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Many of the troops and ships once at the president’s disposal have shifted to the Caribbean.The Trump administration has insisted it has numerous military options to deploy against Iran if the regime uses force against demonstrators. But that menu is far more limited than it was even a year ago. The U.S. troops and ships that were once at the president’s disposal have shifted to the Caribbean. A major American defense system sent to the Middle East last year has returned to South Korea. And administration officials say there are no plans for the movement of major assets. The president...

@LindseyGrahamSC Mr. President: your decisive leadership in isolating this regime economically through your actions today are most impressive. Your promise to have the protestors’ back and put the regime on notice that you will not tolerate the killing has led to the largest outpouring of demonstrators against this fanatical regime since its founding. Mr. President: I believe the Iranian regime has crossed red lines. They are killing their people in large numbers and mocking your leadership. It is now time to take decisive military action — no boots on the ground – going after those who do the killing. Make...

Lindsey Graham: “Who is in charge of Venezuela? Donald J. Trump. If you defy him, what happened to Maduro is going to happen to you”

"Lindsey Graham: You just wait for Cuba. Their days are numbered." ...

Possible US airstrikes

Donald Trump is often described as a “populist,” a “nationalist,” or as someone who sits outside the traditional ideological categories. However, when one examines his foreign policy closely, a different picture emerges. Trump is, in practice, a neoconservative. He is not a neoconservative in the sense we once knew: he does not cloak American interventions in the language of democracy promotion, human rights, or universal values…What makes him distinctive is not the substance of his policies, but the way he frames them, stripped of the moralizing tone. Oddly enough, this makes his foreign policy more transparent—and perhaps, in some ways,...

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney “just loved Israel,” recalls Michael Oren, past Israeli ambassador to Washington. Oren was in the room as an Israeli reservist in the 1991 Gulf War when Cheney, then defense secretary, and his counterpart Moshe Arens met to discuss the response to Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Israeli cities. He was the Israeli notetaker, as Cheney sought to convince Israel not to respond. “The Israeli government was telling the administration that we couldn’t wait anymore, that the paratroopers were out on the runway ready to go to western Iraq,” says Oren. Cheney feared that the...

The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the spy agency to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgement from a commander in chief. “Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a reporter asked Trump at the White House. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump said. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America." The second reason, the president said, was narcotics trafficking. “And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in...

President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term. His revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Mr. Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone...

US Senator Lindsey Graham has warned that President Donald Trump will impose steep tariffs on countries that continue to import oil from Russia, specifically naming India, China and Brazil. Graham made the remarks during a recent interview on Fox News. “Trump is going to impose tariffs on people that buy Russian oil – China, India, and Brazil,” Graham said. These three countries account for around 80 per cent of Russia’s crude exports, which Graham argued is helping to fund the war in Ukraine. He said Trump plans to impose a 100 per cent tariff on oil-related imports from those nations...

The war in Ukraine has thrust advanced air defense systems like the Patriot missile into the spotlight, creating a unique confluence of geopolitical urgency and defense sector opportunity. As Russia's relentless drone and missile strikes escalate, Ukraine's reliance on Western military aid has exposed both the strategic importance of advanced air defense systems and the fragile global supply chains supporting their production. For investors, this dynamic presents a compelling narrative of growth for defense contractors—but also risks tied to production bottlenecks and shifting geopolitical alliances. The Demand Surge: Patriots as the New “Must-Have” Asset The U.S. decision to pause Patriot...

John Bolton, former national security adviser to Donald Trump, applauded the president's decision to strike Iran, explaining to CNN's Kasie Hunt why he believes it was "clearly the right thing to do."

Isolationists seek to discredit warnings about the great dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran as “warmongers” or “neocons.” Yet history proves the opposite: Isolationism allowed Nazi Germany to arm and vastly expand its war machine, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In reality, isolationists are the most dangerous war-mongers. Their intent to keep the U.S. out of military conflict (short of a direct attack on the U.S. homeland), virtually ensures a catastrophic war.

Dorothy Day founded an ongoing series of weekly talks at the Worker, dedicated to “the clarification of thought”. These talks continue to the present. Now, however, some Catholic Workers complain, most of the talks are immersed in the hard left and the thinking expressed is actually “The Calcification of Thought”, one wag has quipped mournfully. Today, attendees of these weekly lectures have encountered the following ideas: - Anti Israel, Anti-“Zionist”, Anti “Usury”, Anti “NEOCON” and pro-Iranian, pro-Assad, pro-PLO propaganda. - Support for violent riots in American cities - The return of antiquated Marxist terminology, like castigating peoples' opinions as "bourgeois"....

President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he is an “easy target” and “our patience is wearing thin,” before demanding Tehran surrender in its conflict against Israel. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He is an easy target, but is safe there - We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” he wrote after declaring “total control” over Iran’s airspace. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.” Trump in a subsequent...

Mike Pence: "If Israel needs our help to ensure that the Iranian nuclear program is destroyed once and for all, the United States of America needs to be prepared to do it." ... [Video at URL]

If someone uses big words to sound smart, they’re probably not. If someone speaks in clichés, they might be lacking original thought. Understanding human communication isn’t always simple. In fact, navigating the labyrinth of human conversation requires more than just a good ear. It also requires an understanding of certain speech patterns and phrases. Now, some folks have a knack for this. They can hear a few words and immediately gauge the intelligence of the speaker. In this article, let’s delve into 8 phrases that, more often than not, are used by people with below-average intelligence in everyday conversation.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote a letter to the editors of The Wall Street Journal that was published on Tuesday in which he vowed that the U.S. Senate was ready to “grind” Vladimir Putin’s “war machine to a halt” if President Donald Trump is unable to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine soon. Graham, one of the most hawkish GOP senators, wrote his letter in response to a scathing Journal editorial titled, “Time for a GOP Senate Revolt on Sanctions Against Putin.” In the editorial, the Journal’s board argues for the GOP to advance Graham’s bill that would “hit...

In what can be called a victory speech over failed neoconservative foreign policy, President Donald Trump proclaimed the end of 30-some years of existing foreign policy in the Mideast. The ideology dragged the U.S. through pointless wars from Libya to Yemen is now dead. At an investment conference in Riyadh, in a speech little-commented on by the mainstream media, Trump said, “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists [sic] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.” For the first time since the First Gulf War in...

With four hats, including national security adviser, the former Trump rival is defying predictions he’d be a weak player. Marco Rubio is doing big things under President Donald Trump — way more than nearly anyone expected. The secretary of State was once thought of as one of the weakest players in the Trump orbit, a man who wouldn’t last long in the Cabinet because he faced many internal rivals and had major policy differences with Trump and the MAGA base. But Rubio has deftly earned the president’s trust, enough so that Trump this week gave him another powerful job as...