More Monday Male Beauty

 

What the Felon's War Against Iran War Is Costing Americans

The stalemate in the Felon's war of choice with Iran continues with no end in sight, oil prices have inched still higher, gasoline prices in America are the highest ever for a Labor Day weekend, inflation is up. Americans are paying dearly for the Felon's foolish war of choice given the ripple effect of higher energy costs, especially for diesel which is used in transporting consumer goods. Add in the inflationary effect of the USA ballooning national debt - 30% of which was added under the Felon - through higher interest rates and increased borrowing costs, and the financial cost to American households is rising even more. In increased energy costs alone it is estimated that the war has cost the American public 93 billion dollars or $1200 per household.  When the military costs are added to this, it's likely the total cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars range. And these estimates do not factor in America's damaged national security through reduce arms supplies and isolation from former allies.  All, in part to perhaps distract from the Epstein files and the manufactured trade war with Canada perhaps aimed at distracting the media from the Iran war.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at the costs the Felon has inflicted on Americans.  Here are excerpts:

Back in early March, speaking to a group of Republican lawmakers and donors who had gathered at his golf club in Doral, Florida, [the Felon] Donald Trump described the Iran war, which he had launched a couple of weeks earlier, as a “short-term excursion” that would end “soon.” Last Friday, the conflict passed the six-month mark. While the U.S. and Israel are no longer bombing Iranian targets on a daily basis, roughly fifty thousand American service members are still deployed to the region; the Strait of Hormuz is largely closed to commercial shipping; a memorandum of understanding that the two sides signed in June has expired; and the Trump Administration has reportedly told Middle Eastern mediators that it has no interest in reviving it.

With no end in sight, the costs of Trump’s war are mounting. Some of them can’t be expressed in dollars and cents. According to the Pentagon, eighteen U.S. service members have been killed and more than seven hundred and fifty wounded. The Iranian death toll is in the thousands, including more than two hundred children, according to estimates from UNICEF and the Iranian government. The war has spilled over into other countries, causing hundreds more deaths—thousands, if you include Israel’s assault on Lebanon.

In principle, it’s easier to estimate the economic costs of the war; in practice, the task is far from straightforward. Even if the calculation is restricted to the United States, you first have to count the military outlays on things such as munitions, additional troop deployments, and repairing the extensive damage that Iranian counterstrikes have done to American bases in the Middle East. Then there are the financial costs that higher energy prices have imposed on American households and businesses. Plus, there are more indirect costs, such as the penalties that Americans have paid in terms of higher inflation and rising interest rates. Only by putting all these things together is it possible to estimate the total cost. But let’s start with the bill for military expenditures, which will ultimately fall on taxpayers.

One issue with tallying them is that the Pentagon has been less than forthright about many aspects of the conflict. In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the conflict had cost roughly $37.5 billion, but he didn’t provide much in the way of detail. Shortly before Hegseth’s appearance, NBC News reported that internal Pentagon estimates put the true figure, including military-base reconstruction costs, at somewhere between eighty billion and a hundred billion dollars.

In air wars, the biggest single expense is often munitions, and that is true in this conflict. The Pentagon has made extensive use of precision missiles, such as Tomahawks, which cost $2.6 million each, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.), and advanced air-defense systems, such as Patriot-missile batteries, which cost $4.9 million. A C.S.I.S. analysis of the war’s cost, published earlier this summer, said that the Pentagon has used more than a thousand Tomahawks and as many as fourteen hundred Patriots, in addition to roughly ten thousand unguided “dumb” bombs. This dramatic rundown in munitions accounts for $26.1 billion of a total military cost of about forty billion dollars, the analysis said.

It identified the second-largest cost item as damage to U.S. bases in places such as Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which it estimated at up to $9.2 billion. Although the Pentagon has tried to play down the effectiveness of Iran’s attacks, they appear to have destroyed, wholly or partially, hundreds of structures, including aircraft hangars, fuel depots, radar facilities, warehouses, and barracks—delivering a blow to U.S. military infrastructure without precedent in recent times. . . . . When the conflict ends, Cancian went on, the Pentagon will have to think seriously about whether to rebuild or abandon the damaged facilities, given their vulnerability to future attacks.

