*** USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier Group Heading to Middle East; Israel Prepares for War ***

Incredible that a tiny country the size of New Jersey with its own nuclear weapons and universal healthcare for all its residents has the ability to summon two nuclear-powered aircraft groups (ACGs) of a country as large and as powerful as the United States of America.

The millions of Americans in the antiwar bloc, a movement as old as the American Revolution itself, are watching which US politicians support attacking Iran and which aren't.

If the US attacks Iran in a few weeks as the Israeli High Command planned for, Democratic Party candidates that receive AIPAC money or support attacking Iran won't be getting the antiwar vote on Tuesday 3 Nov 2026.

Don't believe Coriolanus?

Don't care.

You will note there are Gold Star Family and Veteran's groups in this "Far Left" bloc.

I don't go out much these days but a few time I went to an after hours bar in D.C. and it was considered a Safe Space because that's where cops would go to drink after their shift. Nobody is going to start ---- in an after-hours bar populated by Cops.

#7 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-02-13 06:19 PM |

During all the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan years ago, you could see all the fat-cat military and intelligence civilian contractors laughing and drinking it up in the bistros of Pentagon City.

You couldn't tell from their happy and bloated expressions that our country was at war and that our young boys and girls were getting mulched overseas.

I went there once or twice to meet friends while I assigned to the Pentagon because it was close, but I was disgusted and never went back. I went to the nearby Officer Clubs or met friends elsewhere.

"The international order based on rights and rules ... no longer exists in the way it once did," he said.
This is what Republicans want.
I'm not sure why, but they do.

#6 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-02-14 04:39 AM | Reply | Flag: Like chickens voting for Colonel Saunders or this:

According to newly released files from the US Department of Justice, messages sent between Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon in 2019, reveal Bannon courted the late wealthy sex maniac in his attempts to undermine the former pontiff after leaving the first Trumpf junta.

Bannon had been highly critical of Francis whom he saw as an opponent to his "sovereigntist" vision, a brand of nationalist populism which swept through Europe in 2018 and 2019. The released documents from the DOJ appear to show that Epstein had been helping Bannon to build his movement.

"Will take down (Pope) Francis," Bannon wrote to Epstein in June 2019. "The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU " come on brother."
Pope Francis was a significant obstacle to Bannon's brand of nationalist populism. In 2018, the former Trumpf sycophant described Francis to The Spectator as "beneath contempt," accusing him of siding with "globalist elites" and, according to "SourceMaterial," urged Matteo Salvini, now Italy's deputy PM, to "attack" the pontiff. For his part, Salvini has used Christian iconography and language when pursuing his anti-immigrant agenda.

Rome and the Vatican have been important for Bannon. He set up a Rome bureau when he ran Breitbart News and has been involved in trying to establish a political training "gladiator school" to defend Judeo-Christian values not far from the Eternal City.

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven," Epstein tells Bannon.

Elsewhere in the files, Jeffrey Epstein jokes with his brother, Mark, about inviting Pope Francis to his residence for a "massage" during the US papal visit in 2015.

An FBI report included in the DOJ's release includes a source who claims that an Italian cybersecurity figure described as "Epstein's Hacker" may have held a Vatican City passport.

Jeffrey Epstein had his filthy tentacle everywhere it seems and ICC-indicted war criminal Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu denies that a man who penetrated so many corridors of global power was not a Mossad spy. If that was true, all previous Mossad directors and Israeli PMs should be court-martialed for not recruiting such a valuable asset.

Below, two of the worst blasphemers, miscreants, and reprobates to ever blight our planet are taking a "selfie" in a mirroe. Thank goodness at least one monster is gone forever.

*** German Chancellor Friedrich Merz Blasts Lost US Leadership: "Global Order No Longer Exists" ***

"German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that US leadership can no longer be taken for granted and Europe must prepare to stand more firmly on its own, in a stark warning to world leaders in Munich.

