The Strait To Sequel

Over the weekend, someone went begging to the other major powers to help him out of a disaster of his own making (from Sam Metz, Will Weissert, Julia Frankel, and Cara Anna at AP News):

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has demanded about seven countries send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, but his appeals have brought no commitments as oil prices soar during the Iran war.

The president declined to name the countries heavily reliant on Middle East crude that the administration is negotiating with to join a coalition to police the waterway where about one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally flows.

“I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory,” Trump said about the strait, claiming the shipping channel is not something the United States needs because of its own access to oil. Trump spoke while answering reporters’ questions as he flew back to Washington from Florida aboard Air Force One.

The gist is that after weeks of crowing how victorious he's been blowing up Iran, his handlers have finally gotten him to understand that angering Iran to the point of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz was a really bad idea.

If you're wondering if any of those nations have answered back by now, I think Germany has spelled out what the response is going to be like (via Ellen Mitchell at The Hill):

Germany’s defense minister on Monday rebuffed calls from U.S. President Trump to send ships to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters “this is not our war.”

Trump has called on allies, including those in NATO, for military ​support to keep the vital shipping route open. Iran has effectively closed the strait for the past two weeks in response to the U.S.-Israeli war on Tehran, using missiles, drones and mines to attack oil tankers trying to get through.

“What does … Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to ​do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?” Boris Pistorius ⁠said in Berlin, as reported by Reuters. “This is not our war, we have not started it.”

Ever the bully, trump never understood that a bully's victims will not come to that bully's aid when he's getting punched in the face. Having mocked and belittled and threatened our NATO allies - and pretty much 80 percent of the rest of the planet - trump has no peace offering to give them. 

This isn't post-9/11, when most of Western civilization came to our nation's aid to stamp out Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan (and more reluctantly invade Iraq over WMD lies and deception). trump and his lackeys - Rubio and whomever hasn't been fired from the State Department yet - may want other nations to sacrifice their own people and resources to rescue trump from this debacle, but they don't have the genuine skills of diplomacy - compromise, long-term planning, honesty, commitment to shared objectives - to recover from this.

The world may be facing economic turmoil if oil prices keep going up, but all of the other nations seem willing to suffer the pain momentarily if it means trump and the chickenhawk Far Right get humiliated and broken by their own idiocy and hubris.

An entire Far Right ideology of toxic masculinity is getting punched in the face right now. It's the only good news we have in all this death and fire.

Addendum: I hope this BlueSky skeet stays up. Thank you Dr. SkySkull!

Europeans when being asked to unblock the strait of Hormuz

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— Dr. SkySkull (@drskyskull.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 2:43 PM

What If: When THAT Happens

There's an old joke, no one is sure of the origins other than it came about during the early days of daily newspaper publishing. Thing is, Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly told this joke a lot during his tenure as President, so it's attributed to him:

A kid starts working Monday at a newsstand, where he meets a businessman who comes up, buys the morning paper, glances at the headline, then tosses the paper down in anger. That businessman keeps coming back all week doing the same: buys the morning paper, looks at the headline, tosses the paper away. On Friday, the kid asks the businessman when he approaches "Hey mister, why do you buy the paper only to throw it away?"

The businessman answers "I'm looking for the obituary."

The kid replies "Well mister, the obituaries are on the back pages."

To which the businessman snarls "Kid, when the son of a bitch I'm waiting for dies, it'll be on the front page!"

It's a joke I think of often, especially in this day and age because, well...

It's not like anyone is openly writing about it, other than the occasional news report of You Know Who showing signs of physical injury or illness, like recently (via Digby):

His doctor just said he was using a cream on his neck without announcing that he has shingles. But that’s almost certainly what he has. I had them in the same place. Combined with the stress and his age, he’s not feeling well at all. That can’t be good for the world.

There's been a lot of talk on social media, about the bruised hands, the increased signs of dementia, the inability to stay awake, etc. But nobody wants to say it too much too loudly (mostly because nobody wants to jinx it), but among a lot of the non-MAGA people this particular thought is now out there: "I can't wait for IT to happen."

