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.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Can’t Handle Reality And the Truth

The Felon has always lied - over 30,000 lies during his first regime - and his narcissism will not allow him to ever be wrong or currently face the reality that he is highly unpopular. To listen to him, the USA is winning the war against Iran and controls the Strait of Hormuz (it does not) and it's only a matter of time before Iran surrenders. Indeed, there are increasing reasons to question whether he can recognize objective reality as opposed to the delusions in his mind and his own lies. Seemingly, no one at the White House appears willing to present objective facts to the Felon or do anything to trigger his anger. The emperor has no clothes but no one wants to tell him.  Hence more untrue boasts about the Iran war, the US economy, the price of gasoline and diesel dropping imminently, and his own popularity despite polls showing he is highly toxic outside of the Kool-Aid drinking MAGA base and older Republicans who live in a fantasy world where they think the GOP is still the party of Reagan. Watching the Felon's shit show of lies that evidence his lack of being tethered to reality is upsetting and frightening given the damage being done to the nation which is now weaker, more isolated, and disliked than any time since the end of WWII. A column in the New York Times looks at where we find ourselves:

Can [the Felon] President Trump distinguish truth from fiction? Does he know what is real and what is the product of a computer program? One wants to believe that the president of the United States, cloaked in immense power, would understand the difference between reality and fantasy. One would hope, given the terrible stakes of his decision-making, that he had the capacity to understand and internalize objective reality, even if he did not like it.

But then consider the past week of presidential activity. Last Friday, the president announced a “historic” deal with the interim government of Venezuela to give the United States direct control over a huge portion of the nation’s proven oil reserves.

“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president wrote on Truth Social. [The Felon] Trump contends that this will lead immediately to low gas prices. Except, of course, that it won’t.

Behind the boast lies a murky arrangement that leaves us with a host of unanswered questions. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is in disrepair — who will restore the nation’s actual capacity to extract and refine oil? Who will pay for it? And given the current instability of Venezuelan politics, including the uncertain role of the United States as imperial caretaker after it deposed President Nicolás Maduro, what are the odds that this deal lasts beyond Trump’s time in office? Will American companies risk billions on the hope that this arrangement will outlast his administration? And perhaps most relevant to the president’s political standing, when, if ever, will this deal lower the price at the pump?

These are basic concerns. There is no indication they have ever reached Trump’s mind. And even if someone did raise these issues, his effusive and ebullient announcement suggests that he paid little attention to those concerns. He wants the deal to be great, and so it is . . .

Even more unsettling, on the question of the [Felon's] president’s interest in objective reality, is his use of artificial intelligence. On Sunday, the president posted an A.I.-generated video of the destruction of Kharg Island, an Iranian stronghold. “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!,” he wrote. The post came shortly after the United States military resumed its attacks on Iranian forces. We also know that [the Felon] Trump does not like to receive traditional briefings about American operations in the region. Instead, he is shown a brief highlight reel of destruction, what one official described as “stuff blowing up.” For the record, the most recent Kharg Island bombing was in April.

One would like to assume that Trump can distinguish between footage of actual combat and A.I.-generated propaganda. But can he? For his part, Trump shared the Kharg Island video as if it were real. . . . For six months now, he has said the same thing: that the Iranian military has been destroyed, that the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz, that Iran’s surrender is just over the horizon and that both peace and American victory are imminent.

Are these lies, or does he believe them the same way he believed that the crowd at his first inauguration was larger than the one in 2009? Or is he, again, trying to change reality through the power of positive thinking?

There is one other recent set of moves that raises similar questions about the president’s ability to grasp objective reality: his strategy for the upcoming midterm elections. By any measure, Trump is brutally unpopular. His average approval rating has sunk to the mid-to-low 30s, he is underwater on virtually every issue . . . and the public disapproves of most of his schemes and stunts, such as his pathetic move to rename Lake Ontario to spite Canadian leaders. He has dragged down Republicans in the House, who are projected to lose their majority, and is dragging them down in the Senate as well, where a once favorable map has turned sideways,

In these circumstances, the typical president would keep his distance from his co-partisans in the legislature, mindful of the way his presence might harm their odds. Not Donald Trump. He is practically forcing them to stand by his side at a “midterm convention,” where they will defend him and his record to the country at large. This is pure political malpractice. But Trump can’t see it. . . . . he is behaving as if he is on the brink of a landslide victory granted to his party by voters grateful for a productive and successful administration.

