Trump’s war with Iran is on again, and he is threatening war crimes and insane plans to take control the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is frankly making no sense. He’s obviously frustrated that his war has become a total fuck up, and he has no idea what to do about it. He also doesn’t have any intelligent, experienced advisers–at least none who have the guts to oppose him.
A group of people stands in shallow water as a cargo ship appears anchored in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, June 30, 2026. Amirhosein Khorgooi, ISNA via AP
The US military said it had carried out a fresh wave of strikes on Wednesday, hours after carrying out a fourth night of attacks on Iran
Iran has threatened to block more energy routes, after President Donald Trump reinstated the US blockade of Iranian shipping
Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait came under attack again on Wednesday after Iran vowed to continue retaliation on US military assets, leaving an interim ceasefire in tatters
Trump renewed his threat to hit Iranian power plants and bridges if Tehran does not return to negotiations to end the war started by US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28
President Trump held a Situation Room meeting Tuesday to discuss a massive offensive in Iran that will be wider in scope than the current strikes around the Strait of Hormuz, three sources with knowledge said.
Why it matters: Trump appears willing to escalate the war to cause enough damage that the Iranian regime will open the Strait of Hormuz and accept Trump’s nuclear demands.
Driving the news: Trump convened the meeting as the U.S. military conducted strikes in the Strait of Hormuz area and along the southern coast of Iran for the fourth day in a row.
Most of the targets were air defense and radar systems, anti-ship missile positions and drone launch sites.
U.S. officials said the aim of the strikes was to significantly degrade Iran’s ability to conduct attacks against ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran retaliated by continuing to launch missiles and drones at U.S. bases in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain.
On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports went into effect.
The commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, said in a statement that over the last week Iran “has intentionally targeted civilians across the region by attacking seven commercial ships resulting in nearly a dozen civilian crew members killed, missing, or injured.”
Despite the attacks, the U.S. military managed to coordinate the transit of 300 ships through the strait over the past week, U.S. officials said.
Inside the room: Trump was joined in the Situation Room by his top national security team, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House envoy Steve Witkoff and other senior officials, the sources said.
The sources said the meeting focused on new plans for devastating strikes on strategic targets in Iran, in addition to the strikes against Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s behavior over the last couple of days has been out of control. Whether it’s dementia or not, he doesn’t seem to have any filters left. He just says whatever comes into his moth-eaten brain.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to strike Iran’s bridges and power plants next week if the country does not return to talks.
The comments, made in a Fox News interview, aired as the two countries exchanged fire for the fourth day in a row.
A view of a billboard depicting US president Donald Trump in Tehran, Iran. Anadolu, Getty Images
Trump earlier reversed a threat of a 20% fee on all Strait of Hormuz cargo shipping but resumed blockading Iranian ports.
“Next week it gets really bad for them,” Trump said. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
UN human rights chief Volker Türk responded at the time by saying: “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime.”
The 1949 Geneva Conventions on humanitarian conduct in war prohibit attacks on sites considered essential for civilians.
“I’ll save the energy targets for last, but ultimately we’ll hit energy targets,” Trump said in an interview on Special Report with Bret Baier that aired on Tuesday night.
He said US negotiators had conveyed to their Iranian counterparts on Tuesday evening that they “better make a deal, or you’re not going to have anything left”.
The escalation in rhetoric comes afterTrump said a 20% toll he had threatened to impose in the Strait of Hormuz would be replaced by “massive” trade and investment deals with Gulf states.
Do these countries know about these huge investments?
As the U.S. war with Iran resumes, there is little sign that diplomacy can stop it.
Efforts by Arab, Pakistani and other mediators to revive negotiations or restore a ceasefire have shown no public signs of progress, and the overall feeling in the Middle East and beyond is that the fighting will simply continue for now, according to two analysts and a person familiar with the situation.
The White House is “not really sure where this is headed,” said a former U.S. official in touch with Trump administration staffers, who, like others quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. “This could go on for some time. There’s no trust between Iran and the U.S., and that’s kind of the basis for any kind of diplomacy.”
The renewed fighting includes a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian shipping and Tehran launching multiple attacks on U.S. allies.
President Donald Trump has made clear Tehran must relinquish control of the vital energy shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. But Iran has weathered previous assaults and still managed to threaten oil shipping with drones and missiles, and it’s not clear how this latest campaign would eliminate that threat.
“I think the president will try to destroy Iran’s capabilities threatening the strait,” said Fred Fleitz, Trump’s former National Security Council chief of staff and vice chair of the American First Policy Institute’s American Security. “I think that we will have to take a so-called mowing the grass strategy, where the U.S. and Israel will respond militarily to provocations, then maybe we simply have to wait until the Iranian people take their country back.”
Trump did offer a concession of sorts on Tuesday when he reversed himself and said the U.S. would not impose a 20 percent fee on countries shipping goods through the strait. Instead, he said the Navy would assist ships through the waterway in exchange for investment deals with the United States.
