On Sunday, Charles R. Davis at The Redoubt published a rather eye-opening piece about Greg Bovino. Remember that little Nazi fucker? The one who liked to parade around in a custom-made trench coat that looked suspiciously like it was patterned after the coats worn by SS officers in WWII? The one who pushed ICE to be so violently aggressive they murdered two American citizens and sparked such a massive public backlash that the regime had to pull back on Stephen Miller’s plan to turn ICE into his own personal Gestapo?

Well, the entire time he was goosestepping around the United States, terrorizing minority communities, the legacy press refused to draw any “unfounded” conclusions about his affinity for fascism and a certain German political party from the 1940s. Somehow this curious oversight continued even as Bovnio was a prominent featured speaker at a major gathering of literal Nazis in Portugal:

No media outlet in the English-speaking world covered the fact that a former Trump administration official was at a gathering of the world’s leading fascists to promote “remigration,” a far-right euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the United States and Europe.

Major media outlets also ignored the presence of Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club. A spokesperson for the group — informed of the extremist views (and criminal convictions) of those attending — told The Redoubt that it would “never apologize for standing alongside our European brothers and sisters.”

This was a gathering of some of the world’s most high-profile neo-Nazis and at least two Republicans were there. Not only was the American press too busy to notice, but so was everyone else. Weird.

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

👊Punch Nazis👊

Click here for a one-time donation!

Davis has a theory why and he’s soooooo close to hitting the nail on the head. Part of it, of course, is media capture by right-wing billionaires:

Right-wing capture of the corporate media in the United States is one response; there’s just no incentive to highlight one side of the aisle’s extremists.

…

These outlets will cover extremism and antisemitism if the dots can be connected to an elected Democrat, no question, but not when it’s the other way around. After all, it is in the interests of their ownership, and the reactionary cause, for right-wing politics to be seen as a necessarily brutish response to the dangers of a loony left.

Then there is the soft bigotry of low expectations:

But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s that we, broadly speaking, demand nothing from the right, even if we don’t share the politics. When illiberal figures behave badly, as they are wont to do — when they give voice to their basest and oft-libidinal desires and hatreds — it is viewed as akin to a mangy dog chewing on a slipper. They are not defying expectations; they can’t really be helped.

Whether from sympathy or condescension, far-right politics are interpreted as naturally occurring in a way that left-wing politics are not. Small-minded, reactionary tribalism is the default setting of the world, or so it is thought. It’s only news, and only interesting, when someone who purports to be better shows that they’re not.

But neither of those is the entire picture. The media has been playing this game loooong before right-wing billionaires began buying up the media landscape and loooong before the GOP became the party of open fascism.

So what happened here? How did this neo-fascist summit take place with someone as high-profile as Greg Bovino quite literally giving a Nazi salute and advertising it on Twitter, but not one single major news outlet could be bothered to mention it?

The full answer lies with the pernicious myth of bothsiderism, which has become so vital to the continued functioning of the press, they will literally erase a meeting of the world’s leading Nazis to maintain it. Allow me to remind you that the Trump regime is currently fabricating a global “Antifa conspiracy” as we speak. The press has been very interested in that. But here is an actual, real-world right-wing version of the same thing, and the press? Well, no time for love, Dr. Jones…very busy, many shiny objects to chase…

Here’s the problem, and this has been the problem for decades: There are two parties in the United States. Two main political movements. Republicans and Democrats. Right and left. For longer than I have been alive, one side has been moving, with increasing speed, in the direction of racism, bigotry, fascism, and cruelty. They have been consumed by conspiracies and a lust for violence. They have become a death cult obsessed with purging those they see as weak and unfit. They have moved to the farthest edges of the political spectrum. Their extremism is so far off the charts, there are few political parties in the world that match them for sheer depravity and insanity

The other side? We’ve been moving further to the left, to be sure. Towards the dreaded SOCIALISM and even more dreaded EQUALITY and even worse, EQUITY. We’ve embraced pronouns and gender fluidity and universal health care and maybe even, heaven forbid, taxing the rich out of existence.

