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Iran, Jesus, And S&ht

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 3, 2026

Rejoice! Armageddon is coming!!!

Iran-US Tension: 45-Minute Toilet Lines on World’s Most Expensive Warship: What’s Going Wrong on USS Gerald R. Ford Near Iran?

Servicemen asked to fight Armageddon complain that some of their superiors are gleeful about it. Jonathan Larsen reports at his Substack:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Larsen publishes a response from MRFF President Mikey Weinstein:

These calls have one damn thing in freaking common; our MRFF clients report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new “biblically-sanctioned” war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian “End Times” as vividly described in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology.

God help them that they don’t have to face not only Iranian missiles but also the wrath of Kendall Brown, a livid TikToker who claims her husband is on active duty. Her video excoriating supporters of God’s anointed one went viral. She calls them all monsters.

@kendallybrown

I have never been more serious about any video in my life. If you supported this, I *hate* you. He made it very clear what his intentions were all along. You just either didn’t listen….or didn’t care. And for that? I hate you.

♬ original sound – Kendall Brown

The video hurt some delicate MAGA feelings. (They can dish it out but they can’t take it.) Democrats in Congress would do well to express similar righteous rage (with fewer expletives). It might boost their approval ratings with voters who perceive Democrats as weak.

@kendallybrown

Uh oh I made the right big mad with my video yesterday. Too bad I don’t care about the opinions of lemmings who think they deserve silence from the people whose lives they expect to sacrifice.

♬ original sound – Kendall Brown

Brown references the problem thousands of servicemembers aboard the carrier USS Gerald R. Ford are having with simply using the toilets. They don’t work properly. Insert your own “-ageddon” joke here (NPR, Jan. 17):

On board the carrier, the crew is battling a toilet system that the General Accountability Office reported in 2020 was undersized and poorly designed. The system continues to fail during deployment, forcing the crew of 4,600 sailors to live with a system that randomly breaks down during their months at sea.

NPR has obtained documents that include a series of emails that detail the ship’s effort to grapple with the breakdowns. Problems with the Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer (VCHT) system increased in 2025. The vacuum system was adopted in part from the cruise ship industry. It uses less water, but the system used by USS Ford is more complex. Breakdowns have been reported since the $13 billion carrier first deployed in 2023.

“Every day that the entire crew is present on the ship, a trouble call has been made for ship’s force personnel to repair or unclog a portion of the VCHT system, since June 2023,” reads an undated document provided by the Navy, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

After participating in the Venezuela action, rather than returning to port for repairs, Trump dispatched the carrier immediately to the Persian Gulf region to attack Iran. Observers in the Indian subcontinent are having a good laugh over the shit problem. Lots of social media posts on it from Pakistan, India, and China.

No worries, says U.S. Fleet Forces Command (USFFC): “More than eight months into an extended deployment, the Sailors of USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) continue to demonstrate resilience, professionalism, and sustained morale while serving far from home.”

That’s not what The New York Times hears about the ship’s extended deployment:

The Navy typically schedules ships for six-month deployments and tries to avoid having them go longer than seven. This week, however, the Ford marked its eighth month on deployment.

Members of the crew have told The New York Times that morale on the ship dipped after their deployment was first extended and has cratered since it was ordered to the Middle East.

With waiting 45 minutes to use a toilet, sailors won’t have time to think about Armageddon. Win-win.

Heavens To Betsy, Known Unknowns

Published by digby on March 2, 2026

I never thought I would say this but I would feel safer with Don Rumsfeld in charge of the Pentagon. He was a neocon nutcase but he wasn’t dumb a a rock. That might not be preferable in all cases but I think it’s probably worse to be dumb as a rock in this particular job under this particular president.

With all these people we simply have to hope that we get lucky. They’re all clueless.

And by the way: fuck you Hegseth

Imagine If They’d All Held Firm

Published by digby on March 2, 2026

The WSJ reports:

The Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department as soon as Monday was expected to drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey. 

Trump issued a string of executive orders last year against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.

The White House campaign sent a chill through the industry. Fear of the orders also prompted other large firms to make deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration.

In targeting the firms, Trump cited their connections to his political rivals and criticized their diversity initiatives and pro bono work advocating for immigrants, transgender rights and voting protections.

Let’s face it. While some of these firms may have been scared of Trump, it’s fair to assume that many of them were happy to comply with these “orders” because they agreed with them and wanted to do the “pro bono” work for the administration without having to take responsibility for it.

It’s a shameful chapter that reveals a whole lot about our elite institutions. We should not forget it.

