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.

Happy Hour

get happy

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.

Tuesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy

The Unshitting

A problem is that Trump's desires are basically: everyone says he won, and then everyone shuts up about Iran so he can talk about his ballroom more (roughly). I don't think these demands can be met by reality.

Action, Reaction

There are good and extremely obvious reasons for not breaking laws and taboos about targeting  civilian infrastructure. Ah, well nevertheless.

April 7 (Reuters) - Iran on Tuesday attacked ​a petrochemical ​complex in Saudi ⁠Arabia's Jubail ​industrial city, ​located in the Eastern province, Iran's ​semi-official ​Fars news agency said.

It doesn't take a supergenius military expert to see that those laws/taboos actually favor "us" by delegitimizing acts that we would call terrorism if we weren't doing them ourselves.

Probably will anyway, of course. 

How Am I Doing

I missed this a few days ago.

NPR has learned that hundreds of sailors were evacuated back to the United States from their base in Bahrain after the base was attacked by Iranian missiles and drones. In addition to the base in Bahrain, NPR has learned that there have been evacuations at other U.S. military bases in the region, though the exact details are unknown at this point.

Zito Special - Iranians Welcome A Sweet Nuclear Death Edition

This paragraph was briefly in a BBC report about Iran before people pointed out how insane (and probably fake) it was.

Radin, also in his 20s and living in Tehran, said: "About them hitting energy infrastructure, using an atomic bomb, or levelling Iran. My honest reaction is that I'm OK with all of these.

Now it says:

Radin, also in his 20s and living in Tehran, said: "If attacking targets in the country brings down the Islamic Republic, I'm fine with that. Because if the Islamic Republic survives this war, it will stay forever."

The current version is here.

Doing vox pops down at the Ye Olde Pickle Factory, where they all agree being nuked by Donald Trump would be preferable to one more minute of existence.

For posterity, the reporter is Ghoncheh Habibiazad.

...finally added a note

I Gaze Upon The World With A Degree Of Ironic Detachment

Only way to survive.