Some readers have asked why Russia regards Finland’s membership in NATO as a provocation. For the same reason that Ukraine’s membership is a provocation: US missile bases on Russia’s border. The US does not currently have hypersonic missiles, but will sooner or later. Such missiles on Russia’s borders could reach Moscow in 3 or 4 minutes, clearly an existential threat. Along with Finland, Washington wants the bases in Sweden and the Baltic states, and already has missile bases in Poland and Romania.
Whereas Washington intends Finland’s NATO membership as a new provocation, we must not forget two other existing provocations that the Kremlin has declared to be unacceptable: the existing missile bases in Poland and Romania. It makes no sense for Russia to preemptively prevent missile bases in Ukraine and Finland while permitting existing bases to remain in Poland and Romania. Russian intervention against these two bases are likely the next self-defensive actions the Russians will take.
The West’s whore media has done its best to create worldwide indignation against Russia. People worked up into indignation do not perceive the irresponsibility of Western governments in gratuitously threatening Russia with missile bases on her borders. Instead of properly perceiving the placement of the bases as aggression against Russia, the indoctrinated people see Russia’s response to existential threats as aggression.
I have emphasized for years that these provocations of Russia will eventually cross a red line and result in nuclear war. I have long been critical of the Kremlin for not having stopped these provocations by putting down a strong foot. Russia had that opportunity in Ukraine, but the Kremlin chose a course that failed to make the necessary impression that countries that accommodate US aggression against Russia will experience devastation. It is less risky to make this demonstration in a non-NATO country than in a NATO one. Additionally, the Kremlin waited far too long before intervening in Ukraine, thereby giving the US 8 years to arm and train Ukrainian forces. By pussy-footing around in Ukraine, Russia will again be confronted with the same problem in Finland or elsewhere in addition to the two existing bases in two NATO members on Russia’s border. There is no doubt whatsoever that US/NATO have set a path that leads straight to nuclear war. As nothing that is outside the narrative can be published or discussed in the Western world, nothing can be done to stop this insane drive into nuclear war. It is not even possible to discuss this threat in Western foreign policy circles. Again the world is sleepwalking into war, but this war will be nuclear and the final war.
All that the Kremlin has achieved with its restraint and reliance on negotiation with the West is to intensify the pace and level of provocations. NATO’s Stoltenberg is courting both Finland and Sweden for NATO membership promising their membership would be fast-tracked, and likely other benefits including bagfuls of money. This report should wake people up to the real situation, which is expanding conflict.https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/finland-sweden-nato-applications-could-be-imminent-after-stoltenberg-suggests-fast At some point existential considerations will force Russia to take the initiative and cease responding to Washington’s agenda.
Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman
As the Pennsylvania Democrat increasingly is isolated within his own party, Republicans are quietly trying to win him over.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) speaks with reporters after a briefing from Trump administration officials on the U.S. strikes on Iran at the U.S. Capitol on March 3, 2026. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.
It’s a few days after the election this November, and the results have become clear: Democrats have netted the four seats they need to claim a Senate majority.
But then there’s a disturbance in the force: Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump persuade Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to switch parties or at least become an independent to ensure Republicans retain power in the chamber.
It’s a scenario that’s becoming less fantastical by the day.
The political environment is curdling for Republicans, and the quiet campaign to lure Fetterman across the aisle is underway.
Trump has made the sell, offering his patented total and complete endorsement plus a financial windfall to the Pennsylvanian. A handful of Senate Republicans are also gently feeling out Fetterman and responding to his concerns over the prospect of defecting from the Democratic Party, multiple high-level GOP officials tell me.
If Fetterman does flip, according to officials who were given anonymity to talk about sensitive matters, it will be thanks in large part to his deepening friendship with a pair of senators and their high-profile spouses: Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and his wife Dina, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), and her husband, Wesley.
But the first-term Democrat — who’s infuriated his party with his harder line on immigration and staunch support for Israel, Trump nominees, government funding bills and most recently the president’s ballroom — isn’t yet persuaded.
