CaptainKudzu

Let your heart match your words

2026-07-12T09:23:17.277-04:00

Not long ago, I was ordained as a deacon in my church. One of the duties of deacons here is to periodically deliver a short meditation during the communion portion of the service. Today is my first time delivering this meditation. This is what I plan to say.

I grew up about an hour from Athens, and for part of my young adulthood, I attended the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!) and worked in Athens while I commuted back and forth over an hour of country roads.

Image by ChatGPT

One of my memories of that drive is being behind an old car with a lot of environmentalist bumper stickers that said things like “the Earth is your mother” and “give a hoot, don’t pollute.”

What made this encounter memorable is that, as I drove behind this car, I was nearly hit by a steady stream of cup, bags, food wrappers, and other assorted garbage that was being tossed out both sides of the car.

If you know me, you know one of my pet peeves is people throwing garbage on the side of the road, especially my road, but what struck me at the time was that it was pretty funny that a car with all those environmentalist stickers was throwing such a high volume of garbage on the road.

They obviously didn’t believe what their stickers said.

About the same time, I heard a DC Talk song called “What If I Stumble.” The song started with this introduction:

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today

Is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips

Then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.

That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

How many of us are like the people in that car, not acting out the teachings that we claim to believe in?

This might not be a salvation matter for us. We know that all have sinned, and we know that we will go on sinning because we are human, but God’s grace and our repentance cover our sin.

But the flip side is that I’ve had people who I know tell me that they don’t want to be a Christian because they see so many Christians who obviously don’t believe what they say. Personally, I don’t want my actions to be the reason someone turns away from Christ. We need to remember that Paul wrote that we are Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20), and ambassadors are typically on their best behavior because they want their actions to reflect well on their home country.

So that leads us to the question of how Christians should act. There are lots of Bible passages that give us guidance on how to act, as well as how not to act. I’m not going to try to hit all these because they said I need to keep this to about three or four minutes, and the pastor might get mad if I cut into his time. Besides, Christianity really is not a religion of rigid rules. It took me a few decades to realize that.

What I will do is direct you to one particular verse. It’s a verse that you find in three of the gospels (Matthew 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–34; Luke 10:25–28), but I’ll cite Matthew 22:36-40.

When Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest, he answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

So straight from Jesus, if you aren’t being loving, you’re doing it wrong. A lot of the behavioral guidelines that we find in the Bible are really just ways to help us be more loving to others. In fact, Jesus said this when he said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. People can be annoying and hard to love, and it’s the ones who are difficult to love that we really need to try harder with.

There’s a meme that says following Jesus’s example might include flipping tables, but if we closely at what got Jesus angry, it was religious hypocrites and people who profited from worship at the temple. He sat down talked with the sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and Romans. The dregs of society.

For us, the list of people we should love includes the people who bug you, the people who bully you, the people who cut you off in traffic and just don’t know how to drive, people who persecute you, your enemies (Matthew 5:44), atheists, trans people, other ethnic groups, foreigners (Leviticus 19:33-34), gays, immigrants (Deuteronomy 10:19), people of other religions, people of different political parties, and anyone else you can think of.

Love God and love people.

And if there is anyone here who is being pushed away from Christ because of the actions of some of his followers, I’d like to close with another observation from the internet:

“To be honest, if I was a Christian because of Christians, I’d likely be an atheist by now. But I’m a Christian because of Jesus, and Jesus is pretty freaking awesome.”

Prayer

Lord Jesus, we thank you for your love and mercy. We know that we all fall short of the ideal. Help us to be better ambassadors for you. Help us to live out what we believe.

We pray that you would give us guidance as we relate to others. Help us to see them as you see them. Help us to love them as you love them. Make us instruments of your love.

In Jesus name, Amen.

From the Racket News

Are Democrats blowing it?

2026-07-10T10:30:06.160-04:00

I’ve said for quite a while that 2026 is an election year that is the Democrats’ election to lose. Lately, they seem quite capable of doing exactly that.

The most recent crisis involves the totally predictable implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine. As I wrote several weeks ago, the red flags were there, including but not limited to an SS tattoo.

Image by ChatGPT

On Monday, the story broke that Platner was being accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend. Let’s not sugarcoat it. If the allegations are true, Platner is a rapist. And given his history of sexual misconduct, the allegations are credible.

The good news for Democrats is two-fold. First, party officials are doing what they should have done months ago and calling on him to step down. With that move, the party can maintain some shred of moral integrity, unlike Republicans who seem to accept pretty much anything from their nominees these days.

The second piece of good news is that the Maine Democratic Party has a little time. If Platner withdraws by July 13, he can be replaced on the ballot. Democrats have untilJuly 27 to replace him with another nominee, picked by a nominating committee. Even after that deadline, if Platner withdraws by August 25, he must be removed from the ballot. In that case, Democrats could run a write-in candidate.

The bad news is that Platner has to withdraw. Candidates often are the last to understand that their campaign is toast. (See Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign as exhibit A.) And someone as apparently unstable as Platner might even continue to run out of spite, taking down the Maine Democrats hopes to unseat Susan Collins as revenge for abandoning him.

Time will tell, but at this point, Platner should definitely be abandoned.

In the final analysis, Platner’s latest scandal may prove to be a boon to Democrats. Getting Platner out while there is still time to replace him could salvage Democratic chances in Maine as well as remove a liability to Democrats elsewhere.

But wait, there’s more!

At least 11 Democratic candidates for various offices are self-described socialists. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won congressional primaries in Colorado and New York, where the seats are reliably blue, and are competing in Michigan and Wisconsin, where they are not.

About 39 percent of voters have a positive view of socialism, so socialist candidates start at a general election disadvantage. Only about 21 percent of Americans view the DSA favorably. Worse, most voters who approve of socialism are young, the cohort least likely to vote.

Nominating socialists also makes Democratic candidates nationwide vulnerable to Republican attacks that they are socialist and/or communist (similar to tying the party to a Nazi-tattooed sex predator). The two are not the same, but few understand the distinction, and Republicans are happy to paint with a broad brush.

In fact, the Republican tactic of dumbing down socialism may have contributed to its newfound popularity. For decades now, Republicans have decried everything they don’t like as socialism.

Universal healthcare? Socialized medicine!

Free college? Socialized education!

Higher taxes on the wealthy? Socialized redistribution of income!

As someone pointed out a while back, by painting popular ideas as socialist, Republicans have made socialism sound pretty good to a lot of people.

And that was before Republicans started adopting socialist ideas. Trump has ramped up federal equity stakes in private businesses under the guise of national security, often with a “golden share” or executive, if not controlling, interest. By definition, socialism is “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

I guess if you can’t beat them, join them. File it under “How Republicans learned to stop worrying and love government seizing the means of production as long as it’s Trump.”

Democratic primary voters are not playing it safe, when that’s what they really should be doing if they want to ensure that Trump is blocked from implementing his authoritarian agenda. Especially when it comes to swing states, the safe picks are moderates who have been vetted in other campaigns. Now is not the time to gamble on radicals or newcomers with no electoral experience.

Going further, I’d like to see both parties take a more moderate stance on the issues and a more strident position on morality and decency. I want to see Trump and MAGA defeated, but I don’t want socialist radicals or trumpy Democrats to take their place. Democrats shouldn’t adopt Trump’s depravity any more than they should take up his socialist and authoritarian policies.

Speaking for independents, we want moderation and sanity. We want candidates who are decent people, candidates who we don’t have to dread seeing in the news every day. That shouldn’t be difficult, but partisan voters are making it so.

The crowning irony of all this is that Democrats are likely to win, even with bad candidates (but not Platner). Trump is just that unpopular. In the end, the Republican Trump mania may be what ushers in a socialist boom in the United States.

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FOURTH POLL We ran a quick Independence Day poll on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Eighty-seven percent of respondents prefer to watch firework displays rather than shooting their own.

From the Racket News

Are the Democrats democratic?

2026-07-10T10:21:32.556-04:00

In the wake of Graham Platner’s withdrawal from the Maine Senate, I’ve seen a resurrection of a complaint that Republicans made after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden in 2024. The Democrats, some say, are anti-democratic (with a small “d”) because they overrode the will of the primary voters. This is wrong on a couple of counts.

First, and most obvious, is that strictly speaking, the Democratic Party elites did not force either Biden or Platner out. The lie of this claim can be seen through the simultaneous and contradictory claims that Democrats supported both Biden and Platner. It is logically inconsistent that Democrats could both support and undermine Biden and Platner at the same time.

Image by ChatGPT

In reality, what happened was that new information caused both Biden and Platner to lose support abruptly. (It’s fair to say that both should have lost support earlier.) When the two politicians saw that their campaigns were damaged beyond repair and that there was no way forward, both chose to step down for the good of their party and the country.

The second fallacy is that primary elections are party elections, not governmental elections. When Biden and Platner secured their respective nominations, they won only a place on the ballot, not an office. It makes sense that the parties and the states would consider the possibility that a nominee might not make it from the primary to Election Day. There are legal and procedural steps to follow in such an eventuality.

In the same way that there is a procedure to replace elected officials if they resign or die in office, there are procedures to replace party nominees on a ballot. And just as elected officials might be replaced without an election, nominees can be replaced by party leaders. In one fairly recent example, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Kelly Loeffler to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Johnny Isakson in 2019. Loeffler went on to lose re-election to Raphael Warnock just over a year later. No one said that Kemp was subverting democracy by appointing Loeffer.

Most people don’t understand that primary elections are a fairly recent innovation. Our system of primaries as the dominant means of picking nominees only dates back to the 1970s. The current system was born out of reforms after the turbulence of the 1960s. Prior to the 70s, primaries were a supplement to the traditional convention nominating process. The “smoke-filled rooms.”

Primaries are a failed experiment, in my opinion. They tend to reward extremism rather than electability or competence. The bottom line is that if a group of partisans gets together to select a nominee, they often choose the most partisan option, even if their ideas are not practical and they lack the skills for the job.

The proof for that argument is in the pudding. Candidate quality has decreased sharply over the past few decades. Joe Biden, Graham Platner, Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and AOC are only a few examples of what the primary system has given us. The flip side is that many of our good, competent leaders from the past would not be fringe enough to win a primary today.

So, no. The Democrats are not undemocratic for abandoning candidates who were flaming out in real time. The replacements of Biden and Platner are examples of democratic responsiveness in action. Not supporting candidates with obvious flaws should be normalized. It’s a good thing. Sticking with candidates who are bad because they are part of your tribe is the problem.

The Republicans shouldn’t be ridiculing Democrats for dropping bad candidates, especially as they rally behind Donald Trump, an adjudicated rapist, and Ken Paxton, a serial philanderer and abuser of office. Loyalty is not an asset if you’re loyal to bad people.

I applaud the decision to dump Platner and encourage him to step aside. Even if the Democrats lose the race, they will have stood up for their principles and morality at the very real risk of alienating the progressive wing of their party. That’s a lot more than I can say for Republicans over the last decade.

From Racket News

Happy 250, America!

2026-07-04T12:30:16.213-04:00

I’ll keep this brief, but I couldn’t let America’s 250th birthday pass without comment.

Many nations and constitutions don’t last 250 years, and there seems to be a lot doubt that we can hold together much longer. We are as divided and angry as I’ve ever seen us.

I’m not that old, but I do remember the bicentennial in 1976. The national mood was entirely different with celebrations that were actually by large numbers of people and grassroots festivities around the country. Somewhere I’ve got a picture of all the kids at my church, me among them, dressed in colonial garb that included tricorn hats for the boys and bonnets for the young ladies. That was pretty typical of 1976.

But this year, the national mood is pensive and angry. The celebrations have largely fizzled, thanks in large part to a president who hijacked the America 250 initiative created by Congress and steered resources toward his newly-created Freedom 250. Like everything else, Trump made America’s birthday about himself and threw a wet blanket on the party. America’s 250th is a pale imitation of its 200th.

It’s ironic that America celebrates its 250th with a man at the helm who closely resembles George V. As someone pointed out, our current president checks a lot of the boxes on the list of the Founders’ complaints about the English king in their epic breakup letter:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection…
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us…

A movement that promised to make America great again has done the opposite. The economy is slowing, corruption is rising, we are no longer respected by other nations, and American pride has fallen to a new low.

I say all that to say this: Things have been worse and we’ve survived. Things were pretty dark in the years following 1776. The British burned the White House in 1814. Our internal divisions were worse in the 1860s and probably the 1960s as well. The Great Depression made us question the basis of our entire system,

If we’ve never seen America in worse shape, it’s because we haven’t lived long enough to have experienced our countries previous bottoms. Our history tells us that we can work through it. This too shall pass. The course correction has already started.

My message today is to go celebrate America. Don’t confuse love of country with love of Trump or affirmation of what our government is doing.

As Teddy Roosevelt said, “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

My country, right or wrong, but those of us who love America should celebrate our nation while at the same time working to improve it and live up to the ideals of the Founders, the idea that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A lot of us have lost sight of what America was intended to be, so let me recommend that we all take a few minutes over the next few days to read the Declaration of Independence and think about what our forefathers were fighting to be free from.

Read the Declaration of Independence here: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

Or if you’d prefer, listen to a reading of it here on Spotify (I also recommend the History That Doesn’t Suck Podcast generally):

Happy Independence Day and Happy Birthday, America. Let’s make ourselves worthy of the legacy that the Founders gave us.

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SCOTUS: Constitution means what it says

2026-07-01T12:48:54.133-04:00

In a second day of rulings, the Supreme Court once again made MAGA heads explode. However, as with Monday’s rulings, both sides have something to celebrate and something to mourn. Unlike Monday, Tuesday’s rulings seem to be more consistent and on firmer constitutional ground. (Also, unlike Monday, I did read through the actual decisions and dissents for Tuesday. Many of the briefs are pretty brief. [legal humor])

Tuesday’s main event was the birthright citizenship ruling. This long-awaited decision affirmed the plain language of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts was once again the author of the decision and led a 6-3 majority that included Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, and, in part, Kavanaugh. For a case that involved the plain and simple language of the Constitution, this was a lot closer than it should have been, but it was still a big win for the rule of law.

Image created by ChatGPT

In the case, Trump v. Barbara, the disagreement centered on what the 14th Amendment meant when it said, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” In particular, the question involved the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction.”

This seems a no-brainer because illegal immigrants are clearly subject to US jurisdiction, because they can be arrested and tried in our courts. The majority agreed, and noted that “ jus soli, or right of the soil” predated the Constitution in English common law.

Roberts points out that the language of the 14th Amendment mirrors the language of common law, and then goes on to specifically reject the argument that illegal aliens are not subject to US jurisdiction.

“The narrow exceptions to jurisdiction arose where exercising jurisdiction would ‘degrade the dignity’ of ‘foreign sovereigns’—most frequently in the case of ‘foreign ministers.,’” Roberts wrote. “But private individuals who traveled to the United States for ‘business or caprice’ were ‘amenable to the jurisdiction of the country.’ Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present here are thus subject to the Nation’s jurisdiction.” [emphasis mine]

The dissents fall flat. Justice Alito argues, “The Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” But the text of the amendment specifies a condition of jurisdiction, not allegiance.

In another long dissent, Justice Thomas puts his eggs in the basket that the Framers intended for citizenship to apply to those who are “domiciled” in the US. Again, that defies the plain language of the amendment.

In Kavanaugh’s partial dissent, he argues that Congress used the same language from the 14th Amendment in the Nationality Act of 1940 and the Nationality Act of 1952. This language, he notes, was used by the Court to affirm birthright citizenship in Wong Kim Ark.

“The Executive Order goes beyond what [statutory law] authorizes,” Kavanaugh wrote. “For the Executive Order to be lawful, therefore, Congress would need to amend [current law] or otherwise enact new legislation to encompass those two new exceptions. As of now, Congress has not done so.”

In other words, in Kavanaugh’s view, the 14th Amendment does not explicitly guarantee birthright citizenship, but existing immigration statutes do. Going further, Kavanaugh points out that an Executive Order cannot overrule a statutory law passed by Congress. If Congress decided to pass a law expanding exceptions to birthright citizenship, for example, setting a 12-month residency requirement for the mother, Kavanaugh would likely uphold that statute.

I’m going to nitpick the “text, history, and tradition” doctrine of the Court for a moment here as well. Kavanaugh writes that “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868 and that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have fully anticipated. And the Framers likely would not have anticipated.”

That’s true, but there are a lot of other things the Framers could not have anticipated as well. Among these are automatic weapons and mass shootings. Would the Court’s dissenters be as flexible with gun laws as they want to be with immigration law? My guess is that they would not. As a result, it’s better to stick with the text of the law than with what the Framers would have done under different circumstances. What Kavanaugh is suggesting is no different than the left’s “living Constitution.”

Kavanaugh’s statement also puts a finger on another problem with text, history, and tradition. When we face problems that the Framers never faced or even dreamed of, history and tradition aren’t very helpful. Laws can be constitutional, even if no similar law has been passed in our history.