“Iran made a deal, and they broke it” said White House spokesperson Olivia Wales. “While President Trump’s preference is always peace and diplomacy, the deal is performance-based, and Iran’s actions constitute failure to live up to their commitments.”
The latest about-face is a hallmark of the president’s decision-making process and the minute-by-minute governing policy he favors.
Trump has no authority to impose fees on shipping. But these journalists won’t just say that. And his “minute-by-minute governing policy” is hardly a “policy.” He has no ability rein in any of his impulses control what he says in public.
On the 136th day of his war against Iran, President Trump came up with a new plan. He would impose tolls on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for protecting them from Iranian forces.
But that was then. On Day 137, he had another new plan. No tolls after all.
Mr. Trump’s 180-degree reversal on Tuesday in the face of protests from his Arab allies who were not so excited about paying tolls reflected how adrift he seems to be in prosecuting his war against Iran. What was supposed to be a clean four-to-six-week operation is now in its messy 20th week. Improvisation and impulse are not working.
A banner in Tehran last week threatening President Trump. Credit…Arash Khamooshi, Polaris for The New York Times
A president who has made flexing his power on the world stage a hallmark of his second term has found in Iran an opponent that so far will not bend to his will and a geopolitical conflict that cannot be won through nasty social media posts or tariff threats. The memorandum of understanding that he brokered with Tehran last month to halt the fighting turns out to have been a memorandum of misunderstanding, and Mr. Trump now seems to have neither a clear military nor diplomatic strategy.
“He’s encountered a country that is not willing to play by his set of rules, which is you bend and kiss the ring and tell him how great he is and try to get whatever concession he’s willing to give,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who has advised presidents and secretaries of state on the Middle East.
Mr. Trump’s no-end-in-sight venture in the Middle East has become a fresh lesson in why the region has been a sinkhole for presidential ambition for generations. The instruments of power that help advance U.S. interests elsewhere around the globe do not necessarily work there, as many of Mr. Trump’s predecessors have discovered.
It has been especially frustrating for Mr. Trump, who has reveled in getting his way since returning to office last year and even boasted that he might be the most powerful man in world history. But while he has successfully pressured NATO allies into increasing military spending, extracted concessions from trading partners and essentially took over Venezuela with a one-night surgical commando raid, it is not clear that he can get his way in the Persian desert.
A bit more:
John Hannah, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, in the past has supported the limited use of military force to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. But he said that by going for “a massive decapitation strike,” Mr. Trump had clearly underestimated the theocratic power structure that took power in the 1979 Iranian revolution and overestimated American capacity to topple it.
“In retrospect, this was clearly a war based on fatally flawed assumptions,” Mr. Hannah said, “none more damaging than the president’s apparent conviction that Iran’s revolutionary regime was a flimsy house of cards ready to collapse in a hail of American airstrikes and bellicose Truth Social posts.”
“Compounding the error,” he added, “there was no rigorous national security apparatus around the president prepared to speak truth to power and subject his wrongheaded assumptions to systematic questioning based on the knowledge and experience of real foreign policy, defense and intelligence professionals.” [….]
Mr. Trump seems uncertain how to proceed. He has turned back to the use of military force and ordered the resumption of a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. He has threatened to take “a nice, big fat shot” at Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified site near one of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. But with popular opinion against the war, he has given little indication that he is willing to resume the sort of full-fledged bombardment that marked the beginning of the war.
At the same time, he has suggested there will be further negotiations but has not articulated how talks that failed before could succeed now. In fact, he has expressed deep skepticism that they could, although of course that might simply be a way of lowering expectations. Instead, Mr. Trump seems to think that he can outlast the Iranians because their economy is in dire shape while the Iranians seem to think that they can outlast him because of the politics of gas prices heading into midterm elections at home.
We are in deep trouble. Remember we don’t have that many weapons left after Trump and Hegseth’s previous bombing raids.
One more on Iran from Paul Krugman at his Substack (This is a transcript of a podcast): The Forever War Gets Scary.
The war with Iran has just reached a very scary phase, and I’m not talking about the bombs and the drones….
If you’re following the news, you know that the sort-of ceasefire with Iran has been called off. Trump has reinstated the blockade. The Iranians are back to hitting things with their drones and missiles.
The U.S. position has been wildly erratic. First, Trump said he was going to impose a 20% toll on all shipping, basically turning the Strait of Hormuz into a U.S. toll booth, which would have been wildly illegal and irresponsible, aside from being impossible. Now he says, no, he’s going to demand that countries invest in the United States, which is also actually wildly illegal. But in any case, it’s never going to happen.
Paul Krugman
And yet, this is extremely scary. The reason to be afraid is not that I think the war is going to come to America. It’s not even that I think the United States is going to seriously try to occupy Iran. We don’t have the troops. We don’t have the missiles. Trump depleted a large share of our weaponry in the course of his failed war so far. So this is likely going to be punitive strikes, maybe some war crimes along the way, but that’s all.
