Por Jeffrey St. Clair
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B-2 Stealth bomber flying at night. Photo: Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder / U.S. Air Force. |
After midnight
We’re gonna let it all hang out
We’re gonna cause talk and suspicion
Give an exhibition
Find out what it is all about
– JJ Cale, After Midnight
+ Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace. Unfortunately, he didn’t bomb what was beneath the mountain. If anything.
+ If the objective was to destroy Iran’s nuclear research facilities, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer was a dud. The bombs exploded, craters were left behind, but Iran’s nuclear facilities were mainly left in tact, damaged but not crippled and certainly not, in Trump’s word, “obliterated.”
+ Two intelligence sources told Rolling Stone that Trump’s attacks on Iran were based on “vibes,” not new intelligence.. “There is no intel. The intelligence assessments have not really changed, ” one of the sources said.
+ The Defense Intelligence Agency’s bomb damage assessment suggests there’s a Whole Lotta Lyin’ Goin’ On (for Not Much): “Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program was delayed less than six months.”
+ This assumes that Iran intended, at some point, to pursue building a nuclear weapon of some sort. Yet all indications before Operation Midnight Hammer were that Iran wasn’t intent on building a bomb.
+ But now the US/Israeli airstrikes may have changed their thinking. Now Iran might feel that getting nuclear weapons as soon as possible may be their only protection against offensive airstrikes by Israel and the US. And they don’t have to build a bomb to possess one. In fact, Russia suggested they might give Iran nuclear weapons and the North Koreans will probably be open to selling them some.
+ Trump’s Hammer of the Gods turned out to be the Hammer of the Frauds…
+ Why did Iran’s nuclear facilities survive the MOAB bombs? According to a piece in Yahoo News, “Iran [is] a leader in the new technology of Ultra High Performance Concrete, or UHPC, and its latest concrete advancements were evidently too much for standard bunker busters.”
+ Surprise, Americans are sick of war. Too bad neither Trump nor the Democrats understand that. CNN poll finds 56% disapprove of Trump’s bombing of Iran. Reuters poll finds only 36% approve. No doubt they’re even sicker now that another double-fraud has been perpetrated upon them: a. waging war on a fraudulent basis; b. lying about destroying a nuclear program that didn’t exist.
+ Tom Stephenson on Trump’s Midnight Hammer:
As for the 400 kg of highly enriched uranium that was supposedly the reason for the US joining the attack, neither Israel nor the US knows where it is, and they don’t much care. Since Israel’s attack on 13 June, it has been obvious that Iran’s nuclear programme – which in the assessment of both Israeli and US intelligence is not an active weapons programme – was a diversionary justification rather than an actual motive. Both the US and Israel have wanted to strike at Iran for a long time for quite other reasons. In Israeli security circles an attack was pushed for even more strongly after 7 October 2023. Yet the US isn’t only fighting Israel’s war: decades of American policy have also helped lead to this moment.’
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+ Too bad Trump didn’t show the Iranians the same consideration they showed US troops. Instead, he lied, saying he was giving Iran two weeks to negotiate, then bombed them two days later, at a time when Iran was defenseless against US airstrikes, thus maximizing the human slaughter at no risk to US forces, when he could have just destroyed or damaged the structural targets.
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+ Talk about political theater. Trump says the Iranians asked him if it was ok for them to launch a retaliatory strike on the sprawling US base in Qatar and he gave his permission: “Some missiles were shot at us the other day. They were very nice. They gave us a warning. They said, ‘Is 1 o’clock ok?’ I said, ‘It’s fine.’ Everybody was lifted off the base, so they wouldn’t get hurt. Except the gunners. They call them the gunners.” I can’t imagine this is true, and if it were, wouldn’t it be a treasonous act? It certainly would have been seen as such under any president other than Trump.
+ Lucian K. Truscott IV: “Fake man starts fake war makes fake peace.”
+ Vice President JD Vance: “I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents.” I don’t make this shit up. Who could?
