Month: February 2026

On Wednesday America was subjected to a monumentally outrageous performance by one of the most powerful people in the federal government — and for once it wasn’t by Donald Trump. Pam Bondi was called to Capitol Hill to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, and she chose to behave like a bratty schoolgirl having a temper tantrum in the principal’s office. If the stakes weren’t so high, it would have been almost comical to see an adult behave so childishly in such a formal setting. As it was, the attorney general embarrassed herself, the Justice Department and the country with the insulting, irrational attitude she apparently adopted to impress her boss and mentor, who has worked to shatter the rule of law.

The next Democratic-appointed attorney general will have a mess to confront and clean up. They will need their ethical, intellectual and political wits about them to craft reforms and regulations, and to restore a sense of confidence in the department’s independence. But they can also look to the not-too-distant past for inspiration.

There was a time when Americans considered the attorney general to be one of the most distinguished, consequential appointments in government. Occupants of the office were assumed to be people of high integrity and good character, qualities considered necessary to remind Americans of the commitment to dispense justice fairly and impartially.

Of course this was not always the case. The office of the attorney general is a political position tasked with carrying out the priorities of the president, and that may inevitably lead to at least the appearance of partisanship. It also opens the door to abuse of power by a president inclined to go there. 

Richard Nixon’s behavior during Watergate brought those prospects into clear focus. The president attempted to use the Justice Department to block investigations into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as many other abuses that slowly came to light as the scandal unfolded. Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed to head the investigation, prompted Attorney General Elliot Richardson to resign, followed swiftly by Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, crystallized for the public the corruption at the core of Nixon’s presidency.

After Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Congress realized that reforms were needed to insulate the Justice Department from political pressure by the White House. Years of congressional investigations and in-depth reporting had made the country aware of massive abuses of power by the executive branch. J. Edgar Hoover, who led the FBI for 48 years, had established a personal fiefdom devoted to consolidating power and pursuing his own personal obsessions, sometimes with blackmail and coercion. The intelligence community was implicated as well, along with Nixon’s exploitation of the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies for partisan and personal gain.

Advertisement:he Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which was passed by Congress to, among other provisions, prevent conflicts of interest and create the Office of the Independent Counsel, a position designed to be insulated from political pressure by the president. (The independent counsel statute was allowed to expire 20 years later following the debacle that was the Starr Investigation in the late 1990s.) 

Presidents Gerald Ford and his successor Jimmy Carter took up the mantle of reform, instituting new norms and rules designed to rein in an out-of-control presidency. Edward H. Levi, a respected legal scholar who served as Ford’s attorney general, began working to mend the department from within, which included limiting the scope and power of the FBI. His successor Griffin Bell, who served under Carter, came up with the idea of making the Justice Department a “neutral zone,” which was designed to formalize the idea that the White House would not directly involve itself in any law enforcement decisions. This led to new oversight mechanisms, including the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Personal Responsibility, to keep the abuses in check. Carter’s administration instituted the most sweeping reforms of the civil service since 1883’s Pendleton Act, which replaced the spoils system and created a professional, merit-based system.

According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, with the exception of the Independent Counsel Act and the War Powers Resolution — legislation from 1973 that required congressional authorization for military intervention — those reforms held up quite well, even as various presidents attempted to push the envelope. 

In retrospect, George H.W. Bush’s pardons of Iran-Contra participants was an early attempt by the executive branch to circumvent the post-Watergate reforms. But it wasn’t until the election of Donald Trump that the full scope of the reforms’ inadequacies in the hands of a real tyrant became obvious. Having had no ethical boundaries in his business and personal life, he saw no purpose in observing any such guidelines in government. 

One of Trump’s first scandalous acts as president was firing James Comey. The FBI director ran afoul of Trump early on when he refused to publicly state that the president was not under investigation in the Russia probe or to let his newly-named National Security Adviser Michael Flynn off the hook for lying to the bureau. Since then, Trump has never looked back in treating the norms and rules established after Watergate as rubbish. He would simply ask if he had the power to do something and that would be all he needed to know, ethics and traditions be damned.

In his second term, Trump hasn’t even bothered to ask that question. He simply does what he wants, and if the courts tell him he can’t, only then might he consider pulling back. When it comes to Bondi’s Justice Department and Kash Patel’s FBI, the results are clear. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye laid out in detail, the department is being decimated from top to bottom. The brain drain is overwhelming, with hundreds of career prosecutors being fired or leaving voluntarily; they are being replaced by unqualified lackeys and loyalists. 

