March 31, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 4:11 this morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, to to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. 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. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT”

While this morning, Trump appeared to wash his hands of his Iran war, there was an undertone of panic in his post, especially coming as it did just before an exclusive story by Alexander Ward and Meridith McGraw in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump has “told aides he is willing to end the military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.”

Economist Paul Krugman noted this evening that this is essentially an admission of defeat, and Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank and an expert on Iran, called Trump’s suggestion that he is willing to leave the strait closed “unbelievably irresponsible.” Having started a war, she said, the U.S. and Israel cannot walk away from the outcome. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she told the Wall Street Journal reporters.

Nonetheless, the idea the Iran War would end soon was a signal investors wanted to see. On the strength of the hope for a short war, the stock market posted its biggest one-day gain in ten months.

Meanwhile, another aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, left its home port, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, today to head in the direction of the Middle East, although it is not clear if it will support Operation Epic Fury. According to Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes, the carrier will pick up other elements of the carrier group, including the destroyers USS Ross, USS Donald Cook, and USS Mason, as it crosses the Atlantic. The George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group also includes several aircraft squadrons and detachments that make up the 70 or more aircraft in Carrier Air Wing 7, along with more than 5,000 sailors and military personnel.

Nearly 3,500 sailors and Marines from the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in the region on Saturday.

Yesterday, host Laura Ingraham of the Fox News Channel wondered, “as the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning? And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this? How complex it could actually get, and further possibilities of casualties or other damage—the difficulty of dealing with these people? Or was he told this would be relatively quick, in and out?”

Nick Hilden of AlterNet reported that MAGA leader Alex Jones speculated today that ill-health is contributing to Trump’s poor decisions on Iran. “Trump’s run off the edge of a cliff, and I don’t think he’s coming back from it,” Jones said. He urged MAGA to move on without Trump. “We cut bait on Trump and we mobilize against the Democrats,” he said. “Trump is just a minor figure.”

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo picked up the story of another MAGA figure distancing himself from Trump. When he ran for governor in 2024, former North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson flat out denied stories about his participation in pornography forums and social media chats where he attacked Jewish, Black, gay, and transgender people as well as flirting with Holocaust denial and calling himself a “black NAZI!” He even sued CNN for $50 million for defamation, calling their story about him “a high-tech lynching” before dropping the suit after losing the election.

Walker noted that Robinson recently admitted on a podcast that he was lying all along. He “had to ignore the truth at that moment,” he said, because he was shielding Trump. “I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election,” he said. “Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election.” Asked if he would do it again, he answered: “I’d make the exact same decision. I’d fight in the exact same way.”

After Saturday’s No Kings rallies around the country and the world, and after new polls showing his job approval ratings have dropped to new lows, Trump this afternoon signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting. Although both Democratic and Republican election officials insist mail-in voting is secure and reliable, Trump claims it permits Democrats to cheat.
Ironically, earlier this month the story broke of a right-wing activist in Wisconsin who ordered ballots in other people’s names to prove that mail-in voting enabled voter fraud. Last week Harry Wait was convicted of one felony count of identity theft and two misdemeanor counts of election fraud, suggesting mail-in voting is not as insecure as he thought.

Nonetheless, Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”

“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections.” The Senate Rules Committee oversees federal involvement in elections, and its top Democrat, Alex Padilla (D-CA), called the order a “blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” adding that Trump has “no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting.” Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said that the order is “illegal, dangerous and subversive” and that “Donald Trump fears the American people and is willing to violate the Constitution to stop them from voting.”

“See you in court,” posted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “You will lose.”

Another of Trump’s executive orders was in court today, when Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that much of Trump’s order stripping NPR and PBS of funds was unconstitutional. As Brian Stelter of CNN reported, Moss quoted a Supreme Court ruling when he wrote: “The First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.” Republicans in Congress have since voted to cut federal funding from NPR and PBS, but the decision is a victory for the First Amendment.

Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.

The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”

The Department of Justice has already appealed.

Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”

Tonight Summer Said, David S. Cloud, and Michael Amon of the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates is trying to get a United Nations Security Council resolution to call for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE says it will help the U.S. and other allies open the strait by force.

Neophyte said:

March 31, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 4:11 this morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, to to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. 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. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT”

While this morning, Trump appeared to wash his hands of his Iran war, there was an undertone of panic in his post, especially coming as it did just before an exclusive story by Alexander Ward and Meridith McGraw in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump has “told aides he is willing to end the military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.”

Economist Paul Krugman noted this evening that this is essentially an admission of defeat, and Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank and an expert on Iran, called Trump’s suggestion that he is willing to leave the strait closed “unbelievably irresponsible.” Having started a war, she said, the U.S. and Israel cannot walk away from the outcome. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she told the Wall Street Journal reporters.

Nonetheless, the idea the Iran War would end soon was a signal investors wanted to see. On the strength of the hope for a short war, the stock market posted its biggest one-day gain in ten months.

Meanwhile, another aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, left its home port, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, today to head in the direction of the Middle East, although it is not clear if it will support Operation Epic Fury. According to Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes, the carrier will pick up other elements of the carrier group, including the destroyers USS Ross, USS Donald Cook, and USS Mason, as it crosses the Atlantic. The George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group also includes several aircraft squadrons and detachments that make up the 70 or more aircraft in Carrier Air Wing 7, along with more than 5,000 sailors and military personnel.

Nearly 3,500 sailors and Marines from the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in the region on Saturday.

Yesterday, host Laura Ingraham of the Fox News Channel wondered, “as the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning? And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this? How complex it could actually get, and further possibilities of casualties or other damage—the difficulty of dealing with these people? Or was he told this would be relatively quick, in and out?”

Nick Hilden of AlterNet reported that MAGA leader Alex Jones speculated today that ill-health is contributing to Trump’s poor decisions on Iran. “Trump’s run off the edge of a cliff, and I don’t think he’s coming back from it,” Jones said. He urged MAGA to move on without Trump. “We cut bait on Trump and we mobilize against the Democrats,” he said. “Trump is just a minor figure.”

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo picked up the story of another MAGA figure distancing himself from Trump. When he ran for governor in 2024, former North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson flat out denied stories about his participation in pornography forums and social media chats where he attacked Jewish, Black, gay, and transgender people as well as flirting with Holocaust denial and calling himself a “black NAZI!” He even sued CNN for $50 million for defamation, calling their story about him “a high-tech lynching” before dropping the suit after losing the election.

Walker noted that Robinson recently admitted on a podcast that he was lying all along. He “had to ignore the truth at that moment,” he said, because he was shielding Trump. “I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election,” he said. “Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election.” Asked if he would do it again, he answered: “I’d make the exact same decision. I’d fight in the exact same way.”

After Saturday’s No Kings rallies around the country and the world, and after new polls showing his job approval ratings have dropped to new lows, Trump this afternoon signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting. Although both Democratic and Republican election officials insist mail-in voting is secure and reliable, Trump claims it permits Democrats to cheat.
Ironically, earlier this month the story broke of a right-wing activist in Wisconsin who ordered ballots in other people’s names to prove that mail-in voting enabled voter fraud. Last week Harry Wait was convicted of one felony count of identity theft and two misdemeanor counts of election fraud, suggesting mail-in voting is not as insecure as he thought.

Nonetheless, Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”

“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections.” The Senate Rules Committee oversees federal involvement in elections, and its top Democrat, Alex Padilla (D-CA), called the order a “blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” adding that Trump has “no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting.” Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said that the order is “illegal, dangerous and subversive” and that “Donald Trump fears the American people and is willing to violate the Constitution to stop them from voting.”

“See you in court,” posted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “You will lose.”

Another of Trump’s executive orders was in court today, when Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that much of Trump’s order stripping NPR and PBS of funds was unconstitutional. As Brian Stelter of CNN reported, Moss quoted a Supreme Court ruling when he wrote: “The First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.” Republicans in Congress have since voted to cut federal funding from NPR and PBS, but the decision is a victory for the First Amendment.

Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.

The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”

The Department of Justice has already appealed.

Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”

Tonight Summer Said, David S. Cloud, and Michael Amon of the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates is trying to get a United Nations Security Council resolution to call for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE says it will help the U.S. and other allies open the strait by force.

Shows weakness to China who could decide well even if the USA get involved with us taking Taiwan they don’t have the attention span for the long term.

Cymek said:

Neophyte said:

March 31, 2026 (Tuesday)

Shows weakness to China who could decide well even if the USA get involved with us taking Taiwan they don’t have the attention span for the long term.

don’t know about all that but we’re still trying to work this one out

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Neophyte said:

March 31, 2026 (Tuesday)

Shows weakness to China who could decide well even if the USA get involved with us taking Taiwan they don’t have the attention span for the long term.

don’t know about all that but we’re still trying to work this one out

It does make you wonder if it was some senile decision without any forethought and now actual planning is required its all too hard.
He thought Iran would surrender in a few days and all their offensive weaponary gone.

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Shows weakness to China who could decide well even if the USA get involved with us taking Taiwan they don’t have the attention span for the long term.

don’t know about all that but we’re still trying to work this one out

It does make you wonder if it was some senile decision without any forethought and now actual planning is required its all too hard.
He thought Iran would surrender in a few days and all their offensive weaponary gone.

For once he cannot make a deal. He’s run into people who aren’t yes men.

roughbarked said:

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

don’t know about all that but we’re still trying to work this one out

It does make you wonder if it was some senile decision without any forethought and now actual planning is required its all too hard.
He thought Iran would surrender in a few days and all their offensive weaponary gone.

For once he cannot make a deal. He’s run into people who aren’t yes men.

maybe they’re going to try another Hirosaki or something

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Cymek said:

It does make you wonder if it was some senile decision without any forethought and now actual planning is required its all too hard.
He thought Iran would surrender in a few days and all their offensive weaponary gone.

For once he cannot make a deal. He’s run into people who aren’t yes men.

maybe they’re going to try another Hirosaki or something

That’s why he’s going to keep digging the nuclear bunker under the proposed ballroom.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

For once he cannot make a deal. He’s run into people who aren’t yes men.

maybe they’re going to try another Hirosaki or something

That’s why he’s going to keep digging the nuclear bunker under the proposed ballroom.

roughbarked said:

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

maybe they’re going to try another Hirosaki or something

That’s why he’s going to keep digging the nuclear bunker under the proposed ballroom.

pretty sure these are law abiding leaders of international rules based law and order abiding countries

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

roughbarked said:

That’s why he’s going to keep digging the nuclear bunker under the proposed ballroom.

pretty sure these are law abiding leaders of international rules based law and order abiding countries

Pretty sure your tongue is always implanted firmly in cheek.

April 1, 2026 (Wednesday)

Today, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president attended oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area, alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to observe arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara, a case under which Trump hopes to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case argued before the court today grew out of Trump’s executive order of January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.

Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.

The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right in every State and Territory in the United States.”

But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.

In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.

When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “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.”

In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.

But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned about Black Americans—there were only 4,272 Black Americans in California in 1870, while there were almost half a million white Americans—but wanted no part of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society.

Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country’s early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designed to clarify that Afro-Caribbeans and Africans—imported to be enslaved—would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only “free white persons” to become citizens.

In the late nineteenth century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins, using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage, and intermarriage.

As late as 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.

The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind upheld the argument that only “free white persons” could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens. After the Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about fifty South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.

Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.

Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.

The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”

In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”

But one judge after another has sided against him on this issue, and he apparently showed up at the Supreme Court today to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.

Later, Wang described what it was like to argue in court today. She explained, it’s “a nerve-wracking experience to argue any case in the Supreme Court, and especially one as weighty as this one, where the president of the United States is taking aim at a cherished American tradition and individual right of citizenship based on your birth in this country. I myself am a Fourteenth Amendment citizen because my parents had not yet naturalized when I was born. So I walked in today with the spirit of my parents and so many people’s ancestors in that first generation of Americans—whether they naturalized or not, I consider them all Americans. They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”

Thanks for posting. As usual: interesting and thoughtful commentary.

Neophyte said:

“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

they certainly saved it

who wouldn’t want to be a subject of and swear their allegiance to a fascist theocracy

SCIENCE said:

Neophyte said:

“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

they certainly saved it

who wouldn’t want to be a subject of and swear their allegiance to a fascist theocracy

Things have chabged somewhat since then.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

Neophyte said:

“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

they certainly saved it

who wouldn’t want to be a subject of and swear their allegiance to a fascist theocracy

Things have chabged somewhat since then.

Over the top patriotism does achieve a fascism mentality.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

Neophyte said:

“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

they certainly saved it

who wouldn’t want to be a subject of and swear their allegiance to a fascist theocracy

Things have chabged somewhat since then.

yes as they said it used to be the Republicans pushing for civil rights but pretty sure the undercurrents have been there the whole time

April 2, 2026 (Thursday)

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media a video of the theme song of the Davy Crockett TV series from 1954–1955 starring Fess Parker. Over the clip, he wrote: “Davy Crockett, obviously a distant relative of Jasmine Crockett, and a very High IQ Frontiersman, would be proud of the legacy that he began long ago, and especially Jasmine’s Great Success as a Politician from the Great State of Texas! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The Walt Disney Studio designed the Davy Crockett western series for children when Trump was about nine, an age that put him in the right demographic to have been part of the Davy Crockett craze that put “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” at the top of the Hit Parade and spurred the sale of $300 million of Davy Crockett merchandise as little boys begged their parents for raccoon caps that would make them look like a western hero.

Jasmine Crockett is a current Democratic U.S. representative from Texas. There is no evidence she is related to David Crockett, who served as a U.S. representative from Tennessee from 1827 to 1835 and who died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Trump mused about their possible relationship before, in 2025.

It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does. Davy Crockett was only one of the many westerns on television in the 1950s and 1960s as those eager to dismantle the New Deal government championed the idea of the western hero as the true American. Trump is trying to bring to life a right-wing political fantasy of the 1950s, and Americans in the present are making clear they reject it.

After World War II, Republican businessmen, southern racists, and religious traditionalists hated the government that both Democrats and Republicans had embraced since 1933, one that leveled the American social and economic playing field by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. They insisted that such a system of government action was socialism or even communism, and contrasted it with their fantasy of an independent white man on the frontier who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone.

In 1960 a ghost-written book released under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who wore a cowboy hat and boasted of his family’s ties to the Old West although he himself grew up with a live-in maid and a chauffeur, articulated this right-wing vision.

The Conscience of a Conservative maintained that even if Americans liked the new government that had stabilized the country since the Great Depression and World War II, the Constitution’s framers had deliberately written a document that would prevent “the tyranny of the masses.”

In place of a strong federal government, the book said, power should go back to the states to restore true freedom to Black Americans, farmers, and workers. Federal action had given those groups too much power, and they were using it to destroy liberty and lower the American standard of living. In their hands, the book said, the U.S. was on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. At the same time, the government must protect the country with an increasingly strong military.

At an Easter lunch reception yesterday, Trump echoed this argument precisely. “I said to Russell , ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare,’” he said. “That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have fifty states, we have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too.

They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up, but we, it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, 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.”

Trump is expected to release his 2027 budget plan tomorrow, in time to use it to shape Republicans’ argument for the midterm elections in November. Like Trump’s budget requests for 2026, it calls for an enormous boost to the nation’s military spending, $1.5 trillion, to be paid for with cuts to domestic programs. But members of Congress recognized that domestic spending is popular, and their 2026 appropriations bills kept domestic spending relatively flat.

The popular pressure to fund domestic programs showed today when House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) backpedaled on the Senate’s plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the parent agency for Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection. Far-right House Republicans opposed the Senate’s bill, and bowing to them, Johnson called the Senate’s bill “a joke” and sent House members home until April 13 without voting on it.

Today Johnson said he would bring the bill forward to pass it with Democratic support and that Republicans would then try to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through a budget reconciliation measure that does not need Democratic votes.
Racism was central to the rhetoric of cowboy individualism, and the institutionalization of that racism in the mass deportations and incarcerations of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump has created a backlash. A poll last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration while 61% disapprove.

An analysis of DHS records by Ali Winston and Maddy Varner of Wired revealed today that DHS has used agents from special units accustomed to dealing with high-risk warrants, armed drug cartels, and manhunts for civilian immigration sweeps. Agents from Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR), are part of what the journalists call “a secretive, tightly knit world” in which their identities “are typically excluded from official documents and shielded from public records requests.”

The journalists’ analysis shows that these agents are “as a group, the most violent of the hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago.” Following the use-of-force guidelines rewritten by former leader Gregory Bovino—himself a member of BORTAC—their use of force there “included punching and kicking protesters, throwing tear gas, macing civilians, firing pepperballs and 40-mm foam rounds into crowds, shocking people with tasers, unleashing dogs on deportation targets, and shooting unarmed civilians, killing at least one of them .

The county medical examiner yesterday declared the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a visually impaired Rohingya refugee from Myanmar whom Border Patrol agents dropped off in the parking lot of a coffee shop on a frigid February night in Buffalo, New York, a homicide. Rather than releasing him to his family or lawyer, CBP officers offered Shah Alam what they called a “courtesy ride.” He was found dead five days after agents left him at the closed shop.

A DHS spokesperson told Sydney Carruth of MS NOW that the homicide ruling was “another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol.”

Those who oppose government social welfare programs, regulation of business, and so on, have worked to concentrate power in the president, knowing that Congress will hesitate to slash programs their voters like. Yesterday Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, of the Office of Legal Counsel, published an opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaiser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

“The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose,” the memo reads. “For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”

The fallout from that concentration of power is showing now in Trump’s disastrous adventure in Iran, undertaking to attack the country without consultation either with Congress or with allies.

Yesterday evening, Trump commandeered time from television networks to deliver what officials billed as a major announcement on the Iran war. But rather than announce anything new in his first address to the nation about a war that has gone on now for more than a month, Trump rambled for 19 minutes, reiterating what he has put in social media posts. He said the war was almost over but also that military operations were going to intensify, said its purpose was to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities—despite his claim in June 2025 to have obliterated those capabilities—and said the rise in oil and gas prices would be only a “short-term increase.”

Sounding tired and speaking in a monotone, Trump reiterated his claim that the U.S. doesn’t need the oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz and demanded that other nations who need the oil more force Iran to reopen it. In reality, the U.S. is tied into international oil markets, and prices not only of oil, but also of products that use oil to get to market, are already rising.

One Republican strategist from a battleground state texted Lisa Kashinsky and Alec Hernandez of Politico: “What the hell did he just say?” The strategist called the speech “nonsense.”

As Trump spoke, U.S. stock futures plummeted, erasing about $550 billion in 25 minutes.

Today forty nations, led by Britain and France, discussed ways in which they could work to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited to participate.

In the midst of this crisis, the tension between the Army’s leadership and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew up today when Hegeseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George. The Army chief of staff is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, the top military advisor for the Secretary of the Army, overseeing planning, training, and policy. George was appointed to his position in 2023 and worked closely with former defense secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the four-star general who preceded Hegseth.

Recently, George refused to remove four officers—two women and two Black men—from a promotion list at Hegseth’s insistence.

