Roaming Charges: Calling All Angels!

CounterPunch+ Exclusives

Battle of the Angels, woodcut from the Apocalypse series, Albrecht Dürer (1497-1498). The wall on which the prophets wrote Is cracking at the seams Upon the instruments of death The sunlight brightly gleams When everyman is torn apart With nightmares and with dreams Will no one lay the laurel wreath When silence drowns the screams? Confusion will be my epitaph – Peter Sinfield, King Crimson, “Epitaph”

Battle of the Angels, woodcut from the Apocalypse series, Albrecht Dürer (1497-1498).

The wall on which the prophets wrote Is cracking at the seams Upon the instruments of death The sunlight brightly gleams When everyman is torn apart With nightmares and with dreams Will no one lay the laurel wreath When silence drowns the screams?

Confusion will be my epitaph

– Peter Sinfield, King Crimson, “Epitaph”

+ Let’s review the shifting rationales (all fallacious) for Trump/Netanyahu’s criminal attack on Iran that has quickly engulfed much of the Middle East: Israel was going to attack Iran and Iran would respond by attacking the US; Iran was going to launch a pre-emptive attack on Israel; Iran was going to launch a preemptive attack on the US; Iran was close to having a nuclear weapon; Iran was close to having intercontinental missiles capable of striking the US; Iran was governed by lunatics. Netanyahu talked Trump into doing it. MBS convinced Trump to do it. Trump convinced Netanyahu to do it. Let confusion be their epitaph.

+ Marco Rubio: “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked [by Israel], that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit, sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.”

CNN Reporter: Yesterday, you told us Israel was going to strike Iran and that’s why we needed to get involved. But today the president said Iran– Rubio: No. Were you there yesterday? CNN Reporter: Yes. I asked the question.

CNN Reporter: Yesterday, you told us Israel was going to strike Iran and that’s why we needed to get involved. But today the president said Iran–

Rubio: No. Were you there yesterday?

CNN Reporter: Yes. I asked the question.

+ The “preventative war” rationale, whichever of the shifting versions you choose, is preposterous. A preemptive strike on US targets by Iran would have done minimal damage to the US arsenal in the region and ensured the massive counter-attack the Iranians were seeking to prevent. And, even the Pentagon knows it wasn’t true…

Reporter: Thousands of Americans are stranded. Why wasn’t there an evacuation plan? Trump: Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most. I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack….If anything, I forced Israel’s hand.”

Reporter: Thousands of Americans are stranded. Why wasn’t there an evacuation plan?

Trump: Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most. I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack….If anything, I forced Israel’s hand.”

+ Sen. Mark Warner: “There was no imminent threat to the United States by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the US, then we are in uncharted territory.”

+ Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons. Iran has none. If Iran were really planning a preemptive strike on Israel, that would pretty much invalidate the notion of nuclear deterrence. Let’s get rid of them all! On the other hand, would Trump and Israel have risked launching a preemptive attack on Iran if the Islamic Republic possessed its own nuclear arsenal? Unlikely. (It’s more likely Trump would have written love letters to the Ayatollah, ala his endearing correspondence with Kim Jong-Un.) I think it’s safe to conclude that Iran had no plans to preemptively attack Israel or the US.

+ Rafael Grossi, Director General of the IAEA, told the nuclear inspection agency’s board on March 2 that inspectors found no structured effort by Iran to build nuclear weapons, despite ongoing strikes on sites like Natanz. The U.S. and Israel launched operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury on February 28, damaging above-ground structures but sparing underground centrifuges and causing no radiation leaks. While leaders like Trump and Netanyahu cited imminent threats, U.S. intelligence sources and Russia disputed the urgency, and Grossi called for diplomacy to prevent escalation.

Reporter: “So, why did the US attack?” Rubio: “Iran is run by lunatics.”

Reporter: “So, why did the US attack?”

Rubio: “Iran is run by lunatics.”

+ Speaking of lunatics, Paul White, the spiritual advisor to Trump and head of the White House Faith Office, spoke in tongues to call down angels from Africa and South America to strike Iran…

+ Mike Johnson is doing his best to inflame all of Islam against the US: “We’re the Great Satan in their misguided religion. And there is no way to appease them.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu was once again comparing Iran to the Amaleks and vowing to enact Deuteronomy’s injunction to “blot them out” (Ie, genocide them).