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+ Vance went on the Sunday talk shows, trying to assure people that the US wasn’t interested in Regime Change in Iran. By the time he got back to Usha and the kids at the Naval Observatory, Trump had tweeted this…
+ Laleh Khalili: “As an Iranian friend pointed out, ‘Are you MIGA’ (Trump’s Make Iran Great Again) in Farsi is ‘To miga-yi?’ which also means “do you fuck” (but even more vulgar).”
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+ This would indeed be a remarkable achievement for Hegseth, except it’s not true. Someone, perhaps several someones, leaked the plans to Seymour Hersh…
+ There were leaks before the strike and after (and almost certainly during)…
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+ Fuming about the leak of the bomb (not much) damage assessment, which exposed his lies about the Midnight Hammer operation, Trump says he’s considering limiting the sharing of classified information with Congress. But who did Trump want to hide this information from? Fox News viewers? It’s certainly not the Iranians, they already have a much clearer idea than he does…
+ Trump lies. He lies habitually. He lies pathologically. He lies about inconsequential matters: his golf handicap, the size of his crowds, acing a cognitive test, and his wealth. He also lies about matters of urgency. He lied to Iran, saying publicly he was going to take two weeks to decide whether to bomb its nuclear sites, then ordered airtrikes two days later. He lied to the American people about Iran being on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. (He didn’t even make Gabbard or Rubio lie for him by going to the UN and holding up photos of illicit centrifuges or tubes of enriched uranium, like the hapless Colin Powell.) Then he lied about the damage, or lack thereof, his unprovoked and illegal airstrikes did to Iranian targets. Now he’s lying about his lies.
+ Of course, many of Trump’s acolytes admire his whirlwind of deceits as an example of his sophisticated, as Bush memorably misphrased it, “strategery.” If so, Trump’s game plan of diplomatic lies and public mendacity is likely to end up in the same historical dustbin as “shock-and-awe.”
+ Representative Buddy Carter has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe next year, Buddy. Trump hasn’t yet killed enough people to qualify for the Nobel. Henry Kissinger set quite a lofty standard…
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+ Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution should be automatically repealed through lack of use. The last time the US Congress issued a declaration of war was on June 4, 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.
Since then, the US has conducted military operations (not including CIA covert ops) in…
Korea (50), Taiwan (50), Puerto Rico (50), Vietnam (55 – 75), Lebanon (59), Cuba (61), Thailand (62), Laos (62), Congo (64), Cambodia (68), Palestinian Territories & Egypt (73), Cyprus (74), Lebanon (76), Zaire (78), Iran (80), Egypt (80), El Salvador (81), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (83), Honduras (83), Chad (83), Iran (84),Libya (86), Iran and Iraq (87), Iran (88), Panama (88), Libya (89), Panama (89), Columbia, Bolivia, Peru (89), Philippines (89), Liberia (90), Iraq (90), Iraq (91), Zaire (91), Kuwait (92), Iraq (92), Bosnia (92), Somalia (93), Macedonia (93), Bosnia (93), Haiti (94), Bosnia (95), Central African Republic (96), Kuwait (96), Bosnia (96), Congo and Gabon (97), Cambodia (97), Iraq (98), Kenya (98), Tanzania (98), Afghanistan (98), Sudan (98), Liberia (98), East Timor (99), Yugoslavia (99), Sierra Leone (2000), Nigeria (2000), Yemen (2000), Afghanistan (2001), Turkistan (2001), Mindinao (2001), Uzbrekistan (2001), Somalia (2001), Philippes (2002), Côte d’Ivoire (2002), Georgia (2003), Djibouti 2003), Iraq (2003), Liberia (2003), Haiti (2004), Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea (2004), Pakistan (2004), Colombia (2005), Lebanon (2006), Somalia (2007), Yemen (2010), Libya (2011), Somalia (2011), Uganda (2011), Jordan (2012), Libya (2011), Turkey (2012), Jordan (2012), Mali (2013), Somalia (2013), Libya (2013), Uganda (2014), Syria (2014), Iraq (2014), Yemen (2014), Iran (2015), Syria (2018), Red Sea and Persian Gulf (2019), Iraq (2021), Syria (2021), Afghanistan (2022), Red Sea (2023), Gaza (2024), Yemen (2024-5), Iran (2025)…
+ A war declared by Congress may not be moral, ethical or even legal, but at least it’s constitutional. The unprovoked bombing of Iran was none of these.
