Now I know what they do at faculty meetings on the humanities/social sciences side of campus » « They never learn

Infinite Thread XXXIX

It’s almost spring-like outside — the skies are clear, we’ve got cool breezes on a comfortable day, the plants are coming back… I know it can’t last but I’ll make the most of it. I’ve opened windows to let birdsong in and to drive the cat crazy.

Let the pleasant conversations flow!

Previous Thread

Now I know what they do at faculty meetings on the humanities/social sciences side of campus » « They never learn

Comments

  1. birgerjohansson says

    Thank you for starting a new thread. BTW are there reliable records of how many that participated in Saturday’s demonstrations? I have read a wide range of estimates.

  2. birgerjohansson says

    Humoristic anecdote from social media. A dude named Nasser got the “ass” part automatically censored. The result was actually worse:
    -“Nxxxer” .

  3. says

    For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous set of comments on The Infinite Thread.

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296755
    […] some additional details I’ve gathered from Finnish news today. The two drones both crashed in forest near the town of Kouvola on Sunday morning, after flying nearly 100 km within Finnish airspace. At least one of them was followed by the aforementioned Finnish fighter jets, but not shot down due to reasons I’ll discuss below.

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296756
    “Just 67,000 US Troops In Iran […]” “Anybody smell boots on the ground?”

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296753
    Judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit challenging in-state tuition for undocumented students in Minnesota

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296751
    Trump gives Russia yet another pass, says it’s ‘fine’ for Putin to break Cuba oil blockade

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296747
    Mediaite: Sharpie Rebuts Trump’s Account of Phone Call With Company: ‘We Don’t Have Any Information About the Conversation’

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296537
    Vance suggests Iran could have used nuclear suicide vests

  5. says

    RFK Jr. Gushes Over ‘Empath’ Trump

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has blamed a brain worm for past cognitive issues, is now insisting President Donald Trump is an “empath.”

    Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas on Saturday, the health secretary delivered a full-throated defense of the president—one that sounded less like political alignment and more like a total character rewrite.

    “President Trump is exactly the opposite of everything that I believed him to be,” Kennedy told the crowd.

    “I basically drank the Kool-Aid—that he was this bombastic narcissist who didn’t read books and was ill-informed. But now I know the exact opposite,” he said.

    “He’s an empath.”

    Kennedy didn’t stop there.

    He also marveled at Trump’s supposed intellectual range, claiming he has “encyclopedic, molecular knowledge” of everything from Broadway to Wall Street.

    To illustrate his point, he recounted a moment on the campaign trail when Trump allegedly flipped over a placemat mid-flight and drew a “perfect map of the Mideast,” complete with troop levels along each border. [Unfuckingbelievable]

    […] He also invoked his own family legacy, suggesting that both his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, would have supported Trump’s decisions on Iran and Ukraine.

    “I think that if they were around today, that they would be making the same kind of choices that President Trump is.” [Also unbelievable]

    That kind of fawning isn’t new in Trumpworld. If anything, the louder the praise, the more it tends to signal trouble behind the scenes, and some signs suggest that might be the case for Kennedy. [Yeah, that’s more likely.]

    On Saturday’s edition of Inside Trump’s Head, Trump biographer Michael Wolff said the president has been quietly calling his allies to ask blunt questions about Kennedy.

    “I know that he’s been calling around and saying to people, you know, ‘I hear people say, Bobby is crazy. You think he’s crazy?’” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “And you know the answer he wants.”

    Kennedy’s tenure has been dogged by controversy, particularly over vaccines, where medical groups and public health experts have accused him of pushing unfounded claims and undermining long-standing guidance.

    Even within the administration, there have been concerns that his policies could become a political problem heading into the midterms.

    Of course, none of that came up at CPAC. Instead, Kennedy used the moment to lean all the way in, ditching any remaining distance and embracing Trump with the kind of glowing praise reserved for the president’s most loyal inner circle.

    Kennedy was met with swift ridicule online, with critics zeroing in on the more fantastical details. […]

  6. says

    Vital U.S. radar aircraft was destroyed by Iranian strike on U.S. base in Saudi Arabia, photos show

    The destruction by Iran of a warning and control system aircraft on an American base in Saudi Arabia on Friday could impact the U.S. military’s ability to monitor threats — and raises questions around its preparedness for a “longer war,” experts say.

    […] Several American service members were injured in Friday’s strike on the facility, which sits around 80 miles southeast of the kingdom’s capital, Riyadh. At least one aircraft was also damaged in the strike, two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed to NBC News. [Photo]

    […] “Iran is gradually eating away at the network of early warning systems that the US has built over decades in the region,” Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, said in written comments to NBC News on Monday.

    […] The E-3 Sentry, an airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, was one of six stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base prior to Friday’s attack […]

    Krieg [Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies] said the U.S. should have foreseen such an attack and “should have been prepared better for a longer war,” particularly “fighting from permanent installations, especially in a theatre where the other side has large numbers of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and one-way attack drones.”

    Still, he said he believed the U.S. was still doing a “reasonably effective job overall of protecting its assets in a very difficult theatre,” with “most incoming threats” reportedly being intercepted.

    Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a Bronze Star recipient who served for 21 years, disagreed.

    “We’re not doing OK at all,” he said in a telephone interview Monday. Davis, a senior fellow and military expert at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank, added that the U.S. was “not militarily prepared for this to be a sustained war.”

    […] In an interview in Qatar on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was “100%” confident Moscow was sharing such intelligence with Tehran to aid in targeting U.S. forces across the Middle East in the war, which began after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. […]

  7. says

    Trump’s personal and political interests keep looking more like Saudi Arabia’s

    In recent months, Donald Trump has traveled to Mar-a-Lago nearly every weekend, and this past weekend was no exception. On Friday night, however, the president added a stop before arriving at his glorified country club: Trump went to Miami to speak at a conference for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund.

    The remarks did not go especially well. While bragging about the war in Iran he started for reasons he’s struggled to explain, Trump boasted that he and his administration “saved the Middle East” — a claim that roughly coincided with news that an Iranian missile strike had injured American service members stationed at an air base in Saudi Arabia.

    The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump appeared to be unaware in the moment of the combined missile and drone attack, which was one of the most serious breaches of U.S. air defenses in the course of the monthlong war. While onstage, he continued to praise the dominance of the United States and its Gulf allies. The result was an unsettling, split-screen reminder that despite Mr. Trump’s contention, the war is far from resolved and could risk more American lives.”

    […] The sitting American president was speaking at a conference for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund, on the heels of his son-in-law Jared Kushner turning to Saudi officials for more money for his private investment firm. [!]

    This is the same son-in-law who also happens to be simultaneously leading the U.S. government’s negotiations in the Middle East, despite his obvious conflicts of interests and the fact that he holds no public office. [True]

    […] Riyadh — when it’s not talking business with Trump’s son-in-law, or not focused on private dealings with Trump’s family business — is playing a direct role in helping steer Trump’s foreign policy in the region. The Times also reported last week:

    Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a ‘historic opportunity’ to remake the Middle East, according to people briefed by American officials on the conversations. [!]

    In a series of conversations over the last week, Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government, the people familiar with the conversations said.

    So, on one hand, we see the affairs of state, with Saudi Arabia pressing the American president to continue to wage war against Saudi’s principal foe. On the other hand, we also see the American president’s family working on private deals with Saudi Arabia as Trump simultaneously extends his public support to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund. [Corruption, stupidity, and Trump’s gullibility on display.]

    All of these developments come on the heels of Trump ignoring Pentagon concerns about selling F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, which roughly coincided with Trump announcing that the White House had designated Saudi Arabia a “major non-NATO ally” as part of a new security agreement.

    The same week, Trump welcomed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office, inexplicably praised his human rights record, suggested that murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi had it coming and chastised an American reporter for asking the Saudi leader “an insubordinate question,” as if members of the free press were somehow the crown prince’s employees.

    As the event continued, the American president horsed around with the crown prince like a pair of kids having a good time. Grabbing his guest’s hand, Trump said, “I don’t care where that hand’s been.”

    It was embarrassing at the time, but it’s quite a bit worse now that Trump’s interest in Riyadh’s interests has intensified.

  8. says

    Trump propaganda, the app

    […] Trump peddled the new White House app on Monday, the latest attempt to funnel news through a MAGA-filtered version of reality.

    “You can watch all White House events, read all my executive orders, and keep track of all of our promises made, promises kept,” Trump said, with the same enthusiasm he once used to hawk overpriced steaks in a box. “In fact, I actually kept more promises than I even talked about. We did much more than I said we were going to do.” [video]

    […] As Trump’s war persists, the White House appears to be accelerating its efforts to control the narrative with increased public attacks on independent media from top officials like Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

    Reviews of the app include both the MAGA faithful—probably of the bot variety—and critics, including one who gave a one-star review titled, “Waste of Resources.” [Example at the link]

    Some of those links to “websites” include an Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line, which allows users to drop a dime on neighbors after they’ve read a news article telling them we’ve won the war in Iran and that the skyrocketing gas prices they’re paying at the pump are simply figments of their imagination.

    But don’t rush to your local app store just yet. According to Mashable, the app is a security nightmare that also grants the White House access to users’ precise locations, network connections, and biometric data—along with the ability to keep devices from sleeping and even modify or delete files in shared storage.
    […]

  9. cheerfulcharlie says

    Trump is an empath? Oh noes! Saint Charlie Kirk hated empathy.

    In 2022, Charlie Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, declared, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that…does a lot of damage.”

    See Google. Emathy was a term invented in Germany in the late 19th century. The term was Anglicized in the early 20th century. From the right hand of God in heaven, Charlie Kirk glowers down on Donald Trump.

  11. says

    cheerfulcharlie @9, yes, you are correct. And I’ve heard other right-wingers say that empathy is not a virtue.

    How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles. (That’s an NPR link to part of a conversation broadcast of Weekend Edition Saturday.)

    People tend to think of empathy or caring about other people’s feelings as a good thing, but in some conservative circles, there’s a growing chorus of voices arguing that empathy could be bad.

    ELON MUSK: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

    MCCAMMON: That’s billionaire Elon Musk, speaking recently on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” They were discussing the idea that unchecked immigration into Western countries is threatening Western political and cultural values. Musk agrees and warns that societies are at risk of self-destructing.

    MUSK: There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself.

    JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

    MUSK: So that – we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

    MCCAMMON: Musk, of course, is a close adviser to President Trump and the leader of the administration’s DOGE initiative, which is making massive cuts to the federal government, including humanitarian programs at home and overseas. Musk said empathy can be good, but it’s too often weaponized to persuade well-meaning people to support bad ideas. In recent months, several high-profile Christian conservatives have been sounding similar warnings.

    JOSH MCPHERSON: Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.

    UNIDENTIFIED PASTOR #1: It does.

    UNIDENTIFIED PASTOR #2: Yes.

    MCPHERSON: Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.

    ALLIE BETH STUCKEY: Really, I think empathy as hoisted up as the highest virtue, or even a virtue at all – I think that really gets us into a really big mess.

    JOE RIGNEY: Most people have a hard time imagining how empathy could ever be harmful. And therefore, if I’m the devil, where am I going to hide some of my most destructive tactics?

    MCCAMMON: That was pastor Josh McPherson on his podcast, “Stronger Man Nation,” conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey on the “Family Talk” podcast, and author Joe Rigney, discussing his book, “The Sin Of Empathy,” on a podcast hosted by Al Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. [MCCAMMON is an NPR host.]

    New York Times columnist David French has noticed this discourse and wrote about it in a recent column called “Behold The Strange Spectacle Of Christians Against Empathy.” French says Jesus – the central figure in Christianity – embodied empathy by coming to Earth as a man and enduring the human experience. French notes that Trump has cut programs long supported by many evangelicals and conservative Catholics, including funding for religious organizations that help the poor.

    DAVID FRENCH: So how do you rationalize this change? And I think that that’s why some of these arguments about toxic empathy and other concepts are falling upon willing and open ears because they’re – people are looking for a moral frame around which they can fit the Trump movement, and decrying empathy helps them do that.

    MCCAMMON: Some conservatives also argue that women are especially susceptible to being misled by appeals to empathy, often when it comes to helping people who are suffering or in need. Here’s Allie Beth Stuckey on “Family Talk.”

    STUCKEY: They’ll use emotional, compassionate, kind-sounding language in order to get a woman to think, well, in order to be a good person, in order to be kind, in order to even love my neighbor, then I have to be pro-open borders. I have to be pro-LGBTQ. I have to be pro-choice.

    MCCAMMON: In an interview with NPR, Joe Rigney said he believes women are more naturally empathetic, which makes them better nurturers. Rigney says they’re also more likely to reject church teachings they see as lacking compassion.

    RIGNEY: And in that kind of context, the empathetic sex is ill-suited precisely because of the ways that that empathy could be manipulated into, say, refusing to draw lines or in the name of helping a oppressed group, we’re going to abandon our biblical confession or something like that.

    MCCAMMON: David French, meanwhile, says the idea that women are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation ties in closely with Christian nationalism, the idea that Christian men should run the country.

    FRENCH: And so you do have quite a bit of literature in the far right – the Christian nationalist right – that is decrying what they see as the, quote, “feminized church, feminized political discourse.” They say that America is a gynocracy, is what they will call it. And that empathy element is a part of their argument.

    MCCAMMON: Rigney says he wouldn’t flinch from being described as a Christian nationalist.

    RIGNEY: And I want society to be Christian. So, yes, I think it’s true. I think it’s good for the world, and I think it’s, quite frankly, good for religious minorities. I think that, in many ways, in the absence of that, tyranny is inevitable.

    MCCAMMON: French says he worries that some Christians have shifted from fighting for religious freedom to fighting for Christian dominance. But when it comes to calls for public policies grounded in empathy, he acknowledges that everyone has to draw lines somewhere.

    FRENCH: There are times when the head has to overrule the heart. That is something that has to happen sometimes in public policy. But at the same time, there should be no objection to appeals to the heart because our compassion, our empathy is a fundamental part of who we should be as human beings. […]

    The sound bites that NPR played came from podcasts: “Thinking in Public,” “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “Stronger Men Nation,” and “Family Talk.”

  12. says

    CBS can’t stop Charles Barkley from supporting immigrants live on air

    Poor, poor David Ellison. The newish head of Paramount is trying so hard—and spending so much of daddy Larry Ellison’s money—to eradicate all traces of wokeness on CBS, and then Charles Barkley just goes and wrecks it all live on air.

    Before Sunday night’s Elite Eight matchup between University of Connecticut and Duke University, CBS aired a piece on Alex Karaban, a UConn Huskies forward who emigrated here from Belarus with his family. After the piece aired, Barkley, speaking live during the network’s March Madness in-studio program, went off, and off script […]

    “I love that kid and his family, but the way some of these other immigrants are getting treated in our country right now is a travesty and a disgrace.”

    […] Barkley went on: “And that’s a great immigrant story, and we have a lot of great immigrant stories out there … but some of the things that’s happening in our country to immigrants now is really unfortunate, and it’s really unfair. But immigrants built this country, and we should admire them and respect them.”

    [Ellison] got Trump’s pet thug at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, to block late night host Stephen Colbert from airing an interview with James Talarico, the Texas Democrat campaigning for Senate. Hell, Ellison had the network cancel Colbert entirely, […] for no reason save for the fact that Trump hates him?

    Ellison gave Bari Weiss the reins at CBS News, and he continues to give her free rein even as the ratings tank. The installation of Tony Dokoupil as anchor for “CBS Evening News” has done nothing to move CBS out of the basement for nightly news ratings. Instead, for the week ending March 9, Dokoupil averaged 3.83 million viewers. By comparison, ABC’s nightly news averaged 8.48 million, while NBC nabbed 6.51 million. [smile, that’s good news]

    […] while Ellison can force this non-wokeness into a lot of places at CBS, trying to control live television is a fool’s errand […]

    Barkley is the guy […] who spoke up on ESPN after Border Patrol goons murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis: “It’s scary and it’s sad. It’s sad. I don’t know how. … You know it’s going to end bad. … Somebody has got to step up and be adults because two people have died for no reason, and it’s just sad.”

    This is the guy who, after the Supreme Court killed affirmative action, changed his will about his already-pledged $5 million to his alma mater, Auburn University, from a scholarship for low-income students to scholarships for Black students specifically.

    This is the guy who, after two Black students from a New Orleans high school solved the centuries-old Pythagorean theorem, donated $1 million to support the school.

    Conservatives remain furious that they can’t control culture the way they control all other levers of power. This is especially maddening about sports culture, as conservatives perceive that as a space they should own, culture-wise.

    That was the impetus for all their howling rage over Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl and the genesis of the pathetic alternative halftime show. We all know how that worked out: Bad Bunny grabbed more eyeballs than any halftime show ever, and Turning Point’s halftime show … did not.

    It’s clear that even sports fans do not want the things that Trump and the Ellisons and CBS are selling. […]

  14. says

    Follow-up to birger @10.

    Trump wants to loot Iran—while committing war crimes

    As the war in Iran spirals out of control and weakens the global economy, […] Trump asserted that the United States could steal Iran’s oil resources and destroy civilian infrastructure, acts that could be considered war crimes.

    Over the weekend, Trump told the Financial Times that his “preference would be to take the oil” in Iran. He added, “My favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

    Then in a post to his social media account, Trump wrote on Monday that “if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)”

    Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s infrastructure, which civilians rely on, is an echo of a previous statement made earlier this month. Amnesty International described his statement as “a threat to commit war crimes.” [Amnesty International is correct.]

    “Intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally prohibited. Even in the limited cases that they qualify as military targets, a party still cannot attack power plants if this may cause disproportionate harm to civilians,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, the organization’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns.

    […] Trump’s war of choice against Iran has led to a shortage of oil supplies, causing prices to skyrocket in the U.S. and across the globe. […] caused even more financial stability around the world—which was already being rocked by Trump’s decision to impose massive tariffs on international trade.

    […] Normalizing war crimes and stealing foreign resources is likely to spur even more Americans into opposing Trump’s dictatorial actions.

  15. says

    GOP wants to cut health care funding to pay for Iran war

    […] congressional Republicans are looking for ways to help fund the quagmire President Donald Trump created in the Middle East. And it appears they have settled on an option that could make their approval ratings and chances in the midterm elections sink to new lows.

    House Republicans are throwing around an idea to make cuts to the Affordable Care Act in order to find the $200 billion Trump needs to get himself out of the mess he created in Iran, Axios reported on Monday.

    […] If the Republican Party went through with the plan, 300,000 Americans would likely go uninsured, and millions of others would pay more for their annual insurance premiums […]

    “Republicans in Congress want to cut Americans’ health care to pay for more war in Iran,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote in a post on X. “Let that sink in.”

  17. says

    MS NOW:

    Demonstrators turned out in droves in thousands of cities and towns, big and small, across the country today to protest what No Kings organizers call President Donald Trump’s ‘authoritarian power grabs’ — his administration’s policies on everything from the Iran war, immigration, federal law-enforcement crackdowns in cities and the recent deployment of ICE officers to airports.

    […] Minnesota held the nation’s flagship No Kings rally at the state Capitol in St. Paul, where Bruce Springsteen performed his recent single “Streets of Minneapolis,” about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers, to a massive audience. The line-up also included Joan Baez, Gov. Tim Walz, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and civil rights activists.

    White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed this weekend’s planned anti-Trump demonstrations as “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions.”

    Demonstrators also gathered en masse for rallies in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Texas, and in the president’s backyard: West Palm Beach, Florida, where pro- and anti-Trump protestors briefly clashed a few miles away from Mar-a-Lago before demonstrations turned peaceful again.

    Link

    Good video at the link.

    See also: ‘No Kings’ protests recap: More than 8 million turned out across all 50 states, organizers say

    See also: “No Kings” Protests Draw 8 Million People for the Largest Single Day of Protests in U.S. History

  18. says

    Associated Pres:

    The Pentagon has flouted a court order blocking it from enforcing a policy limiting news reporters’ access to the Defense Department’s headquarters, a New York Times attorney asserted Monday in urging a federal judge to compel the government’s compliance with the 10-day-old order.

    U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman didn’t immediately rule from the bench after hearing a second round of arguments from lawyers for the newspaper and the Trump administration. The Times claims Pentagon officials have implemented a revised press policy that circumvents the judge’s March 20 ruling.

    Friedman sided with The Times earlier this month in deciding that the Pentagon’s new credential policy violated journalists’ constitutional rights to free speech and due process. He ordered Pentagon officials to reinstate the press credentials of seven Times reporters and stressed that his decision applies to “all regulated parties.”

    U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman didn’t immediately rule from the bench after hearing a second round of arguments from lawyers for the newspaper and the Trump administration. The Times claims Pentagon officials have implemented a revised press policy that circumvents the judge’s March 20 ruling.

    Friedman sided with The Times earlier this month in deciding that the Pentagon’s new credential policy violated journalists’ constitutional rights to free speech and due process. He ordered Pentagon officials to reinstate the press credentials of seven Times reporters and stressed that his decision applies to “all regulated parties.”

    […]n a court filing Sunday, Times national security reporter Julian Barnes said Pentagon staff also explained to him and his colleagues last week that their new credentials would give them access a new press area located in the Pentagon library. But the only way for the reporters to access the library is through a corridor or on a shuttle bus that they didn’t have permission to use, Barnes noted — prompting a pointed response from Friedman.

    “How weird is that?” the judge said. “Is it Catch-22? Is it Kafka? What’s going on here?”

    In October, reporters from mainstream news outlets walked out of the building rather than agree to the new rules. The Times sued the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in December to challenge the policy. […]

    Times attorneys accused the Pentagon of violating the judge’s March 20 order, “both in letter and spirit,” by issuing a revised “interim” policy that bars credentialed reporters from entering the building without an escort. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say the latest policy also imposes unprecedented rules dictating when reporters can offer anonymity to sources. […]

    Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell has said the administration would appeal Friedman’s March 20 decision. […]

  19. says

    New York Times:

    “[Thirteen] people who have died in federal immigration custody in the first three months of this year, and one of 46 who have died since President Trump took office last year and began his mass deportation campaign, according to death reports and news releases made public by ICE

  20. says

    Rhode Island Current:

    A U.S. Justice Department lawyer admitted in court Thursday that if Rhode Island hands over unredacted voter rolls, that data will be shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to check citizenship status.

  21. says

    New York Times:

    The war in the Middle East continued to weigh on the U.S. housing market, as mortgage rates climbed for the fourth week in a row, squeezing Americans already struggling with high housing costs.

    The average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage rate climbed to 6.38 percent, according to the mortgage-financing giant Freddie Mac, up from 6.22 percent the week before and the highest level since the first week of September. […]

  22. says

    NBC News:

    The Education Department will relocate from its headquarters to a smaller Washington office as part of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency, officials said Thursday.

    The agency has seen its ranks thinned by mass layoffs since President Donald Trump took office, and its headquarters building has been 70% vacant, the Education Department said. In its place, the Energy Department will assume the lease in the building.

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon hailed it as a milestone in the administration’s efforts to shutter the agency, which Trump ordered to move toward closure a year ago this month.

    “Thanks to the hard work of so many, we have made unprecedented progress in reducing the federal education footprint, and now we are pleased to give this building to an agency that will benefit far more from its space than the Department of Education,” McMahon said in a written statement.

    […] The union representing department workers condemned the move.

    “The message the Secretary’s announcement sends to our staff and the American public is clear — education is next on the chopping block,” American Federation of Government Employees Local 252 President Rachel Gittleman said in a statement.

    Only Congress has the authority to close the department, but the Trump administration has offloaded many of the Education Department’s programs and functions to other parts of the federal government through so-called “interagency agreements.”

    Still, moving the Education Department out of its headquarters is one of the most “overt actions” McMahon has taken to shut down the agency, said Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

    “This decision to close the Department’s physical building is not just a symbolic move,” Scott said in a statement. “It reflects a broader effort to reduce the federal government’s role in ensuring people have equal access to a quality education.” […]

    Link

  25. says

    Trump reportedly includes Elon Musk in phone meeting with foreign leader (again)

    “The president had much to discuss with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So why would he include his billionaire megadonor in the call?”

    […] There was no obvious reason why the American president would include Elon Musk in the call, but according to The New York Times, that’s precisely what happened:

    Elon Musk participated in a phone call on Tuesday with President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, an unusual appearance by a private citizen on a call between two heads of state during a wartime crisis. […]

    It is unclear why Mr. Musk was on the call or whether he spoke. … The call, American and Indian officials have said, was about the escalating crisis in the Middle East, and in particular the Iranian military’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is critical for the shipping of oil and gas around the globe.

    […] it would suggest that the rift between the president and his top 2024 campaign donor has been resolved and that Musk is no longer on the outs with Team Trump.

    […] Why in the world would the American president agree to let a private citizen join a sensitive call with a key foreign leader about an ongoing war?

    More to the point, why would Trump do this again?

    During the Republican’s pre-inaugural transition period, Trump did this quite a bit:
    – When Trump met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago, Musk participated in the conversation.
    – When Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Musk joined the phone call.
    – When Trump traveled to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral and spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron, Musk was there.
    – When Trump spoke to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Musk was there, too.

    About a year and a half later, it’s apparently happening again.

    The New Republic noted, “There is literally no rational justification for including the world’s richest man on a call between two national leaders during a global crisis.” […]

  27. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Lynna @15: Maybe we shouldn’t reward incompetence as pretext for austerity and emergency powers.
     
    birgerjohansson @26: Another possibility from Shriekback, Ambergris.

    Because there are just not enough songs about whale shit (or maybe vomit: the jury’s out, apparently). It floats on the water (known by sailors as Liquid Gold, gets steadily less shit-smelling and ends up as something people pay a fortune for

  30. birgerjohansson says

    CompulsoryAccount7746 @ 27 Ambergris would be a perfect analogy for the current government: smelly garbage that is excreted/vomited and sold as perfume.

  31. birgerjohansson says

    Nerd entertainment. When half a dozen milbloggers get together for a 2-hour Youtube stream to suggest the best 1985-era tech aircraft for a hypothetical megalomanic dictator. The presentations start at the 20-minute mark. 

    “ELBONIA’S NEW FIGHTER!: Designing El Jeffe’s New Ride”
    .https://youtube.com/live/-XUix8ZVJOE

  32. Militant Agnostic says

    Undercover police operation thwarts plot to firebomb NY-based Palestinian activist’s home

    A New Jersey man who authorities say planned to firebomb the home of a prominent Palestinian activist was arrested Thursday following a weeks-long undercover operation, according to a federal complaint and the New York City Police Department.

    The target of the alleged plot was Nerdeen Kiswani, an outspoken Brooklyn-based Palestinian activist who co-founded the group Within Our Lifetime.

    Kiswani, 31, said she received a call late Thursday from an FBI official informing her that a threat on her life was about to take place, and that they had apprehended the threat.

    Authorities said they had arrested the man, Andrew Heifler, as he was assembling Molotov cocktails to throw at Kiswani’s home. For weeks, he had discussed the alleged plot with an undercover official and, at one point, scoped out Kiswani’s home, the complaint said.

  33. StevoR says

    I very much fear the prediction at the end of this yt short here – Will Israel Use NUKES On Iran? is correct altho’ I suspect it’ll be Trump using the nuclear WMDs claiming at least millions of innocent Iranian lives. Desperately hope I’m wrong but who or what will stop this?

  34. KG says

    Trump asserted that the United States could steal Iran’s oil resources and destroy civilian infrastructure, acts that could be considered war crimes. – Lynna, OM@14, quoting DailyKos

    Of course the whole war is a war crime. At Nuremberg, the Nazi leaders were convicted of “Planning and Waging Aggressive War”, and somewhere it’s been said that this is the supreme crime under international law. But maybe Trump thinks he gets a pass because he didn’t actually plan his aggressive war.

  35. says

    RACHEL MADDOW: ‘Smells like corruption’: Maddow points out bizarre pattern of overpayments for warehouses by DHS

    Rachel Maddow points out several instances of Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security paying tens of millions of dollars more than the assessed value of warehouses the administration wants to turn into massive prison camps for immigrants.

    Video is 6:13 minutes “No Kings and No Camps”

    RACHEL MADDOW: Maddow sounds alarm on Trump use of scandal-plagued DHS to mess with elections: ‘Watch this space’

    Rachel Maddow highlights the Trump administration’s shift from using the Justice Department to meddle in states’ elections to assigning that task to the Department of Homeland Security, which is distinguished by scandals, incompetence and a disregard for the law.

    Video is 3:22 minutes

    RACHEL MADDOW: Trump undercuts his own dealmaking with troop deployment guessing game, bad faith track record

    While Donald Trump’s scattershot strategy against Iran appears to produce a lot of positive outcomes for Russia, the American public is not so fortunate. But Trump’s worthless word and the biuld-up of U.S. troops in the Middle East make a negotiated end to the situation in Iran seem increasingly unlikely. Rachel Maddow discusses with former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.

    Maddow reports on the loss of an AWACS plane thanks to Russia helping Iran with targeting.
    Video is 9:51 minutes

  36. JM says

    Newwin: Microsoft Copilot is now injecting ads into pull requests on GitHub

    Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR’s description to include this message: “⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast.”
    A quick search of that phrase on GitHub shows that the same promotional text appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren’t safe from the injection.

    This is such annoying behavior that as soon as MS was caught they said they would stop. People would stop using GitHub if this continued. Probably more importantly they are opening themselves up for lawsuits. The pull request message is written by somebody else, changing the text that somebody else wrote is just asking to be sued. Expect this to return at some point but with more clear line drawn between the MS ad and what the person wrote, followed immediately by a plugin to hide the part MS added.
    It is also a very annoying example of the inject ads everywhere world that Futurama predicted.

  37. says

    KG @34, good point. (Bitter laughter.)

    Sky Captain @27 (in reference to comment 15), good point. We should not reward incompetence. In the Trump administration, loyalty to Trump seems to come with guaranteed incompetence. Hence, congressional Republicans who are loyal to Trump are looking for ways to help fund the quagmire Trump created in the Middle East.

  38. JM says

    Techspot: Microsoft plans 100% native Windows 11 apps in major shift away from web wrappers

    Microsoft plans to build 100% native apps for Windows 11 and launch an initiative centered on a new team focused on native experiences instead of web-based wrappers. The company has also created a new team to lead the work, following years in which many core and third-party Windows apps have relied heavily on web technologies.

    No telling yet if anything will come of this. MS is a huge company and a lot of little projects come and go without any substantial happening.
    MS is not really saying why but the team goals suggest performance. The web heavy applications have persistent performance problems. Starting these applications requires loading and checking things over the internet and even with high speed access there is usually a noticeable delay. It also quickly becomes a problem when you don’t have good internet and the application visible stutters on a regular basis. These web applications cam end up using more CPU time because they have extra code to handle internet synchronization issues.
    MS may have also realized they are setting themselves up for long term expenses with these web applications. Every use of these applications costs MS something, even if it’s a trivial amount. If everybody is using web applications all the time the accumulated cost is probably significant eventually.

  39. says

    Pressed on possible war crimes in Iran, White House’s Leavitt offers the wrong answer

    “The press secretary was asked why the president threatened civilian infrastructure targets in Iran. Her non-answers spoke volumes.”

    As the third week of the war in Iran came to an end, Donald Trump published a remarkable threat to his social media platform: If Iran failed to fully open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, the American president wrote, the United States would start destroying civilian power plants in the country. [As KG pointed out in comment 34, the entire attack against Iran is a war crime.]

    Trump ended up backing off, but the significance of the threat lingered. It suggested that the Republican administration was prepared to target civilian energy supply, which many observers recognized as a possible war crime.

    Subsequent comments from the president culminated in a follow-up threat on Monday morning. “Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched,’” Trump wrote.

    In other words, as far as the American president is concerned, if Iran fails to meet his demands, the U.S. will start taking out civilian infrastructure to punish the nation’s political leaders.

    A few hours later, NBC News’ senior White House correspondent Garrett Haake asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt a very good question. [social media post, with video]

    “Under international law, striking civilian infrastructure like that is generally prohibited,” Haake noted, after summarizing the details of the presidential statement. “Why is the president threatening what would amount to potentially a war crime with the U.S. military? And how do you square that with the administration repeatedly saying that the U.S. does not target civilians?”

    Leavitt replied, “Look, the president has made it quite clear to the Iranian regime at this moment in time, as evidenced by the statement that you just read, that their best move is to make a deal, or else the United States armed forces has capabilities beyond their wildest imagination, and the president is not afraid to use them.”

    That wasn’t much of a response. On the contrary, it seemed to leave the door open to the same problem that sparked the underlying question in the first place. [True]

    As the back-and-forth continued, the White House press secretary claimed that “some experts” had likely pressed Haake to ask his question (Republican disdain for expertise remains a bizarre problem) before concluding, “Of course, this administration and the United States armed forces will always act within the confines of the law, but with respect to achieving the objectives of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is going to move forward unabated.”

    Focusing on Leavitt’s own phrasing, Haake added, “Which objectives would destroying a desalination plant help?”

    The White House press secretary refused to acknowledge the question and moved on.

    That wasn’t too surprising — Leavitt was dealing with a line of inquiry for which there are no good answers — but the exchange didn’t exactly ease concerns about the administration’s willingness to consider war crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ill-defined goals. [!]

  40. says

    Eyeing a possible payday, Jan. 6 rioters file civil suit, seeking millions in taxpayer money

    It’s been quite difficult to keep up with the number of pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who have run into fresh trouble with the law, even after receiving clemency from Donald Trump, in large part because the list keeps growing. This week, for example, Daniel Tocci, a Massachusetts man who received a presidential pardon, was sentenced to four years in prison on child pornography charges.

    Earlier in the month, a different Jan. 6 rioter, who had also been rescued by Trump, was sentenced to life in prison for molesting two children.

    […] as some Jan. 6 rioters ended up in court to face criminal charges, others headed to court for a very different reason. Politico reported:

    Members of the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 are suing the federal government for tens of millions of dollars in damages, claiming that the ‘indiscriminate’ use of force by police officers repelling the attack caused them physical and emotional injuries.

    The lawsuit, filed in Florida, takes aim at the conduct of Capitol Police and Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, whose outnumbered officers fended off the mob for hours while members of Congress fled.

    This might seem like a twisted joke, but the civil litigation is quite real: A group of Jan. 6 rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol as part of an insurrectionist assault on American democracy. They faced resistance from law enforcement officers who protected the U.S. seat of government. The rioters, unsatisfied with presidential pardons, now want a taxpayer-financed payoff for their troubles.

    In a normal and healthy political environment, the public could count on a case like this one being thrown out of court. But in 2026, it’s likely that the rioters will get a generous payday — because that’s what keeps happening.

    It was almost a year ago, for example, that Trump’s Justice Department reached a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack on the U.S. Capitol. As part of the agreement, the Republican administration announced plans to pay roughly $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Babbitt’s relatives.

    The settlement was awfully tough to defend, especially given the weakness of the civil case, though the developments hinted at a larger issue: Team Trump was on board with the idea of offering generous, taxpayer-funded payments to the president’s political allies.

    Last week, it happened again. Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn filed an equally outlandish civil suit, claiming wrongful prosecution in a case in which he had already pleaded guilty (twice) to the underlying charges. Trump’s Justice Department agreed to a settlement with him, too, reportedly worth $1.25 million.

    With these developments in mind, why wouldn’t Jan. 6 rioters line up for a slice of the pie? The president has already expressed an interest in giving them taxpayer money anyway, and their baseless civil suit offers a convenient vehicle for Trump to use the national treasury to reward some his most radical followers.

    I’d put the odds of a generous settlement at around 100%. [Oh no]

  41. JM says

    Arstechnica: After 16 years and $8 billion, the military’s new GPS software still doesn’t work

    The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military’s constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites. It consists of software to handle new signals and jam-resistant capabilities of the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018. The ground segment also includes two master control stations and upgrades to ground monitoring stations around the world, among other hardware elements.

    Although RTX delivered OCX to the Space Force last July, the ground segment remains nonoperational. Nine months later, the Pentagon may soon call it quits on the program. Thomas Ainsworth, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told Congress last week that OCX is still struggling.

    Admittedly this is an insanely complex project, this includes ground stations and the security environment it has to run in has changed over the past 2 decades. On the other hand this is an absurd price for software that doesn’t work.

    “As a result, extensive and more operationally relevant testing with actual GPS satellites, ground antennas, and user equipment led to an increase in finding extensive system issues across all subsystems, many of which have not been resolved,” Ainsworth told the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces in prepared testimony.

    Finding a few issues when rolled out into the field is not uncommon. Finding a lot means the original project had big problems. Problems that the company was or should have been aware of.

    But a key part of the modernization is still plagued by problems. Ainsworth told lawmakers that continuing to update the existing GPS ground control system “is now a viable option as systemic issues with OCX continue.”

    Despite testing and fixes the system still doesn’t work. At the same time the old system has been updated with key anti-jamming and other security fixes. Meaning that sticking with the old system and updating it may be a better solution at this point.

    At the time, defense officials blamed the troubles on the government’s lack of software expertise and Raytheon’s “poor systems engineering” practices. The military restructured the program and continued development, only to encounter further delays and cost overruns.

    Poor engineering can be terminal for a large and complex programming project. For a project this big it also means poor management but the military is slow to blame themselves or contractors for that. The tendency for the military to buy these huge single contractor projects is also a problem, the bigger the project the easier for the contractor to skim some off the top, the easier it is to shuffle the project around and the longer before problems become obvious.

  42. says

    Trump relies on the scummiest people to attack birthright citizenship

    As we stare down the barrel of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case, it’s important to thank conservative legal scholars with flexible morals, without whom President Donald Trump could not have gotten nearly as far with this unconstitutional, racist stance.

    Also in line for a fruit basket from the administration? Dead white supremacists.

    To push this unconstitutional garbage all the way up to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration had to frame the text of the 14th Amendment as debatable and subject to multiple interpretations.

    But the birthright citizenship clause is brief and clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

    Birthright citizenship has been the law of the land since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868, which granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people, overturning the deeply shameful Dred Scott decision.

    Any question as to whether citizenship applied to all native-born people or only the formerly enslaved was settled more than 100 years ago in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents was indeed a U.S. citizen.

    […] When Trump first started floating his wish to eradicate birthright citizenship, the only people talking about it were some of law’s lesser lights, such as John Eastman.

    Better known these days for helping invent the fake elector scheme, Eastman has been saying for years that since noncitizens aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, their children who are born here aren’t citizens either.

    But Eastman is a clown. In order to give the Supreme Court conservatives something to grab onto, they needed some bigger, better names.

    Enter Randy Barnett, who heads the Georgetown Center for the Constitution at Georgetown University. A well-respected constitutional law scholar, Barnett argued big cases like the challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

    He has also gone fully off the rails in the Trump era. Barnett’s faculty page is now chock-full of links to right-wing media appearances, where he spews conspiracies like how the executive branch under former President Joe Biden was “systematically run by unknown subordinates of a mentally incompetent president” and was therefore the “biggest constitutional scandal in U.S. history.” [Yikes. That is evidence of him having gone completely off the rails.]

    […] Barnett and Wurman tried a now-familiar move of spelunking through history and plucking out a sentence or two, using that contextless bit of text to argue that everyone else has been wrong. [I snipped examples.]

    Let’s check in with noted con law scholar and court-watcher Trump over on Truth Social:

    Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES! We are the only Country in the World that dignifies this subject with even discussion. Look at the dates of this long ago legislation – THE EXACT END OF THE CIVIL WAR!

    The problem with that is many enslaved people were brought here illegally. [!] Not illegally as in “it was a moral travesty that they were brought here to be slaves”—though that is certainly true—but illegally as in “U.S. law from 1808 onward banned the international slave trade, but thousands of people were brought here anyway.”

    Trump’s framing would mean that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to some but not all children of formerly enslaved people. In this instance, a child of formerly enslaved parents brought here in violation of the 1808 law would not be a citizen because their parents were here illegally. But if a child of formerly enslaved parents were born here, they would be.

    It’s depressing—though not surprising—that the administration relies on long-discredited racist arguments made by literal Confederates to argue that the 14th Amendment does not actually say what it says, but instead excludes “the children of foreigners transiently within the United States.” [!!]

    Former Confederate officer and attorney Alexander Porter Morse also didn’t like any of the other Reconstruction amendments—big surprise. [Isnipped Morse’s connection to enshrining Jim Crow laws.]

    […] As disgusting as it is to lean on Morse, it actually makes sense for Trump.

    At root, what he wants is a do-over when it comes to the 14th Amendment and Reconstruction at large. It’s an effort to turn the Confederate segregationist losers into winners because he thinks he’s found a court as deeply racist as he is.

    Guess we’re about to see just how far the conservative Supreme Court justices will go. Let’s cross our fingers that at least two of them care more about the Constitution than pleasing Trump.

  44. JM says

    @37 Lynna, OM:

    Sky Captain @27 (in reference to comment 15), good point. We should not reward incompetence. In the Trump administration, loyalty to Trump seems to come with guaranteed incompetence. Hence, congressional Republicans who are loyal to Trump are looking for ways to help fund the quagmire Trump created in the Middle East.

    Trump is an entirely self serving boss who is incompetent and shows no loyalty to his employees. Anybody that was loyal to Trump has demonstrated their incompetence.
    Most of the ones that appear loyal are just looking for the payout. Either from Trump or what they can get out of the system on their own. Some of them are loyal to the system or the US and being exploited by the people at the top right now.

  45. birgerjohansson says

    Happy 92nd birthday Shirley Jones

    (PZ and others may remember her from before her role in “Golden Girls”)

  46. says

    JM @44, true.

    In other, but related news: Dumb and disturbing developments in Trump’s ballroom boondoggle

    What if President Donald Trump’s ballroom wasn’t just an ugly vessel for his obsession with gold-plated detritus? And what if it wasn’t just a way to bribe the president or a way to turn Washington into Mar-a-Lago 2.0? What if it was also … a shed?

    Yes, a shed.

    “The ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under the military, including from drones and including from any other thing,” Trump said.

    That sentence makes no sense, as nothing is being built under “the military,” so let’s try that again.

    “The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump said. “But the military is building a massive complex under the ballroom, and that’s under construction, and we’re doing very well. So we’re ahead of schedule.”

    Who is paying for this “massive complex?” Is it covered by the ballroom’s $400 million price tag?

    Trump didn’t explain how the existence of his top-secret military complex was revealed due to a lawsuit, but he did already blab about it during a Cabinet meeting last week.

    “I mean, now it’s no secret, the military wanted it more than anybody. It was supposed to be secret, but it became unsecret because of people that are really unpatriotic saying things, but doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. It’s going to be great,” he said.

    So it’s top secret but was revealed in a lawsuit, so you decided to just tell everyone. Got it.

    It isn’t wise to try to divine what the hell is going on in Trump’s mush of a brain, but let’s do it anyway. The “stupid lawsuit” is definitely the one filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation seeking to block construction of the monstrosity. In that case, the White House has insisted that construction can’t be stopped—even below ground—for national security reasons. [Of course. Scoff.]

    The administration argued in a public filing that completion of the ballroom project “in a timely fashion is imperative for reasons of national security” and that it is “unworkable to distinguish between construction elements that are national security-related and those that are not.”

    But that argument rests on classified ex parte filings, which are seen only by the judge—not the opposing party.

    So, the NTHP has to fight back against this amorphous assertion that the ballroom is necessary for national security without the benefit of knowing exactly how or why. [!] Things aren’t entirely a mystery, though. In its motion for a preliminary injunction, the NTHP noted that the White House has “all but admitted in public filings that the national-security claims relate to a bunker long located at the site of the former East Wing.”

    No problem, said the NTHP. It doesn’t want to stop construction of a bunker or anything else related to national security—just the ballroom. […]

    Trump’s big dumb mouth is the only reason we know about [the bigger bunker] now. And, hilariously, the entire reveal seems to have occurred because The New York Times made Trump sad.

    Over the weekend, the Times published a piece showing just how much the ballroom design, well, sucks. Like, objectively sucks because it cannot possibly be built as is.

    Trump’s minions on the Commission of Fine Arts, in their zeal to approve whatever slop Trump put in front of them, signed off on plans with teeny-tiny issues like “stairs to nowhere” and a portico that “has no doors to get you into the ballroom.” [!!]

    The article also unpacked how much the ballroom design aesthetically sucks. The frenzy of columns in the portico will block the daylight inside, and the White House driveway has to be rerouted, destroying its symmetry. The whole thing is far too large, with a proposed East Wing that will be 60% larger in square footage than the White House residence.

    The Times noted that, measured by cubic volume and including the porticos, it’s actually three times as large as the residence because the ballroom is so tall. […]

    In response, Trump decided that correcting the record was the most important thing he could do. So he gathered reporters on Air Force One Sunday night to show them new designs that attempt to fix the whole stairway problem.

    “We took the stairs out that were on the south side and really replaced them with these stairs,” Trump said, referring to what he called a “fire stair.”

    He also shared that the columns will be hand-carved in the Corinthian style—Trump’s personal favorite type of column. These plans are entirely different from the ones his lackeys signed off on, which really brings home how little they matter. [!]

    […] “I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this,” he said. “I’m fighting wars and other things.”

    By “other things” he must mean planning his UFC Birthday Boy match, fighting over college football, and contemplating adding a spare bedroom to the White House. [The White House already has 16 guest rooms.]

    It’s clear that Trump views his presidency as the ultimate cheat code for a hack developer like himself. He can build whatever he wants, wherever he wants, whenever he wants—and all with other people’s money.

    No permits, no regulations, no inspections, no laws. Just vibes. The most rancid, tasteless vibes imaginable.

  47. says

    […] Early Tuesday morning, Trump assailed the United Kingdom for declining to help him launch strikes on Iran, writing, “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”

    He claimed that “the hard part” of the conflict is now over and that Iran “has been, essentially, decimated.” Trump argued that the U.K. should go to the Strait of Hormuz and “TAKE” oil, concluding, “Go get your own oil!”

    In another post, Trump whined that France has denied the U.S. permission to use its airspace for bombing runs into Iran, writing, “France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the “Butcher of Iran,” who has been successfully eliminated! The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!”

    His sentiments were echoed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in a press conference a few hours later. [video]

    “There are countries around the world who ought [to] be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well. It’s not just the United States Navy. Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well,” Hegseth said. [video]

    Hegseth also argued that the NATO alliance was weak “if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them.”

    The comments from Trump and Hegseth come after Italy and Spain also refused to allow the U.S. to use its airbases or airspace, respectively, to support attacks on Iran. Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles told reporters on Monday that the U.S. actions were “profoundly illegal and profoundly unjust.”

    Traditional U.S. allies are declining to be involved in the conflict that has severely impacted access to oil, causing gas prices to spike above $4 a gallon in the U.S. for the first time in four years. The shortage was triggered by Trump’s actions, which he has failed to justify to Americans or to the rest of the world. [map showing fuel prices by state in the USA]

    Trump has suggested that America intends to steal Iran’s natural resources and attack civilian infrastructure, which could amount to war crimes. He has chosen to ratchet up the conflict rather than admit he was wrong when he asserted that Iran would quickly fold.

    The administration blundered into its Iran war, adding another element of global instability after more than a year of tariff policies that have backfired against the American economy. Instead of accepting blame for his own actions, the Trump administration has chosen to complain about the rest of the world.

    Link

  49. says

    Trump’s presidential library plans would make even Kim Jong Un blush

    First son Eric Trump on Monday unveiled plans for his father’s presidential library, a gigantic World Trade Center ripoff that will mar the Miami skyline and become yet another grift for the most amoral and corrupt family in American history.

    “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team […],” Eric Trump wrote in a post on X, saying that the Trump Organization and not a nonprofit is the one designing and profiting off this monstrosity. [!] “This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.” [social media post with video]

    The post included a video featuring renderings of the “museum,” which on the outside looks like a bastardized Freedom Tower replete with glass and gold—a sort of mashup of Trump Tower in Manhattan and the garish Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

    Inside the facility is a replica of the Oval Office [that Trump] gilded with Home Depot ornamentals, his pet White House ballroom project, and other horrendous gold accents and tacky trash […]

    There will also be golden escalators (because of course), an Air Force One jet (possibly the $400 million jet Qatar bribed him with?), and a theater with a massive gold statue of Trump [see image at the link] that would quite honestly make North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un blush.

    Trump’s family—which will profit off the project—cheered the gross “library,” which they now can travel to by flying into a nearby airport that grotesquely bears their father’s name. [I snipped the cheers.]

    However, the majority of the country is likely aghast […]

  50. birgerjohansson says

    God Awful Movies:  

    GAM550 “The Girl Who Believes in Miracles”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=sxo4JLjJBB8

    “A movie so generically dumb we couldn’t tell for sure if we’d already watched it.”

    (They tricked poor Jay Novella from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe to review it with them)

  51. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/oh-look-more-evidence-corroborates

    “Oh Look MORE Evidence Corroborates A Epstein/Trump Child-Abuse Accuser’s Story”

    “And more on Epstein’s enablers from Spago to Africa.”

    The fact that Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused at least a thousand girls and so many people knew or were involved — including allegedly the President of the United States of America — and so few cared or did anything is horrifying, but let us not forget the dirty money and corrupt connections that made Epstein’s greasy world turn!

    A longtime peeve of yr Wonkette is when people talk about The Media, The Police, The Government, The Pedo Cabal, as if they were monoliths not made up of people, each one continually negotiating their own deals and tradeoffs with whatever entity. Jeffrey Edward Epstein was but one man, and everyone he danced with each made, then broke or kept, their own deals with that devil in exchange for money, connections, and/or insider information. The techbros, the finance bros, gossipmonger Peggy Siegal, Trump, they all got and gave things in their association with Epstein, and all conveniently turned a blind eye at best to his taboo proclivities.

    Not all of Epstein’s close friends got to rape children with him. But here is more corroboration to the story of the victim who claimed Trump allegedly did, allegedly, allegedly, who in 2019 Trump’s own FBI deemed credible. This was the one who had been living in South Carolina and said she bit Trump’s dick in the 1980s, and also said that Epstein had raped her along with another man, taken photos, and blackmailed her mother with them, holy shit.

    Now new reporting from Ellie Leonard’s Substack and verified by the South Carolina Post and Courier corroborates that victim’s story even more, and gives an identity to the name of one of the accused child rapists.

    Jimmy Atkins was his name, and long-term property rentals were his game. Atkins passed away in 2003 at the age of 69, making him 50 years old in 1984. The victim had told the FBI in one of her four interviews that Atkins had been involved or affiliated with a college in Ohio, perhaps as a dean or “money guy.” And indeed, the tracked-down Jim Atkins was involved with a network of for-profit colleges in Kentucky and Ohio that “included a Kentucky cosmetology academy and a college offering training for blind students on Braille computers.”

    And Atkins first started buying property in Hilton Head in 1985 to get in on the early-’80s real estate boom underway there, buying into and joining the board of a new development for multimillionaires called Wexford Plantation, which quickly filled with swells, even at one point housing Michael Jordan.

    Hilton Head went on to become a boomtown for golf and schmoozing. […] But the Lowcountry always kept a seedy side too [I snipped details of the seedy side.]

    Anyway, in 1985 Atkins assumed control of a real estate brokerage company called Harbour Realty […] and he hired the victim’s mother as a broker and to manage the office there. At the time she was a single mom who’d moved down from New York with two teenage sons and her teenage daughter, and through the worst luck in the world, Jeffrey Epstein had — according to her daughter — rented a place at Atkins’ brokerage through the victim’s mother.

    […] The victim told the FBI that someone had called her for babysitting to Epstein’s address, but when she arrived there was no baby, just Epstein and Atkins, who raped her instead, and took Polaroid nudes of it that they later extorted her mother with. Then the mother embezzled from the company to pay the ransom and went to prison. Today you can’t see a mother falling for it, but it was a different time, the pre-Internet world […]

    The Devil Went Down To Senegal

    Another peeve, when Epstein’s rise as a criminal and asset to foreign governments gets dismissed by “charm.” All C-suite level people — with the possible exception of certain nepo babies — are exceptionally charming or they would not have reached that level! They might be insider trading, they might have herpes and three mistresses, be embezzling from their employees’ retirement fund, and every word they say is a lie, but of course they have good manners and know how to throw dinner parties, network and make small talk, stoopid.

    Charm isn’t rare. He didn’t have to blackmail people, they knew there would be a record, that he surely had at least a few cameras at his home and a flight manifest on his plane. They clamored for his company anyway, because Epstein’s skill was emotional manipulation. […]

    Epstein moved in to fill in whatever holes, financially, emotionally, connections-wise. And then […] he even made it rain down in Africa.

    To Karim Wade, the son of former Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade, Epstein offered in 2011 a connection to a Chinese businessman to help with “offshore banking,” and a few months later Epstein took a vacation through West Africa that Wade had planned for him. Then in 2012 after things went south in Dakar, Epstein offered Wade and his family use of his Palm Beach house to flee to. Then when Karim Wade was later in prison, Epstein paid his legal bills and got Nina Keïta, the pretty niece of Ivorian president Alassane Ouattara, to be his intermediary to communicate with Wade. Hospitably, Keïta also tried to set Epstein up with a girl, but she turned out to be too old: “ask sadia to send pictures of her sister. i prefer under 25.”

