Tag: Iran

US Loses 92K Jobs

The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February largely attributed to lower employment in health care ‘reflecting strike activity,’ according to the Labor Department, though even accounting for that, the number was worse than economists expected. Health care job growth has been propping up employment gains in recent months. The economy continues to lose information sector and federal government jobs. The unemployment rate inched up 0.1 points to 4.4%. [CHART: Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Israel Hits Beirut – After mass evacuations in Lebanon’s capital, Israel has launched its heaviest air strike on Beirut since its 2024 war with Iranian-backed militias, The New York Times reports early Friday. Israel also is hitting Tehran while air defenses battled incoming missiles from Iran.

Choose the leader we want … After admitting most of his administration’s favored candidates for replacing the late Ayatollah Khamenei were killed in the initial US-Israeli air attacks last Saturday, President Trump encouraged the Iranian people to choose their new leaders. Then on Thursday, Trump told Reuters in an exclusive phone interview: “We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future.”

Fuel prices … Gas and diesel prices have been steadily rising since the US-Israeli war on Iran began nearly a week ago. The AAA reports the national average for a gallon of unleaded regular was $3.32, up from $2.982 February 27. Diesel – used in trucks that deliver much of the goods we buy, as Trump reminded us during his 2024 campaign -- averaged $4.33 a gallon, up from $3.757.

“If they rise, they rise,” Trump said. The president says he has no intention of tapping the national strategic reserves, currently 57% full, according to APR’s Marketplace, which reports most economists agree with Trump that the increases are temporary – so long as the war is short-lived.

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Gonzales Out – Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) was headed for Texas’ May 26 runoffs after “The AKA Guy” Brandon Harris edged him out in Tuesday’s GOP primary, 43% to 42%. That changed late Thursday when Gonzalez announced he is dropping his re-election bid, leaving the Republican nomination for Texas’ 23rd District to YouTuber and gun manufacturer Harris, Punchbowl News reports. 

Herrera will face Democratic candidate Kathy Padilla Stout for Texas’ 23rd District seat, which includes Uvalde. –Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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FRIDAY 3/6/26

War on Iran

THURSDAY 3/5/26

Trump to Noem: You’re Fired, More or Less – The answer to what do  we mean by “more or less”? is, “depends on what a special envoy for the Shield of America does, exactly.”

Yes, that is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s next job – until now a nonexistent security position -- in the Trump administration, the president said in firing her, according to The New York Times. Trump also said he wants to replace Noem as Department of Homeland Security secretary with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).  

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would not commit to voting for Mullin and Noem’s firing does not change Democrats’ demand for restructuring immigration enforcement in order to fund DHS.

Conversely, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said he would vote for Mullin, a “nice upgrade” from Noem, the NYT reports. Still, no one has called Fetterman a DINO (Democrat In Name Only). Yet. 

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Power Vacuum – The Senate rejected a war powers vote Wednesday, 47-53, that would have officially put a stop on President Trump’s war on Iran, (per NPR’s All Things Considered ). The vote was mostly along party lines, which means that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voted with most Democrats for the resolution and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voted with most Republicans against it. 

In the House … The House was set to vote Thursday on a similar measure introduced by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA). Similar results were expected, though it would take just a couple of Republicans joining Massie to approve the resolution.

But Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) teed up the thin GOP majority against it, saying “It would put the country in serious harm, and it would certainly jeopardize the lives of our troops and all those who were involved in making these great sacrifices to defend us.”

Spreading through, and beyond, the region … With Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz and reports of strikes on US ally Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan airport, the war has spread wide through and beyond the region. According to Azernews, an Iranian drone strike on Nakhchivan airport has left four dead so far. Meanwhile, Israel Defense Forces have struck Beirut after Iranian-controlled Hezbollah fired rockets and drones on the north of Israel, The Times of Israel reports. 

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Tariff Refunds Due – Federal Trade Court Judge Richard Eaton at the Manhattan-based Court of International Trade has issued a written order directing the Trump administration to begin the process of refunding more than $130 billion in import fees, The Wall Street Journal reports, following the Supreme Court’s ruling against the tariffs in its February 20 ruling on Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump. Such companies as Costco Wholesale, FedEx and Pandora jewelry are among more than 2,000 importers that have filed lawsuits seeking the refunds. –TL

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No Arms Shortages – The US has the means to carry out its air campaign on Iran “for as long as it wishes,” War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a press conference Wednesday morning (per The Wall Street Journal). That campaign could last up to eight weeks, he said – or also, Hegseth said in various points in the press conference, six weeks or less than four. 

