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Debt Rattle October 13 2026

Oct 132026
 
 October 13, 2026  Posted by at 7:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


Mark Rothko Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea 1944


• Trump Hits His Campaign Stride in Youngstown, Ohio (Tim O’Brien)
• Federal Agents Raid Ilhan Omar’s D.C. Home (Matt Margolis)
• Genocide Hypocrites (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Sen. Chuck Grassley, 93, Files for Reelection (Margolis)
• Jack Smith: A Former Special Counsel Joins the “No Kings” Movement (Turley)
• Elon Musk Becomes Largest Donor, To Rescue Senate Republican Majority (JTN)
• Judge Orders White House to Stop Airing Taxpayer-Funded Ads (ET)
• So, Where Was Waldo? (James Howard Kunstler)
• UK PM Consoles Zelensky After Trump Calls For His Ouster (RT)
• Trump ‘Really Mad’ With Zelensky – Media (RT)
• Ukraine’s Worst Diplomatic Nightmare Just Got Closer (Poletaev)
• Montana AG Asks Supreme Court to Revive Case Against DEI Training (O’Neil)

 

 

https://twitter.com/Chicago1Ray/status/2109464933452620031?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2109460381999505609?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2109274727411855451?s=20 https://twitter.com/21WIRE/status/2109403369387282669?s=20

 

 


“Big Rally Energy Is Picking Up..”

• Trump Hits His Campaign Stride in Youngstown, Ohio (Tim O’Brien)

President Donald Trump continued his barnstorming tour around the country on Columbus Day by rallying the base in Youngstown, Ohio, leading the charge to get U.S. Sen. John Husted (R-Ohio) reelected and Vivek Ramaswamy (R) elected as governor. Husted is in a tight race against former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), while Ramaswamy is trailing in the polls behind Amy Acton, one of the more radical leftist gubernatorial candidates in the country this election cycle.


In Trump’s remarks, he praised the local candidates and paid homage to Christopher Columbus on his namesake holiday. Then he launched into the Democrats, pointing out that when they were in charge of the federal government, they gave America the worst inflation in its history, the worst trade deficit in history, and they allowed violent illegal aliens to flood across the southern border into the country.

He tied all of this to Brown and his role in the Senate during the decline of American standing under Democrat “leadership.” Trump said that Brown wants to allow men in women’s sports. He repeatedly reminded the crowd that Brown supports the transgender movement in full, and more specifically the mutilation of children.

In a nod to the day’s holiday, Trump said, “To be a Democrat like Sherrod Brown, you have to believe Christopher Columbus should not be in Columbus, Ohio.” Using Minnesota as a cautionary case study, Trump pointed to the way in which the Somali-American community has taken over that state’s political and governing infrastructure, characterized by massive amounts of fraud and corruption.

He specifically mentioned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), whose house was raided by the feds earlier in the day as part of a federal criminal investigation. He said that Omar “comes from one of the worst countries on the planet.”


He pointed out that Somali corruption in Minnesota was responsible for the theft of tens of millions of dollars from Minnesota welfare programs. He mentioned the arrest of Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, of Richfield, Minn., who was charged with receiving a firearm and ammo as part of a terrorist plot.

And he mentioned the October 2 Eden Prairie shooting at a high school football game, a shooting in which the suspect is Adam Abdihakeem Adam, a Somali who allegedly fired a gun at what police are calling a rival gang. Four others were arrested on rioting charges. After all of this, Trump said, “They come here and tell us how to run our country.” He then added, “They cheat on everything… We’re not going to stand for it.”

He then turned his attention to Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the Senate in Michigan. “Look at the guy running in Michigan,” Trump said. “He’s a jihadist. And the media gives him so much publicity.” After riffing on El-Sayed for a few minutes, Trump turned his attention to Springfield, Ohio, where he said 32,000 people had lived peacefully in small town America. That was before, Trump said, Democrat administrations “dumped” 35,000 Haitian illegal aliens on the town, some of them with criminal backgrounds.

Trump reported that his administration is working to keep his 2024 campaign promise to correct that situation. “They’re getting their town back,” Trump said. While the president ticked off a long list of accomplishments on the part of his administration in this second term, he highlighted that poverty in the black, Hispanic, and American Indian communities has dropped significantly, along with crime rates nationwide.=nHe dropped a now familiar statistic, but an impressive one, that “zero illegal aliens have been admitted into the U.S. through our southern border” over the past 17 months.

His administration has eliminated critical race theory curricula from schools, along with increasing success against the movement that promotes gender mutilation in kids. In addition, he highlighted the White House’s progress towards banning men from competing against women in women’s sports. Because the president repeated these themes throughout his speech, it’s clear that their research is indicating that Democrats remain very vulnerable on social issues.

Can you imagine 15 years ago saying, ‘We will not allow men to play in women’s sports?’ They’d have thought you were crazy,” Trump said. He reminded the crowd that Republicans are defending women — that they are the only ones defending women in these cases. “What they’re doing to women is demeaning,” he commented.

Trump spent a little time talking about Ramaswamy’s opponent, Acton, who, the president said, wants to restore the inheritance tax, the estate tax, taxes on tips, and taxes on overtime, and who wants the elimination of tax cuts the Republicans already passed. He said she wants to “double your state income tax.” He added that Acton wants to “take away your guns,” and that she’s against the Second Amendment.

He warned that if the Democrats win majorities in the midterms, they will work to add Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states, increasing the number of Democratic senators by four and the number of Democratic representatives by 10, and expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices (possibly up to 23). He painted a grim picture of Democrats if they get the chance to rig the system so badly that he may well be America’s last Republican president.

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She’s an opportunist.

• Federal Agents Raid Ilhan Omar’s D.C. Home (Matt Margolis)

Federal agents executed a search warrant at Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) Washington, D.C., home early Monday morning as part of a criminal fraud investigation into her immigration paperwork, according to an exclusive report from Fox News Digital.


The search began at around 6 a.m. Two sources close to the investigation told the outlet that the probe focuses on immigration documents the Somali-born congresswoman’s late father filled out on her behalf when she was a child. Homeland Security Investigations and the Department of Homeland Security are leading the operation, and the Justice Department is also involved. Multiple agents wearing HSI jackets were seen outside the residence.

“Today in the Washington, D.C., area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal investigation.”HSI serves as DHS’s primary investigative arm, handling cases involving cross-border crime, human trafficking, child exploitation, drug smuggling, cybercrime, and counterterrorism.

The search follows months of public signals from senior administration officials. In May, Vice President JD Vance said the Justice Department was examining whether Omar had committed immigration fraud. “It certainly seems like something fishy is there, but everybody’s entitled to equal justice under the law,” Vance said.

Omar has faced allegations for years that she married her brother as part of an immigration scheme. She has repeatedly denied the claim. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin addressed the matter last month. “Something’s going to happen. … We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States. We know he now lives in London,” Mullin said.

He suggested the investigation could reach further back. “There may be more to this, the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with,” the secretary continued. “… If we can prove it, that you shouldn’t have been here in the first place, we will deport you.”

In mid-September, White House border czar Tom Homan confirmed on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing that federal immigration authorities were conducting an “ongoing criminal investigation” connected to Omar. Asked whether the government had evidence that she committed immigration or naturalization fraud, he declined to say. “I know things are going on, but I can’t give specifics of what’s happening,” Homan said.

Pressed on whether he was confirming an investigation, Homan answered directly. “I’m confirming that ICE is, yeah — look, I said months ago that there’s something that’s been reported and needs to be looked at,” he said. Homan added that he would allow HSI to continue its work. “If someone committed an immigration violation, if someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congressman or not, no one’s above the law,” the border czar noted.

He also described denaturalization in proven fraud cases as “very serious.” “If someone lies through that process to becoming a citizen, and we can prove they, in fact, lied or misrepresented themselves, we can absolutely denaturalize them,” Homan said. “We’ve done it before many times over the last 40 years I’ve been around.”

Read more …

“Omar is the daughter of a well-known colonel in the truly genocidal army of Somali dictator Siad Barre.”

• Genocide Hypocrites (Victor Davis Hanson)

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas killers slaughtered 1,200 people, more than two-thirds of them civilians, inside Israel. For the ensuing three weeks, they refused Israel’s demands to turn over the 251 hostages and to surrender the architects of the massacre. No matter—within a day of the attacks, when Hamas gunmen were still fighting Israeli troops on Israeli soil, the American Left was already screaming “genocide!”


They did not mean Hamas’s intended genocide of Jews, a foretaste of which was seen when it launched a surprise invasion force of more than 4,000 terrorists some 15 miles into Israel. The killers were accompanied by some 2,000 “innocent” Gazan “civilians.” All were bent on looting, murder, rape, torture, and hostage-taking of the defenseless.

Nor did the “genocide” chorus refer to the more than 13,000 rockets, missiles, and drones launched from Gaza after Oct. 7 that predominantly targeted Israeli civilian neighborhoods.

What was most surreal about the charges of “genocide” against Israel—along with all the other slurs of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” “occupation,” “war crimes”—was that they so often came from elite first- and second-generation Middle Eastern immigrants to America. Yet these prominent American accusers have remained silent about whether their lurid accusations might far better reflect the sordid histories of their own homelands.

Take the Turkish-American anchor baby Hasan Piker, the millionaire podcaster who has dual citizenship and grew up in Turkey. Piker has gained celebrity as the socialist heartthrob who is the brain of the new Democratic/Socialist/Islamist alliance. Besides his antisemitic rants, he has declared that “America deserved 9/11” and “Oh God, I f-ing hate America so much.”

Yet the outspoken Piker has only once in passing mentioned Turkey’s 1974 invasion and the half-century-long occupation of nearly 40 percent of Cyprus. Nor did Piker, who damns the creation of Israel in 1948, ever say a word about the Turkish torching of the historic Greek-majority Ionian city of Smyrna in 1922, in which tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated.

Given Piker’s supposedly vast historical recall and outspoken human rights advocacy, one would at least expect him to be sensitive to the horror of Turkey’s Armenian genocide, in which Turkish troops slaughtered more than one million civilians, and for which the Turkish government still denies any culpability. But when once challenged by Armenian-Americans, he dismissed them, saying flippantly, “It’s more fun to enrage you.”

And the pattern goes beyond mere podcasters.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a first-generation immigrant from Somalia, also brays loudly about supposed Israeli war crimes. Omar spouts “genocide” and “apartheid” in her frequently antisemitic rants. She has also labeled her adopted nation as “one of the worst countries” in the world.