Even the McSweeney's site doesn't exactly spell it out, but you don't need to read between the lines:

It’s impossible to say when IT will HAPPEN. But it can’t be too long until IT HAPPENS. Looking at the data (age, high-stress job, cardiac history), it is statistically plausible that IT will HAPPEN in the next thirty-six months.

Eighteen, if you factor in hamburger consumption and all the weird bruising.

Of course, it doesn’t feel right to want IT to HAPPEN. And it’s obviously not okay to try to make IT HAPPEN. That’s not what this is ABOUT, just to make things CLEAR LEGALLY as far as VARIOUS AGENCIES are concerned.

But regardless, IT is going to HAPPEN. So you’re allowed to think about IT...

When IT HAPPENS, it will probably be FEELING. Just a huge, overwhelming sense of FEELING, the kind where you didn’t even realize how starved you were for FEELING. Punctuated with alternating waves of SECOND FEELING, as well as SENSATION.

Plus, a sudden absence of THIRD FEELING, which makes you realize the toll of A CONSTANT BASELINE OF LOW-GRADE THIRD FEELING for ten goddamn TIME PERIODS straight, even though you were still plenty aware of THIRD FEELING, trust me...

For all the spiritual and emotional catharsis the event could be, for all the whispered wishes every time every American to the Left of the John Birchers prays at night... what WOULD really happen when IT happens?

Well, the simplest answer to that is the 25th Amendment will kick in, and Vice President JD Vance will get sworn in as President and take over the reins of the White House. It will be done within minutes, maybe an hour or two just to make sure You Know Who is officially an ex-shitgibbon. 

After that, chaos will prevail as the entire Far Right ecosystem between the wingnut media, the wingnut preachers, the wingnut congresscritters, and a handful of guys named Dave begin to fight each other over the rotting corpse of trump's MAGA empire.

For starters: While Vance is going to be in prime position to claim the mantle of MAGA leadership, he's not exactly well-liked even among the Republican base. He's relatively new to politics and doesn't have the network in place within the party ranks to seize control. Above all, he really doesn't have anyone he can trust to help corral a fracturing coalition that will fracture because others will scheme in the backrooms to undercut Vance and seize the MAGA crown for themselves.

Even within trump's Cabinet, there at least two people - Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth - who could challenge Vance for leadership of that rabid MAGA base. Rubio in particular has sold himself as the future of the Republican Party ever since 2010 when he got elected Senator, and happily marketed by the Beltway punditry as the GOP Savior... only to get undercut by trump's rise to power in 2016. If Rubio has any presidential ambitions still in him, he has to known his window of opportunity is closing soon, and having that unpopular Vance blocking his way isn't going to help him.

Granted, in this scenario Vance will likely purge the Cabinet of anyone he thinks will work against him, which likely kicks Rubio out of State and out of any position to sabotage whatever bankrupt foreign policy our nation has left. That could give Rubio the chance to play spoiler for party leadership on the outside, criticizing any miscues Vance would likely commit in office, and primary challenge Vance for 2028. Thing is, in modern presidential politics it's been rare to challenge an incumbent let alone beat them, so there's no guarantee for Rubio to win that way (the best possibility is that early primarying exposes Vance and he declines to run for re-election like Truman and LBJ. But in that scenario the GOP primaries become wide open for another crazy field of multiple candidates).

Any "What If" guessing about a post-trump aftermath relies on one key question: How will that rabid Far Right MAGA base react to losing their golden idol trump? It depends a lot on whomever among the Republican leadership that voter base would see as the worthy successor... which becomes its own problem. There isn't anyone that the MAGAts seem to respect as a future standard bearer: Not Vance, not Rubio, not either of trump's kids with political ambitions (junior and that other guy). There are other hardline panderers among the GOP ranks that *could* appeal; but some of them - Marjorie Taylor Greene comes to mind - have turned against trump publicly and could be hurting their own standing, or others like Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott or Jim "Sex Scandal" Jordan who have alienated other party leaders to where a schism in Congress is unavoidable.

