Roaming Charges: Eyes Open, Minds Wide Shut

+ In 2002, that quipster Donald Rumsfeld responded to a reporter’s question about the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had given WMDs to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups (or had any WMDs, at all) with his now notorious “unknowns”: 

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

+ Despite the debacle he orchestrated in Iraq, Rumsfeld reiterated the quote years later (he was obviously proud of it) in his memoir The Known and Unknown. The so-called “Rumsfeld Matrix” wasn’t original to Donald Rumsfeld. He later credited the phrase to former NASA Administrator William Graham in the 1990s, who used the phrase to describe the difficulties (still unresolved) of building an effective ballistic missile defense system. But the formulation actually goes back at least to the 1960s when  Lt. Gen. William B. Bunker described the problems encountered when engineering complex weapons systems: “There are two kinds of technical problems: there are the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.”

+ All of these problems still exist, naturally. But with the Trump administration the most dangerous “unknown” is one that Rumsfeld didn’t think of mentioning: the unknown knows, the known consequences of actions that the leadership of the Trump war machine seem totally unaware of…such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on Gulf oil producing states, the proven inability of airwars to provoke revolutions or install “friendlier” regimes.

+ On the centenary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Alexander Cockburn and I wrote a reappraisal of the man who got his military briefings in cartoon format: 

When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66, whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.

The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces was set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launch-pads, with the minuscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the Joint Chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money”. The president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

+ Now it appears that Trump, even farther along than Reagan in the declining arc of his cognitive collapse, is getting his “briefings” on the stumbling progress of his Iran war in the form of two-minute “highlight reels” of US airstrikes “blowing up stuff.” But there’s no evidence that Trump has much of a clue about the stuff Iran is blowing up in response or how difficult it will be to stop them.  

For example, it’s unlikely that Trump was briefed on the significance of Iran’s strike on Israel’s largest chemical weapons plants in the Negev desert, near the Dimona nuclear complex. Iranian missiles hit the Rotem chemical facility, which manufactures white phosphorous, the outlawed chemical bombs that Israel has repeatedly deployed against international law in southern Lebanon and Gaza, a weapon that burns the flesh off of humans and animals.

+ Nearly a month into Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran, the US has conducted air strikes against more than 10,000 different targets across Iran.

+ The Israeli Air Force has dropped more than 15,000 bombs on Iran since the start of the war. By comparison, it hit Iran with around 4,000 bombs in last summer’s 12 Day War. 

+ Iran’s health ministry reports that at least 1,937 people have been killed by US and Israeli missile strikes and more than 24,800 injured. At least 66 children under the age of five have been killed to date. Meanwhile, the Pentagon reported on Tuesday that the US casualty count stands at 303, including 13 killed and 290 injured.

+ Earlier this week, Iran’s Ministry of Education said that 241 students and teachers have been killed and 183 wounded since the start of the war, with students accounting for 190 of the deaths and 164 of the injuries and teachers totaling 51 deaths and 19 wounded. It reported that at least 644 schools had been damaged or destroyed by US and Israeli airstrikes.

+ Sen. John Kennedy: “Here’s why we went into Iran: We had no choice. The President didn’t start a war; he was trying to end one.”

+ Republican members of Congress who received classified briefings on the war had a less confident view than the camera-hungry crank from Louisiana. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), House Armed Services Committee chair, skewered Pentagon officials after a classified briefing on the progress of the Iran failed to answer basic questions about troop deployments and plans for the next phases of the war: “We just wanted them to tell us what’s the plan, and we didn’t get any answers.”  A surprisingly coherent Nancy Mace was more to the point:   “Just walked out of a House Armed Services briefing on Iran. Let me repeat: I will not support troops on the ground in Iran, even more so after this briefing.”

+++

+ Every time the US goes to war, I pick up Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the first (and still the best) real book I read about the US at war. The weapons have changed, but not the perverted mentalities of those who get us into these bloodbaths or those who run the horror shows on the ground:

That night, I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, ‘Colonel, you’re insane?’ It was like turning up in the middle of some black Looney Tunes where the Duck had all the lines.

+ My first reading of Dispatches, which I read in one sitting the day it was published, is permanently imprinted on my consciousness the same way every note of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night has been since I ripped the cellophane off the matte black album jacket printed on rough blotter paper and dropped the needle on side one.

+ Hegseth browbeating Congress to approve $200 billion in extra funding for the Iran war claimed in his typical He-Man bravado: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”

+ One’s eyes tend to glaze over at these figures, but $200 billion is an enormous amount and is either a shakedown or a sign that the war will go on for many months and involve a ground campaign. How do we know this? Because of the cost of other wars…

+ Operation Desert Storm (500,000 US troops, 40 days of combat, weeks of bombing, months of deployment): $150 billion

+ Afghan War (2001-2021): $50 billion per year

+ Iraq War (100,000+ troops on the ground): $135 billion per year
ISIS campaign, 21014-2019: $10 billion per year

+ Kosovo War (78 days of sustained airstrikes): $10 billion

+ Libyan War (March to August, 2011 ): $1.1 billion

+ Struggling to meet its recruitment quotas under Hegseth and the deepening Iran war, the U.S. Army has raised its enlistment age limit to 42 and loosened restrictions for people with marijuana convictions (baked ok, as long as you’re not gay or otherwise woke). During the most desperate months of World War II, Stalin raised the age limit for conscription into the Red Army to 45-years-old. But the Soviets were defending themselves from an invasion. Not launching one.

+ The massive bombing of Iran will have consequences that persist for decades. Recall that the leukemia rates after the US bombing of Iraq were higher than after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: “After the bombing in Japan, the rates of leukemia among those living closest to the detonation increased by a devastating 660%… In Falluja, leukemia rates increased by 2,200% in a much shorter space of time.”

+ Laleh Khalili in the LRB on the West’s quest to control, one way or another, Iran’s oil:

Oil was a constant presence in my life when I was growing up in Iran. Petroleum was the engine of Iranian history in the 20th (and 21st) century: from the British usurpation of the Iranian national patrimony with the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909, to the British and US-engineered coup that removed Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in 1953, to the Iranian revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war, to current sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil.

+ Netanyahu: “We are working to bring Iran to places it has never been before. They will understand that they are below, and Jews are above.” As Uri Avnery repeatedly warned, Israel’s committing atrocities in the name of all “Jews,” endangers Jews worldwide and spreads anti-semitism.

+ Trump late-night rant last week on bombing Iran’s electrical grid had the feverish madness of Churchill calling for the firebombing of Dresden, after the Red Army had put the Nazis on the run…

+ The Iranian electrical grid is not a military target. Typically, Trump is following the Neo-con playbook of claiming to “liberate” people by increasing their suffering. It’s never worked and it won’t work now. Of course, the Israelis–from whom Trump seems to be getting most of his tactical and strategic advice–prioritized the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza (and now Lebanon) not because they wanted Palestinians to rise up and overthrow Hamas or Hezbollah but because they wanted to eliminate Palestinians from Gaza and southern Lebanon. Good luck with that strategy (if you can call it that) in a country with 93 million people.

+ Of course, Iran didn’t submit to any of these threats and by Monday morning, after the 48-hour deadline had elapsed and the oil markets soaring, Trump had completely backed down and was tweeting this stream of nonsense, which the Iranians immediately disputed and mocked.

…

Reporter: Who is Steve Witkoff speaking with in Iran?

Trump: A top person. (Iran says there are no talks with the US.)

Reporter: Who is it?

Trump: I can’t. I don’t want them to be killed.

+ By his own airstrikes or Israel’s?

+ Trump is often a one-man Abbott and Costello routine, though the punchlines never seem to land.

+ Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam Al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, responded to Trump’s claim that Iran had agreed to a ceasefire, “Have your internal conflicts reached the point where you are negotiating with yourselves?…The one claiming to be a global superpower would have already gotten out of this mess if it could. Don’t dress up your defeat as an agreement. Your era of empty promises has come to an end.”

+ And why would anyone trust US negotiators after Trump and Hegseth have twice bombed Iran while in the midst of negotiations?

+ Hegseth: “We negotiate with bombs.” I’m normally opposed to electroshock therapy and lobotomies as treatments for psychopathy, but in this case…

+ Only five minutes before Trump announced he was delaying attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure, large trades hit the market. In one move, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 (ES) futures was bought while $192 million in oil (CL) futures was sold. These orders were 4–6 times larger than any other trades at the time. Sen. Chris Murphy: “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind-blowing corruption,”

+ Since 2024, a better on Polymarket won nearly $1 million by successfully wagering on unannounced U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran. They enjoyed an overall win rate of 83%. But on bets over $10,000, the war gambler won 93% of the time, according to an analysis by blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps. Todd Phillips, a finance professor and former Commodity Futures Trading Commission advisory board member, told CNN: “Having win rates in the 80% to 90% range is just too good to be true.”

+ Ian Rappel: “TACO: Trump Always Cashes Out.”

+ Trump’s contradictory pronouncements on Iran, often uttered within the space of a single paragraph (if you can call them paragraphs), seem to be confusing everyone (especially Fox News hosts), except the Iranians.

+ Here’s Fox’s Jesse Watters on Trump backing down on his vow to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure: “It also buys time when you create this deadline… for the market to rally and it buys time for the Marines to get there… because probably, Friday, when the markets close, you might see some action on Kharg Island.”

+ About the same time Watters was making this belabored defense of Trump’s cave-in to Wall Street, the Iranians were firing missiles at Israel, a US military base in the Indian Ocean and oil facilities in the Persian Gulf.

+ Saagar Enjeti: “A war that can only be fought when the market is closed brings a whole new meaning to ‘weekend warriors.’”

+ One of the reasons Trump seems to be so desperately pushing for a ceasefire may be that the US is running out of smart weapons. According to a Chinese report, reiterated in the South China Morning Post and Reuters, the US stockpile of rare earth metals needed for the guidance systems of precision-guided missiles, such as the Tomahawk, is down to a two-month supply.

+++

+ Lindsey Graham on Kharg Island: “We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”

+ During the Battle of Iwo Jima, where 70,000 US troops encountered fierce resistance from only 18,000 Japanese soldiers, the US suffered more than 25,000 casualties, including 7000 US troops killed in action. Graham seems to stick out his fat tongue like a sun-soaked lizard every five seconds. You’d think his staff would tell him how gross it looks, but they probably hate him, too.

+ Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura:  “How can you send someone else’s kids to war if you won’t send your own? So I’m calling on Barron Trump to enlist in the US military. Do something your father never had the courage to do.”

+ Trump on Iran: “We really had regime change. This is a change in the regime because the leaders are all different. I think we can say this is regime change.” Call it that, claim the win and go play a round or two, Don.

+Former Defense Sec. Gen. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis: “Some of the strategic outcomes early on, unconditional surrender, regime change, we’re going to dictate who the next supreme leader is — those were clearly nonsense. Those were delusional.”

+ Trump at his cabinet meeting on Thursday: “The amazing thing is we don’t need the Hormuz Strait. We don’t need it. We don’t need it at all. We have so much oil. Our country is not affected by this.”

+ I was so astounded by this assertion that I checked out the price of gas at the Shell station across the river (Willamette) in West Linn, about an hour after Trump assured the nation that “Our country is not affected by this”…

+ Shortly before Trump began threatening to strike Iran, the price at this station had dropped to $2.97 a gallon. How rich do you have to be to “not be affected” by his “amazing” debacle?

+ Trump on the Strait of Hormuz two days before saying it was irrelevant: “It will be jointly controlled, and maybe controlled by me and the Ayatollah.” I sense a budding romance. Move over, Kim-Jong-un…!

+ Dr. Faith Birol, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA): “The Iran war energy crisis is worse than the 1970s oil shocks.’

+ Economic growth in the UK could be cut in half by the US/Israeli war on Iran.

+ US officials told The Washington Post they no longer believe it is possible to achieve the war’s original goals of overthrowing the Iranian regime and putting its nuclear program permanently out of reach.

Game over.

+ After Anthropic placed restrictions on how the Pentagon could deploy its AI program, Pete Hegseth labeled the company a “supply chain risk” and halted all Defense Department contracts with the company. One of the companies looking to pick up Anthropic’s Pentagon contracts is Perplexity AI. One of the people who will make the contracting decisions, Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and Chief Technology Officer, owns between $2 million and $10 million in stock in Perplexity AI. According to financial disclosure forms obtained by The Lever, Michael has assets totaling between $121 million and $277 million, including holdings in other robotics and AI companies with Pentagon ties.

+++

Since the appalling ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week on Oak Flats, where the US judicial system (so-called) has given the green light for a multinational mining company to annihilate one of the most sacred Native American sites in the Southwest, I’ve been thinking about the many Native Rights campaigns I’ve covered and/or been involved in over the last 35 years: Black Mesa, San Francisco Peaks, Mount Graham, Enola Hill,  Rainbow Bridge, Navajo Generating Station, Lyle salmon fishing site, mining and logging in the Black Hills, Zuni Salt Lake, Oak Flats, ANWR, Klamath River dams, Chaco Canyon uranium mine, Bolsa Chica and Ballona wetlands in LA, Nevada Test Site, Willamette Falls lamprey and salmon fishing site, Jemez/Los Alamos, Standing Rock, the Thacker Pass lithium mine. 

These were/are often bitter, lonely, and dangerous campaigns, especially for Native activists. Not long after moving to Oregon, I received a three-day tour of many of the most intense battle zones in the Four Corners region by the Navajo environmental and tribal activist Leroy Jackson, who took this photo of me outside of Kayenta in the shadow of Black Mesa. Leroy was a very intense person and he was fighting extremely powerful interests, like Peabody Coal, Duke City Lumber and corrupt members of the tribal government of the Big Rez. 

I flipped through my journals of that week and was struck by a conversation we had about the relations between tribal activists and Gang Green and how unreliable the professional environmental groups are as coalition partners with Native people because of their unfailing tendency to compromise for political reasons on issues, such as sacred sites, where there can be no compromise. I jotted down that’d I’d relayed to Leroy one of my favorite admonitions from Dave Brower: “When we win, it’s merely a stay of execution. When they win, it’s forever.” 

Leroy responded by saying, “For so many of you guys (white male activists), this is like a game. You’re here for a while, then back to school or onto some other issues. You can’t be counted on. But we live here. We have to play for keeps.” (I didn’t take offense at this, knowing firsthand the truth of what he was saying.) Leroy did play for keeps. A few months after our road trip, he was found dead in his car in northern New Mexico. The cops called it a suicide/drug overdose. But Leroy wasn’t a drug user. He wasn’t depressed or suicidal. He was almost certainly murdered. Yet, like so many killings of Native Americans, especially activists, the cops didn’t care enough to even investigate his death. They were glad he was dead. 

The “Indian” wars have never ended.

+ Less than two weeks after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the San Carlos Apaches tribe’s claim that the mining of Oak Flats, a sacred site, violated their religious rights, the Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate, Rio Tinto, announced it expects to open the mammoth copper mine by the 2030s and, in a reversal of its promise to keep the mined ore in the US, said that it plans to export some of the 40 billion pounds of copper they plan to extract from the mine because “smelting in the US is not profitable.” So much for America first.

+ Years ago, my pal Chuck Williams told me that native tribes needed to surrender and submit before they’d ever get a penny out of the federal government. Chuck’s Cascades Tribe never did. They refused to cede away their land or fishing rights and paid the price, but kept their dignity and their unsullied claims to the land stolen from them. Another wretched ruling this week in a battle that’s been going on for a century proved the wisdom of Chuck’s dictum, when the court curtly denied the right of the Chinook people of the lands at the mouth of the Columbia River to be recognized as a federal tribe.

“I think no one is surprised by the denial,” said Chinook Chairman Tony “Naschio” Johnson. “We often find we don’t fit into this system of justice. Maybe I’m using quotes around justice, but I feel strongly that the courts have and should be available as a remedy for folks like Chinook. “It is just unbearable to live on your land, to inherit your teachings and a world view of this place that far predates the United States, and to have that reality denied by a government, and I’ll just say by a government that has only cared about our place for its use or abuse. I mean the ways in which they could profit or otherwise benefit from it. And always, it seems, at the expense of the Chinook people.”

+ According to the World Meteorological Association’s new State of the Climate Report, not only the World Meteorological Organization is the amount of heat stored on Earth increasing, but the rate at which it is increasing is also increasing: “In 2025, the observed Earth energy imbalance (EEI) reached the highest value since the observational record began in 1960…  As a result of the growing imbalance, the total amount of heat stored on Earth is not just increasing but accelerating.”

+ Professor Stephen Ramsdorf, Potsdam Institute:

The Central England temperature record represents the longest series of monthly temperature observations in existence. Recent temperatures there are over 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 average, and over 2 degrees above preindustrial values.

+ This should be the peak snowpack period for the mountains of the West. Instead, it’s almost all GONE…

+ According to meteorologist and weather historian M. Herrera, 14 states set new records for highest March temperature and five states (Oregon, Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Illinois) barely missed…

California: 112F
Arizona: 112 F
Nevada: 106 F
Kansas: 101 F
New Mexico: 100 F
Nebraska: 99 F
Utah: 97 F
South Dakota: 97 F
Missouri: 97 F
Iowa: 97F
Colorado: 96 F
Wyoming: 90 F
Minnesota: 88 F
Idaho: 86 F

+ While British homeowners are rushing to install solar panels on their houses, the Trump administration used $1 billion in US taxpayers’ money to bribe a French energy firm, Total, to cancel three offshore wind power projects and use the money on energy powered by fossil fuels.

+ The Chinese EV-maker BYD just introduced a new car that can charge from 10% to 70% in five minutes, and to 100% in nine minutes. The car has a 600-mile range and gets 250 miles of charge in only 5 minutes. Production of EVs in the US has declined by more than 30% since Trump resumed office.

+ A study in Environmental Research Letters found that climate change made the extreme wildfire in the Arctic from 2019 to 2021 200 times more likely.

+ This week, NASA announced plans to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars before the end of 2028. It would be the first interplanetary spacecraft mission powered by nuclear propulsion. What could go wrong?

+ ProPublica digs into how DOGE is gutting existing safety rules to ease the siting of new nuclear power plants. |

+ On an episode of the climate science podcast A Matter of Degrees, Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner who now directs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley, discussed insurance companies refusing to write policies for homes in the fire-prone west and hurricane-prone southeast:

For many Americans, the single biggest financial asset you have is your home. If you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford enough insurance and that home is destroyed, then you’re left with basically nothing. Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is just about dead.

+++

+ Hillbilly Elegy, the Epilogue…

+ The Vance dinner was hosted by billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir.

+ RFK, Jr. on rising food prices: “We don’t need more money, we just need to be smarter about how we buy and how we cook.” We?

+ ABC News: “Higher grocery prices could soon hit supermarkets as the war with Iran continues. The higher prices are because of a surge in the cost of diesel fuel, which powers many of the vehicles that transport products across a vast global supply chain.” Already, wholesale vegetable prices are up 87.5% year over year, fresh fish up by 45.2% and beef up 13%. 

+ Here in Oregon, gas prices climbed by 92.7 cents per gallon in less than a month and 36.7 cents in the last week.

+ Americans have warped ideas about their own wealth. Both the poor and the rich tend to describe themselves as “middle class.” The New York Times profiled a couple living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who described themselves as “being middle class for this area.” Their annual income is more than $500,000. But the median household income for their neighborhood is $173,000 and only $79,000 for New York City as a whole.

+ NBC News ran a pretty good report about the record level of income inequality in the US, a widening gulf that spreads across traditional political boundaries. Of course, the Democrats won’t seize the issue because their own neoliberal policies for the last 40 years have fed the beast that is devouring what used to be their own base and almost everyone else, as well…

+ Gary Keffer, a freelancer in Nashville, Tennessee, who was laid off as a VP of strategic marketing: “I’ve got an MBA, I’ve got 20 years of experience across my resume, and I’m being told that I need to submit my resume to ChatGPT for optimization to get an interview. It’s like this ‘Black Mirror’ environment.”

+ American capitalism is a casino, where the casino owners are guaranteed to win, but still cheat to win even bigger…” memo obtained by The Washington Post says that

Trump showed a classified map to passengers on his private plane in 2022. The memo, part of a now-abandoned prosecution, shows that prosecutors were investigating whether Trump retained classified documents for personal gain. The case was dismissed by a federal judge before it could go to trial. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin has demanded more information, alleging a cover-up by the Justice Department.

+++

+ Markfortwayne Mullin describing, with evident pleasure, his daughter pleading with him not to spank (ie, abuse) her…“She’s like, ‘No, Daddy. No, Daddy, No, Daddy, No. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry, Daddy.’ … She just couldn’t bring herself to even bend over for me to be able to bust her butt.”

Does Markfortwayne wear his white hat when he beats his daughter?

+ Prerequisites to prove you’ve got what it takes to run DHS under Trump: 1. Shoot your own puppy in the head for being disobedient and toss its body in a gravel pit; 2. Abuse your own daughter for being disobedient.

If you can publicly brag about beating your own child for political points, you probably won’t have much of a problem ripping children, some of them born in the US, from the arms of their parents, keeping them locked up in concentration camp-like prisons hundreds of miles away from their moms and dads, making them act as their own lawyers in immigration court or forcing them to make an impossible choice between being wrongfully deported with a parent or being left in the US as one or both of their parents are shipped off to El Salvador or Haiti.

+ 11,000: the minimum number of children who have had a parent detained by ICE/CBP since Trump retook office.

+ Pete Hegseth is trying to push civilian employees at the Pentagon to take temporary positions with ICE and CBP, a move one Defense Department worker called “absurd” and another described as giving the Department a “bad look,” considering the problems it’s encountering recruiting people to fight its war on Iran.

+ Hegseth: “The Department of War stands shoulder to shoulder with state and federal partners so our streets can be defended again.” Who will defend the streets against these “defenders” of the streets?

+ Texas voters, who’ve seen the state’s workforce gutted by raids on immigrants, are apparently turning on ICE and Trump. Who did they think was doing most of the manual labor in this country? The Man-children of the Manosphere? They’re not going to be Red-Pilled into doing that kind of work…

+ This week, Trump sent ICE into more than a dozen US airports, supposedly to supplement the depleted ranks of TSA workers and… they immediately started arresting people…

CNN: Whose idea was it to put ICE in airports?

Trump: Mine. That was like the paperclip. Do you know the story of the paperclip? 182 years ago, a man discovered the paperclip. It was so simple. And everybody that looked at it thought, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ICE was my idea.

+ Operation Paperclip II. Now it makes sense.

+ Suddenly, ICE agents are showing up unmasked at airports, all previous fears of being trolled, doxxed and tracked having evaporated. Jim Naureckas made a solid point. The masks aren’t meant to conceal identities, but to project the faceless power of the state and to terrorize the people you’re conducting a pogrom against and those who come to their defense.

+ Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel, one of the Venezuelan men swept up in Trump’s raids and wrongly deported, described his time in El Salvador’s CECOT prison as “total hell.” Rengel, a barber who lived in Irving, Texas, was arrested and deported solely based on his tattoos, which DHS used to wrongly accuse him of being a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Rengel spent four months in the maximum-security prison, where he was subjected to physical and psychological torture, before being released through a prisoner swap in July 2025. This week, Rengel has filed the first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the Trump administration, seeking $1.3 million in damages.

+ On Tuesday, Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration to secure evidence needed for state police to probe three shootings by federal immigration officers during Operation Metro Surge—including the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti—after the feds broke their pledge to cooperate in the investigations of the shootings.

+ Trump: 90% of the crime is caused by 2% of the population. He was referring to blacks and immigrants, naturally, but our over-criminalized society, roughly 1-in-3 adults in the US (33%) have a criminal record.

+ According to an analysis by the Cato Institute, the incarceration rate for legal immigrants is 75% less than that of native-born US citizens. 

+ They’re not even trying to hide the plan to deploy ICE at election sites…

Steve Bannon: “We can use this, ICE helping at airports, as a test run, a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms.

Rep. Mike Davis: “I think we should have ICE agents at the polling places.”

+++

Ever since I forced her to watch a Trump/Hegseth press event this week, Lola has been imitating Trump’s sleeping while standing routine…

+ 2026 Generic Congressional Ballot 

Democrats: 51% [+4]
Republicans: 40% [-3] 

***

Dem: Dem 99-1
GOP: GOP 93-5
Ind: Dem 57-26
Men: GOP 46-43
Women: Dem 58-35

Quinnipiac Poll
| 3/19-23 | 1,191 RV

+ Those independent voter numbers (57-26) are really something. Of course, the question is: is a “generic” Democrat more or less pathetic than any specific Democrat?

+ Trump’s approval rating is now about as low as Biden’s after Biden appeared to stroke-out during his debate with Trump…and still falling. Nothing Trump’s doing–from the war to immigration to the economy–is popular with the vast majority of the country.

President Trump’s Approval
Disapprove: 62%
Approve: 36%

Support US Strikes on Iran
Disapprove: 61%
Approve: 35%

Trump’s net approval on key issues
Immigration: -13%
Foreign policy: -27%
Economy: -33%
Cost of living: 41%

Reuters/IPSOS Poll

+ The art of the deal guy can’t even close the deal on his own war.

+ The American Research Group polling outfit opens the analysis of their latest survey, which shows Trump’s approval rating at a mere 33%, with this remarkable warning:

Our national monthly survey on presidential performance and the economy has lost subscribers over concerns that any unfavorable results may upset the current administration. We need your support to continue providing unbiased insights. Please join us in continuing this monthly survey.

+ Trump wants to eliminate mail-in voting. Except for him, apparently. Still, Trump’s endorsement and mail-in-vote (a form of cheating, he claims) wasn’t enough to keep the Florida statehouse seat that includes Mar-a-Lago from flipping to Democrat Emily Gregory, a political novice, in a district that Trump carried by more than 10 percentage points in 2024.

+ In this week’s episode of the Sycophancy Roundtable, Trump demands that Kash Patel genuflect to him more slavishly than Stephen Miller…

Miller: What President Trump is doing is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations but for centuries to come.

Trump: Kash, see if you can top that. 

Patel: Mr. President, thank you for delivering the safest country on God’s green Earth.

+ Trump reflecting, somewhat fancifully, on his State of the Union address:

Democrats sat there emotionless, no clapping, nobody standing. At the end of the evening, they were clapping on everything I said because they were called by people watching on television. Did you see they were passing around notes and they were saying, you guys are being killed tonight, start clapping. And they were clapping for everything. Even good Republican things. They were clapping wildly. But it was too late. Because they have no heart.

The only note I saw that night was from Rep. Al Green to Trump, reading: “Black People Are Not Apes.” And Green was removed from the chamber for writing it.

+ Joel Webbon, the Christian Nationalist pastor and MAGA celebrity, claims that “egalitarianism” is part of a Jewish plot to destroy the world;

The end game in pushing egalitarianism, particularly as it pertains to the sexes, almost exclusively in the West, and almost nowhere else, is because they want Western people, particularly those of European descent, AKA white people, to stop procreating. This is the destruction of the world. Egalitarianism is not baked into the scripture. It is baked in the fabric of communism, it is baked into the fabric of [pause and shoulder shrug] Judaism, which I believe is the root of Communism. It is the root of transgenderism. It is the root of Marxism. It is the root of all bitter, baseless envy that just seeks to destroy the world.

There’s some pretty weird stuff packed between Webbon’s phobias. It was, of course, the Anglo-Saxon Thomas Malthus who was obsessed with human population and procreation and a communist Jew, Karl Marx, his sharpest critic. Of course, you won’t hear a squeak out of the ADL about Webbon’s rancid anti-semitism, because like most Christian Nationalists, he supports Israel’s genocidal wars on Palestinians, which they hope will lead to the ultimate conflagration at Megiddo, after which the white Christians men and their Tradwives will be Raptured for a rendezvous with Jesus and the rest of us, including all Jewish people, will be left behind to fight it out during the Tribulations and then consigned to eternal damnation.

+ I now have a clearer understanding of what Sartre meant when he called “God the first criminal.”

+ According to Isabel Vincent, author of “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise,” “In his diary, RFK, Jr. writes about cutting off the penis of a road-killed raccoon in 2001, while his ‘kids waited patiently in the car,’ so that he could examine it later.”

+ Jim Harris: “Raccoon penis envy.”

+ Speaking of RFK, Jr, a new poll finds that fewer than 60 percent of Americans now trust the federal government’s recommendations for childhood vaccinations, a steep drop from last year.

+ Trump: “I love Elvis. I never met Elvis. I met them all. I met Sinatra; I knew all of them. I never met Elvis. Sometimes I feel I should tell a little fib, and say I knew him well.” That would be one of the tiniest fibs he’s ever told…

+ While at Graceland, Trump suggested that Elvis’ two 8th degree black belts in Karate and Kendo were fake (because there’s no question any black belts Trump received would’ve been)…

Trump: Could I have taken Elvis in a fight?

Graceland worker: I don’t know? You might. I think he would’ve been respectful enough to let you win.

+ Realistically, Trump couldn’t have taken Colonel Parker, Priscilla, or Lisa Marie in a fight.

+ After watching Louis Theroux’s wild documentary on the hyper-misogyny of the Bros of the Manosphere (Netflix), this number seems perilously low: According to Gallup, 40% of American women, ages 15-44, would like to permanently move overseas. The Manosphere isn’t limited to the US, of course, but sooner or later all the leading Prophets of Bro-dom end up taking selfies at Mar-a-Lago.

+ What are the odds of me making it through the airport panopticon of TSA/ICE security without a cavity search while wearing this shirt that a loyal reader of Roaming Charges kindly sent me?

+ Here’s the late Chuck Norris and his wife Gena warning that if Americans reelected Obama in 2012, it would plunge the country into “1000 years of darkness.” It’s pretty dark out. Perhaps, they were right. Though the lights might have gone out for 2000 years had Mitt the Mormon Apostate been elected.

+ It’s time to revive Alexander Cockburn’s old “Guillotined!” project of consigning washed-up words, cliches, political cant, twee neologisms and trendy media phrases to the tumbrils of history and execution by the virtual guillotine erected in CounterPunch’s own version of the Place de la Concord. This week’s condemned, the heinous phrase: “Digital and/or content creator.” (Feel free to send me nominations.)

+ The Trump team has brought a new level of incompetence to the political art of lying and for that, at least, we can be grateful:

A top deputy to U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged in a closed-door hearing this month that the Justice Department did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve over the cost of its building renovations, according to a transcript of the court proceedings. The prosecutor’s admission, which has not been previously reported, undercuts President Donald Trump’s claim that “there is criminality” in the $2.5 billion overhaul of the Fed’s headquarters overlooking the National Mall.

+ Come back, L7, your country needs you once again…

Body bags and dropping bombs, the Pentagon knows how to turn us on

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Meet Mayor Mamdani: the Spectacular Victory of a Democratic Socialist in New York City
Theodor Hamm
(OR Books)

A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome
Tara Mulder
(California)

Goya’s Last Portrait / A Question of Geography
John Berger and Nella Bielski
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Music in Continual Motion
Bill Orcutt
(Palilalia)

Tirakat
Ali and Charif Megarbane
(Habbibi Funk)

Extra Stars
Gregory Uhlmann
(International Anthem)

Doing Numbers for the Cameras

“I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras… We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.”

– Michael Herr, Dispatches

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