+ Cornel West on CNN: You can’t violate the national sovereignty of a country!
+ Trump surrogate Scott Jennings: Why? We do it all the time. Who’s going to stop us?
+ AOC: “Trump should be impeached for his unconstitutional airstrikes on Iran.”
Nancy Pelosi: “No, no, that’s a big threshold to cross. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
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+ First, Pelosi, then Trump attacked AOC’s calls for his impeachment over the unconstitutional bombing of Iran. How would you describe this “overwrought,” “hyperbolic,” “melodramatic,” “histrionic,” “bombastic,” “psychotic”…all of the above?
+ 128 House Democrats voted with the GOP to table (deep six) Rep. Al Green’s bill to impeach Trump for violating the Constitution by bombing Iran without congressional authorization. Only 79 Democrats voted to keep Green’s bill alive. Here are their names…
+ Brad Lander: “The line in the Democratic Party right now is not between progressives and moderates — it’s between fighters and folders.”
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+ The most deranged old maid in the US Senate…
+ After noting the parallel between Bush’s unprovoked attacks on Iraq in 2003 and Trump’s on Iran, the Chicago editor and essayist, Ben Schacht, quipped: “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as Farsi.”
+ Trump: “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war; this ended the war.” He didn’t want to use Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but he did. Also, the parallels exist only in his own fragmented mind.
+ On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament passed a bill ending cooperation with the IAEA. The measure will bar IAEA inspectors from accessing Iran until the security of its nuclear facilities is guaranteed. So the net result of Trump’s bombing, which did minimal damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, is that Iran gets to keep its nuclear program and shield its operations from international inspectors. Sounds like a win-win for Iran.
+ Israel didn’t just bomb suspected Iranian nuclear power facilities. It targeted at least 14 atomic research scientists for assassination. Where did they get their names? The IAEA, perhaps?
+ Trita Parsi: “Every day that passes without condemnation by the IAEA of Israel’s assassination of Iranian scientists, particularly since Israel may have gotten the names of the scientists from the IAEA itself, further erodes the IAEA’s credibility…”
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+ If Netanyahu really did turn Israeli bombers heading for Iran around at Trump’s command, it proves that the US really controls the purse strings on Israel and that Biden could’ve stopped the genocide in Gaza at any moment and chose not to.
+ Trump “Israel has been fighting Iran so hard and for so long that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, do you understand that?”
+ Israel has announced it will “focus now on Gaza,” after a “ceasefire” with Iran.
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+ There may or may not be a “lasting” cease-fire with Iran. But there’s no cease-genocide in Gaza.
+ In an interview with Israel’s i24 News, the spokesperson for Rubio’s America First State Department, Tammy Bruce, called the US “the greatest country on Earth, except for Israel.”
Throughout history, we all have to be Jewish. We all have to be [sic] recognized that this is about humanity, the nature, also, of the Jewish people and the western civilization that we all enjoy and that makes life worth living, the nature of the Judeo-Christian ethic, the impact of the Jewish people throughout history, the inventions, the medicines, the educatio delivered by Israel. But really the Jewish people around the world. You really have two options when it comes to the Jewish people: you can be envious or you can be grateful….Perhaps I should not be feeling pride (about being the spokesperson for the US state department) but I feel like we’re all guests, in a way, but the pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people in the greatest country on Earth, except for Israel.
+ A new report published this month via the Harvard Dataverse estimates that at least 377,000 people in Gaza have been “disappeared” by the Israeli military since October 2023, with half of those missing Palestinians believed to be children. The report’s author, Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to examine how Israeli attacks on civilians and the embargo on food and aid have led to a dramatic drop in the Strip’s population.
+ Another new medical research paper puts the violent deaths in Gaza at 75,200 people (as of January 1, 2025) and non-violent excess deaths at around 8,500 for the same period, for a total of 83,700 deaths–about 30,000 more than the official count.
