As for Barack Obama, I will admit that I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him face the consequences of his own arrogance, obsession with personal power, and efforts at vanquishing the exceptionalism that makes this country different from every other one. But I guess, as a wise man once explained: “Life’s a bitch.” -David Samuels

A 100-year-old veteran of the Revolutionary War named Nicholas Veeder poses in his uniform, 1860.

Ro, you’re lying and you know it. You compared a man’s net worth to a country’s GDP. A balance sheet to a year of output. You went to Yale. You learned the difference between a stock and annual output flow. But being a politician and lawyer, you love to lie and gaslight the economic illiterates, it’s your entire business model. You want a 5% tax on Elon to fund free trade school for every American. Trade school costs $80B/yr, you can’t even fund a year. Elon doesn’t have $55B in cash. It’s stock. You know this. To pay, he sells roughly $70B of Tesla and SpaceX shares, and the sale itself gets taxed on top. SpaceX raised $75B at its IPO this morning at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Imagine him selling that amount every year. Ro isn’t taxing Elon. He’s taxing everyone who gas exposure to the market. Every pension fund and index fund on the planet gets wrecked. And given Ro, he’ll insider trade and short before the bill passes. And for what? To rip capital from the best allocator alive and hand it to the most incompetent institution in human history. Elon turned PayPal gains into Tesla and SpaceX: 120,000 jobs, launch costs down 90%, two industries that didn’t exist, a $1.77 trillion company from nothing. You’ve never built anything. You’ve never employed anyone. You’ve never created a dollar of value in your life. You collect a government salary and demand tribute from men who do what you can’t. Your machine spends $7 trillion a year and still runs a $1.8 trillion deficit. It loses up to $521 billion a year to fraud. More than your entire tax raises. The Department of Education went from $34 billion in 2000 to $268 billion in 2024. 8x the money. Reading scores at multi-decade lows. Trade schools still unfunded. You don’t lack money. You lack competence, and you want Elon to subsidize it. You haven’t donated your wealth. You haven’t moved into government housing. Empty your accounts first, Ro. Then preach. Elon’s options get taxed as ordinary income at the top rate when exercised. Over $500 billion in lifetime taxes, the largest tax stream from one human ever. You want $55 billion now in a way that craters the shares the $500 billion depends on. Your tax doesn’t raise money. It kills the companies, kills the jobs, kills the pensions, and torches a bigger check already in the mail. You’re the monkey in the middle, Ro. You can’t build. You can’t allocate. You can’t even count. So you eat from everyone else’s pie and call it fairness.

People wondered why Trump didn't "finish off" Iran sooner... Because you don't "finish off" madmen that'll fight so long as even one is left. And killing every Iranian is a bad look. So he let them "negotiate" while moving oil through the strait, proving their impotence....

US steel imports down 30% as domestic production surges under Trump tariffs. Follow: @AFpost

That level of tie triggers a recount and freezes his ability to raise money during the process.

Treasury Secretary Bessent on economic policy

OFAC finally sanctions Nobitex and other Iranian crypto exchanges, the first of several incoming rollups. Proud to say @CameronOtsuka and I have been covering the softening up of Iran’s crypto infrastructure on @MinePrintHash dating back to the first hit on the exchange that was timed with the strike on Fordow/Natanz last June. This has been an under-appreciated field of battle in which the broader confrontation we’re wading through is taking place. The era of Treasury Supremacy that’s at hand ultimately requires that authority over the stablecoin dollar and its rails rests with U.S. financial institutions.

The U.S. operations spanning Venezuela, Iran, etc combined with the financial sanctions have put the rest of the world’s financial system in a state of reduce demand for money, i.e. no credit growth. No new borrowing, no incremental dollars. You can see it in the rush to the 4 week TBill on Memorial Day when U.S. markets were closed, along with stablecoins like Tether trading below par the entire month of May and getting worse. This is the capital war front that is just one plane of operation in the broader operation the U.S. is executing.

Musical sublimity.

MAGA is dead? You folks have no idea what’s been really going on .

🚨 Obama spent $34 MILLION of your tax dollars renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. No Media meltdowns. Here’s some reactions when it reopened 👇

Haven’t posted on social in quite some time but can’t stay quiet in this time of loss. I’m struggling to tell all what Bobby Cox meant to me and so many others in Braves Country. He was the leader of men and a second father to so many Atlanta Braves thru the yrs. I’m so sad today, but as I sit here watching my two youngest boys play in their championship games on the day he passed, I can’t help but shout the same things he did from the corner of the dugout. ‘Come on kid, u got this!’ We are gonna miss him so much, but his legacy is forever cemented with the success of this franchise for the last 35 yrs. He started it as GM, continued as manager, and passing the torch to others, the Atlanta Braves will continue to be force that Bobby Cox always wanted us to be. We love you Skipper. You were our rock. I love you more than words can express. My boys won both of their games…..Bobby had a hand, I have no doubt!

