Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 441 of 479
Heather Cox Richardson
Mar 09, 2026
Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.
Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.
The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.
The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.
Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.”
“Forget about next,” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”
“We’re marching through the world,” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told a laughing Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel this morning. “We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re gonna have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I have never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan Plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.”
The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism. Since the 1950s, right-wing ideologues in the United States have embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right. That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.
Much more at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-8-2026
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Trump Cornered on Wild New Excuse for Bombing Iran School
PASS THE BUCK
The president can’t get his story straight.
By Vic Verbalaitis | Mar. 9, 2026 10:00PM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-cornered-on-wild-new-excuse-for-bo
mbing-iran-school/
and
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-cornered-on-wild-new-excuse
-for-bombing-iran-school/ar-AA1XRLFG
President Donald Trump blundered his way through a grilling surrounding U.S. responsibility for the bombing of an Iranian elementary school.
During a press conference held at Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida, on Monday, the president was asked about reports that found an American Tomahawk cruise missile was likely what destroyed an Iranian girls’ school on Feb. 28. The strike killed at least 175 people, many of whom were children.
Trump, 79, interrupted the reporter who asked the question, CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju, saying, “Well, I haven’t seen it, and I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is sold and used by other countries.”
“And whether it’s Iran, who also has some Tomahawks—I wish they had more—but whether it’s Iran or somebody else... a Tomahawk is very generic, it’s sold to other countries," Trump rambled. “But that’s being investigated right now.”
The Australian Department of Defense said in late 2024 that only three countries currently have Tomahawk cruise missiles: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
The U.S. also approved the sale of 400 Tomahawks, which are solely manufactured by the American company Raytheon, to Japan in 2024 and 163 missiles to the Netherlands in 2025.
CNN’s Erin Burnett reported on Monday evening that “neither Israel nor Iran uses Tomahawk missiles, according to experts.”
Even Fox News’ national security expert Jennifer Griffin called out the president’s remarks, saying, “It seems highly unlikely that it would be anyone’s Tomahawk other than a U.S. Tomahawk that hit that school, and I think the president knows that.”
When asked about whether Iran possesses Tomahawk missiles and how they would have acquired them, if they do, the Pentagon referred the Daily Beast to the White House.
Minutes later, another reporter, New York Times White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh, asked the president about his confusing response.
“You just suggested that Iran got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war,” McCreesh said. “But you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?”
“Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Trump replied, interrupting the reporter again. “I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know.”
“Numerous other nations have Tomahawks; they buy them from us,” he added. “But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, said aboard Air Force One alongside Trump on Saturday that they were looking into the school strike, but did not completely echo the president’s claims that it was done by Iran.
“We’re certainly investigating,” the former Fox & Friends Weekend host said. “But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
The president interrupted him, saying, “We think it was done by Iran.” “They have no accuracy whatsoever,”
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Whoops! Trump overlooked an important detail:
The U.S. war against Iran has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history, more than double the previous record set during the Middle East crisis of the 1950s, according to an analysis by consulting firm Rapidan Energy.
About 20% of the world’s oil supply has been disrupted for nine days now as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains at a standstill. Crude prices have surged above $100 per barrel in response.
The biggest disruption before the current war was during the Suez Crisis of 1956 when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the energy consulting firm told clients in a Sunday note. In that crisis, about 10% of the world’s oil supply at the time was disrupted.
The disruption triggered by the closure of the Strait is nearly three times the size of the shock caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, Rapidan analysts told clients. The Arab embargo disrupted about 7% of global supplies.
The big difference between the supply shock of the Iran war and past crises is the world has no spare oil capacity to address the problem, the analysts said. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hold the overwhelming majority of swing capacity but they have been cut off from the global oil market by the Hormuz closure, the analysts said.
“The conflict has not only taken offline a historically high share of global supply – it has simultaneously disrupted the primary holders of spare capacity,” the Rapidan analysts said. “The result is a market with no meaningful cushion. There is no swing producer positioned to step in.”
