Okay, help me out here…

As we all know, this last weekend Trump decided to come to the aid of Israel and deployed seven stealth bombers to bomb Iran’s three known nuclear-developing sites.  The Trump administration announced it was a great success (but who really knows?) and that “we are not at war with Iran; we are at war with Iran's future nuclear capabilities.”

Word has it that Iran is a “state sponsor of terrorism” and they live for the day when they can “wipe Israel off the face of the map.”

We hear both sides of the story: Iran is close to producing a nuclear weapon; Iran is years away from producing a nuclear weapon.

Now, no love is lost on Trump around here (this blog).  Same with Israel, considering the brutality they are unleashing in the Gaza area.  Brutality seems to be a way of life in that little corner of the world.  And you will find relgion(s) are the taproot of that burning bush.

While violence is never (rarely?) looked upon as a “good” thing…

Question: Do you think it was a good thing that Trump bombed those Iranian facilities, or a bad thing?  Make your case.

(by PrimalSoup) 

Self-Proclaimed “Peacemaker” Drags U.S. Into Another War

Heeding the request of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump dispatched U.S. warplanes to bomb Iran.

American warplanes bombed three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday night, bringing the U.S. military directly into Israel’s war with Iran. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE,” President Donald Trump incongruously wrote in a social media post announcing the attacks.

Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars during his 2024 presidential run and has cast himself as a “peacemaker.” In his second inaugural address, he pledged to “measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Trump also regularly claims to have opposed the Iraq War from its outset. (He actually supported it.)

“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “All planes are now outside of Iran airspace. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow.”

The aim of the attacks, American and Israeli officials have said, is to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. The U.S. intelligence community says that threat is not, however, real.

“We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so,” reads the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment published in March. The assessment serves as the intelligence community’s official evaluation of threats to “the Homeland,” U.S. citizens, and the country’s interests. Trump dismissed those and more recent assessments to the same effect.

Defense experts who spoke with The Intercept warned the United States might be entering into a new round of the forever wars.

“Between enabling Israel in Gaza and all of its operations across the Middle East, and now these strikes in Iran, we are setting the foundation for the next generation’s ‘War on Terror,’” said Wes Bryant, who served until earlier this year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

He questioned the Trump administration’s abrupt shift from negotiating with Iran about its nuclear program to bombing it.

The idea of an “imminent Iran nuclear threat” wasn’t serious a few days ago, Bryant said. “The fact that suddenly Trump was pulled into this reactive major strike against Iran under the auspices of nuclear deterrence is, I think, among the most disturbing red flags of this administration thus far.”

“Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear targets is a short-sighted one that will not achieve his stated objectives, brings significant risks to the United States, and could derail his foreign policy priorities,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for measured U.S. foreign policy. “To strike Iran while diplomacy was ongoing undermines his push for peace elsewhere including with Putin. Why would Russia or any other country negotiate with Trump going forward?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his military’s objective was to “strike all” of Iran’s nuclear facilities. He had been pressing Trump to augment Israel’s attacks with weaponry his country does not possess — namely the 30,000-pound GBU-57s, known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators or “bunker buster” bombs, that Israel says can destroy Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facility in Fordow.

Former defense officials speculated that these weapons — which are so heavy they can only be carried by U.S. B-2 bombers — were used on Israel’s behalf during the Saturday attacks.

If Iranian leaders respond to the U.S. strikes with a major counterattack, such as striking American military bases across the Middle East, it could set off an escalatory spiral and even more aggressive U.S. involvement.

“Trump is trying to signal that he wants to get back to diplomacy but the risk of a wider war is still very real and high. Iran’s retaliation will determine whether the United States can extract itself so easily,” said Kavanagh, a former senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation who served as the director of its Army Strategy program.

“There is also very little chance Iran will negotiate now because Trump has no way to provide them credible assurances that if they come to the table, they will be spared future attacks,” Kavanagh said. “Trump has sacrificed significant diplomatic leverage for narrow military gains of uncertain duration, and in doing so, has put the United States at risk of another costly Middle East war that will further diminish U.S. global influence and American prosperity.”

