General

From Mark Wauck: “If it’s Thursday, Are There Talks In Islamabad?

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Sadly, I agree. Trump’s character flaws (mainly his narcissism) have gotten worse–much worse, to the point that they endanger the world economy, and GOP, and the U.S. standing in the world.

From Mark Wauck, “If it’s Thursday, Are There Talks In Islamabad?”

The problematic behavior he has exhibited throughout his adult life is, rather, due to character flaws that have long been on open display—especially a strong narcissistic streak that leads him to regularly gamble on risky actions to bolster his grandiose ego needs. These problems probably also explain the astonishing degree to which Trump indulges in wildly inappropriate rhetoric and even openly lies. It’s gotten to the point that it’s now difficult to distinguish what Trump truly believes from his deliberate gaslighting.

I certainly agree that it’s entirely possible, even likely, that aged based mental changes are exacerbating these tendencies and character flaws and leading to repeated disastrous judgment calls. I continue to believe that, within normal limits, Trump understands that his actions have led to disastrous results. However, in line with his character flaws and age related decline in his ability to take corrective action—especially recognizing his own responsibility—his reaction is twofold. First, he seeks devious ways to avoid responsibility and to manipulate those who oppose him. This is entirely in line with his past. However, second, he now—to a degree that is exaggerated beyond his past behavior—lashes out inappropriately against all opposition in counterproductive ways. Thus we see unstable and wild swings of mood and emotional reactions, tempered at times by a return to his shrewder past. The trend is clearly downward, and especially because his narcissism has led him to surround himself to an unprecedented degree with conniving and incompetent ass kissers—people who are willing to feed his ego, but often for their own fanatical purposes. And Jewish Nationalists figure they’ve just bought Trump and the GOP—and lots more war and killing:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

14h

JUST IN: Israeli megadonor Miriam Adelson gives $40 million to Republican super PACs for midterm elections.

For these reasons I’m very pessimistic about any peaceful resolution to Trump’s war on Iran. I believe that Trump is still quite capable of understanding that any attempt at a TACO in this situation will fool no one. No walkaway is possible without a huge loss of US strategic depth, both in purely military terms (loss of bases, logistic hubs, etc.) as well as in financial and diplomatic influence. Trump has well and truly boxed himself in. A TACO move may be theoretically possible, but seems very unlikely in view of Trump’s character flaws, which manifest in his adamant refusal to acknowledge mistakes, or even responsibility for his decisions and actions. He continues to double down on disastrous mistakes, to the extent that corrective action to reverse the effects of those mistakes is now impossible in the real world.

Continues…

One Day in the Life of Ann

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Liberals can ruin anything.

I’ve been trying to distract myself from the end of the world, as Trump blows up not only Iran but the Republican Party with a pointless war that has spiked oil prices, depleted our munitions, closed the Strait of Hormuz, jettisoned America’s moral standing, distracted the president from immigration, and, so far, cost us $30 billion in direct military spending, with $200 billion more requested.

So I’ve been spending my time on murder mysteries.

Reading David Baldacci’s action-thriller “To Die For,” I was willing to suspend disbelief and accept his portrayal of the CIA and FBI as all-powerful, super-stealth agencies, full of swashbuckling killers (men and women!) as opposed to what they actually are, which is incompetent paper-pushers with cushy bureaucratic jobs who didn’t see 9/11 coming. (Refusing to engage in “racial profiling,” FBI officials blew off Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams’ July 10, 2001, memo warning about the “inordinate number” of Muslim men linked to Osama bin Laden enrolled in U.S. flight schools.)

But then I got to the part where the real enemy is revealed — the hidden malevolent force that is about to take down THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Guess what that terrifying organization is …

… a reconstituted KKK! Actual quote from the book: “[They want] a population that looks the same, prays the same, speaks the same, and where white men dominate everything. Just like the KKK.”

This book came out in 2024. Yes, apparently, Baldacci was in a semi-vegetative state during the previous four years of convulsive violence from antifa and their leftist comrades — cities aflame, businesses destroyed, police stations razed to the ground, neighborhoods commandeered by fascist thugs, an explosion in the murder rate beyond anything ever seen in U.S. history. And all this violence was committed with the warm cooperation of a half-dozen local governments.

So this was just the time to release a panicky tome about the (nonexistent) KKK and their scary memes. (A hundred electroshock-therapy sessions couldn’t cure hack writers of their irrational fear of white domestic terrorists.)