    Epstein had all the money in the world, the best connections in the world, and all he wanted was girls to rape, maybe some insider connections and dirt for himself too, maybe a luxury tour of West Africa that somebody else would pay for. […]

    Alexander Acosta did not give one shit that Epstein was raping children, and he openly made and still defends his choice in 2008 to not consider any of Epstein’s child victims credible because they accepted money for “massages.” Imagine if any kid who took candy or another item of value from a pedophile in exchange for getting in their van was automatically not considered not credible! But that was the official legal stance for little girls raped by rich old men […]

    And nothing and nobody abetted Epstein like the world of finance itself […] Jamie Dimon was CEO of JP Morgan Chase where Epstein was a client starting in 2006, and chose to keep Epstein on as a client after his 2008 conviction. Then he turned a blind eye to all the money-laundering human-trafficking red-flaggy things Epstein was doing, like opening six-figure accounts for teenage girls with no last names and/or Social Security numbers, keeping Epstein on as a client all the way up to the point investigators started sniffing around. Dimon was CEO when his firm paid more than $300 million of its loose couch change to settle its Epstein claims. And Dimon still is the CEO today.

    Jamie Dimon’s not going to jail, Trump’s not going to jail, and there ain’t shit-all you or I can do about it. But, funny how the enablers and suspects do always seem to turn out to be exactly who you’d expect.

  52. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna @ 49

    Surely state and/or national authorities will have a say.

    Even if DeSantis remains (a very impopular) governor for two more years it is not certain the State congress will be friendly after November. And after 2028 a Democratic president had better get his shit together and block any Albert Speer bullshit celebrating Trump.
    The Roman senate had the option to declare a bad leader an enemy of the people, so we don’t have many statues of Nero left.

  53. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/oh-no-ukraine-warring-on-hungary

    […] A Washington Post investigation even revealed that the Russians proposed to stage a fake assassination of Orbán in order to build more sympathy for him, where have we heard that before?

    And part of Russia’s (or somebody’s) contribution appears to be flooding the Internet with posts on Facebook and TikTok featuring a freaky AI campaign of extremely realistic deepfakes which don’t mention […] Orbán at all. Instead, the AI videos portray war and murder at the hands of … neighbor Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Who of course have never threatened Hungar […]If anybody poses a threat to Hungary’s borders it would be Putin, after taking Ukraine […]

    Watch clips of the spooky ads below: [videos]

    How sad they all would be if Orbán lost his grip! Since his rise to power, Orbán became the Right’s prize show pig for making regime change sausage out of alternative-facts offal […]

    […] Fast-forward with Applebaum:

    Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the economy, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.

    Will Russia succeed in keeping Hungary in the fold when the prolitaristy goes to vote for Parliament on April 12, in the first free elections Hungary has had since 1990? Or will he win and let Hungary and Russia keep on enclosing Ukraine in their NATO-hating, iron embrace?

    Much more at the link.

  54. says

    Washington Post link

    “Supreme Court rules against ban on ‘conversion therapy’ for LGBTQ+ minors”

    “The major ruling casts doubt on similar prohibitions in 30 states. It is the latest in a string of decisions by the high court rolling back protections for LGBTQ+ people.”

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday found that a Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for gay and transgender minors probably violates free speech rights, the latest in a string of decisions by the high court rolling back protections for LGBTQ+ people and expanding the rights of the religious.

    In an 8-1 ruling, an ideologically diverse majority ruled for an evangelical therapist who argued the state prohibition infringed on her First Amendment rights. Kaley Chiles said she wanted to counsel religious teens dealing with sexual orientation issues and gender dysphoria in ways consistent with biblical teachings.

    The decision casts doubt on similar statutes in nearly 30 states that prohibit attempts to change the expressed sexual orientation or gender identity of youths. Many states passed the laws over the last decade as evidence grew that the treatment was harmful. Colorado argued it was not regulating free speech but outlawing substandard medical care — something courts have long allowed.

    [I snipped opinions filed by individual justices in favor of the majority ruling.]

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the only justice to dissent, read her opinion from the bench in an indication of her strong disagreement with the majority. She said research shows that conversion therapy is bad medicine and that the court’s holding that it is protected by the First Amendment “opens a dangerous can of worms.” […]

    She added in her written dissent, “Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients: They could neither do nor say whatever they want. Largely due to such State regulation, Americans have been privileged to enjoy a long and successful tradition of high-quality medical care. [Questionable.] Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition.”

    The ruling is the first of several this term that are expected to be consequential for gay and transgender rights.

    Chiles, a licensed therapist from Colorado Springs, sued Colorado in 2022 over its Minor Conversion Therapy Law, which was passed in 2019. The law prohibits physicians or mental health professionals from providing therapy to young people that is intended to change “behaviors or gender expressions” or “eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction” to the same sex.

    […] In previous decades, conversion therapy has included techniques including talk, hypnosis, electric shocks and chemically induced nausea to try to change sexual orientation, gender identity or behavior.

    Chiles said she does not want to convert gay and transgender teens but use talk therapy to help those who want to reduce unwanted attractions or change sexual attractions. [And who is going to police that?]

    As she put it in a court filing, her potential clients “believe their faith and their relationships with God supersede romantic attractions and that God determines their identity according to what He has revealed in the Bible rather than their attractions or perceptions determining their identity.” [Recipe for disaster.]

    Jaymes Black, CEO of the Trevor Project, which provides suicide prevention services to gay youths, said in a statement that the ruling will have devastating consequences for LGBTQ+ people.

    “The Supreme Court’s decision to treat the dangerous practice of conversion therapy as constitutionally protected speech is a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk,” Black wrote. “These efforts, no matter what proponents call them, no matter what any court says, are still proven to cause lasting psychological harm.”

    The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and other major medical groups oppose conversion therapy, and studies have linked it to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and higher rates of suicide among gay and transgender people.

    […] Conversion therapy has split the lower courts. Some have found that conversion therapy laws violate free-speech rights, while others have ruled they are allowable regulations of professional conduct.

    […] The justices have pushed to increase religious liberties, while rolling back protections for gay and transgender people. […]

  55. says

    New York Times link

    “Federal Judge Approves Trump Effort to Obtain List of Jews From Penn”

    “The government’s effort to collect the names and phone numbers of Jewish people on campus as it investigates antisemitism has upset some people who worry about how the information will be used.” [Duh]

    The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school [bogus excuse for an investigation], a federal judge decided Tuesday.

    The government’s investigation had unified Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty in opposition to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.

    But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities.
    […]
    “Though ineptly worded, the request had an understandable purpose — to obtain in a narrowly tailored way, as opposed to seeking information on all university employees, information on individuals in Penn’s Jewish community who could have experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the workplace,” Judge Pappert wrote.

    The judge, however, said that the university would not have to reveal any employee’s connection to “a specific Jewish-related organization.”

    […] The case has represented a test of how far the government can go to investigate its suspicions of antisemitism in higher education, and Judge Pappert’s decision could shape how aggressively the Trump administration pursues inquiries on other campuses.

    […] The E.E.O.C. lawyer leading the investigation, Debra M. Lawrence, who has worked for the agency under seven different presidents, described it as a common request for investigations. The commission was given broad investigatory powers by Congress to enforce prohibitions against workplace discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    During the past year, the E.E.O.C. has played a key role in negotiations between the Trump administration and top universities.

    [Yeah, because Trump is using the threat of an investigation to force Universities to pay him money; and to give the Trump administration more control over curriculum, faculty hiring, admission of foreign students, treatment of transgender students, presentation of conservative ideology, etc.]

    In July, Columbia University agreed to pay $21 million to settle a complaint that Ms. Lucas filed after protests on campus over the war in Gaza. The commission has described the settlement as its largest for an antisemitism allegation.

    The Trump administration has repeatedly adopted a hard line toward elite universities, regarding them as hostile to conservative ideology and as hot spots of discrimination. [True! All too true.] Last year, the government paused $175 million in federal funding to Penn amid a dispute about a transgender swimmer before the sides reached a settlement.

  56. says

    New York Times link

    “Judge Halts White House Ballroom Construction”

    A federal judge ordered on Tuesday that construction be halted on President Trump’s proposed White House ballroom, to be built in place of the demolished East Wing, saying work must come to a stop until the project receives a go-ahead from Congress.

    […] In a 35-page opinion, Judge Leon wrote that Mr. Trump likely did not have the authority to act without consulting Congress to replace entire sections of the White House […]

    In an opinion punctuated by 19 exclamation points, Judge Leon also reiterated concerns he had raised for months in court: that from the start, the administration has provided shifting and questionable accounts of who was in charge of the project and under what authority private donations could be accepted to fund it.

    “Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” he wrote. “But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project.”

    Judge Leon wrote that if the White House sought congressional approval, the legislature would “retain its authority over the nation’s property and its oversight over the government’s spending.”

    “The National Trust’s interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated,” he added. “And the American people will benefit from the branches of government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles.”

    […] The decision is technically temporary, a preliminary injunction barring further construction while the litigation continues. The Trump administration could appeal — or could seek the approval from the Republican-led Congress, as the judge instructed.

    […] Lawyers representing the government have also asserted the project falls within the president’s personal authority to modernize or improve the White House grounds. Mr. Trump began construction of the project shortly after demolishing the East Wing in October, arguing that a ballroom was needed to host larger events indoors, without spilling onto the South Lawn.

    But at every turn, Judge Leon had disagreed with Mr. Trump’s position.

    At several hearings, he implored Yaakov Roth, a senior Justice Department lawyer, to “be serious” and back off claims that the project was comparable to minor renovations of presidencies past, including the addition of a swimming pool or a tennis pavilion. He repeatedly referred to the project’s planning and execution as a “Rube Goldberg machine.”

    By March, Judge Leon appeared to have lost patience with what he described as shifting positions by the government, particularly surrounding the role the National Park Service has played in approving the project and acting as a financial conduit for private donations supporting it.

    President Trump has forged ahead with design work as the litigation stalled, working with an architect and periodically showing off renderings of the project. On Sunday, the president flashed the most recent revisions to reporters on Air Force One after a review by The New York Times highlighted elements that architectural experts said appeared careless and betrayed how little the project has been scrutinized.

    In a winding post on social media reacting to the ruling, Mr. Trump lobbed criticisms at the National Trust, which is also involved in a lawsuit over the president’s attempts to seize control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. [I snipped Trump’s comments.]

    […] The president says he has raised more than $350 million from personal backers and around two dozen tech, cryptocurrency and defense corporations to fund the building of the structure without government support. A report in November by the group Public Citizen found that two-thirds of the publicly identified corporate donors had received government contracts, collectively valued at more than $275 billion. [Corruption. Red flags everywhere.]

    Judge Leon repeatedly told lawyers involved in the case that he believed the issues would ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court. […]

    Not looking forward the the Supreme Court giving Trump another “do whatever you want” ruling.

  57. says

    Why is Trump’s DHS wildly overpaying for ICE warehouse detention centers?, by Rachel Maddow

    On Monday morning, a 10-foot-tall golden toilet appeared at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., along with a plaque that reads “A throne fit for a king.”

    “In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what really mattered: Remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House,” the plaque continued, adding that the giant toilet “stands as a tribute to an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.”

    This weekend, that gold-toilet president was also the target of one of the largest single-day nationwide demonstrations in American history. Organizers estimate that more than 8 million Americans joined the third day of No Kings protests against Donald Trump […]

    One of the places where the local press reported a steep increase in participation compared with previous anti-Trump and No Kings protests was in Hagerstown, Maryland, where an estimated 3,000 people took part in a demonstration at the public square.

    In Hagerstown, the banner for the protest wasn’t just “No Kings,” it was “No Kings, No Camps.” Just outside that city, the administration has been trying to build one of its Trump prison camps, which would hold thousands of people without trial.

    The grassroots group Maryland Coalition to Stop the Camps asked people to come from all over the state to Hagerstown to show opposition to the prison camp that Trump is trying to put there.

    This piece of this story is worth watching right now, especially after Kristi Noem was ousted as homeland security secretary and a new guy, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, is taking over.

    One of the things that has emerged about the warehouse purchases the administration has been making for its prison camps is that for some reason the government appears to have been eager to wildly overpay. [!]

    In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth. It was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million. In Roxbury, New Jersey, one warehouse was assessed at $62 million, but the Trump administration came in and offered $129 million for it — more than double the cost. In Georgia, one of the properties valued last year at $26 million was purchased for $129 million.

    […] CNN reported that there is a new inspector general investigation into alleged corruption at the department concerning the soliciting and handling of contracts, including the involvement of Noem and her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski.

    There was already an audit that had been sparked in the department; now, on top of that, there’s a new and apparently urgent investigation, which reportedly included investigators searching the offices of one Homeland Security official who had been placed in a job at the agency by Noem and Lewandowski.

    That investigation came after NBC News reported on March 19 that Lewandowski reportedly sought multimillion-dollar payments from companies contracting with Homeland Security, including companies that operate immigration prisons.

    […] Democratic members of Congress have now opened their own investigation […]

    Earlier this month in Social Circle, Georgia, town officials put a lock on the water meter at a warehouse that the Trump administration is trying to turn into a prison there. In Salt Lake City, officials voted to cap the amount of water that the federal government would be allowed to use at a warehouse it wants to convert to a prison, one that it appears the administration overpaid $48 million for.

    […] That stink is what you think it is: It smells like corruption. […]

    But on Wednesday, the Trump administration will try to make its most radical move yet against immigrants. It will argue before the Supreme Court that when the Constitution says that anyone born in this country is an American, the Constitution didn’t really mean that.

    Everyone calls this the birthright citizenship case, but no one who’s not a lawyer instinctively knows what that means. What it means is that anyone born in this country is an American by virtue of the fact that they were born here.

    But now, the Trump administration is trying to change that. It wants to assess the allegiance and the loyalty of a person’s parents before it decides if that person — born here, in this country — can be considered American.

    The last time we had massive domestic prison camps in this country, to hold people indefinitely and without trial, was in World War II, when the U.S. government locked up Japanese Americans for years, regardless of their citizenship, on the theory that their race alone made them dangerous.

    Japanese American groups and experts on their wartime incarceration have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in that case ahead of the oral arguments this week. [I snipped a lot of historical references.]

    […] under Trump, who has entrusted the wise and prudent stewardship of immigration matters to people like Noem, Lewandowski and now Mullin, the federal government is now going to tell the Supreme Court that the Constitution has been wrong all this time and that it is he, Trump, who, neutrally and with an even hand, will assess a person’s loyalties and allegiances before it’s decided if they are really an American.

    The administration is dragging that stinking heap up to the door of the Supreme Court this very week, the same week that more than 8 million Americans from every single corner of the country came out full tilt and full blast to say No Kings.

    No thrones. No golden toilets. No crowns. No camps.

    That’s where we are. That’s where we stand. Game on.

  58. says

    The Washington Post reported earlier this week:

    [L]ongtime norms are being upended by the proselytizing Christian campaign of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, say multiple former high-ranking military officials and experts on religion and law. Rather than boosting cohesion through a more universal spiritual uplift, they say, the new approach violates the Constitution and undermines the bonds of mutual respect between troops that are essential […]

    Commentary:

    […] The scope of the beleaguered Pentagon chief’s [Pete Hegseith’s] embrace of Christian nationalism is quite broad. In recent months, Hegseth has:
    – led Christian prayer services in the Pentagon’s auditorium;
    – invited radical Christian nationalist figures to speak at official prayer services;
    – used social media to promote messages that suggest his faith should dominate over other religious traditions; and
    – argued during an official press briefing that Americans should take a knee and pray “in the name of Jesus Christ,” at the same briefing in which he quoted Scripture.

    At an event last week, Hegseth took matters to a new level when he prayed for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

    In case this isn’t obvious, Hegseth is as free as every other American to worship, or not, as he pleases. His religiosity is his own business.

    […] the defense secretary isn’t just exercising his faith in line with his conscience, he’s also erasing the First Amendment’s church-state line and incorporating Christian nationalism into his wartime message in ways without precedent in the American tradition.

    Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell during Powell’s tenures as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, told the Post, “The American military has had a remarkable ride of equanimity and fairness and justice and all manner of good adjectives with regard to religion. It’s done this in a way that’s really remarkable — until now.”

    The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had a related report this week:

    If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of biblical law — the highest authority of all — then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy — who cry out to God but, unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him — are affirmatively good.

    […] Looking ahead, there are limited options to curtail the defense secretary’s public advocacy of Christian nationalism — Donald Trump could intervene, though that seems exceedingly unlikely — but Hegseth’s critics are not powerless. On the contrary, some of the Pentagon chief’s policies related to religious promotion have already sparked litigation, which opens the door to possible court-imposed limits. Watch this space.

    Link

  59. Jean says

    birgerjohansson @ 45

    I don’t know who you’re thinking of but Shirley Jones was never in the Golden Girls. And I’m a few years younger than PZ.

  60. Pierce R. Butler says

    birgerjohansson @ # 53: Even if DeSantis remains (a very impopular) governor for two more years…

    Nope – he faces term limits, with an obligation to step out of the Governor’s Mansion at the end of this year.

    For a while we heard rumors he would get his wife to run to replace him, but she couldn’t cut her way out of the Hope Florida scandal, so we may have a real chance for DeSantisization in ’27.

  61. says

    Good news.

    The New York Times reported:

    Democrats on Monday officially claimed a second upset in Florida’s recent special elections when The Associated Press declared an electrical workers union leader to be the winner of a tight state senate contest in reliably Republican West Tampa.

    Brian Nathan, a Navy veteran and member of a new cadre of working class Democrats, will join Emily Gregory, a small-business owner with a public-health background, as upstart Democrats in Tallahassee.

    Commentary: Democrats win another special election, the 30th red-to-blue flip of Trump’s second term”

    […] In a Fox News interview last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about the special elections and whether he sees them as “a canary in the coal mine” ahead of the midterm elections in the fall. “These special elections are a one-off,” the Louisiana Republican replied. “They’re anomalies.”

    To be sure, that might make GOP leaders feel better. Some of them might even believe it. But when the same thing keeps happening, it becomes a lot tougher to see them as one-off anomalies.

    Consider what we’ve seen so far this year. In January, two Democratic candidates won lopsided victories in special elections in Minnesota and restored the state House to an even partisan split.

    Soon after, in Texas, Republicans invested a considerable amount of resources to keep a state Senate seat in the suburbs of Fort Worth. They failed, as Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a union leader and Air Force veteran, won a double-digit victory in a district Trump won by 17 points in 2024. (The president personally tried to rally support for the GOP candidate, but then pretended he didn’t after she lost badly.) [LOL]

    In early February, Republicans in Louisiana saw a unique opportunity to flip a state legislative seat from blue to red — in a district Trump won by 13 points — but when voters had their say, the Democratic candidate prevailed by 24 points. [!]

    In early March, a Democratic state legislative candidate flipped a seat in Arkansas. A week later, a Democratic state legislative candidate flipped a seat in New Hampshire, in an outcome that The New Hampshire Union Leader called “stunning” and a “big upset” given the Republican advantage in the district.

    […] The Downballot noted in its latest analysis that Democrats have now flipped 30 seats from red to blue in special elections since Trump returned to the White House. Over that same period, the number of seats flipped from blue to red remains zero.

    Some will no doubt argue that it’s best not to read too much into a special election held in the winter, several months before November’s races. It’s a fair point. But what matters is how the results fit into the broader political landscape. Republicans are tied to an unpopular president, a growing number of their congressional members are retiring, key elements of the GOP agenda are facing an intensifying public backlash, and they keep losing special elections, including in contests they expected to win. […]

  62. says

    MS NOW:

    A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that President Donald Trump’s executive order ending federal funding for National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service is unconstitutional.

    Good news.

  63. says

    MS NOW:

    U.S. gas prices jumped past an average of $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 on Tuesday as the Iran war pushed fuel prices to soar worldwide. According to motor club AAA, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is now $4.02 — over a dollar more than before the war began.

    This price increase is starting to really affect my budget in a negative way. I’m looking for ways to cut back on buying food. Sheesh.

  64. says

    New York Times:

    The Army has suspended the crews that piloted a pair of Apache helicopters close to the musician Kid Rock’s residence in Nashville over the weekend, Pentagon officials said on Tuesday.

    The crew members involved, who have not been identified, have been barred from flight duties, a spokesman said, a day after the Army began an inquiry into videos posted on social media of the flyover.

  65. says

    A photograph of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has been purged from photo services. Why? Because it was supposedly taken at an unflattering angle.

    Yes, really.

    According to Status, the photo—which shows Leavitt holding her son during a White House Thanksgiving event—was removed from AFP and Getty Images archives. The disappearing photo is just the latest example of the administration’s zeal to control its image—and the media playing along.

    But shortly after the photo was removed from the archives, it began surfacing online, where it was reproduced by the official Democrats X account. [social media posts, with photos]

    A representative from AFP told Status that the photo did not meet its internal standards but also admitted that it was removed after the White House made the service “aware” of its displeasure. The fact that the news service removed the photo after administration pressure undermines the claim that the censorship was solely based on aesthetics. [Levitt is smiling. She is holding her adorable little son. The low angle shows off both Leavitt’s and her son’s slight roll of fat under the chin. It is not unflattering in my opinion.]

    The photo clashes with the “correct” image of women that has been pushed by the MAGA movement. Outlets like Fox News have argued that conservative women are superior to their liberal counterparts because they purportedly embrace beauty treatments like hair dye and lip filler and put greater emphasis on women serving merely as vessels for producing babies.

    But this isn’t the Trump administration’s first clash with unapproved photography.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barred photographers from attending war briefings at the Pentagon after supposedly “unflattering” images of the former Fox News host were taken earlier this month.

    And last year, a Vanity Fair photo shoot with several members of the senior Trump team, including Leavitt, went viral after it highlighted their physical imperfections—again running counter to the administration’s misogynistic messaging about women.

    [Social media post with closeup image of Leavitt. The photo shows the injection sites of her lip filler, and imperfect eye makeup. I don’t care. My focus is on Leavitt’s lies, misinformation, and propaganda spouted from the podium in the White House.]

    President Donald Trump has argued for years that media outlets that do anything other than regurgitate his own lies and propaganda are “fake news,” and the administration has attacked and suppressed journalism that refuses to fall in line.

    The choice by AFP and Getty to purge unapproved images shows that mainstream media continues to be subservient to Trump rather than focus on informing the public. [Yep. That’s bad.]

    Link

  66. says

    WTF?

    Kristi Noem’s very bad month takes a jaw-dropping turn

    The bad news keeps rolling in for Kristi Noem, the fired former head of the Department of Homeland Security. On Tuesday, the Daily Mail reported that her husband is a crossdresser who wears large fake breasts and hot pants while messaging with online adult entertainers.

    According to the report, Bryon Noem sent at least $25,000 to interact with fetish models, whom he communicated with using a phone number that easily identified him as the now-former DHS secretary’s husband. [Social media post, with images.]

    Experts say his behavior opened his wife up to blackmail that could have endangered U.S. national security.

    “If a media organization can find this out, you can assume with a high degree of confidence that a hostile intelligence service knows this as well,” former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos told the Daily Mail.

    Now we’re not here to kink-shame. If Bryon Noem has a thing for, as one model reportedly put it, “huge, huge ridiculous boobs”—on himself or others—that’s his business.

    [And I definitely don’t want to kink-shame anyone, and that includes Kristi Noem’s husband. However, Bryon Noem is a one of those guys who makes it obvious that, as a Christian, he is the best Christian. The best. He says he has “a calling from God.”]

    And given that his wife appears to be openly cheating on him with odious former Trump administration aide Corey Lewandowski, our dude Bryon is more than owed some payback in the form of straying from his marriage with big-boobed models.

    However, we can shame him for pretending to be some holier-than-thou Christian who claimed to have stayed with his wife because of “his calling from God to support her,” as an unnamed family member told the New York Post earlier in March.

    We can also shame him for apparently being so careless and sloppy with his communications with the models, since it could’ve endangered American national security.

    As for Kristi Noem, her representative told the Post she is “devastated” about the revelation that her husband was living this secret life.

    “The family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy and prayers at the time,” the representative said.

    But again, it’s hard to feel bad for Kristi Noem, who wasted millions of taxpayer dollars to fly around the country with her alleged fuck-buddy so she could film ads promoting herself and stage stunts to torture immigrants.

    Noem’s detractors also are accusing her of lying about her knowledge of her husband’s reported fetish, saying it’s something that’s been openly known in Trump world for years.

    “Kristi Noem said her family is blindsided by revelations her husband is a cross dresser and gay. That isn’t true. She knew all about her husband which is why she lives with Corey Lewandowski in the D.C. area. That’s why her husband never divorced her. It was their arrangement,” Laura Loomer, the right-wing conspiracy theorist who somehow ingratiated herself with President Donald Trump, wrote in a post on X. [Laura Loomer is not a reliable source.]
    […]

    Just do your job people. Don’t waste taxpayer’s money. Don’t administer corrupt contracts for services of goods (like the Noem and Lewandowski airplanes with bedrooms and showers), and FFS learn stop being careless with your online communications. I don’t want to see this stuff.

  67. says

    Labor secretary spins new jobs report—before it’s even released

    Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is muddying expectations ahead of what could be another disappointing jobs report later this week.

    “I’m looking forward to Friday’s numbers to see exactly what the trends are,” she told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, before blaming last month’s depressing report on a “strike” and “the weather.” [video]

    “But again, it’s a snapshot in time,” Chavez-DeRemer added. “So I’m looking forward to these numbers.”

    Bartiromo, whose job whitewashing Trump’s failures has never been easy, then slipped in a question that many Americans are asking as unemployment increases: Where are the jobs?

    “We’re seeing them in, you know, a lot of the cybersecurity—in the security job—so it’s been good,” Chavez-DeRemer responded. “But we did have to keep our, you know, foot on the gas pedal to make sure that we’re creating those jobs for all Americans.” [video showing propaganda and spin from the Labor Secretary.]

    […] Chavez-DeRemer’s word salad is unlikely to inspire confidence among the majority of Americans who say it’s a bad time to be looking for jobs—a sentiment that has persisted since Trump took office. [True]

  68. says

    KYIV (The Borowitz Report)—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered on Tuesday to temp as US president while Donald J. Trump undergoes a full psychiatric evaluation.

    “For the past few years, I’ve dealt with one catastrophe after another in Ukraine,” Zelenskyy told reporters. “This has uniquely prepared me for the current conditions on the ground in the United States.”

    He called Trump’s wildly contradictory statements about the war in Iran “nothing more or less than a cry for help.”

    Asked whether Trump was “playing with a full deck,” Zelenskyy said, “He has no cards.”

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/zelenskyy-offers-to-be-temp-us-president

    Satire. But true. :-)

  71. StevoR says

    Really looking forward to seeing Artemis II fly tomorrrow if all goes to schedule – it is kinda a pity about the date tho’ :

    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA test director Jeff Spaulding does not want to hear jokes on April Fools’ Day. He doesn’t want pranks. He just wants to send people to the moon.

    This is not a punchline. NASA is counting down to launch four astronauts around the moon on Artemis 2, a 10-day trip that will lift off a bit before sunset tomorrow, which is April 1 — a holiday for pranksters. But NASA is staying serious.

    “So I am not aware of any pranks or any attempts to pull anything on the flight crew, or on the launch team itself, so I think I’ll just leave it at that,” Spaulding told reporters here at the launch pad. “I’m hoping that we just stay focused on the launch tomorrow.”

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/yes-nasas-launching-artemis-2-astronauts-to-the-moon-on-april-fools-day-its-not-a-joke

  72. StevoR says

    Once at a space conference I attended in Colorado Springs, NASA astronaut Victor Glover — the pilot of NASA’s upcoming Artemis 2 mission to the moon — said something that caused a bit of a stir.

    It was April 17, 2023, just two weeks after NASA had named Glover to the Artemis 2 crew, a lunar flight that will make him the first person of color ever to visit the moon. Glover was there at the Space Symposium conference with other astronauts to talk about, well, space.

    But he also told a group of reporters about his weekly tradition: Every Monday, he listens to “Whitey on the Moon” on the way to work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    Glover happens to be Black. And now he’s going to the moon. NASA is targeting April 1 for the launch of Artemis 2, which will send Glover and three other astronauts on a 10-day lunar flyby mission.

    “It’s funny, because that Space Symposium caused me a lot of grief in the next months because people tried to quote me out of context,” Glover told me in an interview last September. “And it ain’t about racism. It’s about the human condition.”

    “Whitey on the Moon” is a spoken-word poem by Gil Scott-Heron published and set to music in 1970. It recounts the challenges of doctor bills, taxes and high rent for Black Americans at a time when the U.S. was spending billions to send astronauts to the moon and beat the Soviet Union during the Cold War space race. You can read the full poem here.

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis-2-pilot-victor-glover-whitey-on-the-moon-

  73. whheydt says

    Re: SteveR @ #72…
    It was noted at the time, that if the entire NASA manned Lunar budget had been diverted to social programs…the amount would have been within a rounding error.

  74. Silentbob says

    @ StevoR

    Remember the first time the US did this stunt (1968) and there was controversy because the head of the program was a former Nazi who surrendered at the end of the war. Ah, the good old days!

    2026 and the US does the same stunt all over again with an actual fascist government.

  77. birgerjohansson says

    ^ ^ ^
    This is the planned launch time. As we know, this has a tendency to change.

  79. johnson catman says

    re birgerjohansson@78: So, start a war with a country that was not a threat, create worldwide chaos, then leave the mess for someone else to clean up? Typical behavior for a toddler that has never had to take responsibility for anything and has failed at nearly everything he has attempted.

  80. birgerjohansson says

    Nerds attending an Australian museum of armoured vehicles. At 28.50 we find a very Australian design choice. BTW this video was recorded in what passes for “winter” Down Under. “Tank Nerds Are Going To HATE This Video”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=GKca_Bm8M5E

  81. birgerjohansson says

    BTW it is now 5 hours 40 minutes before the planned launch time for Artemis II.

  83. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: MS NOW reporter chased by Israeli settlers while reporting on West Bank violence

    MS NOW reporter David Noriega travels to the West Bank to document a surge in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and is chased off by settlers while reporting firsthand on the attacks and lack of accountability.

    Video is 5:53 minutes

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Trump too busy with ballroom and money-making schemes to focus on war, says Murphy

    “It does seem that the president and the people around him are spending most of their time either working on the ballroom or trying to get rich off this war,” says Sen. Chris Murphy. [And lots of coverage of Pete Hegseth’s statements and actions, including possibly insider trading, as well as insulting the British Navy. Also, more coverage of negative economic effects of the war.]

    Video is 12:24 minutes.

  84. says

    Trump’s attendance at the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship arguments won’t help his case

    “If his radical gambit is likely to lose, why bother with an unprecedented presidential appearance at the high court? There are two prevailing explanations.”

    The language of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment does not lend itself to wiggle room. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it reads. In other words, if you’re born in the U.S., you’re a citizen of the U.S.

    Donald Trump has nevertheless spent years condemning what’s known as “birthright citizenship” and vowing to undo it […]

    To that end, on Inauguration Day [Trump] kept one of his uglier campaign promises and issued an executive order designed to gut the constitutional principle, and directed federal agencies to refuse to recognize U.S. citizenship for children who do not meet the administration’s new standards.

    Not surprisingly, Trump’s radical gambit has struggled in the courts, which relied on generations’ worth of legal precedent, but the Supreme Court nevertheless agreed to hear the case. Ahead of Wednesday’s oral arguments, the president decided to do something his predecessors never did. MS NOW reported:

    President Donald Trump will be watching oral arguments today as the Supreme Court weighs whether the president holds the power to end birthright citizenship. […]

    Trump’s presence at the court is significant. He will be the first known sitting U.S. president to attend oral arguments before the high court, according to the Supreme Court Historical Society.

    By way of explanation, the president told reporters on Tuesday that he intended to sit in on oral arguments “because I have listened to this argument for so long.” (A day later, I’m not entirely sure what that was supposed to mean.)

    […] Trump wants the power to unilaterally declare that the Constitution doesn’t say what it plainly says, and there probably aren’t five justices who will go along with such an absurdity.

    So why bother with an unprecedented presidential appearance at the high court? There are two prevailing explanations — though they’re not mutually exclusive, and both could be true.

    The first is that this is part of a ham-fisted intimidation campaign: By literally showing up in person, it’s possible that Trump, who appointed a third of the court’s justices, thinks he can apply extra pressure to those who will decide the case’s fate. [Yeah, that sounds like Trump.]

    […] The other theory is that Trump recognizes the fact that the Supreme Court won’t let him rewrite constitutional law through an executive order, so he went to oral arguments as a political tactic intended to deliver an anti-immigrant message […]

    “The big thing for Trump is to be seen putting up a fight,” Politico noted. “This policy — always a Hail Mary from a legal perspective — is as much about signaling to the president’s base as it is a serious attempt to change the law.”

    Whatever the explanation, if the president expects his order to be upheld, he probably ought to start lowering his expectations. […]

  85. says

    Hegseth’s intervention in Kid Rock flyby fiasco is part of a more serious problem

    “Even Donald Trump conceded that the helicopter pilots “probably shouldn’t” have done what they did. His defense secretary came to a different conclusion.”

    […] On Saturday an entertainer named Kid Rock, who had a few hit songs many years ago, shared videos via social media of Apache helicopters doing a flyby at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. The clips showed the entertainer, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, saluting and applauding the troops.

    It obviously wasn’t an appropriate use of military resources, and the Army quickly did what everyone expected it to do: It suspended the crew members and temporarily barred them from flight duties pending a review of the incident.

    Even Donald Trump conceded on Monday that the helicopter pilots “probably shouldn’t have been doing it” since “you’re not supposed to be playing games, right?”

    The president’s defense secretary, however, came to a very different conclusion soon after. The New York Times reported:

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday abruptly reversed the suspension of Army crews that piloted two Apache helicopters close to the musician Kid Rock’s residence in Nashville over the weekend. […]

    Mr. Hegseth appeared to end both the suspensions and the investigation, with a social media post on Tuesday night declaring: ‘No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.’

    The Times added that the moves represented “a remarkable intervention from the highest level of the Pentagon,” adding that the decree “was another indication of his contempt for legal guardrails in the military.”

    As far as the Army was concerned, the crews ignored the military’s strict standards for aviation safety, professionalism and adherence to established flight regulations. As far as the former Fox News host was concerned, aviation safety, professionalism and adherence to established flight regulations just weren’t all that important.

    Kid Rock is aligned with Trump and MAGA, the helicopter crews used military assets to favor Kid Rock, and for Hegseth, apparently little else matters.

    […] An apolitical military is a foundational, bedrock principle of the United States. Partisan, ideological and electoral considerations must be utterly irrelevant to what the military is and how it functions.

    […] In October, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols highlighted what he described as an ongoing “civil-military crisis,” arguing that “Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army.” [True, unfortunately!]
    […]

  86. says

    Trump Issues Wild New Executive Order on Voting

    In his latest effort to seize extralegal control over the state-run midterm elections, President Trump issued a new executive order that purports to direct:

    1. DHS to create a “State Citizenship List” of “individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”

    2. the U.S. Postal Service not to mail ballots to anyone not already on a separate approved list it keeps called the “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.”

    Election law expert Rick Hasen tries to make sense of this structure, which is odd and convoluted in addition to plainly unlawful:

    To put this in plain terms: the order would use the USPS, which is not under the direct control of the President, to interfere with a state’s lawful transmission of ballots. If the state does not comply with these rules, federal law would purport to interfere with a state’s conduct of its own elections.

    The EO is unlawful in numerous respects and will face immediate legal challenges.

  87. says

    Trump floats quitting NATO after it won’t endorse his warmongering

    […] Trump is once again floating the idea of the United States abandoning the long-standing NATO alliance, this time because several U.S. allies have refused to aid his war against Iran.

    In an interview with The Telegraph published on Wednesday, Trump was asked if he would reconsider American membership in the alliance, and he responded, “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration.”

    Trump added, “I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin knows that too, by the way.” [aaarrrggghhh]

    Trump told the paper that he thought NATO nations would be “automatic” in helping him to wage war against the Iranian people […] [“Automatic” in this situation?! What a basic misunderstanding! Trump is so ignorant.]

    The newest complaints come a day after Trump fumed at the leadership of the United Kingdom and France, which joined other nations, like Spain and Italy, in refusing to help America bomb Iran. On his social media account, Trump wrote that the U.K. wasn’t “there for us” in the conflict.

    Underscoring why these nations are reluctant to march in lockstep with an unpopular American president, Trump said on Wednesday that “we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!” He has also advocated for stealing Iran’s resources and sabotaging civilian infrastructure, which would likely constitute war crimes.

    Trump has discussed leaving NATO before, but a provision of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by then-President Joe Biden (and co-authored by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio), doesn’t make it easy. The provision requires a NATO exit to be authorized by a two-thirds Senate vote or an act of Congress, not just a presidential decree. [Important point!]

    [I snipped history related to NATO.]

    […] Trump has sought to sabotage [NATO], fulfilling the dreams of Putin. [!] Putin has complained about NATO opposition to his regional power grabs, including his attempt to take over Ukraine.

    The NATO alliance is not perfect, but it has worked for decades—until Trump created an international disaster and demanded that someone else clean up his mess.

  88. says

    Stopgap measures aren’t enough to halt rising gas prices as the world scrambles for more oil, by Associated Press.

    Global leaders have been scrambling to contain the rising cost of oil and gasoline since the start of the Iran war, which took a record amount of oil off the market when tankers full of crude were stranded in the Persian Gulf and military strikes damaged refineries, pipelines and export terminals.

    Hoping to ease some pain for consumers, President Donald Trump and other heads of state have been pulling on various levers, launching more oil on the market in a bid to calm the chaos.

    A group of 32 nations that are members of the International Energy Agency began releasing the largest volume of emergency oil reserves in its history: 400 million barrels. Trump is tapping into oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while lifting sanctions on Russian and Iranian crude and temporarily waiving the Jones Act, a maritime law that requires ships carrying goods between U.S. ports to be U.S.-flagged.

    But despite those maneuvers, crude oil surpassed $100 a barrel and gasoline is selling for $4.06 a gallon on average in the U.S. While the stopgaps are helping, they’re not adding up to enough oil to replace what’s stranded, experts say.

    “They’re all incremental,” said Mark Barteau, professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Texas A&M University. “You’re talking about these different patches being at the level of maybe 1 to 2 million barrels a day each, and you’ve got to get to 20, so it’s hard to see those actually adding up to the numbers that are needed. And then the question is, how long can you sustain those?”

    […] Before the war began, roughly 15 million barrels of crude oil and 5 million barrels of oil products passed daily through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, amounting to about 20% of global oil consumption, according to the International Energy Agency.

    In addition to that loss, some oil producing nations in the Middle East have halted oil production because they can’t ship fuel out of the Gulf and their storage tanks are full. That’s taken about 10 million more barrels per day off the market, the IEA said.

    Then there are the eight countries around the Persian Gulf that together hold about 50% of global oil reserves. [I snipped details.]

    The IEA said in its recent report that “the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz is the single most important action to return to stable oil and gas flows and reduce the strains on markets and prices.”

    […] Some nations have found workarounds to move oil out of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is using its East-West pipeline, which stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, to transfer about 5 million barrels per day out of the Gulf, said Michael Lynch, distinguished fellow at Energy Policy Research Foundation […] But the nation was already using that pipeline to transport oil, so it doesn’t have a lot of spare room to move oil from stranded tankers.

    Trump also temporarily lifted sanctions on approximately 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that was already in transit. But that didn’t add oil to the market — it just widened the pool of potential buyers, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.

    Typically, most Iranian oil was bought by private refiners in China, who purchased it at a steep discount, Sternoff said. But with sanctions lifted, others could scramble to buy the oil, which in turn raises its price to the benefit of Iran, [“to the benefit of Iran!”] he said.

    […] The decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil could have more impact, because Russia had been storing unpurchased oil in tankers, Sternoff said. “By waiving sanctions, it will allow those barrels to clear.” [!]

    Trump’s temporary waiver of the Jones Act to allow foreign ships to temporarily transport goods between U.S. ports could potentially help ease natural gas prices by enabling companies to more efficiently ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast to New England. […] “It’s helpful, but not a game changer,” Lynch said.

    […] The U.S. is a major oil producer, and exports more oil than it imports. But like any other oil producing nation, it can’t just ramp up production instantly to fill the void.

    “If the U.S. were to try to make up the global shortfall, we would need to nearly double our production,” Barteau said. “We couldn’t drill wells that fast even if we wanted to.” [Important point]

    […] In addition, the U.S. doesn’t produce enough of the type of oil its refineries process. [!] It produced about 13.7 million barrels per day of oil at the end of 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration. And refineries processed about 16.3 million barrels per day that year, relying on imports to fill in the gaps […]

    That’s because nearly 70% of U.S. refineries are set up to process heavy, sour crude, according to AFPM. But much of the oil produced in the U.S. is light, sweet crude, which was unlocked during the shale revolution.

    […] As a result, just 60% of the crude oil processed in U.S. refineries is extracted domestically, according to the AFPM. And retooling domestic refineries would cost billions of dollars, the group said. It also would require shutting down the refinery for a period of time, which generally raises gasoline prices.

    […] “[…] if [the war] goes on for another six weeks we get to be in some serious trouble.”

  89. says

    A guide to the Artemis II mission, by Associated Press.

    NASA promises more boot prints in the gray lunar dust, but not before a couple practice missions. The upcoming test flight by Artemis astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen is the first step in settling the moon this time around.

    Here’s a snapshot of the Artemis II mission. [photo]

    The moon is about to welcome its first woman, first person of color and first non-American.

    Koch already holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. During her 328-day mission at the International Space Station spanning 2019 and 2020, she took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

    Glover, a Navy test pilot, was the first Black astronaut to live and work aboard the space station in 2020 and 2021. He also was one of the first astronauts to launch with SpaceX.

    The Canadian Space Agency’s Hansen, a former fighter pilot, is the lone space rookie. Their commander is Wiseman, a retired Navy captain who lived aboard the space station in 2014 and later headed NASA’s astronaut corps. They range in age from 47 to 50.

    The Space Launch System is more powerful than the Saturn V rocket’ […]

    Lots more details at the link.

  91. JM says

    Newweek: Donald Trump Suddenly Leaves in Middle of Supreme Court Arguments

    Trump appeared to attend only the government’s portion of the arguments and departed shortly after Solicitor General John Sauer concluded his presentation, before the plaintiff began making her case.

    Slightly rude, if the president is going to show up in person he aught to listen to the entire argument. He also posted about the case on Truth Social before the arguments finished but he didn’t insult anyone so not as rude as what he posts most days.

  92. says

    In New Challenge To Objective Reality, January 6 Insurrectionists Sue Cops Who Defended Capitol

    […] a new set of seditious grifters are out to see how much money they can get for failing to get away with a coup. Members of the mob who attacked the Capitol that day are suing the government in hopes they’ll be richly compensated for all the pain and suffering they experienced when Capitol and DC Metro police tried to keep them from invading the US Capitol.

    The Federal Tort Claims Act lawsuit filed in Florida accuses police defending the Capitol of “indiscriminately shooting chemical munitions and pepper spray” into the crowd at the Capitol, without of course any mention of what the crowd was doing there. The lead plaintiffs, protesters Patrick and Marie Sullivan and Proud Boy creep Alan Fischer III, accuse the police of causing “physical and emotional injuries, including but not limited to chemical burns, concussive trauma, emotional distress, and other damages to plaintiffs, class members and thousands of other protesters.”

    Politico notes that Fischer was charged with assault, but his case was thrown out before trial by Trump’s pardon of all the attackers; the Sullivans, according to the lawsuit, were in the crowd on January 6 and say they were harmed by pepper spray, but they were apparently not charged with any criming.

    The complaint is sort of darkly hilarious throughout […] Wonkette definitely saw a bunch of people beating the crap out of cops.

    The plaintiffs are requesting the case become a class action, on behalf of all members of the hive of scum and villainy who gathered on the “west plaza, west steps and/or west lawn” of the Capitol on January 6 […]

    You can try to get in on the payout as long as you were there and coughed some. Even if you didn’t try to brain a cop with a flagpole or beat him with his own riot shield!

    If US District Judge Paul Bryon — an Obama appointee — grants the class action request, the filing includes a list of 35 potential winners who have filed tort claims and could be eligible to join the suit. Among them are:

    Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy who ignited the breach of the Capitol itself when he smashed a window with a stolen riot shield and Christopher [Worrell], a Proud Boy who unleashed pepper spray at a line of police officers. Also on the list, pro-Trump livestreamer Anthime Gionet, who is better known by his moniker “Baked Alaska,” who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count. […]

    Pezzola was tried along with other Proud Boys for seditious conspiracy, though he was only convicted on other charges. Yes, he’s also the guy who pleaded for leniency because he’s given up politics, and then yelled “TRUMP WON!” after he was sentenced. Worrell asked the judge in his case for mercy, saying his conduct on January 6 was “inexcusable and unjustified” and that he wanted police and members of Congress to know he was “truly sorry.” Then, just before his actual sentencing, he cut off his ankle monitor and ran away, and was only recaptured after a 10-week manhunt. (He faked a drug overdose to further delay sentencing.) Now he might be in for a big payout for help-help-I’m-bein’-repressed.

    NBC News notes that the list also includes Joseph Fischer, a former Boston cop who was inside the Capitol and slammed a cop with a chair to help another rioter escape (but he was very sorry later).

    Another on the list is Andrew Paul Johnson, one of the Great Patriots who went on to do new crimes after Trump pardoned them. Johnson was convicted in February of molesting two children, one under the age of 12, as well as other child sex crimes, and last month was sentenced to life in prison. He attempted to buy the silence of one of his victims by promising the child a share of the imaginary $10,000 payout he thought Trump would give him for being a J6 hero. […]

    All told, some 46 people could become part of the class action claim for $18.4 million, at a start. But the complaint notes that the class could ultimately include “hundreds or potentially thousands of individual,” […]

    Those poor innocent lambs were brutalized by the cops they beat the shit out of, that’s for sure.

    This is only the latest attempt by January 6 seditionists to profit from their attempt to overthrow the 2020 election […]

  93. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna, OM @ 90

    Hostile takeover? I have an old link at Youtube.

    There is a problem with white supremacists infiltrating US gun clubs and spreading poison. Karl Kasarda- who believes the second amendment is for everyone,  including minorities (and is a surprisingly decent guy, even if I find US gun culture weird) – has a 27 minute video of how a nasty kook took over the gun club he attended.

    “An Example of The Problem: Pima Pistol Club, 2g-ACM, Brutality Matches and Gun Rights”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=vnWfFuR6oAI

  94. birgerjohansson says

    It seems that even Orange -appointed judges have problems with his arguments.
    There is nothing he can do to intimidate them. I hope he insults them all on Truth Social so they get even more pissed off.

  95. johnson catman says

    re JM@91: I am sure The Orange Turd will be plenty rude when they dismiss his executive order and say in no uncertain terms that the US Constitution is very clear that if you are born in the US, you are a US citizen. Birthright citizenship is not uncommon in the world, contrary to what the ignorant fucking orange moron says.

  96. birgerjohansson says

    I am not into sports (according to stereotypes, this indicates I may be Jewish) but Sweden has made some progress in football.
    I post this for the benefit of “Foot-the-ball” enthusiasts in Ankh-Morpork and elsewhere.

    “Graham Potter and Sweden revel in second chances to seize World Cup place”

    .https://share.google/2Db2gNgCbSbe7TNW3

  100. says

    ‘I don’t care about that’: Trump moves the goal posts on Iran’s uranium stockpile

    “Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for 10 to 12 bombs. The American president knows this but no longer appears to care.”

    More than a month into the war in Iran, there’s still great uncertainty about why the United States launched this military offensive in the first place. There’s reason to believe, however, that the conflict has something to do with Iran’s nuclear program.

    At an unrelated White House event on Tuesday, for example, Donald Trump said, “I had one goal: They will have no nuclear weapon, and that goal has been attained.”

    It was a curious comment, in part because by the president’s own assessment, Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon before he decided to launch the war, and in part because Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week presented the administration’s four major objectives in the conflict, none of which had anything to do with Iran’s nuclear program. [!]

    As for whether Trump’s newly manufactured “goal” has actually been “attained,” The New York Times reported, “Unless something changes over the next two weeks — the target Mr. Trump set to begin withdrawing from the conflict — he will have left the Iranians with 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough for 10 to a dozen bombs. The country will retain control over an even larger inventory of medium-enriched uranium that, with further enrichment, could be turned into bomb fuel, if the Iranians can rebuild that capacity after a month of steady bombing.”

    The American president has acknowledged that these details are true, though he apparently no longer cares. Ahead of an Oval Office address to the nation about the war in Iran, the Republican spoke to Reuters about his perspective:

    Of the enriched uranium, Trump said: ‘That’s so far ⁠underground, I ​don’t care about that.’ [WTF?]

    ‘We’ll always be watching it by satellite,’ he added. He said Iran was ‘incapable’ of developing a weapon ​now.

    […] If Trump told Reuters the truth and is prepared to let Iran keep the uranium it already has because he no longer “cares about that,” it would drastically reduce the likelihood of a ground invasion — one that would almost certainly cost lives.

    But there’s another element to this worth keeping in mind as the process moves forward: Ever since the Obama administration struck the original nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015, Trump has insisted that it was wrong to allow the country to hold onto nuclear materials that might someday be used in a nuclear weapon.

    A decade later, he’s suddenly indifferent to Iran’s uranium stockpile — which has only grown larger since Trump abandoned the Obama-era policy.

    Trump’s goalposts, in other words, are on the move.

    Indeed, if the American president’s comments reflect his true perspective (and with this guy, one never really knows), we’re due for a serious public conversation about the motives and objectives for the war. Because as things stand, before the war, Iran had a regime run by radical religious clerics and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard; the country had a significant uranium stockpile; and the Strait of Hormuz was open.

    And now, Trump’s apparent vision for a successful offensive will include Iran with a regime run by radical religious clerics and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard; the country still holding a significant uranium stockpile; and the Strait of Hormuz will be open [not likely that the Strait of Hormuz will be open].
    […]

  101. says

    Republican Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota heaped praise on President Donald Trump’s war in Iran—you know, despite the dead American soldiers and all that.

    “This has been an incredibly successful mission in spite of the tragedy of losing 13 of our service men and women,” Emmer effused during a Wednesday interview on CNBC. “This is an amazing, amazing mission—and guess what, if you watch the news in this country, you’d think we were losing.” [video]

    Despite Emmer’s insinuations, few major media outlets, if any, are suggesting America is losing the war. Much of what is being debated in the news is instead whether the war should have been started at all, and what “winning” in Iran would even look like.

    So far, Trump has successfully destabilized the region and shocked the global oil markets, sending gas prices through the roof, while enriching adversaries like Russia. And now, five weeks into the war, Trump is talking about leaving NATO. [Well that certainly sounds like losing.]

    Last month, Emmer was sent to CNBC to try and finesse Trump’s disastrous foreign imperialism, describing the war in Iran as a “short-term experience.” Shortly after that, reports indicated that Trump’s team was already stretching out their timeline.

    It might not be losing, but it sure isn’t winning.

    Link

  102. says

    Trump’s hunt for undocumented Medicaid enrollees yields few violators

    Last August, as part of the federal government’s crackdown on people in the country illegally, the Trump administration sent states the names of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees with orders to determine whether they were ineligible based on immigration status.

    But seven months later, findings from five states shared with KFF Health News show that the reviews have uncovered little evidence of a widespread problem.

    Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for Medicaid, which covers health care costs for people with low incomes and disabilities, and the closely related Children’s Health Insurance Program. Both programs are administered by states.

    Spokespeople from Pennsylvania’s and Colorado’s Medicaid agencies said, as of March, the states had found no one who needed to be terminated from Medicaid. That was after checking a combined 79,000 names. [!]

    Texas has reviewed records of more than 28,000 Medicaid enrollees at the Trump administration’s request and terminated coverage for 77 of them, according to Jennifer Ruffcorn, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Human Services.

    Ohio has checked 65,000 Medicaid enrollees, of which 260 people were disenrolled from the program, said Stephanie O’Grady, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Medicaid.

    In Utah, 42 of the 8,000 enrollees identified by the Trump administration had their Medicaid coverage terminated, said Becky Wickstrom, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Workforce Services.

    In announcing the reviews, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said: “We are tightening oversight of enrollment to safeguard taxpayer dollars and guarantee that these vital programs serve only those who are truly eligible under the law.” […]

    “It is entirely predictable that all of these burdensome reviews that the federal government is forcing upon states would yield no pay dirt,” Cuello [Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families] said. “The states had already done the reviews once, and CMS was just making them reverify the same information they had already checked. Making states go through the same bureaucratic process twice is incredibly wasteful and inefficient.”

    […] many of the enrollees whose eligibility the Trump administration said it could not confirm are indeed U.S. citizens. O’Grady said Ohio found that, of the 65,000 names referred by the federal government, the state already had information on 53,000 confirming them as citizens and an additional 11,000 showing appropriate immigration status for Medicaid.

    […] The agency did not respond to a question about whether it’s forwarding the names of those whose Medicaid coverage was terminated to federal immigration officials.

