Author: nick

At the recent oral argument in perhaps the most consequential case on the Supreme Court’s docket, the birthright citizenship case of Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts made a telling and illustrative quip. In an exchange with Solicitor General John Sauer concerning the problem of birth tourism, the chief justice responded to Sauer’s concern that 8 billion people around the planet are a “plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”  “It’s a new world,” Roberts said. “It’s the same Constitution.” Roberts had, in so summarily distilling the worldview of the American legal conservative movement, revealed…

Why is it so important for the U.S. to take and retain control of the Strait of Hormuz? No matter what else, why is this the only real nonnegotiable with Iran? At first glance the nonnegotiable seems to be Iran’s nuclear program. This raises the question of what might be left of the program after massive bombing by the U.S. and Israel. The media makes much of the fact that some enriched uranium is supposedly still buried under one of the ruined sites, and of course no one should simply write off radioactive material in the hands of an adversary.…

Liberal justices stalled the release of the Dobbs ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, a new report reveals. Source link

CBS’s “60 Minutes” reports on what it would take for the U.S. to forcibly seize Iran’s stash of highly enriched Uranium, speaking with former national security official Andrew Weber, former WH nuclear adviser Dr. Matthew Bunn, retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward, and former Energy Department official Scott Roecke. “In Iran, we couldn’t send a team in to do this unilaterally without great risk,” Weber said. “You would need to set up in the middle of the country a secure perimeter. It would probably take thousands of U.S. troops to secure the facility while our experts excavated the HEU that’s located…

Trump’s war with Iran is not popular – and that’s no surprise. Critics of the war are correct about one very important thing: It is messy. The Strait of Hormuz remains dangerous. Oil markets are volatile. The risk of escalation has not disappeared. Even after weeks of air strikes – and now a U.S.-led blockade aimed at restoring control of the Strait – Iran retains the ability to disrupt shipping and rattle the global economy. All of that is true. But what critics have yet to show is that there was a better alternative. For years, American policy toward Iran…

The night before l voted against going to war in Iraq, my sister, Beverly, told me that a Knoxville television station had run a poll and found that in East Tennessee, 74 percent were in favor of going to war, 9 percent were against it, and 17 percent were undecided. In very sharp contrast, the New York Times said only 41 percent favored going to war in Iran, and several polls showed even less support, in the 20-30 percent range, before the war started. In comparison, the Times survey said 97 percent favored going to war after Pearl Harbor, 92…

No, Iran Isn't Being Honest About Opening the Strait Source link

A hard lesson and a ruthless political machine. Source link

In the midst of growing chaos Donald Trump has sent his real estate agents to Islamabad in what looks like a unilateral effort at renewed peace talks. He says if there’s no deal this week he’ll start destroying Iran’s power plants and bridges, writes Joe Lauria. The George Washington Bridge (Acroterion/Wikimedia Commons) Saturday, April 18 to Sunday, April 20 By Joe LauriaSpecial to Consortium News Donald Trump said in a flurry of posts Sunday that the U.S. has seized an Iranian ship in the Oman Sea “blowing a hole in the engine room;” that he’s sent negotiators to Islamabad to…

New video on our Patreon, FREE TO WATCH FOR ALL! In which we talk about the 28-year history of the Grail and how we’ve (barely) kept it going all this time as an independent website… Trump puts the FBI on case of missing NASA and nuclear research scientists: ‘No stone will be unturned’. The sound of writing: how bird calls may have influenced ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Will we ever get rid of Bob Lazar? What is a near-death experience actually like? Creating baby geniuses to thwart the AI threat? The new wave of Silicon Valley–backed gene-editing startups is straight out…