But what is really frightening here is that it does appear as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like victory. If we go back just a few days ago, it appeared that what was going to happen was that Trump was going to de facto pull out, give up on the project, take advantage of falling oil prices because the strait was sort of kind of open — and try to spin the story about this was truly, this was actually an American victory and the economy is great and look at the stock market.
And, you know, just it was a little bit — more than a little bit —stupid and doomed. It was also kind of amazing because a serious attempt to end the conflict would have required facing up to reality, saying, OK, this war didn’t go well, but America remains great. Sorry about that.
But that was apparently not something Trump emotionally could bring himself to do. He just cannot admit that this venture failed. He can never admit that anything failed. We’re going to be searching for the saboteurs of the reflecting pool for the remainder of his presidency.
But what is really frightening here is that it does appear as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like victory. If we go back just a few days ago, it appeared that what was going to happen was that Trump was going to de facto pull out, give upon the project, take advantage of falling oil prices because the strait was sort of kind of open — and try to spin the story about this was truly, this was actually an American victory and the economy is great and look at the stock market.
Please read the rest. The point is that now Trump is likely to double down on his “election fraud” story. He’s announced an address to the nation tomorrow night, supposedly about election fraud in 2020, specifically in Georgia. Back to Krugman:
I don’t know how this is going to play out. But we are really now at the point where it’s pretty clear that Trump and the people around him have given up on actually winning the election. They’ve decided instead that somecombination of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and possibly massive illegality is their way forward.
And don’t say they wouldn’t do that. That has been famous last words every step of the way. The proposition that there were some things that even Trump and company would not do has been the best way to be wrong about everything, every step of the Trump administration.
So in a peculiar way, the fact that Trump is back to bombing Iran is really bad news, not because of the bombs. Yes, it’s terrible and all that, But not because I have any real fear that America is going to be at risk from a foreign power, but because I think it signals an enormous risk to us from our own president, our own government.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Now to the war within–between Trump’s ICE shock troops and the American people.
BIDDEFORD, Maine (AP) — Trump administration officials told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to suspend most vehicle stops after two deadly shootings within a week, people familiar with the decision said Tuesday.
The policy change came after an ICE officer shot and killed a Colombian driver Monday in Maine and a week after one shot and killed a motorist in Houston, renewing criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics that were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.
In Florida on Tuesday, a third man in roughly a week died during an encounter with immigration officers. This time, a 28-year-old man was killed after he was hit by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.
The suspension of vehicle stops allows room for exceptions when executing a criminal warrant or working with partner agencies, according to a person who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive law enforcement operations. Matthew Felling, a spokesperson for Maine Sen. Angus King, said the senator’s office was also told by the Department of Homeland Security that ICE was suspending stops.
President Trump on Wednesday said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should continue utilizing traffic stops, calling the tactic one of the agency’s “most important and effective” enforcement tools.
“The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, praising the agency’s efforts to enforce his deportation agenda and taking a swipe at the previous administration’s border policies.
“CRIME IS WAY DOWN IN AMERICA, in many cases with numbers that haven’t been seen in decades,” he said, later adding that “we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
“The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job,” Trump said.
So apparently, the murders will continue, never mind that ICE has no legal authority to make traffic stops. They aren’t police.
Today the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a confirmation hearing on Todd Blanche’s appointment to be Attorney General. Here’s what’s happening so far:
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche defended his tumultuous record as the temporary head of the Justice Department on Wednesday as he faced bipartisan scrutiny of his bid to become the nation’s Senate-confirmed chief law enforcement officer.
Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer tapped last year to serve as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, has held the department’s top job on an interim basis since April, when the president fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi.
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche takes his seat to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Evelyn Hockstein Reuters
In that time, he has accelerated investigations of the president’s political rivals; defended and then abandoned a controversial plan to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund to pay those who claim they were targeted by political prosecutions; and pushed forward with probes aimed at finding evidence to support Trump’s long-held, baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Though Blanche’s tenure has drawn bipartisan pushback at times and prompted even some Republican senators to question whether they will vote in support of his nomination, he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that his ultimate goal is to make America safer.
“I am here today to earn your trust once more,” Blanche said at the top of his confirmation hearing. He added: “In recent years, Americans watched as the Justice Department turned against many of you and a former president, and it damaged the public’s faith in justice. We are fixing that.”
Democrats on the committee, who are unified in their plans to reject Blanche’s nomination, signaled that trust has beenirrevocably broken during Blanche’s months at the Justice Department’s helm.
Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), the committee’s ranking Democrat, lambasted Blanche as a “yes-man” who has overseen a hollowing-out of department personnel and never stopped viewing his job as protecting Trump.
“This nation deserves an attorney general who loves the Constitution more than he loves any single president. An attorney general who is focused on keeping Americans safe and combating corruption — not satisfying the president’s personal grievances and filling his bank accounts,” Durbin said.