A source who spoke to Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James LaPorta of CBS News said that Hegseth “wants someone in the role who will implement President Trump and Hegseth’s vision for the Army.” Two other Army leaders were also removed: General David Hodne, leader of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Major General William Green, head of the Army’s Chaplain Corps. Hegseth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of religious instruction available to military personnel.

And finally, Trump today fired Attorney General Pam Bondi by posting her dismissal on social media. He was apparently angry that she has not adequately punished his enemies and that her botched handling of the Epstein files has stoked rather than calmed the story. For the present, her replacement will be Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before joining the Department of Justice.

It was Blanche who met privately with Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, last July, as the outcry over the Department of Justice’s apparent cover-up of the Epstein files grew. After their meeting, Maxwell was moved from the prison where she was being held in Florida, to a less restrictive, minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas.

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Divine Angel said:

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Ben Cartwright comes to mind.

Divine Angel said:

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

everyone who wants shit like that can just live in their own 跟爱 fantasy world and fuck off and leave everyone else alone thanks

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

everyone who wants shit like that can just live in their own 跟爱 fantasy world and fuck off and leave everyone else alone thanks

Normal sovcits hide in an unused corner and make their own territory, Trump decided to make himself King of the World.

I don’t think AI understood the assignment.

Divine Angel said:

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

everyone who wants shit like that can just live in their own 跟爱 fantasy world and fuck off and leave everyone else alone thanks

Normal sovcits hide in an unused corner and make their own territory, Trump decided to make himself King of the World.

I don’t think AI understood the assignment.

Yes and yes.
Yes, AI completely messed up.
Some how took over Trump’s brain.
Now his ego rating is off scale.
His ego now extending beyond the space debris field and still growing.
I wonder what it is?

Real ego
Imagined ego but feels like?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

He already has. It will be a long while to get over the mess he’s made in the dunny.

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does”

Someone should mention to him that not all tv shows star him as the main character

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

He already has. It will be a long while to get over the mess he’s made in the dunny.

Dirtiest gold toilet in the world.

Tau.Neutrino said:

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Imagines every movie with Trump as a main character, every movie.

Trump becomes one of the bumbling robbers in home alone…

Trump everywhere.

Rewriting history…

Wow, thats peak Trump.

He would if he could.

He already has. It will be a long while to get over the mess he’s made in the dunny.

Dirtiest gold toilet in the world.

It’s so bad the toilet spurts back poo, sprays it back at Trump.

April 3, 2026 (Friday)

On April 4, 1949, representatives from twelve countries in Europe and North America—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States—signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. This defensive security alliance has been a key institution for world stability since World War II.

In the wake of that war, the U.S. and its allies recognized the crucial importance of peacetime alliances to deter future wars. To stop the spread of communism across war-torn Europe, the United States backed a massive financial investment into rebuilding Europe. President Harry S. Truman signed the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, into law on April 3, 1948.

Quickly, though, it appeared that economic recovery would not be enough to protect a democratic Europe. The expansion of Soviet-style communism prompted officials to consider a pact that would enlist the United States to stand behind the security of Western Europe. Crucially, though, they wanted it to stand outside the United Nations, where the Soviet Union could exercise veto power. The outcome was the NATO alliance.

NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.

Over the years, the alliance has expanded to include 32 countries. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all former satellites of the USSR, joined NATO over the protests of Russia, which was falling under the control of oligarchs who opposed western democracy. More countries near Russia joined NATO in the 2000s, and Finland and Sweden have joined since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—Finland three years ago tomorrow, in fact.

When NATO formed, the main concern of the countries backing it was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.

In 1949, when he signed the treaty, President Truman called the pact a positive influence for peace. That peace was, first of all, among the nations signing the agreement. They were, he said, agreeing “to abide by the peaceful principles of the United Nations, to maintain friendly relations and economic cooperation with one another, to consult together whenever the territory or independence of any of them is threatened, and to come to the aid of any one of them who may be attacked.” If such an agreement had been in place “in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today,” he said, “I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two world wars.”

With NATO, Truman said, “we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression—a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”

NATO countries agreed to stand together to withstand aggression from outside the pact. Truman emphasized the difference between the NATO countries and the authoritarian system against which the alliance stood. The NATO countries could stand together without being identical. “There are different kinds of governmental and economic systems, just as there are different languages and different cultures. But these differences present no real obstacle to the voluntary association of free nations devoted to the common cause of peace,” he said. “t is possible for nations to achieve unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit, in other respects, the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable.”

The experience of the United States “in creating one nation out of…the peoples of many lands” proved that this idea could work, Truman said. “This method of organizing diverse peoples and cultures is in direct contrast to the method of the police state, which attempts to achieve unity by imposing the same beliefs and the same rule of force on everyone.”

The NATO countries did not believe that war was inevitable, Truman said. “Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom—war or peace. I have no doubt which they will choose. The treaty we are signing here today is evidence of the path they will follow. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.”

Neophyte said:

April 3, 2026 (Friday)

On April 4, 1949, representatives from twelve countries in Europe and North America—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States—signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. This defensive security alliance has been a key institution for world stability since World War II.

In the wake of that war, the U.S. and its allies recognized the crucial importance of peacetime alliances to deter future wars. To stop the spread of communism across war-torn Europe, the United States backed a massive financial investment into rebuilding Europe. President Harry S. Truman signed the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, into law on April 3, 1948.

Quickly, though, it appeared that economic recovery would not be enough to protect a democratic Europe. The expansion of Soviet-style communism prompted officials to consider a pact that would enlist the United States to stand behind the security of Western Europe. Crucially, though, they wanted it to stand outside the United Nations, where the Soviet Union could exercise veto power. The outcome was the NATO alliance.

NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.

Over the years, the alliance has expanded to include 32 countries. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all former satellites of the USSR, joined NATO over the protests of Russia, which was falling under the control of oligarchs who opposed western democracy. More countries near Russia joined NATO in the 2000s, and Finland and Sweden have joined since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—Finland three years ago tomorrow, in fact.

When NATO formed, the main concern of the countries backing it was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.

In 1949, when he signed the treaty, President Truman called the pact a positive influence for peace. That peace was, first of all, among the nations signing the agreement. They were, he said, agreeing “to abide by the peaceful principles of the United Nations, to maintain friendly relations and economic cooperation with one another, to consult together whenever the territory or independence of any of them is threatened, and to come to the aid of any one of them who may be attacked.” If such an agreement had been in place “in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today,” he said, “I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two world wars.”

With NATO, Truman said, “we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression—a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”

NATO countries agreed to stand together to withstand aggression from outside the pact. Truman emphasized the difference between the NATO countries and the authoritarian system against which the alliance stood. The NATO countries could stand together without being identical. “There are different kinds of governmental and economic systems, just as there are different languages and different cultures. But these differences present no real obstacle to the voluntary association of free nations devoted to the common cause of peace,” he said. “t is possible for nations to achieve unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit, in other respects, the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable.”

The experience of the United States “in creating one nation out of…the peoples of many lands” proved that this idea could work, Truman said. “This method of organizing diverse peoples and cultures is in direct contrast to the method of the police state, which attempts to achieve unity by imposing the same beliefs and the same rule of force on everyone.”

The NATO countries did not believe that war was inevitable, Truman said. “Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom—war or peace. I have no doubt which they will choose. The treaty we are signing here today is evidence of the path they will follow. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.”

Thanks.

“NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.”

And Trump wants to pull out of NATO…

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

April 3, 2026 (Friday)

Thanks.

“NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.”

And Trump wants to pull out of NATO…

yeah but nobody believes in that obsolete way of thinking these days, the correct interpretation is that a country is a dangerous enemy if they might retaliate when we strike them first, so we should strike them in self defence first

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

April 3, 2026 (Friday)

On April 4, 1949, representatives from twelve countries in Europe and North America—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States—signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. This defensive security alliance has been a key institution for world stability since World War II.

In the wake of that war, the U.S. and its allies recognized the crucial importance of peacetime alliances to deter future wars. To stop the spread of communism across war-torn Europe, the United States backed a massive financial investment into rebuilding Europe. President Harry S. Truman signed the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, into law on April 3, 1948.

Quickly, though, it appeared that economic recovery would not be enough to protect a democratic Europe. The expansion of Soviet-style communism prompted officials to consider a pact that would enlist the United States to stand behind the security of Western Europe. Crucially, though, they wanted it to stand outside the United Nations, where the Soviet Union could exercise veto power. The outcome was the NATO alliance.

NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.

Over the years, the alliance has expanded to include 32 countries. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all former satellites of the USSR, joined NATO over the protests of Russia, which was falling under the control of oligarchs who opposed western democracy. More countries near Russia joined NATO in the 2000s, and Finland and Sweden have joined since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—Finland three years ago tomorrow, in fact.

When NATO formed, the main concern of the countries backing it was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.

In 1949, when he signed the treaty, President Truman called the pact a positive influence for peace. That peace was, first of all, among the nations signing the agreement. They were, he said, agreeing “to abide by the peaceful principles of the United Nations, to maintain friendly relations and economic cooperation with one another, to consult together whenever the territory or independence of any of them is threatened, and to come to the aid of any one of them who may be attacked.” If such an agreement had been in place “in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today,” he said, “I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two world wars.”

With NATO, Truman said, “we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression—a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”

NATO countries agreed to stand together to withstand aggression from outside the pact. Truman emphasized the difference between the NATO countries and the authoritarian system against which the alliance stood. The NATO countries could stand together without being identical. “There are different kinds of governmental and economic systems, just as there are different languages and different cultures. But these differences present no real obstacle to the voluntary association of free nations devoted to the common cause of peace,” he said. “t is possible for nations to achieve unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit, in other respects, the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable.”

The experience of the United States “in creating one nation out of…the peoples of many lands” proved that this idea could work, Truman said. “This method of organizing diverse peoples and cultures is in direct contrast to the method of the police state, which attempts to achieve unity by imposing the same beliefs and the same rule of force on everyone.”

The NATO countries did not believe that war was inevitable, Truman said. “Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom—war or peace. I have no doubt which they will choose. The treaty we are signing here today is evidence of the path they will follow. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.”

Thanks.

“NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.”

And Trump wants to pull out of NATO…

Well, they’ve had their share, no need to remain…

SCIENCE said:

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

April 3, 2026 (Friday)

Thanks.

“NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.”

And Trump wants to pull out of NATO…

yeah but nobody believes in that obsolete way of thinking these days, the correct interpretation is that a country is a dangerous enemy if they might retaliate when we strike them first, so we should strike them in self defence first

europeans maybe a bit civilized for the greatest president of the united states ever, possibly the greatest leader ever, he’s wonderful, incredible, intelligent, superior in so many ways, no other country or leader can match the boastfulness, he’s a fig jam man, the master obliterator.

chronologically 79 years old

buffy said:

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

April 3, 2026 (Friday)

On April 4, 1949, representatives from twelve countries in Europe and North America—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States—signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. This defensive security alliance has been a key institution for world stability since World War II.

Thanks.

“NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend one another against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every member nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.”

And Trump wants to pull out of NATO…

Well, they’ve had their share, no need to remain…

namexito

April 4, 2026 (Saturday)

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Randy George, in a struggle to exert his will over the career officers in the service. On Friday at 8:15 p.m., the official social media account of the Joint Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Vice Chairman appeared to express their opinion of the firing when they posted: “On behalf of the Joint Force and the Joint Chiefs, we extend our deepest gratitude to Chief of Staff of the Army, General Randy George, for his decades of steadfast service to our nation. Since 1988, General George and his family have consistently answered the nation’s call with honor and dedication. We are profoundly thankful to General George and his wife, Patty, for their many years of sacrifice and devotion to those who serve. As they graduate from this distinguished chapter of service and look toward the future, we wish them both continued happiness and success in all that lies ahead.”

On Friday, Iranians shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet over Iran. U.S. forces quickly rescued the pilot of the jet, but the second crew member, a weapons system officer, was not rescued until late today, with the news breaking just minutes before midnight.

Iranians also hit a U.S. A-10 Warthog aircraft, a ground-attack plane designed for close support of ground troops, as it was engaging in the search. Its pilot ejected and was rescued. A helicopter also engaged in search and rescue was hit by small-arms fire that injured crew members, but it landed safely outside Iran.

The strikes came two days after Trump told the American people that the U.S. military had “beaten and completely decimated Iran,” that “hey have no anti-aircraft equipment,” and that “heir radar is 100% annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.” Meanwhile, Iranian TV showed people heading into the mountains to find the airman.
Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Gordon Lubold of NBC News identified the last time an American plane was shot down by enemy fire as 2003, with a crash near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. The pilot ejected safely and was rescued.

The social media accounts of the defense secretary and of U.S. Central Command went silent after Thursday night. Trump did not speak to the public about the missing airman and, in fact, has not been seen in public since his lackluster Thursday night speech. When the White House wants to tell the press there will be no more public information released that day, it “calls a lid” so journalists will stop waiting for news. The White House called a lid yesterday at 4:12 p.m., and the president did not go to Mar-a-Lago, as he has been in the habit of doing on the weekends. Trump did not appear at all today, and the White House called a lid at 11:08 a.m.

But Trump did post on social media. Yesterday, while the search for the airman was underway, his account posted: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD??? President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

At 10:05 this morning, Trump posted: “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! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Economist Paul Krugman noted today that this post didn’t sound like Trump. His speech on Wednesday was low energy and delivered in a monotone. It suggested Trump was abandoning the idea of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and handing off the problem to other countries. Now he is threatening to “reign”—he meant “rain”—down “all Hell” on Iran to get it to restore the conditions that existed before he attacked. And then, as Krugman noted, he added “Glory be to GOD!” which sounds a lot more like Hegseth’s Christian holy war language than Trump’s.

Krugman says, “t sounds like he’s…going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation” in Iran.

Michael R. Gordon and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump’s aides have been telling him Iran’s civilian infrastructure is a legitimate wartime target, despite the understanding among experts that such attacks are illegal. The journalists say Hegseth has embraced the aides’ argument that attacking infrastructure would make it more difficult for Iran to transfer the materials they need to develop nuclear weapons. A White House official added that destroying electric plants could foment civil unrest, which would in turn make it more difficult to produce a nuclear weapon.

Ryan Goodman of Just Security commented: “That would be an F on a bar exam.” He observed, “This isn’t legal analysis. It’s idiocy.”

Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree.

Tonight the White House released the president’s schedule for tomorrow, Easter Sunday. It has a scheduled 8:00 a.m. “Executive Time” and a 7:00 p.m. family Easter dinner. He has no scheduled public appearances.

“Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree”

When they say “energy facilities”, do they mean nuclear facilities?

Divine Angel said:

“Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree”

When they say “energy facilities”, do they mean nuclear facilities?

Likely what we would call “power stations”.

Divine Angel said:

“Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree”

When they say “energy facilities”, do they mean nuclear facilities?

Not really. Power stations in general and the electrical grid. Plus of course their oil and gas fields and processing plants, shipping and transport nodes and all the rest of it. Most of Iran’s electricity of course comes from oil and natural gas.

Michael V said:

Divine Angel said:

“Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree”

When they say “energy facilities”, do they mean nuclear facilities?

Likely what we would call “power stations”.

Probably gas or oil-fired.

Rightyo, thanks.

April 5, 2026 (Sunday)
At 8:03 this morning, Easter Sunday, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “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*ckin’ Strait, you crazy b*stards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

There are many things that could be going on with this ultimatum, which actually doesn’t sound like Trump’s usual style, in the same way the post of yesterday morning didn’t.

The post appears to be threatening to commit war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, and it appears to suggest Trump is considering using tactical nuclear weapons. He emphasized the production of such weapons in his first administration. He seemed to encourage this interpretation in an interview with Rachel Scott of ABC News today. She said Trump “told me the conflict should be over in days, not weeks but if no deal is made he’s blowing up the whole country with ‘very little’ off the table. ‘If happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, we’re blowing up the whole country,’ he said. I asked if there’s anything off limits. ‘Very little,’ he said.”

In 2023 a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt alleged that in 2017, when Trump was warning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on social media that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” behind closed doors he was talking about launching a preemptive strike against North Korea and of using a nuclear weapon against the country and blaming someone else for the strike .

Schmidt reports that Trump’s White House chief of staff at the time, retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, brought military leaders to try to explain to Trump why that would be a bad idea and finally got him to move away from the plan by telling him he could prove he was the “greatest salesman in the world” by finding a diplomatic solution to his fight with the North Korean leader.

In his own book about that period, journalist Bob Woodward wrote: “The American people had little idea that July through September of 2017 had been so dangerous.”

But Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo told Woodward: “We never knew whether it was real or whether it was a bluff.”

And that is another way to look at the post from Trump’s social media account: that he is panicked that he has not been able to bully other countries into fixing the mess he created by attacking Iran and precipitating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and is now simply trying to bully Iran. In The Guardian last Monday, Sidney Blumenthal noted that Trump “has declared ‘victory’ more than eight times,” says he has “won” more than ten times, and said Iranian forces have been “obliterated” or suffered “obliteration” more than six times. Blumenthal noted Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power grid and has used the words “decimate” or “decimation” at least six times.

Trump’s crazy post does, after all, push back yet again the deadline for his threats to rain destruction on Iran, which he then extended again in another post at 12:38 P.M. saying: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”

This dynamic was not lost on Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, who noted: “It was March 23rd. Then March 27th. Then March 30th. Then he gave that weird address on April 1st. ew deadline April 4th. Then April 6th at 7 AM. Then April 7th at 8 PM. And now another address tomorrow at 1 PM. The chaos is intentional.” She also noted that his deadlines and his abandonment of them often seem tied to the rhythms of the stock market.

In an interview with Barak Ravid of Axios today shortly after this morning’s post, Trump reiterated that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there” but also said the U.S. is “in deep negotiations” with Iran and that he thinks a deal can be reached. Trump told Ravid that his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—not Secretary of State Marco Rubio—are talking with the Iranians. Sources told Ravid that mediators from Pakistan, Egypt, and Türkiye are facilitating the talks.

But Iranian officials are refusing to deal with Witkoff and Kushner after they apparently misunderstood earlier negotiations and instead told Trump the talks weren’t going well before he launched strikes. Neither Witkoff nor Kushner is a trained diplomat, and both have deep financial ties to the Middle East. Notably, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who urged Trump to start the Iran war, has invested at least $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm.

On March 13, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell of the New York Times reported that Kushner is trying to raise $5 billion or more for his private equity firm from Middle East governments at the same time as he is also supposed to be negotiating peace in the region.

But Stephen Kalin, Eliot Brown, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already cost the Saudis about $10 billion, and the grand plans of MBS were already falling short of money. Some of those plans were U.S. investments. The reporters note that even before the war, the Saudi’s sovereign-wealth fund, the same one that invested in Kushner’s private equity firm, had sold much of its U.S. stock portfolio. Last year, MBS promised to invest up to $1 trillion in the U.S. Those investments are now under review.

Regardless of the inspiration for Trump’s post, by itself it tells a very clear story. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi posted: “The American president has lost his mind.”

