It’s not every day you find yourself motivated to cheer for a government as evil as Iran. But hey, here we are now.
So what is the story for the above? (Yes, most of you already know, but for those that don’t, then here you go.
He is terrified, and he is right to be because Iran issued this passionate religious vow…
He murdered a leading figure of Shia Islam and has in effect painted a target on his back for the roughly 260 Shia Muslims to consider as item No.1 on their to-do list …
Beyond that, how has his utterly pointless and illegal war been going?
He declared that the U.S.–Iran ceasefire, that only existed on paper and not in reality, is now officially over
Both the US, and Iran (and Israel) have never stopped violating the terms of the agreement. That includes the US blockade and strikes on Iran, and Israel’s strikes on Lebanon.
Actions have consequences …
Both sides blames the other.
Where we are now is this:
- There is no functioning ceasefire.
- But neither side appears to be seeking an immediate full-scale war.
- Back-channel diplomacy continues alongside military pressure.
- The Strait of Hormuz is still the flashpoint
What happens next?
The probability of the conflict developing into a sustained, large-scale regional war before mid-August is now roughly 30–40%.
That is worryingly high, but a wider war is still not the most likely outcome. There is also a 50–60% probability for an unstable pattern of limited American and Iranian strikes, maritime incidents and hurried mediation, rather than continuous unrestricted warfare.
What is also clear is that both side are still allowing mediators to operate. There was also a period of relative calm following the latest exchanges. That suggests the attacks may have been intended partly as coercive signalling—demonstrating the cost of further escalation—rather than the beginning of an uninterrupted bombing campaign.
Neither side has an attractive path to a decisive victory. The United States can inflict severe military damage, but preventing every Iranian missile, drone or maritime attack would be extremely difficult. Iran, meanwhile, risks overwhelming retaliation and further destruction of its military and economic infrastructure.
If you are looking for one word to sum it all up then I offer you the term “clusterfuck“. Trump totally owns this, it is his own personal war, Congress has not declared war, nor authorised the use of military force.
One other thought, consider the cost of it all. Imagine what we could have done with all that money …
Given that it is his own personal war we need to personally bill him for the entire cost.
Apart from his utterly pointless and totally illegal war, what else has been happening this past week?
Sen. Lindsey Graham Died.
You will find lots of people popping up to explain to you what a wondering guy he was and how sad it is that the died.
However, if you want the truth then here it is …
He sold his soul to follow a tyrant, power and $$$$. We can be sorry for his family, but he died with zero integrity.
The impact of his life is that the world is now a far better place … simply because he left it.
So what else has been going on.
We learned about the “Islamic Republic of Japan”
He really is very very stupid …
The Sex Abuser now needs to pay up
Daniel Boris – Jean Carroll Comes Calling
FYI … the above got 1M views on Reddit…
The Red Card & FIFA
Earlier is the week he put his thumb on the FIFA scales.
If soccer is not your game then here is a quick summary. US striker Folarin Balogun was given a straight red card in the USA’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Normally, that means an automatic one-match ban, so he should have missed the USA v Belgium round-of-16 match. But FIFA suspended the ban for a one-year probation period, meaning the red card stayed on his record but he was allowed to play.
The controversy is that Donald Trump reportedly called FIFA president Gianni Infantino asking for the red card to be “reviewed”. FIFA then changed the practical effect of the punishment. UEFA, Belgium and others were furious because they saw it for what it was: political interference and special treatment for the co-host nation. UEFA called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and said FIFA had “crossed a red line.”
Clay Jones – Fucking with FIFA #Trump #FIFA #WorldCup #redcardabuse #FolarinBalogun #GianniInfantino
Karma.
When the US played Belgium, they lost 4-1.
Belgian know how to celebrate this victory …
Belgium midfielder Nicolas Raskin says side were fuelled by “sense of injustice” over Balogun’s overturned red card, so it appears that like everything else Trump touches, his blatant attempt to manipulate this also turned to shit.