    In June, advisers to Kennedy ordered CMS to share information about Medicaid enrollees with the Department of Homeland Security, prompting a lawsuit by some states alarmed that the administration would use the information for its deportation campaign against residents living in the U.S. without authorization.

    A federal judge ruled in December that Immigration and Customs Enforcement workers could access information only about people in the country unlawfully in the Medicaid databases of the states that sued. […]

  104. lumipuna says

    (cross-posted from Affinity)

    Hello, all. Happy Artemis II launch day, or night, depending on your time zone. Assuming it does happen (very likely) within the next few hours.

    Several months ago, I mused about my interest in the historical Apollo flights. Lately, my social media has been full of Artemis hype from US space nerds and professionals, mixed with endless alarm over escalating wars, genocides and fascist takeovers, and warnings over looming global energy crisis and economical and ecological collapse. Fuck. I was so ready to get excited about Artemis II, but the other global developments are taking my free time/attention and ruining my joy.

    I’ve been thinking about how it’d be cool it’d be to look at the Moon from Earth at a specific moment during a crewed Moon mission, and imagine seeing the spacecraft there in its real time location, flying next to Moon or sitting on the surface. Of course, it’s so small and so far away that you couldn’t actually see it, even with a telescope. Just knowing the timing beforehand can be tricky. With Artemis II, once the launch has actually happened, we know it takes about 120 hours (give or take an hour or two) until the lunar flyby. In my time zone, that would be around 2 am on 7 April.

    As it happens, the Moon just barely rises above horizon (and only briefly, around 4-6 am on that day) during that part of its orbital cycle, as seen from my northern location. This is because the Earth’s northern hemisphere happens to be tilted away from the direction where the flyby occurs. The weather forecast here is looking bad, too. Those in the Africa, southern/western Asia and Australia should have good view of Moon at the time of the flyby, weather permitting. If you do look at the Moon then, don’t forget to smile for the camera!

  107. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: Lynna @100.
    Cheryl Rofer (Retired nuclear scientist):

    I hate to agree with Donald Trump, but what he says here is pretty much what I’ve been saying: The enriched uranium is deep underground, perhaps buried. The rest of Iran’s nuclear complex is not capable of producing a bomb any time soon.

    And a raid would be a disaster. (That’s just me.) Once again: All intelligence agencies assessed that Iran was NOT working toward a nuclear weapon before the war. Here’s the plan for taking the enriched uranium: “Temporary occupation.” The yardstick is Project Sapphire, which removed 600 kg of enriched uranium from Kazakhstan. It took a month, with the full cooperation of the Kazakhstani government.

    Cheryl Rofer: “The fluorine in UF6 adds about a third to the mass of uranium as reported. The containers add a lot.”

    Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences – Iran likely transferred highly enriched uranium to Isfahan before the June strikes

    visual analysis of the image alone cannot determine with certainty what was inside the 18 containers on the truck. […] The blue packages strongly resemble “overpack” containers used to transport radioactive materials […] heavily shielded to withstand physical impact and high temperatures, as well as to protect against radioactivity, criticality risks, and dispersion during transport.
    […]
    The cask body is made of cast iron and weighs 10,700 kilograms when empty or 12,300 kilograms [27k lbs] when shock absorbers are added. The package is operable by a truck crane. The total load for 18 of these packages would be 190 to 220 metric tons [485k lbs], depending on the cask configuration and without counting the payload. Several types of Chinese-manufactured multi-axle flatbed or lowbed heavy-duty trailers can carry 200 metric tons or more.
    […]
    This calculation suggests that Iran could have transferred all of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to Isfahan via the truck seen in the satellite image

  109. JM says

    Palestine Chronicle: ‘You Are Not Our Enemy’ – Iran’s President Sends Message to Americans

    In a rare move amid the escalating war, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has issued a direct message to the American people, bypassing governments and addressing public opinion at a critical moment.

    It’s an interesting reasonable move in a situation where the conflict is massively unpopular in the US. It must be read with an eye towards Iran trying to manipulate public impressions just as much as the Trump administration. I also get the impression it’s aimed as much at 3rd parties as the US.

    The Iranian president’s message repeatedly questions dominant Western narratives, particularly the portrayal of Iran as a destabilizing force.
    He argues that such perceptions are not rooted in historical reality, but rather in political and economic interests tied to military expansion, arms production, and regional dominance.

    These perceptions are inflated in the US, which has often cast Iran as the villain for political reasons and to justify military spending. However, it is also true that Iran has been a destabilizing force. When the revolution happened in Iran the government became staunchly anti-Israel and began proxy and direct attacks on Israel before Israel started any aggression on Iran. They have also funded revolutionary and terrorist groups. The letter points out multiple times that Iran has not started a war in modern history but in modern history they have always been a weak country.

    The article has the full text of the letter. Here are quotes from the letter.

    Yet all these pressures have failed to weaken Iran. On the contrary, the country has grown stronger in many areas: literacy rates have tripled—from roughly 30% before the Islamic Revolution to over 90% today; higher education has expanded dramatically; significant advances have been achieved in modern technology; healthcare services have improved; and infrastructure has developed at a pace and scale incomparable to the past. These are measurable, observable realities that stand independent of fabricated narratives.

    There he is playing to the people in Iran. This overstates the post revolution improvements, which was funded by selling oil not internal economic improvements.

    Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime? Is it not true that Israel, by manufacturing an Iranian threat, seeks to divert global attention away from its crimes toward the Palestinians? Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar—shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?

    Here it is playing into antisemitism and into third countries. It’s true that Israel has manipulated Trump and the US government but he goes over the top in the middle.

    I invite you to look beyond the machinery of misinformation—an integral part of this aggression—and instead speak with those who have visited Iran. Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants—educated in Iran—who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West. Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?

    I have. They hate the current war but also hate the government of Iran and were hoping it would collapse on it’s own.

  110. says

    MS NOW:

    Just days after labeling the Senate deal to end the record-breaking shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security a ‘crap sandwich,’ Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., now appears ready to swallow it whole.

    Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., announced Wednesday they will move forward with the two-track approach senators unanimously backed last Friday. They will pass a bill to fund most of DHS, with the exception of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Patrol, and then look to approve money for ICE and CBP in a separate reconciliation package.

    “In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited,” Johnson and Thune said in a joint statement.

    nstead, Johnson on Friday forced a House vote on an alternative measure to fund all of DHS for eight weeks. While it passed almost entirely along party lines, the stopgap measure stood no chance in the Senate, where Democrats have repeatedly rejected a similar proposal in recent weeks.

    Lawmakers were back to square one.

    But it turns out, all they needed was a little push from Trump.

    Less than three hours before Johnson and Thune’s announcement, Trump urged Republicans, in a lengthy statement on Truth Social, to pass funding for ICE and CBP through budget reconciliation. While that approach would allow GOP lawmakers to bypass Democratic opposition, it would require near-unanimous GOP support.

    Trump said he wants the legislation on his desk by June 1 — an ambitious timeline that dramatically increased pressure on Republicans.

    “We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won’t be able to stop us,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We will not allow them to hurt the families of these Great Patriots by defunding them. I am asking that the Bill be on my desk NO LATER than June 1st.”

    With Johnson suddenly on board, lawmakers appear poised to end the DHS shutdown just as soon as the House can reconvene. It’s unclear exactly when that might happen. The House is not due back until April 14. But Johnson could always call lawmakers back sooner — or look to pass the Senate bill while both chambers are out on recess through a special process.

    Because the House never technically sent its 60-day continuing resolution to the Senate, it could just recede from its amendment of the Senate-passed bill and immediately send the legislation to the president.

    Either way, barring another sudden shift from Trump or House leadership, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history may soon be over — and Democrats are already taking a victory lap.

    “For the last 47 days, Donald Trump and Republicans have subjected the nation to chaos at airports, jeopardized our national security and kept the government closed to allow ICE to continue to brutalize the American people without consequence,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said in a statement. […]

  111. says

    New York Times:

    The spokesman of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmaeil Baghaei, denied in a statement on Wednesday evening that his country had requested a cease-fire from the United States, as President Trump claimed earlier in the day. He called the claim ‘false and baseless.’

  112. birgerjohansson says

    They are in orbit.

    I am used to other operators providing on-screen data about velocity, altitude et cetera but NASA only provided elapsed time.
    .
    Also, I would have appreciated more than one camera on screen during the most dramatic moments. NASA did not bother to provide very much on-board camera vision until seconds after booster separation, or seconds after main stage separation.
    There was a camera showing the view from the front but the full moon overwhelmed the camera.
    .
    The CGI simulation showing what it would look like from the side was crap, it showed msin engines still working after main stage separation. Jeez, a teenage nerd would spot that error!

    I am getting increasingly irritated. I kept switching between Youtube channels looking for better coverage.

  113. says

    NBC News:

    An American journalist was kidnapped in Iraq on Tuesday by suspected Iranian-backed militants, according to the State Department and the country’s Interior Ministry. The journalist was identified in the hours after her kidnapping came to light as freelancer Shelly Kittleson, with Al-Monitor, one of the publications she works for, calling for her ‘safe and immediate release.’

  114. says

    New York Times:

    The Trump administration is seeking a federal court’s approval to fire more than half of the remaining staff at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a step back from the White House’s prior attempts to eliminate at least 90 percent of the bureau’s staff and shutter the agency.

  115. says

    Associated Press:

    A federal judge in [Texas] dismissed a lawsuit on Tuesday that sought to allow churches to endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status, dealing a blow to the Trump administration and other conservatives who have worked to eliminate the decades-old law barring nonprofits from supporting political office seekers.

    Good news.

  116. says

    The Hill:

    Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) on Friday vetoed a bill to rename Phoenix’s State Route 202, or Loop 202, after conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated late last year.

    Good news. It is not appropriate to name State Routes in Arizona after Charlie Kirk.

  119. says

    TEHRAN (The Borowitz Report)—Shortly before Donald J. Trump was set to address the American people on Wednesday night, Iran declared that it would agree to end the war only if there was regime change in the United States.

    “The United States is a rogue state led by an unstable ruler,” the Iranian statement read. “Such a madman must not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.”

    The Islamic Republic’s ultimatum drew immediate and strong support from Greenland, Canada, and the rest of NATO.

    At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said only that Trump was well-rested for his televised address, having spent the day sleeping at the Supreme Court.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/iran-agrees-to-end-war-only-if-there

  121. StevoR says

    A powerful magnitude-7.4 earthquake has struck in the Molucca Sea region north-east of Indonesia, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).

    The USGS reported aftershocks as high as magnitude 5, and Indonesia’s meteorology agency BMKG reported tsunami waves in West Halmahera at 0.3m high and Bitung at 0.2m ‌high.

    The quake, which hit early today, had a depth of 35 kilometres and its epicentre was 127km west-north-west of Ternate, Indonesia, the USGS said.

    The US tsunami warning system said tsunami waves were possible in neighbouring countries.

    Indonesian broadcaster Metro TV reported one person had died from falling rubble in the Manado area, and video showed damaged buildings.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-02/indonesia-molucca-sea-earthquake-tsunami-warning/106525262

  123. StevoR says

    @73. whheydt : Re: StevoR @ #72…It was noted at the time, that if the entire NASA manned Lunar budget had been diverted to social programs…the amount would have been within a rounding error.

    Yup. We can both fund social welfar eand look after peopel and fly to the Moon and beyond too!

  124. says

    Listening to Trump’s speech tonight was mostly a waste of time, unless you are one of the few who still needs to be convinced that he is fucking bonkers.

    Trump didn’t really say anything new. He repeated a bunch of stuff he has said before. He didn’t back up anything he said with facts. He insulted the NATO alliance … again. He claimed that opening the Strait of Hormuz to all ship traffic is someone else’s problem, not his. He lied … a lot.

    He praised Saudia Arabia, Qatar, and others in the Middle East.

    He issued multiple threats. As reported by The Washington Post:

    […] In a speech from the White House, Trump said the United States was on track to complete all of its military objectives “shortly, very shortly” but first there would be a period of military buildup: “We’re going to hit them extremely hard,” he said. “Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age.” […]

    Trump also offered up the alternate reality that must run on loop in his head:

    […] he said discussions with Iran were “ongoing,” Trump made no mention of the list of 15 demands he has sent to Tehran — via the government of Pakistan — or what he said earlier Wednesday was Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s offer of a ceasefire. The Iranian government denied such an offer had been made and has made its own demands, including control over the Strait of Hormuz and war reparations for destruction by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. […]

    During part of the speech, Trump sounded like he was taking his toys and going home (maybe?, or maybe putting American boots on the ground and seizing islands off Iran’s coast? … who knows??). But first, Trump has to create so much havoc and chaos that if affects almost the entire planet:

    […] This week, Trump has laid the groundwork for a withdrawal from the conflict, even as he has surged the military to the region.

    On Tuesday, he waved off the argument that both sides would need to reach an agreement for the U.S. to walk away from the conflict, saying the new Iranian regime is already “much more accessible.”

    “No, they don’t have to make a deal with me when we feel that they are, for a long period of time, put into the Stone Ages, and they won’t be able to come up with a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “Then we’ll leave whether we have a deal or not. It’s irrelevant now.”

    Trump claimed military success in Iran. He definitely exaggerated and over-sold how decimated the Revolutionary Guard and Iran’s military capabilities are. And he indulged in being happy about blowing stuff (and people!) to bits. Trump repeated several times that a lot of Iranian leaders had been killed.

    From The New York Times:

    The United States and Israel have done significant damage to Iran’s military capabilities. But Iran still fires missiles, has nuclear material and coordinates with militias in the region.

    Here is an assessment of where the war stands now based on the goals Trump described on February 28 in an eight-minute video:

    1. “We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated.”

    The U.S. and Israeli militaries have destroyed many of Iran’s ballistic missiles and launchers in airstrikes. But a large number are undamaged, and Iran continues to fire missiles in the region. In addition, it is using attack drones. The United States and Israel have decimated many Iranian factories that produce missiles.

    2. “We’re going to annihilate their navy.”

    The two militaries have destroyed much of Iran’s navy. A notable attack took place near Sri Lanka in early March, when a U.S. submarine fired torpedoes to sink an Iranian destroyer, the IRIS Dena, which had a crew of 180 people. Initial reports said at least 80 people were killed. The ship had taken part in naval exercises in India and was on its way home. The United States had participated in the same exercises.

    3. “We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their I.E.D.s, or roadside bombs as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans.”

    Mr. Trump was referring here to militias in the region that receive financial support and other types of backing from Iran. The militias are still active. […]

    Mr. Trump’s reference to I.E.D.s — improvised explosive devices — and roadside bombs is an anachronism: Two decades ago, Iran supported some Iraqi Shiite groups that were fighting American soldiers during the Iraq War. But militias have not been laying roadside bombs to attack Americans in recent years.

    4. “And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. It’s a very simple message. They will never have a nuclear weapon.”

    U.S. intelligence agencies did not assess before the war that Iran had made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon. […]

    Mr. Trump ordered airstrikes last June that severely damaged three nuclear sites in Iran. However, U.S. officials say they think some highly enriched uranium remains […]

    5. “Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had promised Mr. Trump in the run-up to the war that his country could help galvanize a popular uprising that would lead to the overthrow of the Iranian government. That revolt has not materialized.

    Mr. Trump said he had carried out “regime change,” and pointed to airstrikes that have killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and other senior officials.

    However, the newly appointed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the deceased cleric, is a hard-liner aligned with a powerful arm of the Iranian military. The current government remains theocratic, authoritarian and anti-American, and continues to wage a war of resistance.

  125. StevoR says

    @ 74. Silentbob :

    @ StevoR – Remember the first time the US did this stunt (1968) and there was controversy because the head of the program was a former Nazi who surrendered at the end of the war. Ah, the good old days!

    2026 and the US does the same stunt all over again with an actual fascist government.

    Yeah. The Trump regime is fascist and is in power & that stinks and could well been avoided if more people had done more to support Kamala in their final presidenial election. Anyone who didn’t do all they possibly could to help her in order to stop him should hang their heads in shame.

    OTOH, I don’t believe NASA as an organisation is fascist so there’s that.

  126. Silentbob says

    Correction: I was comparing Artemis 2 with Apollo 8, but Apollo 8 went into orbit around the Moon, performing a Lunar Orbit Insertion burn while behind the Moon and out of radio contact with the Earth.

    Artemis 2 is a simple free return trajectory (distant) flyby of the Moon. That is, no significant rocket burns required enroute.

    So 1968’s Apollo 8 was by far the more sophisticated mission, and Artemis 2 is not remotely comparable.

  127. birgerjohansson says

    Trump speech:
    “I will never let anything like this ever happen… and never should any past president…”
    So, we are living in a time loop where past and future are the same?

    A summary of the speech from Meidas Touch, with fact checking.
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=hk5jUdpRU_U

  128. birgerjohansson says

    At least the Orion spacecraft has a toilet for the crew. So in 54 years we have achieved better crew comfort.

    The Soviet free return Moon mission Zond capsule (which was designed to be crewed) was even more cramped than Apollo.

    Not everything with Artemis is terrible. We have to acknowledge how NASA is restarting from a low level with poor funding. I just sound grumpy because I remember Apollo 8 well.
    And I remember the first color photo of Earth rising above the lunar horizon – a symbol of the tiny living biosphere on a hostile universe – and the emotional impact.

  129. birgerjohansson says

    Anticipated Fox News reaction:
    “This rousing speech will live on in memory alongside FDR;s speech after Pearl Harbor and Kennedy’s Berlin speech”.

    Future Mike Johnson: “The president brilliantly explained why we are in this war and why we are better off than ever.”

  132. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘Massive political failure’: Hayes, Wallace react to Trump prime-time address

    Chris Hayes and Nicolle Wallace give their immediate reactions to Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran war.

    Video is 8:04 minutes.

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Trump shows up to Supreme Court as birthright citizenship case gets picked apart

    Civil rights scholar Sherrilyn Ifill explains why Trump’s birthright citizenship order faced sharp skepticism at the Supreme Court—with the president in the room.

    Video is 9:08 minutes

  133. says

    What was missing from Trump’s oddly low-energy Iran address: A case for war

    “Trump attempted to slap some gold paint on his foreign policy disaster while acting like the global fallout from the conflict he started is not his problem to solve.”

    […] In a prime-time address from the White House, a decidedly lethargic president argued both that the war was necessary — lest Iran rain destruction down on America and much of the world — and that the war is going great and will soon be over. If there is anyone not already on board with Trump’s war who would have been convinced by that speech, it’s hard to imagine who and where they are.

    The speech featured many of Trump’s familiar rhetorical tics. The military, he said, has delivered “victories like few people had ever seen before,” while Iran was about to obtain “a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.” Everyone apparently is in awe: “The whole world is watching, and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance, they just can’t believe what they’re seeing.” And before you know it, the war will be just a memory. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

    And the global energy crisis the war touched off? Not Trump’s fault, certainly. “This short-term increase” in gas prices, he said, “has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks at oil tankers.” It’s hard to consider those attacks “deranged” when they were utterly predictable and have given Iran the best leverage it has to force an end to the conflict on favorable terms.

    Trump also insisted that “we’re now totally independent of the Middle East,” and that “America has plenty of gas. We have so much gas,” so we don’t have to worry about the restriction of oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz. This would be news to anyone who has filled up their gas tank in the past few weeks.

    But a significant chunk of Trump’s speech was given over to a fact-challenged attack on the international nuclear agreement reached with Iran when Barack Obama was president. […]

    On May 8, 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multinational deal to restrict and monitor Iran’s nuclear program that was painstakingly negotiated and finalized in mid-2015, with the help of China, Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the European Union. Trump’s own advisers then, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, had pleaded with him not to abandon the agreement, arguing that it was keeping Iran’s nuclear ambitions in check. But Trump killed it, claiming that the Iranian regime would quickly come crawling back and give in. “They are going to want to make a new and lasting deal,” he said. But no new agreement ever materialized.

    To be fair, the 2015 nuclear deal did not address Iran’s missile stockpile or its support for proxy groups, including Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. But the core terms of the agreement — allowing Iran some limited uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes and strictly monitoring its nuclear program, in exchange for relief from economic sanctions — are ones Trump would probably be happy to take today, if he were being honest. Instead, he said in his speech Wednesday that had the nuclear agreement remained in place, “there would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now,” because Iran would have built nuclear weapons, then launched them against every country in sight. [bullshit]

    Only in Trump’s mind could an agreement that included close monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program have made it more likely that Iran would build nuclear weapons than with no monitoring at all. [True] But Trump began this war without thinking through the political effects — not just here at home but also in Iran and beyond. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and his shifting statements on the topic show just how irrational his prosecution of the war has been.

    When Iran closed the strait by threatening and attacking some ships traveling through it, Trump first reacted with rage and threats. Then he demanded that American allies step up to help secure the strait. Then he said it wasn’t our responsibility at all: “The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations that use it — the United States does not!” Then this week he said other nations that need oil from the strait should “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,” a point he repeated Wednesday night.

    […] he did say in his speech that when he ends the war, the strait “will just open up naturally.” [Reminds us of Trump saying that COVID would end naturally.] As contradictory as his statements may be, the Iranian government seems confident that all it has to do is hold on long enough for Trump to get fed up, declare victory and leave. […]

    History is replete with disastrous wars, launched for terrible reasons and carried out with blundering incompetence. But in modern times we may never have seen a war go sideways as quickly as the one that Trump started in Iran, with an Iranian regime still holding on to power and the world plunged into an energy crisis. And though he tried to slap some gold paint on this catastrophe, Trump still hasn’t made a case for why his Iran war was anything but a terrible idea.

  134. says

    Pointing to the Iran war’s cost, Trump abandons his pre-election promises about day care

    “We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of day care,” the president said. Trump touted a very different position in the run-up to Election Day 2024.

    During Donald Trump’s remarks at an Easter lunch reception at the White House, the president wasn’t asked for his position on helping American families cover the costs of day care, but he took some time to pontificate on the subject anyway.

    “I said to [Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care.’ That has to be up to a state,” Trump said. “We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay.” [Video]

    He went on to say that it’s just “not possible” for the federal government to help defray the cost of day care, adding, “You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

    […] Trump made the case for investing in wars instead of day care at an Easter Lunch reception […]

    It is, however, worth taking a brief stroll down memory lane and looking back at the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

    In September 2024, Trump fielded questions at the Economic Club of New York, and one voter asked what he could do to help address the cost of child care. He began by describing it as a “very important issue,” and said specifically of day care, “In this country, you have to have it.”

    As part of that exchange, Trump appeared to suggest that he expected his trade tariffs to generate so much revenue that it could help cover day care costs. “As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” he concluded.

    [I snipped additional examples.]

    […] months later, Trump hasn’t just forgotten about those assurances, he’s also turned his ostensible priorities inside out.

  135. says

    On the war in Iran, the public deserved the truth. But Trump offered something else.

    Trump said Iranians, before the war began, “were also rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe and virtually any other place on Earth.” That wasn’t true.

    He said, “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.” That might have sounded nice, but it was wrong.

    Trump said, “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred.” It really hasn’t.

    He said, “We were a dead and crippled country after the last administration and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation.” He actually inherited the strongest economy on the planet in early 2025, and there’s plenty of inflation.

    Trump said, “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East. … We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have.” As consumers struggle to pay for increased energy costs, there’s ample evidence to the contrary.

    He said, referring to the families of fallen U.S. troops, “I was with them and their families, their parents, their wives, their husbands. We salute them. And now we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives. And every single one of the people, their loved ones, said, ‘Please, sir. Please finish the job.’ Every one of them.” No, that’s not what happened.

    Trump said he was responsible for “record-setting investments coming into the United States, over $18 trillion.” This remains an entirely made-up figure, which is at odds with assessments from his own White House.

    He said, in reference to the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran, “Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash.” That’s not what happened — and Trump himself just eased Iranian oil sanctions, which allowed a lot more than $1.7 billion to flow into Iran’s treasury.

    Referring to the Obama-era agreement, Trump said, “His Iran deal would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them, would have been a different world. There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion, the opinion of a lot of great experts, had I not terminated that terrible deal.” All of this turned reality on its head.

    He claimed Iran launched a “race for a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.” That sounded scary, but this wasn’t true, either.

    Toward the end of the president’s remarks, he added, “The whole world is watching, and they … just can’t believe what they’re seeing.” Oddly enough, he might as well have been referring to his own speech.

    Embedded links are available at the main link. The embedded links lead to additional sources that debunk Trump’s lies

  136. says

    On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.

    The Associated Press reported that the medical examiner’s office did not “reach any conclusions about responsibility” for the homicide and that Shah Alam’s death was “caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration. “

    […] Shah Alam was initially arrested after an incident where he became lost attempting to return home; the Buffalo Police Department approached him as a threat, ostensibly for holding a curtain rod he used as a walking stick. Instead of trying to assist him, officers tased and arrested him. He was incarcerated for a year before his release, when Border Patrol in effect dumped him.

    […] In a press release, Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who represents the area in Congress, demanded that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Patrol, cooperate in James’ state-level investigation.

    “In light of this determination, DHS must fully cooperate with New York State Attorney General James, and newly-confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin must order an independent and transparent investigation,” he said.

    Link

  137. says

    On Wednesday night, President Donald Trump delivered a poorly received national address about the global crisis he created by attacking Iran. And on Thursday morning, he followed up the speech by whining about international rock star Bruce Springsteen.

    “Bad, and very boring singer, Bruce Springsteen, who looks like a dried up prune who has suffered greatly from the work of a really bad plastic surgeon, has long had a horrible and incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS,” Trump fumed on his Truth Social account.

    In his rant about Springsteen, Trump lied and once again regurgitated the falsehood that his 2024 election win—in which he did not win a majority of the popular vote—was a “Landslide” victory. He concluded by calling on MAGA supporters to boycott Springsteen’s “OVERPRICED CONCERTS, WHICH SUCK.”

    […] Soon after Trump’s speech concluded, the cost of a barrel of crude oil increased 13%, reflecting the markets’ collective view that Trump has no plan to solve the problem he created. […]

    Things are bad, and pushing for boycotting Springsteen concerts isn’t going to fix a single thing.

    Link

  138. says

    US crude tops $110 per barrel and stocks tumble after Trump vows to escalate attacks on Iran

    Oil rose more than 10% and U.S. futures tumbled Thursday after President Donald Trump said in his first national address since the Iran war began that the United States will escalate its campaign in the coming weeks.

    Futures for the S&P 500 tumbled 1.5% before the opening bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.4%. Nasdaq futures slid 2%.

    Thursday is the last day of trading this week due to the Good Friday holiday. Markets have not posted a weekly gain since the war began in late February. […]

  140. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-speech-iran-war-is-not-a-war

    “Trump Speech: Iran War Is Not A War, Over Also Not, So Why Don’t You Love Me Any More, America?”

    “Same as he ever was!”

    […] Bless you, Associated Press, for providing a transcript. Did you know the AP is a nonprofit? They are mostly sustained by news outlets’ wire subscriptions. The death of the pulp-based newspaper business over the past decades and then the rise of AI has wounded them terribly, but the staff remaining are still grinding away! Are we procrastinating reading Trump’s moanings? You betcha!

    […] Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing and America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.

    Before discussing this current situation, I also want to thank our troops for the masterful job they did in taking the country of Venezuela in a matter of minutes. That hit was quick, lethal, violent and respected by everyone all over the world. After rebuilding our military during my first term, we have by far the strongest military anywhere in the world. And now we’re working along with Venezuela and are, in a true sense, joint venture partners. We’re getting along incredibly well in the production and sale of massive amounts of oil and gas, the second largest reserves on Earth after the United States of America. We’re now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet we are there to help. We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have. But we’re there to help our allies. […]

    [What fuckton of bullpucky!]

    […] Everybody should be all for the war, though, Trump said, because Iran is the world’s “number one state sponsor of terror.” Which, of course is, not true, not even before Pete Hegseth bombed a girl’s elementary school killing 168, Latin American fishing boats, hundreds in residential buildings in Yemen, etc. […]

    More at the link.

  141. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/ex-gay-torture-may-soon-be-legal

    “Ex-Gay Torture May Soon Be Legal Again In Colorado (And Everywhere Else), Because SCOTUS”

    “Except conversion therapy is consumer fraud, and fraud is not protected by the First Amendment.”

    On Tuesday, in a deeply disappointing 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado therapist who claimed that the state’s ban on conversion therapy for minors violated her right to free speech. Sort of. The case will now go back to the lower courts, which will now review it under “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of judicial scrutiny — meaning that the state would have to prove that the law fills an essential government purpose, not just a permissible one. Lower courts previously judged the case with the lowest level of judicial scrutiny, only determining whether there was a rational basis for the law. Which there obviously is.

    But this likely means doom for every ban on ex-gay torture in the nation, meaning that really terrible parents will once again be able to send their gay and transgender kids to really terrible therapists in hopes of forcing them to change their sexual preference or gender identity.

    Kaley Chiles, the therapist involved in the case, specifically said that she relies only on talk therapy and does not use the more extreme aversion techniques like electroshock or drug-induced nausea, and that she only gets religious with clients who want it and who “have a goal to become comfortable and at peace” in their bodies. That, in short, sounds like some real bullshit, especially since it’s pretty unlikely that these kids would seek her out on their own, particularly those not yet old enough to drive. It’s likely not going to be their goal so much as it would be their parents’ goal. At best, they would seek it themselves out of fear that it will cause them to lose their parents or their community or burn in a lake of fire for all eternity.

    […] We know, for an absolute fact, that gay conversion therapy is harmful. Hell, even the people who ran Exodus International issued apologies back in 2012 for having ever promoted it in the first place, acknowledging both the “pain and hurt” that it caused and the fact that it did not work. Other “ex-gay” groups have done the same, especially once they all figured out that they can’t actually change their sexual orientation.

    […] More importantly, therapy is not supposed to be about the therapist and their very special personal feelings about who people should be allowed to love or be, it’s meant to be about the patient. If there were a scourge of pro-anorexia therapists, or therapists who were encouraging kids to commit suicide or other harmful activities, it would be reasonable to ban them from doing so.

    Free speech is one of the most important rights we have. It’s right up there with our right to party. Consumer rights, however, are also pretty important, which is why free speech does not extend to fraud. Given that, again, we know that conversion therapy does not work and does cause harm, Kaley Chiles would be committing fraud if she were to claim that she is able to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Claiming that it is a religious thing is also not always an excuse.

    Case in point! In 2023, Mark Grenon and his three sons were sent to prison on charges of “conspiring to defraud the United States and deliver misbranded drugs,” resulting from their sale and marketing of a toxic industrial bleach as a “Miracle Mineral Solution,” which they claimed cured all diseases. They specifically tried to get around this by starting their own church, the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, and claiming that said toxic industrial bleach was a “sacrament.”

    It did not work.

    […] practically all of the successful lawsuits against conversion therapists have hinged on the issue of consumer fraud. In a landmark 2012 case, the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH) on behalf of several former patients, on the grounds that the organization’s claim that it could change someone’s sexual orientation amounted to consumer fraud and unconscionable business practices. […]

  142. johnson catman says

    re Lynna@135:

    Please, sir. Please finish the job.

    JFC! Another fucking “Sir” fiction.

  143. says

    Trump fired Pam Bondi.

    Pam Bondi out as attorney general, Trump says

    Video at the link.

    Attorney General Pam Bondi is leaving her position, President Donald Trump announced Thursday, amid reports that he was frustrated with her handling of some of his key priorities. [Not even fellow whacko could please Trump?]

    “We love Pam [scoff], and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future,” he said in a Truth Social post, adding that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would take over as the department’s acting attorney general.

    A senior administration official and a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that Bondi was fired.

    Trump had grown “more and more frustrated” with Bondi in recent days, a person familiar with White House deliberations said, adding that while he likes her as a person, he doesn’t think she has “executed on his vision” in the way that he wants.

    But changing the Justice Department’s leadership doesn’t guarantee the president the outcome he seeks, as courts have so far largely blocked the administration’s efforts to go after his enemies, and Congress successfully sought and won the release of the DOJ’s files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

    […] Bondi is the second Cabinet member to be axed by the president.Kristi Noem was fired last month as homeland security secretaryin a descent that mirrored Bondi’s. NBC News reported that Trump grew increasingly frustrated with Noem but that her performance at two congressional hearings is what finally cost her the job.

    Trump had chosen Bondi, a longtime loyalist, to lead the Justice Department after embattled former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew as nominee.

    Bondi had long ties to Trump. During the 2016 Republican National Convention, she joined in “lock her up” chants aimed at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and she was then part of Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial. After Trump lost the 2020 election, she was involved in efforts to overturn the results, falsely claiming that he had “won Pennsylvania.” […]

  144. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/hooray-republicans-will-end-the-dhs

    “HOORAY, Republicans Will End The DHS Shutdown! OH NO, Republicans Can’t Agree On That After All!”

    “GOP in disarray again.”

    Republican leaders in the House and Senate announced Wednesday that they’d broken the impasse over funding the Department of Homeland Security without any of the limits on ICE brutality that Democrats have held out for. The celebration lasted until Thursday morning, when the House convened for a ceremonial two minute session without taking any action on the bill the Senate sent it. [!]

    Maybe the House will take up the bill again Monday […]

    If nothing else, at least America got this compare-and-contrast diptych of headlines from the New York Times on Wednesday and then Thursday: [Images of headlines]

    After we screencapped that wonderful pairing, the Times wussed out and revised the second part of the headline on the more recent story to the perhaps softer phrasing “House Punts on D.H.S. Spending, Extending Shutdown.” By later today, it may change yet again […]

    Let’s sort through the wreckage […] and figure out what happened here. […] As you may recall — it was a whole week ago, which in the Trump Time Distortion Matrix could be five minutes or several lifetimes — the Senate last Friday voted to fund all parts of the Department of Homeland Security except for ICE and the deporty parts of Customs and Border Protection. Democrats weren’t able to force through the restraints on ICE that they wanted, but Trump didn’t get either of the things he wanted: full funding for ICE, or his stupid voter suppression law.

    Once it reached the House, though, the far-right crazies rejected the Senate bill, and instead passed an eight-week extension of full funding for DHS, including ICE, until May 22. Then both houses went on vacation, with zero chance that Senate Democrats would vote for the House bill.

    The “breakthrough” Republicans announced Wednesday set the clock back to last Friday again, scuttling the House’s full extension of DHS funds and reviving the everything-but-ICE arrangement from last week. The only difference between last Friday and yesterday wasn’t in the bill at all, but in the White House, where Donald Trump agreed to let the all-but-ICE bill pass, to be followed at some later date by a GOP-only reconciliation bill to fund ICE for the rest of the fiscal year, if Republicans can get their shit together to pass it. Trump last week was insisting that wasn’t good enough, because he wants ethnic cleansing and rigged elections too. […]

    Everything went fine until the Senate’s second try at its all-but-ICE bill passed and went to the House this morning, where for some reason, Republicans did not take it up.

    And then suddenly I was run over by Pam Bondi getting shitcanned, so we guess we’re writing that up for morning […]

  145. says

    Trump does not have to turn over presidential records, Justice Department says

    “In an opinion released Thursday, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel found the 1978 Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional. But the office only offers guidance to the president, it doesn’t make law.”

    The Justice Department has issued a legal opinion arguing that President Donald Trump does not have to turn over his presidential records to the National Archives at the end of his administration.

    The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires presidential documents be sent to the National Archives and Records Administration. In an opinion released Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found the law “is unconstitutional for two independent but interlocking reasons.”

    It exceeds Congress’ powers and it does so at the expense of the autonomy of the presidency, T. Elliot Gaiser wrote in the opinion, noting that Congress can’t order the papers of Supreme Court justices to be sent to the archives.

    The president “need not further comply with its dictates.”

    If the Trump administration chooses to follow the opinion from the office, which offers legal advice to the executive branch but does not set law, he could face outside legal challenges should he violate the Presidential Records Act in the future.

    The determination is a signal that the president will not turn over his documents to the archives. Trump was accused violating the Presidential Records Act by refusing to turn over documents he kept after leaving office following his first term.

    According to federal prosecutors, Trump willfully retained national defense documents at his private home in Mar-a-Lago, obstructed justice and concealed materials, including a classified military map reportedly shown to unauthorized individuals. The case was dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon in 2024 before he won re-election. […]

    The office of legal counsel serves as a quasi-judicial office within the executive branch. It was once involved in the George W. Bush- era memos authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding against terrorism suspects.

    […] The Presidential Records Act, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 following the Watergate scandal, requires official records of the president and vice president, created or received after January 1981, to be made public, and for the National Archives to manage a president’s records after the individual leaves office.

    The act requires that the president “take all practical steps” to keep presidential records separate from personal records, and it allows the president — once the archivist weighs in — to dispose of records that no longer have “administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value.”

    The act also states that presidential records are automatically transferred into the legal custody of the archivist as soon as the president leaves office.

  146. Reginald Selkirk says

    Scientists get first look at the evolution of early complex animals

    … More than 700 fossils found in southwestern China’s Yunnan province offer a window into life from 539 million years ago, during the waning end of the Ediacaran period, a time of simple but strange animals that lived two-dimensionally in the oceans, never going up or down, researchers said.

    But a study in Thursday’s journal Science said many of the fossils in this trove are remnants of more complex animals that lived three-dimensional lives, traveling up through the water and eating. Those are traits that had been thought to only spring to life at least 4 million years later in the Cambrian period, during what was called the Cambrian explosion of complex and recognizable animal life. ..

  147. says

    Trump’s rage at NATO allies is binding them together — against him

    Donald Trump’s anger at NATO allies for refusing to join the war against Iran has so far achieved one thing: uniting them against him.

    In private, over intimate dinners, and on the sidelines of meetings in Brussels and elsewhere, European leaders and officials are discussing how to handle the U.S. president’s threats to quit NATO and what they would do if he followed through.

    They now share the grim view that Trump’s increasingly angry attacks on Britain, Spain, France and others confirm a fundamental breach in the transatlantic alliance. And while they aren’t yet sure what the final answer should be, some countries are already looking to expand their defense and security arrangements to work around a broken NATO.

    […] “It’s pretty clear NATO is already falling apart,” an EU official said, adding that Europe must urgently bolster its own defenses: “We can’t wait for it to be completely dead.”

    […] In recent days the Trump administration has plunged the military alliance into perhaps the deepest crisis of its 77-year history. The president and his team have vowed to reassess U.S. membership in NATO once the Iran war is over, in retaliation for the failure of European allies to join the conflict against Iran.

    […] In Helsinki last week, 10 European leaders met for a private dinner without their officials and aides in the intimate surroundings of the Mannerheim Museum, the home of Finland’s World War II leader Gustaf Mannerheim.

    Amid the 1940s interiors, decorated with the former president’s hunting trophies, the leaders of countries including the U.K, Sweden, Finland and Norway held a frank discussion about the dire state of the transatlantic alliance. Trump’s stream of invective via social media is bad and getting worse, they all agreed.

    But they resolved they couldn’t consent to the U.S. president’s demands to join the fighting against Iran. […] what’s remarkable about the international response to the war in Iran is how united European leaders have been in their refusal to send military assets to join the American and Israeli bombing.

    […] Starmer added that NATO was “the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen” and the U.K. remained “fully committed” to it. British finance minister Rachel Reeves, however, lifted the lid on the real frustrations in London. “I’m angry that Donald Trump has chosen to go to war in the Middle East — a war that there’s not a clear plan of how to get out of,” she told the BBC.

    Even so, Starmer is working hard to show that Britain and other countries really do want to help — not least because their economies depend on restoring trade through the Strait of Hormuz and bringing down oil prices.

    On Thursday, the U.K. is set to host a virtual summit of 35 nations to discuss “all viable diplomatic and political measures” to restore freedom of navigation and trade in the region — with every member of the G7 except for the U.S. expected to be in attendance, as well as many smaller states including the tiny Marshall Islands.

    […] The U.K. and other allies will also explore how potentially to help in peacekeeping or policing efforts in the Gulf — but only once the fighting has ended.

    […] n private, officials concede the relentless criticism from the U.S. inevitably weakens NATO because at its heart, the alliance is an idea. Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty states that members will be ready to defend any member who is attacked.

    The moment that promise is questioned, NATO loses its potency as a deterrent against Russian aggression. Trump has questioned the idea so often he has turned doubting NATO into official policy.

    […] if Article 5 doesn’t hold up, the JEF J[oint Expeditionary Force, a British-led defense cooperation group for Northern European countries] still might. Ukraine has already joined an enhanced partnership agreement with the JEF, and at some point Canada could also forge closer links to the group, one official said.

    Another network that’s assuming greater importance is the Nordic Defence Cooperation partnership (Nordefco) consisting of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

    […]It’s one thing for Europe to prepare for America to pull out. It’s another to confront the military aggressor on its doorstep.

    For the Baltic states in particular, the existential threat from Moscow is why unity matters.

    […] Anguishing over whether the U.S. is wrecking NATO shows that the West is “divided,” he said. “This is exactly what Putin wants to see.”

  148. says

    By ousting Pam Bondi, Trump made the right call for the wrong reasons

    “The president ousted the attorney general, not because she corrupted the Justice Department, but because she didn’t corrupt it enough.”

    Video at the link.

    As 2026 got underway, The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump “repeatedly” complained to White House aides about Attorney General Pam Bondi, privately deriding the nation’s chief law enforcement officer as “weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda.”

    The message wasn’t subtle: If Bondi intended to keep her job atop the Justice Department, she had to do more to impress the president.

    Soon after, the beleaguered attorney general appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and put on a truly ridiculous display, in what was widely seen as one of the ugliest congressional hearings in modern American history. Trump, however, approved of her cringeworthy antics, which appeared to buy her a little time at Main Justice.

    The reprieve was short-lived. MS NOW reported:

    President Donald Trump on Thursday announced he has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, removing her as the nation’s top prosecutor. […]

    Trump had informed Bondi in recent days that she would soon be removed from her position, a White House official and another person familiar with the situation told MS NOW. The official said Trump still personally likes Bondi and notified her before the official removal to ‘help her along.’

    The president confirmed the news by way of his social media platform […]

    There’s little doubt that the attorney general deserved to be ousted. Bondi was cartoonishly bad at her job and oversaw an unraveling DOJ that’s now a shell of its former self. […]

    She failed in practically every way that an attorney general can fail.

    But the problem isn’t that Trump’s decided to fire her, it’s his reason for firing her.

    If the president had fired his handpicked attorney general […] because she was an incompetent, hyperpoliticized Cabinet official who prioritized the White House’s partisan agenda above the rule of law, that would’ve made sense. But that’s not what happened.

    As MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported, “Pam Bondi was fired largely because Donald Trump grew dissatisfied with her inability to deliver on prosecuting his perceived enemies.” [Yep. All too true!]

    This is the entire story in one sentence: The president ousted Bondi, not because she corrupted the Justice Department, but because she didn’t corrupt it enough.

    Indeed, someone probably ought to tell the president that her successor will struggle just as much as she did to meet his expectations, because Trump wants what an attorney general can’t deliver: evidence-free indictments against his perceived political enemies. [True]

    […] Bondi has always been there for Trump — dropping a case against his fraudulent “university,” clumsily defending him during one of his impeachment trials, leading a Trump super PAC, even turning Main Justice into an extension of his political operation — but it ultimately wasn’t enough. […]

  149. says

    TEHRAN (The Borowitz Report)—The leaders of Iran’s Islamic Republic crowed on Thursday that they have begun to achieve their goal of regime change in the U.S.

    “First Kristi Noem, and now Pam Bondi,” the official Iranian statement read. “The dominoes are falling one by one.”

    Iran said that, although the US claims Donald J. Trump is still in power, “His speech last night did not prove that he is still alive.”

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/iran-says-it-has-started-to-achieve

    Satire

  150. Reginald Selkirk says

    Bogus maple syrup from Quebec producer found on grocery store shelves

    Radio-Canada’s Enquête program has uncovered a major Quebec maple syrup producer selling fake maple syrup in cans on store shelves…
    Enquête purchased five cans of Bourdeau’s syrup at random from different stores and from different batches and took them to the provincial laboratory responsible for testing and assuring quality control for maple syrup in Quebec, le centre ACER, for analysis.
    The results were unequivocal.
    All five cans, each labelled “pure maple syrup,” contained at least 50 per cent cane sugar…

  151. says

    Josh Marshall:

    I want to reiterate all the points I made about Trump’s speech last night. Just for the sake of his own political standing, the whole idea was a mistake. It wasn’t a good speech. It wasn’t delivered well. And it didn’t either make favorable news or actually address the issues that have the public or energy markets upset.

    I didn’t realize as I was watching the speech that his vague “two to three weeks” prediction of when the war will end was really just a restatement of what we might call the Trumpian Constant, the prescribed duration after Trump will, purportedly, always have gotten things worked out and awesome. The time before the Obamacare replacement plan is released, when infrastructure week will finally arrive. I mean, two weeks is genuinely a cliche with Trump or, in more modern parlance, a meme. Trump just tacked on another week. As you might have seen there are lots of charts floating around showing how the price of oil and oil futures spiked pretty dramatically during his speech.

    A piece from Semafor reminded me that there’s really only one part of that speech that probably meant anything to energy markets: Trump’s evolving and coalescing decision that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz isn’t Trump’s problem. It’s up to a handful of importer nations in Asia, almost all of which have small regional navies and would, in any case, face vast coordination problems if they tried to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force.

    When Trump says that — not our problem, up to those guys — everyone knows that means it’s not going to happen. And Trump has made the decision that what his war caused isn’t his problem to fix. So expect oil prices to go a lot higher. Because it’s that throttled oil supply that is responsible for all the international economic fallout. […]

    […] After a bunch of pretty dismal news about energy prices and maritime insurance rates he [Tim McDonnell, writing for Semafor] writes this: “Another important, and possibly more reassuring, signal is the far end of oil price futures. Crude oil to be delivered in December 2028 is now about $66 per barrel, a bit higher than it was before the war but a good 40% below the price for deliveries today.”

    As he suggests, this isn’t necessarily that reassuring. Certainly not to anyone in the world of electoral politics who is on the line for these numbers. It’s a reality check to everyone in the world of politics, which has mostly been in denial about all of this. Just on the basis of what has already happened and even with a fairly quick resolution of the conflict, this is already baked in not just for this election cycle but for most of the next one. [!]

    […] we know that Iran wants to exercise control over the Strait of Hormuz going forward and probably exact some kind of tolls on passage. If the U.S. doesn’t try to undo that either by force or diplomacy, it seems highly unrealistic in the near term that any coalition of states with small regional navies is going to do anything about it. It seems far more likely that countries will make one-off deals with Iran for the passage of ships heading for their ports.

    Or perhaps China (the biggest importer of Iranian oil) will make some arrangement with Iran and thus become the guarantor of a big chunk of the global oil supply, and vastly increase its geopolitical power in the Gulf and throughout Asia.

    The upshot remains a massive geopolitical defeat for the United States regardless of how much stuff the U.S. military may have blown up during the course of the war. [!]

  152. says

    Reginald @150, well that is certainly a crime! Glad to see that Bourdeau was caught. Now I wonder if other companies selling “maple syrup” are diluting it with cane sugar.

    In other bad news: A deadly bacterial disease is returning, doctors warn, as vaccination rates fall

    “Hib once killed 1,000 children a year, permanently disabling many more. Doctors who’ve never seen the disease say the comeback is changing the way they practice medicine.”

    A scar that runs along the base of Dr. Lara Johnson’s neck serves as a permanent reminder of the devastating effects of a vaccine-preventable disease.

    When Johnson was 4 years old, she caught a dangerous, potentially deadly bacterial infection: Haemophilus influenzae type b, commonly called Hib.

    The bacteria attacked her epiglottis, the piece of cartilage that covers the windpipe when eating so food doesn’t get into the lungs. Her airway was closing up and she couldn’t swallow.

    […] Doctors had to cut through her neck and into her windpipe so she could breathe. Antibiotics treated her infection, the plastic airway was removed and she recovered.

    It was 1980. A Hib vaccine wasn’t available until seven years later.

    Prior to the vaccine, about 20,000 children in the United States — mostly babies and toddlers — developed severe forms of Hib every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many children were left with permanent brain damage. About 1,000 children died each year.

    After vaccinations began, the number of Hib infections dropped to fewer than 50 a year. Many doctors who’ve trained in the past 40 years have never seen a case.

    Now, parents […] are increasingly opting out of vaccinating their kids against Hib. […]

    Doctors like Johnson, who a year ago was treating children hospitalized with measles during the West Texas outbreak, are sounding the alarm on Hib, fearing it could be the next vaccine-preventable disease to make a comeback.

    […] As more people stop vaccinating children against diseases, Hib “is something that we might see soon,” Nolen said. “It’s really tragic to think we’re going to have to go back to having emergency rooms filled with little babies who have this highly, highly deadly and dangerous disease.”

    […] Conversations with pediatricians suggest additional Hib cases are occurring and causing severe illness. [I snipped details.]

    […] The possibility that Hib could make a comeback means that doctors have to start thinking differently — and possibly more aggressively — when a young, unvaccinated patient comes in with what looks like a typical bacterial infection.

    […] Despite the name, haemophilus influenzae bacteria don’t cause the flu that circulates every winter. […]

    Even people who aren’t sick can spread Hib to others through coughs and sneezes. Sometimes the bacteria cause problems that are relatively easy to treat, like ear infections. They can also cause serious, invasive infections in the lungs, blood stream and joints, as well as the epiglottis like in Johnson’s situation.

    It’s Hib’s ability to cause inflammation of the brain and spinal cord — meningitis — that still frightens doctors who remember what it was like treating kids before the vaccine was available. Doctors diagnosed it by doing a lumbar puncture, or spinal tap, to analyze their cerebrospinal fluid. […]

    The CDC recommends three to four Hib shots (depending on which brand they get) for all kids under age 5. Studies have shown the full series is at least 93% effective in preventing the bacterial illness.

    […] A 2025 NBC News investigation with Stanford University found that childhood vaccination rates overall have fallen in at least 77% of U.S. counties and jurisdictions since 2019.

    The number of parents hesitant about vaccines and medicine in general has risen in recent years.

    […] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fueled anti-vaccine sentiments further since becoming health and human services secretary. […]

    Doctors are desperate to undo the damage so that vaccine-preventable diseases remain in the past as much as possible.

    “The last night I was a pediatric resident, a child came in with Hib and promptly died by the next day,” said Vanderbilt’s Edwards, whose residency was in the 1970s. “I didn’t work for 50 years to have everything destroyed by one man.”

    It’s been almost a year since Ashlee Dahlberg lost her 8-year-old son, Liam, to Hib. [I snipped details.] Testing revealed Liam’s body had been invaded by Hib and that it had turned into bacterial meningitis.

    By April 26, Dahlberg said, MRI scans showed that her son’s brain had swollen so much that the damage was irreversible. They took him off life support two days later.

    Liam and his two sisters had been vaccinated. But his immune system was susceptible to illnesses like Hib, Dahlberg said, because he’d been on an inhaled steroid to treat asthma. She is speaking out about her family’s loss to encourage other families to vaccinate their children to protect kids like Liam — as well as his younger sister who also has asthma.

    “What I would really love for other people to understand is that there are people out there who are like my son, who have weakened immune systems,” Dahlberg said. “What may be a cold for your child is a death sentence or a hospitalization for another.” […]

  153. says

    MS NOW:

    Donald Trump’s handpicked National Capital Planning Commission voted Thursday to authorize the president’s plan to erect a gilded 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom in place of the historic East Wing, which was destroyed last fall to make way for the ballroom.

  157. JM says

    Yahoo News: With U.S. Absent, 40 Countries Meet To Figure Out Strait Of Hormuz Reopening

    After President Donald Trump effectively washed his hands of the choked-up Strait of Hormuz, leaders of around 40 countries met on Thursday to figure out a way to get the vital shipping channel reopened.
    The U.K.-led talks, which included countries such as France, Germany and some Gulf nations, were initiated after Trump on Tuesday told U.S. allies to “go get your own oil” and said there’s “no reason for us” to help get the vital waterway open again.

    Interesting group. It would be a big win for the countries involved if anything comes from this. It’s unlikely though because it’s hard to come up with a transit plan in a war without neat borders and with the US constantly changing their plans.

    Opening the meeting, U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper condemned Iranian “recklessness,” and noted the blockage is hurting countries “who were never involved in this conflict.”
    Trump has repeatedly expressed anger at NATO allies for not helping with a war he started, even though that’s not the point of the military alliance.

    The first part there is just some stage setting, for political reasons they want to blame the US but not let Iran off the hook entirely. The second is pointing out one bit of Trump’s absurdity here but it probably makes sense in Trump’s mind. Something about a military alliance being pointless if he can’t use it for attacking other countries.

  160. JM says

    AP News: Hegseth says he will allow troops to take personal weapons onto military bases

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that he will allow service members to carry personal weapons onto military installations, citing the Second Amendment and recent shootings at bases across the country.

    Soldiers are trained with weapons so this will be less counter-productive then in most places but still isn’t a good idea. The shooters will gain more benefit from being able to openly carry more weapons then the people trying to defend themselves.

    In a video posted to X, Hegseth said he is signing a memo that will direct base commanders to allow requests for troops to carry privately owned firearms “with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection.”
    He said any denial of a service member’s request must be explained in detail and in writing.

