Category: Art Of The Deal

New Governor, Same As The Old Governor

This is a really good explainer.

Threadrolled here.

There Goes The Narrative

@sunlorrieOnly in Ford’s Ontario would Reagan explaining his reasons for imposing tariffs on Japan be transformed into an ad about Reagan defending free trade…

Updates.

Update: To that end, I am pleased to see Ontario’s ad campaign is being suspended…

@LaurieScottPCSee my statement below regarding the announced closure of Holsag’s manufacturing facility in Lindsay, Ontario.

Meanwhile…

Elbows Down!

I thought our new PM was just the guy we needed to stand up to the Americans. Oh, well…..

American truck maker Paccar Inc. is laying off 300 more factory workers in Quebec ahead of a 25 per cent import tariff to be imposed by the U.S. next month.

The factory in Sainte-Thérèse, a Montreal suburb, manufactures Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks and relies heavily on revenue from the United States.

Don’t Throw Him In That Briar Patch, Br’er Schumer

How the shutdown enabled the Trump administration’s mass firing spree;

The White House is using the government shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands of people — furthering the aims of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort earlier this year.

Why it matters: This time the stated focus isn’t efficiency or eliminating fraud. It’s all about shrinking the federal government — and doing away with programs that run counter to the administration’s ideologies.

The big picture: This is the first time an administration has used a shutdown to terminate federal workers.

The firings appear to be in line with the overall goal of bringing the federal government under the president’s control and shrinking its size, as OMB Director Russell Vought laid out in Project 2025.

UN Carbon Tax: Dead In The Water

John Ʌ Konrad V;

I can’t share the details on how @michaelgwaltz & @SecRubio have, in just a few days, organized the greatest opposition to UN policy since the Cold War and blocked this UN Carbon Tax.

I can say it was a knife fight to the end.

“I’ve been in this industry for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” one shipping executive told me today. “You just don’t say NO to these guys. It’s unheard of.”

It’s unclear who “these guys” are, but I suspect the European families with shipping investments and net wealth that far exceeds Elon’s.

Absolutely none of the maritime experts I interviewed early this week thought the US could pull this off. Zero. Massive amounts of money, NGO influence, diplomatic threat and media manipulation were behind this… and the American media (except @gCaptain and Fox News) was dead silent.

And yet Trump did it.

“That Trump Truth Social post sent shockwaves through the building,” one UN delegate in London told me. “NOBODY expected it. The Secretary General @IMOSecGen looked like a deer in the headlights this morning.”

Incredible. Simply incredible work by team Trump and a massive blow to the European deep state who planned to use this tax as a slush fund to plug holes in US Aid funding for globalist NGOs.

Promises made. Promises kept!

Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign to Derail Global Shipping Emissions Tax

Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter

Ed Morrissey;

Trump won this war in June, when he made an unapologetic decision to intervene with military strikes in Iran. Those strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities completely shook up the order in the region, which had settled into an Iranian track toward dominance. Israel had already done most of the damage by wiping out Hezbollah’s upper echelons and their banking system, which led directly to the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the rise of a new Syrian regime that detests the mullahs in Iran. However, the strikes by Trump on Iran forced everyone to reconsider their assumptions and recalculate for a president who had no problem ordering military force to defend and protect American interests.

However, the strike by Israel on Hamas facilities in Doha played a role here too. Trump claimed to be angry over that attack, and the White House made it known that he supposedly forced Benjamin Netanyahu to apologize to the Qatari emirate. However, that also sent a signal that both US and Israeli impatience over the Hamas Hokey Pokey and the uselessness of the Billionaire Boys Club in Doha had reached a critical moment. With both the US and Israel willing to throw down against terror networks and their sponsors, time ran out for Hamas.

Art Of The Deal

Fox News: Israeli lawmakers declared Trump ‘the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House’

Trump described the ceasefire with Hamas “as a very exciting time for Israel and for the entire Middle East” and said “the forces of chaos, terror and ruin that have plagued the region for decades now stand weakened, isolated, and totally defeated.”

