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🎯💯🚨🔥
Hegseth acted like an angry cheating drunk, never took responsibility, attacked Jeffrey Goldberg, and then went on a gaslighting tirade.
Lloyd Austin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ was hired by Biden because of merit.
Hegseth 🤡 was hired by First Felon because of skin color.
Forget speeches. In the Middle East, deterrence is the only diplomacy.
by General Yoav Gallant
After the June strike, many wondered aloud what kind of agreement must now be written, or what structure must be formalized. But those questions may already be behind us.
The current regional alignment, spanning Israel, the United States, key Persian Gulf states, and European partners, has proven more agile, more operational, and more durable than any formal pact we could have drafted. It did not emerge from a diplomatic summit. It emerged from shared threats, mutual confidence, and the realities of the battlefield.
This informal alliance, built in urgency and refined in coordination, did not wait for ratification. It functioned and triumphed without delay, without headlines, without ceremony. It proved that shared values and operational trust can outperform any clause or article.
We should stop asking whether we need a treaty. The real question is whether we are ready to acknowledge what we already have.
And for those still clinging to old frameworks, consider this: when a British defense minister sends you a letter asking you to ask him for help; when Gulf states coordinate airspace behind closed doors; when American and Israeli pilots fly missions minutes apart over hostile territory — that is not diplomacy, that is deterrence, that is an alliance.
Over the years, I’ve learned that, in the Middle East, speeches, declarations, and even signed agreements mean very little. What counts is performance on the ground. Stability, prosperity, and peace only come through strength.
What we have now is not a document; it is a reality, and an opportunity.
The exclusion of such coverage is unconstitutional, a federal judge in Maine ruled.
Trudy Ring at The Advocate:
The Department of Defense’s health insurance plan, Tricare, must cover gender-affirming surgery for transgender dependents of active and retired service members, a federal judge has ruled. The exclusion of coverage for this care violates the equal protection guarantees of the U.S. Constitution, U.S. District Judge Nancy Torresen ruled November 1. The suit was brought by two transgender women in their 20s, identified by the pseudonyms Jane Doe and Susan Roe, who are both daughters of retired military members and are covered by Tricare. Doe and her father filed suit in 2022 in U.S. District Court in Maine, and Roe was added to the suit last year. Doe lives in Maine and Roe in Florida. Both of the women’s fathers served more than two decades in the military.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the Defense Department, the department’s health agency, and Tricare were named as defendants. The women challenged a 1976 federal law that excluded coverage for “surgeries ‘justified solely on psychiatric needs including, ... sex gender changes’ and other services deemed ‘not medically necessary,’” Torresen wrote in her ruling. “Congress considered all ‘cosmetic’ procedures (including ‘sex gender changes’) to be ‘nonmedical’ in the sense that they were ‘psychologically’ or ‘psychiatrically’ justified, and not strictly medically necessary,” she continued. But Torresen found that such surgery is indeed medically necessary and that the Defense Department had not shown that any important governmental interest was advanced by denying the coverage.
Good news: Judge Nancy Torresen issued a ruling on November 1st in Doe v. Austin that Tricare is required to cover gender-confirmation surgery for transgender dependents of active and retired service members.
Lloyd Austin announced the Pentagon will send nearly $1 billion to Ukraine, bringing the total the United States has committed to Ukraine to
100%
Connect the dots: It’s America and Iran against Israel
The American appeasement of Iran has left many people mystified. They should have been paying more attention.
Twelve days before the October 7 pogrom, Jay Solomon reported on the Semafor site that Ariane Tabatabai, chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defence for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, was part of an “Iran Experts Initiative” created by senior Iranian foreign ministry officials to bolster Tehran’s position on global security issues, particularly its nuclear programme.
In other words, Tabatabai was an agent of influence for Iran, at the heart of the US government and with the highest level of security clearance.
Semafor and the Iranian opposition group Iran International had obtained a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails. These revealed that in 2021 Robert Malley, who was the point man on Iran under both the Obama and Biden administrations until he was removed in June 2023 following a still unexplained “mishandling of classified materials,” had infiltrated Tabatabai into the US State Department to assist him in his negotiations with Iran.
The day Solomon’s article appeared, 31 US Senators wrote to the Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, to express their concern. They wrote: “We find it unconscionable that a senior department official would continue to hold a sensitive position despite her alleged participation in an Iranian government information operation”.
They noted that in March 2021, shortly after Tabatabai was appointed senior adviser to the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Iranian dissidents had reported her long history of echoing the Iranian regime’s talking points.
Indeed, that month Adam Kredo reported in the Washington Free Beacon on these dissidents’ shock at Tabatabai’s appointment. They claimed she had parroted the regime’s position in multiple public appearances, and that her father was part of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inner circle.
In April 2021, several House members requested a review of Tabatabai’s security clearance. In response, the Biden administration dismissed these claims as “smears and slander”.
Even more astonishingly, Tabatabai runs the office overseeing hostage negotiations. Three weeks after the October 7 pogrom, a reporter asked the White House spokesman, John Kirby, whether it was appropriate for Tabatabai to be in such a position given the claims made against her. Kirby stalled. Tabatabai is still there.
Online, several commentators (including myself) wrote about this. The mainstream media studiously ignored it.
In the past few days, they’ve ignored another vital revelation.
I heard a lot of things I wanted to share earlier today, but haven't reached a non-work computer until recently and was distracted by the airdrop news so I had to talk about that first. Most of the things that stood out to me were in the Democracy Now podcast, but I'll be linking the headlines from their website, which has text versions of the articles instead of just audio.
The Intercept: New York Times Exposé Lacks Evidence to Claim Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence Oct. 7: Shortly after the first Hamas attack, the New York Times published an inflammatory article about systematic rape by Hamas soldiers. It initially intended to have an episode of The Daily (its podcast) about the topic, but the podcast's fact-checkers found that the article's writers had bent a lot of truths and their sources were often questionable at best; the needed rewrites for honest reporting were so comprehensive that the episode script was scrapped entirely. Goes over the ways in which the reporters manipulated facts and opinions, the NYT not really acknowledging the conflict, and how heavily it impacted international response to Israeli actions, especially by the US government.
From their Headlines page, the bold is their titles and the reset is my summary or additional references:
Defense Sec. Austin Refuses to Draw Line in Sand for Israel After Food Aid Massacre in Gaza - DS Austin is grilled by a congressmember and still doesn't commit to anything; notable is that he cites a death toll that is probably accurate to the estimates of real death, but not accurate to the confirmed deaths and so the numbers had to be later walked back by the Pentagon.
Washington’s Largest Union Backs Democratic Vote for “Uncommitted” Ahead of Primary - UFCW is joining the movement that Michigan got rolling. I talked about it more in a recent addition to this post, if you want to know more about which states are organizing to do the same.
Lebanese PM Says Gaza Ceasefire Would End Conflict on Its Border with Israel - Lebanon has been bombing northern Israel for a while now; this is just the 'if you leave Palestine alone, we'll stop sending explosives your way' message that's been broadcast for a while.
There are a number of other stories going on that aren't getting a huge amount of coverage on most platforms, like Texas's wildfires, or are just too complex for me to summarize (they have a longer article on the border visit and policy debate), but these three stood out to me, which is probably why they're the first ones mentioned.
(Source)