His White House ballroom, now rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court, and his proposed monuments — even his commemorative coin — all reflect the same belief: that he is the greatest and most popular person to ever serve as president, maybe the most popular person to ever live. (It is not hard to imagine Trump telling the world that he is “more popular than Jesus.” He’s practically said as much.) He even shared an image ranking himself above George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, among others, as the greatest president of all time.

Trump exists in a world where he can do no wrong. Where he is loved by the people and feared by his enemies. His deals never fail, his wars are overwhelming victories and his party is on the march to another majority.

The problem is that this relentless — almost religious — positivity leaves you ill-prepared to deal with crisis. And the presidency is a job defined by crisis, either sudden or of your own making. Trump’s unusual relationship to the objective world leaves him dangerously unable to pivot, shift gears or change course. It is not that he thinks he can steer around the iceberg, it’s that he doesn’t believe it is there in the first place, even when it is staring him in the face.

Taken all together, it adds up to a mounting political disaster for the president and his allies — and an actual, material disaster for the rest of us.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

The Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored

The so-called "Right" - comprised of Christofascists, Republicans prostituting themselves to them, and countless ideologues and conspiracy theorists - have several favored myths (lies, in reality) that they love to push.  One is that Christians are being persecuted when in reality the claimed persecution is merely restraints on their ability to persecute others. Another is the lie that tax cuts "pay for themselves" and that trickle down economics works as evidenced by the ballooning national debt and the ever growing wealth disparities. A third is the myth/lie that the federal government, colleges and universities and research organizations all censor the speech of "conservatives and conservative "Christians," something Fox News promotes. Of course, there is no evidence to support the claim and in the Felon's regime's quest to stamp out delusion driven imagined censorship real damage is being done to both organizations, research projects, and even American foreign policy (to the extent the Felon hasn't already destroyed it). The take away is that the political and social right seemingly have a need feel under imagined attacks even as they do to others what they decry if done to them.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this third myth and the damage being done.

For nearly a year and a half, the Trump administration prepared its case. Political appointees inside the State Department combed through old files and databases. Civil servants received notice that their personal emails would be examined. Darren Beattie—the founder of a far-right conspiracist website, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy—sent out a request for files on anyone who had communicated with or written about the Global Engagement Center, a now-dissolved agency that once worked to expose propaganda campaigns by Russia, China, Iran, and other countries around the world.

The request, seen last year by the MIT Technology Review, was far-reaching. Beattie was seeking information on Bill Gates; the commentator Bill Kristol; Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official; a German government minister; the analyst Renée DiResta, formerly at Stanford University, as well as others associated with a research project called the Election Integrity Partnership; and, as it happens, me.

This unprecedented investigation was meant to expose the Biden administration’s “censorship–industrial complex,” a shadowy network allegedly dedicated to the mass suppression of American free speech. Since 2020, internet trolls have accused Biden-administration officials, social-media companies, and university researchers of weaving a nefarious plot to censor conservatives. Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.

And yet for the past year and half, neither Beattie nor anyone else has actually managed to prove that the plot ever existed. Like a soap bubble that vanishes with the touch of a hand, the “censorship–industrial complex” belongs to that mystical category of things that disappear when you examine them too closely.

The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship. None has done so. One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone. The answer was no. Another, brought against the Stanford research project by America First Legal—Stephen Miller’s team—failed in July, when a judge found the suit had no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after a discovery process requested by the plaintiffs, no evidence. . . . . Other cases against the Biden administration were simply settled by President Trump’s Department of Justice without finding any evidence of “censorship” either.

Now the Trump administration’s most dedicated ideologues have also failed, spectacularly, to prove the existence of a “censorship–industrial complex” inside the State Department. After months of searching, Beattie’s successor as undersecretary for public diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, recently decided to publicize the unimpressive results of the inquiry into the Global Engagement Center. But instead of writing a report admitting that the documents that surfaced contained nothing of interest, she leaked them, selectively, to an internet troll known as DataRepublican.

