The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.
“He allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that. It’s a shocking thing to realise people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives. The hatred – what is that about? It’s a fear of your own weakness.”
― Fran Lebowitz
The grim reality of Trump’s forever war on Iran hit home over the weekend with the announcements that three more US soldiers were killed by Iran, with one missing. US Central Command announced the deaths on Twitter. Trump remained silent for 24 hours, only to break his silence by posting about sanctions legislation, without mentioning the fallen service members. (He did call in to NewsNation to say that the deaths “were a very sad thing.” Yet, he somehow found the time over the weekend to golf and attend the FIFA World Cup Final (where he was booed), leisure activities that ignored the multiple deadly Iranian assaults against the US military. See International Business Times, ‘Unbothered’ Trump Hit by Outrage for Attending the World Cup Final While Calling the Loss of Two US Troops ‘Very Sad’.
We should mourn for the fallen and their families, who are victims of Trump’s massive incompetence and profound ignorance. Trump’s ill-begotten war on Iran has now claimed 17 US military members. It has strengthened the reactionary hardliners in Iran, has elevated Iran to a regional power by granting it control of the Strait of Hormuz, and has nearly drained the US of munitions reserves.
The latter point bears repeating: the reckless battle plan by Trump and Hegseth has so depleted US military stockpiles that it impairs our ability to fight another war. See CNN, Iran war heats up while US weapon stocks remain depleted, risking military’s ability to fight future wars.
Finally, over the weekend, oil prices surged to $90 per barrel. Reuters, Brent oil tops $90 as US, Iran intensify attacks in Middle East.
Apart from a failing economy, fighting a losing war with no exit strategy is the surest way to lose control of Congress and the presidency. And yet congressional Republicans will remain lockstep with Trump as he stumbles from one crisis to another in his Iran war.
Trump’s first attempt to end the war by effectively surrendering to Iran was unsuccessful, leaving him little room to maneuver. He must either expand the war through ground invasion (and further impair US military readiness for a second war), or simply remove US troops from the region to avoid further US casualties. Either outcome will be a disaster for the US, members of the military, and global peace and security.
Perhaps worst of all, America’s enemies have learned that the US can throw the full might of its air and naval superiority at a country without achieving victory. That is a destabilizing message when both China and Russia have expansionist aspirations.
The war will stop when Republicans can no longer tolerate the political cost of a forever war and gasoline prices driving inflation. And to clarify, “the political cost” is where we come in. We must remind everyone that Trump broke his promise to end “forever wars” and bring down prices “on day one.”
The quagmire in Iran will get worse, unless we help stop it by raising the political cost to intolerable levels. I know that many of you are already leading by example on bridges, along roadsides. Thank you! But it will take more of us speaking out to help end the senseless war on Iran. This will stop when enough of us say, “NO.”
DHS claims that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens have registered to vote.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed late last week that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens have registered to vote in four states. CBS News, What to know about the Trump administration’s claim that 250K noncitizens are registered to vote in 4 states
Mullin has threatened to cut off election security funding to four states that are allegedly harboring hundreds of thousands of non-citizens who have committed a felony by registering to vote when they are ineligible to do so. NBC, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatens states over elections
Mullin’s claims are false. The most obvious way to prove their falsity is to note that the proper course of action would be to refer the cases to the DOJ for prosecution. Mullin has not done so. As election law expert Rick Hasen wrote last week,
If [Trump] had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that [they haven’t] shows that these claims likely have no legs. Claims of noncitizen registration often evaporate upon closer inspection (such as the systems’ failure to catch newly naturalized citizens).
While it may be overwhelming for the DOJ to indict 250,000 alleged felons for voter registration fraud, the DOJ has the resources to indict a couple of hundred alleged felons to create an example for others. But the DOJ won’t do that, because the alleged non-citizens registering to vote don’t exist. To be clear, there are isolated instances that are usually the product of confusion or mistake. But those cases amount to a couple of dozen a year—at most. See Reuters, Trump claims non-US citizen voting is rampant; the numbers tell another story.
Per Reuters,
[A] new Reuters analysis of federal court data undercuts Trump’s assertion that a conspiracy of noncitizen voting is afoot in America.
Case records show that federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under a federal “voting by aliens” statute created by Congress in 1996, Reuters found. More than two-thirds of those prosecutions—86—have been filed during Trump’s five-and-a-half years in office. In none of the cases did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election. And no defendant was accused of being paid to vote. Instead, many appear to stem from voter confusion, miscommunication with election officials or administrative errors.
In an irony lost on Trump, one of the highest-profile prosecutions of a permanent lawful resident registering to vote was a 79-year-old grandmother who voted for Trump. She received a couple of weeks in prison (given her lack of prior criminal record). The Trump administration then deported her.
The point is this: 250,000 is a lot of (alleged) felons that DHS has identified but not prosecuted. Since Trump is desperate to support his theory that there is massive voter fraud by non-citizens voting, it would be in Trump’s interest to bring hundreds or thousands of indictments immediately. He won’t and he can’t, because Markwayne Mullin is lying.
I don’t know where Mullin came up with his 250,000 number. Nobody does, probably including Mullin. DHS is not tasked with tracking voting data, so how it reached a conclusion about fraudulent voter registration is anyone’s guess. The simplest speculation is that DHS compared one flawed list of US citizens compiled for immigration purposes to another flawed list of US voters, compiled from publicly available lists that are constantly being updated.
In a nation with 230 million eligible voters, the number of people who naturally transition into and out of the voter pool in any given year is in the tens of millions. Markwayne’s 250,000 number is likely statistical noise. See, e.g., ABC News, System that DHS is urging states to use to assess voter rolls known to return faulty results: reports.
