Bernie Gartenlaub

@marcthiessen Trump changed his stance towards Iran. Playing in neutral is not his game. Time to go on offense again for the kill

If you were in Iran’s shoes, you would perceive weakness, conclude that Trump’s threats were bluster and that he is unwilling to resume the bombing campaign, that Trump is feeling political pressure from high gas prices, that the U.S. blockade of Iran in the strait is backfiring on him and that it is only a matter of time before he is forced to end that too. You would think that your ability to threaten the oil infrastructure of America’s Persian Gulf allies is not only successfully deterring Trump from striking you again but also preventing him from taking away your control of the strait. You would think that you, not Trump, have the cards. wapo.st/4eEuLHX

@EchoesofWarYT I wish you had annotated the sources of all your accounts of Doc Hollday.

Doc Holliday was a dentist with a classical education in Greek and Latin who killed his first man at 19, coughed blood into a handkerchief for the next 17 years, and died in bed with a glass of whiskey, saying, "This is funny." Funny because he'd spent his entire adult life expecting to die in a gunfight. He never did. John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia in 1851. He came into the world with a cleft palate and a partial cleft lip, a deformity that in 1851 was usually a death sentence for an infant. His uncle, a surgeon named John Stiles Holliday, performed the corrective surgery himself when the baby was two months old. His mother Alice spent the next several years patiently teaching the boy to speak clearly. She taught him piano. She taught him manners. She taught him how to bow to a woman and how to address a gentleman. By the time he was a teenager, John Henry could quote Virgil in the original Latin, play Chopin from memory, and dance a quadrille. Then she died of tuberculosis when he was 15, and so did the small, soft world she'd built for him. He was sent to Philadelphia to study dentistry. He graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872 at the age of 20, one of the youngest in his class, and his entry "Diseases of the Teeth" was considered exceptional. He won an award at a dental fair for "Best Set of Artificial Teeth in Gold." His diploma still exists. You can look at it. He moved back south, set up a practice, and started coughing. By 1873 the diagnosis was unmistakable. Pulmonary tuberculosis. The same disease that killed his mother. Doctors gave him a few months, maybe a year. They told him his only chance was to move west, where the dry air might slow the lungs from drowning. He kissed his cousin Mattie goodbye. He had been in love with her for years. She would later become a Catholic nun, Sister Mary Melanie, and she was the woman Margaret Mitchell would model Melanie Hamilton on in Gone With the Wind. They wrote each other letters until the day he died. Nobody has ever found those letters. The family burned them. He went to Dallas. He set up a dental office. And his patients, watching this thin polite young man cough blood into a handkerchief between extractions, stopped coming. So he turned to cards. Faro, mostly. Poker when he could find it. He had a gambler's gift and a dying man's nerve, and within two years he was making more in a week at the tables than he'd made in a year pulling teeth. He moved through Texas and into the Colorado mining camps, then New Mexico, then Arizona. He drank an estimated two to three quarts of whiskey a day, partly because it numbed the lungs and partly because nothing else did. Here is what made him terrifying. Most gunfighters in the Old West were cowards in expensive boots. They picked fights they could win and avoided fights they couldn't. Doc Holliday already knew he was dying. There was nothing you could threaten him with. There was no future you could take from him. He would walk into a room of armed men with that thin slow smile and a Colt and a knife and sometimes a sawed off shotgun under his long grey coat, and the math running behind his pale blue eyes was simple. Every day he was alive was already stolen. The men across the table had something to lose. He had nothing. He weighed about 135 pounds. He was five foot ten. He was usually drunk. And by the time he reached Tombstone, men crossed streets to avoid him. His common law wife was a Hungarian woman named Mary Katharine Horony, better known as Big Nose Kate. She had been born to nobility in Budapest, run away as a teenager after her parents died, worked as a prostitute in Iowa, and ended up on the frontier with a temper that matched his. He once got her out of jail by bribing a guard. She once got him out of jail by setting fire to the hotel next door as a distraction, then walking him out at gunpoint. They fought constantly. They loved each other in the way two people love each other when they both know one of them is going to die soon. He met Wyatt Earp in Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1877. The friendship that followed would shape both their lives. The legend goes that Doc saved Wyatt's life in Dodge City, walking out of the Long Branch Saloon to find Wyatt surrounded by cowboys with guns drawn, and putting his pistol to the leader's temple before anyone saw him move. Wyatt later said he owed Doc his life. He said Doc was "the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six gun I ever knew." Wyatt Earp said that. About a tubercular dentist who could quote Cicero. At the OK Corral on October 26, 1881, the fight lasted thirty seconds. Doc was carrying a 10 gauge coach gun under his coat. He killed Tom McLaury with both barrels. When Morgan Earp was assassinated months later in retaliation, Doc rode with Wyatt on what history would later call the Vendetta Ride, a three week killing spree across Arizona that left every man they believed responsible dead in the dirt. They were never caught. They were never tried. They simply rode out of the territory and disappeared. By 1887 the disease had finally caught up with him. He was 36 years old. He weighed less than 120 pounds. He had outlived nearly every man who had ever tried to kill him, and most of the ones who had only thought about it. He checked into the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where the sulfur springs were said to ease the lungs. They didn't. On the morning of November 8th, the nurse brought him a glass of whiskey. He had always sworn he would die with his boots on, the way a gunfighter was supposed to die. He looked down at his bare feet under the white hospital sheet. He looked at the whiskey. He started to laugh. "This is funny." Then he drank it. And he died.