It is disturbing to watch as the Court’s self-proclaimed constitutionalists become enamored with the “mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie” in their jurisprudence after they became the majority on the Court, much the same as the Republican Party’s conservatives found a new love for government overreach. Thomas and Alito have been particularly disappointing.

Speaking of the left, they are enraptured over the birthright citizenship ruling, but they are likely to be enraged over a different decision. Or two.

The bigger case of the two was West Virginia v. BPJ, a ruling that upheld the authority of states to ban biological males from competing on female sports teams. The 6-3 ruling was split along ideological lines, with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting.

The core of the ruling, authored by Kavanaugh, was the statement: “Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex.”

Again, I’d say this is the correct outcome based on a plain reading of the law, as well as common sense, which often has nothing to do with the law. As Kavanaugh spells out, “The term ‘sex’ in Title IX, the Javits Amendment, and the Title IX regulations cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.”

The dissenters don’t seem to have a serious argument against the wording of the law, but rather base their dissent on emotions. Justice Sotomayor wrote for the minority, “The majority extends great sympathy to those it favors: the young cisgender girls and women who play sports. I share that sympathy. Playing sports can lead to benefits that are immeasurable, and many are understandably invested in ensuring that competition stays fair and safe. Because the majority, however, inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions, I respectfully dissent.”

I don’t have any particular animus against transgender people, and I don’t think that transgender boys playing on girls’ team constitutes any sort of emergency, but I do agree with the majority that the plain language of the law and the concept of federalism, which also came up in the mail ballot case yesterday, means that the states get to work these things out for themselves in the laboratories of democracy.

If the left does not like the outcome here, I’d tell them the same thing that I’d tell the right on birthright citizenship and mail-in ballots, namely that there is a process to change laws that you don’t like. That process is centered on the legislature and not the courts or the presidency.

The final case for Tuesday was National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, which overturned a 2001 decision upholding campaign finance limits on coordinated expenditures by the parties and candidates. This was another 6-3 decision along party lines.

“Ultimately, the First Amendment question in this case boils down to whether [the Federal Election Campaign Act’s] limits on political-party coordinated expenditures are permissible in order to prevent circumvention of the base limits on contributions to candidates through earmarked contributions to parties,” Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

Answering himself, Kavanaugh says, “ The Court agrees with petitioners that the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits are not proportionate, necessary, and narrowly tailored given the other less-speech-restrictive tools available to the Government to prevent circumvention—in particular, earmarking and disclosure laws.”

Here, as well, I agree with the majority. I tend to be an absolutist on free speech. Let people and parties say what they want, but disclose who is paying for it.

There is a chance that this ruling may help to strengthen the political parties against disruptive outsiders in the future. At least part of the political mess that we find ourselves in is due to the lack of influence of party leaders. Now, if we could just get rid of primaries.

Over the past two days, the Court has exploded the view that it is a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. The president and Republicans won some and lost some big ones, although not by as much as I would have liked.

Again, these rulings underscore the importance of electing good people. If we have reached a point where we are depending upon nine justices to preserve our rights and freedoms, then we are already much too far down the road of tyranny. And if we came within two votes of millions of Americans potentially losing their citizenship, there is ample evidence that freedom is endangered for many of us.

This week, Donald Trump’s own appointees often acted to stymie his power grabs, but in the future, it may not always be true that we have such independent justices on the bench. It is very important that we elect presidents who will nominate good judges (one of the few areas where I think Trump has done well, albeit unintentionally; he wanted justices who would be personally loyal) and senators who will confirm the good ones and dismiss the bad ones.

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MORE BAD SCOTUS NEWS FOR TRUMP In another blow to Trump, the Supreme Court refused to overturn his civil judgment for the rape and sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll. Trump owes Carroll $5 million for his actions, and it now seems that he will have to pay up.

CLARITY FROM KAVANAUGH Yesterday, I speculated that the difference between the Cook and Slaughter rulings may have been the importance of the Federal Reserve to the economy. In his concurrence, Kavanaugh seems to have admitted as much:

Even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve could spark political upheaval, including confusion about whether the President could immediately remove multiple Governors at will, as well as turmoil in the U. S. and world economies. I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U. S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that, in various permutations, we have been thinking about for many years.

Originally from The Racket News

The inconsistent Court

2026-07-01T12:47:15.632-04:00

The Supreme Court released a full broadside of decisions on Monday. There was something to please and anger everyone. There were decisions that were a blow to the Trump Administration and decisions that made Trump crow about the “Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years” [random capitalizations are his] on Truth Social. Yes, there’s something for everyone, but I think that both sides are likely to concentrate on the cases they lost.

For the record, I haven’t read the full decision in any of these cases and don’t plan to. I’m in the middle of a large library book, “Guadalcanal” by Richard Frank (the definitive account of the WWII battle; it says so on the cover), and I do this for free, so no, I’m not reading all these decisions, but I will explain them, aided heavily by other reports, particularly from SCOTUS Blog.

Image by Chat GPT

Let’s start with Chatrie v. United States, in which the Court held that geofence warrants are legally considered searches and are subject to Fourth Amendment protections. Justice Kagan, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson, held that cellphone location data is subject to an “expectation of privacy… that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.” This is a victory for civil libertarians.

In a ruling that has triggered meltdowns, pearl-clutching, and rending of garments among the MAGA set, the Court also held that states could choose to receive mail ballots after Election Day. Single-day elections and mail ballots have been a MAGA bogeyman since 2020, but the Court affirmed the constitutionality of America’s federalist system as it applies to state authority to run and regulate their own elections.

Watson v. Republican National Committee involved a challenge to a Mississippi law that allows mail ballots to be counted if they are received within five days of Election Day. It’s important to note that the ballots have to be postmarked by Election Day, not after, as some scaremongers are claiming. The ruling was 5-4, with Justice Barrett writing for a majority that included Chief Justice Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.

I’m a little surprised at how this one turned out, but as Barrett explains, “the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

In my opinion, this was the right call. Once a mail ballot is placed into the care of the Post Office, the voter has no control over whether it is delivered quickly or not. It seems reasonable to allow some extra time for mail ballots to arrive after Election Day; otherwise, ballots mailed on Election Day would not be counted because same-day mail delivery is not a possibility.

As always, my advice to voters is to drop your ballot off in person if you can’t vote in person. (I typically vote early in person, and I highly recommend that strategy if your state allows it.) If you absolutely must mail your ballot, I strongly recommend that you do so well before your state’s deadline. Requesting a return receipt might not be a bad idea either, unless your state has a way to check whether the ballot has been received, like the Georgia MyVoter page.

Finally, there was a split decision on the ability of the president to fire members of independent agencies. In a 6-3 decision, the Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor, a 90-year-old precedent, and allowed the president to fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission. In the same breath, the Court denied the president the right to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve in a 5-4 decision.

In Trump v. Slaughter, Roberts, supported by Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas, held that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.”

On the other hand, Roberts also wrote for the majority in Trump v. Cook, where he was joined by Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Kagan, and Jackson. In that decision, Roberts wrote that allowing the president to fire Cook “would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”

It’s two Chief Justice Roberts’s in one! What are we doing here, guys?

If you’re wondering why Roberts and Kavanaugh would vote one way in one case and flip their votes in another, you’re not alone. Much of the legal and political world is wondering the same thing.

The core issue in both cases was the president’s authority over independent agencies established by Congress. In the statutes creating the agencies, Congress stipulated that members could only be removed for cause. In Slaughter, the Court seemed to reject that stipulation while it preserved it in Cook. This sends a very mixed message to Congress and lower courts.

The ruling in Cook raises the possibility that a president could make a pretextual case for firing a Fed governor and says that the bar for dismissal is not “very low” as the government claimed, but “not only the fact of independence but also the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design,” which in turn “counsels a substantial threshold for ‘cause.’”

Cook had been temporarily reinstated by a lower court, and this week’s ruling was based on the appeal of that temporary stay. The Court did not dismiss Trump’s attempt to fire Cook, but it did say that to remove her, the government must show that it would likely win on the merits of the case. Cook now gets to fight her dismissal in federal court while she continues to sit on the board of the Fed.

But what about Slaughter? The statute mandates that FTC commissioners could only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” yet Slaughter was fired without any indication of cause. Is Roberts’ ruling not making FTC employment “at will” without even a pretextual claim?

If there is any material difference between the two cases, except that the Fed controls the money supply and monkeying with the dollar could cause a global depression, most of us can’t see it. The twin decisions are almost schizophrenic.

Hopefully, future cases will lean more in the direction of Cook than Slaughter, but the cases underscore the need to elect honorable, trustworthy people to the presidency. If Slaughter is the ruling precedent, there is nothing to stop a president from firing bureaucrats of all agencies and restocking the pond with his cronies. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Election Commission are supposed to have balanced partisan membership, but under Slaughter, that may be out the window as well.

Slaughter is another example of the “one-way ratchet” in which Congress delegates some authority to the president, and then courts strike down congressional limitations on the president’s use of that authority. The result is a large transfer of power to the executive that Congress almost never gets back.

I’m not sure what a good solution is here, because Congress does not have the expertise, the time, or the brainpower to make federal regulations on all the minutiae of modern life. Congressional geriatrics are not the best people to regulate cutting-edge issues like artificial intelligence. We need independent agencies to fill the gaps. Perhaps those agencies could be placed under congressional, rather than presidential, supervision, but would the courts allow that?

If you want to worry about anything in Monday’s decisions, worry about all the power that the Roberts Court is handing to the president as it strips away congressional guardrails. The extremes of unitary executive theory are bad no matter who is president, but they are especially bad considering the current president.

Again, the bottom line is that we need to stop electing incompetent and power-hungry presidents. We need trustworthy and able administrators, but we also need to enact reforms that make it easier for Congress to hold bad presidents accountable. We also need the courts to preserve congressional authority.

Add that to the list of much-needed post-Trump reforms. Is anyone writing this down?

Originally from the Racket News

The Iran deal and the midterms

2026-06-17T13:22:45.837-04:00

JUN 17, 2026

Let me begin by saying, “I told you so.” Right after the war began and again a couple of weeks ago, I told you that the Iran war was going to end badly, specifically noting in March, the “most likely scenario is that Trump finds something to call a victory and walks away.”

This deal could be the worst deal ever, and Trump would still tout the fact that a deal was made and call it the greatest diplomatic victory in world history. Assuming that the end is finally here, which is not necessarily a safe assumption with Netanyahu and Israel not playing ball, those predictions seem to have been fulfilled.

Image by Chat GPT

As I pointed out, Trump really needed to make a deal to get oil flowing again and keep gas prices from skyrocketing before the midterms. There are several big questions about the deal, not least the question of exactly what Trump just agreed to, but also whether the framework will restore the oil trade and save the Republicans from midterm voter anger.

Right now, we don’t know a lot about the contents of the deal, but we do know that a lot of Trump supporters (and anti-anti-Trumpers) who are Iran hawks are angry about what seems to be a capitulation, while other, more cultish Trump supporters are simply cheering the fact that a deal was made. More ideological Trumpists are concerned about the future of the Persian Gulf, while Trump partisans, who applaud anything and everything Trump does, are just concerned about Trump’s popularity and the effect on the midterms and his continued power.

I think one thing that we can be sure of is that oil prices will decline in the short term. Over the past few months, it has become apparent that the markets like hints of peace. Oil prices fall at the mere suggestion of a possible deal, and financial markets soar when oil prices fall. At the very least, it seems likely gas prices will not be astronomical for the remainder of the summer travel season, but they probably won’t be as low as the status quo antebellum.

Don’t expect Trump supporters to make this distinction. They’ll credit Trump for the fact that gas prices are coming down without any regard for the fact that Trump caused gas prices to spike in the first place. It will be another case of “Trump Solves Problem Created By Trump.”

The next question would be how long the peace will last. Netanyahu refuses to be bound by the deal and says Israeli troops won’t be withdrawn from Lebanon. If Israel keeps fighting in Lebanon, and Iran retaliates by striking targets in the Persian Gulf or clamping down on access to the Strait of Hormuz, this may be the shortest peace deal since Trump’s last Persian Gulf ceasefire.

Let’s assume the current ceasefire does more or less hold and that Iran allows shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Will those relative victories avert a Republican cataclysm in the midterms?

That’s a nah from me, dawg, and I’ll give you a few reasons why. Most obviously, Trump and Republicans will still need to answer for why they started - and lost - an unnecessary war. All other things being equal, Republicans are going to have to explain why they spent hundreds of billions of dollars (not counting the money they may or may not be giving to Iran), killed 13 and injured scores of American soldiers, depleted stocks of munitions that leave us vulnerable elsewhere, and, in the end, left Iran richer and strategically stronger than it was before the war. Trump’s war achieved none of his stated goals, and it doesn’t look like Iran will even give up its enriched nuclear material.

Voters may not care about theoretical issues on the other side of the world if there is no active shooting and dying, but that still does not mean that Republicans are out of the woods. Prices are still elevated, and not just for gas. Food prices were up even before the war, driven partly by Trump’s trade wars.

The price of food will likely remain high for the time being and may get worse before it gets better. Much of the world’s fertilizer came through the Strait of Hormuz, and the supply was effectively cut off during the war. Prices spiked for the available supply. This means that the cost of growing food was more expensive this year, and crop yields may be lower. Those costs will be passed along to consumers.

In fact, many of Trump’s policies directly contribute to higher prices. In addition to the war and its associated energy and fertilizer spikes, the tariffs that Trump schemes to keep in place despite court rulings that strike them down and the war on immigrants also create upward pressure on prices.

Pocketbook issues often drive voters. If that’s the case this year, Republicans can expect a shellacking as voters watch grocery prices rise while they see clips of Trump saying, “I love inflation.”

Nothing seems to be going well under the Trump regime. From disastrous foreign policy to spending millions on the reflecting pool only to have the water promptly turn green from an algae bloom, the meme that Everything Trump Touches Dies (#ETTD) is on display on a daily basis, and with Trump putting his name on everything, it’s difficult for voters to avoid making the connection.

Even traditional Republican issues like immigration have seen an erosion in voter approval and trust. In particular, there has been widespread dissatisfaction with Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement, especially among the independent and Hispanic voters who helped put Trump and Republicans over the top in 2024.

As it stands now, Republicans will be arguing that inflation is good, food prices aren’t as bad as consumers think they are, pallets of cash for Iran were bad under Obama but even more cash from Trump is good, and that taxpayers should pony up $600 millionfor a presidential ballroom at a time when many are worried about how to pay for their next meal. That’s not only tone-deaf, it’s also politically disastrous. Republicans might as well campaign under the slogan, “Let them eat cake.”

And all this assumes that Trump will be on his best behavior and won’t do anything to create more bad news for Republicans before Election Day. Friends, I’m here to tell you that won’t happen. There is no way that Trump can go four months without creating a plethora of new messes. By next week, let alone four months from now, he may have declared war on Greenland or who knows what?

There are not many consistent things about Donald Trump, but there are a few. One is that he will never give up on tariffs, no matter how much they strangle the economy. Find someone who loves you as much as Donald Trump loves tariffs (and himself).

Another major point of consistency is that Donald Trump cannot go long without being in the limelight. That’s true even if he gets in the limelight by doing crazy and destructive things. That’s going to be true between now and the midterms as well, and you can take that to the bank.

From the Racket News

Trump fought Iran, and Iran won

2026-06-06T22:01:23.087-04:00

Is it time to say “I told you so?”

A few weeks ago, I said that the Iran war was ending with a whimper, rather than with a bang. Even before that, when the war first started, I said that war with Iran was easier to start than finish, noting, “The US excels at tactical warfare. It’s the long-term, strategic thinking that we tend to have problems with.”

Three months later, my observation from early March that the “most likely scenario is that Trump finds something to call a victory and walks away” seems to have hit the nail on the head.

I’ve lost count of the ultimatums that have been demanded and ignored over the last couple of months. Iran hasn’t given an inch to Trump’s demands, and now the president says he “couldn’t care less” if negotiations are over. With no negotiations and no fighting (at least not serious fighting), the war with Iran seems to be in a Korea-like limbo, with the exception that Iran is now strategically better off than it was before the war started.

Yes, Iran maintains a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz with only a trickle of shipping running the gauntlet. Both the US and Iran are letting a few ships transit in their respective lanes of protection, but the numbers remain about 90 percent below pre-war levels.

The low number of tankers leaving the Persian Gulf has resulted in steadily declining stockpiles of oil. The price of oil has remained relatively steady since hostilities simmered, based on the assumption that Trump is ending the war and reports that a deal is near.

“When the President forces this conflict to a successful end, gas prices will drop back to multi-year lows and global energy markets will be much more stable in the long term,” White House officials told the Washington Post.

But ending the war is proving to be difficult. Iran has reportedly broken off negotiations, demanding that Israel halt its attacks in Lebanon. Iran’s action has caused a rift between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, with Trump confirming that he called the Israeli leader “crazy” in an expletive-filled phone call in which the two discussed their “tactical disagreements.”

