CarolK

When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism. We found that the request came directly from the White House. propublica.org/article/donald…

@ProjectLincoln @LePapillonBlu2 No one references the cost to rebuild our foreign military bases and our military arsenal. How many $Billions should we add?

$70 Billion and 13 service members to achieve this.

Wow. Never thought I'd see the GOP as the party of "Iran has legitimate self-defense requirements for missiles"

Thoughts on the “Ceasefire” with Iran: President Trump should share the ceasefire agreement with the American people.  They deserve to see it and draw their own conclusions about the results of the president’s war. Just as they should have been informed before he launched it. From what’s been reported, it’s a bad deal to end a misguided war of President Trump’s choosing. The only thing worse would be to continue the war that has proven so costly in lives lost — including U.S. service members — and taxpayer dollars spent without making the American people safer or their lives better. By President Trump’s own terms, the war is a failure. The Iranian regime is intact and its military wing more empowered, while the Iranian people are more impoverished, repressed and desperate. Iran apparently retains a significant supply of missiles and drones and the productive capacity to make more. It has renewed links to lethal proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. The ceasefire agreement seems to be silent about these issues The attempt to “re-obliterate” Iran’s nuclear program — which President Trump claimed to have wiped out last year — failed. Iran still has the highly enriched uranium it had produced before the war started, along with centrifuges to spin the uranium into weapons-grade material. Maybe that will be addressed in the negotiations that are supposed to start this week. But at what price in terms of sanctions relief and assets unfrozen? At best, we’ll get back to something that looks like the JCPOA — the nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama without going to war that put Iran’s nuclear program in a box. President Trump tore up the JCPOA in 2018 and then failed to replace it. There’s reason to doubt we will come away with anything as strong as the JCPOA — which took two years to negotiate in partnership with all the major powers — in 60 days, playing a far weaker hand. And by the way, if the president tries to claim credit for Iran renouncing nuclear weapons as part of any agreement, look no further than the very first paragraph of the JCPOA, which contains the same pledge. The only “achievement” of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war started. And we will apparently pay Iran to do so, in the form of waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil. Iran has now demonstrated the capacity to stop or slow the passage of oil, natural gas, fertilizer and other critical products upon which so much of the world depend. Going forward, it will almost certainly find ways to collect “fees” for safe passage that will help entrench the regime. Don’t expect a return to normal any time soon, if at all. Crude oil prices will drop from the record highs they reached — but they’re unlikely to fall to pre-war levels. We will all pay for a sustained inflationary effect. It will take time to restart oil and gas production, repair infrastructure, refill dangerously depleted stockpiles, clear mines, and restore confidence. Just as it will take a lot of time to replenish our own supply of offensive and defensive missiles, to the detriment of our deterrent in other parts of the world. Maybe the only positive development is the world’s renewed focus on renewable energy as a way to break the stranglehold of the Strait. But China will be the big winner as the world’s leader in wind, solar, EV’s and batteries — further expanding its influence — while the Trump administration is paying wind farms to shut down and gutting incentives to make us more competitive in EVs. (I just returned from Norway, where more than 90 percent of the new cars sold last year were full EV’s. Norway may be ahead of the curve, but we’re driving right off the road). Meanwhile, the administration achieved a terrible trifecta of alienating our partners in Europe (insulted and threatened for two years, not consulted on the war and then lambasted for not helping bail us out), Asia (which bore the greatest impact of high energy prices and rising scarcity) and the Middle East (the primary target of Iranian retaliation), while diminishing our standing and credibility everywhere. Most of all, President Trump’s war of choice has failed the ultimate foreign policy test: it has failed to make the American people better off. At a time when more and more American families are struggling to make ends meet, this war has made filling everything from the gas tank to the grocery cart to medical prescriptions harder and more expensive. We should all be glad the war is over — for now. No doubt President Trump will claim credit for ending it. But that’s like an arsonist boasting about putting out a fire he started after half the house has been burnt down.

Snyder: One of our national fairy tales is that [Donald Trump] is a negotiator or he has some kind of negotiating skills. He does not. He's a charismatic performer who played a negotiator on TV, but he does not have negotiating skills. He's terrible at it.

Thanks to Trump and his “Big Beautiful Bill,” student loan payments will go up as much as $4,000 a year starting July 1st. While billionaires get massive tax breaks, working people will be defaulting on their debts. Unacceptable.

