Mostly Monday Reads: Gobblefunk

“Meanwhile… at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not everyone in Trumpland is impressed with the latest distraction. MAHA!”John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There actually is some good news from the Supreme Court Today.  I’m not holding my breath that it will stand, however. It’s hard to hold your breath on anything. The Straight of Hormuz is still an active battlefield, no matter what Orange Caligula tells the press. People are dying in ICE custody as ICE has not been paying for medical care for 7 months. All of our allies are moving closer to Europe and farther from us, no matter where they are in the world. We’re a shithole country. We might as well face up to it.

Just breaking: news from the Supreme Court. NBC News reports that “Supreme Court temporarily restores full access to abortion pill. “The decision means mifepristone remains available nationwide without an in-person meeting required while litigation continues.”  I read this headline after taking Temple for a walk and found a bunch of stickers on the neutral ground. Of course, I picked them up, and Temple and I will be plastering them at all the local bars later today.

This seems a little karmic, doesn’t it? Lawrence Hurley and Aria Bendix have the lede.

The Supreme Court on Monday provisionally blocked a lower court decision that would have limited availability nationwide of the abortion pill mifepristone.

In two brief orders, Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, said the decision by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would remain on hold until at least May 11. Alito issued the order because he is the justice who handles emergency issues arising from that appeals court, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The temporary pause gives the high court time to consider next steps in the case as it weighs separate emergency requests filed by drug makers Danco and GenBioPro.

The nationwide availability of mifepristone was cast into jeopardy on Friday when the appeals court granted Louisiana’s request to void Biden administration rules that allowed the drug to be administered without an in-person meeting, meaning it can in theory be mailed anywhere in the country, even in states with strict abortion bans.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president of abortion rights group Planned Parenthood Action Fund, welcomed the decision.

“While mifepristone access returns to where it was on Friday morning, the whiplash and chaos that patients and providers are navigating have already had real consequences for real peoples’ lives and futures,” she said in a statement.

Anti-abortion groups have been pushing for years to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement, alleging that taking mifepristone at home can be dangerous — despite studies that have found it to be safe and effective.

Danco makes Mifeprex, the brand name version of mifepristone, while GenBioPro makes a generic version.

Alito ordered Louisiana to file its response to the company’s request by the end of the day on Thursday.

This is the latest deadly weirdness from NBC News. Once again, we see Trump cannot be trusted, and that Hegseth is probably drunk bombing. “U.S. denies Iranian claim that it hit American warship as Trump launches mission to reopen Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. said two American-flagged commercial vessels transited the critical waterway Monday as part of the new “Project Freedom.” This story is reported by Yuliya Talmazan and Courtney Kube.

The U.S. military on Monday rejected Iranian claims to have struck an American warship trying to enter the Strait of Hormuz and said the first commercial ships had transited the critical waterway as part of President Donald Trump’s new mission to guide stranded vessels.

Meanwhile, the South Korean government confirmed earlier reports that explosion and fire had occurred on a South Korean-operated cargo ship on Monday.

Trump announced that starting Monday the U.S. military would help free ships that have been “locked up” and unable to transit the key trade route amid the maritime standoff between Tehran and Washington.

Iran signaled an aggressive response to this latest bid to break its stranglehold over the strait, which has left global shipping at an effective standstill and sent energy prices spiraling.

Tehran issued a new map and a flurry of statements that sought to reassert its control. Early Monday, it claimed to have stopped U.S. destroyers from entering the strait.

After the U.S. warships ignored several radio warnings, cruise missiles, rockets and combat drones were fired near them, army public relations said in a statement carried by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Iranian state media had earlier claimed that two missiles had hit a U.S. ship near the entrance to the strait, but the U.S. military denied this.

“No U.S. Navy ships have been struck. U.S. forces are supporting Project Freedom and enforcing the naval blockade on Iranian ports,” Central Command said in a post on X.

A U.S. official also denied to NBC News that any U.S. Navy ships were prevented from accessing the strait on Monday by Iran.

It really does sound like we’re the bad guys now, doesn’t it?  Washington Monthly‘s Paul Glastic has this interesting bit of analysis today. “Why the U.S.-led Liberal World Order is Only Mostly Dead.”

Even before Donald Trump launched his ill-advised war on Iran, America’s allies were already pronouncing the end of the era of U.S. leadership of the free world. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in April of 2025 as she tried to rally governments in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to counter massive tariffs that Trump had recently imposed. “The old order is not coming back,” declared Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney this past January in a widely reported speech at Davos after fresh attempts by Trump to seize Greenland.

But in the wake of Trump’s cavalier attack on Iran and the global economic pain that has resulted, even some of America’s most vocal and influential champions of U.S. supremacy seem ready to throw in the towel. The neoconservative national security scholar Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution recently penned a requiem in The Atlantic for eight decades of Pax Americana:

Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.