This is the thing about trump's devoted followers: They are more devoted to HIM than to the Republican Party itself. Given opportunities to change their support to other political figures, they refuse. We saw this in the 2024 primaries even with trump facing a number of criminal and civil charges (and convictions) that normally would make a candidate vulnerable: The likes of Ron DeSantis did his best to "own the libs" the way trump did, only to get rejected hard because the Real Thing was still available and the MAGA base did not want to abandon trump.

I've railed about this before: trump habitually, constantly violated social and political norms and yet kept gaining more voter support. he defied political gravity every time a scandal would have ruined anyone else. Of all of trump's business failings, he is good at one thing: Marketing himself. he wields a horrifying and dark charisma that claimed dominion over a section of the American population - the haters, the fearmongers, the grifters - that no else can reach.

trump is shameless, in a way nearly every other person on the planet isn't. A lot of politicians know how to appeal, how to pander, how to demagogue: None of them can sink themselves to the level of shamelessness trump can, which is why none of them can appeal to that MAGA base the way he does.

Vance tries to do it and gets mocked. DeSantis tried and failed. If Greene or other Far Right figures try to rise up and fill the vacuum of hate, they arguably won't be able to fill that void no matter how vile or vicious they behave. Because they run the risk - through self-awareness, through hesitation or moderation to keep themselves even vaguely human - of succumbing to political gravity where trump never fell.

As for the fracturing nature of the Republican Party itself: trump has made himself so indispensable to the party's organization and survival that there is a genuine possibility the GOP will fracture once he's gone. Again, we could see a civil war between the various trump wannabes rising up to pander to the rabid Far Right base for the 2028 presidency. But we could also witness a Republican Party falling apart between the various factions that are torn between keeping our international prestige high (and stopping Russian / Chinese hegemony from taking our top spot), keeping our business overlords happy (by ending trump's disastrous tariff wars), or pandering to an "America First" mob base that also wants a Christian Nationalist war against the heathens to bring about the End of Days.

A lot of that remains speculation. When - IF - THAT happens, we'll have to see what actually plays out.

Something we should prepare for when THAT happens is the likelihood of trump's devoted base going on the warpath. trump has called often at his rallies for his supporters to act out and attack others. We've seen what happened on January 6th, in spite of the MAGA faithful trying to whitewash / excuse the horrors of that riot. This isn't speculation: there is genuine fear if/when trump dies, his base will react with fire and fury.

We can look to how the Far Right reacted after the assassination of one of their media elites Charlie Kirk. The conservative punditry tried to turn Kirk into a Free Speech saint - ignoring all the hate speech he promoted and the colleges he attempted to censor - and attacked anyone on social media they viewed as dishonoring Kirk's memory. They actively got people fired from jobs for their own free speech rights, and a number of people and institutions were harassed with death threats.

At the same time, that same conservative punditry turned on each other trying to make themselves into Kirk's heir to his conservative empire. The likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Ben Shapiro pulled out the knives to backstab each other to claim the audience and financial base for their own. Owens in particular has gone after Charlie's widow Erika, who's been using the martyrdom to rise to political power on her own. Some of the rancor is over the growing anti-Semitism driving the Far Right rage conflicting with the public necessity of siding with Israel in the Middle East chaos going on right now. But a lot of it is really about who gets to be the next Trump - the role Charlie Kirk was growing into - and profiting from it all when trump himself kicks the bucket.

The unity we see in the modern Republican Party - the Far Right Conservative movement as a whole - really only exists as a money-making machine for those at the top who can profit from the graft, the insider trading, the kickbacks, the marketing of hats and t-shirts, the influence peddling, and open bribes. All of it led by the Grifter-in-Chief trump who's trying to squeeze every nickel he can (pennies are phased out, by the way) before he has to answer to a wrathful deity.

And that's the thing. A lot of the corruption trump is pulling right now - and a lot of the half-baked foreign and domestic policy debacles he keeps inflicting upon himself - shows all the trademarks of a con artist half-aware he's running out of time (look at how desperate trump is to see that hideous ballroom of his finished). His end is coming, and Judgment cometh right soon.

It's going to be a question of surviving the chaos that follows.

