MCDG

@kaitlancollins Run for reelection and defend your values.

Sen. Thom Tillis: “The threshold for somebody following Pam Bondi ends the moment I hear they said one thing that excused the events of Jan. 6th. I’ve been very clear on that. So, I hope whoever they have in mind to follow General Bondi is very clear-eyed on my position on Jan. 6th.”

@avidseries And X/online political culture will remain retarded long after he’s gone, but I do wonder what people will do in the privacy of the voting booth.

We finally have an antiwoke president. But he is retarded.

@NBCNews Hershey’s chocolate is garbage and has always been garbage.

Hershey's will use “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” in all Reese’s and Hershey’s products, a move that comes after Brad Reese went viral for calling out the candy maker. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/h…

@mattyglesias The fact is, any word-mangling this admin uses in order to contend NATO should involve itself in Iran could just as easily be used to demand greater US involvement in Ukraine. US may have regional interests in ME but Europe is existentially threatened on it’s eastern flank.

At American insistence, the treaty was written with limited geographic scope so that the United States would not get dragged into its European allies’ colonial wars.

@sentdefender But NATO is only useless if the US declares it so. This is so fucking stupid.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump told The Telegraph that he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO after it failed to join his ongoing war against Iran, stating that the alliance is a “paper tiger” and that this is known by Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

@PeteHegseth @KidRock @USArmy This shit is so retarded

Thank you @KidRock. @USArmy pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots. 🇺🇸

@AndrewSabisky @SirSimonClarke Just more work for the home office.

@SirSimonClarke I think the Treasury does actually have a vested interest in future taxpayers existing. A world where fertility gets even worse is going to be a very very expensive one for HMT in the long run

I can’t see a rational policy case for discriminating against people who don’t have children/think they can’t afford to start a family. If a tax is a bad tax, it’s a bad tax for all, not just for some.

@MsMelChen Once worked at a maj. white school that had many black & Hispanic students and also children of Syrian and Venezuelan refugees. Had to take training at a nearby school, 90%+ black, and heard a fellow assistant comment on how beautifully diverse the school was.

The failure to connect the dots here is quite remarkable

@PatrickHeizer Rothampstead Research in the UK does a similar thing with grass and one particular soil experiment has been running since 1843. Pretty cool!

Just learned that I work less than a mile from the longest-running stone weathering experiment: NIST's stone wall test. Built in 1948, it includes 2352 samples of stone from 47 US states and 16 countries, and uses two types of mortar.

@JoshPateCFB Can you imagine having a mind that produces tweets like that unironically? This place is a mental illness expo.

@Realrclark25 Our PE teachers let us do this one time in final week of secondary school (UK). Gym, no pads, ball in center, kids in 4 teams sat in a square, ordered by size. Number would be called and you had to run, dive, wrestle, & swipe the ball back to your side. Was crazy.

This has to be A.I. Can’t be real. I refuse to believe a coach would do this. It’s nonsensical and dangerous.

@justinmassie1 Rubio knows better.

Just like when NATO wasn’t there to support the French in Algeria and the British in the Falklands. This is simply not NATO’s purpose.

@JoshPateCFB Which G5 to P4 transfers are you keeping your eye on? Memphis TN

Legendary (it’ll just be normal) mailbag episode coming tomorrow night…drop ?s here & include hometown

@NateSilver538 Started with the tariffs and what it’s done to farmers. I live in the rural south; all my coworkers are MAGA and they say what farmers are facing is borderline apocalyptic. Now fertilizer issues due to Hormuz strait… there’s no confidence, it’s squarely on Trump & they know it.

Obviously, gas prices are a big factor. But Trump has profound problems. There *are* signs of erosion among his base. Only 22% of Americans have a *strongly* favorable view of Trump. 2028 aspirants are starting to pull away from him. One wonders about the effect of his age, too.

Trump's approval rating just fell below 40 percent in our tracking for the first time. And his net approval rating is now -17.4, also a new low and down about 5 points over the past several weeks.

@TheJonahDylan Gotta be proud of every returning player in this day and age. Jordan Bell is a Tiger! 🐅🐅🐅

Here’s Jordan Bell today on why he stayed at Memphis and how he’s grown over the past two years:

@dccommonsense Dan, I can’t see any good uses for the MEU and 82nd airborne. They seem to me to be very easily called bluffs. If Iran doesn’t give him a way out, do you think it’s possible he issues orders that the military refuses?