If you want to understand who is winning and who is losing, just look at which side is ignoring the other’s demands and which is scrambling to make a deal.

As I’ve pointed out previously, Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place. He can’t afford to openly admit defeat, but he also can’t afford to let the energy crisis drag on. Both are poison for the midterms.

And now the corner that Trump has painted himself into is getting smaller. In a bipartisan vote, the House passed a war powers resolution on Wednesday that would limit the president’s ability to launch new attacks. The measure must pass the Senate to become binding, but does not have to be signed by the president. Even without passing the Senate, the measure’s passage in the House is an indication of the war’s unpopularity and Republican division on the issue.

Many of Trump’s Iran problems are self-made. The Administration’s plan seems to have been to follow the Venezuela model of a decapitation strike, followed by replacing Iran’s leadership with an ally, in this case, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whether this was a good idea to begin with or not is moot, because the plan fell apart when Ahmadinejad was injured in airstrikes in the early days of the war. The former president is no progressive, even though he was under house arrest by the current regime, and was a bogeyman of the right for years while in office.

Likewise, Trump created difficulties with Congress and the public by choosing a go-it-alone approach. Trump failed to even attempt to make a case for war before launching the attacks, probably gambling that the Ahmadinejad gambit would win the war before opposition could build. When the secret plan failed, there was no Plan B.

Trump also did not attempt to talk Congress into supporting the war. The end of major hostilities coincided closely with the 60-day limit specified by the War Powers Act, and the Administration made no serious attempt to get congressional approval for extended hostilities.

Large-scale strikes may have ended, but a low-intensity conflict continues. The US maintains a blockade on Iranian oil, an act of war in itself, and Iran continues to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides are also still shooting. The US recently attacked Iranian air defense sites, and possibly in retaliation, Iran has attacked Kuwait and Bahrain.

The status quo might last indefinitely if not for the elephants in the room: The energy crisis and the dwindling oil supplies. At some point, Trump is going to have to make a decision to either go all-in and restart the war in a major way to force open the Strait or to make a deal to get oil supplies flowing again.

There really isn’t much question as to which course he will choose. Even without increasing constraints from Congress, the president would likely order the TACO from the menu. If Trump had any intention of escalating the conflict, he would have done so two months ago. The chances of escalation are inversely proportional to the length of time until the midterms.

In the meantime, the Trump Administration has adopted the Alfred E. Neumanattitude of “What? Me worry? with a social media post saying, “It will all work out well in the end - it always does.” Or maybe it’s a dog whistle to the QAnon slogan, “Trust the plan.” There is really no evidence that Trump has a plan, however, and, as Republicans used to tell Democrats, hope is not a plan.

The irony is that Trump was elected in large part because Republicans saw him as a fighter. What will happen to the movement when MAGA realizes that he not only lost the only real fight that he’s ever had but that he backed down in the face of Iranian resistance?

From The Racket News

Dems should dump Platner

2026-06-04T17:41:03.585-04:00

Democrats have a problem with Graham Platner.

At first, the Maine native seemed like a dream candidate for Democrats, but he quickly became a nightmare. The blue-collar oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan may have had broad appeal on the surface, but things quickly went awry when it was learned that the surface of his body was decorated with a Totenkopf (death’s head) tattoo associated with the Nazi SS.

The Nazi tattoo has apparently been covered with a Celtic knot, but Platner got worse from there. The candidate, who has become known online as “NTG” for “Nazi Tattoo Guy,” seems to have a talent for finding controversy. This past January, he was interviewed by an anti-semitic podcaster and said he was “a longtime fan” of the show. More recently, he has become embroiled in a sexting scandal that stemmed from his wife allegedly telling a campaign aide that he had sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women early in their marriage. They married in 2023.

All that is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more bad decisions in Platner’s past that we know about and probably a lot that we don’t… yet.

Having said all that, if I were in Maine, I’m not sure how I’d vote. Normally, a candidate of Platner’s obviously poor quality would not get my vote. Normally, I wouldn’t vote for someone with Platner’s progressive policy positions or who had described himself as a “communist,” which is just as troubling as his dalliance with the Nazis. (Platner and Nick Fuentes may be the only people to pick both sides in the Nazi-Soviet debate. The proper answer is “neither.”)

These aren’t normal times.

I’ve written before that I believe that most Republicans need to lose in the next few elections. I am far from certain that Donald Trump intends to peacefully exit the White House in 2029, and I think we need a Congress that is prepared to resist his lawlessness both until and after the next presidential election. I’m not sure that Susan Collins can be trusted to do that.

To be fair, Collins is one of the least trumpy Republicans left in the Senate. She has opposed him at times, such as voting to convict in his second impeachment, and sided with him at other times, such as voting to acquit him in his first impeachment. Collins has opposed Trump’s actions in Iran and his ballroom funding, as well as being “disappointed” in the president’s endorsement of Ken Paxton, but how she’ll vote if and when these issues come up in the Senate, especially after the election, is anyone’s guess.

Susan Collins is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get. She might stand strong on principles that other Republicans have long since abandoned, or she might fret, express her disappointment and frustration, and vote the party line anyway.

As a Never Trump guy, I’m concerned about decency in politics. But as a Never Trump guy, I’m also concerned about authoritarianism and lawlessness in our government. For people like me, the Maine Senate race is another Fezzik’s choice: We obviously can’t vote for the candidate who is deeply morally flawed, but we also obviously cannot support the candidate who has enabled the president in his lawlessness all too often.

Some would choose not to vote or vote third party. I also reject those choices. I’ve voted third party in the past, but the reality is that one of the major party candidates is almost always going to win. It’s better to choose from the duopoly candidates and try to get the lesser evil, which after all is also the greater good if you’re a glass-half-full person.

The best solution seems to be a Kobayashi Maru scenario. Maine Democrats should change the facts of the situation.

Janet Mills, the governor of Maine and Platner’s former primary opponent, recently hinted that she never formally dropped out of the race. She only suspended her campaign.

“People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning,”Mills said in a recent interview. “I am still on the ballot.”

At this point, a lot of Maine voters would like to see Mills unsuspend her campaign.

A restarted Mills campaign should be paired with a Democratic push to encourage Platner to drop out. So far most Democrats seem to be standing by Platner, but that could change. They stood by Biden up to a point, and then the dam broke.

Unlike with Biden in the presidential primary, Maine has not held it’s primary yet. Election Day is next Tuesday on June 9, but early voting has been going on for several weeks. (Scenarios like this are the best argument against long periods of early voting.)

To add to the tension, Maine has a ranked-choice primary. Voters could rank Mills above both Platner and David Costello, the third Democratic candidate. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the lowest scoring candidate is eliminated and the totals are refigured until someone gets a majority.

There is still a chance for Democrats to avoid a disaster in Maine, but time is running out. Given the gravity of the situation, hopefully they can manage to dump Platner for the good of their party and their country.

I’ll add that Platner, along with Trump, Paxton, and many others, is a good argument for scrapping the failed primary election experiment that has yielded candidates of inferior quality time and again. The parties should start looking at alternatives to the current system (although giving Trump more control over the Republican Party would not be good in the short term).

Primaries in the internet age give us candidates that deeply politicized internet junkies want rather than candidates who are good for the country or even competent at basic governance. That’s an indictment of both sides, and the Maine race is the choice between a bad candidate or a better candidate who will back a bad and possibly fascist president.

Maine voters have a tough choice. I’m glad I don’t have to make it. I hope their choice in November will be better than it looks like it will be at the moment.

Never trust a guy with a Nazi tattoo. That’s especially true if he’s a politician.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

SHAMELESS PLUG The Racket News has a new online friend. Stan Mitchell, a military and Christian podcaster, recently made our acquaintance and mentioned one of my online observations on an episode of his podcast (that segment begins at about 25:30). Check out Stan on the platform formerly known as Twitter or Blue Sky.

PERSONAL NOTE I haven’t been around much for the past few weeks. My daughter graduated high school, and we had a lot of family and friends come to help us celebrate. That included my son, who came home on leave from the Air Force. I stepped away for a while to take some much-needed family time.

Steve and I haven’t met face-to-face many times, but our families did recently get together for barbecue before the Thornton bunch attended a Weird Al Yankovic concert. It was great to visit with the Bermans, and Mrs. Yankovic’s boy still puts on a great show.

From the Racket News

Few surprises in this week’s primaries

2026-05-20T21:08:57.225-04:00

Yesterday was a primary day in Georgia, and the results held few surprises for those who had been paying attention. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Democrat primary ballots outnumbered Republicans both in the early voting and on Election Day. Democrats had an edge of about 150,000 votes, which is very unusual for Georgia.

The actual results were pretty much as expected. Georgia requires a majority so there will be a runoff if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote. The top two Republican candidates for governor were both MAGA: Rick Jackson, the billionaire who has spent $80 million of his own money to win a job with a $185,000 salary, and Burt Jones, the current lieutenant governor and an unindicted coconspirator in the 2020 fake elector plot. Former Atlanta mayor Keshia Lance Bottoms won the Democratic nomination outright.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!B7hu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F356cfd95-5a2b-4c55-8acb-d64076dbe73d_2070x1380.jpeg

Photo credit: Element5 Digital unsplash.com

MAGA had a good night, and if you know the Georgia GOP, this was no surprise. In one of the more notable results, Vernon Jones, a former Democrat who is black, earned a spot in the runoff with Tim Fleming. Jones has a history of scandal that includes both firing white employees and replacing them with blacks and a history of sexual misconduct that includes a rape allegation. But he’s a black Trump supporter. Fleming, his opponent, is also an election denier. I wouldn’t trust either with the integrity and security of Georgia elections.

A bright spot for Democrats was the fact that Senator Jon Ossoff’s opponent will either be Rep. Mike Collins, a MAGA radical, or Derek Dooley, the son of a legendary UGA coach but a political neophyte. The runoff will test the influence of Gov. Brian Kemp, who handpicked Dooley, over the MAGA preference for Collins. Ossoff will likely beat either option.

One of the most curious, albeit not surprising elements of the evening, was the result of two state Supreme Court races. These nonpartisan races appeared on the primary ballots, and Democrats had placed high hopes on their preferred candidates, who ran afoul of ethics rules regarding statements addressing issues that they might rule on as justices. This scandal broke just before Election Day. (Accusations that Kemp moved the judicial elections to the primary to confuse voters are false. Judicial elections have been held in the spring for at least 10 years.)

Both incumbents won re-election, but the curious thing was that challenger Miracle Rankin ran eight points ahead of her co-Democrat Jen Jordan in the parallel race. There is speculation that this may have been due to the fact that Rankin’s name sounded “black” or that Democrat voters didn’t familiarize themselves with the ballot, but it may just be that Jen Jordan, a former state senator and candidate for attorney general, wasn’t very popular. The loss in the two races even as Democratic voters were more energized and engaged may be due to a hesitance to politicize the state judiciary.

Outside of Georgia, Thomas Massie’s congressional race in Kentucky was closely watched. Massie, a libertarian Trump critic, was targeted by Trump for defeat. Massie lost by about 10 points.

In addition to being a Trump critic, Massie was a bit of a nut. His defeat may be partially explained by his response, in which he attacked his opponent’s support of Israel by claiming that he was in Tel Aviv during the election.

And finally, Texas has not yet held its primary, but Donald Trump endorsed another Vernon Jones-type candidate there. Ken Paxton is a serial adulterer who was impeached by Texas Republicans for corruption. It’s no surprise that Trump likes him, but his strong support from the Christian right is disappointing.

The big takeaway from Tuesday is that the Republican Party is firmly under Trump’s control. Dissenting politicians are being purged, even if it means that it is more likely that Democrats win control of the House and Senate.

This is more confirmation that the old conservative Republican Party no longer exists. There is only Donald Trump’s personality cult and the Democrats. A vote for any Republican is a vote to enable Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

That’s the choice for November.

From the Racket News

The US is to Cuba, as Iran is to the US

2026-05-19T21:24:03.655-04:00

Remember the analogies on the SAT? The question would give you two words, and then you’d have to match their relationship with two other words. For example, puppy is to dog, as kitten is to cat.

We Gen Xers used to hate the analogy section of the SAT, but I was reminded of it recently by unfolding parallel world events. First, Cuba announced that it is out of oil. The island nation received most of its oil from Venezuela and has not received shipments from that nation since January, following the US raid that captured Nicholas Maduro. Most other oil deliveries have been inhibited by the Trump Administration’s blockade aimed at regime change.

Now, the Cuban government says that the island is completely out of oil and diesel fuel. Compounding the problem, the electrical grid is teetering, with rolling blackouts lasting as long as 22 hours per day in some areas. The irony here is that US policy towards Cuba is something that would trigger the ire of the United States if someone else did it.

The manmade energy crisis may bring about regime change in Cuba, or it might make the country vulnerable to a US invasion, the US is reportedly considering indicting Raul Castro, but there are costs. There is a humanitarian crisis from shortages of energy, food and water that includes a skyrocketing infant mortality rate that is an obvious, painful cost of the blockade. The tarnishing of America’s image in Latin America at a time when China is making inroads into the Western Hemisphere is less obvious, but no less important.

But even more alarming is that Iran is doing to us what we are doing to Cuba. Oil and gasoline prices have risen as Iran continues to control access to the Persian Gulf, but so far we have not seen shortages. That may change within a few weeks.

For the past few months, the world economy has relied on previously-shipped inventories of oil along with newly-pumped oil from other areas. Those inventories have steadily declined, including the release of 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which, for context, puts the total contents of the SPR at less than 375 million barrels. Oil prices have remained relatively low on market hopes of a diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz that so far, has not come.

Industry experts predict that, without a resolution, the “low oil“ light for national economies could start to blink red by the end of June. Hamad Hussain, climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, told Fortune that oil prices might follow a “non-linear” path to $130-140 per barrel if the Iranian blockade is not resolved soon. Read that as a sudden, near-vertical spike in oil prices. Such a spike could lead to efforts to reduce demand, such as rationing, or panic buying.

In other words, we may only be a few months behind Cuba.

One of the first commodities where consumers feel the pinch may be motor oil. There are reports of leaked internal memos from Autozone, Toyota, and Nissan that indicate the companies are already preparing for potential shortages of motor oil. If you remember the Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020, you already have an idea of what a motor oil shortage might look like, but at least oil changes can be postponed.

Jet fuel shortages are also looming for the summer, particularly for Europe, where much of the go-juice is imported. While it’s unlikely that the airlines will run out of fuel, the summer travel season may come with flight cancellations and increased ticket prices.

All this is already on top of gasoline prices that are already high and climbing higher. The US is already flirting with its record-high gas price of $5.02, set on June 14, 2022, in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Adjusted for inflation, the highest price was $4.05 gallon during the 2008 recession, the equivalent of $6.02 today.

And with higher energy prices comes higher everything else. Energy is used to produce and transport other products from food to furniture and clothes to cars. The energy-driven inflationary price increases are a hidden tax inside the cost of everything we buy.

It’s unlikely that the US will completely run out of fuel like Cuba has, but we will feel a similar pinch unless the Strait issue is resolved soon. That, in itself, is unlikely. Either Trump buckles and makes a deal favorable to Iran or launches a massive, costly, long-term invasion and occupation of thousands of square miles of Iranian coastline. It’s a rock-and-a-hard place scenario, and the president will delay committing to either option as long as possible.

Trump is caught between wanting to resolve the Iran crisis successfully and not wanting to look weak, start a protracted war, or crash the global economy. The conundrum seems to have him stuck in a loop of threatening and then postponing severe consequences to the Iranian regime, hoping each time that Iran will fold.

At some point, however, the economic damage is going to reach a point where he either has to admit defeat or go all in. That decision point may be reached when oil reserves get catastrophically low and prices start to spike again as fears of shortages mount. After all, the US military needs oil to prosecute a war against Iran.

And there is the possibility that Cuba will also turn hot. As the situation on the island becomes increasingly desperate, the Cuban government may make a move that Trump could use as a pretext for an invasion. Axios recently reported that Cuba has amassed hundreds of drones over the past few years. These drones might be used in an attempt to break the blockade, or they might be used defensively against the US base at Guantanamo Bay or targets in Florida if the US attacks.

Ultimately, it may be up to Congress to resolve both crises. A bipartisan group of war critics has come very close to passing a war powers resolution that could end or severely restrict Trump’s authority to unilaterally wage war on Iran. As economic catastrophe and midterms loom, more Republicans might break ranks with the president. The growing number of Republican incumbents successfully primaried by Trump-endorsed challengers may change the math of war powers politics.

On Cuba too, Congress needs to act to prevent yet another war that could overextend the US military and critically deplete stocks of munitions. Congress needs to make clear to the toddler-in-chief that he can’t have another war until he finishes his last one.

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ILLEGAL ALIEN Donald Trump posted a picture of himself with a shackled ET to Truth Social.