“They are toast and they know it, or at least they soon will know it,” Hegseth said. 

Hegseth was tamping down concerns the war in Iran would deplete the US arsenal. He was accompanied at the Pentagon by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine.

Hegseth said that a US submarine sank an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, the first such sinking by a sub since World War II. 

Caine said that Qatar shot down two Iranian bombers that were “inbound” and that the United Arab Emirates has intercepted multiple drones, while Iran has fired more than 500 missiles and launched 2,000 drones. 

All the President’s Explanations … The US with Israel struck Iran before Iran could get off a pre-emptive strike of its own, President Trump said Tuesday in yet another explanation for the war. The US-Israeli airstrikes brought an abrupt end to negotiations between Iranian diplomats and US special envoy Steve Witkoff and White House son-in-law Jared Kushner last week. 

Trying to straighten out the White House’s message, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said later Tuesday that Tehran was given “every single possible opportunity” to shutter its nuclear weapons program in negotiations with Witkoff/Kushner (per The Guardian).

Tehran “had no intention of actually negotiating a nuclear deal,” Rubio said. 

Rubio earlier had acknowledged that Iran wasn’t enriching uranium for weaponry following the US strike last June on the country’s three major nuclear facilities. 

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First Round of Primaries – Texas State Rep. James Talarico topped firebrand US Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary for John Cornyn’s (R-TX) US Senate seat, The Associated Press reports. Talarico took 52.8% of the vote to Crockett’s 45.9% in his quest to become the first Democrat elected statewide in 30 years.

On the GOP side, incumbent Cornyn, after spending $70 million on his campaign, edged state Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton, 41.9% to 40.7%, which means they’re both headed off to a May 26 runoff.

In North Carolina former Gov. Roy Cooper (D) faces former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Watley (R) to replace retiring Republican US Sen. Thom Tillis. 

Arkansas is the biggest climb for Democrats, with Hallie Shoffner winning the party’s primary to challenge Sen. Tom Cotton’s re-election bid. Democratic state Sen. Fred Love will challenge incumbent Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sander’s re-election bid. –TL

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TUESDAY 3/3/26

The Latest – The State Department has closed US embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after being hit by Iranian drone attacks and has advised ambassadors to immediately depart from 14 Middle Eastern countries, The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, Israel’s military said Tuesday it has seized an area of Lebanon in a conflict with Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia.

Death toll … Six US soldiers have been killed, USA Today reports, with 787 deaths counted in Iran, 11 in Israel and eight in Gulf states.

Munitions buildup … Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says the case for supplemental funding for munitions was “brought up in discussions” Monday in a Gang of Eight closed door briefing with Trump officials and top lawmakers on the House Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Appropriations committees, Roll Call reports. 

“There are more details to be determined, of course, how long the operation goes and what the need is,” Rubio told reporters after the meeting.

Good questions … President Trump generally has been sticking with his four- to five-week timeline. Impetus for US involvement with Israel has been less clear.

Pre-emption … Israel’s determination to attack Iran would guarantee that Iran would strike back at both Israel and the US, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers in a closed meeting with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine, The Guardian reports. Rubio & Co. held the meeting ahead of an expected House vote Thursday on a war powers resolution sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA). 

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol afterwards.

President says … “Our objectives are clear,” Trump said at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House Monday (pictured). “First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities and we see that happening on an hourly basis, and their capacity to produce brand new ones, and pretty good ones they make. Second, we’re annihilating their navy, already we’ve knocked out 10 ships. They’re at the bottom of the sea. Third, we’re insisting that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon, they can never have a nuclear weapon. I’ve said that from the very beginning. They’re never gonna have a nuclear weapon. They were on the road to getting one, legitimately through a deal that was signed foolishly by our country. And finally, we’re insuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorists outside of their borders.”

Trump uncharacteristically took no reporters’ questions after just six minutes of remarks but characteristically pivoted to compliment himself about choosing new gold drapes and how he is building the biggest, best ballroom anywhere in place of what used to be the White House East Wing.

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The Clintons’ Recordings – The House Oversight Committee Monday released recordings of its questioning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton regarding their connection to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, taken at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center in New York last week, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Hillary Clinton told the committee she did not know Epstein, only that Ghislaine Maxwell had attended daughter Chelsea’s wedding as a “plus-one” with another guest.