The press would have you believe we are just as extreme as the right. That Democrats are the inverse of Republicans. But in no universe is that true. Put aside the fact the Democratic Party is far too centrist to be the flipside of the GOP of even 40 years ago, never mind the seething cauldron of hate and violence and ignorance the Republican Party is today. Even our most extreme hypothetical positions still do not match the right’s depravity.

Universal Basic Income. Free college for all. Guaranteed reproductive rights. Civil and voting rights enshrined in the Constitution and fully protected. Housing and jobs and food guaranteed for all. Environmental justice. Preventing catastrophic climate change. Stop me when this becomes too terrifying for you. Let me know when we reach the level of the right’s march to ethnic cleansing by way of mass murder. What part of the left’s agenda, its REAL agenda, not the imaginary one created by the right and promoted by the press, actually sounds scary? Pride flags? Black people swimming in your pool? A female president?!

Fuck off. None of that comes within a lightyear of the blood-soaked fantasies your average Republican masturbates to. Death camps. Slavery. Rape gangs. Legalized pedophilia. Genocide. All of which they openly talk about. They’re eager to enact a future of horrors. They’ll gleefully tell you all about it.

This newsletter needs your shares and likes and comments to grow. Please let Substack know we’re worth your time and attention!

Share

The press is aware of this. They’ve been aware of it the entire time. To be a journalist is to be acutely aware that one party and its base is a cesspit of mindless rage and spite and evil and the other is…not. But you can’t talk about that. Because if you do, you have to really talk about it. You have to look your audience in the eye and tell them the truth: The American right is fucking evil. Irredeemably evil. Unforgivably broken and sick and twisted and beyond all hope.

But this is America. We do not speak the truth about racist white men. We do not speak of their violence and corruption and perversion. We look away and blame “both sides” because when everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. That means there never have to be consequences for the racist white men we built this entire country to coddle. Consequences for them might make them angry, and that would be bad. Bad for who? Well, everyone, of course! But especially for the racist white men, so let’s just not do that…

This is how there could be a meeting of the global Nazi elite, and the entire Western media missed it. Because it’s not just an American problem, is it? We’ve been allowing racist white men to get away with their crimes for generations. It’s just particularly bad in the United States.

The legacy press is not working for us. It hasn’t been for a very long time. It works to shield racist white men from accountability, especially rich racist white men. The legacy press exists to protect the status quo, the machinery that enables the abuse and oppression of women and minorities and children at the hands of racist white men.

When this is over and Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo starts, the legacy press has to be investigated as well. They have been collaborators for far too long to ignore their role in the rise of American/global fascism. Time to take out the trash and start over.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

There are 153 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

In a surprise move that exactly nobody saw coming, the Department of Justice today said that it will abide by a judge’s temporary order not to take any steps to supply to or disperse funds Trump’s so-called “weaponization” fund that would pay-off Trump supporters who say they had been targeted by Biden’s DOJ. The judge’s order applies until June 12 when a formal hearing on the lawsuit challenging the fund is scheduled.

Money for the $1.8 billion cash-for-criminals fund was to be included in a reconciliation bill that would fund the ICE and Border Patrol parts of the Department of Homeland Security funding which has been held up by House and Senate Democrats who have demanded changes to the bill that would constrain the department’s immigration tactics.

Mainstream media reports are using phrases like “backing off” and “scrapping the fund” to describe the Trump administration’s moves today. This is called wishful thinking. The judge’s order puts only a temporary hold on Trump filling his Nazi feeding trough with billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money. Trump could seek to re-start the “weaponization” fund later with a new scam, attaching money for the fund to another reconciliation bill, or he could simply instruct the DOJ to do a mass settlement of lawsuits that are filed by Jan. 6 insurrectionists and use money from the Treasury belonging to taxpayers. The Trump DOJ has already settled a lawsuit by Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to charges he had lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Despite his guilty plea, Flynn claimed that he had been illegally targeted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI.

