JD Vance and Nixon

Vance both lies and tells the truth about Nixon ... yes, today Nixon's crimes seem almost quaint in comparison to the things Trump has done, but it wasn't the "deep stste" that took Nixon down - it was superb investigative reporting ...



And, at the end, it was Congressional Republicans who saw the writing on the wall.

To Vance, it's just an historical story, but I'm old, so I remember it. In 1973, when the Watergate hearings were broadcast live on tv, I had one of my first part-time jobs while I was going to college.

My sister (L) my mom and me (R) in the college years ...

Anyway, I was working in a tv repair shop on an air force base. Never had a customer, so I spent all my time watching the hearings on the shop's tv. It made an impression ...



Vance and Trump want us to accept what they are doing as unremarkable. But it's the worst thing that can be done to a people ... the stealing of the right to vote in a free and fair election.

Hate will keep us together

Last night, after the Democratic primary races in New York, Chris Hayes had Mayor Mamdani on his show ... he had endorsed three candidates from his Democratic Socialist party to run against incombents, and they all won.

Chris is a big fan of Mamdani - he's almost giddy in the video. I'm not. a fan of Mamdani. I don't like the assertion that progressive Democrats should now be thought of as "centrists" because Socialists have been added to the party. I don't like their pandering to the "young working-class male" vote with candidates like Platner.

And I especially don't like their hatred of Israel and emphasis on a foreign policy that excludes every other foreign country's actions but instead focuses on a created narrative about the one democracy in the Middle East.

They give new definitions for words like "genocide" and obsess over a group that has freely elected a terrorist regime that keeps women as second class citizens and is proud of murder, rape, and hostage-taking.

Anyway, in the video, Mamdani's hatred of Israel is hard to miss, and he says a lot of stuff that is just not true. What's depressing is that I don't think anyone cares about that. As a political party, it seems we have decided to take a page from the Republican playbook .... we will let hate be the glue that binds us and propels us to supposed victory.

Now "we" are the antisemites

On June 9 I had a post titled The purity test. It was about an Ezra Klein podcast on the new directions of the Democratic party. One of those new directions was being anti-Israel.

In the post I mentioned how Congressman Dan Goldman was talked down in the podcast for supporting Israel. I mentioned that I had watched Goldman many times on MSNBC and when he was legal counsel for the Democrats in Trump's first impeachment, and that I thought he was a good guy.

As it turns out, Goldman lost his seat in the primary that just took place in New York. The person he lost the seat to is also Jewish, but is anti-Israel and is a Democratic Socialist endorsed by Mamdani.

What made me notice this was a news story of how Goldman was banned from a coffee shop in New York because he supports Israel ... NYC coffee shop tells Rep. Dan Goldman he’s not welcome over his pro-Israel views ....

[...] In the harshly worded [Instagram] post, Poetica Coffee alluded to Goldman’s stance in support of Israel, which progressives like Lander and human rights groups have strongly criticized over the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, and mentioned genocide and AIPAC.

“Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice?” the post said, accompanied by what appeared to be a security image of Goldman looking at his phone while he was at the register.

“See, here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between,” the post continued, according to screenshots that circulated on social media and were reported by several news outlets. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.” ...

And then there was his office ...

These are the same photo.

Enough is enough. Where do we draw the line? pic.twitter.com/Fuv0GFli5d

— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) June 23, 2026

So now my party, the Dems, are the party of antisemitism :(

Hah!

- RFK Jr. on Air Force One with his happy meal of ultraprocessed food. OMG! ... is that a "sugary drink" sitting before him?!

Federal judge blocks state bans on buying soda and candy with food stamps

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from allowing five states to ban the purchase of sugary drinks and candy with food stamps.

The decision is a major setback for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, known as MAHA, which is focused on minimizing the consumption of ultraprocessed foods to reduce the prevalence of chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes ...

The idea that millionaires like RFK Jr., a man with no medical degree who eats road kill and wants to make tallow great again, should give advice to poor people about their food choices is absurd. The sad truth is that many ultraprocessed foods are cheaper and more convenient than their healthier counterparts. When you are down to buying your groceries with a credit card at the end of the month, sometimes you have to settle.

I think the real issue is not nutrition but punishment - this administration wants to punish poor people for needing government help to feed their families.

Press conference

Watching Meet the Press Now, in which Trump is giving a press conference, completely misrepresenting the situation with Iran. He's hailing the MOU as if it was a wonderfully crafted treaty that will benefit the US, when actually it's a maimed copy of the JCPOA, which greatly benefits Iran instead. Then off he goes on all other subjects with his pet press corps.

In Switzerland

Mideast Live Updates: Strains Quickly Emerge on First Day of U.S.-Iran Talks

Negotiators for Iran and the United States met in Switzerland for a little over an hour on Sunday as they seek to turn a 60-day cease-fire into a lasting peace, but it was quickly apparent how far apart the two sides are.

Iranian negotiators insisted on an end to the war between Israel, a U.S. ally, and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, as a condition for further talks, according to Iranian state media. The talks were also strained by President Trump’s renewal of threats against Iran, just as Vice President JD Vance was hailing the “great progress” that was being made ...

Two things ...

1) The very first point in the MOU contains this language ... The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran .... undertake from now on ... to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other ... Trump has laready broken the agreement by making his latest threats aganst Iran.