But Omar is the daughter of a well-known colonel in the truly genocidal army of Somali dictator Siad Barre. The latter waged a decade-long war of extermination against the rival Isaaq clan that opposed Barre’s 21-year-long dictatorship. Estimates of the Barre regime’s murderous toll range from 50,000 to 200,000 killed, mostly civilians. Few in Omar’s politically active Somali immigrant community ever concede that many fled Somalia to America only when Barre’s two-decade reign of terror was finally overthrown, and they feared retaliation from his victims.

Of course, the nation’s biggest elected leftist rising star has also joined in.

Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, employs the same tired anti-Israeli and anti-American verbiage. Yet he went further than other antisemites when he launched grandstanding threats to jail Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any time the latter visited New York to address the United Nations.

For America’s 250th birthday, Mamdani’s July 3 “commemorative” address blasted American “monopolies that dominate every industry,” federal agents supposedly “terrorizing our streets,” and a country where we “sell our elections to the highest bidder.” The calumny was odd coming from a dual citizen of the police state of Uganda, where there are no real elections but lots of Indian “monopolies.”

Indeed, Mamdani himself better fits his own charges of “settler-colonist” and “apartheid.” His Indian community in Uganda comprises less than 0.1% of the population. But somehow it still accounts for over 60% of Uganda’s GDP. It was implanted there by 19th-century British imperialists as a “settler-colonial” community to help control the indigenous black population.

In short, we should remind these privileged ingrates—regardless of what corner of the world they hail from–to look inward before they blast their adopted country and not to project the sins of their own homelands upon either Israel or America.

Read more …

“His eighth term runs through Jan. 3, 2029, and if he were to win a ninth, he’d be in office until he’s 101.”

• Sen. Chuck Grassley, 93, Files for Reelection (Margolis)

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is 93 and has filed to run for another six-year term in 2028.


Grassley has held elected office since 1959 and has sat in the Senate since 1981. He’s the longest-serving Republican in the history of Congress and one of the longest-serving senators of all time. As Senate president pro tempore, he’s also third in line for the presidency. His eighth term runs through Jan. 3, 2029, and if he were to win a ninth, he’d be in office until he’s 101.

I’m honestly not sure whether this means he’s definitely going to run again or is just filing paperwork. But if he does run, it’s a bad idea. A really, really bad idea. Grassley made that case himself just last month. Speaking at an Iowa GOP event in West Des Moines on September 25, he urged Republicans to turn out for the party’s nominee for governor in November, and explained what was weighing on him.

“At 93 years of age, I don’t know how many more groups of Republicans like this I’m going to have a chance to talk to, but one of the reasons I’m worried about who’s going to be elected governor — I don’t plan on dying in office, but if I did, I don’t want a Democratic governor choosing my successor,” Grassley said. His concern has a legal basis.

Under Iowa law, the governor picks a temporary replacement when a Senate seat opens up, and that appointee serves until voters choose a permanent successor at the next general election. Currently, polls suggest that Democrat Rob Sand is favored over Republican Zach Lahn, as Sand has a +8.4 lead in the RealClearPolitics average.

Grassley issued a similar warning in October 2018, when he was 85 and Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) was fighting for a full term in a close race. Reynolds survived and cruised to reelection in 2022. No Iowa governor has had to fill a Senate vacancy since 1936, after Sen. Richard Murphy of Dubuque died in a car accident.

In fairness, Grassley, to the best that I can tell, is healthy, though I haven’t seen a recent clip of him. But who cares if he is? His advanced age makes seeking reelection problematic, and his comments last month make it clear that even he acknowledges that. At the time, he hadn’t said whether he’d run again. That question appears to have been answered, and the answer is the wrong one.

Republicans already know how this goes. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) disappeared from the Senate over the summer, and the lack of transparency around it was troubling. His staff dodged basic questions about his condition. Considering McConnell’s other well-documented health problems, their silence was entirely unacceptable.

Grassley needs to let it go and retire.Let’s be honest here. Throughout Joe Biden’s so-called presidency, Republicans demanded transparency about his health, and for good reason. Democrats and the White House were obviously lying to us. McConnell’s office spent the summer doing the same thing.

And McConnell’s absence had consequences. Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman (R-Ark.) needed McConnell’s vote to move his farm bill out of committee. Without it, and with every Democrat on the panel opposed, the bill stalled. When McConnell returned, he still didn’t look healthy enough to serve. At least he’s leaving office in January.

Democrats have their own cautionary tale — and I’m not talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) clung to her seat when she clearly couldn’t perform her duties anymore, and it became a huge problem for her party.

So if Grassley does follow through and ultimately seeks reelection, I hope a Republican challenges him in a primary. Make no mistake about it, a Senate seat is a job, and the people who hold one owe voters the ability to do it for the full term. Conservatives spent years calling out a party that put pride and ambition ahead of the country’s interests and lied about it to everyone’s face. After what Democrats did with Joe Biden, Republicans should be better than this.

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Totally non-partial.

• Jack Smith: A Former Special Counsel Joins the “No Kings” Movement (Turley)

After his recent congressional testimony, former Special Counsel Jack Smith appeared at a “Power to the People Fest” sporting a “No Kings” T-shirt. Aside from a midlife crisis, the most likely explanation is that Smih( wanted to send a message, reaffirming his bona fides as an anti-Trump warrior. It was a Comey moment, but without the seashells.


The Power to the People Fest featured many whom Smith has long cultivated in the “Democracy-is-Ending” crowd. The organizers billed the event as “working to restore and strengthen democracy” and featured some of Trump’s loudest critics. The top billing went to Bruce Springsteen, who has lately turned his concerts into anti-Trump rave sessions, including comparing Trump officials to “Gestapo” and calling the administration “treasonous.” He continued those attacks at the concert with Smith, denouncing Trump as “lawless” and his administration as murderers.

For his part, Tom Morello, the chief organizer of the rally, has called Trump and his administration “fascists” and leading crowds in chants of “F— Trump.” And there was Smith in his own “No Kings” tee shirt. b It was a particularly inopportune time, as new evidence on Capitol Hill showed how Smith not only seized phone records of Republican members of Congress, but tracked communications with Trump’s attorney.

Smith has always been undone by his excessive appetite and his habitual failure to respect the limits on his authority. He has a history of losing major cases by advancing excessive and abusive legal claims. This included his stinging defeat in a unanimous Supreme Court decision dismantling his case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R).

During the Trump investigation, Smith showed that he had learned nothing from his losses. Indeed, former Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith with full knowledge of his past disregard for constitutional limits. Smith richly deserves to be criticized for his unrelenting attack on free speech protections as well as his decision to file a second case focusing on the 2020 election.

And the unfolding details of how Smith seized the telephone records of Republican members of Congress, including those investigating his own conduct, only confirm suspicions that Smith wanted to bag Trump at any cost. That included seeking to curtail appeals and rush prosecutions before the 2024 election. Smith failed when Trump chose to run despite the lawfare, and he failed again when Trump handily won the election. But Smith’s obsession was so consuming that he was willing to try Trump right up to Inauguration Day.

The new details of Smith’s investigation should outrage members of both parties. The use of pen registers (to identify the destination of outbound calls and messages) and of trap and trace orders (for incoming) entirely disregarded longstanding rules protecting the legislative branch from such encroachments. And what is particularly alarming is that these searches were obvious fishing expeditions — these were not focused searches on specific wrongdoing, like the searches involving the corruption case against Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) 20 years ago.

In addition to members of Congress, Smith and his team monitored the activities of Trump’s legal defense team, journalists and campaign advisers. That includes now-White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ phone. At the same time, Smith secured a non-disclosure order from the court that prevented mobile carriers from notifying the affected lawmakers that they were being spied on. Thus, as members were looking into Smith’s excesses, they were not told that he was receiving and poring over their telephone records.

The White House Government Transparency Task Force released material this week showing that Smith’s team used an investigation codenamed “Plasmic Echo” to engage in an untethered fishing expedition. Notably, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco signed off on the sweeping seizure with no apparent effort to address obvious constitutional concerns over the right to counsel and Article I powers. Once again, Garland was entirely passive and simply endorsed the recommendations of those around him.

FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a March 2022 memo to Garland and Monaco seeking the attorney general’s approval to launch Plasmic Echo. Monaco added her endorsement before Garland signed off.FBI investigators traced “Wiles’ phone calls and text messages with at least 21 lawyers affiliated with Trump, numerous campaign staff, political advisors, and at least five journalists from at least February to May 2023.”

This investigation also involved gathering intelligence on Trump’s political action committee, including its donors and campaign expenses. Smith and the FBI continued the aggressive posture even as agents were balking at some of these means, including those who felt that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was unnecessary to resolve the concerns over the classified material.

Smith has continued to portray himself as unbiased and not motivated in any way by the election: “Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role,” he has said. But shortly afterward, he appeared in his No Kings tee shirt at the Power to the People fest. It was vintage Smith — an almost mocking arrogance in the face of growing criticism over his methods and partisanship.

The irony is that Smith was a better fit as a member of this profanity-spewing anti-Trump crowd than he ever was as special counsel. The pretense was gone, and he was finally in his element. In that sense, he might view this as his coming-out party, but Smith actually came out years ago.

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$276 million.

• Elon Musk Becomes Largest Donor, Aims To Rescue Senate GOP Majority (JTN)

Tech mogul Elon Musk has emerged as the Republican Party’s most important midterm donor, funneling more than $276 million into Republican campaigns and political action committees since July. The enormous sum makes Musk the largest known midterm donor, according to campaign finance records Musk’s team shared with The New York Times on Monday.


Musk has poured $158 million, nearly 60% of his contributions this summer, into the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC backing the Republican Party’s Senate candidates across the country. Musk has also donated over $76 million to his own America PAC, which he founded in 2024. The group is operating in seven key Senate battleground states.

Musk’s spending has given the Republican Party a boost across the country, further cementing the party’s financial advantage over the Democrats, who continue to face money issues heading into the midterm elections.

Musk, who oversees a technology empire composed of companies like X and SpaceX, is the world’s richest man. At the beginning of the Trump administration, Musk led efforts to streamline the federal government and cut waste as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Musk departed the administration after a public spat with President Trump, a dramatic about-face from his strong backing of the candidate in the 2024 election. However, the pair have since reconciled, though Musk’s support of Republicans has remained quieter since he departed the government.

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Trump fooling around.

