Drill Baby Drill...the US Politics Thread (Part 3)

[Redbj]

and the last line needs to be…thank you for blag blag blag

[Cologne-Liverpool]

I mean we’re laughing now, but they’re probably bombing the forum servers as we speak.

[Limiescouse]

This is incredible

Judge Zahid Quraishi Ejects New Jersey Federal Prosecutor From Court, Orders...

The judge critiqued the prosecutors office because they prematurely struck a plea deal (on a child exploitation case) before the FBI had finished their investigation and so were unable to respond when the ongoing investigation brought up more compelling evidence. In pressing them on that he was unable to get clear answers on who was actually running the office, suspects Habba is still involved and so shut everything down until the office leadership could show up at his court and clear it up.

A judge telling a prosecutor’s office they have lost the faith of the court is a really big fucking deal

[RedWhippet]

I’m not sure whether this is belongs on the war thread or this one, but it relates to the bombing of the Iranian girls school. By any estimation, it is a fuck up of the highest order, but it transpires that 90% of the team that are supposed to prevent this were axed by Musk’s DOGE team:

The role ‘war on woke’ may have played in deadly US bombing of Iran school

Now Musk may have regarded “not bombing civilians” as “Woke nonsense”, but if you look at this in terms of pure efficiency, it’s a dreadful waste of money. A Tomahawk cruise missile is an expensive piece of kit and the number of missiles available is ultimately limited. A single missile costs in the region of $4 million, so it is very much in both military and economic interest that they strike a valid military target.

In this case, it has destroyed a civilian target in the worst way imaginable. The immediate cost of to the US is a loss of $4 million: quite possibly more than the savings from the personnel that were dismissed. The long term loss to the US in terms of its reputation is far higher than that.

But that is one missile that we know of. How many others are they aimlessly throwing around that are merely blowing up disused buildings or other non-military targets?

[Limiescouse]

It is absolutely a political issue and ties to what I said in this thread a few days ago. When you change the way government works - the very existence of key roles, the safeguards that have been put in place as a result of lessons learned, deliberative processes for policy making - you have to be held even more responsible for the outcome of it than normal. Intelligence failures happen in every conflict like this. But when someone is running a new “process” that marginalizes or cuts out those domain experts then you have to be held to even more accountable for the outcomes failures that resulted.

[Magnus]

Seems you people managed to have an entitre party with song, wine and dance, without even inviting me.
Grumbles

[Magnus]

@anon8517609

From what I understand, the second assault wasn’t really about nukes anymore. The Feb 28 strike hit nuclear facilities, but Iran still had a lot of military and missile infrastructure that posed immediate threats, especially around the Strait of Hormuz and key naval sites.

Basically, the first strike was about slowing down nuclear capabilities, and the second was about responding to Iranian retaliation and preventing further attacks on shipping, allies, and military targets. Saying the program was “obliterated” is probably more political messaging than a literal military guarantee, there’s still a risk that anything left could be rebuilt, and the U.S. wanted to make sure Iran couldn’t continue threatening the region while tensions were high.

It’s messy, but in conflicts like this, one strike almost never ends everything. It’s usually a series of moves and counter-moves.

So tempting answering a dead account.

@anon8517609

I think that’s a fair criticism in terms of questioning motives, honestly, nobody outside the inner circle really knows the full reasoning behind these decisions. But I’m not convinced it’s as simple as “Trump doing Netanyahu’s bidding” or chasing oil either.

For one thing, the current conflict didn’t just appear out of nowhere. The escalation is tied to the wider regional situation and things like the fighting over shipping. When Iran started attacking ships and threatening the passage there, it created a huge international crisis because supposedly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through that.

The U.S. and Israel framed their strikes as targeting military and nuclear-related infrastructure tied to those threats. For example, U.S. forces carried out a major airstrike, hitting dozens of Iranian military sites they said were linked to missile storage and naval mining operations used to disrupt shipping.

Now that doesn’t automatically mean the justification is correct, plenty of people inside and outside government are questioning it. In fact, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official recently resigned arguing that Iran did not pose an imminent threat, which shows there’s serious disagreement even within the administration.

Where I’d probably differ from you is on the idea that this is purely about oil or control of resources. If the goal were to seize Iranian oil, the strikes likely would have targeted oil infrastructure directly, but so far those facilities have largely been avoided while military sites were hit instead.

At the same time, I do agree with one of your broader points: the consequences of actions like this are incredibly hard to predict. We’re already seeing global oil prices spike and major economic disruption because of the conflict, which suggests the situation may be far messier than anyone anticipated.

So I guess where I land is somewhere in the middle: I don’t think the motivations are as simple as personal incompetence or oil grabs, but I also don’t think governments are always transparent about their real strategic goals. Like most wars, it’s probably a mix of security concerns, alliances, domestic politics, and miscalculation.

Tempting.

But I will spare you all. Just wanted you all to know that I felt the temptation of the ring !!!

[redalways]

You were too busy unravelling over Bodo/Glimt to be fair…

[CanuckoLFC]

Absolutely nothing can go wrong, can’t it?
(Maybe I should post this on the AI Thread)

The Pentagon is planning for AI companies to train on classified data,...

[Sportbilly1966]

Thanks I appreciate that

[Sportbilly1966]

Somebody’s been on the ‘shrooms’ again

[Sportbilly1966]

@Bonus

wise words

Wise words on TAN

[Limiescouse]

Rand Paul is a piece of shit, but this is so beneath a confirmation hearing that even in this political environment should be instantly disqualifying. Utterly disgraceful shit

CALL TO ACTIVISM

What he’s referencing is Paul being beaten up by a neighbor over a property dispute that hospitalized him with pretty serious injuries including a punctured lung

[CanuckoLFC]

FBI is buying data that can be used to track people, Patel says

This is the first confirmation that the FBI has resumed actively buying people’s data for investigations.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/fbi-buying-data-track-people-patel-00834080

Kash Patel Admits the FBI is Buying Private Data on Americans

[mattyhurst]

I see Markwayne seems to be scraping the barrel of cnuts.

[Arminius]

Apologies to whomever posted it if I saw it here, but someone said replacing Noem with him was like shitting your pants and changing your shirt

[Sithbare]

I’ll take the bot anyday.

[mattyhurst]

About sums him up.

[Limiescouse]

This is a really great conversation on the Trump admin’s actual stance on immigration. The guest is the Cato institute’s Immigration head, so hardly a lefty, who explains how in multiple ways the admin has been harder on legal immigration than illegal. Furthermore, this was both predictable and predicted by him in a piece he wrote in the first week of the admin. Rather than just picking the one bit of their rhetoric you thought was most palatable and pretending that was what they meant (they only intend to address illegal immigration), you needed to recognize their contradictions on the issue, see the way they were constantly mislabeling legal immigrants in a lot of different classes as illegal, and look to their actions in the first term and it was pretty obvious they would be going after immigrants en masse not just people here illegally.

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

[Bekloppt]

Thanks LS. Useful ammunition in my war against the BiL.