Swing Your Partners, Occupy Gaza & Mess w/Texas – Top 3 Takeaways, August 8th, 2025
Takeaway #1: Choose your trade partners wisely
Today is a potentially important day in numerous ways. First, it’s President Trump’s deadline to Russian President Putin to end the war in Ukraine or to suffer additional consequences. At this point it’s clear there will be no peace declaration today so Trump’s tough talk must be backed up with tough policy or risk losing crediblity. Already we’ve seen President Trump double tariffs on one of Russia’s top trade partners, India, due to their energy trade with Russia. Here’s the view of who could be in the crosshairs today... China is by far the largest trade partner of Russia, with over 80% of the country’s fuel comes from Russia. Will Trump reignite a trade war with China over his Russian demands? But it doesn’t end there. Turkey, a NATO member, is number three in purchasing Russian energy, Brazil – which Trump has already signled out for especially high tariffs, is a big buyer, South Korea is also in the mix and even countries still within the EU – led by Hungary, but also France (as they and many other hypocrites virtue signal to Ukraine). Belgium’s a big buyer on a relative basis too. No kidding... So here’s the thing. Not many people are paying as much attention to today’s Russian deadline as it probably deserves. I have no idea what exactly will or won’t take place today but the implications are many. This is worth watching today.
Takeaway #2: Will Democrats be allowed to mess with Texas?
Something else that could come to a head today... Whatever may be with the fleeing Democrats in Texas. Today is the day that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has pledged to move forward with his plan to remove the 50+ fleeing state legislators from Texas who left the state to prevent a vote on the state’s congressional redistricting plan. In the words of Paxton: Starting Friday, any rogue lawmakers refusing to return to the House will be held accountable for vacating their office. What does that mean? It would mean that Paxton would file a case against each of the 50 Democrats in district courts seeking to expel them from office. It’s a process. From there, if Paxton and the state of Texas were to win, Governor Greg Abbott would have to call special elections to fill their seats as that’s what’s called for under Texas law. In other words, his adminisration couldn’t knock the Democrats out and replace them with their preferences as well. But there is one development that sets the stage for all of this today. The Texas Supreme Court has set a 5 p.m. deadline today for Texas Democrat Caucus Chair Gene Wu, the leader of the fleeing, to respond to the state’s already filed request for him to be removed from office. Stay tuned...
Takeaway #3: A change of plans
On Friday morning, nearly twenty years to the day that a tremendous mistake was made by the Israeli government that eventually led to Hamas’s attrocities on October 7th, 2023 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanahu successfully pushed through a proposal approved by Israel’s Security cabinet that approves a full occupation of Gaza City (and the surrounding strip). What that means is that Israel intends to undo what it did that aided the rise of Hamas in the process. Called the Disengagement Plan Implementation Law, the Israeli Cabinet passed a law in June of 2004 ceding control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian National Authority. The law imposed a deadline of August 15th, 2005 for all 21 Israeli settlements, which had been in place since 1970, to be dismantled and for all Israeli soliders to be evicted. The logic at the time was said to be two fold. First, there was the high cost of the ongoing occupation which was said to be draining resources from Israel’s mainland to a non-permanet Israeli territory. Second, was ongoing warring between Israel and terrorist organizations like Hamas, over the Gaza territory which Israel had occupied since 1967. The demand of Palestinians, at that point led by the PLO, in exchange for realative peace, was the withdrawl from Gaza. Well, we see how that worked out. Israel had already agreed to cede control of disputed teritories under 1993’s Oslo Accord, and then only a little over a decade later, the ceded the Gaza Strip as well. These moves were viewed as huge victories by terrorists, like Hamas, which flooded the territory with it’s presence, rapidly recruited new members, and within a matter of months overwhelmingly won the election in January of 2006 knocking the PLO from power setting the stage for everything that happened since. It was literally only five months from the time Israel fully withdrew from Gaza until the time that Hamas had completetly taken over control of the entireity of the Palestinian terroritories and people. It was entirely predictable that a terror organization which was founded on a mission statement that states: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. '[Peace] initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement... Would result in what we’ve seen. There can be no peace with Palestinians because they don’t desire peace, but rather the eradication of Jewish people and the state Israel. Netanahu’s reversal of plans twenty years later is what’s needed if the citizens of Israel are to ever have a chance to live in relative peace once again. The plan calls for the eventual turning over of the territory to an “alternative civil adminisration” that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.