“I’m not changing,” Fetterman told me in an interview Friday when I asked if he was ruling out both becoming a Republican or turning independent. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one. “
Yet, at least in private, he’s not totally rejecting dropping his “D.”
When one senior Republican recently brought up the idea of becoming an independent to Fetterman, he absorbed the suggestion and didn’t embrace or reject the overture, according to a GOP official familiar with the conversation.
In our interview, Fetterman said bluntly: “I’d be a shitty Republican.”
There are his votes against big-ticket measures, such as last year’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, but also his liberal views on a raft of cultural issues.
There’s something else, too: Fetterman has watched how his Republican colleagues who break from Trump, at different levels, have been treated.
“Committed conservatives like Cassidy and Tillis are getting pushed out of their seats,” he noted. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, and the president is now targeting him in his primary. And Tillis announced his retirement after clashing with Trump over the aforementioned OBBB.
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Fetterman has raised these same doubts about how welcome he’d be as a Republican to his GOP colleagues, too, I’m told by sources briefed on the conversations.
If Republicans can’t tolerate even Tillis, Fetterman suggested, how would they accept somebody who supports abortion rights, gay rights, legalizing marijuana and is pro-labor? (He flies the pride flag outside his Senate office.) Senate Republicans have reminded the Pennsylvanian that there are members of their conference who are more moderate on each of those issues.
Trump, who knows a thing or two about party switching, has also gotten in on the action. He’s told one GOP senator he prefers Fetterman making the full conversion to Republican, according to a source familiar with the conversation.
And Trump has said, if Fetterman does, he’d reciprocate. In his typical unsubtle fashion, the president conveyed as much to Sean Hannity in March and asked Hannity to play intermediary.
When Fetterman sat for an interview with the Fox host the next day, Hannity delivered the pitch, recounting Trump’s marching orders nearly verbatim.
“‘Your job is to tell him: He’s gonna run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big,’” Hannity told Fetterman, recalling Trump’s instructions.
Fetterman didn’t respond to Trump’s authorized offer, but, when asked how Democrats treat him, notably said: “They don’t mistreat me, but I think increasingly they’re suspicious or kinda standoffish.”
In our conversation, Fetterman was much more eager to discuss how his support for Israel is the root of Democratic anger at him than he was his political future.
Whenever he’s asked — in public or private — about a switch, he invariably cites two statistics to explain how baffled he is about why people would even ask the question.
There’s his record of voting with Democrats 93 percent of the time and the running joke he has with McCormick about how he, Fetterman, somehow polls better with Republicans than the state’s actual GOP senator.
Fetterman, however, is shrewd enough of a political operator to know exactly why he’s alienated his party and become a Republican favorite. It may have started by standing with Israel when most of his colleagues became horrified with the Likud government’s actions in Gaza following Hamas’ 2023 attack.
But Fetterman has since exacerbated the situation by conducting himself in these tribal times in ways that please the right and anger the left: He largely ignores Trump’s transgressions, finds ways to support the White House in high-profile moments and is increasingly ubiquitous when criticizing his own party on right-coded media in ways that affirm conservative views about liberal excess.
In the modern information environment, this posture, of course, plays a far bigger role in shaping his political image than the totality of his voting record.
Where Fetterman does not play the fool is on his potential leverage in the chamber. He brought up the Democrats-net-four-seats scenario without my prompting, all but taunting his current party about how much they may soon need his vote.
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“If we flip four seats in the Senate, who is the number 51 for the new majority?” he asked, alluding to himself.
Top Democrats are publicly mum about the flight risk in their caucus because they’re alarmed about spooking him.
“I’m not commenting on that,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told me when I outlined the risk of Fetterman deserting should Democrats win 51 seats in the midterms.
Schumer has, I’m told by other Senate Democrats, tried to sustain a relationship with Fetterman, recognizing that a cold shoulder in person could only prompt him to take the left’s online derision to heart.
Other Democratic senators allow there’s a chance Fetterman may bolt, but put the likelihood relatively low — similar to the possibility that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may become a Democrat or independent.