From the Racket News

An unintended consequence of the Iran war?

2026-05-08T12:38:00.002-04:00

Whenever the government acts, the effect often flows to other areas of the country like ripples in a pond after a stone is tossed in the water. These ripples often affect things in unexpected and sometimes counterproductive ways. This phenomenon is sometimes called the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Donald Trump’s war on Iran is a government action that is ripe for unintended consequences. In fact, we’ve already seen a few.

The initial, limited attack has given way to a lengthy stalemate over control of the Strait of Hormuz. That stalemate, along with the loss of control over the Strait and its associated energy crisis, themselves represent an unintended consequence of the airstrikes. I am 100-percent certain that Donald Trump expected a quick Venezuela-style strike followed by another capitulation and victory lap rather than a protracted quagmire that rapidly morphed into a threat to the world economy.

Image created by Chat GPT

A world economic collapse could be another unintended consequence of Trump’s Iran policy. Spirit Airlines has already become the first major corporate casualty of the new status quo, but it likely won’t be the last. Chevron’s CEO recently predicted “physical shortages” and economic slowdowns as the nations adapt to the new, constricted flow of oil supplies.

“Demand needs to move to meet supply,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said on Monday. “Economies are going to have to slow.”

The laws of supply and demand tell us that oil and gasoline prices will rise until they find an equilibrium with falling demand at the new level of supply. The increased price level will merely be painful for consumers and some businesses, but it will be financially fatal for others.

All this brings me to my hypotheses of the day: What if Donald Trump turns out to be a boon to the adoption of EV technology?

With the exception of a brief flirtation with Tesla Cyber Trucks when Donald Trump and Elon Musk were in the midst of their bromance, the right has long been a vocal opponent of electric vehicles. Not only have anti-EV memes been a staple of the online right, but the Trump Administration has been hostile to EV incentives. Criticism of EVs has included questions about costs and efficiency, the environmental friendliness of battery production, and prepper concerns about the availability of electricity in an apocalyptic scenario. (Spoiler alert: gasoline probably won’t be widely available in a doomsday scenario either, and it normally takes electricity to pump gas.)

One of the big roadblocks to the adoption of EVs has been low gas prices. There was little reason to consider an EV when you could fill up even the large fuel tank of an SUV for $2.50 per gallon. Even the much-maligned gas spike during the Biden Administration, which was actually due to Vladimir Putin’s attempted invasion of Ukraine, was a temporary blip lasting only a few months. Domestic energy production also spiked, reaching a record high during the Biden Adminstration although few realized or admitted it. By the end of his term, gas prices were in line with historic averages.

The irony is that Republicans have long accused Democrats of secretly trying to raise gas prices as a means of coercing Americans into transitioning to EVs. Now that gas prices are rising and will soon break records under conditions that can be traced squarely back to the policy choices of a Republican president, they call for patienceand even make false claims that prices are already falling.

The current situation is much different from the short spike under Biden. Experts warn that gas prices won’t return to pre-war levels anytime soon. The war and the dueling blockades have created systemic chaos and shortages that will take months to sort out after the Strait is reopened, and there is no sign that the Strait is going to reopen anytime soon. No reliable sign anyway.

At minimum, we are looking at elevated gas prices for months, possibly for years. As I write this, the US average price for regular gasoline is $4.56 per gallon. In February, it was $2.92. To put it in consumer terms, filling up a 15-gallon gas tank just went from $46 to $68. That’s an extra $22 per fill-up. If you’re a commuter or soccer mom who fills up two to three times per week, those costs multiply. If your family has several cars, the costs multiply again.

And gas prices are still rising. Where they stop, nobody knows.

An extra $100 per week isn’t enough by itself to justify trading in your gas guzzler for a hybrid or an EV, but the Trump Effect on gas prices has removed a powerful disincentive against considering EVs: the idea that gas prices are low, so there is no reason to consider new technologies. As prices continue to rise, many consumers who are in the market for new cars will take a close look at hybrids and EVs as a way to reduce their exposure to high energy costs.

Other objections to EVs have already been largely overcome. EV prices have falleneven as ranges and efficiency have increased. Charger availability has expanded with many public chargers available at no charge. (A little EV humor there.) New battery and charger technology also allows charging so fast that charging time can rival the time it takes to make a fuel stop at a gas station. EV battery life has also improved, and many automakers include warranties that cover the battery for the typical usage life of the car.

EV technology has come a long way in the last few years. EVs are now practical for a large share of the population’s typical driving needs, but unfamiliarity and anxiety about range and batteries have made adoption of the technology slow. Few would have expected Trump’s war on Iran, a war in which he once openly fantasized about taking Iranian oil, to provide the impetus to overcome the fears about adopting EVs, but oil prices that are above $4 and climbing may be the incentive that many Americans need.

I would not be surprised if EV sales didn’t increase due to the energy crisis. I’d be more surprised if they didn’t. And like Republicans giving credit to Barack Obama for being the best gun salesman in history, Donald Trump’s failed Iran policy may get a lot of credit for unintentionally spurring many Americans to take the leap towards electric vehicles.

History shows that government programs often often have results that can be the opposite of what was intended. It looks like that will be the case with the attack on Iran in multiple ways.

And did someone say “gerrymandering?”

From the Racket News

Who killed Spirit?

2026-05-04T12:13:00.001-04:00

Over the weekend, an airline died. Spirit Airlines, 34, of Dania Beach, Florida, passed away suddenly on Saturday after a prolonged illness. Spirit was a true Florida company, quirky, rowdy, and sometimes tacky, but also beloved. (Like many Floridians, Spirit’s age is disputed. The company had its roots in 1964 as Clippert Trucking Company, but Spirit Airlines was formed in 1992.)

As with many sudden deaths, the focus quickly shifted from the life and legacy of the departed company to the question of “Whodunnit.” I’ve been doing Community Notes for a while now, and normally it’s difficult to get Notes published, but I noticed that a bevy of Notes were somehow approved with astonishing speed accusing Elizabeth Warren of orchestrating the carrier’s demise. While it’s true that Warren did oppose a proposed Spirit merger, that is not the full story of Spirit’s death.

Image by ChatGPT

When I said that Spirit had suffered from a prolonged illness, I wasn’t kidding. The airline was a company that people loved to hate. Just 10 years ago, the company was very profitable as an ultra-low-fare carrier that introduced American travelers to a la carte pricing, but that business model was never very popular.

If you’ve never flown Spirit, here’s how it operated. When you booked a fare, you would see a really low base price, but that price would rise as you paid extra for services that other airlines included with their fares. Spirit was the first US airline to require passengers to pay for checked bags, but it didn’t stop there. You had to pay for snacks, you had to pay to pick a seat, you even had to pay for a boarding pass and to put a carry-on bag in the overhead bin. If you bought the extras, you might end up paying more to the low-fare airline than you would for a ticket on a more well-known competitor.

Spirit was a niche airline that specialized in flying a small number of routes with a small number of flights. It didn’t try to be everything to everyone. It mainly tried to get vacationers to tourist hot spots as cheaply as possible, not necessarily as conveniently as possible.

Spirit boomed in the 2010s with both profitability and a number of safety awards, but then came the pandemic and the havoc that it wreaked on the travel industry. Spirit’s niche of elective travel to leisure destinations was hard hit.

In 2022, the company was the subject of several takeover attempts. The first suitor was Frontier Airlines, another low-fare carrier, but Spirit shareholders rejected that offer in July. Shortly after, JetBlue came calling with another attempt to acquire rather than merge with Spirit. This is the deal that you’ve seen referenced on social media.

The Biden Adminstration’s Department of Justice sued to block the deal, saying “If allowed to proceed, this merger will limit choices and drive up ticket prices for passengers across the country” and “eliminate Spirit’s unique and disruptive role in the industry.” It was ultimately a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, rather than Joe Biden or Merrick Garland, who blocked the deal. Elizabeth Warren, a senator at the time, opposed the deal but was not directly involved.

After the deal was blocked, Spirit’s stock value was halved and the company filed for bankruptcy in November 2024 amid mounting losses in the post-COVID world. The company reorganized to trim its costs and went on flying, emerging from bankruptcy in March 2025 after rejecting yet another offer from Frontier.

In August, it was back after posting losses and burning through much of its cash. Frontier tried to do what most airlines do at that point and cut costs, parking airplanes and furloughing (i.e., laying off) employees. The airline planned to reduce its workforce by about a third and its flights by 25 percent.

Then came the Iran war. After Donald Trump launched his attacks on Iran in February 2026, the Iranian regime blocked the Strait of Hormuz. The number of tankers carrying oil from the Persian Gulf dropped from thousands to a trickle.

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Airlines have three main cost centers: Labor, aircraft, and fuel. The first two are relatively predictable. Fuel prices are not.

To address the volatility of fuel prices, airlines “hedge,” that is, they buy contracts for future fuel deliveries at a given price. These futures contracts are a gamble because the price can either go up or down, but at least the company has reduced an unknown variable to a known quantity.

The problem for Spirit was that an airline in bankruptcy has a difficult time getting the money or credit to hedge fuel. Spirit’s “shrink to shine” plan was undercut by the skyrocketing price of jet fuel that increased its operating costs and the fact that it did not have a fuel hedging program in place.

Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy pointed out that Spirit’s restructuring plan assumed jet fuel prices of $2.24 per gallon for 2026. Instead, they were faced with $4.51 per gallon and rising. The price of fuel was double what Spirit had planned for.

Why didn’t Spirit just raise its fares and pass along the higher costs to its passengers, you might ask. There are several reasons with the most obvious being that a low-fare carrier’s customers are very price sensitive. Further, the low-fare customers that were Spirit’s target market are also being squeezed by higher prices for gasoline, food, and other consumer items. They have less disposable income than they did a few years ago.

Finally, Spirit’s rising prices eroded its edge over airlines that were able to hedge their fuel prices. Delta Air Lines even owns its own refinery. If the price of the ticket is close, most passengers would fly one of the traditional airlines, especially considering Spirit’s added fees and more limited schedules.

So who killed Spirit? The answer is not as simple as either side would have you believe.

In aviation, we have a model called the accident chain. A crash rarely has one cause. In almost every crash, there is a chain of linked causes that contribute to the accident. If one or more of these links is broken, the chain is broken and the accident can be avoided. The same theory applies here.

Could the merger (acquisition) by JetBlue have prevented Spirit’s ultimate crash? Perhaps, but there is no way of knowing for sure. The failure of the deal definitely left Spirit weakened and vulnerable, but JetBlue is also on the verge of bankruptcy and may declare it by the end of the year. Combining the companies might have given them enough strength to carry on, but it might have only delayed the inevitable.

And it could also be true that the deal might have been good for the company, but not the country. I, along with many other Americans, am concerned about the steady growth of monolithic megacorporations that reduce our consumer choices. Merrick Garland may have been right that the merger would have reduced consumer options while driving up prices and making it harder for new companies to enter the airline marketplace.

Earlier this year, United and American discussed a possible merger as a way to better compete with foreign carriers. The combined company would have been twice the size of Delta, with 2,800 planes and about 40 percent of the US domestic market. How big is too big, and do consumers really benefit when “all restaurants are Taco Bell?”

One thing that the merger would not have done was save the Spirit we know. This would have been JetBlue acquiring the weaker company, and buyouts seldom go well for aviation employees. Many jobs would still have been lost from duplicated positions and the fact that the new company likely wouldn’t need as many pilots and flight attendants as the two separate companies had. Flight crews who kept their jobs would have likely lost seniority, which is very important at the airlines.

Whether the merger would have saved Spirit or not, it is indisputable that high fuel prices were the final nail in the company’s coffin. Even with the JetBlue deal, the new company might have failed anyway, but without the fuel price spike, Spirit would be flying today. Spirit specifically cited high fuel prices in its announcement that it was shutting down, while making no mention of failed mergers.

Spirit isn’t the first airline to be killed by high fuel prices. I don’t like to brag, but my career has lasted longer than three of the airlines that I worked for. One of those was Independence Air. Independence was a low-fare carrier that was formed in the wake of the airline bankruptcies of the 2000s. The company was an attempt to reinvent Atlantic Coast Airlines, a regional carrier that had operated as United Express and Delta Connection but lost its contracts as those companies restructured.

A major reason that Independence failed was that another fuel spike occurred in 2003 just as the company was taking off. Like Spirit, the newborn Independence was in a weak state, and like Spirit, fuel prices that were dramatically higher than expected killed it.

The point here is that a strong company can weather storms that a company in a weakened position cannot. A strong company can absorb the shock of unexpected higher costs that can be the death knell for a company with other problems. Spirit had problems.

Weak companies can also be a bellwether for stronger companies and the larger economy. The weak die first, but if the problems continue to mount, even companies perceived as strong can fail.

With oil and fuel prices continuing to rise and no relief in sight, Spirit is likely to be the first of many to suffer serious problems. As fuel prices rise, fares will rise, and demand will fall. There is already concern about a looming shortage of jet fuel, and many airlines, even big, strong ones, are cutting costs and reducing flights.

And the problems extend beyond the airline industry. Farmers are another sector that is perennially on the edge of failure, and farm bankruptcies are already rising sharply. In addition to last year’s tariffs and trade wars, farmers now face higher fuel costs and shortages of fertilizer, yet another commodity that is tied to the Persian Gulf.

The partisans on both sides are spinning their simplified versions of Spirit’s demise, and to a certain extent, they are both right. But a merger deal might have saved only one (maybe two) companies, while high energy prices threaten countless businesses and farms, the entire economy. And as the failures mount, it will be increasingly hard to blame Biden.

And as the sticker says, Donald Trump can point to all the “creative destruction” that his Iran policy has wrought and say, “I did that.”

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THE WAR IS OVER As I predicted last week, Donald Trump announced on Friday that the war with Iran was over. The announcement came as the conflict reached the 60-day deadline established by the War Powers Act.

LONG LIVE THE WAR But the US blockade of the Iranian blockade, an act of war, continues, and on Sunday, Trump announced that the US will escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, following an Iranian attack on a cargo ship, also an act of war.

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU In celebration, enjoy the viral AI video of General Grievous appearing on Pawn Stars.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXmdFSTgnp-/

From the Racket News

Not with bang but a whimper

2026-04-30T11:49:00.001-04:00

One of the more memorable poems from my high school literature classes was “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot. When I say the poem was memorable, it was really the last stanza that lodged itself in my teenage brain. The poem hauntingly closed:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

That phrase resurfaced in my mind in recent weeks as the ceasefire with Iran was extended over and over again. The president has repeatedly renewed the ceasefire despite Iran's refusal to meet his demands and despite the continuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, the president seems more focused on his ballroom plans, which are now requiring taxpayer funding, and railroading James Comey than winning the Iran war.

Trump’s Iran strategy seems to have devolved into making occasional vague threats, like this one on Truth Social that depicts Mr. Trump in another AI cosplay, this time seemingly as a Secret Service agent or a Man In Black (and I don’t mean Johnny Cash). Trump urged Iran to “get smart soon” and “sign a nonnuclear [sic] deal,” which presumably means a deal that would make them non-nuclear. The consequences if they don’t are unclear, but they would most likely face another empty ultimatum.

Screenshot of Trump Truth Social post from April 29

Trump’s partisans call his tactics “the madman strategy.” They believe that Trump is not literally crazy; it’s just a role he plays to frighten opponents into submission. The problem with this theory, aside from the fact that Trump may have actual and literal mental problems, is that for the madman strategy to work, there has to be follow-through on his mad threats. So far, TACO has trumped the madman strategy.

I do believe there is ample evidence that Donald Trump has age-related mental problems in addition to a general lack of intelligence and competence. I don’t think he’s mad, however. He has not only backed away from his threats to kill a “whole generation” of Iranians, possibly with nuclear weapons, and to attack the power plants that Iranian civilians depend on, but he has also retreated from apparent plans to invade portions of Iran such as Kharg Island. We moved Marines from the Far East to the Middle East early in the war, but so far, they are still sitting aboard their ships.

The problem with the madman strategy is that if other countries call your bluff and you back down, opponents don’t believe your future threats. The madman act doesn’t hold up if you only talk like a madman and don’t act like one.

In truth, Trump is acting carefully towards Iran. He has to. He is hemmed in by competing and mutually exclusive goals. He wants Iran to back down, but he also does not want to stop the flow of oil. He wants to save face, but he does not want the stock market to crash. He wants to appear strong, but he knows the war is unpopular and does not want to fuel the opposition by committing ground forces. In addition, he is operating without congressional authorization and is nine months away from facing a much less friendly Congress.

When all this is taken into account, it seems almost certain that Trump will not expand the war. Further escalation runs the risk of upsetting oil and financial markets, as Iran could further tighten the screws on the “trickle” of ships currently transiting the Strait of Hormuz and have their Houthi allies close the Bab el-Mandeb strait that leads into the Red Sea towards the Suez Canal.

