Alice Bird

The U.S. is now engulfed in what could be another forever war in Iran. Here’s a warning from 10 years ago that sadly feels too relevant right now.

Authoritarians wage wars to deflect public attention from their own scandals. Donald Trump is no different.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Trump 2.0:

-Bombed Iran (twice), Venezuela, and Yemen
-Allowed Israel to repeatedly violate a ceasefire and kill civilians
-Ripped healthcare and SNAP away from millions
-Deployed masked ICE agents to terrorize American cities

The "Peace President."

A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.

We mustn’t let this war do so.

*IDF:SIRENS SOUNDED IN ISRAEL, PROJECTILES LAUNCHED FROM LEBANON

Or not.

@wsj.com
www.wsj.com/business/ene...

At least Carlin isn’t alive to see this.

Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.

Trump could argue - and I am not saying I agree - that his Art II powers allow him to act for 60 days against imminent threats
to the USA and its allies, as well as under general UN self-defense Art 51 provisions.
It's bullshit, but presidents get wiiiiiiiide latitude on this

One of my colleagues wrote about this over 30 years ago, noting that Congress was all about "blame avoidance" in foreign policy, which basically made the president a king

Even by cult standards, this is just bonkers.

Sunday with Lily Murderface la

OUCH.

Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran A few paths to success, many to failure

Apt quotation from former US ambassador to Iraq: "there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

I like @radiofreetom.bsky.social ending: #InsideStraightOdds.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Tom Nichols: Chanting USA is not actually a strategy. How do we know when we're done? Three Americans are dead, 48 Iranian leaders and a lot of other Iranians are dead. We need something more than a midnight video from a guy in a hat telling us everything's going to be awesome.

My Friend, Stalin’s Daughter How “the little princess of the Kremlin” became the Cold War’s most famous defector, then struggled to create a new life in the United States.

Svetlana Stalin, Joseph's daughter, was born 100 years ago yesterday. She lived an extraordinary life and defected here in 1967. Late in life, I found her living anonymously in Wisconsin. We became friends and exchanged hundreds of letters.

Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran A few paths to success, many to failure

First impression: This is regime change, lots of ways for it to go wrong, a few it could go right, but at huge risk:
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Enshittificator Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

This is amazing.

Leave the Military Now What does courage demand?

This was prescient:

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/leave-the-...

US-Israeli strike on girls' school kills at least 85 students, Iran's judiciary says At least 85 students have been killed in US-Israeli strikes that hit an Iranian girls' school in Hormozgan province, Iran's judiciary said on Saturday. Washington has not commented on the reported str...

Remind me, when you slaughter 85 young school children, are you the Good Guys?

What if I'd told you in, say, 2010, in the wake of the Iraq War and the subsequent political upheaval: "yeah, not only will we not learn our lesson, not only will none of the people who perpetrated this crime be punished ... we're going to do it all over again! Less than 20 years later!"

Hillary Clinton’s "coal gaffe" is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media She navigated a hall of mirrors.

Not to make everything 2016, but @volts.wtf wrote a good essay on how Hillary Clinton got this treatment back in 2016. Even when there was no scandal, you could always turn that into a scandal by arguing that her tone and word choice were the REAL scandal.

Re-read Coates’ “First White President” piece this week. I can’t believe how good it is. Nails every line. His conclusion is the same: we can’t call the thing what it is because it’s… just too terrible. 10 years later it holds up amazingly well.

Speeding is "illegal." This war on (not with) Iran is criminal. Among the litany of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the MAGA Murder Regime.

Exactly what I was thinking! And before that the southern colonies' support for the Revolution. England was on the brink of outlawing slavery in the Isles. North America would eventually see the same.

More classic good-guy stuff.

Too perfect.

For what?