There are, however, at least two reasons to think Fetterman may be more likely than his GOP colleague to drop his party label (in addition to Murkowski’s seniority and her good-for-Alaska role as a swing Republican floor vote).
First, the Senate is akin to a high school cafeteria. And Fetterman these days is much more comfortable sitting, quite literally, with the Republicans. He never shows up for Democrat-only gatherings, such as the caucus’s regular luncheons.
Fetterman gets along well with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the two text one another regularly. Yet the GOP leader has largely let Britt and McCormick handle the Keystone account.
Watch: The Conversation
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After resisting it because he didn’t want to prompt chatter, Fetterman has now started to hang out in the Senate GOP cloakroom during long votes. For a time, he would remain alone and spend time between votes reading through his phone until Britt came out to join him for meals. This was a way he didn’t have to enter either party’s mini-Capitol clubhouse. Now, though, Fetterman is spending hours with Senate Republicans in their cloakroom and in some leadership offices.
Recently, he was present in the GOP cloakroom when a conversation — which included Baptist-pastor-turned-Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) — turned toward the theological, and the socially liberal Fetterman got a look on his face that said, ‘Is that what you guys talk about here?’ one GOP lawmaker recounted.
This may sound like so much congressional gossip. But the higher one climbs in politics, the more personal it often becomes. That’s never been truer than in the Trump era. It may seem paradoxical given the stakes of the present — massive challenges at home and abroad and a president bent on consolidating power and punishing enemies — but I’ve witnessed the same pattern for the last decade.
It goes like this: The more one drifts from their political tribe, the more they’re scorned and mocked by that tribe, often in personal terms. This only prompts the person drifting away to accelerate their turn and adopt the language, customs and some positions of the other tribe with an I’ll-show-them determination. Soon, they’re identifying somewhat or entirely with the new tribe. The path only goes in one direction.
Fetterman could be the poster child for this pattern. He’s a contrarian by nature — he grew up in a Republican household. Plus, Fetterman has seen how much publicity he can draw for himself and how much it enrages his own party when he, say, accuses Democrats of having Trump Derangement Syndrome and endorses Trump’s elephantine East Wing addition.
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As he’s drifted from the party line, Fetterman has become increasingly isolated. He’s suffered a massive staff exodus — his former scheduler is now his chief of staff — and those who previously worked for him say he spends much of his time on social media. Fetterman wants to know how he’s playing.
“It’s a one-two punch,” said Adam Jentleson, Fetterman’s first Senate chief of staff who has publicly spoken out against his old boss, describing how the senator craves the scroll. “He gets the praise dopamine hit and the anger-at-criticism one.”
The former aides and Pennsylvania Democrats say he rarely participates in the unglamorous work of a senator: showing up for ribbon-cuttings around his home state or racing between committee hearings in Washington. Fetterman turned heads last year when he didn’t attend an announcement in Berwick that Amazon had made the largest private investment in Pennsylvania history. It wasn’t at all surprising at home, though: He has a cool relationship with Gov. Josh Shapiro and barely interacts with the state’s Democratic congressional delegation.
He does, though, spend considerable time with Republicans, particularly the affable Britts and McCormicks, who’ve all but adopted Fetterman and his wife, Gisele.
Classmates together in 2022, Britt bonded with Fetterman early, when he was seen as far more of a liberal. The two cemented their friendship when Britt visited her colleague after he entered Walter Reed hospital to address mental health challenges. They already had a natural kinship because the 6’8” Fetterman had bonded with the 6’8” Wesley Britt, a former NFL offensive lineman. Fetterman calls Wesley “The Big Unit™” in their group text chats, Britt shared last week at a joint appearance with the two senators moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker.
“They’re America’s family,” Fetterman said of the Britts at the discussion.
It was an event dedicated to finding “Common Ground,” and it was the latest in the burgeoning bipartisan buddy show Britt and Fetterman have started.