The wreckage left behind is what will await the next Democratic attorney general who, with an equal commitment from Congress, will have no choice but to reform the entire department from the bottom up. At the end of Trump’s first term, the New York Times’ Peter Baker reported that Goldsmith and former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer created a bipartisan blueprint for what such a rebuilding would require. They proposed to restrict the president’s pardon power and private business interests, enhance protections for journalists and give more powers to future special counsels among other things. 

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and others in the Congress have similarly drawn up plans to overhaul the ethics rules and create various mechanisms to prevent the gross abuses of power that Trump and his loyalists are practicing. According to Baker, these would include  “limits on a president’s authority to use declarations of national emergencies to take unilateral action; more protections for inspectors general and whistle-blowers; and an accelerated process to resolve disputes over congressional subpoenas.”

With a Supreme Court determined to give presidents more power rather than less, even in light of Trump’s absolute monarchical power grab, it remains to be seen whether any of these restraints will come to fruition. Democrats will have to do everything in their power, including such bold acts as expanding the high court, to make it work. If they don’t, the damage done by Trump will be permanent. 

Once they have seen the door is open to abuse, future tyrants will eagerly walk through it — and there are plenty more waiting in the wings and willing to take advantage of what Trump has wrought.

On fighting, flexibility, and getting out of your own way

A couple of lengthy essays last week spoke to chronic problems (blind spots?) plaguing the Democratic Party. Handy advice for a party self-aware enough to recognize it. DNC Chair Ken Martin commissioned a post-2024 review and then buried it. So Mark Leibovich addressed the topic in The Atlantic, as did Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. But before we get to their critiques, indulge me. I’m just a simple country blogger.

I was the state party’s Get Out The Vote Coordinator (GOTV) for NC-11 in 2006. A week ahead of Election Day, candidate Heath Shuler’s field director and I made a tour of western counties to check on their preparations. We asked one group of county leaders what they’d done and/or still needed to do.

“We’re done,” they told us.

Excuse me?

“We called through the phone list and put out the signs.”

They caught us looking sideways at each other.

“You mean, you want us to do … more?“

Um, yes. They weren’t being lazy. They’d done all they knew to do. They’d done all their county had ever done. What they’d learned from the people before them, who’d learned it from the people before them, etc.

All this time I’d thought that was a problem for rural counties where the presidential nominee isn’t parachuting in a team from national headquarters to show them how the big kids GOTV. Now I see it as a party-wide problem: Democratic activists keep doing what they first learned and will not adapt to changing political realities.

My current obsession is with turning out more independent voters (“unaffiliateds” in NC), especially now that they outnumber Democrats. When I point out deficiencies in standard practice for identifying them, deficiencies that I can document with data, I’m assured that our people will address it by doing the same thing they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it. Just more of it.

Democrats’ national voter database, for example, was conceived and implemented around the time in North Carolina that Democrats were 48% of state registrants, Republicans were 34%, and UNAffiliated were 18%. Decades later that mix is UNAs 39% (45% in my county), with Ds and Rs tied statewide at 30%. Yes, Democrats have updated their software, but they haven’t updated their strategy for using it. That was conceived a long time ago in a political galaxy far, far away. Democrats need a new targeting paradigm and won’t admit it. They’re comfortable with what they’re used to. Just like my friends from 2006. It’s cultural as much as technical. They don’t innovate, don’t experiment, don’t take chances.

Tomasky identifies four other problems.

Problem 1 is summarized by Navin Nayak: “Democrats come to Washington to get things done, and Republicans come to Washington to fight.” Democrats just telling people they are fighting for them is meaningless. They have to be seen doing it:

Americans want to root for a fighter, to cheer for the underdog who punches back. The fictional George McFly who meekly takes it is cringe-worthy. Nobody wants to vote for him. The guy who cold-cocks Biff Tannen elicits cheers.

How many times have I referenced all those Rocky movies American paid to watch over and over and over? They want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. People don’t want to vote for Democrats committed to playing it safe.

Problem 2: Democratic infighting over ideology. Tomasky cites Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”):

“Democrats are fundamentally committed to issues and policies, and they lose sight of the values that underlie those issues and policies,” he said. “It’s a difference with Republicans. They start with values, but they never bother to get around to policy, because they’re not really interested in running anything.”

