I Didn't Even See Her Enter the Building Let Alone Leave

This happened so fast I didn't even have time to blog about it properly (via NPR's Washington DC desk)

Katie Zacharia is "transitioning out" of her role as press secretary, according to a White House official not authorized to speak on the record, marking a stunning turn of events for the spokeswoman who officially started Monday and is out by Friday.

Zacharia's first briefing was Tuesday morning where she faced scrutiny both over her performance – during which she delivered a lengthy and halting opening statement read from notes and called on only three reporters – and her legal credentials.

President Trump on Friday cast doubt on the future of Zacharia, saying he had a discussion with her just before leaving for a campaign rally in Georgia.

The 41-year-old graduate of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and self-described attorney had stepped in as Trump's chief spokesperson at a moment when his popularity has fallen to record lows and Republicans are scrambling to limit potential losses in the midterm elections.

Much of the scrutiny of Zacharia focused on her credentials as an attorney. While standing with Trump, she was asked by reporters where she passed the bar exam.

"When I moved to China," Zacharia answered, an apparent reference to what she has described on her LinkedIn page as a period of time from 2011 through 2013 spent working for a prominent Beijing-based law firm called Zhon Lun...

Except that there's no record of Zacharia getting certified in China, and currently no record of her passing a bar exam stateside. She has a law degree, but that's different from the bar which allows you to practice law in courts and other legal matters. (It's like me having a degree in journalism, but it doesn't automatically make me a reporter.)

As much as her credentials were under question, what hurt Zacharia as trump's new bald-faced gaslighting liar press secretary was her actual performance her first official day on the job (via Tom Jones with Poynter): 

New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia held her first press briefing on Tuesday.

And how did it go? Put it this way: It could have gone better. Way better. In fact, it couldn’t have gone much worse.

Here’s how you know it’s bad: Insiders are already asking if her days are numbered.

A visibly nervous Zacharia met the media for a mere 14 minutes, looking down for most of it while reading prepared notes. She then called on just three reporters, all from conservative outlets: Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail.

Reactions to the slow-motion train wreck were swift and overwhelmingly negative.

The New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh called Zacharia’s debut “a bumpy one.”

CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins called it a “bizarre” press briefing, telling colleague Wolf Blitzer on the air, “And so I’m not really sure, Wolf, that I’ve ever been to a press briefing where there were only three questions in the briefing. It was quite unusual, especially for the first press briefing, which was widely touted by the White House and announced by the president...”

It was bad enough that some are wondering if Zacharia will last even as long as Anthony Scaramucci, who made it only 10 days as White House communications director during Trump’s first term. One anonymous official told MS NOW’s Jake Traylor, “Getting behind the podium is tough, but she got off on the wrong foot. She needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record...”

Ahhh, Anthony Scaramucci. The original tin-plated standard for political career brevity. Jones had him at 10 days but most others are generous about his brief stay as trump's media whipping boy, setting a Scaramucci as a measurement of 11 days in office. Wiki editors are unforgiving in their promptness: they've already added Zacharia as a measurement of 5 days (or .45 a Scaramucci).

Zacharia's week-long tenure brought up serious questions from Jones about why someone as inexperienced as her with public relations was tapped for trump's Mouth of Sauron Putin:

Veteran media journalist Jeremy Barr of The Guardian made the correct point on social media Tuesday: “There were plenty of actual Fox News employees available who could have done this job (rather than an unpaid guest), someone like Emily Compagno for example…”

How true. It seems as if Trump had plenty of people to choose from instead of Zacharia for such an important role.

Did Trump really hire her simply because he liked her appearances on various news networks, particularly Fox News? How did she get the job? Was she vetted at all?

The Washington Post’s Michael Birnbaum reported Trump made the hire without even talking it over with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Birnbaum wrote, “Senior White House staff, including Wiles, were informed of the decision to hire Zacharia the night before Trump announced it on Friday, the people said. Zacharia had little time to prepare for the briefing, which can be a challenging joust with the press in which a press secretary needs to advocate on behalf of the administration, stick to the facts — sometimes — and improvise quickly when tricky topics arise.”

She looked overwhelmed and underprepared, leading some to wonder why she was rushed to the podium so quickly after being hired. One Trump adviser told CNN, “She should have been doing murder boards for two weeks before going up there.”

It should be noted Zacharia's predecessor Karoline Leavitt at least had experience in the communications rooms of various political offices, not only interning during trump's first term but also for Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Everyone else beforehand - even good old Sean "Spicy" Spicer had years as a communications director for the GOP - were practiced and field-tested to go before hostile press rooms. It's not like trump - and it doesn't seem like his handlers had a say in this one - could would or should go after incompetency as a quality for such a high-profile position. And yet he did, because trump is more obsessed with appearances - young, white, blonde - than anything else anymore.

Zacharia's sudden departure leaves trump's comms unit in serious turmoil, desperate to find a more credible spokesperson who isn't going to drag trump or the Republicans any further into humiliation that trump and the Republicans are already doing to themselves this midterms.

If Zacharia has any good thing happening for her this week, it's that Saturday Night Live will never get around to mocking her the way they did Spicy. (slow clap) Good for you, Katie. Good for you.

Performative Stupidity

Dear Americans, when you elect Republican clowns (via Chris Marquette and Kyle Cheney at Politico)...

In a quest to frame former special counsel Jack Smith as a liar during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Schmitt asked him if he was in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, for an NBA basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks — amid mounting drama around the Atlanta-based criminal investigation into Donald Trump led by prosecutor Fani Willis.

The esteemed Senator from Missouri was eager and desperate to catch a prominent opponent of donald "Break All Laws" trump in a lie so he could accuse Smith of perjury, and claim another scalp for the Great Far Right Cause that he could parade around the Fox Not-News talk shows.

Thing is, Schmitt and his own staff never paid attention to the details, or did any actual fucking research.

Smith clarified that he didn’t go to that game. But he did go to a different one on the same day: He was in College Park, Md. to see the Maryland Terrapins women’s basketball team play the Iowa Hawkeyes, led by phenom Caitlin Clark, who dropped 38 points that night in a win over the Terps.

It appeared that Schmitt misinterpreted a text message reference to the “hawks” among Smith’s deputies, who discussed reserving a seat for Smith in the front row.

“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair,” the Missouri Republican asked, intimating that he was about to get Smith to perjure himself.

Schmitt tried to connect the NBA game Smith did not attend in Atlanta to Feb. 2, 2024 — the date Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney who was investigating Trump, acknowledged a personal relationship with another prosecutor on her team...

You might recall that Fulton County prosecution went down in flames due to Willis' ill-advised relationship, which was painful considering she and her office did present a lot of damning evidence trump and his allies were attempting to criminally undermine the 2020 election results.

This is due to trump - and the Republicans pandering to trump's delusions - trying to rewrite all of reality by accusing everyone else of being in on conspiracies against him when they uncover real-world evidence of trump's criminal misdeeds. There is one huge ongoing revenge plot on trump's side of things... which isn't working out because trump's lies can't fit the facts as David A. Graham at the Atlantic points out:

When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.

Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not...

No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it.

More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them...

The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes...

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post...

...The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.

Actually David, it's because trump can never admit he lost at anything, so...

Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.

In order for trump to be a winner in 2020, there had to be a massive conspiracy against him. But like the fantasies trump pushed that he was "a victim" of Democratic schemes in 2016 when he lost the popular vote and suffered an investigation into his corrupt ties to Russia, none of trump's false narratives can hold up to the scrutiny of a courtroom where facts matter. trump tried this attack back then, and his lackeys like John Durham failed to prove a conspiracy then just as they're failing today.

And yet, they need to keep pursuing these false leads to maintain the lie that it's the Democrats who are cheating bastards, not trump or the Republicans (who are). They're going to keep doing this performative bullshit until they get their scalps for display at the next CPAC rally, even as they burn everything down to get there.

Yet another reason to vote these useless Republicans out of office. Americans, please see this stupidity for what it is and get rid of it.

If One Can Hope For a Big Enough Wave (w/ Update)

If the Far Right Republicans were in control of everything heading into the midterms, they wouldn't exactly be panicking like this (via David A. Graham at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican whose district Trump won by 15 points in 2024, recently released an ad critiquing the administration’s immigration enforcement, saying that Hispanic voters feel “betrayed.” Byron Donalds, the GOP’s nominee for governor of Florida, scrubbed most references to Trump from his website—a notable move considering that the foundation of Donalds’s entire career has been fidelity to the Donald. The Senate contenders Mike Rogers of Michigan and Ashley Hinson of Iowa are both calling for an end to the Iran war. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, has even suddenly changed his mind and now believes that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

The number of prominent Republicans distancing themselves from Trump has accelerated, or at least reached a critical mass, in the past 10 days. The shift is interesting—first, as an indication of what information GOP candidates are receiving privately about the president’s unpopularity and its drag on them, and second, because public critiques of Trump from Republicans have been vanishingly rare, no matter how unwise, outrageous, or unpopular his actions have been.

But the defections are perhaps better understood as a sign of normalcy, even in a deeply abnormal context. A president’s party almost always loses seats in a midterm, a result of the pendulum effect in elections. And the dynamics of this race are especially challenging for Republicans because Trump is historically unpopular, outpacing even his own poor ratings in 2018, when Democrats dominated the midterms. Trump is now presiding over persistent inflation, exacerbated by a failing war of choice in Iran. All of this predicts that GOP candidates would be wary of Trump...

Thing is, this time it feels different. After massive gerrymandering to make more congressional districts "safe" for Republican incumbents, the polling - if the New York Times numbers are accurate - is showing massive shifts - ranging from +11 to +31 (or more) - in favor of Democrats across far too many districts.

Texas and Florida would become ground zero for a possible Democratic tsunami, with the party’s chance at a large congressional majority potentially hinging on whether it could break through Republican gerrymanders in those states. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/u...

[image or embed]

— Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 7:06 PM

In case the skeet disappears,
a screenshot of Garcia's observations

The thing that proved advantageous to trump and the Republicans in 2024 - a shift of (mostly male) Latino/Hispanic voters who supported trump over Harris - is now abandoning the Far Right thanks to the odious deportation attacks trump and his lackeys at DHS/ICE are inflicting on Latino communities even in must-need-their-votes states like Florida and Texas. This would explain Rep. Salazar's desperate ad pretending to oppose trump's anti-immigration policies... when everyone knows she and her fellow Republicans in Congress supported those policies and are doing nothing today to stop him.

As much as Donalds and Salazar and numerous other Far Right GOP candidates/incumbents act or say in public, they are tied to the hip with trump and his destructive ways: They never held him accountable to every constitutional violation and ethical breach he's done, not in his first term and clearly not in his second. If voters are paying any attention - and the polling suggests they are - the Republicans can't hide from their culpability in trump's crimes.

For all the conspiracy theorizing of how the Republicans - especially as trump and his lackeys at Justice and Homeland Security and the Post Office are working to disrupt the upcoming midterm voting - could just rig the results and "win" by their form of cheating (extreme gerrymandering, blocking voters at the polls above all, tricking voters to not show, those sorts of things), if they felt they could pull that off then they wouldn't be panicking like they are now. The campaigns tend to have more resources for their own internal polling work - number they don't share to the public - and whatever it is the Republicans are seeing from their own numbers have them terrified they're losing more than the US House or a couple of state governorships.

The polls may say one thing, but what matters above all is actual voter turnout. Elections always matter - I wish more people understood that - and in spite of every Far Right attempt to deny everyone else their power to vote, people need to show up in droves this October during Early Voting weeks - arguably the safest time to do it - and show up no matter what by Tuesday November 3rd for Election Day itself. 

If you're angry about how bad things are, if you're angry about inflation killing you at the gas pump and grocery store, if you're angry about unwanted wars and a military getting decimated by idiocy from trump's people mismanaging it all, if you're angry about your communities under attack by trump's masked thugs kidnapping your neighbors and their kids, you have a way to express that anger the right way.

Show up at the ballot box and vote every corrupt and inept Republican bastard out of office.

Update: Spotted this Axios report from Marc Caputo, Hans Nichols, and Alex Isenstadt where the "Oh Crap" GOP settings are at DEFCON-2.

It's looked bad for Republicans all year, but this week felt different — like the political environment was disintegrating in real time, one ominous data point after another.

Most worrisome for the GOP, there's virtually no chance the war ends, inflation cools, interest rates fall, consumer confidence rises, and economic optimism surges before the Nov. 3 election.

That's why Republicans fear the undertow imperils so many candidates once deemed safe...

The problems for the GOP are everywhere. In the battle for the Senate, once ruby-red Texas looks more in play than ever, and Florida isn't far behind. Nor is Alaska. North Carolina and Georgia look lost. Maine is problematic.

The Senate GOP campaign arm is begging donors for another $8.9 million to defend Senate seats in three states that Trump won by double digits two years ago — Alaska, Iowa and Ohio.

"We're having problems just getting Republican voters to respond to polls," said one national Republican pollster. "At what point do we think these guys aren't showing up at the actual polls on Election Day?"

As I've said, turnout matters. As much as getting Democrats invested in showing up, as much as getting Independent voters to show up in favor of Dem candidates, having Republican voters tune out is just as important. Granted, it's hard to get anyone to answer to polls - I admit, I've been sending every phone text request this year to BLOCKED - but even in normal circumstances you should find enough people to respond. THIS midterms, Republican voters refuse to even pretend to pollsters to back their own party.

It's hard for a partisan voter to flip to the other party - when people buy into a brand (tm), they're faithful until the brand betrays them personally - so the next-best thing is that they refuse to show, as a means to express their anger. In the gerrymandered districts the Republicans carved for themselves in Red states, even two percent of your voter base failing to show could be devastating: It's looking like five to ten percent of the GOP base won't vote.