+ Is there some profound moral distinction between Iran calling the US the Great Satan and the US calling Iran the Axis of Evil?

+ “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His [Jesus’s] return to Earth”. No country this backward should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons…

+ US commanders told their troops that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus” to bring down the Iranian regime, set off the Apocalypse and summon Jesus back to Earth. So the bombs across Iran may wake Jesus from his 2000-year-long slumber–during which he dozed soundly through the Black Death, the Inquisition, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, genocide against aboriginal peoples, Nietzsche’s pronouncement of his father’s death, wars using poison gas, the Holocaust, atomic bombings and the ethnic cleansing of his own descendants in Gaza–but why are they convinced he’d come back on the side of the bombers?

This morning, our commander…urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

+ In launching the forever wars, the Bush crowd tried to avoid inevitable comparisons to the Crusades, fearing the fiery backlash such analogies would rightly engender among the predominantly Muslim people they were claiming to “liberate.” Not so, the Trumpers, who have not only eagerly embraced the absurd image of themselves as born-spurred crusaders, but also as apocalyptic agents of End Timer fantasies about Armageddon and the Rapture. Bush’s PNAC cabal, which included many Jewish Neo-cons, has been replaced with Trump’s team of Christian Nationalist nutters who are itching to send Jewish “Christ-killers” (their doctrinal anti-Semitism has never been in doubt) up in the same mushroom cloud of radioactive smoke as the Muslim infidels.

+ Maybe Jesus hasn’t been sleeping all these years, but has instead simply become terminally bored by the blood-soaked antics of his Dad’s favorite creatures–especially annoyed by the noisome claque of souls who claim to worship him–and has chosen to remain aloof from it all, like the Supreme Deity described by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as lurking “within or behind or above the handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Sounds about right. We see the celestial clippings all around us, though Trump’s EPA refuses to classify them as toxic waste.

+ So why did they attack Iran? My theory: they bombed Iran is that Iran was willing to give up or scale back its nuclear program, which would have removed any justification for the regime change war Netanyahu craves…

+ You can’t get much more explicit than this.

The public statements are mostly just play-acting. None of these people feels they need to explain themselves to anyone, not even to Sean Hannity. If Congress doesn’t care (and it doesn’t) that its constitutional authority has been usurped, why should the Trump Syndicate bother coming up with a serious justification for usurping it? Tell them something new every day. Keep them guessing. Who will stop them?

Reporter: Do you have someone in mind right now to lead a new Iranian government, because you said all the people you did have in mind have been taken out? Trump: We had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.

Reporter: Do you have someone in mind right now to lead a new Iranian government, because you said all the people you did have in mind have been taken out?

Trump: We had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.

+Trump’s statement that the US may have killed the people it wanted to take over the government of Iran after it killed the current leadership of Iran must rank as one of the most astounding confessions of imperial incompetence in history.

Here’s Seymour Hersh on how Trump’s loose lips may have gotten the CIA’s own assets inside the IRG and IRI killed:

Before the attacks on Iran commenced, US and Israeli operatives inside the country worked intensely under deep cover to recruit future leaders of Iran from various groups, including, perhaps, from inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for protecting the Ayatollah. The president apparently spoke without recalling that this fact is top secret. I have been told Trump’s casual comment has led to a Revolutionary Guard witch hunt to search out the insiders who may have been dealing directly or indirectly with Israeli or American intelligence agencies.

+ Apparently, someone Trump didn’t (and doesn’t) have in mind for ruling whatever’s left of Iran is the Baby Shah, who received the same cold shoulder from Trump that he gave to Machado’s dream of running post-Maduro Venezuela…

Reporter: Reza Pahlavi, is he an option at all in your mind? Trump: It would seem to me that somebody from within maybe, would be more appropriate. I’ve said that he looks like a very nice person, but it would seem to me that somebody that’s there, that’s currently popular, if there is such a person.

Reporter: Reza Pahlavi, is he an option at all in your mind?

