Whatever White House security officials deemed a credible threat from Iran prompted the Secret Service to sneak Trump off Air Force One and fly him out of Turkey on a different plane. Staff, Air Force One personnel, and journalists were forced to fly on a decoy plane that might have been a target for destruction.
In the latest example of organizations blaming the messenger rather than the sins being exposed, the Trump Administration is furious that someone is leaking the fact that the U.S. is running low on bombs.
Harkening back to the distant past of a Cold War alien to Americans under the age of 50, Trump and his Republicans are unleashing hoary insults like “commie” on the Democratic Party. How much further back will they go?
The upset victory of progressive Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s Senate seat has put the Democratic civil war in sharp relief. Are moderates more electable? If so, who cares—if they won’t do anything once they get into office?
The United States maintains the world’s largest military budget (with recent proposals around $1.5 trillion). Despite this, recent analyses and reporting highlight ongoing shortages of key munitions—such as Tomahawk missiles, Patriot and THAAD interceptors, and 155mm artillery rounds—driven by high consumption in conflicts (including the war with Iran), prior transfers to Ukraine, limited industrial surge capacity, and long production lead times of two to four years or more.
The DOJ used the occasion of a quiet midsummer weekend to drop embarrassingly trumped-up charges against an Olympic athlete falsely accused of vandalizing Trump’s renovated DC Reflecting Pool.
David Hearn, a three-time Olympic canoeist, had been accused of deliberately damaging the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. Prosecutors now say newly obtained Interior Department documents show the peeling liner and other damage resulted from a “botched” and rushed contractor installation (tied to the America 250 celebrations), not vandalism.
For the umpteenth time in recent months, Trump has announced a big peace deal—this one between Israel and Hamas. The terms, however, seem completely unacceptable to Hamas: under the proposal, they would disarm first before Israel would begin to withdraw from Gaza.
If the trillions spent on wars and the military were divvied up among Americans, no one would have any trouble getting by. But that’s not our system.
Half of Americans say they’re having trouble paying for gas and groceries. Their president and the ruling Republicans don’t seem to care much, much less be willing to do anything about it.
As the US-Israeli war against Iran expands throughout the Middle East, involving the Houthis and resulting in the closure of the Red Sea as well as the Persian Gulf, oil and gas prices are rising.–oil prices have hit a six-week high amid the conflict.
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