It didn’t seem to make any difference that the DOJ that prosecuted Flynn was run by Donald Trump at the time. Trump’s current DOJ, the one that was run by Pam Bondi and now by his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, paid Flynn $1.25 million despite the fact that he had pleaded guilty in federal court to the charges against him.

Hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants pleaded guilty to charges that they had breached the Capitol, stolen material, and assaulted police officers. Do you think their guilty pleas make any difference to Donald Trump? No. They’re just evidence that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were doing Trump’s bidding when they launched the assault on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Trump isn’t giving up. He said that he was funding his precious ballroom, which over the weekend he told Fox News was in fact a “monument to myself,” with private funds. Then he turned around and slipped a billion-dollar line item that would pay for his ballroom with taxpayer dollars into the same DHS reconciliation bill that would have paid for his “weaponization fund.”

Don’t watch the pea under the cups, folks. Watch the man running the three-card-monte game in the Oval Office of the White House. He’s been shoving public money in his pockets since Inauguration Day, and he’ll keep doing it until he leaves office. The only thing that will stop other scam reconciliation bills from reaching his desk is Democrats taking control of the House and the Senate in November.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

Donald Trump has said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon 74 times. I know that because the White House has a page with that title: 74 times that President Trump has made clear that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. He seems a little obsessed. At his cabinet meeting the other day, he said “the world will be in great danger” if Iran gets a nuke. He has never said why this would be true. Because they’re such bad guys? There are plenty of bad guys in the world, and some of them already have nukes.

Hello, Putin. Hello, Xi.

What’s his obsession really about, anyway? Trump wants to be remembered as the guy who built the ballroom, the guy who ruined the Kennedy Center, the guy who put his name on everything but street curbs in Washington D.C.

(Ooops, sorry. I may have just given him an idea.)

The one thing he doesn’t want to be remembered as is the guy who let the Ayatollah get a nuclear weapon. Or ten or twelve. He tried using the bully pulpit. He’s been yapping about Iran never having a nuke since 2011, according to his own website. You would think that if he was so adamant about it, he wouldn’t have cancelled Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. It was signed in 2016 and would have limited Iran’s enriched uranium to 3.6 percent for 15 years. That would have meant that Trump didn’t have to worry about Iran getting a nuke until 2031, and he would be out of office by then. Not his problem.

But he cancelled Obama’s deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018. The JCPOA, as it was known, was signed by the U.S. and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, plus Germany and the European Union. That sounds pretty good, right?

Big problem. That would mean Barrack Hussein Obama got the credit for Iran not having nukes. We couldn’t have that, could we? Plus, it was negotiated by Secretary Swiftboat himself, John Kerry. Can’t have those two commies responsible for the world being safe from Iran having nukes for 15 years, can we? Besides, Trump wouldn’t have had the issue to bellow about – OMG! Iran’s about to get a nuke!

He tried bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, which had come back online after Trump cancelled Obama’s deal in 2018. “Obliterated” was the line they came up with to describe what had been done to Iran’s nuclear capability after Trump’s 12-day bombing campaign, dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer,” of course, because Hegseth had put his Office of Guys Who Come Up With Macho Names on the job, and that’s what they came up with.

Then there were intelligence reports that, well, they didn’t really get all the enriched uranium, and the centrifuges somehow survived. So, Trump started a war, because, as he said just days before February 28, “They can’t have nuclear weapons. It’s very simple.”