Trump: It would seem to me that somebody from within maybe, would be more appropriate. I’ve said that he looks like a very nice person, but it would seem to me that somebody that’s there, that’s currently popular, if there is such a person.

+ Trump told the New York Times that he won’t rule out putting US troops on the ground in Iran: “If necessary. I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it. I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary,’”

+ Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal, after a closed-door briefing earlier by senior officials in the Trump Administration on the ongoing war with Iran:

I just want to say, I am more fearful than ever after this briefing that we may be putting boots on the ground and that troops from the United States may be necessary to accomplish objectives that the administration seems to have, but I also am no more clear on what the priorities are going to be of the administration going forward, whether it is destroying the nuclear capacity of Iran or simply the missiles or regime change or stopping terrorist activities. I think the administration owes it to the American people to have briefings not just for members of Congress but for the American public. Nothing here should be classified, it should be available to the American people.

+ 12: Percent of Americans who support sending US troops to Iran.

+ Those boots Trump’s thinking about may be worn by Kurds. The CIA is reportedly arming Kurdish separatists to invade Iran and instigate a popular uprising against the IRI. More likely, a Kurdish invasion will ignite an ethnic civil war in Iran, sending civilians fleeing the carnage in all directions. We’ve seen this story before. How many times have the Kurds been used as a CIA proxy force, with promises of US support for an independent state, only to be betrayed, left behind to be slaughtered, imprisoned or tortured by regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey?

+ White House officials now contend that Operation Epic Fury isn’t a “war,” but a “special combat operation.” This is pretty much the same thing Putin called the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fourth “special” year…

+ Lindsey Graham has always wanted a world war and he just might get one: “I’m calling on President Trump today — join Israel to attack Hezbollah …Fly with Israel.”

+We were neck deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool said to push on…

+ Trump: “I guess the worst case would be, we do this, and then somebody takes over, who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen.”

+ This case is almost inevitable, as your own CIA warned. Worst-case scenarios? Thousands killed. Millions of refugees. War spreading to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen. Global recession. World War III. Nuclear annihilation….

+ HAL 9000 had more circuits working when he began to sing, “Daisy“, than Trump does now…

Spanish MEP Irene Montero.

+ Spain survived nearly five decades of fascist rule and emerged as a much better country. The US helped defeat fascism and became one of the worst countries imaginable, arrogant, brutish and stupid. Spain’s Member of Europe Parliament Irene Montero: “Because no one stopped the genocide in Gaza, the United States and Israel are now targeting Venezuela and Iran. We must isolate the U.S. and Israel now, so they can no longer spread terror across the globe.”

+ Trump: “Spain has been terrible. In fact, I told Scott [Bessent] to cut off all dealings with Spain. Spain actually said that we can’t use their bases. And that’s all right. We could use their base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it.”

+ Indeed, Spain may be the last rational country in the “West.” Pedro Sanchez on denying the US use of Spain airbases, ports and airspace for its war on Iran: “Very often great wars start with a chain of events spiralling out of control due to miscalculations, technical failures, and unforeseen circumstances. Therefore, we must learn from history and cannot play Russian roulette with the fate of millions.”

+ Trump: “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies.”

+ How’d that work out in Afghanistan, Don?

+ Trump: “We have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we’re using in this war. We have really an unlimited supply.”

+ No, the US doesn’t. It’s burning through its stockpile of smart weapons and ballistic missile defenses.

+ The U.S. produced only about 600 Patriot (PAC-3) missiles in 2025. According to a report in the Financial Times, an internal Pentagon assessment says the U.S. could “easily” expend “a year’s worth” of munitions in just a few days. Meanwhile, Iran’s arsenal includes 2,500 ballistic missiles and more than 10,000 Shahid-136 drones.

+ The US is firing $4 million Patriot missiles to take down $20,000 Iranian drones…This is the kind of math story problem that only works out well for Boeing and Lockheed…

+ The US exhausted five years’ worth of Tomahawk missiles in just three days.

+ Funny how that happens…

+ Sen. Markwayne Mullin: “War is ugly. It smells bad. If anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that’s happening around you and taste it, and feel it in your nostrils, it’s something you’ll never forget. And fortunately, you have President Hegseth — or Secretary Hegseth … President Hegseth has been there.”