Next on the escapist trail, I watched an episode of “Law & Order.” Sticking to formula, the writers took a hideous, real-life crime committed by a non-white person and made the perp a super-WASPy white man. The “ripped from the headlines” show I saw was strikingly similar to a Muslim’s mass shooting in Canada 10 years earlier.

In 1989, Gamil Gharbi, son of a French Canadian mother and an Algerian immigrant father, who hated women (no, really?), methodically murdered 14 female engineering students at École Polytechnique, a top technical school in Montreal. Gharbi barged into an engineering classroom and ordered all the men out, then shot the women, explaining he was “fighting feminism.”

The misogynist Muslim continued on his way, entering another classroom, again threw the men out, and shot or knifed the women to death. During his 20-minute rampage, Gharbi killed 14 women and injured 10. (It appears that not one of the ejected men, listening as the ladies were shot, attempted to intervene, not exactly smashing the stereotype of French Canadians as useless sissies.)

In the “Law & Order” version of this real-life Muslim murder spree, a group of 17 female pre-med students in Central Park are gunned down by a creepy guy, aiming only for women, while muttering “Damn bitches.” Description of the suspect from one of the TV witnesses: “He was white.” And just so no one missed the point, he was played by a blond, blue-eyed, all-American actor.

Hoping for a less annoying distraction, I tried one of my favorite shows, “Murder, She Wrote” — or as a cruel ex-boyfriend called it, “Underpants She Soiled.” (The lead character is a cheerful dowager who solves an apparently unending series of homicides in her small New England town.)

But even this aggressively apolitical program worked in a gratuitous shot at Republicans. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the near-perfect Opposites Day nature of the remark.

In the show, the owner of a Fifth Avenue salon says of her star hairstylist, “One of our nine Republican candidates for president pays him $600 plus airfare to fly to Washington every two weeks.”

Because, you know, Republicans are such rich, elitist snobs.

That episode aired in 1995, which happens to be just two years after President Bill Clinton made international news for stopping traffic at Los Angeles International Airport so that he could treat himself to a $300 haircut ($670 today) from “Cristophe of Beverly Hills” aboard Air Force One. The story became, as one Washington Post columnist put it, “The Most Famous Haircut Since Samson’s.” The Post alone ran more than 50 stories on it.

No one at “Murder, She Wrote” — not the writers, editors, Standards and Practices executives, cameramen, not even the actors — could have missed the story about Clinton’s tarmac trim. But the dialogue sounded good to them.

It didn’t stop with Clinton.

In 2007, Sen. John Edwards’ Federal Election Commission filings revealed that he’d billed his presidential campaign for two $400 haircuts from a Beverly Hills stylist, $250 for hair styling and makeup from a swank salon in Dubuque, Iowa, and $225 in services from the Pink Sapphire in Manchester, New Hampshire, which, NBC News reported, “is described on its website as ‘a unique boutique for the mind, body and face’ that caters mostly to women.”

Famously, Hillary Clinton got a $600 haircut in 2015 from the posh John Barrett Salon, requiring half of Bergdorf Goodman to be put on lockdown.

According to Google AI, every haircut scandal has involved a Democrat. These include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $300 haircut in 2019 and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s spending more than $30,000 from his 2024 campaign coffers for hair and makeup.

Back to the dissolution of the world, Google also reveals that in 2016 Benjamin Netanyahu got a haircut in New York City for a whopping $1,600. Perhaps patriotic hairstylists could put an end to the slaughter by threatening to withhold services from the well-coifed prime minister.

If our storytellers ever try their hand at reimagining the Iran War, at least they’re unlikely to confuse which party bears responsibility for this catastrophe.

Mearsheimer: Israel and its enormously powerful lobby have the means to make Trump dance to their tune, as they have demonstrated repeatedly since Trump moved back into the White House.

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Mershiemer:

On 14 April 2026, I was on “Judging Freedom” talking with Judge Napolitano about Iran. My central point to the judge was that Trump is in no position to work out a deal with Iran that settles the ongoing war in a meaningful way. The reason is simple: Israel has no interest in a ceasefire, much less an agreement that satisfies any of Iran’s demands, especially its demand that it maintain the capability to enrich uranium. Israel would prefer to wreck Iran, much the way Syria was wrecked. And Israel and its enormously powerful lobby have the means to make Trump dance to their tune, as they have demonstrated repeatedly since Trump moved back into the White House in January 2025. The only circumstance where Trump might stand up to Israel and the lobby is if the world economy is on the verge of disaster, and the president feels that eventuality would be so dire that he has no choice but to stand up to Israel.