    Right now a soldier can request permission to have and use a weapon but the officer can reject it and the protocol for using the weapon is tight. It amounts to a ban on carrying but you can get permission to store your gun on base and train with it on the military training range. Hegseth is reversing this, saying the officer must have a good reason to reject permission to carry.
    The bit about in detail and in writing is an implied threat, saying that any denied request will be used against the commander later.

  161. JM says

    CNBC: U.S. payrolls rose by 178,000 in March, more than expected; unemployment at 4.3%

    Nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted 178,000 in March, a reversal from the 133,000 decline in February and better than the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 59,000.

    Better then expected but not really good. Recently the US payroll has had a weird pattern of alternating between being positive one month then negative the next. This has resulted in some OK months over the past year but total net over the past year being close to zero.

  162. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘Babies in detention’: Stacey Abrams sounds alarm on Texas ICE site holding children

    “What we’re trying to do is help focus not only the mind, but the hearts. If Americans can’t remember that children do not deserve to be incarcerated and tortured, then our democracy is already lost,” says Stacey Abrams on raising awareness of the ICE facility detaining children in Dilley, Texas.

    Video is 7:51 minutes, with guest host

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Swalwell denies Bondi leaked to him, says Trump is ‘seeing ghosts’

    Ahead of her firing, Trump was frustrated with Pam Bondi because he believes she may have leaked to Rep. Eric Swalwell, according to reporting from Semafor. Swalwell joins “All In” to react.

    Video is 7:20 minutes, with guest host

  163. says

    U.S. fighter jet downed over Iran, search and rescue mission underway, officials say

    Related video at the link.

    [update]: An F-15 fighter jet pilot has been rescued alive by the U.S. military after their aircraft went down over Iran, a U.S. official said Friday.

    The aircraft appears to have been shot down by Iran, and a U.S. military search was ongoing for those on board, U.S. officials said.

    The rescue mission follows hours of reporting by Iranian state media of a downed U.S. fighter jet. Iran’s media published photos alongside claims from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that it had shot down the aircraft. The Pentagon and the White House did not immediately comment on the claims.

    […] a regional governor in Iran’s southwest issued a public plea for locals to find them and promised a reward, according to official and semi-official Iranian news organizations; a representative of merchants and businesses was reportedly offering the equivalent of $60,000. [video]

    […] It will also add to doubts over American-Israeli claims of dominance over Iranian skies. The joint campaign has focused intensely on destroying and degrading Iran’s missile defenses, but Tehran has retained the capability to hit back across the region.

    Iran has claimed previously to have struck American military planes, but the U.S. has not confirmed any such incidents during the war.

    U.S. Central Command said an F-35 fighter jet made an emergency landing March 19, but stopped short of confirming this was the result of an Iranian attack.

    Kuwait accidentally shot down three U.S. fighter jets near the start of the war.

    The rescue operation Friday followed a morning of reporting by Iranian media and military observers on social media.

    […] A channel affiliated with Iranian state television claimed that a U.S. pilot ejected from their aircraft over a rural region of southwestern Iran.

    […] Responding to photos published by outlets in Tehran, one expert told NBC News that “structure looks like an F-15.”

    “From the tail flash stripe markings from the 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom,” said Peter Layton, a former officer in the Australian air force and visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia.

    The base in Suffolk, eastern England, and RAF Feltwell in the neighboring county of Norfolk, host the 48th Fighter Wing, comprising some 7,000 active-duty personnel and four squadrons of F-15 Strike Eagles and F35A Lightning II fighter jets.

    It is the largest U.S. fighter operation in Europe and has been a key hub of American activity heading to the Middle East.

    Images of damaged pieces of the plane are available at the link.

  165. says

    Link

    Joyce Vance:

    DOJ filed a notice of appeal on Wednesday, signaling that it will try to undo a federal judge’s order that requires the release of 5-year-old Liam Ramos, whose photo put a human face on Trump’s mass deportation policy and busted open the myth that it was about getting violent criminals off the streets of Minneapolis. Liam’s Dad, Adrian Conejo Arias, an asylum applicant, was detained and then released with his son.

    Although the two were seized in Minneapolis, The Justice Department filed its notice of appeal in federal court in Texas, because the two were held in the Dilley detention facility in there. The appeal goes to the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The conditions in Dilley are shamefully inhumane with food contaminated by bugs, failure to provide essential medical care, and unsanitary conditions being well-documented. [social media post from Joaquin Castro]

    The federal judge who ordered the father and son released after their lawyers filed a habeas petition noted the complexities of the situation in his brief order. He noted the pair might still be forced to return to their country in origin because of our “arcane” immigration system, but that if it happened on his watch, they would at least receive due process. “That result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place,” Judge Fred Biery wrote, before referencing Ben Franklin’s comment, “a republic, if you can keep it.” [screen-grab of court order]

    The federal government is using its resources to try and send 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos back to detention in a facility it can’t be bothered to make safe. No one in this administration would spend five minutes or eat a single meal in those conditions.

    There is a cost to tying up investigative and prosecutorial resources. ProPublica got the data: “In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases.” You can make time for cases like Liam Ramos’ when you abandon public corruption prosecutions. Apparently, this DOJ did.

    […] We need to keep telling immigrants’ stories; putting real faces onto people who could easily remain faceless. They are all individual stories. These are people with futures ahead of them. Not everyone may be entitled to remain in this country, but that doesn’t mean they should be warehoused in disease-ridden facilities with rotten food.

    As for Liam and his Dad, they came to this country seeking asylum. Asylum is a fundamental human right that affords people fleeing persecution or danger the right to request protection and legal residence in another country. It’s provided for by both international law (the 1951 Refugee Convention) and U.S. laws. Protecting their rights seems essential […]

  166. JM says

    Legal AF: Trump DOJ Replacement EATEN ALIVE INSTANTLY
    Michael Popok answers the question of why Todd Blanche has not been considered for head of the DOJ. Todd Blanche was one of Trump’s personal lawyers, why is he acceptable for running the DOJ but not being the public head?
    The answer appears to be that Blanche is even worse the Bondi was in terms of following the law. Blanche might twist it in Trump’s favor but he won’t break it or go around it. He only acceptable as second in charge at DOJ because he can run a large organization and does know the law.
    He also is suspicious to some MAGA types because he was a registered Democrat at one point, switching when it became clear that following Trump into the government was the best way for him to get ahead. Trump likes that sort of loyalty but a lot of MAGA wants dedication to classic right wing goals.

  169. JM says

    NPR: Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system

    Last year saw a rapid increase in court sanctions against attorneys for filing briefs containing errors generated by artificial intelligence tools. The most prominent case was that of the lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who were fined $3,000 each for filing briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated citations.
    But as a cautionary tale, it doesn’t seem to have had much effect.
    “Recently we had 10 cases from 10 different courts on a single day,” says Damien Charlotin, a researcher at the business school HEC Paris who keeps a worldwide tally of instances of courts sanctioning people for using erroneous information generated by AI.

    We have passed the point where this can be considered an innocent mistakes. At this point a lawyer caught using AI should be looking at a suspension of law license, if not outright disbarment. Honestly, it should never have been considered an innocent mistake, the idea of using an entirely untested system to write legal documentation should always have been a serious issue.

  170. says

    Washington Post link

    “Trump requests record-breaking budget of $1.5 trillion for Pentagon”

    “The proposal would also make $73 billion in cuts to environmental, education and health research programs.”

    […] President Donald Trump on Friday officially requested $1.5 trillion in spending for the Pentagon next fiscal year, which would be the largest defense budget in U.S. history. [bad news]

    Trump also outlined some $73 billion in cuts to nondefense federal spending, including cuts to health research, K-12 and higher education, renewable energy and climate grants, a low-income housing energy program, and community development block grants. The cuts to nondefense spending represent a 10 percent reduction from the current fiscal year. [bad news]

    […] The White House’s 2027 fiscal year budget proposes a 44 percent increase in defense spending and asks Congress to approve another $350 billion for military weapons [!] and an expansion of the “defense industrial base,” […]

    The summary also urged Congress to approve a 13 percent increase, or $40.8 billion total, focused on the Justice Department’s efforts to “bring violent criminals to justice” related to immigration, gangs and drug cartels.

    The influx of funding for the Pentagon would include more money for the “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a 7 percent pay raise for troops, tens of billions for shipbuilding and the development of new artificial intelligence capabilities in the military, according to the full budget released later Friday. [probably all bad news]

    It also includes massive proposed cuts to federal agencies and programs that the administration argued represented wasteful government spending. OMB requested that lawmakers reduce funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 52 percent or $4.6 billion; the State Department and other international programs by 30 percent or $15.5 billion; the Department of Labor by 26 percent or $3.5 billion and the Department of Agriculture by 19 percent or $4.9 billion. [!]

    The request would cut $15.2 billion in funding for renewable energy projects [bad news]from Democrats’ party-line infrastructure law passed under President Joe Biden and $5 billion from the National Institutes of Health focusing on programs the administration argues promotes “dangerous ideologies” related to equity and inclusion and international aid. Lawmakers have previously resisted cuts to NIH.

    […] Already, the U.S. and Israel’s war in Iran is running up billions of dollars in costs that the administration has signaled it plans to backfill. […]

    Republicans have disagreed internally over how much more they’re willing to put into the conflict, especially after lawmakers approved tens of billions in additional funding for defense in their tax and spending law last year.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) praised the proposal as one that would “restore fiscal sanity, reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington,” and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who leads the defense appropriations subcommittee, said he welcomes “the president’s request for significant growth in annual appropriations for the U.S. armed forces.”

    Democrats in Congress criticized both the defense boost and cuts and pledged to reject the proposal during the appropriations process. […]

    The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that raising defense spending by $1.5 trillion would add $6.9 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years when accounting for increased interest costs. [!!]

    Trump signaled in January that he planned to ask for $1.5 trillion for defense spending, which he said would allow the U.S. to “build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to” and could be offset by tariff revenue [lie about tariffs]. However, the Supreme Court ruled in February that most of the president’s emergency tariffs were unconstitutional, forcing the administration to refund more than $150 billion in revenue.

  171. says

    Artemis II’s moon-bound astronauts capture Earth’s brilliant blue beauty as they leave it behind, by Associated Press.

    The Artemis II astronauts have captured our blue planet’s brilliant beauty as they zoom ever closer to the moon.

    NASA released the crew’s first downlinked images Friday, 1 1/2 days into the first astronaut moonshot in more than half a century.

    The first photo taken by commander Reid Wiseman shows a curved slice of Earth in one of the capsule’s windows. The second shows the entire globe with the oceans topped by swirling white tendrils of clouds.

    As of midmorning Friday, Wiseman and his crew were 90,000 miles from Earth and were quickly gaining on the moon with another 168,000 miles to go. They should reach their destination on Monday.

    The three Americans and one Canadian will swing around the moon in their Orion capsule, hang a U-turn and then head straight back home without stopping. They fired Orion’s main engine Thursday night that set them on their course.

    They’re the first lunar travelers since Apollo 17 in 1972.

    Two images at the link.

  172. says

    Follow-up to comment 163.

    Fox News goes into fluff mode after US jet is downed in Iran

    A United States F-15E was shot down in Iran on Friday, according to U.S. officials. Early reports are that at least one of the two service members has been rescued and is receiving medical treatment.

    Fox News […] went into overdrive trying to soften the blow of President Donald Trump’s costly Middle Eastern war.

    “For 50 years presidents have talked about doing this, and he’s the first one to do it and face the scrutiny of instant gratification,” former Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley said. “But he understood that it was going to take risk and it was going to take some short-term hardships for a longer-term gain for our country […] So I think this just shows that freedom is not free and things have to be fought for and earned, and we have the best and the brightest in this country that are prepared.” [video]

    If that jingoism didn’t make your brain melt, Fox contributor Emily Compagno gave an even more abstract defense.

    “I was asked the other day what fills in the gap between facts for me in the situation,” she said “And what fills in the gap is my faith in our commander-in-chief—the duly elected representative of the people—that he has prioritized, given voice back, given grace back, given priority back to the safety and security of our soldiers.” [video]

    There is no amount of cheerleading or word-salad that will erase the innocent lives lost and harmed because of Trump […]

  173. says

    Follow-up to comment 53.

    Ukraine Creates 24/7 “Hungarian Radio Ukraine” To Counter Orban Propaganda

    You got to hand it to the Ukrainians … adaptive and always looking for new ways to get ‘er done. They’re busy fighting an intense existential war on one hand and also fighting on another front … the vicious and toxic propaganda war being waged against them by the Prime Minister of Hungary and a Putin tool currently fighting for his political life, Viktor Orban.

    In the face of the unrelenting fire hose of invectives, insults, toxic propaganda and all manner of subterfuge from Hungary, Ukraine has decided that it is not a profitable use of their time to dedicate precious time to officially rebut the daily effluence from the “Orban cess pool”. Instead the Ukrainians have decided to go directly to the Hungarian people and voters who will decide Orban’s tyrannical and political fate on April 12, 2026, which is 9 days from today (April 3, 2026).

    Hungarian Radio of Ukraine is a 24/7 online radio stream launched by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on April 2, 2026, specifically to counter “absurd statements” by Hungarian officials. Hosted on a popular internet streaming platform, it continuously broadcasts text in Hungarian, Ukrainian, and English that outlines Kyiv’s official position and rejects what it terms “toxic anti-Ukrainian propaganda” from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s team [embedded link is available at the main link]

    […]

    [Ukraine] “has never meant and does not mean any harm to neighbouring Hungary. We ask all Hungarians not to trust the toxic anti-Ukrainian propaganda coming from officials on a daily basis. We are destined to be good neighbours, members of the EU and NATO, not of the ‘Russian world’. Thank you for listening to the Hungarian Radio of Ukraine.”

    […]

  174. says

    Follow-up to comment 170.

    Trump budget would cut TSA funding, require privatization at small airports

    […] Trump wants to cut funding to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and require privatization of security operations at small airports.

    The White House’s 2027 budget proposal, released Friday, proposes cutting $52 million from the agency’s funding, which officials created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in an effort to ensure tighter airport security. The budget also suggests having small airports enroll in the Screening Partnership Program under which TSA pays for private screeners to work at airports.

    […] The budget did include a $481 million increase to hire more air traffic controllers, for which airports have lacked sufficient staffing.

  175. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-to-put-his-name-on-seniors

    How many times in the past month has the world heard from […] Donald Trump that the United States has all but wiped out Iran’s military? It has been his constant refrain almost from the moment the bombs first dropped a long five weeks ago. Iran’s entire air force and navy have been “successfully knocked out.” (March 3) Iran’s military had been “decimated.” (March 12) Just this past Wednesday, […] Trump told the world that Iran’s “ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed.” The Pentagon estimated publicly that 90 percent of Iran’s missile capacity was “degraded or destroyed,” and 70 percent of its missile launchers have been “neutralized.”

    There is one tiny problem with all this gleeful braggadocio, which is that sources in the intelligence community went running to CNN to let the public know that those missile numbers are a bunch of bullshit. According to this new report, Iran still has about half of its missile launchers intact, along with about 50 percent of its “drone capabilities,” […] That amounts to thousands of drones. One source told CNN that Iran is “still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.”

    Hm, it sounds as if the president’s promise that the US can wind down operations in two to three weeks might be — hang on to your hats — bullshit. […]

    Why hasn’t the US knocked out more missile launchers? Well, the Iranians have countered our attempts to find them with the highly technical military strategy of hiding them in caves, making them much more difficult for us to find in the first place.

    […] It is ironic that this is all coming out the very same week that the White House put out its annual budget request for the military. And wouldn’t you know it, Trump wants another, extra, half a trillion dollars in spending, from roughly $1 trillion in 2026 to $1.5 trillion in 2027. Hey, we’ve got a lot of Tomahawk missiles to replace!

    What will America be getting with this increased military spending besides replenishing the weapons stocks we are wasting in a useless war in the Mideast? (Again?) Well, we’re getting an investment of $17.5 billion in the “Golden Dome” missile defense system. That’s the system that is supposed to protect North America from ballistic and hypersonic missiles that might be fired at us from our enemies. Golden Dome relies on space-based data centers run by an AI network, an idea that proponents think is super cool and skeptics think sounds like a multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle that will at least replace Reagan’s Star Wars system from the 1980s as the dumbest missile defense idea this nation has ever cooked up. […]

    The budget request also includes this: [social media post] Oh boy, the Golden Fleet, that series of what Trump calls “battleships” and everyone else calls “some sort of surface warfare boat that is not a battleship, more like a destroyer, but Trump is, like a four-year-old, entranced by the idea of big naval guns going boom.” [And, Trump wants a bunch of ships, no matter how anachronistic, on which he can slap his name.]

    […] If — and it’s a big if — these boats get built, they will not sail until sometime in the 2030s. But they haven’t actually been designed yet, Trump’s silly “kids on The Simpsons designing Funzo”-level images notwithstanding.

    […] the president proposes to pay for all this by slashing non-defense spending by roughly 10 percent, or about $73 billion, next year. This would include stuff no American needs, such as, uh, healthcare, airport security, and whatever other bugaboos pass through the howling void between Trump’s ears […]

    Oh, and also:

    “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said during the speech. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

    Medicaid, Medicare, who needs ‘em? Not the guy who’s suing the IRS for $10 billion in American dollars because … just kidding, there’s no reason. […]

    We strongly encourage Trump to campaign for the midterms on this message of “huge military spending increases while cutting anything that would keep people fed and healthy in the near term.” […]

  176. JM says

    Newsweek: Second US Combat Plane Crashes Near Hormuz After Iran Shootdown: Report

    A second U.S. Air Force combat aircraft crashed Friday in the Persian Gulf region, with the lone pilot safely rescued, two U.S. officials told the New York Times.

    The officials said the A‑10 Warthog went down near the Strait of Hormuz around the same time an F‑15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran, an incident in which one crew member was rescued and search teams are still looking for a second airman.

  177. JM says

    Trump seeks $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as active prison

    The White House on Friday sought $152 million to return the former Alcatraz prison island to ​active duty, following up on President Donald Trump’s call ‌last year to transform the popular San Francisco Bay tourist destination.
    The request was tucked into a proposed budget the White House released ​to fund the government for the 2027 fiscal year. ​Such spending requests are typically treated by lawmakers ⁠in Congress as suggestions.

    So somebody at the White House remember to formally ask Congress to fund opening Alcatraz. I had hoped that idea would sink and we would never see it again. In a normal administration some trial balloons like this are floated just to give Congress something to shoot down. Trump was serious, despite this being a stupid idea in several different ways.

  178. says

    Follow-up to comments 53 and 173.

    Operation Save Orbán: Trump deploys Vance to Hungary

    “U.S. President Donald Trump gives a final heave to try and keep under-pressure Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in power.”

    The Trump administration is going all in to save its No. 1 ally in Europe.

    U.S. Vice President JD Vance is set to land in Budapest on Tuesday for a high-stakes intervention that underscores how far the White House is willing to go to shore up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before the April 12 national election.

    Orbán is flailing in the polls, as anti-corruption opposition candidate Péter Magyar surges ahead in his bid to claim power in Budapest after 16 years of leadership by the ruling Fidesz party.

    […] The U.S. vice president will hold talks with the MAGA-allied Orbán and then give a public address, during a trip that directly involves Washington in the final stretch of a heated election campaign.

    […] In multiple speeches and remarks over the 15 months since President Donald Trump returned to office, senior U.S. officials have made clear they believe Europe is on the wrong political path, and that the nationalist-populist Orbán is a model for the continent to follow.

    The Hungarian prime minister has promoted his vision of illiberal democracy, while frequently clashing with Brussels over the EU’s direction on migration, Russia and minority rights. [!!]

    Vance himself delivered an blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference in February last year, […] ignoring religious freedoms and not acting to halt illegal migration.

    […] While top Fidesz officials were hyped about Vance’s Hungary visit, not everyone is so impressed.

    Magyar warned the visit could come with strings attached, hinting at undisclosed military arrangements and suggesting Washington may seek concessions in exchange for its support. […]

  179. JM says

    Edward ‘Big Balls’ Coristine Is Helping Out on Viral Fraud Videos Now

    Nick Shirley—the right-wing creator whose YouTube investigation sparked the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota—claims that his most recent video about alleged fraud in California was bolstered by data provided by none other than Edward Coristine, one of the first members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) known online as “Big Balls.”
    Coristine, who joined DOGE at 19 years old with no prior government experience, was staffed across several agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Before joining DOGE, Coristine worked at Elon Musk’s Neuralink for several months and founded a startup known for hiring black hat hackers.
    In an interview with Coristine published on Shirley’s YouTube channel on Thursday, Shirley claims that Coristine personally pulled data on Medicaid spending for businesses based in California as potential targets. Coristine nodded along, telling Shirley that the government must create more opportunities to crowdsource fraud investigations.

    Crowd sourcing fraud investigations is a bad idea. People tend to get hung up on false positives, statistical anomalies, small real fraud in large programs and the complexity of evaluating fraud in large programs. Which is to say that the average person doesn’t have the skills to evaluate fraud in large programs.
    You could probably get some use out of a crowd source program looking for specific individual cases of fraud but care would have to be taken to avoid projecting it to the program as a whole.

  180. says

    Team Trump isn’t done pursuing Cassidy Hutchinson over Jan. 6 testimony

    “Years after the former White House aide’s stunning revelations, many Republicans still seem to want to bring her down.”

    As a rule, when members of Congress refer someone to the Justice Department for prosecution, it sounds dramatic, but there is no guarantee that prosecutors will take the referral seriously. The DOJ might appreciate a heads up from lawmakers about suspected wrongdoing, but it’s just as likely to ignore the recommendations.

    It was just last month when the House Republicans’ Jan. 6 committee, which is intended to serve as a conservative counterweight to the actual, bipartisan Jan. 6 select committee that wrapped up its historic work in 2022, asked Main Justice to go after Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

    According to the partisan panel led by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, Hutchinson lied to Congress about Donald Trump’s awareness for violence ahead of the insurrectionist riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

    Under normal circumstances, the DOJ would blow off a criminal referral like this, recognizing it as more of a political stunt than a serious recommendation. However, note this detail that featured in a report The New York Times published Thursday on the DOJ’s efforts to please the president by pursuing his political foes:

    [Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche] have gotten the president’s message. They have stepped up efforts to investigate several other Trump targets. … They have also pushed prosecutors to investigate a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 […]

    […] serves as a timely reminder that Hutchinson remains a Team Trump target — to the point that the most powerful officials at Main Justice have reportedly pushed prosecutors in private to pursue her.

    What’s more, during a recent congressional hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith, GOP members pressed the prosecutor with questions about Hutchinson, reinforcing the perception that she’s a key party target. (Smith made it clear that Hutchinson’s testimony played little to no role in his decision to bring criminal charges against Trump.) Relatedly, Kash Patel, prior to the podcast personality becoming the FBI director, included Hutchinson on his notorious “government gangsters” enemies list.

    Based on the publicly available information, there’s no reason to believe Hutchinson, who delivered stunning Jan. 6 testimony nearly four years ago, did anything wrong. But the president himself recently used his social media platform to talk about Hutchinson […].

  181. says

    JM @179, good points. Thanks for that analysis.

    In other news: Small Businesses Are Being Left Out of Tariff Refund Process, CBP Data Suggests

    Data shared earlier this week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection suggests the smallest and most vulnerable importers are being left behind in the early stages of the tariff refund process.

    After the Supreme Court overturned most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, […] Judge Richard Eaton of the Court of International Trade mandated that the federal government repay American importers for tariffs collected under the statute. CBP wrote in an early March court filing that there were about 330,000 importers eligible for a slice of the $166 billion in tariff refunds. […]

    The data shared by CBP, along with interviews with trade attorneys and advocates, shows that the biggest importers are first in line to get paid back. The disparity reveals the ways small business is continuing to be negatively impacted by Trump’s archaic tariff regime, even beyond eating the lion’s share of the levies.

    The first 26,664 importers registered for the automated CBP system account for $120 billion in refunds, Lloyd wrote. That means just about 8% of all importers paid more than 72% of all IEEPA tariffs for an average refund amount of more than $4.5 million. And that leaves more than 300,000 importers to collect the remaining $46 billion in refunds, or about $150,000 per firm.

    It suggests, experts said, that smaller firms are struggling to access the CBP system and collect on what the government owes them.

    “If you think about a small and medium-size business, they don’t have a trade compliance department,” Eugene Laney, president and CEO of the American Association of Exporters and Importers, told TPM. “They don’t have supply chain managers.” […]

    Even before SCOTUS struck down Trump’s tariffs, CBP had recently transitioned from issuing paper checks to an electronic automated clearing house payment system. Businesses need an account with CBP’s import and export portal to enroll in that electronic payment system, and need to be enrolled in both to access the refund portal.

    […] The disparity in the size of firms that have managed to pursue restitution for Trump’s unlawful tariffs illuminates the disproportionate harm those billions of dollars in trade fees had on small U.S. businesses — the very businesses the president purported to help.

    […] A report from the progressive Center for American Progress thinktank published at the end of March found the average small business spent $306,000 on Trump’s tariffs over the past year.

    […] Trump’s tariffs failed to create sustainable manufacturing jobs. The sector actually shed jobs in between January 2025 and January 2026.

    […] The sheer cost of tariffs isn’t the only burden crushing smaller firms. Laney described that many firms put up additional collateral and took out loans in order to afford the increased import fees and stay afloat.

    […] small and medium sized businesses borrowed so much money that if they don’t get the refunds in time, then they could potentially go out of business.

  182. says

    ‘You should be lynched,’ Florida Republican tells a Black man

    Republican Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback told a Black man who confronted him on the campaign trail that he should be lynched.

    Yes, you read that right.

    Lynching is the process of extrajudicial murder by mob, usually by hanging. Throughout U.S. history, Black people have been the most frequent victims of lynchings by white mobs.

    The comment occurred after Fishback was confronted about previous allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct with an underage girl in 2022, resulting in a Florida school district severing ties with him. Fishback has denied the allegations.

    As he berated the man for bringing up the allegations, Fishback repeatedly said, “You should be lynched.” [video]

    This is not the first time that Fishback has made a comment like this. After the Trump administration arrested journalist Don Lemon—who is Black—for reporting on an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest at a Minnesota church, Fishback [said], “Don Lemon should be lucky that he’s not getting executed in the public square for his little stunt, his violence, his aggression” […]

    Fishback has also made racist comments about his fellow GOP gubernatorial candidate, Rep. Byron Donalds—who is Black—calling him a “slave” to donors, saying that his worldview is a “Section 8 ghetto,” and referring to him as “By’rone.”

    As part of his far-right campaign, Fishback has also gone after women and has proposed a “sin tax” for OnlyFans creators.

    […] He is also a supporter of white supremacist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who opposes immigration, women’s rights, and free expression.

    Fishback is not an outlier. This far-right movement, which builds on the bigoted ideology of the Trump administration, continues to make inroads within the GOP. For example, newly appointed head of the College Republicans, Kai Schwemmer, is also a devoted Fuentes follower and has made pro-slavery comments and voiced opposition to women’s right to vote.

    A gubernatorial candidate telling a Black man that he should be lynched is just the latest example of what the future of right-wing politics looks like—and it looks eerily like the darkest parts of U.S. history.

  183. says

    California dairy recalls raw milk cheese linked to illnesses and hospitalizations

    “The move ends a conflict between the farm and the FDA, which requested a recall weeks ago when the investigation began.”

    Raw Farm is recalling its raw milk cheddar cheeses amid an outbreak of a dangerous strain of E. coli, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

    As of Friday, the FDA reported that the cheeses are linked to nine people in three states who developed E. coli O157:H7, a severe type of the bacteria that can cause stomach cramps, vomiting and bloody diarrhea. The cases are in California, Texas and Florida.

    The California dairy company previously refused to recall its products when the FDA’s investigation began in mid-March.

    Three people have been hospitalized and one person developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a life-threatening E. coli complication that can cause kidney failure. Over half of the illnesses are in children under 5 years old. No deaths have been reported.

    To find a potential link, the FDA interviewed eight of the infected people about what they ate the week prior to infection. All of them reported eating raw dairy products.

    […] McAfee said the voluntary recall was “made under protest” and “simply a moment in time where this was the right decision for Raw Farm and our consumers.”

    “RAW FARM continues to contest the epidemiological links provided by the FDA,” the company said in a statement released Thursday.

    Raw milk products are made from dairy that hasn’t been pasteurized, a process that heats it enough to destroy bacteria.

    Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was previously a proponent of raw milk, touting it as the only kind of milk he drinks, and said he would end the “aggressive suppression” of raw milk by the FDA.

    More recently, Kennedy has shied away from promoting raw milk as he campaigns in support of the new dietary guidelines, focusing instead on whole milk without mentioning whether it’s pasteurized or raw.

    Raw Farm has been linked to previous E. coli outbreaks, including one in 2024 also for raw cheddar cheese that resulted in five people being hospitalized.

    The FDA has recommended that people not consume the recalled products. […]

    These are the recalled items, which also include batches made prior to these dates:
    8 oz Lightly Salted Cheddar Block; Batch: 20251027-2; Expiration: 8/23/2026
    80 oz Lightly Salted Cheddar Block; Batch: 20251015-4; Expiration: 8/11/2026
    16 oz Lightly Salted Cheddar Block; Batch: 20251027-4; Expiration: 8/23/2026
    80 oz Bag of Original Cheddar Shred; Batch: 20260205; Expiration: 5/6/2026
    16 oz Jalapeno Cheddar Block; Batch: 20251128-1J; Expiration: 9/24/2026
    8 oz Lightly Salted Cheddar Shred; Batch: 20260212; Expiration: 5/13/2026
    8 oz Jalapeno Cheddar Block; Batch: 20251128-2J; Expiration: 9/24/2026

    […]

  184. says

    Politico:

    “A federal judge on Friday reaffirmed his decision to block subpoenas from the Justice Department to the Federal Reserve on the grounds that the probe appears to be driven by a political vendetta, setting the stage for an appeal by the Trump administration.

    Good news, but perhaps only temporary.

  185. JM says

    Middle East Eye: Iran says it rejects Trump offer of 48-hour ceasefire

    Iran said it has rejected the US proposal for a 48-hour ceasefire between both sides, the Fars News Agency said on Friday, citing an unnamed official source.

    A 48 hour ceasefire right now would be a convenience for Trump while he tries to figure a new plan and moves units to the middle east. It is just somewhat funny in that Trump said Iran wanted a ceasefire and they rejected it. Most likely Trump didn’t understand the situation or was just lying. However, the events of today may have caused Iran to flip. They may have been looking for a ceasefire while they prepare defenses but now they want to continue because fighting looks worse for Trump.

  186. birgerjohansson says

    Apart from shooting down a F-15, the Iranians also damaged two rescue helicopters and shot down a A-10 Warthog. The crew of these three aircraft are safe.
    .
    To distract you from the shitshow, here is Chelzor the Destroyer reacting to Dragon Ball Z abridged by Team Four Star
    “[Namek Time!] Dragon Ball Z Abridged Episode 13 Reaction”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=7zC2IGyt0LQ
    Goku forgets to use the Nimbus. Vegeta is being his usual mean self.

  190. StevoR says

    as the global economy reels from the conflict in the Middle East and as world leaders have started to openly speak in contemptuous terms of the President of the United States, Zelenskyy has been the busy man finding workarounds to ameliorate the effects of Donald Trump’s chaotic, catastrophic and internally contradictory foreign adventures.

    It’s not just that Zelenskyy has turned up in the Middle East to offer Gulf states anti-drone weaponry and expertise.

    Reuters reported last week that, based on its calculations of market data, at least 40 per cent of Russia’s oil export capacity “is at a halt following Ukrainian drone attacks, a disputed attack on a major pipeline and the seizure of tankers”.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-04/iran-volodymyr-zelenskyy-gulf-strait-of-hormuz-macron-merz/106511122

  193. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Trump targets more children with strike on Iranian Orphanage (Mar 31)

    killing two people and injuring five […] a newly built orphan charity complex in Fardis, a city about 25 miles west of Tehran

    Eiynah Mohammed-Smith: “Cartoon villain levels of evil.”
     
    Adil Haque (Law prof) on Apr 1:

    It seems we just bombed some residential buildings [in Tehran] in an attempt to kill [Kamal Kharazi] a former diplomat who was trying to facilitate negotiations. A civilian trying to *end* hostilities, surrounded by other civilians in their homes.

    NYT: [Former Iranian foreign minister] Kharazi had been overseeing engagement with Pakistan for a possible meeting between Iranian officials and Vice President JD Vance.

    Anjali Dayal: “It’s arguably less a war than it is just a string of war crimes.”
     
    Jacob Bogage (Reuters) on Apr 2:

    Donald Trump posts a video that appears to show the aftermath of a U.S. attack on civilian infrastructure in Iran.

    Trump: “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again—Much more to follow! IT IS TIME FOR IRAN TO MAKE A DEAL BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF WHAT STILL COULD BECOME A GREAT COUNTRY! […]” [Video clip]

    Nicholas Grossman (Intl rels prof): “Deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure without apparent military value is a war crime.”

  194. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Adding to 193.
    SasanianShah (Iranian historian) on Apr 2:

    Just talked to a friend whose brother in law was the chief architect & project manager of [Baylaqan Bridge to the west of Tehran/north of Karaj]. He’s crying uncontrollably. It’s heartbreaking on a personal level.

    ^ SasanianShah: “pics […] showing the ordinary people who were celebrating the Iranian national picnic day (13 Bedar) in its vicinity. 13 people are reported killed”
     
    SasanianShah on Apr 2:

    USrael destroyed the Pasteur Institute of Tehran, an important centre for epidemic disease research & a main producers of vaccines in the ME. Established over 100 yrs ago […] This is a crime against humanity. [Photos]

    SasanianShah on Apr 3:

    What the hell?? USraelis bombed the National (Shahid Beheshti) University in Tehran and destroyed its main building and a women’s dormitory??! National University is a stronghold of social sciences and humanities, and many of my closest colleagues and friends teach there. [Photo]

  195. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Eiynah Mohammed-Smith (Polite Conversations):

    The New Arab: Israel has passed a controversial death penalty bill that targets Palestinians while exempting Jewish Israelis. Sixty-two lawmakers voted in favour and 48 against the bill. [Video clip]

    They’re wearing noose pins and drinking champagne.

    Elia Ayoub:

    It was written by the fascist Ben Gvir. […] And yes he was campaigning with this. [Photo: noose lapel pin]

    Don’t worry, Britain, France, Germany and Italy have expressed concern that the legal lynching of Palestinians risks “undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles”. Yes it sure risks doing damage to Israel’s famed democratic principles. [Guardian article]

     
    972mag – Why the death penalty would cement the Israeli radical right’s ascendancy

    The bill is extreme even by current Israeli standards. It creates a new capital offense, makes the death penalty mandatory under vaguely defined conditions, and eliminates judicial discretion altogether. Crucially, its language is explicitly discriminatory, applying to Palestinians who kill Jews but not to Jews who kill Palestinians. As one of the bill’s sponsors, MK Limor Son Har-Melech, put it bluntly, “There is no such thing as a Jewish terrorist.”
    […]
    Israel formally abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954—a relatively early move, at a time when countries such as the UK and France were still carrying out executions. Capital punishment nevertheless remained on the books for a narrow set of exceptional offenses […] In practice, however, Israel has carried out only one execution in its history: that of Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the Holocaust, in 1962. […] the widespread use of extrajudicial killings allowed Israel to pursue lethal force without resorting to judicial executions.
    […]
    demands for the death penalty for Palestinians—often expressed through variations of the slogan “Death penalty for terrorists”—have become a prominent fixture of Israeli right-wing discourse. […] Knesset members regularly introduced bills to modify existing laws and policies around capital punishment—a ritualistic act of populist defiance against an ethos of responsibility, restraint, and concern for international opinion. None ever passed […] Above all, this turn toward capital punishment reveals a fundamental change in Israel’s balance of power
    […]
    To be clear, the old Israeli establishment with its “shooting and crying” mindset has been responsible for countless atrocities […] Israel routinely carried out extrajudicial killings while touting its refusal to execute. But as George Orwell observed, hypocrisy can serve as an important safeguard: It depends on the possibility of shame, and the gap between professed values and actual practice can be exposed and leveraged by those pushing for accountability
    […]
    today’s pro-death penalty camp is not hypocritical […] It lets go of the pretense of restraint […] It is essential to understand that the death penalty bill is part of the broader judicial overhaul agenda, not an improvised response to the shock of the October 7 attack. […] the consolidation of authority in the hands of [natsec minister] Ben Gvir and his allies at the expense of the judiciary and the military. […] the bill also meant to signal a break with the international community and its norms. […] With the lone exception of Belarus, no European country carries out executions—not Turkey, and not even Putin’s Russia. […] The global epicenter of executions today is China, North Korea, and Iran. This is the club Ben Gvir seeks to join

    Eiynah Mohammed-Smith:

    Muhammad Shehada (Human rights advocate): This is how the deputy head of Israel’s parliament celebrated
    [Photo: Holding an actual noose in front of party balloons]

    Evil is an insufficient word.

  202. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘Your hands are full of blood’: Pope Leo rebukes Hegseth’s war prayers

    As the Trump administration wraps its militarism in Christian rhetoric, Pope Leo delivers a moral rebuke, saying God rejects the prayers of leaders who wage war. Religious scholar Brad Onishi joins to discuss.

    Video is 8:46 minutes, with guest host Antonia Hylton

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘Stunning day’: U.S. sees ‘most difficult day’ in Iran as downed pilot remains missing

    “Today was unquestionably, I think, the most difficult day for U.S. forces since this war began over a month ago,” says MS NOW national security reporter David Rohde, as officials confirm two U.S. aircrafts were shot down by Iranian forces and one pilot remains missing.

    Video is 8:09 minutes, with guest host.

  203. says

    Sky Captain @193, 194 and 195. Thank you for bringing us up to date with the extent of the evil.

    To go with that, I recommend the segment in comment 202 where the host discusses “[…] The Trump administration wraps its militarism in Christian rhetoric.” In particular, Antonia Hilton shows several clips of Pete Hegseth quoting biblical verses to justify his “no mercy,” “no quarter” approach to war; and how he wants to reduce his enemies to “dung.” This Hegseth evil joins forces with evil politicians in Israel.

    There’s also an element of racism in the rhetoric coming from the leaders of both countries. I’m thinking of Trump’s very recent statement about bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages where they belong.” It’s that addition of “where they belong” that makes it even worse. I’m also including the way that some Israeli politicians overtly (or tacitly) support the Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians and take their land. That unpunished activity belongs in the same category as the vote to have the death penalty apply only to Palestinians and not to Jewish Israelis.

  204. says

    Iran’s victory and Trump’s losses, in a summary:

    Tollkeeper on the Strait of Hormuz. Iran now controls selective passage through 20% of global oil and LNG transit. Ships pass with Iranian permission. The US Navy no longer guarantees freedom of navigation.

    Sanctions-proof oil revenue. Crude above $100/barrel, buyers desperate, sanctions architecture functionally collapsed. Iran went from struggling to sell oil to naming its price.

    Domestic unity. The largest protests since 1979 disappeared overnight. The population that was in open revolt in January is unified behind the government by March.

    Generational leadership renewal. Mojtaba Khamenei inherits with wartime martyr legitimacy instead of through a messy backroom succession crisis.

    Regional military credibility. Demonstrated the ability to strike US bases across six countries and hold the entire Gulf at risk simultaneously.

    Moral high ground. Attacked during active negotiations. Schools hit. Hospitals, research centers, and Red Crescent warehouses bombed. Iran doesn’t need propaganda — it needs cameras.

    Coalition fracture. NATO allies — France, Spain, Italy — withdrew military support. France recognized Iranian authority over Hormuz by requesting passage. The Western alliance is splitting in real time.

    […] Iran’s stated terms — stop the bombing, lift sanctions, guarantee sovereignty, acknowledge the right to a peaceful nuclear program — are calibrated to sound ambitious on day one and obvious by day 60. Time itself converts Iran’s position from a wish list to common sense. They don’t need Washington to say yes today. They need the rest of the world to say “that seems fair” by summer. And the world is already moving in that direction.

    Iran’s message to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain is lethally simple: “We didn’t bomb your country. We bombed the American base in your country. Remove the base, remove the problem.” That’s an offer disguised as a threat.

    […] Trump’s incompetence handed them a veritable cornucopia of fringe benefits to offset all the physical damage. Damage that can be repaired, from a moral high ground. […]

  205. says

    Follow-up to comment 204.

    Meanwhile:

    […] Trump on Saturday warned Iran that “time is running out” before the U.S. rains “all hell” down on the Middle East country.

    “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!”

    […] Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said the loss of two fighter jets, along with a U.S. Air Force UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and a second search-and-rescue helicopter that were both hit while searching for the second F-15E crew member, show that “Iran is winning the war.”

    “And now, just a day after he told the entire world –– all the American people –– that they had successfully taken out all of Iran’s anti-aircraft capability, they’ve shot not just one but two aircraft out of the sky,” Moulton said Friday. “So, obviously, Trump is way in over his head. He has no idea what he’s doing, and he’s lying to us once again.”

  206. says

    Chinese firms market Iran war intelligence ‘exposing’ U.S. forces

    “The private companies — some with ties to the military — are marketing detailed intelligence on movements of U.S. forces, even as Beijing seeks to keep its distance.”

    As the war in Iran erupted five weeks ago, social media sleuths across Western and Chinese platforms flagged a wave of viral posts detailing equipment at U.S. bases, the movements of American carrier groups and granular breakdowns of how military aircraft were assembling for strikes on Tehran.

    The intelligence came from a fast growing new market: Chinese firms — some with links to the People’s Liberation Army — marrying artificial intelligence with open-source data to market information they claim can “expose” the movements of U.S. forces.

    Beijing has sought to distance itself from any direct involvement in the Iran war, but the firms — many of which have emerged in the past five years as part of the government’s push to harness private AI for military use — are capitalizing on the conflict.

    U.S. officials and intelligence experts are divided over whether Chinese firms’ publicly marketed tools pose a genuine threat or are being credibly used by U.S. adversaries, but say the surge in private-sector offerings points to a growing security risk and reflects Beijing’s intent to project the strength of its intelligence capabilities. […]

    Images sourced to the firm — which is not part of China’s military but holds a National Military Standard certification required for firms supplying services to the People’s Liberation Army — and posted on Chinese and Western social media, for example, detailed the buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East on the eve of the launch of Operation Epic Fury, including the passage of the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike groups. It also shared detailed breakdowns of the number and types of aircraft massing at Israel’s Ovda Air Base, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base and Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base.

    […] “My understanding is that they are buying a lot of imagery from actual collectors like the Jilin satellite constellation that China operates,” said Fedasiuk, who has tracked the rise of Chinese firms positioning themselves as experts in monitoring U.S. military movements.

    Jing’an Technology, another Hangzhou-based firm tracking U.S. military movements in the Middle East, released what it claimed was a recording two U.S. B-2A stealth bombers communicating with each other during the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury. [That purported recording was later deleted.]

    […] Analysts say the work of private firms like MizarVision and Jing’an could also offer Beijing a plausible way to aid partners while maintaining official distance from conflicts. […]

  207. says

    Trump and the Myth of American Oil Independence

    When President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he’s winding down the U.S. war on Iran and washing his hands of the embattled Strait of Hormuz, he invoked what he likes to call America’s “energy dominance”: The United States has become the biggest oil producer in the world, and no longer needs to secure the Persian Gulf by force.

    “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” he declared. “We don’t need it.”

    That’s news to the oil and gas industry. […] The flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the U.S. is far less than it used to be. But no matter what Trump says, the industry is keenly aware of how important that oil still is. That’s why CEOs have been pleading with Trump for weeks to end Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait, which remains vital to the global market in which they operate.

    And it’s another reason why it’s time to add Big Oil and national security to the list of longstanding political and economic dynamics that Trump has thrown into chaos.

    […] the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in March, and the retaliation that followed, made clear that trouble in the Persian Gulf still means trouble for energy flows globally and for Big Oil (and Big Gas), whose investment calculations are being scrambled. It rapidly set off a global energy crisis — and, thanks to the mechanics of the U.S. refining industry, Americans were less insulated from a price spike in the United States than the average consumer might have expected.

    […] In the shorter term, it’s still not yet clear whether Trump will make good on his threat to abandon the Strait of Hormuz — or whether he’ll direct the U.S. military to secure it, one way or another.

    What is clear? In a world where oil and gas are still king, the United States isn’t as “energy dominant” as it might seem. No matter who’s in power.

  210. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    DW – German men need military permit for extended stays abroad

    A new military service law took effect in Germany […] in the wake of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. The legislation was contentious and many people even took to the streets to protest the potential reintroduction of mandatory military service—after conscription was suspended in 2011—for men.

    But another provision in the law has so far gone largely unnoticed. It relates to a requirement for men between the ages of 18 and 46 to “obtain an approval […] if they wish to leave the Federal Republic of Germany for more than three months.” […] the military needed to know how many men were living long-term outside the country. While the law requires men to request the permit, […] it also obliges the military career center to issue it, if “no specific military service is expected during the period in question.”
    […]
    the ministry spokesperson pointed out that “the regulation was already in place during the Cold War and had no practical relevance; in particular, there are no penalties for violating it.”
    […]
    The new law that took effect on January 1, the so-called Military Service Modernization Act, aims to raise the number of active-duty soldiers from roughly 180,000 men and women at present to 260,000 by 2035. […] all men turning 18 will have to fill out a form answering questions about their education, health status and willingness to serve in the armed forces. For women, answering the questions is voluntary, as they cannot be required to perform military service under the Constitution.

    From mid-2027, all men turning 18 will also be required to appear for a fitness test to determine who could be drafted in the event of conflict—a highly controversial measure that has been slammed by critics as a first step towards full conscription.

  212. JM says

    Huffpost: Pentagon To Host Good Friday Service Just For Protestants, Not Catholics

    The Pentagon has invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.

    “Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” reads a Friday email sent by Air Force leadership, a copy of which was shared by an employee.

    The Pentagon chapel is supposed to be an interfaith chapel. Normally on Good Friday they hold service without a Catholic Mass that is open to everybody and there is a separate event in the evening specifically for Catholics. The usual Catholic priest was away and it may just be a scheduling mess up or really tacky wording but there isn’t a clear answer.

  213. JM says

    NBC News: Polymarket apologizes for allowing wagers on fate of U.S. pilots downed in Iran

    Prediction market platform Polymarket issued an apology for allowing users to place bets on the fate of American pilots aboard a U.S. fighter jet downed over Iran.

    In a since-deleted market, users were able to wager on when the pilots might be rescued, with the majority predicting a Saturday rescue.
    “US confirms pilots rescued by…?” the market read.

    Polymarket yanked it and apologized when it got noticed by Congress. I doubt the managers at Polymarket care but they are pulling some official attention for allowing bets on some things. They are also having insider trading problems, with sports betting, casino betting and political betting problems. They don’t want to be drawing any more attention and that bit is tacky even by Polymarkets low standards.
    For Polymarket it’s one of those internet open proposal issues. Anybody can suggest a new issue to bet on, if there is enough interest and it passes review it’s opened. It doesn’t take much human intervention, they are supposed to review all proposals but there are probably a handful of people and Polymarket opens hundreds of items per hour.

  214. says

    Trump, on Truth Social:

    Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!

    Paul Krugman wrote about this in his Substack column […]

    Donald Trump isn’t sounding like himself, and that’s terrifying. Hi, Paul Krugman here with a brief update on Saturday afternoon. . . .

    I don’t think Trump has ever said “glory be to God.” That doesn’t sound like him. That sounds almost as if Pete Hegseth wrote this post […] The misspellings and all do look like Trump in his own hand, but it feels like this is the influence of our religious fanatic Secretary of War, or as people in the Pentagon apparently call him the Secretary of War Crimes. [!]

    This is really bad. It’s hard to see what happens in 48 hours. It’s clear that Trump, for all his pretense of, “I’m always winning,” is aware of how completely he screwed things up, that he’s aware that he has basically led America into an epic strategic defeat.

    […] Just in general, although religiosity is often expected of American leaders, saying glory be to God before you unleash violence, that is not what used to be the American way.

    Anyway, I’m scared. I wonder very much what the next few days will bring because this is looking like basically a president who is losing it and unfortunately losing it in a way that can really make the world a much worse place very fast.

  221. says

    Follow-up to birger @219:

    Fresh off the daring nighttime rescue early Sunday of the U.S. airman shot down in Iran on Friday, President Donald Trump warned Iran, “Open the F—-n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”

    Just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, the president praised the crew member who was rescued and the special military team that got him safely out of Iran. “We have rescued the seriously wounded, and really brave, F-15 Crew Member/Officer, from deep inside the mountains of Iran,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “The Iranian Military was looking hard, in big numbers, and getting close. He is a highly respected Colonel. This type of raid is seldom attempted because of the danger to ‘man and equipment.’ It just doesn’t happen!”

    He announced he would hold a news conference early Monday afternoon with Pentagon officials. “God Bless our great MILITARY WARRIORS!” he added.

    Minutes later, the president vowed that Iran can expect heavy bombardment — very soon.

    “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—-n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” Trump said, adding, “Praise be to Allah.” [WTF?]

    The president’s unorthodox Easter morning message was startling, even to those in Washington who have grown accustomed to his unconventional leadership.

    Former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had a public falling out with Trump before she left Congress, said the president “has gone insane.” […]”[…] Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.”

    […] Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reacted to the president’s F-bomb-laced holiday missive, saying on X, “Happy Easter, America. As you head off to church and celebrate with friends and family, the President of the United States is ranting like an unhinged madman on social media.”

    https://www.ms.now/news/trump-f-bomb-easter-iran-airman

  222. says

    U.S. military rescues missing airman in Iran in daring night mission

    Related video at the link.

    […] The announcement capped a tense day and a half as the U.S. and Iran raced against each other to find the American airman alive. A senior administration official with knowledge of the operation who spoke on condition of anonymity told MS NOW that the CIA aided the effort in multiple ways.

    Before the missing weapon systems officer had been located, the CIA launched a deception campaign and spread false accounts inside Iran that U.S. forces had found him and were moving him on the ground and out of the country.

    At the same time, the CIA used its capabilities to confirm the location of the missing American. The senior administration official described the effort as the ultimate search for a “needle in a haystack.”

    The officer, who was injured, followed his training, hiked away from where he landed and ascended a ridge, according to The New York Times. The American airman then hid in a mountain crevice, the senior administration official told MS NOW.

    The CIA shared his exact location with the Defense Department and the White House. Trump ordered a military rescue mission, which the CIA supported by sending real-time information. Axios first reported the CIA’s role in the rescue.

    Israeli Prime Minister Prime Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated his American counterpart and war partner in a statement he posted on social media. [social media post, with video]

    “This rescue operation reinforces the sacred principle: no one is left behind,” Netanyahu said. “This is a shared value demonstrated time and time again in the history of both our countries.”

    […] The Omani foreign ministry said it held a meeting on Sunday with Iranian officials about “possible options for ensuring the smooth flow of transit” through the vital waterway to provide oil to rest of the world. […]

    Earlier on Saturday, the White House pushed back on criticism that Trump had not publicly addressed the search-and-rescue efforts. “There has never been a President who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump. On this Easter weekend, he has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office. God Bless him,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement posted on X.

  224. StevoR says

    An Op-ed & news story here :

    New York City police arrested a member of a Jewish Defense League group known as JDL 613, for plotting to assassinate a Palestinian-American leader. The suspect is Alexander Heifler, whose Linkedin account lists his employment as a machine learning engineer at CVS Health, a major healthcare company. He joined a chat group and told of his plan to murder Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of the Palestine solidarity group, Within Our Lifetime (WOL).

    An undercover New York Police Department agent infiltrated the group and contacted Heifler. He offered to help him execute the attack on Kiswani’s home using multiple Molotov cocktails. Just before the weapons were ready, law enforcement raided his home and arrested him.

    Source : https://www.newarab.com/opinion/nerdeen-kiswani-plot-has-anti-arab-lynching-arrived-us

  225. StevoR says

    The Israeli army has turned its so-called Yellow Line in the Gaza Strip into a new border, through the establishment of dozens of new military outposts, according to Arabic media reports on Tuesday.

    The buffer zone created by the army, which spans from the north to the south of the enclave and is parallel to the Salah al-Din Street, has seen several checkpoints crop up in recent days.

    Reports in Arabi21 said the presence of the checkpoints means that the military presence in the area is no longer temporary and effectively turns the Yellow Line into a new border.

    Since Israel established the Yellow Line in October, the army has targeted and killed any Palestinians who approach it, and has used the surrounding empty areas near it to establish military outposts.

    Source : https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-army-entrenching-gaza-yellow-line-new-border?utm_source=chartbeat&utm_medium=recommendations&utm_campaign=related&utm_content=position-2

  226. birgerjohansson says

    Everyone should know the story of this researcher.

    Maurice Hilleman – Wikipedia .https://share.google/MS4e8cNUD7iLVkvVR
    .
    His first major achievement came with making Pharma prepare for the Hong Kong strain of the flu. And he continued on that road, probably saving millions.

  227. StevoR says

    Have heard that Artemis II is already halfway to our Moon – which seems remarkably quick to me! Latest (?) news :

    The next major milestone of the approximately 10-day journey is expected on day six, (early Tuesday Australian time) at which point the astronauts will enter the “lunar sphere of influence”, when the Moon’s gravity will have a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.