When you begin from values, Westen said, you inevitably are emphasizing points of commonality with others in your coalition, because you share those values. Whereas when you begin with policy, you inevitably end up emphasizing differences, because policies are particular, and people have different ideas about them.

The meta message voters hear is that Democrats can’t get their shit together. How can voters know what Democrats stand for if Democrats don’t? A checklist of policies may flow from values but the values should come first and prepare the ground.

Problem 3: Centrists “always want to believe on some level that it’s still 1989, and the left either has just led or is about to lead the Democratic Party to ruin.” Except 1989 was in another century. The country is not permanently somewhere in the middle.

It’s true that not many middle Americans would identify themselves as leftists or even liberals. But they don’t want to live in a cruel country. Their moral sentiments are not directed toward the rounding up of millions of decent people or the attempted erasure of a tiny and powerless percentage of the population. Centrists ought to link arms with progressives and play offense on these issues.

The centrists’ second mistake is worse: the presumed yearning for “normalcy.” I hear some centrists say: People don’t want all these big plans; they don’t want Democrats to remake society. They just want things to get back to normal, by which they mean some sort of pre-Trump idea of business as usual.

We’re not going back. Ask someone who understands that it’s a new day:

AOC on why she's at the Munich security conference:

"I think this is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the Transatlantic partnership, ah, rip up every democratic norm, ah, and, you know, really calling into question, as was mentioned by,… pic.twitter.com/Cd3n5V2ZeB

— Winter (@LeftyWinter) February 13, 2026

Problem 4: The left is in its own bubble. A lot fewer Americans identify with the left than they think. At the end of the day on Nov. 3, we don’t count ideology. We count votes.

It also feels as if many people on the left forget that the first job of any political party is to win a majority. If the Democrats don’t win 51 Senate seats and 218 House seats, they aren’t doing anybody a lick of good. That means they have to win in states and districts that are purple at best. Candidates in those places are going to have to take some positions that progressives won’t like. The left has to show more tolerance for these candidates.

Say it with me: Duh.

Tomasky has a slew of suggestions for resolving these issues. Too many to mention, but go here.

Leibovich’s critique gets more at the Democrats’ cultural self-owns. In particular, its attempt to mollify each and every sub-interest group in the tent. The subhead puts it bluntly: “They say they want to save democracy. First they’ll need to get out of their own way.”

“It’s reflective of a broader problem within the party,” said Simon Bazelon, lead author on the “Deciding to Win” project. “We are scared of ever making anybody in our coalition upset.” That, along with the party’s reluctance to fight or to make enemies makes them appear weak.

“Weakness is the toxicity of our brand,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom observes.

There is a lack in the party of fresh perspectives untainted by years of going along to get along. To remain vital, the party must be continually fed by new blood:

One recurring resentment among Democratic voters is the disconnect between the party’s red-alert anti-Trump rhetoric and the musty vehicles—Biden and Harris, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the various other dust-gatherers—it keeps deploying to resist him. “People continue to say, ‘Oh my God, Trump is an authoritarian; the world’s going to end,’ all this stuff,” David Hogg, the 25-year-old gun-control activist and advocate for recruiting young progressive leaders, told me over the summer. Hogg, who had a brief and tumultuous stint as a DNC co–vice chair in early 2025, is contemptuous of the party’s lingering cohort of elder leaders.

“It’s like, ‘Okay, look who your members of Congress are: Some of them literally cannot stand for a press conference,’ ” he said. “You cannot credibly tell the American people that democracy is in danger and the world is ending, and the people that you are putting up on the front lines of fighting back against that genuinely belong in a nursing home.”

I complain regularly that party elders fail to recruit and train their replacements, young ones. Locals just asked me again to take shifts troubleshooting electioneering/voting challenges that arise during our primary. I agreed. But I asked for a young mentee. I may not be ready for the nursing home either, but I know when it’s time to step back. Many Democrats in Congress do not. That’s not just about age. Sen. Bernie Sanders is sharp and still hard at the fight. But it’s a lot about age, especially if you want less engaged independents under 45 to vote.