Whatever the true figure is, it’s a considerable sum that comes on top of the bloated trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that has already been approved for 2026, and it is money that could, in theory, be used for other purposes. Take the seventy-three billion dollars in extra funding that House Republicans approved. The authors of an analysis published last week by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, pointed out that this amount of money would “provide full Medicaid coverage for 5 million more people, with $33 billion left over.” That money, in turn, could be used to substantially raise SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) for children from poor families and double the funding for the National Park Service and for emergency food-and-shelter assistance, the CAP authors said.

In broader economic terms, the biggest burden that the war has created is sharply higher energy prices. Since late February, the cost of gasoline has risen by more than a dollar a gallon, on average, across the fifty states: that’s more than a third. And petroleum isn’t the only fuel that has become more expensive. The price of diesel, which powers the trucks that traverse the country carrying goods of all types and sizes, has risen by roughly half. . . . . if you combine the rising prices of gas and diesel, the financial hit to Americans since the war began is about ninety-three billion dollars—more than seven hundred dollars per household.

That isn’t the final economic tally. The price of heating oil has shot up by about seventy per cent. The cost of fertilizers, which are largely made from methane gas, the price of which spiked after the war began, has also risen sharply, contributing to higher food prices. . . . . since February, the rate of inflation has risen from 2.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent. Market interest rates, which are influenced by inflation and inflation expectations, have also jumped up, raising the costs of mortgages, car loans, and other types of consumer credit.

Adding all these things together, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, put the total cost of the war for the typical American household at a thousand dollars—a figure he described as conservative. That was at the end of June. More recently, Zandi has raised his estimate to more than twelve hundred dollars. . . . “Trump decided to launch it, and Americans are paying for it.”

Thus far, the cost to Trump has largely been restricted to sagging poll ratings. Last week, a survey from Reuters/Ipsos put his approval rating at thirty-three per cent, matching the lowest level recorded by this poll during either of his terms in office, with just twenty-five per cent of respondents approving of his handling of Iran. Absent a break in the war’s current stalemate between now and the November midterms, the [Felon] President and his party may end up paying a higher political price. But the economic costs of the conflict can’t be reversed.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Felon And Pete Hegseth Are a Wrecking Ball

Like many I suspect, at times I find it is difficult to believe that the Felon is not a Russian asset given the Felon's blind allegiance to Vladimir Putin - does Putin have a full set of the Epstein files or other kompromat that terrifies the Felon? - and the severe damage the Felon and his incompetent Secretary of Defense are doing to America's national security and the U.S. military, especially the U.S. Army.  Putin must be smiling broadly.  Meanwhile, Putin is aiding Iran in the Felon's war of choice and making threatening moves towards Europe, yet the Felon's fealty to Putin remains undiminished.  Reportedly the Felon's emissary to Putin, Steve Witkoff told Putin Saturday that he’ll think back fondly on the “incredible stories and incredible memories” that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given him. This statement is beyond disturbing given Putin's war crimes against Ukrainian civilians. It will take many years to undo the damage done to relations with America's former allies, the purge's of competent  senior military commanders deemed insufficiently loyal to Pete Hegseth, and the racist and white supremacy agenda of the Felon/Hegseth that will likely make recruitment of servicemembers more difficult.  And then there is the ongoing disaster in the Iran war. A piece in the New York Times looks at the severe damage being willfully done. 

It is difficult to fathom the damage President Trump is doing to America’s national security. He is making our nation more vulnerable than it has been at any time since the cloudiest days of the Cold War.

Trump administration scandals come with such speed and frequency that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. One minute you’re reading about potential war crimes in the Caribbean. The next moment there’s a news alert about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ongoing purge of generals. Then you click over and read a story about depleted stocks of some of America’s most important munitions.

That’s a fraction of the havoc the administration has wrought. In a strange way, the very frequency of the scandals works to the administration’s advantage. Each new story distracts us from the last one, and we don’t have a minute to pause, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture.

I want to be careful not to be too alarmist. Our military is still highly capable, and we have watched it successfully execute some extraordinarily difficult missions during Trump’s second term. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and the rescue of two downed American airmen from the heart of Iran were remarkable feats of skill and courage.

It’s comforting — I guess — to know that Hegseth can’t undo the effects of a generations-long commitment to excellence in just 20 months.

That’s the end of the good news. From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security.

The short-term damage is serious enough. Even just to achieve what is at best a stalemate in the Persian Gulf, the administration has created a critical shortage in interceptors that can shoot down missiles and drones and in other precision munitions, including some of our most advanced offensive weapons.