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+ New York City is at once both the glittering apotheosis of capitalism and the street-grime resistance to it. This week, the street rose up and defeated the oligarchs.
+ Zohran Mamdani: “We have found exactly the way to defeat organized money, which is organized people.”
+ You don’t win these kinds of campaigns with PAC money, robocalls, or TV ads. You win it by hitting the pavement and talking to people face-to-face. Cuomo couldn’t do that, even if he wanted to, because he would have been assaulted.
+ 40,000: number of volunteers who worked on Mamdani’s campaign.
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+ And the Nate Silver Award for Polling as Wish Fulfillment goes to…well, all of them except Public Policy Polling.
+ The question now is whether the decrepit (physically and ideologically) Democratic leadership rallies around the dynamic new politician their own voters have choose or will they do everything they can to subvert him, as they did Sanders, Jamal Bowman and Indira Walton the vibrant black Democratic Socialist who won the Democratic primary for mayor Buffalo in 2021 with 52% of the vote in a three-way race, defeating the incumbent Byron Brown by 7%. Then, in the general election, Brown, backed by the Democratic and Republican grandees of NY, ran as an independent and defeated Walton, snuffing out another progressive challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has suffocated the life out of the party.
+ Did the endorsements of Cuomo by Bill Clinton or Larry Summers put Mamdani over the top?
+ Jeet Heer: “It turns out that being endorsed by virtually everyone on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight log is not, in fact, appealing to voters.”
+ Former Cuomo confidant, Howard Glaser, gave his acidic assessment of the Cuomo campaign: “A grim and joyless campaign, as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to see. Victory, if it comes at all, will be bandaged with tinny fanfare and strident gloat, to muffle the voice at the center that won’t stop whistling: ‘I’m hollow.”
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+ Every time Trump lashes out at someone for having a “low IQ” (used mainly for blacks) or not being “very smart,” it is a confession that he fears (indeed, knows deep down in the icy recesses of his leathery heart) that they’re much smarter than he is. Here, Trump is looking in the mirror and calling the reflection, “Mamdani.”
+ David Klion: “The most cynical forces in Dem politics, the ones who have spent the past few months pushing surrender on every substantive front, are humiliated now. Their whole theory of politics is in ashes. The people they have the deepest contempt for accomplished what they never could.”
I hope this is true, but I fear they are “beyond humiliation” and will never change course, even though they’ve been stuck in the doldrums for 50 years. If two losses to Trump didn’t prompt a purge of the leadership and its defunct ideology, what would?) Even now, they are coalescing behind the black Cuomo, Eric Adams, as the best chance to bring down Mamdani.
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+ The most iconic public statue in America–honoring the arrival of immigrants from around the world–stands at the entrance to the country’s greatest and most diverse city, a city that was built and energized by immigrants. NYC represents all Miller despises, fears and wants to eradicate.
+ The Democrats, professional Zionists, and the mainstream press (including a despicable last-minute grilling from Stephen Colbert) desperately tried to give Mamdani the Corbyn treatment, speciously smearing him as an anti-semite, and Zohran just brushed it off. According to pre-election polls, Mamdani ran 2nd among Jewish voters in NYC. But given how warped the polls turned out to be in favor of Cuomo, he probably ran first.
+ After watching the Israelis slaughter Palestinian women and children every day for the last 20 months, the anti-semitism slur reflexively launched at critics of Israel is beginning to lose its sting…
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+ Not the Onion…
+ What a delicious self-own. BetarUSA: “We are in Israel.”
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+ The freakout over Mamdani has reached the backwoods of Tennessee…
+ Nima Shirazi: “Netanyahu just announced that NYC will have a nuke in 3-5 years.”
+ Where was the outcry about “America’s Mayor” Rudy Guilani, who was recorded saying this about the city’s Jewish population:
Jews want to go through their freaking Passover all the time. Man oh ham. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. The Red Sea parted. Big deal. It’s not the first time that has happened.