Former president Barack Obama, 64, recently chalked up his wins to being younger when he ran for president. “There is an element of, at some point, you age out,” he told Brian Tyler Cohen. “You’re not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through,” reports Politico:

“I’m not making a hard and fast rule here, but I do think that Democrats do well when we have candidates who are plugged into the moment, to the zeitgeist, to the times and the particular struggles that folks are thinking about as they look towards the future, rather than look backward toward the past,” Obama told Cohen.

Leibovich speaks with other younger Democrats with fire in their bellies who are trying to get establishment Democrats out of their way. And yet, he sees advantage in, as James Carville advised, staying out of Republicans’ way when the other side is destroying itself. Liebovich concludes, “there are worse things to be than the alternative.”

Except that’s the kind of visionless, election-cycle thinking that’s turned the Democrats into a gerontocracy, one that’s failed to invest in its own future and led by people perceived as in it for themselves. Not unlike a drug maker starving new drug research funding so it can keep quarterly earnings high. Instead, the company lobbies to extend profits from existing patents until the CEO retires. If it feels stagnant, it’s because it is. If it feels like a party holding onto a normal that isn’t coming back, it’s because that’s true too. Its national leadership is coasting into irrelevance.

Obama warns:

“That spirit, that energy, it’s out there, and you can feel it, but it’s bottled up,” he said. “We haven’t given enough outlets for young people to figure out, ‘How do I become a part of that?’ That’s this enormous, untapped power that we have to get back to.”

Party leaders can start by knowing when they’re past their “best by” date. There’ are few places for fresh faces to go when people up the ladder won’t leave.

Not just in general

The Bulwark has a post up about Democrats believing the key to winning is increasing voter turnout. It’s claims such as “Texas isn’t red or blue; it’s a non-voting state.”

Laura Egan obviously concurs, citing data from David Schor, Nate Cohn, and David Wasserman that shows instead that increasing voter turnout harms Democrats:

The party’s commitment to this idea has even perplexed Republicans. In a 2022 interview, former Texas GOP chair Steve Munisteri told Texas Monthly that Democrats were misunderstanding the partisan allegiance of unregistered voters and argued that they were investing too heavily in voter registration. “They just don’t understand the numbers or haven’t done the research,” he said.

In another quote, Lakshya Jain, political analyst at Split Ticket, an election-modeling and data-analysis group tells Egan, “Election after election proves that this idea of high turnout being the key to Democratic wins is completely wrongheaded. The lean of low-propensity voters in states like Texas, etc.—they are all pretty Republican.”

I don’t have time this morning to address the “nonvoting state” theory in detail. But while I won’t dispute findings referenced above that increasing voter turnout in general harms Democrats, those experts are talking about average turnout across the board. The key is to know where to increase turnout. I’ve addressed the weakness in Democrats’ voter targeting theory before.

Half the time when I log into their national database, VoteBuilder, a familiar deep voice in my head says, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Democrats over rely on what comes out of a computer because it comes out of a computer. I was an engineer; I’m skeptical. You’d better be looking at the right data and know how to interpret what the computer is spitting out … and not spitting out. VoteBuilder was developed and deployed in my state decades ago to help turn out Democrats when the registration breakdown was D: 48%, R: 34%, and Unaffiliated 18%. Today in North Carolina it’s D: 30%, R: 30% and UNA: 39%.

Democrats are still using a tool developed a long time ago in a political galaxy far, far away in one that has turned on its head. And using that tool the way they always use it, in our seven largest and bluest counties, Democrats are leaving tens of thousands of independent votes on the table, I believe, because their targeting tool (and the way they are taught to use it) does not see them, and because Democrats don’t even ask them to vote. It’s not enough to flip the state blue, but enough to avoid nail biters that took down Cheri Beasley in 2022 and plagued Allison Riggs in 2024. The reasons are technical and, as much as any other reason, involve a party culture highly resistant to change.

Egan writes, “low-propensity voters have tuned out of politics for a reason. If Democrats want to build lasting majorities, they need to more seriously engage with why.” I posit that one reason is that they are not engaging them at all. And one reason doesn’t involve messaging or policy. In “The Experience of Grassroots Leaders Working with the Democratic Party,” one complaint stands out:  A majority of respondents said the party does a terrible job targeting voters, saying that its lists are far too narrow. I have the receipts.

I rarely ask people to sign petitions but this one is worthwhile — on the merits and on the politics:

The editors of In These Times are joining the editors of The Nation in formally nominating the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

Please sign this petition right away to join us in amplifying that nomination and demonstrating mass public support.