On the other hand, Trump can’t back down and appear weak to either his MAGA base, his domestic opponents, or his international rivals. A clear Iranian victory would embolden others to ignore Trump’s madman act, as well as come at a political cost at home.

Trump’s conundrum is reminiscent of the classic battle of wits scene from “The Princess Bride,” in which Fezzik reasons that he obviously cannot choose either of the poisoned goblets. Ironically, this scene also gives us the quote about falling “victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia,” in addition to another Man in Black reference.

Trump obviously cannot continue to escalate the Iran war for political reasons, yet he clearly cannot de-escalate either. So, what is a cornered president to do? Probably nothing. Many animals, when cornered, will freeze and hope the predator doesn’t see them. I think that’s what we can expect in Iran. Trump’s Iran policy will be like a deer in headlights.

Donald Trump’s war on Iran may end, not with the bang of a nuclear explosion or even the “rolling thunder” of another “shock-and-awe” air campaign. Like Douglas MacArthur and the Korean War, the Iran War may never die, but “just fade away.”

Continuing the blockade allows Trump to act like he’s still fighting, even as Iran defiantly calls upon the US to end hostilities in exchange for reopening the Strait. The war could continue this way indefinitely, from ceasefire to ceasefire, with both sides claiming to have the upper hand.

There are downsides to the status quo, however. The price of oil is high and rising higher as markets realize that the Strait is not going to be fully open anytime soon. That will be a strain on the US and global economies, as well as weighing down Republican chances in this year’s midterms. In addition to energy prices, fertilizer also transits the Strait of Hormuz, and its shortage around the world could spark a food crisis in addition to the energy crisis. The status quo also means continuing expensive and morale-sapping deployments of US forces in the Persian Gulf region.

For Iran, the status quo offers time to rebuild its defenses and prepare for a possible ground invasion, but the regime also faces the possibility of widespread unrest as millions of its citizens fall into poverty. Of course, the regime has few compunctions about murdering thousands of dissidents to maintain order, but a popular revolt would mean that the mullahs would be fighting a two-front war.

There are a few things that might break the logjam of the current status quo. One of those things is if the supply of oil to world markets is inadequate to keep the economy going. CNN reports that the number of tankers transiting the Strait went from about three thousand per month to 154 in March. While some oil is still moving through the Gulf and along alternate routes, inventories are dropping, and if stocks run low enough to become a security threat, Trump and/or others might be forced to roll the dice and invade to topple the regime or at least open the Strait.

For the moment, there seems to be enough oil reaching markets to keep the economy moving, albeit at greatly elevated prices. Nevertheless, some experts predict a “day of reckoning coming.” That day is more likely to arrive if the Iranian regime remains at the switch, controlling access to and from the Persian Gulf, but at the moment, there is no good way to change that reality.

That’s especially true when the man in control of the effort against the Iranian regime is reminiscent of another reference from high school English lit, specifically William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth:” “… an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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VRA GO BYEBYE? SCOTUS struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created two majority African-American districts. The Court did not strike down the Voting Rights Act, but effect of the decision will likely be felt across the South. Justice Alito wrote in the opinion, “The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.”

UAE GO BYEBYE The United Arab Emirates will leave OPEC on May 1. The move will further weaken the cartel’s control of oil prices and production.

from the Racket News

The assassination conspiracy (theory)

2026-04-28T10:06:00.001-04:00

Since the most recent foiled assassination attempt on Donald Trump, I’ve seen a lot of people from the left side of the political spectrum theorize that the attack was, for lack of a better word, and with apologies to Alex Jones, a false flag. That shouldn’t be surprising, but what is surprising is that it isn’t just Democrats who are arriving at this conclusion. While perusing coverage of the incident, I noticed a Wired article that opined, “MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged.” The interesting thing about this is that, upon closer inspection, the article was published on April 17, a week before the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

At this point, Trump has survived three assassination attempts as well as a number of other plots and security incidents. This has sparked online claims that Trump has survived more assassination threats than any other president and that Democratic presidents have not been subject to any attempts at all. The first claim depends on how you count, and the second is outright false, but it is true that Trump has had a number of close calls, particularly the Butler, Pennsylvania, attempt in 2024. It was the Butler attempt that was the focus of the Wired article, although there is a new one that deals with the WHCA attack.

Screenshot of video posted by Donald Trump showing Cole Thomas Allen crashing through security checkpoint

At this point, I’ll make two statements. First, I am a political opponent of Donald Trump, but I don’t think assassination is justified, moral, or should be condoned. Further, I don’t think Trump’s death or injury would benefit the Trump opposition. The president is running the Republican Party into the ground. The GOP is at a very unpopular level and is about to get “shellacked” in the midterms. I don’t think most Democrats want to make him a martyr or a sympathetic figure.

Second, I don’t think the attempts were fake. It would be very difficult to find patsies who would risk life and freedom so that Donald Trump could gain a few percentage points in the polls.

And these are real risks. Thomas Crooks was killed on top of a building in Butler, Pennsylvania, with an AR-15 that he used to shoot at Trump and with which he killed a rallygoer. Ryan Routh is serving life in prison for his attempt on Trump’s life in West Palm Beach in 2024. Cole Thomas Allen will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars as well. There are many reasons why someone might want to kill a president, this president in particular, but I can’t really think of a good reason why anyone would mortgage their future in a fake attack.

Having said that, I do have a lot of questions about the attack last weekend. For starters, why was Trump there in the first place? Trump has never attended a White House Correspondents Association dinner as president. The last time he showed up to the event was in 2011 when he was roasted by Barack Obama. A theory that I have some sympathy for is that Trump was so humiliated by the incident that it inspired him to run for president as revenge against those who mocked him.

Further, why were so many members of the cabinet present? Of 16 people in the presidential line of succession, 11 have been confirmed in attendance at the dinner. This includes seven of the next 10 in line to be president, including Vice President Vance (first on the list of succession), Speaker Mike Johnson (second), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (fourth). We very nearly experienced the emergency presidency of President Pro Tempore of the Senate Chuck Grassley (third).

While it is not unheard of for cabinet members and congressmen to attend the dinner and there are no designated-survivor rules for the event, unlike the State of the Union, this seems like an extraordinarily top-heavy list of attendees. Of course, the simple explanation may be that this was Trump’s first time at the dinner as president, and the sycophants in the cabinet and congressional leadership know that Trump loves nothing more than to have his ego stroked. Not attending could have been viewed as professional suicide or at least a slap in the president’s face.

The attempt also raises questions about security and the effectiveness of the Secret Service. This is especially true in light of security lapses that came to light following the Butler attempt, as well as older scandals about unprofessionalism, including partying and drunkenness of Secret Service agents.

The dinner, which was not a state event, was being held at the Washington Hilton. Since it was not a state dinner, the argument that a gold-plated ballroom might have prevented the attack is a non sequitur, even though the White House was apparently pushing this pretty hard shortly after the incident. Trump himself plugged his ballroom project as a security solution in the aftermath of the attack. Ironically, the Washington Hilton was also the site of the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

A dinner in a hotel ballroom can be a security nightmare. It would be difficult to screen every guest in the hotel, and Cole was reportedly checked into the Hilton as a guest. Much like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, Cole probably took his weapons into the hotel several days before the attack.

The BBC discusses the security measures at the hotel in detail, noting that the hotel was closed to the public hours before the event and that the heaviest security, including metal detectors, was around the ballroom where the banquet was to take place. Cole never penetrated the security cordon and never got close to the president.

Nevertheless, there was criticism of the security plan. Gary O'Donoghue, a BBC correspondent at the dinner, said that security was not “particularly heavy” and noted, “The man on the door outside only took a cursory look at my ticket from what must have been six feet away.”

A newly unearthed clip of local Fox personalities talking on hot mics backs up that observation. They observe that “two random chicks” are holding the door open and joke that the Secret Service should “just get a doorstop.”

Former UK ambassador, Kim Darroch, criticized the lack of security in depth, noting, "If you were there [as a hotel guest] and you had bad intentions about breaking into this dinner, there's just one security thing you had to get past... and then you're in the ballroom.”

Even the perp criticized the lack of security in his manifesto, writing, “What the hell is the Secret Service doing… No damn security. Not in transport. Not in the hotel. Not in the event.”

Allen allegedly armed himself with a shotgun, pistol, and knives (no AR this time) and attempted to breach the security checkpoint going towards the hotel ballroom. He exchanged fire with law enforcement before being detained and captured without injury, but this brings up another question: With all the bullets that were flying, how did he survive without being hit? Did the Secret Service Agents attend the Star Wars Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship?

With Butler and the other recent plots against Trump, there are legitimate questions about whether security was too light or perhaps whether the Trump Administration’s lack of competence has infected the agency. The current director of the Secret Service is Sean Curran, who was appointed by Trump in January 2025 and has been with the agency since 2001. I don’t see any obvious red flags with Curran, but the investigation into what went wrong should include a look at the morale and culture within the Secret Service.

One thing that has been mentioned that was demonstrably not a factor is the ongoing DHS shutdown. Secret Service agents are among the DHS employees who are being paid through Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” ICE, CBP, Coast Guard, and TSA are also being paid.

There are also questions about the alleged shooter. Cole Thomas Allen (maybe we should be suspicious of people named Thomas) is a 31-year-old resident of Torrance, California, near LA. Allen is reportedly very intelligent, graduating from Caltech with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2017 and a master’s in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. Per NBC News, he donated $25 to ActBlue, a Democratic organization, in 2024, and was a member of a Christian fellowship at Caltech.

Prior to the attack, he sent a manifesto to members of his family (read it in full here), who forwarded it to police. Despite claims by Trump and others that the manifesto was “anti-Christian,” Allen specifically tried to explain and rationalize his actions to Christians in the manifesto, arguing that “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes,” citing “yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” as an objection to his plan, and thanking his church for its love. What little we know of his religious beliefs comes across like a liberal version of right-wing Christian Nationalism, although he probably sees himself more as a latter-day Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I suspect that we may eventually learn that Allen has a high-functioning form of some mental illness or disorder. The manifesto, in which Allen called himself “Friendly Federal Assassin,” presents a very odd picture of the shooter and his thought processes.

Mental illness is a common factor in many similar cases, perhaps more so than the always-assumed trope that to shoot a political figure, you must be radically political from the opposite end of the spectrum. Often, there is no coherent political ideology or evidence of strong political views, although, in this case, the manifesto does allude to a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” that even the president assumes to be a reference to Trump, an adjudicated rapist and friend of Jeffrey Epstein (463 days into Trump’s second term, the Epstein files have still not been released). The manifesto also notes that other cabinet members, “not including Mr. Patel,” for reasons unknown, were targets.

Alternatively, it may be that Allen was influenced by both Trump’s corrupt and authoritarian behavior and the very online world we all inhabit. Again, I’m not going to justify or condone any act of political violence, but I think it is fair to point out that Trump’s rhetoric and actions have likely had the result of inciting violence against him. Again, that does not justify the violence, but it is an explanation.

As to the possibility that Trump and MAGA manufactured the whole incident (or incidents) as a public relations stunt, while I wouldn’t say that Trump is ethically above such behavior (or above possibly wearing a bandage on his ear for far longer than was medically necessary), the logistics make it very unlikely. It is far more likely that the attempt was real and that the president will use it to his political advantage. That is one reason among many why there should be no more violence against Donald Trump.

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LINKS YOU CAN USE A lot of pundits are claiming that the left is more accepting of political violence than the right. That claim does not stand up to scrutiny. Numerous polls, such this Marist poll from 2025 and this PRRI poll from January 2026, show that support for violence is higher among Republicans. Further, in recent years, deaths from right-wing political violence have exceeded those from left-wing violence. Both sides tend to blame the other for violence, but the good news is that majorities on both sides reject violence.

From the Racket News

MAGA FAs and FOs

2026-04-24T11:02:00.001-04:00

Let me start off by saying that this is not an aviation post. If you clicked here to read about MAGA flight attendants and first officers, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but stick around because I’ve got some interesting thoughts on other subjects.

The FA and FO that I had in mind is a common phrase these days. If you don’t know what it means, it’s an acronym containing the same, not suitable for family values voters word that was in the “Let’s go, Brandon” chant. To clean it up a little, I’ll say it means “Fart Around, Find Out.” Essentially, it means that when something bad happens to someone, they had it coming.

Photo credit: Dan Burton/Unsplash.com

MAGA’s FAFO moment came on Tuesday when Virginia voters decided that they wanted to cast aside the state’s fair and balanced congressional districts and replace them with a new map that will likely net Democrats a total of 10 seats and leave Republicans with one. When the votes were counted on Tuesday, there was much weeping, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments from the MAGA set.

Ironically, most of the people who were upset on Tuesday were cheering last year when Texas redrew its congressional map. To hear the MAGA crowd talk about it, Virginia’s referendum was a shot fired out of the blue at constitutional democracy.

“Virginia is about 55 percent Democrats, and they want to force by majority vote that the state send 91 percent Democratic representation to Congress,” Republicans argue, but what they conveniently forget to mention is that Virginia was a response to Texas. Some probably really have forgotten about Texas, because I’ve seen several people online threatening to have Texas reconfigure its districts yet again.

For those who don’t remember, let me bring you up to speed. States typically redraw congressional districts after a census, which occurs every 10 years. After Republicans saw gains in Hispanic voters in 2024, Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw their lines again to gerrymander the state’s congressional seats in an attempt to blunt expected Democratic gains elsewhere in the midterms. It was abnormal, but not unconstitutional. The Texas legislature approved the new map in August 2025, and Gov. Gregg Abbott signed the measure into law.

In response, California Democrats put Proposition 50 on the ballot to draw new congressional districts that would gerrymander away several Republican seats. That measure passed in November and is expected to erase many of the extra seats Republicans hope to gain in Texas.

But it didn’t end there. Other states, including Maryland and New York, also considered action. Virginia actually put it to the voters, and the voters said, “Go for it.”

The redistricting war did not begin in New York in 2024, as some claim, by the way. New York’s map was approved in 2024, but the process started years earlier and was delayed by litigation. It was not a mid-decade redistricting attempt.

So the Republicans may (more on that later) get a handful of seats from Texas, but they will lose them in California, where redistricting used to be based on maps drawn by an independent commission, and Virginia, which formerly had one of the fairest maps in the country.

Republicans may have awakened a sleeping beast. Both states take advantage of gerrymandering, but of the states that try to draw fair maps, most are Democrat-leaning, while quite a few red states have only one or two congressional districts.

The Texas mid-decade gerrymandering war has moved us backwards from what I’d like to see: nonpartisan districts everywhere and a national gerrymandering ban. I think that gerrymandering is to blame for a lot of the extremism in both wings of American politics because politicians who don’t have a viable opposition party have no reason not to be as extreme as possible to win the primary.

But that dream is going to have to come from the legislatures because, as I said earlier, gerrymandering is not unconstitutional. As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court held that gerrymandering is permissible with the exception of drawing districts that are racially discriminatory, except to the extent that racial discrimination is required by the Voting Rights Act. If that sounds like a tight line to haul, it really isn’t because, to a great extent, racial lines are also political lines, at least for some groups. Gerrymandering usually faces a low bar for lawfulness.

So don’t fret about the recent injunction from a state judge that seeks to invalidate the results of Tuesday’s election. Remember that both Texas and California had legal challenges to their new maps. The Supreme Court affirmed both redistricting plans. In Virginia’s case, the state supreme court overturned previous rulings that would have killed the referendum.

I can also point out that both California and Virginia put their gerrymandered maps to the voters; Texas did not. If there are any complaints to be made about the lack of democracy in gerrymandered maps, they should be directed towards the Texas statehouse in Austin, but newfound Republican critics of gerrymandering never seem to have problems with the Texan casus belli.

And that brings us to the potential fly in Texas’s ointment, namely the looming possibility of a blue wave election amid what is turning out to be Republican unpopularity of historic proportions. You see, gerrymandering is often accomplished in a way that gives districts a lopsided partisan majority, making them safe for the party in power. However, Trump’s Texas redistricting did the opposite. Republicans assumed that Hispanic voters who voted Republican in 2024 were part of a new permanent majority and redrew lines to encompass their new red Hispanic voters. If that is a bad assumption, then Republicans may have just diluted their strength. turning safe districts into battlegrounds.

And it looks extremely doubtful that Hispanics will stay red. A recent AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics had fallen to about 25 percent after an estimated 42 percent voted Trump in 2024. Who could have imagined that treating Hispanics and immigrants like criminals who were presumed guilty would backfire at the polls?

The cratering among Hispanics is only part of public opinion turning against Trump and the Republicans nationwide. Trump’s overall approval is only 43 percent in Texas, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick recently said that Republicans will have a “tough time” keeping their majority in the state House.

When the full story of the redistricting war is written, it may be said that Trump broke norms to try to pick up a few seats and ended up losing several states, including Texas. People say that Texas will never go blue, but Trump may have found a way.