"The leadership claim of the US is being challenged, perhaps already lost," Merz said during the opening of the Munich Security Conference, laying out the starkest assessment yet from Berlin of a world increasingly defined by great-power rivalry. "In the era of great powers, our freedom is no longer simply guaranteed. It is under threat."

He argued the global system itself may already have collapsed. "The international order based on rights and rules ... no longer exists in the way it once did," he said.

Merz also drew a lesson from Germany's own history. "We Germans know a world in which might makes right would be a dark place," he said. "Our country has gone down this path in the 20th century until the bitter and dreadful end."

Most strikingly, the chancellor confirmed discussions with French President Emmanuel Macron about a European nuclear deterrent."

"US President Dummkopf Trumpf seizing power on 20 Jan 2025 gave European nationalists and hardline conservatives a champion at the head of the world's largest economic and military power; now groups on both sides of the Atlantic want to seize the moment. Their ambition is to repurpose the soft-power tools America once deployed to spread the gospel of liberalism, to expand their reach and power and ultimately rebuild the West in their image " a project both sides call a "civilizational alliance" (AKA white supremacy).

~snip~

This Empty Suit was vetted for his position by mega-oligarch Larry Ellison strictly on his fealty to Israel. The catalog of USSECSTATE Marco Rubio's vile blasphemies are too lengthy for a weblog entry, but we'll do our best here. The vastly underqualified Rubio callously dismantled USAID and removed the State Dept web portal to report war crimes. Rubio fired seasoned diplomats and ambassadors and dimed out El Salvadoran nationals to right-wing President Nayib Bukele in order to deport migrants to his hellish CECOT prison.

This good-for-nothing worked with CIA to undermine Venezuela's government and illegally abduct President Nicolas Maduro. Marco Rubio expedited the transfer of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money to Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. Rubio nominated Jeremy Carl, a known antisemite, for a senior position at the State Dept.

Marco Rubio withdrew visas of people who ridiculed hate monger Charlie Kirk. As a US Senator, Marco Rubio undermined the Affordable Care Act by attaching damaging riders to the bill. Marco Rubio is now working on overthrowing the regime in Cuba and making life more miserable for the people there with even more sanctions.

Many years ago I was lucky enough to meet one of the last Jews from Baghdad.

His English was excellent, but his Yiddish was minimal or non-existent from what I recall.

"R.I." said that while life under Saddam Hussein was bad, the Jews weren't targeted, liquor was freely available, women went to school in modern dress and in higher education, and he made himself a decent income. He didn't go into what his business was, but it was fairly lucrative.

"R.I." related to me that after Saddam Hussein was toppled in the aftermath of OIF, all of a sudden in Iraq "the Jews became Jews."

I told him those were basically the exact words of a musician in Vienna in the 1930s named Georg Kreisler:

"Before 1938 we were all Austrians. Hitler made us Jews." [sic]

The blog monitors may wish to combine this thread with another one about the Munich Security Conference.

Likud's tactic was the same as the National Party in Suid-Afrika, divide the opposition.

The Boers secretly funded the Inkatha Freedom Party (who were Zulus) to target the ANC (who were predominantly, mot all, Xhosas like Nelson Mandela).

The Bedouins had a positive relationship in Israel for decades, many of them serving in the IDF as desert scouts.

One of the first IDF rescue missions in Gaza was to free a Bedouin.

The deplorable Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to activating a jihadist cell of young gangsters in Gaza to hijack UN and NGO food delivery trucks. This cell of quislings was later rendered ineffective by Hamas or PIJ operatives.

Hi Clownshack

Initially Israel was far left and created by the Labor Party and if anything, right-wingers in Wash DC were concerned this "socialist" state might tilt towards the Soviet axis. Israel had plenty of East European Jews and remember, the 1919-1920 Palmer Raids deported those East European Jews out of fears of Marxism.