Journalist Steven Beschloss wrote: “This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”

The 25th Amendment establishes a process through which a majority of the Cabinet and the Vice President, or another body Congress designates, can remove a president deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Murphy was not the only one thinking along those lines. Hollie Silverman of Newsweek reported that on the prediction market platform Kalshi, which allows traders to buy “yes” or “no” shares on the question “Will the 25th Amendment be used during Trump’s presidency?” “yes” has moved in recent days from 28.6% to 35.1%.

“ Schmidt reports that Trump’s White House chief of staff at the time, retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, brought military leaders to try to explain to Trump why that would be a bad idea and finally got him to move away from the plan by telling him he could prove he was the “greatest salesman in the world” by finding a diplomatic solution to his fight with the North Korean leader.”

Feed his ego, free the world.

April 6, 2026 (Monday)
“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that 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.”

Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.

Today was another surreal day in the second Trump administration.

At the traditional White House Easter Egg roll this morning, Trump, whose right hand was swollen and covered with makeup after his weekend away from the cameras, stood with First Lady Melania Trump on a White House balcony, accompanied by a human-sized Easter Bunny. The columns of the White House stood festooned in soft red, white, and blue plaid over the crowd of young children and their parents in festive pastel clothes excited for the day’s events. The band played “Hail to the Chief.” After a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Trump told the audience that “it’s a day where we celebrate Jesus, it’s a day where we celebrate religion, and it’s an honor to be the president of the United States.”

Then things veered off course. He continued: “Our country is doing so well like it has never done before. You’ll see that very shortly, and things that we’ve done have not been done before. We’ve broken every record on the stock market, we’ve broken every record on our military.”

And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”

While the children were rolling their eggs along the ground with spoons, Trump spoke to reporters, telling them about Iran, “If it were up to me, I’d like to keep the oil. I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand.” He suggested that attacking Iran’s infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime because “they killed 45,000 people in the last month. More than that. It could be as much as sixty. They killed protesters. They’re animals, and we have to stop them, and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

He claimed again that former presidents are telling him they wish they had done what he did in attacking Iran; all four living ex-presidents have denied speaking to him. Sitting with children drawing pictures, he told them they could sell his autograph on eBay for $25,000. He signed their pictures, and while he signed, he told the children that former President Joe Biden was “incapable of signing his name” so he had aides follow him around with an autopen machine.

A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”

The celebratory speeches about the war compared a rescued airman to Jesus Christ and gave a great deal of detail about the rescue operation, but they didn’t deliver much information to the journalists packed into the room about negotiations or goals or the president’s ultimatum that Iran must agree to his demands by 8:00 tomorrow night or face “obliteration.”

Trump reiterated: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.” He said that while the regime governing the country has changed—meaning its leadership, because the actual regime is still in power—that his reason for undertaking the war was not regime change, but rather to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

He assured the journalists that he has had a plan all along. “I saw somebody said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have a plan.’ I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, Here’s my plan, we’re going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we’re going to do this, and then we’re gonna, and if you don’t do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is…. Every single thing has been thought out by all of us. But I can’t reveal the plan to the media. So, you know, but we’re just thrilled by the success of this operation.”

Trump has said Iranians are upset when the strikes stop, and a reporter challenged him to explain “Why would they want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power?” He answered: “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. The Iranians have, and we’ve had numerous intercepts—‘Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing! Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding, and when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, “Please come back, come back, come back!’”

After noting he was responsible for the killing of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, he added: “I did one other but this one was not picked up. Osama bin Laden—If you read my book, I said you’ve got to take him out one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book. To be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.”

A special operations team located and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. Trump’s frequent claim that his book called for a raid against Osama bin Laden has been just as frequently debunked as a lie.

Today was an exhausting day as Americans seem to have little choice but to pay attention to a man who is bizarrely threatening what appear to be war crimes against Iranians while spinning wild tales. The members of both chambers of Congress are away for another week and Republican leaders are showing no sign of calling them back, leaving the American people to face whatever Trump has in mind for tomorrow on our own.

In contrast to Trump’s vision of government according to the whims of a single man, no matter how bonkers those whims might be, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—who, as a naturalized citizen, is not eligible for the presidency—is illustrating what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Mamdani’s videos about governing New York City inform New Yorkers about what their government does. At the same time, though, they lift up and honor the workers who make the wheels of government turn. During his campaign, Mamdani promised his administration would see to it that potholes got filled, and as the road maintenance workers made the trip to fill the 100,000th pothole of the year, he tagged along. The video humanized the process and dignified work that often doesn’t get attention.

Another video today about the 311 call center in New York City that helps residents find resources to help solve everything from where to recycle a mirror to how to get an apartment repaired featured Tangie Williams putting a face to the people in the center as she coached Mamdani himself through a call. Williams told Mamdani that the calls that “tug at my heart” are elderly people who have no family and need both to be heard and to access help, which she provides with evident joy.

Speaking of same old…

Neophyte said:

And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”

It is mind numbing and very concerning.

……………………….And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”

I have to completely agree.

Thanks for posting.

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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 has painted himself into a corner in his impulsive war against Iran. His job approval is dismal and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, is sending the cost of oil soaring, squeezing the global economy. Always in his life he has had someone to fix his mistakes—his father, Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, the “adults in the room” in his first administration who distracted him from catastrophic errors, and so on—but no one was willing to bail him out of the global disaster of his war on Iran.

So he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” an open threat to push his current embrace of war crimes all the way to genocide. No one knew if he was gearing up for a ground invasion of Iran in a war that has never received congressional authorization, or a massive bombing campaign, or even the use of nuclear weapons.

Or if he was making yet another empty threat.

Within the announcement were signs that perhaps it was bluster designed to let him claim victory and walk away. Despite his claim, there has been no “regime change” in Iran: the regime is very much still in place, although it has changed leadership in the wake of the bombing deaths of previous leaders. The new leaders appear to be more radical than their predecessors.

There was also the unmistakable echo of television advertising in his announcement. Either “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” or “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.”
At 6:32 this evening, we learned that the horrifying announcement of the morning was, indeed, cover for Trump to declare victory and get out of the crisis he has caused in the Middle East.

Trump posted: “Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.

“We received a 10 point proposal from Iran,” Trump continued, “and believe it is 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. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Michael Rios of CNN reported that Iran’s media is claiming it has achieved a great victory, forcing the U.S. to agree in principle to its 10-point plan, which includes the end of sanctions against Iran, the removal of all U.S. combat forces from bases in the region, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. If these terms are correct, they leave the United States significantly worse off than it was before the war and leave Iran significantly stronger.

Trump called Rios’s story a fraud, and immediately sought to reassert his strength. He posted, “Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement,” and said that “CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’”

Political commentator Ben Rhodes summed up the situation: “In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”

And then, a minute after midnight, Trump posted:

“A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else! The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. 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. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “Trump went from making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later, and he received no concessions in between. He’s an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” was not just a reference to Iran. If he had destroyed Iran in our names, unhampered by the Republican Congress members who have vowed to defend the U.S. Constitution, it would also have been an epitaph for the United States of America.

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

He still might, if he starts sweating about the Epstein files again.

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

Did Bubblecar diagnose him?

😆 🤣

I know…I know. Actual professionals did.

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

He’ll likely try to bypass any safeguards or congress to press that button too.

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

Nods.

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

He still might, if he starts sweating about the Epstein files again.

What Epstein files?

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

He still might, if he starts sweating about the Epstein files again.

Sadly you are correct captain spalding.

The Republicans could end this today if they did the 25th Amendment. But they don’t.

kii said:

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

Did Bubblecar diagnose him?

😆 🤣

I know…I know. Actual professionals did.

Dr Bandy X Lee lost her job over diagnosing Trump. She’s doing a series of videos on how to manage violence and maintain yourself in such a time. She’s still talking and educating.

Michael V said:

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

He still might, if he starts sweating about the Epstein files again.

What Epstein files?

He could drop a nuke on the Epstein files.

thankfully bullying isn’t a medical diagnosis

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

captain_spalding said:

He still might, if he starts sweating about the Epstein files again.

What Epstein files?

He could drop a nuke on the Epstein files.

He sent them on Artemis to be dropped on the moon

roughbarked said:

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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!”

…

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

And the rest of the world was also wondering if a nuke was about to be dropped on Iran, because Trump’s malignant narcissism.

He’ll likely try to bypass any safeguards or congress to press that button too.

It is doing my head in.

April 8, 2026 (Wednesday)

On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night.

His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving, and Lee’s army was melting away. Just that morning a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.

So on the night of April 8, Grant retired to bed in a Virginia farmhouse, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” It didn’t work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.

As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general’s uniform, carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the “rough garb” of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general.

But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer—“about twenty-five thousand”—in stride, telling the general that “he could have…all the provisions wanted.”

By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North’s moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while the Union army, backed by a booming industrial economy, could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier’s uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.

April 9, 2026 (Thursday)

The ceasefire President Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday night fell apart almost immediately. Israel complained that it hadn’t been consulted, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Israel did not accept an end to its bombardment of southern Lebanon as a way to dislodge Iran-backed Hezbollah militants. Steven Scheer of Reuters noted today that 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.

Iran has been permitting certain ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but responded to Israel’s continued bombing by closing the strait again.

Vice President J.D. Vance said there was a “legitimate misunderstanding” about whether the ceasefire included Lebanon. “We never made that promise,” he said. But in fact, Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, who posted the terms of the ceasefire on Tuesday, noted that the agreement did include a ceasefire in Lebanon. He tagged Vance in the post.

As more information about the achievement of the ceasefire became known, it reflected poorly on Trump. Humza Jilani, Abigail Hauslohner, and Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times reported yesterday that while Trump claimed Iran was begging for a deal to end hostilities, it was actually the Trump administration that was pushing Pakistan to broker a deal with Iran. Tyler Pager and Katie Rogers of the New York Times reported that the White House was helping to craft Sharif’s social media statements, suggesting Trump “was actively looking for a way out of the crisis” as his own imposed deadline drew closer on Tuesday evening.

Although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims the U.S. has had a “historic and overwhelming victory” that achieved “every single objective,” David S. Cloud of the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that Iran saw the ceasefire as a “triumph” because it had survived a 38-day barrage from the United States and Israel and because it had gained control over the Strait of Hormuz, inflicting deep damage on the U.S. economy. Iran claimed the U.S. had suffered “an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.” Iran’s new leadership is even more anti-Western than the previous leadership, killed in the early days of the U.S.-Israeli strikes.

Yesterday the president posted his own interpretation of the terms of the agreement, but they were aspirational and asked for Iran to agree to terms that were less advantageous for the U.S. than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 and Trump tore up in 2018.

The actual terms of the ceasefire agreement were murky. On Wednesday, Iran released its version of the points of the agreement; the White House said those points weren’t the basis for the ceasefire.

Also yesterday, Trump suggested the U.S. was considering joining the Iranians in demanding tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it,” he told journalist Jonathan Karl. But today Trump posted: “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!” Hours later, he added: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!”

By Wednesday night, Trump was backing away from his celebratory statements about the ceasefire. “All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with. If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary—NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE. In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

Meanwhile, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported today that survivors of the deadly March 1 attack on U.S. forces in Kuwait, which killed six service members and wounded over 20 more, disputed Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the deadly drone that hit their position as a “squirter,” suggesting it squirted through the defenses of a fortified area. The survivors say their position was not fortified and was dangerously exposed to attack.

Although Congress is not scheduled to conduct business again until April 13, Democrats were in Washington, D.C., today to try to force Republicans to vote on a war powers resolution to end the war on Iran. Republicans have steadfastly refused to discuss Trump’s attack on Iran, even on Tuesday after Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” That pattern continued today. The Republican in charge of the House, Chris Smith of New Jersey, refused to recognize the Democrats and ended the day’s session immediately. He later said the Democrats should get behind the ceasefire agreement.

This afternoon, out of the blue, First Lady Melania Trump called the White House press pool to hear a statement. The first lady strode to a podium bearing the presidential seal—always reserved for the president alone—and announced that she had never been friends with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, that she had never had a relationship with Epstein or his “accomplice” Ghislaine Maxwell, and that the “lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” She called for Congress to hold hearings for Epstein’s victims, and concluded that “Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized.”

Her six-minute statement appeared to have been written by someone else: she could not pronounce some of the words in it, like “trivial,” and she said “calculating” and “convinced” in place of “circulating” and “convicted.” Notably, she did not mention her husband even as her unexpected statement injected the issue of the Epstein files and his appearance in them squarely back into the news. When she was done speaking, she turned and walked back out of view the way she had come, as reporters shouted questions.

Trump told a reporter he did not know the first lady was preparing to give a speech, but a source told CNN’s Betsy Klein that Trump had been alerted that she was going to make the statement. If his actions afterward were any indication, he wasn’t keen on it.

This afternoon, Trump began posting wildly. At 4:28 his social media account lashed out at former allies Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, who don’t support Trump’s war in Iran. Trump said “hey’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” He reiterated his false claim that he won “in a LANDSLIDE,” and suggested MAGA voters love him. Those standing against his Iran adventure are “not ‘MAGA,’” he wrote; “they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA.”

Then, at 5:28, Trump’s social media account posted: “The Wall Street Journal, one of the worst and most inaccurate ‘Editorial Boards’ in the World, stated that I ‘declared premature victory in Iran.’ Actually, it is a Victory, and there’s nothing ‘premature’ about it! Because of me, IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON and, very quickly, you’ll see Oil start flowing, with or without the help of Iran and, to me, it makes no difference, either way. The Wall Street Journal will, as usual, live to eat their words. They are always quick to criticize, but never to admit when they’re wrong, which is most of the time! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

And then, at 7:49 tonight, the president’s social media account posted a graphic video of a man killing a woman with a hammer. The screed that accompanied the video attacked Haitian immigrants, former president Joe Biden, and “the Radical Democrats in Congress.” The post echoed the usual vicious racism to which Trump turns to feed his base. But it is hard to miss that hours after his wife gave an unexpected press conference about Jeffrey Epstein, Trump posted a video of a woman’s murder.

Neophyte said:

April 9, 2026 (Thursday)

The ceasefire President Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday night fell apart almost immediately. Israel complained that it hadn’t been consulted, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Israel did not accept an end to its bombardment of southern Lebanon as a way to dislodge Iran-backed Hezbollah militants. Steven Scheer of Reuters noted today that 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.

Iran has been permitting certain ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but responded to Israel’s continued bombing by closing the strait again.

Vice President J.D. Vance said there was a “legitimate misunderstanding” about whether the ceasefire included Lebanon. “We never made that promise,” he said. But in fact, Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, who posted the terms of the ceasefire on Tuesday, noted that the agreement did include a ceasefire in Lebanon. He tagged Vance in the post.

As more information about the achievement of the ceasefire became known, it reflected poorly on Trump. Humza Jilani, Abigail Hauslohner, and Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times reported yesterday that while Trump claimed Iran was begging for a deal to end hostilities, it was actually the Trump administration that was pushing Pakistan to broker a deal with Iran. Tyler Pager and Katie Rogers of the New York Times reported that the White House was helping to craft Sharif’s social media statements, suggesting Trump “was actively looking for a way out of the crisis” as his own imposed deadline drew closer on Tuesday evening.

Although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims the U.S. has had a “historic and overwhelming victory” that achieved “every single objective,” David S. Cloud of the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that Iran saw the ceasefire as a “triumph” because it had survived a 38-day barrage from the United States and Israel and because it had gained control over the Strait of Hormuz, inflicting deep damage on the U.S. economy. Iran claimed the U.S. had suffered “an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.” Iran’s new leadership is even more anti-Western than the previous leadership, killed in the early days of the U.S.-Israeli strikes.

Yesterday the president posted his own interpretation of the terms of the agreement, but they were aspirational and asked for Iran to agree to terms that were less advantageous for the U.S. than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 and Trump tore up in 2018.

The actual terms of the ceasefire agreement were murky. On Wednesday, Iran released its version of the points of the agreement; the White House said those points weren’t the basis for the ceasefire.

Also yesterday, Trump suggested the U.S. was considering joining the Iranians in demanding tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it,” he told journalist Jonathan Karl. But today Trump posted: “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!” Hours later, he added: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!”

By Wednesday night, Trump was backing away from his celebratory statements about the ceasefire. “All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with. If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary—NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE. In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

Meanwhile, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported today that survivors of the deadly March 1 attack on U.S. forces in Kuwait, which killed six service members and wounded over 20 more, disputed Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the deadly drone that hit their position as a “squirter,” suggesting it squirted through the defenses of a fortified area. The survivors say their position was not fortified and was dangerously exposed to attack.

Although Congress is not scheduled to conduct business again until April 13, Democrats were in Washington, D.C., today to try to force Republicans to vote on a war powers resolution to end the war on Iran. Republicans have steadfastly refused to discuss Trump’s attack on Iran, even on Tuesday after Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” That pattern continued today. The Republican in charge of the House, Chris Smith of New Jersey, refused to recognize the Democrats and ended the day’s session immediately. He later said the Democrats should get behind the ceasefire agreement.

This afternoon, out of the blue, First Lady Melania Trump called the White House press pool to hear a statement. The first lady strode to a podium bearing the presidential seal—always reserved for the president alone—and announced that she had never been friends with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, that she had never had a relationship with Epstein or his “accomplice” Ghislaine Maxwell, and that the “lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” She called for Congress to hold hearings for Epstein’s victims, and concluded that “Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized.”

Her six-minute statement appeared to have been written by someone else: she could not pronounce some of the words in it, like “trivial,” and she said “calculating” and “convinced” in place of “circulating” and “convicted.” Notably, she did not mention her husband even as her unexpected statement injected the issue of the Epstein files and his appearance in them squarely back into the news. When she was done speaking, she turned and walked back out of view the way she had come, as reporters shouted questions.

Trump told a reporter he did not know the first lady was preparing to give a speech, but a source told CNN’s Betsy Klein that Trump had been alerted that she was going to make the statement. If his actions afterward were any indication, he wasn’t keen on it.

This afternoon, Trump began posting wildly. At 4:28 his social media account lashed out at former allies Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, who don’t support Trump’s war in Iran. Trump said “hey’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” He reiterated his false claim that he won “in a LANDSLIDE,” and suggested MAGA voters love him. Those standing against his Iran adventure are “not ‘MAGA,’” he wrote; “they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA.”

Then, at 5:28, Trump’s social media account posted: “The Wall Street Journal, one of the worst and most inaccurate ‘Editorial Boards’ in the World, stated that I ‘declared premature victory in Iran.’ Actually, it is a Victory, and there’s nothing ‘premature’ about it! Because of me, IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON and, very quickly, you’ll see Oil start flowing, with or without the help of Iran and, to me, it makes no difference, either way. The Wall Street Journal will, as usual, live to eat their words. They are always quick to criticize, but never to admit when they’re wrong, which is most of the time! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

And then, at 7:49 tonight, the president’s social media account posted a graphic video of a man killing a woman with a hammer. The screed that accompanied the video attacked Haitian immigrants, former president Joe Biden, and “the Radical Democrats in Congress.” The post echoed the usual vicious racism to which Trump turns to feed his base. But it is hard to miss that hours after his wife gave an unexpected press conference about Jeffrey Epstein, Trump posted a video of a woman’s murder.

FMD

Worse and worse. More and more bizarre.