In the early days of CounterPunch, we used to run a feature on the dumbest members of Congress. There are too many of them now to make such a list much fun, but even in a crowded field of cretins, Mullin stands out…

+ Baron Trump is apparently exempt from military service because of his height. Can one be too tall to be a Drone Operator?

+ As far as I can determine, the only Trump in the history of the Trump family in America to join any form of the military was Trump’s brother Fred, who was disowned by his father and brother because he became a commercial airline pilot for TWA, a career Fred, Sr. and Donald thought was “childish.” Fred Jr. went to Lehigh University, where he joined a Jewish Fraternity as recompense for his father’s Jew hatred. He also joined the Air National Guard to get his pilot’s license. In a family of bigots, Fred Trump, Jr. seems to have been a pretty nice guy, although the unrelenting denigration from the rest of the family drove him to drink and an early grave.

+ Phil Klay: “Hegseth has offered more clarity on his war on the Boy Scouts than on the current war with Iran.”

+ When Pete Hegseth said the command trailer where US troops were killed in a direct hit by an Iranian missile was “fortified,” he probably meant with whiskey…

+ Will Menaker: “Say what you want about Donald Rumsfeld, and he had the brain of a fucking lizard, but he never got so blinded drunk at a strip club that he tried to get on stage with the dancers.”

+ Pete Hegseth in 2024: ” I’ve been a recovering neocon for six years now…The foolishness with which we ricocheted around the world intervening, thinking it was in our best interest when really we just overturned the table and created something worse.”

+ Not impressed by Pete Hegseth pumping iron? Neither was former iron pumper, James Bovard.

+ If the Iranians had hit an Israeli girls’ school in a drone attack, I doubt very much that Kristof would have emphasized how bad the visuals looked for Iran.

+ Has the UN ever proved itself to be more useless? It did nothing to slow the genocide in Gaza. It couldn’t even stop Israel from bombing UN facilities and systematically killing UN workers. It’s done even less to stop the US/Israeli assault on Iran. And where are the BRICS nations, who held themselves forth as a countervailing force to US militarism? They can’t even get fuel to Cuba.

+ Iran has managed to hit: the US military base al-Udeid, in Qatar; Space Force’s AN/FPS-132 Ballistic Missile Early Warning Radar System, the largest radar operated by the U.S. in the Middle East, which has an estimated cost of around $1 billion; the U.S. consulate in Dubai; and the CIA’s station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

+ According to a CNN poll from Monday, 60% of Americans said they don’t believe Trump has a clear plan for the war and 62% say they think he should get congressional approval for any further military action.

+ The Trump press briefing with Frederic Merz was like a scene from the rec room in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Trump playing all the parts…Will someone buzz Nurse Ratched?

+ Trump: “The UK has been very uncooperative with that stupid island that they have. They never even saw the island before. What’s that all about? It’s a shame. I love that country. My mother was born there. My father was born… he [Merz] knows all about my father. Somebody said, ‘What would you do if you were the UK?’ Open up the North Sea. They’ve got windmills all over the place that are ruining the country, ruining the landscapes, ruining the beautiful fields.”

+ HAL 9000 had more circuits working when he began to sing, “Daisy”, than Trump does now…

+ German Chancellor Merz after meeting with Trump on Iran: “It is indeed the case that at least the American government, according to my level of knowledge and insight today, has no really formulated strategy about the future civil leadership of this country.”

After his much-ridiculed trip to the White House, a German paper referred to Merz as “the wandering moron.”

+ Sen. Tuberville on the six US troops being killed in the Iran War: “The Democrats up here, they couldn’t care less. They’ve been pushing buttons and running these wars like Vietnam and uhhhhh, in my lifetime. And of course, all the Gulf wars. But we didn’t try to win those wars.”

+ Here’s the latest parapraxis episode from the minority leader of the US Senate…

Reporter: Do you think Israel boxed the US into war with Iran?

Schumer: “Look, no one wants a nuclear war, no one wants a nuclear Israel, but we certainly don’t want an endless war.”