Such declarations of the end of the U.S.-led international order are understandable. In a sense, they are a simple recognition of what Trump writes every day in ALL CAPS in his Truth Social posts, and of what his second-term government has been doing for 16 months. Just as Trump burned through his inherited wealth in a series of failed real estate ventures in his younger years, so is he now squandering decades of accumulated U.S. power in a mad attempt to overthrow the post-war system of alliances and institutions that was the means of acquiring that power. And he still has more than two-and-a-half years left in his presidency. Who knows how much more damage he will do? There is no reason to think he will abandon his beliefs that our allies are parasites, that international institutions are for losers, and that strongmen like him and Vladimir Putin should rule their spheres without constraint.

Countries across the globe are now recognizing that their past reliance on Washington for everything from advanced weaponry to sea lane protection has made them vulnerable to a leader like Trump. Consequently, they are looking for ways to give themselves some “strategic autonomy” from the United States—by, for instance, tilting towards China, or crafting a new coalition of “middle powers,” as Carney suggested in Davos, or creating a “European NATO” in which the U.S. no longer plays a leading, or perhaps any, role.

Given the circumstances, countries are wise to pursue these new arrangements. But they are poor substitutes for the U.S.-led liberal international order that Trump is dismantling. A better strategy is to rebuild that order in some form as soon as Trump leaves office. That might seem like wishful thinking, but it is not. Rather, it is the probable course of events if (as also seems likely) a Democrat wins the White House in 2028.

According to numerous polls, Democratic voters remain staunch supporters of Ukraine, NATO, and international institutions generally. They profoundly oppose Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela and Iran. To win the presidential primary, any Democratic candidate must adhere to these views and, if successful in the general election, follow through in office to remain popular with the base. That shouldn’t be a problem if Democrats also control both houses and support a more internationalist foreign policy. Agencies gutted by Trump, such as USAID and the State Department, could be refunded and even expanded via reconciliation, thus requiring no GOP votes.

Some Republican lawmakers, free of Trump, might also be willing to support a more traditional foreign policy approach. In April, when Trump threatened to pull out of NATO if the allies didn’t help open the Strait of Hormuz, GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there was little appetite in his caucus to support Trump in that effort. “We got an awful lot of people who think that NATO is a very critical, incredibly successful post-World War II alliance. And I think in the world today, you need allies,” Thune told reporters. Additionally, a NATO in which member states have raised their defense spending and taken increased responsibility for aiding Ukraine is an alliance that more conservative Americans can get behind without feeling like suckers.

Many supporters of traditional U.S. multilateralism fear that, because of Trump’s nationalist and extortionist policies, other countries can no longer trust us. After all, American voters elected Trump not once, but twice. That’s a fair point. But it’s also true that American voters threw Trump out of office once and, in virtually every election over the past year-plus, have signaled their unhappiness with the state of the country under his leadership. Moreover, all advanced democracies have far-right authoritarian political movements that could take over their governments. We can’t trust their voters any more than they can trust ours. We may all be fated to oscillate between liberal and illiberal governments, as Hungary has, until we address the working-class economic distress that is the root cause of the problem. As I have argued, it’s easier to do that multilaterally than separately.

These days, it’s easy to see why all of these countries have given up on us. Many of us here in the country feel that way, too. It’s so important to make sure the midterms flip the House and the Senate. If not, I may be writing future blog posts from Lima, Peru. Alison Quinn, writing for The Daily Beast, has the perfect observation. ”  We’ll have to ask Dr. BB for confirmation, but I believe lack of sleep can increase the level of madness in a mentally ill person. “Truth of Trump’s Wild Sleepless Nights Exposed. LOSING HIS MIND. Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty dive into a jaw-dropping investigation revealing the president’s relentless late-night posting habits.”

A third of Donald Trump’s social media posts now come in the middle of the night when the soon-to-be 80-year-old president should be sleeping, raising urgent new concerns about his mental health as he navigates war.

Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty break down a shocking investigation that puts Trump’s late-night posting habits on stark display, revealing a disturbing pattern between those baffling posts fired off in the dead of night and the awkward moments in the Oval Office when the president has been caught appearing to doze off.

“It is an extraordinary, extraordinary piece of work. Josh Fiallo, our brilliant reporter, counted up all the times that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in April and then he looked at when he was posting and he looked between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. and we discovered that there were only five days in April when the president did not post on Truth Social between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.,” Dougherty said on The Daily Beast Podcast.

“Eighty percent of nights when he could be sleeping, he’s posting,” he said.

While Trump’s often bizarre Truth Social posts have in many ways become a hallmark of his time in office, there was something quite different about them in the month of April: They appeared to become more frantic, disjointed, and more incendiary, as Trump’s political troubles multiplied, leading to foul-mouthed tirades and threats of war crimes that shocked even his own MAGA base and prompted some of his own allies to sound the alarm. It was no longer just Democrats questioning his fitness for office, but former advisers and much of the American public.

A Fox News poll conducted April 17-20 found that 55 percent of respondents felt Trump did not have the “mental soundness” to be an effective leader.

Well, at least the majority of us can see clearly. So that’s it for me. I got a smoker grill and intend to sit in what will become the new backyard of the kathouse and eat some very delicious food this summer. That’s mostly because I’m having the kitchen completely redone soon, so I have to cook somewhere else.  It will be like a Girl Scout camp trip soon!

Please take care of yourselves, be kind to yourselves, and remember we’re always here for each other!

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

“Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” ― Roald Dahl, The BFG.