• Judge Orders White House to Stop Airing Taxpayer-Funded Ads (ET)

A federal judge on Oct. 11 issued a temporary restraining order barring the White House from airing the remaining slots of taxpayer-funded television ads featuring President Donald Trump and his administration’s policies and achievements. U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon said the motion filed by watchdog group Common Cause, candidate for the Alabama state House Robert Hunter, and Service Employees International Union 32BJ and its political action committee had the legal standing to challenge the White House ads.


In a four-page ruling, Rochon said the plaintiffs have shown that they were likely to succeed on the merits of their arguments and that issuing a block would serve the public interest. The judge also found that the plaintiffs would suffer irreparable harm if the restraining order was not granted.Rochon barred the administration from “using, disbursing, or transferring funds appropriated to the Department of Homeland Security to develop, create, disseminate, place, distribute, publish, or air the challenged advertisements.”

The judge also ordered the administration to cancel ads scheduled for broadcast on Oct. 11. The order named the Department of Homeland Security and its chief, Markwayne Mullin, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles as defendants.

In a statement, the plaintiffs praised the judge’s decision, saying it would help to prevent the use of taxpayer money on what it called “unlawful political propaganda.” “There is no legal justification—and no precedent—for the president to use the machinery of the government and funds set aside by Congress for other uses to influence electoral outcomes that further his own agenda,” they said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment but did not receive a response by publication time. The White House has previously stated that the ads were not campaign ads, noting that Trump is not on the ballot in the November election.

“These public service announcements are unapologetically American, clearly disclosed, and aimed at the country—not a line on the ballot,” it said in a Sept. 25 statement.The White House also cited examples of past administrations from both parties using such ads to explain their policies and promote their visions for the nation.

In an Oct. 7 lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that the Department of Homeland Security had signed a $20 million contract for the national broadcast of the ads. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a separate suit on Oct. 7, accusing the White House of violating federal budget rules by using taxpayer money to fund the ads.

Trump defended the ads on Oct. 5, saying that it was “a rather standard thing to do” for an elected president and their administration. “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money,” he said in a Truth Social post.

Trump said he would pay for the ads using his own money and the funds he raised for his MAGA Inc. political action committee.

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“Wait a second. I assumed Democrats were getting ALL their candidates from mental institutions.” —Margot Cleveland

• So, Where Was Waldo? (James Howard Kunstler)

Let’s just say you were running for a US Senate seat in one of our country’s biggest states. . . and it was roughly one month to election day. . . and, goshdarnit, you caught the flu. According to the CDC, a normal course of the illness in an otherwise healthy, non-elderly adult goes like this: days 1-3, abrupt onset of chills, fever, body aches, sore throat; days 4-7, symptoms fade; afterward, symptoms go away, reduced energy may linger another week.


Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas came down with the flu around September 26, vanished from the campaign scene altogether Sept. 30, and reappeared ten days later at an Austin City Limits music fair. Ten days is a long time to be off the campaign circuit in a supposedly super-tight race in the climactic month of the contest, don’tcha think?

And wouldn’t you suppose that by day 4 or 5 the candidate could bestir himself to pick up a phone and record something like, “Hi voters. JT here. I’ve been down with an awful case of the flu. Please bear with me. Will return ASAP.” Could have done it in a bathrobe, dignified enough, propped up in bed or in a comfortable chair, maybe not looking his best, but. . . .

But, no, he did no such thing. By day 7 or 8, feeling better, he might have been doing Zoom calls from his home office with news media, donors, reminding voters why it was important to vote for him. No, that didn’t happen, either. During the period of his illness, his Twitter feed put up a few posts that could have been written by anyone, and probably were, taunting his opponent, AG Ken Paxton. He did not post anything about being sick or returning to the public arena, and then on Friday, October 9, he popped up at the ACL Fest with no prior notice, “meeting with voters,” his campaign said — 75,000 attendees in 95-degree heat — for about fifteen minutes before he left. Okay. . . .

On Saturday, Oct. 10, the candidate held a meeting with his campaign workers by day and that evening he was seen at a Kacey Musgraves concert at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, just kicking back, enjoying himself. On Sunday, Oct. 11, he did a brief interview with NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth and MS NOW to dismiss “conspiracy theories” about his absence from the scene (more on that anon). That evening, he was supposed to show up at a Dallas fundraiser, but there is no record in the news media that he actually appeared.

Let’s step back to late September and recap. James Talarico’s last public event in Texas that month was at the Texas State Fair in Dallas, Sept. 26. He did not mention feeling ill then. On Monday, Sept. 28, he flew to New York for a joint fundraiser for himself and for Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, hosted by actor Robert DeNiro. It was held at Capitale, an event venue at 130 Bowery, in a magnificent old bank building. Tickets ranged from $500 to $27,000 a seat. Earlier, he’d stopped at a much smaller fundraiser thrown by former DNC finance director Maureen White.

The following evening, Tue, Sept. 29, he attended a fundraiser in Greenwich Village put on by the Human Rights Campaign. Sometime after that, he flew back to Texas. On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Talarico did a “virtual appearance” with the US Hispanic Business Council in which he was coughing and blowing his nose, and told the group, “I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago [that is, while he was in New York], and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas, and I was diagnosed with the flu.” Yet after he reappeared in public, on Sunday, Oct 11, he told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reporter Phil Prazan, “I just went to my primary care physician.” There was no mention of his drop-in at an urgent care facility.

The reason we entertain all these details is because a rumor erupted over the weekend that candidate James Talarico actually spent a week or so at a mental health clinic called the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, recovering from some sort of “stress” event — the “conspiracy theory” he averred to with News-5 and MSNOW. Independent Reporter Nick Sorter posted a phone call supposedly with an employee of the Lindner Center who said that James Talarico had been “discharged” the previous evening.


The Lindner Center later issued a flat denial that Talarico had ever been a patient there, and Talarico himself issued a denial on his “X” account, saying, “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” We’ll see if he files any libel suit against Nick Sorter and others who reported on the mystery of his whereabouts. Or, if he files a case against the Lindner Center for violation of his HIPAA rights for disclosing information about his discharge.

Anyway, there is a registry for private jets and we’ll know soon enough whether James Talarico was on a Cessna Citation X (Serial No. 750-0271) owned by the Austin Aviation Group out of Wimberly, Texas, that departed from Butler County Regional Airport near Cincinnati on Oct 9 at 9:19 a.m. landing in Austin, TX, at 10:24 a.m.

It’s beginning to look like maybe James Talarico was not the best candidate the party could come up with. But then, look at who he beat in the primary election: Jasmine Crockett.

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War with Russia is the no. 1 thing they want.

• UK PM Consoles Zelensky After Trump Calls For His Ouster (RT)

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has rushed to reassure Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky after US President Donald Trump publicly called for his replacement. The American leader accused Zelensky of refusing to reach a peace deal with Moscow and worsening the global fuel crisis through continued Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.


Burnham called Zelensky on Saturday, the same day Trump suggested that the Ukrainian leader should be replaced for refusing to reach a settlement with Moscow. The British prime minister described the previous 24 hours as having been “difficult for Ukraine” and “reiterated his complete solidarity,” according to Downing Street.

Burnham and Zelensky also discussed “the importance of maintaining pressure on Russia,” with London vowing to slap Moscow with additional sanctions. Earlier on Saturday, Trump accused Zelensky of seeking to “make problems for the world” through the continued attacks on the Russian energy infrastructure, including refineries. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal,” he said.

Trump’s remarks “shocked” Kiev, according to German reporter Paul Ronzheimer. “We never expected this,” a close adviser to Zelensky told the journalist, adding that Kiev feared Washington could suspend intelligence-sharing with it.

On Friday, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin reached an agreement aimed at reining in skyrocketing global fuel prices. Washington temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel, while Moscow agreed to release 300,000 metric tons of diesel immediately and another 500,000 in November. Zelensky blasted Trump’s decision as “weak.” Kiev’s European backers have repeatedly rushed to Zelensky’s defense following public criticism from Trump.

In February 2025, after Trump branded Zelensky a “dictator without elections” and slammed him for unwillingness to reach a deal with Moscow, then-British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and several European leaders, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, publicly defended the Ukrainian leader and criticized Trump’s choice of words.

Later that month, a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky descended into a scandal, with the US president accusing his guest of gambling with millions of lives and risking World War III. European leaders, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, Macron and Starmer, quickly rallied behind Zelensky, reaffirming their support for Kiev.

Despite the repeated vows of solidarity, the bloc is increasingly struggling to satisfy Kiev’s continued demands for financial assistance. In late September, the EU rejected Kiev’s request for a €220 million ($250 million) farmer subsidy to offset the fallout from the Ukrainian Black Sea maritime trade disruptions linked to Russian strikes on the Ukrainian logistics in response to Zelensky’s 40-day PR pressure campaign of strikes on Russian territory.

In early October, the bloc similarly rejected Ukraine’s plea to accelerate financial support needed to cover an unexpected $27 billion defense gap, prompting Zelensky to lash out at Kiev’s backers by accusing them of not doing enough for Ukraine.

Russia has previously repeatedly named the position of Kiev’s European backers as one of the main obstacles to settling the conflict. The EU is still clinging to the idea of “strategically defeating Russia,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last month.

Commenting on the situation last week, Peskov also said that neither Ukraine nor its European backers had moved any closer towards talks, with European nations still “obstructing” the peace process.

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Zelensky’s in the way.

• Trump ‘Really Mad’ With Zelensky – Media (RT)

US President Donald Trump is furious with Vladimir Zelensky over Kiev’s continued attacks on Russian oil refineries, with Washington reportedly threatening to cut off weapons supplies and intelligence sharing unless Ukraine stops the strikes, according to Axios and the Financial Times.


The confrontation comes after Trump struck a diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to ease a global fuel shortage that has sent American energy prices soaring. Kiev has continued targeting Russian refining facilities despite repeated warnings from Washington, with Trump accusing Zelensky of deliberately hurting American consumers and farmers while refusing opportunities to end the conflict.

“Trump is really mad. He feels Zelensky is taking the US for granted,” a White House official told Axios on Sunday. The source argued that Kiev’s attacks on Russian refineries were doing more damage to its relationship with Washington than to Moscow.

American officials contacted Kiev and several European capitals over the weekend, threatening to suspend intelligence sharing and the NATO-backed Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) mechanism, through which European countries purchase American weapons for Ukraine, according to the Financial Times, which cited officials familiar with the discussions.

Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner also allegedly warned Ukrainian representatives during talks in Miami on Friday that Washington could stop sharing intelligence if Kiev continued to ignore the president’s demands, according to a Ukrainian official cited by Axios.

A US official, however, denied making direct threats, saying the negotiators had instead reminded Kiev of Washington’s extensive military and intelligence support and urged it to stop taking actions that hurt American consumers.

The confrontation has threatened to derail broader negotiations aimed at ending the Ukraine conflict. Witkoff and Kushner have reportedly put their planned trip to Moscow on hold until Kiev and its leading European backers clarify whether they are prepared to support a unified peace proposal.

Trump reached a diesel deal with Putin on Friday after Zelensky ignored at least half a dozen requests from Washington to stop striking Russian refineries, according to earlier Axios reporting. The US Treasury subsequently eased sanctions on Russian diesel exports until April 2027, while Moscow pledged substantial fuel deliveries to help alleviate global shortages.

Zelensky condemned the move as a “weak decision,” arguing that the agreement would provide Russia with additional revenue. Trump hit back by accusing the Ukrainian leader of creating problems for the world and suggesting it was time for Ukraine to elect a new leader capable of reaching a deal.

On Sunday, Trump unexpectedly announced that Moscow and Kiev had agreed to an immediate ceasefire covering attacks on energy infrastructure. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” he wrote on Truth Social.

The announcement caught Kiev by surprise, with Zelensky saying it “was news for me.” Moscow has also yet to confirm any agreement.

A White House official described the proposed agreement as a “refinery for refinery” arrangement, under which both sides would stop attacking oil refineries, but not necessarily other energy infrastructure, according to Axios. Kiev has objected that such a deal would disproportionately benefit Moscow, since Ukraine has only one largely nonfunctional refinery and relies heavily on imported fuel.

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The fuel deal’s real significance lies in diplomacy: Trump and Putin found a way to work together without making Ukraine part of the bargain

• Ukraine’s Worst Diplomatic Nightmare Just Got Closer (Poletaev)

On the evening of October 9, the presidents of the United States and Russia spoke by phone. The announcement that followed was straightforward: Russia would sell the US 1.8 million metric tons of diesel over the next three months, followed by a million tons a month, and the US would issue temporary licenses authorizing the shipments.


The news drew a furious, bordering on hysterical, response from Kiev and stunned silence from Europe. Let’s look at why this deal matters, what it has to do with Ukraine, and what might come next.

The tug-of-war championship
Ever since US President Donald Trump returned to office, the central aim of Russian diplomacy has been to separate relations with the US from the Ukraine issue. The White House is open to the idea, too: The US needs Russia as a counterweight to China, and there are substantial economic opportunities. But as we explored in an earlier piece, until recently, neither side managed to pull it off.

Ukraine and its supporters in Europe and the US, meanwhile, have pursued the opposite goal: keeping US-Russia relations tied to the Ukraine conflict.

In February and March 2025, Trump relieved America of responsibility for Ukraine’s fate and handed the job of financing it squarely to Europe. The US retained just three commitments: the relatively modest military supply programs already approved under former President Joe Biden, intelligence sharing, and weapons sales for cash, with Ukraine waiting in line like any other customer.

This maneuver cemented a status quo that neither Europe and Ukraine on one side nor Russia on the other would allow to change, with their respective allies in the US also weighing in. Everyone tried to bring Trump over to their side on Ukraine. Nobody succeeded. This is why the understandings reached in Anchorage went nowhere: Ukraine’s supporters torpedoed them. It is also why those supporters failed to use Trump to escalate the conflict. Russia prevented deliveries of Tomahawk missiles, the expansion of Starlink coverage over Russian territory, and so on.

Despite the apparent stalemate, Russian officials kept talking to Witkoff and Kushner. The aim was to maintain a channel to Trump and deny Ukraine’s supporters an opening to drag the US back into the war on their side or steer him back onto Biden’s course. This is why Russian officials at every level distinguish between US and European actions, often explicitly contrasting the two.

A few numbers on oil
Russia is one of the world’s largest diesel exporters, supplying just under 40 million metric tons to the global market in 2025. On July 8, 2026, Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries prompted a temporary ban on diesel and gasoline exports. Since then, Russia’s refining situation has improved considerably. Gasoline remains in short supply, but a domestic diesel surplus has emerged, and the export ban has begun to loosen in practice. According to Reuters, diesel deliveries to Central Asian countries were already up 19% in September.

Rising diesel production was only part of the story. The end of the harvest season also reduced demand. And as the seasons change, Russia switches to winter-grade fuel, traditionally selling off its remaining summer-grade stocks to countries with warmer climates. One way or another, seaborne diesel exports were heading toward a restart. Trump had also raised that possibility, publicly linking it to Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries.

The Krivoy Rog school of diplomacy
Back to geopolitics. Until yesterday, Russia had been unable to separate its relationship with the US from the Ukraine issue. Even the war with Iran failed to do the trick, despite keeping oil and petroleum product shipments from the Persian Gulf blocked for more than six months. Help came from an unexpected quarter. Hoping to bring US diesel prices down at least a little before the congressional elections, Trump asked Zelensky to stop attacking Russian refineries.

Zelensky responded by demanding a sweeping energy truce. We’ll stop hitting refineries, he effectively said, if Russia stops attacking our energy infrastructure and blockading our ports. And you, Trump, have to supply us with missiles for our Patriot systems, and so on. Getting nowhere with Zelensky, Trump struck a deal directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who offered to supply diesel in exchange for a suspension of sanctions, without any preconditions.

The transaction itself is not particularly consequential. Yes, it could cool speculative trading ahead of the elections and push prices down somewhat. But the 1.8 million metric tons due to arrive over three months will cover just three or four days of American consumption.

For Russia, the US is an ordinary customer in purely commercial terms. Moscow will make some money selling to America, but it could just as easily have sold these volumes elsewhere. Petroleum products are in short supply worldwide, while Russia has a diesel surplus.

Yet the deal gave both sides what they had been seeking since February 2025: a bilateral relationship detached from Ukraine. So far, that applies to just one specific issue, but getting started is the hard part. Zelensky tried to twist Trump’s arm, pushing him to make Putin stop bombing Kiev, and overplayed his hand. Now Kiev can be bombed relentlessly, and Trump has no reason to care. He got what he wanted.

This does not mean sanctions are finished or that the two powers are entering an era of warm friendship. Oil sanctions are probably here to stay, and as soon as global market conditions change, Washington will turn them back up to full blast. But the sanctions wall can now be taken apart brick by brick, restoring ties wherever both sides stand to gain: launching new energy projects in the Arctic, for example, jointly taking over the surviving Nord Stream 2 pipeline, or resolving the sale of Lukoil’s overseas assets. Ukraine no longer has anything to do with that process or any influence over it.

The art of the backroom deal
Cynics insist that the Trump administration is a complete mess, with the right hand oblivious to what the left is doing. The way this agreement came together suggests otherwise. After the campaign of long-range strikes against Russia went badly off script, Zelensky once again tried to secure a ceasefire through Trump. He has been trying since early 2025, with no success, but he still held out hope.

Trump could have publicly given Zelensky the boot again. But on Ukraine, he faces opposition not only from Congress but also from parts of his own administration. And an election is just around the corner.

Instead of staging a public showdown, Trump’s team spent more than two months visibly engaged in intensive talks with Ukraine about an energy truce. His envoys, Witkoff and Kushner, traveled to Kiev, and Trump himself showered Zelensky with compliments. In reality, all of it proved to be a screen for a quiet, swift, informal deal with Moscow.

It has since emerged that the first tanker carrying diesel to the US left St. Petersburg on September 22 and is expected to reach the US any day now. In other words, the deal was already well advanced three weeks ago, and both sides were confident it would go through. That takes some skill. This episode shows that Trump keeps a firm grip on his team and can prevent leaks when he needs to. Even Rubio, prone to breaking ranks, played his part exactly as the boss wanted.

And once the deal was done, there was no longer any need to smile at Zelensky in public. The masks came off. For the first time, Trump publicly declared that Ukraine needs a new president and must hold elections. The liberal media will inevitably say that Trump is repeating Russian propaganda narratives. In fact, he was saying what he thinks.

***

The diesel deal does not mean Moscow and Washington will now live in perfect harmony. The differences between them are deep and fundamental, and the recently enacted ‘Graham law’ makes lifting any sanctions impossible for at least the next five years.

But this Friday, Putin and Trump finally managed to get past Ukraine and leave it behind. US-Russia relations now depend on Russia and the US alone.

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“.. That Allegedly Declared ‘All Caucasians’ Racist..”

“DEI training actively undermines workplace harmony, and it causes hostility, distrust, and division,”

• Montana AG Asks Supreme Court to Revive Case Against DEI Training (O’Neil)


Montana AG Austin Knudsen on stage with South Carolina Senator Tim Scott

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen is leading 20 states in urging the Supreme Court to take up the case of Joshua Young, a former Colorado prison guard who sued the Department of Corrections over a diversity, equity, and inclusion training.


“DEI training actively undermines workplace harmony, and it causes hostility, distrust, and division,” the amicus brief, exclusively obtained by the Daily Signal, states. Young’s “complaint identifies myriad examples of how the [Department of Corrections’] training program endorsed treating and viewing Caucasians worse than other races,” the amicus brief notes.

According to Young’s lawsuit, “the training insisted, among other things, that all Caucasians are racist, that they perpetuate white supremacy, that the very notion of race was invented by white people to justify the oppression of people of color, that white supremacy is an ever-present feature of daily life in the United States, and that Caucasians who deny their own racism are merely ‘fragile’ racists who cannot accept their own prejudice.”

However, Young claimed the training’s effects reverberated afterward, shaping how the prison operated and leading him to conclude that he could not advance in the department. Young’s supervisors told him they would evaluate whether he incorporated its principles into his work. According to his filings, the training increased distrust within the prison, discouraged him from seeking a promotion, and caused him to second-guess otherwise justified use-of-force decisions due to potential race-based implications.

“Given CDOC’s instruction that employees analyze workplace decisions through a racial-equity framework, Young understood that his superiors would be more likely to credit accusations of racism against him—making his assigned job significantly harder,” the filing states.Lower courts rejected Young’s lawsuit, ruling that his allegations did not establish a sufficiently severe or pervasive hostile work environment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found the training “troubling on many levels” and said its race-based rhetoric was “well on the way to arriving at objectively and subjectively harassing messaging,” but concluded that Young fell short of proving a violation, because the training happened only once and was not followed by additional harassment.