We can't tell for certain what turnout will look like this November, because the primaries that happened earlier in the year are so poorly attended to begin with. It's one of the unspoken failures of our electoral system, that barely a quarter of registered voters show up for that stage of the process when you're choosing the candidates to represent your own party. If more people showed up for that, we might have a better idea of which way the November turnouts will go. Alas...

The Cowards of Congress Fleeing: 2026 Midterms Edition

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this blog at Crooks & Liars for the Mike's Blog Round-up! You you can, please do me a favor. A friend of mine from my writing circles, Sarah E. Glenn, passed away. If you can see your way to buying one of her works, and if you like it recommending it to others, would be a great way to remember her. Thank you.

You'd think with a serious midterms election cycle upcoming that the incumbent Republicans would present themselves during the last two months of their terms as competent serious legislators, doing the work of the People in order to impress their voters back home.

Instead, the House Republican leadership under Mike "What Spine?" Johnson are folding up camp and scurrying into their hidey-holes to avoid any last-minute hot potatoes they don't want left in their laps (via Lisa Mascaro at AP News):

Speaker Mike Johnson is closing up the House early, sending lawmakers home Wednesday to campaign for the midterm elections after what he claims is the most productive Congress in decades.

But not without a scathing rebuke from GOP Rep. Thomas Massie for all the unfinished business.

Massie’s resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the war in Iran and his bipartisan effort to force the release of more files in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation are all being left behind, blocked from votes.

“We’re calling off Congress? And we’re in the majority?” Massie railed from the House floor.

“I’m trying to get justice for the Epstein survivors,” he said. “I’m trying to stop a war.”

It's been noted before - starting back after the 2022 midterm results - that this is the weakest, narrowest party majority in the House in decades - and it didn't get better in 2024 when trump's coattails were worthless  - where the Republicans had between two to five seats of wiggle room at any time to get any of their wingnut agendas passed.

As a result, in spite of Speaker Johnson's big lie of "most productive Congress in decades," this has actually been one of the least productive (it's the 119th session, with only 2% of enacted bills), with a sizable number of bills getting through - including a "Release the Epstein Files" package that trump and the party leadership never wanted passed - without Johnson's control.

Johnson is refusing to keep the House open to avoid not only Massie's attempts to hold trump and his corrupt administration accountable - something that might actually benefit House Republicans in the elections as the polling suggest voters are very angry about the corruption and trump's failures - but to avoid any further embarrassments of his failure to keep his own house - metaphorical and literal - in check. He'd rather shut down, declare victory, and pretend in the million-dollar ad campaigns flooding the media markets that "ALL IS WELL".

This is just further proof that the Republican Party is not serious about doing their jobs. They'd rather take the annual six-figure salaries and goof off at fundraiser parties than serve the public trust. They'd rather hide from the disasters consuming the American voting base - the high inflation, the failed Iran/Middle East wars that a majority of Americans clearly want to end, the terrifying increase of poisoned food/water, the spread of more disease - than do anything to fix any of that.

For the LOVE OF GOD, VOTERS. Vote Democratic: at least THEY want to do the damn job and fix things.

Where The Hell *Are* The Billions Already Wasted At the Pentagon, If They're Desperate to Pilfer Even More Money?

What the HELL is going on here? According to the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, Hegseth's Department of Defense is about to raid the National Institutes for Health's piggy bank:

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) has learned that officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) are working to divert billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to supplement the Department’s budget.

Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens...

We as taxpayers have witnessed billions of dollars going to Defense every budget, we've had Secretary of Steak and Lobster Dinners Hegseth come begging for even more money this summer as ammo and troops got thrown into a costly destructive war on Iran. We've seen the end results of our front-line soldiers and sailors suffering with supply woes, bad food, and lack of support from a logistics system broken under Hegseth's misrule.

Something is rotten in the Pentagon, if they're having to raid other agencies for funds. What the hell happened to the billions we already gave the Defense Department, to where they're now out of money?

There's been calls for years to have a full audit done on the DoD. This is a major red flag warning us that audit is way overdue.

It's a Breakdown. Go Ahead And Give It To Me...

A good sign of how incompetent a Cabinet Secretary is doing at the job is the high number of resignations of key persons from that Department. Just yesterday, Secretary of Defense Idiocy Pete Hegseth got a vote of no confidence with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll jumping the figurative ship (while Navy crews are literally jumping).

A worse sign of how bad it's going within a department is when leaks get out to the media. That's often coming from underlings unable to resign but desperate to cleave an exit route for themselves before the ship sinks everybody. How else to explain the release of rather classified internal briefs to the Washington Post this weekend, detailing how most of the military commanders Hegseth hasn't fired yet are issuing "non-concurrances" in opposition to Hegseth's ongoing mismanagement of unwanted wars.

Mark Hertling over at The Bulwark provides some context:

The Post reported Sunday that several of America’s senior military commanders have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that continuing the current pace and scale of operations against Iran risks weakening the military’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere. The warnings appeared in the highly classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

The most eye-catching part of the Post story was that several senior commanders registered “non-concurs” with continuing some deployments. That sounds dramatic because it is—not because non-concurs are unusual in this process, but because of what they tell us about the condition of the force after six months of war.

The Book is essentially an operational and strategic assessment of how America’s military forces are allocated around the world. The people who assemble it are the staff for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many sections with different responsibilities contribute: Logisticians assess the ability to move and sustain forces, strategists consider the effect on global commitments and other contingency plans, and the services and combatant commands then assess what providing or losing a particular capability means to their overall missions. The operations directorate takes all this expertise into account and prepares the Book for the chairman, who then reviews it and gives it to the secretary of defense.

The Book doesn’t just concern itself with infantry divisions, fighter squadrons, and aircraft carriers. Modern military operations depend as much on intelligence platforms, air-defense units, military police, engineers, communications specialists, medical units, transportation companies, postal detachments, and even organizations responsible for showers and laundry. Those units aren’t glamorous, but commanders can’t fight without them. Every one of those capabilities must come from somewhere. That’s why the Book is ultimately about risk...

I saw this firsthand when I served on the Joint Staff as the J7, which at the time oversaw contingency planning. We were routinely asked to assess what satisfying one combatant commander’s request would do to another’s war plans. It didn’t matter if it was an armored division, an aircraft carrier, or a single aircraft: If someone wanted it, it usually meant someone else didn’t want to give it up.

When I was in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went through these Books weekly during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, questioning units and even numbers of personnel being deployed. The discussions were often painful for the Joint Staff briefers. But his purpose was straightforward: understand the consequences before deciding...

If there's anything we've seen from trump and from his lackeys like Hegseth, those two have no understanding of anything. /headdesk

This isn’t just Pentagon competition among commanders who want more forces. The reported non-concurs are occurring after months of munitions expenditure, extended deployments, deferred maintenance, and the movement of scarce capabilities from around the world to the Middle East. The Book is doing precisely what it was designed to do: expose tradeoffs to the secretary before he makes another decision.