One of many lessons to be learned, both in Texas and Iran, is that bullying only gets you so far. When you make people angry enough that they start fighting back, things can go south pretty quickly.

FAFO.

From the Racket News

mRNA in the USA!

2026-04-22T22:53:00.001-04:00

It isn’t often that we get earth-shattering good news these days, but we did last weekend. It’s my pleasure to pass along the news that we may have cured pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the scary ones, even by cancer standards, where every diagnosis is scary. It’s difficult to test for, so by the time you’re diagnosed, it’s often terminal. Treatments have had a low probability of success. Per NBC News, fewer than 13 percent of people with pancreatic cancer live past five years.

Until now.

Image created by ChatGPT

The big medical news over the weekend was the result of a long-term trial that used an experimental mRNA vaccine to attack pancreatic cancer cells. The trial began in 2019, a year before mRNA vaccines became widely known during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists tailored vaccines to the specific cancer cells in each of 16 patients in the trial. In eight patients, the vaccine triggered immune system cells to attack the invasive cancer cells. Seven of these patients are still alive after four to six years. Of the eight patients whose immune systems did not respond, the median survival time was 3.4 years. Only two were still alive when the announcement was made.

The study represents a giant step forward in the fight against pancreatic cancer, but it is not a panacea. Participants in the trial first had to have surgery to have the tumor removed, but surgery is only possible in about 20 percent of cases. The 50 percent success rate of the experimental vaccine is still long odds, even if it’s much better than no treatment.

While the advancement is important in the fight against pancreatic cancer, this treatment is only the beginning. The same technology shows promise against many other diseases and forms of cancer. There are already vaccines for other forms of cancer in the works, including prostate cancer.

[As an aside, let me point out that the phrase “a cure for cancer” is a bit misleading.] There are many types of cancer, and some of them are more curable than others. There is not likely to ever be a single cure for cancer, but we are likely to see an increasing number of successful treatments for various forms of the disease, that’s why I use the plural term “cures for cancer.” Former Senator Ben Sasse, who announced that he has metastatic pancreatic cancer last December, is reportedly in a separate trial.]

The promise of the new technology is what makes it so ironic and tragic that Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. head up the federal government at this momentous point in medical history. Cancer research was a big target and a big loser in Elon Musk’s DOGE war on federal spending. In the first half of 2025, the Trump Administration cut 1800 grants and $8 billion in cancer research funding. RFKJR’s HHS continued with an emphasis on cutting research into mRNA vaccines, a favorite bogeyman of the anti-vax right, despite their real world successes.

Some anti-vax conspiracy theories are based on a misunderstanding of what mRNA vaccines do. Contrary to popular belief, they do not change your DNA. Rather, as the National Medicine Library explains, mRNA vaccines introduce a protein that corresponds to proteins found in a virus or other foreign cell. The body’s cells then produce antibodies that target the protein, fighting off the foreign cells.

Other conspiracy theories claim that mRNA vaccines cause so-called “turbo cancer,”rather than cure diseases. While it is true that there had been a surge of cancer cases among younger people, the increase predates the advent of mRNA vaccines and is likely due to lifestyle factors. There is no known link between the COVID mRNA vaccines and cancer, “turbo” (which does not exist) or otherwise. In fact, some studies have identified potential benefits from the COVID vaccines in fighting cancer.

A favorite trope of Trump supporters has been, “Trump could cure cancer, and you’d still hate him.” The chances of Trump curing cancer are about the same as the chances of Trump flying to the moon by flapping his arms, but the reality is closer to the opposite. Trump and his cohorts not only did not cure cancer, they cut the funding for numerous promising research programs and undermined public faith in mRNA, a technology that has the potential to remake medicine as we know it. Trump killed cures for cancer, yet his base still loves and trusts him.

There are few areas where MAGA has been so dramatically, tragically wrong as it has been with its opposition to mRNA vaccines and research. Research will go on, but precious time is being lost because of the loss of federal funding. Many scientists will go to other countries where more funding is available, and for many scientists and doctors who are immigrants, to places where there are more friendly immigration policies. They will take their American education and work for our competitors because our government no longer wants immigrants.

A few years might not seem like much, but if you or a loved one has been diagnosed with a fast-moving disease like pancreatic cancer, days matter. The loss of four or more years of research could be the difference between life and death.

Because I frequently beat up on President Trump, I will also give him some credit here. During his first term, Trump signed the Right to Try Act, a law that allows terminal patients access to experimental trials. If a patient is likely to die anyway, they should have the right to try new treatments, even if they are in the testing stage. Give them a shot at life.

Nevertheless, as a two-time cancer patient (read about my experience here), I take it personally that the Administration has made such draconian cuts to such promising programs. That’s especially true since any savings from DOGE have been squandered on spending increases for items like the massive growth of ICE and the war on Iran (more than $1 billion per day). Spending and borrowing have increased under Trump, even as cancer research was thrown under the bus.

It’s a sign of the times that we can get confirmation of the existence of UFOs or a promising new treatment for one of the most deadly strains of cancer, and no one bats an eye. So much for all the old movies in which characters opined that the government couldn’t tell the truth about UFOs without causing a mass panic. I guess we just needed a trumpian dumpster fire as a distraction when they dropped that rhetorical bomb, but the news of the pancreatic cancer vaccine is news that deserves to be celebrated far and wide.

There is mounting evidence that America bet on the wrong horse in 2024, but none so stark as the realization that we chose tariffs and unnecessary wars over cures for cancer. We will have an opportunity to correct that mistake, starting in just a few months. We should fire those members of Congress who offer Trump their unquestioning support and hire those who will restore funding to cancer research projects and rein in an out-of-control president.

We are on the cusp of a tremendous scientific breakthrough that has been dreamed of for generations, but like the old joke about what makes airplanes fly (the answer is “money”), highly technical medical research also takes large piles of cash, and when large piles of cash are required, for better or worse, usually the primary source is the federal government.

If the issue for the midterms is spending to create cures for cancer or deport elderly immigrant grandparents, I’m pretty sure I know what Americans will choose.

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VIRGINIA VOTES Virginia voted to redistrict to add Democrat seats in response to Texas’ mid-decade redistricting.

TACO TUESDAY Trump extended the Iran ceasefire indefinitely.

FLU NOT Pete Hegseth announced that US troops would no longer be required to get annual flu vaccinations.

From the Racket News

The mystery of the missing aircrew

2026-04-16T08:59:00.001-04:00

There’s a new conspiracy theory in town. I’m seeing lots of claims on the internet that the recent massive rescue mission that allegedly extracted two downed Air Force F-15 crewmen was a massive hoax, along with speculation about what was really going on.

For those who might be living under a rock, a USAF F-15 fighter-bomber, call sign Dude 44, was shot down over Iran on April 3, Good Friday. The pilot was rescued quickly, but the Weapons Systems Officer, the WSO or GIB (Guy In Back), was the subject of an intense search and rescue effort that culminated in his retrieval during the early morning hours of Easter Sunday.

Where the conspiracy theories come in is that in the weeks following the rescue, little, if any, additional information has come out about the status of the crew, their identities, or their condition. Given the need for good PR regarding the unpopular and seemingly unsuccessful war in Iran, it seems likely that the Department of Defense (which is still the real name of the agency) would like to treat both the rescued and the rescuers as heroes and parade them around in public. That has not happened. The only positive information about the identities of the crew was a remark by Donald Trumpthat the rescued WSO was “a highly respected Colonel.”

As is often the case, the lack of information has created a vacuum that is being filled by conspiracy theories. That includes speculation that the crew was captured, fed by bad information such as a 1990 video from the Gulf War reposted to Facebook, or that the operation was a cover story for a raid into Iran with a different purpose. Some deny that the raid occurred at all.

First, I think we can reasonably be sure there was a rescue mission. The F-15 represents one of only two airborne losses to Iranian fire from the war so far. The other was an A-10 that was heavily damaged about the same time. That pilot was rescued after flying out of Iran and ditching in or near the Strait of Hormuz. Essentially, the Air Force wouldn’t have a reason to lie about the F-15 shootdown and give the Iranians credit for a kill that they didn’t earn.

We can also know that Iran did not capture or kill the crew. If live prisoners or dead bodies were in Iranian hands, the images would be widely broadcast by Iranian media. They have not been.

Further, the US has historically made immense efforts to rescue downed aircrew where possible. Going back to Vietnam and beyond, downed pilots and crewmen would be the subject of large rescue efforts that included helicopters, attack aircraft, and sometimes fighters, bombers, tankers, and even ground forces. Rescue efforts were important for aircrew morale as well as to deny the enemy a source of propaganda. Additionally, it takes years to train crewmen so there is a logistical reason as well.

So why the cover-up? I’m venturing into speculation, but there are a few possibilities.

The most obvious answer is that to protect the crew’s privacy. Maybe, like many soldiers who do heroic things, they didn’t want the notoriety. Along the same lines, it would not be unreasonable to fear that they or their families could be targeted by Iranian terror cells back home. Maybe their injuries were significant enough that they are still hospitalized.

Or maybe there is some reason that releasing the crew’s identities would be embarrassing. The possibilities here run the gamut from crew members being involved in Never Trump politics to being gay to being members of a minority related to military DEI policies. Again, this is all speculative, but in the past, the military has been known to cover up operational screwups that reflected poorly on the service. The 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, an NFL player who walked away from the Arizona Cardinals to fight in Afghanistan after September 11, was one such case.

With a notoriously secretive and closed Administration, it’s difficult to say what might be embarrassing enough to justify a coverup. If there is a move to cover up something embarrassing, it may be related to why two MC-130 transports had to be destroyed after one reportedly got stuck in the sand at the hastily established forward runway inside enemy territory or why the F-15 was shot down in the first place.

A more likely explanation, however, is that the coverup is related to military secrets. We don’t know the precise mission that the F-15 was on or what its target was, but there is speculation that it was related to Iran’s nuclear program. It might be that revealing the crew’s identity would provide information to the Iranians about their mission.

Releasing information about the mission might also endanger Iranians on the ground. Dissidents who opposed the regime reportedly assisted the Special Operations troops responsible for rescuing the crew. Publicity might place those Iranians in danger.

Publicity might also give away the secret technology used to locate the WSO. The crewman was reportedly located using a secret CIA tool called “Ghost Murmur” that can detect heartbeats at extreme distances. But Ghost Murmur may just be a cover story or a red herring. Experts in the field say that the technology, as described, may be scientifically impossible. That leaves the question of how the colonel was really found.

Finally, with respect to the theories that the operation was a cover for some sort of raid, perhaps targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, I think that would look very different from the operation that the world saw. Attack aircraft and troop carriers would converge on the target, rather than using different types of aircraft to search over a wide area while suppressing Iranian forces that were moving in.

Iranian media posted pictures of the downed American plane (although it was initially misidentified) so we know without a doubt that an F-15 was really lost. The Iranians themselves seem convinced that the shoot-down and rescue effort were real, even offering a bounty for the stranded aircrew.

Logically, if we lost a plane in Iran, then we also lost a crew. If the Iranians didn’t capture the crew, then the US must have retrieved them.

At this point, there is simply no way to know the full truth about what happened Easter weekend deep Iran, but there is little reason to suspect that the entire incident was a hoax. The most likely explanation for the inconsistencies and unanswered questions are that they relate to military secrets. There is almost certainly a coverup of some sort going on, but it’s likely related to garden variety classified programs rather than a sinister hoax perpetrated for unknown reasons.

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SOME MEN YOU JUST CAN’T REACH Days after triggering a backlash for a blasphemous post presenting himself as Jesus, Donald Trump shared another imagethat showed him with Jesus and labeled him God’s “Trump card.”

From the Racket News

Unfit

2026-04-14T10:30:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, after posting “praise be to Allah” twice in the previous week, Donald Trump posted a picture of himself in flowing robes, touching the head of a sick man as people pray around him. It has been suggested that the sick man, who is obviously being healed by Trump, bears a striking resemblance to Jeffrey Epstein. While the Epstein reference may not (or may) be intentional, the episode is further proof of Trump’s unfitness both mentally and morally.

The post has obvious messianic overtones and has drawn criticism even from avowed Trump supporters like Riley Gaines of Fox News. It goes way beyond Christian Nationalism into blasphemy and cultism. At the same time, Trump posted a rant against Pope Leo on Truth Social,

Interestingly, the picture was apparently first posted by another account in February. At some point, one of the figures resembling soldiers in the sky in the original picture was altered to appear as something vaguely demonic. This makes the whole weird episode even more bizarre.

I have waffled on whether Trump should be labeled a false prophet. In the past, most of the messianic claims were made by people around Trump, rather than the man himself. He was surrounded by false prophets and did not reject their claims. I considered Trump an antichrist in the biblical, 1 John sense, because, not only did he reject the messianic claims made by his followers, his platform, policies, and behavior were often diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ and the Bible. But with this post, the evidence seems clear that Trump is claiming divinity and had clearly crossed into false prophet territory.

Let me be clear about one thing: In America, our First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion protect the right of Trump and his disciples to claim that he is the Messiah. MAGA has the freedom to literally worship Trump if they want.

I’ll go further. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for any public office. Trump and MAGA don’t have to be Christian, and they can campaign on a platform Trump worship if they so desire. That’s all constitutionally protected.

Having said that, it is delusional behavior. Donald Trump has apparently gone way beyond believing his own press. If the president believes that he is the “chosen one,” as he said in 2019 during his first term, and can resurrect dead Epsteins, it is a clear sign of mental problems akin to the trope of dressing up like Napoleon.

The Old Testament gives us a biblical test for prophets that should be applied to Trump and his followers: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” This verse should be applied to Trump and the other false prophets who try to deify him.

If Trump is the messiah, let him raise the dead for all to see. To paraphrase Jesus, which is more difficult, to post a picture of yourself healing someone or to actually heal someone of a real affliction?

It should be obvious at this point that Trump is either stunningly incompetent and delusional or a dangerously malevolent force. There really is no middle ground.

Some have tried to explain it away or deflect. Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary, theorized that it was a mistake, saying, “President Trump’s team never should have posted this image. If he saw it first, he never should have approved it.”

As I write this on Monday, both posts are still up, which undermines the theory that someone other than Trump posted them (although the text post is uncharacteristically free of misspellings and randomly capitalized letters). If it was a mistake, it would be easy to take them down and apologize. Neither has happened. [Note: The picture was apparently quietly deleted on Monday afternoon. The rant against Leo is still up.]

Others try to shift the focus. I’ve seen numerous accounts argue that a) Democrats booed God in 2012 or that b) Democrats only care about anti-Catholic bias or anti-Christian behavior when it benefits them. On the first point, bad behavior by Democrats does not excuse worse behavior by Trump. The second and third points rely on stereotypes of the Democrats that are easily proven untrue. Many Catholics and other Christians are Democrats. This was true before Trump and is even more true 10 years into the MAGA cult.

The Trumpist argument becomes a “no true Scotsman’ logical fallacy when it is pointed out that 36 percent of Protestants and 39 percent of Catholics voted for Harris in 2024. “Well, those aren’t real Christians,” the MAGA apologists often say. In reality, neither party has a lock of Christianity or Christian voters.

An alternative explanation that emerged was that the original context of the image was that Trump was not “portraying himself as Jesus,” but rather, was “doing the work of God to heal our nation.” I saw a number of posts making this argument that appeared to be copied and pasted, possibly shared by an army of bots.

The first problem with this argument is that nothing in the context of the photo suggests that it is symbolic of Trump healing our nation. The second problem is that it still portrays Trump in a messianic fashion, healing not just one person, but the entire country. That’s arguably much worse.

I haven’t seen Speaker Johnson’s reaction, but my guess is that he would say he hasn’t seen it.

As Monday wore on, faced with the choice of being seen as blasphemous or monumentally stupid, Trump went with stupid. An official White House accountposted a video of Trump admitting that he shared the video. His explanation?

Trump said, “I did post it. I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross as a Red Cross worker, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.”

Rapid Response 47@RapidResponse47

.@POTUS: "I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support... It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better."

12:48 PM · Apr 13, 2026 · 697K Views

1.59K Replies · 907 Reposts · 5.19K Likes

“I just heard about it,” Trump continued, “and I said, ‘How do they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better, and I do make people better, I make people a lot better.”

If Trump explained why he was sharing a picture that portrayed him as a doctor, which is only slightly less crazy than portraying himself as Christ, it was not in the clip. For added context, the Red Cross was one of the organizations that lost funding due to Trump and Musk’s cuts to USAID, and no doctor I’ve ever seen dresses like the man in the picture.

However, the truth is that this is not the first time that Trump has shared images of this nature. There was the picture of Trump dressed as the pope, an image that said he was on a “mission from God,” and the infamous golden idol, among others. These previous posts did not make the splash that Sunday’s post did, but they were of the same vein. With Trump, it’s always helpful to look at the big picture of his general bad behavior rather than letting his supporters rationalize away specific instances.