… and yes, it is in many ways symbolic as well …
Chef’s kiss …
Election Security
Corruption on a truly epic scale
“We’ve got a party that is fighting for fraud and a party that is fighting against fraud.” — JD Vance
Well hey JD, Here is a handy little list that enables you to work out which team you are playing for …
Multiple layers of Lunacy and utter incompetence
ICE Gestapo updates
ICE is still murdering people – www.thebulwark.com/p/he-lived-h…
The family only found out what had happened via videos of him dying via social media.
ICE really are truly obnoxious shits …
As for what ICE claim, yes, the “official” account is confirmed to be total Bullshit. “Witnesses dispute ICE account…” (again) www.usatoday.com/story/news/n…
Dennis Goris – Bullet points #ICE
MAGA Christian Cranks
The nuttier right-wing religious fanatics within the MAGA cult are as always doing their thing. Here are a few this week’s samples for us to dip into, mock, and also debunk and expose as liars and manipulators.
- Scott Perry calling democratic socialists “nationalist socialists” is not an argument; it is a middle-school word game wearing a congressional lapel pin.
- Democratic socialists winning primaries is not “the closest we’ve been to destroying the country since the Civil War.” The Civil War involved slavery, secession, and actual armies. This involves voters choosing candidates who talk about housing, wages, healthcare, and taxing billionaires.
- Apparently, democracy is sacred right up until voters pick someone Scott Perry dislikes. Then suddenly the ballot box becomes Gettysburg with better branding.
- The real panic here is not that America is being destroyed. It is that a few candidates are challenging the donor-approved order, and some Republicans are so intellectually bankrupt they have to shout “Nazis!” at people whose big sinister agenda is making rent less impossible.
- When your argument depends on pretending “democratic socialist” means “National Socialist,” you are not defending the republic. You are losing a fight with a dictionary.
Pastor Doug Wilson praises the Trump administration for drastically cutting humanitarian aid, saying that it’s “one of the most humanitarian things” they have done.
- The word for taking food, medicine, and disaster relief away from vulnerable people is not “humanitarian” it is “cruelty“.
- Christian nationalists have learned to baptize indifference as virtue. Help the poor? “Waste.” Feed the hungry? “Globalism.” Keep children alive? “Woke bureaucracy.” Apparently the Sermon on the Mount now reads: blessed are the budget cutters, for they shall inherit the talking points.
Eric Metaxas is not a fan of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani: “This serpent of a man hates America and Jews as much as the Iranian Mullahs do and would turn NYC into Mecca-on-the-Hudson if given the chance. But we won’t give him that chance. We’re on to him.”
- Eric Metaxas has apparently reached the “everyone I dislike is a snake, a mullah, and secretly Mecca” stage of political commentary, which is less analysis than a panic attack wearing a flag pin.
- Calling Zohran Mamdani a “serpent” who “hates Jews” and wants “Mecca-on-the-Hudson” is not a serious argument. It is a greatest-hits album of Christian nationalist bigotry: Islamophobia, fake patriotism, apocalyptic cosplay, and the usual attempt to turn “a Muslim public official exists” into a five-alarm civilizational emergency.
- The theology is garbage too. Nothing says “Christian witness” quite like bearing false witness, demonizing your neighbor, and then pretending the Sermon on the Mount was just a deleted scene.
- Metaxas isn’t “on to him.” He’s just on brand: terrified of pluralism, allergic to democracy, and convinced that America belongs only to people who confuse Christianity with owning the place.
- If you are wondering about “hates Jews”, then let’s be clear: Criticism of the genocidal actions of the political entity, the Israeli state, is not criticism of the religious belief of Judaism.
- William Koenig has discovered the perfect religious-right weather forecast: partly cloudy with a 100% chance of blaming whatever happened yesterday on your least favorite foreign policy decision.
- A heat wave in July is not God’s press release. It is summer, physics, and a political pundit desperately trying to turn thunder into a fundraising email.
- This is Christian nationalism at its most revealing. Strip away the “biblical family” branding and what’s left is just panic that women might become too educated, too financially secure, and too independent to be easily controlled. The horror is not that young women are lost; it’s that they might not need some bearded theocrat with a guitar explaining their place to them.
