The fighting has stopped between Israel
and Iran. Families of hostages now hope
for a deal in Gaza
Posted By: Mercedes44, 6/26/2025 6:40:07 AM
Liran Berman hasn’t had much to keep hopeful over the 629 days of his twin brothers’ captivity in Gaza. Ceasefire deals have collapsed, the war has dragged on, and his siblings remain hostages in the Palestinian enclave. But the war between Israel and Iran, and the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that halted 12 days of fighting, have sparked fresh hope that his brothers, Gali and Ziv, may finally return home. With Iran dealt a serious blow over nearly two weeks of fierce Israeli strikes, Berman believes Hamas, armed and financed by Iran, is at its most isolated since the war in Gaza began,
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Mercedes44"
Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is busy introducing Skittles to an experimental yak collective in Tajikistan.
There are a lot of things about the 21st century Democrats that make me wish that Elon Musk could get to us Mars faster. As long as he doesn't invite any Democrats to the Martian party, that is.
Back in ancient times — we called them "The 1900s" — not all Democratic elected officials cheered on criminals. No, I'm serious! Many of them were even patriotic Americans — the real kind. We were crazy idealists and thought that things would be that way forever.
distanced herself from apparent New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, calling him “the wrong choice for New York.”
“Socialist Zohran Mamdani is too extreme to lead New York City,” Gillen said in a statement. “His entire campaign has been built on unachievable promises and higher taxes, which is the last thing New York needsBeyond that, Mr. Mamdani has called to defund the police and has demonstrated a deeply disturbing pattern of unacceptable antisemitic comments which stoke hate at a time when antisemitism is skyrocketing. He is the absolute wrong choice for New York,” she
House Freedom Caucus (HFC) chair Andy Harris is warning that Senate GOP leadership is making a losing bet if they try to force House conservatives to swallow the upper chamber’s version of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.
Harris, who leads the conservative flank of the House Republican Conference, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a Wednesday interview that he is prepared to tank the Senate’s proposal — arguing the upper chamber’s budget package would increase budget deficits while reducing House-passed spending cuts.
Towards Jihadist Pogroms in Europe?
4 replies
Europol reports indicate that Europe is now home to tens of thousands of radicalized individuals. The attacks in Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) demonstrate the feasibility of complex operations by small groups.
Will people who criticize Islam be dragged through the courts by a desperate regime, while those who outspokenly fantasize about murdering Jews are granted a blank check?
Is quoting Islamic law "inflammatory"? The answer is completely arbitrary.The European Court of Human Rights often upholds convictions if statements about Islam are deemed to disrupt "religious peace" or "target Muslims". This subjective determination reflects a legal trend in Europe to prioritize "social cohesion" over freedom of speech, unlike the U.S. First Amendment.
The fighting has stopped between Israel
and Iran. Families of hostages now hope
for a deal in Gaza 3 replies
and Iran. Families of hostages now hope
for a deal in Gaza 3 replies
Liran Berman hasn’t had much to keep hopeful over the 629 days of his twin brothers’ captivity in Gaza. Ceasefire deals have collapsed, the war has dragged on, and his siblings remain hostages in the Palestinian enclave.
But the war between Israel and Iran, and the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that halted 12 days of fighting, have sparked fresh hope that his brothers, Gali and Ziv, may finally return home.
With Iran dealt a serious blow over nearly two weeks of fierce Israeli strikes, Berman believes Hamas, armed and financed by Iran, is at its most isolated since the war in Gaza began,
Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.
The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again. Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.
Trump administration officials on Tuesday slammed a leaked preliminary intelligence assessment of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear facilities by weekend US airstrikes that the president has touted as a massive success.
The classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) bomb damage assessment — deemed a “low confidence” estimation of the effectiveness of Saturday’s strikes on the Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz sites — reportedly determined that Iran could bring its nuclear program back online as quickly as within one to two months, according to Fox News.
On the high end, estimates indicate that Iran could restart uranium enrichment within a year, according to those who viewed the DIA report.
The message started by congratulating Donald Trump on his “decisive action in Iran” and then got even more flattering, gushing about reaching the precipice of achieving “something NO American president in decades could have done.”