My friend Jamie Raskin is one of the most careful and principled people in Congress. So when he says the director of the FBI may be running a taxpayer funded slush fund, I pay attention. Here is what he found. Kash Patel directed more than $1 million in bonus payments to a small circle of agents in his inner circle and on his security detail. Some were getting nearly $8,000 every two weeks on top of salaries that were already maxed out at the federal ceiling. A number of them collected close to $40,000 over consecutive pay periods. The payments came so fast that the FBI’s bonus reserve accounts ran dry and some checks bounced. So who got the money? Agents on Patel’s so-called "director’s advisory team." That is the unit created in 2025 and described internally as a payback squad, built to dig up dirt on the law enforcement officials who investigated Trump and his allies. Raskin has given Patel until June 29 to account for every payment, every recipient, and any internal review of whether this was even legal. Patel should answer for all of it. theguardian.com/us-news/2026/j…

March 9: "We're now totally independent of the Middle East. We don't need their oil." April 1: "It doesn't really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need." June 17: If I didn't agree to the MOU, we "would run out of reserves at about 4 weeks...we would really run out, and there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it."

Scientists at Trump’s EPA say they are being told to make chemical risks “disappear on paper.” When a safety test shows danger, supervisors reportedly ask them to keep shrinking the scenario until the poison looks safe. Senior scientists reassigned to paperwork. Former chemical industry lobbyists running the offices meant to regulate the chemical industry. But the cancer does not disappear. The birth defects do not disappear. The kids drinking the water and getting sick do not disappear. The EPA exists to protect people, not the profit margins of the people poisoning them.

@BulwarkOnline Four months is a "long time ago", but your whining & lying over the 2020 election is an invalid cry from an elderly man in mental & physical decline. Tell us again Trump that the lives of those children & teachers mean nothing to you! Evil has no boundaries.

Q: "Can you say whether you will hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children on the first day of the war?" Trump: "No…It's such a strange question to be asked at this date. You're talking about a long time ago."'

Iran won this war. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, they forced Trump to capitulate without achieving any of his major war objectives. I hope future presidents will study the lessons of this defeat. Too many people died, and too much money was spent for nothing.

This agreement is far worse than I expected. To reopen the strait— a strait that was open before the war— we and our partners are transferring billions to the autocrats. We get nothing else— no elimination of enriched uranium, missiles, or terrorist support. And to add one final gift, we agree to not help the Iranian people pursue their democratic aspirations. Just incredible.

@ChrisMurphyCT Senator, please start including an estimated cost to rebuild our foreign military bases and restock our military arsenal. Those hundreds of $Billions are adding up fast!

The net result of a war that cost $60 billion, killed 13 Americans and thousands Iranian civilians, set off a new war between Israel and Lebanon, and caused massive U.S. inflation: America agrees to give Iran billions in exchange for nothing. A disastrous humiliation.

@atrupar @NotHoodlum Another lie that serves as a distraction from Netanyahu and Israeli news reporting on Trump’s incompetence by surrendering to Iran, an announcement that Israel does not support.

Trump: "You know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said he's a stupid son of a bitch."

Trump believes he has the power to weaponize the U.S. Postal Service to restrict voting. Marc Elias and his law firm are already challenging that notion in court. “[The Trump administration has] come up with a scheme that is so unbelievably unconstitutional and authoritarian.”

As I’ve said consistently for several years now, one of the best ways to protect your heart health is to keep up with your Covid vaccinations. And as I also say, remember the antivaccine activists don’t care about you or your family, they have another agenda washingtonpost.com/health/2026/06…

Trump is attempting to undo the republic to retain personal power. No one in DOJ or FBI should be assisting him in this essentially criminal and anti-American undertaking. theguardian.com/us-news/2026/j…

Esta no es una escena de una película, es el ejército de mercenarios de la Gestapo de Trump, el ICE, esta noche, en el campo de concentración para inmigrantes de Delaney Hall, secuestrando a quién protesta contra él en sus puertas. Así se está jugando el Mundial de EEUU, no lo verás en los medios de comunicación... que si llega a ser Rusia u otro pais enemigo de ellos, estarían contándotelo hasta en braille.

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This is damning. This was his main justification for the war.