It is also why the leak itself is so serious.

The Book is highly classified because, taken together, its contents provide an X-ray of American military readiness. It tells senior leaders not only where forces are, but where commanders believe they are short, which capabilities are being stretched, what war plans are accepting additional risk, and where the United States might have difficulty responding to a future crisis. That’s invaluable information for America’s adversaries.

But for the Secretary of Defense, it should be something else: a warning. The Book exists to identify risks before they become vulnerabilities—and the secretary’s job is not merely to read those warnings, but to act on them.

Hegseth can't. And won't.

The Secretary of Defense Pandering can't act on the warnings because they go against the fantasy narrative his boss trump has spun: Not only about the war on Iran, but also the overall fantasy that the United States is great under his leadership. Anyone in TrumpWorld who ruins that narrative gets exiled to the 2:00 am infomercial slots on the Newsmax channel.

Hegseth won't act on the warnings because of his own rage and frustration dealing with a military chain of command he views as "woke" or unmanly. This is a guy who's highest military rank was a major in the National Guard, obsessing over a "Warrior" ethos that remains at odds with the armed forces' focus on professionalism. Half of what he's doing to the military right now is expressing that rage towards generals and admirals he now "outranks", clearing out anyone who doesn't buy into that Warrior Code - or doesn't fix his racist/sexist world-view - he's trying to infuse into the troops at the detriment of morale and discipline. 

Leaking this information - that the upper ranks of the US military are at odds with their civilian (inept) bosses - is a major red flag: There is chaos instead of organization in one of the most important departments of our federal government; and there is a good chance the lower ranks of our armed forces are going to mutiny in some form or another when - not if - Hegseth and trump push them too far.

The Dumbest War Since The One With Jenkin's Ear

Did you see CNN's report this morning about trump's not-so-smart war effort against Iran? (via Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen)

The request from a senior officer at the US military command carrying out President Donald Trump’s war with Iran came in an email: We need ideas.

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

The crowdsourcing-style query, which military officials said was unusual over email, is one sign of the limited — and potentially unpalatable —options available to Trump to force Iran into a deal on his terms. Hoping to find an alternative, the official at CENTCOM kicked off the brainstorming session via email to see if anyone had a better idea. The second source said CENTCOM is looking at everything, acknowledging it needs to reevaluate the strategy.

Granted, in previous wars we've never really had the technology to get instant feedback from the troops, but even *asking* for brainstorming sessions in the middle of a firefight is insane to contemplate.

I admit I am a novice at war - the closest I ever got was applying for a ROTC scholarship to please my dad - but even I understand the strategic necessity of planning your wars BEFORE YOU START THE DAMN THINGS.

trump jumped into this fiasco with ego inflated and eyes closed: Tempted by the glory of being a wartime mob boss president (even as he insists on getting Peace Prizes), and by promises from Netanyahu who needed the United States to inflict regime change on Iran. trump honestly does not understand how to manage wars, and refuses to realize that wars aren't just bombing targets and waiting for the other nation to beg for mercy. Because Iran isn't about to beg, and Iran was in stronger strategic position - control of the Strait of Hormuz - than trump understood.

The real strategists in the armed forces - the guys and gals at our war colleges and defense think tanks - would have warned trump, Hegseth, and the rest of the Republican neocon warhawks - and they likely did before Hegseth kicked them out of the Pentagon - that we needed more resources lined up by February of this year, and a plan already in place to keep that strait opened to deny Iran any bargaining power. A chastened trump administration - reaching out now for the experts to brainstorm - is already too late: Iran holds the high ground at this stage of conflict, and it is going to take more resources and manpower - a call for enlistments if not triggering a draft among 20-something men who didn't want wars, getting more money out of a Congress angry they hadn't been consulted or briefed, getting our industries on a war footing that most of them aren't set to handle - that our nation can't offer.

It's telling that trump's officials are asking their ideas people to come up with plans to "punish" Iran: Always thinking in the mindset of the bully, and unable to realize there is nothing trump and his lackeys can do to hurt Iranians more than they're doing now. All Iran has to do is wait, endure the ongoing cycles of "peace plans", threats of decapitation, bombing of civilian infrastructure, and outlast trump to where different people are sitting in the White House who aren't going to be murdering assholes.

How's that for a war plan, donald?

trump's Vengeance Becomes a Whimper

In the ongoing saga of trump's damage upon our nation's Reflecting Pool in Washington DC, the sound and fury of trump accusing others of vandalizing what he wrecked has signified nothing.

The key target of trump's ire - a retired Olympian arrested for destruction of property when all he did was touch the already-peeling paint job on the pool - had the charges dismissed in court today (via staff with NPR):

Federal prosecutors have moved to dismiss the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn, saying instead that damage to the pool was "the result of botched installation and not vandalism."

The botched installation by the by is what got all the experts shouting months ago.

Earlier this month, Hearn, 67, pleaded not guilty to a single count of destruction of property causing more than $1,000 in damage to the pool. Hearn has repeatedly said that he simply touched the water in the pool out of curiosity last month. But the government alleged he had ripped a piece of sealant at the bottom of the reflecting pool after it had undergone a $14-million renovation.

"This was a deliberate act to damage the reflecting pool at the National Mall that members of the National Park Service actually have worked hard to restore and have witnessed," U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro previously said of Hearn's actions.

Pirro - more of a media hack than a practicing lawyer - had spent weeks in front of cameras claiming she had proof, insisting this was all vandalism... and now has to answer to the reality she exaggerated if not outright lied about all this the whole time. Pirro was in court claiming Hearn "forcefully pulled" huge chunks of material from the pool and now the Justice Department lawyers are saying "uh well..."

In a filing late Friday, the U.S. Attorney's Office for D.C. switched course, saying it had relied on initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (DOI) and U.S. Park Police (USPP).

Friday's filing reads: "It was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents ... indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings ("AIC") and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026."

After the renovation was completed, the pool's blue lining began peeling off in chunks and algae blooms turned the waters a murky green. The project has been widely criticized as a waste of taxpayer money.

Lawyers for Hearn responded to Friday's decision in a statement, saying the Trump administration owes Hearn an apology for a case that should have never been brought.

There were others whom Pirro charged with similar accusations who deserve to have their cases dropped as well. 

This all happened for several reasons.

One: trump can never admit he makes mistakes, he can never be in the wrong. he couldn't blame the bad paint job on the guy he personally paid to do this shoddy work, and he couldn't admit that painting the Reflecting Pool was a bad idea; so he has to blame it all on "vandals" and enemies to soothe his spoiled ego.

Two: trump has to make examples of those he deems enemies, by threatening to sue or actually suing others who can't afford the excessive legal fees and emotional stress of facing criminal (or civil) charges. he's aided by a Far Right conservative army of lackeys who ascribe to the philosophy of "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Punching down at everyone not of their tribe is what they live for, and it's turned a legal institution like the Justice Department into a mob of MAGA bullies.