Everything to Trump is “very simple.” Now, here we are three months later, and Trump is working on a “deal” with Iran that says something like, “Iran pledges not to develop a nuclear weapon,” or maybe not. Iran has insisted publicly that the deal doesn’t say that. Anyway, the key thing about Trump’s new deal with Iran is that they agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t an obsession of Donald Trump before, but now it is, because ooops, it wasn’t closed before Trump’s war. All his MAGAs are bellying up to the pumps out there and putting $75, $100, $125 in their pickups and they’re complaining about the price of gas, and Trump looked around and saw more than a thousand tankers parked on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, and suddenly he decided that maybe reopening oil trade in the Persian Gulf is more important than Iran getting nukes.

Or something like that. It’s so hard to keep up with what obsession he’s working on and what he says he’s going to do about it. Hegseth probably has an Office of Trump’s Latest Obsessions burrowed away on Basement Level 3 of the Pentagon trying to keep up.

Here’s what the problem is, or one of the problems, anyway. Trump has surrounded himself with such an insane gaggle of incompetent fools that there is nobody around the administration who remembers what the word “proliferation” means. It describes why countries want nuclear weapons in the first place. Let’s have a look at India and Pakistan, the latest entries in the so-called nuclear club. They don’t like each other. In fact, they really don’t like each other. So, because both countries were afraid the other would get nukes, they started working on their own nuclear programs, and what do you know, they both developed nuclear weapons! Why? Proliferation. As Trump likes to say, it’s simple: The other guy’s got nukes, so I’ve got to have nukes. It’s what enemies do.

In the Middle East, the big sworn enemies, the local Pakistan and India if you will, are Israel and Iran. Israel has nukes. They don’t have a sign in the Negev reading “We’ve got nukes,” but they do. Everyone knows it. So, Iran wants nukes. Proliferation. It’s simple.

The problem with getting nukes is, once you get them, you become the target of everyone else who’s got nukes. They don’t want you to use them, so they do some nuclear saber rattling. If you use your nukes on us, we’ll wipe you off the face of the earth. They used to call it MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, but they don’t even bother calling it that anymore.

Iran knows this. We may not like Iran, we may not like the idea of their “Islamic Republic” and the way they want so badly to spread the Muslim faith everywhere that they are willing to use terrorism to do it, but hey! There are other states with their own reason for using terror to spread whatever it is they want to spread.

Iran is just playing the proliferation game. Israel has nukes, so we want nukes. Does that mean if Iran gets nuclear weapons that they will use them against Israel? Well, India and Pakistan hate each other. They haven’t hit each other with nukes, because they know the price they’ll pay. Bye-bye India. Bye-bye Pakistan. No more ruling elites. No more Gulfstreams. No more shopping trips to Paris. No more condos in Monaco and London.

Human beings have this annoying habit of wanting to use violence, including starting wars, against people they don’t like while staying alive to enjoy whatever fruits that come with their violence and wars. But look at what Russia has done in Ukraine. They want the Donbas and the rest of the regions along Ukraine’s border with Russia, and what have they done? They’ve destroyed what they said they wanted. It’s a wasteland, Eastern Ukraine.

What sense does it make? Absolutely none. What sense did it make for Trump to go to war against Iran? None. That is clear by now. He hasn’t achieved a single goal. He hasn’t knocked out their nuclear program. He hasn’t stopped them from exporting their revolution through groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Despite the pounding they’ve both taken from Israel, they’re still alive. He hasn’t frightened the Iranian leadership into “unconditional surrender,” which he said was his goal back when he was babbling and Truth-Socialling his aims and dreams all night in the Before Days. That would be the Before They Closed the Strait of Hormuz Days.

Donald Trump isn’t going to get a “deal” with Iran that includes giving up their nuclear ambitions, if for no other reason than Iran doesn’t like being pushed around, and they don’t think Donald Trump has any business telling them that they can’t have nukes.

Look, if we really wanted Iran and all the other nasty countries we consider our enemies to not have weapons of mass destruction, we would be trying to ban them from developing their drone capability. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last four years, it’s that drones are weapons of mass destruction because they can be used in mass quantities, and they’re very, very deadly, and they’re cheap as hell.