The Strait Story

Let's get straight to the point: trump and his pro-war lackeys had no idea what they were really doing starting a war with Iran (via Phillips Payson O'Brien at The Atlantic): 

Astonishingly, President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared when Iran, under air assault from the United States and Israel, retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. Military planners have pointed out for decades that the waterway—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes—is highly vulnerable to Iranian assault. But the Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure because officials assumed that such a move would hurt Iran more than the United States.

In its failure to anticipate Iran’s reaction, the administration ignored a dynamic that former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a first-term Trump appointee, was fond of pointing out: Once hostilities begin, “the enemy gets a vote.” U.S. leaders have drastically underestimated the Iranian regime’s ability to survive, adjust, and strike back. Just two weeks into a war that began at a time of the president’s choosing, the U.S. appears uncertain about what to do next.

You can see the lack of intellectual and operational awareness with trump and everyone in his chain of command - Secretary of Voguing Pete Hegseth especially - when it comes to war planning just by noticing the map of the Strait of Hormuz.

via Wikipedia Commons

It's the geographic bottleneck of politics. I've got no training in military strategy or tactics, and even *I* can tell that narrow gap is a major hinderance to any naval operations. No shipping can slip through that 12 mile gap without detection, and Iran is in a prime position to threaten every oil tanker trying to get out of the Persian Gulf.

They've done this before, by the way. The "Tanker War" during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s saw Iraq try to tempt Iran to blockade the Strait in order to draw the United States into their fight. Iran tried to avoid that by targeting Iraqi tankers only, delaying any American intervention until 1987 when the Iraqis accidentally struck the USS Stark, giving Reagan's government the excuse to go after Iran (which unfortunately also led to the tragic downing of an Iranian airliner Flight 655).

So considering anyone with a basic understanding of geography, and anyone with a memory of recent history - the 1980s weren't THAT long ago - you'd think there would be enough people even among the neocons and war chickenhawks in the current White House who would have at least done some planning into securing control of the Strait to ensure the flow of trade (oil) would continue unabated.

That - alas - would require someone in trump's administration to be genuinely competent at this point.

trump and Hegseth and every other person involved in this mismanaged war effort simply didn't think or even care to think where the long-term consequences of their actions would lead (as if they ever did).

You can tell they operated on the ass-umption that their "decapitation strikes" - taking out the Ayatollah and any Iranian military chain of command - would lead to the immediate collapse of Iran's government and willingness to fight. That it would lead to the Iranian citizenry - already in decades of protesting the harsh regime of hardliner Shia clerics - rising up in mass protest to overthrow whatever was left to leave a power vacuum to trump's (and Netanyahu's) liking.

It never occurred to trump's circle that Iran's military and leadership have been planning for this kind of situation for decades: Having witnessed the tactics of our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, believing they've been in an existential fight against American hegemony since 1979 actually since 1953 when the CIA installed the Shah, and moving into more modern warfare methods such as drone bombs and cyberattacks (some of which the US military haven't adapted against yet). 

It hasn't occurred to our government's leadership - not just trump but let's face it most of our Presidents since the Second World War - even with the evidence after Afghanistan / Iraq / hell, Vietnam that bombing a population into submission doesn't work. The Iranian people may be tired and frustrated and willing to rise up against the Ayatollah including the new guy replacing his dead dad, but they're not going to do it while trump and his underlings are bombing schools, museums, and desalination plants.

I've often criticized Duyba's failed war effort in Iraq, pointing out that he and his people may have had a Plan A for going in and forcing regime change, but they had no Plan B when their attempt to install a puppet leader fell through. Considering what trump and Hegseth and the rest of the clowns are doing with Iran, there doesn't even seem to be a Plan A with them.

So, to the 77 million of you who voted for this shitgibbon to return to power: WE WARNED YOU. GODDAMN YOU, WE WARNED YOU and you were too butt-hurt about libruls and diversity to realize the damage you were bringing back.

And now a lot of things will get worse: The price of gas obviously, economic instability here and abroad, the likelihood of troop deployments and thousands of American families watching their loved ones go into harm's way - for arguably no reason at all this time save for the vanity and cruelty of trump and his lackeys - are just the immediate pain points we'll feel. We'll be feeling all of this months or even years down the road.