The frightening truth is that our nation is being led by a man with a messiah complex who believes that he can do no wrong. This man is surrounded by people who only tell him how great he is. This man has started a destructive war that threatens to cripple the global economy as shortages of oil disrupt entire supply chains from both the transportation and manufacturing sides.

We are at the mercy of a madman.

In a sane, healthy democracy, the answer would be the constitutional process of the 25th Amendment. In our reality, the constitutional process is an inadequate answer that would require a majority of the sycophants in Trump’s cabinet to support his removal. That is unlikely in the extreme.

Our best hope at this point, other than hoping that the cabinet wakes up to the danger, is that we can survive until a midterm backlash occurs that will hopefully install enough Democrats to impeach and remove the president. But November is a long way off with a delusional madman in control, and January is even further away.

In the meantime, feel free to weigh in on whether Trump really thinks he is the best thing since and is on an equal footing with Jesus Christ or whether he’s just so monumentally stupid that he thinks doctors wear flowing white robes and have glowing hands. Maybe he just thinks we are stupid. Maybe it’s all of the above.

Pick your poison.

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TWO REPS DOWN A Democrat and Republican will both be leaving Congress. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Cal.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) are both resigning amid sex scandals.

From the Racket News

Peace in our time?

2026-04-09T12:03:00.002-04:00

On Tuesday, the world’s emotions ran hot. The day started with a threat by Donald Trump to destroy Iran’s civilization and culminated with a ceasefire deal. As more information emerges about the ceasefire, it seems that the entire incident was an entirely predictable TACO scenario in which Trump went to the brink of what many interpreted as a threat of nuclear attack and then backed down.

Interestingly, a tweet by the prime minister of Pakistan calling for peace originally began with the phrase, “Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X.” This led to immediate suspicion that the message was not composed by the prime minister or anyone in Pakistan. The header was removed a few minutes later, but the incident smacks of fake “black Trump supporter” posts that originated from white accounts. There is much speculation that the Trump Administration fed the prime minister his lines. It would be really ironic if the prime minister’s call for an end to the war wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Image created by ChatGPT

Iran dismissed Trump’s 15-point plan to end the war and submitted its own 10-point proposal that Trump called “workable.” That’s surprising because the Iranian plan includes the removal of sanctions, Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, reparations for the war, acceptance of Iran’s right to enrich uranium, and the cessation of hostilities against both Iran and its militant allies in the Middle East, as well as the withdrawal of American forces in the region. The Iranian plan amounts to a call for America’s unconditional surrender of the Middle East.

It’s hard to see how Iran would have even thought their proposal would be seriously considered when Trump and Netanyahu’s original war aim, disabling Iran’s nuclear program, would be totally discarded by the plan. And then there’s the Strait of Hormuz, which was free to navigate before the war and is now controlled by Iran.

The Iranian plan reminds me of nothing so much as Austria-Hungary’s 1914 ultimatum to Serbia. The deliberately over-the-top demands were designed to be rejected by Serbia. Austria was like the dog that caught the car when Serbia accepted all but one of the conditions.

And like the conditions accepted by Germany at the other end of WWI, acceptance of Iran’s proposal would guarantee a future war (which would also violate the plan). Leaving Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, with an intact nuclear program, and with an angry grudge against the United States and Israel would mean that Iran could enrich itself with shipping tolls and oil revenues and resume the war at a time of its own choosing.

It’s hard to see how Iran would have even thought their proposal would be seriously considered, especially in light of subsequent Administration claims that they threw the Iranian proposal directly into the garbage, but it’s also difficult to see what the Trump Administration thought that it was agreeing to if it wasn’t agreeing to the Iranian proposal. To be fair, it’s a bit hard to tell what the terms of the ceasefire are since there doesn’t seem to be a written agreement, but Trump did repost an Iranian message claiming he had accepted their 10 points.

The full 10 points are unlikely to be accepted in a permanent agreement, but It seems likely that the Iran war will end in a worst-of-all-worlds scenario. Iran’s nuclear program is damaged but likely intact. The regime is also not only intact but emboldened and in control of the Strait. We’re arguably in a worse spot than we were pre-war. Even Fox News is acknowledging that Trump’s war aims have not been met.

That’s also true when it comes to dealing with China and Russia. Make no mistake: Xi and Putin were watching. They saw not only the skill and effectiveness of the US military but the indecisiveness and sheer incompetence of the national command authority.

Odds are good that the ceasefire won’t hold. By the time you read this, the truce may have already broken down, and as I write this on Wednesday, I’m wondering how much I’ll have to rewrite before posting on Thursday. [Indeed, by Thursday afternoon, it seems that the US is the only country that has ceased firing.]

The most immediate problem is that Trump agreed to the ceasefire; Israel did not, and to the extent that they are honoring it, they are only doing so in Iran. The Israelis have hit targets in Lebanon. There are also reports of an attack on an Iranian refinery, probably by Israel, and retaliatory Iranian strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE. Initially, Iran said the Strait was still closed and that ships transiting without permission would be destroyed, but by Thursday afternoon, the regime was saying that a limited number of ships would be allowed passage after paying tolls.

Iran was earning $50 billion annually under sanctions before the war. By David Stockman’s estimate, they are currently taking in an estimated $100 billion annually without sanctions, with the potential to add another $90 billion for tolls through the Strait at $2 million per ship under normal traffic flows.

I think that Iran is performing a balancing act. They want to limit passage through the Strait to exercise control over the world economy and refill their coffers. If they completely shut down the Strait indefinitely, however, they run the risk that a coalition will emerge to move in and reopen the waterway by force, possibly destroying the regime in the process.

Assuming the ceasefire holds, Trump has indicated that the pause will only last for two weeks. That means the war may resume about the same time that we get the Republican healthcare plan and Trump kicks off infrastructure week. A Pentagon assessment found that approximately 80 percent of Iran’s air defenses have been destroyed, but the hiatus should give them time to import new systems from China (since Russia is also running short due to Ukraine) and dig in against a possible ground invasion before hostilities resume. Trump’s micromanagement of the campaign is reminiscent of LBJ during the Vietnam War.

No matter what happens next, all signs point to the idea that Trump is tired of the war and looking for a way out, even to the point of suggesting a joint venture between the US and Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz, calling the idea “a beautiful thing.” A war can’t be won without the political will to do so, and it seems that no one, not even Donald Trump, the man who started the war, has the will to win this one.

As Robert Pape, the airpower expert that I quoted at the beginning of this war, points out, “The US used overwhelming force—and still could not control the outcome. That’s a structural shift in power.”

Donald Trump came to a crossroads between choosing to go all-in with a ground war and accepting a loss. He chose to lose. The shooting and killing may continue, but this war is as good as over unless he reconsiders.

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IRAN DISCOVERS TACO TUESDAY I haven’t been sharing Iran’s propaganda videos, but the regime is definitely winning the meme war. The newest video lampoons Trump’s “Taco Tuesday” reversals. The worst part is that it’s impossible to refute because it’s true.

CHINESE DETENTE Taiwan’s opposition leader, a favorite in upcoming elections, is going to China on a peace mission. I’d be surprised if the trip wasn’t a response to the lack of trust that many of our allies are probably feeling right now.

ELECTIONS UPDATE Special elections this week provided more encouragement for Democrats. The Donks picked up a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin, a mayoral win in Missouri, and a state legislative flip in Oklahoma. Although they didn’t win the main event, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat, as Steve Berman wrote, that was always a tough lift in that deep-red district, but the swing was impressive. Jamie Dupree, Georgia reporter extraordinaire, reported that the average shift in the nine counties that make up the district was 25.5 points towards the Democrats from 2004.

From the Racket News

Are we losing?

2026-04-03T09:21:03.575-04:00

It doesn’t take much expertise to see that the US and Israel are dominating Iran militarily in the month-long war. The coalition of two has bombed Iran with impunity with no losses of combat aircraft over hostile territory. The only aircraft losses known are to friendly fire or drone attacks on US bases. Iran’s leadership has been decapitated, and its military is in a shambles.

So why is it then that there is a wide perception that Iran is winning the war?

A photo of Iranian warship Shahid Bagheri during US strikes on 2 March 2026. Photo: DOD/Wikimedia

The most obvious explanation is that the war is continuing after four weeks when it was originally estimated to be winding down by now. Not only is the regime still in control of the country and continuing to fire missiles and drones at its neighbors, but Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz and holding world energy markets - and the world economy by extension - hostage.

Iran’s successes at surviving and leveraging its limited capabilities are compounded by the confused response from Washington. The president’s response on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has been to issue ultimatums and then extend the deadlines, to issue calls for help from the international community and then to say that he doesn’t need help, and finally to speculate that the Hormuz crisis will end because the strait will “automatically open” when the war ends.

The overall image projected is of a military force that dominates the battlefield, paired with strategic leadership that is uncertain about where to go from the current position and that offers contradictory assessments of the state of affairs. How many times can the Iranian regime, its military, and its nuclear program be “obliterated” yet continue to offer resistance and control access to the Persian Gulf?

In his speech on Wednesday, Trump said, “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death [sic].”

“The new group is less radical and much more reasonable,” he added.

I’m not sure if Trump himself is deluded on this or if he simply hopes that America and the world will forget that he told Iranians at the onset of the war, “The hour of your freedom is at hand.” Trump may not have used the words “regime change,” but he and his cabinet officials made clear that was a goal.

Regime change, which the president simultaneously denies was a goal and claims has already occurred, has not happened. The regime is still in power with different leaders, none of whom seem any less radical and more reasonable than the old leaders, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

There seems to be no good explanation for the failure of Trump and Netanyahu to consider the possibility that Iran would respond to the joint attacks by bombarding its neighbors and closing the Strait of Hormuz. Many deny that the attackers did not foresee the possibility of these responses, but the evidence is there for all to see in the lack of preparation for such contingencies.

Despite the long military buildup prior to the war justified by an allegedly unforeseen imminent Iranian attack, State Department employees and dependents were not evacuated, there was a shortage of bunkers for US troops in the region, and ground forces had to be moved from the US and Japan to prepare for a possible ground war. Many US aircraft losses were from planes parked in the open. Further, Trump’s own statements (for what they are worth), indicate that Iran’s response was unexpected.

But maybe there is an explanation for the lack of preparation. An Alert Reader sent me a video in which Carrick Ryan, who I am not familiar with, explains that the Venezuela operation was so successful because the US was apparently working with Delcy Rodriguez prior to the raid that captured Maduro. Ryan theorizes that there was a similar arrangement in Iran, but the leader that the US had chosen to replace the ayatollah was accidentally killed in the decapitation strikes, something that Trump alluded to early on. When the kill-and-replace option failed, there seems to have been no Plan B. It is impossible to say for sure whether Ryan’s theory is correct, but it does fit much of the available evidence.

Whether Ryan is correct or not, we are at a critical juncture in the war. Down one road is escalation and sending ground forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The other fork leads to a TACO strategy of declaring victory, ending the war, and hoping that “reasonable” elements in the Iranian regime allowing shipping to once again transit to and from the Persian Gulf.

Both options come with limited upsides and YUGE potential downsides. Escalation would mean a massive commitment in terms of American troops, treasure, and time. We would be in Iran indefinitely with all that would entail. Standing down would mean a strategic victory for Iran that leaves the regime in power and with increased stature as the de facto controller of access to the Persian Gulf.

The US military has done everything asked of it, but it seems increasingly likely that we may lose the war strategically because of massive incompetence and failure to seriously consider alternatives if the plan of Iran’s regime falling quickly did not come to fruition. What makes this even worse was that such a Hail Mary scenario was always unlikely.

This was a major reason that Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Obama, and Biden did not order a war against Iran (which they probably would have done with congressional input, if they had). It wasn’t that previous presidents didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to issue order that would result in thousands of deaths, many of them American, it was that they understood the risks were very high relative to the likely rewards.

At a fork in the road with two bad choices, the most rational choice now may be to escalate and push for regime change in order to keep the world economy afloat and prevent the mullahs from returning with a nuclear weapon in the future, because if the regime survives, it will definitely see becoming a nuclear power as the only way to keep from being the target of another US-Israeli war. Make no mistake, this is not a good option, but it does seem to be the least bad option.

The problem for the Trump Administration is that it got this far without congressional buy-in and now we are in the midst of an unpopular war that is rapidly turning into the tar baby scenario that I wrote about a month ago. Trump will need congressional authorization and appropriations to continue the fight, but there is no guarantee he will get them. If he does, it is likely to boost the level of the shellacking that Republicans are about to receive in the midterms. There is an even-money chance that Trump TACOs for political reasons.

I wouldn’t say the US is losing at the moment, but time is on the side of the Iranian regime. The mullahs just have to hang on while public support for the war continues to plummet. The pressure is on Trump to either poop or get off the pot. Everyone knows by this point that the war isn’t going to be won in the air.

As I have said in the past, I’m tired of America winning battles and losing wars, yet it seems we are headed down that road once again, whether we leave the Gulf this week or fight for 20 years and then leave. We have the greatest military in the world, but our politicians have the habit of putting our soldiers into unwinnable situations.

This war is solely due to Donald Trump’s hubris and ineffectiveness as a leader. As many of us warned, allowing the president to do whatever he wanted with no accountability was bound to land him in trouble. Now, he is out of the frying pan and into the fire, taking America and the world with him.

Iran’s regime was a legitimate, though not imminent, threat. The irony is that the war is more likely to bring regime change in the US than Iran.

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THE THURSDAY MASSACRE Heads figuratively rolled on Thursday. Trump fired AG Pam Bondi while Defense Secretary Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff and highest ranking officer, along with the heads of Army’s Training and Transformation Command and chaplain corps.

From the Racket News

Is abortion literally murder?

2026-03-24T09:48:00.001-04:00

Rhetorically speaking, abortion has been called murder for a long time. Now, that assertion may be tested in court.

A new case to watch involves a woman from Kingsland, Georgia who knowingly took pills to abort her unborn baby. Fox 5 Atlanta reports that Alexia Zantail Moore, a 31-year old woman, went into an emergency room on December 30, 2025 complaining of abdominal pains. Moore, who was about 22 weeks pregnant, told doctors that she had taken 8 misoprostol pills, a drug that is used to induce abortion, and the opioid oxycodone.

Moore delivered her baby, which was born with a heartbeat and lived for about an hour. The infant tested positive for oxycodone, but misoprostol does not show up on toxicology reports. Moore said that she got the misoprostol from a group called Access Aid and the oxycodone from a family member.

Moore reportedly told an investigator, "I know my infant is suffering, because I am the one who did the abortion. I want her to die."

Photo credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm/Unsplash.com

Now, Moore is facing charges of murder in the death of her baby girl. Moore was arrested in early March and detained in the Camden County jail. Per the arrest warrant, she “unlawfully and with malice aforethought, caused the death of baby girl Moore, a human being who was born alive and survived for one hour. Under Georgia law, the victim became a person at the moment of live birth.”

Under Georgia law, abortion is illegal after a baby’s heartbeat is detected in most cases. This usually occurs at about six weeks. Moore allegedly told the investigator that she believed that she was at about 14 weeks, but she is not being charged under Georgia’s heartbeat law.

Georgia law also holds that unborn babies are considered legal persons. It is the second law, the personhood law, that is the basis for Moore’s murder charge. Once the baby was born alive, it became a legal person, and in the investigator’s view, Moore was responsible for the baby’s murder.

It’s easy to see Moore as a villain in the case, based on what she told the investigator, but looking deeper, she is also a tragic figure. 19th News gives more background about the accused murderer, an army veteran and the mother of two other children, ages six and nine. Moore was reportedly discharged from the army with 100 percent disability due to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Edith Moore, the mother of the accused and a local pastor, said of her daughter, “As a mother, and me talking as a grandma, she’s an excellent mother. I believe her children are her life. She has been a good provider for her children.”

A friend denied that Moore took abortion pills, saying, “I remember her calling me, freaking out. She was bawling her eyes out. She said she didn’t know what to do.“

She continued, “‘If worse comes to worst,’ I said, ‘If you 100 percent go through with having the baby, and if you don’t want it, you can always give it to me, and you know, it’ll be taken care of.’”

I am opposed to abortion, but looking deeper at this case shows that the issue isn’t always black and white. I mourn for the loss of Moore’s baby girl, but my heart also breaks for Moore herself, an apparent single mom who is obviously struggling to raise her existing children, with her mental health, and likely with finances as well.

As I’ve written in the past, if pro-lifers really want to reduce abortion, they should focus on reducing demand for abortion, rather than just passing bans. Alexia Moore may be a good example of this. If mental healthcare and assistance in raising and paying for children were more readily available, not to mention low-cost contraceptives, Moore might not have felt the need to abort her baby.

The Camden County DA has reportedly not decided whether to take her case to the grand jury to seek an indictment, but I don’t see that the State of Georgia benefits by paying to keep Alexia Moore in jail alongside violent criminals and drug dealers in the meantime. Her two boys don’t benefit from having their mom incarcerated either.

