The misleading impression given about the Iran war

If you follow most mainstream US news reports about the war with Iran, and especially the statements by Trump, Pete Hegseth, and defense department officials, you will hear mainly about how the US is pummeling Iran with its missiles and little about how Iran is responding. The impression given is that Iran has had its offensive and defensive capabilities destroyed, leaving the US able to operate with impunity in the region and is unscathed except for some minor losses.

So one can be excused for being surprised that Iran has not unconditionally sued for peace or outright surrendered. Further puzzling, given Trump’s claim that the US is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, is the report yesterday of Iran hitting tankers that were trying to break the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz under a US aerial escort.

Iran has said it struck two tankers trying to pass through the strait of Hormuz under the escort of the US military as Donald Trump gathered his cabinet to discuss the stalling war and rising prices as midterm elections in the US loom.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Friday that the “non-compliant oil tankers … were struck and brought to a halt, while four other oil tankers quickly changed course and returned to their previous positions”. The military body said the ships had tried to pass through the strait via an “undeclared route” and under US aerial escort.

Iran and the US have said ships should pass through the strait via two competing routes, with Iran bombing ships that take the southern route, close to the coast of Oman, and the US bombing ships that violate its blockade of Iranian ships and ports.
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Trump has tried to open the strait of Hormuz by force, but increasingly intense US strikes on Iran have yielded few results.

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Trump’s lies about Lincoln pool vandalism exposed by his own justice department

Trump’s justice department admits that the reason that the Lincoln pool paint was peeling was because it was a botched rushed job and they have dropped the charges against David Hearn, the person they accused of vandalizing it. They released this news late Friday night, since that is when they think no one is paying attention and thus the time to release embarrassing information.

The Justice Department admitted Friday that President Donald Trump’s $14 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was “hasty and botched,” and it is dropping the criminal case against former Olympian David Hearn that accused him of vandalizing the pool, according to a new court filing from DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

The admissions are an embarrassing reversal for Pirro — and for Trump, who has insisted publicly for weeks that vandals were solely responsible for the severely damaged pool lining, chronic algae blooms and green-hued water at the iconic landmark.

Three other people have been swept up in the administration’s push to blame the pool’s problems on alleged vandals — each pleading not guilty to lesser, misdemeanor charges. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges against at least one of those people as well Friday, according to DC court records.

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Africa? Where’s Africa?

Most people have an abysmal level of knowledge of world geography, unable to place even major countries on a map of the world. I recall when I first came to the US as a graduate student, friendly people would ask me where I was from. When I said Sri Lanka, I would often get blank looks. That was not a surprise since Sri Lanka is a small country that is not a global player, and it had changed its name from Ceylon only four years earlier. So when people followed up by asking me where it was located, I would say that it was a small island off the southern coast of India and that was usually sufficient for them to place it. But I recall once a woman responding, “Oh, so you’re from South America!”

Jon Stewart has joked that wars are America’s way of learning geography since it is only when the US starts a war with some country that people learn about that region of the world. So it was no surprise to learn that at a global conference on AIDS held in Brazil last week, a presentation by US officials that had a map of Africa had every single country mislabeled.
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The Cybertruck breaks a record, and not in a good way

For the longest time the Ford Edsel, launched in 1957, held the record as the biggest flop automotive history, the measure used being the target sales compared to actual sales.. (Via Rob Beschizza)

Ford launched the Edsel in 1957 with projections of 200,000 units in its first year. It sold less than one-third of that target, and its vertical grille (mocked as resembling a toilet seat) became shorthand for corporate failure that has endured nearly seven decades.

But superachiever Elon Musk has beaten that record with his Cybertruck, launched in November 2023.
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Anthony Fauci slams senator Rand Paul as ‘unhinged’

The loony right has been obsessed with the belief that the Covid-19 virus did not jump from animals to humans but was because of a Chinese lab leak, and that scientists especially Anthony Fauci who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was a key figure in the fight to prevent the virus from harming more people than it did, was part of the cover-up.

Senator Rand Paul has been relentlessly pushing this notion and targeting Fauci and called him up before a special hearing. But Fauci refused to answer his questions and called him unhinged.

The hearing was centered around an assertion Paul has promoted for years: that the Covid pandemic began in 2020 as a “leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as virologists see a natural jump from animals to humans as more likely.

This belief underpinned Paul’s argument for bringing Fauci before the committee. If the pandemic was indeed started by a “lab leak”, Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided the institute with a sub-grant, he later told reporters.

His only witness was Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Trump and Joe Biden during the pandemic, and has become a political punching bag on the right.

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Jon Stewart blasts the White House Correspondents Dinner

This annual event, where Washington-based journalists meet, eat, drink, and schmooze with the people they cover, with other celebrities thrown in, is a disgusting example of the incestuous world of politics, shattering the illusion that these reporters are hard-hitting seekers of the truth even if their work antagonizes politicians. This year Trump was the main speaker and to say that he bombed is putting it mildly. Even his ardent supporters found it hard to find anything good in his rambling tirade of venomous insults.