These lawsuits and criminal filings may go nowhere, but it wastes his victims' time and financial well-being. And it sends a message - which any mobster like trump enjoys doing - to others not to get in his way or make him look ridiculous.

This is where Hearn needs to follow the example of E. Jean Carroll. She was a victim of trump, she called him out, he tried to ruin and defame her, she fought back. And she won in court, securing both a legal payment and confirming the court's ruling that trump is a goddamned sex offender.

Hearn and the others wrongfully charged for vandalizing something trump already ruined need to fight back. trump will never apologize like the lawyers demand (again, trump will never admit he's wrong). trump needs to get sued in civil court for his acts of defamation towards Hearn and others. Granted, it won't go anywhere while he's still in office - the Jones v Clinton ruling applied to matters before Clinton entered office - but it'll be waiting for him the second he's kicked out (thank you 22nd Amendment). Hearn's lawyers should also pursue going after the Justice Department hacks - Pirro especially - for prosecutorial misconduct, to push back against the Roy Cohn wannabes eager to please trump.

Marcy Wheeler over at Emptywheel shared this tidbit, something even she didn't know about until today:

Lastly, in a filing I had not seen reported before, Hearn revealed that after a witness testified that there was no way to attribute the damage to Hearn, given all the pre-existing damage, DOJ sent him or her back to the grand jury to falsely claim they had proof Hearn had done $1,000 of damage.

Presenting false testimony to a grand jury ought to count for SOMETHING towards misconduct, for God's sake. Every Justice lawyer on this fiasco from Pirro on down needs to face their own criminal charges, see how they like it.

The Legacy of a Man Desperate for Relevance

Update: thanks again to Steve In Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. Keep on raging.

Lot of crazy political stuff to write about, but this bit of news overnight dominated today's thoughts: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, longtime figure among the Republican leadership, died at the age of 71.

He did not leave behind a good or kind legacy: He attacked immigration policies, tried to end asylum laws, fought to end "sanctuary cities," and committed to other Far Right stances against women and minorities much like any other Republican blowhard.

This was a man who wanted to be the most important person in the room... and never could (via Mark Liebovich, at the Atlantic):

Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One.

What could be more fitting, then, for Graham—unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning—to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived...

It is perfectly on the nose that Graham’s departure would occur just a few hours before he was supposed to appear on Meet the Press. It would have been his 64th appearance on America’s longest-running public-affairs program. In the Meet the Press greenroom there used to be a prominent photo of Graham yapping away alongside his Senate sidekick, John McCain. McCain, for his part, appeared 73 times on Meet the Press, more than any other guest in history—something McCain was especially proud of.

In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God’s green Earth (or God’s greenroom) was to beat McCain’s record. He never will...

“Try to be relevant,” Graham told me in that same 2019 conversation when I asked how he became such a relentless and essential lapdog to Trump (okay, I didn’t use quite those words). This was an ongoing mystery around Washington, especially given how critical of Trump Graham had been when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016...

Graham was always a first-class political shape-shifter, easily darting between the smarty-pants of Official Washington and the bare-knuckled MAGA Populists of South Carolina. This dynamic extended to the on- and off-camera Lindseys: One minute, he would be chumming it up with a Democratic colleague before their “hit,” and then, when the lights came on, he would be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump’s supporters back home...

It is a pity - in some way - that all of that glad-handing and back-patting - and ass-kissing - never really translated into anything substantive, especially considering how trump as president undid every foreign policy objective or ignored every policy suggestion that Graham tried to support.

Anne Applebaum (also at the Atlantic) took note of how Graham identified how dangerous trump could be as president... and accepted him anyways as his lord and master:

When Donald Trump first appeared in U.S. politics, Graham recognized him immediately for what he was: the spokesman for an alien ideology, one radically different from the idealistic patriotism that Graham had practiced and preached since childhood. Trump privately mocked the military that Graham loved as nothing but “suckers and losers.” He put falsehoods, cynicism, and personal greed at the center of his politics, while expressing disdain for transparency, accountability, and democracy itself. In 2015, Graham described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who should “go to hell.” Also as a “nutjob.”

When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak.

But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator. Graham went out of his way to telegraph his closeness to the president. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television, and supported him as he slowly destroyed the alliances that Graham had defended all his life, even as he undermined the institutions of democracy at home. In 2021, Graham refused to vote to convict Trump, even after he assaulted the Capitol and tried to reverse the results of the election...

The simplest thing to say about Lindsey Graham is that he sold his soul to donald trump and he sold it cheap. Whatever morals or personal values he held, he gave it up for access to power and retaining relevancy within a political party that spiraled downward into its own hell of racism, greed, and incompetency. Anything Graham could have stood for got flattened, and he never showed any sign of regret for what he'd lost.

That can be said for any of the Republican leadership that could have chosen integrity over dishonor, that is if any of the aging-out Republican leaders are still alive. We need actual proof of life regarding Mitch, you cowards.

What If They Held a 4th And Nobody Showed?

Just point and laugh, kids, just point and laugh (Edith Olmstead at New Republic):

White House staff are reportedly concerned that Donald Trump’s Fourth of July rally is a recipe for disaster—one that will send the president into yet another meltdown. 

The remarkably low turnout for Trump’s Great American State Fair has sparked serious worries that the president’s massive rally planned for Saturday will also be a dud, multiple sources told CNN Wednesday.

The rally is scheduled to take place outside on the National Mall, as temperatures in Washington are forecast to reach a stifling 100 degrees. 

One official familiar with the event told CNN that there would likely be large groups of people who reserved tickets for Trump’s address but don’t end up attending. Empty seats means that viewers are likely in for another presidential temper tantrum—a sorry sight given it will be the country’s 250th anniversary. 

The rally will be punctuated by a massive fireworks display, currently scheduled to begin at 11 p.m. Unlike in past years, attendees will not be able to bring coolers to help beat the heat. 

It's like they're intentionally working to scare your average attendees - the ones who don't want to die from heat stroke - away from the shindig.

Worse, delaying the fireworks until 11:00pm at night is recipe to make people tune out from watching on television. Traditionally, firework shows start at sundown - somewhere around 8:00pm - and wrap up in an hour so the kids won't stay up too late. People will watch the New York and Boston performances - with arguably more entertaining musicians and actors providing stirring patriotic oratory - and ignore trump's planned rally rants that will likely drone into dementia-driven idiocy.

trump's handlers could try to bus in their usual suspects of rally attendees, but you'd think they would have done that to bring in crowds to trump's State Fair event to avoid looking like a disaster this past weekend.

It might not even be a good look for them if they persist on keeping people from bringing their own coolers and drinks, and end up with a sizable number of unconscious or dying victims in the crowd.

So here we are, facing a 4th of July in our nation's capital on a major anniversary where nobody shows.

This wouldn't have happened under President Kamala.