This means that the global oil market will need to balance by destroying demand through sharply rising oil prices, the analysts said. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is “finite and insufficient to fully offset” the supply bottled into the Persian Gulf due to the closure of Hormuz, they said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/the-us-iran-war-is-the-biggest-oil-sup
ply-disruption-in-history.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:American Farmers Dealt New Blow as Trump’s Iran War Escalates
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Mar 10, 2026 at 04:00 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/american-farmers-dealt-new-blow-as-trumps-ira
n-war-escalates-11648730
The war zone sits at the crossroads of the world's fertilizer supply. Since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran a week ago, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a near standstill. The waterway moves roughly 20 percent of the world's daily oil and 25 percent of its nitrogen fertilizer.
The fertilizer shock is not arriving alone. Diesel has surged to a national average of $4.60 a gallon.
"In soybeans alone, we lost $54 billion from the president's tariffs," he said. "What they're proposing with a $12 billion relief package is a drop in the bucket."
Farmers had already grown critical of the administration over a deal that quadrupled Argentine beef imports, undercutting domestic producers.
Farm bankruptcies filed under Chapter 12 are up 46 percent compared to 2024.
Thank you, Trump, for your attention to these details.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Some of the underlying premises behind “drill, baby, drill” were accepted by many people. At the very least, it was widely presumed that U.S. self-sufficiency in oil would protect America from disruptions in oil supplies overseas.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
But that presumption was wrong. America produces a lot of oil, substantially more than we consume. Although we import some oil, mainly from Canada and Mexico, while exporting even more oil, mainly from Texas, we buy hardly any oil from the Persian Gulf. Yet the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused U.S. prices of oil products to soar. Self-sufficiency in oil has done nothing at all to insulate the U.S. economy from Middle East chaos.
It could be different. In the 1970s the U.S. imposed price controls on domestically produced oil and partially insulated consumers from global oil shocks. When price controls were lifted, they were replaced by a windfall profits tax intended to capture part of the gains experienced by oil companies.
It’s almost inconceivable that 1970s-type price controls or excess profits taxes would be imposed today. So US prices of gasoline and other oil products reflect world crude prices, and the fact that America produces a lot of oil doesn’t matter at all.
It is a detail Trump doesn't think about.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-impotence-of-drill-baby-drill
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War
Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.
By David Cole | March 6, 2026
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/06/the-lie-of-preventive-war/
In January, during a lengthy New York Times interview with President Donald Trump, one of the paper’s reporters asked him whether he saw “any checks” to his “power on the world stage.” Yes, he answered: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.” Another reporter asked about international law. “I don’t need international law,” he explained. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people.”
That attitude—save the last two sentences—has been on dramatic display in recent months. Already it has served as the basis for the extrajudicial execution of more than 150 people claimed to have been transporting drugs on the high seas and the deaths of at least a hundred people during the illegal invasion of Venezuela to arrest President Nicolás Maduro, provoke regime change, and gain access to that country’s oil.
But never has Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran. As of March 4 the death toll in Iran from the joint US–Israeli military assault, underway since Saturday, had risen to nearly eight hundred. That number includes the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of its top officials, but also reportedly at least 175 people at a girls school—many of them children between the ages of seven and twelve—that was in session when bombs struck.
Trump’s war with Iran may not trouble his “morality,” but it is manifestly illegal. It violates what is often described as the first principle of international law, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which prohibits nations from using or threatening to use force against another nation except in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council. Neither condition obtains here. Early Saturday morning, Trump issued an eight-minute video in which he claimed that he had acted to defend the American people from “imminent threats.” To justify that claim he cited historical Iranian wrongdoing dating back to the 1979 hostage crisis, as well as its support of terrorist groups, but he identified no actual imminent threat. He repeatedly said that Iran could never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but he also stated that a June 2025 air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities had already “obliterated” its nuclear capability. And he urged the Iranian people to “take over your government,” an explicit endorsement of regime change having little to do with self-defense. (As no one disputes, Khamenei was a truly despotic leader, responsible for inflicting terror and death on his own people and on those of many other countries. But there are many despots around the world, and no principle of international law makes Donald Trump the arbiter of which ones stay in power and which ones should be killed.)