Wishing a very Happy Birthday to the great @RonCarterBass who is 89 years old today! The legendary bassist's most recent album "Sweet, Sweet Spirit" is a heartfelt tribute to his mother that blends Jazz & Gospel in collaboration with Ricky Dillard: rickydillard.lnk.to/sweetswe…

We’ve got plenty we’ve uncovered…and much more to go 🤙🏽

@JG_Nuke, The UAE's hosting of Iron Dome infrastructure alongside Israeli troops paired with its OPEC exit is signaling explicit operational buy in to @realDonaldTrump's vision of the Abraham Accords security architecture & cartel busting production discipline. Backwardation futures are pricing with precision the expectation that the short term Iranian chaos premium will fade while a long term UAE supply surge compresses the curve. The asymmetric risk on both legs is acutely real, but so is the reward structure. The oil futures market & the UAE alike are putting their money where Mr. Trump's mouth is.

IRAN INTERNATIONAL, CITING TWO INFORMED SOURCES: PRESIDENT PEZESHKIAN AND PARLIAMENT SPEAKER GHALIBAF ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE WAY DIPLOMACY — PARTICULARLY THE NUCLEAR NEGOTIATIONS — IS BEING HANDLED BY ABBAS ARAGHCHI, AND ARE PUSHING FOR HIS REMOVAL.

MOAR Winning!

The German economy has been in a full-blown depression for years. Private-sector investment barely covers depreciation costs, and the country is running on fumes. Politicians are now attempting to fill the vacated industrial capacity with arms production and eco-projects in an effort to stabilize the country—an endeavor that is doomed to fail. At the same time, the policy of “open borders forever” is ensuring that the German welfare state is being literally plundered. This country is being abandoned to ruin by a caste of globalists who are enriching themselves through it. Dark times are coming for the Germans.

If you’d told me a few years ago this is where we’d be on Iran, I’d have said you were high: 1. Nuke program set back years. Enrichment and reprocessing gutted, weaponization sites destroyed, Fordow inoperable, Natanz in ruins, a generation of senior nuclear scientists eliminated. 2. Ballistic missile program crippled. Monthly production down from 100 to near zero. Roughly half the regime’s missiles and launchers destroyed. The IRGC Aerospace Force commander who ran the missile enterprise dead. 3. Air defenses devastated. American and Israeli airpower dominating Iranian skies, with strike aircraft operating over the country with near impunity. 4. Full economic warfare. Not just OFAC sanctions anymore, but military pressure layered on top: naval blockade, near-zero oil exports, choked imports, wrecked steel and petrochemical sectors, triple-digit inflation, and a currency that is effectively worthless. 5. Regime decapitation. Khamenei dead. Larijani dead. Hundreds of senior IRGC, intelligence, military, and Basij commanders dead including the IRGC commander-in-chief, the armed forces chief of staff, and the Aerospace Force commander. Mojtaba Khamenei inheriting a hollowed-out regime with no supreme authority and a gutted command structure. 6. The region turning on Tehran. Gulf states shutting down the sanctions-busting, money-laundering, and financial escape routes the regime has relied on for years. No Arab capital willing to throw Iran a lifeline. China and Russia providing limited support. 7. Proxy network shattered. Hezbollah and Hamas heavily degraded. Houthi political leadership taking direct Israeli strikes. The “Axis of Resistance” and “ring of fire” are now more slogans than real threats. 8. Syrian corridor severed. Assad is gone. The new government in Damascus is actively blocking Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah: arresting smugglers and publicly declaring Syria will no longer serve as a transit corridor for Tehran’s terrorists. The land bridge to the Mediterranean that took decades to build is effectively closed. 9. Lebanon pivoting west. With Hezbollah battered and resupply choked, Israel and Lebanon have opened direct peace talks for the first time since 1983, aimed at a permanent agreement and Hezbollah’s disarmament. Beirut now asserting that the Lebanese armed forces alone are responsible for national defense. This is a direct repudiation of Hezbollah’s “resistance” claim. TBD. 10. Deterrence exposed as a bluff. Four direct attacks on Israel — April 2024, October 2024, June 2025, March 2026 — failed to impose strategic cost and instead triggered heavy retaliation. Iran couldn’t even use Syria as a launchpad. 11.Economy hollowed out from within. Power shortages, water crises, factory shutdowns, pension unrest, and mass protests. Nationwide demonstrations erupted in December 2025 after a year of economic freefall, with bazaaris, oil workers, and truckers, the regime’s traditional support base, joining strikes across all 31 provinces. Running out of oil storage space. Fuel shortages. The worst crisis since 1979. 12. Scientific and technical brain drain. Beyond the nuclear experts, Iran has lost a generation of irreplaceable expertise in missile design, centrifuge engineering, and weapons development. The survivors are harder to recruit and easier to deter. 13. Naval power decimated. The regular navy shattered, IRGC navy taking growing losses as CENTCOM moves to reopen Hormuz. And against all of this: the regime forced to play its Hormuz card at its weakest possible moment when the U.S. has options instead of when we didn’t: namely, Tehran with nuclear-armed ICBMs, 10,000 ballistic missiles, a Chinese- and Russian-built military, hundreds of thousands of attack drones, a fully operational terror network, and hundreds of billions of dollars to harden its economy. That’s the strategic picture. It’s extraordinary. Much more to do but I can’t comprehend how much has been achieved.

RT @sapinker: We should oppose the Trump administration's abuse of the law to intimidate and cripple private advocacy organizations they do…