This wasn’t an ardent supporter swooning or the president taking to social media to sing his own praises in his familiar ALL CAPS style. This was NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte heaping direct praise on Trump as he flew to a two-day NATO summit in the Netherlands.
Iran executed three more prisoners Wednesday over allegedly spying for Israel, its state-run IRNA news agency reported, the latest hangings connected to its war with Israel.
The hangings happened in Urmia Prison in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, which is the country’s most northwest province.
IRNA cited Iran’s judiciary for the news, saying the men had been accused of bringing “assassination equipment” into the country.
Iran has carried out several hangings during its war with Israel, sparking fears from activists that it could conduct a wave of executions after the conflict ended.
Just as China has been attempting to redraw maritime boundaries in the South China Sea —renaming reefs, building artificial islands and militarizing waters in defiance of international rulings — it is now exporting a similar playbook to land borders. These moves are about more than maps. They are about creating a norm of impunity, where might makes right and ambiguity is weaponized.
Over the past two decades, China has transformed contested reefs, shoals and rocks into militarily fortified islands, backed by creative "historical" narratives, domestic law, and a selective reading of international norms.
In the dwindling days of his run for Gracie Mansion, Zohran Mamdani has picked a strange priority: publicly funding gender change treatments for minors. If elected, the New York Sun reported, Mamdani plans to spend $65 million on “gender-affirming care.” He also promised to investigate New York hospitals that have stopped providing the services, fearing the Trump administration’s wrath, and create an “Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs” at City Hall. That Mamdani decided gender changes for teenagers deserved his campaign’s attention typifies his problem as a candidate — and danger to the city.
Voters go to the polls Tuesday to pick the Democratic nominee for New York City’s next mayor.
They face a truly awful range of candidates, yet with a duty to stop the worst of the worst: cheap influencer Zohran Mamdani — a babyfaced socialist antisemite who’s never accomplished anything except this so-buzzy campaign. Democrats must soundly reject him — by leaving him completely out of their five picks on the ranked-choice voting ballot.
Why? It’s not just that Mamdani’s bumper-sticker agenda is repugnant (at best) — with his enmity for police, business, educational standards and everything else that makes this town work,
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The majority of the Supreme Court is just as fed up with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as we are.
A slate of Supreme Court opinions were released today, including Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. The court sided with Medina in a 6-3 decision, ruling that states like South Carolina are not legally bound to funnel taxpayer dollars towards abortion facilities like Planned Parenthood
Dissenting, as per usual, was liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, [snip]
Jackson’s dissent begins by invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1871 – legislation which expanded the federal government’s power to defend citizens’ constitutional rights against “white supremacist violence,” in Jackson’s words.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett has gotten a bad rap lately for siding with the leftist wing of the Supreme Court on a few cases, but if you ever needed a reminder of why ACB was such a pivotal addition to the Supreme Court, look no further than her latest majority opinion, which brutally destroyed Ketanji Brown Jackson for her moronic dissent in Trump v. CASA, Inc.
In a 6-3 decision that handed President Trump a major victory, the Court put the brakes on runaway district judges issuing nationwide injunctions — an abuse that’s become the left’s favorite tool for stalling any policy they dislike.
Jackson’s dissent veered into unhinged territory
The Zohran Mamdani Revolution
21 replies
They did it. They finally did it. Those maniacs. They blew it up.
As New Yorkers walk dazed through the streets of the world's greatest city, seeking perhaps the half-buried Statue of Liberty lying beneath the silent sands of adeserted beach in the Forbidden Zone, one thing has become clear: The young revolutionaries of the Democratic Party are ready to take control of their party's future. And there's hardly anyone left to stop them. On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Ugandan-born trust fund baby -- the scion of a Columbia University post-colonialism professor and an Oscar-nominated Hollywood director --
Supreme Courts Upholds Right of Parents
to Opt Their Kids Out of LGBTQ-Themed
Classroom Activities 20 replies
to Opt Their Kids Out of LGBTQ-Themed
Classroom Activities 20 replies
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday handed down its ruling in the parental rights case of Mahmoud v. Taylor. In a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS decided that parents do have the right to opt their elementary school-aged (pre-K through 8th grade) children out of classroom instruction that may include materials on gender and sexuality. The three dissenters were Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito states that the parents involved were likely to succeed in their claim that the school system, by not allowing the opt-out on LGBTQ-themed classroom activities, was an unconstitutional burden on their religious liberties.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom sued Fox News on Friday, seeking damages of at least $787 million from the conservative network for allegedly defaming him in misleading comments about a phone call with President Donald Trump.