April 10, 2026 (Friday)

It feels like something shifted in the United States this week after President Donald J. Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Kennedy School noted, the Geneva Conventions prohibit “acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.” He notes that Trump’s threat terrorized 90 million Iranians by threatening them with genocide.

Trump has continued to struggle to assert his power over Iran since Tuesday, and has continued to fail. Yesterday former secretary of state John Kerry told Jen Psaki of The Briefing that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had urged presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and George W. Bush to strike Iran, and they all refused him. Only Trump was willing to go along.

But negotiations have been rocky all along, and today Trump warned that if Iran didn’t come to a peace deal, the U.S. would launch even deadlier attacks. “We have a reset going,” Trump told the New York Post. At 9:31 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL RESET!!! PRESIDENT DJT.” At 12:27, Trump vented some of his apparent frustration that the Iranians have been trolling him, posting: “The Iranians are better at handling the Fake News Media, and ‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!” A minute later, he posted: “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways. The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!”

Trump continues to try to shore up the international right-wing authoritarian project even as people are turning against it. Today he threw the economic might of the United States of America behind Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who gutted Hungary’s democracy and turned the country into an authoritarian state. Orbán is deeply underwater ahead of the April 12 parliamentary elections in Hungary. Vice President J.D. Vance has been in Hungary to support Orbán, and today Trump posted: “My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

A recently revealed transcript of an October 2025 phone call between Orbán and Russian president Vladimir Putin shows Orbán promising to be a “mouse” aiding the “lion” Putin, telling the Russian leader: “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.” Tonight Hungarians filled the streets to protest Orbán, chanting “Russians, go home.”
Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump has repeatedly promised to pardon his top officials before he leaves office and that he brings up the subject frequently. In a recent meeting, he said: “I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval .” In response to a request for comment by Meredith Kile of People magazine, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke; however, the President’s pardon power is absolute.”

But Tuesday has given momentum to those trying to rein Trump in. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, made a record of Trump’s recent bizarre behavior in a letter today to the president’s personal physician, Captain Sean P. Barbabella.

Raskin noted that “xperts have repeatedly warned that the President has been exhibiting signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline. And, in recent days, the country has watched President Trump’s public statements and outbursts turn increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening.” Raskin recounted Trump’s wild social media posts and weird performance at the White House Easter egg roll, what the congressman called “a bizarre display that shocked tens of millions of Americans and astonished observers across the political spectrum.”

Raskin wrote that Trump’s “apparently deteriorating condition has caused tremendous alarm across the nation (and political spectrum) about the President’s cognitive function and continuing mental fitness for the office of President, and prompted concerns about the President’s well-being.”

Raskin asked the White House physician to “onduct a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment of the President, including a formal cognitive screening instrument, and publicly release the results; rovide a detailed report on the President’s current mental and physical health status, including any medications he is currently taking and their potential cognitive side effects; and ake yourself available for a briefing, under oath, with Members of the Committee on the results of this assessment.”

Former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg said on Morning Joe today that the gradual destruction of the United States under Trump changed suddenly on Tuesday. “For the leader of the free world, the leader of this country, to just make a nakedly genocidal threat against another civilization, as if the United States of America was a death star that was going around blowing up civilizations, of course that crosses a new line, and, of course, that’s a new low,” he said.
Buttigieg continued: “I think the really important thing to remember is that the effects of that kind of thing will outlive Donald Trump long after he has departed the scene, the collapse in trust, not just affection for the United States, but trust in the United States, and it’s very important that not just allies but, frankly, also adversaries that we’re negotiating with when we’re making a peace deal or some other kind of deal, that they have a level of trust that there is stability in the United States.”
Those trying to write off Trump’s threat as bluster or just Trump being Trump were missing the point, he said. “he reality is that the whole country is being judged. Even though most Americans don’t support him anyway. The whole country is being judged just for tolerating that kind of thing at the White House.”

The pushback against Trump is spreading across the United States. Jess Craven of Chop Wood, Carry Water today called out rock and roll legend Bruce Springsteen’s opening last night at his concert in Los Angeles:

“Good evening, Los Angeles,” he said. “Welcome to the Land of Hope and Dreams tour. We begin tonight with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas. We pray for their safe return.

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times. We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals, democracy, our Constitution, and our sacred American promise. The America I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration,” he said.

“Tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unrivaled corruption, resistance over complacency, truth over lies, unity over division, and peace over war.”

buffy said:

April 10, 2026 (Friday)

It feels like something shifted in the United States this week after President Donald J. Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Kennedy School noted, the Geneva Conventions prohibit “acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.” He notes that Trump’s threat terrorized 90 million Iranians by threatening them with genocide.

wrong, everyone knows that kkk jokes, he’s the best joker, it’s just the art of the deal, we live in unserious times so iranians should just calm down, he means nothing of it, it’s just harmless sport

@davidfeldman

https://youtu.be/rNvfpcrli4A?si=iDm-3vr1jrX2kBkC

April 11, 2026 (Saturday)

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor.

Attacking the fort seemed a logical outcome of events that had been in play for at least four months. On December 20, 1860, as soon as it was clear Abraham Lincoln had won the 1860 presidential election, South Carolina lawmakers had taken their state out of the Union. “The whole town was in an uproar,” Elizabeth Allston recalled.

“Parades, shouting, firecrackers, bells ringing, cannon on the forts booming, flags waving, and excited people thronging the streets.”

Mississippi had followed suit on January 9, 1861; Florida on January 10; Alabama on January 11; Georgia on January 19; Louisiana on January 26; and Texas on February 1. By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven southern states had left the Union and formed their own provisional government that protected human enslavement.

Their move had come because the elite enslavers who controlled those southern states believed that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marked the end of their way of life. Badly outnumbered by the northerners who insisted that the West must be reserved for free men, southern elites were afraid that northerners would bottle up enslavement in the South and gradually whittle away at it. Those boundaries would mean that white southerners would soon be outnumbered by the Black Americans they enslaved, putting not only their economy but also their very lives at risk.

To defend their system, elite southern enslavers rewrote American democracy. They insisted that the government of the United States of America envisioned by the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence had a fatal flaw: it declared that all men were created equal. In contrast, the southern enslavers were openly embracing the belief that some people were better than others and had the right to rule.

They looked around at their great wealth—the European masters hanging in their parlors, the fine dresses in which they clothed their wives and daughters, and the imported olive oil on their tables—and concluded they were the ones who had figured out the true plan for human society. As South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues in March 1858, the “harmonious…and prosperous” system of the South worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond dismissed “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal.”

On March 21, 1861, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, the newly elected vice president of the Confederacy, explained to a crowd that the Confederate government rested on the “great truth” that the Black man “is not equal to the white man; that…subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Stephens told listeners that the Confederate government “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Not every white southerner thought secession from the United States was a good idea. Especially as the winter wore into spring and Lincoln made no effort to attack the South, conservative leaders urged their hot-headed neighbors to slow down. But for decades, southerners had marinated in rhetoric about their strength and independence from the federal government, and as Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana later wrote, “he prudent and conservative men” of the South were not “able to stem the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it…. It is a revolution…of the most intense character…and it can no more be checked by human effort, for the time, than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.”

Southern white elites celebrated the idea of a new nation, one they dominated, convinced that the despised Yankees would never fight. “So far as civil war is concerned,” one Atlanta newspaper wrote in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” White southerners boasted that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed” in establishing a new nation. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina went so far as to vow that he would drink all the blood shed as a consequence of southern secession.

Chesnut’s promise misread the situation. Northerners recognized that if Americans accepted the principle that some men were better than others, and permitted southern Democrats to spread that principle by destroying the United States, they had lost democracy. “I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” Lincoln had asked in 1858.

Northerners rejected the white southerners’ radical attempt to destroy the principles of the Declaration of Independence. They understood that it was not just Black rights at stake. Arguments like that of Stephens, that some men were better than others, “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said. “You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”

Northerners rejected the slaveholders’ unequal view of the world, seeing it as a radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion against the government. He called for “loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.”

Like their southern counterparts, northerners also dismissed the idea that a civil war would be bloody. They were so convinced that a single battle would bring southerners to their senses that inhabitants of Washington, D.C., as well as congressmen and their wives packed picnics and took carriages out to Manassas, Virginia, to watch the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. They decamped in panic as the battle turned against the United States army and soldiers bolted past them, flinging haversacks and rifles as they fled.

For their part, southerners were as shocked by the battle as the people of the North were. “Never have I conceived,” one South Carolina soldier wrote, “of such a continuous, rushing hailstorm of shot, shell, and musketry as fell around and among us for hours together. We who escaped are constantly wondering how we could possibly have come out of the action alive.”

Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two fifths of the livestock—horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for food—were dead. Over half the region’s farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.

On March 4, 1865, when a weary Lincoln took the oath of office for a second time, he reviewed the war’s history. “To strengthen, perpetuate and extend was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it,” he said. “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

“Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish,” he said.

“And the war came.”

April 12, 2026 (Sunday)

By the end of 2024, inflation in the U.S., which had soared in the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdowns, was almost back to the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2%. Even so, during the 2024 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised he would bring prices down on Day One, beginning with energy prices, thanks to new high tariffs, business deregulation, and tax cuts.

It was a year ago today, just ten days after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, that Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro told the Fox News Channel that “90 deals in 90 days is possible. The boss is going to be the chief negotiator. Nothing’s done without him looking very carefully at it—he has such a fine attention to detail.”

Trump’s “Liberation Day” tore up the free trade principles on which leaders after World War II based the international order that promoted stability and prosperity. In their place, Trump first declared an emergency to take the power to manage tariffs away from Congress, then used that power to elicit favorable treatment for his own businesses or bribes from those who needed the tariffs on their products lowered.

The Supreme Court declared those tariffs unconstitutional on February 20, and later that day Trump claimed the right to impose tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes tariffs to address “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits.” Trump was the first to use this law, and his use of it has already been challenged.

In the meantime, the administration has not begun the process of refunding the approximately $175 billion owed to the importers who paid the illegal tariffs, but says it will begin that process on April 20. Democrats have introduced bills to refund the costs of the tariffs passed on to consumers. The money from illegal tariffs is accumulating about $23 million a day in interest, to be paid for by taxpayers.

In mid-March, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell noted that inflation was rising. He explained that “some big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters ​is actually tariffs, so we’re looking for progress on that” once Trump’s tariffs move through the system.

Statistics released by the Labor Department on Friday showed that Trump’s war with Iran has pushed inflation to 3.3%. That’s the fastest rate of growth in almost two years, tripling the 0.3% rate in February, when inflation was 2.4%. Gasoline prices rose 21.2%, a record.

Economist Heather Long told Alicia Wallace of CNN: “It’s going to get a lot worse before there’s any relief. Even if the war on Iran ends in two weeks, and there’s magically an agreement, inflation will continue to rise for months to come.” She continued: “We haven’t seen it come through with food yet, in airfares—those are clearly going to go higher—and in transit costs. It’s just a matter of time.” She added: “We almost forget the tariffs, because we’re all paying attention to the gas, but it’s a good reminder that part of the issue here is we’re piling on top of what was already rising.”

Those energy costs are going to continue to skyrocket until the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil is transported, reopens for traffic. After strikes from both the U.S. and Israel costing the lives of 13 U.S. service members and countless Iranian and Lebanese civilians, and more than $1 billion a day, Iran has closed the strait for all but a few vessels from favored nations. In negotiating to reopen the strait, the U.S. is demanding terms that are significantly weaker than the ones Iran agreed to in 2015 during negotiation with the Barack Obama administration.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, together with Germany and the European Union—took 20 months to hash out. The agreement constrained Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions that would let Iran recover about $100 billion of assets frozen in overseas banks.

Yesterday Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff were in Islamabad, Pakistan, to negotiate with Iran. According to Vance, their goal was to get Iran to stop its quest for a nuclear weapon, although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations. And yet these leaders of the U.S. delegation, who have no experience in diplomacy, announced after only 21 hours that they could not reach an agreement and were leaving.

At just about the same moment Vance, Kushner, and Witkoff left the negotiations, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were watching an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Miami. Earlier, Trump had said to reporters that he didn’t care if the team in Islamabad reached an agreement. “We win, regardless,” he said. “We’ve defeated them militarily.” The fact that the president had the U.S. secretary of state with him at a UFC event while talks were breaking down in Islamabad showed Trump’s disdain for the State Department, as well as his attempt to play Vance and Rubio off against each other as each vies for Trump’s endorsement as the inheritor of MAGA.

Today Trump announced that the U.S. military will blockade the Strait of Hormuz, sending the price of oil surging.

It is unclear what the president hopes to accomplish by blockading the strait. He told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel his new policy is “called ‘all in and all out.’ There’ll be a time when we’ll have ’em all come in, and all come out, but it won’t be a percentage. It won’t be a friend of yours, like, a country that’s your ally or a country that’s your friend; it’s all or nothing. And that’ll be, uh, that won’t be in too long a distance. No, we’re, uh, just bringing the ships up. We got a lot of ships, so we’re bringing them up. We think that numerous countries are gonna be helping us with this also, but we’re putting on a complete blockade. We’re not gonna let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like and not people that they don’t like, or whatever it is. It’s gonna be all or none, and that’s the way it is, and it’ll be, you saw what we did with Venezuela. It’ll be something very similar to that, but at a higher level.”

U.S. Central Command, overseeing the U.S. military operation in Iran, announced today that it would “begin implementing a blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13…in accordance with the President’s proclamation.”

Trump’s promise to voters that he would lower prices, along with his crusade against immigrants, attacks on education and the courts, and vow to resurrect a patriarchy in which white Christian men would dominate women and people of color, was closely patterned on the “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. MAGA Republicans embraced Orbán as the leader of a movement to replace democracy with an authoritarianism that empowered the far right.

MAGA Republicans invited Orbán to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and media figure Tucker Carlson interviewed him in Hungary. His destruction of democracy in Hungary provided the blueprint for Project 2025, with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts building close ties to Orbán’s institutions.

But Orbán’s vows to reinstate traditional values in Hungary produced higher prices and profound corruption. His corruption as well as his evident attempts to make Hungary subordinate to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin infuriated Hungarians, whose hatred for Russia runs deep, especially after that affinity was recently revealed to be actual promises to be “at your service” “in any matter where I can be of assistance.”

Although Orbán’s political party has skewed governance in Hungary to make it hard for him to lose at the polls, as well as censoring the media, Hungarians turned out today in record numbers—77% of registered voters—and gave Orbán’s opposition party more than two thirds of the seats in the parliament, a supermajority that will let the opposition undo some of the changes Orbán’s party made to cement their power. Orbán’s defeat means that the parliament will name opposition leader Péter Magyar, a former Orbán loyalist, as prime minister.

“We have done it,” Magyar told a crowd after Orbán conceded. “We have liberated Hungary and have taken back our country.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on social media: “Hungary has chosen Europe. Europe has always chosen Hungary. A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”

Along with other right-wing leaders, both Trump and Vance had worked for Orbán’s victory in the election, with Vance actually traveling to Hungary to urge voters to turn out for Orbán’s party. Orbán’s defeat is a major blow to the MAGA belief that the right-wing forces opposing liberal democracy are the vanguard of an unstoppable movement blessed by God.

Trump responded to Orbán’s defeat with a long screed attacking Pope Leo XIV, who has spoken out against the religious justification for wars, a statement widely interpreted as commentary on the Trump administration’s claim that the war in Iran is a holy war. “God does not bless any conflict,” the Pope posted on Friday. “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “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.”

Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.

Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

Arts said:

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

Team up with Elon and Trump Mars.

Arts said:

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

I think that architect must have been a Gerry Anderson fan…

Neophyte said:

Arts said:

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

I think that architect must have been a Gerry Anderson fan…

they should just go fucking deep and join the ocean gate

Arts said:

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

Sagittarius A ?

Cymek said:

Arts said:

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

Sagittarius A ?

You’re an ideas man

Neophyte said:

I think that architect must have been a Gerry Anderson fan…

They never did explain why that control tower continually roatated.

Must have been a damn nuisance when trying to observe what was actually happening on the launch pad.

Cymek said:

Arts said:

Divine Angel said:

“ although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations.”

There have been several comments on social media today about the Trump family directly benefitting from this war in the form of stock market manipulation.

“Trump posted an image of Trump Tower on the moon”

LOL sorry I missed it, I’m gonna have to find it now

I don’t think the moon is far enough … Trump should aim higher? further? farther?

Sagittarius A ?

Ain’t nobody coming back after crossing that event horizon.

Bubblecar said:

Neophyte said:

I think that architect must have been a Gerry Anderson fan…

They never did explain why that control tower continually roatated.

Must have been a damn nuisance when trying to observe what was actually happening on the launch pad.

Maybe there was a restaurant on the top floor…

Neophyte said:

April 12, 2026 (Sunday)

By the end of 2024, inflation in the U.S., which had soared in the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdowns, was almost back to the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2%. Even so, during the 2024 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised he would bring prices down on Day One, beginning with energy prices, thanks to new high tariffs, business deregulation, and tax cuts.

It was a year ago today, just ten days after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, that Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro told the Fox News Channel that “90 deals in 90 days is possible. The boss is going to be the chief negotiator. Nothing’s done without him looking very carefully at it—he has such a fine attention to detail.”

Trump’s “Liberation Day” tore up the free trade principles on which leaders after World War II based the international order that promoted stability and prosperity. In their place, Trump first declared an emergency to take the power to manage tariffs away from Congress, then used that power to elicit favorable treatment for his own businesses or bribes from those who needed the tariffs on their products lowered.

The Supreme Court declared those tariffs unconstitutional on February 20, and later that day Trump claimed the right to impose tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes tariffs to address “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits.” Trump was the first to use this law, and his use of it has already been challenged.

In the meantime, the administration has not begun the process of refunding the approximately $175 billion owed to the importers who paid the illegal tariffs, but says it will begin that process on April 20. Democrats have introduced bills to refund the costs of the tariffs passed on to consumers. The money from illegal tariffs is accumulating about $23 million a day in interest, to be paid for by taxpayers.

In mid-March, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell noted that inflation was rising. He explained that “some big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters ​is actually tariffs, so we’re looking for progress on that” once Trump’s tariffs move through the system.

Statistics released by the Labor Department on Friday showed that Trump’s war with Iran has pushed inflation to 3.3%. That’s the fastest rate of growth in almost two years, tripling the 0.3% rate in February, when inflation was 2.4%. Gasoline prices rose 21.2%, a record.

Economist Heather Long told Alicia Wallace of CNN: “It’s going to get a lot worse before there’s any relief. Even if the war on Iran ends in two weeks, and there’s magically an agreement, inflation will continue to rise for months to come.” She continued: “We haven’t seen it come through with food yet, in airfares—those are clearly going to go higher—and in transit costs. It’s just a matter of time.” She added: “We almost forget the tariffs, because we’re all paying attention to the gas, but it’s a good reminder that part of the issue here is we’re piling on top of what was already rising.”

