Our Greatest Ally

He has been released.

Sounds Bad

Our approach to war is that it's always unfair to respond in any way. And, well, maybe it is, but that doesn't stop it from happening.

Iran has threatened to cut undersea internet cables that run beneath the Strait of Hormuz to choke the global banking system.

Gen Hossein Mohebbi, spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described the communication lines on the seabed as “legitimate new targets”.

Severing the cables could affect global systems, disrupting financial markets, bank transactions, healthcare and the consumer internet.

FALL FUNDRAISING 2026 DAY 1

The election is in less than two weeks. If Dems win, it will be, of course, due to the power of mighty blogs! Vote blue no matter who!

If they lose, it will also be, of course, due to the power of my mighty blogs! Centrist Dems suck!

It's all on me!

Venmo!

Or Paypal!

Or Patreon!

Thanks to all!

This Year's Soccer Moms

Every election cycle, savvy pollsters invent an important voter category, like "Soccer Moms."  This year it's "Pedophile Parents" and Ramaswamy is gonna make sure those people go to the polls.

Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign for Ohio governor is pouring $4 million into a bombshell ad in which his opponent's estranged mother attacks her daughter — doubling down on the message despite fierce bipartisan backlash, Axios has learned.

Extremely savvy politics.

Asked for corroboration of that report, police and court officials in the Youngstown area could not immediately produce records from the 1970s. But the Acton campaign produced documents showing that Dr. Acton’s stepfather pleaded not guilty, was indicted by a grand jury and fled the state before trial. Though another warrant was issued for his arrest, he never appeared before a judge. He died in Pennsylvania in 2004.

Seize It

Not a surprise of course.

Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine

The SpaceX founder authorized the move and has been discussing Ukraine with Trump, but the president has denied ordering the restrictions

A feisty European prosecutor might meet him at the border, too.

Seems to be some buck passing between Trumpers and Musk, too, so who knows.

Some U.S. officials say that Musk acted unilaterally and that Trump didn’t specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. But a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses.

Fundamentals

Most economic news seems to be average-to-bad, yet the stock market keeps soaring!

Who will be the bag holders?

Our Friends In The Middle East

Being a lefty noninterventionist (this is not an absolute position, just a strong lean), I, or people like me, get screamed at a lot for being too soft on whoever the Big Bad of the Day is. Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria, Russia... 

When we urgently have to go bomb the shit out of the Big Bad's innocent civilians, people like me tend to object, and not because we love Saddam or Gadhafi or Ahmadinejad or Assad or Putin usually, but because we don't like blowing people up and don't think we have a very good record of accomplishments when we do.

And then there's our ally Saudi Arabia. It might be the worst regime in the world, by whatever measure. Close to it, anyway. It isn't that I want to go bomb Riyadh, but I do wish that some of the people who love to scream at hippies for loving dictators would explain their silence on the country, occasionally.

The UK will deploy RAF Typhoon jets to defend Saudi Arabia in response to escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks, the government has said.

Sure there are always Realpolitik arguments, but lefty RealPolitik arguments generally don't get much consideration. 

Real Men Go To Tehran

 And there are no realer men than Bibi and Donald.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says both he and President Trump are “committed to completing the ⁠elimination of the Iranian ⁠regime” and recently “discussed this”.

The great thing about regimes is once you eliminate one then there's a new regime and  you get to eliminate that one too.

There is no actual vision, real or fake, for what the next regime should be or how to achieve it.

No I have no idea what will happen. 

Welp

20 years ago I would've said (and likely did, on this very blog) that while the US had an immense amount of ignored corruption, it was somewhat segregated from actual lawmakers themselves. Now I don't think this is true at all. Corruption in congressional offices is the norm, not the exception. 

In early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham’s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.

The scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said — in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state’s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.

Kao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: “This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.

Resistance to new electeds who don't come from within the normal channels is to some degree about ideological and clan replication, but it is also because newcomers might be shocked to find all the gambling in the casino.

Trump made all these investigations go away.

