Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
This week’s featured post is “Can Democrats gain from MAGA discontent?“
Ongoing stories
- Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Justice Department is working increasingly hard to support Trump’s conspiracy theories about rigged elections.
- Climate change. Rising sea levels is looking like a bigger problem than previously thought.
- The Iran/Lebanon war. The Strait is closed again. Trump wants us to believe that he’ll achieve a victory-like peace any day now. But it’s not happening.
- Ukraine. Ukraine is coping with its shortage of soldiers by fielding more robots.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the war
Last week I predicted that Trump’s anti-blockade-blockade would fail to convince Iran’s leaders they are defeated.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.
Well, here we are. Yesterday morning Trump tweeted:
We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
I see no end in sight here. Trump won’t stop the bombing until he has an agreement he can spin as a victory, and there is no victory to be had. So he will keep doing what he’s been doing: destroying stuff and killing people, then stopping the bombing and announcing that Iran has made concessions it hasn’t actually made, then getting angry when Iran doesn’t do what he said they would do, then resuming the destruction and killing.
I am amazed the news media and the stock market keep taking Trump’s statements seriously. Thursday, for example, he claimed Iran had agreed to give up its enriched uranium. The claim got lots of headlines and a rise out of the stock market, which set records on Friday. But it was just a fantasy, so Sunday we’re back to threatening to commit war crimes.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval is not exactly “cratering”, as some claim. Rather, it’s just inexorably headed downward, week by week. It’s not any one development that’s turning people around. Rather, it’s the unending bad decisions and outrageous behavior. Every day brings something new. Half the country now disapproves “strongly” of his overall performance, with another 13% disapproving “somewhat”.
and Trump vs. the Pope
I would like to ignore the Trump-versus-Pope story, because it’s another one of those stories that gets people wound up for no real purpose. (I mean: If Trump were generally governing justly and well, but just couldn’t get along with the Pope, it wouldn’t bother me.) But I have to comment on the ridiculous ways Trump’s sycophants have tried to support him. Nominally a Catholic himself, J. D. Vance warned:
I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
and said that the Vatican should “stick to matters of morality“– as if war were not a moral issue. And Speaker Mike Johnson — not a Catholic, but someone who brings religion up quite often — claimed that the Pope doesn’t understand the Just War doctrine.
Let’s think about that for a second. A war can be fought justly if all the following conditions apply:
- Going to war is a last resort, after all non-violent means fail.
- The war’s sole purpose is to redress an injustice.
- The war is not for a hopeless cause, but has a reasonable chance of succeeding.
- The goal must be a reestablishment of peace.
- The violence of the war is proportional to the injustice being redressed.
- Every effort is taken to avoid civilian casualties.
No matter how you spin the facts, that is not a description of the current war.
To understand why the USA is where it is today, all you need to do is see that Trump cannot tolerate even the mildest, insightful criticism from the Pope, but Trump will allow Putin to humiliate him deeply and constantly, while still craving Putin’s approval.
and you also might be interested in …
As predicted last week, Eric Swalwell hasn’t just ended his campaign for governor of California, he has resigned from Congress. Simultaneously, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned. He’s the guy whose female staffer committed suicide after Gonzales pressured her for sex. The cases proceeded at very different speeds: The Swalwell allegations only surfaced about a week before his resignation. Gonzales had been in trouble since September.
Remember the Dreamers, undocumented people who were brought to America as small children and know no other country? Giving them a path to citizenship has been popular since the Obama administration first offered them protection. Well, Trump’s ICE has deported 174 of them.
The DOGE bros who destroyed USAID had no idea what it did.
California’s high minimum wage appears not to have killed jobs and barely raised prices.
Having no answers for any of Texans’ real issues, the Texas GOP is trying to push Islamophobia.
ICE is doing a better job of avoiding headlines than it did pre-Minneapolis. But it is still a lawless gang of thugs. A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York explains his release order for two men unlawfully detained:
Respondents [i.e., ICE] have arrested individuals, detained them, and then afterwards issued arrest warrants that document the basis for the arrest. Sadly, ICE’s own “testimony confirmed that this illegal practice has become standard procedure for ICE enforcement efforts in this district.” … Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards. This sadly is the practice in many other parts of the world. But in the United States, the law prohibits such conduct.
NPR looks at how Iowa’s school-voucher program affects students in Cedar Rapids. Mostly, the results follow the obvious predictions:
- Charter schools have to maintain a lot of public school standards (like admitting anyone), but they benefit from massive donations from rich supporters. They have better, newer facilities than legacy public schools.
- Private schools can pick and choose students, so they get state money while avoiding expensive special ed students and students considered “disruptive”. They grow, and also become a destination for white flight, as well as for parents who consider the public schools dangerous.
- Public schools lose students and funding, and have to worry about closing.
RFK Jr. has pulled research funding from lots of MRNA vaccine programs. But one has just shown impressive results in treating pancreatic cancer, which currently has a low survival rate.
The Trump regime is stacking the deck in order to get more indictments of his perceived enemies. They have defined a “grand conspiracy” case that claims all the investigations of Trump’s illegal acts were part of a single plot, and they are pushing that case in a Florida district where corrupt Trump judge Aileen Cannon can oversee it. They’ve fired the career prosecutor and replaced her with a Trump puppet.
The NYT has found hundreds of AI-generated pro-Trump influencers on social media. They have diverse appearances, but similar messages.
Utah is constructing a 1300-bed facility for the homeless. It’s seven miles from Salt Lake City’s center and isn’t planned to include public transportation. Common Dreams fears it could become a forced-labor camp.
and let’s close with a rerun
This mash-up of Bruno Mars’s music with Hollywood’s dancing is one of my favorite closings. I have used it before, but that was years ago.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
“…as if war were not a moral issue.”
To JD Vance, I don’t think it is. It appears he has only the thinnest sense of personal morality, and even that morality is filtered through Peter Thiel’s fascism and whack-o-ism.