In recent months, the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of armed federal agents to the Twin Cities and indiscriminate raids under “Operation Metro Surge” have brought horrific state violence to Minnesota’s streets. Local residents, ICU nurse Alex Pretti and mother, Renée Nicole Good, were murdered by federal officers, sparking outrage and accelerating a movement of resistance across Minneapolis and beyond.

In the face of these attacks, the people of Minneapolis have stood their ground with nonviolent protest, mutual aid, and solidarity, confronting fear and authoritarianism with dignity and resolve. Thousands marched in freezing temperatures; communities have organized legal observers, delivered groceries to those in hiding, and whistled warnings in demand for human rights and constitutional freedoms.

You can sign it here.

“I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pic.twitter.com/9jJOP1S2ue

— Hotist (@TheHotist) February 13, 2026

Also this week, his department’s assault on medical research has led Moderna to withdraw from MRNA stage three trials for a whole range of diseases because it’s pointless. And the FDA decided not to approve the new flu vaccine.

But not to worry. They’re telling us all to drink beef tallow to be healthy again so we won’t need those vaccines anyway.

Is anyone surprised?

Aleksei A. Navalny was most likely poisoned by a toxin found in a South American frog, five European countries said on Saturday, making the most concrete Western accusation yet that Russia’s leading opposition figure was murdered by his government in an Arctic prison two years ago.

Samples taken from Mr. Navalny’s body showed the presence of a toxic substance, epibatidine, according to a statement released by the foreign ministries of Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

“Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia,” the statement read.

“Only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin against Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in Russia,” it read.

Remember Viktor Yuschenko? They poisoned him with Dioxin:

Trump loves to get revenge on his enemies but he’s a piker compared to Putin. (I’m sure he wishes he could get away with what Vlad gets away with but then he’d have to pretend that he didn’t do it and that’s just no fun.)

Remember that Trump thinks the world of Putin — the man who does that to his political enemies. He’s a monster and our president eagerly sucks up to him every chance he gets.

“The conclave that elected Pope Leo was more rigged against Donald Trump than the 2020 presidential election.” — Steve Bannon pic.twitter.com/y1tiZBkh4q

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) February 15, 2026

He didn’t like Pope Francis either. Get a load of this excerpt from the Vanity Fair article about Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein’s very close friendship, which is a real mind-blower:

 In November 2018, as Bannon was hatching a plot to export MAGA-flavored nationalism abroad after his success storming Washington with Trump, Epstein suggested he build his campaign around a media company, not an NGO. The latter would afford less privacy and invite more scrutiny. “Press. Private. Protected,” Epstein told Bannon. “Think of it as a battle plan. You have made great strides. Forged ahead. [At] some time you stop and build a fort to protect your gains.”

Within a year, Bannon launched War Room, a live podcast beamed out daily from a basement studio near Capitol Hill. He styled himself as a general barking orders to the shock troops of the MAGA movement. The extent to which Epstein inspired the launch of War Room, which The Washington Post once described as “a far‐right Meet the Press,” is unclear, and Bannon hardly mentions his old friend anymore. The crimes of Epstein—who a medical examiner determined died by suicide as he awaited trial—have been a fixation of Trump’s base for years, yet these days they barely merit a mention on War Room.

One possible reason for that came into focus last year as Trump’s Justice Department, under pressure from Congress, began to dump out millions of documents from their cache of files related to the Epstein case. These documents further illuminated the extent of the friendship between Bannon and Epstein, whose private exchanges are jocular, even affectionate at times.

Epstein sent Bannon caring messages about his health and offered him stays at his properties and trips on his plane. After organizing a flight for Bannon, Epstein joked that he was “the most highly paid travel agent in history,” and added: “Massages. Not included.” In one text from 2018, Bannon actually messaged Epstein, “You up???” In another, he told Epstein that a Fox Business anchor who had him on her show was “so wet” during their interview. When prosecutors upheld Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, the two celebrated: “Dude!!!!!!” Bannon messaged. “Tell me this is real.” They seemed to relish in confiding in each other about Trump’s struggles in office, including in one exchange where Bannon called Trump “stupid” and another where he mocked him as a “stable genius.” Epstein once messaged Bannon, “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”

And yet Bannon remains in very good graces with the MAGA set. In fact, he’s one of their most respected intellectual strategists.