+ The night after Mamdani’s stunning (to some) victory, the NYT was doing its thing, trying to make progressive Jews feel guilty about their vote for
+ The sensibility of the New York Post is essentially the same as the NYT but more straightforward and with funnier headlines…
+ It should come as a humbling experience to the elite columnists at the NYT, New Yorker, New York mag, the Post, and The Atlantic that they “fired all of their guns at once” and didn’t even wing Mamdani. Of course, in order to rise to the level of “elite columnist,” you’re by definition at least one generation, and often two, out of step with the politics of the moment. Liberal columnists like Jonathan Chait and Thomas Friedman are just as entrapped by political anachronisms and nostalgia for a past that never existed as Trump. Only he may know it and they don’t.
+ Venture capitalist Mark Gordon explaining his $250,000 contribution to Cuomo’s Super Pac in the wake of Mamdani’s win:
I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm. It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sorts of things were not useful things to do.
+ Meanwhile, another venture capitalist, Bill Ackman, is desperate to help finance a new challenger to Mamdani: “There are hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight.”
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+ Narciso Barranco was working as a landscaper at an IHOP in Santa Ana when ICE agents, who refused to identify themselves, grabbed him, threw him to the ground, repeatedly punched him in the face, and pepper-sprayed him. ICE later said he attacked them with a “weed whacker,” but videos of the abduction show no such attack. Barranco is the father of three sons, all of whom are US Marines.
+ Barranco’s son, Alejandro, on his father, after he’d been pepper-sprayed, body-slammed, punched, and bloodied by ICE: “He has always worked hard to put food on the table for us and my mom. He was always careful and did his taxes on time. He never caused any problems, and he is known as a kind and helpful person by everyone in our community. I believe my father was racially profiled. They didn’t ask him anything. They just started chasing him and he ran because he was scared. He didn’t know who was after him.”
+ Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus was five months pregnant when she was arrested and abducted by ICE and sent to the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, even though she’d committed no crime that needed “correction.” The prison guards refused to give her any prenatal care or an ultrasound, even after she pleaded for help and got sicker and sicker.. She told the prison doctor that she’d felt no fetal movement in days and was experiencing severe abdominal pain. After a steady flow of vaginal discharge for three days, she was finally hospitalized and kept in shackles as she experienced a miscarriage:
When I was delivering my baby, they didn’t even give me a little privacy. Imagine. A guard was sitting right there, watching me day and night. They even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape. Like I was some criminal. I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’
+ 55-year-old Sae Joon Park, a Green Card holder and Purple Heart recipient, was forced to self-deport to South Korea, after living in the US for almost 50 years, during which time he served in the US Army, got shot in the back in combat, and spent years battling PTSD and addiction. The reason ICE came after him? A drug possession charge from 15 years ago. ” I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told NPR in an interview before his departure. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”
+ A deaf and mute Mongolian man named Bay, who was seeking asylum in the US, has spent more than 80 days at an ICE facility. During that time, he has not had an opportunity to see a judge or communicate with anyone who understands Mongolian Sign Language, according to his sister.
+ ICE raided a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, abducted a family and deported them to Brazil, including a two-year-old girl, who is a US citizen. The girl suffers from chronic health issues and is now considered a “non-citizen” in Brazil, where she has no rights to medical treatments under Brazil’s public health care system, and can’t enroll in daycare or school. She’s living in the country on a temporary visa that will expire in a few weeks, at which point she could be deported back to the US without her parents.
+ Bob, a 36-year-old from Brazil told Brandon Tauszik of Mother Jones: “What’s been going on in LA is we’ve just been seeing a lot of people come in and just ripping people out in a very intense way…rounding them up, like fucking stray dogs.”
+ LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez said this week that ICE showed up at a domestic violence shelter, looking to snatch the abused, not the abusers…
+ In 1988, Johnny Noviello was 10 years old when he moved from Canada to Daytona Beach with his family. He grew up in Florida and eventually obtained his green card, becoming a legal permanent resident of the United States. In May, he was detained by ICE after DHS revoked his green card, citing a drug offense from 2017. On Monday, Noviello was found dead in his cell at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, where he’d been incarcerated for the last six weeks, awaiting deportation to Canada. He was 49 years old. Noviello is the tenth person to die in ICE custody since Trump assumed office.