Where is Iran’s drone manufacturing? Same place that its nuclear program is. Same place Ukraine’s and Russia’s drone factories are: Underground.

We’re rapidly reaching a point in history when waging war will become absurd, because technology has caused something extraordinary to happen. War has become cheap, and it can be carried out remotely. Nuclear war is already absurd. It’s too expensive in terms of losing everything from lives to cities to electrical grids to water systems – all the necessities of modern life.

It’s absurd for Trump to demand that Iran is never to have nukes. Iran is going to get nukes, and just like India and Pakistan having nukes as they face off across a border of permanent acrimony and hate, the world will go on. If Trump is looking for something to do in those few hours when he’s not obsessing about his ballroom and the Kennedy Center and his 250 dollar bill and hiding the bruises on his hands and bragging about passing genius-level dementia tests, he should call Hegseth over at the Pentagon and tell him to get off his ass and stop spending billions on aircraft carriers and fancy jets that even Iran can shoot down and start developing a helluva gigantic drone program. Everybody else is. Gotta be bigger and better and more expensive than every other macho dude in the neighborhood, right?

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

If you are looking up at your house and realizing your old shingles have seen better days, your very first thought is probably about the cost. Your second thought, however, is almost certainly about the chaos. No one wants their home to look like a construction zone for weeks on end, which is why homeowners always ask how long the process takes. When you hire a dependable roofing contractor  to handle the job, the timeline is often much faster than you might expect. Let us break down exactly what happens from the moment the crew arrives to the final cleanup.

The Factors That Change the Timeline

Before looking at the standard schedule, it is important to realize that no two houses are exactly the same. A simple ranch-style home is going to be a much faster job than a three-story Victorian with multiple peaks and valleys.

The biggest variables include:

• The size of your home:  More square footage simply means more material to move.
• The pitch of the roof:  Steep roofs require extra safety gear and slower movement.
• The weather:  Rain, high winds, or extreme heat will halt a crew instantly.
• The materials:  Standard asphalt shingles go down much faster than slate or cedar shakes.

Day One: Delivery and Preparation

The actual physical work usually starts a day or two before the hammers start swinging. A large truck will drop off bundles of shingles, underlayment, and flashing right in your driveway.

On the official start morning, the crew arrives early, usually around seven or eight o’clock. Their first task is protecting your property. They will do the following:

• Drape heavy tarps over your landscaping
• Move patio furniture out of the blast zone
• Position a giant dumpster near the roofline

This setup takes about an hour or two, but saves your plants and windows from stray debris.

The Messy Part: Tearing It All Down

Once everything is protected, the real noise begins. The crew uses specialized pitchforks and shovels to rip off your old shingles. They start from the peak and work their way down, tossing the old materials directly into the dumpster.

For a standard home, the tear-off process takes anywhere from three to six hours. If your roof has two layers of old shingles because a previous owner skipped a tear-off, this phase can take twice as long. During this time, your home will be incredibly loud, so it is a great day to take the dogs to the park or work from a local coffee shop.

Inspecting and Preparing the Deck

With the old shingles gone, your roof is bare. The crew will inspect the wooden plywood boards underneath, which are known as the decking. If they find soft spots, water damage, or rotted wood, they have to replace those sections before moving forward.

If your deck is in great shape, they immediately start laying down the new foundation. They install an ice and water shield along the edges, followed by a breathable underlayment across the entire surface. This creates a waterproof barrier that keeps your home safe even if a shingle blows off down the road. This phase usually wraps up by the end of the first afternoon.

Installing the New Materials

This is where you finally get to see your investment come together. The crew starts nailing down the new shingles, working in precise, overlapping rows from the bottom up. They will also install new flashing around your chimney, vents, and valleys to ensure water cannot sneak into the seams.

On a standard, average-sized home, a skilled crew can finish laying the shingles in a single day. If you have a massive home or complex architectural details, the installation might spill over into day two or day three.