Schumer walks away. A reporter says, “Nuclear Israel, senator?”

Schumer turns around and asks, “What’d I say?”

Reporter: “Nuclear Israel.”

Schumer: “Oh, no! Lemme say that again. No one wants an endless war, but we certainly don’t want a nuclear Iran, that’s for sure, okay?”

+ The average price per gallon of gas in the US is now $3.198, 10 cents higher than it was a year ago. (It’s $4 per gallon here in Oregon.)

+ Trump: “…People felt that something had to be done [on Iran]. So, if we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe lower than even before…”

+ Biden on rising gas prices during Ukraine war: “Americans will have to pay up for as long as it takes.”

CNN: You’ll concede this is war?

MARKWAYNE MULLIN: We haven’t declared war. They declared war on us

CNN: The president called it war and Secretary Hegseth called it war. When you walked up just now, you called it war

MULLIN: Okay. That was a misspoke.

+ I hope they keep putting Mullin out there. Every appearance is comedy gold. (Trump’s recruiting him to run DHS, instead.)

+ Tom Cotton: “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years.”

Forty-seven years gives new meaning to “imminent”…

+ Sen. Chris Murphy: “This is as serious as it gets. This is war and peace. They told us in that room that there are gonna be more Americans that are gonna die, that they’re not gonna be able to stop these drones. We have to have a debate in the US Senate on an authorization of military force.”

+ The last time Israel launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, Iran’s response was measured: firing a limited number of missiles aimed at Israeli military targets. When Trump ordered the assassination strike on General Soleimani, Iran did not close the Strait of Hormuz or try to assassinate the Secretary of Defense or the Director of the CIA. Of course, these were both under the Khamanei regime, which has now been largely eliminated. The new regime is unlikely to be quite as restrained in its retaliatory strategies, especially when they know they have nothing left to lose.

+ In a memo to the staff at the US embassy in Israel, Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a former minister, U.S. ambassador joked to staff about having sex while sheltering in place. A U.S. official described the memo to the Washington Post as “awkward” and “odd.”

+ Sen Seth Moulton: “If that’s [ie, regime change] actually what the president wants, he ought to read up on the history a little bit. He ought to think about the war that he didn’t go to. That he allowed another American to go in his place when he dodged the draft, making up some excuse about a sore foot so that he didn’t have to go serve in Vietnam. There is an example of a war where we sought regime change, where we sought a new government, and it all fell apart.”

+ Cost of Iran War: 5 billion and counting…

Hesler Garcia Lanza came to the US when he was 9 years-old. He was soon determined by a judge to be a minor who had been “abused, neglected or abandoned by one or both parents, making reunification impossible.” As such, he was granted “Special Immigrant Juvenile Status,” allowing him to remain and work in the US on a path toward citizenship. With this protective status, Garcia Lanza grew up in the US, went to school, conducted himself admirably, graduated from college with honors and got a job designing lighting for theaters.

Then he was arrested by ICE. He was handcuffed, his legs shackled and he was put in a holding cell with suspected criminals. But Garcia Lanza wasn’t the man ICE was looking for. He was arrested because he looked like a man ICE was supposedly searching for. When Lanza Garcia proved that he was in the US legally and had a work permit, ICE still refused to release him. Instead, they wrote up a post-arrest administrative warrant for him, revoked his protected status and work permit and opened deportation proceedings against him. Garcia Lanza had no criminal record. After a court ordered Garcia Lanza’s release, ICE responded by imposing a fine against Garcia Lanza to cover the costs of his illegal arrest and detention.

These actions elicited a fiery rebuke from Federal Judge Gary R. Brown of the Eastern District of New York, who called ICE’s actions “a reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.” Brown fumed: “This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America. Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy. Equally, the laws of this nation, including the Constitution, statutory law and regulations, proscribe the illegal arrest and detention of the petitioner as well as the retaliatory termination, without notice, of the privileges associated with his SIJ status. While the Executive Branch retains the right – as it has done – to set policyregarding immigration matters, it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws – a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.” Judge Brown is a Trump appointee.

+ A measles outbreak has been reported inside the notorious ICE Camp Montana East detention prison in El Paso, where three people died in 44 days.