+ At least 65 percent of the people abducted by ICE had no criminal convictions and 93% had no convictions for acts of violence. According to Cato’s David J. Bier:
“As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes.”
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+ ICE is arresting and deporting 1,100% more noncitizens without criminal records than it did in Trump’s first term.
+Increasingly, many of these arrests (at least 130 in the last 7 days) are of Iranians , who had previously been granted the right to stay in the US without Green Cards, as long as they showed up for their immigration hearings. Take the case of 67-year-old Maddona Kashanian.
Maddona Kashanian came to the US from Iran on a student Visa in 1978. After graduating from college and the Iranian Revolution, she applied for asylum. Her request was denied, but immigration officials granted her the right to remain in the US as long as she obeyed US laws and made regular check-ups with her immigration officers. In nearly 50 years, Kashanian never missed an appointment or was charged with a crime.
Then, last week, Kashanian was at her home, working in her garden, when three unmarked vehicles pulled up in front of her house. Masked men got out and arrested Kashanian. She was tossed in the back of a pickup truck and taken to a local jail in Hancock County, Mississippi, where she spent the night. The next day, she was rendered to the South Louisiana ICE facility in Basile. Why was this harmless woman targeted? Because she’s Iranian at a moment when Trump was waging war on Iran.
+ The Houston Chronicle obtained records that show Houston police have called ICE nearly 60 times this year, including on a woman who was reporting domestic violence by her ex-husband. The woman had fled the gang violence in El Salvador 7 years ago and had several children who are US citizens.
+ Either ICE can’t keep track of all the people it has disappeared or doesn’t want to: “A director of an immigrant rights group said that his organization had received around 4,000 calls regarding disappearances since June 6th. ‘Some we just don’t know where they’re at,’ he said. ‘We keep getting reports that folks are missing.'”
+ “Because it’s hot”…Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons on why ICE agents are wearing masks: “If you look before January 20, and even after January 20, the men and women of ICE did not have to have masks on their faces. Me personally, I don’t want those officers having to wear those masks because it’s hot, it’s dangerous. But ICE agents are being doxxed at a horrible rate.”
+ Jay Driskell has another explanation for the emergence of the masked men of ICE that recalls the deep historical ties between vigilantes and police in America…
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+ An ICE agent pulled his gun on a protester who was taking a photo of his license plate. Are they going to start masking their plates, too?
+ ICE is vastly expanding its enforcement powers by deputizing local police officers to arrest suspected non-citizens. Many of those picked up during traffic stops have no violent criminal record and are pulled over as a result of racial profiling.
+ Stephen Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a company that is reaping huge profits from the mass deportations that Miller is supervising…
+ In an appalling decision, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations to countries with little notification. Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissent. (What happened to Amy “Commie” Barrett?) The Court provided no legal rationale for its decision to allow Trump to deport people from Central and South America or Asia to Sudan, Kosovo and Libya. Why? Because there is none.
+ Erez Reuveni, a federal prosecutor who was fired for questioning the Justice Department’s handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, told Congress in a deposition that Emil Bove, a top lieutenant to AG Pam Bondi, said the department’s lawyers and DHS officials should ignore federal court rulings on deportation cases and tell federal judges, “Fuck you.” Reuvani said he was “stunned by Bove’s statement” because, to his knowledge, “no one in DOJ leadership – in any Administration – had ever suggested the Department of Justice could blatantly ignore court orders, especially with a ‘fuck you.'” Trump has nominated Bove to serve on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
+ The federal judge who ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from jail demolished the Trump Administration’s maliciously manufactured case against him…
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+ Then, in a surreal filing in the same federal court on Tuesday, the Trump Justice Department warns a federal judge that if it releases Abrego Garcia from jail, the Trump Homeland Security Department might have ICE deport him once again (in violation of court orders) to El Salvador…This would be absurd in any administration not run by Donald Trump.
+ Khalil Mahmoud on being told by ICE that he was being detained and his student visa canceled because Marco Rubio had determined he was a threat to the foreign policy of the US:
It was very ironic. I literally laughed. What did I do that I’m a foreign policy threat to the United States? Did I, like, damage the US-Israeli relationship? Because it doesn’t appear so.