The Final Cleanup and Inspection

Professionals leave your yard looking better than they found it. Once the last ridge cap is nailed down, the crew shifts into cleanup mode. They will pick up large scraps, sweep your gutters, and use massive magnetic rollers across your lawn and driveway to catch every single stray nail.

The site supervisor will then walk the property with you to ensure you are happy with the work. Once the dumpster is hauled away, your life goes right back to normal.

Final Word

At the end of the day, most standard roof replacements take just one to two days of actual manual labor. Choosing a licensed and experienced roofing contractor ensures the project stays on track and your home remains protected through every single step.

Photo: Ryan Stephens via Pexels

CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF DCREPORT’S NONPROFIT MISSION

The post How Long a Roof Replacement Actually Takes From Start to Finish appeared first on DCReport.org.

We have had very good and productive conversations.

What do you figure? Sounds like something the head of the English department at a small liberal arts college in Maine or Ohio might say after a long staff meeting to discuss adding a book to the department’s required reading list.

Nope. It’s Donald Trump making one of his hundreds of nonsensical statements about the war on Iran he started. We have had very, very strong talks, Trump said three weeks into the war. They are begging us to make a deal.

By April 6, he said, They have made a proposal, and it’s a significant proposal. The very next day, Trump had yet another spin on the situation: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

All this was after he told the world he wouldn’t accept anything less than “unconditional surrender.” We haven’t been involved in a war since 1945 that ended in unconditional surrender. And man, we’ve started us some wars.

Now we’re told that today Trump held a two-hour meeting with his “national security team” in the Situation Room at the White House to discuss “a potential agreement with Iran.” Nobody knows what happened at the meeting, but he was able to make it through two hours! Wow! They must have had both his hands hooked up to an IV loaded with liquid Adderall.

A week ago, we learned that all that bombing by Israel and the U.S. failed to put even a small dent in Iran’s military preparedness. For all Trump’s talk of Iran’s navy being “at the bottom of the sea,” they still have something like 200 small attack boats capable of firing anti-ship missiles and laying mines. Seventy percent of Iran’s missiles and drones are still online. Only a small number of the missile sites Iran maintains along its 600 miles of coast on the Persian Gulf were destroyed, and it is almost certain that some of those have been rebuilt.

Big talk. That is the one thing Donald Trump has been good at. But all his big talk through its ups and downs and peace is at hand and we’re going to bomb them back to the stone age has brought us to the point where some sort of peace deal needs to be made so Iran will allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen. We now have an actual deadline: July 9. Oil analysts at Brookings are predicting that on that date, all international emergency oil reserves will have run out and oil prices may skyrocket to $150 a barrel or above. Panic has set in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that’s what all the hurry-up is about.

The last thing in the world that big-talker Donald Trump wants is to look weak. But today, the New York Times published what might be called a short-list of what Iran and Trump’s two real estate hucksters, Witkoff and Kushner, have been talking about. We now have at least a fuzzy picture of what the end of Trump’s war is going to look like.

Witkoff and Kushner have managed to get Iran to agree that things should go back to the way they were the day before Trump started bombing the shit out of them. Wow! What an incredible accomplishment! The Strait of Hormuz – which was not part of our vocabulary previous to February 28 – will be reopened. There will be a new 60-day pause in hostilities. We’ve already been in a kind of rolling pause in hostilities, but let’s forget that for the moment and celebrate our new pause in hostilities, okay? And Iran will “pledge” to never develop a nuclear bomb. Or Trump will accept some kind of “deal” that Iran will agree to drop its nuclear ambitions for 20 years. Or all of Iran’s “nuclear dust” will be shipped out of the country. Something like that, anyway.

That’s what the White House says. Iran, however, is reading from a different “agreement.” They aren’t promising that the Strait will reopen without tolls; in fact, they say they’re talking to Oman about jointly controlling the Strait. They aren’t promising an end to their nuclear program. They aren’t giving up their enriched uranium.