Bill Clinton told the committee he recalled seeing Donald J. Trump at a golf tournament about 2002-03 in which the future president told the former president he “had some great times together over the years” but fell out over a real estate deal.

“The president …” Bill Clinton said, “this is 20-something years ago, never said anything to make me think he was involved in anything improper with regard to Epstein, either. He just didn’t. He just said, ‘we were friends, and we had a falling out over a land deal.’ That’s all.” 

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Tuesday’s Primaries – Primary elections are held Tuesday in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas. – Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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Regime Change? -- MONDAY 3/2/26

By Todd Lassa

Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei is dead, killed by Israeli and US military forces on sudden strikes announced by President Trump at 2 a.m. Saturday, Washington time.

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History is dead,” Trump Truth Socialed. 

In a brief telephone interview from Mar-a-Lago Sunday told The New York Times he intends to keep the assault on Iran going for “four to five weeks.”

“It won’t be difficult. We have tremendous amounts of ammunition,” the president said in the interview. “You know, we have ammunition stored all over the world in different countries.”

The US military attack on Venezuela in which its president, Nicolás Maduro was arrested and brought to New York in January was “the perfect scenario” for regime change in Iran, Trump told the NYT. But Iranian protesters – an estimated 7,000, according to The Associated Press, of whom gave their lives trying to push back against the brutal totalitarian regime in the last month – do not have an organization backing them in order to take over, Middle Eastern analysts say.

“Anytime you start down this path, you don’t really know where it leads,” Daniel Shapiro, former US ambassador to Israel, told NPR’s Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday, from Israel, as Iran counter-attacked that country with missiles. “Again, I hope to see the demise of this regime, and I hope the Iranian people have a better life. But what has been launched now could produce all kinds of outcomes, and it could produce a military dictatorship. It could produce a civil war. It could produce a splintering of the country itself.”

The US-Israeli attack comes after negotiations broke down last week between Iranian diplomats and US special envoy Steve Witkoff with White House son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump has said just before his State of the Union address that war on Iran could come within a couple of weeks if no accord was reached.

In another, earlier call, this one with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer Sunday, Trump said of Iran’s post-Khamenei leadership; “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner.”

But attacks intensified on Sunday, the NYT reports, with Iran striking Israel and Gulf countries in the Middle East, killing three US troops. 

Having prepared for Trump’s apparent capriciousness, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced a House resolution calling for a war powers vote on Trump’s military action in Iran.

Is the start of a new war with Iran a wag-the-dog situation? The week in which only congressional Republicans and the MAGA faithful had anything good to say about Tuesday’s State of the Union address ended with ex-President Bill Clinton testifying on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein while deferring to the House Oversight Committee to determine whether the current president should do the same.

But any wag-the-dog theories must consider the other party involved in a “four or five week” war on Iran: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who fended off an impending trial into corruption charges against him by claiming it would divert too much necessary attention on the country’s war fighting Iran-backed Hezbollah in Gaza.

Last December, in a request suggested by Trump, Netanyahu asked Israeli President Isaac Herzog for a pardon. Netanyahu has called the three separate cases of bribery, breach of trust and fraud launched in 2019 a “witch hunt.”

Four years before that, Netanyahu vehemently opposed then-President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action written to prevent Iran’s nuclear arms development. Trump killed Obama’s JCPA at the beginning of his first term in 2017.

Today, Netanyahu has yet another diversion from his impending trial, as Trump faces the possibility of another extended US war in the Middle East and the end of the lower gasoline prices at the pump he has claimed as a major part of his second term’s economic miracle. 

After the US-Israeli attacks, Iran notified ships in the region that it had closed the Strait of Hormuz, according to The Independent. By Sunday night, benchmark US crude futures were up by as much as 11% to $75 barrel, with Brent futures, the global price gauge, up 8% to about $79, The Wall Street Journal reports.

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MONDAY 3/2/26

…meanwhile…

Britain’s New PM – Speaking in front of 10 Downing Street after his appointment by King Richard III, Britain’s third prime minister in less than two months, Rishi Sunak, vowed to make economic stability his priority, The Guardian reports. Admitting that “mistakes were made” by predecessor Liz Truss, who announced a “mini-budget” with unfunded tax cuts during her 50 days as PM, Sunak warned of “difficult decisions to come.”