+ ICE has been quietly operating a detention center inside the mostly vacant Strom Thurmond federal building in Columbia, South Carolina, for the past decade. More than 400 people were secretly held there last year. City officials claimed they had no idea.

+ Meliton Moralez Ruiz has lived and worked in the US for 25 years. He was pulled over and detained by ICE on his way home from work. They showed no warrant for his arrest and Moralez Ruiz has no criminal record. He is the father of two children, both of whom are US citizens. His youngest child suffers from chronic heart failure and developmental issues. The boy will need a heart transplant. He was held without bond. Judge Kea Riggs, a Trump-appointed judge from Arizona, has ordered ICE to provide a bond hearing so he can return to his family.

+ Republican Sen. Thom Tillis to Puppy Killer:

A 14-month-old dog is basically a teenager in dog years. You decided to kill that dog because you hadn’t invested the appropriate time and training, and then you dare to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices! … Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened in Minneapolis.

Tillis’ evisceration of Noem proved fatal. Trump fired her three days later.

+ Trump found one of the few people in Washington dumber than ICE Barbie to replace Noem at DHS, assuming he’s confirmed, which the Senate is likely to do, if only to remove Mullin from their chamber…

+ Noem isn’t going anywhere. Trump named Puppy Killer his Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas, the Miami summit being held at his Doral Country Club this weekend, where only those political leaders showing obeisance to US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere are invited.

+ Puppykillers’ presumed replacement at DHS, Sen. Marywayne Mullin–who will be confirmed by his fellow senators just to get him out of their chamber–told CNN he wants “to see more lethality at home and abroad.” So apparently Trump axed Noem because her immigration agents had only killed three American citizens in the last year and not more?

+ In a decisive victory for pro-Palestine student protesters at Columbia University, last week, a judge in New York dismissed the university’s findings of disciplinary violations against 22 students who had been arrested over the occupation of Hamilton Hall in April 2024

+ RFK Jr: “President Trump understands that we’re engaged right now in spiritual warfare and that the malevolent forces want to drive us apart and end our connection to each other. One of the ways we can remedy that is by reinstituting this sacred ritual of eating with each other and cooking.”

+ Rep. Thomas Massie says that key members of his staff were offered top jobs in the Trump administration in an effort to derail legislation that would have forced the DOJ to release the Epstein files. Massie: “If the country’s savable, I’ll win my reelection. And if it’s not, I don’t need to be there.”

+ Angie Farella, RFK’s new vaccine advisor, encouraged sick children to hug their elderly family members: “So if you had a little kid who had a bunch of colds, I would tell them go hug on Grandma and Granddad … You are not going to hurt them.”

+ There’s now a Charlie Kirk (two-time college dropout) banner hanging on the facade of the Department of Education building in DC, his contribution to American education apparently equivalent to that of Booker T. Washington and the 19th century (anti-suffragette) educator Catharine Beecher…

Screengrab from Washington Post video posted to Instagram.

+ Emails obtained by Popular Information revealed that Liberty University School of Law told students interested in applying for legal internship positions with the Department of Labor that applicants “MUST be aligned politically with President Trump’ and ‘GPA is not a strong factor.” Interviews were conducted by Liberty Law graduate Vittoria D’Addesi and a White House Liaison Office representative. The questions included asking whether applicants voted for Trump.

+ While you were doomscrolling the Middle East in flames, Trump authorized another “special military operation,” this time in…war for it…Ecuador.

+ Trump said this week he make take Cuba by “friendly force,” whatever that means. He thinks he’s “on a roll.”

+ Keep Portland Weird and Racist: About an hour into a work session of the Portland Metro Council last week, Councilor Juan Carlos González, the first Latino person to serve on the council, was talking about a report on housing funds in Portland when he was interrupted by Councilor Mary Nolan…

“Can you say that in English? I don’t understand what you just said.”

“Let me try to repeat that in English, which is the language I was speaking,” González replied.