Young’s petition argues that the 10th Circuit’s approach conflicts with rulings from other federal appeals courts that have recognized a single sufficiently severe incident may create a hostile work environment. Title VII forbids employers from fostering a hostile work environment through “severe or pervasive” workplace harassment. Knudsen’s brief accuses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit of only evaluating the case “under a pervasiveness standard” in noting that the training occurred only once.

“This sort of top-down discrimination is worlds away from most hostile work environment claims, which usually involve employees harassing other employees,” Knudsen’s brief argues. “A training program that instructs employees to treat others differently based solely on race creates a work environment ‘permeated with abuse.’” “The answer to racism is not more racism,” Knudsen declares.

Young filed an internal discrimination complaint with the Colorado department, but the inspector general declined to investigate because it found insufficient cause. Colorado has argued that the department did not require employees to change their personal beliefs.

Knudsen’s brief asks the Supreme Court to grant Young’s petition, reverse the dismissal of his case, and allow his hostile-work-environment claim to proceed. The justices would not be deciding whether Young ultimately proved discrimination. The brief goes further than simply urging Supreme Court review. It condemns this form of DEI training in general, suggesting that employers may engage in discrimination by requiring it.

“Employer training sets the tone for the entire workplace,” Knudsen warns. “When an employer officially sanctions racial scapegoating and treating individuals differently depending on their race in the workplace, that employer per se creates a hostile work environment. Even infrequent training can create a pervasive race-based hostility for the races singled out for negativity.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/DanCook26214426/status/2109325625748033940?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle March 31 2026

Mar 312026
 
 March 31, 2026  Posted by at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  60 Responses »


Damien Hirst Spiritual Day Blossom 2018


• Trump Presents a Strong Statement Toward Iran – Rubio Responds (CTH)
• Israel Has Launched America Into The Third World War (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Geopolitics of the Third World War (Alexander Dugin)
• Iran’s Victory Would Have a Silver Lining (Paul Craig Roberts)
• EU Parliament Told Continent Is ‘On Track For CIVIL WAR’ (MN)
• US Senators Seek To Sanction Hungary Over Obstructing Ukraine Aid (ZH)
• Whatever the Ruling on Birthright Citizenship… (Turley)
• Springtime for RINOs (James Howard Kunstler)
• The Great Illusion of NATO is Fading Fast (Trenin)
• Tom Homan Bulldozed Jake Tapper’s DHS Funding Narrative (Matt Margolis)
• This Trillion-Dollar Firm Wants Out of Mamdani’s NYC (Stephen Green)
• Scott Jennings Destroyed the ‘No Kings’ Rallies, CNN Wasn’t Happy (Margolis)

 


 

https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/2038285905627136090?s=20 https://twitter.com/MichaelARothman/status/2038389429426147786?s=20

 


 


Rubio’s good.

• Trump Presents a Strong Statement Toward Iran – Rubio Responds (CTH)

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears for an interview on Good Morning America, President Trump released the following statement:


“The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately “Open for Business,” we will conclude our lovely “stay” in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet “touched.” This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year “Reign of Terror.” Thank you for your attention to this matter.” ~ President DONALD J. TRUMP

Secretary Rubio responded in real time to questions about the objectives. Rubio impressively underlined the objectives in Iran, reemphasizing the core intent of the military operation to remove the capacity of Iran to pose a threat to the stable alliances that have formed in the region.

Read more …

“The UN, EU, US, Russia, China, India are yet to try to stop Israel’s multi-year genocide of the Palestinians.”

• Israel Has Launched America Into The Third World War (Paul Craig Roberts)

“The Third World War has been initiated by the United States in the context of preserving, strengthening, and ultimately consolidating the unipolar model of world order. All others are offered a choice: to become obedient vassals or to be treated as enemies. It is against these opponents of the unipolar world that Washington is waging the Third World War. At stake is sovereignty.”


I think a more correct explanation of Trump’s change of posture is the power of the Israel Lobby over the US government, media, universities, and entertainment and Netanyahu’s ability to use this power to put the US again at war for Greater Israel as the George W. Bush administration was used in “the war on terror,” which was the opening phase of destroying “seven countries in five years” called for by the Zionist neoconservatives. It is the extraordinary control that Israel has over the United States that accounts for Trump’s change in posture. Trump inherited the war with Russia in Ukraine. He could not end it because the combination of the Israel Lobby and the US military/security complex is too powerful for an American president.

I am surprised that a person as thoughtful as Dugin does not see Netanyahu’s role in realigning Trump. Especially so because in February the former Israeli prime minister, Bennett, addressed the American Conference of Jewish Organizations and declared: “Turkey is the next Iran.” These were marching orders to the Israel Lobby to begin the demonization of Turkey and setting Turkey up as the next “terrorist” country to be destroyed. Dugin is very much aware of the threat posed by Greater Israel, but in his article he does not say that it is the Israel Lobby that changed Trump from a multipolar position to a unipolar position, thereby bringing wider wars to the world.

As best as I can tell, most governments defer to Israel’s explanations and justifications. The UN, EU, US, Russia, China, India are yet to try to stop Israel’s multi-year genocide of the Palestinians. In the US, UK, and some EU countries it is becoming a hate crime and a criminal felony to criticize Israel. American students are expelled from US universities for criticizing Israel. Even Putin defers to Israel and abandoned Russia’s Syrian ally to Greater Israel. As for the current conflict in the Middle East, Hezbollah secretary-general Qassem is the only person to accurately describe the war with Iran in terms of “the US-Israeli project of ‘Greater Israel.’” https://paulcraigroberts.org/finally-an-arab-leader-who-understands/

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“Washington has now fully adopted the neoconservative position and behaves as if it alone possesses genuine sovereignty ..”

• Geopolitics of the Third World War (Alexander Dugin)

(Translated from the original Russian version on RIA Novosti).
Many analysts are now advancing the hypothesis that the Third World War has already begun and that we are in its first stage. Whether this is so or not will become clear in the near future, but for now let us assume the validity of this hypothesis and attempt to survey its geopolitical contours.The essence of the Third World War lies in a radical transformation of the entire architecture of world politics. The international institutions that exist today have long ceased to correspond to the real state of affairs. They are still organized according to the logic of the Westphalian system and the bipolar world. The Westphalian model is based on the recognition of the sovereignty of all states acknowledged at the international level. The United Nations is built on the same foundation.


However, in practice, over the past hundred years, the principle of sovereignty has turned into pure hypocrisy. In the 1930s, a system took shape in Europe in which only three forces were sovereign, and these were strictly ideological: 1. the bourgeois-capitalist West (Britain, the United States, France, and so on); 2. the communist USSR; 3. the Axis countries with a fascist ideology. This situation persisted even after the end of the Second World War, except that one of the ideological poles—the fascist one—disappeared. The other two—the capitalist and the socialist ones—grew stronger and expanded. Yet once again, no national state was sovereign in itself. Some were governed from Moscow, others from Washington. The Non-Aligned Movement wavered between the two poles.

he self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the USSR put an end to bipolarity, and from that moment only the United States remained as the bearer of sovereignty. The United Nations and the Westphalian model became a fig leaf for global hegemony. Thus emerged the unipolar world. Already in the 1990s, it became clear that international law would have to be revised—either in favor of a world government (the liberal “end of history” scenario of Francis Fukuyama) or in favor of direct Western hegemony (as envisioned by American neoconservatives). European countries followed the world-government scenario and, as a preparatory stage towards it, ceded their sovereignty to the European Union. Everyone else was subtly encouraged to prepare for the same.

However, in the early 2000s, a new tendency emerged: the will to restore sovereignty in Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing moved to make sovereignty not a fiction but a reality. Thus, multipolarity made itself known. From that point onward, it was proposed that sovereignty be vested in “civilization-states”—both those already formed (Russia, China, India) and potential ones (the Islamic world, Africa, Latin America). These, in turn, coalesced into BRICS.

As a result, the unipolar project came into direct confrontation with the multipolar one. Both globalists and neoconservatives opposed multipolarity. The potential for conflict was evident, while the old norms and rules inherited from previous geopolitical eras no longer functioned. Whether the Third World War has already begun or not is ultimately secondary; its geopolitical content is clear: it is a war between unipolarity and multipolarity over a new architecture of the world, over the distribution of sovereign centers of decision-making: either confined to the West alone or shared among rising civilization-states.

Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term in 2024 with an agenda that suggested he might accept multipolarity: rejection of interventions, criticism of globalists, direct conflict with liberals, sharp attacks on neoconservatives, a focus on domestic U.S. issues, and calls to return to traditional values—all of this gave reason to believe that Trump and his administration would align with multipolarity, while seeking to secure the most advantageous position for the United States within this new framework.

However, very soon the Trump administration began to move closer to the neoconservatives and to move away from its initial position. This was followed by support for the genocide in Gaza, continued provision of intelligence to Kiev, the seizure of Maduro, preparations for an invasion of Cuba, and finally a war against Iran, including the killing of the political leadership of the Islamic Republic. Washington has now fully adopted the neoconservative position and behaves as if it alone possesses genuine sovereignty in the world: without any reference to rules or international law, it asserts unilateral authority over the entire globe. It seeks to prove this in practice: through wars, invasions, abductions of heads of state, and the orchestration of regime-change operations.

The Third World War has been initiated by the United States in the context of preserving, strengthening, and ultimately consolidating the unipolar model of world order. All others are offered a choice: to become obedient vassals or to be treated as enemies. It is against these opponents of the unipolar world that Washington is waging the Third World War. At stake is sovereignty. Since there is as yet no single power capable of symmetrically opposing the United States, it is conducting military operations across several fronts simultaneously.

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“Israel wants to mobilize 15,000 working Israelis. Trump has sent 15,000 Marines and paratroopers. Iran has mobilized 1,000,000 troops. What does that tell you? ”

• Iran’s Victory Would Have a Silver Lining (Paul Craig Roberts)

Former Israeli Army officer says Israel’s military is “on the brink of collapse.” Israel’s capability, with US help, is assassinations and sneak attacks. Israel’s army is good at bombing civilians and shooting mothers and babies in the head. But when it comes to fighting, Israel is pitiful. Twice the vaunted IDF tried to occupy Southern Lebanon in order to steal the water resources there. And twice the Israeli army was totally defeated by a mere Hezbollah militia with no air force, tanks, or artillery. It might be about to happen for a third time.


