Green Algae and Nukes 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🚀🚢

Deal or No Deal:  What’s going on at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool provides a good analogy for Trump’s Iran deal. The pool has long had a gnarly green algae problem.  All in on optics, Trump hired his swimming pool guy who was told a quick fix was needed.  The out of his depth pool guy filled in a few cracks and painted the pool’s bottom blue. Within days the algae returned in force, the pool is now greener and murkier than ever.  Trump now has his “expert” who may or may not know swimming pools, but who is clearly way out of his depth dealing with the problems of an enormous reflecting pool pouring gallon containers of hydrogen peroxide into the pool that’s not really a pool to create another temporary fix. And of course, it’s all Obama’s fault.  Like the pool, Iran has long been a problem.  Obama’s painstakingly negotiated JCPOA nuclear deal was far from perfect.  It limited Iran’s uranium enrichment for a while but kicked much of the nuclear problem down the road.  It didn’t address missiles or Iran’s funding of surrogate groups like Hezbollah, and it very controversially involved the releasing of some frozen funds.  However, the deal for all its imperfections was negotiated by genuine experts schooled in international diplomacy and nuclear science and did keep Iran from expanding its reserves of what Trump calls nuclear “dust.” Trump walked from the deal during his first administration.  Iran went back to enriching its uranium while building up its missile supply and funding its violent surrogates.  Trump went to war, saying he’d put an end to the nukes, missiles, and surrogate funding.  He inflicted lots of pain but apparently Iran has a high tolerance for pain and a Strait of Hormuz ace card.  Trump’s experts who aren’t experts have now negotiated a memorandum of understanding that few including Israel, which is supposed to walk away from Lebanon as part of the “cessation of all military operations” deal but won’t, have officially seen though maybe they have now since CNN just released what they say is the deal’s terms.  It involves Iran holding on to its uranium but promising not to build a bomb, the end of sanctions, financial relief in the form of Iran being allowed to return to the selling of its oil and other petrochemical products, the release of more funds than either Obama or Biden ever freed up, a large aid package from neighboring countries, the opening of the Strait for which Iran may or may not charge transit fees but nothing with regard to missiles and surrogates.  Reports are that Trump’s Kushner and Witkoff led negotiating team are now searching for nuclear experts to help with the nuke details that are supposed to be worked out in sixty days, as if that’s possible. Trump who is very good at convincing his base that what he says is true even when it is not, says his deal is way better than Obama’s ever was and anyway the current situation is all Obama’s fault, and Biden’s too.  The pool is greener than ever; Iran won the war.

Primary Update:  Representative Mike Collins, Trump’s preferred candidate easily won his Georgia Senate primary yesterday. Collins is an election denying MAGA who is currently being investigated by the House ethics committee for making ghost payments to an “intern” who was the girlfriend of his chief of staff.  In other words, he’s a typical Trump choice but maybe not so perfect for Georgia which of late has been voting for blue Senators.  Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff couldn’t be happier.  Trump and Governor Kemp’s preferred Governor candidate Lt Governor Burt Jones, another MAGA election denier lost to billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson who also positioned himself as a Trump supporter even though he didn’t have Trump’s endorsement.  Jackson will face off against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in what is likely to be a very expensive race since he’s still got lots of money to burn.   

More 💩:  Further feeding fears that the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have obtained tapes of White House strategy sessions, the newest segment of their soon to be released book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” previewed in the NY Times reveals that White House officials debated suspending habeas corpus in order to facilitate mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Habeas corpus is the Constitution given right that allows a person who is detained or imprisoned by the government to challenge the legality of their confinement in front of a judge. Advocated by White House strongman Stephen “Goebbels” Miller, the proposed suspension of rights, was ultimately put to rest, or put to rest for now, by Staff Secretary Will Scharf who wrote a series of confidential memos addressing its illegality.  Scharf is no liberal snowflake but apparently is one of those conservatives who still believes that the Constitution matters. The conversations detailed by Haberman and Swan also reveal that VP Vance who has been trying to soften his image in anticipation of a presidential run by appearing on programs like The View advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act to “quell” Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests. Keeping with the suppression and targeting theme California Governor Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, reported yesterday that his wife is being investigated by the Department of Justice, saying she’s being targeted for being his wife and is another victim of Trump’s vindictiveness. On the pettiness and vindictiveness front, early this morning Trump announced via Truth Social that he’s cancelled today’s Senate confirmation hearing for DNI nominee Jay Clayton, not because he’s cancelling Clayton’s nomination but because he wants to punish the Senate and House by keeping acting DNI/Housing guy Bill Pulte who no one trusts in place for a while, payback for the continuing hold up of the FISA surveillance extension, the failure to pass his SAVE voter ID/suppression bill, and also for subjecting Clayton’s replacement to the Southern District of NY US Attorney position to the blue slip convention that requires signoff from NYS’s two Democratic Senators Gillibrand and Schumer.