He spends just as much time with the McCormicks. Fetterman has attended Washington social functions as a guest of his fellow Pennsylvania senator and, a day after his appearance with Britt last week, he sat on stage with Dina Powell McCormick, a Meta executive, at a luncheon conversation dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Oh, and the night that Fetterman was with Britt in Washington, the McCormicks were posing for selfies with Gisele Fetterman on one of the biggest nights of the year in Pittsburgh, ancestral and adopted yinzers happily playing host to the NFL draft.
The friendship is in plain view, and the subtle courtship is just below the surface.
Delivering Fetterman would be a coup for both GOP senators, particularly if the Pennsylvanian is the deciding vote for Republicans to hold power. McCormick and Britt are both ambitious, talented and young enough to have a future either in their conference leadership or on their party’s presidential ticket.
Some Republicans believe Fetterman is unlikely to make the complete party switch. The more likely prospect, they say, is that Fetterman becomes an independent who caucuses with the GOP, or simply casts his vote to ensure Thune remains majority leader. Ensuring Republican control of the Senate floor could be especially critical should there be a Supreme Court vacancy in Trump’s final two years.
That, also, may mark the end of Fetterman’s tenure. He won’t say if he’ll even seek re-election in 2028. He dodges the question whenever he’s asked.
Many Democrats, in Pennsylvania and Washington, argue persuasively that he doesn’t like the job, and the story ends with Fetterman remaining in the party and simply not running again. That way, he could continue to be the Democrat-who-attacks-Democrats, maximizing his invitations from Fox News, for whom his internecine criticism is both brave and good box office.
If he does decide to run again as a Democrat, he’d face a forbidding primary stocked with well-funded opponents, potentially including former Rep. Conor Lamb, his 2022 primary foe, and a canny congressman with a Philadelphia base, Rep. Brendan Boyle.
If Fetterman bolts, the looming question is: What deal could he cut with Republicans? Thune and Trump may be more apt to promise their full-fledged support, including a vow to clear the 2028 GOP primary field, if Fetterman joins the GOP. McCormick has already told people he won’t oppose Fetterman in a Republican primary.
On “the things that matter most right now, John Fetterman is with us,” Rothman said, adding that Fetterman “supported most of President Trump’s nominees, which is a big deal.”
None of this, though, may be enough to clear Fetterman’s path. A Democrat who trolls his own party may be less appealing to Republican voters when he’s just another Republican, and with a host of unorthodox positions.
Fetterman doesn’t have to look far to find an eerily similar situation.
In 2009, another contrarian and often irascible Pennsylvania senator, Arlen Specter, concluded he couldn’t win a Republican primary the following year and became a Democrat. That put his new party closer to a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority. The switch, as he memorably declared on camera, would “enable me to be re-elected.”
Not so much. Specter had the support of the Obama White House and much of Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment, but still lost his primary by more than seven points.
The other recent precedent was in 2001, when then-Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords flipped from being a Republican to an independent who caucused with Democrats. That broke the chamber’s 50-50 deadlock, and the de facto majority the GOP had because they held the vice-presidency, and handed Democrats a one-seat majority for the remainder of the Congress.
While Jeffords cited policy differences, he, too, felt socially ostracized by his old party, including a guest list snub when a Vermont teacher was honored at the White House. Jeffords never ran again.
Fetterman could try following the Jeffords model (albeit the mirror opposite): becoming an independent and foregoing a primary altogether in 2028. Lacking a political home would make fundraising an immense challenge, but he may be able to tap into pro-Israel donors who find themselves politically homeless today.
Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine have won multiple reelections as independents who caucus with Democrats. However, that’s in part because they’ve established de facto non-aggression pacts with their home-state Democrats while maintaining support from their Democratic colleagues in the capital.
Could a recently-declared independent Fetterman pull off something similar in Pennsylvania in this polarized era? It would depend on what signals Trump sends (and how much he still controls his party’s primaries in 2028).
But what’s clear is that Fetterman’s unpopularity among Democrats means he would have a better chance to return to the Senate as an independent or a Republican than in his current party.