    … (Snip)..

    After that, the crew was planning to go over their checklist for documenting their experience travelling around the Moon.

    The astronauts have had geology training in order to be able to photograph and describe lunar features, including ancient lava flows and impact craters.

    They will see the Moon from a unique vantage point compared with the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s.

    Apollo flights flew some 70 miles above the lunar surface, but the Artemis II crew will be just over 4,000 miles at their closest approach, which will allow them to see the complete, circular surface of the Moon, including regions near both poles. The Artemis II astronauts have already seen brand-new perspectives.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-05/artemis-astronauts-preparing-for-historic-lunar-flyby/106532426

  229. birgerjohansson says

    StevoR@ 227

    Every day has 86 400 seconds. In the beginning Artemis II was travelling at more than 11.2 km/s but this rapidly dropped.
    At the extreme end of the ellipse it will be almost down to 1 km/s at which point the lunar gravity will start bending the path back towards Earth. It is possible to get a long ellipse return without lunar interference, but this is quicker.
    Distance to the Moon varies a bit, on average it is 380 000 km.

  230. says

    Follow-up to comment 221.

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/jesus-fcking-christ-is-fckin-risen

    […] I don’t even know what to say about this. It is Easter. President God’s Flawed Earthly Vessel is celebrating the resurrection of crucified American Jesus with the traditional American liturgy Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.

    It’s the Handel’s Messiah b-side.

    I’m going to choose to step away from my initial reaction — We have elected an actual madman.

    We are in deep, deep shit. —

    breathe, and focus instead on the also true that lunatic man knows he’s in big big trouble. Of course, that doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t. […]

  231. birgerjohansson says

    Remember British comedian Kenny Everrett who passed away 31 years and one day ago.
    He was one of the pioneers who showed comedy could be different.

  232. says

    Josh Marshall: There’s Another Big Reason Trump Is Stuck in the Gulf

    You’ve certainly seen or heard about President Trump’s morning threat to destroy Iran’s civil energy and bridge infrastructure if the country doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday. To quote him: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” (That’s not my arch summary. That’s a quote.) I will set aside that these would appear to constitute war crimes as going without saying.

    The man is careening from one day to the next from ‘the Strait doesn’t matter’ to (alternatively) ‘not our problem/it will open itself’ to ‘I give you fucking two days or you’ll be living in hell.’ Of course, then, he has then repeatedly “postponed” the day of destruction after encouraging talks with Iran leaders, talks which we then learn a few days later never occurred. But now he says, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” (This time I really, really mean it!)

    In other words, talk like an insane person and carry a really small stick. He thinks these outbursts make him look stronger but each threat and retreat makes him look weaker and more clearly not in control of the situation. These are the words of a man who has spent a lifetime either TACOing or bullshitting his way out of messes suddenly coming up against an immovable object and at a moment when he already appears to be under some mix of extreme psychic strain and a more general senescent decompensation.

    There is another part of this equation which I do not think has gotten sufficient focus. On March 24th The New York Times published an article which reported that the Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, has told President Trump that he needs to finish the job, overthrow the Iranian regime or render it so feeble that it cannot threaten anyone – the second condition likely being impossible without achieving the first. As the Times put it (emphasis added), “Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government.”

    Placing a story like this in the Times, is about as clear and as audacious a message a Saudi ruler can send to the US government without purchasing a nationwide 30 second ad campaign. I interpret this as him saying: just to be sure the message is getting through or in case you’re getting the message and not sharing it with your people. Trump whacked a hornets nest and MBS says now Trump needs to remove the nest. It can’t be left in place. He needs to overthrow or defang the Iranian regime. […]

    The common thinking in the US is that President Trump either blundered his way into this mess or was goaded into it by Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s a bit of truth to the second idea and a lot to the first. But it’s MBS and the leader of the UAE along with other gulf princes who are really Trump’s guys, much more than Benjamin Netanyahu. The way the Trump White House has interwoven US security, money and geopolitics with them runs much deeper. And, critically and relatedly, the Trump family’s business ties with them are infinitely deeper. [!]

    I’m not saying Trump won’t follow through on these threats, though I think he’s most likely to cave again. What it means is that this war is likely to last a lot longer than most people think. What it all comes down to is that I don’t think Trump can leave, even though he’s desperate to. That is the context in which we need to see these escalating rage tweets.

  233. johnson catman says

    I wonder if there are any military leaders left that would refuse to carry out strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran because they know for a fact that it is illegal and a war crime? I am sure that the Secretary of War Crimes and The Orange Turd would have them removed and replaced, but what if there are a good percentage of those officers in the command structure?

  234. says

    johnson catman@233, good question.

    In other news:

    Congressional Republicans have jet-setted across the country after refusing to ensure the very Transportation Security Administration officials keeping them safe on their travels get a paycheck.

    [Media outlets have] been posting user-submitted photos of GOP lawmakers leaving town and even vacationing after failing to reach a compromise to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The agency has been shut down for over 50 days as Republicans refuse to work with Democrats to reform Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the wake of officers killing two U.S. citizens and brutalizing immigrants.

    Thirty members of Congress—including Republican Reps. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, Claudia Tenney of New York, and Jason Smith of Missouri—took a taxpayer-funded trip to Scotland. Many of them even got to visit Edinburgh Castle, a must-see with tourists.

    The most embarrassing of the photos, though, were a series of shots of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was spotted enjoying himself—perhaps a little too much—at Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida.

    Graham ate a meal at Chef Mickey’s (which this Disney traveler wants you to know is one of the most overpriced and gross eateries on the sprawling property). The childless Graham was also pictured holding a Little Mermaid bubble wand and waiting to ride Space Mountain, the iconic indoor roller coaster. [video]

    After the humiliating images surfaced, Graham gave this lame statement […: “I voted 7 times to fully fund the government. Call a Democrat.”

    Of course, Democrats do not control either chamber of Congress, thus Republicans have the responsibility to put forth legislation that can actually pass. Even some mainstream media outlets, which often couch their words to avoid losing access to GOP sources, are now placing the shutdown blame at the feet of Republicans in Congress.

    Meanwhile, Democrats have offered their own funding measures to make sure TSA agents and other non-immigration-enforcement DHS functions are funded, but they were blocked by Republicans.

    But I digress, back to the cowards fleeing D.C. while DHS is still shut down.

    Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, infamous for hitching a flight outta dodge when faced with challenging circumstances, was spotted flying to sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which seems to be a popular location for Republicans on this ill-advised two-week break amid a partial government shutdown.

    Other Republicans caught fleeing Washington, D.C., include Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and John Barrasso of Wyoming, the latter of whom was confronted by angry travelers […]

    Ultimately, Republicans abdicated their responsibility and left town without a funding deal. […]

    Link

  235. says

    […] Trump gave Americans a bizarre, expletive-filled Easter Sunday message, celebrating US plans for war crimes against Iran following what appears to be the rescue of two airmen shot down in southern Iran.

    “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

    As a text launched on the morning of one of the most significant religious holidays on the Christian calendar, the post is disturbing enough, but it becomes even more so when read aloud, as Jake Tapper did on CNN’s Sunday show, State of the Union. [video]

    Aside from the president’s uninhibited vocabulary, attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally considered a war crime by international law experts.

    “Given that such power plants are essential for meeting the basic needs and livelihoods of tens of millions of civilians, attacking them would be disproportionate and thus unlawful under international humanitarian law,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said when such threats initially surfaced, “even in the limited cases that they qualify as military targets.”

    […] “At my direction, the U.S. Military sent dozens of aircraft, armed with the most lethal weapons in the World, to retrieve him,” Trump posted in celebration on Truth Social just after midnight on Sunday. “The fact that we were able to pull off both of these operations, without a SINGLE American killed, or even wounded, just proves once again, that we have achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies.” [“Overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies” is a lie. Iran’s ability to respond is degraded, but not overwhelmed.]

    As Amin Saikal, a professor of Middle East and Central Asian studies at the Australian National University, told Al Jazeera on Sunday, rescuing the two pilots allows Trump to more freely pursue his military strategy, namely, the 48-hour deadline he imposed on Iran’s leadership Saturday morning to open the Strait of Hormuz before “all Hell will reign down on them.”

    Later on Sunday, Trump told ABC News‘ Rachel Scott that if Iran does not agree to a deal, “we’re blowing up the whole country.” [JFC]

    Link

  236. JM says

    @233 johnson catman: The senior officers Hegseth and Trump have removed makes the news but as a percentage of command officers it’s small. I expect most would not take a mission that was clearly a civilian target. The danger is that they don’t need very many to be willing to take those orders. When launching a missile, firing artillery or dropping a bomb on coordinates they can’t see most people involved don’t have any idea what they are hitting. Hegseth would need only a few officers and likely some intelligence people. Hegseth can probably find enough people to do it as long as it’s multi-function infrastructure like bridges and power.

  237. JM says

    Institute for the Study of War: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 4, 2026
    War continues in Ukraine despite events in other places taking news headlines away. This tends to happen with wars.

    The Kremlin continues to face harsher backlash from Russia’s domestic populace about its intensified censorship efforts in recent weeks than Moscow likely expected or was prepared for. Polling from the Kremlin-linked Public Opinion Forum (FOM) from March 27 to 29 found that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trust rating fell by five percentage points from 76 percent to 71 percent since March 22 – the highest decrease since 2019.

    Weirdly the headline is still the Russian government interfering with Telegram and other internet censorship. The recent Russian government moves have had more impact on Putin’s popularity in Russia then the Ukraine war has had. The Russians are not happy about the war but until the government started getting in the way of internet access they didn’t blame Putin.

    Russian objective: Push Ukrainian forces back from the international border to create a defensible buffer zone with Belgorod Oblast and approach to within tube artillery range of Kharkiv City
    Ukrainian forces recently advanced in northern Kharkiv Oblast.

    Now that the 2026 offenses are really in motion there are multiple lines of attack. In some Russia is making slow progress, in others the Ukrainians are pushing back. Where the Ukrainians attack they can push the Russians back but the Ukrainian military doesn’t have enough offensive units to hit Russia everyplace they are attacking. Overall Russia is not making real progress, even where Ukraine is not pushing back Russian progress is slow to non-existent.

    Ukrainian forces struck at least one Russian chemical plant in Samara Oblast. Russian forces launched 286 drones against Ukraine.

    There have been some requests, mostly from Russia, that Ukraine let off the Russian oil infrastructure while the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Ukraine isn’t buying it and continuing deep strikes against targets they can hit. Russia has move their air defense around to give better coverage to key industrial and transport infrastructure so Ukraine is not doing as much damage as when they first made strikes deeper into Russia. Keeping this up is still key for Ukraine because it keeps Russia from concentrating their air defense.

  238. JM says

    @214 Lynna, OM & @235 Lynna, OM: Trump saying “Praise be to Allah.” is really strange. That isn’t some diplomatic friendliness tacked on a message aimed at the government of Iran. It’s in a threat with profanity in it. Nobody is going to like it and both in Iran and the US it might offend some people.
    I can’t imagine anybody around Trump writing that in a post for Trump or it getting approved if anybody else did write it, so it must have been Trump himself. Which really brings his mental state in question.

  240. whheydt says

    Re: birgerjohansson @ #239…
    Not Sting, but somewhat related as part of LotR… My wife used to do a lovely description of the destruction of the Witch King of Angmar as an exchange between him and Eowyn, wherein he notes that the prophecy is that he can not be killed by “the hand of man”. At which point Eowyn reveals that she is a woman. The Witch King then asserts that what is meant (using relevant Latin) that it means “man as distiguished from animals” rather that “man as distinguished from woman”. To this Eowyn then says, in that case, allow me to introduce my assistant who is a Hobbit–and, thus, not “man” by either definition–and who has just inserted an Anorian blade into the back of your knee.

    Tolkien was a philologist and my late wife had a degree in Linguistics, so such niceties would come naturally to both of them. As further aside, Tolkein was–apparently–not particularly satisfied with Shakespeare’s take on “..when Burnham Wood comes to Dunsinane” and invented to Ents to do that sort of thing far more literally.

  241. Silentbob says

    @ 227 StevoR

    Have heard that Artemis II is already halfway to our Moon – which seems remarkably quick to me!

    Kepler’s Laws innit. Object in orbit sweeps out equal areas in equal times. So if your perigee is LEO and your apogee is beyond the Moon, you’re going to be travelling very much faster at perigee. Stands to reason halfway from perigee to apogee would be much quicker than the other half.

  243. Silentbob says

    @ 241 Me

    Just fact checking myself. Artemis 2 was not in low Earth orbit prior to the free return engine burn, but the point – the closer you are to Earth the faster you go – remains.

  244. birgerjohansson says

    Artemis II will enter radio shadow behind the Moon for 40 minutes tonight. I hope they will film the ‘Earthrise’ moment when Earth becomes visible again from behind the moon.

    [I am unsure about writing ‘moon’ as in everyday language or ‘Moon’ as in the name of the distinct astronomical object. We call Earth ‘Earth’, after all]

  246. birgerjohansson says

    Disambiguation. I realised we must spell out wether we refer to Sting the artist, or the sword. One tried to cut Paul Atreides, the other cut through the spider webs in Mirkwood.

    If you swing it really fast through the air, can you call the sound a ‘singing sword’? You should not “stand too close to’ the wielder. And was the fellowship of the ring “policing’ Middle-Earth ?

  248. StevoR says

    The Artemis 2 astronauts will get a rare skywatching treat on Monday (April 6).

    The quartet will see a total solar eclipse that evening as they slingshot around the moon’s far side, in a flyby that breaks humanity’s all-time distance record. And that eclipse will be something that none of us stuck on terra firma have ever seen. (And, to be clear, groundbound viewers won’t see this one; it will be visible only to the Artemis 2 crew.)

    “From our vantage point, the moon and the sun in the sky appear approximately the same size,” NASA’s Kelsey Young, Artemis science flight operations lead, said during a press conference on Saturday (April 4). But Artemis 2’s Orion capsule “has a much different view than we do,” she added. “And so the moon appears much, much, much larger in their view than it does from us here on Earth.” As a result, the sun will disappear from Artemis 2’s view for about 53 minutes on Monday — about seven times longer than the maximum period of totality possible for eclipses seen from Earth.

    Artemis 2’s total solar eclipse will begin Monday at about 8:35 p.m. EDT (0035 GMT on April 7), 90 minutes after Orion reaches its maximum distance from Earth — 252,757 miles (406,773 kilometers), which is about 4,000 miles (6,400 km) farther than NASA’s Apollo 13 mission got in April 1970.

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/artemis-2-astronauts-are-about-to-see-one-of-the-rarest-skywatching-sights-of-all-a-solar-eclipse-from-beyond-the-moon

    Lucky astronauts and sure hope they get some great photos for the rest of us!

  249. Reginald Selkirk says

    Emergency jabs after 100 children die of suspected measles in a month in Bangladesh

    Bangladesh has launched an emergency vaccination campaign after a fast-spreading measles outbreak is suspected of killing more than 100 people, mostly children, in what may be the country’s most lethal wave of the disease in recent history.

    The campaign, which began on Sunday, comes amid more than 7,500 suspected measles cases since 15 March, according to health ministry data.
    …
    While Bangladesh has long vaccinated children against the highly contagious disease, the recent outbreak has exposed gaps in its programme, raising concern.
    …
    In Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people, routine measles vaccines are given to children as young as nine months old.

    But Shahriar Sajjad, deputy director of the Health Department, told BBC Bangla that about one-third of those infected in the recent outbreak were under nine months old.
    …
    There have been no special measles vaccination campaigns since 2020, first because of Covid then because of the “political situation”, Sajjad told BBC Bangla…

  250. says

    https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-dhs-funding-order-congress

    “Trump’s DHS paycheck promise is a major problem”

    The end of the longest partial shutdown in history is in sight — but thanks to some House Republicans refusing to come back to Washington to pass it, the finish line is still almost two weeks away. These House conservatives, however, are getting a reprieve from Trump. Trump posted on Truth Social last week that he would “soon sign an order to pay ALL of the incredible employees at the Department of Homeland Security.”

    He followed through on Friday, signing a memo ordering his administration to “provide each and every employee of D.H.S. with the compensation and benefits” they’d have earned if the department weren’t shutdown. But until Congress says otherwise, the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t have the money to make good on this promise. In his attempt to let lawmakers off the hook, Trump is setting yet another dangerous precedent that threatens the balance of power in America.

    Government shutdowns, be they full or partial, have gone from an anomaly to a regular part of the legislative toolbox. […]

    TSA agents have called out sick in droves during the last month, prompting massive lines at airports around the country. Other, less visible parts of DHS have also been suffering, including the Coast Guard and staffers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

    […] ICE and Border Patrol’ […] are currently drawing money from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed last year that gave both a several billion-dollar slush fund from which to draw funds.

    After initially dismissing the Senate deal, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., yielded last week, promising with Thune to get the ICE and Border Patrol funded in a party-line vote later this year. But a group of conservative lawmakers are so upset with the deal that they won’t even vote on it until Congress returns from spring break on April 13 — leaving DHS in limbo for almost another fortnight. [!]

    That degree of petulance would be much riskier if it weren’t for the president running cover for the absentee legislature. As it stands, the the idea that Trump can cause funding to appear out of nowhere is deeply troubling.

    The memo Trump signed Friday builds on one issued last month to get backpay in TSA agents’ hands. The earlier directive ordered Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought to essentially figure out where the money is coming from. It memo specifically instructed them to “use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them.” [interesting details]

    The administration has yet to give a public explanation for exactly which funding streams were drawn […]

    That kind of financial shuffling was eyebrow-raising enough when it was just for TSA. Somehow finding the means to pay the more than a quarter-million DHS employees when no new funding exists is a much bigger stretch, one that can’t be accepted as a done deal. It’s a power that no president has ever claimed and goes against the Antideficiency Act, a 150-year-old law that prohibits federal officials from spending or obligating money that Congress has not appropriated. [!]

    Vought has argued that the appropriations are essentially a ceiling, not a floor, allowing the administration to choose how much of that funding to spend. It’s a willful misreading of the law […]

    The promise of a bill coming down Pennsylvania Avenue eventually doesn’t grant Trump the authority to pre-spend that money. [!]

    […] If money siloed off for one function under the law can be freely spent throughout the government, there’s no limit to how often a president can rob Peter to pay Paul. […]

    This may be yet another instance of the White House daring its opponents to challenge them. After all, who wants the poor optics of suing to get that money back from FEMA staffers — only to potentially see the case made moot once Congress acts? It’s a bluff that should still be called though. The safeguards that prevent the Treasury itself from becoming an at-will checking account for the executive branch should be defended […]

  251. says

    […] the White House’s mobile “news” app, which was launched two weeks ago, provides a very different impression about current events.

    The app, according to Team Trump, intends to offer Americans “a direct line to the White House — cutting through the noise with unfiltered, real-time updates straight from the source.” As The Washington Post noted, the result is an online service that offers “a glimpse into a world in which only Trump’s triumphs make headlines.”

    ‘AMERICA IS BACK,’ reads an all-caps headline that dominates the app’s home screen. Top stories trumpet the president’s ‘policy wins,’ track the decline in egg prices, and hail a ‘historic turnaround on immigration,’ with more people leaving the United States than entering it in 2025. […]

    ‘Welcome to the golden age!’ declares a pop-up screen inviting users to provide their email address to receive news and updates. Another prompt directs users to enable push notifications so they can receive ‘breaking news alerts.’ A red button invites them to ‘text President Trump’; tapping it pulls up a pre-drafted text message that begins, ‘Greatest President Ever!’ [JFC]</blockquote
    While all of this might sound absurd, and more than a little embarrassing for ostensible adults serving in the executive branch of the world’s preeminent superpower, the launch has apparently had some success: The Post’s report noted that the app was downloaded roughly 700,000 times in its first week, and it “topped Apple and Google’s download charts in the news category.”

    We can probably think of many examples of conservative news outlets that have the qualities of state media, but the White House is taking matters one step further, creating a literal online state media app — and there’s apparently a market for such propaganda.

    […] “The app has also raised some alarms from digital privacy researchers who delved into its software and reported that they had found mechanisms by which it could log users’ location,” the Post’s report noted. NOTUS published a related report, adding, “Cybersecurity researchers warn that the White House’s new app regularly shares users’ IP addresses, time zones and other data to third-party services. But most of its users wouldn’t know that, because the app doesn’t disclose its data sharing the way most others do.”

    The White House denied that the app collects user locations and insisted that the app is “safe and secure.” There appear to be quite a few cybersecurity researchers who have come to a very different conclusion.

    Link

  252. JM says

    XDA: Linux 7.1 is finally ending support for Intel’s 37-year-old 486 processor

    As spotted by Phoronix, there’s a new change that’s queued up to merge into Linux 7.1. Authored by Ingo Molnar, the change, titled “x86/cpu: Remove M486/M486SX/ELAN support,” begins dismantling Linux’s built-in support for the i486, which was first released back in 1989. As the changelog notes, even Linus is keen to cut ties with the architecture:

    This is still just proposed but enough people in the Linux kernel group want to do it that it will happen unless there are too many complaints.
    The 486 is terribly obsolete and any project using one has probably not updated in years. It’s still interesting to see it removed and decisions around how long to keep compatibility with old hardware. 386 support was removed some time ago because it was difficult to support, it had hardware limitations and security issues that couldn’t easily be worked around. The 486 lasted longer and is being removed more because people don’t want to waste time maintaining it then fundamental problems.

  253. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Elia Ayoub (Journalist, Lebanese diasporan):

    Israeli soldiers are detonating entire villages in South Lebanon while taking selfies. Ancient mosques, churches, cemeteries, schools, hospitals—all being obliterated […]

    One of the towns […] Khiam, is where they ran their notorious torture prison during their previous occupation of South Lebanon. If you know Soha Bechara’s story, that was in Khiam. [Video clip]

    Israel detonated Naqoura village [Video clip]

    More villages […] Israel is the one sharing these videos. They are proud of their war crimes. [Video clip]

    Rando: “[Naqoura] As in the place where UNIFIL has (had?) it’s headquarters?”
    Elia Ayoub: “Yes.”
     
    The New Arab – Israeli forces destroy 17 UN peacekeeper cameras (Apr 4)

    Israeli forces destroyed 17 surveillance cameras linked to the United Nations peacekeepers’ main headquarters in southern Lebanon in 24 hours […] the coastal town of Naqoura. […] “the cameras appear to have been destroyed by some kind of laser” […] “[Israeli] soldiers are present in Naqoura and have been undertaking massive demolitions of buildings in the village this week” […] “not only have these demolitions destroyed civilian homes and businesses, but the strength of the blasts have caused damage to UNIFIL’s headquarters”.

    Three Indonesian peacekeepers from the UN force have been killed in two separate incidents over the past week. UNIFIL also reported Friday an “explosion” in one of its bases near Odaisseh in south Lebanon that wounded three personnel, adding that they “do not yet know the origin of the explosion”.

    It would’ve made headlines if the UN HQ were destroyed since Saturday, so it’s still there, albeit damaged.

  254. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/air-canada-boss-fired-for-unpardonable

    “Air Canada Boss Quit-Fired For Unpardonable Canadian Sin”

    In the end it was hubris that brought down Michael Rousseau, the president and CEO of Canada’s biggest airline, who announced his resignation last week after public outrage over his conduct.

    He managed to deke around the pitchforks after tripling his take-home pay the year after the expiration of a hold on executive bonuses that was a condition for government pandemic loans. He didn’t step down over fury for jettisoning free carry-on luggage or forcing striking flight attendants back on the job through binding arbitration. […]

    Non, Rousseau’s laissez-faire attitude toward learning French was finally a bridge too far for the head of a major Quebec-based company. Air Canada faced a PR nightmare after he put out a four-minute condolence video only in English (but with helpful subtitles!) following the fatal accident at LaGuardia airport when an Air Canada Jazz flight from Montreal hit a fire truck while landing, killing the two pilots and injuring dozens. […]

    I spent a year answering Air Canada’s telephones after university and had to meet the same in-house standards as everyone else:

    Creating meaningful connections every day is our promise to our customers, our employees and our community. We proudly deliver on this promise by offering services in their language of choice where required across our network […] Whether it is in both official languages of Canada (English and French) or in 23 other route languages, we are steadfastly ensuring this 50-year-plus commitment.</blockquote.

    Even the prime minister piled on. “I am so disappointed by Air Canada’s CEO’s video message; it lacks judgment and compassion,” Mark Carney told reporters en route to the office on Wednesday. “We proudly live in a bilingual country; there are two official languages, and Air Canada has a special responsibility to communicate at all times, in any situation, in both official languages.”

    […] yes, people died and it seems gauche or embarrassingly Canadian for this Two Solitudes language drama when nobody is even sure how safe it is to keep landing at American airports in the Trump 2.0 era. As Marcie wrote in the crash’s aftermath:

    Since the start of the Trump administration there have been 184 aviation disasters in the US, killing a total of 387 people, starting with the January 2025 midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the first commercial big-jet domestic fatal airline disaster since 2009. While at the same time, Trump and Secretary Whitey On The Moon have been gutting the agencies responsible for aviation safety, even given pre-existing shortages. Thousands of FAA employees, including air traffic controllers, safety inspectors, maintenance mechanics, flight-map updaters, and even the lawyers at the Aviation Litigation Division charged with making sure pilots meet requirements and don’t have DUIs (!) have all left after taking buyouts, getting laid off, or not having their contracts renewed.

    […] It’s human nature to want to cut Rousseau some slack as a numbers guy in his sixties who might not be up to the task of learning a new language, but that’s part of the problem. He promised since being hired five years ago to get right on it, and tolerance has reached a Christ, c’est assez moment with the rich and powerful not being held to the same standards as everyone else. He also doesn’t gain much sympathy as someone born to a francophone mother who grew up in Cornwall a couple of miles from the Quebec border and is now married to a woman whose mother tongue is also French. Not to mention he’s the former CFO of the now-defunct Hudson’s Bay Company — which was North America’s oldest corporation — built on the backs of French-Canadian coureurs de bois and once made the mistake of boasting to a crowd about living in Montreal for 14 years without speaking a word of French. It’s like he’s somehow proud to have never learned the local language.

    Also his last name is frickin’ Rousseau! It’s possible he doesn’t even know the diminutive surname translates as “little redhead.”

    The guy could learn a thing or two from Calgary zookeepers who are doing everything they can to accommodate a new polar bear imported from Quebec who only responds to commands in French. [video]
    […]

  255. KG says

    Lynna, OM@235
    Ben Meiselas of Meidas Touch speculates that the Trump regime’s narrative of the second man’s rescue is a cover for a failed mission to retrieve uranium from Isfahan. Meidas Touch is a regular source of clickbait headlines, but as Meiselas points out, the Trump regime lies about everything, and the official line means around half a $bn in planes and helicopters was blown up by the USA’s own forces and the main landing was 200km from where the plane went down.

  256. KG says

    <

    blockquote>Thirty members of Congress—including Republican Reps. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, Claudia Tenney of New York, and Jason Smith of Missouri—took a taxpayer-funded trip to Scotland. Many of them even got to visit Edinburgh Castle, a must-see with tourists. – Lynna, OM@234, quoting DailyKos

    <

    blockquote>

    Oh, if I’d known they were coming, I’d have organised a suitable reception!

  257. KG says

    Remember British comedian Kenny Everrett who passed away 31 years and one day ago.
    He was one of the pioneers who showed comedy could be different. – birgerjohansson@231

    He was also a shit.

  259. birgerjohansson says

    The Onion:

    “President Donald Trump warned Iran on Monday to accept his ultimatum or face the wrath of his next ultimatum.”

  260. birgerjohansson says

    Wow. Who could have thought an infectious disease we considered dangerous enough to develop a vaccine against it might be dangerous?

    Has anyone informed RFK Jr about Bangladesh?

  261. Militant Agnostic says

    KG @255

    That would explain why they had landed large transport aircraft (that were destroyed because they couldn’t take off) in Iran

  262. says

    KG @255, good points. Apparently 200 miles from the missing crew member! That’s a lot.

    Miltant Agnostic @261, another good point.

  263. says

    White House’s Wiles reportedly concerned about information bubble surrounding Trump

    “The president’s chief of staff has urged officials to be “more forthright with the boss” about the war with Iran. That’s easier said than done.”

    It’s not the sort of sentiment that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles would likely share publicly, but according to a report from Time, Donald Trump’s longtime aide has expressed private concerns about the information bubble surrounding the president.

    Two White House sources told the magazine that Wiles shared her fears with officials that White House aides were giving the president “a rose-colored view” of how the war with Iran was being perceived domestically, “telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear.” The report added that the chief of staff urged colleagues to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks.

    […] this is very easy to believe. Whether officials intend to follow Wiles’ advice about being more candid, however, is another matter entirely.

    The problem is not new. Two weeks into the conflict, The New York Times reported that some administration officials were feeling pessimism about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war, “but they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”

    Soon after, NBC News reported that U.S. military officials were compiling video updates for Trump on the war, filled with footage of explosions. The video montages, the report added, were “fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war.”

    The problem, however, is institutional and structural. Wiles may very well like the idea of a White House in which officials are “more forthright with the boss,” but she has helped create an environment in which this does not appear to happen. [True] The Times’ Jamelle Bouie had a great column along these lines about a month ago:

    [O]ne of the fundamental realities of this administration is that the president has organized his White House in such a way as to prevent anything from ever troubling his precious mind. Having surrounded himself with sycophants — with men and women so eager to please that they’ll submit to practically any humiliation thrown their way — he has filtered out information that might challenge his preconceptions, his assumptions, or even simply his ego. […]

    What he wants from his aides and allies … is the kind of praise, attention and constant affirmation that you might give to a child with low self-esteem. [!!]

    During Trump’s first term, there was no shortage of sycophants, but there were high-ranking officials with access to the Oval Office who would, at least sometimes, tell the president the one word he does not like to hear: “no.” Indeed, one of Wiles’ predecessors, retired Gen. John Kelly, felt compelled to occasionally tell Trump that some of the things he wanted to do were illegal.

    But in the second term, those voices have been purged. The result is a dynamic that White House officials seem to understand all too well: Tell Trump how right his assumptions are and receive praise and job security, or tell him the truth and face potential unemployment.

  264. says

    Follow-up of sorts to comment 263.

    On Iran’s military capabilities, Trump and U.S. intelligence point in different directions

    “Why is the president insisting that Iran’s military ‘can’t fight back’ and has ‘no capability’ given the evidence to the contrary?

    Related video at the link.

    On Monday morning, a reporter asked Donald Trump why the U.S. war with Iran is ongoing if, as he’s said, Iran’s military has been obliterated. It wasn’t entirely clear whether the president fully understood the question, since he responded by recommitting to the premise of the inquiry.

    “They can’t fight back,” he said. “They have no capability.”

    The rhetoric was certainly familiar. As recently as two weeks ago, Trump boasted, “We literally have planes flying over Tehran and other parts of their country, [and] they can’t do a thing about it.” Weeks earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth similarly bragged about “complete control of Iranian skies” and “uncontested airspace.”

    During his national address from the White House last week, Trump went so far as to say of Iran, “They have no anti-aircraft equipment. … We are unstoppable as a military force.”

    The comments came before Iran shot down an F-15E fighter jet — the first time in 23 years that a U.S. fighter jet was downed by enemy fire — in addition to striking two Blackhawk helicopters and an attack jet that were assisting in the search-and-rescue effort.

    The developments weren’t the only reason to discount Team Trump’s boasts. The New York Times reported on the latest U.S. intelligence, which painted a picture at odds with the one presented by the White House:

    Iranian operatives have been digging out underground missile bunkers and silos struck by American and Israeli bombs, returning them to operation hours after an attack, according to U.S. intelligence reports. [!!]

    Iran has also retained a significant amount of its missiles and mobile launchers, the reports say. … American intelligence agencies have cast doubt on how close the United States is to destroying Iran’s missile capability, a key goal in the war. [!]

    […] American intelligence estimates have concluded that Iran “retains the ability to use its remaining arsenal of ballistic missiles and missile launchers to attack Israel and other countries in the region.”

    So why is the American president insisting that Iran’s military “can’t fight back” and has “no capability”? It’s certainly possible that he’s simply trying to deceive the public, hoping to change attitudes about the conflict. It’s also possible that Trump simply doesn’t accept the accuracy of U.S. intelligence, preferring his assumptions to the evidence. […]

    But it’s also worth asking whether Trump is even aware of those U.S. intelligence assessments, given the information bubble he appears to live in and officials’ reluctance to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.

  265. says

    For proponents of ethical reforms, transparency and good government, the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation was an important and productive time. The White House controversy was so systemic, and the political fallout was so dramatic, that policymakers agreed to create all kinds of new limits and guardrails intended to prevent future presidential abuses […]

    Take the Presidential Records Act, for example. The post-Watergate law was created to force presidents to turn over all their records to the National Archivers, as part of a larger effort to combat corruption and ensure White House transparency. Last week, Donald Trump’s team unilaterally decided it doesn’t think the Presidential Records Act is constitutional and that it no longer intends to comply with the 48-year-old law.

    It was a step down a familiar path. The New York Times published a memorable analysis on this in January:

    From the opening days of his second term, President Trump took aim at Watergate’s ethical checkpoints as if in a shooting gallery. First, he fired 17 inspectors general, a job established in the Watergate era to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in government. He also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency created by legislation in 1978 to protect government whistle-blowers. Then he fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, created around the same time to guard against financial conflicts of interest by top government officials. And he has used the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as political tools, roles they worked to shed after Watergate.

    […] A half-century ago, policymakers responded to a corrupt, power-hungry Republican president by establishing an ethical framework that proved quite effective, until another corrupt, power-hungry Republican president decided that the framework was getting in the way of his authoritarian-style ambitions, and a GOP-led Congress decided to let him do as he pleases.

    […] I have no idea what’ll happen in the 2026 and 2028 elections, but it would take Democratic majorities to respond to the Trump era the way Congress responded to Nixon decades ago.

    Link

  272. birgerjohansson says

    I am told there was an elderly secretary of state during the 19th century who became very impulsive and would get very angry, suggesting war with various nations – while he was never officially diagnosed with dementia, it was almost certainly the case.
    .
    Unfortunately, I have forgotten his name. It would be useful to refer to him when discussing Trump’s conduct.

  273. StevoR says

    I think James Fell is exactly right here

    Is There Anyone to Stop Him from Nuking Iran?
    Soldier in trench during the First World War: “This is the worst war ever.”
    Homer Simpson: “The worst war ever, so far.”
    Soldier in Okinawa during the Second World War: “THIS is the worst war ever.”
    Homer Simpson: …

    Not once, but twice, a sizeable portion of the American electorate lost its fucking mind and handed control of America’s nuclear arsenal to an oversized Oompa Loompa with the impulse control of a toddler who just downed a half dozen Red Bull.

    It’s a frightening prospect, someone who is crazier than a shitbug controlling all those intercontinental boom sticks. Except the Count of Mostly Crisco is not the only one.

    The Supreme Exalted Infallible Important Incontinent Kim Jong-fuckface is an entire cave full of batshit, and he has nukes too.

    Yet in 2017, Coppertone Caligula was threatening to nuke North Korea. This, despite North Korea having an agreement with China, in place since 1961, that China will defend North Korea against unprovoked aggression. The United States may have a couple thousand operational (ready to fly) nukes, but the combined radioactive kaboom power of North Korea and China would give any rational person pause. Any rational person.

    Thankfully, during Tangerine Palpatine’s first term, when he had an itchy nuclear trigger finger for North Korea, the Danger Yam’s chief of staff John Kelly, a retired USMC general, brought in some other military leaders and they talked him out of it.

    Alas, things are different now.

    Before we get all present-day apocalyptic, a bit of history.

    During the Cold War standoff with the Soviets, there was great fear of a BOOB, a Bolt Out Of the Blue. The commie rats might send their missiles flying because Khrushchev stubbed his toe and spilled his vodka, and the “No, fuck YOU!” return strike had to be launched within minutes or a sizeable chunk of the ability to retaliate would be a pile of radioactive rubble. It was the whole “mutually assured destruction” thing that, crazy as it seems, probably kept us from making each other glow in the dark for several decades.

    But dammit we’ve had some close calls. Somehow, cooler heads have always prevailed.

    Vasily Arkhipov, a handsome devil of a naval officer who was part of the Soviet-U.S. oceanic standoff during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, prevented the world from being run by intelligent cockroaches. There was a naval blockade of Cuba, during which the submarine on which Arkhipov was executive officer had been too deep to have any outside communication for several days. An American ship detected his sub and dropped depth charges to force it to surface. The sub captain surmised World War III was underway and decided to launch a nuclear torpedo. The political officer agreed, but Arkhipov’s assent was also required to activate the weapon, and he said are you totally fucking bugshit? No! He convinced them to surface as assess the situation, and planetwide annihilation was averted.

    Yet another close call took place in 1983 when we were once again saved from annihilation by a cool-headed Russian officer. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was duty officer for the Soviet nuclear early warning system. The system said hey those capitalist pigs just launched a bunch of nukes at us. Petrov was supposed to bump it up the chain of command, but he knew everyone was twitchy as shit and would probably launch a retaliatory strike first and ask radioactive questions later. He also didn’t trust the new system, because there were indications it might be a false alarm, such as the system saying it was only five missiles and not an all-out fusion fuck you as was expected with a first strike. So, he kept his mouth shut and just … waited. He had guessed correctly that it was a system malfunction and reported that instead.

    What best represents what’s taking place right now, however, was during the final months of President Nixon’s term.

    It was in 1973, during the Yom Kippur war. Henry Kissinger, who finally died in 2023, qualifies as a war criminal for myriad reasons. Guy was a total dick, except that one time he wasn’t, creating the concept of “shuttle diplomacy” by acting as an intermediary in negotiations between Egypt and Israel to dial down the hostilities. Nixon was drunk off his ass all the time because of the Watergate scandal, and Kissinger stepped in to calm things down. It almost went nuclear because U.S.-backed Israel was about to wreck Soviet-backed Egypt, and Moscow was threatening to give Egypt nukes to prevent their ally’s defeat. Couple this with the largest naval confrontation of the entire Cold War between American and Soviet navies facing off in the Mediterranean, and we may have faced a Road Warrior scenario where people had to scrounge for expired cans of Chef Boyardee to survive.

    In 2000, the Guardian ran a story about Nixon with this as the opening line: “For most of his political life Richard Nixon was prey to drink, prescription drugs and fits of rage.” Kissinger was well aware of the dangers of Nixon’s mindset and habits, and was quoted in the piece as having said more than once, “If the president had his way, there would be nuclear war each week.”

    But it wasn’t just Kissinger working to calm things down. As reported in the Telegraph, there was Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger standing guard: “During Nixon’s last days in the White House at the height of the Watergate crisis, when some were doubting the President’s mental stability, Schlesinger reportedly instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him before carrying out any of Nixon’s orders regarding nuclear weapons.”

    I don’t need to list the reasons why having Eric’s dad in charge of nukes is scary as blood in your stool. Just check his latest Truth Social posts. Unhinged? Someone ripped the door off its hinges, soaked it in kerosene, then threw it into an active volcano of narcissistic dumbfuckery.

    Apricot Pol Pot is far more deranged now than he was in 2017, and his international humiliation with Iran is much worse that the sabre-rattling he did with North Korea during his first term. He done fucked up good, and there seems to be no way out of it. I fear he imagines turning the country into a parking lot is a viable solution to the fucktacular shitnado of ass his idiocy has created.

    He’ll end the world to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files.

    I expect that he truly wants to nuke Iran, and this time we don’t have a Kissinger or a Schlesinger or a Kelly reining him in. Twenty-fifth amendment that fucker? Yeah, right. According to the Atlantic: “Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to recommend the removal of the president in cases where he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,’ and allows the House and Senate to confirm the recommendation over the president’s objection by two-thirds vote.”

    It won’t happen because anyone in Voldemoron’s cabinet who isn’t an absolute lickspittle has been replaced. All those useless motherfuckers have a PhD in toadying. Shit, Secretary of Dick Measuring Whiskey Pete Keg’s Breath probably wants to nuke Iran as well. Just a few days ago he tweeted, “Back to the Stone Age.” Fucking psychopath.

    I have a very bad feeling that right now we are the closest we’ve been to a nuclear weapon being used against human beings in a very long time.

    Then what? Well, Russia is an ally of Iran, and they have an absolute assload of nukes …

    In conclusion, tell those closest to you that you love them.

    NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.
    Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.

    Source : https://www.facebook.com/bodyforwife/posts/pfbid0xpjYTHeFf1yk2rJbu5RmZjU4n1FHeGSCo6DrgPf2XAgybWCRSPv9qSznysqz7h8ol

  274. Silentbob says

    @ ^

    For anyone else wondering who Stevo’s quoting here it’s apparently some random fitness guru. X-D

  275. birgerjohansson says

    How Do Lava Tubes Form? Where Does The Lava Drain? w/@shawnwillsey | GEO GIRL 

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=UBa1gTKOdHk
    If you live in a state with active volcanism, you should definitely check if some of these features are open to the public for safe entry. I wager some of those caves can easily break a leg if people do not waych their step.

  276. StevoR says

    @274. Silentbob : No he’s not. Or at very least James Fell is much more than that and has a degree in history and has written several books :

    James Fell (born 1968) is a Canadian writer. He initially wrote about health and fitness in an effort to debunk fitness myths. Since 2020, his books have focused on historical events.

    …(snip)..

    .. he (Fell – ed.) discovered a love of history from an inspiring professor. He received a master’s degree in history, then an MBA.

    … (Snip)..

    ..In 2020, he began writing about history, posting daily on his social media.[4][12][13] The daily posts explained unusual and often unknown events that occurred on that calendar date in history.[12][13]

    In 2021, Fell independently published a collection of his daily posts called On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. By 2022, he had sold 30,000 copies, and his social media following had grown from 80,000 to 250,000 people. He then published a second edition. The books included revisions based on feedback from readers.[12][13][4] Fell added to his web page a “Historyscope”, inspired by daily horoscopes, so readers could find out what happened in history on their birthday.[14]

    In 2023, Bantam Books released On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down,[15] and it was ranked fourth on the Canadian non-Fiction Best sellers list for the week of October 9 to 15, 2023.[16] It also appeared first in Alberta for non-fiction sales.[17]

    Fell, talking about a range of topics including fitness, motivation, and history, has appeared on podcasts, Canadian television, and radio shows. These include The Social,[18] Citytv,[19] Shaw TV Calgary,[20] CBC Radio One[21], CKUA Radio Network,[22] and The Thinking Atheist Podcast with Seth Andrews.

    Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fell_(author)

  280. StevoR says

    @277. rorschach :

    paywalled – all I could see was thsi bit at the start – dunno how much is missing..

    President Trump escalated his aggressive rhetoric toward Iran, threatening to wipe out the entirety of the country’s civilization if Tehran doesn’t cede to his demands by 8 p.m. Tuesday. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

    The U.S. conducted more than 50 strikes on military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island early Tuesday, according to two U.S. officials, ahead of Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face bombardment of infrastructure such as bridges and power plants.

    The U.S. and regional mediators continued their push for a ⁠potential 45-day cease-fire that could lead to a permanent end to the ‌war with Iran but little progress has been made, officials familiar with the matter said.

    Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. had completed its military objectives in Iran and that the ball is now in Tehran’s court.

    Saudi Arabia said its air defenses had intercepted 18 drones in the space of a few hours.

    Israel is on heightened alert for the possibility of attacks on its critical infrastructure.

    Source : https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-2026-trump-deadline-latest-news

    Folks need a subscription to see more..

  283. StevoR says

    Via Aussie ABC live Trump’s (latest) War updates :

    Donald Trump has ramped up his threats to Iran, saying a “whole civilisation will die tonight” if the regime does not do a deal to end the war.

    It came as the US and Israel pounded the country with strikes.

    Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have said at least one attacker has been killed and two others wounded in a gunfight with police outside a building housing the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.

    Plus :

    We’re hearing the US military conducted strikes on military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island.

    The Axios news outlet reported the news, citing an unidentified senior US official.

    In addition to :

    …(Trump – ed) said “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again” and went on to say: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

    “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

    Trump’s latest social media tirade comes as strikes have been reported across Iran targeting bridges and railways across the country, as well as the strategically important Kharg Island.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-07/iran-war-live-updates-trump-press-conference/106534506

  284. says

    RACHEL MADDOW: Report exposes a Trump scheme to override midterm vote with bogus crisis

    Rachel Maddow talks with Senator Mark Warner, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, about reporting in the Washington Post that people close to Donald Trump are being pitched an idea to use fake intelligence about foreign election interference to allow Trump to declare an emergency and take over the voting system ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

    Video is 6:20 minutes

    RACHEL MADDOW: Maddow: U.S. military fights war on two fronts: Iran and Trump incompetence

    Rachel Maddow looks at how Donald Trump’s overall cluelessness and incompetence is made worse by Pete Hegseth’s active destabilizing of the U.S. military and poor decision-making in wartime.

    Video is 10:47 minutes

  285. says

    THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Democratic lawmaker calls for Trump’s removal using the 25th Amendment

    In response to questions about his mental fitness, Donald Trump told reporters at the White House, “I don’t care about critics.” Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine joins MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss her concerns over Trump’s social media posts threatening to bomb Iran and why, in her view, it’s time for his removal from office using the 25th Amendment.

    Video is 5:04 minutes

  287. says

    ‘Foolish’: Trump scolds Americans for opposing some of his ambitions in Iran

    “Evidently, we’re just simpletons, unable to grasp the brilliance of Trump’s idea about stealing Iran’s natural resources after starting an unnecessary war.”

    Related video at the link.

    It’s not exactly a secret that most Americans oppose the U.S. war in Iran. […] in this case even Trump seems to realize that the military offensive he ordered is not popular.

    When a reporter asked Monday, “What do you say to Americans who are not a fan of the war?” the Republican president replied, “They’re foolish, because the war is about one thing: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

    Speaking of foolishness, Trump’s comment didn’t make a lot of sense. For one thing, it’s generally not a good idea for a president to scold his fellow Americans. For another, given that Iran does not have, has never had and was not close to building a nuclear weapon, his latest rationale for the deadly conflict fell far short of coherence.

    But as it turned out, this wasn’t his only complaint about public attitudes in the country he ostensibly leads. Politico reported:

    President Donald Trump on Monday said he would like to ‘take’ Iran’s oil — but that he hasn’t because Americans want to see the war brought to a close.

    ‘If I had my choice, I’d keep the oil. But I also want to make the people of our country happy,’ Trump told reporters at the annual White House Easter egg roll.

    As part of the same exchange, the president said: “Unfortunately, the American people would like to see us come home. If it were up to me, I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money.”

    In recent days, Trump has been obsessing over the idea of seizing Iranian oil. A week ago, for example, at an Easter lunch, he said of the war in Iran, “I’d prefer just to take the oil.”

    Although the president briefly told the public, “We don’t need their oil,” during a nationally televised address, he quickly made clear that he wants Iranian oil anyway, publishing a series of items pushing the idea on his social media platform, in addition to incessant public comments. [video]

    In case this isn’t obvious, there’s a word for what happens when one country attacks another and takes its natural resources. It’s a practice called “plunder” and, according to international laws that the United States helped write, it’s a war crime. [!]

    […] “I’d like to keep the oil; I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand it,” the president added on Monday morning.

    Evidently, we’re just a bunch of simpletons, unable to grasp the brilliance of Trump’s idea about stealing Iran’s natural resources after starting an unnecessary war.

  288. says

    Team Trump leans into religious messaging, claims God supports U.S. war in Iran

    “An increasingly unstable leader is insisting that he has divine support for his military ambitions. When has that ever gone wrong in world history?”

    Related video at the link.

    At a White House Cabinet meeting two weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio complained about the religious clerics who lead the Iranian government. “These are religious fanatics,” Rubio said.

    […] there was a degree of irony to the criticisms. As CNN summarized:

    Far from shying away from the idea that there is a religious aspect to the US-Israeli war on Iran, US government leaders are leaning into it, invoking God and promising fire and brimstone for Iran’s civil society if its leaders do not buckle to US demands.

    Even in an administration in which references to Christian nationalism have become routine, Monday offered several examples of the broader phenomenon:
    – Asked if he believes God supports U.S. actions in Iran, Donald Trump replied, “I do, because God is good, because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of.” He did not elaborate on who is being “taken care of” through U.S. bombing campaigns.
    – At the same news conference, the president claimed he was in a position to convey God’s wishes to the public. “God doesn’t like what’s happening,” he added. [JFC]
    – Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly likened the rescue of a missing American airman shot down over Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. “God is good,” he concluded.
    – Trump thanked God for “watching” over U.S. forces as they searched for a downed American fighter pilot.

    [video]

    The rhetoric came one day after Trump published an unhinged threat to Iranian officials through his social media platform, which read in part: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

    What the world is confronting, in other words, is an increasingly unstable leader, threatening to commit war crimes, while insisting that he has divine support for his military ambitions.

    And when has that ever gone wrong in world history?

  289. says

    Hegseth: “Shot down on a Friday — Good Friday — hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter. God is good.”

  291. says

    The man who watches Trump all day, every day

    “Aaron Rupar spends up to 80 hours a week following the US president, from meandering speeches to impromptu press conferences. He says it’s ‘pretty bleak’ ”

    The psychological demands of Aaron Rupar’s work are immense. He counts himself lucky to have remained more or less healthy after a decade in his job.

    “I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m like a model of mental health,” says the father-of-two from Minnesota. “But for the most part, especially considering what I do and how much time I spend doing it, I think I’ve been able to emerge relatively unscathed.”

    Rupar works from his spare room in his Minneapolis house. […]

    Rupar is a one-man news agency, running accounts with a million followers on X and another 930,000 on BlueSky. He also writes a Substack with 274,000 subscribers. A small fraction of those subscribers pay $50 per year, his main source of income. [Embedded links are available at the main link.]

    […] For those who think they know Trump, Rupar invites them to buckle up and watch a full speech.
    During a recent cabinet meeting that lasted an hour and 40 minutes, Trump veered from talking about his love of Sharpie pens to his hatred of the “disgusting” country Somalia, his disdain for Britain’s “toy” aircraft carriers, to his dream that one day an interior decorator would invent 24-carat gold wallpaper. “I’m a gold person,” he said.

    “It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” says Rupar. “That’s kind of how people are trained to do political journalism. It’s like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy, what’s new?’ So you kind of pick up those things and convey them to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.” [Important points]

    […] “I think certainly covering this stuff over the last decade has probably negatively affected my mental health just because it’s pretty bleak most of the time,” he says. “But I still get up and feel privileged in some ways to be able to cover historic events for a living. And to have the audience that I have.”

  293. says

    U.S. strikes Kharg Island […]

    […] Even before Trump’s deadline, an intense wave of strikes was reported on bridges across Iran and on Kharg Island, the country’s key oil export hub. The U.S. military struck dozens of military targets on the island overnight, a U.S. official told NBC News.

    Bret Baier said on Fox News that President Donald Trump called him this morning and said that “8 p.m. is happening” as of now, referencing the threatened strikes on Iran’s bridges and energy infrastructure tonight.

    […] U.S. gas prices rose again today, soaring to a national average of $4.14 a gallon amid Iran’s continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz […]

    The price of U.S. crude oil jumped more than 3% to nearly $116 per barrel, after the first reports that the U.S. struck Kharg Island, from which Iran exports 90% of its crude oil. A U.S. official confirmed the strikes to NBC News, but said the strikes did not involve oil assets.

    Brent crude oil also jumped to more than $110 per barrel.

    U.S. stock futures also declined to their lows of the morning, with the S&P 500 showing a drop of more than 0.5%, on renewed fears that the new strikes, and Trump’s 8 p.m. ET deadline, could heighten already widespread uncertainty and supply issues in global energy markets.

    […] The U.S. military struck dozens of Iranian military targets on Kharg Island overnight, according to a U.S. official.

    The mission included U.S. airstrikes along the northern side of the island and did not include any U.S. troops on the ground, the U.S. official said. They did not strike the oil, but instead hit military bunkers and storage facilities, air defense systems and other military facilities. […]

  294. says

    […] Trump’s anti-civilization threat was rebuked by Democratic leaders.

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the post was evidence Trump is “an extremely sick person” and added, “Each Republican who refuses to join us in voting against this wanton war of choice owns every consequence of whatever the hell this is.”

    Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown said the post was “totally insane.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington wrote, “This threat is outrageous, dangerous, and unhinged.”

    “There are 90 million people in Iran. Delivering on a fraction of this unhinged, insane threat would be the greatest war crime of all time,” wrote Illinois Rep. Sean Casten.

    Before the threat, several Democratic representatives called for the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to be invoked. The amendment lays out the procedure for removal of the president after they are deemed unable to perform their constitutional duty.

    Even some of Trump’s most outspoken supporters slammed his support for war crimes. Pundit Tucker Carlson said that the nuclear codes should be hidden from Trump. Far-right activist Candace Owens also called for the 25th Amendment in addition to calling Trump a “genocidal maniac.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Trump’s comments were “evil and madness” while conspiracy theorist Alex Jones released a “war crime alert” and said Trump was threatening genocide.

