I Guess Trump Had Better Do Some Unhinged Posts About China

Who knew American hegemony was so fragile.

China has indicated it will halt exports of sulfuric acid from May, hitting metals and fertilizer industries already strained by raw material bottlenecks resulting from the Iran war.

Some sulfuric acid producers in the country recently received notifications about the change, and one large buyer has been told about it by their Chinese supplier, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The ban will cover sulfuric acid that’s a by-product of copper and zinc smelting in China.

Cash Up Front

I have no idea what Iran's strategy is, precisely, but they do know what everybody except DC political reporters know, which is that President Deals does not believe that he is bound by deals.

Trump’s warning: If a peace deal is not reached this weekend, the US is prepared to renew and intensify strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump warned. Iran’s parliament speaker said the talks cannot start until the US meets two conditions: a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of blocked Iranian assets.

But, Atrios, surely political reporters understand this too! They just pretend not to, because journalism.

Fair enough.

Vance, Chief Diplomat

I am sure this dumb asshole has the necessary smarts and charm to pull off a miracle.

What Was That About

Does anybody know?

Washington — First lady Melania Trump on Thursday delivered remarks denying any friendship or relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and she called on Congress to hold a public hearing with Epstein's survivors. 

Not Enough Teen Pregnancy

Teen sex and pregnancy were once the great social and moral problems of the country, consequences of our extremely generous welfare state and of course LIBERAL PERMISSIVENESS and FEMINISM.  Now apparently teens aren't fucking and getting pregnant enough.

Teens aren't fucking enough, because of woke.

I'm so old I remember when journalists would happily maintain the fiction that all young Republican staffers and politicians were virgins until marriage, and believed strongly that gross personal hypocrisy never justified contrasting "private" (very public, actually) lives with public proclamations and policy positions.

It is one thing to respect privacy, quite another to just ignore what is in front of you and present a completely fake narrative to the public. I don't mean they should have been dragging low level staffers by name, just that they should not have been maintaining the general facade of fake Christian Conservativism.

Morning

Get your morning on.

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How Dare You Vote Against The Troops

Not that I was a fan - either on the substance or politics - at the time, but I did understand the difficulties of voting against military budgets and war supplementals in the post 9-11 era. I don't think there are actually any such difficulties now.

 
Trump is unpopular, the war is unpopular, and while they play the press on easy mode, they aren't actually very good at catapulting the propaganda in the way the Bushies were.

Still I do not expect a united front against it. There are hawkish Dems who love war with neocon fervor, more that love giving money to the defense industry, and even more who are just cowards who fail to understand the current moment.

Opposing that and supporting stuff people like should be easy, and yet...

Donald Trump’s failed Iran war is at last making the question of his sanity into a first-tier political issue that Republicans can no longer duck. But that’s only the beginning of the political reverberations created by the president’s decaying mental acuity.

As Trump blurted out the other day, he believes that the direct costs of the war combined with his unprecedented request for a 44 percent increase in military spending mean that the federal government can no longer afford Medicare. This is of course preposterous—most of the cost of Medicare is financed by the dedicated payroll taxes that workers pay. Trump has also floated cutting Social Security’s disability program, another form of social insurance with a dedicated stream of tax revenue.

When the press rediscovers the pressing urgency for deficit cutting, you can laugh and tell them to eat shit.

Confidently Asserted

In the old days, a google search never promised to give you The Answer. That wasn't what it was for. A search might lead you to some information which could help answer your question, but we all understood that it was caveat lector. It was a search engine, not a definitive answer provider.

The AI "answers" pretend to be that.

Google’s AI Overviews are peddling misinformation on a scale that may be virtually unprecedented in human history.

A recent analysis conducted by the AI startup Oumi at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time.

In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated.

The issue isn't just google, of course. The misinformation peddlers are being emedded into everything, and as they are eating each other's output, they are likely to get worse, not better.

Would Whiskey Pete Lie To Us?

And how did this slip through Bari's editing.

Survivors of the deadliest Iranian attack on U.S. forces since the war began have disputed the Pentagon's description of events and said their unit in Kuwait was left dangerously exposed when six service members were killed and more than 20 wounded.

Speaking publicly for the first time, members of the targeted unit offered CBS News a detailed account of the attack and its harrowing aftermath from the perspective of those on the ground.

The members CBS News spoke to disputed the description of events from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who described the drone as a "squirter" — in that it squirted through the defenses of a fortified unit inside Kuwait.

"Painting a picture that 'one squeaked through' is a falsehood," one of the injured soldiers told CBS News. "I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position."

If I Did It

Mostly behind the paywall, but one of the "leak hunters" is almost certainly the leaker.

Donald Trump is a Mad King president, perpetually pissed off about seemingly everything. That is always what you like to hear about someone running a major new war that’s killing thousands and affecting millions across multiple continents. But there’s something new that is uniquely enraging him, those who’ve spoken to him recently tell me. In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their forthcoming book, Regime Change – including over his reckless decision to launch an illegal war against Iran.

In response to the president’s demands, Trump officials have launched a massive leak hunt within Trumpland and the federal government, multiple Trump advisers say.

 (click to embiggen and make more readable)

The Era Of The Mad King

Sometimes I have some things to say, but quite often, under Trump, there isn't much more to say other than "this is fucked up." I get the impulse to write longer pieces about things, but I think they generally end up suggesting more complexity than there is.

Trump's particular personality traits are established at this point, and while he isn't entirely predictable, there just isn't anything deeper there. Trump is Trump.

Morning

Thirsty Thursday.

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Mood Ring For Rich People

The MARKETS (stocks and oil) are not yet disturbed by the latest developments. You can decide what that means.

Cease Ceasefire

Apparently the Strait of Hormuz is closed to traffic again. It was nice while it lasted. Thank you, Mr. President.

Ah, Well, Nevertheless

* IRAN'S TASNIM NEWS AGENCY CITING UNNAMED SOURCE: IRAN WILL WITHDRAW FROM CEASEFIRE AGREEMENT IF ATTACK ON LEBANON CONTINUES @reuters.com

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 3:19 PM

I think Donald forget to consult with Netanyahu.

What Did "We" Accomplish

Serial killer Pete Hegseth got to kill more than 170 Iranian schoolgirls, so for him it was all worth it.

His God said he did good, too.

Big Beautiful Deal

Mr. President, sir, only a FIFA Peace Prize winner such as yourself could have made such an incredible deal.

Thank you for bringing peace to the world.

I don't think my response is the right one. You don't have to hand it to him at all, of course. But my response is much better than Senator Murphy's.

There is indeed a deal, of sorts, for the moment, and Murphy is saying that is a bad thing. Not that everything Trump has done has been bad, but that what happened last night is bad, relative to the alternative.

I'm sure if you asked him, "Uh, Chris, did you mean it would have been better for Trump to have bombed the shit out of Iran, as he was promising?" that he would say no. But what the fuck is he saying, then?

Do not encourage him.

Morning

 Wandering Wednesday.