+ The new House Homeland Security appropriations bill would require “ALL NON-DETAINED MIGRANTS” entering the U.S. to wear a GPS monitoring device.
+ Florida is blasting another hole in the Everglades to build a prison, which Ron DeSantis has dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” in a swamp populated with poisonous snakes and alligators, where the weather is often unbearably hot and humid and subject to extreme flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes. All designed to torture people who’ve committed no crimes, who work hard, pay taxes and provide for their families.
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+ For the first time in 50 years, the US is on pace to lose more immigrants than it gains.
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+ A Norwegian student was barred from entering the US because ICE agents found a meme featuring a bald JD Vance on his phone. Now the meme is being reproduced in almost every newspaper, TV news show and Social Media platform in the world. Own goal, ICE! (You can see why JD wears the eyeliner. He’s even creepier without it.) It even appeared on the floor of the Irish parliament…
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A new report commissioned by Bernie Sanders shows that Trump’s tax cut bill will double the uninsured rate in many states by kicking 19 people off Medicaid for every millionaire that gets a tax cut.
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Sanders: “This report makes it abundantly clear that the reconciliation bill that Republicans are attempting to ram through the Senate this week would be a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans throughout the country. Not only would this disastrous and deeply immoral bill throw 16 million people off of their health care and lead to over 50,000 unnecessary deaths every year, it would create a national health care emergency in America. It would devastate rural hospitals, community health centers and nursing homes throughout in our country and cause a massive spike in uninsured rates in red states and blue states alike. That’s not Bernie Sanders talking. That is precisely what doctors, health care providers and hospitals have told us.”
+ They’ll either get over it or die from lack of medical care before the next election seems to be GOP thinking on slashing Medicaid…No f-ing clue what the Democrats are thinking.
+ MAGA Logic: Killing Iranians can increase one’s resolve to kill…Americans?
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+ Fed’s Powell: “The economy is slowing this year. Immigration (crackdowns) is one reason.”
+ According to Fortune, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have surged in recent data, with the rate for those holding a bachelor’s degree rising to 6.1%—and even higher for those with advanced degrees or some college but no degree—contrasting with a national rate of 4.2%.
+ Six months into 2025, employers in the US have announced nearly 700,000 job cuts, an 80% increase over the first half of last year.
+ Meteorologist John Moraels on Trump’s cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service: “We’re back to tracking hurricanes like it’s 1999. Except this isn’t a party. And people could die.”
+ The Trump administration plans to eliminate from its dietary guidelines the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one (women) or two (men) drinks per day.
+ The amount spent on lobbying by the Beer, Alcohol and Wine Industry in 2024: $29.6 million.
+ DC’s Eleanor Holmes Norton asked whether she’s going to seek yet another term in the House: “Yeah, I’m gonna run for re-election.” She turned 88 this month.
+ According to the BBC, social media is now the main source of news in the US. It shows.
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+ Bernie goes off on AI during his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience: “Others, Zuckerberg, you know, are talking about: if you’re lonely, we got a machine for you… We got a friend for you on AI and her name is Mary and you can chat with her 20 hours a day, and she really loves you….We are human beings and we’re gonna have to cling to each other to get through this thing. All I would say at this moment is that the answer is not to fall in love with your AI creature out there.”
+ In somewhat less vivid language, Pope Leo from the Southside also warned of the risks children face from using AI, saying he’s concerned about “the possible consequences of the use of AI on their intellectual and neurological development…Access to data, however extensive, must not be confused with intelligence.”
+ Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his kids will “never be smarter than AI.” Father of the year!
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+ In contrast to the new pope, a group of evangelical religious fanatics associated with Trump’s “Faith Office” were at the White House on Monday, praising Trump for bombing Iran and speaking in tongues. Aren’t these the same people who want to make English the official language of the US?
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+ Looks like Musk has some catching up to do in the panspermia department…
+ You wonder how Mackenzie Bezos ever hooked up with this boorish twerp and stuck it out long enough to take half his ill-gotten wealth and redistribute it…What an enormous sacrifice for her country.