He’s Falling Apart

Published by digby on March 2, 2026

It appears that Trump has Shingles which I’m sure is causing him quite a bit of pain. It probably explains why he’s been wearing his hat all the time — he can’t use his hairspray. easily — and why he hasn’t been in public much. But unless he’s on very strong pain meds, that doesn’t explain this:

Remember, it was in the middle of a medal of honor ceremony as he has ordered the country to go to war with Iran:

His doctor just said he was using a cream on his neck without announcing that he has shingles. But that’s almost certainly what he has. I had them in the same place. Combined with the stress and his age, he’s not feeling well at all. That can’t be good for the world.

What we’re seeing is Pete Hegseth out there saying insane nonsense while Rubio is very carefully suggesting that they decided to move because they knew that Israel was going in and that Iran would strike U.S. bases in reaction. He didn’t mention the nuclear rationale or regime change. He said it was about destroying their military capability, period.

I guess that’s the Iran version of the Venezuela plan. “We’re going to wreck the place and if you’re good boys and agree to do our bidding (read: oil) we’ll let you do whatever you want to your own people. We’ll even help by encouraging them to protest and try to overthrow the government so you’ll know who they are and can kill them later. ” (That’s what Bush Sr. did at the end of the first Gulf War which is known as the betrayal of the Shiites and the Kurds.)

I look forward to hearing the Jake Tappers of the world condemn the betrayal of the Iranian people as energetically as they condemned Biden for fulfilling his (and Trumps!) promise to leave Afghanistan after 20 years of war.

“MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Published by digby on March 2, 2026

Uh huh. Last summer:

Blake Neff is a far right influencer, former Tucker Carlson writer and producer of the Charlie Kirk show:

Rapey pod-bro Andrew Tate:

After Venezuela, Trump said:

“MAGA loves it,” Trump said after the United States invaded Venezuela and seized its leader Nicolas Maduro, sparking outrage among the more anti-intervention factions of his base. “MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Do they? I would guess he’s mostly right. But it won’t take too many staying home next November to hand the Democrats the Senate.

Look Who’s Back….

Published by digby on March 2, 2026

After the Supreme Court recently took a carving knife to Donald Trump’s claim of emergency powers to justify much of his tariff agenda, one could easily think he and his associates might reconsider their view that he needn’t follow the plain language of the Constitution. No such luck. The president is making it clear that he plans to ignore the Court’s decision that found imposing tariffs required congressional approval, and that he will find other ways to check off the remainder of his dictatorial wish list. 

Trump has only a few real priorities in his second term: tariffs, revenge, money and legacy. His continuing obsession with the 2020 presidential election falls under the revenge category, and instead of it waning as an active concern, it actually seems to be gaining steam. The recent FBI raid of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize the stored ballots from that race looks to be just the opening salvo in a much larger strategy to interfere in the 2026 midterms. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump is contemplating an executive order declaring a national voting emergency, citing the same law the Supreme Court just declared he could not use when it came to imposing tariffs. 

Trump has been hinting around at this, posting on Truth Social a couple of weeks ago, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” 

Since the president’s inability to accept his loss has made all of us experts on what the Constitution says about elections, this bleat was rightfully dismissed as yet another asinine rant. Article I of the Constitution makes it clear that the states are charged with the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives… but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” It says nothing about the president taking over the voting system because he thinks there’s an “emergency.” In fact, it says nothing about the executive at all. 

If you’re wondering where Trump got such a ridiculous notion, look no further than the usual suspects, some of whom have been around for decades, pushing insane conspiracy theories and assassinating the characters of Democratic candidates around election time. It’s long been a GOP cottage industry, and a lucrative one. 

According to the New York Times, Trump’s director of “election security and integrity” is a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, one of the most relentless 2020 election deniers who was considered to be a “fringe menace” in the first Trump administration. He was involved in the attempts to overturn the election and has continued to pursue the case ever since. Olsen has been given the power to criminally refer cases to the Justice Department, and he was revealed to have instigated the search warrant for the Fulton County raid. But he is one of many 2020 denialists working throughout the administration in jobs related to elections. 

The Times’ reporting focuses on two outside activists who are pushing Trump to sign this executive order, which is being touted as a “17 page draft” that explains the legal rationale for using the National Emergencies Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, neither of which confer any executive jurisdiction over voting. The main instigator is a newer name in GOP dirty-tricks circles. Peter Ticktin is a lawyer and former New York Military Academy schoolmate of Trump’s who worked on the attempted coup in 2020. The other is a much more familiar and shady name in GOP politics: Jerome Corsi, the man who made “swift boating” a household term. 

Corsi first made his name over 20 years ago when he wrote “Unfit for Command,” the book that smeared then-Massachusetts senator and Democratic nominee John Kerry in his 2004 presidential bid against George W. Bush. Corsi’s book was a patented right-wing hit job, dishonestly targeting Kerry as nothing more than a rich boy liar who faked his heroic war record. But his approach was particularly cunning: The accusation he leveled at Kerry mirrored the real story of Bush’s National Guard service.