As one GOP senator cracked to me: “I’d have a better shot at winning a Democratic primary there” than Fetterman does.Filed Under:
The Labor Department said Thursday that U.S. initial unemployment claims totaled 189,000 for the week ending April 25, down 26,000 from a revised prior-week figure of 215,000. That is the lowest reading in more than 50 years, according to The Associated Press, citing research firm High Frequency Economics, which said the figure was the fewest new applications since September 1969.
Analysts had projected 212,000 applications for the week, according to Bloomberg.
At 207,500, the four-week moving average — a measure designed to reduce week-to-week volatility — was 3,500 below the previous week’s revised figure.
For the week ending April 18, the number of people collecting ongoing unemployment benefits reached its lowest point in two years, dropping by 23,000 to 1.785 million, according to Bloomberg. The insured unemployment rate held at 1.2%.
On an unadjusted basis, initial claims totaled 179,765, a decline of 26,668, or 12.9%, from the preceding week. The comparable figure a year earlier was 224,021.
Among individual states, New York posted the steepest reduction in unadjusted filings, shedding close to 11,000 applications, with California and Connecticut also seeing notable pullbacks, according to Bloomberg.
The historically low filing numbers have persisted even though a string of prominent employers — among them Meta Platforms, Nike, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon — have publicly announced workforce reductions, according to Bloomberg and The Associated Press. Fed Chair Jerome Powell pointed to a labor market displaying “more and more signs of stability” after the Federal Reserve opted Wednesday to hold its benchmark rate steady, according to Bloomberg.
Since the economy recovered from the pandemic-era downturn, new unemployment filings had generally held within a band of roughly 200,000 to 250,000 per week, according to the AP.
I still remember fondly the time I got an A- on my 8th grade earth science paper. It was one of my proudest moments as a student.
Meanwhile, as MIT boasts, some folks are, well, a bit beyond that.
Physics is riddled with paradoxes: Think of how information leaks from supposedly inescapable black holes or how the conventional laws of physics break down at the quantum scale. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski ’13 believes that within these apparent contradictions, new discoveries await.
Ah yes, “how the conventional laws of physics break down at the quantum scale.” I think about that often!
Well, apparently Ms. Pasterski thinks about it quite a bit. In fact, her entire life story seems to be just one long exercise of thinking.
Born in Chicago, some of Pasterski’s earliest accomplishments include:
Building her own Zenith aircraft starting from age 12.
Attending the prestigious Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Holding an internship at the space tech company Blue Origin at age 16.
Working as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing Phantom Works by 18.
Not a bad rap sheet for someone under 20!
She subsequently attended MIT, during which she did work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (no biggie). She eventually graduated from the prestigious institution with “a 5.0 grade point average.” (I was not aware GPAs went that high.)
These days Pasterski’s engaged in a little light research, nothing too strenuous:
She and her colleagues are working to unite general relativity, which describes gravity and the macroscopic world, with quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles. It’s a field of physics research known as quantum gravity.
If Pasterski helps solve this problem that has vexed scientists for decades, the result will be the holy grail of physics: a fundamental theory of nature that characterizes pretty much everything. One day there may be engineering applications. “If you understand how things work,” she says, “you can do things with that knowledge.” But she’s in this to solve an existential puzzle — to reveal what she calls “the source code of the universe.”
If all of this makes you feel rather small, don’t worry: Pasterski “estimates there are probably only a couple of thousand people in the world with whom she can meaningfully converse about her work in physics.” It’s a small club!
She has pushed back against the moniker of “the New Einstein,” however, stating that in her hunt for the universal source code she is just “happy to be a part of this legacy that our field is building.”
Okay but we’re still gonna call you Einstein, lady!
The implications of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais overturning race-based voting districts are far more profound and far-reaching than anyone has yet realized.
This week, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, ended decades of race-engineering in how congressional districts are drawn. The opinion is likely not only to benefit Republicans by increasing their representation in Congress, but it also should end racial engineering in a multitude of local institutions, to the benefit of all. It signals the beginning of the end for progressive governance, begun by President Woodrow Wilson (ironically, a segregationist), whose vision conflicts with the Constitution.