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More on the Trump Tapes – CNN cited this quote from Bob Woodward’s new audiobook, The Trump Tapes, in Jake Tapper’s lead-in to an interview with The Washington Post’s associate editor Tuesday night: “The record now shows that Trump has led – and continues to lead – a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy.”

--Edited by Todd Lassa

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(MON 10/24/22)

Iran and China – At the end of the week in which the Iranian government denied it was supplying kamikaze drones to Russia for its war on Ukraine – a denial no one other than Tehran and the Kremlin believe -- The Washington Post reported Saturday that some classified documents the FBI recovered from Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago last August 8 included highly sensitive secrets about Iran and China.

“If shared with others,” sources told the newspaper, “such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.” At least one of the documents details Iran’s missile program, WaPo reports. 

The Woodward Tapes: These revelations come before release of The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with Donald Trump, available from Simon & Schuster Audio on Tuesday. Associate Editor Bob Woodward writes in his WaPo op-ed that the tapes “show why he is an unparalleled danger” to the U.S., siding with such dictators as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and valuing loyalty from political associates over all else. 

Connecting the Dots: Prospects the Biden administration will re-negotiate the 2015 Obama Iranian nuclear deal dismantled by Trump are surely over. But the whole of the Trump administration foreign “policy”, from swift cancellation of that agreement with Iran to the former president’s antagonism toward NATO and his admiration for Vladimir Putin must be examined in the Justice Department’s investigation of Mar-a-Lagogate.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Trump is the Most Conservative Republican President of Our Time

By Andrew Boyd

The question at hand, is Trump a conservative, is an interesting one for sure. Stephen argues first and foremost that it’s family values and fiscal conservatism. It’s certainly arguable that the conservative movement put a lot of its eggs in these two baskets over the past several decades and has largely failed to deliver on either. But I think there are greater fundamental issues at play. More on that later. Let’s first unpack the stuff in Stephen’s argument.

In character, I'd agree that Trump is not a conservative. In his deeds, he most certainly is.

On the fiscal front, Trump is a mixed bag. He’s not taken on the systemic issues of government bloat and out-of-control federal spending (yes, it’s a spending issue), but he has installed pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that led to a booming post-Obama, pre-COVID economy the likes we’ve never seen. Sadly, I’m not sure there’s a serious political player on the national stage who’s willing to go to bat for a balanced federal budget or the reeling in of the welfare state. These are cans virtually everyone seems happy just to kick down the road. I’d say that, systemically, our body politic is in something akin to a persistent vegetative state on the debt and deficit thingy, which is certainly not ideal from this conservative’s point of view, but not something particularly attributable to Trump.

But what about free and fair trade? asks Stephen. Yes, it could be argued that Trump stepped over the line on the Canadian aluminum tariffs, but I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent in a conservative’s appreciation for the free exchange of goods at home and nationalistic international economic policy. Trump was elected to represent the people of Peoria, nor Paris, after all, and I’m mostly down with that. Tariffs are lousy, long-term structural tools, but they can come in handy at the negotiating table, which is by and large how the administration has used them, in my estimation. 

But what about family values? Seriously, in Washington, Stephen?  Surely you jest.  Personal peccadillos of the Trumpian sort have been baked into the swamp cake since the dawn of the republic. Do I wish he was less like JFK and more like Obama in the category of marital fidelity? For sure. But you work with what you’ve got. And in the new age of a leftist, socialist-slouching Democratic party, I think an increasing number of conservatives are inclined to take a more macro view.  

At the macro level, Trump, I would argue, is the most conservative president in my lifetime.  Drawing down the 15-year Afghanistan fiasco, taking the hard line with China, appointing textualist Supreme Court justices, delivering American energy independence and leveraging the same in foreign policy, supporting Israel, the Middle East’s only functioning Democracy, putting Hezbollah and the Iran mullahs on their heels and calling out the leftist media establishment for their gross journalistic malfeasance. 

The only blind obedience I’m aware of within my Republican circles is to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and the ideals these documents embody. Trump isn’t perfect by a long shot, but he’s drawn the party back toward its genuine center of gravity, motivating its base and drawing a stark contrast with the socialist, globalist, identity politics dogma of the unhinged left.  

If time and space weren’t issues, I’d take another thousand words to explain how Obama was, by contrast, the least traditionally liberal, least inclusive president in my lifetime, by a long shot, but that’s a column for another day.

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