- Sauvé advertises himself as making music “for the new Christendom” and describes his own outlook as “Patriarchal,” so at least the warning label is on the tin. His album page even describes one track as “a song to fix women,” which is quite a sentence to publish voluntarily.
- The punchline is that these people call women’s independence “rebellion,” but call male insecurity “order.”
- This is not “religious liberty.” It is religious apartheid.
- As you and I already know, but apparently he is too stupid to understand, the Constitution does not say Christianity “takes precedent” over other faiths. It says government shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That is the whole point: the state does not get to crown a favourite religion and then downgrade everyone else’s rights.
- The theology is just as ugly as the civics. If your faith needs government muscle to “take precedent,” then the problem is not Muslims praying in public. The problem is that your Christianity so fragile it needs the lieutenant governor to hold its hand.
- Beckwith is not defending America’s heritage. He is attacking one of its core promises: that rights are rights, not coupons handed out by Christian nationalists to people they approve of.
Hank Kunneman declares that “our country was founded on Christian principles”: “Most of our documents were based on the Bible; the way that our civic government and laws and things and the way that our Constitution was framed.”
- Literally none of that is true. The willingness to look you in the eye and lie tells you about the credibility of anything he might say about anything.
- But lies are perhaps to be expected from this self-appointed “prophet” who is only in it for the $$$
- OK, once again for those sitting in the back and are slow at grasping the basics. The Constitution was not “based on the Bible.” It was based on the radical idea that government should not get to pick your religion, police your conscience, or turn citizenship into a church-membership card. If the founders wanted a Christian constitution, they had quills, ink, and every opportunity to write “Jesus” into it. Instead, they wrote “no religious Test” and “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” That is not a biblical republic. That is the sound of theocracy being shown the door before it could start measuring the curtains.
- What a f**king liar. After the Gaetz reveal, Republicans did not give Gaetz “the boot.” In fact, he was not only nominated by Trump to be Attorney General but Starnes himself avidly supported his confirmation.
- Whenever these guys start quoting “abomination,” it is remarkable how quickly they lose interest in biblical commands about greed, cruelty, lying, mistreating strangers, and worshipping golden calves in red hats. Apparently God’s word is crystal clear when it can be used to exclude gay people, but becomes very mysterious when it says something inconvenient about power, mercy, or hypocrisy.
- The moral bankruptcy and racism is off the charts here. Jesus said “go and make disciples,” not “go and rebrand colonialism as mission work because your politics peaked in the 1800s.” Partridge isn’t defending Christianity here. He’s auditioning to be the court chaplain for a plantation owner’s fever dream.
- Anybody want to take a bet that this guy has a secret room of Nazi memorabilia.
Joshua Haymes declares that “it’s crazy how much money you can make on the internet for being evil & retarded,“.
- To illustrate his point, he has been giving us all a real-time demo via his own social media strategy.
- If his “evidence” is that Obama supported ethical values that don’t align with his, then that’s a huge tell regarding his “Christian” values.
- “love your neighbor” is fairly prominent in the source material these guys keep claiming to have read, yet they openly demonstrate on a daily basis that they vigorously oppose this.
- Meanwhile, Obama attended Christian churches for 40 years, just to fool us. That’s certainly quite a commitment to … (checks notes) … Islam.
- The man who preached mercy, blessed the meek, washed feet, touched lepers, forgave enemies, and told people to love their neighbors is now being rebranded by the masculinity panic crowd as “Ripped Gym Bro Jesus,” complete with six-pack abs and culture-war protein powder. This is quite frankly deeply deeply weird.
- His bizarre Christology appears to have been written by a locker-room podcast.
A week after Right Wing Watch very robustly debunked the false Christian history being promulgated by Chad Connelly, he ….
- Apologised and corrected … (paused) … nah, just kidding, you know how these guys roll by now. What he actually happened is that he continues to spread the same lies.
- Their willingness to knowingly and very deliberately lie tells you all you really need to know
Weirdest of the Weird
Let’s be honest here, they are all consistently weird each and every week. Viavthe following nuggets of weirdness we can get “insights”.