Netanyahu at the U.S.-Iran talks

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DD Geopolitics

Pepe Escobar: The ‘Second Coming’ at Hormuz — Trump Blocks the Blockade; Blessed Be the Oil; Pepe Escobar reveals the inside details of the Iran- American negotiations; The Americans came to cut a deal to divide the spoils of the Hormuz tolls. April 14, 2026.

(Partial transcript) There are some very interesting details coming out from members of parliament of Iran who were actually in the room. These are the best like our friend Professor Marandi, he was outside of the room. So people were telling him what was going on. So some of these guys, don’t forget the Iranian delegation was 71 people. So we still don’t know how many when when Aragchi and Vance were actually in the same room talking face to face. We don’t know how many Iranians. I would assume at least seven or eight because these people were and some of them are members of the security council. This guy who start leaking very discreetly some stuff is a parliament member. He said that in the beginning Aragchi and Vance there was a certain flow. It was a relatively adult conversation.

Soon guess who barges inside the room? Dumb and dumber. Heckle and Jackal, Tweedle Dee and Twiddle Dum and Kushner with messages from Netanyahu. And after that there was a phone call from Netanyahu to Vance. According to our member of parliament after that the whole thing started to derail.

I think this is all all of us need to know about it and the position of Vance was terrible. Well, to start with, can you imagine in the most important diplomatic day in the modern history of the United States and Iran in the past 47 years, the president of the United States was playing golf and then at night he went to a fucking UFC, whatever, with his secretary of state who should have been in the room. So, this means that they set Vance up.

They sent him on a mission impossible. Come on. The guy went to Yale Law School. How how how he didn’t see this thing coming? It’s unbelievable. They put him in the line of fire. He didn’t have any autonomy.

There are differences on how many calls from 6 to 12 to to Trump during the 15-hour negotiation process. And on top of it, direct interference from Netanyahu via Tweedle Dee and Twiddle Dum and the phone call. So, obviously they didn’t go there to negotiate. I put this in my my column is coming out in Russia, I think after our conversation, unfortunately. Basically the Americans went there to dictate not to negotiate.

There’s an extra little bit of information that came from another source. the whole uranium enrichment Kabuki was not the main thing.

He actually said that and then with Kushner and Witkoff the Americans wanted a cut, a very large cut on the toll booth. It was about money. Grifters. And this is what they are. They are a bunch of bloody grifters. Why do they send Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee to something so important? Because they want some money out of it. So obviously the whole thing had to collapse. And of course the degree of unpreparedness of the American delegations. The Iranians were, wow! Can you imagine that?

Only the um nuclear dossier in the Iranians, they had a file this thick, 120 pages with all the details underlined everywhere. So they they they had the whole all the dossiers on top of their hands and in written files all of them. The Americans arrived with two or three pages which they probably didn’t read somebody scribble for them, you know.

So, they were completely unprepared and dealing with an extremely well-prepared delegation. But the most incredible thing is that in the beginning at least there was some degree of dialogue.

Okay. Vance is not a grifter. At least we don’t know. But and he seems to have a brain. So it was in the beginning. Yeah. Okay. Tiny brain. But at least there was some measure of dialogue. And Aragchi is an extremely patient guy. He’s very cool, measured and patient. He listens. So obviously he was making an effort to listen to Vance.

But then the whole thing completely derailed which was expected. Our Pakistani friends, apart everything that we know about this Pakistani junta. Basically this is a this government is run by Field Marshall Munir who has Trump on speed dial, and it’s part of the industrial security intelligence complex comp complex in Pakistan. The people who put Imran Khan in jail we we all know.

But okay, credit to them they broke their backs to make this thing work. They worked like hell. And this is what I heard from Pakistan. I was doing a podcast with Pakistanis before talking to you guys. That was very interesting.

Behind the scenes, he told me a few things that he heard from the the Pakistani mediators, They were not the the architects of the whole thing. They were the gobetweens but as go-betweens. They did a great job.

There is a I don’t know you have if you have seen a photo there is uh the face of Mohammad Ishaq Dar, the Pakistani foreign minister He’s totally dejected, We cannot see the face of Vance but we see the face of Asim Munir (Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan), talking to Vance like you can see that he’s pissed. It’s like he’s saying you come to my country and you fuck us up in the middle of all that knowing from the beginning that you were just using us for who gave you the right to do this. This is what you read in Munir’s face. That’s very very impressive and that sums it all up I would say.

But they, and they keep they keep working 247. They say look maybe there’s going to be a second round. It could be here or maybe it could be somewhere else maybe in Qatar. But they’re still working for a second round of negotiations. Even though the end a as as you saw and the whole world saw that key phrase by Vance, they decided not to accept our terms…..

