Got everything that I desire, sets the summer tabs on fire ...
Donald Trump on Truth Social: Barack Hussein Obama’s Deal with Iran, the JCPOA, was an easy, beautiful, smooth road to a Nuclear Weapon, which Iran would have had six years ago, and would have used long before now. My Agreement with Iran is the exact opposite, A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON! In fact, they no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement. The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL. Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had. Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands. At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States. We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future. Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly. If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Ed: "Ultimate alternative"? Is that what it sounds like? Maybe that's what it takes to get the IRGC to capitulate, but even a sotto voce reference to nuclear weapons is playing with fire.
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Erick Erickson: I do not know why it is so hard for President Trump to understand that, having provoked this war, he cannot now end it with Iran in the position Trump has left that nation.
The enforcement mechanisms so Iran cannot divert its new revenue stream to terrorists is unknown and, we know, Iran has worked feverishly for years to work around the existing mechanisms to great affect.
Neither side wants to show the text until it is signed, which itself is alarming. But based on the two things we know from Iran’s foreign minister, the United States destroyed most of Iran’s war making capacity and will now provide Iran the means to rebuild it.
And we will not get Iran’s nuclear materials, which this present agreement will not even deal with.
The United States won a war and appears now willing to lose it and allow its enemy — which has killed thousands of Americans for years — to rearm and nuclearize.
Ed: Ever since Gen. Dan Caine told the press that "no one should mistake our restraint for a lack of resolve," it has seemed clear that this administration has also failed to comprehend the nature of this enemy. I'm willing to wait and see the actual text before making final conclusions about this deal and the enforcement strategy behind it. It may well be strong enough to contain Iran and keep the seas open to all for another generation. But eventually, we will have this same conflict, and the IRGC is counting on our lack of resolve when the next crisis comes.
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This was what I was told about Iran in a background briefing from a senior administration official this morning.
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) June 12, 2026
- The United States is still days away from signing a deal with Iran to “destroyand remove” its entire enriched uranium stockpile,reopen the Strait of Hormuz without…
The official described the new agreement as the “antidote to the JCPOA [the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal] because the very stockpile that was allowed to be built up [under the JCPOA], is the thing that we’re going to eliminate as part of our agreement.”The agreement is built on a “pay-for-performance” model. “The way the deal is structured [is] the economic benefits to the Iranians won’t come until they deliver the weapons on the nuclear program ... that we require…“The more they perform, the more they receive,” said the official.
Sanctions relief and potential infrastructure investment from Gulf Arab countries, estimated by the official to be $200 billion, would be provided only after Iran delivers on its end of the deal.“The biggest benefit for Iran would not be from any unfrozen assets. [It] would be from the sanctions relief and from the Gulf Arab countries investing in their country. “What the president wanted us to do is to accomplish our objectives, primarily, that Iran not have a nuclear weapon,” the official said.“ They’re going to be rewarded for acting like a normal country rather than the largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
Ed: Be sure to read it all. The White House began briefing reporters from conservative platforms yesterday to sell this as a very tough deal. If the final deal measures up to these claims, the war will have greatly improved the region in the short and mid-term. As long as the IRGC remains in power, however, this is nothing more than a longer hudna than most.
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Axios: What they're saying: "We are closer to a peace deal than ever before. With finalization likely expected in the next 24 hours, Pakistan is preparing for the electronic signing of the peace deal immediately after, followed by technical level talks next week," Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wrote on X on Saturday.
- Shortly after, the Pakistani foreign ministry confirmed that the virtual signing ceremony has been scheduled for Sunday. ...
Behind the scenes: U.S. officials and sources in the mediating countries confirmed that the signing will take place virtually, and claimed it is mainly for logistical reasons.
- One of the main reasons is that Vice President J.D. Vance, who is leading the U.S. negotiations team, wouldn't have been able to go back to the U.S. before President Trump leaves for the G7 summit in France on Monday morning, the sources said.
Ed: That gives the Iranian regime just one more day for its Tehran Two-Step.
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Jerusalem Post: US President Donald Trump told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that it is time to end the war with Iran, Axios reported on Saturday.
A senior US official told Axios that Trump called Netanyahu on Thursday evening and described the potential US-Iran agreement as "a great deal." ...
The official said that Netanyahu expressed to Trump his concern that the deal must address Iran's nuclear program, but avoided any significant argument with the US president.
"Bibi probably understood that a deal was about to happen and that he could not stop it," said the official.
Ed: It's not the first time that the US has pressured Israel to end a war against Iran and its proxies well before a complete victory. In fairness, this is one of the longest periods of time that Israel has gone before getting forced into a premature deal, and the IDF has done far more damage to the Iranian hydra than ever before. Netanyahu knows that, and he's also likely figuring that Iran will cross up Trump sooner or later, and probably sooner than Trump realizes. May was well go with the flow now and prepare for the collapse of this deal when it inevitably comes.
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Platner snags the coveted Hunter Biden endorsement. https://t.co/tbhT6vcHmf
— JWF (@JammieWF) June 11, 2026
Ed: Also, Hunter would like us to remember that his father is Sharp As a Tack™, that it wasn't his laptop but that it got stolen and his information was on it, and that he doesn't have a daughter named Navy with his alleged affair partner. If there is a less credible endorser in politics than Hunter "Hookers & Blow" Biden, I'd like to find him or her. Even Michael Avenatti might have more credibility than Burisma Board Biden. Oh wait, I think I know someone who's vying for the title ...