Thirty-one years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that racial gerrymandering — defended as a means for ensuring proportional electoral results according to race — should not continue.
In my view, our current practice should not continue. Not for another Term, not until the next case, not for another day. The disastrous implications of the policies we have adopted under the Act are too grave; the dissembling in our approach to the [Voting Rights] Act too damaging to the credibility of the Federal Judiciary. The “inherent tension” — indeed, I would call it an irreconcilable conflict — between the standards we have adopted for evaluating vote dilution claims and the text of the Voting Rights Act would itself be sufficient in my view to warrant overruling the interpretation of § 2 set out in Gingles. When that obvious conflict is combined with the destructive effects our expansive reading of the Act has had in involving the Federal Judiciary in the project of dividing the Nation into racially segregated electoral districts, I can see no reasonable alternative to abandoning our current unfortunate understanding of the Act.
Iran’s regime lost the war the moment American force and economic pressure exposed its bluff; what remains is the slow collapse of a terror state running out of money, options, and time.
Some nearly stochastic notes on Iran. I begin by singing the same song I have been crooning since President Trump announced the ceasefire and naval blockade in mid-April. The war is over. If this were a novel, we’d be in epilogue territory where we tie up some loose threads in the plot and learn about the fates of various characters.
First, let’s talk about money, or rather Iran’s lack thereof. On February 28, the US and Israeli militaries unleashed Operation Epic Fury (“Roaring Lion” in Israel). Despite what you hear from the Left (and from the Iranian propaganda mill), that was one of the most successful and also one of the quickest military operations in history. But the inventory of ships sunk, air defenses obliterated, drones and ballistic missiles incinerated, arms manufacturing infrastructure exploded, and regime leaders eliminated tells only part of the story. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlined another current of the narrative in his ongoing description of Operation Economic Fury.
The naval blockade, which interdicts shipping to and from Iranian ports, is costing the regime some $500 million per day. The current exchange rate is nearing two million Iranian rials for one US dollar. Iran’s effort to circumvent the blockade via land routes from Pakistan will never amount to much. Bessent summarized the status quo for regime leaders who might be puzzled:
It is very difficult for rats in a sewer pipe to know what’s going on in the outside world. Some color for the Iranian leadership as they literally sit in the dark:
1. The United States has complete control of the Strait of Hormuz.
2. There is a hard currency, i.e., U.S. dollar, shortage.
3. Food and gasoline rationing are in place.
4. The entire international community has turned against you.
5. The BLOCKADE will continue until there is pre-February 27 Freedom of Navigation.
Many of the thugs running Iran and enforcing its terror regime have retirement accounts and other assets outside the country. The US Treasury knows all about them. “The retirement funds they thought they had outside of Iran, we are freezing. Same with their villas in the South of France. We are going to track them down, and we are going to continue the economic pressure as well as the blockade.”
According to a bulletin posted by CENTCOM on May 1, the US Navy has so far encountered 45 commercial vessels attempting to evade the blockade. All were forced to turn around. Even The Wall Street Journal, no friend of President Trump or the war in Iran, has acknowledged the success of Operation Economic Fury. “Iran Is Grasping for a Solution to an American Blockade It Can’t Break,” reads a headline from April 30.
Tehran thought it was gaining the upper hand after the war started in February as it attacked ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz, shutting down commercial traffic and blocking a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies. Six weeks into the conflict, the US responded by blockading shipments from all Iranian ports.
That shut down Iran’s network of shadow ships, which for years defied US sanctions on Iran’s substantial oil exports by going dark at sea before clandestinely transferring their cargoes to China. The tankers have been unable to breach a cordon of US warships that have chased them all the way to the Indian Ocean.
How do you spell “desperation”? How about deploying mine-laying dolphins to harass maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz? That’s one of the regime’s latest tactics, suicide dolphins, along with sundry threats to cut internet cables and telecommunications infrastructure that cross the Strait.
