Winning Iranians over, one dumb arse presser at a time…

Jake!

Dow 36,000 back on! Paging Kevin Hassett.

PAT RYAN: 'Does the US want to be the policeman of the Middle East getting nothing but spending precious lives & trillions.' Rng a bell? COLBY: Defer to you R: That was Trump. How about this - 'we simply cannot afford to get enmeshed in a Middle East war' C: Defer to you R: That was actually you

I refuse to let the fact that her replacement will be just as bad reduce in any way the sheer joyous schadenfreude of this moment if it happens.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The only thing weirder than the Americans who think or assume the UK is the 51st state are the oddball British weirdos who think that.

Sounds like they are close to getting the AFV contract with the MOD…

Overall I think England did pretty well in the T20 WC in the end. So NZ v IND- should be tasty.

NOEM: I would disagree with the judge CROCKETT: I'm sure you would, but can you tell me whether or not you have a law degree? NOEM: A what? CROCKETT: A law degree NOEM: No I do no- CROCKETT: Okay

Genuinely surprised that Gloucestershire is so low on this.

Does the WH website still have that post up insisting that Iran’s nuclear capability was annihilated last year?

Honestly if you want a base for a short break in the Netherlands then Haarlem is excellent.

'UNIMAGINABLE CRUELTY': Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointeee from NY, thrashes DHS' treatment of a man who came to the US at 9 as an abuse/neglect victim, has no criminal record and became a college grad. "The laws of decency condemn such villainy." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"Operation Epic Fury has delivered twice the air power of Shock and Awe of Iraq in 2003." Yeah that's where the Iraq War went wrong. Not enough bombs.

It is just a special military operation.

Not pulling any punches here.

”Show no mercy- it is what Jesus would have wanted“.

He is going to need her support a lot to stand any chance. She can turn out voters he needs.

This is one of the all time best skeets

F/A-18: Maekar; F-15E: Baelor. I will not be taking questions at this time.

For no particular breaking topical reason, a recent (award-winning) cartoon.

Leaving aside the US having a $ 5 billion trade surplus with Spain it would be pretty difficult to target a single member of the EU.

Good morning from Haarlem. #GoodMorningFromHaarlem

Trump had a net popularity in UK in February of -70 and I doubt that has improved this week. I’m not sure there is a lot of upside with the voters in being a slavish sycophant towards him.

‘Starmer is no Churchill’ If that means he isn’t going to commit British forces to a poorly thought out and under-prepared naval operation through a narrow and heavily defended maritime bottleneck- then I’m personally OK with that.

Is Dan just trolling Americans now?

Reading this I’m now even more smug about being an early adopter of hating Morrissey.

Surveying the Bluesky landscape over breakfast and amazed to see @dankaszeta.bsky.social still, like brave Horatius on his bridge, locked in single combat with hordes of Americans who refuse to believe that other countries and peoples exist.

Presiding over a session of the Security Council about children and education in conflicts two days after her husband’s war wiped out a girls elementary school. The sheer shamelessness of it.

Ok I searched this up and was genuinely very surprised which college this is. I guess I’m getting old.

Sneaking suspicion that the US government will secretly have more respect for this than for whatever the hell it is the UK is doing.

This war lurches between the comically stupid and the utterly horrific. I know that is true of most wars but somehow they’ve dialled this one up to eleven.

I think we can all hear that dog whistle perfectly well.

My neighbour told me Kuwaiti air defence keeps eating his F-15s so I asked how many F-15s he had and he told me he just goes and gets another F-15 so I said it sounds like he's just feeding F-15s to Kuwaiti air defence and then his daughter started crying

Did a single journalist ask either Trump or Hegseth about this?

I think it is the case that in the last 24 hours Kuwait has managed to shoot down half of the F 15s that have been shot down by anyone In the entire history of the aircraft. Quite an impressive achievement really for an ally.

Could never understand self professed realists (not Patrick) who fell for Trump.

Day three of the “special military operation” for regime change in Iran.

‘We destroyed the village in order to save it’ had a good run but ‘The strikes were so successful that we killed the people that we wanted to talk to‘ is now the dumbest thing ever said in relation to a military operation.

I'm proud to support Shine A Light for Brain Tumour Awareness Month and @braintumourrsch honouring the memory of my dear friend, the extraordinary poet and author Benjamin Zephaniah. His legacy continues to inspire, and together, we will find a cure. #ShineALight

Markets might hold up OK on Monday counting on TACO- but if there are no signs of de-escalation by Wednesday it could get hairy.

2025 reports of Trump obliterating Iran’s nuclear weapons to be scrubbed from White House, CBS News websites.

This Is Just To Say I have written The 6 requested references for your post Which I very much hope are useful to someone's career. Forgive me for pointing out it is not good practice to take them up so soon.

The lie is revealing- Trump just wants to declare victory quickly- he doesn’t really have an objective beyond that.

It took less than four years to turn the Twitter blue tick from a marker of assumed reliability into one indicating ‘likely disinformation’. (In that sense it might be argued it is still useful).

So Iranian strategy appears to be to inflict pain on the Gulf States until they threaten to stop giving the Trump family bribes- which is a theory of victory at least as coherent as anything the Israelis and USA have got.

The real issue is not how fast the 82nd can get there but how fast Edward Fox and Michael Caine can relieve them with the Guards Armoured Division.

There is no real upside to any of this but I admit thinking about the ‘too much tax and too many browns in UK- I’m off to live in Dubai’ crowd is giving me a little half smile.

Did we have dueling? Yes. Yes we did.