Ritter’s Rant 085: The Blockade by Scott Ritter

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Ritter’s Rant 085: The Blockade by Scott Ritter

President Trump has declared a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But there is no blockade, just bluster and posturing from a man who lost control of the conflict with Iran the minute it started.

Read on Substack

Massie Rakes In $2.5 Million In Q1 As Trump Escalates Primary Fight

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Massie Rakes In $2.5 Million In Q1 As Trump Escalates Primary Fight

Of Massie’s 20,665 donors in the first quarter, approximately 76% were first-time contributors while 993 donors from Kentucky contributed a total of $190,399, including 401 from his 4th Congressional District, the figures showed. The first-quarter showing comes as Massie faces a competitive Republican primary on May 19 against former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, who has received backing from President Donald Trump. Massie has repeatedly clashed with Trump since the latter’s return to the White House in January 2025. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Massie Says GOP Risks Losing America First Base If Primary Challenge Succeeds)

Massie told the Caller on Friday his fundraising was driven “without a consultant or fee going to anybody,” saying his campaign relies on grassroots support. “The bad thing about being the number one target, there’s a lot of pressure on you. The good thing about being the number one target is that a lot of people have rallied to support me,” he said.

So far this cycle, Massie’s campaign has brought in a total of $4,932,036 from 32,809 total donors, including 1,545 Kentuckians who have contributed close to $312,000, according to figures shared with the Caller. The congressman emphasized that much of his first-quarter contributions came from small-dollar donors, with an average contribution of $94.

 

Tensions between the congressman and Trump escalated after Massie voted “No” on the president’s landmark legislation the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” pushed legislation to release the Epstein files and opposed U.S. involvement in a war with Iran. Trump labeled Massie a “nut job” and “disloyal” while giving remarks in the representative’s district in early March, Axios reported.

With the party increasingly split, Massie told the Caller he remains focused on preserving the GOP majority and the importance of coalition-building.

“Right now my own party seems to be shrinking the tent and I’ve told them this already and when I see them in Congress personally that if I lose they’re gonna, they’re gonna alienate a big portion of the, of the coalition that put us in the majority and put us in the White House,” he said.

Gallrein accused Massie in a X post Sunday of having a notable share of campaign contribution originating “from donors outside Kentucky, including individuals and organizations that have also supported Democratic candidates and causes.”

Massie challenged Gallrein to debate and cited a Caller report from March in response Monday. Eighty-five percent of donors who gave the maximum allowable amount to Gallrein’s campaign had a history of contributing to Democratic candidates, according to federal election filings cited by the report. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Democrat Donors Flood Cash To Trump-Backed Massie Challenger)

Massie was driving through rural Kentucky on his way to the Grant County GOP’s Lincoln Day Dinner when he spoke with the Caller, frequently dropping in and out of cell service. He claimed Gallrein did not show up to the dinner.

“My opponent turned down 5 debates so far. We’re traveling tonight to a county GOP event that was gonna allow each participant to take questions for 10 minutes, and he backed out of it. It wasn’t even a debate or really even a forum, just an opportunity for him and me to answer questions for 10 minutes from [the audience],” he told the Caller.

 

The Caller reached out to Gallrein for comment over the dinner but did not receive a response prior to publication. The candidate posted Monday on X that he had attended a Henry County Lincoln Dinner over the weekend, an event Massie also said he attended.

Massie said his team will prioritize television advertising in their outreach efforts ahead of the primary, saying that they have recently taken the “upper hand” in that area while expanding mail efforts in targeted counties across Kentucky’s 4th District.

The additional funds have also allowed the campaign to broaden its voter outreach beyond reliable primary voters to “newly registered voters” and “people who’ve never voted,” he told the Caller. Massie added that the campaign has now gone on air in the Huntington-Charleston media market for the first time. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Massie Warns AIPAC, Trump’s War Against Him Could Backfire)

“We didn’t want him to be able to erode any support” in Massie’s home base, the congressman said.

With just 36 days until the primary, the race is shaping up as a test of how candidates define their role in Washington — an issue Massie addressed as he pushed back on critics and underscored his commitment to remaining an outspoken and active voice in Congress.

“I think people are hungry for somebody to speak up in Congress. Basically, Congress is inert right now, doing almost nothing, and probably will be doing nothing from now until November,” he said. “With the exception of me, I’ll be forcing votes and trying to make things happen — and, if nothing else, going out there and saying the things that need to be said that other people are afraid to say. Sometimes it gets me in hot water, but people are hungry for that.”

