Mike G.

Pretty much confirming that the US tried to recruit them and they said no.

Score: Skyrim
Soundtrack: Alan Wake

The media smells blood in the water and they are goddamn right to.

She gave her Nobel peace prize to the guy and he just took it lol

Himes: I have a theory on how this ends…

You’re going to see oil go across $100… Projections for economic growth are going to go down.

And at some point in 3-5 weeks, the president is going to say this is really not tenable. And he’s going to declare victory and walk away.

Wait for them to calm down -> They're not calming down

US strategic analysis of Iran:

Shutting an oil well isn’t like turning off a faucet.

It’s a huge engineering risk, difficult to reverse — and an indicator the Kuwaitis don’t see choke points improving anytime soon.

Even if you believe the Iranian regime was irredeemable, and the citizens of Iran would prove unable to dislodge it, Khamenei's son is worse and now in control.

This seems like the early stages to set up a “Iran agreed to stop attacking its neighbors, mission accomplished!” Off-ramp.

Yea the post 9/11 “you can’t critique America at all” ain’t gonna fly considering where the public is and where the Presidents polling already is
Also big LOL that the press isn’t largely okay with the war so far

It’s almost like we didn’t think this through.

"Speedrun of Dubya Term 2" looking like a solid bet right now

I know the popular sentiment is that he stole it, but it’s far more likely that it was used without typical congressional appropriation.

Vance:

Everybody Loves DEI Now The way Trump regime officials tell it, and the way mainstream media outlets repeat it – sometimes verbatim – you'd think the question of whether the United States should promote diversity is precisely a 50-50 issue. You'd think there are exactly as many Americans who vehemently oppose diversity as there are Americans who support the creation of maintenance of a multicultural democracy. You would be wrong to believe this reflects reality in any way, if the actual real-life numbers are to be believed. There is nothing close to a durable American constituency for tearing down Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and replacing them not with meritocratic systems, but with straight-up, in-your-face white supremacist retrenchment. > **Become a****Bad Faith Times supporter****today and get access to the BFT****discord community****, where we talk politics, movies, music, and other stuff. You can also****leave a tip****if you see fit.** The constituency for the regime's appalling, AI-powered attack on diversity in the ranks of government agencies, the military, and academia is, in fact, vanishingly small. It is the kind of constituency that can be ignored if politicians want to ignore it. Beyond the chinless Elon Musk fanboys posting racist memes on the X platform from their mother's basements and commanding Grok to make them a digital girlfriend – the only kind of woman that doesn't find them repulsive – there isn't an appetite for taking a hatchet to diversity efforts as some kind of solution to whatever ails the nation. Fewer than two in ten Americans surveyed by The Economist and YouGov in late February said bolstering diversity in the US makes the country a "worse place to live." Not even a quarter of white folks said diversity would be a detriment to the country, and nearly seven in ten self-identified independents said increasing diversity would make the US a better place or would not make much difference. So-called non-MAGA Republicans, whatever that means, are cool to the regime's flailing efforts to kill DEI wherever it stands, going as far as firing high-ranking women and Black people in the military at the behest of fascist online posters who have directed the regime's actions since it took power in January 2025. A few national polls in 2025 found more Americans buying into the wretched idea that diversity efforts had gone too far and needed to be scaled back. The February 2026 polling suggests a good chunk of those people soured on anti-DEI politics after watching Republicans' attacks on diversity play out in every corner of American society. The viciousness with which the regime has sought to dismantle diversity may have planted the seeds of Woke 2.0, which is more clear-eyed and angrier than Woke 1.0. Back to The Economist/YouGov findings: Outright saying a more diverse US makes the country a worse place is extraordinarily loaded. It tells me a few things about the respondent: They are classic, textbook-style white supremacists in that they believe in the genetic superiority of the white race, their worldview is tragically anchored in hierarchies of oppression – the soul-corroding idea that if I'm not atop that hierarchy, my enemy will be – and they have bought into the right-wing unreality in which civil rights and the promotion of diversity has gone too far and now, 61 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, constitutes systemic discrimination against white Americans. They Want The Robots To Be RacistI have a bad habit of pretending the right-wing mind is some labyrinthian construct that one can only comprehend by sinking oneself into the deepest depths of conservative thought. Then I see right wingers begging machines to be racist and I realize how fucking stupid I’ve been, how needlesslyBad Faith TimesDenny Carter This is how you get an Education Department secretary who says with a straight face that she will fight for equal treatment for all American students via directives aimed at dismantling DEI initiatives in public schools. Deep within the sordid right-wing unreality – their own invented world shaped and reinforced through their powerful social media media machine – it is white students facing repression today in U.S. schools thanks to DEI policies that have – in the minds of true believers – flipped the hierarchies of oppression. This is one example of many from the second Trump term, and thankfully a federal judge recently saw through this bad-faith attack on DEI efforts in public schools and slapped down the Education Department's covert, racist directive – one that was never going to survive outside the right's unreality. The fake reality in which anti-DEI policies are necessary is also why the regime's U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission – a body charged with enforcing federal laws making it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or employee – is asking white Americans to file complaints against companies that hired a person of color over them. With the sheen of caring about civil rights and equity and inclusion, the right-wing hacks who work for the Trump regime can pretend to be freedom fighters for the dispossessed, in this care white dudes forced to compete for jobs (and status) with ladies and people with brown and black skin. They even use the language of civil rights as cover for their hideous little plans, hoping, I suppose, that shredding diversity initiatives across the country will gain wider acceptance. These vile anti-diversity efforts have not seen anything resembling popularity, as The Economist found in striking numbers. That four in ten self-identified MAGA respondents agree that diversity makes the country a worse place in which to live should be surprising to exactly no one. That it's not seven or eight out of ten MAGA freaks who say this highlights the smallness of the constituency that backs the regime's half-assed attempts to rewrite American history in the image of those who despise the country as it currently exists. Removing a plaque commemorating the struggle of enslaved people – and having a judge immediately demand the restoration of the plaque – is not going to undo generations of progress, however slow and painful that progress has been. It might give regime officials a dopamine rush and draw praise from loveless weirdos on X, but it does nothing to achieve their overarching goal: Repealing the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, which they consider a mistake of history in need of correction. The Economist/YouGov polling revealed a desire among right-wing Americans to be move beyond the push to make the United States a fairer and freer place for all. More than half of Republican respondents said Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of racial equality and equity had been achieved. A mere 12 percent of Republicans said MLK's dream of freedom for people of color in the US had not been realized. Black and Latino respondents, as you might imagine, seemed a lot less certain about the fate of MLK's dream than Republican respondents. If you, like me, are white and have lots of white family and friends, you've probably been told – a safe distanced from mixed company – that slavery and Jim Crow and systemic discrimination belongs to the past, that it has been dealt with, that we can and should move on from the messiness of righting historical wrongs and clearing a path for a sustainable multiracial, multicultural democratic republic. The laziness of this sort of thinking is designed to be political convenient. A society that collectively decides racism and repression and discrimination have been solved – that all of those pesky little boxes have been checked – can have a government and workplaces that side with me, the white guy. Bleeding DEI dry requires an acknowledgement that things have been fixed, not just among white people but among everyone. Without that widespread belief, you have diversity efforts surviving this blackpilled regime and one day thriving in a nation that has watched what anti-DEI politics look like and have not liked it, not one bit. _Follow Denny Carter on_ _BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_ _._

