurys as Gulf War stokes currency fears
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