Corsi’s next projects were aimed at Barack Obama, starting in 2008 with his book “The Obama Nation.” He followed that in 2011 with “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”, a smear that Trump had taken to the top of the charts. Corsi was also alleged to have worked with one of the original dirty tricksters — and long-time Trump friend and mentor — Roger Stone on the Wikileaks campaign against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

One of the great ironies of this latest round of underhanded campaign tactics — and yet another example of Corsi’s old “I know you are but what am I” strategy — is that this proposed emergency executive order is based on thoroughly debunked accusations of foreign interference in the 2020 election involving China. The story goes that the Chinese government manufactured phony identification cards to help people vote for Joe Biden — and that former FBI Director Christopher Wray covered it up. This wild theory, which was based on some 20,000 fake drivers’ licenses being seized in Chicago, most of which were intended for college students to get into bars, recalled the ridiculous audit of ballots in Arizona, in which conspiracy theorists were looking for the presence of bamboo in the paper’s composition. (And there are about half a dozen more conspiracy theories about foreign interference.)

Since multiple investigations found Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump and his accomplices naturally said that China interfered in 2020 — and now they are using it as an excuse to sow doubt about and hijack the 2026 midterms. And Corsi, the man who was involved in some of the back-channel work to disseminate the Russian hacks of Clinton’s emails in 2016, had the chutzpah to say, “Here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” 

You cannot make this stuff up. 

Election denialism is Trump’s personal contribution to the degradation of our political culture. When all is said and done, it will remain his most enduring legacy. No president before him has ever been so willing to create mistrust in the electoral system to cover for his own failures. Remember: This is someone who said before any votes were cast in 2016 that he would only accept the election results if he won. 

But the work of smearing Democrats and causing havoc in elections is a Republican specialty, and some of the people who’ve been making a tidy living at it for decades are on board for one more ride.

Salon

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Strategy

Published by digby on March 2, 2026

Who needs it?

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took to a Pentagon podium to brief the media on the ongoing state of the conflict in Iran. TL;DR: Mission Accomplished.

Iran’s regime, he said, has waged a “savage, one-sided war against America” for decades. “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.” Apparently, this war will go better than Iraq and Afghanistan because we have no long-term objectives: Trump “called the last twenty years of nation-building wars dumb, and he’s right. This is the opposite,” Hegseth said. “No stupid rules of engagement. No nation-building quagmire. No democracy-building exercise. No politically correct wars.”

Well ok then.

 President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

He doesn’t have the yips about boots on the ground. Great. Don’t let the make-up and hair fool you, he’s a real man.

“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”

Trump also said he wasn’t concerned about Iran using terrorism to repay America for the weekend’s attack.

“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said.

He doesn’t have the yips about terrorist reprisals either. Apparently, he doesn’t have them about Americans being killed in general. Fine, fine, everything’s fine.

Here’s a new lie about the nuclear sites:

“They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were permanent. They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”

“I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

Ooooh. There was another site nobody knew about. Uh huh.

He said that most people support him and he did “the right thing.”

“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago,” Trump said.

I don’t think he does care about polling. He does whatever he wants under the assumption that he’s so perfect they will inevitably come around.

The megalomania is running strong right now. We are in a very dangerous moment.

Who’s Minding The War?

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 2, 2026

Are thee human or are thee machine?

“Gemini is AI and can make mistakes,” reads the disclaimer below this AI-generated image.

As of this writing, Kuwait has shot down three U.S. F-15s in “friendly fire” incidents. Reports say all crew members are safe, whatever that means for airman ejecting into an airstream at hundreds of miles per hour. Four U.S. servicemembers died in an Iranian missile attack on a tactical operations center in Kuwait. A “squirter” slipped through air defenses, says former Fox News Weekend’s Pete Hegseth.

The New Republic‘s Siva Vaidhyanathan wonders just who is minding the war: humans or AI? Commenting on the reported attack on a girls’ school in Southern Iran, Vaidhyanathan wonders (without citing confirming facts) if autonomous weapons are in play. The question arises in the wake of the Pentagon’s dispute with Anthropic over use of its AI technology for operating fully autonomous killing machines. Yes, the kind featured in dystopian movies.

The Pentagon insists its contracts with AI firms sanction “any lawful use” of the technology. Anthropic balked. The Trump administration’s definition of lawful is as suspect as its adherence to any laws with which it disagrees:

To understand what “any lawful use” means in practice, it helps to understand what it is designed to eliminate: The possibility that a private company could tell the United States military how its technology may or may not be used. In the Pentagon’s view, once a tool is purchased, the buyer sets the terms of its application. The vendor’s values, safety commitments, and ethical frameworks become, at the moment of transaction, irrelevant. The military has its own lawyers. It has its own review processes. It has its own standards. And given the degradation of legal safeguards and restrictions on the entire executive branch in the last year, almost any act of depravity or mass murder could be ruled “lawful” by a Pentagon that has purged itself of its most moral and ethical lawyers and leaders and a Supreme Court devoted to maximizing Trump’s autocracy.