    Both American and Iranian lives are under threat as events are unfolding in the direction that Democrats warned it would while Trump remains in office.

    Link

  295. says

    TEHRAN (The Borowitz Report)—In what is being hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough, in the early hours of Tuesday the government of Iran offered the US a peace plan which insiders say trades a strait for a straitjacket.

    Although details have yet to be hammered out, the Iranian proposal drew enthusiastic praise from over a hundred world leaders including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Mark Carney, who called it “long overdue.”

    As news of the offer spread around the world, spontaneous dancing broke out in the streets of such cities as London, Berlin, and Nuuk, the capital of Greenland.

    According to those familiar with the offer, the Iranians revised the US peace plan and added a 25th amendment.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/iran-offers-strait-in-exchange-for

    Satire that sounds all too close to the truth.

  296. says

    Trump adds a new wrinkle to his fatally flawed case against NATO

    “As substantively incoherent as the president’s case against NATO has been, he made matters worse at the end of a White House press conference on Monday.”

    […] At a White House Cabinet meeting two weeks ago, [Trump] said he’s “very disappointed with NATO” because its members “didn’t come to our rescue” after the United States launched a war with Iran. What he failed to note, of course, was that the United States wasn’t attacked and didn’t need a “rescue” from anyone.

    Nevertheless, in the days that followed, the Republican continued to ratchet up his condemnations of the most successful military and diplomatic international alliance in the history of the world. The day after his Cabinet meeting, Trump spoke at an investment conference sponsored by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and whined that NATO “just wasn’t there” for the U.S. when he asked for help with the Iran war.

    The following week, the American president spoke to The Telegraph, a prominent publication in the U.K., which asked if he would reconsider the United States’ membership in the alliance. “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration,” he replied.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed the point around the same time, with the latter saying, “You don’t have much of an alliance if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them.”

    The underlying point, however, remained unchanged: We didn’t need them. We launched a war of choice, for reasons the White House still hasn’t explained in any meaningful way, and there is nothing in the NATO charter that requires its members to participate in unnecessary military conflicts, just because the American president wants them to.

    But as substantively incoherent as Trump’s case against NATO has been, he added a new wrinkle at the very end of a White House press conference on Monday, when he shared fresh thoughts on his broader indictment against the alliance.

    After noting that Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, is scheduled to arrive at the White House this week for a meeting, Trump declared, “You know, it all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘Bye, bye.’”

    […] It was every bit as bonkers as it appeared. By Trump’s own telling, he demanded control over the Arctic island, and when Denmark and the people of Greenland failed to satisfy him, the American president decided that the NATO alliance was no longer worthy of U.S. support.

    As for the international effects of Trump’s radical absurdities, Politico reported last week that Trump’s anger “has so far achieved one thing: uniting [NATO members] against him.”

    Vladimir Putin has long dreamed of seeing a wedge between the United States and the NATO alliance. The incumbent American president appears eager to satisfy the Russian’s vision.

  297. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/happy-death-of-civilization-day-everybody

    Welp, guess Trump has penciled in today as biggest bombing day ever, with 93 million people cut off from power and water and/or blasted to smithereens […] [social media post]

    […] And that’s our Schroedinger’s Trump, both the most powerful man in the universe and simultaneously helpless as a kitten to stop the murderous mess he himself made by attacking Iran unprovoked, and unable to stop himself from killing 93 million people if that is what it takes to get the Strait of Hormuz re-named after him […]

    Iran has called his bluff and said no fucking dice to a deal, even after Trump moved his own deadline at least seven times! On Monday, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency announced talks had collapsed, that Iran conveyed a message through mediators from Pakistan, rejecting Steve [Witkoff] and The Kush’s [Jared Kushner] ceasefire proposal of “open up the Strait so we can come kill you faster” because Iran wants a permanent end to the war instead.

    “We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Cairo, told the Associated Press on Monday.

    And bonus, Iran threatened to strike the $30 billion Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi [!] that Trump gifted the UAE in exchange for buying some Trump crypto. [video]

    Meanwhile, infrastructure in the region has already been getting attacked by Israel […] Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel attacked the South Pars petrochemical plant at Asaluyeh in Iran, and there was another Israeli attack in March on South Pars facilities, which led to Iranian attacks targeting oil and gas infrastructure across the Gulf Arab states. And since Trump’s speech and before the deadline, Israel has already started blowing up Iranian bridges and train tracks. [!]

    […] President Brain Weave took to the stage yesterday for an hour and a half to dazzle the world with his rhetorical prowess. […] [video]

    He starts out with Happy Easter […] But he was there, for sake of “the exactitude”! Though he doesn’t know if the war is escalating or de-escalating. But “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” meaning tonight. […]

    Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Sec. Def. WAR Pete Hegseth spent most of their talky-time expounding on minute details of the rescue […] Trump also took time to shit on NATO some more, and Trump and Hegseth both made room for plenty of God and Jesus.

    […] “Sand was — this was not much of a runway this was a farm, not a runway it’s a farm but, uh, it did the trick but […]” [Trump referring to large planes from the USA that got stuck in wet sand on a runway in Iran. US military forces blew those planes up and used smaller aircraft to evacuate the crews.]

    […] Life is all one reality show he’s starring in [Trump referred to the setting where the large planes were blown up as “from central casting”]. For his closeup, his monologue was “Mad at Leaker,” referring to the reporter who reported that a shot-down pilot had gone missing. [video]

    [I snipped Trump’s threats.]

    That appears to be Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who says he was not the original source […]

    But the SAND!

    “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. It’s such an honor to be involved with it we were up late at night, and then we were waiting for those contingent planes to come in and we say, come on, let’s go get in, because they’re waiting out on this farm without a runway with wet, crummy soil, sand, mostly sand, wet sand.

    “And it eats planes alive and we’re waiting and we’re saying, I hope that one can land and take off and they came in like magic, boom, boom, boom, one after another, it was like genius.

    “And that’s called Iran Prime, right, General? That’s — that’s where the whole bed is and here we are sitting there waiting for a plane but they came in so fast and so hard and these guys knew exactly what — let’s go, come on, get in, let’s go, pwah, they came one right after another. Not at the same time.”

    You’re welcome, Iran, some tips for finishing off downed pilots, and ps., pointer, wet sand is a problem for the planes.

    Oh, and he shit on NATO some more. […] [video]

    […] Out. Of. His. Gourd!!

    Anyway […] it was time for the Pete Hegseth Tent Revival and Praise Hour.

    “One downed airman evaded capture for more than a day, scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy. When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple and it was powerful. He sent a message, God is good. In that moment of isolation and danger, his faith and fighting spirit shone through.”

    Is this about the nukes, or about the Strait being open, or is it a holy war? […] Everything is a Jesus metaphor […]

    [I snipped more of Hegseth’s referrals to Jesus and to religion.]

    God sure hasn’t been too good to those blameless dead Iranian schoolgirls, or Christians and others in Lebanon or thousands of others! Didn’t the crusaders and inquisitors of old at least give their conquered subjects the chance to convert at the end of a sword? […]

    [Trump] is apparently furious that the Pakistani Iranian leadership proxies negotiating with son–in-law Jared Kushner and real estate/golf buddy Steve Witkoff apparently don’t speak English, and guess did not provide a translator for them either, awkward! […][video]

    The guys up there promising to bomb the UAE data center and ringing up the Associated Press seem to be getting their points across clearly enough.

    […] Sure is starting to sound like the US, Israel, and Iranian leadership actually want a forever war here. It keeps them in power forever because WAR EMERGENCY. Iranian mullahs get to say, see, we told you the US was the Great Satan and American-style Democracy isn’t perfect! Israel gets to take over Lebanon and be the boss of the region. Russia’s oil-sanction problem is now all gone […]And China is having their best year ever […]

    Q: You message has moved from ‘the war is coming to an end’ to ‘we’re gonna be bombing Iran to the stone ages.’ So which is it? [video]

    “Can’t tell you. I don’t know.” Swell.

    Q: You’ve said, glory be to God in this conflict. Do you believe that God supports the United States actions in this war?

    TRUMP: I do. Because God is good. Because God is good, and God wants to see people taken care of God doesn’t like what’s happening. I don’t like what’s happening everyone says I enjoy it. I don’t enjoy this, I don’t enjoy it. These two guys [Hegseth and Ratcliffe] don’t enjoy it. You know, people say, oh boy, they’re so tough. They don’t want — they don’t like — I don’t like seeing people killed. [bullshit]

    Really? Sure sounds like he does, slobbering to wipe out a whole country like that! […] [video]

    What will happen tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 a.m. Tehran time? You know how much Trump loves to be a star and show off, but how far will he take it? […]

  298. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/title-x-under-trump-planned-parenthood

    “Title X Under Trump: Planned Parenthood Out, Unplanned Parenthood In”

    “The administration plans to cut all funding to Planned Parenthood clinics in 2027.”

    Last week, anti-abortion-rights freaks like Josh Hawley were very, very upset after it came out that the administration quietly released Title X grants to Planned Parenthood that had already been funded by the Biden administration — largely because their attempts to get out of releasing those funds have all failed in court.

    However, […] the Department of Health and Human Services released its new guidance for Title X grantees, which will go into effect in January 2027 when the five years of funding from the Biden administration runs out.

    The new guidance [melds] RFK Jr.’s favorite buzzwords and bad ideas with anti-abortion rights, pronatalist, anti-LGBTQ+ buzzwords and bad ideas — and seems more likely to cause unplanned pregnancies than to prevent them.

    Title X is supposed to fund sexual health and family planning, the latter of which is traditionally thought of as individual people and families using contraception in order to thoughtfully plan out their own families based on what they can manage and afford […] This idea, however, runs contrary not just to the GOP’s anti-abortion stance, but also the recently adopted batshit crazy “pronatalist” leanings of much of the Trump administration and its allies, who now encourage young people to “have more children than [they] can afford.”

    […] The terms “birth control” and “IUD” are not mentioned even once in all 67 pages of the guidance, although “natural family planning” comes up four times.

    […] Elsewhere in the guidance, this is made clear. They also took a very special moment to highlight “pornography use” as somehow contributing to chronic health conditions […]

    The Department of Health and Human Services also released its proposed 2027 budget last week, which includes major cuts to sexual health and family planning services, most notably killing off the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program — as the Right has become increasingly “pro” teen pregnancy. […]

    More at the link, including specific language from the new guidance. I snipped a lot.

  299. says

    See the first close-up photos of the moon from NASA’s Artemis II mission

    The crew spent about seven hours circling the moon, taking photographs and making observations of never-before-seen features.

    For the first time, humans have glimpsed the entire far side of the moon with their own eyes — and their photos are beginning to come in. […]

    NASA plans to publicly release the full set of moon photos taken by the Artemis II astronauts, but because of downlink limitations, the bulk will not be retrieved and processed until after the astronauts return to Earth.

    More details, photos and videos are available at the link.

  307. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Alex Wellerstein (Nuclear historian):

    The reason that the US President has the exclusive authority to order the use of nuclear weapons is because Truman set up the system along those lines after WWII. This is often depicted as either a power grab, or because in the nuclear age such decisions “must” be made quickly. This is false.

    The *actual* reason Truman reserved this power for himself, and refused to allow it to be delegated or shared by the military, is because he believed that this was the only way to *prevent* nuclear weapons from being used again. Full stop.

    This is unintuitive for good reason, as Truman was the only President—so far—to use nuclear weapons in war, and he always defended that use. But that story is more complex than people know, and he harbored deeply conflicted feelings about the bombings, and plainly abhorred the bomb as a weapon.
    […]
    The use of atomic bombs “must never happen again,” he repeatedly urged in public and in private after World War II. Centralizing that use power in himself was the only way, especially in those early days, that he felt he could accomplish this.

    Was he right to do so? In 1945-1953, perhaps. But as an ongoing policy? I don’t think so. Truman had far too much faith that American democracy would elect prudent leaders
    […]
    I think that gets overlooked quite a lot: that presidential executive use authority was not about the power to use the atomic bomb, but the responsibility not to use it if it could be helped.

    ‪Alex Wellerstein:

    Most of the popular understanding of Truman’s role in the bombing, INCLUDING from his supporters (much less his detractors) is wrong. Truman had no idea a 2nd bomb was going to be used so soon.

    The day after Nagasaki, Truman revoked the existing military strike order, centralized all authority to use nuclear weapons in himself (and not the military, who had been the ones actually using the weapons), and refused to allow it to happen again.
    […]
    He always defended the bombings, to be sure, because he believed that it was his role as President to do so. One can certainly take issue with that if one wants.
    […]
    My argument in the book is that he truly did not understand that the first bomb was going to be used on a city (as opposed to a “purely military target,” a military base), and he did not know a second bomb would be used within days.

    You can fault him for his ignorance, to be sure. But I believe (and believe the evidence supports) the idea that *he* thought that the “decision” he had made was to spare a city (Kyoto) and destroy a military base (Hiroshima). That he *misunderstood* the one operational decision he took part in. And that his “atonement” for this was, as described, to endeavor to make sure that atomic bombs would never be used again.

  308. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an eleventh-hour announcement on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump gave himself a two-week deadline to come up with a new distraction from the Epstein files.

    “Threatening to annihilate a nation of 90 million people worked for about a day, but now I need to come up with something else,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

    Immediately after his announcement, Trump summoned his entire Cabinet to the Situation Room to brainstorm ideas before the two-week window expires.

    Distractions reportedly being considered include naming Kid Rock Attorney General, replacing Lincoln’s head on the Lincoln Memorial with his own, and putting Hannibal Lecter’s face on the dollar bill.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/trump-gives-himself-two-weeks-to

    Satire

  309. says

    MS NOW:

    House Democratic leadership demanded Congress come back in session to ‘vote to end this reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges our country into World War III,’ according to a joint statement issued by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., among others. The leaders called Trump ‘completely unhinged’ and said his latest statement, issued Tuesday morning, ‘shocks the conscience and requires a decisive congressional response.’

    Also from MS NOW:

    ‘We speak today with one voice and one purpose: to condemn President Trump’s threat to extinguish an entire civilization,’ said the statement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee; and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, among others.

    Also from MS NOW:

    Pope Leo XIV blasted Trump’s latest threats against Iran as ‘truly unacceptable,’ in his most recent rebuke of the U.S.’ actions in Iran.

    Also from MS NOW:

    The United Nations rebuked Trump’s threats to Iran at a press briefing in New York today, during which U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric implored leaders to ‘choose dialogue over destruction.’ … ‘There is no military objective that justifies the wholesale destruction of a society’s infrastructure or the deliberate infliction of suffering on civilian populations,’ Dujarric said.

  310. says

    MS NOW:

    As of this moment, the Administration believes that the President is legally free to destroy records of his official government conduct, or even spirit away the records for his own future personal use.’ That’s what two nonprofit groups told a federal court in Washington on Monday, in a legal complaint seeking a declaration that the Presidential Records Act is constitutional. The complaint was prompted by a bold new claim to the contrary by the Trump Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

  311. says

    Dem-Backed Judge Will Win Wisconsin Supreme Court, Expanding Its Liberal Majority

    Chris Taylor, the Democratic-backed candidate for Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court, is projected to defeat Maria Lazar, the Republican-backed candidate, expanding the Court’s liberal majority, per the Associated Press. Taylor’s win represents the fourth straight victory for Democratic-backed candidates in the state’s high court elections.

    […] Taylor spent the last week of the campaign barnstorming around the state and secured an endorsement from former President Barack Obama. Former Attorney General Eric Holder also stumped for the liberal candidate this last week. Taylor — an appeals court judge and former state legislator who previously worked for Planned Parenthood — campaigned on her support for reproductive rights and her opposition to recent cuts to safety net programs. Lazar, also an appeals court judge who worked for former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) administration, campaigned on an anti-abortion position and tried to criticize Taylor’s political career, despite having one herself.[…]

  312. says

    Trump walks back bombing threats for 2 weeks—if Iran agrees to ceasefire, by Associated Press

    […] Trump said late Tuesday he’s pulling back on his threats to launch devastating strikes on Iran, swerving to deescalate the war less than two hours before the deadline he set for Tehran to capitulate or else a “whole civilization will die tonight.”

    Trump said he was holding off on his threatened attacks on Iranian bridges, power plants, and other civilian targets, subject to Tehran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the pivotal waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported during peacetime.

    He also said Iran has proposed a “workable” 10-point peace plan that could help end war the United States and Israel launched on Feb. 28.

    Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said it has accepted a two-week ceasefire in the war and that it would negotiate with the United States in Islamabad beginning Friday.

    Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said passage through the strait would be allowed for the next two weeks under Iranian military management. It wasn’t immediately clear whether that meant Iran would loosen its chokehold on the waterway.

    In a post on his social media site, Trump said that he would suspend attacks on Iran for two weeks provided Tehran agreed “to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING” of the strait.

    Even as the ceasefire was announced, missile alerts continued in the United Arab Emirates and Israel early Wednesday, hinting at the chaos surrounding the diplomatic moves.

    Since the war began, Trump has repeatedly backed off deadlines just before they expire.

    In doing so again Tuesday, Trump said he had come to the decision “based on conversations” with Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Gen. Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful army chief. Sharif, in a post on X hours earlier, urged Trump to extend his deadline by two weeks to allow diplomacy to advance. He used the same post to ask Iran to open the strait for two weeks.

    The president said in his social media post that Iran has presented “a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

    “Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated,” Trump said.
    […]

  314. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Before the ceasefire…

    The Guardian – Iran calls on young people to form human chains around power plants as Trump deadline looms

    Iranian media showed people gathering outside electricity stations, waving Iranian flags and holding up banners, including at the country’s largest power plant, near Tehran, and in Tabriz in the north-west. In Dezful in the south-west, people gathered on a bridge said to be 1,700 years old.

    News Eye:

    Extraordinary scenes as Iranian citizens start forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites. [Video clips] Reports circulating that regime forces are driving through Iranian cities with loud speakers telling citizens to gather around infrastructure. Bravery? Coercion?

    B52 bombers are literally in the air on their way to Iran and hundreds of thousands of Iranians are in the streets waving flags and surrounding bridges & power plants. [Video clip]

    Difficult to imagine this has any precedent in modern warfare.

  315. whheydt says

    Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #314…
    (Second item) Probably not in modern warfare, but something akin to that takes place in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where people gathered on top of a mountain to try to hold off an announced kinetic strike–10 tons of rocks in a steel con coming down at terminal velocity from the Moon–by force of will/praying.

  316. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    NYT – Iran’s 10-Point proposal demands an end to attacks and sanctions

    Two senior Iranian officials […] said the proposal included a guarantee that Iran would not be attacked again, an end to Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the lifting of all sanctions.

    In return, Iran would lift its de facto blockade of the key shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran would also impose a fee of roughly $2 million per ship that it would split with Oman, which sits across the strait. Iran would use its share of the proceeds to reconstruct infrastructure destroyed by American and Israeli attacks, rather than demand direct compensation

    Carl Quintanilla (CNBC): “$2 million per ship—to cross a Strait that was free six weeks ago.”

    Cheryl Rofer: “I am going only by memory, but it seems to me that the Iranian 10 points are pretty much what they started with.”
    Rando: “Well, except for the tolls on the Strait. Yes.”

    ‪Jon Gambrell (AP): “Iran includes ‘acceptance of enrichment’ in Farsi version of its ceasefire plan, something missing from English versions.”

    Cheryl Rofer: “This is why negotiation teams include skilled interpreters and translators, but it was probably Witkoff and Kushner again.”
     
    NYT – How tolls in the Strait of Hormuz would undercut international law

    Most of the countries in the world have agreed to an international treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, that bans interfering with ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. But neither the United States nor Iran has ratified the treaty. And now, both are saying they want to impose tolls
    […]
    The Law of the Sea establishes a process for international disputes, but only for countries that have ratified the treaty. […] The Law of the Sea functions as a treaty that 171 nations and the European Union have ratified. It sets national borders in the ocean, creates rules for industries like fishing, and establishes the safe passage of ships through international waters […] the handful of nations that didn’t ratify the law have generally followed its norms for decades, including the United States and Iran, a practice that reinforced the law as an international status quo
    […]
    If Iran were to keep charging tolls in peacetime, as it has said it intends to do, that could set a precedent that tempts other nations bordering critical waterways around the world to follow suit
    […]
    Separately […] for the past year the Trump administration has indicated its intention to disregard the Law of the Sea in another way. […] it plans to issue permits that would allow companies to mine the seabed for valuable minerals […] a practice that the Law of the Sea was also designed to regulate.

    Bill Grueskin (Journalist): “The United States and Iran, violating international law together. [heart emojis]”
     
    AP News – Israel is still attacking Iran, says military official

    [They] said early Wednesday morning that Israel was still attacking Iran. Moments earlier, the White House said Israel had agreed to the terms of the two-week US-Iran ceasefire agreement. Iran also kept up fire on Israel.

    Elia Ayoub: “Israel violated the previous ceasefire over 15,000 times in 13 months so we should expect them to violate this one, what, 500 times in 2 weeks? In all seriousness, I’m happy for Iranians and it might be calmer in Lebanon, but there is absolutely no reason to believe anything Israel publicly commits itself to.”

    Al Jazeera – Israel continues bombing Lebanon despite Pakistan saying allies included in US-Iran truce

    The Pakistani prime minister said in a statement that the United States and Iran, and their allies, had agreed to an immediate ceasefire, including Lebanon […] And then we had this statement from the prime minister of Israel a short while ago, saying that, in fact, Lebanon is not included.

     
    SasanianShah (Iranian historian):

    Trump: A whole civilization will die tonight

    Has someone told T-rump of what the oracle of Delphi told Croesus before he was to join Cyrus in battle?

    [if Croesus made war on the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire.]

  317. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Al Jazeera – More details on Iran’s 10-point plan for ceasefire talks with US

    Iran’s Fars news agency […] quoted an informed source as saying that the proposals include:

    – Iran’s commitment not to build nuclear weapons
    – Provisions paving the way for a complete cessation of any aggression against Iran and allied groups
    – Possible withdrawal of US combat forces from the region and a ban on any attacks on Iran from regional bases
    – Limited daily passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz for two weeks, under a Safe Passage Protocol provision and specific rules of Iran.
    – Lifting of all primary, secondary and UN sanctions against Iran
    – Covering Iran’s losses from the war by creating an investment and financial fund for the country
    – Acceptance by the US of Iran’s right to enrich nuclear materials and discussion on the level of enrichment
    – Permission for Iran to negotiate bilateral and multilateral peace treaties with regional countries
    – Extension of the non-aggression policy towards all resistance groups in the region
    – Ratification of all commitments through an official United Nations resolution

    Involving the UN is good. Illegal tolls seem like a problem for that though.

  323. birgerjohansson says

    The Fully Operational EES Deadline | Outside Views on Brexit and the UK”
    .
    The digital EU Entry -Exit System [EES] is turning Europe into a digital fortress. The Brexit argument of ‘taking control of the borders’ did not take into account that the other side would do the same. To the EES system, there is no difference between the British and Australians. All will be checked by a biometric system.

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=RfhUkAQJmCk

  327. JM says

    Raw Story: ‘Trump is evil’: White supremacist Nick Fuentes turns on ‘wicked’ president over Iran

    President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is too much for self-described white supremacist Nick Fuentes to handle.
    During a new episode of his podcast “America First” on Tuesday, Fuentes reflected on an Easter threat Trump sent to Iran via his Truth Social platform.

    “It’s everything about it. It’s bad enough that we are in a war in Iran without a reason, without a plan B, an exit strategy, a plan. It’s not enough that we’re being lied to about it, that we’re doing it for Israel,” he added. “Americans are dying, and Trump is totally flippant about that. But it’s Easter Sunday. It’s literally the holiest day of the year, and this is what you post?”

    Trump is starting to lose the America first isolationist leaning part of the far right. The part that wants the US out of all dealings with other countries. Getting into an pointless war with Iran is exactly the sort of thing they hate.
    It’s interesting that a significant part of what Fuentes objects to is that Trump did it on Easter. Fuentes may be trying to expand his listeners into the Christian Nationalism crowd. That would be a big expansion for him, he was always associated with the non-religious far right in the past.

    “And this is when you realize Trump is evil,” he continued. “He’s not a bad president. He’s not surrounded by bad advisors or bad personnel or people who are disloyal or not giving him good advice. I’ve been trying to say this for years. It’s him. He is the problem. He has always been the problem. This entire time… It’s him. And it’s him at his core. It is because he is a completely hollow and wicked person.”

    There is also a political aspect to this, with some far right figures positioning themselves for a post Trump world. Trump is in his second term, looks weak and the Republican party in general looks to do badly in the next election. Some on the right are already setting themselves up to say they had nothing to do with the Republicans losing power, they didn’t support those Republicans and advised the right do different things.

  328. JM says

    Cryptobriefing: Iran demands Bitcoin, crypto payments for Strait of Hormuz passage: FT

    Iran demands Bitcoin payments for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union told the Financial Times.

    The toll, about $1 per barrel, must be paid in crypto after tankers submit details of their cargo. Empty vessels are exempt, but all ships will be monitored to prevent weapons smuggling during the two-week ceasefire.

    Crypto can evade sanctions much more easily. Iran will probably trade it with Russia, which has a large network of crypto traders setup to evade international sanctions.

    The process is slow, allowing only a few ships per day to transit safely, creating a backlog in the Gulf. Shipping companies like Maersk are taking a cautious approach while terms are clarified.

    The route Iran is using through the Strait means they can easily fire on any ship, can easily board them with small coastal ships and is slow.

    Daily beast: Trump Floats Absurd Fantasy to Cope With Iran Humiliation

    “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it—also securing it from lots of other people,” Trump said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

    Random idea Trump had today. Collect fees for Hormuz transit as a joint operation. If they are smart Iran will jump on this because Trump will likely agree to very bad terms if he is getting a cut of the cash.

  329. JM says

    CNN: Fragile ceasefire in the balance as Iran says it is halting Strait of Hormuz traffic

    • Strait of Hormuz: Iran stopped oil tanker traffic through the crucial waterway after Israel attacked Lebanon, semi-official news agency Fars reported. According to Fars, just two oil tankers had crossed the strait since the ceasefire came into effect.

    • Strikes in Lebanon: The Israel Defense Forces said it carried out the largest coordinated strike on the country since the war began, killing and wounding hundreds, according to Lebanon’s health minister.

    Trump said the cease fire didn’t extend to Lebanon while Iran did. Israel took the opportunity to blow up the cease fire with the largest raid to date. Now what does Trump do? Iran has not entirely abandoned the cease fire, only stopped ships from crossing the Strait again. They obviously want Trump to lean on Israel but Trump is more bluster then brawn when it comes to that sort of thing.

  330. says

    At the start of a ceasefire with Iran, Trump has failed by his own standards

    “Total and complete victory, 100%,” the American president said. “No question about it.” There are plenty of questions about it.

    As a tenuous two-week ceasefire in Iran begins, it’s easy to breathe a sigh of relief. Whether or not the pause endures, the suspension of combat operations means less death and bloodshed, less destruction and reduced odds of Donald Trump committing deliberate war crimes.

    But as the dust settles on the agreement and highly relevant details start to come into focus, Trump would have the public believe the unnecessary war he launched is a triumph. “Total and complete victory, 100%,” the Republican told AFP. “No question about it.”

    In reality, there are plenty of questions about it.

    To begin with, did this war actually achieve anything?

    On Feb. 28, when Trump announced the start of the U.S. offensive in a prerecorded video filmed at his glorified country club in Florida, the president didn’t explain why he’d decided to launch the war, but he did present the public with five objectives:

    1. Destroy Iran’s missiles and missile industry.

    2. Annihilate the Iranian navy.

    3. Sever the ties between Tehran and its proxies in the Middle East.

    4. Prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

    5. Create the conditions necessary for regime change.

    The White House’s stated objectives in Iran then evolved as the war continued — a problem that was itself emblematic of the administration’s incompetence and misguided policymaking — but roughly 39 days after Trump’s remarks, if the U.S. mission were in fact a “total and complete victory,” we’d expect to see check marks alongside each of those five goals.

    But that’s simply not the case. Iran’s navy has certainly been decimated, but the other four objectives have plainly not been met. [True}

    What’s more, just a few days into the conflict, Trump said his “worst case scenario” was that Iran, five years down the road, would remain in the hands of radical clerics and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Six weeks later, Trump is prepared to accept a near future in which Tehran is still controlled by radical clerics and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

    […] Despite Trump’s chest-thumping, Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz is now stronger than it was at the start of the war and poised to generate enormous profits for the Iranian treasury. The White House is also prepared to allow Iran to move forward with its uranium stockpile intact, despite the president’s occasional rhetoric about that being the whole point of the war.

    The United States, meanwhile, has suffered horrible losses, including fallen U.S. service members, a badly tarnished global reputation and tens of billions of tax dollars, on top of the economic and energy sector consequences. Lingering overhead, meanwhile, are ongoing questions about the mental stability of the Republican who thought this was a good idea in the first place.

    To see this as anything but a colossal strategic failure would be a mistake. By any fair measure, the U.S. is worse off now than before it began its war of choice.

    […] there’s great uncertainty about whether the ceasefire can hold and what to expect from delicate diplomatic efforts.

    In the meantime, White House officials will respond to the developments with a victory lap, playing the public for fools. The only people who’ll believe them are those who choose not to acknowledge what’s actually happened.

  331. says

    Declaring Victory and Walking Away Can’t Conceal the Scale of Trump’s Folly

    Despite some initial reports that a tenuous two-week ceasefire is holding in the Middle East, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar all claimed to have subsequently received incoming missile fire. For its part, Iran claimed that one of its oil refinery on a island in the Persian Gulf had come under attack since the ceasefire by unnamed “enemies.” [reality]

    The ceasefire did not include Israel’s ongoing offensive in southern Lebanon, where it carried out the largest wave of strikes since the war began.

    The real focus of the highly contingent ceasefire agreement was the Strait of Hormuz, which was free and open before President Trump’s elective war and is now throttled by Iran. Trump is declaring the strait open for his own political purposes, but the terms of the ceasefire give Iran more control over the vital waterway than it had before the war started:
    – Iran and Oman will jointly charge newly imposed fees for passage through the strait. “The strait is in the territorial waters of both Oman and Iran,” the AP reports. “The world had considered the passage an international waterway and never paid tolls before.”
    – The new fee is “roughly $2 million per ship,” the NYT reports.
    – The White House and Trump reposted a statement from the Iranian foreign minister that showed the highly contingent nature of the agreement on the strait:

    For a period of two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and with due consideration of technical limitations.

    On the water, there were few signs that the ceasefire had created sufficient conditions for safe passage through the strait. While it was still early, Lloyd’s of London issued a statement that cautioned about the continuing peril: “Moving before new protocols are clarified could expose crews, ships and cargoes to heightened risk.”

    The strategic catastrophe for the United States appears to extend beyond the narrow confines of the strait. Trump called Iran’s 10-point peace plan “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Any long-term agreement along those lines would be a remarkable coup for the Iranians to have pulled off in the face of withering American firepower: [social media post]

  332. says

    Follow-up to comments up-thread about the ceasefire between Iran and the USA:

    […] Former senior Obama National Security official Ben Rhodes noted in “the best case scenario” that the deal negotiated by Trump simply reopened shipping lanes that were open before Trump decided to attack Iran.

    Rhodes noted the costs of the conflict include the deaths of thousands of people (including hundreds of children), attacks on American bases and embassies, munitions depleted, global economic chaos, and price increases.

    “Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next,” he concluded. […]

    Link

  334. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/two-weeks-trump-caves-on-murdering

    “Two Weeks Trump Caves On Murdering Entire World”

    Well, it was scary there for a minute, wasn’t it!

    But the guy they call TACO did the thing he always does. After trying to engender fear and respect from the world […], Donald Trump surrendered to Iran last night, in exchange for nothing. It was a war he started for no reason, and he got nothing. (Unless you count whatever rush he and Secretary Shitfaced Hegseth got from exploding those little girls at that school. And the American troops killed and injured. […].)

    But sure, loser, declare victory: [social media post from Trump]

    Oh, two weeks, eh? We should have known […]

    Iran, of course, got stuff. For instance, Iranian state media is crowing that they suckered Trump into accepting their own 10-point plan, and fully declaring victory.

    “The enemy, in its unfair, unlawful, and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat,” the council statement reported by state media read.

    “Our hands remain on the trigger, and at the slightest mistake by the enemy, a full-force response will be delivered,” it warned, according to the statement obtained by CNN.

    [Iran is better at bellicose, blustering statements than Trump.]

    […] In response, Trump and his […] minions like the FCC’s Brendan Carr are birthing full-grown cows at CNN, for reporting what Iran said. You can see in the screengrabs in the Bluesky post below that Fox News also reported what Iran said. [social media post from Adam Steinbaugh]

    That Trump temper tantrum really deserves to be blown up and read in all of its impotent hilarity: [social media post from Trump]

    “Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to … ” […]

    [I snipped Ben Rhodes’ comments, which are in comment 332]

    Yes, and no regime change. Just the same regime, but younger, and angrier, now that Trump and Israel murdered a whole bunch of their family members including the former leader. And no actual guarantee Iran won’t manufacture nukes, unlike what Barack Obama got in 2015.

    What a fucking joke.

    Some late breaking headlines from the ticker:

    Pakistan says this “cease fire” includes Lebanon. Israel (of course) says no it doesn’t, and Israel is reportedly still shooting at Iran.

    Lindsey Graham […] insists that Congress must approve any so-called 10-point plans to so-called end this war. (Oh now he thinks Congress has a role to play.)

    Markets in Asia are surging, and based on what we saw last night when we opened up our investment portal, the US pre-market was doing the same, because that’s what markets always do when Trump narrowly acts to save the world from his latest self-created apocalypse.

    They’re setting US and Israeli flags on fire in Tehran.

    The United States will reportedly be “helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz,” said Trump on Truth Social late last night, in a post where he declared the day a “big day for World Peace!” He insisted that “There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will.” [OMFG]

    Mmhmm, you betcha, sure. Hey, is the strait “open” if you have to pay Iran two million bucks […] if you want to pass through? Just asking.

    You can keep watching CNN’s ticker for more humiliating news for Trump, all of which Brendan Carr will surely investigate for hurting Trump’s feelings and making him look stupid and weak.

    “Total and complete victory. 100 percent. No question about it,” said Trump, in an interview last night, about surrendering to Iran.

    And how! Fox & Friends counted the ways this morning, or at least one of their hosts did:

    Co-host Lawrence Jones walked through the initial demands one by one, in plain language. “We have not reached any of those objectives,” he said. [LOL] [I snipped lists of objectives]

    Don’t worry, the rest of the idiot couch started […] explaining how total humiliation is actually total victory. “President Trump succeeded in putting so much fear in this new regime that they were willing to come to the table,” said Griff Jenkins. “The president didn’t chicken out,” insisted Sean Hannity’s girlfriend. “Up until the 11th hour, he almost had to do it and Iran, obviously, they came to the table.”

    Haha, yeah, OK, sure, um, you bet.

    Donald Trump said yesterday in his I WILL MURDER CIVILIZATION! post that last night would be “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world.” We guess he just forgot to add the laugh track.

    This is what happens when really stupid, megalomaniacal people like Trump do really stupid, megalomaniacal things. There was never a plan. There was never a strategy. […] There was only his ego, and whatever laser pointer the most belligerent little shitholes in his Cabinet pointed for him […] Trump, a conman, liar, fraud and adjudicated rapist, is used to being able to wriggle out of any situation he gets himself into, declare victory and brush it off. And the media might let him here, as he has yet again promised that a thing will happen in “two weeks,” […]

    As Aaron Rupar notes here, the fact that Trump ended his night celebrating the world peace he’s convinced he just created doesn’t change the fact that he started the day threatening to mass-murder the innocent citizens of an entire country: [social media post from Aaron Rupar]

    The world is laughing at Trump today, though. And so are the American people.

    Today would be a good day for whoever’s holding the full Epstein child rape files to release them.

  337. says

    New Labor Department Rule is Trump’s Latest Favor to the Crypto Industry

    “The rule could offer an infusion of new funds for the president’s family’s favorite industry at retirees’ expense.”

    The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a rule designed to make it harder to sue retirement plan fiduciaries that invest in risky, more volatile assets. The rule is also […] the Trump administration’s latest giveaway to the Trump family’s favorite industry: Cryptocurrency.

    Drawing on Trump’s August 2025 executive order titled, in part, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets,” the Labor Department rule highlights a non-exhaustive list of six such investments, including private credit, real estate, and cryptocurrency. To protect retirement plan agents and managers who choose to include these riskier products in their 401(k) offerings, the proposed rule outlines six factors over 164 pages designed to define a legally required “prudent process” fiduciaries should take to vet an asset. It lists several hypothetical situations and thoroughly explains how to do the right thing in each as defined by this administration. The rule signals to fiduciaries: If you follow these step-by-step processes, our rule offers you safe harbor from litigation. [!]

    “When a plan fiduciary [follows] the described process…,” the rule reads, “its judgment regarding the factor or factors is presumed to be reasonable and is entitled to significant deference.” The DOL’s proposal “gives fiduciaries […] the discretion and flexibility.”

    Trump’s DOL rule is the latest element of the president’s oft-stated goal to grow the crypto industry, signaling the administration’s desire to allow huge sums of money to flow from retirement accounts into the largely unregulated, new financial realm […]

    “The White House is now directly meddling in every policy, especially with regard to financial regulation like this,” Corey Frayer, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told TPM. “And rather than making [an] analysis of the facts and coming to some neutral conclusion, the policies are all bent towards either serving industry or, worse, benefiting companies that Trump and his family have enormous financial interest in.” [!]

    In the first several months of his second term, Trump’s family enterprise World Liberty Financial netted more than $800 million crypto sales, according to a Reuters tally — largely through sales made to foreign countries and entities. But as with many of the administration’s pro-crypto policies, the impact is not purely personal — crypto’s administration-supported expansion throughout the U.S. economy could come at a cost to average Americans at a time when the Trump administration is dismantling consumer protection agencies and departments like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [!]

    […] the rule removes legal protections from retirees in the event employer-sponsored retirement plan managers don’t live up to their fiduciary duties. [!]

    […] Cryptocurrency has long been considered a volatile, less regulated instrument susceptible to financial crimes, though some digital assets try to offer more stability and are pegged to traditional assets.

    […] Trump’s August executive order used almost the exact same language employed by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink last year in his influential annual letter to investors. With one section titled “The democratization of investing,” Fink spends much of the letter arguing that capitalistic wealth creation can reach more people by diversifying retirement plan investments to include private credit and digital assets.

    […] But Trump and Wall Street don’t actually care about expanding access to wealth […] Instead, it’s about broadening the investor pool to inject more wealth into the pockets of sophisticated investors.

    “To make money there’s gotta be this kind of perpetual motion machine where you’re constantly finding new people to bring into the ecosystem to offload the investments onto,” said Steele [Graham Steele, former Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Treasury Department], who is now an academic fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. “The administration uses language about quote unquote democratization, but it’s really a way to prop up asset prices to benefit crypto, venture capital, and private equity in particular.” [!]

    […] Steele and Frayer said the language in the DOL rule could, in fact, result in propping up certain asset classes by sending a wink and a nod from the administration to fiduciaries. […]

    A study from JPMorganChase found fewer new investors are entering the crypto market. […]

    Democrats in Congress have initiated several investigations and inquiries into the president’s ties to the crypto industry and his other business interests, which they have said present exceptional conflicts of interest.

    […] World Liberty Financial in January applied with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter under the name World Liberty Trust Company. In the application, the firm said it had attached a request “to have full fiduciary powers” in a “Confidential Business Plan” exhibit, though it’s unclear exactly what the request contained or what the implication of those powers would be. […]

    Steele and Frayer envisioned a future where companies seeking to curry favor with the president could pump up their retirement offerings with crypto offered by World Liberty Financial. [!]

    “We already see foreign countries doing this,” said Frayer.

    Financial shenanigans to make easier for Trump and his family to run a cryptocurrency grift.

  338. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/megyn-kelly-been-on-one-this-week

    Megyn Kelly, she is this up-and-coming right-wing podcaster. Very cranky, very hateful, very dutifully and permanently esconced in Donald Trump’s [corner], even though one time in 2015 he accused her of having “blood coming out of her wherever.” She was mad about that, once. But hey, if you can’t beat the adjudicated rapist fascist little Hitler, join the adjudicated rapist fascist little Hitler, that’s what we reckon Megyn Kelly always says!

    Plus, she’s one of those disturbed right-wing women who has made hating trans people her entire personality, and that trumps all other considerations for her.

    The other day, Kelly announced that she didn’t really want Donald Trump to drop a nuke on Iran, but hey, if she had to pick between that and being talked down to by Michigan Senator […] Elissa Slotkin, she would pick bombs. (Because that’s the choice: scoldings from Elissa Slotkin, or murder civilizations with bombs. Truly it is the “Cake or death?” of our time.)

    She explained on Monday on her Sirius XM show:

    KELLY: All I think about when I think about the Democrats is those very unattractive people in Minneapolis. When I think Democrat, that’s what I think.

    That’s what she thinks. Know what we think? […] people who look at a protest made up of people banding together to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped, human trafficked, and murdered and start ranking them by hotness. […]

    KELLY: That to me, I could never vote for, never. I mean, honestly, Trump could drop a nuke and I’d still vote Republican over those people because honestly, what they want to do is nuke our own country.

    You know, it’s like the open border, what they’re doing to children, all that stuff is still — they would do it all if put back in power. I think most Republicans know that.

    […] Remember how hating trans people is Megyn Kelly’s entire personality? She’s one of those lunatics who thinks schools are literally forcing kids to become trans in the guidance counselor’s office, and then offering free after-school gender confirmation surgeries as an extracurricular. […]

    Yeah, it’s kinda weird when you consider how much time she spends standing up for Donald Trump and his Pedophile-Protecting Party, but like we said, she is a lunatic.

    OK, so that was Monday. Then there was yesterday, before Donald Trump made his Big, Beautiful Deal with Iran to surrender to Iran in exchange for nothing in return.

    Kelly, bless her heart, was really having a rough go of it with Trump’s declarations that he was going to massacre the entire Iranian population […] Earlier in the week she was willing to trust that Dear Leader had a brilliant strategy, that he was just keeping the Iranians guessing, that maybe he was doing A Tactic.

    But yesterday? Not yesterday: [video]

    KELLY: I mean, I don’t know about you, but I am sick of this shit. I’m just — I’m sick of it. Can’t he just behave like a normal human?

    I mean, honestly, like the president — 3D chess, just shut up, fucking shut up about that shit. You don’t threaten to wipe out an entire civilization, we’re talking about civilians, just casually in a social media post. You know?

    Hahahahahahahahahahaha, amazing.

    KELLY: Like, I am the first to try to understand Trump and his strategy and to not freak out over his weird social media posts and language that is loose and incendiary.

    Like literally one day before!

    KELLY: Truly, I’ve lived with it for ten-plus years. I learned it the hard way when I was on the receiving end of for nine months. And truly, I think that was a gift to me in many ways because it helped me really come to understand what he does with his social media.

    When Trump said Kelly was bleeding out of her wherever, he was giving her A Gift!

    KELLY: But, this is completely irresponsible and disgusting. This is wrong. It’s wrong. He should not be doing it. I don’t care that it’s a negotiate — his negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians — men, women, and children? An American president? So that the Strait Of Hormuz will be open? It’s just wrong. It’s not hard to say it. It’s not hard to recognize it. I wish he would stop doing this.

    We’ve got some bad news.

    KELLY: Like, he can’t negotiate without doing this? What does that say about him? What does that say about the the position that our country is in right now in these negotiations? He’s got to say this? He can’t be a dignified, strong leader without threatening a bunch of war crimes?

    Um, well, we’d answer those very good questions, but we’ve been answering them for approximately 11 years, so if Megyn Kelly would like answers, may we refer her to the homepage of Wonkette dot com? […]

    KELLY: He’s like — what is he? Genghis Khan? Like, what is he trying to do? And why can’t he do it with strength, threats — sure go for it — that don’t diminish and demean the United States Of America in this way.

    Yeah LOL it was just yesterday that Trump diminished and demeaned the US. Before that he was just nailing it, a picture of dignity and decorum!

    We don’t know what Megyn Kelly is saying today, now that her Dear Leader has humiliatingly lost a war he started by declaring victory […] fuck it.

  339. says

    Washington Post link

    “Hormuz traffic at standstill, strikes reported in Gulf”

    […] traffic in the strait remained at a standstill Wednesday, according to Iran’s state-backed media and marine traffic monitors. While two tankers passed through early in the day with permission, traffic has since stopped, [!] reported Fars, an Iranian state-backed outlet.

    The Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates reported incoming strikes Wednesday […]

    Hegseth offered few details on two key provisions of the agreement — whether the U.S. military will have a role in getting commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz or in removing buried uranium that Iran may have to hand over as part of a deal.

    The Israeli military on Wednesday morning issued new evacuation orders to residents of southern Lebanon, indicating plans to step up military operations. Amid the hostilities, the Lebanese army overnight called on citizens to delay their return to southern villages and towns where Israel has advanced.

    […] While an Israeli-led assassination campaign has killed many senior political and military leaders in Iran, officials and analysts say that hard-liners remain fully in control of the government in Tehran.

    Trump wrote Wednesday that any country supplying military weapons to Iran will face an immediate 50 percent tariff on all goods sold to the United States. [FFS, I doubt that Trump is competent enough to follow through on that threat. And, of course, he would let Russia off the hook.]

    Some U.S. officials and analysts have said Trump’s claims of military success are largely based on overly optimistic assessments of the war by Hegseth that risk misinforming the public.

    […] Even if negotiations are successful, it would probably be months before oil and gas prices return to anything close to where they were before the war broke out. The firm Capital Economics projects oil prices will average around $95 into the summer before dropping to $80 by the end of the year. […]

    More at the link.

  340. birgerjohansson says

    DNA has led to the arrest of a suspect for a double homicide that happened in Sweden 2005. The suspect was tracked down through the DNA of relatives, mirroring a case in USA that was solved in a similar manner.

  342. KG says

    birgerjohansson@326,

    There was some talk of the Andrew formerly known as Prince fleeing to Dubai in order to avoid possible prosecution (for selling official secrets to Epstein rather than child rape) in the UK. Doesn’t seem like such a good plan right now.

  343. KG says

    CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@316,

    Another (alleged) Delphic prophecy given (allegedly) to Philip II of Macedon (Alexander “The Great”‘s dad), when he was planning to invade Persia in order to “liberate” the Greek cities on the coast:

    Wreathed is the bull for the slaughter, and the slayer too is ready.

    Shortly thereafter, Philip was assassinated at a public ceremony by Pausanias, the commander of his bodyguard. Both Alexander and his mum, Olympias, were suspected of complicity in the assassination – Pausanias was conveniently killed rather than captured as he fled the scene.

  344. KG says

    Distractions [from the Epstein files] reportedly being considered include naming Kid Rock Attorney General, replacing Lincoln’s head on the Lincoln Memorial with his own, and putting Hannibal Lecter’s face on the dollar bill. – Lynna, OM quoting the Borowitz Report @308.

    None of those ideas are remotely crazy enough. Poor Borowitz! How can an honest satirist possibly keep ahead of what currently passes for reality?

  345. KG says

    My own attempts (admittedly based on Borowitz’s: Making Mutjaba Khamenei Attorney General as part of a deal with Iran, replacing all four heads on Mount Rushmore with his own, and instituting an annual “Hannibal Lecter Day”, inclucing a banquet at which a dish of human liver and fava beans will be served.

  346. KG says

    In Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is told that the Mad Hatter is in prison, being punished. This is to be followed by his trial, after which he will commit the crime.

    Distinctly reminiscent of Trump’s procedure: first declare victory, then fight the war, and finally establish a reasonable casus belli: Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and demanding tolls from ships wishing to pass through.

  349. StevoR says

    Marvellous photos here collected together by Aussie ABC news :

    The far side revealed: Artemis II’s lunar fly-by in pictures

    A record-breaking voyage, an earthset in silence, and a total solar eclipse — astronauts on the Artemis II mission experienced sights no human has witnessed in half a century.

    By Audrey Courty and Maddie Nixon (& really by the Artemis II flight itself actually..)

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-08/artemis-lunar-fly-by-in-pictures/106540618

  352. says

    A sampling of headlines from leading U.S. news outlets on the tenuous ceasefire with Iran:
    – Trump’s ceasefire already under strain [Politico]
    – White House struggles to prop up truce marked by confusion, contradictions [Washington Post]
    – Why Iran Thinks It Won the War Despite Huge Military Losses [Wall Street Journal]
    – After Trump pauses war, Iranians fly flags of victory, not surrender [Washington Post]
    – ‘Seems like losing’: What the US hasn’t won in Iran [Politico]
    – Gulf States Fear an Emboldened Iran after Trump’s Cease-Fire [Wall Street Journal]
    – New Deadline Looms for U.S. and Iran as Truce Wavers [New York Times]
    […]

    Absurdist Headline of the Day
    This would have been surreal in the 10 days before the ceasefire, but now it’s an absurdist comedy headline: US Asks Allies for Quick Plans to Secure Hormuz After Ceasefire [Bloomberg]

    It’s especially absurd because at the same time the Trump administration is asking allies for help to fix what it broke, it’s also doing this: Trump Team Explores Punishment for NATO Countries That Didn’t Support Iran War [Wall Street Journal]

    Talking Points Memo link

    Embedded links to the headlines referenced above are available at the main link.

  353. says

    Latest on the Middle East …
    – Iranian counterattacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors now appear to have paused.

    – At least 203 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded by Israeli strikes in Lebanon on Wednesday in the deadliest day of the conflict there.

    – The Strait of Hormuz remains throttled by Iran:

    Four ships were allowed to pass Wednesday, the fewest so far in April, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, down from more than 100 a day before the war. Iran is requiring ships to work out toll arrangements ahead of time and then pay the fees in cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan, mediators and shipbrokers said.

    Same link as in comment 352.

    Also from Talking Points Memo:

    Quotes of the Day

    Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s state oil company:

    This moment requires clarity. So let’s be clear: the Strait of Hormuz is not open. Access is being restricted, conditioned and controlled.

    Iran has made clear — through both its statements and actions — that passage is subject to permission, conditions and political leverage. That is not freedom of navigation. That is coercion.

    Mohammed Baharoon, director-general of the B’huth Dubai Public Policy Research Center, a think tank in the UAE:

    Iran is the only one that is happy with the outcome. They have now been re-established as the policeman of the Gulf. We woke up to a deal that doesn’t reduce the risk, but instead replaces it with a bigger risk.

  354. says

    Summary of a New York Times article:

    More than 100 immigration judges (out of some 750 total) have been dismissed by the Trump administration in an unprecedented purge that threatens to strip any semblance of due process from immigration proceedings.

    Excerpts from the article:

    […] At the same time, the administration has reshaped the immigration bench, announcing the appointments of 143 permanent and temporary judges, including many who previously worked as immigration prosecutors for the Department of Homeland Security or as military lawyers.

    By many measures, the administration is achieving its goals. The number of people being ordered deported has risen sharply, while judges have approved asylum claims in fewer than 10 percent of cases this year, the lowest rate for which data is available, The Times found. […]

    The effort stems from the administration’s view — as articulated by Mr. Miller — that many undocumented immigrants should no longer receive a constitutional right of due process as they seek legal status.

    “The only process invaders are due is deportation,” Mr. Miller wrote on X last year.

    […] The administration has instructed judges to stop granting bond to immigrants who crossed the border illegally, a change from decades of practice. The new policy has required people to remain in detention for extended periods even if they do not have a criminal record and have lived in the country for years.

    [I snipped details about the backlog in the courts that occurred during the Biden administration.]

    […] The Justice Department established the courts in their current form in 1983. They are administrative, not criminal, similar to the handling of tax disputes. There are no juries, and immigrants often represent themselves.

    Under the Refugee Act of 1980, judges can grant asylum only to those fleeing persecution on account of religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in “a particular social group.”

    But many migrants today are fleeing situations that may not qualify them for asylum, such as poverty, climate change and violence. They have few other legal pathways to seek status in the United States.

    Asylum seekers often wait years for a hearing on their claims. The delays have created an incentive for more migration, as people are allowed to work — and establish roots — in the country before their cases are decided, immigration experts across the political spectrum have said.

    […] Mr. Trump started firing immigration judges almost as soon as he returned to office, removing four top court officials, including the chief judge, on the day of his inauguration.

    Over the following year, the Justice Department regularly fired waves of judges with little notice or stated reason. Some have sued, claiming discrimination or that their civil service protections were violated. Dozens of others have quit or retired.

    […] “It’s a dismantling of the court system,” said Jeremiah Johnson, one of the fired San Francisco judges. […]

    NYT link

  355. says

    Washington Post:

    “The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists familiar with the decision. […]

    Looks like RFK Jr. throttling the facts again.

  358. says

    Wonkette:

    Boise tells Idaho law barring Pride flags to fuck off, starts painting rainbows errrrrewhere. (Idaho Statesman)

    Idaho Statesman link

    Great photos at the Statesman link.

    Some Idaho lawmakers have tried to bring down Boise’s Pride flag since last year, ultimately succeeding this year after the Legislature added a fine for violating a 2025 law that banned Pride and many other flags on government property. Boise’s City Council had made the Pride flag an official flag to get around the 2025 law.