Gods help us. AGAIN.

The Wickedness of the Unwanted War

Are we the baddies?
-- Mitchell and Webb

The "bomb 'em all" war that trump and his lackeys triggered in Iran last week started with a horrific war crime: the destruction of a school building that killed hundreds including children. Only now are we getting confirmation it was our side doing it (via Merlyn Thomas and Shayan Sardarizadeh with the BBC, through a fact-checking service called BBC Verify): 

A US Tomahawk missile hit a military base near a primary school in southern Iran where Iranian authorities said 168 people, including around 110 children, were killed, expert video analysis shows.

A video published yesterday by Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency, which BBC Verify has confirmed as authentic, shows a missile moments before it struck an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base next to the Shajareh Tayebeh primary school in Minab.

BBC Verify has previously established through satellite imagery, verified videos and expert analysis that the area near the school was hit by a series of strikes.

Experts who have seen this latest video told us the presence of a Tomahawk missile, along with evidence the area was hit with multiple strikes, indicates this was a US operation. Neither Israel nor Iran are known to possess Tomahawks, experts said.

Netanyahu and his Israeli forces are eagerly striking targets across Iran for their own reasons - to end Iran's proxy war through terror groups, and to destabilize the entire Middle East to justify land-grabbing Gaza and the West Bank - but they've dragged in on their side a bomb-happy trump regime that wants "results" through glorified explosions and graphic body counts.

Just look at Secretary of War Assholes Pete Hegseth, out here crowing about ignoring the rules of engagement that our military is supposed to follow to reduce civilian casualties (via Haley Fuller at Military.com):

At a Pentagon briefing on March 2, 2026, War Secretary Pete Hegseth used blunt language about how the United States would fight, saying there would be “no stupid rules of engagement,” “no politically correct wars,” and “no nation-building quagmire.”

Those remarks became a flashpoint because rules of engagement, or ROE, are not “vibes” or slogans. They are a formal control system that ties tactical force decisions to strategy, law, and escalation management. Human Rights Watch responded the same day by warning that dismissing ROE in public can read as minimizing legal constraints that exist to protect civilians and keep operations compliant with the laws of war. 

In U.S. doctrine, ROE start with standing baseline rules and then get tailored by commanders for a mission, geography, and threat picture. The Joint Staff’s Standing Rules of Engagement and Standing Rules for the Use of Force (CJCSI 3121.01B) are the backbone reference that describes how U.S. forces think about self defense, hostile act, hostile intent, and the conditions for using force...

There are well-documented cases where tighter guidance on the use of force improved strategic outcomes by reducing civilian harm and preserving legitimacy with the population. In Afghanistan, ISAF’s 2009 Tactical Directive under Gen. Stanley McChrystal tightened standards for air-to-ground fires and emphasized protecting civilians, explicitly shaping how units used force in populated areas.

U.S. military analysis later described how that directive and related command emphasis drove changes in how airpower was used and contributed to decreased civilian casualties from airpower during that period. That is not a moral victory lap; it is operational logic. Civilian harm can create tactical blowback, degrade intelligence access, and strengthen enemy recruiting. 

Counterinsurgency doctrine makes the same point in more formal language: in COIN, legitimacy and civilian protection are not side quests. They are part of the theory of victory, which means ROE can become an instrument of strategy rather than just a compliance checklist...

In short: we're supposed to be the good guys, and good guys do not blow up schools and kill hundreds of children.

We do that - our US forces go in and commit atrocities across the board - and we signal to the local population we can't be trusted, that we are the demons that the other side keep painting us as. Recruitment for insurgents will go up: Local resistance - if we ever send troops to occupy - will get violent. Regional terrorism within any allied nations - and the likelihood of another terror strike here in the U.S. - will play out. And you get the quagmire Hegseth claims we're not getting dragged into.

But Hegseth doesn't care, he just wants to preen and strut as "a warrior" playing out his Alpha Male fantasies. trump never cared, he wants to satisfy the cruel urges that fill that empty void where a human soul should be.