The same logic—that internal military review is sufficient to govern the deployment of powerful technologies—underwrote the expansion of the NSA surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden. It underwrote the algorithmic targeting programs in Yemen and Somalia, where AI-assisted kill lists generated strikes that killed the wrong people with a regularity that official reviews consistently declined to examine.

Just picture a self-driving taxi with a missile strapped to the hood.

In his February 26 statement, [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei said: “Today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” This technical conclusion is shared by a significant portion of the AI research community, grounded in the basic observation that large language models hallucinate, misidentify, and fail in ways that are not fully predictable. In a military context, an unpredictable failure is a dead civilian with no accountable author.

And your point is? asks Pete Hegseth. His Pentagon “wants an AI that will do what it is told without the inconvenience of a conscience embedded in its terms of service,” writes Vaidhyanathan.

So Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security,” immediately barred any U.S. military contractor, supplier, or partner from doing business with Anthropic. Naturally, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, stepped forward and accepted the “any lawful use” language.

I’ve long argued that corporate “persons” possess only appetite and instinct, and no soul and no conscience. Anthropic at least retains their memory.

R.I.P. 20th Century

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 2, 2026

In a nutshell

A closeup of the statue of the 16th President of the United States, and an inscription. Photo by Scarlet Sappho (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Donald John Trump should have this headline emblazoned over his mausoleum in gold:

Trump Buries the 20th Century

(Has he had a gaudy mausoleum designed yet or does he expect to live forever?)

The headline comes from a Politico column by Alexander Burns, Politico’s senior executive editor:

With a roar of rockets and bombs, a gasp of international outcry and the death of Iran’s supreme leader, President Donald Trump’s legacy became clearer than ever.

He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight.

Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition.

His Supreme Court appointees struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the seething political and legal stalemate on abortion rights that governed America since the 1970s.

His military interventions in Latin America have brought the Cuban government, one of the last surviving Cold War regimes, to the brink of collapse.

His tariffs and trade threats have blown apart the Reagan-Clinton policy consensus on free trade, upending half a century of global commercial arrangements and diplomatic relations.

This reads like the bill of particulars in our Declaration of Independence from George III.

Burns goes on. NATO’s post-war legacy of trans-Atlantic stability? Dead. Post-Watergate legal and ethical norms? Dead. Any sense that the United States, the former arsenal of democracy, stands for anything beyond “corporate favoritism and personal enrichment” and “use of the justice system as a weapon of vengeance”? Dead.

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

America’s credibility in the community of nations is ground to dust, its legacy abandoned in the desert like the trunkless legs of Ozymandias. Joe Biden considered the TV showman’s self-absorption, Burns writes, with his “philistinism and historical ignorance,” an insult to American tradition and to the office of the presidency. And Trump is.

The builder, it turns out, is better at demolishing what others created than he is at building. That includes our nation of laws. He is better at slapping his name in gold on once noble edifices than at creating anything worthy of the world’s memory, save for what once was. Trump would rather cart the links at his Mar-a-Lago resort and be feted by Botoxed courtiers as artificial as his ridiculous comb over.

Burns concludes:

If the 20th Century is finally dead, this country’s trajectory in the 21st is an immense question mark.

That is the great challenge Trump has left for the next president. For a visionary successor, it could also be an opportunity unmatched in recent U.S. history.

Has anyone checked to see if in his temple of honor, Lincoln’s seated statue sheds tears? Such a miracle might at least shock some Americans deadened by Trump’s garish spectacle into shedding their own over what he’s destroyed. Perhaps to mourn. Perhaps to repent. Perhaps to find themselves once again. It’s long been said that with Trump and the party he leads there is no bottom. No ultimate, dark night of the soul from which springs a renewed commitment to clawing back a life (and a country) worth living. Indeed, there seems none.

As the country staggers toward fall elections and whatever befalls us in 2028, now is a time for visionaries, if there be any left among the technocrats and social media influencers Americans now send to Washington, D.C. in place of statesmen like Lincoln.

Yeah, They’re Going To Die. So?

Published by digby on March 1, 2026

I don’t usually do the “imagine if XXXX said this…” because it’s just so obvious. But I have to make an exception in this case. My God. Imagine if Biden or Obama had ever said such a thing.

He seems more addled than usual. I’d guess he isn’t getting much sleep. He’s awake all night hoping against hope that somehow this works out ok even though he has no idea what to do. He just banks on his luck holding out.

Days before the election, the president appeared to admit for the first time that Republicans might lose the House. “It could happen,” Trump said. “And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’” Trump said.

It’s worked for him so far. But the stakes have never been higher than they are now.