Maybe this is why abortion bans don’t usually hold mothers criminally liable for the abortions of their babies. Usually, the focus is on prosecuting abortion providers rather than abortion patients. Often, the women are just as much victims as the babies.

But in Moore’s case, the abortion was self-induced. There was no abortion provider. Just an anonymous pharmacist who provided abortion pills (if Moore actually took abortion pills).

With a number of new abortion bans and personhood laws around the country since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, if Camden County decides to prosecute Moore, it is likely to become a landmark legal case. However, my money would be on the county dropping the charges. There would be no winners in a case like this, and I’m skeptical that many DAs would want to go down in history as the first prosecutor to take such a dubious and tragic case to court.

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ICE AIRPORT UPDATE Yesterday, I referenced an incident with ICE at the San Francisco airport in which an alleged US citizen was violently detained in front of her daughter. The government says that the pair were being deported to Guatemala when they tried to flee.

From the Racket News

Airplanes and Iran

2026-03-24T00:33:00.001-04:00

The big news of the morning is a collision between an Air Canada Jazz CRJ airliner and airport emergency vehicles crossing a runway at New York’s La Guardia International AirPort. The two pilots of the CRJ were killed, and several others were injured.

The ATC audio recording (a video has also surfaced) shows that the controller cleared the emergency vehicles across the runway where the CRJ was landing, but the big question is why. The accident occurred at 11:47 pm, and air traffic control facilities are often understaffed at night. This is speculation at this point, but l’ll be interested to see whether controller workload played a role.

Screenshot of the CRJ runway collision from OSINTDefender

You might wonder why the airplane didn’t go around or the ground vehicles didn’t swerve out of the way. There are a lot of multicolored lights around a runway at a big airport, so the lights of the emergency vehicles and the airplane probably blended in. They may not have seen each other until it was too late. Further, the CRJ was reportedly traveling at about 100 mph. This would be too slow to fly and too fast to stop or take evasive action.

At towered airports, pilots and ground vehicles are dependent on ATC to coordinate traffic movements. Looking before you cross a runway is always a good safety practice, but this seems a clear case of human error on the part of the controller.

Speaking of aviation, if you have airline tickets this week, I’d recommend that you cancel the flight and drive. The DHS funding shutdown has resulted in extremely long security lines at airports around the country. Trump has ordered ICE in to assist TSA in their airport security duties even though ICE agents are not trained for such work.

American voters might want to ask themselves why ICE is the only DHS agency that is funded and why it is funded so well that it can do TSA’s job as well as its own. The answer in part is that Republicans massively overfunded ICE in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill with a multiyear appropriation. Why they threw so much money at ICE and insulated it from the normal appropriations process is something that Republicans need to answer, along with why they are going to such lengths to prevent ICE from being subject to the same rules as other law enforcement agencies.

Republicans online have been busy blaming Democrats for the long TSA lines, but in reality, Republicans have been quietly killing partial funding bills. On Monday morning, news broke that congressional Democrats and Republicans had reached a deal to end the shutdown, but Trump would not agree to the compromise. This means that the shortage of transportation security workers during a war with a terrorist nation will continue, along with a passenger inconvenience of YUGE proportions.

I predicted online that putting ICE officers in contact with the public at airports would be a disaster that made the agency even less popular. That seems to be quickly coming true as social media reports trickle in of ICE agents milling around aimlessly, along with the violent arrest of a reported US citizen mother who was traveling with her daughter (#GOVT GONE WILD). Trump has acknowledged that ICE will be conducting immigration arrests at airports, so that’s something else travelers have to look forward to.

LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻@LongTimeHistory

Additional raw footage from new angle. 👇 This woman is U.S. citizen traveling with her young daughter—according to witness who filmed video. She could not prove her citizenship to satisfaction of the agents—and was violently taken into ICE custody. San Francisco Airport

10:41 AM · Mar 23, 2026 · 1.51M Views

1.73K Replies · 8.44K Reposts · 18K Likes

Along the same lines, I saw a marked ICE vehicle at a major Florida airport this morning. This was the first time in my life that I have seen any ICE vehicle, much less inside the secure area of an airport. I am only speculating, but they seemed to be acting like Customs officers, who are a frequent sight on airport ramps.

Finally, Trump announced that he had been conducting talks with Iran and would suspend a threatened bombing campaign against Iranian power plants. Iran has denied that talks were taking place, but the buried lede is that Trump is more willing to negotiate with terrorists than Democrats.

From the Racket News

Seven percent

2026-03-20T21:21:00.001-04:00

It looks as if American ground troops will be committed in Iran within the next week or so. As I described last week, a Marine expeditionary force is being moved from Okinawa to the Persian Gulf, and Senator Lindsey Graham has indicated that the target is Kharg Island, an Iranian oil facility at the opposite end of the Persian Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz.

Graham may be engaging in a strategic deception because, to get to Kharg Island, the Marines would have to run the gauntlet of the Strait of Hormuz with its nearby Iranian missile batteries and drone sites. The alternatives would be either to disembark the Marines and move them by air to Kharg Island, in which case the question is why use the Marines at all, or have the amphibious fighters assault the Iranian mainland and islands adjacent to the choke point of the strait. This would make more strategic sense when it comes to reopening shipping lanes, and if I can figure this out, the Iranians can too.

Image by ChatGPT

The Iranians can also figure something else out: The war is not popular, either at home or abroad (except maybe among Iranian dissidents and neocons). If you only inhabit Republican and MAGA internet circles, this might come as news.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that overall support for the war is hovering at about 40 percent, but only seven percent support large-scale ground operations in Iran. An additional 34 percent would support limited operations by Special Forces, but even the combined figures are less than 55 percent who oppose all use of ground troops.

Seven percent.

It’s hard to find the country united on any issue enough to render single-digit polling, but Trump has done it. Even Republican support for a ground invasion is only at 14 percent, although a 63-percent majority of Republicans supports Special Forces raids.

By way of comparison, by 1973, the year that the US combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, public support for that war was at 29 percent. Yes, you read that right. The most unpopular war in American history was more than three times as popular as the idea of invading Iran.

But the real kicker is that 65 percent of Americans think Trump is going to commit ground troops anyway.

Think about that for a second. Two-thirds of Americans think that the president is going to follow a course opposed by more than 90 percent of the voters. That indicates an electorate that sees the president as out of touch and unresponsive.

My first instinct is that launching a ground war is political suicide when it comes to the midterms. Of course, Donald Trump is constitutionally term-limited despite talk of a third term, but I think someone as vain as he is cares about his legacy.

Following quickly on that thought is the fact that American service members are likely to bear the brunt of public dislike for the war. It is not fair to America’s fighters to dump them into a situation that is not only almost universally unpopular, but may not be strategically winnable.

I would not be surprised if an invasion didn’t initially become somewhat more popular with a rally-around-the-flag (or more accurately, rally-around-Trump) effect, but a long-term war with such low support cannot be successful in a democracy. Elective wars should not be started without popular support, a good reason, a clear objective, and good chance of success.

If Donald Trump sends American ground troops into Iran, he is not only gambling with their lives (and possibly, as in Afghanistan, the lives of soldiers yet unborn), he is gambling with his legacy. If he involves the US in yet another Middle East quagmire, his memory will be cursed by future generations.

Trump is also gambling with America’s financial future. The Administration is already asking for $200 billion in new spending to fight a war that has not been authorized by Congress. This as the national debt has just added $1 trillion in five months, almost doubling since Trump vowed to erase it in 2017. The deficit hawks have been replaced by Iran hawks.

Trump’s original error was going to war without first building support of either the American public or our allies, but he has spent the past year disregarding the opinions of both when not actively working to alienate them. Now the president is staking everything on a Hail Mary to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and win the war.

It is a desperate strategy that is more likely to embroil the US in another generational quagmire that will strain the US and world economies while giving China an opportunity to expand, not to mention killing and maiming untold numbers on both sides. If Republicans allow Trump to follow this destructive course with seven percent of the country behind him, they deserve to be cast into the political wilderness for the foreseeable future.

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F-35 DAMAGED by apparent enemy fire over Iran. The pilot landed safely, but if Iran can hit the stealthy fighters, it raises the risks of attacking and makes the use of drones and standoff missiles more necessary.

From the Racket News

Iran war! What is it good for?

2026-03-16T13:05:00.001-04:00

It’s no secret that I was an early skeptic of the Iran war. I don’t think an attack was justified or wise, but since we are already embroiled in the conflict, I find myself in the same position as many others who have serious concerns but are hoping for the best. If we are going to fight, I want to fight to win.

One of the first steps in fighting to win is having a defined goal. So far, that has been a problem. Justifications and objectives for the war offered by the Administration range from destroying Iran’s nuclear program to undercutting the nation’s ability to foment terror to regime change and even “unconditional surrender.” These narratives could conceivably overlap, but the shifting nature of causus belli seems to reflect a lack of a real, defined strategy. If we want to win the war, we must decide what winning means.

Residents in Tehran on the third day of US-Israeli air strikes, 3 March 2026 Credit: Avash Media on Wikimedia

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In my opinion, there should be two goals. At this point, our focus should be on destroying Iran’s nuclear production and delivery capability and restoring stability to the world economy. Damage to Iran’s terror networks would be a plus, as would regime change, but we have to realize at this point that regime change is unlikely.

As I discussed two weeks ago, earlier in the war, there are some things that air power can do, and some that it cannot. Historically, air power alone has never implemented regime change. Air power can destroy things, but it can’t rebuild them. It can damage a regime, but it can’t topple it.

There was hope in some quarters that Iranian dissidents would rise up and overthrow the theocratic Islamist regime. So far, there seems to be no evidence that this is happening. The only way to change the regime is to put boots on the ground (a phrase that I detest, but it’s accurate) in Iran.

Attempting regime change would mean occupying Iran, the seventeenth-largest country in the world. Iran is approximately the size of Alaska, four times as large as California, and two and a half times the size of Afghanistan, another mountainous country that we did not have the manpower to subdue, even with coalition partners. Occupying Iran would represent a black hole into which American soldiers and taxpayer dollars disappear for the foreseeable future.

So, what is an appropriate and realistic strategy? First, we should decimate Iran’s nuclear, missile, and drone facilities. When we aided Israel in 2025’s 12 Day War, I was concerned that the president pulled the plug too quickly, before this objective was met. Apparently, I was correct because here we are again. Since the genie is already out of the bottle, we should avoid that mistake this time.

We should also attack Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors and Persian Gulf shipping. Leaving Iran with the ability to retaliate after the war is over would mean that it is likely that we will have to return and do the job over again in the near future.

In any case, we'll likely have to come back anyway. The regime is still going to be in power and will be focused on revenge. The more completely we do the job now, the longer it will be before they recover and become a serious threat once again. I’ve heard this described as “lawn mowing,” and I think it will be a long-term reality.

So, I’d hammer Iran with air power, and then negotiate a ceasefire. The problem at this point is that Iran may not be ready to quit. The Iranian regime is reportedly demanding compensation and a US withdrawal from the Persian Gulf as its price for ending the war.

How can Iran make demands at this point, you might ask. Even though they have taken a beating, they still have leverage in the form of controlling the Strait of Hormuz and their continued ability to launch drone and missile attacks on their neighbors. Despite claims that Iran was running out of missiles and drones, the attacks have continued with some recent high-profile successes, such as damaging five KC-135 tankers at a Saudi air base and a strike on a port in the UAE that stopped oil shipments.

So far, the war has been limited in that neither side has gone after oil infrastructure or desalination plants in earnest, but that could change. Destroying oil facilities could cause oil shortages and even worse price spikes, while attacking desalination plants in a region where potable water is in short supply could spark a humanitarian crisis.

It was almost a year ago that Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs threatened to tank the world economy, and once again, the world economy is on the brink. This time, the problem is the likelihood of significant and long-term oil disruptions. If the Iranian regime thinks that it will be destroyed, there is nothing to prevent it from setting the Persian Gulf oil facilities on fire, and with them, the world economy. A faltering economy might be the one thing that can persuade Trump to back down from Iran, just as he backed off the initial tariffs.

Two weeks ago, I referenced the story of the tar baby, and it looks as though that prediction is coming true. The US has moved more assets into the region and, despite claims that Iran’s military is being destroyed, missile and drone attacks are still inflicting damage around the Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed to all shipping except Iranian and Chinese. We have grabbed the tar baby and are finding it difficult to let go.

If we land ground troops in Iran, it is going to be even harder to let go. Whether the landings are on Kharg Island or along the Strait of Hormuz, our troops would be vulnerable to both conventional and guerrilla attacks as well as drone and missile bombardments. Our troops would be on the receiving end of the Ukrainian drone videos we’ve watched for three years.

Over the weekend, there were reports that the US was moving a Marine expeditionary force from Okinawa to the Middle East. This signals a likely escalation to ground combat, as well as further weakening US forces in the Pacific, where China has its eye on Taiwan, where things have been suspiciously quiet.

Lindsey Graham seemed to signal that the Marines’ target would be Kharg Island, which would be a massive escalation both in terms of starting a ground war and threatening Iran’s economic survival while simultaneously failing to open the Strait of Hormuz. It would have the advantage of requiring fewer troops than an occupation of hundreds of miles of Iranian coastline, however.

At the same time, it is unlikely that a limited occupation of the Iranian side of the Strait could reopen shipping lanes. Iranian missiles and drone swarms are flying hundreds of miles across the Gulf. We would have to occupy a huge swath of the country to put their launchers out of range of shipping in the Gulf. That would take far more than the 2,500 Marines currently en route.

On the other hand, committing ground forces could play into Iran’s hands. Once we have troops in contact, it is very difficult to withdraw them without losing face. It would become a war of attrition in which Iran’s goal would be to wait us out, as the Vietnamese and Afghans did. Even if Democrats regained power, they might not end the war. We saw that in Afghanistan under Obama.

Maybe we would be able to set up a free Iranian government, but there are doubts as to whether that is even a goal. The Trump Administration left the Venezuelan regime intact (minus Maduro) and has signalled that it would accept a new Iranian leader from within the current regime.

If setting up a free Iran is an objective, it will likely require a full occupation of the country for a prolonged period of time. As we have seen in the past, troops initially greeted as liberators can quickly come to be seen as occupiers.

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With the war unpopular from the beginning, there is no appetite in the American public for a prolonged round of nation-building. We should give Iranian opposition groups all the help we can, but we can’t do it for them.

I am not saying all this because I want America to lose this war. Just the opposite. I am saying it because I am tired of America winning battles and losing wars due to poor strategic thinking. I want America to succeed, and I want Iran to be free, but we also need to be realistic.

The Trump Administration did not plan to evacuate diplomatic personnel and their families, it did not plan to combat Iranian drone swarms despite Russia’s experience in Ukraine, and it did not plan on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz despite warnings from military commanders. It sounds a lot like the Trump Administration planned on an easy war with the Iranian regime complying by rolling over dead after a few days, and now that Plan A has failed, there is no Plan B except to escalate. That is a recipe for failure, as LBJ learned in Vietnam.

The US needs to step back to phase one and decide what we can realistically hope to gain from this war. We need achievable goals that do not rely on wishful thinking and Trump’s whims. Turning back the clock on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a realistic objective.

And now that it is apparent that this war is not going to be over in a matter of days, Congress needs to get involved before the president decides to unilaterally commit troops. Whether Congress decides to authorize an open-ended deployment to Iran or not, the decision needs to be a national one with an open debate. We do not need to allow the president to get the country into a very long, costly war with no input from the voters or the legislature. Donald Trump is not a king and should not make decisions on war and peace alone.

It is already difficult for Congress to oppose an ongoing war and risk being labeled as defeatists or not supportive of the troops, but our elected representatives need to stand up and do their jobs. If the war is worth fighting, it is worth going on the political record for. If it isn’t, we should start looking for a way to end it.

That is a lot easier than what we are asking of our soldiers.

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GOVT GONE WILD Another ICE detainee has died after allegedly being abandoned by her jailers. Daphy Michel, 31, a Haitian immigrant, was reportedly found dead at a Pennsylvania bus terminal four days after her charges were dismissed by a judge and three days after she was apparently released by ICE without notifying her family.

An Afghan immigrant who served with US Special Forces was detained by ICE in Texas. The 41-year-old died the next day.

Separately, testimony by ICE agents in a civil trial indicated that the agency had a quota of eight arrests per day. The agency had previously denied having arrest quotas. The agents used an app to target areas with numerous immigrants, but its data was often wrong.

DOGE DEPOSITIONS Video clips of depositions by former DOGE staffers went viral. The clips showed that DOGE staffers often had no idea what they were cutting, at one point defending removal of a video about Jewish slave labor in the Holocaust as DEI, and did not care who they hurt. They also admitted that their efforts did not reduce the deficit. The judge in the case about restoring grant money ordered that the videos be removed, but they are still widely available across the internet.

THE EPSTEIN FILES have still not been released in the 420 days that Donald Trump has been back in office.

From the Racket News