It's telling that neither man were never truly soldiers. For all of Hegseth's "military" experience in the National Guard, he rode a desk not a tank. None of the actual Code of good soldiering got through that thick skull of his. Hegseth thinks warring is all about killing, and planting a colored flag on a battlefield to claim victory.

He is so wrong about that.

And trump, draft-dodging bone-spur coward that he is... he said far too often to far too many people that soldiering is for losers and suckers.

In the process, Hegseth is pushing our military into committing more and worse war crimes on the scale of My Lai, or Sand Creek. He's hoping - with trump's approval - to turn our troops into mindless trigger-pullers, taking aim at any target he and trump order them to kill.

This may be about the senseless - and criminal - killing of Iranians, and Venezuelans, and South American boaters, and now they're taking aim at Cubans. It's also about trump and the Far Right's desire to get troops to aim their rifles and missiles at other Americans, the ones the Far Right fear and hate the most.

trump wants his war on the part of America that doesn't cower or offer him adoration. Hegseth and the other Republican chickenhawks are willing to help him.

We need to stop these warmongers, not just for the sake of innocent lives across the globe but for the sake of our families, friends, and communities.

trump, Hegseth, and the Far Right want to be the Bad Guys. We shouldn't let them.

How Can Our Own Military Be Running Out of Ammo?

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! And did Italy just beat the US in baseball this week???

As much as the ongoing deaths of civilians and soldiers horrify me as trump pushes the United States into more bombings and more war with more nations, another thing irking me is the revelation that our military is woefully unprepared for most of this, especially in terms of supplies. Susie Madrak over at Crooks & Liars has the details:

Inside the Pentagon, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation. “The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

Senior leaders are worried that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles.

“I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” one source added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

The president’s senior military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, warned the White House last week that munitions shortfalls and a lack of broad military support from other U.S. allies would raise the risk to any operation in Iran and to the U.S. personnel put in harm’s way.

Granted, the government under Biden has been shipping out a lot of reserve firepower to places like Ukraine, but our own military should have been stockpiling newer gear, ammo, defense systems, tanks, planes, helicopters, and other equipment to fill that void. 

I went digging for information about what's going on with our military manufacturing, and by the looks of it there's hundreds of billions of dollars getting pumped into all that (via Jake Kaufman at Defense and Munitions, a trade magazine):

The President’s FY ’26 National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, a 13% increase from 2025. However, at the moment, Congress has passed $831.5 billion for the Department of War’s Defense's discretionary budget. Outstanding budget considerations going through Congress could bring that final number up toward $893 billion...

You would think $893 billion would pay for a lot of bullets...

The budget includes an additional $1.3 billion for industrial-based supply chain improvements and an additional $2.5 billion for missiles and munitions production expansion. The budget also includes significant new investments of $200 million for automation and artificial intelligence (AI). It breaks down to shipbuilding, munitions and defense supply chains, and air and missile defense alone accounting for 50% of the total enhancements...

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Where's the fucking money, Lockheed Martin???

Blood and Ash the Price We Will All Pay For This

Again, I woke up to war this year. This started around 2:14 AM EST (via Amir-Hussein Radjy at AP News):

Two residents reported hearing the sounds of strikes echoing across the capital. A resident in the area of Mehrabad airport reported the sounds of “two heavy explosions” shaking windows just over half an hour ago. In central Tehran near Vanak, another resident reported the sounds of “blasts and war” coming at almost the same moment.

The more comprehensive AP report by Brian Melley:

The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday in a massive operation that President Donald Trump said killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while targeting military capabilities and aiming to eliminate the threat of Tehran creating a nuclear weapon.

There was no comment on Khamenei by Tehran, while Trump urged Iranians to seize the moment and “take over.”

In counterattacks, Iran fired drones and missiles at Israel and aimed strikes at U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Exchanges of fire continued into the night. Iranian state media, citing the Red Crescent, on Saturday evening said at least 201 people had been killed and more than 700 injured.

Iran has also been attacking civilian targets in Dubai and other parts of the Arabian Middle East. Iran is threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz if they haven't started already, something that can easily cut off a massive amount of oil needed for global energy needs, spiking gas prices here in the U.S. as well as other nations.