The situation on the ground for ordinary Iranians is dire. There is a stream of reports about the regime torturing and executing protesters. Recently, notices have been plastered on city streets announcing that cell phones, Starlink hardware, satellite dishes, and VPNs are illegal. One brave Iranian using Starlink issued a harrowing story about a young father who used Starlink to get the news:
They are openly hunting us for daring to seek truth.
And they just proved they mean it.
This innocent Iranian father [second image] was using Starlink—just like me—to get real news for his family in the middle of the blackout and get the censored information out to the world. They arrested him. They tortured him. They beat him to death.
A father. A husband. A man who only wanted to protect his children from the regime’s lies.
I am using Starlink right now to write these words to you. Every single day, the regime’s agents threaten me. Every single day I know I could be next. My heart is shattered. My soul is on fire. The fear is real, and it never leaves.
But I will not stop. My country is on the line. My people are on the line. 90 million Iranians are suffocating in this 47-year nightmare.
We don’t even know who the hell we’re talking to. We call, and Mohammed picks up, the cousin of the brother-in-law of the barber . . . and I tell them: Are you the leader? We’re looking for a REAL LEADER, not a scared duck! . . .
Whoever grabs the job lasts less time than a kebab in my hand. They’re like a headless duck team: they quack, they flap . . . and in the end, one always ends up fried.
Tehran’s current line is that they will stop their attacks in the Strait of Hormuz—piddly little expostulations that they are—if the US ends the war, lifts the blockade, and postpones talk about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump’s answer? Forget it. And by the way, he noted, he doesn’t want Iran to abandon its nuclear program for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. Iran may never acquire nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, as the clock ticks and Iran’s economy slips into drain-swirling oblivion, CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper has just briefed President Trump on “final blow” strike options, including “Iran’s remaining military equipment and installations, regime/IRGC leadership, and other infrastructure.”
President Trump may very well choose to redeploy the kinetic option. We’ll see. Either way, the regime is finished. Let’s leave the last word to Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy:
We’ve learned two things from our conflict with Iran:
1. If you turn the other cheek with Iran, they’ll stab you in the neck.
2. President Trump has oranges the size of beach balls.
The U.S. national debt exceeded the total amount of output from the entire economy as of March 31, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The country’s publicly held debt was $31.265 trillion, while the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of goods and services in the economy, was $31.215 trillion. The ratio of GDP to Debt was 100.2%, up from 99.5% in September 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The government now spends $1.33 for every dollar it collets in revenue, with budget deficits running consistently at around 6% of GDP. That figure will continue to rise unless drastic spending reductions are made — which seems unlikely given the lack of serious budget cut proposals making their way through Congress.
Unfunded liabilities including Social Security and Medicare will increase as baby boomers continue to retire, further straining the federal budget. These mandatory spending programs account for approximately 50% of federal spending. Future unfunded liabilities could total as much as $193 trillion, according to a March report from Open the Books.
In 2027, the Congressional Budget Office projects that mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus interest on the debt, will permanently exceed federal tax revenue, according to a Boyd Institute report. That means every dollar of discretionary spending on programs ranging from defense to research to federal agencies will be completely financed using borrowed money, according to the report.
A decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate is expected to further strain the already bloated federal budget, with the rate dropping to its lowest level since 1977 in March, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The U.S. already spends more on interest payments on the debt than it does on defense spending, according to the Boyd Institute report. This issue will be exacerbated if interest payments the government pays to its debt holders increase.
Profligate government spending prompted former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to warn on April 16 that the federal government needed to craft an emergency plan to address a potential crisis in the market for U.S. Treasury bonds — which investors buy and are used to fund the government’s spending deluge.
Paulson warned that as the federal government continues to rack up more debt, investors will demand higher interest rate yields to compensate them for taking on the risk of purchasing Treasury notes as the likelihood that the government can make all its payments on time declines. This in turn would cause the interest the federal government pays to finance its debt to rise, thus making insolvency more likely, a term economists have termed a “doom loop.”