I love this part:

For Bannon, Epstein was a conduit to an international network of elites. For Epstein, Bannon offered insight into Trump, an old friend he remained fascinated by. “They were both using each other,” the source who knows both men explained. “Jeffrey would introduce people together a lot, as a way of making himself useful for his patrons.” (The files also demonstrate that despite Bannon’s frequent diatribes against “the ruling class,” he remains a Barbour-clad member of the cosmopolitan elite himself. This is a man who stays at The Pierre when he visits New York and Le Bristol when he’s in Paris. His quest to spread populist nationalism across the globe was aided by private jet travel. In one exchange, eager to get to Paris from Rome, Bannon asks Epstein: “Is it possible to get your plane here to collect me[?]”)

FFS…

As for the Pope, Bannon and Epstein apparently plotted against Pope Francis:

Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to Trump, told Epstein that he wished to “take down” the leader of the Catholic Church. In June 2019, Bannon wrote to Epstein: “Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”

In the text exchange, Bannon references the book In the Closet of the Vatican, which exposed much of the secrecy and hypocrisy at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. Another text exchange from April 2019 shows Epstein emailing himself “in the closet of the vatican.” He then sent Bannon an article titled “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose.” Bannon responded: “Easy choice.”

Rome and the Vatican were once a very important priority for Bannon. In 2014, the former Trump adviser established a Rome bureau while he was running the right-wing outlet Breitbart News. He also wanted to set up a “gladiator school” for Judeo-Christian political training near the city. Those plans were blocked by the Italian government in 2021; Bannon reportedly was furious.

Now he’s saying the conclave that elected Pope Leo was rigged. Lol. You can read the whole story of the plot against Francis here. It’s a doozy.

If you get the chance to read the Vanity Fair article it’s a really great distillation of all the evidence that’s come out about the Bannon Epstein friendship. He was talking to him and making plans to hang out all the way up until the day he was arrested in 2019.

And it’s all good in Trump world. No big deal at all.

Remember how Donald Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal and then four years later bombed their alleged nuclear program and Trump said it was “completely and totally obliterated? ”

So why are they trying to make a nuclear deal with Iran less than a year later?

President Trump’s top advisors reportedly warned him that making a deal with Iran on its nuclear program is historically “difficult to impossible.”

Trump asked special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner what the chances were of reaching an agreement with Tehran, according to a senior US official, Israel’s Channel 12’s Barak Ravid said on Telegram Saturday.

The pair told the president history shows the West has never been able to strike a positive deal with the Islamic Republic leaders, but that they would continue to “take a tough line” during negotiations, Ravid reported.

Trump has vowed to use military force if the Ayatollah doesn’t agree with the US, threatening that Iran would face a “very traumatic” moment.

At his campaign event in Ft. Bragg on Friday:

 U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday embraced potential regime change in Iran and declared that “tremendous power” will soon be in the Middle East, as the Pentagon sent a second aircraft carrier to the region.

[…]

Asked if he wanted regime change in Iran, Trump responded that it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” He declined to share who he wanted to take over Iran, but said “there are people…For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” Trump said after a military event at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “In the meantime, we’ve lost a lot of lives while they talk. Legs blown off, arms blown off, faces blown off. We’ve been going on for a long time.”

Trump has threatened strikes on Iran if no agreement is reached, while Tehran has vowed to retaliate, stoking fears of a wider war as the U.S. amasses forces in the Middle East. The U.S. targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in strikes last year. When asked what was left to be targeted at the nuclear sites, Trump said the “dust.” He added: “If we do it, that would be the least of the mission, but we probably grab whatever is left.”

[…]

The Gerald R. Ford, the United States’ newest and the world’s largest carrier, has been operating in the Caribbean with its escort ships and took part in operations in Venezuela earlier this year. Asked earlier on Friday why a second aircraft carrier was headed to the Middle East, Trump said: “In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it … if we need it, we’ll have it ready.”

He’s really working that Nobel Prize Committee, isn’t he?

Erecting barriers to barriers

Remember, kids, when Republican-controlled states passed photo ID laws then began closing down DMV offices where people could apply for them? Now Republicans want to require you to present a passport for voting and they’re stopping some libraries from processing passport applications:

The U.S. State Department has ordered certain public libraries nationwide to cease processing passport applications, disrupting a long-standing service that librarians say their communities have come to rely on and that has run smoothly for years.