The current war with Iran now expanded into Lebanon is disrupting Israeli life and bringing bombing home to them as Iranian missiles penetrate Israel and Washington’s air defenses without difficulty. More and more of Israel’s population is seeing the current war as an unnecessary “political war” and do not support it. If by “political,” Israelis mean the Zionist Greater Israel agenda, then the Israeli population’s support for the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel might not be very broad or deep and might be eroding. Possibly Israelis, as well as Muslims, are having the Zionist agenda imposed on them.

If this is the case, then the Israeli population’s support for the Israeli-American war on Iran may falter before the Iranian population’s support does. Already, the American public is heavily against Trump’s war against Iran. Unless the Trump-Netanyahu war criminals use their nukes, Iran is likely to win this war. The silver lining in an Iranian victory is the liberation of both America and the Israeli population from servitude to the crazed Zionist agenda of a Greater Israel from the Nile to Pakistan.

Americans should pray for an Iranian victory. Otherwise, their blood and money will continue to be used for Israel’s bloody purpose of Greater Israel. Israel wants to mobilize 15,000 working Israelis. Trump has sent 15,000 Marines and paratroopers. Iran has mobilized 1,000,000 troops. What does that tell you? If the dumbshit Netanyahu-Trump strike Iran with nukes, Iran will nuke Israel by destroying the nuclear plant at Dimona. Israel will no longer exist. Israel is tiny. lran is as large as Western Europe. An honest American has to ask himself how America became the vehicle for Israel’s wars for Greater Israel. Whatever happened to the requirement that the American government represents Americans’ interests, not those of some foreign country?

The 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by US VP Dick Cheney and the Zionists he positioned in the essential offices of the US government. The orchestrated “attack on America by Muslin terrorists” was the “New Pearl Harbor” that the American Zionist neoconservatives said was necessary to destroy seven Muslim countries in five years. It has taken longer than the five years that 4 Star General Wesley Clark said was the agenda shown to him by Pentagon generals. But America is now working for Israel on destroying Iran, after having disposed of Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Last month former Israeli prime minister Bennett came to America to address the American Organizations for Israel and gave them marching orders to begin demonizing Turkey as “the next Iran.”

Turkey has a leader who is just as stupid as America’s, as the UK’s, France’s, Germany’s, Russia’s, China’s, India’s. If Tayyip Erdogan understood the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel unfolding in front of his eyes, he would understand that he and his country are next and would have united with Iran to preserve Turkey’s sovereignty. But the fool thinks he can sit on the fence and ride both horses. In a world in which nuclear weapons and the ability to deploy deadly infections exist, and in which no objective, inquiring media exists, any fake news can rule.

There is nothing shameful about Iran fighting for its right to exist as a sovereign nation. But it is shameful for America to inflict harm on herself and others by fighting for Greater Israel.

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“Mass migration is shredding cultural homogeneity and paving the way for Balkanisation and violence..”

• EU Parliament Told Continent Is ‘On Track For CIVIL WAR’ (MN)

Europe’s ruling class has spent decades importing chaos under the banner of “diversity,” and now the bill is coming due in the most explosive way possible. A major conference held inside the European Parliament has heard stark warnings that the continent is barreling toward civil war as mass migration erodes trust, creates no-go zones, and fractures societies along ethnic lines. Professor David Betz of King’s College London cut straight to the point, telling the assembled lawmakers and experts: “Europe is on track for civil war”.


The event, titled Civil War: Europe at Risk?, was hosted by French populist-right leader Marion Maréchal and Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers. It also launched a new report documenting up to a thousand no-go zones across Europe based on public data including crime rates, sexual violence, youth gangs, unemployment, school performance, antisemitism, homophobia, mosque density, attacks on firefighters, and NGO presence. Maréchal opened the conference by reflecting that formerly peaceful and stable societies are “rapidly transforming before our eyes into societies of violence and mistrust”, stating that “the main basis of trust between citizens is cultural homogeneity”, which is now fast eroding.

She warned Europe is already under a great strain of “diffuse guerrilla activity”, which takes various forms, including “riots, looting, random attacks, anti-white racism, and terrorist attacks”. Weimers echoed the assessment, noting the impact of mass migration on cultural cohesion. The Swedish MEP reflected: “Western democracies that were once relatively homogenous societies have become deeply fragmented. Newcomers often share little in common with the indigenous population. More alarmingly, many have no intention of assimilating.” Both hosts said they were driven to hold the conference to find political answers and prevent “the horror of civil war”.

Betz, who has gained prominence for highlighting the collapse of social cohesion, described the trajectory in chilling detail. He warned of “a peasant revolt. A conservative uprising in which the ruled seek to punish their rulers for violating their obligations under the social contract, and for changing the rules of the game against their wishes. It will look something like Italy’s Years of Lead, the ‘dirty wars’ of Latin America, or maybe The Troubles of Northern Ireland, but on a larger scale.” He continued: “What is already a guarded society will become a radically more heavily fortified society as elites seek more protection with more walls, guards, and surveillance. It will be bloody… the Balkanisation of British life along ethnic lines [is underway].”

Betz further urged, “What I call assortative movement is already occurring, quite obviously in some places like Tower Hamlets in London, Sparkhill in Birmingham which are already ethnic enclaves, zones of negotiated policing with parallel legal systems, alternative economies, and… zones of endemic and large-scale out-group sexual predation… this ought to be more generally frightening.” “In government there are plenty of people who understand fully the gravity of the situation, although it is, career-wise, terminal to speak of it openly,” he added.

Betz also warned of the ultimate stakes for native populations. “Where does Balkanisation lead us? … it leads to the extinguishment of Britain in the sense of a coherent cultural entity dominated by people genuinely sharing the titular identity of ‘British’… it leads to large scale and widespread civil war…” “It is very possible that the Britons end up like the Canaanites or the Arcadians, a people of historic interest, their monuments visible here and there in some sort of ruination, of interest to archaeologists and historians,” Betz explained, adding “This would be a tragedy, but that is a very viable option in front of us, and in fact it is a possibility that is quite close.”

Weimers asked bluntly: “Where will Europe be in 50 years? Will there be a Europe in 50 years?” Betz further outlined how any future conflict might unfold, describing “the siege of urban areas but with a few 21st century twists. In many ways it will be reminiscent of the siege of Sarajevo, but much more dominated by paramilitary actors using system disruption tactics. Most importantly, infrastructure attack to degrade and destroy the life support systems of urban, non-native enclaves.” He continued, “The political object is very simple, it is to compel non-natives to leave.

The strategy is to create conditions of life in the cities so intolerable that leaving is preferable to staying… it’s not an implausible theory of victory because its central premise, the instability of the modern urban condition, at the best of times is something scholars of urban studies have been warning against for 50 years already.” Betz warned that “fuel systems are easy to attack, they are flammable if not explosive by definition, they are difficult to repair, and expensive to replace. In fact they are impossible to replace in civil war conditions where no insurance is available.” He continued, “Moreover, disruption of fuel has very rapid knock-on effects of everything else logistically, most importantly the food distribution system which is the traditional weapon of siegecraft.” The full conference is below:

Betz has continually warned of the deep social erosion he’s believes is cascading toward civil war in Britain and Eure. Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp has also warned that integration breakdowns have worsened over the past two decades, paving the way for inevitable conflict. Kemp outlined that there is “No government, the government now or any prospective government of the UK, has the guts to stop it” when it comes to the Islamification of Britain. The pattern is unmistakable. Globalist policies of open borders and elite denial have created parallel societies, eroded national identity, and left ordinary Europeans with no peaceful political outlet.

As Betz has noted, many in government already grasp the gravity but stay silent to protect their careers. As educational as this all is, Europe doesn’t need more conferences or reports. It needs leaders with the courage to end mass migration, restore cultural cohesion, and put their own people first — before the warnings stop being theoretical and the conflict becomes reality.

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“The ruling Fidesz party has made anti-Ukraine messages the central element of its election campaign and insisted on maintaining Russian oil imports.”

• US Senators Seek To Sanction Hungary Over Obstructing Ukraine Aid (ZH)

Because US Congress is perfectly functional, and all domestic issues have been resolved (one would very ironically think), the FT reports that a bipartisan pair of US senators are set to introduce legislation calling for sanctions to be imposed on senior Hungarian officials involved in obstructing aid to Ukraine. If passed, the Block Putin act would require President Trump to impose financial sanctions and visa bans on Hungarian government officials involved in the country’s purchases of Russian oil and gas, and who have sought to block support for Ukraine.


The introduction of the bill comes as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has held up a €90bn EU loan to Ukraine as he faces a tough re-election campaign ahead of parliamentary elections next month. Opinion polls indicated Orbán, who has served as prime minister since 2010, could lose power. The opposition Tisza party’s lead stood at 23% points on Wednesday, according to pollster Median. Pro-government polls show a slight lead for Orbán’s ruling Fidesz. Orbán, historically aligned with Vladimir Putin, has accused Kyiv of disrupting the flow of Moscow’s oil to Hungary by stalling repairs to the Druzhba pipeline, which transits Ukraine.

Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Thom Tillis, co-chairs of the Senate Nato observer group, are set to introduce the legislation this week. The pair have been outspoken about Europe’s continued dependence on Russian energy. Tillis said: “The United States and our allies must remain united in supporting Ukraine and in cutting off the revenue streams that fuel Putin’s war.”“This bill holds senior Hungarian officials accountable while giving Hungary a clear path to get back in line with its allies by ending its reliance on Russian energy and stopping its obstruction of support for Ukraine,” he added.

Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said: “It is beyond belief that vice-president Vance is reportedly planning on visiting Hungary to provide an electoral boost to a corrupt government that continues to help fund Russia’s war machine.” “If we want this war in Ukraine to end, the Trump administration needs to be consistent in holding our allies to the same standards; no one, especially Viktor Orbán, should get a free pass,” she said. While much of the continent has sought to wean itself off Russian oil and gas supplies since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Hungary and Slovakia have increased their dependence on Russian energy… and lucky for them, as now the “rest of the continent” is about to go dry as a result of the Iran war.

Complicating matters, Trump is very close to Orbán and has endorsed his re-election bid. Politico on Wednesday reported preparations were being made for US vice-president JD Vance to visit Hungary days ahead of the elections. Trump has criticized Europe for continuing to buy Russian energy and has urged the continent to take the lead in supporting Ukraine. “They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia,” Trump said in his address to the UN General Assembly in September. The draft text of the bill, which has been seen by the FT, does not mention Orbán explicitly as a target of the sanctions. Therefore, it would fall to the Trump administration to determine which Hungarian officials have been involved in holding up aid to Ukraine and continuing the country’s dependency on Russian energy, a congressional aide said.