Blanche also committed a little oopsie:
Blanche, himself, briefly stumbled when describing his relationship to Trump and whether he considers the president a friend.
“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said, before quickly correcting his statement. “Was his lawyer.”
Todd Blanche fended off questions about his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files at his confirmation hearing Wednesday morning, telling members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that “when it comes to victims of his horrible man, we will never, never not talk to victims.”
But pressed by the top Judiciary Committee Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, to meet with 10 victims present in the hearing room, Blanche suggested he is personally prohibited from meeting directly with them and instead offered to have them meet with one of his deputies.
Durbin replied: “I think you ought to be in the room because you ought to hear this. You have a singular responsibility for these files.”
Earlier in the hearing, Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) handed Blanche an opportunity to defend his work overseeing the disclosure of the files. Blanche told the committee that “if we learn today, if we learn next week, if we learn next month that there’s an individual that we can investigate, indict and prosecute out of the Epstein files, you better believe it we will.”
I’ll believe that when I see it.
That’s it for me today. What stories grabbed your attention today?
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BREAKING:BIDDEFORD, Maine (AP) – Homeland Security secretary said man killed by ICE in Maine was not the target of warrant, Maine Sen. Angus King says.
Apparently the conservative DC Reporter is claiming that during Trump's Thursday night speech he's going to claim election fraud in Georgia, and assert that both Senators Ossoff and Warnock are illegitimate.This announcement might even come before that.🤷♀️www.rawstory.com/trump-georgi…
This is footage of ICE handcuffing a 26 year old father after murdering him in broad daylight. We cannot look away. Abolish ICE. Abolish qualified immunity. Hold these murderous thugs accountable.
“Mitch McConnell isn’t messing around in his new leadership role.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
We’ve been playing Where’s Mitch for about a month now, when Republican Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly of an Aortic Dissection. The Republican Senate Majority is already a close call without the current situation, and polls show a good possibility of a switch to Democratic Leadership, given the chaos of this Trump Term. Given the headlines and the accompanying stories, I think we can safely say that whatever respect Graham may have had, he sacrificed it to serve Orange Caligula.
Here’s the story that grabbed me first, today. This is an Op Ed at Public Notice from Tom Schaller. “Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism. From Gingrich to Trump, Graham was a fixture as the GOP became increasingly malignant.” Sounds right to me.
The sudden death this weekend of Lindsey Graham at age 71 — young, by today’s gerontocratic standards — is a personal parable for the changes within the conservative movement and modern Republican Party during Graham’s political career.
Indeed, few national elected officials so perfectly bridge the rapid rise of the Newt Gingrich-led GOP to the steady gutting of American conservatism by Donald Trump over the past decade.
Graham is not the sole member of that bridge generation; the career of fellow Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, for example, spans back further, to the days when Barry Goldwater remained conservatism’s intellectual beacon. But Graham perfectly embodies the post-1990s morphing of conservatism into the malignant force that, today, animates Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that every great cause “begins as a movement, becomes as business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
this clip is proof beyond any doubt that Lindsey Graham stands for nothing and only cares about staying in good standing with the Trump cult
The analysis is a long, winding road of the shifting malignancy that became Senator Lindsey Graham. A few examples stood out to me. As we all know and remember, Graham never met a military excursion he didn’t support. Schaller’s conclusion, however, makes all the prior evidence add up completely.
Lindsey Graham died a coward. His three-decade career in national politics should be remembered for more than his shameless, pusillanimous capitulations — but not, unfortunately, for some noble pursuit or purpose he used his chameleon-like political skills to secure. He should instead be remembered for using his power to bow and scrape, to change his political colors, largely if not solely in service to himself.
Conservative figures like the deathly-ill Mitch McConnell or Chief Justice John Roberts have been described as destroyers and “gravediggers” of American democracy. But at least they have wielded their shovels to bury America’s constitutional traditions and safeguards in pursuit of their own pinched and petty political philosophies.
Lindsey Graham, American chameleon, did nothing of the sort. He cowered and capitulated for three decades in Congress merely to be at the center of power. From 1994 revolutionary to 2026 poltroon, he embodies the movement-to-business-to-racket transformation of modern conservatism. He lived for nothing and died the same way.
May he rest in pusillanimity.
That’s pretty much the consensus from all sorts of media contributors. Of course, we do have the major trad media that’s doing its best to make the proverbial sow’s ear into a purse. Take CBS, for example, Puleeze. “Breaking down Lindsey Graham’s key accomplishments. Tributes are pouring in for longtime South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died Saturday at 71 from an aortic dissection, according to the medical examiner’s preliminary findings. CBS News‘ Fin Gomez breaks down some of his key accomplishments.” Do not watch the messiness they put on air with a full stomach. I’m not sure being a leader on ‘stronger, more muscular’ on military and diplomatic fronts is a positive thing.
The Washington Post, another legacy media outlet, has this headline today. “Graham’s journey with Trump embodies how the Republican Party has changed.” He was definitely a follower of whatever the current craze was, that’s for sure. Dan Merica wrote this analysis.
