RVP Commenter

George Conway fights back tears as he recalls how he decided to give nearly $1 million to Biden's Victory Fund in 2024 — which would have otherwise gone to his children. He says he started crying and had to pull his car over. "I want my kids to inherit a democracy."

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Incredible coda to this rescue operation for the 2 F15E airmen: The very same Special Operations units were formed after the failed Operation Eagle Claw ordered by President Jimmy Carter to rescue the 53 American hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran are the very same units who performed heroically during this 48 hour rescue operation. On April 24-25 1980 – 46 years ago – a rescue mission for the US hostages was aborted amidst sandstorms and mechanical failures affecting the military helicopters involved. The aircraft had gathered at a remote site dubbed “Desert One.” The conditions on the ground in part reminiscent of the two MC130 aircraft getting stuck in the wet sand on Saturday at the make shift landing strip in Iran. A US helicopter collided with a C130 transport plane leaving 8 American servicemen dead. The disaster led to the creation of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the creation of SEAL Team 6 (Naval Special Warfare or DEVGRU) a few months later in 1980. Each played a central role in the rescue of the two F15E airmen. SEAL Team 6 was formed in November 1980 in the wake of the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw. The Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC which is based at Fort Bragg was also formed in 1980, a direct consequence of the failed rescue mission. 46 years later members of these very units carried out a daring rescue in the exact same country where their units were essentially born out of a failed rescue operation that marred a presidency and led to the creation of SEAL Team 6 and JSOC.

Jennifer Welch: “The Republican party has been lying to voters for decades. Wealth will trickle down, billionaires are job creators, we are the pro-life party, we support family values. It is all a fucking lie. The Republican party is a death cult”

A tradition unlike any other.

🚨 NEW: CNN pollster SHOCKED as new poll shows Republicans LEAD in net favorability ahead of the 2026 midterms "Take a look at this! Democrats are, just simply put, running behind their previous benchmark..."

You don’t get it. We will lose a dozen aircraft to save one pilot. We will blackbag your dictator in the dead of night. We will even beat you at your national sport, just for fun. The sooner you stop trying to understand the U.S. from a euro mindset, the sooner we can speak seriously.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

Another Minnesota fraud story. 84.9% graduation rate 49.5% reading proficiency

Perhaps only the NYT could drop this in the middle of a story, spend not a moment musing about it, and move on.