Those energy costs are going to continue to skyrocket until the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil is transported, reopens for traffic. After strikes from both the U.S. and Israel costing the lives of 13 U.S. service members and countless Iranian and Lebanese civilians, and more than $1 billion a day, Iran has closed the strait for all but a few vessels from favored nations. In negotiating to reopen the strait, the U.S. is demanding terms that are significantly weaker than the ones Iran agreed to in 2015 during negotiation with the Barack Obama administration.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, together with Germany and the European Union—took 20 months to hash out. The agreement constrained Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions that would let Iran recover about $100 billion of assets frozen in overseas banks.

Yesterday Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff were in Islamabad, Pakistan, to negotiate with Iran. According to Vance, their goal was to get Iran to stop its quest for a nuclear weapon, although both Kushner and Witkoff have deep financial ties to the Middle East and have been openly courting investments there during negotiations. And yet these leaders of the U.S. delegation, who have no experience in diplomacy, announced after only 21 hours that they could not reach an agreement and were leaving.

At just about the same moment Vance, Kushner, and Witkoff left the negotiations, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were watching an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Miami. Earlier, Trump had said to reporters that he didn’t care if the team in Islamabad reached an agreement. “We win, regardless,” he said. “We’ve defeated them militarily.” The fact that the president had the U.S. secretary of state with him at a UFC event while talks were breaking down in Islamabad showed Trump’s disdain for the State Department, as well as his attempt to play Vance and Rubio off against each other as each vies for Trump’s endorsement as the inheritor of MAGA.

Today Trump announced that the U.S. military will blockade the Strait of Hormuz, sending the price of oil surging.

It is unclear what the president hopes to accomplish by blockading the strait. He told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel his new policy is “called ‘all in and all out.’ There’ll be a time when we’ll have ’em all come in, and all come out, but it won’t be a percentage. It won’t be a friend of yours, like, a country that’s your ally or a country that’s your friend; it’s all or nothing. And that’ll be, uh, that won’t be in too long a distance. No, we’re, uh, just bringing the ships up. We got a lot of ships, so we’re bringing them up. We think that numerous countries are gonna be helping us with this also, but we’re putting on a complete blockade. We’re not gonna let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like and not people that they don’t like, or whatever it is. It’s gonna be all or none, and that’s the way it is, and it’ll be, you saw what we did with Venezuela. It’ll be something very similar to that, but at a higher level.”

U.S. Central Command, overseeing the U.S. military operation in Iran, announced today that it would “begin implementing a blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13…in accordance with the President’s proclamation.”

Trump’s promise to voters that he would lower prices, along with his crusade against immigrants, attacks on education and the courts, and vow to resurrect a patriarchy in which white Christian men would dominate women and people of color, was closely patterned on the “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. MAGA Republicans embraced Orbán as the leader of a movement to replace democracy with an authoritarianism that empowered the far right.

MAGA Republicans invited Orbán to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and media figure Tucker Carlson interviewed him in Hungary. His destruction of democracy in Hungary provided the blueprint for Project 2025, with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts building close ties to Orbán’s institutions.

But Orbán’s vows to reinstate traditional values in Hungary produced higher prices and profound corruption. His corruption as well as his evident attempts to make Hungary subordinate to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin infuriated Hungarians, whose hatred for Russia runs deep, especially after that affinity was recently revealed to be actual promises to be “at your service” “in any matter where I can be of assistance.”

Although Orbán’s political party has skewed governance in Hungary to make it hard for him to lose at the polls, as well as censoring the media, Hungarians turned out today in record numbers—77% of registered voters—and gave Orbán’s opposition party more than two thirds of the seats in the parliament, a supermajority that will let the opposition undo some of the changes Orbán’s party made to cement their power. Orbán’s defeat means that the parliament will name opposition leader Péter Magyar, a former Orbán loyalist, as prime minister.

“We have done it,” Magyar told a crowd after Orbán conceded. “We have liberated Hungary and have taken back our country.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on social media: “Hungary has chosen Europe. Europe has always chosen Hungary. A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”

Along with other right-wing leaders, both Trump and Vance had worked for Orbán’s victory in the election, with Vance actually traveling to Hungary to urge voters to turn out for Orbán’s party. Orbán’s defeat is a major blow to the MAGA belief that the right-wing forces opposing liberal democracy are the vanguard of an unstoppable movement blessed by God.

Trump responded to Orbán’s defeat with a long screed attacking Pope Leo XIV, who has spoken out against the religious justification for wars, a statement widely interpreted as commentary on the Trump administration’s claim that the war in Iran is a holy war. “God does not bless any conflict,” the Pope posted on Friday. “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “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.”

Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.

Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.

It just never ends. I have been to a few of her livestreams. She answers questions sometimes. They are interesting.

April 13, 2026 (Monday)

On April 12, the day of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.

The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.

Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.

Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.

Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.

It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.

But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.

Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”

Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.

Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.

But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.

Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

April 14, 2026 (Tuesday)

There are signs the political game has changed in the United States since Hungarian voters rejected Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership on Sunday, April 12. His party’s loss of control of the government to a supermajority of its opponents undermined the belief that right-wing authoritarianism was an unstoppable force in world politics. Since MAGA Republicans had tied themselves to Orbán and his movement, his loss also weakened their own claims to inevitable victory over those trying to protect democracy.

On Sunday night, President Donald J. Trump appeared to melt down on social media. In The Atlantic today, Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s “emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.” Nichols notes that after Trump attacked the Pope and portrayed himself as Jesus, he posted an AI version of a Trump Tower on the moon. (“Sure,” Nichols writes. “Why not?”)

Then Trump posted a meme of how senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former president Joe Biden all look old—unlike Trump—and then posted clips from Newsmax. The postings continued throughout the night. “This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader,” Nichols writes. “The American people must not look away…. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.”

Trump has tried to explain away the AI image he posted on social media on Sunday depicting himself as Jesus, clothed in robes, bathed in radiant light, and apparently healing a man in bed. After an extraordinary outcry over the image from his evangelical Christian followers, he took the image down, telling reporters “I thought it was me as a doctor” and claiming that “only the fake news” could suggest the image showed him as Jesus. He added: “I do make people better.”

With the House back in session today, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to establish an independent commission to evaluate the president’s mental state. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes a process by which either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of a body created by Congress to evaluate the president’s fitness can declare that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In a press release, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expressed concern about “Trump’s escalating erratic conduct.” The bill has fifty Democratic co-sponsors.

“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation,” Raskin said in a statement.

Trump’s deteriorating mental state has become impossible to overlook, but Republicans are making excuses for it. Cabinet members, who owe their positions to Trump and who likely recognize they will never rise to such power again in a merit-based system, will probably not question Trump’s mental acuity. But Raskin’s measure will force Republicans in Congress either to vote for an independent commission to evaluate Trump or to own his increasingly erratic behavior themselves.

Today, when asked if he were comfortable with Trump’s threat of last week that an entire civilization would die if it did not meet his demands, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) changed the subject by saying: “You’ve got to…look at what the president is doing, and I think right now he’s trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, which…we are all supportive of.” The strait was, of course, open before Trump attacked Iran.

The Lincoln Project accused Republicans of “ignoring Trump’s sharp mental decline the same way they’ve ignored his crimes.”

Trump’s erratic behavior has led the U.S. into disaster by striking Iran, which in turn attacked its neighbors and closed the Strait of Hormuz. After unsuccessfully bullying other nations to force Iran to reopen the strait to all ships, not just to those of certain nations, Trump last week declared a ceasefire and a framework for an agreement, then suggested the U.S. and Iran would together manage the strait. When Iran continued to maintain control of it, Trump announced the U.S. would blockade the strait to make sure no ships at all could cross through it, with the idea that the U.S. can withstand the economic pain that closure will cause for a longer time than Iran can.

Data released today show that wholesale inflation has risen to 4%, the highest annual rate in three years. Today Marta Pacheco of EuroNews reported that the last of the vessels that left the Strait of Hormuz before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran have reached Europe. Analysts expect a new surge in energy prices. In Talking Points Memo today, David Kurtz points out that the economic mess in which the U.S., and the world, finds itself is entirely Trump’s fault. The trade wars, unjustified war in the Middle East, and attacks on U.S. science, universities, and immigration that are throttling economic growth are all a product of Trump’s personal choices.

As the war enters its seventh week, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said today that Senate Democrats will repeatedly force votes on war powers resolutions designed to force Trump to get congressional authorization before any further military action in Iran. “Forty-five days into this war, Congress has been sidelined because our Republican colleagues refuse to take a strong stand against this war and duck it completely because they’re afraid of Trump,” Schumer ​said today.

Thune and other Republicans countered with the belief that the war won’t go on much longer, and they support Trump’s actions.

Today former attorney general Pam Bondi was scheduled to testify under oath before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the Department of Justice’s handling of the release of the Epstein files. The DOJ has released only about half of those files despite a law requiring it to produce them all no later than December 19 of last year. Many of the records it did release are heavily redacted, despite the very few and very specific conditions under which Congress allowed such redactions.

Bondi did not show up.

The Department of Justice is taking the position that since she was subpoenaed as attorney general and no longer holds that position, the subpoena was no longer in force.

Democrats on the committee disagree.

Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who was a prosecutor before she entered the House, posted: “Pam Bondi refused to show up for today’s Oversight deposition—defying our lawful subpoena. We couldn’t care less that she was fired from her job as Attorney General. She is responsible for leading the White House cover-up of the Epstein files.

Since she didn’t show up, Oversight Democrats will move to hold her in contempt of Congress. The survivors deserve justice—and we will get answers. Enough is enough.”

Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told the Weeknight: “People have to be held accountable for the laws that we pass in the Congress and the subpoenas that we put in place.”

“This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader,” Nichols writes.

It would make sense for world leaders who are democratically elected or appointed to do some sort of senility or Voight-Kampff test.

Rational behaviour, empathy, “morality”, should be a must for someone with such power.

Cymek said:

It would make sense for world leaders who are democratically elected or appointed to do some sort of senility or Voight-Kampff test.

Rational behaviour, empathy, “morality”, should be a must for someone with such power.

Trump’s doing awesome on his cognitive tests, remember?

Divine Angel said:

Cymek said:

It would make sense for world leaders who are democratically elected or appointed to do some sort of senility or Voight-Kampff test.

Rational behaviour, empathy, “morality”, should be a must for someone with such power.

Trump’s doing awesome on his cognitive tests, remember?

Neophyte said:

Divine Angel said:

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Michael V said:

Divine Angel said:

https://tokyo3.org/forums/holiday/posts/2380434/

LOLOL

:)

yeah but 3 of those are people and 2 are video devices

It would make sense for world leaders who are democratically elected or appointed to do some sort of senility or Voight-Kampff test.

Rational behaviour, empathy, “morality”, should be a must for someone with such power.

Trump’s doing awesome on his cognitive tests, remember?

yeah but 3 of those are people and 2 are video devices

Neophyte said:

April 14, 2026 (Tuesday)

There are signs the political game has changed in the United States since Hungarian voters rejected Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership on Sunday, April 12. His party’s loss of control of the government to a supermajority of its opponents undermined the belief that right-wing authoritarianism was an unstoppable force in world politics. Since MAGA Republicans had tied themselves to Orbán and his movement, his loss also weakened their own claims to inevitable victory over those trying to protect democracy.

On Sunday night, President Donald J. Trump appeared to melt down on social media. In The Atlantic today, Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s “emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.” Nichols notes that after Trump attacked the Pope and portrayed himself as Jesus, he posted an AI version of a Trump Tower on the moon. (“Sure,” Nichols writes. “Why not?”)

Then Trump posted a meme of how senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former president Joe Biden all look old—unlike Trump—and then posted clips from Newsmax. The postings continued throughout the night. “This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader,” Nichols writes. “The American people must not look away…. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.”

Trump has tried to explain away the AI image he posted on social media on Sunday depicting himself as Jesus, clothed in robes, bathed in radiant light, and apparently healing a man in bed. After an extraordinary outcry over the image from his evangelical Christian followers, he took the image down, telling reporters “I thought it was me as a doctor” and claiming that “only the fake news” could suggest the image showed him as Jesus. He added: “I do make people better.”

With the House back in session today, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to establish an independent commission to evaluate the president’s mental state. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes a process by which either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of a body created by Congress to evaluate the president’s fitness can declare that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In a press release, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expressed concern about “Trump’s escalating erratic conduct.” The bill has fifty Democratic co-sponsors.

“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation,” Raskin said in a statement.

Trump’s deteriorating mental state has become impossible to overlook, but Republicans are making excuses for it. Cabinet members, who owe their positions to Trump and who likely recognize they will never rise to such power again in a merit-based system, will probably not question Trump’s mental acuity. But Raskin’s measure will force Republicans in Congress either to vote for an independent commission to evaluate Trump or to own his increasingly erratic behavior themselves.

Today, when asked if he were comfortable with Trump’s threat of last week that an entire civilization would die if it did not meet his demands, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) changed the subject by saying: “You’ve got to…look at what the president is doing, and I think right now he’s trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, which…we are all supportive of.” The strait was, of course, open before Trump attacked Iran.

The Lincoln Project accused Republicans of “ignoring Trump’s sharp mental decline the same way they’ve ignored his crimes.”

Trump’s erratic behavior has led the U.S. into disaster by striking Iran, which in turn attacked its neighbors and closed the Strait of Hormuz. After unsuccessfully bullying other nations to force Iran to reopen the strait to all ships, not just to those of certain nations, Trump last week declared a ceasefire and a framework for an agreement, then suggested the U.S. and Iran would together manage the strait. When Iran continued to maintain control of it, Trump announced the U.S. would blockade the strait to make sure no ships at all could cross through it, with the idea that the U.S. can withstand the economic pain that closure will cause for a longer time than Iran can.

Data released today show that wholesale inflation has risen to 4%, the highest annual rate in three years. Today Marta Pacheco of EuroNews reported that the last of the vessels that left the Strait of Hormuz before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran have reached Europe. Analysts expect a new surge in energy prices. In Talking Points Memo today, David Kurtz points out that the economic mess in which the U.S., and the world, finds itself is entirely Trump’s fault. The trade wars, unjustified war in the Middle East, and attacks on U.S. science, universities, and immigration that are throttling economic growth are all a product of Trump’s personal choices.

As the war enters its seventh week, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said today that Senate Democrats will repeatedly force votes on war powers resolutions designed to force Trump to get congressional authorization before any further military action in Iran. “Forty-five days into this war, Congress has been sidelined because our Republican colleagues refuse to take a strong stand against this war and duck it completely because they’re afraid of Trump,” Schumer ​said today.

Thune and other Republicans countered with the belief that the war won’t go on much longer, and they support Trump’s actions.

Today former attorney general Pam Bondi was scheduled to testify under oath before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the Department of Justice’s handling of the release of the Epstein files. The DOJ has released only about half of those files despite a law requiring it to produce them all no later than December 19 of last year. Many of the records it did release are heavily redacted, despite the very few and very specific conditions under which Congress allowed such redactions.

Bondi did not show up.

The Department of Justice is taking the position that since she was subpoenaed as attorney general and no longer holds that position, the subpoena was no longer in force.

Democrats on the committee disagree.

Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who was a prosecutor before she entered the House, posted: “Pam Bondi refused to show up for today’s Oversight deposition—defying our lawful subpoena. We couldn’t care less that she was fired from her job as Attorney General. She is responsible for leading the White House cover-up of the Epstein files.

Since she didn’t show up, Oversight Democrats will move to hold her in contempt of Congress. The survivors deserve justice—and we will get answers. Enough is enough.”

Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told the Weeknight: “People have to be held accountable for the laws that we pass in the Congress and the subpoenas that we put in place.”

Thanks for posting.

April 15, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.

One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The very heavens seemed to reflect the dawn of a new era. Poet Walt Whitman noted that after months of fog and clouds, the weather had cleared. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear,” he wrote. “It seems as if it told something as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

When the Lincolns and their guests arrived at the theater at about 8:30, the people in the audience leaped to their feet to applaud and the actors stopped the production while the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” About a half-hour later, the president felt chilly and put on his overcoat but was clearly relaxed and enjoying the play. Shortly after 10:00 the Lincolns were holding hands, and Mrs. Lincoln worried their public affection would scandalize the young Clara Harris, daughter of New York senator Ira Harris, who shared their box with her fiance, Major Henry Rathbone. Mrs. Lincoln whispered to her husband that she wondered what Clara would think of them holding hands, and Lincoln answered: “She won’t think anything about it.”

They would be the last words he ever spoke. On the stage, the play had just reached its best joke, and as the audience roared with laughter, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head, then slashed Rathbone’s arm as the officer tried to stop him from getting away. He jumped to the stage, breaking his leg, and shouted the state motto of Virginia, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” thus always to tyrants.

As Booth escaped, news spread that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had also been attacked, and in the days to follow, the euphoria of the last days of the war gave way to grief. The windows in Washington, D.C., were hung with black garlands. And then the rain came back. In New York City, Whitman wrote in his diary: “Lincoln’s death—black, black, black—as you look toward the sky—long broad black like great serpents slowly undulating in every direction—New York is distinguished for its countless gay flags—every house seems to have a flag staff—on all these the colors were at half mast.”

At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death by hanging; four were imprisoned.

But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be “liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.

At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.

Congress fought back, trying to protect the principles for which Lincoln had died, but with no accountability for a war that had left 620,000 Americans dead and cost more than $5 billion, the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious. Former Confederates still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.

By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form of socialism.

That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.
By the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America.

In the 1930s, with the southern economy dependent on New Deal programs from the federal government, Confederate iconography fell out of sight, but it sprang back to popularity after President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948. That year, the Democratic Party split in two as half of the party followed Truman and half refused. Southern racists under then–South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond—who had fathered the child of his family’s teenaged Black housekeeper in 1925—formed the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party, called “Dixiecrat” in a play on the South’s nickname, and took the Confederate battle flag as their party flag.

The ruling of a unanimous Supreme Court that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision resurrected Confederate ideology more widely. In Georgia the Ku Klux Klan had reformed near Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta in the early twentieth century, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to create a giant carving of Confederate leaders on the side of the mountain. The plan had been abandoned by 1928 as interest in the project waned, but it was reborn after Brown v. Board. Vice President Spiro Agnew dedicated the monument, which features Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, in May 1970.

The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.

Former Army gunner Timothy McVeigh wrote to a newspaper in 1992, saying: “Taxes are a joke. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement…. Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.” Three years later, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people, including nineteen children younger than six, and wounding more than 800 others. When captured, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.”

In 2009, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer and former paratrooper who had been a staffer for Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), started a right-wing gang called the “Oath Keepers.” Claiming to take their inspiration from the patriots who stood against the British regulars on Lexington Green in 1775, they pledged to stand against what they considered a tyrannical government.

In 2021, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, along with the right-wing Proud Boys, were part of the planning and execution of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol when they tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. Biden had won both the electoral vote and the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but the insurrectionists wanted their own leader, President Donald Trump, to stay in office. One of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate flag into the United States Capitol.

In November 2022 a federal jury convicted Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for using force and violence to try to stop the process of the democratic election of a president. Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes.

As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years.

Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., wrote.

Exactly 161 years before, on the night of April 14, 1865, bystanders at Ford’s Theater carried the grievously wounded Lincoln to a boardinghouse across the street, where members of his Cabinet crowded around his bed. At 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. His secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had tried to preserve American democracy and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

When he tried to put his own loss, and that of the nation, to poetry, Walt Whitman thought back to the heady days of Spring 1865 when the heavens themselves seemed to promise a glorious democratic future, and their contrast to what came after.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” he wrote, “And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
“I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Thanks.