Lindsey Graham was not always a fan of Donald Trump.
That shift — from outspoken critic to unyielding confidant — exemplifies how Trump has transformed the Republican Party so completely in his own image, turning one-time skeptics into true believers while exiling those who refused to bend to his will.
Consider this: Graham went from calling Trump a “jackass” who would cost the party the presidency in 2016 to saying Trump was “not far behind God” a decade later.
Graham and Trump’s relationship began, in earnest, during the Republicans’ 2016 presidential primary, decades after Graham entered Congress as part of the Republican revolution of 1994. Graham’s campaign was short-lived; he entered the race in June 2015 and ended it six months later without fanfare. Two weeks after Graham’s announcement, however, Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower and, well, never exited.
Graham was one of Trump’s harshest critics during his brief campaign, highlighted by the then-GOP frontrunnergiving out the senator’s cell phone number at an event and Graham later calling Trump a “jackass.” Trump routinely mocked Graham’s low standing in the polls and called him “one of the dumbest human beings I have ever seen.” And Graham vented about the way Trump spoke about Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona).
After exiting in December 2015, Graham first endorsed former Florida governor Jeb Bush, then got behind Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” Graham wrote on Twitter in May 2016 when Cruz dropped out. “And we will deserve it.”
Graham didn’t even vote for Trump in 2016, deciding instead to stand on the platform of the proverbial Trump train and vote for independent EvanMcMullin.
What a difference a decade makes.
I believe that Graham morphed quicker than that. He went from the old McCain corner of voice of reason to the voice of treason pretty quickly. He was the most overt opportunist I think I’ve ever witnessed. The only thing he was consistent on was war mongering. He never heeded the warnings from Lincoln or Eisenhower about the threat of the military-industrial complex.
Politico now reports that Trump wants his seat to go to his sister. “McMaster, Trump look to Graham’s sister for Senate. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to announce the interim replacement later Monday.”
President Donald Trump said Monday he wants South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to appoint Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to serve the remainder of the late senator’s term.
One Republican familiar with McMaster’s plans said the governor intends to appoint Nordone to serve in the Senate for the rest of the year. This person was granted anonymity to discuss the decision.
McMaster is expected to announce his decision about who will replace Graham during a press conference later Monday afternoon.
“I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina,” Trump said in a post on social media. “This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!”
Trump’s word carries significant weight in deeply conservative South Carolina, and his preference for a caretaker appointment triggers a wide-open primary to take Graham’s place as the Republican nominee for Senate.
The Republican Party has now made me unable to stomach voting for their women. The story behind the two of them is endearing. This story is from Yahoo! News. “Inside the family life of Lindsey Graham, the senator who helped raise his little sister. Graham, who died Saturday at 71, became his sister Darline’s legal guardian after their parents died 15 months apart. He never married, and called her the closest person in his life.” Jack Brewster has the story. It does include a few comments about a gay man and his commitment to undermining his own identity. Again, opportunism seems to rule his decisions.
Lindsey Graham was one of the rare U.S. senators who never married and had no children. But the South Carolina Republican, who died Saturday at 71 after a brief and sudden illness, did not consider himself a man without a family.
“I’ve never married. I guess I attribute that to timing, too,” Graham wrote in his 2015 memoir. “The opportunity never presented itself at the right time, or I never found time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough not to have time for me. I haven’t been lucky that way. But I have a family.”
That family was, above all, his younger sister, Darline Graham Nordone.
I tend to fall more in line with what Jeer Heet offers in his Graham Obit at The Nation today. “Lindsey Graham Chose Evil. Conspiracy theorists liked to say that Graham’s Trump sycophancy was a result of blackmail. But the truth is worse: He stuck with Trump to keep the US war machine going.” I think he will be mostly remembered for his war mongering and his complete reservation on Trump.
Although Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly on Saturday at 71, was one of the most odious figures in American public life, he does deserve a partial defense from a strangely pervasive calumny directed against him by liberal critics. In the last decade of his life, Graham underwent a dramatic political transformation. In 2015 and early 2016, Graham became a no-holds-barred foe of Donald Trump, whom he lambasted as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who “represents the worst in America.” But Graham started to warm to Trump once the insurgent candidate won the Republican primary on May 4, 2016. This process accelerated after Trump was elected president in November, when Graham became, against stiff competition, the president’s most obsequious lackey.
Graham’s metamorphosis was all the more startling because his earlier disdain for Trump sprang logically from his political history. Prior to 2016, Graham was best known as the ultra-hawkish ally of fellow war-happy senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman (their noxious nickname for themselves was the “Three Amigos”), which made him a natural opponent of candidate Trump’s isolationist foreign policy. Further, Graham had a history of bipartisanship, working with Democrats on immigration reform and campaign finance and casting the sole Republican vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nominations. This gave Graham a profile, on domestic matters at least, more mainstream than Trump’s burn-it-down populism.