    Rep. Ted Hill, R-Eagle, brought two bills this year to address the flag law. Ultimately, Gov. Brad Little signed one of his bills on March 31. It provides a $2,000 fine per flag per day and allows the attorney general to sue. The law bans official city flags added after Jan. 1, 2023. The day Little signed the bill, the city took down the Pride flag, which has flown for years.

    But Boise is responding: Thick rainbow stripes in the colors of the Progress Pride flag stretched up the flagpoles almost all the way up to the flags themselves Tuesday afternoon, and a large white sign emblazoned with the Progress rainbow sat on City Hall windows overlooking Capitol Boulevard.

    The Progress Pride flag adds the colors of the Trans flag to those of the traditional Pride flag, and its black-and-brown stripes represent people of color, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The art appears to be drawing some attention; one woman, getting out of her parked car on Tuesday, noticed the poles and pointed them out to her companion. “Creating a city for everyone,” the sign said, the latter word colored from red to purple. […]

  359. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/ice-caught-lying-about-a-shooting

    “ICE Caught Lying About A Shooting Again, This Time Making Up Entire People And Things”

    It may seem like there are fewer stories of ICE violence and lies lately, but that’s only because the President of the United States of America is a headline-hogging diva who uncovers a new low for human rights and sanity every day, not because DHS has improved any. […]

    Example latest, newly obtained video from the New York Times shows what led to a Venezuelan man being shot in Minneapolis on January 14, the week between the murders of Renee Good (on January 7) and Alex Pretti (January 24), and turns out agents and Kristi Noem lied wildly about what happened, not just in a “car was about to run me over!” way, but making up entire people and events that did not happen.

    Starting with that there were two men, not one, nor three. And the one who was shot, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, was not the same man the ICE agent was pursuing, that was his housemate Alfredo A. Aljorna.

    [….] Sosa-Celis and Aljorna (who was not injured) were arrested and charged with felonies. And then, a month later, Daniel N. Rosen, the Trump-loyalist top prosecutor in Minnesota, popped up in court asking a judge to dismiss charges against the two men! And ICE director Todd Lyons made a brow-raising statement at the time:

    “Video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Mr. Lyons said. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation.”

    Don’t hear that too much!

    What actually happened, turns out: There were no protestors, and no ICE agent beatdown for three minutes or any other number. There was a snow shovel, but it was on the other side of the yard, and no one touched it. There was no broom, and/or broom handle. The agent was chasing Aljorna, who slipped on the path of his home. The agent jumped and tackled Aljorna on all fours like some kind of Twilight werewolf, and Sosa-Celis ran out to help drag his friend away from the agent. And the whole tussle took all of 12 seconds, not three minutes.

    Aljorna and Sosa-Celis succeeded in getting away from him, into the house, and shut the door. Neither of them attacked the agent […]

    Horror movie shit! Then they got away, and the fucking faceless nameless nightmare monster from hell that they got away from assumed a firing position and shot through the door of the home where two children also lived, hitting Sosa-Celis in the leg and also narrowly missing a playpen. Then DHS tear-gassed the entire house, including the children. Soulless, evil, and trained and directed to be that way from the top.

    And … why did prosecutor Daniel N. Rosen wait a whole month before asking a judge to dismiss the charges? Oh, he just never bothered to watch the video until then. […]

  362. says

    On the future of NATO, Trump eyes a weird alternative to U.S. withdrawal

    “The White House reportedly has a new plan to “punish” NATO. Russia probably won’t like it, which suggests it might not happen.”

    Donald Trump’s festering hostility toward NATO has taken a hysterical turn of late, with the president expressing outrage that U.S. allies refused to participate in his misguided war in Iran.

    At her latest briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a direct quote from Trump, saying members of the NATO alliance “were tested, and they failed.” Speaking for herself, the president’s chief spokesperson added, “It’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people.”

    Leavitt was describing an imaginary foreign policy landscape. In reality, the U.S. launched a war of choice for reasons the White House still hasn’t adequately explained, and there is nothing in the NATO charter that requires members to participate in unnecessary military conflicts just because the American president wants them to. [True]

    If the American people had been attacked, NATO members would’ve been there for us, as they were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. [True] But that’s not what happened. Indeed, as recently as March 17, more than two weeks into military operations, Trump explicitly argued in writing that the U.S. did not need NATO’s assistance.

    Hours after Leavitt’s briefing, Trump met privately with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and The Washington Post reported that the Republican “appeared to hold back on Wednesday from taking dramatic action to reshape the U.S. relationship with NATO after a high-stakes meeting with its top leader.”

    The meeting was soon followed by an all-caps missive published to Trump’s social media platform that read, “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them, and they won’t be there if we need them again. Remember Greenland, that big, poorly run, piece of ice!!!”

    This was, for all intents and purposes, juvenile gibberish — though it was an odd reminder that Trump believes NATO is to blame for standing in the way of his desire to seize the arctic island for reasons he also hasn’t explained in any meaningful way.

    But perhaps most important was The Wall Street Journal’s report on the Republican administration’s plans for the alliance, which would fall short of full withdrawal. From the article:

    The White House is considering a plan to punish some members of the NATO alliance that President Trump thinks were unhelpful to the U.S. and Israel during the Iran war, according to administration officials. [FFS]

    The proposal would involve moving U.S. troops out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries deemed unhelpful to the Iran war effort and stationing them in countries that were more supportive. [!!] The proposal would fall far short of President Trump’s recent threats to fully withdraw the U.S. from the alliance, which by law he can’t do without Congress.

    The Journal’s report […] added that the White House is intent on “punishing” NATO and that this plan “has circulated and gained support among senior administration officials in recent weeks.”

    For roughly the past eight decades, the U.S. military has stationed tens of thousands of American troops at bases across Europe. If the Journal’s report is correct, Trump and his team envision a plan in which they reposition those troops away from countries that annoyed the White House and into countries that didn’t annoy the White House.

    It’s not altogether clear what Trump thinks this would achieve or what strategic objectives this might accomplish. And there’s a potential wrinkle that stands out. From the Journal’s article:

    Countries that could benefit because they are viewed as supportive include Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Greece, the officials said. The Eastern European countries have some of the highest defense-spending rates in the alliance and were some of the first to signal they would support an international coalition to monitor the Strait of Hormuz. After war broke out, Romania quickly approved U.S. requests to allow its bases to be used by the U.S. Air Force.

    The plan could result in putting more U.S. troops closer to the Russian border, an outcome likely to antagonize Moscow. [!]

    In other words, Trump’s plan to punish NATO might very well lead to a troop buildup near Vladimir Putin’s backyard, which the Russian leader wouldn’t like. It makes me wonder whether any of this is likely to actually happen, since Trump is usually eager to make Putin happy.

  363. says

    New GDP data offers another round of discouraging news about Trump-era economy

    “In the first year of Trump’s second term, economic growth fell to a nine-year low.”

    […] Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confidently predicted to a national television audience that the U.S. economy is “really going to pick up in the fourth quarter” of 2025.

    It did not pick up in the fourth quarter of 2025. CNBC reported:

    [T]he Commerce Department reported that economic growth was even slower than previously reported for the fourth quarter of 2025. Gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced, rose just 0.5% on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate. […]

    In other words, despite endless Republican hype, economic growth and job growth were significantly stronger during Joe Biden’s final year in office compared with the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.

    […] during one of JD Vance’s recent Fox News appearances, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy. A week earlier, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” The president himself has argued — before, during and after the fourth quarter — that he’s responsible for creating the strongest economy in American history. [all bullshit and lies, from top to bottom]

  364. johnson catman says

    re Lynna@363:

    during one of JD Vance’s recent Fox News appearances, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.

    Yeah, definitely a Trump boom, as in the economy got “blowed up real good.” (Thanks SCTV for that line from many years ago!)

  366. says

    johnson catman @364, LOL. All too true.

    In other news, as viewed by Borowitz:

    TEHRAN (The Borowitz Report)—In its first act of goodwill since the declaration of a ceasefire, on Wednesday Iran permitted a container ship loaded with copies of the Epstein files to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

    “In recent weeks, the closure of the Strait has cut off the world’s supply of Epstein files,” an Iranian government statement read. “Now, those files will flow freely to the four corners of the globe.”

    Although Iran is charging vessels millions for safe passage through the Strait, “We are sending the Epstein files through free of charge,” the statement indicated.

    The Iranians said they had taken Donald J. Trump’s threat to destroy their civilization “very seriously,” noting, “We see what he’s already done to American civilization.” [LOL]

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/iran-allows-ship-loaded-with-epstein

  372. says

    New York Times:

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed on Thursday to continue striking Hezbollah in Lebanon, hours after he appeared to make a concession by saying his country would start talks with the Lebanese government about trying to disarm the Iran-backed paramilitary group.

    MS NOW:

    More than 80 countries — which did not include the U.S. — condemned Israel’s lethal strikes on Lebanon. … Several international leaders have condemned Israel’s intensified strikes on Lebanon, which killed more than 300 people yesterday alone, according to The Associated Press, citing the country’s health ministry.

  373. says

    MS NOW:

    Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei vowed today to tighten control over the Strait of Hormuz and claimed victory in the ongoing war between his country and Israel and the U.S. ‘We will definitely take the management of the Strait of Hormuz to a new phase,’ Khamenei said in a series of posts on X.

  374. says

    Reported by The Washington Post, and summarized by Steve Benen:

    The good news is, the vaccine saves lives; the bad news is, the Trump administration doesn’t want us to know that: “The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists familiar with the decision.”

  375. says

    MS NOW:

    First lady Melania Trump denied any ties to convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on Thursday. … ‘The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,’ the first lady began in remarks delivered from the White House. … It was not clear who or which statements or reporting she was referring to.

    [… “Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the Congressional Record,” she said. “Then, and only then, will we have the truth.”

    […] In a brief phone call following her remarks, the president told MS NOW he did not know about the first lady’s statement ahead of time [WTF?], adding that “she didn’t know [Epstein].”

    A White House official normally involved in external communications who was not authorized to speak publicly told MS NOW that many White House staffers were caught off guard by the first lady’s statement. [..]

    Video at the link.

    Melania was in the White House. She spoke from the podium the President of the United States often speaks from.

  376. JM says

    Anton Petrov: 20 Year Long Study On Cloning Comes to a Shocking Conclusion
    20 year study of serial cloning of mice reaches an end. Turns out that a creature can’t be cloned indefinitely, eventually accumulated genetic damage catches up with them. The mice in the study took about 55 generations.
    There are some important considerations to the study, it was done on mice, a species that normally reproduces sexually. Creatures that reproduce asexually normally would probably be more resistant. That it was mice is probably also significant, larger and more complex creatures probably fail faster.
    In truth, none of this was unexpected. I find the most interesting part of the experiment that the mice lasted as long as they did and viability dropped off a cliff near the end.

  377. StevoR says

    Via Aussie ABC news

    By the time I arrived at Pete Hegseth’s church, the entire block had been cordoned off by police officers and the National Guard.

    Across the road, protesters screamed incoherent messages into megaphones directed at the brick building.

    Sirens cut through the demonstrators as a convoy of seven black Suburbans pulled up, lights flashing.

    The US secretary of defense, his wife and their seven children emerged from their vehicles and were whisked inside by Secret Service agents.

    “You can go in now,” an officer told me once the Hegseth family had disappeared.

    I walked into Mr Hegseth’s church, eager to better understand a belief system that challenges the legitimacy of democracy and key principles in the US constitution yet is shaping the man leading the world’s most powerful military.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-10/pete-hegseth-holy-war-in-iran-christian-nationalism/106500910

  378. StevoR says

    Cool combo here -Japanese poetry and buried trees helping us understand space weather:

    Now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have shown a new approach for detecting historical SPEs, where they use medieval records to guide ultra-precise carbon-14 measurements of buried asunaro trees in Northern Japan.

    Using this combined approach, the physicists have identified and dated an SPE to a period between winter 1200 to spring 1201 CE in the medieval period, when solar activity was extremely high. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B.

    Professor Hiroko Miyahara from the OIST Solar-Terrestrial Environment and Climate Unit explains, “Previous studies on historical SPEs have focused on rare, extremely powerful events. Our paper provides a basis for detecting sub-extreme SPEs—events that occur more frequently and are around 10–30% of the size of the most extreme cases, but still hazardous.

    “Sub-extreme SPEs are more challenging to detect, but our method now allows us to efficiently identify them and better understand the conditions under which they are more likely to occur.”

    Source : https://phys.org/news/2026-04-medieval-japanese-poetry-trees-elucidate.html

  380. StevoR says

    the study suggests that even if we observe a certain type of signal at the center of our galaxy—an excess of gamma radiation that could result from the annihilation of dark matter particles—failing to detect the same signal in other systems, such as dwarf galaxies, is not enough to rule out this explanation.

    Dark matter, in fact, may not consist of a single particle, but of multiple slightly different components, whose behavior varies depending on the cosmic environment.

    …(Snip)…

    The probability that the two components of dark matter meet and annihilate would also depend on the ratio between these two particles within each astrophysical system. This ratio could be different in galaxies like our own—where the two types of particles might be present in similar proportions—and in dwarf galaxies, where it could instead be strongly unbalanced.

    “In this way, you get very different predictions for the emission,” explains Krnjaic.

    The model proposed by Krnjaic and colleagues therefore represents a more flexible alternative to the simplest standard scenario, as it allows for the possibility of explaining the absence of a gamma-ray signal in dwarf galaxies without ruling out a dark matter origin for the signal observed in the Milky Way.

    Source : https://phys.org/news/2026-04-dark-states.html

  381. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Warning: This viral story came from The Free Press, an anti-woke site founded by Bari Weiss. And that was paywalled.

    The Daily Beast – Trump Goon Gives Vatican ‘Bitter Lecture’
    https://archive.is/cAR3L

    [Anonymous] Vatican officials briefed on the meeting told The Free Press that one of the Pentagon’s most senior officials summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre to meet in January—then told him that the United States has the military power to do “whatever it wants,” and that Pope Leo […] “better take its side.”

    The site writes that “as tensions escalated,” one U.S. official “went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

    Pierre was reportedly summoned […] by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, a Catholic who […] is a close ally of Catholic convert JD Vance. Such a meeting […] is believed to be unprecedented.
    […]
    The Free Press writes that Pentagon brass “picked apart the pontiff’s January speech,” referring to his inaugural State of the World Address. […] in which Leo challenged Trump’s so-called Donroe Doctrine, saying, “A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force[“]
    […]
    One Vatican official told The Free Press, “The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration.”
    […]
    A spokesperson for the Defense Department said […] “The Free Press’s characterization of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted […] The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion. We have nothing but the highest regard, and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”

    Niwa Limbu (Catholic Herald’s Vatican correspondent):
    https://xcancel.com/NiwaLimbu1988/status/2042212789582795164

    I have been told by two sources that it wasn’t Elbridge Colby who initiated the sharp attack against Cardinal Christophe Pierre […] Multiple U.S. officials were present, and it came from another US Department Representative.

    Niwa Limbu: “I have just gotten off the Phone with Cardinal Christophe Pierre and it was suggested that there is a media blackout regarding this topic with His Eminence commenting, ‘I would prefer not speak.'”

    Niwa Limbu: “I am not clued up with American politics […] Having two insider scoops on the issue does not mean I’m promoting it.”

    Commentary

    The scriptwriters merit praise for inventing ever-more creative ways for this administration to insult foreign leaders.

    I got $10 says that JD Vance will be appointed antipope.

    He may already be an antipope, going by what he did to the last pope.

    The American antipope has already staked his claim. [White House AI photo]

    The Mar-A-l’Avignon Papacy.

    Confusingly, this would make the real Pope be the antifa Pope

    This could reasonably be interpreted as a threat to imprison and murder the Pope. A diplomat summoned by the *military*, run by someone who believes he’s on a divine mission and that public Catholic worship should be banned, and who cancelled the Catholic Good Friday service in the Pentagon chapel.

    So… we’re bombing the Vatican now?

    Pedophiles beefing with Catholics wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card.

    Fun fact: There have technically been several recent antipopes, but they did not have state backing or enough influence for anyone to care. The Spanish Franco cult one even has a special hat.

    Rando:

    Eldridge Colby, aka the Strategy Cheese* is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, who’s main job it was to make Trump’s ravings about Europe into coherent policy. […] He’s for abandoning Europe and focussing on Taiwan, but got increasingly insane about it. He also hitched his wagon to Hawley and supported Jan 6. He also is the Grandson of the late William Colby, former Director of Central Intelligence. He’s DC royalty […] He roomed with Ross Douhat in the 2000s […] I mentioned that he got increasingly insane […] now he wants to defend Taiwan by striking it with TLAMs (I am not joking).

    * Trump nominee favors ‘destroying [Taiwan semiconductor]’ fabricators if China invades Taiwan—strategy designed to deprive China of key motivation to attack but devastate world economy
     
    Aaron Rupar:
    https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3miz2sr6q3c2m
    “JD VANCE: […] I don’t know who Cardinal Christophe Pierre is. […] Okay, I’ve met him before. Sorry. I just didn’t remember the name. I’ve never seen this reporting. [Video clip]”

    Rando:

    we need to talk about Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and how frankly jaw-dropping it is for Mr. JD “Just Wrote a Whole Book About Catholicism” Vance not to know who he is.

    Pierre hit retirement age and stepped down last month, but for ten years he was the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States. It’s sort of an oddball gig in that it’s BOTH a diplomatic and religious position; he represents American Catholics to the Vatican, and Vatican City as an entity to the US.

    In Vance’s defense, I also didn’t know what an apostolic nuncio was […] then again, I’m not a Catholic who is also Vice President […] I really don’t think he wants to be trapped between Trump and the Pope even more than he already is, which means he should be asked about this every single day.
    […]
    there’s kind of two waves to [the Avignon Papacy]. there was a 60something-year stretch of the 1300s in which a bunch of French popes, who were still like valid legit Everybody’s Pope, refused to move to Rome and posted up at Avignon […] it’s the second stretch of Avignon drama in [1378-1417] that most people associate with it because that’s the schism […] one of the French popes was like “fuck it, fine,” and moved back to Rome HQ, but his successor had a lot of beef with the French cardinals. They elected their own “anti-pope” and moved him back to Avignon. cue many years of conflict.
    […]
    Whatever Pentagon trad Catholic smugly brought up Avignon should keep in mind that the perception everywhere outside France that the French crown had the Pope under their thumb WAS ACTUALLY NOT POPULAR OR RECEIVED WELL at all […] I can KIND OF see how, if you’re the French crown, and you’re like “we put this guy in the Chair of Saint Peter, we own his ass,” you might feel perfectly entitled to summon him for meetings and kick him around, but it’s WILD for the Pentagon to treat Pope Leo like they have that right.

  384. JM says

    @381 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:
    Salon: “Reasonable discussion”: Pentagon denies reports that official threatened Pope Leo

    The Pentagon called reports of the meeting “highly exaggerated and distorted,” saying it was “a respectful and reasonable discussion.”
    “We have nothing but the highest regard, and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See,” it said in a statement to Salon.

    The Pentagon doesn’t deny the meeting happened but says it was friendly and respectful using diplomatic empty air words.

  386. JM says

    The Hill: Live updates: Vance heads to peace talks; inflation surges as Iran war spiked energy prices

    Vice President Vance heads to Pakistan today, where he faces his biggest challenge yet, as he leads U.S. negotiations with Iran amid the fragile ceasefire. President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner will also be part of the talks.

    For Vance this is likely a make or break moment. If he can cut a deal that is acceptable in the US and holds for any length of time he will gain a lot of credibility. If he fails it likely ruins any chances he has in 2028.
    Iran has not been happy with Witkoff and Kushner, judging them incompetent. I’m not sure why Iran wants Vance, they may over estimate his power/position or they may just want somebody else more competent to deal with.

  387. JM says

    The Week: Hegseth must open Pentagon to reporters, judge rules

    A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday threw out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s revised effort to restrict press access at the Pentagon, saying the Defense Department “cannot simply reinstate an unlawful policy under the guise of taking ‘new’ action.” Suppression of “political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy,” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in his opinion, siding with The New York Times for the second time in a month in its challenge to Hegseth’s restrictions on reporters’ access to Pentagon sources and information.

    The judge was not happy. Hegseth is clearly trying to dodge around freedom of the press here. The history of this is that recently Hegseth created a new Pentagon military reporting policy, it was thrown out for violating free press. Within days of the first being thrown out Hegseth imposed a different new policy. It didn’t fix the fundamental problems with the first and was very obviously just a different way of trying to restrict the press.
    I can only imagine the sort of superficial publicity and image focused control Hegseth wants over the press. He got angry that pictures he considered unflattering were published.

  388. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: WaPo bombshell: RFK’s CDC burying report on Covid vaccine success, hosted by Ali Velshi

    The Washington Post reports the CDC is sitting on a public health report that was supposed to have been published two weeks ago—a report that showed the ongoing success of the Covid vaccine. Michigan Senate candidate and epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed joins to discuss.

    Video is 9:09 minutes.

    ‘Who’s telling the truth here?’: Velshi slams Trump’s spin of shaky Iran deal

    “You listen to the government of the United States talking about a ruthless authoritarian overseas regime and you have to wonder to yourself: Who’s telling the truth here?” says Ali Velshi.

    Video is 6:33 minutes

  389. says

    Survivors of deadly Iranian attack on U.S. military outpost reject Hegseth’s claims

    “The defense secretary said a ‘squirter’ snuck through U.S. defenses and killed six soldiers in Kuwait. Survivors of the attack have pushed back.”

    Related video at the link.

    For U.S. service members, one day from the war with Iran stands out: On March 1, the second day of the military offensive, an unmanned Iranian drone struck a “tactical operations center” in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, killing six U.S. soldiers and wounding many others.

    Donald Trump’s response to the deadly developments sparked a controversy; the president posted a prerecorded video to social media, in which he said, among other things, “Before it ends, that’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

    But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s response was considerably worse.

    Two days before he pressed news organizations to downplay the significance of fallen U.S. troops, the beleaguered Pentagon chief told reporters, in reference to the Iranian drone, “Every once in a while, you might have a squirter that makes its way through.”

    In other words, according to Hegseth, defenses were in place to protect the U.S. military outpost in Kuwait, but one unmanned drone managed to sneak through and do deadly harm.

    That version of events is now facing important pushback from sources in a position to know. MS NOW reported, as part of the network’s liveblog coverage:

    The White House did not address the account Thursday of survivors of the Iranian attack on a U.S. military outpost in Kuwait who pushed back against the Pentagon’s characterization of the incident. Six U.S. service members were killed in the strike during the early days of the war.

    In an interview with CBS News, one soldier injured in the attack on the Port of Shuaiba called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s description of the incident as merely one drone that ‘squeaked through’ a ‘falsehood.’

    One of the injured soldiers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, specifically told CBS News, “Painting a picture that ‘one squeaked through’ is a falsehood. I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position.”

    Other soldiers from the Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command who survived the attack said in the interview that the military never articulated a “good reason” for moving their unit “closer to Iran, to a deeply unsafe area that was a known target.” They described the bunker protection “as weak as one gets.” [!!]

    Asked if the attack was preventable, one soldier replied, “Absolutely, yes.” [video]

    […] for now, neither the Pentagon nor the White House have commented on the soldiers’ descriptions of the attack and the lack of military preparedness.

    […] 14 years ago, an attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, left four Americans dead. Republicans and their allies spent several years questioning the defenses in place at the time, holding countless hours of congressional hearings, and in 2014, the GOP-led House even launched a special select committee to scrutinize what happened in detail. The investigation never substantiated Republican conspiracy theories, quietly ending its work in late 2016.

    The question for the party and the administration is simple: If questions surrounding the deadly attack in Benghazi warranted years’ worth of granular examination, and there’s reason to believe the current defense secretary made false claims about a deadly attack in Kuwait, will that receive comparable demands for answers?

  390. says

    What does Trump know? What does he forget? What does anything he says mean?

    The Jeffrey Epstein scandal had largely faded from public view in recent weeks, especially as attention turned to the war with Iran, but it made an unexpected comeback on Thursday afternoon in a strange fashion.

    From the White House, first lady Melania Trump delivered surprise remarks, in which she denied having any meaningful ties to convicted sex offenders Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and condemned reporting to the contrary. The trouble was, no one had any idea what she was talking about: She appeared to be responding to allegations that the public hadn’t heard.

    Complicating matters, the first lady endorsed congressional hearings with Epstein victims — a position that put her at odds with the Republican Party’s preferred approach — and seemed to suggest there might yet be more unindicted co-conspirators, which is definitely not the position taken by the president’s Justice Department.

    Just as jarring as the first lady’s remarks were the circumstances under which she made them: Donald Trump told MS NOW he didn’t realize his wife was going to make these remarks, while her spokesperson told The New York Times that the president was informed in advance about her plans to make a public statement.

    [Obviously, those are contradictory statements.]

    Unfortunately, this was not the only evidence of a chaotic and dysfunctional White House.

    A couple of hours after the first lady’s decision to push the Epstein scandal back into the spotlight, her husband had a surprise declaration of his own. MS NOW reported as part of the network’s liveblog coverage:

    Trump warned Iran [Thursday afternoon] that it ‘better not be’ charging tolls on ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz. ‘There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!,’ Trump said in a Truth Social post. [WTF?]

    The presidential missive didn’t make a lot of sense. “There have been reports”? The odd online statement made it sound as if he, the chief executive of the world’s preeminent superpower, with unlimited access to a highly sophisticated global intelligence apparatus, simply had no idea whether or not Iran was imposing tolls. [!]

    Just one day earlier, the president told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl largely the opposite, saying his administration was considering a “joint venture” with Iran that would include tolls through the Strait of Hormuz. The Republican described the possible partnership as “a beautiful thing.” [!]

    So it was that, as Thursday came to an end, it wasn’t at all clear what his position was or which of his contradictory positions to take seriously. [yep]

    In a functional West Wing, this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

    At face value, the back-to-back oddities appeared wholly unrelated — the Epstein scandal and U.S. policy in the Middle East have nothing to do with each other — but the juxtaposition offered a timely reminder that the current White House is a poorly run mess.

    About a month into his first term, the president boasted that, as far as he was concerned, his White House was “running like a fine-tuned machine.” Even he no longer makes such claims, which no one is going to believe anyway.

  391. robro says

    What happened to the recent cease fire with Iran? Answer per Heather Cox Richardson: Bibi needs to keep bombing Lebanon because “Israel has been under a state of emergency that halted the work of the judicial system, but with the end of the war, Netanyahu’s trial for corruption is scheduled to begin again on Saturday.”

    I’m sure that has nothing to do with any decisions that might involve killing innocent people.

  392. says

    Trump Goes International With Criminalizing Left-Wing Opposition

    […] Sebastian Gorka has been pretty under-the-radar as the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s second term National Security Council, but now he pops up in this important New York Times story as a leader of what you might call the internationalization of the administration’s effort to criminalize left-wing opposition:

    [Gorka] has pushed to designate more far-left groups abroad as terrorist organizations, to pressure foreign allies to investigate the groups and to search for connections between them and Americans.

    For months, Mr. Gorka has led a regular counterterrorism meeting with dozens of officials from U.S. security agencies. In those meetings, he has pushed for more attention on antifa, as well as other groups, like transgender activists and undocumented migrants. [!]

    […] Authoritarians like Trump practically need a shadowy, cohesive, violent opposition — at least rhetorically — and if they don’t have one, they’ll set about inventing it.

    The beauty, from the MAGA perspective, of the amorphous nature of antifa is that it can be a vessel into which every right-wing fear, conspiracy theory, and fever dream can be poured. What emerges from the NYT story is that Gorka is pushing the myth of an all-encompassing global antifa with purported ties back to American leftists:

    Mr. Gorka has repeatedly told U.S. officials that “there are no lone wolves,” according to two officials who have witnessed the comments, in urging them to find links between left-wing extremists abroad and Americans, which could create a legal avenue to investigate U.S. citizens.

    That possibility has alarmed current and former U.S. officials who worry the Trump administration is politicizing counterterrorism efforts, with the ultimate aim of punishing Mr. Trump’s opponents at home, potentially with charges of supporting terrorism. The unusually expansive way in which the administration has defined far-left extremism, they warned, could allow investigators to use slender connections to people overseas to go after Americans who have no real history of violence.

    Gorka has an ally at the State Department in Thomas G. DiNanno, the undersecretary for arms control and international security. […] The State Department issued a statement to the NYT confirming it is working with international partners to counter “antifa-aligned terrorism.” It’s offering a $10 million reward for information that disrupts the finances of violent leftist groups. [!] […]

  393. says

    Middle East update, summarized by Talking Points Memo:

    Israel: here’s growing evidence that Israel’s operation in Lebanon was understood by the parties to covered by the ceasefire with Iran, but instead Israel ramped up attacks against Hezbollah, complicating diplomatic efforts to such an extent that President Trump gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “stern message” in a brief phone call to “scale back attacks,” according to the WSJ.

  394. says

    Trump administration plans to attack Biden DOJ as ‘anti-Christian’ in new report

    “The report comes out of an executive order that established a ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,’ according to details viewed by NBC News.”

    The Trump administration is finalizing a report that casts the Biden Justice Department as anti-Christian over its enforcement of laws protecting abortion clinics and enforcement of Covid regulations, among other issues, according to details of the report viewed by NBC News. [JFC]

    The report stems from a Justice Department-led task force that aims to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” formed after an executive order President Donald Trump signed in February 2025. […]

    Trump has long claimed that Joe Biden was anti-Christian, though the former president is a devout Catholic who has rejected those statements. […]

    Trump’s order argued that the “Biden Department of Justice sought to squelch faith in the public square,” and the draft task force report uses similar language, claiming the Biden administration “engaged in anti-Christian bias.”

    An analysis by the Interfaith Alliance after Trump’s executive order found no evidence of widespread anti-Christian bias in the U.S.

    “In reality, it will weaponize a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimize discrimination against marginalized groups,” the alliance analysis said. [Too true.]

    One part of the report is expected to criticize the Biden Justice Department’s use of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which was passed in 1994 in the wake of attacks on abortion clinics and providers.

    Some anti-abortion protesters who were prosecuted under the law when Biden was in office were pardoned by Trump when he took office.

    […] The report’s draft language is unusual for the Justice Department, which typically speaks through legal filings, and examinations of internal policies and procedures normally emerge from the inspector general’s office. But it isn’t solely a DOJ product; the task force also included Trump Cabinet members. [!]

    […] FBI Director Kash Patel was interviewed for the upcoming report and noted that the Richmond memo [a retracted 2023 memo from an FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia, that discussed “radical-traditionalist” Catholics] had been “discussed widely and rightfully so,” according to details viewed by NBC News.

    Patel said they did a “full deep dive” into the creation of the memo and said the FBI had “jettisoned all relationships with the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League,” which he said “contributed to this woeful violation of our constitutional rights.”

    The Southern Poverty Law Center is a legal advocacy organization founded in the 1970s that seeks to fight systemic discrimination through litigation. The Anti-Defamation League is a nonprofit dedicated to stopping antisemitism and extremism in all forms.

    Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to head the Civil Rights Division, has used the FACE Act in a historically unprecedented manner, charging dozens of anti-ICE protesters who showed up to a Minnesota church, as well as former CNN anchor Don Lemon. Her office unsuccessfully attempted to keep many of the defendants incarcerated until trial, an unusual demand in cases where defendants are accused of nonviolent crimes. They also wrongly accused and arrested a woman who didn’t take part in the protest. […]

    Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in response to a question from NBC News this week that the work of the “weaponization working group” — previously headed by Jan. 6 defendant advocate Ed Martin — would emerge publicly soon.

  395. says

    robro @391, I agree.

    In other news:

    Inflation in March saw the biggest month-over-month spike in three years, all thanks to President Donald Trump’s boondoggle of a war in Iran that led to the largest single-month increase in gas prices since the 1967 oil embargo.

    But rather than acknowledge that Americans are being squeezed by higher prices, Republicans actually celebrated—yes, celebrated—the inflation report.

    “Core inflation just came in LOWER than expected for the month of March!” the Republican National Committee wrote in a post on X.

    The RNC continued, “President Trump continues defying the ‘experts’ and beating expectations,” ending the absurd spin with an emoji of money floating away and an American flag.

    Indeed, core inflation—which doesn’t include volatile energy and food prices—was 2.6% in March, a 0.2% increase from February.

    But that does not negate the fact that Americans last month paid 21.2% more for gasoline, and 30.7% more for fuel oil that helps heat homes—totals that helped spike overall inflation to 3.3% in March.

    That 3.3% inflation meant that Americans’ weekly pay actually saw a net loss last month, as the spike in gas prices outstripped a nominal rise in wages.

    It’s why polls show Americans strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, and why consumer confidence in March fell to the lowest level ever recorded.

    “The reason it feels hard to get ahead right now is because it’s hard to get ahead right now,” University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers wrote in a post on X. “Wages are barely keeping up with prices, and prices are just starting to heat up.”

    What’s more, experts say that the inflation reports will likely get worse in the coming months, as rising fuel costs have downstream effects. […]

    For example, shipping companies are already tacking on fuel surcharges to make up for the rising cost of gas—added expenses that businesses are sure to pass down to consumers. Same with airlines, which are raising baggage fees and flight prices to compensate for the spike in jet fuel.

    After reading the GOP’s response to the inflation report, many are probably asking why they would release such a tone-deaf comment.

    But it’s easy to understand when you realize that Republicans can never admit that Trump is wrong. […]

    Republicans are privately fretting that the war in Iran will lead to bruising midterm losses.

    Link</>

  396. says

    Environmental news:

    In his continuing quest to prop up a dying coal industry, President Donald Trump’s latest move is to make it more toxic—literally.

    Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, which these days is more of an Attack the Environment Agency, is proposing to let coal plants use “alternative groundwater protections standards,” which sounds benign, but actually means that it will be easier for coal companies to dump coal ash, which contains a whole host of contaminants like mercury and arsenic. […]

    Also, coal companies would be off the hook for cleaning up their toxic mess on their entire properties—only where they dumped the coal ash. Basically, this just makes it easier for coal companies to leave their poisonous sludge in groundwater. And some coal ash dumps would be exempt from any regulation at all under the new rules. [!]

    The EPA’s proposed rule would allow the agency and individual states to determine that their residents can be exposed to higher levels of cobalt, lithium, and lead in their coal-ash-contaminated groundwater. And if coal companies want to make a little extra coin on the side? That toxic coal ash could be used in place of normal non-toxic soil in things like playgrounds and parks. [!]

    Enjoy that arsenic, kids!

    […] health risks actually include links to cancer, heart disease, and brain damage […] the price we have to pay for the administration’s commitment to “restoring American energy dominance,” as EPA head Lee Zeldin explained.

    Yeah, about that.

    While the whole country is in the grip of runaway gas prices thanks to Trump’s war, folks in West Virginia, the very heart of coal country, are also in the grip of insane electricity costs. […]

    These days, West Virginia residents face monthly electric bills that can exceed their mortgage payments. […]

    [I snipped Trump’s blather about alternative energy sources “killing the beauty” of just about everything.]

    Meanwhile, back in the real world, electricity costs in February were up 4.8% nationwide compared with the same time last year, while natural gas prices spiked 10.9% higher. But things are far, far worse in West Virginia, where the average household electricity rate is up 73% per kilowatt hour. That translates to monthly bills of up to $750. Oh wait, sorry. Bills were as high as $750/month last September. Now, they’re pushing $900 monthly.

    In part, that’s thanks to the state’s Public Service Commission, which has approved a plethora of rate hikes. Not really surprising when you learn that the three-member panel includes a former power company lobbyist and the former head of the state coal association. […]

    Meanwhile, your tax dollars are going to coal companies to upgrade aging power plants. At the same time, the administration is also forcing companies to keep coal plants open, even when they don’t want to, and even though it costs consumers more to keep them open. It’s a financial giveaway to coal companies at the expense of the health of everyone in coal country.

    But hey, at least we have Coalie, that cute lil piece of coal mascot. [Image at the link] Too bad he won’t keep West Virginians warm at night when utilities cut off their power because they simply can’t pay the staggering bills. And those bills are a direct result of Trump’s hatred for renewable energy and fixation on fossil fuels. He’s wrecking the environment, and we’re all paying the price.

    Link

  397. says

    Trump used to love them all, especially when they were backing his election campaign … and when they kept the MAGA hordes all riled up in Trump’s favor. Oh how things have changed.

    […] “I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” he wrote on Truth Social Thursday.

    Trump added, “They’ve all been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.” [Methinks he doth project too much.]

    […] The right-wing media voices that Trump has lashed out against were his most loyal foot soldiers, more so than even congressional Republicans. For instance, Jones has spent years arguing that the United States was under demonic attack from the left and that Trump was empowered by God to save the country.

    Since he started running for office in 2015, Trump happily promoted Jones’ brand of conspiracy thinking, palled around with Owens’ demagoguery, and laughed along with Carlson’s racist rants. […]

    Link

  398. says

    Ukraine secures oil lifeline from Gulf states in exchange for military support

    “After reaching pacts with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, Zelenskyy said similar agreements were in the works with Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain.”

    Ukraine will receive much-needed fossil fuels from Gulf countries in exchange for the defense assistance it is providing, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

    Kyiv made defense pacts with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in March, but further details of those agreements were not revealed then. At the time, Iran’s drone swarms were battering the region in response to American and Israeli attacks.

    Middle Eastern allies of Washington looked to Kyiv for help — they wanted Ukraine’s drone combat expertise, accrued over four years of war with Russia. Last month, Zelenskyy sent more than 200 Ukrainian soldiers from his anti-drone units to the Middle East to help those countries fend off Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones — a variant of what Ukraine has faced from Russia.

    On Friday Zelenskyy explained the defense deals in a briefing to journalists.

    “We have arranged ten-year agreements with three countries,” he said, adding that in return for its combat expertise, Kyiv would receive missile interceptors, financial assistance, and most importantly, supplies of oil and diesel.

    “In some cases, we receive crude oil that will be delivered to refineries in Europe for processing,” said Zelenskyy. “In others, we are talking about finished products — diesel.”

    Kyiv is facing a massive fuel shortage, owing to Russia’s persistent targeting of fuel depots […]

    Ukrainian gas prices have likewise skyrocketed, while the government has admitted it relies on foreign suppliers for about 85 percent of its fuel stocks. POLITICO previously reported how Ukrainian soldiers were rationing diesel — used to power heavier war machines, like tanks and other armored vehicles on the front lines.

    Zelenskyy added he had secured enough fuel for the next year and that similar agreements were in the works with Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain.

  399. says

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/breaking-another-statement-from-melania

    BREAKING: In the early hours of Friday, when everyone else at the White House was fast asleep, Melania Trump made the following statement:

    Good morning.

    The lies linking me with the disgraceful Donald J. Trump need to end today.

    The individuals lying about me are devoid of ethical standards, humility, and respect. I do not object to their ignorance, but rather, I reject their mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation by linking me to the most hated man on the planet.

    I have never been friends with Trump. I was invited to the same parties as him from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach. When I saw him at one of those parties, I realized it was a party full of grifters and low-lifes, and immediately left.

    To be clear, I never had a relationship with Trump or his accomplices, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and especially Stephen Miller. The thought of having a relationship with any of them makes me want to hurl.

    Numerous fake images and statements about Trump and me have been circulating on social media for years now. Be cautious about what you believe. These images and stories are completely false.

    I am not a witness or a named witness in connection with any of Trump’s crimes. I was never involved in any capacity—I was not a participant, was never on Trump’s plane, and never visited his hideous Palm Beach club.

    The false smears linking me to Trump from mean-spirited and politically motivated individuals and entities looking to cause damage to my good name to gain financially and climb politically must stop.

    Now is the time for Congress to act. Trump is not alone. To commit his crimes he has had the help not only of the toadies in his Cabinet but from a pack of slimy oligarchs such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. I call for thorough, Nuremberg-style hearings to bring all of these despicable traitors to justice.

    Then, and only then, will we have the truth.

    Satire

  401. StevoR says

    Poem seen on fb shared by an fb friend :

    A Whole Civilisation Will Die Tonight

    My son needs lunch and I have
    To put his backpack together
    But a whole civilisation will
    Die tonight so I’m wondering
    If they’ve closed their schools.
    Like, a snow day, maybe,
    Except instead of snow its
    “Keep your children home so
    If you die, you die together” —
    Instead of “we’ll open back up
    Once the plows have cleared” its
    “We don’t know if we’ll be here
    Tomorrow hold your babies tight.”

    Its just “talk” I’m told,
    Which I’ve been told before.
    “Its how the President makes his deals.”
    But I’ve never heard anyone talk about
    Other human beings this way, and I’m
    Not certain I can look my son in my eyes
    If we all agree to stomach it one more time.

    A whole civilisation will die tonight,
    As I zip up his backpack and
    Kiss him off to school I think :
    If this is what we call leadership
    Then I’m not entirely sure ours
    Isn’t already dead.

    Michael F Dubois.

    Italics original. Capitalised initial letter of each line mine – oddly not done in original or at in least the version shared on fb.

  406. StevoR says

    Yes! Contact resumed. Hearing Commander Wiseman’s voice over radio. Sounding good. :-D

  409. says

    StevoR, comments 402 to 408, that was fun to watch. Excellent!

    In other news, as reported by MS NOW:

    Vice President JD Vance is heading to Islamabad today to lead a U.S. delegation in peace talks with Iran. Vance told reporters this morning he thinks the talks are ‘going to be positive.’

    I too hope the talks are positive, however I do not trust JD Vance. He does not have a background in diplomacy or international affairs.

    Somewhat related news, as reported by MS Now:

    The U.N. World Food Programme warned today that a food security crisis is rapidly developing in Lebanon, with more than 80% of markets no longer functioning, forcing the country to increasingly rely on humanitarian convoys. [!]

  410. says

    Good news:

    A federal judge in Boston dismissed a lawsuit from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that sought access to Massachusetts state voter rolls amid the Trump administration’s push for registration lists from nearly every state.

  411. says

    Update on Trump’s plans for a “triumphal arch” in Washington D.C.:

    […] Trump’s plans for a new triumphal arch in the capital, unveiled on Friday, include a towering winged figure with a Lady Liberty-like torch and crown, flanked by two eagles and guarded by four lions — all gilded.

    The 12-page plan released by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts shows the arch will stand 250 feet tall (76.2 meters) from its base to the tip of the winged figure’s torch, with “One Nation Under God” and “Liberty and Justice for All” inscribed in gold atop either side of the monument.

    The plan indicates the structure would stand between the Lincoln Memorial in the east and Arlington National Cemetery toward the west and within a traffic circle connecting Washington with northern Virginia. The arch would dwarf the Lincoln Memorial, which stands at 99 feet tall (30.2 meters).

    Trump wrote on social media that it “will be the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World. This will be a wonderful addition to the Washington D.C. area for all Americans to enjoy for many decades to come!” […]

    Trump’s Washington arch plan includes golden-winged figure, eagles, lions and ‘One Nation Under God’

    Yet another gilded monstrosity. Photo slide show at the link.

    It does not look graceful to me. It looks heavy, domineering … and the size is out of proportion when compared to the Lincoln Memorial. Yuck.

  412. says

    Sigh:

    […] Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, launched a salvo that appeared rather serious. Last month, the former television personality said New York’s Medicaid program last year provided personal care services, covering things such as bathing and meal preparation, to roughly 5 million people. [5 milllon!]

    “That level of utilization is unheard of,” Oz said in a social media video, in which he levied the allegations. He added that New York needs to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”

    […] There are 6.8 million New Yorkers enrolled in Medicaid, and if 5 million of them received personal care services last year, it would raise legitimate questions.

    But the CMS chief [Mehmet Oz] was wrong. The number wasn’t 5 million, it was 450,000. Oz was off by a factor of 11. (He also made false claims about eligibility for the program. The video he posted remains online as of this writing.)

    The Associated Press published a devastating report on the mistake, which was used as the basis for a federal investigation.

    President Donald Trump’s administration this week acknowledged it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud probe into New York’s Medicaid program, a glaring mistake that undercuts a federal campaign to tackle waste, mostly in Democratic-led states.

    The error, which the administration admitted first to The Associated Press, prompted health analysts to question how many of the Republican administration’s sweeping anti-fraud efforts around the country were based on faulty findings. One of a few mischaracterizations it made about New York’s Medicaid program, it also reflected a common criticism that’s been made of Trump’s second administration — that it tends to attack first and confirm the facts later.

    The Trump administration, evidently, misidentified New York’s approach to billing code applications.

    Michael Kinnucan, a senior health policy adviser at the Fiscal Policy Institute who helped highlight the false claim, told the AP, “These numbers could have been cleared up in a phone call, so it’s really slapdash.” [yep]

    A spokesperson for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul added, “The initial claim by CMS was patently false, and we are glad they now admit it.”

    The administration’s “war on fraud” appears to be off to a predictably Trumpian start.

    Link

  413. says

    Wall Street Journal:

    President Trump has repeatedly promised his top administration officials pardons before he leaves office, according to people who have heard his comments.

    “I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump said in a recent meeting to laughs, according to people with knowledge of the comments. That radius appears to be expanding as the president repeats the line. Another person who met with Trump earlier this year said the president quipped about pardoning anyone who had come within 10 feet. […]

  416. JM says

    Next Level Game Art: How Crimson Desert Fakes Realism (It’s Genius)
    Interesting short video talking about how Crimson Desert creates one particular illusion as part of creating the image of a highly detailed world. There are a lot of these in modern game engines but this is focused on one particular point that the company behind Crimson Desert has not disclosed. It appears to be a known technique but not one used in many games.
    The issue is that even with modern game engines a large open world can’t possibly have detailed geometry for every wall, box, door, windows and other background bit in the game. Instead games use various tricks to create the impression they do with less real information.

  417. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘That’s the story’: First woman of color astronaut touts Artemis II diversity

    Dr. Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in space, reacts to the “inclusiveness” of the Artemis II mission: “We will get the most out of space when we have more perspectives.”

    Video is 3:18 minutes, hosted by Ali Velshi

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Artemis II splashes down after historic mission

    Ali Velshi hosts as the four astronauts of the historic Artemis II mission return from deep space.

    Video is 9:01 minutes.

  418. JM says

    Raw Story: Judges done giving Trump DOJ benefit of the doubt after massive errors caught: report

    A February 2025 memo from Bondi directed DOJ attorneys to “vigorously” defend Trump’s policies and referred to them as “his” counsel, according to a former Justice Department attorney who spoke anonymously to Bloomberg. The result, sources say, is a culture where lawyers are wary of pressing federal agencies about the accuracy of information they receive, because challenging it feels like challenging the boss.

    It’s common that once top level officials are out of office that some material about them surfaces. Replacements throwing dirt on their predecessor, officials getting some revenge and officials trying to get some cover for what they did under the replaced official. Any or all of those could apply here.
    The material itself is not a surprise to anybody who knows how the Trump administration works. Bondi told the DOJ to act as if they are Trump’s personal lawyers. This included not challenging material provided by other parts of the government. Thus the sudden explosion of DOJ officials providing incorrect material in court.
    The Bloomberg source article also talks about how judges are getting less and less tolerant of it. Traditional the DOJ operated under what was called “presumption of regularity”. The idea that basic facts provided by the DOJ were correct, that witness testimony provided by the DOJ might be wrong but the DOJ had already taken steps to insure the basic verifiable facts had been verified. None of that is true now, the DOJ has been burned multiple times with entirely incorrect evidence. Judges have had to start demanding more evidence of the DOJ and more supporting material. This slows all of the cases the DOJ brings beyond the various issues of the government lying to the court on a regular basis.

  419. says

    Well I’m Glad We Got Through the Week Without Committing Genocide

    When I saw him talking about killing a whole civilization, I just assumed he meant ours. That the Project 2025 termites had finally gnawed through enough support beams to bring the whole motherfucker down around our ears.

    Then I remembered Donnie Dotard’s late-onset megalomania.

    “Oh right! We handed command of the most awesome goddamn military force in human history to an amoral narcissist who grows more desperate to rewrite his legacy with each fresh application of concealer to the ever-expanding death splotch on his left hand.”

    “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he mashed out with his stunted, ineffectual fingers […].

    And maybe Catturd was impressed, but the Iranians sure weren’t. If their centuries-old culture did indeed face genocide, at least they’d troll their annihilator with surprisingly amusing AI Lego videos first. And let me say, I was already plenty ashamed of my country before we lost a meme war to medieval theocrats.

    He needed a little help from Pakistan to chicken out this time, but Power Plant Day and Bridge Day are best left unobserved, don’t you think? […]

    Yes, this holiday season, every autocrat in your life will be clamoring for a Strait of Hormuz of their very own. Who needs more than two dolls when you can make the global economy dance to your merest whim? Why, even the President of the United States of America can’t help but fantasize about all that sweet, sweet toll revenue.

    …all he has to do is work out the details with the religious fanatic whose father he killed. How hard could it be for the master dealmaker? […]

    […] Everybody assumes our “next conquest” will be the invasion of Cuba, or maybe even Greenland, but my money’s on the Vatican. That’s right, if this so-called Pope insists upon preaching peace, Uncle Sam might have to get Avignon on his anointed ass.

    […] Am I a hypocrite for wanting peace in the Middle East while simultaneously hoping this MAGA civil war slides into mutually assured destruction territory as soon as humanly possible? Trump, Tucker, Candace, Megyn, Alex Jones […]

    JD Vance flew to Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orbán, because convincing an electorate to sign on for a second helping of shit is integral to his own political future. Oddly, the Vice President declined to visit any other NATO allies on his trip, just the flailing Putin puppet. Hmm. And his speeches are usually such big hits on th’continent, too.

    […] I should be madder to see Russian propagandists cavorting around the White House lawn at the Easter Egg Roll, but if you really wanna spend your leisure time around a decomposing rapist while he rants at children about the autopen, knock yourselves out, dorks.

    Turd Reich apparatchiks probably shouldn’t place too much faith in their boss’ (alleged) promise to hand out blanket pardons on the way out the door, because there’s no fucking way the old man’s reading and writing skills survive another three years.

    […] After a reeeeeeeal rough stretch, it looks like Bryon Noem is finally back on the path to a quiet, simple life of normalcy and digniOPE, NEVER MIND.

    Goddammit, Donald Trump didn’t launch a 200-front trade war just so Donald Trump could build his ballroom out of European steel! Or wait, since the aforementioned Eurosteel was clearly a bribe to get out from under tariffs, maybe the system is working precisely as intended. […]

    Melania wants you to know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t swap her to the Donald for fifty bucks and a case of beer. Called a whole-ass press conference to say so, in fact. Say, speaking of the Epstein files, wasn’t there something about a game show host sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl? I wonder whatever happened to that guy…

    […] The CDC doesn’t want the public to know that Covid vaccines work, which strikes me as maybe not the most efficient way of controlling diseases, though I suppose we should be thankful they’re not promoting ivermectin. Or bleach.

    The regime announced the end of the U.S. Forest Service, which is obsolete now that we understand all of our woodlands’ problems can be solved with six or seven brooms. […]

    Excerpt from the Guardian link above that refers to the U.S. Forest Service:

    US public lands will “pay the price” of a drive by Donald Trump’s officials to restructure the agency […]

    All regional offices of the US Forest Service, which manages 78m hectares (193m acres) of land – roughly the size of Texas – are set to close as part of an overhaul launched by the Trump administration. The service has already shed hundreds of staff members since Trump returned to power last year.

    The latest restructuring, announced on 30 March, includes a move to relocate the agency’s headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City, Utah; the consolidation of 57 research facilities into a single site in Colorado; and the closure of regional offices across the country in favor of 15 politically appointed “state directors”.

    “Trump’s moves are illegal, because this kind of activity was explicitly prohibited in fiscal year 2026 appropriations,” said Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), which represents 20,000 workers at the service. “The Republican Congress is allowing the White House to break the law and violate the constitution, without so much as a peep from our big, brave, so-called freedom-seeking Republicans. They won’t even uphold their own oaths to support and defend the constitution from tyranny.” […]

  421. says

    Minneapolis Star Tribune:

    A U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota ruled Thursday that multiple federal agencies have three weeks to produce troves of unredacted evidence related to the killing of Renee Good by federal immigration agent Jonathan Ross. […]

    Good news.

    More good news:

    Sixteen years ago, the Supreme Court handed corporations the power to buy American elections and called it free speech. Montana just found an exit ramp.

    The Montana Plan—a proposed Montana ballot measure that’s gaining steam—doesn’t overturn Citizens United. It goes around it. States grant corporate charters and decide the powers those charters include. It would simply remove “spending in elections” from those powers, killing dark money at the source.

    The Montana Mining Association and the Montana Chamber of Commerce immediately ran to court to kill it before voters could sign on. But on April 2, the Montana Supreme Court rejected them 7-0 […]

    Posted by the dworkinsubstack

  422. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/heck-of-a-week-jd-vance

    “Heck Of A Week, JD Vance!”

    Yes, yes, no one wants to think about JD Vance any more than they have to. Including Donald John Trump! Seems he left Vance out of his inner loop on the Armageddon he was mulling in Iran over the weekend, and instead sent him, along with Melania’s embattled former modeling agent Paolo Zampolli, to go support Viktor Orbán in Budapest instead ahead of the parliamentary elections there tomorrow.