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Photo: Greenpeace.
+ Criterion is running a Blacklist Noir collection this month, featuring films by directors and screenwriters who were chased out of Hollywood during the Red Scare. I watched Hell Drivers for the first time. Imagine pitching this scenario in today’s Hollywood: “Well, it’s about these guys who drive big pickup trucks 10 miles to get gravel and 10 miles back as fast as they can.” But the film is utterly compelling: Wages of Fear meets On the Waterfront. Great cast: Simon Baker, Peggy Cummings, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoogan, Sean Connery and David McCallum. Shot by Geoffrey Unsworth (who went on to shoot 2001, Polanski’s lucious Tess, and Fosse’s Caberet) and directed by the blacklisted Cy Enfield, who, being a fellow magician, met Orson Welles in a magic shop one day, got hired for the Mercury Theater, worked on The Magnificent Ambersons and was perhaps the last person to see Welles’ final cut before the studios that later banned the young genius butchered it beyond recognition.
+ The New York Times is putting together a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, and they asked a few writers and filmmakers to submit their top 10 picks. They didn’t ask me, naturally, but I sent this to them anyway.
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
2. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)
3. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai)
4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki )
5. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard)
6. Old Boy (Park Chan-wook)
7. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
8. A Separation (Ashgar Farhadi)
9. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)
10.Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro)
+ Each Roaming Charges generates a little spurt of emails, generally running about seven haters to three lovers. Most of the calumnies from the haters are so clotted with cant and clichés that they’re barely worth reading, though I see it as my editorial duty to forge my way through to the end of each one. But last week’s column inspired Jean W. to fire off a letter which flamed with such sincere scorn and outrage that I felt it was worth sharing, if only to motivate the other haters to write more energetic missives of denunciation and detestation.
In a column that was 99% about the outrages of the week–from Israel bombing Iran and shooting starving Palestinians as they lined up for morsels of food, to masked agents of our own federal government abducting innocent people from their cars, homes, hospital beds and places of worship and renditioning them to distant concentration camps–what really ticked off Jean were my aspersions about Bob Dylan for refusing to join John Lennon in a series of concerts in the early 70s to raise bail money to spring poor blacks stuck in local jails across the country, as recounted in the recent documentary One-to-One.
Too bad nobody can comment on your columns in Counterpunch—you might have to deal with real ideas and opinions. I say this because I read the whole thing slowly realizing that you were a mini mouse poking at people for their bad taste when you got to Dylan. Even with that lead in, I could hardly believe that you still had a resentment that Bob didn’t do what you wanted him to do in the 70’s. The 70’s! It was utterly pathetic, your moaning about the man that changed America with his words, while you can do nothing but mewl and puke in a tiny article in a tiny and mostly worthless publication in a tiny corner of the interwebs like an old duffer who got jilted in his 20’s and never got over it. There are so many important things to discuss and try to understand in the US today and you have a small space to begin that in. But instead you run a gossip column while Rome burns. Yikes.
My reply…
Dear Jean,
You just commented, didn’t you?
I was writing about the 70s because the excellent film in question was about Lennon and Dylan in the 70s.
As for Dylan’s politics, go listen to Neighborhood Bully again. Pretty sure Bob must be enthused about the genocide in Gaza and the murderous bombing of Iran. He’s certainly stayed silent about it, as others have risked their careers by speaking out. The Nobel laureate, of course, would risk nothing by doing so. That he hasn’t, speaks volumes, as Gaza burns.
Best,
The Old Duffer
PS-What do you have against Minnie Mouse? She seemed to be doing most of the labor in that family, while Mickey goofed off. I’m honored by the comparison.
We’re Gonna Find Out What It’s All About…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives
Sybil Derrible
(Prometheus)
Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA
Will Sloan
(OR Books)
Kant
Alexandre Kojève
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Solace of the Mind
Amina Claudine Meyers
(Red Hook)
Raspberry Moon
Hotline TNT
(Third Man)
Fairyland Codex
Tropical Fuck Storm
(Fire Records)
Born Again in New York City
“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Bluebeard
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
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