Orbán and his foreign minister Péter Szijjártó have long sought close ties with Russia, with Szijjártó meeting his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov more than 20 times since the start of the war in 2022. The ruling Fidesz party has made anti-Ukraine messages the central element of its election campaign and insisted on maintaining Russian oil imports. “If President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy wants to get his money from Brussels, he must open the Druzhba crude pipeline,” Orbán said in a video message to the Ukrainian president last week. “They tell us openly that they don’t want to allow cheap Russian oil through to Hungary, so the situation is very simple. No oil — no money.”

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Why does the American Bar Association.express an opinion?

• Whatever the Ruling on Birthright Citizenship… (Turley)

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in the historic birthright citizenship case. It is a hearing that has been over 150 years in the making, since the ratification of the 14th Amendment. It is not just a long-debated question that has divided the nation, but it has divided many lawyers as well. For that reason, there was one brief that stood out before the court: the amicus brief of the American Bar Association. The ABA filed its “friend of the court” brief to argue that the matter is clear: Anyone who gives birth on our soil, even if here illegally or only briefly, may claim U.S. citizenship for their child.


Most nations on Earth, including many of our European allies, reject birthright citizenship, and many of us in this nation believe that it is a foolish policy. Yet, even as someone who opposes birthright citizenship, I have long believed and argued that there are good-faith arguments on both sides of this debate. The sponsors of this language clearly disagreed on the issue at the time of its enactment. Some stated at the time that the language did not allow for birthright citizenship.The debate comes down to six poorly chosen words: “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Those words were not in the original draft, but were inserted by an amendment. Thus, they were not superfluous or casual verbiage, but an intentional condition. They were placed in the middle of an otherwise clear statement that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States.”

For more than a century, many have argued that the words reflect an intent to limit the amendment to citizens and legal residents who are subject fully to the jurisdiction of the United States. That brings us back to the bar association. Regardless of how one comes out in the fascinating historical and constitutional debate, this is a case one would expect the ABA to sit out. It clearly does not speak for all lawyers on the issue, yet, it filed a strident brief and laid out a parade of horribles about what would happen if the Supreme Court were to reject birthright citizenship.I found the brief to be one of the least compelling submissions to the court. But, once again, the media will portray the brief as speaking for American lawyers, even though the ABA represents less than two out of every ten attorneys.

I previously wrote a column on these pages on “the rise and fall of the American Bar Association,” exploring how the ABA has alienated many lawyers with its partisan advocacy. When it was founded on August 21, 1878, in Saratoga Springs, New York, the 75 lawyers present from 20 states (and the District of Columbia) wanted an organization to create a national system of standards for “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice.” It was created to focus on professional accreditation, education, and training. That changed in 1990, when advocates overrode earlier votes to remain neutral on the constitutional interpretations supporting the right to abortion.

The adoption of a pro-abortion position shocked many and fundamentally changed the culture at the ABA. (It is worth noting that the very arguments embraced by the bar association were later rejected by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision.)Since that time, the ABA has become fully captive to partisans who use the organization to support liberal and often Democratic Party positions. The result has been a steady decline in membership.Today, there are roughly 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S. Even if the ABA represented just half of that number, it would have 650,000 members. As recently as 2015, it still had 400,000. But more recently, membership has fallen to 227,000, or just 17 percent of the bar.

Despite complaints that the ABA has become a partisan organization, its leadership has doubled down with positions and programming that are echo chambers for the left. During Trump’s terms, the ABA has uniformly opposed him and his policies. The ABA brief in favor of birthright citizenship is signed by ABA President Michele Behnke. It simply declares the language and history clear and resolved. It then predicts a virtual meltdown of order and due process in this country if birthright citizenship is not upheld. The decline of the ABA to the point where it does not speak for most lawyers has followed a familiar model. The media also abandoned neutrality in covering such stories, with many journalism schools now teaching students that they are advocates for social justice.

Likewise, academia largely purged its departments of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians, as it increasingly prioritized advocacy over education. All three of these groups have one thing in common beyond their liberal ideological bias and advocacy: They are all increasingly unpopular. Higher education and the media have plummeted in public trust to record lows. Like the ABA, which can no longer claim to speak even for most lawyers, there is little indication that the loss of trust is causing the leadership to do any soul-searching. As memberships and revenues decline, the use of these institutions for advocacy remains personally beneficial. Behnke is leading an organization that is a shell of its former self, but she (like academics and journalists) is lionized for taking these positions.

Ironically, Behnke has a role in two of these areas, as a board member for the University of Wisconsin Law School and the University of Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association Board.Faced with an ABA doubling down on these controversial positions, various states are moving to do away with its historical role in bar memberships. The brief reaffirmed for many lawyers that the ABA is no longer a neutral and fair representative for all lawyers. It will continue to represent a dwindling faction of lawyers who look at the association as more of a stridently ideological than a strictly professional organization. That is why, whatever the outcome in Trump v. Barbara, the American Bar Association is likely to be the loser.

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“This sort of derangement is a novel psychopathology in the human species. . . a synthesis of low-IQ feminized brain scramble & neurotic lunacy.” JD Haltigan on X

• Springtime for RINOs (James Howard Kunstler)

Went to the No Kings assemblies in my town and the next nearby town on Saturday. Mental illness as far as the eye could see. Old folks, too, as far as the eye could see, predominately of the female persuasion: the devouring grandmothers. The Democratic Party has marshalled mental illness as its premier campaign strategy, and lately it is winning bigly around the country as mental illness becomes the go-to cope option for the ragged remnants of Boomerdom.


They believe things that are patently insane, for instance, the latest proposal by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) that illegal immigrants deserve reparations on account of being “traumatized” by U.S. immigration enforcement actions. If it feels like the Democratic Party is at war with our country you are not hallucinating. It is every bit as much a jihad as the Death to America crowd in Iran has explicitly pushed since 1979.

The president gets no help whatsoever from his own party, as you see in the disgraceful hijinks around the urgent issue of election reform. You know exactly how the election playbook was written: let x-million foreigners into the country illegally, give them (illegally) social security numbers, driver’s licenses, automatic voter registrations, addresses, mail-in ballots. . . and voila! They don’t even have to mail-in their own mail-in ballots. Lawfare ninja Marc Elias will arrange ballot pick-up service. And the cherry on top is that the census must count all the illegal aliens to add new congressional districts for extra seats in Congress.

So, in the face of that, Republican Majority Leader John Thune could not muster enough votes to save the SAVE Act. Or so he said. Looks more like lack a’wanna. Eerie lack a’wanna. On their tours of cable news, the hapless Republican senators, when asked, would not name their colleagues leaning against the SAVE Act. But you know who they are. Mitch McConnell, Murkowski, Tillis, Collins, Capito.

Leader Thune could not even manage to get Homeland Security funded with the prospect of Iranian sleeper cells awakening around the country. He just threw in the towel at three o’clock in the morning on Friday, and sent the whole crew home to meet the Easter Bunny. Chuck Schumer did an end-zone dance. The brokenness of our politics could not be more in your face. As things shape up this grueling springtime, Mr. Trump might have to go Abe Lincoln on these folks. That is, declare some sort of national emergency to save the election and the country.

Of course, the nation is more than a little distracted just now with doings in Iran. The No Kings folk are unabashedly rooting for everything to go wrong there, and not a few conservatives in the public arena are straining to conjure an Iranian victory in their black-pilled deliriums. Many claim they “have no idea” what we are doing there — can it be that hard? — or else they are rabidly exercised over our alliance with Israel in the operation. You know how that goes. Cue Tucker. He’ll explain.

The truth is we are pounding these savage Shia clerics and their Revolutionary Guard myrmidons to the garden of eternal bliss where the seventy-two virgins wait. Whatever remains of Iran’s legit government is bargaining under cover for an off-ramp now. Pakistan mediates. The parties sit in different rooms and pass notes through the mediators in a third room. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pretends that he will not negotiate with Mr. Trump’s envoys, Witkoff and Kushner, both Jews, the horror! But that’s sheer fakery.

To avoid humiliation in the process, Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones around the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and they will probably keep doing that until the very moment of capitulation. Anyway, in less than a week, Mr. Trump turns the lights off all over Iran, and then they are back in the twelfth century. . . no command communication, no juice for anything, no money, no food, no water, no nothing . . . and a population getting dangerously desperate to make it all go away. . . to return to some dim memory of what normal life once was in an Iran not ruled by psychotic death cultists.

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“America steps back, and the Alliance starts to wobble ..”

• The Great Illusion of NATO is Fading Fast (Trenin)

One of the more idealistic ambitions of the last Soviet leadership was the simultaneous dissolution of both Cold War blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Only half of that vision came to pass. The Warsaw Pact disappeared in the spring of 1991. NATO didn’t. Instead, it endured and expanded. Over the following decades, the alliance not only survived but grew from 16 to 32 members. It took part in military campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya, and steadily extended its reach. After the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, back in 2022, NATO expanded further, incorporating Finland and Sweden, while consolidating itself more firmly on an anti-Russian footing than at any time since the Cold War.


For the first time in its history, Russia found itself facing a unified military alliance stretching across Europe and North America. The idea of a “collective West” opposing Moscow ceased to be rhetorical and became a strategic reality. Yet by the mid-2020s, cracks had begun to appear. The return of Donald Trump to the White House marked a shift not in America’s commitment to NATO, but in how that commitment was defined. Trump has abandoned the familiar model of the US as a paternal, often indulgent leader of the alliance. In its place, he presented America as a demanding hegemon, insisting that its allies bear a far greater share of the burden.

Initially, European capitals reacted with unease. For decades, they had relied on Washington to shoulder the lion’s share of NATO’s costs. Yet they have adjusted. Military spending targets rose, even toward Trump’s proposed 5% of GDP. But the real shift went deeper than budgets. Under Trump, Washington’s strategic focus moved decisively away from Europe and toward China. While previous administrations had sought to integrate Beijing into global governance structures, Trump pursued confrontation, both economic and geopolitical. In his second term, containing China has become the central pillar of US foreign policy.