The Neverending Cycle of trumpian Failure: War With Algae Edition

This all for the record started back in April of this year when trump - high on his own narcissism regarding the desecration of the East Wing, and decades believing his own architectural tastes were above reproach - decided out of nowhere to have the great Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial get its surface painted blue.

As Collin Binkley reported for AP News back then: 

President Donald Trump is having the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool coated in a swimming pool surface hued in “American flag blue,” covering up a decades-old granite surface that he said was “leaking like a sieve” and would take years to replace.

The president announced the renovation at an Oval Office event Thursday, saying the coating had already begun. He was inspired to tackle the project after a friend visited from Germany and lamented that the water was filthy and looked disgusting, Trump said.

I don't think trump ever mentioned who the friend was - one of the many faceless "brave strong types" who come up with tears in their eyes calling trump "sir" in eternal gratitude - and I don't believe trump ever pointed to any official study into the pool's condition as justification for getting this done. I am firmly convinced trump decided to get the reflecting pool painted because he got it confused with "swimming pool," which is a different type of pool altogether.

The project is one more makeover refashioning the nation’s capital to Trump’s liking, following others such as the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make room for a new ballroom...

In Trump’s telling, the reflection pool project is a case study in business acumen. The president said he scrapped plans to have the granite replaced, which he said was estimated to cost $301 million and would take at least three years.

Instead, Trump said he called a few pool contractors he knows from past real estate projects — “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road,” Trump said.

The guy in question turned out to have gotten a no-bid contract for $1.7 million or so (and cost overruns no surprise ballooned to $13 million), and that the guy once bribed Democratic congresscritter James Traficant Jr. back in the day. You can't make this shit up.

trump bulldozed ahead on this project in spite of people warning him that painting the pool surface would cause rapid algae growth. Because it turned out, yes it did (via Jenna Lee at Washingtonian):

The Trump administration’s renovations of the Reflecting Pool on DC’s National Mall held up for about a week.

Construction crews spent weeks painting the more-than-2,000-foot-long pool “American Flag Blue” at Donald Trump’s request, ahead of the country’s 250th birthday. Although the shallow Reflecting Pool has long been plagued by algae growth, a pool renovation expert told Washingtonian that the color of the paint could be exacerbating the problem.

On Wednesday, a day after the basin was refilled, workers were seen cleaning out clumps of algae—which have transformed the pool’s signature reflection to a mossy green. The algae resurfaced by Friday morning...

Steve Goodale, a Canadian swimming pool specialist who goes by “Swimming Pool Steve,” said the darker blue of the renovated pool may worsen the pool’s existing algae problem absent other mitigation efforts, because the darker color will absorb more sunlight and increase the water temperature, making the pool ripe for more algae blooms. 

“If we change nothing else except the color, and we go from a lighter color to a darker color, absolutely you’re going to have more prolific algae growth,” Goodale said. “It’s a foregone conclusion.” 

This wasn't a case study in business acumen. This was a case study in self-aggrandizing stupidity, driven by an ignorant asshole who thinks he's smart and classy and nowhere near either.

The locals have seen algae in the reflecting pool before, but by most accounts on social media they've never seen it bloom as quickly or thoroughly as it has with the painted surface.

Making things worse is that the paint isn't working: it's peeling away in chunks highlighting how cheap and ill-done the whole job had been (via Sahil Kapur and Sophie Ziedalski at NBC News):

President Donald Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations is not going according to plan...

Then, the new Trump-branded “American flag blue” color was short-lived as algae turned the pool green, causing the administration to send crews to dump hydrogen peroxide into the expansive pool to deal with the problem.

In recent days, NBC News spotted some blue paint chipping off the surface, with strips of it peeling away and floating atop the pool for visitors and passers-by to see as the busy summer tourist season in the nation’s capital gets underway.

Not a good look at all for trump, is it?

Which is why trump's response isn't so shocking: Rather than admit a screwup, trump is blaming everyone else as "vandals" and having police - some of them from other states??? I need verification on that report - go around the pool arresting people. For example, this former Olympian (via Bailey Richards at People (yes, they've actually been doing solid reporting on trump's failures)):

Former Olympic canoeist David Carter "Davey" Hearn was arrested for destruction of government property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hours before President Donald Trump claimed it was vandalized following its recent renovation. Hearn claims he was just touching a piece of detached liner.

United States Park Police officers arrested the 67-year-old — who competed in the canoe slalom in three Summer Olympics — on Friday, June 19, after he stopped to look at the newly renovated Washington, D.C., pool in the midst of a 52-mile bike ride, according to The Washington Post.

Hearn told The Post that after noticing a piece of liner that was partially detached from the pool, which was painted "American Flag Blue” as part of its more than $14 million renovation, he reached into the water to see what the piece felt like — and just moments later, he was being arrested.

While preparing to leave and continue his bike ride, the U.S. Park Police officers arrested and detained the former Olympian on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, per The Post. Hearn claimed to the newspaper that his detainment at a Park Police facility lasted for nearly five hours, and he was allowed to leave at around 9 p.m. local time.

If the police are going around arresting people for "destruction of government property," they need to go arrest trump for how he fucked up the reflecting pool in the first place (as well as what he'd done to the East Wing of the White House).

And Hearn is not the only one: Social media is displaying other arrests going on around the poolside over the weekend. Given how trump is using the Justice Department to go after his enemies, I wouldn't be surprised of any escalation of arrests so that trump can shift blame onto any locals and tourists his thugs can grab along the Mall.

trump is desperate to have everything "look perfect" for his glorified attempt to hijack the 250th birthday of the nation this 4th of July, even if it means putting National Guard troops - they're still stuck in DC on trump's orders - around the Mall to prevent anyone getting close enough to see how algae-clogged our national landmark is. Never mind the physical damage left behind by trump's bloated and unpopular UFC staging on the White House lawn - NOW it looks like a landfill, thanks trump! - which will cost millions to landscape: Just add that to the ugliness of the pit trump has dug into the ground for his ballroom vanity project.

In the meantime, the algae keeps growing back, thanks to trump's deluded beliefs he alone can make things better.

Gods help this nation. 77 million of us elected a vain moron, and the damage is becoming more clear even without a reflective pool to show us.

The Neverending Cycle of trumpian Failure: War With Iran Edition

I kept thinking of when and how to respond to this recent (as of June 14th) cycle of trump trying to bully, buy, and bluff his way out of his Iranian fuckup of a war; but kept stalling because new developments involving this latest "treaty" - which is actually a Memorandum Of Understanding, more of a handshake to agree on further handshakes - got worse as the week went on.

Well, it's Saturday and I've got nothing else to but laundry and waiting for afternoon thunderstorms - if any comes - so let's just go to Graeme Wood at the Atlantic to summarize how bad it is:

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic...

Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordingly and seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s economy has been a disaster for about 15 years and is now a total wreck. Sanctions relief will help, but who exactly will want to invest in a country whose government is sustained by brutality and ruled according to the whims of a junta led by a mangled religious fanatic...?

