#firster

[ratmare]

Who dies first in Hansry is my version of top/bottom preferences

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

i really dont want them to introduce another prosecutor to the roster in aa7 so i want them to reuse an old prosecutor and i think sebastian debeste would be great for that role. that being said i also dont want them to use sebastian debeste as the prosecutor in aa7 even though i love him because that means they'll have to localize his name to the stupidest bullshit in english

[definitely-not-karen]

I love the transformers wiki so much.

Oh a character that looks like First Aid appears before he canonically exists… let’s call him Firster Aid :)

[deus-ex-mona]

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: O Canada

Poe: so things are Poe: things are pretty crazy these days Poe: so crazy it's hard to even see the point in getting together with some friends Poe: around the campfire Poe: to talk and tell stories and forget the world a bit Poe: yeah it sure is

Poe: but maybe- King: hey did you hear the president is going to declare war on Canada Poe: Robert Heinlein: yes! Heinlein: YES!! Heinlein: [doing end zone dance] YES!!!!

Poe: you're awful excited, rob Heinlein: you bet I am! Heinlein: as a writer of military science fiction, you better believe me when i say Heinlein: i love wars! Heinlein: they're so theatrical! Heinlein: [finger guns] pew! pew! pew!

Heinlein: finally! the time has come! Heinlein: the Patrick henry society will rise again!

George Romero: the Patrick henry society? Heinlein: you may remember us from our pro-Vietnam campaign Romero: i thought science fiction writers said they wanted no more Vietnam Heinlein: oh that's a typo Heinlein: it should say "No, more Vietnam!"

George Romero: he can't declare war on the socialist paradise of Canada! Robert Heinlein: oh yeah, ya dirty hippie? give me one reason why not? Romero: for one thing Romero: first of all where would all the conscientious objectors run away to? Heinlein: you mean draft dodgers Romero: eat shit heinlein

Heinlein: there's nothing better than a war! Heinlein: i can't wait until we prove our AMERICAN SUPERIORITY by quickly & decisively crushing a weaker country! Heinlein: this time, i'm sure it'll work out good for us!

Heinlein: i know it didn't really work for us in Vietnam Heinlein: or Korea Heinlein: but this time Heinlein: this time i'm sure it will Heinlein: i mean what are the odds that it'll bite us in the ass a third time?

George Romero: fourth Heinlein: what? Romero: fourth time Romero: you forgot iraq Heinlein: well now come on Heinlein: that one's debatable Heinlein: i mean Heinlein: did we REALLY lose that one? Romero: Afghanistan Romero: fifth

Romero: what about Nicaragua Heinlein: what about Heinlein: that doesn't count!!! Heinlein: who is this America hater? Heinlein: this blame America firster? Heinlein: this pinko commie lesbian socialist democrat?!? Romero: they call me George "comrade to the people" romero

Heinlein: [narrows eyes] that sounds like commie talk to me Heinlein: where did you say you were from? Romero: Pittsburgh Heinlein: [on phone]and, as soon as i get off hold with this snitch line, that's where you're going back!!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 22, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 23, 2025

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lyinginbedmon]

A running joke about my D&D character Dahren is that he's a trans man but in dwarven society, gender doesn't work the same way that it does for regular humans. This is because everybody is hand-sculpted by their relatives and animated in a magical ritual, rather than conceived by luck of the draw.

So the question is how is Dahren even able to be trans?

And if we want to be very dull about it, we simply go with "Lying didn't know that about this campaign setting when they made the character", but let's dig into it a little more.

Firstly, we know dwarves don't "do" transgender, because Dahren is the only example. There are transgender characters from other races, but Dahren has studied and researched endlessly and so far as he knows he's the first and only one in dwarven history. He's not even entirely aware of what being transgender actually is because it's such an alien thing to his entire culture.

Secondly, we know dwarves do "do" gender, because there are men and women. Since dwarves don't reproduce sexually it's easier to think of these as being two roughly-standardised phenotypes more than sexes or genders. Milk first or cereal first.

Lastly, we know that which of those you are is important, at least to some people in dwarven society. We know that because Dahren's birth sex precluded him from doing things he wanted to do growing up. It's possible that this is a consequence of interactions with other societies, essentially importing foreign biases intentionally or otherwise, or it might just be that some of his relatives are jackasses. We know the Mohran family has a fair few eccentric black sheep.

So day one: Dahren is sculpted by his relatives. Maybe they're after a daughter, maybe they flipped a coin, but the person they sculpted and adorned with gems was Dahren's original dwarven form. A milk-first model. The instant he became self-aware, he knew something was wrong, though he didn't quite yet have the language to know what.

Then as he gets older, he notices the two phenotypes. Dahren was made to be a milk-first, but he wanted to do things the way cereal-firsters did them and there was a pang of heartache every time he had to do them milk-first instead. His friends and family and society keep prodding him to do things like a milk-firster but it always feels weird somehow.

And then, one day, home alone for once, he marches into the kitchen, grabs a bowl, and not entirely realising what he's doing... does it cereal-first. And suddenly it feels Correct.

Tradition plus culture over time equals expectations. Any population of sentient individuals invariably looks for patterns and establishes codes and protocols of behaviour and, ultimately, that extends to their social hierarchy and expectations. Dwarves lacked any reason to have gender the way humans do, but they still thought enough like humans to unintentionally invent one.

Essentially, as long as lines are drawn arbitrarily through a population, there's always going to be people on the wrong side of theirs. And whilst gender might not be as big a deal in dwarven society compared to ours, it was enough to rub Dahren the wrong way, resulting in dysphoria and an impulse to correct the problem.