“DataRepublican” is the X pseudonym of Jennica Pounds, who has a history of misreading data and connecting dots to describe nonexistent conspiracies. But the plan went wrong: Upon receipt of raw documents from Rogers, including screenshots without context, Pounds decided that Rogers was a “Deep State” operative and refused to release them. Subsequently, it emerged that Pounds herself has been secretly employed by the Pentagon, which presumably makes her a deep-state operative too. But that’s another story.

Because Pounds would not publish the documents, Rogers did so herself, . . . As she must have known, they contained no evidence of conspiracy, no proof that anyone in the Biden administration censored millions or even dozens of social-media posts. Instead, Rogers, who is theoretically responsible for promoting good relations with people in foreign countries, went after a series of U.S. citizens.

Rogers also criticized another very public, not remotely secret report, written jointly by the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, and the European Union, investigating “gendered disinformation,” a subject that sounds very “woke” until you realize that deepfake porn videos and orchestrated misogyny are tactics regularly used against female politicians such as Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign minister, or Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. The Iranian regime uses them to harass female dissidents around the world.

In the normal course of things the saga of the GEC documents would be, and should be, dismissed as a storm in a teapot. But unfortunately, the administration’s pursuit of a nonexistent censorship–industrial complex has already had real consequences for real people. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was closing the Global Engagement Center because it had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” This was untrue, and even at the time there was no evidence for such an extraordinary statement. On the contrary, the GEC was the only institution in the U.S. government that was publicly tracking hostile international information operations, including by exposing websites in Africa or Latin America that appeared local but were in fact run by Moscow or Beijing. Rubio’s statement maligned the people who worked on these reports. Will the secretary of state now apologize to them? Compensate them? Rehire them?

The closing of the center also means that no one is now doing that work. Thanks to Rogers, Beattie, and a handful of others, the U.S. decided to blind itself to the reality that Russia, China, and Iran, with its viral animated Lego videos, all run deceptive campaigns that reach millions of people around the world. And now Americans do nothing to halt, explain, or counter them.

As if this same conspiracy theory had not done enough damage, Rogers and others at the State Department are also putting the nonexistent censorship–industrial complex at the center of American foreign policy toward Europe now too. At a conference at the Hudson Institute last spring, Rogers said that a “censorship class” had already “scuttled to Europe” to pursue a supposed vendetta against Americans from across the ocean. At the same event, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri . . . declared that “we are witnessing a deeply troubling assault on free speech” in Europe.

These views, all of which derive from the same set of false stories, are actively shaping American policy in Europe. Late last month, the State Department put forth plans to spend $4 million to support right-wing media in Europe, including a consortium of “independent journalists” who would support the Trump administration’s view of the world.

Belatedly, even some part of the Trump administration appears to have quietly concluded that all of this has gone too far and that maybe, in fact, it would be useful for the U.S. government to understand how hostile governments seek to manipulate the internet. In May, the State Department put out a tender for software developers who could help analyze “foreign adversarial propaganda” and thus replicate the work once done by the Global Engagement Center.

As DiResta wrote this week, “they’re hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.” So much time, energy, and money was wasted pursuing a fiction. Now more time, energy, and money will need to be spent to clean up the damage.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Iran: The Logistics Nightmare Facing U.S. Warships

One of the hallmarks of the Felon's war of choice against Iran has been the lack of planning for an extended war being conducted on the opposite side of the world. The Felon and his sycophants believed the war would last a few days or a few weeks at most and seemingly little was considered in terms of a more extended conflict and the difficulties of supplying troops and U.S. warships in the war zone. The U.S. Navy's main supply base is in Bahrain on the west side of the Persian Gulf reachable only via the Strait of Hormuz. On the first day of the war, Iran struck back and largely destroyed the Navy's logistics base leaving the only real resupply facilities thousands of miles away.  This has created a logistics nightmare for resupply operations and has lead to issues with both food supplies and refueling for aircraft fuel and fuel for non-atomic powered vessels.  Any planning with an ounce of foresight would have contemplated this potential mess, but such seeming was not the case with the Felon and his incompetent Secretary of Defense.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Navy's difficult situation and resupply issues that will not be going away.  Here are highlights:

On a typical U.S. aircraft carrier, 5,000 crew members work around the clock and require up to four meals a day. Although the ships are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters flying off them use millions of gallons of fuel each week.