First up is this.
Mario Murillo believes that Tucker Carlson’s criticisms of President Donald Trump and Israel are the result of “a demonic attack.“
- Mario Murillo thinks Tucker Carlson criticising Trump and Israel is “a demonic attack,” because apparently the devil’s latest strategy is… foreign-policy commentary.
- The real Insight: This is the now classic Christian nationalist cheat code. When someone criticises your political idol, don’t answer the argument, just accuse invisible demons of filing the complaint. Tucker Carlson saying something inconvenient isn’t possession. It’s what happens when a movement built on blind loyalty discovers one of its own still has a microphone and a grudge.
- Also, notice how “spiritual warfare” always seems to mean “someone disagreed with my preferred Republican.”
Next we have this?
- Donna Rigney’s God apparently needs someone to install a supernatural Wi-Fi hotspot over Mar-a-Lago before He can talk to the President.
- Funny how these “prophetic portals” always seem to appear over politicians they already support.
- As for seeing an angel in the clouds—that’s called pareidolia, the same reason people see Elvis in burnt toast.
- If your political arguments require invisible portals and cloud selfies from angels, you are no longer just visiting Narnia, you are now permanently an immigrant who is living there.
- The real Insight: Notice that the claim is unfalsifiable: if Trump succeeds, they credit the portal; if he fails, they’ll say people didn’t pray enough or Satan interfered. Evidence no longer matters. The most effective response is usually to shift the discussion away from whether the claim is true and toward how we know whether something is true.
So where are we now, is “Weird” the new normal and which of he above wins?
Neither, because Dale is this weeks winner with his claim that a flight radicalised him. Prior to that flight, this Christian nationalist pastor who opposes interracial marriage, wants to ban women from voting, and advocates for white Christians to recolonize Africa was barely radical at all …
Weekend at Mitch McConnell’s
There are rumours that the GOP is doing a Weekend at Bernie’s with McConnell …
What is true is that there has been a vacuum of information, and also those offering proof of life are basically individuals who, if they claimed they were wearing underwear, could not be trusted to be telling you the truth.
A rather fascinating observation is that if you add up all the minutes that Mitch McConnell supposedly spoke with people last Tuesday on the phone from his hospital bed, then you quickly realise that he was on the phone for 126 hours.
The beauty of the vacuum is that anybody can step in and claim anything (and yes, Massie really did tweet that, it is not mocked up) …
Daniel Medina – McConnell suffered a heart attack & was rushed to the hospital, & since then, we’ve learned that he’s still there. Beyond that, there have been no updates. No one’s seen him or heard from him, & this has left us wondering if he is died. #news #mitchmcconnell #politicalart #maga #agitprop #restinpiss
Clay Jones – Where’s Mitch? #MitchMcConnell #MoscowMitch #CocaineMitch
Update: The July 4th Image that went viral
This was from July 4th …
Look how proud she is to show her face while they are all too ashamed to show theirs.
It inspired Michael de Adder and MacLeod.
Macleod reports that his Cartoon (above) provoked quite a reaction on FB …
Even More Political Cartoons from the past week
As always, there are many more excellent cartoons.
Nick Anderson – crowd size
Clay Jones – I found out why Trump had to fly home from Turkey on the old Air Force One #Trump #AirForceOne
Daniel Boris – Pillars of Deceit.
Platner
Guess who was defending Platner? (but hey, when your a disgusting lascivious predator, then of course you are) …
So yes …
The allegations against Platner were disqualifying. He had to drop out.
The difference between Platner and Trump is Platner was credibly accused by a victim — Trump was credibly accused by a victim AND found liable by a jury.
Also, the GOP wanted Platner to stay in the race, to help Collins. They didn’t expect him to actually drop.
However, this happened …
Replacing Platner with a decent candidate who can harness progressive energy could have a LOT of upsides.
As always, it is the political cartoonists who tell us the story.
Finally – A Fun Fact
After all of the above, let’s chill a bit.
The below is not political at all, just a fun fact from Wednesday last week.
You have just one life on this pale blue dot, a speck of dust in the cosmos, live it well.