That was all based on Dahren's perspective however. The benefit of getting out of your own hometown and seeing the world is it can give you new insight to things that seemed obvious before. So maybe this isn't typical of dwarven society overall, but it was certainly perfectly normal for Dahren.

[yvanspijk]

First, firster, firstest

Former was formed by combining Middle English forme ('first') and -er, so at the time it literally meant 'firster'. Foremost is peculiar too: it used to be formest - forme plus -est, so literally 'firstest' - but the part -mest was replaced by unrelated most. See the infographic for more.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

How to avoid a job for the rest of my life... Perhaps you have some answer

Well I rode trains for like....hold on let me do the math, 14 years. Then I moved into a house where no one cares that I never have money. They own the house tho, so it's not like rent is an issue.

I will say, riding trains is fun but it can also be extremely rough. I'm straight edge and always have been. I can count all my living friends from when I first started traveling on one hand. Everyone else od'd years ago. You also get caught in shitty weather a lot, if you're a poc like me you often interact with racists on the streets and I mean people who will call you the n word hard r to your face and you gotta be ready to fight them. With that being said the train riding community has gotten really faggy and friendlier over the years. I went to a queer train riders gathering like 3 years ago and I was one of the oldest people there and I'm only in my early 30's. Traveling kids are usually really young or pretty old, most don't make it through their late twenty's.

I dont believe in teaching people how to ride trains online. I think it has to be done in person to really get it. But I can give advice on a buncha other shit pertaining to living on the streets. But also I've always been an anarchist so I lived an atypical life to most other homeless people. I would crack squats/stay at them, lots of punk houses let me crash on their couch, at one point I lived and traveled on a school bus with a buncha earth firsters. Ok, I'm rambling now. Yeah.

Fuck a job, work is for suckers, and my housemates.

[the-best-of-waynes]

or what?

Get a “toaster oven airfryer” wayyyy easier to clean but essentially does the same. Also toast.

thank you for this advice, I will buy the toaster.

[nephitefortuna]

AU First Aid

Forged on Prion, First Aid is a rather helpful little guy, even if his anxiety makes him unreliable in combat he can still assist his allies by attaching himself to them or their weapons granting them a power up or helping them repair themselves faster. They were trained by Ratchet before being transferred to Firster Aid on the Paradronian Front. He is rather nervous when meeting new bots but hopes to make himself welcomed, especially in his new squad where there seems to be no immediate commanding officers.

[keepsmagnetoaway]

Uncanny X-Men 179 (March 1984)

Chris Claremont/John Romita Jr & Dan Green

After a rocky few issues, this one suddenly goes hard.

Yeah, so. This is a good issue, primarily because its a Morlocks issue, but also because John Romita Jr has at last been successfully paired with an inker who can bring some depth and interest to his quite bland art, Dan Green. It's thanks to Green that scenes like these feel as dark and weird as they need to.

Yeah. The original emergence of the Morlocks was interesting and welcome, but it was never this weird and horror-coded. Look at this shit!

So we should probably talk about the child bride thing, huh. Back when they first showed up, it was established that Caliban - the lonesome proto-Morlock who actually showed up even firster, but let's not worry about that - had a thing for Kitty, and she promised to come back to him if the Morlocks helped out the X-Men. This issue is that coming back.

There's no escaping the creepiness here. We've seen creepy depictions of Kitty many, many times, including in that first run-in of hers with Caliban, but this is an issue that's absolutely all about it. The weird punk trappings of the Morlocks and their narrative of subjugation and rebellion make it more palatable than when the reader is being asked to leer along with more powerful, more straightforwardly villainous pervs, but it's still a deeply uncomfortable issue. And yet.

And yet. The ending here is very pat - after some back-and-forth, Caliban just decides that he does not, in fact, want to compel a child into marrying him, how terribly heroic - but the issue as a whole is just so gnarly and interesting that I can't complain about it too much. The Morlocks - especially weird little Leech, who debuts here, the Yoda-like guy who saps the powers of other mutants when nearby - are so striking that, after the last few issues, this one was a breath of dank sewer air.

[sizzlingcloudmentality]

me watching everyone line up to get manhandled by MY GIRL

listen, it's not what it looks like, i swear! but you've been at work and i got bored and so... it just happened. BUT IT'S PLATONIC. they are not you!

(may i offer you spot #0, so you're firster than the first)

[misfitwashere]

June 22, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 23

READ IN APP

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

—

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

June 22, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Jun 23 Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

[darkmaga-returns]

Amid continued American entanglements in the Middle East, neoconservative commentators seek to shore up the tired status quo by delegitimizing foreign policy dissent. Nowhere is this more evident than on the ever-radioactive issue of the U.S. relationship with Israel. Fearing an above-board debate, these gatekeepers have marshaled obscurantist phrases such as “Code Pink Republicans,” a guilt-by-association tactic meant to negatively polarize the conservative base in favor of staying the course on U.S.-Israeli relations. Add to the mix old classics like the “isolationist” slur and the conspiracist obsession with the “Soros-Koch” complex, and neoconservative hawks are working overtime to stigmatize long-standing and legitimate bodies of conservative foreign policy critique. 

Despite the rhetoric of modern neoconservatives, there is a long history of conservative skepticism about cheek-by-jowl U.S.-Israel relations. Throughout the early Cold War, conservatives in Congress—including Republicans—opposed American entanglements in the Middle East, drawing on an earlier noninterventionist consensus that valued restraint overseas and fiscal prudence at home. Conservative Republicans presented a vocal bloc of opposition to the Eisenhower Doctrine, which expanded American influence in the Middle East, ostensibly to counter Soviet influence and fill the vacuum left by the ignominious departure of the European colonial powers. One such dissenter was Iowan Representative H.R. Gross, one of the most fiscally conservative congressional members in history.