What explains Graham’s quick change of political identity? One theory popular among Resistance liberals and Never Trump conservatives was that the senator, who was widely rumored to be a closeted gay man, had been blackmailed by Trump, perhaps with kompromat provided by Vladimir Putin. In 2019, for instance MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle dropped a heavy-breathing hint along this line by suggesting that Trump knows “something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”
The blackmail theory was never grounded in evidence and suffered the further disadvantage of making Graham seem like a victim rather than someone making affirmative choices about his life. The actual story of Graham’s ideological conversion is much worse than any conspiracy, because he gave us his principles for the worst of reasons: to stay close to the center of power, stave off MAGA primary challenges, and bring Trump around to Graham’s deeply militarist worldview.
It’s hard for me to spend so much time and energy on Graham, but he was always along for every political ride, one way or another, grabbing onto any diatribe he could. I hope these next few days will at least raise questions about the idea of “to thyself be true.” He confused me. He denied being a gay man, but sure rode his own interests into some disturbing behaviors and politics. I bet he’d love to see all this attention he’s generated by dying so unexpectedly and young.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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The news is as crazy as usual today. Remember when weekends used to be quiet? Here’s what’s happening:
The Justice Department has subpoenaed 4 New York Times journalists who reported on security issues related to Trump’s new Air Force One. The administration’s attacks on the First Amendment are getting out of hand.
The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.
In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.
The Times denounced the administration’s actions.
“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, in a statement on Friday evening.
“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” Mr. McCraw wrote. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”
The subpoenas contain few specifics, asking only that the journalists testify “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” They were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Clayton, who leads one of the country’s most prominent law enforcement offices, was recently nominated by Mr. Trump to serve as director of national intelligence.
Representatives for the White House and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan did not respond to inquiries on Friday evening.
The Times journalists who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, who reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had departed Turkey on the old Air Force One as a security precaution at the urging of the Secret Service. On Thursday, The Times reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including antimissile capabilities. Both articles cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.
Before the Wednesday article was published, a senior official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted a reporter and a senior editor at The Times to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The F.B.I. official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked The Times to disclose its sources for the article; the newspaper refused to do so. (A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, confirmed the account.)
This is really frightening. Fortunately, The Times has deep pockets and can defend their journalists.
The Trump administration has subpoenaed several New York Times journalists after their report on security concerns involving the new Air Force One, according to the paper.
The new jet, which President Donald Trump received as a gift from Qatar, entered service last week.
The subpoenas issued Friday seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday, the paper said, adding that federal agents delivered some subpoenas to the reporters at their homes.
There was no immediate response from the White House or Department of Justice to requests for comment on Saturday….
Issuing subpoenas represents a major escalation in the Republican president’s effort to threaten independent new organizations by leveraging the power of the federal government against them. It is also part of a systematic pattern by Trump to attempt to undermine press freedom in order to shield him from negative coverage.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department issued subpoenas seeking to compel testimony from reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. In both cases, the department later withdrew the subpoenas.
During his first term, Trump suggested that the press constituted an “enemy” of the American people. Since returning to the White House last year, he has waged an aggressive campaign against the media unlike any in modern U.S. history.
Trump’s pattern of attacks against news outlets and media figures he believes are overly critical of him has included filing lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, threatening to revoke TV broadcast licenses and seeking to bend news organizations and social media companies to his will.
This is the article the Times published on Wednesday that so outraged Trump and his goons.
President Trump flew out of Turkey on Wednesday night on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 as a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran, according to people briefed on the plans, who said the change came at the urging of the Secret Service.
The swap deepens questions about whether the new plane, which the president had pressed to be ready as soon as possible, was retrofitted with sufficient security measures over the last year. Lawmakers and some officials have raised concerns about whether the expedited timeline allowed for the addition of an advanced missile defense system and other modifications used to protect the president.
By Jacquie Hughes
In a statement, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said that “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.” [….]
But people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues, said the new plane does not have all the features of the older plane. The switch in the president’s aircraft when he departed Turkey was a precautionary measure made at the advice of the Secret Service and not because of a specific threat, they said.
Mr. Trump, who has marveled at the luxury touches of his new jet, flew on it on Monday night to go to Turkey for a NATO summit. After his arrival, the conflict with Iran reignited, and the United States launched a series of strikes against that country while Mr. Trump and NATO leaders were about 1,000 miles away in Ankara.
The president on Wednesday denied that the change in his aircraft was made because of security concerns. Instead, he asserted that the swap was so the new jet could leave early and make stops at U.S. military bases to show it off to the troops because the aircraft is “magnificent.”
But when pressed by reporters in Ankara about the reason for the change, Mr. Trump also repeatedly noted that he was Iran’s No. 1 target, and referred at one point to having seen or been briefed on a list of Tehran’s targets in recent days.
You can use the gift link to read the rest.