In a letter submitted to Congress two days later, the president omitted his previous, unsupported claim of an imminent threat. Instead he vaguely asserted that he had acted in defense of Americans at home and abroad, as well as “in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” But in the absence of any ongoing attack, or any evidence that Iran was planning an imminent attack, neither the United States nor Israel had any authority to start a war against another sovereign country.
Trump’s unilateral action also violated the Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and authorize more limited military actions (referred to in the Constitution as “letters of marque and reprisal”). That allocation of responsibility was deliberate. As George Mason explained at the time, the aim was for “clogging rather than facilitating war.” The framers worried, justifiably, that presiden
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Yes I did.
And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Your just-so story is this: The US was bombing Iranians with Tomahawks. The Iranians saw their opportunity to bomb their school children with a Tomahawk they just so happened to have. And thus, the US looks like it bombed the school children.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Yes I did.
And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
A "just-so story" is a speculative, unverified explanation for a specific phenomenon. "Just-so stories" are often criticized as being unfalsifiable, "ad hoc" narratives.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Can’t Decide Whether the Iran War Is Still Going On
The president seems to be at odds with both himself and his secretary of defense about the status of the conflict.
By David A. Graham | March 10, 2026, 4:05 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/03/trump-iran-war-confusi
on-mixed-messages/686320/
The Trump administration can’t say why the United States went to war with Iran, and it can’t say what the goal of the war is. Now it can’t even decide whether the war is still going on.
During an interview with CBS News yesterday afternoon, President Trump all but declared victory. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said.
This statement is so self-contradictory and confusing that one might be tempted to write it off as just riffing, except that he reiterated it at a press conference later in the day. “We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective, and some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” he said, apparently referring to himself. All that was missing to complete the parallel to the Iraq War was a flight suit, an aircraft carrier, and a Mission Accomplished banner.
Yet the same afternoon, the Department of Defense posted on X, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” mangling a famous quotation from John Paul Jones, the father of the U.S. Navy. Reporters at the press conference, perplexed, asked Trump about the gap. “You said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning, so which is it?”
“Well, I think you could say both,” Trump replied.
You could—if you were a pundit making an argument about the future of the war. But people might hope for a bit more clarity from the man who launched the war without congressional authorization, popular support, or even much buy-in from his own advisers.
Trump’s equivocation yesterday may be his attempt to steady an economy shaken by the war. The president’s approval has been battered recently by the high cost of living. Although inflation was a major factor in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump has seldom focused on it since entering office and has insisted that affordability is somehow both a Democratic “hoax” and a problem that he has already solved.
The war in Iran has exacerbated existing stressors: It has driven up gas prices, rocked stock markets, and suggested that Trump’s attention is not on the economy. The president appears rattled by this and even called on oil-tanker captains to “show some guts” and sail through the contested Strait of Hormuz, according to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, though he hasn’t volunteered to personally dodge Iranian missiles aboard a floating makeshift bomb.
Trump’s comments yesterday seemed to work, at least in the immediate term: Oil futures dropped, and markets rebounded a bit. Over time, however, whatever succor Trump provides to the economy by saying that the war is nearly over is likely to be canceled out by his administration’s vacillation. Markets seek stability, and Trump can’t seem to decide on a talking point, much less a strategy or aim for the war itself. As my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl reported last week, Trump offered 10 different rationales for the war in its first six days alone. Traders may be primed to look for examples of Trump chickening out, but yesterday’s remarks seem more like a feint at ending the war: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that today would “be yet again our most intense day of strikes.”
Trump appears confused not only about the future of the war but also about some of its basic facts. The U.S. has faced international criticism over a missile strike on a girls’ school in Iran, which was next to a naval base that was also struck. Iranian authorities say that about 175 people were killed at the school, mostly children. Over the weekend, Trump said that the attack was friendly fire. “In my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Since then, evide
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