This inevitably required a redistribution of resources. The latest US National Defense Strategy made the logic explicit: Western Europe, with its combined economic and demographic weight, was capable of managing the Russian challenge on its own. America would remain within NATO, but its role would change. It would step back from the front line and expect Europeans to step forward. This recalibration was most visible in Ukraine. Trump, wary of escalation and unconvinced of Ukraine’s strategic value, reduced US involvement without ending support altogether. He shifted the financial and military burden increasingly onto Europe and began engaging Moscow directly, often without consulting European allies.

For Western European elites, this was deeply unsettling. They had invested heavily, politically and economically, in the Ukraine conflict. For some, it had even become a tool for consolidating the European Union and driving militarization as a means of economic stimulus. Then came a further shock. Trump’s remarks on Greenland and Canada in which he questioned the sovereignty of longstanding NATO members struck at the alliance’s core assumptions. Whether or not such ambitions were realistic was beside the point. What mattered was that the leader of NATO had publicly cast doubt on the territorial integrity of its own allies. This was unprecedented.

Taken together, these developments called into question NATO’s foundational principle: collective defense. For decades, Article 5 had been treated as an ironclad guarantee, underpinned by American nuclear power. Yet in reality, that guarantee had always contained ambiguity. When the treaty was ratified, the US Senate ensured that Washington wouldn’t be automatically committed to war.

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“.. if you want ICE to take the mask off, the threat level has to decrease. It’s up 8000 percent increase in threats against ICE officers..”

• Tom Homan Bulldozed Jake Tapper’s DHS Funding Narrative (Matt Margolis)

Border Czar Tom Homan hit the Sunday shows this weekend, and the liberal networks didn’t know what hit them. Over at CNN, he spent the segment repeatedly bulldozing Jake Tapper, and it was awesome. Homan wasn’t there to take any crap, and he repeatedly hammered the same indisputable point to Tapper: fund the Department of Homeland Security, and the problems go away.


For example, Tapper asked why, if the administration had the power to move money around to pay TSA agents without Congress, it took 41 days to act. This is a point many Democrats have been making lately, and Homan crushed it. He responded by broadening the issue beyond TSA, and that TSA pay does not address the larger DHS funding problem. “You’ve got the Coast Guard. You’ve got CISA. You’ve got the men and women of Secret Service. You’ve got a lot of people working at the Department of Homeland Security that isn’t getting paid,” he said. He argued the entire department should be funded because the country is facing a “heightened threat posture.”


The most effective part of Homan’s response was how he turned Tapper’s question back on Congress. He said he did not pretend to be an appropriations expert, but he was clear about the political bottom line. “I’m just glad that President Trump is able to pay the TSA agents. At least that’s a start,” Homan said. “But, again, there’s a lot more, many more, thousands more, tens of thousands more DHS employees who are not being paid that need to be paid.”

Tapper then tried (and failed) to hit Homan on the ICE deployment to airports, asking whether the agents would leave once TSA workers were paid. Homan refused to give him the answer he seemed to want. “We will see,” he said. He explained that the deployment depends on how many TSA workers return, how many have quit, and what each airport needs. He said he was working with TSA and ICE leadership to figure that out, while praising ICE for “plugging those holes” and helping keep airports secure.

When Tapper cited the TSA union’s criticism that ICE replacements were like “a teaspoon of cough syrup” for a patient with pneumonia, Homan fired back that the wait times had already gone down. He said he had seen improvements in Houston and that additional agents were being sent to Baltimore. “Every place we send ICE officers, the lines have decreased,” he said. “They need to decrease more.” Homan also pushed back hard on the idea that ICE was overstepping its role at airports. He said ICE officers were checking IDs and covering exits so TSA screeners could focus on the machines. “We’re doing the job TSA is asking us to do, so their officers can get back to main screening,” he said.

Tapper then moved to the DHS deal and asked why President Donald Trump would oppose a deal that Senate Republicans said was good. Homan did not budge. He said Trump wanted the entire DHS funded and open, and he accused Democrats of trying to change ICE tactics and force the agency to arrest fewer people. “They’re holding the department hostage because they don’t like what ICE is doing,” Homan said. “If they don’t like what ICE is doing, then change the law. That’s your job.” When Tapper brought up warrant changes, mask use, alleged mistaken detentions, and broader criticism of ICE, Homan insisted that the laws had not changed.

“Let’s talk about the masks. You don’t see ICE wearing masks inside the airports because they’re not on the street arresting criminals. You have got the agitators who cross the line and threaten ICE agents,” he said. “The same people in the Democratic Congress that want ICE to take off the mask are the same people who say ICE is going to shoot people inside airports. I mean, they can’t have it both ways. So, if you want ICE to take the mask off, the threat level has to decrease. It’s up 8000 percent increase in threats against ICE officers, and that’s because of a lot of the rhetoric coming from the Hill. Stop calling ICE Nazis and racists. Stop saying they’re going to shoot people inside airports. That’s going to drive the threat level down, and we can talk about masks.”

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Apollo Global Management manages a meager $900 billion in assets…

• This Trillion-Dollar Firm Wants Out of Mamdani’s NYC (Stephen Green)

As New York City’s filthy commie mayor struggles to fill a $5.4 billion budget gap with a massive soak-the-rich-then-soak-them-some-more tax hike, trillion-dollar asset management fund Apollo Global Management says it will open a secondary headquarters in Florida or Texas. “Apollo expects most of its future hiring to be in the second hub rather than Manhattan,” according to the New York Post, surprising literally no one.] “The reality is that you can’t propose budget after budget that vilifies employees and then be surprised when they decide to go somewhere else,” Partnership for New York City CEO Steve Fulop told the paper.


“New York City can’t tax people in sane states,” Your Friendly Neighborhood VodkaPundit sagely added while adding an extra dash of schadenfreude to his Bloody Mary. You know what happens after a huge firm like Apollo builds a second headquarters in a low-tax, liberty-loving state like Florida or Texas, right? Sooner or later, they shrink operations at the old HQ before finally boarding the windows and padlocking the doors. “TAX THIS!” to put it in language New Yorkers understand and enjoy. Before we get deeper into this, I’d like to apologize for the completely over-the-top hyperbole in the lead and in the headline. As it turns out, Apollo Global Management is nothing like a “trillion-dollar firm.” In fact, Apollo manages a meager $900 billion in assets, which is practically nothing, and certainly not even close enough to a trillion dollars for Mamdani and his commie cronies to ever miss it.

On the other hand, $900 billion here, $900 billion there, and pretty soon you’re pining for the days of $5.4 billion deficits. So about that deficit. NYC has an annual budget of about $127 billion, and chronic deficits of $4-6 billion. But that’s nothing for the city’s “Democratic Socialist” mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who wants to throw additional billions of Other People’s Money at public education (already some of the most expensive in the world, and with terrible results), legal services for illegals fighting deportation, city-run grocery stores, Homeless Inc., free buses, and more. NYC lavishes its 8.5 million people (and shrinking) with $127 billion in spending, not including whatever Albany contributes with state spending. That’s just shy of $15,000 per person in city spending alone, but I wonder if you’ll ever meet a New Yorker who feels like they get anything close to $15,000 in services.

The city’s budget is slightly more than the entire state of Florida ($117.4 billion) spends on the state’s 23.5 million people (and growing). Florida’s budget includes $16.75 billion in reserves and $250 million for debt reduction. But let’s look at Miami, Florida’s largest city, where the local government spends just $3,600 per denizen — or roughly a quarter of NYC’s largess. Yet the Post notes that Mamdani views his city’s deficit as “a crisis that can only be fixed with more taxes to build revenue.”

“Florida has already lured heavyweights like Citadel and Elliott Management,” the Post reminds readers, while “Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are hunkering down in Texas.” Wealthy individuals and trillion-dollar firms (sorry, I did it again!) like Apollo either have left New York or are eyeing the exits. And Mamdani is just getting started.

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“If he were a king, Senate Democrats would be powerless because if Trump were a king, or acting like one, he’d just be able to do it.”

• Scott Jennings Destroyed the ‘No Kings’ Rallies, CNN Wasn’t Happy (Margolis)

The “No Kings” rallies over the weekend were such a joke, and CNN’s Scott Jennings totally exposed them for what they really are on Sunday’s State of the Union. What happened was that CNN political commentator Ashley Allison argued that the weekend’s protests represented a growing resistance movement — one that had been slow to materialize after the 2024 election but was now picking up steam. She pointed to the crowds, the celebrity appearances, Bruce Springsteen and Jane Fonda lending their star power to the cause. “When you have millions of people peacefully go out, rock stars, Bruce Springsteen, Jane Fonda, all these folks coming out and saying, we don’t like it either, we’re not in isolation, it shows a unifying force that could be powerful,” she said. Snooze…


Anyway, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) was even more enthusiastic, boasting about how he attended six rallies over the weekend like it was a badge of honor or something. That’s when Jennings pounced.”That’s a lot of free speech for a country with a king,” he said. Subramanyam tried to brush it off, inviting Jennings to join them next time and offering to get him a T-shirt. But Jennings didn’t let up.”That’s a lot of free speech for a country with a king,” he said again.There’s a reason that Subramanyam tried to ignore that statement.

The entire premise of the “No Kings” movement — that America is somehow living under a monarchy — looks stupid when thousands of people can freely march through major cities with zero consequence on a random Saturday. I would also add that Trump really wants the SAVE America to pass, but Democrats are blocking it in the Senate. If he were a king, Senate Democrats would be powerless because if Trump were a king, or acting like one, he’d just be able to do it. Nevertheless, Subramanyam ignored Jennings and pressed on, saying the rallies showed genuine grassroots energy and that he’d even met a Republican attendee who said the Iran situation would keep him from ever voting Republican again — which I guarantee never happened.

But I digress. The next great moment came when Jennings exposed what the No Kings rallies were really about. “These No Kings rallies actually look pretty representative to me of the Democratic coalition,” he said. “I saw people flying the hammer and sickle in New York City. I saw Hezbollah flags. I saw Hamas flags. I saw Palestinian flags. I saw trans signs. I see weirdo liberal boomers out there. This is pretty representative of the Democratic coalition. And that’s who funds it as well, by the way.” Allison pushed back immediately, insisting that the fringe elements Jennings mentioned didn’t represent what the movement stood for. But Jennings wasn’t buying the “that’s not who we are” defense.”You like hammer and sickle? You like hammer and sickle flags?” he shot back as the table erupted. “They had a bunch of them. They come from somewhere,” he added. They sure did, no matter how uncomfortable that makes the left.

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https://twitter.com/NatCy891/status/2038711644625293539?s=20 https://twitter.com/CRRJA5/status/2038097858428080577?s=20

 

 

 

 

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