Israel's alignment with the US came much later, after the 1950s UK/France/Israel Suez Canal crisis that Eisenhower stopped.

The aftermath of the 1967 IDF attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War is when Israel, sort of neutral between the USSR and the US, began tilting towards Wash DC.

A few years later, Nixon's support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to the subsequent oil embargo and crisis.

In the post WWII era, Turkiye (and then Iran) were the US intelligence frontline against the USSR. And then a short-lived CENTO was formed.

There is a saloon/restaurant in NYC that I occasion once in a while. One early evening, to my right and back is an NYPD Lieutenant from the Intelligence Division sitting at a table enjoying an expensive meal with a NYS judge. We nod to each other politely.

Then I'm chatting and drinking with Irish and Jewish attorneys at the bar (one was interviewed on CNN over a huge case).

In walks an elderly Italian mobster who was busted in SDNY in the 1990s for operating those phony telephone booths and other sins.

I always joked with him that I lost a lot of money in his infernal machines and we all roar in laughter. He did time at Fort Dix FCI and uses his expired BOP ID card as his "introduction card" to strangers.

Anyways, after relating some amusing mafia anecdotes to us and enjoying the drink we bought him, he says: "'Scuse me gentlemen, I gotta go to work."

He saunters right past the NYPD LT and the judge and approaches a worker in the saloon to quietly collect the money the waiter owns the mob.

There was an idea to carve out a piece of Germany to give to the Jews of Europe.

The Morgenthau Plan was the name of it, I think, and the Allies wanted to make Germany an agrarian country-- no more military-industrial complex or army.

But Cold War reality stepped in and the plan was scrapped.

The Marshall Plan then took shape to rebuild Germany and make it a military ally against the communist Soviet Union.

Then NATO formed around that concept.

Last century an elderly Israeli man told me, "after the war (WWII), Palestinians just wanted a place to live, but the Jews needed to have a country."

After centuries of Ottoman rule and then a post WWI British mandate, that made sense to me from the Palestinian perspective.

Hi DBT2:

Years ago some of my friends on the Upper East Side attended the various synagogues up there, the neighborhood where Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein both lived, but I can't recall which ones.

Anyways, both predators targeted or ensnared Jews, particularly Bernie who grifted the "Gold Coast" millionaires in Great Neck.

I have suspected one of the synagogues up there was a hunting ground for these two, but this is only a suspicion.

Growing up, we knew in my family and social circle that the Trumpfs weren't Jewish because of their German name.

And can you imagine any of the Trumpfs dropping a shekel into a pishka?

"Measles cases continue to be detected in Russia in 2026, although the overall number of cases in Europe and Central Asia has dropped significantly according to the WHO, which warned of remaining outbreak risks."

The handful of USAID officers I came across in the Middle East and Africa were not snobby embassy poobah types, but basically decent Americans who wanted to help the disadvantaged people of the Third World the way JFK envisioned.

I was more proud of their work than mine.

Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Tulsi Gabbard: the three witches in MacBeth.

Good-for-nothing modern day Benedict Arnold US Army Lt General Michael Flynn (Ret) was prosecuted and convicted for lying to the FBI, a violation of 18 USC 1001.

Deputy US Marshals have nothing better to do than protect and drive around this wretch.

Good thing the Trumpf junta wiped out USAID which saved millions of people's lives and made friends for America overseas.

On every USAID package was boldly written "not for sale" and "from the people of America."

On 20 Jan 2029, the next President will have plenty of work to do to fix everything, but there simply won't be enough minutes in a day, staff on hand, or money in the coffers for him or her.

1,461 days of gross malfeasance, theft, poor diplomacy, portraits being taken down, job terminations, awful executive orders, buildings re-named, etc etc by the idiotic Trumpf junta is like a never-ending 9/11.

Todd Blanche sounds like a real classy guy.

Gotcha, Corky.

Dummkopf Trumpf: "I care about the people of Iran who are living under a brutal regime."