Carriers don’t travel alone. They are protected by destroyers armed with antiaircraft and cruise missiles, together forming what is called a carrier strike group. Those ships also need to be resupplied with food and fuel.

There are currently two carriers and 12 destroyers in the Middle East helping to enforce a blockade of Iranian ports. . . . . The Navy has about 20 ships in the Middle East, carrying roughly 20,000 sailors and Marines. The logistical challenges are immense: The ships need enough food for more than 420,000 meals and about eight million gallons of fuel each week.

The Navy has operated there for decades and built supply depots throughout the region.

But Iran destroyed a critical Navy logistics base in Bahrain on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, and other ports in the region that can accommodate an aircraft carrier or a supply ship are also within range of Iranian missiles and drones, making them inaccessible.

Navy supply ships in the region now have to travel 2,200 miles to a tiny island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia to bring food, fuel and other goods to the warships in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.

The next option is to go to Singapore, 3,700 miles away — which requires the ships to pass through the Strait of Malacca, a busy commercial corridor.

Because the war has cut off access to nearby bases in the Middle East, the only option is to undertake resupply missions at sea every five or six days. This process is potentially hazardous, exposing both the receiving ship and the supply ship to risk. During these missions, both ships need to travel together, keeping precisely the same course and speed. With waves, winds and current, it’s a challenge to keep the ships safely within about 150 feet of each other for hours.

At the same time, helicopters ferry supplies between the ships, carrying pallets of food, spare parts and mail in nets slung underneath.

The deployments for these warships are open-ended — they only go home once the president and the defense secretary decide so. However, this is not sustainable.

The Navy has only 11 aircraft carriers in total, and has sent four of them to the Middle East for the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing lengthy repairs in shipyards and will not be able to deploy again for years. 

One carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, spent most of its nine months at sea with no port calls. Under normal conditions, a Navy carrier would visit port about once a month to give its crew a brief rest.  On Aug. 20, the Lincoln was relieved by the U.S.S. George Washington and began making its way back home. The Lincoln was expected to make a stop on Wednesday in Thailand for a few days before continuing across the Pacific to its home base in San Diego.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches off the Rails

Living in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, one is surrounded by military bases - the Norfolk Naval Base, Joint Bases Little Creek and Fort Eustis, Oceana Airbase, Langley Air Force Base, as well as smaller operations - and literally thousands of military service members.  Things that impact the U.S. military impact both the local economy, but also the lives of friends, neighbors and their families. The result is that when there is an incompetent Secretary of Defense with discriminatory policies that favor skin color over all else and a goal of driving out competent generals and admirals there are real world consequences both locally and at the national security level.  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out Pete Hegseth is driving the U.S. military into a ditch no doubt much to the delight of America's foes in the Kremlin and Beijing. Rather than looking out for America's strategic best interests or concern about the supplies and morale of our servicemembers, Hegseth's sole concerns are (i) pleasing the mad king in the White House and (ii) ridding the Pentagon of anyone he views as disloyal and/or unwilling to parrot his lies.  Hegseth's incompetence is putting all of us and especially our servicemembers at risk.  Here are article highlights:

Making Pete Hegseth the secretary of defense was always a huge gamble. A television host with little background in national-security or defense affairs, who topped out as a major in the National Guard, he was nominated based on the same qualification shared by most of Donald Trump’s other appointees: loyalty. And now the price of that gamble is evident. The Pentagon is careening offtrack under a secretary of defense who is firing or forcing the resignations of officers and civilian officials, not because they are unqualified but because he believes they are insufficiently loyal to him, personally.

The latest casualty of Hegseth’s ongoing purge is Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned today after repeatedly clashing with the secretary of defense. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer report, a person familiar with Driscoll’s resignation said that he had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” In the careful circumlocutions of Washington-speak, that means that Driscoll went to the White House to complain about Hegseth, and the president sided with Hegseth.

Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims “spit me out.” He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary.

Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth’s irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

In a time of war, however, Hegseth’s shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth’s incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump’s good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.