2) Vance and some Iranians met today to discuss the MOU, particularly the problem of Israel and Hezbollah fighting in Lebanon. So why on earth is Israel not at the meeting? Or Hezbollah? Why was Israel not consulted about the terms of the MOU? Why was Israel not asked to sign it?

The chance of any agreement created by Trump surviving is non-existent. Perhaps by design?

Father's Day

Celebrating dads of every kind 🦢🫶

📸: Trudie Davidson#swan #fathersday #cygnets pic.twitter.com/OssArUP2Gn

— Animal Planet (@AnimalPlanet) June 21, 2026

Washington Week on the MOU

Washington Week discusses Trump's MOU with Iran. I used to watch this show a lot. It's very good ...

The hatchet man

JD Vance sticks it to Israel ...



Trump needs someone on whom to blame his terrible failure with Iran. Who could be better, with the midterms coming up, than unpopular Israel?

What Israel thinks of the MOU

And also what's happening with the Gaza Board of Peace? All this discussed in the Times of Israel's daily briefing ...

The MOU

It's one thing to have made mistakes, but it's another to spin the failure as a win. It's not just that time was wasted, an ally let down, money spent and prices going up at home. People are dead. Maybe the Strait of Hormuz will work right again eventually, but there's no coming back from dead.

At the G7

God help us all :(

Let's make up a deal

Michelle

Michelle Obama is not a man, and neither is that dope that called her one.

This is Michelle Obama: sweet, kind, intelligent, and good ...

Losing the war

Rachel Maddow on us losing the war with Iran ...

Told you

The White House would never describe a jihadist drone attack on an American town as “small and meaningless.”

It is beyond disappointing to hear it refer to Hezbollah aggression as the same.

Say no to IRGC blackmail. https://t.co/HAJVbNomyb

— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) June 14, 2026

And ...



It was a mistake for Israel to trust Trump. I understand why they did it ... they felt they had to ... but any observation of him as a person and as a leader would show that he is untrustworthy. I'd like to tell Israel that things will get better, and I hope they do eventually, but as long as he is in power, I think the whole world will continue to be negatively affected by him.

Voting in California

I vote in California. it is a very reliable system. In the last election I used a mail-in ballot .... I do this because I am legally blind and it's hard to see stuff ... and after voting, instead of mailing it, I dropped off my ballot at my local public library.

Republicans have been saying that California's voting system is corrupt, doubrless because they know the actual votes will be against them. But here is Jacob Soboroff of MS NOW in LA at a voting center, explaining how things work ...

War crimes

Analysis of Satellite Image and Videos Suggest Precision U.S. Strikes on Iranian Water Facility

[...] Iranian state media reported that the U.S. had hit water storage buildings and a local official said that water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby. Temperatures in the area have reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week. .... Deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure could constitute a war crime under international law ...

Trump has repeatedly threatened to target civilian infrastructure.

In the yard

The oleanders are blooming ...

Hansel won't look up at me to get a good picture ...

Here's a boysenberry plant that's gone wild ...

And here are some little wild plums ...

Here you can see where the grapes went wild and grew up into the trees ...

And here is Fluffy, the mother of my indoor cat Yoda. Took a long time to catch Fluffy and get her spayed ...

The purity test

Watching another Ezra Klein podcast and wow is it depressing. It's about the Democratic party's future foreign policy (saying we ever win again).

Ezra and his guest, Matt Duss, basically believe that the Dem party must ... 1) turn its back on everything Biden did (God, he is a convenient scapegoat, isn't he?) ... 2) make its purer-than-the-driven-snow moral stand on the high ground of hating Israel.

The guest, a former advisor to Bernie, seemed especially and fervidly anti-Israel. He spoke as if there is no factual doubt that Israel has been committing genocide as well as every other bad thing possible, when that is just not true. But truth isn't important in politics, the perception of truth is.

One thing that really bothered me ... the podcast starts with the impuning of Congressman Dan Goldman of New York. His crime? He's a Democrat but he hasn't said anything bad about Israel (he's Jewish, you know).

For years I have seen Dan Goldman appear on MSNBC as he has done so many good things, both now as a politician, as the lead counsel on Trump's first impeachment, as a legal advisor at MSNBC, and earlier as a US attorney in the Southern District of New York. But all that doesn't matter since he hasn't called Israel genocidal.

This is a bad purity test. We didn't lose the last election because Biden helped Israel. We didn't lose the election because some Democratic politicians are unapologetically Jewish. We lost it because the Democratic party's bigwigs were wealthy, educated, famous, and lucky people who forgot about those less fortunate. Now we can add to the Democratic party's mistakes an apparebt embrace of antisemitism. What could go wrong?

Divergence

The aims of Israel and of the Trump administration in the Iran war are diverging. I feel for Israel because they actually believed Trump's lies, and now they are being left in the lurch.

D Day

It's the anniversary of D Day. And there's a new movie out about that day ... Pressure.

Pressure is a 2026 war drama film directed and edited by Anthony Maras and written by Maras and David Haig, based on Haig's 2014 stage play. It stars Andrew Scott as meteorologist James Stagg and Brendan Fraser as Dwight D. Eisenhower as the pair work to plan the Normandy landings during World War II; Kerry Condon, Chris Messina, and Damian Lewis also star.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but today I saw a discussion about it from the Bulwark with retired General Mark Hertling ...



PS - happy to see Brendan Fraser. Will always love him in The Mummy :)