At the same time, to maintain the stalemate against Iran, the United States is drawing resources from other, more dangerous theaters of potential conflict. There are now no active carrier battle groups in the Pacific region, for example, exactly when China has ramped up its military activities around Taiwan.

The lack of interceptors is escalating the crisis in Ukraine. Russia is able to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles virtually at will, creating a critical vulnerability for the Ukrainian war effort. Last week, for example, Kyiv endured the longest sustained bombing campaign on the Ukrainian capital since the opening days of the war.

The Economist has also reported that Putin is planning to throw hundreds of thousands of additional troops into the fight, and he’s provoking NATO with a series of incursions so severe (including, according to the German government, an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany) that it prompted John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, to visit Russia to reportedly warn Putin against any further aggression.

As long as Iran — a longstanding ally of Russia that’s closely linked to its neighbor through the Caspian Sea — remains in the fight, it can continue to deplete our interceptors to the point where it might take years to bring our stocks back to acceptable levels, even if we ramp up production at immense cost.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of terrible self-imposed wounds to America’s alliances. There are obvious immediate risks, for example, to withdrawing troops from allied nations or shortening military exercises with South Korea, but the damage done by engaging in trade wars with allies and threatening aggression against Greenland (remember that?) can’t be repaired by just one administration.

Even if the next Democratic president tries to reconcile with our allies, every allied government will be asking itself, “How long will this last?” Every prudent allied government will hedge its geopolitical bets, and that can harm the United States in incalculable ways.

Our allies fear not just that they’ve lost Trump, but even worse, they fear that they’ve lost a substantial portion of the American people.

We’ve already seen the consequences of American faithlessness. The Trump administration has pitched a fit demanding allied aid in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, only to be greeted with stony silence. Why should our allies expend blood and treasure standing with an American government that didn’t even have the decency to consult them before launching its costly, poorly planned Middle Eastern adventure?

Why should they expend blood and treasure standing with America when America is also threatening the independence and sovereignty of NATO member states? They are getting enough of that from Putin.

The end result could well be a period of extended Western vulnerability as Europe bears the considerable costs (and takes several years to increase its defense capabilities) to deter Russia even while it can’t count on the United States to fulfill its treaty obligations.

The long-term threat is to the character and competence of the armed forces. They are becoming politicized, and the politicization of a military can both destroy its combat effectiveness and turn it into an instrument of domestic oppression.

If you are under the delusion that Hegseth’s purges are about competence more than loyalty — a welcome corrective to the excesses of D.E.I. programs — well then, as we say in the South, bless your heart.

Trump’s critics aren’t the only ones alarmed, I’d refer you to the recent resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. As Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan and Michael Scherer reported for The Atlantic, in a recent White House meeting, “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump.”

Driscoll was reportedly worried that Hegseth’s purges were hampering the ability of the Army to transform itself. And this is just as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are demonstrating that the world is in the midst of another revolution in military affairs, and we are not prepared.

The combination of corruption, stupidity and sycophancy — the Pentagon was recently caught surreptitiously employing conservative media influencers who reliably defend Hegseth online — that pervades the Trump administration is now infecting the Pentagon at the moment that our most powerful enemies are becoming more aggressive.

I loved my time serving my country. It was one of the great honors of my life. If anything, I’m biased toward viewing the military in general and the Army in particular through rose-colored glasses. But my view is getting darker. Terrible leadership of even the most virtuous institutions can have terrible consequences.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that the battlefield is the most unforgiving place on earth.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Jen Kiggans Has Betrayed Our Servicemembers

To listen to Jen Kiggans' political ads is to listen to a fantasy world where Kiggans is falsely depicted as "bipartisan," looking out for the best interests of her constituents and making life more affordable for residents of Hampton Roads. Kiggans' actually voting record reveals a totally different story where she votes lockstep with the Felon's agenda and voted for the falsely named "big beautiful bill" that gave huge tax beaks for the very wealthy, perhaps threw a few bread crumbs to  some in the middle class, and slashed funding for Medicaid and other social programs leaving many Virginians poised to lose healthcare coverage and other critical benefits.  She brags about being a nurse practitioner yet is fine with people losing access to healthcare in sharp contrast to the views of many I know in the medical field.  With Kiggans, her only real agenda is to kiss the Felon's diaper encased ass and to spread falsehoods spewed by the Felon and his sycophants within the GOP. Perhaps most damning, however, is her betrayal of our servicemembers as she continuously backs the Felon and his demented Secretary of Defense. One can only hope that the thousands of military voters in Hampton Roads will open their eyes to Kiggans' many betrayals and vote for Democrat Elaine Lura who, unlike Kiggans, will put her constituents and our servicemembers first.  A column in the Virginian Pilot looks at Kiggans' betrayal of the military.  Here are column highlights:

During my time as an F-14 pilot deployed on the USS Eisenhower, I was struck by how normal everyone was. Yes, we had all worked hard to master unique skills under a very disciplined environment, but we were still just people. Looking after each other was of prime importance, good skippers garnered devotion, leaders who used others for their own advancement were labeled “diodes” since they only operated “one way.”