This reminds me: When is Obama going to be criminally investigated!

@CrazyVibes_1 Contrast the patriot Truman with the communist traitor Obama the leech

On the morning of January 20, 1953, Harry S. Truman and his wife Bess climbed into their own Chrysler — paid for with their own money — and drove themselves out of Washington. No motorcade. No security caravan. No choreographed farewell meant to polish the record. The thirty-third President of the United States merged into ordinary traffic and headed back to Independence, Missouri — the same small town that had shaped him — carrying an approval rating near thirty-two percent and a widely shared media conclusion that his presidency had fallen short. Washington did not mourn his departure. Home offered no immediate redemption. Truman returned not to comfort but to constraint. His income came largely from a modest military pension — sufficient only if one defined “sufficient” generously. There was no speaking tour prepared, no corporate directorship, no financial cushion reserved for a former president. At one point, he took out a bank loan simply to bridge the distance between what he had and what daily life demanded. Congress noticed. Not out of sentiment, but out of unease. Watching a former commander-in-chief navigate visible financial strain unsettled even political opponents. In 1958, lawmakers passed the Former Presidents Act, establishing pensions and benefits for those who followed. The system exists because Truman’s reality made its absence impossible to ignore. He did not campaign for sympathy. He walked the streets of Independence every morning, as he always had. There was no Secret Service protection for former presidents yet, and he never requested special treatment. He answered his own telephone. He personally replied to thousands of letters. If someone wrote to him, he believed they deserved an answer from him. On his desk — now preserved in the Truman Library — sat the sign that defined his presidency: The buck stops here. The decisions that had damaged his popularity were not reconsidered. The Marshall Plan committed American resources to rebuilding Western Europe after World War II. Critics warned of excess and entanglement. The rebuilt Europe of the following decades offered its own rebuttal. The Truman Doctrine established the framework for containing Soviet expansion — a foreign policy architecture that would shape four decades of global strategy. Its consequences would be debated for generations. Its structure endured. In 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the United States military. Congress would not act. He did. The political cost was immediate and steep; Southern support fractured. He signed it anyway. In 1951, he dismissed General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was not simply a general; he was a national icon. Removing him for publicly challenging civilian authority was politically perilous. Public backlash intensified. Mail poured in criticizing Truman. Approval numbers dropped further. He acted because the constitutional principle of civilian control of the military mattered more than personal standing. That principle outweighed applause. Truman accepted the cost without visible regret. History, unlike approval polls, operates on delay. In July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson traveled to Independence — not for optics, but for acknowledgment. At the Truman Library, Johnson signed Medicare into law. Truman had proposed national health insurance in 1945. It had been rejected, attacked, and politically burdensome. Two decades later, the idea returned in workable form. Johnson handed the first two Medicare cards to Harry and Bess Truman. The gesture recognized continuity. The idea had begun with the man once dismissed as misguided. Time had altered the nation’s readiness, not the principle itself. Truman died on December 26, 1972, at eighty-eight. By then, the verdict of January 1953 had been revised. Presidential historians increasingly ranked him among the upper tier — not without noting mistakes, but with acknowledgment that the most controversial decisions had proven consequential and largely correct. He understood the distinction between popularity and necessity. The Marshall Plan. The Truman Doctrine. Desegregation of the armed forces. The removal of MacArthur. The early call for national health insurance. Individually, each was politically hazardous. Collectively, they reveal a presidency grounded in consequence over comfort. He left Washington in a Chrysler, approval in the thirties, carrying a bank loan. He spent nineteen years walking the same streets of Independence, answering his own phone, replying to letters himself, living quietly under a belief that character is measured most honestly when no audience is present. History recalibrated. It often does. Not quickly. Not loudly. But eventually, for those who chose what was necessary over what was easy, it arrives.