More than 40,000 U.S. active-duty military personnel and civilians working for the Pentagon are deployed across the Middle East. U.S. troops in the region have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since October 2023 in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza. Predominantly led by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian-allied Houthi government in Yemen, the strikes include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region.

Trump struck a ceasefire deal with the Houthis in May. Prior to the U.S. attacks on Iran, the Houthis threatened to again target U.S. ships in the Red Sea if Washington joined Israel’s attacks on Iran.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has expressed his desires for regime change in Iran and not ruled out targeting the country’s supreme leader, saying “no one in Iran should have immunity.” Israel’s defense minister said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cannot “continue to exist.” Trump joined in on the threats, pointing out that the U.S. knows Khamenei’s location and dangled the possibility of assassinating him in the future.

“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week, before Saturday’s strikes.

“Military force, by itself, is seldom effective in orchestrating regime change,” Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, told The Intercept before the U.S. began its attacks on Saturday.

“There will be ramifications against the U.S. and this should be discussed and addressed in detail,” Votel warned. “There is no clean course we can take in this situation.”

by Nick Turse

The Intercept 6/21/25 

USSC helps abused prisoners!; MAGA ignores the law, again; djt kills residential solar energy

A 5-4 USSC decision came down that, surprisingly, favored prisoners who have been mistreated while in prison. The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) requires prisoners with complaints about prison conditions to exhaust available grievance procedures before filing suit in federal court. But “exhaustion is not required” when a prison administrator “threaten[s] individual inmates so as to prevent their use of otherwise proper procedures.” Ross v. Blake, 578 U. S. 632, 644.

Respondent Kyle Richards is a prisoner in Michigan. He alleges that he was sexually abused by petitioner Thomas Perttu, a prison employee. He also alleges that when he tried to file grievance forms about the abuse, Perttu destroyed them and threatened to kill him if he filed more. Richards sued Perttu under 42 U. S. C. §1983 for violating his constitutional rights, including his First Amendment right to file grievances.

The 5-4 decision included two MAGA judges who sided with the prisoners, Roberts and Gorsuch, and the three Dem judges. The four MAGA judges who dissented and would have put Richards' life in jeopardy after Perttu threatened to kill him were, Barrett, who was joined by Alito, Thomas and Kavanaugh. Given the cruelty inherent in MAGA politics, it is surprising that Roberts and Gorsuch decided to spare Richard's life. MAGA often works in deeply mysterious ways.

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Law & Crime reports that djt is ignoring FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) law information requests. This is another step toward djt eventually ignoring the courts and doing what he wants. A recently filed lawsuit alleges that djt's administration refuses to release documents about "politically motivated" immigration enforcement and mass deportations. Since there rarely any significant punishment for failure to provide information that the laws says has to be provided, djt risks nothing by forcing people to go to court to get the information the law says they are entitled to get. 

The question is, when will djt take the final step and tell the courts they have no jurisdiction or power over him? 

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pv magazine reports on the dismal state of the solar energy industry under MAGA's intense hostility to it:

U.S. residential solar on the brink of collapse

In a shock for the industry, the latest draft of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” excludes residential solar lease providers from the Investment Tax Credit

A teetering U.S. residential solar industry may now be on the brink of collapse. Faced by macroeconomic challenges and shifting sands of state and federal policies, an industry once defined by double-digit growth in installations is experiencing steep declines – and the latest draft of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes things far worse.

The latest draft of the bill is bad all-around for clean energy, but it is particularly damaging to residential solar, cutting federal tax credits far sooner than expected.

Residential solar installations declined 31% in 2024. Over the last year, industry titans like SunPower, Sunnova, and Mosaic Solar have filed for bankruptcy.

The industry historically has leaned on the value proposition of lowering customer electricity bills and providing predictable costs for the long-term. However, that value has been increasingly difficult to provide.

Tariffs have posed challenges to the industry as well. Aluminum, used in both solar panel frames and racking systems, are hit with 25% tariffs. Solar cell and module import tariffs from major global suppliers have come in higher-than-expected this year, too.

In 2022, the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, extending a tax credit that covers 30% of installed system costs through the mid-2030s. The latest One Big Beautiful Bill Act draft forwarded by the Senate Finance Committee ends this tax credit far ahead of schedule.  