The yanks and freedom from government interference
It seems to prevent the good parts, socialised medicine, protection from business exploitation, for example
Yet allows them to repress all sorts of humans rights, have a military that could if it wanted take over the entire nation.

Cymek said:

The yanks and freedom from government interference
It seems to prevent the good parts, socialised medicine, protection from business exploitation, for example
Yet allows them to repress all sorts of humans rights, have a military that could if it wanted take over the entire nation.

Are they great yet?

Divine Angel said:

Cymek said:

The yanks and freedom from government interference
It seems to prevent the good parts, socialised medicine, protection from business exploitation, for example
Yet allows them to repress all sorts of humans rights, have a military that could if it wanted take over the entire nation.

Are they great yet?

If by great you mean large in size, then yes…

Neophyte said:

April 15, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.

One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The very heavens seemed to reflect the dawn of a new era. Poet Walt Whitman noted that after months of fog and clouds, the weather had cleared. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear,” he wrote. “It seems as if it told something as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

When the Lincolns and their guests arrived at the theater at about 8:30, the people in the audience leaped to their feet to applaud and the actors stopped the production while the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” About a half-hour later, the president felt chilly and put on his overcoat but was clearly relaxed and enjoying the play. Shortly after 10:00 the Lincolns were holding hands, and Mrs. Lincoln worried their public affection would scandalize the young Clara Harris, daughter of New York senator Ira Harris, who shared their box with her fiance, Major Henry Rathbone. Mrs. Lincoln whispered to her husband that she wondered what Clara would think of them holding hands, and Lincoln answered: “She won’t think anything about it.”

They would be the last words he ever spoke. On the stage, the play had just reached its best joke, and as the audience roared with laughter, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head, then slashed Rathbone’s arm as the officer tried to stop him from getting away. He jumped to the stage, breaking his leg, and shouted the state motto of Virginia, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” thus always to tyrants.

As Booth escaped, news spread that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had also been attacked, and in the days to follow, the euphoria of the last days of the war gave way to grief. The windows in Washington, D.C., were hung with black garlands. And then the rain came back. In New York City, Whitman wrote in his diary: “Lincoln’s death—black, black, black—as you look toward the sky—long broad black like great serpents slowly undulating in every direction—New York is distinguished for its countless gay flags—every house seems to have a flag staff—on all these the colors were at half mast.”

At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death by hanging; four were imprisoned.

But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be “liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.

At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.

Congress fought back, trying to protect the principles for which Lincoln had died, but with no accountability for a war that had left 620,000 Americans dead and cost more than $5 billion, the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious. Former Confederates still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.

By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form of socialism.

That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.
By the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America.

In the 1930s, with the southern economy dependent on New Deal programs from the federal government, Confederate iconography fell out of sight, but it sprang back to popularity after President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948. That year, the Democratic Party split in two as half of the party followed Truman and half refused. Southern racists under then–South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond—who had fathered the child of his family’s teenaged Black housekeeper in 1925—formed the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party, called “Dixiecrat” in a play on the South’s nickname, and took the Confederate battle flag as their party flag.

The ruling of a unanimous Supreme Court that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision resurrected Confederate ideology more widely. In Georgia the Ku Klux Klan had reformed near Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta in the early twentieth century, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to create a giant carving of Confederate leaders on the side of the mountain. The plan had been abandoned by 1928 as interest in the project waned, but it was reborn after Brown v. Board. Vice President Spiro Agnew dedicated the monument, which features Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, in May 1970.

The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.

Former Army gunner Timothy McVeigh wrote to a newspaper in 1992, saying: “Taxes are a joke. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement…. Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.” Three years later, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people, including nineteen children younger than six, and wounding more than 800 others. When captured, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.”

In 2009, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer and former paratrooper who had been a staffer for Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), started a right-wing gang called the “Oath Keepers.” Claiming to take their inspiration from the patriots who stood against the British regulars on Lexington Green in 1775, they pledged to stand against what they considered a tyrannical government.

In 2021, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, along with the right-wing Proud Boys, were part of the planning and execution of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol when they tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. Biden had won both the electoral vote and the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but the insurrectionists wanted their own leader, President Donald Trump, to stay in office. One of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate flag into the United States Capitol.

In November 2022 a federal jury convicted Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for using force and violence to try to stop the process of the democratic election of a president. Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes.

As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years.

Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., wrote.

Exactly 161 years before, on the night of April 14, 1865, bystanders at Ford’s Theater carried the grievously wounded Lincoln to a boardinghouse across the street, where members of his Cabinet crowded around his bed. At 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. His secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had tried to preserve American democracy and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

When he tried to put his own loss, and that of the nation, to poetry, Walt Whitman thought back to the heady days of Spring 1865 when the heavens themselves seemed to promise a glorious democratic future, and their contrast to what came after.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” he wrote, “And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
“I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Thanks Neo. I was going to put this up but needed to do food prep first.

“Thanks Neo. I was going to put this up but needed to do food prep first.”

I had just done mine :-)

Cymek said:

The yanks and freedom from government interference
It seems to prevent the good parts, socialised medicine, protection from business exploitation, for example
Yet allows them to repress all sorts of humans rights, have a military that could if it wanted take over the entire nation.

pretty sure we’ve been reading this all wrong the whole time and the sole purpose of government is to organise and give a veneer of legitimacy to imperialist warmongering

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

The yanks and freedom from government interference
It seems to prevent the good parts, socialised medicine, protection from business exploitation, for example
Yet allows them to repress all sorts of humans rights, have a military that could if it wanted take over the entire nation.

pretty sure we’ve been reading this all wrong the whole time and the sole purpose of government is to organise and give a veneer of legitimacy to imperialist warmongering

Well yes.
This is what it seems to be.

April 16, 2026 (Thursday)

Congress is back in session, and there is a frantic feel in the air. Republicans appear to be assessing the fall of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior along with his abysmal job approval numbers, rising prices, and an unpopular war in Iran that currently does not appear to have a solution that will not result in the U.S. losing face.

In Hungary, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar is setting a bar as he appears to want no part of playing business as usual with Orbán’s cronies. A center-right politician, Magyar appeared as a guest on state television after his party’s dramatic win—Orbán’s state media had not let him appear on it before the election—and said he intended to suspend the station’s news service because state media does not provide the journalism that the country deserves. He said that he would end the state subsidies for Orbán’s right-wing-allied university and that Hungarian president Tamas Sulyok, a close ally of Orbán, was “unfit to serve as the guardian of legality” and “must leave office immediately.”
Republicans appear to be trying to grab all the turf they can before the midterm elections.

Today the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 140, a bill that overturns a 20-year mining ban upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) introduced the measure, which passed the House in January. It clears the way for a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta to engage in copper-sulfide mining, which produces sulfuric acid, above the pristine BWCA. Those waters include 1,175 lakes and over 1,200 miles of rivers and streams. According to outdoor writer Wes Siler, about 165,000 people visit the BWCA annually, generating $1.1 billion in economic activity and supporting 17,000 jobs.

The Republicans’ attack on the BWCA for the benefit of a foreign billionaire feeds President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing crusade against Minnesota. Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, is targeting New York today as well, saying that the federal government will withhold $73.5 million from the state because it has refused to review the commercial driver’s licenses of almost 33,000 immigrants. New York officials say they are complying with federal law.

Trump is also continuing to try to exert his personal power over the government, threatening again to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whose term as chair ends in May but who has said he will continue on the board until the administration drops its trumped-up criminal investigation of him over alleged cost overruns on the renovations of Treasury buildings.

As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

Today Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on social media that an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves surveillance warrants against foreign actors and agents in the U.S., “raises serious concerns about FBI implementation of FISA 702,” the law that allows warrantless surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) reposted Massie’s comment and added that he, Wyden, has sent “a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about.”

This exchange seems to suggest that FBI director Kash Patel has authorized FBI agents to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant, illegally.

Churchill Ndonwie of the Miami Herald and Garrett Shanley of the Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau reported yesterday that attorneys for the immigrants being held at the Florida detention center called “Alligator Alcatraz” said in court that after a judge protected the detainees’ right to use their phone and access their lawyers, the guards cut off their access to phones and beat and pepper-sprayed detainees, openly defying court orders to respect their civil rights. The facility is operated by the Florida Division of Emergency Management but must operate according to Department of Homeland Security standards.

Prosecutors in Minnesota today charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with two counts of second-degree assault after he pulled alongside a car on a highway in Minnesota and pulled a gun on the occupants. There is a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters: “There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law in the state of Minnesota.”

Today the new Department of Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, announced that acting director of ICE Todd Lyons will be leaving his position at the end of May. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Todd Lyons led a secret police force for Trump where masked agents attacked our own American streets, violated Constitutional rights, and shot our own citizens. We’ll hold you accountable too.”

Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo noted that in their panic over polls and the popularity of Democratic candidates, Republicans are trying to reclaim their base by turning back to Islamophobia and hoping a culture war will drown out concerns about gas prices, corruption, the Iran war, and Trump’s erratic behavior. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted that Muslims—who first came to the American colonies in the early 1600s, by the way—“don’t belong in American society,” and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called “the demand to impose Sharia Law in America…a serious problem.”

But there are signs that Trump is weakened enough that even past supporters are sliding away. At the beginning of his administration, Trump favored Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, who flattered Trump and poured as much as $90 million into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, becoming one of the largest investors in World Liberty Financial, founded by Trump’s sons. The Securities and Exchange Commission had sued Sun for securities and market manipulation in 2023, but in March 2026 it quietly settled the lawsuit for a payment of a $10 million fine.

On Tuesday, Sun accused Trump’s World Liberty Financial of setting up a trapdoor that allows company officers to freeze accounts. Sun says he has been unable to sell since September 2025, a freeze that a blockchain tracking group says has cost Sun about $80 million. On social media, Sun called out “the bad actors at .”

According to Rob Wile of NBC News, World Liberty Financial responded by suggesting Sun himself had engaged in misconduct. “See you in court pal,” it posted.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund, was reviewing its investments even before the Iran war hit its finances, and yesterday Andrew Beaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that it is “on the verge of pulling” its funding from LIV Golf, the rival to the PGA Tour it launched with Trump’s blessing—and mostly on his golf courses—in 2022.
Meanwhile, Trump posted four screeds about the proposed White House ballroom today after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, stopped its above-ground construction but permitted construction of the below-ground bunker to continue. In one of his missives, Trump complained:

“The White House doesn’t have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom, one with Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass—which all means that no future President, living in the White House without this Ballroom, can ever be Safe and Secure at Events, Future Inaugurations, or Global Summits. This Magnificent Space will allow them to carry out their vital duties as the Leader of our Nation. Furthermore, the Ballroom, which is being constructed on budget and ahead of schedule, is needed now. Almost all material necessary for its construction is being built and/or on its way to the site, ready for installation and erection. Much of it has already been paid for, costing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. If somebody, especially one with no standing, had a complaint—Why wasn’t it filed many months earlier, long before Construction was started? The Public Record was open for all to see. Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025. Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

🍿

Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

So say the Vogons

Cymek said:

Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

So say the Vogons

Yes, I need a new ballroom too as a matter of military imperative. The fate of the country depends on it!

Thanks.

Cymek said:

Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

So say the Vogons

He’s building an intergalactic hyperspace bypass?

seriously who among the genius world leaders is going to be comfortable going into a hardened ballroom with these fascists

SCIENCE said:

seriously who among the genius world leaders is going to be comfortable going into a hardened ballroom with these fascists

I imagine a good half of the federal Liberal Party MPs and Senators are eagerly awaiting their invitations …

SCIENCE said:

seriously who among the genius world leaders is going to be comfortable going into a hardened ballroom with these fascists

Dining on world+class Mcdonalds

party_pants said:

SCIENCE said:

seriously who among the genius world leaders is going to be comfortable going into a hardened ballroom with these fascists

I imagine a good half of the federal Liberal Party MPs and Senators are eagerly awaiting their invitations …

And all Of One Notion.

Divine Angel said:

bq.
There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025. Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

🍿

Biden didn’t do anything last re January 6th. I don’t hold out much hope that the Democrats will do anything.

Biden could have used the special powers that SCOTUS bestowed upon Trump. He could have expanded the Supreme Court. He failed to act.

April 17, 2026 (Friday)

This morning, after a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect Thursday, Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial ships. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Iran’s leadership has said it would not recognize a ceasefire with the United States until Israel’s bombing of Lebanon stopped.

With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.

He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.

Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”

But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.

Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”

When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

While being able to announce the end of the Iran war—at least for now—relieves Trump’s immediate crisis, there are many others in the wings. This evening, an article in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security. Fitzpatrick notes that Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks “fierce” has made officials think “we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

Writ even larger than the behavior of the director of the FBI is the growing focus on corruption in the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, House Democrats announced they have created a task force to reinforce ethics rules and highlight the Trump family’s self-dealing when in office. The task force is made up of members from across the country and from different caucuses in the Democratic Party. Representative Joe Morelle, a fellow New Yorker and close ally of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, will lead the task force along with Kevin Mullin of California, Delia C. Ramirez of Illinois, and Nikema Williams of Georgia.

Also on the task force are the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Robert Garcia of California, and the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, as well as Congressional Progressive Caucus members Greg Casar of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the head of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, Brad Schneider of Illinois.

They will be looking into self-dealing like Trump’s current negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service to settle the $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it after an IRS contractor during his first term leaked some of his tax information, along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers, to two news outlets during Trump’s first term. Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, said the leak caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

Peter Nicholas of NBC News noted in February that $10 billion is more than 80% of last year’s IRS budget.

Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press notes that several watchdog organizations have filed briefs challenging Trump’s lawsuit. Democracy Forward argued that the case is “extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” and that “the conflicts of interest make it uncertain whether the Department of Justice will zealously defend the public in the same way that it has against other plaintiffs claiming damages for related events.”

On Wednesday, Democratic representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Dave Min of California, along with Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act to ban presidents and vice presidents from stealing taxpayer money.

Pointing to the Department of Justice’s recent settlement of $1.2 million with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians before Trump took office, after he sued for $50 million on the grounds that the criminal case against him was malicious prosecution, Raskin warned of an “emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds and then settling the suit as a ‘defendant’ for big bucks.”

“Over the past 15 months, we have seen unprecedented corruption from this administration, but this new abuse of power of providing huge cash payments to ‘settle’ baseless lawsuits brought forward by Trump and his allies is a new low. The bill that Senator Warren, Leader Schumer, Ranking Member Raskin, and I are bringing forward would stop this backdoor bribery and bring some accountability back to the federal government,” said Representative Min.

In February, when the lawsuit came to public attention, Trump noted that it seemed odd for him to be negotiating with himself over the issue, but told reporters that he would give whatever monies he was awarded to charity. “We could make it a substantial amount,” he said. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”

April 18, 2026 (Saturday)

And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours. Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”

Susannah George of the Washington Post noted that the fragile temporary ceasefire between Israel and the government of Lebanon also appears to be cracking. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Israel Defense Forces said Saturday that it believed Hezbollah had violated that ceasefire. It said: “IDF is authorized to take the necessary measures in self-defense against threats, while ensuring the security of Israeli civilians and the soldiers deployed in the area.”

This morning, Trump said Iran wanted “to close up the strait again, you know, as they’ve been doing for years, and they can’t blackmail us.” In fact, the strait was open until Trump began to bomb Iran on February 28. Trump’s choice of the word “blackmail” is interesting in this context, for there have been no public threats of exposing someone’s secrets or threatening harm to them in association with the crisis in Iran.

MeidasTouch reports that Iran says it has not agreed to further talks with the U.S. because of its pressure tactics and what it calls “unreasonable demands.”

The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Iranian political officials are not the ones controlling decision-making. Instead, it appears the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the primary force of the Iranian military, is in charge. Benoit Faucon of the Wall Street Journal writes that disagreements about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz suggest divisions in Iran’s leadership.

Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times reminds readers that even if the strait does open fully, it will take weeks for oil from the region to flow back into world markets. High oil prices will persist for weeks, at least, as producers wait to make sure stability has really returned before they ramp production back up on the 20% of facilities in the region that have not been damaged. The damage from Trump’s attack on Iran “has inflicted the kind of damage that takes months, if not years, to repair,” Elliott wrote. Energy research and investment firm partner Arjun Murti told Elliott: “We don’t expect oil prices—and therefore pump prices—to go back to prewar levels.”

Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.

Meanwhile, Shelby Holliday, Michael R. Gordon, and Costas Paris of the Wall Street Journal report that the U.S. military is “preparing…to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters” in an attempt to force Iran to reopen the strait and back away from its nuclear program. President Barack Obama’s team, along with China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom had achieved both of those goals with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Trump tore up in 2018.

The journalists report that, as part of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, the U.S. Navy has already forced twenty-three ships trying to leave Iranian ports to turn back. Now it intends to take control of vessels around the world that are linked to Iran. The administration is calling this phase of the U.S. war against Iran “Economic Fury.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, said yesterday that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran. This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil. As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions or insurance requirements.”

On Wednesday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, broke the record for the longest deployment of an aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War: 295 days. The vessel left its home port in June 2025 for the Mediterranean but was rerouted to the Caribbean as part of Trump’s buildup there. It took part in the capture of then–Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, then headed to the Middle East. A fire in one of its laundries left 600 sailors without berths, and it went to the Mediterranean for repairs.

Nahal Toosi of Politico wrote yesterday that, according to diplomatic cables she obtained from U.S. diplomats in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, the Iran war is hurting U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is losing the trust of the populations of those countries and possibly of their governments as well. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world, with more than 287 million people, and under President Joe Biden the U.S. had been working to strengthen ties with it.

Trump’s erratic behavior has caught the attention of the New York Times, where on April 13 Peter Baker wrote that the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” along with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” Baker noted that retired generals, diplomats, foreign officials, and even Trump’s former allies on the right are all expressing concern.

Yesterday Steve Hendrix and Stefano Pitrelli of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s erratic behavior is alienating even those right-wing populists in Europe who hailed his reelection in the belief that it would strengthen their own hand. The authors say that Trump’s high tariffs, demands for Greenland, and surprise attack on Iran had already put right-wing leaders in an awkward position. For some of them, his portrayal of himself as Jesus on Orthodox Easter and his attacks on the pope are a bridge too far.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Catholic, said Trump’s attack on the Pope is “unacceptable.” In turn, Trump attacked Meloni, saying: “She doesn’t want to help us with NATO, she doesn’t want to help us get rid of nuclear weapons. She’s very different from what I thought. She’s no longer the same person, and Italy won’t be the same country.”

Supporting Trump appears to be a losing proposition in Europe, where last summer Europeans thought Trump was only slightly less dangerous to peace and security in Europe than Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In March a YouGov poll showed Trump with unfavorability ratings of 78% in France, 86% in Germany, and 80% in Italy.