Hegseth was reportedly virtually alone among senior officials in supporting Trump’s decision to attack Iran—when he should have been the one person in the room who knew better. The secretary of state and CIA director were against the idea. According to the The Wall Street Journal, even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another of Trump’s unqualified-but-sycophantic appointees, mustered the courage to give the president bad news, telling Trump that killing the reigning ayatollah and striking Iran would “likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons”; that the Iranians “would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market”; and that Iran “would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East,” all of which happened almost immediately after Trump gave the order to go to war.

Hegseth, however, supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. A man of principle would have warned his president even at the risk of his job, but Pete Hegseth is not that man.

And now Hegseth has banished another enemy, Driscoll, from the Pentagon. But as the saying goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that multiple senior military leaders—those still left, that is—have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran.

Hegseth’s response to this story was to send his spokespeople out to castigate the press for revealing classified information. In an amateurish bungle, the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the reports were “inaccurate” but also a “betrayal of the force”—leading sensible people to ask how the stories could be false and dangerous at the same time. And these were just the responses from people who are officially authorized to speak for the Pentagon; another bombshell report over the weekend revealed that the department has recruited online influencers into paid roles, but without either the influencers or the Pentagon telling anyone about their cozy arrangement with the government.

Fortunately, even under the strain of a petty and incompetent secretary, and a president mired in his delusions, senior military officers are still speaking up and telling their boss the truth about America’s parlous defense situation. One of the advantages of a large bureaucracy staffed with professionals is that much of it can run and function, at least for a while, under even the most inept leaders.

But Hegseth is apparently close to getting the Pentagon he wants: Much like his boss at the White House, Hegseth seems to desire a building full of loyalists who put the boss’s personal fortunes over the national interest. Some reports indicate, for example, that Hegseth wants to replace Driscoll with Parnell—who has no significant qualifications for the post beyond his time fighting with the press on the secretary’s behalf.

The result of all this is that the United States is losing a war to a third-rate power in the Middle East. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing their rampage in Europe and apparently considering things so perilous that the CIA director had to fly to Moscow just to warn the Kremlin off of whatever it was thinking of doing. The Chinese are watching as Trump and Hegseth have stripped the Pacific theater of its only American aircraft carrier. In the midst of this chaos, Hegseth does chin-ups while he ponders calling all of America’s admirals and generals back to another mass meeting so he can again carp at them about fat soldiers and bearded sailors.

Pete Hegseth has failed in every mission except one: keeping his job. But firing or forcing out everyone else in the Pentagon will not make Pete Hegseth into the secretary of defense America and its men and women in uniform need. With each dismissal, he exposes only his own insecurities, even as he manages to stay employed—but the people and the armed forces of the United States are paying the inevitable price of his incompetence.

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The Felon/GOP's Obsession Wit "Blood and Soil"

Project 2025, which the Felon claimed to know nothing about during the 2024 campaign (he lied as usual) but is striving to now implement, is at its core a racist, white "Christian" nationalist agenda that seeks to define and empower "real Americans" and "heritage Americans" and relegate everyone else to "other" status. The Felon and his henchmen are blocking immigration for non-whites, having ICE agents pick up anyone looking possibly Hispanic, and embracing white South Africans who they claim are facing discrimination in their home country. The only attribute these select immigrants have, of course, is their skin color.  The irony is that many of the advocates for "heritage Americans - those able to trace their ancestry to the colonial period, to Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish early settlers - do not qualify themselves. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and the Felon himself do not meet this qualification and JD Vance 's children are half Indian (as in India), so the hypocrisy is writ large. Similarly, only certain types of "Christians" are welcome in this racist and reactionary movement. Liberal Christians - who actually follow Christ's dictates on social gospel - are excluded. A piece at Salon looks at this obsession: 

Nine years ago this month, America was introduced to what was then called the “alt-right” and is now pretty much just “the right.” On Aug. 11, 2017, we witnessed what had been advertised as a “Unite the Right” rally in which a large group of young white men marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil!” The next day, a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer was killed by an alt-right participant who drove his car through the crowd at high speed. President Donald Trump famously announced that there were “very fine people on both sides,” and it was clear to many Americans just where he and the Republican Party were heading. 

It was startling at the time to hear those chants. They seemed like something out of the history books. Such open antisemitism was a vestige of the Klan and neo-Nazi marches of the past, and the words “blood and soil” had no American antecedent at all, at least not the specific term. They are associated with the Nazis, derived from the German völkisch movement, which romantically valorized the agrarian people as the backbone of society and evolved into the eugenics and ethnic cleansing programs under Adolf Hitler. 

A large faction of the modern American right has now adopted this idea to promote nativism and white nationalism, calling it “Heritage American” and basically positing the idea that only people of European ancestry are appropriate to live in the United States. But it’s actually even more specific than that. A true heritage American would be able to trace their ancestry to the colonial period, to Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish early settlers.

The most famous of those pushing the Heritage American idea is Vice President JD Vance, although he doesn’t use the term. In his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, he declared, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” . . . People will not fight for abstraction, but they will fight for their home.”

Vance has said that he looks forward to being buried in that old cemetery himself, as will his children. But as political analyst Mona Charen noted, “his children are the product of a marriage between himself and the daughter of recent immigrants. Her ancestors are buried in India. Is that their ‘homeland’? Are his children less American than he [is]?” 

Aside from that important point, what Vance says is simply not true. Americans have fought for “abstractions” plenty of times, including two bloody World Wars, both of which were fought on foreign shores. If you ever had the chance to talk to World War II veterans, you know they believed they were fighting for “freedom” against the scourge of fascism. Setting aside Pearl Harbor, any real threat to the “homeland” was mostly an abstraction in itself. And all the literature about the American Revolution itself is rife with the passionate cries for liberty and equality, not paeans to “the land.” 

The late Gordon Wood, the preeminent scholar of the revolutionary period, explained that there was no common lineage, even at the nation’s founding. Hence, these “Heritage Americans,” thinking they are the one true bloodline, are deluded. There were three quarters of a million people of African descent, thousands of Native Americans, people from every European nation and quite a few from elsewhere. The country was always a nation of immigrants and, according to Wood, a widespread concern at the time was that forming a national identity could be difficult.

But we did — around the Declaration of Independence and the belief in individual liberty and equality, as formalized in the Bill of Rights. America is the only country on earth that organized itself this way, but as Wood pointed out, we had no choice. Unlike other countries, we were literally not “a people” until we became a nation. 

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — one of the justices who voted in the minority in Trump v. Barbara, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee automatic birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors — was quizzed heavily on the idea of America as a creedal nation when he recently made the rounds flogging his children’s book. His response caused much agita among the Heritage American types. “Our nation is not founded on a religion,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation. And I hope we take a moment to reflect on that and to recommit ourselves to that.”

The justice’s mention of religion is what struck a nerve because the insistence that the country was founded explicitly as a Christian nation is fundamental to the Heritage American belief system. That specific argument has been going on forever, and Vance and others — like Tucker Carlson — who have jumped on this bandwagon, know it to be a potent signal to the powerful evangelical bloc. To have an avatar of far-right jurisprudence espouse the belief that America is, in fact, a creedal nation and was not founded on Christianity was a welcome shock.

As the Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa reported, various red states are now attempting to pass laws disallowing naturalized citizens from holding office, essentially creating a group of second-class citizens. This is yet another attempt to create a “blood and soil” nation out of one that was built on something else entirely. 

America has never perfectly lived up to those ideals, and the struggle to do so continues to be painful for those who have yet to fully benefit from the nation’s promise. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. But attempting to redefine the country as white nationalist völkism is a fool’s errand. Wait until Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito discovers that he doesn’t qualify because his family didn’t emigrate to the U.S. until the 20th century, and Donald Trump will be mighty disappointed to find out that he and four of his five children are not true Americans because their mothers were born in another country. Once you start pulling on this thread, the whole thing starts to unravel. 

As Wood wrote, “since the whole world is in the U.S., nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the ‘one people’ that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

For the record, on my mother's side, I would be a "heritage America" because I have ancestors from England who arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600's, English and Scottish ancestors who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in the early 1700's, and French ancestors who arrived in New Orleans shortly after the city's founding. Yet, since I am gay, the authors of Project 2025 would no doubt say I do not qualify. 

 

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