This posed a shock to the investment community. Share prices of the largest residential solar provider Sunrun are down over 40% in the trading day following the latest draft of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Trump publicly requested that Big Oil spend $1 billion to help him win the 2024 election. In a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April, Trump promised oil company CEOs that he would reverse environmental rules and policies in exchange for their financial support. One analysis indicates that the oil and gas industry spent about $450 million to support and influence Donald Trump and Republicans throughout the 2024 election cycle and 118th Congress.

Killing solar energy in the US can thus reasonably be seen as djt's payback to the coal, oil and gas industry for their campaign contributions, also know as free speech. Pay-to-play politics does not care about collateral damage such as global warming, sky high consumer electricity bills or extinct species.

Regarding our bifurcated economy: Deregulation and deprotection are more profitable

The Economist sees a two-way split in the US economy, one liberal, the other conservative:

The broader MAGA universe extends beyond goods with over-the-top marketing to products and employers merely favoured by Republicans. And each economic choice adds up to something bigger. According to our analysis, America is splitting into two different economies and markets: one conservative, the other liberal. People on each side think about the economy differently; they buy different things and work in increasingly different industries. Not only that, the MAGA economy is doing surprisingly well.

The association of Republicanism with backwardness is at odds with the data. Even places like Yuba City are doing better than before and together MAGA-land is enormously powerful. If Democrats have two-thirds of American GDP, that still leaves Republicans with around $10trn—making them the world’s third-largest economy.

The growing gap between the MAGA and Democratic economies can be seen in both “soft” and “hard” data. Surveys suggest that Democrats and Republicans now live in separate realities.

The two economies are separating in part because their industrial compositions are changing. We have analyzed data on work and pay across counties. Over time, places that voted Democratic in 2024 have taken a greater share of knowledge-intensive forms of economic activity. In 1993 roughly the same share of employee compensation came from the “information” sector, comprising software and the like, in Republican counties as elsewhere. Now the [Republican] share is 30% lower than average, while dependence on manufacturing has risen. All told, employment patterns in the Democratic and Republican economies have diverged by 20%, as measured by the difference between “location quotients”, a gauge of job dispersion by industry.

Recent market turmoil hit the Republican basket hard. But in the past decade its shareholder returns, including dividends, have thrashed the blue one.

Since the end of 2020 MAGA’s price has easily outperformed that of DEMZ. Goldman Sachs, a bank, has built a stock index containing firms “that could benefit from key Republican policies”, such as those in oil. Over the past decade their share prices have comfortably beaten the market.

Two points:

• That is an indicator that the deep split in American politics has spilled over into the economy and society generally. These splits will remain for a long time, probably decades at least. This looks like a new normal. 

• Is the red economy generally less environmentally, worker and consumer friendly than the blue one? That seems to be implied. I asked Pxy. It analyzed that and concluded in part: 

Conclusion: The MAGA economy is showing surprisingly strong performance by several measures, particularly in stock returns and certain sectors like manufacturing and energy 44. However, this performance appears to come with significant trade-offs in environmental, worker, and consumer protections 45. The Republican policies driving this economic performance—deregulation, tax cuts, energy development, and manufacturing focus—prioritize short-term economic growth over long-term sustainability concerns.

The questions and the entire Pxy analysis is available at this link. 

The bottom line: Not surprisingly, by getting rid of environmental, worker, and consumer protections companies can make more money. MAGA elites and the djt administration have not denied their deregulatory agenda. Instead, they openly celebrate it as a core achievement and policy objective (1, 2, 3, 4). Instead of denying the scale of their deregulatory agenda, MAGA elites reframed this using consistent propaganda narratives, e.g., (1) deregulation results in economic benefits, and (2) federal regulations are tyrannical socialist government overreach. 

That reframing allows MAGA elites to acknowledge deregulation while spinning it as economically necessary (5, 6). What MAGA propaganda does not say is that the benefits are mostly for the elites. Not much, if anything, is going to be trickling down to average consumers, workers or the environment. Deregulation protects corporations and powerful special interests while deprotecting consumers, workers and the environment. This is more evidence of the authoritarianism and kleptocracy of the MAGA wealth and power movement. 

It is not just economic benefit that flows up from 

deregulation, power also flows up from us to the elites