| second: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing criticism from members of his own party over the Pentagon's decision to exclude congressional Democrats from recent closed-door briefings.
Republican senators say the approach could make it harder to secure support for President Donald Trump's proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget. Several GOP lawmakers have urged Hegseth to resume bipartisan engagement with Congress.
Hegseth has so far made at least two recent trips to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on the administration's defense priorities, but Democrats were reportedly excluded from the closed-door sessions. The briefings came as the Pentagon seeks congressional backing for a record defense spending increase. [go to link] |
| second: Monday’s announcement by Trump calls for separating combination shots — including the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine — into separate injections. Appointments for that and other vaccinations should be spaced out whenever possible, the order states. To accomplish that, drugmakers would need to revive a slate of individual vaccines that have not been marketed separately in the U.S. for decades. They would also have to build new manufacturing plants. Health experts say there is no scientific basis for changing course.
“We do things that are less convenient and more expensive if there’s a good reason to do it,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “There is no good justification for this. I think it’s very bad public health policy.” [go to link]
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| second: Trump has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to bring the Iran war to a close. Resuming a limited bombing campaign didn’t get it done. Neither did making apocalyptic threats to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization. Every time Trump touts a possible breakthrough in negotiations, the hard-liners in Tehran seem to delight in changing their terms and yanking away a possible deal. •
So Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. [go to link] |
| second: Trump’s secret flight swap used staff and media as decoys. More than a hundred aides, officials and reporters were kept onboard to fly towards Britain from Turkey, without being told there was a threat to their lives. “It appears that the idea was we can reduce the danger to President Trump by offering up 100 or so people to be killed by the Iranians in his place.” [go to link] |
| second: Trump justified his anti-vax decree by pointing to an alleged link between vaccines and autism. Yet dozens of careful scientific studies have failed to find any such link.
However, you know what does have a strong, well-documented correlation with autism? Air pollution. Childhood exposure to air pollution is clearly associated with higher rates of autism. Moreover, scientists have found a found a strong association between autism and pre-natal maternal exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution.
So Trump’s campaign against vaccines won’t reduce autism, but it will cause many children to suffer devastating, possibly deadly, infections diseases. Meanwhile, autism rates will rise as a result of his crusade against clean energy and in favor of dirty energy. [go to link] |
| second: The Trump administration claims oil is flowing normally again. There’s just one problem. “It is not possible to reconcile the disparity between what we see and what he is quoting,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler. [go to link] |
| second: None of these statements are false; they highlight the statistical rarity of transgender athletes competing at high levels in the United States compared to various social issues, organizations, and security incidents.
• There are more active Ku Klux Klan chapters than trans athletes in America.
• There are more states where child marriage is legal than trans athletes in America.
• There have already been more school shootings in 2026 than trans athletes in America.
• There are more anti-government extremist groups in almost every single state than trans athletes in America.
• There are more Republican pedophiles than there are trans athletes. [go to link] |
| second: When, in 1987, Ronald Reagan implemented tariffs against Japan over a semiconductor tiff, he complained that “imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take.”
When Trump unveiled his widespread tariffs in April 2025, he did so gleefully, cradling an infographic in a Rose Garden ceremony. Trump saw the tariffs as a quick fix, declaring that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” But reversing half a century of Republican economic blunders isn’t as simple as slapping tariffs on the rest of the world. [go to link] |
| THG:
Trump's Plan to Rig the Midterms Just Lost in Court 21 Times
[go to link] |
| second: Trump took office on an explicit promise to bring prices down and to avoid costly foreign wars. He is instead spending billions of dollars on a war that is pushing up the price of energy, fertilizer, and everything that is made out of energy and fertilizer (i.e., food), and he’s making no effort to justify the sacrifice to the public because he doesn’t want to admit that’s what he did. [go to link] |
| second: After winning an election in which Trump explicitly and repeatedly promised to bring down the cost of living, he’s done the reverse. [go to link] |
| second: Gulf States Accept a New Normal in Hormuz: Iran Is in Control, NOT Trump.
Oil-and-gas exporters dislike the emerging deal to reopen the waterway but see it as the least-bad option. Persian Gulf energy producers are concluding that Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz will become permanent, disrupting their oil and gas exports and global energy supplies indefinitely. [go to link] Tough luck, Trumptards, but the fat boy's war flopped |
| second: There has been a great deal of discussion of how the USA has run down its stocks of certain classes of advanced military equipment. This expenditure of ammunition is indeed shocking, and even before the latest Trump escalation in July had led to dangerously low stockpiles in certain areas; stockpiles so low that, I for one, do not believe that the US military will be capable of fighting a major war for years. ~ Phillips P. OBrien | Aug 11, 2026
[go to link] |
| second: Trump’s decision to use the National Guard in law and enforcement missions in Washington, D.C., and other cities ultimately proved ineffective, despite costing $1.7 billion. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP,’” he pooped. “These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.” [go to link] |
| second: Iran says it will not negotiate with Donald Trump and will maintain its current strategy until his presidency ends in 2029. Tehran also insists the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until Washington accepts its conditions.
Read More:
[go to link] To make Trump extra angry, Iran should only negotiate with Obama. |
| second: 6ix, Trump trashes around, trying all his many words, but the Iranians won't surrender to him and he doesn't know what new words and horrible threats will work magic. For example, he rejects Iranian demands for war reparations before opening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead he demands that the Iranians compensation him for lives lost in past regional conflicts. He thinks that is a very clever plan, but the Iranians laugh at him. They aren't intimidated by his mighty threats to bankrupt them. What next? Maybe threaten to bomb Iran, again? It didn't work before, but maybe next time it will. Maybe bigger bombs will work? How about another vague threat to nuke Iran? |
6ixStringJack: Maybe, huh? Be sure to give us an update on that story as it develops, Shit Golem. 
|
| second: Prompted by an Iranian assassination threat, Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey last month when the White House said he was flying aboard Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse that involved hiding the president in an airport catering cart. He boarded Air Force One in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals.
A credible threat to Trump involving Iran set the “deception operation” in motion.
[go to link]
The Iranians certainly got into Trump's head. |
| 6ixStringJack: Hey... I've wrote thousands of lines now in Python code with the assistance of free AI, which has required days of my "illiterate" ass playing AI whisperer. Meanwhile, Ted Bundy Clone is so fucking stupid he struggles with wiping his own ass on a good day. |
| 6ixStringJack: Nah... Just post more political cartoons. Because you don't know how to use that brain you've let waste away. |