+ A Pew survey found that the US is the only country in the world where the majority of the people (53%) view their fellow citizens as having bad morals. Contrast that with Canada, where 92% of Canadians have positive views of their fellow Canucks, even the Quebecois. Down here, the Baptists believe the Unitarians are Satan’s servants. It’s no wonder that when a comedian set up a fake ICE tipline, Americans started snitching out neighbors from Pensacola to Pocatello…

+ According to Reuters, the Trump Administration is preparing a legal case against Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodriguez, including readying a criminal indictment, “to strengthen its leverage with Caracas.” These are the predictable rewards of cooperating with pathological liars, Delcy.

+ The latest polls from the UK show the complete (and richly deserved) collapse of the Starmer-led Labor Party and the stunning rise of the Greens, who garnered their highest level of support ever…

+ James Butler on the British Greens: “The Greens can now plausibly argue that they are not a wasted vote but, in a swathe of seats, the obvious progressive choice. Many historically Labour voters will have been relieved to hear someone saying on air that they don’t hate migrants, billionaires have too much money and progressive politics is not a cause for self-flagellation or shame.” Here, the US Green Party seems less consequential than ever, incapable of capitalizing on the grotesqueries of Trump or the incompetence of the Democrats.

+ Former Goldman Sachs boss, Lloyd Blankfein, who is still a free man despite the misery he inflicted on tens of thousands of people, says he “smells a crash coming.”

+ American attitudes on the State of the Economy

Poor: 42% Fair: 28% Good: 23% Excellent: 4% YouGov / March 2, 2026

Poor: 42% Fair: 28% Good: 23% Excellent: 4%

YouGov / March 2, 2026

+ A record number of American workers are raiding their 401(K) retirement accounts, as the economy deteriorates. In 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal, “6% of workers in 401(k) plans administered by Vanguard Group took a hardship withdrawal. That is up from 4.8% in 2024 and a pre-pandemic average of about 2%.”

+ The per capita annual income of the bottom 95% in the US is $43,263. It’s $57,000 in Switzerland. The average Belgian earns about $3,000 more a year than the average American, but works 24% fewer hours.

+ According to Fortune, 27% of new hires in the US have taken a pay cut.

+ There are only 1.6 job openings for every 100 employees in white-collar service roles, according to Bloomberg. That’s the lowest level since 2015,

+ The Dow has lost 2,000 points since that fateful day Pam Bondi proclaimed before Congress that it vindicated every transgression Trump had made against the Constitution (and human decency) in the last 12 months. But as Adam Tooze points out, Dow 50,000 was itself a mirage, distracting from the index’s limping performance compared to European markets…

+ Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told his employees that he stands by his decision to allow the Pentagon to use the company’s software for classified “projects,” while admitting he feels “terrible for subjecting” his staff to the fallout from the deal.

+ More than 70 percent of American public school teachers hold at least one side job, according to a new Gallup survey released this week.

+ On Monday, state officials in Ohio approved a $4.5 million sales tax exemption for a $136 million data center expansion in Northeast Ohio. The plant is expected to create a total of 10 new full-time jobs.

+ The number of US adults who feel optimistic about their future life has dropped to 59.2%, the lowest number ever, according to Gallup.

+ Even Republicans are beginning to rethink capitalism…

“Which is a better economic system?” All Americans Capitalism: 59% Socialism: 41% Among Republicans Capitalism: 74% Socialism: 26% Among Democrats Socialism: 54% Capitalism: 46% Harris / Feb 26, 2026

“Which is a better economic system?”

Capitalism: 59% Socialism: 41%

Capitalism: 74% Socialism: 26%

Socialism: 54% Capitalism: 46%

Harris / Feb 26, 2026

Mountain Goat, Glacier National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

+ Over a 12-year-period from 2007 to 2019, the population of Mountain Goats in Glacier National Park dropped by a staggering 45 percent, according to a recent study conducted by the National Park Service. The likely cause? Glacial retreat and the dramatic changes to the iconic goat’s alpine habitat resulting from climate change.

+ A new study from Wageningen University in the Netherlands found that sea-level rise is happening much more rapidly and at a higher level than previously estimated due to inaccurate modeling. On average, sea levels are 30 cc higher than prior estimates and sea levels in the Indo-Pacific and south-east Asia may already be 100 to 150 cm higher than believed, placing hundreds of millions of people at risk of being displaced by rising oceans. The study notes that 90 percent of the scientific papers and hazard assessments it analyzed underestimated baseline coastal water heights.