    But nobody was picking up the phone! [video] [audience laughs]

    […] Can’t wait to find out if Hungary succumbed to the charms of Vance and Viktor Orbán’s party of Russian-bot-pushed AI slop pretending that Ukraine is bombing Hungary. Trump chimed in his support on Friday too! [social media post promising economic goodies if Orbán wins]

    And Vance Xitted only two things last week: his Easter greeting — unlike the boss, he and Junior at least gave a hat tip to the reason for the season — and then after Armageddon had been somehow averted on Tuesday, that speech in Hungary. In which he blasted the “bureaucrats of Brussels,” [Vance insulted the EU again!] meaning the EU made of 27 member states to which Hungary voluntarily belongs, for “trying to destroy” Hungary’s economy by not letting them tap into sanctioned Russian oil, and not letting Orbán have $17 billion, which they are withholding until the government attempts to stop its rampant corruption and restores judicial independence. [Vance represented the USA as being on the wrong side of every issue.]

    Those bucks represent 8 percent of Hungary’s GDP. Points out the Guardian,

    over the last 22 years, Hungary has benefited hugely from EU funds. By 2018, more than 80% of Hungary’s public investment came from European funds intended to help poorer EU member states catch up with their wealthier neighbors. [!]

    Hand-biting, that is also the MAGA/MHGA way! Watch it all if you want, trigger warning for maddening. [video] [audience frowns]

    The lowlights […]

    He co-signed Viktor Orbán’s lies that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had threatened Orbán or Hungary somehow.

    “It’s completely scandalous. You should never have a foreign head of government […] threatening the head of government of an allied nation.”

    No, he said that! With his mouth!

    Will Hungarians succeed in getting that corrupt old slug and his Fidesz party off their backs? Maybe! Many in the country of 10 million seem mighty enthused! [video]

    Holy Pope Threats!

    Also on Tuesday, right before the 8 p.m. Armageddon deadline, the patriarch of the church to which JD Vance vowed to follow in 2019 pointedly commented,

    “I would like to invite everyone to think in their hearts of so many innocent children, so many totally innocent elderly people who would also be victims of this escalation,” he said. “I would like to invite everyone to pray, but also to seek ways to communicate. Perhaps with congressmen, with authorities, saying that we don’t want war, we want peace.”

    […] Pete Hegseth’s allegedly Catholic humility-free Under Secretary of WAR for Policy Elbridge Colby (also close buddy of also allegedly Catholic Vance’s) summoned Vatican Ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre to try to get him to go strong-arm Pope Bob Leo XIV from Chicago into taking Trump and Vance’s side on them bombing the shit out of whatever innocent people they want. They apparently invoked the Avignon Papacy period of 1309 to 1376, which followed agents of Philip IV of France kidnapping 73-year-old Pope Boniface VIII on Maundy Thursday in Rome and giving him a rough ride to Avignon that killed him within a month. And then there were some French popes, la comptine des enfants avec chanson, whole thing. [video]

    Oh to have been a microwave on the wall for how Ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre replied to that mouthy, arrogant little disciple.

    JD Vance, smarmily, declined to comment. [video]

    Meet JD’s Right-Hand Man

    Speaking of doctrines and JD Vance, also don’t miss the recent profile in New York magazine of his closest confidant, one 35-year-old chief of staff Jacob Reses.

    He is the mysterious “Jacob” in the leaked Signal chat that showed Trump-administration officials in 2025 planning a strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen. [Interesting!] He is a conservative nationalist who was lauded as an emerging leader on the New Right trying to remake the GOP into a more populist party. He is Vance’s most important adviser on domestic politics [!] “by a country mile,” says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine. “Reses is clearly the Kissinger to the Nixon.”

    Unlike his boss, who appears to relish publicly excoriating his enemies and defending the Trump administration on social media, Reses keeps his X account private. There, he has taken to boosting posts embracing the virulent strain of Christian nationalism that has recently taken over the Republican Party. In September 2025, Reses, who declined requests for an interview, reposted Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s approving quote of the following screed: “To save this Nation of Kindness that has bestowed such blessing on us, we Jews can no longer be squeamish about the majority’s invocation of the Christian deity and other aspects of their faith. The neutering of Christianity has been disastrous for all of us and must end.”

    Sounds like JD Vance is more like the golem that he, Peter Thiel, and Trump have joint custody of.

    Reses has been a devotee of Vance’s ever since his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, turned Vance into a celebrity. In his rapid rise to power, Reses has worked with Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Michael Needham, and Josh Hawley, all of whom constitute important nodes in the constellation of MAGA thought. [yikes]

    [I snipped more of Reses’ background]

    […] Holy Living-Room Couch War!

    And let’s not forget his holy war at home. Wife Usha, who is Hindu, is pregnant, due in late July. Can’t get over Usha saying that they would raise the kids in both traditions then let them pick, and JD saying he hoped Usha would eventually be moved to convert. Sounds like a lifetime of theological battles every holiday, if not every day, but whatever. [video]

    And of course both traditions are staunchly against murdering innocent schoolgirls, or lying to protect criminals. […]

    But that is for another episode of As The Couch Cushion Turns! […]

  423. says

    Ukraine and Russia swap 175 war prisoners as Easter ceasefire starts

    “The POW exchange was mediated by the United Arab Emirates, Russia’s defense ministry said.”

    Ukraine and Russia swapped 175 prisoners of war each on Saturday as a 32-hour ceasefire began on the occasion of Orthodox Easter.

    Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted pictures of the Ukrainian soldiers being welcomed back home.

    The group includes troops who have fought on different war fronts, from Mariupol to the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. Seven civilians were included.

    “Some of them are wounded. Most have been in captivity since 2022. And finally — they are home,” Zelenskyy said.

    Despite the stalemate in diplomatic talks on the end of the war, Moscow and Kyiv agreed to a truce starting on Saturday and lasting until midnight Sunday, when Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter, the Kremlin announced on Thursday.

    […] “Ukraine will adhere to the ceasefire and respond strictly in kind. The absence of Russian strikes in the air, on land, and at sea will mean no response from our side,” Zelenskyy said, showing openness to extend the truce even beyond the agreed deadline.

    “A ceasefire on Easter could also become the beginning of real movement toward peace — our side has made the corresponding proposal,” he wrote on X, saying the idea of a truce extension has been communicated to the Russians.

  424. JM says

    @423 Lynna, OM: In most years of the war there has been an Orthodox Easter truce of some sort but it has also been violated a bit. It may seem trivial but Ukraine doesn’t like Russia unilaterally declaring a cease fire while refusing to agree to any joint cease fires. Easter is too big a holiday for Ukraine to ignore though and they put up with it for Easter. Russian aversion to any sort of joint agreement makes other cease fires difficult.
    Violations of the cease fire make the news a bit but in reality small violations of cease fires along such a broad front is expected. There are always going to be some troops on guard duty that get spooked and open fire on nothing. Plus both sides likely take the cease fire to do some scouting of the no go zone in between the two armies.

  425. birgerjohansson says

    I am including this link in the thread to get some beauty into a drab, blood-soaked time.
    .
    This is not mere ‘heroic fantasy’. It is good heroic fantasy! 
    “Witch Hat Atelier Adapted The Impossible” [to film].

    This, plus ‘Frieren’ and ‘Dungeon Meshi’ are the Big Three in recent anime.

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=MMeKTWxp9t0

  431. JM says

    CNN: US-Iran talks last into the early morning hours in Pakistan

    • Sticking point: Pakistani sources say the discussions have been positive overall, but a stalemate persists over control of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway where the US said it began mine-clearing operations on Saturday.

    Hindustan Times: US-Iran ceasefire talks hit stalemate over Hormuz; Trump shares update after warships cross

    Tensions around the Strait of Hormuz have reportedly stalled the ceasefire talks between the US and Iran. According to a Financial Times report, negotiations underway in Pakistan have hit a deadlock, with the status of the strait becoming a central sticking point.

    There have been a lot of leaks and the information is contradictory with sources saying they are going OK to they are already deadlocked. There is general agreement that control of the Strait of Hormuz is a major issue. Iran wants permanent control, the US disagrees. A lot of 3rd parties not in the talks say it would be illegal.
    There is a lot of contradictory information in general, with both sides apparently leaking things for tactical negotiating advantage and political advantage back home. Pakistan appears to be making some of their own, to play up their role as neutral grounds. Trying to pump up their reputation if things go well but defect any blame if it fails.

    MSN: US destroyer turns back after Iran’s warning near Strait of Hormuz

    A United States naval destroyer, potentially a warship, was compelled to reverse its course as it approached the Strait of Hormuz after receiving a warning from Iran, according to reports from a semi-official Iranian news outlet.

    Same on the US destroyers in the Strait. Some claim that have already passed through it, Trump is saying they are removing mines in the Strait and some sources saying they were blocked by Iran. It isn’t even clear if the two sides are referring to the same incident. The US moving military ships through the Strait during negotiations is a very aggressive move, the sort of clueless aggression that I expect from the Trump administration. Nothing really to gain but impressing some MAGA types in the US but lots to lose in the negotiations.

  433. whheydt says

    Re: JM @ #431…
    One doesn’t use destroyers to remove mines…unless you’re planning to lose one destroyer per cleared mine.

  434. says

    Staff At Minnesota Deportation Hub Received ‘Obscene’ Trump-Themed Challenge Coins Adorned With Skulls

    Image at the link.

    Federal employees involved in the massive operation that led to a surge of deportations and detentions around Minneapolis in recent months have received a souvenir from the controversial mission. A federal worker provided TPM with images of a challenge coin that was given to employees from various government agencies at the B.H. Whipple Federal Building Minnesota, which holds a detention center and has served as a headquarters for ICE agents and others involved in the controversial Minneapolis operation, which was dubbed “Metro Surge.” The commemorative token includes portraits of President Donald Trump and a person who appears to be White House Border Czar Tom Homan glaring out from under a skull.

    The federal employee who provided TPM with images of the coin requested anonymity to avoid retaliation; TPM verified that the person has worked in the building. We have redacted some potentially identifying information from the images of the coin. According to the worker, the coin was distributed within the building this month. […]

    A DHS spokesperson provided a statement stressing that Customs and Border Protection has a process for reviewing and approving “branded merchandise,” including challenge coins.

    “[…] One side of the coin features a skull, which has glowing eyes, a helmet, and mask. That grim visage, which is flanked by a pair of assault rifles, appears above the words: “OPERATION METRO SURGE MINNESOTA” and “ONE NATION UNDER GOD.” Trump and a figure who appears to be Homan are depicted below the text along with an American flag, flames, a police dog, and a row of masked agents in tactical gear bearing the names of different Department of Homeland Security agencies and units that have played a key role in the White House’s mass deportation efforts. The different groups highlighted on the coin include the Border Patrol as well as two of that agency’s elite units, BORTAC and BORSTAR, which have played a particularly prominent role in the use of force against civilians that has accompanied the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in urban areas.

    […] The challenge coin distributed at the Whipple Building seemingly revels in the violence that occurred in conjunction with Operation Metro Surge. On the flip side, the token showcases another helmeted skull with glowing eyes looming over officers in tactical gear carrying a U.S. flag amid an explosion, burning buildings, and a low flying military helicopter. The base of the coin features the text “METRO SURGE URBAN OPERATIONS.”

    […] Whether this coin came from an official source or underwent an official review, its distribution in a federal building is a notable indication of the culture within the agencies involved in Trump’s immigration enforcement surge. […]

    The federal worker who provided TPM with the images of the coin distributed at the Whipple Building said they felt the souvenir was inappropriate given its seeming glorification of the violence […]

    “It says ‘urban operations.’ That’s operations against American civilians. They’re celebrating that,” the worker said, adding, “It’s obscene. It’s wrong.”

    TPM is interested in learning more about this coin and other similar tokens. If you have information about challenge coins please do not hesitate to get in touch with us on Signal.

    View the “Operation Metro Surge” challenge coin below.

  435. StevoR says

    At least 30 people were killed on Saturday in a stampede in the northern countryside of Haiti, authorities said, warning the death toll could rise.

    Jean Henri Petit, head of Civil Protection for Haiti’s Nord Department said the stampede occurred at the Laferriere Citadel, an early-19th-century fortress built shortly after Haiti’s independence from France.

    One of Haiti’s most popular tourist attractions, the fortress on Saturday was packed with students and visitors who had come to participate in the annual celebration of the UNESCO World Heritage site.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-12/haiti-stampede-at-least-30-dead-and-death-toll-could-rise/106555878

  436. StevoR says

    NASA’s press conference with the Artemis II Integrity crew here which starst at the 35 mins mark and goes for an hour and twenty minutes total.

  437. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Will Stancil:

    Okay this isn’t really happening anymore, so I can tell you how l had “internal ICE sources”: the 3000 very stir-crazy ICE agents were all going wild on Minneapolis Tinder. Local girls would match with them and string them along for intel. They loved to brag about what they were doing all day. They’d send live videos of raids, tell them where they were staying, and generally dump tons of operational information out to any girl who’d pretend to be impressed by it.

    My friend who did this would wait until her cover was blown, find the guys’ wives in Texas or wherever, and forward them a history of the messages.

    I’m sure they were aware this was happening, but the reality is that they had no way to prevent it unless they could figure out a way to get thousands of bored men in the dead of winter give up every hope of getting laid.

    Rando: “ICE fishing.”

  438. Silentbob says

    @ 435 StevoR

    What a bizarre link. A stampede of what? Of people? What caused this stampede? The link gives no clue whatsoever apart from a cryptic reference to rain in the last sentence. A stampede simply “occurred”.

    A case study in how not to write a news story.

  440. StevoR says

    @ 438. Silentbob : Umm, given people were killed in it I think its pretty obvs from the context.

  441. StevoR says

    After an absolute marathon of overnight negotiations and historic high-level talks between the United States and Iran, a deal to end the war that has thrown the Middle East and global energy supplies into chaos has not been reached.

    Early this morning local time in Islamabad, US Vice-President JD Vance said after “21 hours”, the pair hadn’t reached an agreement. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America,” he said in a short press conference before leaving Pakistan.

    Iran’s semi-official news agency Tasnim reported that “excessive demands” by the US had hindered negotiations.

    So what were the main sticking points? What’s happening now? And where does this leave the ceasefire?

    … (Snip)..

    In the meantime, the world has been left with a stark image.

    At the end of his brief press conference after the negotiations, the US vice-president tapped the lectern, turned heel and walked out.

    The question of “are we going back to war?” shouted at him was left unanswered.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-12/iran-us-war-ceasefire-peace-talks-jd-vance-negotiations/106555976

  442. StevoR says

    Plus live blog on the ceasefire talks & Trump-Netanyahu’s war on Iran here :

    US Vice-President JD Vance says no deal has been struck with Iran after delegations from both countries engaged in historic negotiations for over 21 hours.

    He says the US delegation in Islamabad, Pakistan, is set to leave after giving its “best and final offer” to Iran.

    Follow live…

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-11/iran-war-live-updates-pakistan-peace-talks-trump-vance/106554508

  443. StevoR says

    Via The New Arab :

    Whether by design or indecision, Donald Trump continues to keep the world guessing. Even after the Pakistani-brokered, fragile two-week ceasefire, odds are split on whether he sticks to diplomacy or is simply using negotiations as a smokescreen to transition the war into a new phase.

    The precedent for deceiving Tehran via negotiations remains fresh, bitter, and instructive. Based on his track record, “guessing” Trump’s intent becomes less difficult: war is the destination; diplomacy is the cover.

    … (Snip)..

    Despite the current buzz about a temporary ceasefire, it is difficult to imagine this “mad war” ending halfway. The momentum behind its continuation until the so-called total victory far outweighs the scattered calls for an immediate ceasefire. This includes Iran’s strategy of attacking neighbouring Gulf states.

    Leveraging global pressure through oil and gas disruptions has backfired, yielding more regional enemies than political leverage. Whether reports of Saudi and Emirati requests for Trump to “finish the job” are accurate or not, the sentiment across Gulf governments has shifted. They are increasingly receptive to a prolonged campaign that ends future Iranian threats to their countries.

    This evolution bolsters Trump’s narrative that he is fighting a defensive war for the entire region, rather than merely shielding Israeli interests. However, as the conflict drags on and the human and economic costs mount, the possibility of a middle-ground resolution through negotiation vanishes. In this climate, a diplomatic exit is no longer just unlikely; it is being systematically engineered out of existence.

    Source : https://www.newarab.com/opinion/trumps-ceasefire-trick-escalation-pessimists-view

  444. StevoR says

    Whilst a very long way from that war a group of our relatives are fighting their own ugly one too :

    Even so, their remote home became the scene of a primitive “civil war” — one that dramatically changed their group.

    It quickly turned lethal.

    The schism in their community has been documented for the first time in a new report published by a team of researchers based out of the University of Texas.

    The peer-reviewed report, published in the journal Science this week, reviewed decades of shifting social ties among the chimpanzee community.

    Researchers had been continuously monitoring the group since 1995, according to Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist..

    ..(Snip)..

    According to the report, the group had been part of a single large community in Ngogo for the first two decades of research.

    Between 1998 and 2014 — the “pre-fission” era, before things went sour — the group existed in overlapping “clusters” throughout the year.

    … (Snip)..

    The first sign of trouble, the report said, came on June 24, 2015.

    On that day, members of the western and Central clusters approached each other near the centre of the group’s territory.

    “Rather than reuniting … the Western chimpanzees ran away, and the Central chimpanzees chased them,” the report said.

    Members of the two groups avoided each other for six weeks afterwards — something the report noted had not been seen before.

    From then on, the group’s separation or modularity increased “sharply”, with 2015 marking the beginning shift from one fluid group to two rival groups.

    By 2018, a permanent fission was “evident based on social, special, and reproductive data”.

    “What was once the centre of a shared territory had become a border,” the report said.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-10/chimpanzees-wage-civil-war-in-uganda-research-reveals/106543254

  445. StevoR says

    Then even further away still in a very different environment :

    The iconic emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal are edging closer to extinction, according to a projection by the world’s largest environmental network.

    The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has released an update to its “Red List of Threatened Species”.

    The list now categorises both animals as “endangered” because of human-induced impacts on the environment.

    “The declines of the emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal on the IUCN Red List are a wake-up call on the realities of climate change,” the organisation’s director general, Dr Grethel Aguilar, said.

    Emperor penguins — the largest of the 18 penguin species in the world — were previously categorised as “near threatened”.

    But between 2009 and 2018, their numbers fell by about 10 per cent.

    The rapid reduction was linked to the early break-up and loss of sea ice, which can cause chicks to freeze or drown.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-09/tas-emperor-penguins-and-seals-listed-as-endangered/106545150

    Sorry, a lot of bad news around today..

  447. Silentbob says

    @ 439 StevoR

    How embarrassing that 40+ years after learning to glide a vehicle after re-entry to a runway landing the US has atrophied to the most primitive landing technique ever devised – the “splashdown”.

    There’s something wrong when 45 years ago looks like the future:

  450. says

    JFC

    Trump orders Strait of Hormuz blockade after peace talks fail

    “Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!” President Donald Trump warned Sunday.

    Related video at the link.

    After peace talks with Iran broke down, President Donald Trump on Sunday ordered a U.S. military blockade of the Strait of Hormuz […]

    “Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” the president said in a Truth Social post. [WTF?]

    […] In an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Trump was asked about his controversial statement on April 7, when he threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization.”

    “That statement got them to the bargaining table,” Trump said, adding, “They haven’t left the bargaining table. I predict they come back and they give us everything we want.”

    Trump’s announcement about the U.S. blockade of the strait comes after the United States and Iran failed to reach a deal after 21 hours of face-to-face negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, this weekend. Trump said the ceasefire struck last week is contingent on Iran reopening the vital sea route for the world’s oil and gas and other essential supplies.

    The president said in his social media announcement that he has instructed the Navy to “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.” He said the blockade “will begin shortly.” [OMFG]

    Vice President JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation to the peace talks on behalf of the U.S., told reporters Sunday morning before leaving Pakistan that the U.S. gave Iran their “final and best offer” — suggesting, perhaps, negotiations will resume.

    While Vance declined to elaborate on why the talks brown down, Trump said Sunday that “most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not.”

    “That country will not have nuclear weapons,” he said on Fox News. […]

    “We will also begin destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits,” Trump said Sunday on Truth Social. “Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!”

    Other key figures lamented the failed talks. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, who mediated several rounds of talks, called them “intense and constructive” and reaffirmed his country’s commitment to facilitate a deal. […]

    “It is hard to see talks continuing, let along concluding with a deal, without some give on both ends,” said Rob Malley, who led U.S. negotiations with Iran during the Obama administration. “And the problem is the two parties believe they have the upper hand […]

  451. StevoR says

    Wait, what? Trump is now BLOCKADING the Straits of Hormuz!?

    United States President Donald Trump says the US Navy will commence a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, after “Iran promised to open the Strait of Hormuz” and “knowingly failed to do so”.

    In his first comments since negotiations in Islamabad between the US and Iran failed to reach an agreement, the US president said on social media platform Truth Social that Iran’s actions in the strait were ‘”world extortion”.

    He also said the US Navy would begin “destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits (sic)”.

    … (Snip)..

    ..Defending the planned blockade, Mr Trump told Fox News that Iran could not control which ships go through the Strait of Hormuz, declaring that either every ship should have safe passage or none would.

    “We’re not going to let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like,” Trump said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures program.

    “It’s going to be all or none and that’s the way it is.”

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-12/trump-blockades-strait-of-hormuz-iran-us-war/106556552

    The can’t beat them so join them approach? WTF?

  452. says

    Despite apocalyptic warnings, California fast food wage hike didn’t kill jobs

    In their third report on the subject and second update of data, University of California researchers reach the same conclusions that have twice bedeviled the anti-wage hike sector of the restaurant industry:

    California’s $20 an hour fast food minimum wage, instituted in 2024, did not reduce employment.

    It led to only the most modest of price increases — barely noticeable to a consumer.

    It significantly improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of California workers in many of the industry’s largest fast-food chains, with an average wage increase of more than 10%.

    Those results have held steady across three years of work by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. They also align with a previous study on the California law conducted jointly by Harvard University’s Kennedy Center and UC San Francisco, as well as with long-established research showing that minimum wage increases generally don’t affect employment numbers or prices much.

    […] “We have some entirely new data” in the report issued April 1, said Michael Reich, chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Berkeley institute. “The results, though, are pretty much the same as before.”

    […] opponents suggested that raising the floor for fast-food workers from $16 to $20 an hour would prompt employers to shed jobs, dramatically raise prices or both.

    The Berkeley studies, beginning in 2024, have consistently found no such thing. [!] In the most recent research, Reich and co-author Denis Sosinskiy concluded that the higher minimum has increased the average weekly wage for covered fast food workers by about 11%, but did not reduce employment. In terms of what we pay at the cash register, the report found that restaurant owners had increased their prices by only about 1.5% — or six cents on a $4 item.

    [The wage law] is applied only to the largest fast-food chains, those with more than 60 locations nationally. In California, that means that about 525,000 employees are potentially affected by the $20 minimum out of the roughly 750,000 who work at fast-food locations in the state.

    Second, the effect of the wage was never going to be as severe as threatened, because a significant number of workers were already making well more than $16 an hour — and some chains, including In-N-Out Burger, routinely paid far more than that in order to attract talent and prevent turnover. […]

    In other words, actual wages didn’t go up 25% just because the minimum went from $16 to $20. The Berkeley study found that average wages in the state went up by less than half that.

    […] So why did prices go up only 1.5%? Reich says it’s because labor costs account for only about 30% of most fast food businesses’ overall costs. Thus, an 11% average raise meant their overall costs went up only about 3%, half of which they passed on to the customer.

    Industry-funded research has attempted to paint a grimmer picture of the wage law. A report by one group last year blamed 10,700 fast food job losses in California on the $20 figure, though it began counting those losses almost 10 months before the new law took effect. The conservative Hoover Institution, meanwhile, had to retract a similar report after concluding that its author included data points that proved to be misinterpreted. [Misinformation.]

    Asked for comment on the new UC Berkeley findings, the advocacy group Save Local Restaurants CA pointed to a UC Santa Cruz study that found higher menu prices, fewer hours and benefits for workers and an accelerated move toward automation by fast-food store owners — the result, it said, of the higher minimum wage.

    […] hundreds of thousands of California workers have been able to move closer to an actual living wage thanks to the change.

    In most of the state, $20 an hour still isn’t near enough, and the state government-appointed Fast Food Council has not approved a cost-of-living increase since the law’s inception.The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates that a single adult with no dependents needs to earn $30.48 an hour to afford basic living costs in the state […]

    Still, the fast-food wage remains a significant achievement, one that, according to the Berkeley research, was pulled off without the serious side effects that its detractors foretold. That body of evidence continues to grow, while the wage’s beneficiaries continue to scrap for a decent living in the Golden State.

  453. says

    Follow-up to the excerpt in comment 419 from a Guardian article.

    New Yorker link

    “The Forest Service ‘Reorganizes’ Under Trump”
    By Bill McKibben

    “The agency has been a force across rural America. The changes will make lots of room for lumber lobbyists, less for forest science.”

    On a recent morning in central Vermont, where I live, it was raining, and the wood frogs had just begun to chorus. The sap run from the maple trees has started to dwindle as the branches begin to bud out. There is a timeless quality to a New England spring (or as timeless as anything can be in an age of rapid climate change), and part of that timelessness is the United States Forest Service, whose land boundaries I wander across most days on rambles through the woods.

    For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century.

    The Forest Service controls a hundred and fifty-four national forests and twenty national grasslands—at a hundred and ninety-three million acres, that’s the second-largest land base, public or private, in the country, trailing only the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the nation’s federal rangelands. Sometimes the national forests are confused with the (much smaller) national-park system, which is understandable—often those parks butt up against the forests, and the uniforms of the two services look a little alike, and that’s before we’ve even considered the Fish and Wildlife Service. But, if you see people driving a minty-green pickup, they’re from the Forest Service, a job that implies a very particular history.

    [I snipped history that includes President Theodore Roosevelt actions and those of his first Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s.]

    […]\if providing resources for economic growth was the Forest Service’s founding ethos, over time it has, in patches, reflected a more John Muirish view: the national-forest system now includes about half of all the designated “wilderness” in the lower forty-eight states. When you drive into a national forest (and you likely have, since the Service retains the largest road network in the world, eight times the length of the interstate-highway system), you pass a sign that proclaims it a “Land of Many Uses.” In the Green Mountain National Forest, near where I live, there’s not just timber production but, also, the Breadloaf Wilderness, big stretches of the Long Trail (America’s first long-distance hiking trail), snowmobile corridors, ski areas, and a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail with signs every few hundred yards quoting his poems.

    Although there’s always been pressure on the Service to “increase the cut” and harvest more timber for local mills and builders, and although this has often led to egregious clear-cutting […] there’s also been a measurable move toward sounder science.

    Aldo Leopold, for instance, essentially invented the field of conservation biology while working on game management in the national forests of the Southwest; the U.S.D.A. website, as of this writing, still pays tribute to his un-Trumpian ideas about “the benefit that comes from slowing down and taking the time to listen to nature. In today’s world, being quiet is a valuable commodity; taking time to stop and listen for those minute details outdoors that weave a tapestry of stories all around us is a rewarding experience if we but stop and pay attention.”

    […] Sound science, we have learned, is anathema to the Trump Administration, which moved within weeks of taking office this term to demand more timber production from America’s forests. So it was no surprise that part of the “reorganization” announced last week involved the ceasing of most of the experimental-forest research and closure of the research stations in the U.S.F.S. network. These are the sites of experiments that can reach back for decades; since trees, by definition, take a fairly long time to grow, that span allows scientists to understand how forests develop and to look for the changes that a warming climate is producing.

    But there’s a deeper message in the reorganization, too, which shuts down the Service’s nine regional offices and relocates its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. Utah is at the heart of what’s been called the Sagebrush Rebellion, which rose during the Reagan era to challenge the prevailing management of federal lands, and, indeed, the entire idea of federal lands. In recent years, Utah’s senator Mike Lee has led efforts to sell off huge tracts of those lands across the West to developers. [!]

    […] The U.S.D.A. last month announced big loans and grants to companies revitalizing sawmills and wood-processing infrastructure.

    […] the gutting of the Forest Service couldn’t come at a more inopportune moment. This winter was by far the hottest ever recorded across the Western U.S., and that has left the mountains of the West, where Forest Service lands are primarily concentrated, with the smallest snowpacks in recorded history, which, a new study from Western Colorado University found last month, is intimately linked to wildfire danger. The possibility—the probability—of conflagration is on every Western mind. It turns out that conservation really does matter: when you burn too much oil, draw too much water, cut too many trees, you eventually end up in enormous trouble. The Trump Administration seems to have decided that, if we’re in this bad a fix, we might as well make the last few dollars out of it, on every possible front. To borrow, out of context, a Trump quote from last weekend, “All Hell will reign down.”

  455. says

    Orbán’s 16-year rule over Hungary ends in crushing election defeat

    “The Hungarian prime minister concedes to Péter Magyar, who is set to win a supermajority in the 199-seat parliament.”

    Good news.

    The 16-year reign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is at an end after a crushing election loss on Sunday that will send political shockwaves from Washington to Moscow.

    The EU’s most autocratic leader — a close ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin — was on course to lose by a decisive margin in Sunday’s vote.

    With more than 72 percent of the vote counted, his opponent Péter Magyar looked set to win 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament. Orbán’s Fidesz party was on track to win only 54.

    Orbán conceded, with tears in his eyes, saying: “However it turned out, we will serve our country and the Hungarian nation from the opposition.”

    If the current margin of victory holds, Magyar will secure a supermajority in parliament that will allow him to unravel key features of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” — demolishing the prime minister’s tight control over the judiciary, state companies and the media.

    Orbán’s departure will come as a huge relief to the EU, whose systemic weaknesses he has exposed and exploited for years, most recently by helping Putin block €90 billion of European support to Ukraine. [!]

    […] A heavy loss for the Hungarian premier will also deliver a painful blow to Trump’s MAGA movement, which has viewed Hungary’s prime minister as a talismanic trailblazer for its own brand of anti-immigrant, Christian-oriented nationalism. [!]

    Brussels officials have long accused Orbán of undermining key pillars of Hungarian democracy — from the judiciary to the media — and of helping Putin block vital EU support to Kyiv

    [And those two paragraphs above reveal the reasons that this defeat for Orbán is good news.]

    Trump offered several personal endorsements before the race — backed up by visits from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance — but could do nothing to swing a race that was shaped by growing public frustration over Hungary’s ailing economy, and the corruption and cronyism associated with Orbán. [Impotent and incompetent Trump administration]

    […] With this two-thirds majority, the government could kill off the structures that keep 80 percent of media under Fidesz’s influence, reclaim state assets handed to Orbán-aligned foundations and think tanks, and rewrite election rules long skewed to make it difficult for any contender to remove a party from power, paving the way for a return to democratic pluralism.

  456. says

    Follow-up to comment 455.

    Orbán’s Hungary drove a top university campus into exile. JD Vance said it should be a model for the U.S.

    “The closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said in 2024.

    The Central European University in Hungary’s capital still looks the part.

    Its limestone entrance rises above a grand 1820s mansion, its newer additions all hard modern lines and confidence. It has won architecture awards. It was built to suggest a certain kind of Hungary, too: outward-looking, liberal, at ease with the West.

    Today it is eerily quiet.

    Founded by George Soros after the fall of communism, the university says the authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán forced 90% of its teaching operations out of the country in 2019, leaving behind a stark symbol of how far the nation has moved during the prime minister’s 16-year regime.

    “This should be full of students but as you can see it is almost empty,” Márta Pardavi, one of Hungary’s most prominent human rights advocates, said while showing NBC News around the building this week. [photos at the link]

    When the Central European University moved academic activities to Vienna, 130 miles west over the border with Austria, its then rector, Michael Ignatieff, described it as a “dark day for freedom in Hungary” and for academia.

    Someone with a different view of the strongman’s education crackdown is Vice President JD Vance, who was in Hungary this week trying to boost Orbán’s flagging polls ahead of a crucial election Sunday. Vance has championed Orbán as what conservatives can achieve if they get tough on the liberal indoctrination he believes is rife in American colleges and universities.

    “The closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said in 2024, then a Republican senator from Ohio. “I think his way has to be the model for us — not to eliminate universities, but to give the choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.” [Misinformation and ignorance from Vance.]

    […] In 1989, the Hungarian leader actually received a Soros Foundation scholarship to study at Britain’s University of Oxford. But much of Orbán’s criticism of the Central European University has been directed personally at Soros, who is Jewish, often deploying antisemitic tropes in what has become a crusade against the billionaire philanthropist. […]

  457. Pierce R. Butler says

    A very short review of events:

    US President Donald Trump said Friday [4/10] that the “only reason” Iranian officials are still alive is so the US can negotiate with them in an ominous warning ahead of crucial peace talks in Islamabad.

    Trump downplays Iran negotiations, says deal ‘makes no difference’ [Sat, 4/11]

    Seems obvious/blatant to me that (a) Trump set Vance up for failure; (b) the Iranians knew it; and (c) Vance, Witkoff, and possibly even Kushner must have had some inkling.

    However, I have yet to see any “pundit” connect these dots, though I haven’t checked out all the usual suspects. With the US now taking its turn to block the Strait of Hormuz, and Melania-spikeheel-in-mouth-gate, it seems likely this will fall between the cracks along with so many other Trump fubars. Has anyone else here seen this dolchstoss spelled out?

  458. says

    BUDAPEST (The Borowitz Report)—In the immediate aftermath of his stunning defeat on Sunday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban received a visitation from the ghost of Pope Francis, who tore into him for meeting with JD Vance.

    “I warned you not to let that monster near you,” the late pontiff said. “What kind of idiot are you?”

    At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered no comment on the Hungarian election, but said that going forward Vance would participate in Cabinet meetings from a remote location only.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/ghost-of-pope-francis-to-viktor-orban

  460. beholder says

    @440 StevoR

    Your curious choice of the term “stampede” suggests animals were involved. At the very least, even after reading the link it’s not “pretty obvs” what was going on.

  464. birgerjohansson says

    A bit of fun to cheer you up.

    “The DIFFERENCE Between USA And UK Memes!? | Rina Reacts To UK VS USA MEMES ”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=baRovebBzu4
    .
    USA vs Britain is like Sweden vs every other Scandinavian country. ‘Why are you doing things that way?’ ‘You are the ones doing it wrong!’

  465. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Nature – Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real.

    a medical researcher […] dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server […] Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. […] The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks […] major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition […]

    Even more troublingly, […] the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
    […]
    she decided […] on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania—that’s a psychiatric term.”

    [The fake author] Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California. One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”. Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”. […] red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.

  466. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Pierce R. Butler @457:

    Has anyone else here seen this dolchstoss spelled out?

    RawStory – Trump throws JD Vance ‘under the bus’ as part of ominous 2028 plot

    While talks were underway, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) match
    […]
    Cochran, an adjunct professor of information science [wrote on Twitter] “Today Vance realized the deal he made with the devil was not worth it. And that he probably doesn’t have a way out.” As to why Trump had his secretary of state accompany him to a high-profile fighting match rather than take part in the high-stakes negotiations with Tehran, Cochran proposed a theory, and one that aligns with reports that Vance’s apparent opposition to the U.S. war with Iran has created a rift with the president. “Trump clearly knew earlier he had no deal. That’s why he said he didn’t care. He just threw Vance under the bus […] it would not surprise me if Vance was set up to fail so they could cleanly push Rubio in ’28.[“]

    Anjali Dayal (Intl Relations prof):

    Nothing says skilled diplomacy like spending a single day laying out your terms and then going home when they’re not immediately and unilaterally accepted. Call it cynicism, but I suspect an actual anti-interventionist would’ve tried for, you know, maybe a second day of diplomacy.

  468. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Mexico’s Socialist president to roll out universal healthcare

    Mexico’s 120 million citizens will begin to enjoy free, universal access to healthcare from next year […] The first phase of the new universal system will begin on 13 April, with citizens aged 85 and older eligible to register for the ID needed to access care. From January 2027, healthcare institutions will start working together to bridge gaps in access to care.

    Since coming to power in 2024, Sheinbaum has sought to undo decades of damage caused by neoliberal policies […] She has pledged to build 1.8m new homes to tackle a housing shortage while strengthening tenants’ rights. Last year she announced plans to shorten the work week from 48 hours to 40 hours, while increasing the minimum wage by 13%

  472. Nick Wrathall says

    @460 beholder.

    “Stampede” was not StevoR’s word choice. StevoR simply quoted from the report they linked, which you say you read (though given your claim that StevoR chose that term I doubt it).

    But since when are humans not stampeding animals? They seem to undertake said animalistic behaviour with disturbing frequency.

  480. Reginald Selkirk says

    Judge dismisses Trump defamation lawsuit against Murdoch, WSJ about Epstein letter

    A federal judge in Florida on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against media baron Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal, which claimed the newspaper defamed Trump with a story saying the president had sent a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

    But Trump will be given the chance to file a new amended lawsuit in the case, Judge Darrin Gayles said in his ruling in U.S. District Court in Miami.

    Gayles said he had to dismiss the civil complaint because Trump, who has denied sending the letter to his then-friend Epstein in 2003, had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.” …

  481. JM says

    CNN: Trump warns Iran as US military blockade on Iranian ports takes effect

    • US blockade: The US military blockade on all traffic entering and leaving Iranian ports started at 10 a.m. ET today, after weekend peace talks in Pakistan faltered. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has vowed to retaliate.

    US retaliates on Iran with counter blockade. What exactly the US blockade means is not unclear, as usual the Trump administration can’t publish or issue a coherent clear policy. The issue is that the US doesn’t really want to stop ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz, breaking Iran’s blockade is one of the US goals now. The US does want to keep ships from paying Iran for passage. So what the US is saying that the US will stop ships that have paid Iran for passage or stop at an Iranian port.
    AP: US military is poised to blockade Iranian ports, while Tehran threatens ports in the Mideast

    “Security in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman is either for everyone or for NO ONE,” the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting reported Monday. “NO PORT in the region will be safe,” read a statement from the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guard.

    Iran is in a bit of panic with it’s response, making a lot of unclear threats and talking about attacks on other targets because they know an open confrontation with the US Navy is a no go. Iran would be better off hunkering down and concentrate on blocking the Hormuz.

  482. says

    After picking an ugly fight with pope, Trump promotes image panned as ‘blasphemy’

    “[Trump’s] offensive against the pope, followed by the image presenting himself as some kind of American Jesus, represented quite the one-two punch.”

    Related video at the link.

    In 2015, just a couple of months after launching his Republican presidential campaign, then-television personality Donald Trump decided to do something rather provocative: He publicly took aim at Pope Francis.

    The pontiff, the GOP candidate complained at the time, was “very political” and failed to recognize what Trump said was the distinct possibility of Islamic State group terrorists invading the Vatican. Months later, the future American president added, “I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico.”

    After Francis denounced the idea of a border wall dividing the United States and Mexico, Trump upped the ante in February 2016, calling the pope’s comments “disgraceful” and suggesting he was “a pawn” of the Mexican government.

    A decade later, as president, the Republican decided to go even further in an offensive against Francis’ successor, Pope Leo XIV.

    In a 330-word tirade published on Sunday night to his social media platform, Trump wrote, among other things:

    Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. … I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! … Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!

    As part of the same online rant, Trump meandered through a series of odd grievances, touching on Covid-era restrictions, Iran’s nuclear program, the recent U.S. offensive in Venezuela, how impressed he is with the 2024 election results, the stock market and how annoyed he is that the pope “meets with Obama Sympathizers.”

    In case that wasn’t quite enough, Trump — who, last May, thought it would be amusing to push the idea that he should be chosen as the next pope — took credit for Leo’s ascension. “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump,” he wrote, making up a Vatican motivation that never existed in reality.

    Soon after, during a brief Q&A with reporters, Trump was asked why he “attacked” the pope. Instead of challenging the premise, the Republican replied, “I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess. … I am not a fan of Pope Leo.” [video]

    […] Leo, for example, recently chastised those who invoke God as supportive of military might […]

    More recently, after Trump issued a genocidal public threat, saying he was prepared to kill “a whole civilization,” the pope seemed to suggest that Americans should contact members of Congress as part of a political pushback campaign.

    The question was less about whether Team Trump, which has spent months clashing with the faith community, would go after the Catholic leader, and more about how. We now have an answer.

    On Monday morning, aboard the papal plane en route to Algeria, the church’s first-ever American pope told The Associated Press, “I have no fear of the Trump administration.” [!]

    Asked directly about Trump’s comments published on a platform called Truth Social, Leo added, “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.” [!]

    Ouch.

    […] On Sunday night, Trump apparently thought it would also be a good idea to promote an image that appeared to present him as some kind of American Jesus. [Image at the link]

    […]“There is behavior that’s so self-evidently deranged that merely seeing it should lead to fury and disgust,” The New York Times’ David French wrote in response. […]

    UPDATE (April 13, 2026, 11:38 a.m. ET): This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Trump’s online item was removed from his platform.

  483. says

    Alaskan political news, as summarized by Steve Benen:

    * Why are Republicans worried about Alaska’s Senate race? Because former Rep. Mary Peltola continues to position herself as a real contender: The Democrat raised nearly $9 million in the first quarter (January through March), setting a state record. Peltola is taking on Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, in the fall. [summarized from MS NOW]

    * In related news, there are growing concerns in Alaska that the Supreme Court might prohibit late-arriving mail ballots, which would could disenfranchise thousands of Alaskan voters. [summarized from Politico]

  484. says

    Trump II Spirals Deeper Into Madness in Bonkers Weekend

    If you spent the weekend enjoying spring, you’ll be forgiven if you’re a tad disoriented this Monday morning.

    Since we last convened Friday:
    – Viktor Orbán conceded defeat in Hungarian elections.
    – President Trump decided to shut down the Strait of Hormuz for Iran. [head/desk]
    – Eric Swalwell’s political career abruptly flamed out after serious sexual misconduct allegations emerged.
    – Trump openly beefed with the pope while portraying himself as an American Jesus.

    And yet … stating things plainly like that doesn’t begin to capture the bonkers nature of the weekend’s news. Just ask JD Vance, who emerged as the biggest loser after an ignominious trip abroad that included a last-ditch campaign appearance for Orbán and the quick collapse of negotiations to end the Iran conflict he reportedly quietly opposed.

    Latest on the Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz

    Trump’s arc on the Strait of Hormuz goes something like: I will destroy Persian civilization if Iran doesn’t open the strait -> The strait will open automatically on its own after the ceasefire and we can all make money off of ships transiting through it. -> Fine, I’ll close the strait myself.

    Contrary to President Trump’s assertion that the U.S. will blockade the strait, the U.S. military says it’s only a blockade of Iranian ports. [Hmmm. That is quite a different assessment of the U.S. “blockade.”]

    NATO allies are refusing to participate. It is not at all clear what the blockade is intended to accomplish or reasonably could achieve — or how it fits into Trump’s broader strategy, to the extent there is one.

    Iran Damage Assessment

    A trio of NYT articles:
    – Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz
    – New Evidence Further Implicates U.S. Missiles in Strikes That Killed 21 Civilians in Iran
    – Iran’s Schools and Hospitals in Ruins [verified damage to 22 schools and 17 health care facilities]

    Lawless U.S. Boat Strikes Continues

    A U.S.. strike Saturday on two alleged drug-smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific killed five people, raising the death toll in the campaign to at least 168 people. […]

    The Purges: Immigration Judges

    The Trump administration has fired two immigration judges who dismissed high-profile deportation cases against pro-Palestinian international students Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi, the NYT reports. […]

    Monumentalism Watch
    – In a Saturday order, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sent Trump’s vanity ballroom case back to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to sort out whether the project is ballroom or a bunker.
    – Trump unveiled plans for the gargantuan monstrosity he wants to erect at the foot of Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial: [images at the link]

  487. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/iran-cant-blockade-strait-since-february

    “Trump blockading thing that’s already closed in order to reopen that which was previously open.”

    Well, JD Vance led the American side of ceasefire talks with Iran this weekend, and that went about as well as when he breathed on Viktor Orbán and murdered his dictatorship and breathed on the last pope and sucked out what was left of the late pontiff’s will to live.

    So not well.

    Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who led Iran’s side in the talks, addressed Trump in a new statement on his return to Iran: “If you fight, we will fight.”

    And on the American side:

    “We need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon,” said Vice President JD Vance, leading the U.S. side.

    Ooh! Ooh! Idea! They should call Barack Obama, he negotiated a whole thingie-dingie in 2015 where Iran agreed to exactly that and was complying with it. […] time for Donald Trump to blockade the Strait of Hormuz!

    But wait, wasn’t the Strait of Hormuz already blocked by Iran? Largely and for all practical purposes!

    […] at 5:30 Iran time, or 10 a.m. EDT in ‘Murica, Secretary Hegseth will have his Navy blockade the strait, but selectively. It will be “enforced impartially against vessels of all nations,” saith the regime, with the exception that if ships are going back and forth between non-Iranian ports, then they are not blockaded.

    The Navy is also supposed to go find all the mines Iran dropped in the strait.

    So in essence Trump is trying to close off the strait that Iran controls to Iranian ships but open it to everyone else.

    […] Will the Navy actually be able to enforce this? Unclear!

    Experts say it is unlikely the US military would fire missiles or other weapons at tankers, given the risk of an environmental disaster. The most likely option is the US navy will try to force vessels to change course through threats, and if that doesn’t work, they will launch armed boarding parties to take physical control of the ships, experts say.

    “[…] The reality is, this mission is difficult to execute alone and likely unsustainable over the medium to long term,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official during the Biden administration now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

    Will the Navy be able to go find the mines […]? No idea! […]

    And what will this do to global financial markets? Hahahahahahaha, well have you seen the price of oil since Trump’s announcement, back over $100 a barrel? For reference, it was $70 before Trump started his stupid pointless fucking murder war that’s killed Americans and thousands of Iranians and Iranian little girls for absolutely no reason besides the violently abusive stranger danger bloodlust of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. Plus there’s the thousands Benjamin Netanyahu has massacred in Lebanon for whatever psycho deranged bullshit reason he’s making up today.

    Hey wait, you might be asking! Weren’t we five minutes ago allowing Iranian oil to move, and even lifting sanctions on Iranian oil, in order to try to keep global oil prices down? [!!] Why yes.[…]

    Iran’s Revolutionary Guard later said the strait remained under Iran’s “full control” and was open for non-military vessels, but military ones would get a “forceful response,” two semi-official Iranian news agencies reported.

    […]

    In a post on social media on Sunday, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and the country’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote: “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4–$5 gas.”

    Can’t imagine how any of this could go wrong.

    On Sunday, Trump issued one of his trademark babbling all caps decrees on Truth Social, explaining that he was blockading ANY AND ALL ships from entering the strait. (That’s when he wasn’t posting Truth Social memes of himself as literally Jesus, and saying Pope Leo is a real PINO — pope in name only — and that Leo should be grateful to him for the privilege of being given the opportunity to pope in the first place. SEE BELOW.)

    Here is part of that babble:

    Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz. At some point, we will reach an “ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO IN, ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO OUT” basis, but Iran has not allowed that to happen by merely saying, “There may be a mine out there somewhere,” that nobody knows about but them. THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION, and Leaders of Countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted. I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas. We will also begin destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits. Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!

    Only Donald Trump is allowed to do WORLD EXTORTION! Iran should KNOW THAT! Get ready to get BLOWED UP!

    Anyway, clearly something happened between that verbal shitvomit and the actual announcement from CENTCOM, something that forced the regime to TACO things back from “any and all” to only ships going back and forth between Iranian ports. […]

    Let’s finish this post with Trump’s other Sunday presidential activities.

    Here is Trump’s attack on the pope: [social media post]

    And here’s Trump behaving like the literal antichrist as described in 2 Thessalonians and posting a meme of himself as Jesus: [social media post, with image]
    […]

  488. says

    Follow-up to comment 487.

    Comments from readers of the article:

    I like how the two militaristic-cum-Demogorgon guys in the sky over that completely batshit-blasphemy AI slop image are holding hands.
    ——————–
    Fighting with the Pope? Losing a war in Persia? Am I living in late antiquity?
    ———————
    LOL at evangelicals getting the vapors over the blasphemy […] You assholes looked the other way gladly for this 34-count felonious sex pest because he promised you ethnic cleansing. He promised he would torture trans people. He promised you he would roll back rights and tamp down on Black people, which he is doing. […] You know this asshole is all violations of the Ten Commandments wrapped in one.
    ——————————-
    Trump employs Operation If I Can’t Have It, No-One Can.

  489. JM says

    @482 Lynna, OM
    Mediaite: Trump Cooks Up Bonkers Explanation for Why He Posted Meme Seeming to Depict Him as Jesus: ‘I Thought it Was Me as a Doctor’

    “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor — and, had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support,” Trump said. “And only the fake news could come up with that one. So I just heard about it, and I said, ‘How do they come up with that?’ It’s supposed to be me as doctor making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”

    He is either lying and/or his brain has decayed too much.

  490. johnson catman says

    re JM@489: You can omit the “either” and the “/or” in you statement. It is both.

  491. birgerjohansson says

    DJT: “Pope Leo is weak on crime”.
    Wrong! Mike Hammer and Pope Leo put the fear of God into the gangsters of Gotham City.

  492. Steve Morrison says

    @435: I’m skeptical of the word “stampede” here. What almost always happens in crowd disasters is that people are squeezed in the middle of a crowd and die of suffocation. Then the media usually reports it as a “stampede” and the public has the impression that the victims were trampled to death.

  493. says

    As Tax Day arrives, Trump’s decision to kill off IRS Direct File looms large

    When the Biden administration and congressional Democrats approved the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the legislative package included an idea that seemed long overdue: It directed the Treasury Department to create the IRS Direct File system to make it easier for Americans to file their tax returns at no cost, as taxpayers in many other countries already do. [Yep. Good idea.]

    It was implemented in 2024 and proved predictably popular with the public. There was no great mystery as to why: People like free things, especially when it comes to dealing with government bureaucracies they’d rather avoid anyway. The result was a program that demonstrated that the federal government can function more efficiently and make Americans’ lives a little easier.

    Then the 2024 presidential election happened.

    As if on cue, lobbyists for the commercial tax preparation industry asked the Trump administration to reverse course and abandon the policy. Republican officials quickly agreed and ended Direct File after a successful one-year experiment. [Bad idea.]

    As Tax Day arrives this week, The New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum lamented the unnecessary demise of a worthwhile program.

    More affluent households are probably stuck paying for tax prep, at least as long as the tax code retains anything like its current complexity.

    But there is simply no good reason that 100 million households should have to pay to file their taxes. The government ought to regard the existence of a tax preparation industry for standard returns as a parasite on the body politic. Intuit and its rivals are collecting fees for a service that should not exist. [!]

    Appelbaum’s column added that the source code for Direct File is sitting in an online repository. “All that’s missing is an administration willing to stand up for the public interest,” he concluded.

    […] When Donald Trump and his team officially killed off the Direct File program last fall, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said in a written statement, “This is another corrupt decision by the Trump Administration to help corporate donors while raising costs and making life more difficult for the American people. Whether it’s raising price-hiking tariffs, cancelling infrastructure projects, driving up electricity prices, blocking attempts to lower the cost of health care, going to court to prevent hungry people from getting SNAP, or eliminating a no-cost method to file taxes, President Trump is going all out to make life less affordable for American families.”

    It’s not easy for any president, even a competent one, to snap their fingers and magically reduce the cost of living, but White House teams can at least try to make a positive difference. The demise of IRS Direct File offers timely evidence that this Republican administration doesn’t want to bother.

  494. says

    GOP stoops to new racist low to defend Trump’s war

    Republicans Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Rep. Mark Alford of Missouri made the rounds on right-wing media Monday to defend President Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war.

    “Democrats like high gas prices because of their radical climate agenda,” Barrasso told Fox News. “So people understand what the president is doing, agree with him, and know that we need peace and stability and need to protect America long term from the threat of Iran.” [video]

    Meanwhile, Alford decided to skip all pretense and insisted that everything is going according to “plan.”

    “We’re seeing a temporary bump in those fuel prices—I know that’s tough on our farmers, it’s tough on people trying to get to work,” he told Newsmax. “But this is a short-term pain for a long-term gain so that we make sure that we don’t get nuked in the United States of America by Islamic dirtbags.” [video]
    […]

  495. says

    ISLAMABAD (The Borowitz Report)—Negotiations between Iran and the US collapsed over the weekend after Vice President JD Vance scolded the Iranians, “President Trump has made you rich off the Strait of Hormuz and you haven’t said ‘thank you’ once.”

    “The president has spent billions of US taxpayers’ money over the past six weeks,” Vance said. “He’s left your regime intact, hasn’t removed a single pound of enriched uranium, and has enabled you to charge millions for ships to pass through the Strait, which you never could before he attacked you. The least you could do is show a little gratitude.”

    The chief Iranian negotiator seemed unmoved by Vance’s lecture, informing him, “You have no cards.”

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/vance-scolds-iran-trump-made-you

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