Jon Stewart, in a funny skewering of Trump’s dreadful speech says that the event should be put in the dustbin. As a stand-up comedian, Stewart knows how to tell jokes and he brutally dissects Trump’s ineptness at telling even the simplest ones.

The rightwing snit over the The Odyssey (2026)

It takes very little to set the rightwing nut jobs off into starting a new front in the culture wars, usually over things that are either non-existent or highly unlikely, such as fears that immigrants are eating their pets or that a drug cartels are taking over American city streets or that it was forbidden to say “Merry Christmas” any more.

I find it particularly amusing when right wingers get up in arms when some recounting of stories in films and TV do not conform to their weird ideas of authenticity. It becomes even more ludicrous when the stories are purely fictional so that appeals to history make no sense. Remember the insistence that Santa Claus is white? Or the flap over the live action remake of the Little Mermaid because the title character was a person of color?

The latest silliness involves Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey that has opened to rave reviews and massive box office sales. It is the latest retelling of the Homeric poem and it features actors of color in key roles such as Helen of Troy and a transgender actor in another role. Of course, the whole epic is an obvious myth (the fact that Helen was hatched from an egg that was the product of Zeus transforming himself into a swan and mating with Leda, the queen of Sparta, should have been a clue) but that did not deter these loonies.
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Anti-establishment candidates keep winning Democratic primaries

In the latest result in a congressional primary race in Arizona yesterday, a candidate defeated a rival who had been backed by the Democratic Party establishment in the race for an open congressional seat that had been held by a Republican and is now contested by a Trump-backed candidate.

Amish Shah, an emergency room doctor, beat back the choice of Democratic leadership in Arizona on Wednesday in the latest sign that the party’s voters are increasingly willing to override the national machine.

Shah won his primary in Arizona’s 1st congressional district over the candidate favored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in Washington, a significant result in a race the DCCC has identified as central to retaking the House.
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The DCCC had thrown its weight behind the former Republican Marlene Galán-Woods, a former television journalist in Phoenix who switched parties in Trump’s first term.

The competition for the 1st congressional district, an affluent area that includes north-east Phoenix, Scottsdale, Fountain Hills and Paradise Valley, is rated by both parties as one of the more winnable Republican-held districts in the country, and is expected to help determine control of the US House of Representatives. Although Republicans hold a voter registration advantage, the district has shifted toward the center over the last decade.

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How Joe Biden enabled Israel’s war crimes

One of the most disgusting things about the Biden administration was his steadfast refusal to condemn Israel’s horrific genocidal behavior in Gaza. Kamala Harris’s refusal to distance herself from that policy when she became the Democratic nominee, and the Democratic Party establishment’s condoning of the genocide, was one of the factors that led to a lack of support for her, especially among the progressives and the young, and led to the poor performance in the 2024 elections.

David Kirkpatrick writes about how Biden ignored the plea of Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, that Israel was egregiously violating human rights and asking him to do something.

Allowing the Red Cross to visit detainees during a war or an occupation is one of the brightest lines established by the Geneva Conventions. Yet, after October 7th, Israel, for perhaps the first time in its history, fully blocked the organization’s access to Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, putting it in the company of pariah states such as North Korea and Eritrea; even the warring factions in Yemen allowed Red Cross visits. Spoljaric noted that humanitarian groups and journalists had reported a “massive surge” in the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. At least a thousand had been released back into Gaza, and many of them gave accounts of torture, even though the Israeli military had concluded that they were not Hamas fighters. The Times reported that one released detainee, a law student named Fadi Bakr, described being beaten so severely that his genitals turned blue and blood still appeared in his urine weeks later. He said that Israeli guards had played music so loudly that one of his ears bled.

Of course, Biden did nothing, other that making weak appeals for restraint to Israeli prime minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to not do anything extreme, which he completely ignored, so confident was he of unquestioned US support.
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Will Trump step in to rescue the Tates?

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan represent some of the worst elements of the so-called manosphere, the world of pathetic young male losers who think that by improving their looks and adopting an aggressive macho posturing, wealth will flow to them, and that this will attract women whom they can abuse. This makes them prime targets for influencers who exploit them by telling them that their problems are because the world is controlled by a secretive cabal who keep them down, and offer them courses and dubious investment opportunities that they promise will enable them to become wealthy and break their shackles and make their dreams come true, but in fact only impoverishes them further. Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere that I reviewed here went inside that world and revealed its misogyny, homophobia, racism, and anti-semitism in all its ugliness.

The British-American Tates were arrested on Saturday and held in Miami after being charged by UK authorities with rape and sex-trafficking charges and an extradition request has been issued.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said the new charges relate to four further victims and were brought after authorities received evidence from Bedfordshire Police in southeastern England. The charges include rape, assault, trafficking and offenses relating to “indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.”

The charges announced Saturday, which bring the total number of alleged victims in the U.K. to seven, are the latest in a long-running international legal saga involving the brothers that has spanned the U.S., Britain and Romania. The brothers have denied wrongdoing.

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