So Trump’s on again off again war with Iran is back on. Iran apparently fired on some ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump ordered some retaliatory strikes on Iran while he was overseas. Iran is also threatening to assassinate Trump and he is again threatening them with war crimes.
The U.S. is demanding that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and that ships crossing the vital corridor won’t be attacked anymore, senior U.S. officials said Friday, adding that internal Tehran power struggles have made it difficult to reach and keep a deal.
The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe to reporters the state of play with Iran, said the resumption of strikes this week came after what they described as a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners trying to sabotage the ceasefire between Tehran and Washington.
It comes as U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated on social media Friday that he views the interim ceasefire deal as “OVER!” But he said the U.S. would continue talks aimed at putting a permanent end to the war.
The officials said Friday that Trump is giving U.S. negotiators limited time to reach a deal with Iran, but, in a sign of the challenges ahead, they underscored that the president had a wide range of options if talks fall apart. They also said a power struggle was playing out in real time in Iran after U.S. and Israeli strikes at the start of the war killed its longtime leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei….
The U.S. is working on pressing Iran to make a public statement that the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for world energy markets, is open and free to ships to transit, the officials said.
Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei announced on Saturday that revenge for his father’s assassination “will most certainly be carried out.”
Why it matters: The statement was published after the burial ceremony for his father, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Throughout the weeklong funeral procession, there were massive public calls for the death of President Trump.
Mojtaba Khamenei, who didn’t appear inI public during the funeral ceremonies, didn’t specifically mention Trump. But earlier this week, Israel gave the U.S. information that suggested Iranian officials recently discussed the idea of assassinating Trump, U.S. and Israeli officials said.
On his way back from Turkey on Wednesday, Trump traveled in the old Air Force One plane rather than the new plane that the U.S. received from Qatar. The New York Times reported that security concerns prompted the mid-trip switch in planes.
What he’s saying: Mojtaba Khamenei — who was seriously wounded in the attack that killed his father, and hasn’t appeared in public since — pledged on his Telegram channel to “avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars by bringing the criminal and dishonorable killers to justice.”
“This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it will most certainly be carried out. These criminals — whose names are known from top to bottom — will take to their graves the unfulfilled wish of dying peacefully in their beds. They should know that this does not depend on my personal presence or that of any other official,” he wrote.
Khamenei added that whether he is alive or dead, the revenge for his father’s death “will be accomplished,” and stressed that“soon, freedom-loving people throughout the world will each carry out part of this divine mission.”
Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, shared his alarm over Trump’s recent Truth Social threat with MS NOW viewers.
By Miroco Machiko
“The fact of an American president threatening genocide against the whole people in case he’s assassinated is more than unseemly,” Stengel said. “It’s it’s incredibly vulgar and undiplomatic language.”
Stengel was responding to Trump’s own reaction to the Wall Street Journal report earlier this week that a new Iranian plan to assassinate him may have been uncovered by Israeli intelligence.
Late Friday night, Trump responded with a direct threat.
“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” wrote Trump, “with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME!”
He is such an idiot.
Late yesterday, MSNOW reported that Kash Patel was called on the carpet at the White House to respond to reports of his using his job as FBI director to gain access to luxury travel.
FBI Director Kash Patel abruptly cancelled a planned flight Friday to see his girlfriend in Chicago this weekend, after top administration officials frustrated with Patel summoned him to the White House, according to two people with knowledge of the change.
The precise reasons that Patel’s political bosses demanded he cancel his trip and report to the West Wing are unclear, but several people said top Trump deputies were disturbed by a range of actions by Patel. Some found it confounding that the FBI director was leaving town amid the recent revival of the war with Iran and alleged threats against the president’s life, according to a person familiar with efforts to help Patel rebuild trust with the White House. For this article, people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter.
Others cited two unforced errors by Patel that created bad optics for the Trump administration, the first being his early morning tweet bashing MS NOW for its coverage of his high-flying lifestyle, they said, in which Patel boasted: “my jet ski is gold plated…dumbass.”
By Shozo Ozaki
The second misstep, the people said, was that extensive reports by MS NOW and other news outlets about taxpayers footing the bill for Patel’s globe-trotting ultimately spurred formal questions from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, a critical ally of President Trump’s.
On Thursday, MS NOW reported exclusively that Grassley had first asked Patel in a May letter about his use of the FBI jet and his decision to purchase luxury armored BMWs so he could travel more discreetly in the Washington, DC area. In a separate letter, Congressional Democrats said they had received information that Patel was demanding that FBI staff arrange special perks on his official trips, including a jet ski excursion and a helicopter tour. The FBI has disputed that, and said Patel had complied with federal rules pertaining to his travel.
White House spokespeople denied the report, but…
Patel cancelled his flight to Chicago just as he was preparing to leave on Friday morning, according to three people briefed on his move. But the trip to Chicago was already stirring anger and controversy inside the FBI, multiple current and former law enforcement officials told MS NOW. He was planning to attend his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins’ performance Saturday at a country music festival held in the parking lot of a major Chicago stadium, the three people said. Patel’s staff had arranged for the director to make an office visit Friday to the Chicago field office to coincide with his trip, according to two other people with knowledge of the director’s schedule.