On Wednesday, April 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would not renew the sanctions waivers that had permitted the sale of Russian oil. Yesterday the administration reversed that, renewing the waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil and petroleum products loaded through May 16. The sale of oil provides a financial lifeline for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Last night in Kansas, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is speaking across the country in support of Democratic candidates, explained to an audience why he is working so hard to restore American democracy. He said: “hen you have one of those long nights, when you’re asking yourself, can I really do any more that I’ve already done? I want you to reach into whatever is your personal why.

“For me, the reason I make sure to hit the road and be with you on a night like this is actually, ironically, the very same thing that makes it a little bit harder than it used to be. When I woke up this morning before I headed to the airport, about 6:30 this morning, as usually happens, my first interaction was with a four-year-old boy. And I’m putting out the cereal for him and his sister. And he says, ‘Papa, can I come with you? On this trip?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’ll work out. I gotta go to Kansas. You gotta go to preschool, and…’ And then he walks up to me with, um, a Sonic the Hedgehog walkie-talkie. He tells me to put it in my briefcase. He says, ‘Take this with you. That way we can talk to each other.’

“I wasn’t sure whether I should explain how range works on walkie-talkies or not. Just gave him a big hug instead. But what I know is that it won’t be so long before he and his sister, who right now are asking me questions I can handle—like, the other day, I got: ‘Papa is a grapefruit bigger than a pineapple?’ I can handle that. But,what am I gonna do when they say, ‘Papa, back in the 2020s, did you do enough?’

“They’re gonna ask that, and I want to make sure we have a very good answer by the time they’re old enough to ask that question.”

Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times reminds readers that even if the strait does open fully, it will take weeks for oil from the region to flow back into world markets. High oil prices will persist for weeks, at least, as producers wait to make sure stability has really returned before they ramp production back up on the 20% of facilities in the region that have not been damaged. The damage from Trump’s attack on Iran “has inflicted the kind of damage that takes months, if not years, to repair,” Elliott wrote. Energy research and investment firm partner Arjun Murti told Elliott: “We don’t expect oil prices—and therefore pump prices—to go back to prewar levels.”

80% of facilities have been damaged?? Fkn hell.

Yesterday I was reading about a cruise ship (no passengers) which had been waiting for something like 47 days to get through the Strait. As soon as the Strait opened, it barrelled through and made it before the Strait closed again. I read about one of the Celestyal cruise ships; didn’t hear about the other four stranded cruise ships.

https://www.seatrade-cruise.com/ship-operations/five-gulf-stranded-cruise-ships-clear-strait-of-hormuz

Neophyte said:

April 18, 2026 (Saturday)

And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours. Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”

Susannah George of the Washington Post noted that the fragile temporary ceasefire between Israel and the government of Lebanon also appears to be cracking. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Israel Defense Forces said Saturday that it believed Hezbollah had violated that ceasefire. It said: “IDF is authorized to take the necessary measures in self-defense against threats, while ensuring the security of Israeli civilians and the soldiers deployed in the area.”

This morning, Trump said Iran wanted “to close up the strait again, you know, as they’ve been doing for years, and they can’t blackmail us.” In fact, the strait was open until Trump began to bomb Iran on February 28. Trump’s choice of the word “blackmail” is interesting in this context, for there have been no public threats of exposing someone’s secrets or threatening harm to them in association with the crisis in Iran.

MeidasTouch reports that Iran says it has not agreed to further talks with the U.S. because of its pressure tactics and what it calls “unreasonable demands.”

The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Iranian political officials are not the ones controlling decision-making. Instead, it appears the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the primary force of the Iranian military, is in charge. Benoit Faucon of the Wall Street Journal writes that disagreements about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz suggest divisions in Iran’s leadership.

Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times reminds readers that even if the strait does open fully, it will take weeks for oil from the region to flow back into world markets. High oil prices will persist for weeks, at least, as producers wait to make sure stability has really returned before they ramp production back up on the 20% of facilities in the region that have not been damaged. The damage from Trump’s attack on Iran “has inflicted the kind of damage that takes months, if not years, to repair,” Elliott wrote. Energy research and investment firm partner Arjun Murti told Elliott: “We don’t expect oil prices—and therefore pump prices—to go back to prewar levels.”

Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.

Meanwhile, Shelby Holliday, Michael R. Gordon, and Costas Paris of the Wall Street Journal report that the U.S. military is “preparing…to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters” in an attempt to force Iran to reopen the strait and back away from its nuclear program. President Barack Obama’s team, along with China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom had achieved both of those goals with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Trump tore up in 2018.

The journalists report that, as part of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, the U.S. Navy has already forced twenty-three ships trying to leave Iranian ports to turn back. Now it intends to take control of vessels around the world that are linked to Iran. The administration is calling this phase of the U.S. war against Iran “Economic Fury.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, said yesterday that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran. This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil. As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions or insurance requirements.”

On Wednesday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, broke the record for the longest deployment of an aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War: 295 days. The vessel left its home port in June 2025 for the Mediterranean but was rerouted to the Caribbean as part of Trump’s buildup there. It took part in the capture of then–Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, then headed to the Middle East. A fire in one of its laundries left 600 sailors without berths, and it went to the Mediterranean for repairs.

Nahal Toosi of Politico wrote yesterday that, according to diplomatic cables she obtained from U.S. diplomats in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, the Iran war is hurting U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is losing the trust of the populations of those countries and possibly of their governments as well. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world, with more than 287 million people, and under President Joe Biden the U.S. had been working to strengthen ties with it.

Trump’s erratic behavior has caught the attention of the New York Times, where on April 13 Peter Baker wrote that the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” along with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” Baker noted that retired generals, diplomats, foreign officials, and even Trump’s former allies on the right are all expressing concern.

Yesterday Steve Hendrix and Stefano Pitrelli of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s erratic behavior is alienating even those right-wing populists in Europe who hailed his reelection in the belief that it would strengthen their own hand. The authors say that Trump’s high tariffs, demands for Greenland, and surprise attack on Iran had already put right-wing leaders in an awkward position. For some of them, his portrayal of himself as Jesus on Orthodox Easter and his attacks on the pope are a bridge too far.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Catholic, said Trump’s attack on the Pope is “unacceptable.” In turn, Trump attacked Meloni, saying: “She doesn’t want to help us with NATO, she doesn’t want to help us get rid of nuclear weapons. She’s very different from what I thought. She’s no longer the same person, and Italy won’t be the same country.”

Supporting Trump appears to be a losing proposition in Europe, where last summer Europeans thought Trump was only slightly less dangerous to peace and security in Europe than Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In March a YouGov poll showed Trump with unfavorability ratings of 78% in France, 86% in Germany, and 80% in Italy.

On Wednesday, April 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would not renew the sanctions waivers that had permitted the sale of Russian oil. Yesterday the administration reversed that, renewing the waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil and petroleum products loaded through May 16. The sale of oil provides a financial lifeline for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Last night in Kansas, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is speaking across the country in support of Democratic candidates, explained to an audience why he is working so hard to restore American democracy. He said: “hen you have one of those long nights, when you’re asking yourself, can I really do any more that I’ve already done? I want you to reach into whatever is your personal why.

“For me, the reason I make sure to hit the road and be with you on a night like this is actually, ironically, the very same thing that makes it a little bit harder than it used to be. When I woke up this morning before I headed to the airport, about 6:30 this morning, as usually happens, my first interaction was with a four-year-old boy. And I’m putting out the cereal for him and his sister. And he says, ‘Papa, can I come with you? On this trip?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’ll work out. I gotta go to Kansas. You gotta go to preschool, and…’ And then he walks up to me with, um, a Sonic the Hedgehog walkie-talkie. He tells me to put it in my briefcase. He says, ‘Take this with you. That way we can talk to each other.’

“I wasn’t sure whether I should explain how range works on walkie-talkies or not. Just gave him a big hug instead. But what I know is that it won’t be so long before he and his sister, who right now are asking me questions I can handle—like, the other day, I got: ‘Papa is a grapefruit bigger than a pineapple?’ I can handle that. But,what am I gonna do when they say, ‘Papa, back in the 2020s, did you do enough?’

“They’re gonna ask that, and I want to make sure we have a very good answer by the time they’re old enough to ask that question.”

All Biden had to do to make sure Harris won was to stop sending funding, bombs and bullets to keep killing children in Palestine.

Though Greg Palast did make a documentary about how 10 million American voters voted for Kamala Harris and their votes were counted. It is called “Vigilantes Inc. It is free on YouTube. I would give a great deal to understand why she didn’t call for recounts.

April 19, 2026 (Sunday)

On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.

It was hard to understand how things had gotten so bad. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Bostonians had looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

But that euphoria faded fast. Almost as soon as the war was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent, a right the king had guaranteed to Englishmen in the Magna Carta of 1215. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury—also a historical right—and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dockhands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766 the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Son of Liberty Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to persuade people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about thirty of the Sons of Liberty had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. When the soldiers set out on the night of April 18, two Sons of Liberty flashed two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church—the highest point in Boston—to signal to watchers that the soldiers were traveling across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

Paul Revere and William Dawes headed for Lexington. There, they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. They picked up young doctor Samuel Prescott, who had been in Lexington courting, on their way. British soldiers stopped Revere and Dawes, but Prescott got away and made it to Concord. As they heard the news, families set off a system of “alarm and muster” developed months before for just such an occasion, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency.

Just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green. When the soldiers marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, they found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

Even before the British soldiers made it back down the Battle Road from Concord on April 19, militiamen—both white and Black, free and enslaved—from the Massachusetts countryside, furious that soldiers of their own government had shot at them and killed their neighbors, rushed to surround Boston, laying siege to the soldiers and British officials there.
By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.

Heather speaks about concentration camps in America

April 20, 2026 (Monday)

Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.

The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.

But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”

Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.

Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.

On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.

On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”

The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

Today Nick March of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, March found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.

A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “he results of Oct 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”

Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.

“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.

“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.

“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’

“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”

This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”

But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.

After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.

Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.

This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”

The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”

And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.

When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.”

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

Cymek said:

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

thankfully there aren’t warmongering atheists pretending to be doing God’s work, trying to dominate the world.

more to your point though, absolutely Iran likely can take a lot more causalities, and they’re keen to send US soldiers back home in boxes.

but don’t forget who started this kinetic war, you’re suppose to forget eventually, turn on Try news, they may be able to help, sort of intellectual vomit, ideological vomit.

Cymek said:

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

When every person killed is martyred.

transition said:

Cymek said:

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

thankfully there aren’t warmongering atheists pretending to be doing God’s work, trying to dominate the world.

more to your point though, absolutely Iran likely can take a lot more causalities, and they’re keen to send US soldiers back home in boxes.

but don’t forget who started this kinetic war, you’re suppose to forget eventually, turn on Try news, they may be able to help, sort of intellectual vomit, ideological vomit.

To be fair if Iranians want to be free they need to do it themselves
If we interfere, we will likely make it worse, we don’t really know the situation and all the subtle power structures
Create a power vacuum and every man and his dog rush into grab their part.

Heather Cox Richardson speaks for about 2 minutes

transition said:

Cymek said:

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

thankfully there aren’t warmongering atheists pretending to be doing God’s work, trying to dominate the world.

more to your point though, absolutely Iran likely can take a lot more causalities, and they’re keen to send US soldiers back home in boxes.

but don’t forget who started this kinetic war, you’re suppose to forget eventually, turn on Try news, they may be able to help, sort of intellectual vomit, ideological vomit.

BP?

Cymek said:

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

It’s a taboo weapon in Islam.

So I don’t think so.

Israel yes though.

Michael V said:

transition said:

Cymek said:

I’d assume Iran would fight to the bitter end, even risking nuclear attack than surrender to the USA.
Especially when religion is involved and you can fool yourself, you’re doing gods work and if killed get kudos from him in the afterlife
War also turns people petty so they would do everything to punish everyone else as much possible

thankfully there aren’t warmongering atheists pretending to be doing God’s work, trying to dominate the world.

more to your point though, absolutely Iran likely can take a lot more causalities, and they’re keen to send US soldiers back home in boxes.

but don’t forget who started this kinetic war, you’re suppose to forget eventually, turn on Try news, they may be able to help, sort of intellectual vomit, ideological vomit.

BP?

MV didn’t forget :)))

ruby said:

Michael V said:

transition said:

thankfully there aren’t warmongering atheists pretending to be doing God’s work, trying to dominate the world.

more to your point though, absolutely Iran likely can take a lot more causalities, and they’re keen to send US soldiers back home in boxes.

but don’t forget who started this kinetic war, you’re suppose to forget eventually, turn on Try news, they may be able to help, sort of intellectual vomit, ideological vomit.

BP?

MV didn’t forget :)))

:)

Michael V said:

ruby said:

Michael V said:

BP?

MV didn’t forget :)))

:)

Baden-Powell?

Neophyte said:

Michael V said:

ruby said:

MV didn’t forget :)))

:)

Baden-Powell?

Lord no.

April 21, 2026 (Tuesday)
There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.

Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN reported last night that by the end of last week, negotiators for the U.S. and Iran appeared to be on the verge of hammering out an end to hostilities before the two-week ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Then Trump took to the media to crow that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”

Iranian negotiators said Trump’s claims were false and that if he didn’t remove the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, they would reclose the Strait of Hormuz they had just opened. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” a source told Treene and Liptak.

Over the weekend, Iranians closed the strait and the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel. On Sunday, even as two senior U.S. government officials were on television saying Vice President J.D. Vance would lead a new round of talks in Pakistan, Trump was on the phone telling reporters that he wouldn’t. On Monday, Trump told a reporter that Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House.

After Iranian officials said today they were not sure they would respond to U.S. positions or go to Pakistan for talks, Vance’s trip has been put on hold. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, complained of “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” on Iran’s state media.

For his part, Trump blamed the Democrats for the chaos in U.S. diplomacy. “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran,” his social media account posted yesterday. The post insisted “it will be done RIGHT, and we won’t let the Weak and Pathetic Democrats, TRAITORS ALL, who for years have been talking about the Dangers of Iran, and that something has to be done, but now, since I’m the one doing it, belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration. This is being perfectly executed, on the scale of Venezuela, just a bigger, more complex operation.”

As David S. Bernstein of Good Politics/Bad Politics noted, Trump’s account this morning reposted another account claiming that Iran was preparing to execute eight women, showing AI-generated images of them. Trump posted: “To the Iranian leaders who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!!” As Bernstein put it: Trump urged Iran “to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X.”

Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported today that Trump is considering using money from the U.S. Treasury to shore up the finances of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, which have been hurt by the Iran war. After the story appeared, Zach Everson of Public Citizen pointed out that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, has directed hundreds of millions to Trump personally, buying 49% of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and investing $2 billion of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin.

Tonight, Trump announced he is extending the ceasefire with Iran until Iran comes up with a proposal to end the fighting permanently. Iran has responded by saying Trump’s extension “means nothing” and suggested it was a “ploy to buy time for a surprise strike.”

According to a new poll out today from Strength in Numbers/ Verasight, conducted between April 10 and April 14, just 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance. Sixty-one percent disapprove, a new low. Seventy-two percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling rising prices. In a generic ballot for Congress, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by 50% to 43%, a margin of seven points.

Administration officials’ approach to the midterm elections seems to be to continue to sow distrust of elections. Following Patel’s claim, on Sunday, that there would soon be arrests stemming from the 2020 presidential election, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a letter from April 14 demanding that a Wayne County, Michigan, elections official give it records from Wayne County and Detroit from 2024 and alleging that there was fraud in 2020. Although Trump won Michigan, he lost Wayne County by almost 250,000 votes.

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and secretary of state Jocelyn Benson wrote in the Detroit Free Press that “this demand isn’t about election integrity—it’s about a weaponized DOJ trying to please a president who doesn’t want to be held accountable at the ballot box by voters tired of the chaos of his administration. It’s also about the upcoming elections in November and in 2028, which he is working to discredit by sowing doubt as to the security and fairness of the process. It’s not going to work with us, and it’s not going to hold up in court,” they wrote. “Michigan’s elections are safe and secure.”

Trump seems, though, to be courting the base that in 2021 attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to keep him in power. After offending his base first by posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ and then by insulting Pope Leo XIV, Trump is participating this week in an event called “America Reads the Bible.” Kaanita Iyer and Aleena Fayaz of CNN report that Trump is expected to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office. The same verse was read by Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and is associated with white evangelicals’ belief God sent Trump to heal America.

Trump’s vulnerability is showing on Capitol Hill. In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky examined House speaker Mike Johnson’s no good, very bad day last Thursday. With a Republican majority in the House of only three seats and a dramatically weakened president, Republican House members handed Johnson two embarrassing losses on Thursday.
First, Republicans joined with Democrats first to pass a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to protect the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and then they passed the measure itself.

Trump’s administration has left his claims to want to deport undocumented criminals far in the dust, working hard to get rid of legal immigrants as well. When she was homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem ignored the requirements for evaluating TPS and simply refused to agree to routine extensions of TPS for people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.

Haitian TPS holders sued, noting Noem’s apparent racial animus as a driving factor in her decision and that Haiti remains dangerous in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that destabilized the country. In February, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes paused the loss of Haitian immigrants’ TPS until the lawsuit works its way through the courts. Last month, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) brought a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to restore TPS to Haitian immigrants.

Johnson has tried to do Trump’s bidding even though it means ignoring what members of Congress actually want. It is possible for members to force a measure to the floor even after the speaker bottles it up through something called a “discharge petition,” by getting a majority of members of Congress to agree to override the speaker, but such an action is exceedingly rare because it requires members of the majority to side with the minority against their own speaker. Or it was exceedingly rare before this Congress. Herb Scribner of Axios noted last year that there were seven successful discharge petitions in the 30 years between 1985 and 2015; there were the same number from 2023 to 2025.

Four Republicans, all of them from purple districts, joined all the Democrats to sign Pressley’s discharge petition. Then when the measure came up for a vote, six more Republicans voted in favor of it. As Berlatsky notes, the bill probably won’t pass the Senate, but not only did it demonstrate Johnson’s weakness, it also, as Jamie Dupree of Regular Order noted, was a real rebuke to Trump on immigration. And it was bipartisan.

That was not the end of Johnson’s bad day. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was scheduled to expire on April 20, and Trump and Republican loyalists wanted simply to renew it. But members of both parties have issues with Section 702 of that act, which allows the government to collect information about the communications of foreigners without getting a warrant from a judge. But there are increasing signs the government is also collecting data from Americans without a warrant, and members of both parties concerned about government overreach have refused to extend the law without reforms to 702.

Republican leaders tried to force through a five-year extension just after midnight on Friday, but while four Democrats voted in favor of the measure, twelve Republicans voted against it, sending the measure down to a loss by 20 votes. Then Johnson tried to push through an 18-month extension. Twenty Republicans voted against even considering it. Finally, the House agreed to extend the law for just ten days.

Today, Virginians passed a redistricting referendum that will boost the Democrats’ chances of winning four more seats in the U.S. House. Redistricting in the middle of a decade is rare, but after Trump pressed Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats, California retaliated with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas seats. Other states followed suit. As David A. Lieb of the Associated Press explained today, Republicans currently believe that their redistricting of Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that redistricting Virginia temporarily will make up the difference.