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He never actually said that.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 13, 2026
Ed: The governor who barred family get-togethers while communing at the French Laundry restaurant says what? Newsom is just a couple of decimal places away from being a Bond villain. He has spent almost a decade of his own career failing to lay a single mile of high-speed rail track while spending billions, and he has the nerve to suggest that Musk is the problem ... by using a fake quote. And it's not as if this has only recently been debunked ...
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Code and Culture (Dec 12, 2012): Apparently it’s a thing to quote Plutarch as having said “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” This phrasing does not appear anywhere in the Project Gutenberg edition of the canonical Clough version of Lives.
It is possible that “oldest and most fatal” is just an unusual translation from the original Greek and so doesn’t turn up in a ctrl-F search, but I am extremely skeptical. As somebody who has actually read Plutarch (and who quotes him accurately in my own syllabus), it doesn’t pass the smell test. Plutarch has a distinctly aristocratic perspective and is more likely to complain about demagogues pandering to the mob than to complain about the dispossession of the poor. For instance, in his lives of the Gracchi he describes the underlying grievances of the depopulation of small farms and the rise of the latifundia, but he also criticizes the Senate for going squishy by offering conciliatory redistributive measures (specifically, a grain dole and colonial land) to the mob, “by gratifying and obliging them with such unreasonable things as otherwise they would have felt it honorable for them to incur the greatest unpopularity in resisting.” ...
Ultimately I can’t identify where this “oldest and most fatal” canard comes from, but I’m pretty sure it ain’t Plutarch and most likely it was just made up in the 1960s. All I have to say is to quote Thomas Jefferson, “he who would falsely ascribe a passage would desecrate a mind.” Or maybe he didn’t say that and actually I just made it up because I think it’s kind of cool to be able to draw on the authority of a memorable historical thinker using archaic sounding language.
Ed: This got linked in the community notes on Newsom's tweet, and it's worth checking out. The author uses Google data to estimate that this canard got invented in the 1960s, which should surprise no one. A commenter to his post narrows it down more specifically.
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Is she actually lecturing us about rich people from the back of a limousine 🤣 https://t.co/RiZ12pYLxc
— Jessica (@JessicaTetreau) June 12, 2026
Ed: Yes, yes she is. Warren's net worth has increased plenty while in public office. We should be far more concerned with that trajectory than when innovators make 4,400 people into millionaires overnight.
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If the socialists had their way, Elon would have had his paypal profits taken and redistributed for the greater good.
— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) June 13, 2026
The world would never have seen Tesla, nor SpaceX.
And the world wouldn't know it, because they were uncreated, and thus unseen.
Imagine the companies that…
Imagine the companies that don't exist, because Washington destroyed them before they were born.
Ed: That's exactly what will happen when socialists impose their confiscatory policies. And we know this because that is what's happened every time socialists have taken power.
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Paul Mirengoff at Ringside at the Reckoning: The Athletic is an online sports publication of the New York Times. Although I hate paying money to the Times, I subscribe to The Athletic because (1) it does a very good job of covering sports and (2) unlike the Times, it rarely expresses left-wing bias.
But this article, called “Welcome to America, the problematic host of the World Cup,” is so political, and so stupid, that it has me thinking I’ll stop subscribing the next chance I get. ...
It’s obvious that Brewer knows next to nothing about Europe, about the history of U.S. immigration policy, and about soccer. All he seems to know is that he wants our cities and towns to be sanctuaries for illegal immigrants.
But he’s unwilling or unable to make the case that they should be. So instead, he simply brands the half (at least) of America that disagrees with him as, in effect, racist, and draws a moral equivalence between the U.S., Russia, and Qatar.
Ed: It's worth reading this in full. Progressives shrieked when Jeff Bezos laid off a good portion of the WaPo's sports section, but it's because it was filled with similarly ignorant political lecturing under the guise of sports reporting. This is the kind of narrative-building that the NYT does in the other parts of its newspaper rather than reporting. It's just much more glaringly obvious when it appears in sports and entertainment beats.
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Lmao it’s funny how it was actually the leftists who pushed their whole “diversity” alliance to get the Muslims in charge in Hamtramck.
— Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) June 12, 2026
Then these guys take over the entire council and one of the first things they do is ban the LGBT flag from city property (haram).
Anyone… https://t.co/CVt8pamZxe pic.twitter.com/R46XF2sDMs
Ed: The fable of the frog and the scorpion come to mind, as well as Al Wilson's "The Snake." Speaking of which ...
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Summer anthem just dropped 🔥 pic.twitter.com/s37cZ3EdeM
— Michael Hennessey (@Snowflake_News) June 12, 2026
Ed: This is NSFW, via Power Line.
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Saving LA - Phase III pic.twitter.com/9n9wv1tonZ
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) June 12, 2026
Ed: Via our pal John Ondrasik. Can't wait for Phase III. I just wish Phase II had succeeded.
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Last night's lyric: "Montego Bay" by Bobby Bloom. Sing out!
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