The ABC News article explains in detail why any database being used by DHS is meaningless. DHS’s citizenship database is tied to Social Security records. The known error rate is about 7% for matching citizenship and SSA benefits. Moreover, citizenship was not tracked in the SSA database until 1978, meaning that tens of millions of “false positives” of non-citizen residents would be included in the database.
Per ABC, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, described the results as “garbage in, garbage out” if DHS used the SAVE tool to cross-check public voter records.
Morales-Doyle told ABC,
I have complete confidence that these numbers are essentially worthless, that they don’t mean anything. It conflicts with all available data and history and just clearly cannot be the case that there are this many noncitizens on the rolls.
The good news is that, once again, the administration is showing its evidence of alleged voter fraud in advance of the midterms, and the “evidence” is worse than a joke. It is non-existent. The failure of the administration to prove voter fraud now will allow voting rights advocates to prepare to defeat the ludicrous arguments being floated by Markwayne Mullin and Trump.
Concluding Thoughts
As usual, whenever I try to bring perspective and analysis to claims that Trump will “declare an emergency and use the military / ICE to seize ballots,” I get a fair amount of pushback—as in dozens of emails in response to Saturday’s newsletter. Almost all the pushback boils down to this: “It doesn’t matter what you say, what technicalities apply, Trump is just going to do it.”
Such emails announce a firm belief in a conclusion and cut off discussion. So, if there is nothing I or anyone can say to suggest that armed intervention to seize ballots is remote and that if Trump resorts to such tactics, he will be stopped, then there is little point in carrying on a discussion.
But for those who firmly believe that Trump will use force to interfere in the election, a few questions present themselves.
If it is a certainty (in your view) that Trump will overturn the election, what then? Do we just give up? Why bother to vote? Are you simply going to wait for the end of democracy in November and say, “See! I told you so!” Or does something happen before and after that? Are you protesting? Canvassing? Encouraging voter turnout in any way?
I do not understand the compulsion to convince others that Trump will intervene in the election by force . . . followed by a full stop about what happens next. Just 100% focus on what Trump will do, and nothing about what we will do.
While I don’t understand that approach, I want to flag a serious problem it creates. If you view your role at this moment in our nation’s history as convincing others that Trump will overturn the election through force, you should recognize that you are likely dissuading people from voting and doing all of the hard work that it takes to win a wave election. You are effectively telling them their work doesn’t matter; if you tell them enough times, they might believe you.
And “No,” we are not naïve and are not refusing to recognize reality. We understand what is happening. But we refuse to quit. We refuse to surrender to fear. We refuse to make self-defeating predictions about future outcomes that are still within our ability to influence. We refuse to cry “Uncle!” if Trump does make a move to seize ballots. We will take to the courts. We will take to the streets. We will engage in massive boycotts of Trump’s business allies. We will call a national strike and shut down the nation until all ballots are counted in a free and fair manner.
While I don’t think any of the above will be necessary, that’s what happens after the incomplete thought, “Trump will declare an emergency to seize ballots.” If that happens, and I don’t believe it will, it is the beginning of the fight, not the end.
Apologies to everyone who did not send me a “He will do it anyway” email. But I fear that the volume and frequency of such predictions are accelerating. We cannot fall victim to their fatalism. I won’t. I hope you won’t, either. We have an election to win, and we cannot be detained by those who want to quit before the first vote is cast.
Southern Brown Bandicoot (Isoodon obesulus), Eat a tasty nectar from some Banksia, family Paramelidae, order Peramelemorphia, Cranbourne, VIC, Australia
US officials tarred Tehran's team as terrorists, with one US official saying he 'danced a happy dance' after they left
Driving back to my hotel at 1:30 a.m. that night — the same one the team had been booked into — I was startled to see their distinctive royal-blue bus on the highway: not parked for the night, but moving. After the post-game press conference, anti-doping testing, airport fingerprinting, and flight, they arrived back at their hotel in Tijuana at 4:40 a.m., only to eat a post-game meal near sunrise.
By refusing them hospitality, the U.S. effectively deprived Iran's World Cup team of time to sleep and eat, even on a match day. Iran was never offered fair play or an equal chance.
Iran's Alireza Jahanbakhsh put the team's ask plainly: "To be honest, we don't ask for much. We just ask for the same procedure for all the other 47 teams." The answer came from the head of the White House's World Cup task force, Andrew Giuliani, who told ABC News the players should thank the U.S. for "our hospitality." After Iran was eliminated came the curtain call. The Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at a World Cup security briefing that he was "so happy," that his department had "pulled their visas," and that he "might've sung a song or two or maybe even danced a happy dance.”
On the same day Iran played its final match, the U.S. was bombing Iran. The players took the field while their own country was under American fire. When the players emerged from the plane in Tijuana, Mexico, at the start of the tournament, they were wearing pins reading “168” — a reminder to the world of the 168 Iranians, mostly children, who were killed on February 28, the opening day of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, at an all-girls' school in Minab.
This artifact is believed to be the world's oldest known copper crown, dating back approximately 6,000 years to the Chalcolithic period (4500–3500 BCE).
It was discovered in 1961 as part of the "Nahal Mishar Hoard" in the Cave of the Treasure in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea.
The crown is fashioned from copper using the lost wax casting method and features protuberances shaped like vultures and building facades.
Btw the heat *is* why we see water that's not really there, but mirages aren't exactly hallucinations so much as optical illusions:
It's just the changing density of the air refracting light weirdly, so it looks like there's a reflection of the sky on the ground, which our brains often interpret as a pool of water. It can also happen upwards instead of downwards, especially at sea, when the air is much colder near the surface and a warm front appears above it:
Which, btw, is one possible explanation for ghost ship sightings, so that's fun :)
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vaporwave
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
amandla
baratheonpilled
stormborns
jacobvanloon