The Trump regime's efforts to undo the gains of the Civil Rights movement are shockingly unpopular

HUGE payrolls miss, wow

Feb Payrolls -92k vs +55k est/+130k prev
2m net revision -69k
Unemplomyent 4.4% vs 4.3% est/4.3% prev
Avg hourly earn YoY +3.8% vs +3.7% est+/3.7% prev
Jan Retail sales MoM -0.2% vs -0.3% est/0.0% prev
Control group est MoM +0.3% vs+0.3% est/-0.1% prev

South Dakota's "Meth. We're on it" campaign

I'll always remember Kristi Noem for the "Meth. We're on it." campaign.

The current deflection in MAGAworld is “I paid the same amount during Biden, so what’s the big deal?”

Insurers refuse to cover ships going through the Strait. All GPS signals are blocked or spoofed because everyone on every side of it is using devices you can buy on Amazon to make sure drones and smart bombs don't find them.

Nothing is moving through that Strait until the war is over.

FYI before you click on rage to find out who wrote this it’s an oped by Josh Hammer.

Carry on.

The party is desperately trying to keep Vance away from all of this as possible.

From NRO's Audrey Fahlberg: SCOOP: Trump's furious that Noem said under oath in her Senate Judiciary hearing that the he had advance knowledge of the $220M DHS ad campaign & approved its release He's privately floated Markwayne Mullin as prospective replacement, @NRO has learned

Looks like DHS isn't getting more trustworthy any time soon. This does explain Mullin's TV tour — or maybe the tour explains Trump's interest in him.

Hey that’s about the cost of the SSI Restoration Act, which would cut recipient poverty by 60%, eliminate marriage penalties, and modernize draconian asset limits.

gavin newsom is a very useful weathervane because he believes in nothing save the fact that he should be president

that he's making these noises about israel support should tell you how incredibly over it is for israel within the democratic party going forward

I really hope this isn’t Amodei caving

Trump said the program was totally obliterated LAST WEEK

Paramount credit downgraded to 'junk' status over debt worries S&P and Fitch Ratings are cool to the $79 billion in proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. debt.

Off to a great start, I see.