 

Of special note were the enlisted, a successful culture that combined danger, youth and hard-living conditions is difficult to create and easy to ruin. . . . .  I’m only alive today because the chiefs and petty officers guided me through this deadly labyrinth while the junior enlisted working the flight deck made the impossible seem ordinary. Amazingly, these people were and are, by and large, kids.

We were regularly reminded how important it was to look after our troops. Sure, we might have two nuclear reactors and 70 advanced aircraft, but if the 19- and 20-year-olds couldn’t feel like anybody cared about them, the whole system would start to crumble. A salute wasn’t a sign of superiority; it was an acknowledgement of a duty for someone to take responsibility for another.

At 62, I’ve lost too many friends to brain cancer and seen the effects of PTSD first hand. Powerful radar radiation, cancerous chemicals and the experience of seeing friends die, even in training, can have consequences for 20 or 30 years.  . . . . We as citizens have a sacred duty to our neighbors on active duty, for they are too young to fully understand the long-term consequences of the game they are playing.

Which brings me to U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans. We sent our sailors overseas, to a war the American people didn’t approve, for which Congress didn’t debate, for a threat that both our Virginia senators stated did not exist. In the meantime, we insulted our allies, alienated our neighbors and disregarded military expertise. And with that we sent our young men and women to endure incredible hardship, danger and isolation.

We spent 20 years, a trillion dollars and 2,461 lives with the war in Afghanistan. We spent 20 years and lost roughly 58,000 lives in Vietnam. It’s likely that the Republican-led Congress will squander young men and women’s lives for no better reasons than they did with our previous wars. Was it too hard for Kiggans to vote on a war powers resolution or impose even the smallest of constraints on the president? Can she confidently say that the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan are not going to be repeated with the war we stumbled into now?

The issues with the USS Lincoln and Ford deployments are not normal. They are the result of gross negligence from our Congress members who view the young service members in our Navy as pawns to wave the flag at, not real people. Sure, you can ask our military to do incredibly hard things, but you better have a damn good reason that can stand up to 20/20 hindsight.

An aircraft carrier only works when the citizens sending it to sea do so with honesty, competency and trust. Kiggans is too scared of Trump to do what’s right. It’s on all of us to hold her accountable.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Has No Idea of the Tidal Wave That’ May Be Coming

It's Labor Day weekend which traditionally sees political campaigns shift into high gear with the mid-term elections a mere two months away.  The Felon has made it obvious that he will do anything and everything to make it more difficult for Americans to vote perhaps suggesting that he does have some vague understanding of his unpopularity and the drag he poses on Republican candidates.  Not, of course, that he would ever admit this reality.  With many working and lower middle class families struggling and demanding help with ever higher prices, the Felon is focused on building monuments to himself, enriching himself and his family, starting a trade war with Canada - perhaps to get the Iran war that he has lost out of the headlines at least temporarily - in which Canada has very real weapons if it chooses to use them, and spewing lies about how wonderful he and the economy are.  Meanwhile, the national debt has ballooned - the Felon is responsible for 30% or more of it - upsetting the bond market, causing some former allies to shift gold reserves out of the USA, and pushing mortgage rates higher.  The only ones enjoying a "golden age" are the Felon and his family and the super wealthy.  In this context a lengthy piece at The New Republic suggests that the mid-term elections may prove far worse for Republicans than many pundits are predicting. Yes, in politics much can change in two months, but absent some unexpected surprise, it may be difficult to change the current trajectory.  Here are article highlights:

On this cusp of Labor Day, when election campaigns kick into fourth gear, I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have to say it: The voters are going to barber-strap Donald Trump in the November midterms.

I’ve been wrong before, of course. On the other hand, I’ve also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody—I mean everybody—was saying that Bill Clinton’s Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year’s midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police—Gingrich’s mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican—than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely.