The agency, which regulates U.S. passports, began issuing cease and desist orders to not-for-profit libraries in late fall, informing them they were no longer authorized to participate in the Passport Acceptance Facility program as of Friday.

“We still get calls daily seeking that service,” said Cathleen Special, executive director of the Otis Library in Norwich, Connecticut, where passport services were offered for 18 years but ceased in November after receiving the letter. “Our community was so used to us offering this.”

A State Department spokesperson said the order was given because federal law and regulations “clearly prohibit non-governmental organizations” from collecting and retaining fees for a passport application. Government-run libraries are not impacted.

The spokesperson did not respond to questions as to why it has become an issue now and exactly how many libraries are impacted by the cease and desist order. In a statement, they said, “passport services has over 7,500 acceptance facilities nationwide and the number of libraries found ineligible makes up less than one percent of our total network.”

But then elections are often about narrow percentages, aren’t they?

The State Department has ordered some libraries to stop processing passport applications, as Republicans in Congress push a Trump-backed bill requiring a passport or similar proof of citizenship, beyond a Real ID, to register to vote in the upcoming midterms. pic.twitter.com/7JDSxgEBOh

— WarMonitor (@TheWarMonitor) February 14, 2026

FYI:

Public libraries are organized differently in each state. In Pennsylvania 85% of public libraries are non-profit organizations, versus being a department of a local municipal government. In Maine, it’s 56%; Rhode Island, 54%, New York, 47% and Connecticut, 46%, according to the American Library Association.

Pennsylvania Reps. Madeleine Dean, a Democrat, and John Joyce, a Republican, have proposed bipartisan legislation that would allow 501(c)(3) non-profit public libraries to continue to serve as passport acceptance facilities by amending the Passport Act of 1920. A similar companion bill is pending in the Senate.

Dean, who first learned about the policy change from a library in her district that has provided passport services for 20 years, called the State Department’s interpretation of the law “nonsense.”

It takes a criminal mind.

The American people are getting angry

Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and their wilding DHS brownshirts are pissing off Americans from north to south, from east to west, and from South Texas to New Jersey. They are pissing off Americans uncomfortable with being pissed off enough at their government to stand up and do anything about it. Until they do.

Joe Walsh posts:

ICE stopped a U.S. citizen. Smashed her car window. Dragged her out. Threw her U.S. passport into the street. Agents wore masks and refused to identify themselves.

Let that sink in.

We asked http://PAXIS.app what the law says and what should come next:

ICE enforces immigration law under Title 8. It has no authority over U.S. citizens. The Fourth Amendment protects every person from unreasonable seizures and excessive force. An administrative ICE warrant does NOT authorize breaking windows. It does NOT authorize assault. It does NOT suspend the Constitution.

This is not routine enforcement. It is a potential constitutional violation.

This should be reported.

File a police report for the property damage. Create an official record. Report it to the DHS Office of Inspector General and the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Preserve photos, video, medical records, and witness names.

Federal power is not above the Constitution. Document everything. Demand accountability.

Help support PAXIS and get it into the hands of every immigrant and ally in the USA: https://gofundme.com/f/PAXIS

ICE stopped a U.S. citizen. Smashed her car window. Dragged her out. Threw her U.S. passport into the street. Agents wore masks and refused to identify themselves.

Let that sink in.

We asked https://t.co/qyUIygAKBU what the law says and what should come next:

ICE enforces… pic.twitter.com/ghN9m23mZt

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) February 14, 2026

This New Jersey man has had all he can stand. His government is terrorizing school children. That did it for him.

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Turn Out and Up (@turnoutandup)

ICE raid elementary bus stop at morning pick up—send 4th & 5th graders running in panic.

Students were waiting normally—suddenly agents stormed in.

Bus driver circled around the stop to protect all of the kids.

Once at school they were so upset—counselors had to be called in.… pic.twitter.com/luUI8Xzchi

— LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 (@LongTimeHistory) February 13, 2026

There is a tradition in this country (or at least a popular myth) about Americans as a people being slow to anger. Don’t get them angry. Let’s hope Trump, Miller, Bondi, Vought, Noem, Hegseth, and the rest of the Trump bootlickers get to find out what happens when you do.