curated news excerpts & citations
Steven Beschloss: The Threat of Retaliation in America
The Trump regime’s actions are making America less safe. They are exploiting fear to seize more power. We should not be intimidated.
So many of the Trump regime’s actions can break your brain. Launch a war against Iran …
… this massive military assault comes in the wake of FBI Director Kash Patel firing a dozen counterintelligence agents and staff whose responsibilities included monitoring possible threats from Iran on American soil.
CNN reported that this gutting was motivated by “a simple reason”: Trump wanted the removal of agents investigating him for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the story by reporter Hannah Rabinowitz also noted that these firings “have added to concern inside the Justice Department and FBI that counterterrorism and intelligence investigations in the wake of the military operation in Iran could be hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” removing “decades of combined experience in identifying the types of threats that sources say could appear” because of the Iran attack.
How foolish is that? Well, extremely foolish if you think that the Trump regime should be committed to keeping America safe.
According to Miles Taylor, former counterterrorism operations lead at the Department of Homeland Security, his old department wasn’t in the room when the bombing started and doesn’t appear to have been involved in the defensive planning. Taylor, who now write the valuable Defiance newsletter, notes that “thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts and officials have been moved to ‘immigration’ enforcement.”
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I think it’s important to hear from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder, who just published a Substack piece entitled “The Desire for Terror.” He talks about “self-terrorism,” which involves “allowing things to fall apart, and then grabbing opportunely at a bit of the falling wreckage, which is something that Trump does well.” Snyder explicitly states:“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States.” …
(Steven Beschloss more…)
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 9, 2026
It has become clear that Trump had no plan in Iran other than to strike it, knock out the leaders he didn’t like, and hope the Iranian people would rise up and put in place new leaders he could deal with. …
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark explains that the Trump administration didn’t bother to have a theory for why the U.S. was going to war with Iran, or to explain to the American people why such a war would be a good thing, because they didn’t think there was going to be a war, just a fast, hard strike that would enable the U.S. to put a new Iranian leader in place.
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The spreading war in the Middle East threatens the ties between the region and the U.S. that Trump has pushed since taking office. As Eliot Brown, Georgi Kantchev, and Lauren Thomas of the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the richest countries in the Persian Gulf last year tried to strengthen ties with Trump by pledging billions of dollars of investment into the U.S. Now they are having second thoughts. A prominent Dubai businessman posted at Trump on social media: “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war?” Trump had placed the Gulf states “at the heart of a danger they did not choose,” he wrote.
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Aaron Rupar of Public Notice commented: “Trump is completely flailing. He didn’t anticipate the economic blowback and now he’s trying to undo the past 10 days and contain the damage.”
As part of its apparent war on what the administration calls “narco-terrorists” in Latin America, U.S. Southern Command announced yesterday that it has struck another small vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing another six men.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Ken Klippenstein: Homeland Security Warns of Iranian “Fatwa”
Malcolm Nance: Boots on the Ground is Coming: Three More Arabian Nightmare Scenarios
Can US Special Forces raid Iran’s hidden nuclear stash, Seize Islands and Control the Straight of Hormuz without casualties like the Maduro operation?
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Paul Krugman: Dire Strait
… oil markets went wild while I was airborne.In a way that was odd, because the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since the war on Iran began, with no obvious way to get it reopened quickly. As I showed in yesterday’s primer, continued closure of the Strait is a shock to world oil supplies bigger than the oil shocks of the 1970s. What changed?
Well, on Friday Trump called for UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, suggesting both intransigence and a tenuous grip on reality. Then the Iranians chose Khamenei’s son, reputedly a hard-liner, as the new Supreme Leader. These developments may have dashed the hopes of oil traders who still thought we might have cosplay regime change, Venezuela-style: The regime basically continues, but a new leader makes conciliatory noises and throws a bunch of money Trump’s way. That could still happen, but not for a while.
Time matters here. As the Strait remains closed, producers are shutting down, and this isn’t like turning off a tap that can be quickly restarted.
(Paul Krugman more…)
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BBC Mundo: How Iran is using cheap drones to respond to attacks from Israel and the US.
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In the days since the conflict began – on Saturday, February 28 – Iran has launched nearly 2,000 drones at various targets in the Middle East in an effort to overwhelm defenses and spread chaos in the region.These Shahed drones, known as kamikaze drones, carry explosives that detonate on impact and can cause significant damage. The largest attack inflicted by Iran on the U.S. was a drone strike on a base in Kuwait that killed six American soldiers.
(BBC Mundo more…)
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James Eagle: China’s export machine enters a new technological phase
At the start of the century China’s rise as an export powerhouse was driven largely by labour intensive manufacturing. After joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 the country rapidly expanded production of textiles, basic electronics and other goods that relied on low cost labour, driving a sharp rise in its trade surplus.
(James Eagle more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: Tens of thousands of civilians are stranded and at risk
“Everyone saw this coming except the President.” An “unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.” Were these the words from Democrats decrying Donald Trump for failing to plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians under a blizzard of retaliatory fire raining down on the Gulf States? No, those were Republicans excoriating former President Joe Biden for the botched 2021 exit from Afghanistan. Back then, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) thundered, “It’s a very dire situation when you see the United States Embassy being evacuated.”
Fast forward to last week. The Trump regime closed down three of our embassies (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait), abandoning U.S. citizens in those countries. Trump’s minions failed to consider advanced planning to evacuate Americans from the region, leaving them to fend for themselves in places where missiles are flying and buildings are ablaze.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
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Rebecca Solnit: Terminology, Clarity, and the Question of What Is the Left?
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In this New York Times thing, I got to say something I was very glad to get out into the world, in an answer to whether Gavin Newsom or Zohran Mamdani was the hero we needed: “One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.”And I said something I was less happy about. I replied to another question with Newsom in it, “I’m watching the left gear up to attack Gavin Newsom just in case he’s the nominee in 2028, and it makes my heart sink, because I watched people tear down Al Gore, I watched people tear down Hillary Clinton, I watched people tear down Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There are definitely major things to critique about every one of them, but at the moment, when the job is to defeat the other guy, we defeat ourselves.” That’s something I would not have written or, having written it, would have revised and qualified and cleaned up, but you don’t get to do that in an interview. I’m now seeing moderates use it to blame progressives and the left for lots of things, and leftists assert that I meant there should be no critiques, though clearly I said there should be. Somewhere else in the interview I did manage to say, “the left is a lot of different things, not a monolith.”
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
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Daily Beast: MAGA Melts Down Over Hours-Long Airport Line Chaos
FLIGHT CLUB
MAGA voices are trying to find anyone but Trump to blame for the shutdown.
(Daily Beast more…)
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Jay Kuo: New Secrets from the Epstein Files
While Trump commits war crimes abroad, he can’t escape mounting evidence of sex crimes here at home.
Three separate reports—from the South Carolina Post and Courier, the Miami Herald, and even the Murdoch-owned New York Post—corroborate the account of a sex crime victim interviewed four times by the FBI. They raise serious questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s death in custody, including stunning evidence of a possible cover-up and apparent payoffs to a guard.
Let’s walk through what we’ve learned just in the last few days thanks to some intrepid reporting.
(Jay Kuo more…)
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
- January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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