The first is people like you and me—the people who have always thought he was a fascist goon and an imbecile, and who would go out to cast a vote against him and his minions even if it meant voting for Homer Simpson. We are turbo-charged to get to the polls, and there are millions of us.

The second is the swing voters who were, to be frank—oh, okay, let’s put it slightly more politely—naïve enough to believe that Trump could lower prices and fix the economy. They know now that Trump cannot do that; he possesses no such magic wand. Would that they had known in November 2024. But they know now, and those who bother to vote will vote 80, 90 percent against Trump and his party.

Third is the BMPs: the Betrayed MAGA Pigeons. They’re not the same as swing voters. Unlike swing voters, they were never going to think for five minutes about voting for a Black woman in 2024. But to feel okay about themselves, they had to build a case for Trump in their brains that justified their Trump vote, even made it a righteous protest against the status quo. Core to the BMP justification were a few central ideas: that Trump would improve the economy; that he was right on immigration and heads needed to be cracked; that Kamala Harris was the real warmonger, and Trump would calmly keep the peace.

Well, that defense against reality has been crushed like a grape under a tire. Trump has failed on the economy. He’s gone way too far for these people on immigration (Joe Rogan this year compared ICE to the Gestapo). And finally, the Iran war destroyed it. Trump and the Republicans are losing the “manosphere,” a process Sidney Blumenthal described with coruscating precision on this site a couple weeks ago. But they’re losing many other segments of MAGA-land as well that simply can’t believe he started a war; let alone an obviously stupid war that we’re losing; let alone at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, as the Israeli prime minister just bragged on Israeli TV.

The first two groups will turn out in droves against Republican candidates. The third group won’t do that. But it, dispirited and confused, simply won’t turn out. And their absence, I think, is what will be decisive. There will be no defense against the onslaught.

Well, you say. That may all be true. But a clever politician can reframe things. We’re on the cusp of Labor Day—the traditional start of general-election campaigns in the regular-people-start-to-pay-attention sense. On the assumption that most people haven’t been paying attention so far, doesn’t Trump have time to redirect the narrative?

The answer is that he does, maybe, have the time. He certainly has the money, though he may be hoarding it for his own selfish purposes well beyond this year. But he doesn’t have the brains. And he doesn’t have the brains because his brain marinates in a fantasy world in which Trump can do no wrong.

The cultural power that he possessed in the spring and summer of 2025 has completely vaporized. He sits up there and says we’ve won the war, we control the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation’s no big deal. Affordability isn’t a thing. Data centers are great, and if you’re against them, you want to stay “backwards and poor.” The United States is the “hottest” country on earth. As the American people cry out for help, he’s obsessed with building monuments to himself.

With the multibillion-dollar propaganda machine he’s got behind him, there are, of course, still millions of Americans who believe him. But to return to my three groups: The first group of course doesn’t believe a word; the median representative of the second group has lost all faith in him; and the BMPs have turned on him.

And ask yourself: What’s going to get better in this country between now and Election Day? Answer: Not much that I can see. We got a good jobs report this morning, but the bond market is still jittery and central banks are contemplating rate hikes. On Iran, he may cut a deal, but it will be a bad, desperate deal, and most people will recognize it as such. He’d better pray that a new ICE shooting controversy doesn’t explode in October. Am I missing anything? Ah, yes. Water-body renaming. He may score a couple more key wins there.

So: By November 3, there’s every chance that Trump will be more unpopular than he is today. His mental deterioration in just these last few weeks is noticeable, and in two more months, he may literally be drooling.

The result? Again—I don’t want to jinx anything. I’ll just say it like this: I heard someone the other day on TV say that we may need to start paying more attention to Senate races in states like Kansas, where Democratic preacher Adam Hamilton is in a near dead heat with GOP incumbent Roger Marshall. In Nebraska, a recent poll has independent Dan Osborn running even with GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts. One recent Arkansas poll was close. In Florida, everybody laughs off the democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination. But she pulled off a stunning upset in the Democratic primary, and she did it without running a single television ad. And the appointed Republican incumbent is knee-deep in that Medicaid scandal involving the governor’s wife.

I’m not predicting Democratic wins in the last two states. I am saying that a wave is building. And the man toward whom the wave is heading looks out on the ocean and sees calm, pacific seas. He’s delusional, spent, incapable of responding to reality. In the next two months, all that is only going to get worse—and more apparent to the American people.