The Supremos have made bribery an almost nonexistent crime, but something doesn't have to be a crime to be incredibly corrupt, something many journalists have been pretending to forget lately.

It's Evening In America

I keep saying this, but I do think it's important to understand that an increasingly senile malignant narcissist will happily burn the world down on his way out. Things cannot go on without him. 

His monuments (ballroom, Kennedy Center, arch, etc.) are his attempts to live forever, though in true Trump style he can't imagine doing that by putting his name on anything actually good, or spending his own money to do it.

Trump is very good at fucking things up with good intentions (I don't mean he is ever good, just that in his own mind his crackpot plans are genius). Imagine what happens when he fully turns to wrecking things on purpose?

He's already done some of this, such as destroying the Kennedy Center. That blast radius could grow.

Oh Canada

I also know nothing about Canadians politics. I don't think all separatist/independence movements should be dismissed out of hand, but this seemed to be Chud magnet.

Though in all these situations, "voting for independence" is the easy part. It's the details of the divorce agreement that matter, and can't be captured in an aspirational vote.

Nobody really knew what they were voting for with Brexit, for example, which was its own kind of separatist vote. It could've allowed for "Norway" or the shitshow they ultimately agreed to.

Morning

 Totally Tuesday

Happy Hour

get happy

Why They Changed It I Can't Say

Americavania, Americachusetts, Amermont, Amerhampshire, Amerorado...

Snowball

I suspect people will start missing their mortgage payments in nontrivial numbers.

Trump administration officials are preparing to impose financial penalties on millions of Americans in default on their federal student loans next year, according to five sources familiar with the matter.

The Treasury Department is moving forward with plans to hire private debt collectors, three of the sources said, possibly as soon as November. The sources said those plans are unlikely to be announced before the midterm elections.

I'm not going to yet claim that Trump will deliberately destroy the economy - he's pretty good at doing that with his brilliant ideas without intending to - but I will say that he will happily burn everything down on the way out. 

Obviously this particular consideration is in itself corrupt, but it was also true during the whole student loan discourse during Biden's term. People buried by student loans are mostly not who The Discourse imagines them to be

Last year, Treasury officials expressed concerns that too aggressively pursuing these measures could hurt low-income borrowers, two sources said. Staff also said they pointed out to senior Treasury officials that scores of Trump supporters would be seriously hurt by going after the wages and benefits of workers who are in many cases struggling to hold onto their jobs. Their message was, “This is not who you think it is. The demographics are not good for us,” one source said.

Vote Blue No Matter Who

Carville doesn't run The Democrats, of course, but his name is on half of their fundraising pleas.

Born Every Minute

We all (even me) get things wrong, but a reasonable take on the last few decades would be to see it as an era of elites being suckered by scammers over and over again, from Enron to Saddam-had-WMDs to mortgage derivatives to Theranos to Elon-Is-Tony-Stark to NFTs to various obvious fake things about Gaza/Israel to AI...

I'm sure I am leaving many things out.

It wasn't that people made mistakes, it was that the people-with-microphones shouted down anyone who disagreed, almost in unison, and then quickly moved on to embrace the next scam.

Sure some people were the cons, not the marks, but I think that often they are the same people simultaneously. Elon himself is both con and mark most of the time, in that he often does believe his own bullshit.

Sure, Elon

 

Centrist Democrat: this gift should be means-tested! Why should rich kids get SpaceX shares, too?

Vive

I haven't said anything about what's happening in France because I have no idea what's happening in France.

I have long recognized that I know absolutely nothing about the politics of countries other than the US and the UK, and almost everyone non-French weighing in on such things knows as much as I do.

"We" scoff at the opinions/knowledge of mostly clueless American swing voters when they express themselves to a NYT reporter, and those people know much more about American politics than almost every generalist US pundit knows about France.

Our politics is often incredibly stupid, and so is the politics of France and every country. If you don't have any sense of the stupid bits, you don't really have any sense of what's happening, ever.

Morning

Suck it up, buttercups.