When it comes to the nuke part, the “framework” gets really, really fuzzy. Trump has a red line, that the deal he makes won’t look anything like Obama’s nuclear deal, when Iran agreed to reduce its enriched uranium to 3 percent from 60 percent for 15 years in return for the U.S. releasing $1.7 billion of Iran’s own money that was being held in New York and Europe by sanctions.

So, why is the number $300 billion in the “framework?” Well, because Iran is demanding money to help it rebuild after Trump’s bombing, and Gulf states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are saying they’ll create some kind of “investment fund” that the U.S. will not contribute to but will help “manage” in some non-specified manner. Except it has leaked out that Witkoff and Kushner proposed that part of the “rebuilding” of Iran will involve real estate deals in Tehran they will participate in. But Donald Trump won’t be giving any money to the Ayatollah. Somebody else will.

Of course, if it’s a Trump “deal,” there will be a potential profit for himself and his grubby condo pals.

In the meantime, the U.S. and Iran have been trading drone and missile strikes along the Strait of Hormuz close to Bandar Abbas, because apparently, you can’t have a ceasefire without a little firing going on – not in the world Donald Trump lives in anyway.

The phrase turning over in the grave has been running through my mind a lot recently. I haven’t even attempted a list of former American political and military leaders who have been spinning in their graves as their ghosts watch this insane clown “president” attempt to manage a war that none of them would have even contemplated against the country of Iran.

The lies coming out of the Pentagon say that we have spent about $29 billion on the war against Iran. It’s amazing that the E-Ring of the Pentagon hasn’t collapsed into the Potomac River from the weight of the bullshit being slung around by Pete “Pushups and Tattoos R Us” Hegseth.

And on this day, when Trump finally got around to having a meeting with his “national security team” to discuss how to bring this disaster to a close, the number that’s being tossed around that will get Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and allow the world to go back to importing 20 percent of its oil from the Gulf is $300 f-ing billion.

Through all this, there has been no talk at all from the Trump administration about how to ensure that this global economic disaster caused by a pause in the world’s oil supply never happens again. Europe is talking. Countries in the European Union get almost 50 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. China is talking. Thirty-five percent of their electricity comes from renewable energy sources. Countries all over the world are working to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for all kinds of reasons – they don’t want to depend on foreign sources such as oil producing nations for oil and gas, they want cleaner air, they want their kids and grandkids to grow up in a world where it’s not 100 degrees day after day, year after year.

But Trump and his posse of MAGA geniuses? They want the Strait of Hormuz reopened so they won’t get killed in the midterms by $5 and $6 gas and McDonald’s burgers you’ll have to take out a loan to buy. That’s their big plan. Get the oil flowing again, dudes! That’s the ticket!

Well, at least a judge has ordered Trump’s name to come off the Kennedy Center. There’s that. Trump wants his name on everything. Maybe Iran will agree to rename the Strait after him as a sop to his Mount Everest size ego. How does “The Strait of Just Resting His Eyes” sound?

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

It’s beginning to add up, isn’t it? Let’s take Trump’s war on Iran: It doesn’t matter what he does, it doesn’t matter how he spins it, it doesn’t matter what happens next, it doesn’t matter what the eventual negotiated terms are, he has lost the war that he, and no one else, started. You can see him squirm in real time. Today at the meeting of his cabinet – more about this below – when he was asked where his negotiations with Iran stood, he said either Iran “gives us what we want or we’ll finish them off.”

He’s been making that threat almost daily since the beginning of March. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Iran still has its near-weapons grade uranium. Reports this week say that Iran maintains 70 percent of its missile stocks, 70 percent of its launchers, 70 percent of its drone capability, including manufacturing, and 70 percent of the missile sites along the Persian Gulf that overlook shipping lanes. The Pentagon has been forced to admit that we don’t have 70 percent of anything, including cruise missiles and anti-missile Patriot batteries.

