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 :)

One more song

I love this song, sing it to the cats :) From one of my most favorite tv series, Once Upon a Time ...

James Taylor

"In Concert" at the BBC, November, 1970

The interview

Trump storms out of interview after being challenged about election fraud claims, DOJ fund

Meet the Press host Kristen Welker interviewed Trump ... you can see the whole interview here ... about his slush fund for Jan 6 rioters. When she challenged him on the facts, he flipped his wig and left ...



During the interview he said he "lovedd the idea" of paying off the rioters if only it could be done. Well, of course it could be done. He could pay them off himself ... isn't he richer than God? But he wants us to do it. The rioters probably will be paid eventually, as there are apparently other ways the Justice Department can pay them without needing any oversight from Congress.

And I just have to say ... the lies. Gobsmacking.

Narta Lagoon

A family of parasites. Creating nothing of worth, they prey on what belongs to others, damage it beyond recognition, and sell the remains to wealthy idiots.

The Right's sexism

I know I've been posting Ezra Kleine a lot lately, but the topic in this video really touched me .... the extreme sexism of the political Right and their continuing project of returning society to a time when men were men (think Quest for Fire) and women were just their f*ckable child-bearing slaves.

I was young in the 60s/70s, when the advent of birth control pills gave women the power to decide for themselves when and if they wanted to have children. That was perhaps the most important step towards women's equality.

Here's a past video from the Gates Foundation that advocates for helping women in other countries get birth contol. But the message is just as relevant to our own society, especially now: contraception gives women a chance for education, employment, health, and a better life for the children they do have ...



It will come as no surprise, then, that the Right has done everything possible to destroy women's freedom to choose birth control and also abortion. The Right will dress this up with laughably tortured religion/philosophy, but this is truly about one thing - keeping women powerless. It is abominable.

More on Platner

Report details allegations of unsettling behavior toward women by Graham Platner

More bad stuff coming out about Graham Platner. Some Democrats don't care as long as he can win against Susan Collins. Others see this support of Platner in the same way they saw Republicans supporting Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tape.

Platner's campaign staff includes those who helped get Mamdani and Fetterman elected. Apparently they are trying to find Democratic candidates who will appeal to all the young working-class men that voted for Trump. I don't like this approach. Don't find Platner trustworthy. Democrats can't win by copying Republicans.

The daily briefing

The Times of Israel's daily briefing with editor David Horovitz. They talk about the phone call between Trump and Nretanyahu as well as the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It's good to get Israel's perspective on what's happening in the war with Iran. The US press, both conservative and liberal, seems to have a lot of bias when it comes to reporting on Israel.