@AmitSegal @BarakRavid Trump is screwing up. He can’t make a “deal” with Iran now. Finish them! Or fuck it up

According to @BarakRavid the U.S. and Iran are at the closest point to an agreement since the war began. The framework includes: • The U.S. and Iranian naval blockade will be gradually lifted during the detailed negotiation period. • The United States will commit, in the memorandum of understanding, to gradually lift sanctions and release tens of billions of dollars from frozen assets. • Negotiations are still underway on the duration of the uranium enrichment freeze. Three sources said the freeze would last at least 12 years, and one source estimated the final outcome would be 15 years. In addition, the U.S. wants to include in the agreement a clause stating that any Iranian violation regarding uranium enrichment will extend the freeze period. • Two sources claimed that Iran would agree to transfer the highly enriched uranium it possesses out of the country. • The United States expects to receive Iran’s response within 48 hours regarding several key points in the draft framework agreement.

t.co/XdFzIETIFT ‼️🇦🇪🇮🇱 HISTORIC BREAKTHROUGH 🔥 For the first time ever, an Arab nation is hosting Israeli defense forces and technology on its soil. Israel and the UAE just signed a major defense pact — Israeli air defense systems and operators are now deployed in the Gulf. This is the Abraham Accords in action: real alliances against the Islamic regime and its jihadist proxies.

$IREN looks like it’s about to pop

@EricLDaugh @stockcommgroup Those Iranian liars will keep on stringing us on. We have to wipe them out now!

🚨 DONALD TRUMP CONFIRMS IRAN HAS AGREED TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS This is HUGE! 🇺🇸 "Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and they won't. And they've agreed to that, among other things, yes!" 🔥

@KenGardner11 @hughhewitt Just destroy the Iranian regime!!!

We have a once in a generation -- maybe once in a century -- opportunity to break what might very well be the worst terrorist regime on the planet. Why on earth do we continue to allow it to bargain for the terms of its continued survival.

@elorwelliano Great waterfront real estate. Gut the interior for apartments for the wealthy

BUENAS NOTICIAS Esto es hermoso: ¡La ONU está próxima a desaparecer! El secretario general de la ONU, António Guterres, ha lanzado una alerta muy dramática en una carta enviada a los 193 Estados miembros: «Las Naciones Unidas están al borde del colapso total», y podrían quedarse sin fondos para julio si los países miembros, especialmente Estados Unidos que aporta "apenas" alrededor de 2.200 millones de dólares al presupuesto ordinario, no pagan sus cuotas pendientes. ¡Trump que califica a la ONU como “un club donde la gente se reúne a hablar y pasarlo bien”, ha dicho que no soltará más dinero!

@USATRUMPMAN1 “4 dead in Ohio”

Who knows what this picture is from ?

Mark,i’m afraid that Trump is caving to Iran because if we make a deal: 1- Iran will keep on breaking the deal, dragging us along with them for months & years. 2- We will be hoping that the Iranian people will overthrow their criminal government 3- The Iranian government will continue hostile acts and attack us every way possible 4- Iran will become a different kind of quagmire that will drag on as we police the peace.

I see the Left is already saying that a deal with Iran is Obama 2.0.  That will be part of the spin by the Democrats and the Woke Reich isolationists no matter what is in the deal.  As will the spin that this military operation was not necessary, that Iran was never a grave threat, and the situation is worse as a result.  This will be the narrative.  And the Republicans are, as usual, scared of their own shadows, demanding an "off ramp."

Elon’s road to becoming a trillionaire and destroying Altman

@Roger774501171 Joe Jackson

Without naming Bonds , Clemens or Pete Rose, as they should be in Cooperstown. Name me a name who needs to be in Cooperstown ,and was overlooked. I’ll start Lou Whitaker .

@KarluskaP Jessica is a say anything morally bankrupt cunt

It got heated again on The Five when Greg posed the question “why do you care if I like Trump”

@sabra_the Arafat’s stolen loot went to his progeny

His daughter, Zahwa Arafat, is worth billions and owns entire blocks in London where she lives. She even has an entire street in London named after her, because she owns all the properties on both sides of the street. She also owns Properties in Paris, where she also lives and other parts of France to. She has properties in other countries also such as Malta, and in Switzerland, with a massively huge Swiss Bank Account . All her money is stolen money… stolen by her father Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian terrorist from Cairo.. Arafat became the 1st official Muslim “Palestinian”, in 1964. (A Fake Palestinian of course, because he was born in Cairo). 🛑 His Real name, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini (aka his invented name "Yasser Arafat") was never a self governing entity of any kind, and certainly not in Palestine.

Here’s what Iran sees: After being warned not to, they hit UAE and fired on a US ship - and we didn’t respond. Instead we suspended the SoH mission. They take that as weakness. They don’t think Trump is willing to bomb them again. They think they have leverage. He needs to prove them wrong.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was dishonest, caused 'chaos,' ex-exec Mira Murati says in bombshell testimony trib.al/WwZsTey