The humiliation is the point. Iran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation. Who cares if the deal never really happens, or if each part turns out to be a little less sweet than it first appears? Iran has never before won a war, and even the blows it has struck against the United States, Israel, and its own citizens have up to now been pathetic and furtive, taking the form of terror attacks and indirect action through proxies. The existence of an understanding, with humiliating terms for America, is a heap of symbolic and emotional capital that no Iranian regime has enjoyed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The optics of the whole deal even as trump shouted how great it was got more humiliating - or funny depending on your sense of humor and awareness of history - when trump made a big deal of signing the MOU while he attended the G7 conference of the major economic powers while it was being held in France at Versailles.

...Yes. He really signed a terrible "treaty" at Versailles. trump never DID have a firm understanding of world history, and none of his lackeys seemed to see the problems of recreating one of the more disparaged peace treaties in European history. The only way trump and his handlers could have screwed this up more would have been signing the deal in Munich.

One of the reasons I didn't want to say anything about trump's "victory" in getting that napkin signed was because I knew - and I know many other more versed experts on foreign policy knew - this peace deal wasn't going to last, no different than all the other times trump crowed he'd gotten the Strait of Hormuz reopened or forced Iran to give up their missiles and nukes (in progress).

And, to no one's surprise except Lindsey Graham's, the Iranian government declared this morning that the Strait is closed (again) because Israel under Netanyahu - WHY did you let him back into power, Israel??? - is still bombing Lebanon as part of Netanyahu's big plan to keep warring and stay in office.

The only way this war ends is if Iran makes the demand that the US government hands over trump (and his other pro-war advisors) to them for war crimes, and the Republicans in Congress finally decide to cave on that. One hopes.

Update: the PolandBall guys on YouTube understand perfectly what this meant.

Creating Cracks In a Corrupted Coalition

It took four tries trying to get around a cowardly Republican House leadership, but there's a resolution now to end trump's failed war against Iran (via Claudia Grisales at NPR):

A bipartisan majority in the Republican-led House voted on Wednesday to end the war with Iran, the clearest rebuke yet of President Trump's handling of the conflict and the subsequent economic fallout.

The war powers resolution passed by a vote of 215 to 208, with four Republicans joining Democrats in support.

The resolution had originally been set for a vote two weeks ago, but Republican leaders sent House members home early for a May recess when it appeared the largely Democratic-backed measure had enough Republican votes for passage. However, the extended break didn't shift GOP support to kill the measure...

The vote is mostly symbolic. Democrats, despite multiple attempts, have been unable to pass a war powers resolution through the Republican-led Senate. Even if the measure passed in Congress, it would almost certainly be vetoed by President Trump, whose administration has questioned the constitutionality of the War Powers Act.

Still, Senate Democrats have been inching closer. Last month, they won support on a procedural measure to set up a war powers vote after a handful of Republicans broke ranks to join them. A final vote has yet to be scheduled.

Given how there are a number of anti-war Republican Senators - some of whom have nothing to lose going against trump's tirades and kneecapping - there is a good chance the Senate will approve the resolution.

It won't stop trump and his lackeys from pursuing more violence and stupidity against Iran, but it will put him on notice that he's not going to get help from congresscritters when (not if) he screws up even more in his overseas follies.

That Speaker Mike Johnson couldn't kill this vote outright signals how ineffective his leadership has been the last two years, and how meager a majority the Republicans control the House heading into a midterms that's screaming Blue Wave.

The voters have a chance here to ensure their anti-war, anti-tariff, anti-trump views gain position in Congress well enough to bring this corrupt trump rule to heel.

GET THE GODDAMN VOTE OUT, AMERICA, AND KICK EVERY BROKEN REPUBLICAN OUT OF OFFICE FOR GOOD.

Failing One War in Iran, Starting Another with Cuba

We're in yet another week of trump proclaiming a peace deal with Iran is in the works, and yet every sign that trump isn't going to gain concessions or any true victory the way he thinks (via David A Graham at the Atlantic):

Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

(Absolute rage regarding that mess, but I digress)

The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. Hawkish Trump allies promptly criticized the deal, and despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday. “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” he posted. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.

Take a moment to notice how trump is obsessing over the nuclear deal in 2015 Obama made with Iran that trump impulsively tore up: A deal that in hindsight was working in spite of trump's refusal to accept anything Obama did as President (or accepting Obama as human, period). trump doesn't even know what the deal is, or even cares: All he cares about is that it'll be "better" than what Obama did. And trump is too clueless personally to comprehend how fucked he is:

First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel...

Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. He has cycled through different rationales for the war, including regime change and stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but hasn’t landed on one. Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.

Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement...

There is another reason that Graham doesn't note for why trump is desperate for a deal, desperate to crawl away declaring victory in a war with Iran he's clearly lost: trump wants to start another war with a visible target, one that the Far Right would be happy to see (even if most Americans don't want any wars at all right now). The likelihood of attacking - if not straight-up invading - Cuba keeps ticking higher (via Paul McLeary at Politico):

The Pentagon has spent months positioning the troops and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba — all it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.

The president has floated an invasion of the island after economic and political pressure failed to topple the Communist government. But the Navy’s built-up presence in the region — the largest in the world outside the Middle East — would allow the U.S. to act immediately.

This is something that should get cleared with Congress, but Republican congresscritters have abandoned their role in government and so we're facing yet another unwanted war.

These strategically placed assets set the table for military action, from a capture of Havana’s leadership much like the seizure of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, to a series of precision strikes. And they open the possibility that the U.S. throws itself into the third international conflict of the Trump administration.

Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday at a full Cabinet meeting. “Having a failed state 90 miles from our shores is a threat to the national security of the United States.”

Cuba is a failed state thanks to decades of American sanctions and a more recent blockade on any oil/fuel getting to Cuba to keep their lights on, but of course Rubio's not going to admit to that. It doesn't help that Rubio is a Cuban expat whose entire political identity is tied into being an anti-Castro advocate eager to invade his family's old country: Exacting revenge against the Castro regime that drove the hardline Cubans out.

I've mentioned these anti-Castro types before: I met some of the original generation - those from the 1960s - at various political functions in South Florida when I worked in Broward County and was a McCain supporter. That generation was rabid in their hatred of anything they deemed 'Communist' or favoring their demon Fidel. Given how Rubio is from my generation, that hatred has passed down to the current generation in power, and they are still fantasizing about pulling off a Bay of Pigs that won't fail.

But that's the problem: Whatever promises Rubio and others are whispering into trump's ear to get him to sign off - the promise of an easy military victory, the hope of being more manly than the wimps who failed to recapture Cuba for wingnut glory - even something as simple as staging an invasion on an island 90 miles off the Florida Coast is going to be too hard for this administration. Back to McLeary:

But the administration faces a timeline to act. Many of the biggest warships deployed in the summer are approaching 10 months at sea, far beyond the usual six to seven months. This has caused defense officials to worry about overextending crews, and adds to the stress on a naval force that is also conducting a blockade of Iranian ships in the Arabian Gulf...