+ UK emissions fell by 2.4% in 2025 as coal-burning dropped to a 400-year low. Dr. Simon Evans, deputy editor of Carbon Brief: “Incredibly, we used less coal last year than in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.”

+ A new study published by the National Library of Medicine on the effects of air pollution on human cognition found that “a 1-unit increase in the average amount of particulate matter observed over the past 6 years in a school district reduces the average standardized test score by about 4%.”

+ I’m not worried. Are you?

+ Well, maybe just a little worried. Someone said the rotting skin on Trump’s neck looks like Shingles. Kimberly’s been pestering me for years to get the Shingles vaccine, warning I could get the infection behind my eyeballs and then what would I do, eh? I resisted. What were the odds? But this image sold me. I’m getting the shot.

+ An analysis of Trump’s speeches by Player’s Time shows that Trump speaks at a 2nd grade level of readability, using only 11.2 words per sentence with a word diversity of only 10.4 percent. In sum, Trump speaks in short sentences, using simple words that he repeats over and over. By comparison, Obama’s sentences averaged 24 words, Bush’s 16.7 words and Biden’s 13.3 words. Biden spoke at a 4th-grade level, Bush at a 7th-grade level, and Obama at an 11th-grade level. The study notes that European leaders, who were analyzed (Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar, and Viktor Orban), spoke at between a 7th and 10th grade level, higher than more than half of recent US presidents.

Not that speaking ability seems to matter much. Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump all ended up handing their economic policies over to the same crowd of Wall Street mercenaries and mired in the same wars without any clear and convincing explanation as to why.

+ Christopher Coyne at Reason on the newly released tapes of Henry Kissinger’s private phone calls: “For Kissinger, lies weren’t a strategic tool limited to selective uses in international statecraft. They appear to have been part of his personal makeup.” The man was a ghoul and, as Ron Jacobs noted, proud of it.

+ Melania Trump chairing the UN Security Council? This much hyperreality would’ve been too much even for Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco to get their minds around, though Baudrillard comes close: “One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.”

+Look, Mom, CounterPunch made the Epstein files! An email from [redacted] references articles by Suzan Mazur on the anti-Darwinist evolutionary biology movement.

+ Sean Jacobs on the musical genius of Fela Kuti and the Nigerian Left: “Fela’s political career unfolded when a distinctly Nigerian left – rooted in universities, trade unions and parts of the state – was at its intellectual and institutional height. His music, public persona and confrontations with military rule cannot be fully understood without reference to that history.”

+ Blood Moon over Our Little Mountain on Monday evening. (I got locked in the Pioneer Cemetery while taking this photo and had to climb over the spiked gate to get out, like a zombie on the run. After I congratulated myself for not impaling my leg on a sharp iron prong, a neighbor laughingly told me that if I’d simply stood on the white X, the gate would have opened automatically. Always learning the hard way.)

Take a Ride with Alice…

Booked Up What I’m reading this week…

Unholy Kingdom: Religion, Corruption and Violence in Saudi Arabia Malise Ruthven (Verso)

Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane Andy Beta (DeCapo)

Outsider Animals: How the Creatures at the Margins of Our Lives Have the Most to Teach Us Marlene Zuk (Princeton)

Sound Grammar What I’m listening to this week…

In My Dreams Bill Frissell (Blue Note)

Vila Fabiano do Nascimento & Vittor Santos (Far Out Recordings)

Highway to Heavenly Heavenly (Skep Wax)

A Reality Very Near to Them

“When Iranians speak of Islamic government, when, under the threat of bullets, they transform it into a slogan of the streets; when they reject in its name, perhaps at the risk of a bloodbath, deals arranged by parties and politicians, they have other things on their minds than these formulas from everywhere and nowhere. They also have other things in their hearts. I believe that they are thinking about a reality that is very near to them, since they themselves are its active agents.” – Michel Foucault

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.

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Huckabee’s Dangerous Delusions About Israel and the Middle East

The Veil, the State, and the Illusion of Liberation

QAnon is Dead. Long Live QAnon!

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