And for those who told me "it's not about the oil. The USA has all the oil it needs". Please🙄. Trump undercuts his supporters before they know they're supposed to be changing the narrative (again). And this is straight-up stealing and open 19th century style colonialism.

@objecttothis @ChrisO_wiki But oil won’t go through it if Trump takes or damages it, and 90% of the oil goes to China so you’ll guarantee some sort of response from them. It’s a monumentally dumb threat because doing it would be monumentally dumb. Turn off MAGA tv and educate yourself.

@ChrisO_wiki Kharg is valuable because most of their oil goes through it. Ships can't get close to the mainland because of geography. Despite your straw man, Trump isn't as dumb as you think he is. By the way this would have been on every administrations target list for the last 40 years.

One of the most remarkable things about this interview is that Trump appears to think that Iran's oil is *on* Kharg Island. It's just an offshore terminal to which oil is pumped via pipes leading from the mainland, where it's produced.

@ChrisO_wiki He thinks bullish rhetoric bolsters his negotiating position. It doesn’t, because assaulting Kharg Island is retarded, but Trump’s the only one who doesn’t know it.

@SinaToossi I wonder if we’ll get to the point of the military refusing orders. Obv I’m just some uneducated civilian, but it feels like the state of the conflict is relatively transparent and we have no good options beyond war crimes and sending marines into near-suicidal conditions.

The idea that there is some level of pressure that will force Iran to capitulate on its core security interests has continuously been tested and failed. It did not work under years of “maximum pressure”. And it failed after the last war, when Iran interpreted the demands on the table not as compromise, but as existential threats to the state. Now, in the middle of an active war, that perception is only reinforced. The prevailing logic in Tehran is simple. Either endure, raise costs, and force a more favorable outcome, or face destruction anyway. Escalation in this context does not compel surrender. It hardens resolve.

@alpha_numer0 @avidseries Ok, and?

I believe Trump as a person - as a character - makes it very difficult for Iran to discern any rhyme or reason for his actions. If he confuses his indirect allies, then why would his enemies also not be confused by his actions? I believe he has demonstrated this character continuously throughout his time in politics. I think it was Starmier recently who said Trump didn't even inform him that they were going to strike Iran?

There is nothing in the DNA of the Iranian regime that would permit it to surrender most of its core interests (such as development of its missile programs and the retention of its proxies), and it isn't going to negotiate its way toward giving up power. Its only consideration is its survival and the fulfillment of its apocalyptic religious mission. It will do anything to stay in power, even if that includes slaughtering its own populace, allowing important infrastructure and the economy to be destroyed, and wrecking its relationships with neighboring states. And don't even think about outmaneuvering them at the negotiating table. Iranians have been negotiating with each other for millennia in their marketplaces and social relations. They are much better at it than Americans. (The pathetic Obama deal, if anything, is proof of that.) The Israelis have (belatedly) assessed that the regime will not fall purely through the application of overwhelming military superiority. Every signal I am seeing from ordinary people inside Iran suggests a pessimism about participating in mass protests against the regime. (Admittedly, the Internet blackout makes it difficult to determine the state of mind of Iranians.) But the plain fact remains that without organized and aggressive mass protests and boycotts, the regime will not collapse, and while American "boots on the ground" could conceivably be successful in conducting some limited special operations on Iranian soil, any attempt to launch a full-scale invasion of the country in order to affect regime change is as likely to fail as succeed, at great cost to American lives. The idea that the US military could control for very long a city as vast as Tehran against the IRGC and Basij without an alliance with the Iranian regular army seems farfetched, to say the least. What have US and Israel achieved so far? They've set Iran's nuke and missile program back a few years. What has Iran achieved? They've shown that, despite being militarily trounced, they are perfectly capable of shaping the course of a conflict with the US by attacking economically fragile neighbors, destroying or neutralizing some of America's military assets in the region, closing the Gulf to shipping and impacting the global economy, instilling enough fear in its own population to get it to stand down, showing the Gulf States that an alliance with the US against Iran offers only limited value and may in fact be a net liability, and proving its institutional resilience despite the loss of almost its entire senior leadership. Iran came to the battle fully prepared, the US didn't. It doesn't matter how many targets the US and Israel have hit. If the regime doesn't fall, the Iranian regime, now more hardened than ever, will have won.