Several FBI agents complained internally that this office visit was belatedly-added cover to justify Patel flying the director’s jet — which is estimated to cost tens of thousands of dollars for such domestic trips — to enjoy a weekend in Chicago with his girlfriend, the people said.
“Patel was coming (to Chicago) today for a fake office visit for his girlfriend’s country concert this weekend,” one of the sources briefed on the trip said. The source noted Patel “cancelled the trip while on the tarmac at Andrews” and was “summoned to the White House immediately,” adding that it was “apparent panic” and “believed to be in response to his morning tweet today.”
Read he rest at MSNOW.
We still don’t know whether Mitch McConnell is alive or brain dead. Since it was reported that he was found unconscious and given CPR, I think it’s most likely that he was intubated and is still on life support. The chances of an 84-year-old man recovering after CPR outside a hospital and very slim. It’s also odd that his wife would leave for a trip to China if there was any hope of McConnell regaining consciousness anytime soon.
Mystery surrounding Senator Mitch McConnell’s health is deepening as the US Congress prepares to return from recess next week.
McConnell, 84, has not been seen in public since he was admitted to hospital in the Washington area on 14 June. Nearly a month later, the Kentucky Republican’s office has released only sparse updates, saying he is “continuing to improve” and remains engaged with Senate business, while refusing to disclose the nature of his illness or explain why he remains hospitalised.
Emergency dispatch audio obtained by media outlets indicates that first responders were sent to his home following reports of an unconscious person and that CPR was under way. On Friday, CNN released video footage that showed a person on a stretcher being wheeled towards an ambulance, though their face was not visible.
The senator’s office has neither confirmed nor denied the reports, leaving a vacuum that has been filled with fevered speculation, based on circumstantial evidence, about McConnell’s condition.
“I think he’s dead,” opined Malcolm Nance, a career counter-terrorism intelligence officer, in an interview with Amy McGrath, who lost to McConnell in the 2020 election, on the Truth in the Barrel podcast. “It’s very clear. I heard that 911 tape and I was an EMT when I was in the military at one point and you know we used to do CPR a lot. One of the things that teach you about CPR is the probability of coming back from CPR is very, very, very small.”
By Maki
McGrath, a former marine fighter pilot, replied: “Well, it’s an interesting take. We’ll see what happens there as well.”
The Senate returns on Monday for a four-week legislative session dominated by defence spending, national security and government funding bills. McConnell’s continued absence threatens to complicate Republican efforts to advance those measures with only a narrow 53-47 majority.
McConnell chairs the Senate rules committee and a defence appropriations panel, which is crucial in shaping Pentagon funding and where Republicans hold only a one-seat advantage.
Without him, partisan disputes over annual appropriations could become even harder to resolve ahead of the 1 October deadline for new federal spending. Congressional leaders are already signalling that another temporary spending measure may be needed to avert a government shutdown.
Read more at the Guardian link.
Have you heard about that horrible stomach virus that is going around? It comes from a parasite called cyclospora that the CDC used to closely monitor.
The country is in the midst of a nationwide outbreak of explosive diarrhea caused by a parasite the CDC stopped surveilling at the federal level in July 2025.
That’s around the same time the Trump administration began haphazardly attacking and defunding federal health and science agencies under the guise of “government efficiency,” with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. separately also pushing out critical federal scientists and researchers.
Prior to that date, a collaborative CDC program called FoodNet helped federal and state regulators track eight foodborne pathogens.
Among them was cyclospora, a heat-loving spherical parasite that’s sickened 1,000 people in an ongoing outbreak in Michigan (the state’s worst), with similar illnesses cropping up in 28 other states.
In addition to cyclospora, surveillance of campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio and Yersinia was cut. FoodNet now only regularly monitors two diseases: Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli.
A list of CDC talking points seen by NBC News last summer clearly blamed funding for the program’s drastic cutback.
“Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens,” the talking point read.
More at the link.
Those are the stories that caught my attention today. What’s on your mind?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
That’s pretty much the consensus from all sorts of media contributors. Of course, we do have the major trad media that’s doing its best to make the proverbial sow’s ear into a purse. Take CBS, for example, Puleeze. “Breaking down Lindsey Graham’s key accomplishments. Tributes are pouring in for longtime South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died Saturday at 71 from an aortic dissection, according to the medical examiner’s preliminary findings. 
I believe that Graham morphed quicker than that. He went from the old McCain corner of voice of reason to the voice of treason pretty quickly. He was the most overt opportunist I think I’ve ever witnessed. The only thing he was consistent on was war mongering. He never heeded the warnings from Lincoln or Eisenhower about the threat of the military-industrial complex.
The Republican Party has now made me unable to stomach voting for their women. The story behind the two of them is endearing. This story is from 
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