Trump has had 11 cabinet meetings since taking office last year. You’ve seen the reports – they are usually praise fests that run two to three hours, with each cabinet member in turn hailing Trump’s greatness as they condemn his enemies such as presidents Biden and Obama. Today’s cabinet meeting was supposed to take place at Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Trump switched it at the last minute to the White House pleading “bad weather.” The meeting lasted all of one hour.

You know what I think? He couldn’t manage the travel. He spent the whole Memorial Day weekend in the White House. On Tuesday, Trump spent several hours at Walter Reed Medical Center for what was advertised as his “regular” medical checkup. It’s his third yearly checkup in 13 months. He’s a wreck. He falls asleep moments after he sits down, and it doesn’t matter where he is, or who is present. His chin hits his chest in the Oval Office with cabinet members, sports teams, school children, senators and members of the House and the entire White House press pool in attendance, cameras on. On Monday, he fell asleep at Arlington National Cemetery during the solemn ceremony to mark Memorial Day. He brags constantly about “acing” a test that measures cognitive health with simple questions such as identifying animals and drawing a clock. The test doesn’t measure intelligence. It measures how close you are to dementia. Doctors say that when a cognitive test is given repeatedly, it is being used to monitor dementia.

He looks like hell. His mouth droops. His makeup is badly misapplied. His hands are spackled with pancake makeup to conceal injection sites, sometimes both at once. On Monday, as he walked across the plaza at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he repeatedly slapped the side of his thigh with an open hand, as if he couldn’t control himself. When he stood at attention for the ceremony, he couldn’t keep still, his body rocking back and forth, his shoulders moving side to side.

Now he’s bragging about defeating members of his own Republican Party in primaries he turned into loyalty tests. He ran someone against Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana because Cassidy voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial. He supported serial adulterer and financial corruption wizard Ken Paxton against Senator John Cornyn in Texas…for what reason? Cornyn didn’t do anything that could be seen as disloyal. Trump just wanted to play dominance and submission in the Texas sandbox.

Trump’s primary victories were pure exercises of MAGA control. The far-right super minions of his base obediently turned out to punish whomever Trump pointed a finger at. Trump’s Republican primaries were like those hunting ranches where rich guys show up to shoot pheasants that are released from cages right in front of them. Look! A disloyal Senator! Shoot him!

Right in the middle of the highest inflation in years, skyrocketing gas prices, looming midterm elections that are getting further out of his control by the minute, what is Trump pushing? His absurd ballroom and his cash-for-criminals “weaponization” fund that will channel money to Jan. 6 insurrectionists and anyone whose pockets Trump wants to fill with payoffs. Neither project has popular support among voters, with both polling underwater, as Trump’s own poll numbers continue to fall.

We have reached the point where the question needs to be asked, what the hell is going on? Trump has the political instincts of a rattlesnake. When he strikes, he almost never misses. But his misses are outnumbering the deadly bites at this point. Even his victories against sitting senators and Representative Massie of Kentucky may turn out to be hollow. The Republican hold on the House is razor thin, and with Tom Tillis of North Carolina already off the reservation and Susan Collins behind in her reelection in Maine and Murkowski in Alaska an independent wild card, even the Republican hold on the Senate is in jeopardy.

Did Trump just figure he could snap his fingers and make things like ripping off the Treasury to the tune of a billion dollars for his ballroom that he had promised won’t cost taxpayers “a penny” would happen automatically? He’s diving off the high board into a shallow pool on both, with his chances of winning votes in Congress disappearing at the same rate his poll numbers are crashing.

The real question right now is how bad is the collapse of his physical and mental health? With no one in the White House and no one in Congress who is willing to risk telling him no about anything, how far down will his spiral go?

You know who is watching all this in real time: The Iranian leadership, whoever they are. Do you think they are going to make even minor concessions to Trump as they watch the same decline that we see?

Watch the Strait of Hormuz. That’s where to find the answers to questions on everyone’s minds, if not on their lips.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription