Here’s another quote from X, this one linked by Stephen Green posting at Instapundit. The author is Andrew Clark.
In 72 hours we went from:
Trump never expected the possibility of Hormuz closing,
To:
Trump was briefed Hormuz could close but riskily did it anyway,
To:
Trump bombed Kharg Island but it likely won’t force Iran to open the Strait.
To:
Iran opened the Strait.
Trump keeps exceeding media expectations. Imagine how frustrated they must feel, I’m loving the schadenfreude.
Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit, links to a quote about the Trump foreign policy that is kinda wonderful. Exaggerated a bit? Sure, but kinda wonderful nonetheless. The author’s nom de X is Northern Barbarian, who writes:
You do get he's basically walking on water. Making every elected hack, bureaucrat and diplomat of the last 40 years or so look like dithering incompetent fools, when they weren't actively and despicably enabling said dictatorships, that is.
Could it all go wrong? Yeah. But for the first time since Ronald Reagan blew up the Soviet Union, someone's trying.
Oddly enough, Barack Obama was “trying” too, trying to turn Iran into an Islamic superpower. Fortunately, he failed because they failed, even with his help. Electing as president someone who neither identified with, nor liked the US, turned out to be as dumb as it sounds when described accurately.
I just read a very interesting meditation on the sequential organizational response to someone pointing out an error in the organization’s work. Other than being a bit repetitious, it is excellent.
Perhaps without intentionally doing so, it describes why over time organizations ossify and die. And why the people who compulsively point out errors may be just a bit autistic, if often in a good way.
The author ends up asking organizations to stop being defensive and correct noted errors. This may be a forlorn hope. He is, of course, pointing out a set of errors in how organizations respond to error correction, in the service of maintaining stability-at-all-costs.
Victoria Taft, who does the weekly West Coast, Messed Coast column for PJ Media, has some interesting CA data. She writes:
Since Gavin Newsom's radical reign as governor began in 2019, an assortment of high-tech, founding Silicon Valley companies, retail outlets, and other companies have fled due to his and his party's greed. They include:She left out Yamaha, headed to GA. Many of these are really big firms. Driving big employers out of state is economic suicide. And yet ... CA Democrats persist.
- McKesson
- Chevron
- In-N-Out Burger
- Tesla
- Charles Schwabe
- Palantir
- Toyota
- X
- Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
- Realtor.com
- SpaceX
Two days ago we wrote about the SAVE act which aims to prevent non-citizens from voting, citizens from voting multiple times using false identities, and vote fraud generally. As we noted, most Americans favor the act's provisions, yet it hasn't passed thru Congress and ended up on the President's desk.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who favors SAVE, has said he hasn't the votes to pass it, and has been widely criticized for his comment. Writing for Hot Air, Duane Patterson does a good job of explaining why Thune is correct, concerning the "talking filibuster" ploy.
To pass it would require dumping the Senate's long-standing rule requiring a supermajority (60 votes) to shut off a filibuster. This the Republican majority could do with a simple 50+1 majority.
So why do quite a few senators refuse to take that step? Senators tend to be long-serving. Senators who are reelected even once serve during at least 3 presidential terms. They know it is likely they'll end up in the minority at some point and that the 60 vote rule is all that keeps a 'trifecta' administration* from going crazy and destroying the country, doing stuff like nationalizing all private property, or conversely banning abortions nationwide.
It seems Democrat senators are willing to act against majority opinion in this case because they know the issue isn't topmost in their voters' minds.
*My term for when one party has majorities in both houses of Congress and has the presidency.
Afterthought ... I'm certain it has occurred to many senators that one of the primary roles of the Senate is to keep US enacted policy in the middle of the ideological spectrum. To damp down extreme impulses that may temporarily electrify the populace.
Richard Fernandez writes a column for PJ Media and blogs as wrechardthecat. Today he has an insight about Trump’s approach to foreign policy that I find useful and worth sharing with you.
Instead of invading hostile states with large ground forces, it has used a discontinuous series of actions to continuously nudge states in a preferred direction, rather like a tugboat pushing a ship rather than boarding it and seizing the helm.To use a construction industry metaphor, the Trump approach to regime change more closely resembles renovating and remodeling an old building rather than demolishing it and replacing it with a new structure.
We see this in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. We’ve tried nation-building and, since the World War II after-action clean-up ended, we haven’t been good at it. Trying something else makes perfect sense.
Think of the new approach as “post-Pottery Barn,” we don’t quite break it, and don’t end up owning it. It more nearly resembles the action of a muscular HOA, coercing a misbehaving homeowner to stop being a neighborhood nuisance.
Writing for the Brussels Signal, Canadian essayist Conrad Black notes that Trump has been taking down the few allies Russia and China have attracted. He concludes:
No one should underestimate the psychological and strategic importance of the disappearance as Russo-Chinese allies in the first half of this year of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, on the heels of Syria. This is a seismic shift that has gone largely unnoticed and is not over.
Unnoticed only in the West, I might add. Be certain it has not escaped the attention of both Moscow and Beijing. Trump is altering the worldwide balance of power.
A man in a hurry, Trump bids fair to become the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan, perhaps even since Lyndon Johnson. Like Trump, both of those were also widely hated.
COTTonLINE readers obviously follow politics so you know polling shows the SAVE act now stuck in Congress has wide public support. Most Republicans, over two-thirds of Independents, and half of Democrats - something like two-thirds of all voters - favor requiring ID to vote and limiting voting to US citizens.
And yet Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for something everyone admits is widely popular. If you needed proof that our government is not always responsive to voter demands, you have it here.
That refusal is rich fodder for conspiracy theorists, playing right into their hands. It is the Deep State in action, forced out from behind the bureaucratic 'curtain' behind which it normally operates.
What actually fuels the Democrats' stonewalling of SAVE is the "soft bigotry of low expectations" in action. They distrust the motivation of a large percentage of their voters.
They fear many of their voters will be dissuaded by the minor effort of showing citizenship to register, making voting too much hassle to bother with. Actually their fears are probably baseless as their typical voter is no longer Joe Sixpack, more likely to be someone with blue hair and a B.A. in Non-binary Studies.
Is the MAGA movement split over the attack on Iran? Power Line's John Hinderaker examines the evidence and concludes it is not.
Recent polling shows strong unified support for our actions in Iran. Hinderaker has the polling numbers for you.
I believe the opinion you read claiming such a split is wishful thinking on the part of left-leaning journalists and op-ed writers. These cite the viewers of Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens as their evidence.
Those two are outliers on the right in much the same way that Sen. John Fetterman is an outlier on the left. I bet Fetterman has followers who are MAGA but who like that he agrees with their program. Who's to say Carlson and Owens don't have a bunch of lefties who follow them for the same reasons?
Polling Hinderaker cites implies strongly the "crossover followers" hypothesis could be true.
The Washington Free Beacon posts a remembrance of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It takes the form of a review of his Meditations, this edition newly translated by Aaron Poochigian (2026).
For a book written nearly two millennia ago, Meditations is still in print in several different translations. Other than the Bible and Koran, there are few books with such staying power.
Marcus Aurelius is remembered as a successful philosopher king. If this review describes his philosophy accurately, it feels somewhat like my own. A coincidence, I admit.
The review is good, without being heavy or overlong. It tempts me to go read his Meditations, at this very late stage in my long, interesting, and mostly successful life.