“These back-to-back long deployments will add up over time,” said a defense official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about military operations. “Keeping them out there so long creates more problems in the long run when it comes to refitting and repairing those ships once they come home.”

The prolonged missions come on the back of the record-setting 11 month deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, which ended this month after sailing from Europe to the Caribbean for the Maduro operation and then to the Middle East for the Iran war...

But the long deployments take a toll on the crews and Marines, who had planned for a normal rotation and are now months past their initial scheduled return home.

With our military troops stretched thin already, do we really have enough manpower to go into a jungle-covered, mountainous region like Cuba to try and capture their officials and occupy the lands? And the problems with logistics are already showing with the current deployed fleet: We're already aware how supplies and food under Hegseth's command at the War Defense Department are mismanaged to the point of futility (if not starvation for the front-line troops).

All Cuba has to do is the same thing Iran did: Deny trump a quick victory, make enough strikes to bloody America's nose (it's obvious Florida would be a rich target to strike ports, utilities, and key transportation hubs to disrupt the state), and survive long enough for trump's declining poll numbers to sink the whole Republican Party by the midterms. P.S. Most Americans don't want to invade Cuba, making it likely trump's approval will go lower if he decides to.

This is an administration of Far Right Republicans looking for any kind of military success to justify their Alpha Male fantasies, driven at the top by a madman who wants to win peace prizes while bombing three to seven nations at a time. This is also an administration made up of the least-qualified people for the jobs they're handling, meaning they are making bad decisions into worse policy that will lead to disaster.

And our troops are going to be the ones paying for those bad decisions. At the least. In a fight with Cuba, that is something that can come stateside far faster and far bloodier than we could ever expect.

In a trumpian train wreck bound to get worse - WE WARNED YOU, AMERICA - by every moment, this is getting seriously worse.

An Abuse of Prosecuting Power: trump's Destruction of the Rule of Law

When last I reported on the struggles of Kilmar Abrego Garcia - one man among hundreds of thousands of immigrants getting hunted, jailed, and punished by trump and his lackeys - he was facing false allegations about gang ties while the courts untangled the lies over what was or wasn't an "order of removal".

In the midst of all that, Abrego Garcia got hit with criminal charges, as part of trump's escalation having made this all a personal vendetta. If there's any good news today, it's that the judge overseeing the case dismissed all charges while highlighting that vendetta as a major reason why (via Sergio Martinez-Beltran at NPR):

A federal judge in Tennessee on Friday dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego García, an immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia was charged last year with human smuggling after being returned to the U.S. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. He didn't face charges then, but the Justice Department reopened an investigation into the traffic stop after a federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return from El Salvador.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw said the actions by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche "taints the investigation with a vindictive motive."

"The reopening of the closed HSI investigation is the source of the vindictiveness," Crenshaw said, referring to Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts federal criminal probes.

Crenshaw said the government would not have prosecuted Abrego Garcia if not for his successful lawsuit challenging his deportation to El Salvador.

"Blanche's now unrebutted public statements tying the reopened investigation to Abrego's successful lawsuit taints the investigation with a vindictive motive," Crenshaw said. "The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power."

One of the things about the American legal system is how much power a prosecutor wields: it's insane what DAs can get away with, and rare are the times that judges ever rein in those powers. That our nation's judges have been overruling and dismissing a lot of criminal matters brought to them under trump's broken Justice Department should tell you how inept and failing the current prosecutors are acting to serve trump's whims.

Just yesterday in an unrelated criminal case, a judge in Chicago tossed out a matter involving a group of ICE protestors - the Broadview Six - when the judge found out the AUSAs heading the prosecution violated a ton of regulations involving the grand jury. 

Marcy Wheeler over at her blog goes into more detail just how screwed up it got:

For months, the defendants in the Broadview 6 case had been trying to get the transcripts from the grand jury, arguing that DOJ’s theory that they had conspired to impede an officer whose car they were accused of blocking did not accord with the law. On April 9, Judge April Perry permitted the government to simply file the jury instructions for her review, rather than responding to the defendants’ argument. But the government actually had to get an extension before they did file the transcripts.

When Judge Perry reviewed the transcripts after receiving them on April 23, she found there were three presentments. And while the instructions on the law were problematic before the first one, it got cleaned up by the time the grand jury returned an indictment...

But she also found they were redacted, and so instructed the government to bring unredacted copies to a hearing on April 29.

The government dismissed the felony, 18 USC 372, and therefore mooted the transcript order.

The defendants, smelling a rat about the redactions, nevertheless persisted in asking for the transcripts. And after the government expressed a willingness to do so, Judge Perry got the full versions earlier this week.

She almost immediately ordered every AUSA involved in redacting the transcripts to show up to a hearing yesterday...

I can tell you on Bluesky when the legal eagles heard about that order, they knew the judge was pissed.

Perry described four problems with the unredacted grand jury transcripts:

• Vouching, in which a prosecutor invokes her own assurances in lieu of evidence
• Improper communications with grand jurors outside the grand jury room
• Dismissal of the grand jurors (one in particular) who objected to the charges
• The redaction of the transcript to hide all that

I'm not a lawyer, but I know what "vouching" is: it's where a guy is basically gaslighting you with "trust me babe, I know what I'm doing" without presenting the actual evidence for a trial that a grand jury is supposed to review. I know what "ex parte" outside communication is, which is something of a no-no. Removing grand jurors - or forcing them out - is supposed to be a huge no-no. And redacting all of that to hide it from a judge tends to make judges believe the prosecutors are straight-up lying to them.

Judge Perry said as much when dismissing the Broadview case (via Edward Helmore at the Guardian (US)):

Perry said she was “incredibly shocked” by the government’s redactions, and that she had never seen the “types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts”.

She added that “trust has been broken”.

These Justice Department officials deserve to face all sanctions and even disbarment once the dust settles. In all, a complete breakdown of ethics, professionalism, and trust. 

Which is what we expected when trump regained high office and brought back his style of bullying, vindictiveness, and incompetency.

trump truly believes the legal system is there to punish enemies, as a reaction to all the times he's been brought to court for all the actual crimes and frauds he's committed over the decades. It doesn't matter how things are supposed to be done in the legal system, trump doesn't care: All he wants are results of everyone he hates and fears suffering in courtrooms under his brand of (in)justice.

Which is why I worry still for Abrego Garcia and all the others facing these miscarriages of justice. The courts may have tossed out these attempts at prosecution, but trump will demand his Justice Department minions generate a new set of criminal allegations based on trump's fearmongering... and that won't CAN'T be proven real in a court of law. 

As long as trump is there to twist the rule of law into his law of misrule, no one is really safe.

Keep fighting. And for the LOVE OF GOD throw every elected Republican official out of office this midterms.