At the moment, it doesn't look like trump and his gung-ho war buddies are going to commit any troops to a ground invasion, contenting themselves with a massive bombing campaign alongside Israel to perform "decapitation strikes" to destabilize the regime. Essentially the same thing trump ordered when using the military to capture Venezuela's president a month ago.

Thing is, any serious attempt at regime change is going to NEED boots on the ground and an occupying force to rebuild things. trump may have captured Maduro but all that did was promote Venezuela's Vice President to the top job. If the US bombing did succeed in killing Khamenei - who was 86 and dying anyway - all we've done right now is promote another cleric to the Ayatollah job and that person is hiding in the deepest basement he can find.

And even then, our nation's track record at nation-building after war and occupation hasn't been all that great post World War II. We tried in Afghanistan and failed (trump made sure of that). We tried in Iraq and failed (lying us into war over fake WMDs made sure of that). The biggest - the most horrifying - argument in the halls of power in DC over trump's campaign against Iran is how there's no real plan involved. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic spells out the hazards:

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordnance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us...

America twice had its hands full in Iraq, a nation of 37 million, even with the assistance of several countries. The U.S., France, and Britain managed to subdue tiny Libya, a nation of 7.5 million, and left its dictator to be raped and beaten in the streets. This time, conditions are different and more challenging: The target is two and a half times the size of Iraq, America has exactly one openly declared ally in this enterprise, no serious armed rebel force exists in Iran, and no coalition of nations is assembling to march into Tehran...

In short, the United States and Israel - both driven by neocon fantasies of purging the Middle East in blood and fire - are doubling down on the chaos thinking a shinier better world will emerge. That we will be - yet again - "greeted as liberators" even though we're destroying the village nation in order to save it us. This is in spite of the evidence that we're going in mostly alone, going into a territory and terrain far harsher than we've dealt with before, and with no real clue where the exit doors are when it's time to flee for our lives.

All of these problems were ones I'd pointed out back in 2019, during trump's first reign of error, when it was clear even then that going to war in Iran one way or another was a bad idea. Nothing had changed since then, except for trump's growing dementia, arrogance, and desperation to *win* at something to confirm his own self-worth at everyone else's expense.

Topping all of this is the fact trump's actions are illegal - he does not have authorization from Congress for this - and that we're already getting reports from Iran of high civilian casualties (aka war crimes). There is no other way to say this, America: WE are the bad guys here.

And GODDAMN every media pundit who proclaimed trump 'a dove' while defaming Hillary and Kamala as warmongers. You lied to yourselves as well as to the nation about who the real warmonger has been - and which party (hint, not the Democrats) has profited from these wars ever since 2001.

Without a clear agenda, without true and honest goals, without a sincere desire to do what is right for the poor suffering citizens of Iran - and the other lands that trump and his thugs would desecrate for their own greed and lust - this war that has begun poorly will end much worse, with more suffering and dismay than our own nation will be willing to bear.

Goddamn every one of you bastards who supported trump the last ten years, because the next ten years of blood and ash are the price we're all paying for your fear and rage. 

I Love You More Than Hate Loves War

Last month, Bruce Springsteen released a protest song railing against the violence of trump's thugs towards immigrants and protestors, and it came as part of an early wave of protest songs spreading across the American airwaves as other artists chimed in.

Last week, one of the other bands I follow - U2 - released their own song about the violence in Minneapolis, on an EP (sort of a mini-album) alongside other songs protesting the state of things across the world from Ukraine to Sudan to Iran to Gaza. 

trump and his ilk have operated for years on the belief that their world-view - of greed, of fear, of hating others they can't understand or accept - is the only view that matters, and waged - still waging - a culture war to establish their hate over all of us.

Yet now our American culture - driven by music, by entertainment, by passion and heart and hope - is fighting back, delving into the long-standing traditions of protest songs to spell out where the haters are wrong, and how they're going to lose.

Keep fighting. Keep singing.

We - the communities, the families, the real Americans - shall overcome.