Gallrein entered the race against Massie in October 2025. “This district is Trump country. The President doesn’t need obstacles in Congress — he needs backup,” he said in a statement at the time obtained by Politico.

President Trump’s birthright citizenship fight is about history, not hysteria

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Fox News – Opinion by Amy Swearer – 4/13/26
From the moment President Trump issued his executive order on birthright citizenship, critics derided it with a litany of adjectives nearly as colorful as they were unwarranted.
It was racist. Ahistorical. Unprecedented. Un-American.
During oral arguments at the Supreme Court last week, Justice Elena Kagan appeared to add another pejorative to the catalogue: revisionist.
Kagan’s accusation was, to be sure, more professionally dressed than many of the others. But it’s equally erroneous.
Solicitor General John Sauer wasted no time pushing back on Kagan’s characterization, which, in its specific context, was limited to the government’s contention that birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegally or temporarily present aliens remained an open question even after the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Sauer pointed out the irony of Kagan’s characterization: the modern “consensus” that Wong Kim Ark settled these questions is the revisionist interpretation. The federal government only definitively adopted this view of Wong Kim Ark in the 1930s. And it did so at the prompting of a single senior State Department official who had earlier admitted in a law review article that his opinion was contrary to that of the general legal community.
Sauer’s response hits on a truth that cannot be repeated enough to the American public: Much of the prevailing modern assumption about “universal” birthright citizenship is based on a revisionist interpretation. The view exists as the “consensus” today only because it won out in a hostile takeover, supplanting an original, and far more limited, understanding of the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
Consider the ACLU attorney’s reference during oral argument to an 1896 State Department regulation that defined birth on U.S. soil as the sole requirement for birthright citizenship, excepting only the children of tribal Indians and foreign diplomats. Yes, that policy existed. It was apparently implemented during the latter half of President Grover Cleveland’s second term. But it was, itself, a revisionist policy: It broke not just from the policies of earlier administrations, but from the policy articulated by the executive branch during Cleveland’s own first term.
In 1885, Cleveland’s first secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, had instructed federal officials not to issue an American passport to a man whom all parties agreed had been born in the United States to parents who weren’t ambassadors. Bayard concluded that the man, Richard Greisser, wasn’t a U.S. citizen, despite having been born in Ohio, because his German father and Swiss mother had never established permanent residency in the United States. In fact, they’d returned with Richard to Germany within a year of his birth and raised him there as a German subject. In stark contrast to the regulation issued more than a decade later, the first Cleveland administration declared that Greisser had been, at the time of his birth, “subject to a foreign power” and not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” as required by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
Bayard’s position on birthright citizenship for the children of temporarily present aliens was the normative policy at the time. His predecessor under President Chester Arthur, Frederick Frelinghuysen, had similarly instructed federal officials not to issue citizenship documents to U.S.-born Ludwig Hausding. Like Greisser, Hausding was the son of “Saxon subjects” who were “only temporarily in the United States” and who raised him in Germany from infancy. Frelinghuysen’s State Department was clear that the mere “fact of birth [on U.S. soil], under circumstances implying alien subjection, establishes of itself no right of citizenship.” The immigration status of Hausding’s parents at the time of his birth made his claims to birthright citizenship “untenable.””
In 1890, State Department officials under Benjamin Harrison demonstrated their continued reliance on this operative theory of birthright citizenship, rejecting citizenship claims for a child born in a New York hospital to Mary Devereaux, a would-be immigrant mother awaiting a final determination of her eligibility to enter the country. The Irish mother had become ill while being held aboard a British ship in New York Harbor and was permitted to disembark for treatment at a New York hospital until after she gave birth.
The State Department concluded that both mother and child were eligible for deportation because the child, though born on U.S. soil, was not born “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, in the sense of the [F]ourteenth [A]mendment.” It also noted that this decision was consistent with the opinion of renowned legal scholar Francis Wharton, who wrote in his treatise that the same reasoning which excludes tribal Indians from birthright citizenship “would exclude the children born in the United States to foreigners here on transient residence.”
Whatever may have led to the 1896 change in State Department policy, it was, indeed, a change — a revision — of the earliest executive branch policies based on the earliest executive branch understandings of birthright citizenship.
Those earliest executive branch interpretations of the Citizenship Clause are interchangeable with the allegedly “revisionist” theory now defended by the Trump administration. And the resultant policy lines drawn about who is or is not a citizen by birth are effectively the same.
The Trump administration’s efforts to abide by the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment aren’t revisionist. They’re just restorative.
To the originalist, no distinction in words could matter more.