Zachary Roth of Democracy Docket noted that Trump ally Steve Bannon warned on his podcast Monday that “Democrats are demonic” and said that if allowed to have power, they will impeach Trump. “Not just, are they going to take power and use these four seats to impeach Trump?” he said, “But they’re going to use this as a template for the rest of the country. It’s coming.”

“ There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.”

Divine Angel said:

“ There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.”

Imagine if it was the Bang Bus and Trump the lead c***

Neophyte said:

April 21, 2026 (Tuesday)
There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.

yeah after 10 years of free passes and “there’s no way they could get away with this, we got them now” we guess people can still hope

April 22, 2026 (Wednesday)

Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.

As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.

State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.

Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”

The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.

But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”

Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.

In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.

But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.

Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.

This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.

In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.

Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”

But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.

Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.

Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.

Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….

“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.

“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.”

Same old, same old: One party pushes boundaries and rewrites rules. The other is expected to play the game which no longer restrains the others.

Gerrymandering is sucha. cool word though.

I wonder what Republicans truly want

A police state dystopia were most of the population work as slaves controlled by large corporations who have their own armies to enforce compliance.

Cymek said:

I wonder what Republicans truly want

A police state dystopia were most of the population work as slaves controlled by large corporations who have their own armies to enforce compliance.

They’re using Russia as an exemplar.

Divine Angel said:

Cymek said:

I wonder what Republicans truly want

A police state dystopia were most of the population work as slaves controlled by large corporations who have their own armies to enforce compliance.

They’re using Russia as an exemplar.

what do yous mean dystopia, this is billionaire oligarch utopia

Cymek said:

I wonder what Republicans truly want

A police state dystopia were most of the population work as slaves controlled by large corporations who have their own armies to enforce compliance.

They’ve kind of got that now.

Prisoners work for 10 cents per day.

70% of Americans are living pay check to pay check. They work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days and they pay rent and skip meals so their kids can eat.

Thanks for posting.

April 23, 2026 (Thursday)

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.

As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.

Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.

According to the CNN reporters, Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether Trump knew. At about 5:30, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”
Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.

On social media yesterday, Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice,in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired!” Today, on social media, Trump’s account posted: “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”

Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted today that Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.

Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”

Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.

Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column today that “o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”

While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.

As Charles Tiefer of Talking Points Memo reported today, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has proposed funding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, through budget reconciliation, a process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate, this means things tucked into a budget reconciliation measure can pass without any Democratic votes.

Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.

But Republicans have refused to agree to those reforms and are turning to funding through budget reconciliation so they don’t have to negotiate. And rather than funding ICE and CBP for the year, as the rest of the appropriations bills do, Thune is proposing to fund them for the next three years, taking away Congress’s power to reform ICE and CBP by withholding funds not just for 2026, but for 2027 and for 2028. Even if Democrats take control of the House or Senate after 2026, they could not reform ICE or CBP, which would remain a growing force under the president’s control.

Today Thune also teed up a vote on a bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for three years, until April 2029. Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the system for collecting information on foreigners who appear to pose a threat to the U.S. can also sweep in U.S. citizens, enabling the government to surveil citizens without a judicial warrant. They want to make sure there are stronger guardrails in place to keep the government within constitutional limits. The House has been trying to hammer out a measure with cosmetic reforms, but if it fails, Thune will try to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 with no reforms, taking away from Congress the ability to limit problematic government surveillance.

But the tide defending democratic values continues to rise.

On Tuesday, more than 100 former NASA astronauts announced they were launching Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan organization to protect American democracy. In an open letter introducing their organization, they noted that as astronauts, they “have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States” and continued: “We are committed to science, evidence-based decision-making, public service, and the rule of law.” They vowed to speak out for American values and to work with lawmakers to protect those values: “the rule of law, constructive checks and balances, equal opportunity, and the peaceful transfer of power.” They reminded people that “ strong democracy makes all else possible: economic growth, national security, and our rights and freedoms.”

“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin told Adam Kovac of Scientific American. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”

buffy said:

April 23, 2026 (Thursday)

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.

As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.

Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.

According to the CNN reporters, Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether Trump knew. At about 5:30, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”
Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.

On social media yesterday, Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice,in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired!” Today, on social media, Trump’s account posted: “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”

Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted today that Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.

Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”

Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.

Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column today that “o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”

While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.

As Charles Tiefer of Talking Points Memo reported today, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has proposed funding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, through budget reconciliation, a process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate, this means things tucked into a budget reconciliation measure can pass without any Democratic votes.

Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.

But Republicans have refused to agree to those reforms and are turning to funding through budget reconciliation so they don’t have to negotiate. And rather than funding ICE and CBP for the year, as the rest of the appropriations bills do, Thune is proposing to fund them for the next three years, taking away Congress’s power to reform ICE and CBP by withholding funds not just for 2026, but for 2027 and for 2028. Even if Democrats take control of the House or Senate after 2026, they could not reform ICE or CBP, which would remain a growing force under the president’s control.

Today Thune also teed up a vote on a bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for three years, until April 2029. Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the system for collecting information on foreigners who appear to pose a threat to the U.S. can also sweep in U.S. citizens, enabling the government to surveil citizens without a judicial warrant. They want to make sure there are stronger guardrails in place to keep the government within constitutional limits. The House has been trying to hammer out a measure with cosmetic reforms, but if it fails, Thune will try to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 with no reforms, taking away from Congress the ability to limit problematic government surveillance.

But the tide defending democratic values continues to rise.

On Tuesday, more than 100 former NASA astronauts announced they were launching Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan organization to protect American democracy. In an open letter introducing their organization, they noted that as astronauts, they “have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States” and continued: “We are committed to science, evidence-based decision-making, public service, and the rule of law.” They vowed to speak out for American values and to work with lawmakers to protect those values: “the rule of law, constructive checks and balances, equal opportunity, and the peaceful transfer of power.” They reminded people that “ strong democracy makes all else possible: economic growth, national security, and our rights and freedoms.”

“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin told Adam Kovac of Scientific American. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”

Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.

Without that how is it not simple thuggery and the type of behaviour you’d expect from paid assasins.
Can imagine it wouldn’t take much for them to simply fire first and claim self defence

Politics Chat 23rd of April

April 24, 2026 (Friday)

On April 25, 1945, delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to establish a permanent forum for international cooperation: the United Nations.

Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

Between 1942 and 1945, forty-seven nations signed the Declaration by United Nations, a treaty formalizing the alliance that stood against the fascist Axis powers. The treaty declared that signatories would not sign separate peace agreements with Germany, Italy, or Japan and would work together to create a world based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter.

In October 1943 the governments of the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China declared that they would continue to cooperate with each other after the war ended, and that they recognized the need to establish an international organization, “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

To create that organization, representatives from those four nations met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., in late summer and fall 1944. They hammered out the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals for an international organization called the United Nations. Its purpose would be to maintain international peace and security by acting collectively to stop aggression and settle international disputes, to strengthen ties between nations, and to work together to solve problems.

The organization was based on “the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states,” and membership in it would be open to all such states.

In February 1945, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin met near Yalta in Crimea to discuss the postwar world. The Allies had liberated France and Belgium, and the Germans had lost the Battle of the Bulge in late January, while Soviet forces were within 50 miles of Berlin. It was clear that the end of the war in Europe was coming.

At Yalta the three leaders hashed out the last pieces of the proposed United Nations and agreed that “a United Nations conference on the proposed world organization should be summoned for Wednesday, 25 April, 1945, and should be held in the United States of America.” Those invited to the conference would be “the United Nations as they existed on 8 Feb, 1945” and any associated nation that had “declared war on the common enemy by 1 March, 1945.”

On March 1 a visibly exhausted Roosevelt addressed the nation. “A conference of all the United Nations of the world will meet in San Francisco on April 25, 1945,” he said. “There, we all hope, and confidently expect, to execute a definite charter of organization under which the peace of the world will be preserved and the forces of aggression permanently outlawed.”

“This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace. This time,” he said, in reference to the failed League of Nations after World War I, “as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.”

Roosevelt explained: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation. It cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large Nations—or of small Nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.

“It cannot be a structure of complete perfection at first. But it can be a peace—and it will be a peace—based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter—on the concept of the dignity of the human being—and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.”

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and less than two weeks later, on April 25, 3,500 people arrived at the San Francisco conference: 850 delegates and their staff and advisors, along with the staff of the conference. To follow developments, more than 2,500 reporters and observers were also there.

The conference organizers divided the delegates into committees to figure out how, exactly, to make the United Nations work. Together they wrote, and then adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter.

“We the peoples of the United Nations,” the preamble to that document began, are determined “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The document declares the signers “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” It calls for the maintenance of international treaties and international law.

The preamble also called for countries to live in peace with each other, uniting their strength to maintain international peace and security and making sure that “armed force shall not be used” unless it is in the common interest. As Roosevelt and Churchill had called for in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, it called for nations to work together “for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”

“To accomplish these aims,” the signatories announced, “ have resolved to combine our efforts.”

Seemed like a good idea at the time. but got significantly watered-down in its implementation.

party_pants said:

Seemed like a good idea at the time. but got significantly watered-down in its implementation.

Well, she forgot to mention the New World Order, Rothschilds, Illuminati thing…calls herself an historian, hmmmm…

Neophyte said:

party_pants said:

Seemed like a good idea at the time. but got significantly watered-down in its implementation.

Well, she forgot to mention the New World Order, Rothschilds, Illuminati thing…calls herself an historian, hmmmm…

Even the most democratic and tolerant and liberal societies within their own borders can act like thugs when it comes to somebody else’s country. Interests always seem to get in the way of principle in world affairs. It doesn’t need a conspiracy theory, it’s just the way it is.

party_pants said:

Seemed like a good idea at the time. but got significantly watered-down in its implementation.

Gave Russia the option to veto so nothing ever got done.

roughbarked said:

party_pants said:

Seemed like a good idea at the time. but got significantly watered-down in its implementation.

Gave Russia the option to veto so nothing ever got done.

who’s been vetoing

The Decline of the Trump Presidency and Revisioning of the US
25 minutes long

Heather says time to speak up and running imagine what you want for the future

2 minutes

April 25, 2026 (Saturday)

Tonight the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) held its annual black-tie dinner, which is designed both to raise money for the institution and to provide a glitzy night out for journalists. In recent years the event has drawn criticism for the chumminess it reveals between White House journalists and the lawmakers they cover. This year, that concern was heightened dramatically when the WHCA invited President Donald J. Trump to attend the dinner and to give a speech.

Since he entered the political arena, Trump has denigrated the press and even urged supporters to attack journalists, but in his second term his administration has gone further, trying to silence the press with lawsuits or threats of them against media outlets and individuals, blocking access to the White House and the Pentagon for journalists Trump dislikes, personally attacking female journalists, arresting independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and raiding the home of Washington Post political correspondent Hannah Natanson. Inviting him to address the press at a fancy dinner seemed to normalize his attacks on the First Amendment.

While it is customary for a president to attend at least one WHCA dinner, where traditionally a comedian roasts him, Trump has always refused to attend. This year, though, he agreed (although a mentalist was engaged to perform instead of the usual comedian). With his job approval numbers plummeting and the administration mired in a war in Iran that Trump appears to have started on a whim, along with the economy stumbling, there was plenty of speculation about what he would say at the event and how journalists should react if he used the opportunity to insult them.

We will probably never know. Something happened at the event that made Secret Service agents evacuate Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. Exactly what happened is not yet clear: it appears law enforcement stopped an armed man outside the event, and a subsequent noise alarmed dinner attendees and Secret Service agents, who rushed the president, the first lady, and other government officials to a secure location.

During the confusion, as Trump was being held near the ballroom, he posted: “Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’ but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again.”

Then, at 8:36, he posted that law enforcement “has requested that we leave the premises, consistent with protocol, which we will do, immediately. I will be giving a press conference in 30 minutes from the White House Press Briefing Room. The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition. We will be speaking to you in a half an hour. I have spoken with the representatives in charge of the event, and we will be rescheduling within 30 days.”

Trump took to the podium a little after 10:30. Referring to the threat of a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner—which has never happened before—he said: “I will say, you know, it’s not a particularly secure building, and, uh, I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s much more secure. It’s got— It’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it. They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons, but today’s, uh, a little bit different, because today, we need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.”

Trump said that there was a record crowd at tonight’s event and that he felt everyone coming together, but he urged people to do so even more fully in light of what he said was another attempt on his life. In response to a question about why Trump thought attempts on his life happened so frequently—a reminder: there is as yet no information about what the man’s plan or motives were—he responded that assassins come for “impactful people” and boasted of how much he has done for the country.

The Framers of our government enshrined the right to freedom of the press in our Constitution along with the right to gather together, to practice any religion we want (including none at all), the right to say what we want, and the right to ask our government to do (or not to do) things. After writing a new constitution that created a far stronger national government than existed under the Articles of Confederation, which had underpinned the government since 1777 (although the Articles were not ratified until 1781), the Framers designed the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights to hold back government power.

The power to control what citizens can publish about the government would give leaders the power to destroy democracy. A free press is imperative to keep people informed about what leaders are doing. Lose it, and those in power can do whatever they wish without accountability.

From the beginning of the American republic, though, the press was openly partisan. This meant the president worked quite closely with newspaper reporters from his own party while ignoring, or sometimes even trying to silence, his opponents. By the 1880s the country had begun to turn against the partisan press and to “independent” newspapers, and the number of papers took off.

No longer advocates for a party position and eager to attract readers, reporters began to look for new, exciting stories. And not much was more exciting in 1886 than a marriage in the White House. On June 2 of that year, 49-year-old President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom, who had been his unofficial ward, in the Blue Room.

Reporters had dogged their courtship (many thought he was interested in her more age-appropriate mother), and they flocked after the newlyweds, finally prompting the irritated president to ask his personal secretary to keep them away. But while the president was angry at the scrutiny, editors recognized a good story, and by the end of Cleveland’s first term, a reporter had figured out he could just stay at the White House and write columns based on interviews with people coming from meetings with the president. Other papers immediately stationed their own people at the White House.

In Cleveland’s second term, which started in 1893, his private secretary worked directly with the press. Through the next few presidencies, the role of press secretary began to take shape. Theodore Roosevelt relished attention from reporters. When his shy successor William Howard Taft shunned them, they complained he was hiding things.

So, shortly after he took office in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson held the nation’s first press conference, only to complain both that reporters were quoting statements he considered off the record and that the conferences were a free-for-all in which anyone could shout out questions, often ones Wilson found irritating (like his opinion about Groundhog Day).

In 1914, rumors circulated that Congress might begin to choose which reporters would be allowed at Wilson’s press conferences. In alarm, eleven White House reporters organized the White House Correspondents’ Association. In 1921, as part of their annual election of officers, fifty members of the growing WHCA held a dinner. With former newspaperman Warren G. Harding in the White House, they were in a celebratory mood despite Prohibition (which they ignored). Taking their cue from the famous Gridiron Club, which held dinners where they roasted politicians, WHCA members poked fun at the administration and Congress.

While at first the reporters simply wanted access to the president, as the WHCA became an established force it came to work for transparency more generally, recognizing that journalists are the main eyes and voice of the people. It protected press passes for journalists who regularly covered the White House, and assigned seats in the briefing room.

But all that changed in February 2025, after Trump took office for the second time. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the administration would no longer recognize the role of the WHCA in managing the White House press pool. Instead, she said the “White House press team” would control access to the White House. At the time, then–WHCA president Eugene Daniels said the change “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States” and “suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president.”

“In a free country,” Daniels said, “leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

Trump repeated tonight that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner will be rescheduled.

April 26, 2026 (Sunday)

Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.

The letter claimed that there was “another attempt on President Trump’s life” last night at the Washington Hilton, where Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the White House Correspondents dinner was taking place last night.

The man, whom police have identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, sprinted through a magnetometer before authorities stopped him. Shots were fired, although it remains unclear who fired them. A Secret Service agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot but has been released from the hospital. According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, the government is charging Cole with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.

Shumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come.”

“Put simply,” Shumate wrote, “your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk…. Enough is enough.” He demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation “voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump. If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”

This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.

Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” Even so, Secret Service agents did indeed stop Cole before he could enter the ballroom.

Yesterday, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly awarded the company it chose to build the ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park near the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the cost of the work to be $3.3 million. The journalists explain that the Trump administration dramatically increased the estimated cost by adding an additional 27% for inflation and then adding another inflation estimate of 24%, then increased its estimate by another 50% because it wanted to get the fountains fixed quickly, then simply gave the contract to Maryland-based Clark Construction.

While Trump claims the ballroom will be paid for by private donations, the government will pay for the fountain repairs. This means the contract should have been open for competitive bidding. To justify awarding the contract without that process, the journalists report, the administration cited an “urgency” exception to normal procedures meant for war or natural disasters.

The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.

Trump has justified his refusal to seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran by claiming Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. While Trump’s own intelligence agencies contradicted that claim, it enabled Republicans to argue that Trump had authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows the president to act to counter an “imminent” threat.

But the War Powers Act says the president must notify Congress of any such action within 48 hours of its start. Then, by 60 days after that notification, the president has to stop using the military for that action unless the Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action. Democrats have fought hard against Trump’s unilateral decision to go to war, but Republicans have refused to press him to get congressional approval, apparently hoping that Trump would find a way out of the Middle East crisis before hitting the 60-day mark.

But so far he has not, and the 60-day window closes on May 1.

Trump appears to believe the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will hurt the country so badly that Iranian leaders will have to agree to his demands. But that pressure will take time to build. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” he posted Thursday. He told reporters: “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me…. So we were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years; we were in Iraq for many, many years.… I don’t like to say World War II, because that was a biggie, but we were four and a half, almost five years in World War II. And we were in the Korean war for seven years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”

If Trump doesn’t find an end to the conflict, Republicans must either vote to authorize what is already a deeply unpopular war or let Trump continue his war without congressional approval, adding fuel to accusations that he is becoming a dictator. After all, Trump claimed in January, after he had attacked Venezuela without congressional approval, that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and would “take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”

The idea that the president can use the military as he wishes without authority from Congress demolishes one of the fundamental principles of our democracy: that we have a right to a say in how our lives and treasure are spent.

Rather than enabling Trump, Republicans could reassert the authority the Framers of the Constitution put in Congress’s hands and stop his deadly blundering.

“We’ve heard a lot of talk from Republicans that they’ll give this president 60 days,” the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, told Mike Lillis of The Hill. “And this is a failed effort. And it’s long past time that he come to Congress and explain what the strategy is and what the exit is. Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”

April 27, 2026 (Monday)

There is a story behind this picture from Virginia’s Skyline Drive that I will write as soon as there’s a little breathing room in the news. But for now, let’s just enjoy a break.

We can pick it all back up tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

April 27, 2026 (Monday)

There is a story behind this picture from Virginia’s Skyline Drive that I will write as soon as there’s a little breathing room in the news. But for now, let’s just enjoy a break.

We can pick it all back up tomorrow.

That looks peaceful

Neophyte said:

April 27, 2026 (Monday)

There is a story behind this picture from Virginia’s Skyline Drive that I will write as soon as there’s a little breathing room in the news. But for now, let’s just enjoy a break.

We can pick it all back up tomorrow.

Nice.

:)