“We need an emergency break-the-glass plan which is targeted and short term on the shelf, so it’s ready to go when we hit the wall,” Paulson told Bloomberg during its Wall Street Week event. “When you hit the wall and you’re trying to issue Treasurys, and the Fed is the only buyer and the prices of the Treasurys are down and interest rates are up, that’s a dangerous thing.”
JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also warned of a looming bond crisis caused in large part by the government spending deluge during a Tuesday investor’s event in Norway. “The way it’s going now, there will be some kind of bond crisis, and then we’ll have to deal with it, Dimon said.
“I just think maturity should say you should deal with it, as opposed to let it happen,” Dimon added, according to CNBC.
Except for anticipation of what comes next, it is not.
Minnesota, California, Colorado, Illinois and New York sued Jan. 8, right after the Trump administration announced it was shutting off child care funds. The states argue that the executive branch cannot cancel payments already appropriated by Congress.
The New York federal judge on the case, Arun Subramanian, granted a stay until this Friday, which means states can draw down from the federal funds it has until then. Subramanian will hear arguments from both sides on Friday, at which point the judge may make a more lasting ruling or issue another temporary stay.
In the “vast majority” of Trump administration funding freeze cases, courts have ruled against the administration, said Peter Larsen, an assistant professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.
However, Larsen added, the Trump administration could defy the court order as it has in cases involving National Institutes of Health grants and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau funding, among other subjects.
If the court ruled for the Trump administration, Minnesota would surely appeal the decision, Larsen said, but the state would probably be out of federal child care funds in the interim.
DCYF informed providers Jan. 9 that it can finance child care assistance for “several months” without additional federal funding. But DCYF has not answered weeks worth of questions from providers (and reporters) about when it last drew down from federal funds and how much reserves it has on hand.
“We are just getting told to sit tight,” Herod said.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris put a saxophonist to sleep on stage Wednesday during a rant against the Trump administration at an awards dinner.
Overtaken by fatigue, or boredom, the drowsy horn player drifted off right as Harris warned that “people would take to the streets if they tried to cancel elections,” video from the Public Counsel’s William O. Douglas Award Dinner in Beverly Hills, Calif., obtained by TMZ, showed.
The footage, taken by an audience member, showed the musician had his eyes closed and head down for nearly a minute, all while sitting just a few feet from the failed 2024 Democratic presidential nominee onstage.
“They have had an agenda that has been in place for decades to get to this very moment and beyond, which is to make it so difficult for the people to vote that they won’t,” Harris raged, as the saxophonist snored.
She continued, “Because they know the people are not stupid and see the corrupt, incompetent, callous administration that is in the White House right now, and they are so damn scared of losing the midterms.”
The jazz player roused himself awake, it appears, just in time to play Harris off the stage.
**SNIP**
During the chat, Harris argued that Democrats “need to be ruthless” in countering Republicans.
She also admitted Democratic politicians “dropped the ball in a variety of ways” and urged people to “challenge the status quo and fight the system on behalf of the people.”
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson laughed and seemed to encourage the notion that millionaires could leave the state of Washington while discussing her support for a progressive tax during an interview earlier this month.
“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, bye,” she said, which prompted cheers and laughter from the audience at the Seattle University event, Seattle University Conversations, which took place on April 14.
Wilson was asked if she believed progressive taxes were an “easy” and “promising” solution to the tax climate in the area. She said she never thought they were easy, but said she was excited about the millionaire tax that passed in the state.
“In general, we still have the very regressive tax system, and my office is doing a lot of work to look at what our options are in terms of progressive taxation,” she said. “We do have more flexibility at the city, at the county, in terms of our taxing authority. And at the same time, I believe what I said before, which is that, it’s not good for Seattle’s business environment, for example, for the cost of doing business in downtown Seattle to be wildly out of step with, for instance, neighboring Bellevue,” she said.
Wilson said that she was looking at progressive tax options that don’t increase the cost of employing people in Seattle.
“We have a large structural budget deficit at the city that we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with in this upcoming budget cycle,” she added. “And my budget office, budget staff are hard at work trying to figure out both how we can use our revenue as effectively and efficiently as possible.”
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 