“No more lies,” Newsom wrote in a tweet that announced his lawsuit, which the Democrat filed in Superior Court in Delaware, where Fox News is incorporated.
The monetary damages Newsom is seeking almost exactly match what Fox Corp. Fox News, and other Fox cable networks agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems in April 2023 to settle a Delaware lawsuit alleging they defamed Dominion by falsely claiming its machines swayed the outcome of the
The Supreme Court decisively ended lower courts’ ability to block policies issued by the Trump administration using nationwide injunctions on Friday.
In a 6-3 ruling, the majority found that lower courts exceeded their authority by issuing a nationwide block on President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions.
“The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone,”
Democrats are uneasy about Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, and nowhere was that discomfort more obvious than in House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ evasive response when an anchor pressed him about Mamdani’s ideology. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough put Jeffries on the spot, asking him if Mamdani’s far-left views on economic issues and Israel were the kind of ideology Democrats should embrace in 2026. Instead of addressing the question, Jeffries pivoted hard, steering the conversation away from Mamdani entirely, and onto — you guessed it — Donald Trump.
June 27 really needs to be a national holiday wherein we collectively observe the bottomless depravity of the dying news media. We could call it something like “Biden Debate Day.”
The date is significant because it was the start of a 131-day journey that showed just how far the media were willing to go to steal an election. June 27 was the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, or as I like to recall it, “The day the media knew Biden had to go.”
Up until then — it was the one and only time voters got to directly compare Trump and Biden side by side in 2024 —
As RedState reported, the Trump administration scored a major victory on Friday after the Supreme Court ruled that district court-level nationwide injunctions exceeded judicial authority. That will throw a wrench into the left-wing strategy of seeking universal relief in a select few left-wing jurisdictions across the country and hopefully return some actual balance to the separation of powers within the U.S. government.
Of course, while the decision was a victory for common sense and for voters who would prefer judges not overstep their bounds to essentially operate as president, it was a defeat for Democrats who have relied on that abuse to remain in power even when they lose.
Peter Orszag, a businessman and ex-Obama official, claimed Thursday that the Democratic Party was in peril of becoming an anti-capitalist and antisemitic party.
Orzag spoke with CNBC in the aftermath of Democratic New York Assemblyman Zohran Mandani winning the Democratic New York City mayoral primary election. Mandani was endorsed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America.
“Let me step back and just say that I am saddened to say that I think the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly antisemitic and anti-capitalism,” Orszag said. “And the thing about it is turning … towards socialism and turning away from your moral principles through antisemitism never works."
Consider Ceaușescu
13 replies
On Christmas Day in 1989, the people of Romania held a long-awaited ceremony that was more joyous than any Nativity had been in decades. They held a spontaneous trial of President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, found them guilty of capital crimes against the Romanian people, and sentenced them to death. There was no shortage of volunteers for the firing squad, and those lucky enough to be chosen didn’t wait for the order to fire: they riddled the Ceaușescu’s bodies with more than one hundred bullets.
The story of how the dictatorial couple met their end has important lessons for those wondering about the fate of today’s Iranian
A Democratic representative told homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, to go back to “1930’s Germany” in a fiery X exchange on Wednesday.
Miller posted, “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration,” referring to socialist Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic primary for mayor. Representative Mark Pocan (D., Wis.) calmly responded, “Racist ***. Go back to 1930’s Germany.” X users were quick to point out that saying this to a Jewish man is a bad look. For example, the National Republican Congressional Committee called it “just the latest in a long line of outrageous, disgusting antisemitism” from Pocan.