Trump, who is also set to depart for Egypt on Monday, suggested a peace deal with Iran could be next as he looks to enfold more Middle Eastern nations into the Abraham Accords, which saw the normalization of relations with several Arab nations during his first term.

Trump’s remarks before Israeli Knesset


Meanwhile, in Gaza… “This time people weren’t fleeing Israeli attacks. They were running from their own people,” one witness told the BBC.

Cancon: Andrew Coyne hardest hit

Kurt Schlichter: The Well-Deserved, Utter Humiliation of Palestinian Terrorists and Their Friends

“Why?”

Yes, Hamas Caved. (Read it all).

Egypt and Qatar told Hayya the deal was his last chance to end the war, according to the officials. They pressed Hamas to understand that holding the hostages was becoming a strategic liability, giving Israel a source of legitimacy to keep fighting.

The next day, joined by Turkey, they warned him that if Hamas didn’t approve the plan it would be stripped of all political and diplomatic cover; Qatar and Turkey would no longer host the group’s political leadership, and Egypt would stop pressing for Hamas to have a say in Gaza’s postwar governance, the officials said.

Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter

Roger Simon: MidEast Peace Big Trouble for the Democrat Party

Given what Trump has just achieved, it makes the MSM and Capitol Hill Dems look like clown shows. They, particularly the Democrats’ increasingly bizarre Mamdani/AOC left-wing, have been busy running their party into the ground. Trump’s peacemaking allows them to finish the job by making the Democrats seem so kooky by comparison that even extinction now seems a possibility.

Sound excessive? I don’t think so. Listening to cable news tonight, I may have missed something, but I did not hear one Democrat congratulate President Trump on his achievement.

According to Grok, at this writing, even Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, a Jew, and supposedly a friend of Israel, has said not a word. Terrified of AOC? You bet.

What is wrong with these people? Well, plenty. They are so overwhelmed with hate, for Trump and evidently for each other, that they can’t see straight or think rationally.

Golden Era?

I’m skeptical that revaluing gold would change much in the finances of the US government, or any other government for that matter, but I’m curious to hear what SDA readers think.

Here’s my take: despite a legislative quirk that pegs the dollar price of gold at a ridiculously low level, I’m quite certain that the creditors to Uncle Sam have already pegged it implicitly at it’s true dollar price. It’s as if your farm was valued at $2 million and you owed $1 million, but your balance sheet hadn’t been updated in years. It’s quite likely that your creditors would have already recalculated that balance sheet for you, or they would not have lent you the money in the first place. Readjust your balance sheet and you will find that you still owe $1 million.

US gold re-marking would have implications for both the Treasury & Fed balance sheets.

  • US Treasury: assets would rise by the value of the gold re-marking & liabilities would rise by the size of gold certificates issued to the Fed.
  • Federal Reserve: assets would rise by value of gold certificates & liabilities would rise by a crediting of cash in the Treasury cash balance (Exhibit 4). And here is the punchline: the Fed balance sheet impact would look like QE though no open market purchases would be required & Fed liability growth would initially be in TGA.

In other words, the best of all words: a QE-like operation, one which see the Fed quietly funnel almost $700 billion in cash to the Treasury… but without actually doing a thing!

“The biggest investment package of its kind in British history.”

‘You are amongst friends’ – Keir Starmer

@HansMahncke This is just incredible when you recall that only a few years ago Donald Trump was a a canceled man, banned from TV, erased from social media, his videos scrubbed, and his name forbidden in polite society. And now here he is being honored at a state banquet in Windsor Castle.

Elbows up.

Press conference Live feed.

How Are Those Elbows Holding Up?

Unexpectedly!

Canada’s economy shrank much more than expected in the second quarter as U.S. tariffs squeezed exports, but higher household and government spending softened the blow somewhat, Statistics Canada said on Friday.

The GDP for the quarter that ended June 30 slowed by 1.6 per cent on an annualized basis, while first-quarter growth was downwardly revised to two per cent, the data agency said.s.

Eric Daugherty: United States GDP for Q2? +3.3%. Higher than expected. Maybe Canada should stop trying to go to economic war with President Trump.

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