anniewalsh.bsky.social

Making the Strait of Hormuz safe for energy shipments would be a remarkable accomplishment, one that the world has never seen since the beginning of the month.

I have no particular feelings one way or another about LaFlamme or any of the other non-Mills/Platner candidates, but I am not sure why Platner immediately got treated like a serious major candidate while a bunch of other people who were certainly not *less* qualified than him got treated as jokes.

Costello and Wood, notably, have *actual qualifications* well beyond Platner's, and the rest are certainly not any less qualified. But for some reason it was decided that Platner was a major candidate. Why was that? Who decided that?

The answer seems to be "literally the political consultants who gave us John Fetterman found their next big star, possibly because he used to sell them cocaine when he was bartending at the Tune Inn". Which is pretty fucked.

Obvious proof Trump is deranged & a danger to the entire world is that over the last 3-4 days he’s gone from saying we’ll force Iran to open the Straits, to they’ll just magically open, to it’s up to everyone else to open them, to threatening war crimes against the civilian population of Iran

This gets at why Track AIPAC is so insidious. They apparently lump together contributions from organizations like J Street, which is solidly in #3, with AIPAC, which is pretty clearly not with #3, and if not under #4 or #5, is at best in favor of the status quo & opposed to #3.

They only lump them in sometimes though. And seemingly most of the time that they think JStreet is bad is when the candidate is Jewish. bsky.app/profile/cole...

Hegseth should be fired immediately if "nobody was even thinking about." It is called contingency planning.

Looks like Barrack is bailing him out.

IDK about this situation, but there are definitely “activists“ who are funded by RW to sow division between groups who would normally find common cause. ADOS is an example. We had a pro-ICE Dem who IDed as ADOS in the state legislature who voted with Reps constantly. ibw21.org/commentary/u...

59% of rural counties have no maternity care. Republicans' answer? Let the ACA tax credits that millions of Americans rely on expire. Happy 16th birthday to the life saving law Republicans are fighting to destroy.

Reupping because Kat lying about her upbringing and *still* claiming she's poor should've come out much sooner and been a bigger story, which adds to what I've always seen as a bit of phoniness to her, including moving to Streeterville to run for a seat in another district.

To NBC5 Thursday: "AM I poor right now? Yeah. I have depleted my savings. I have been financially independent since I was 21." She must be living in public housing in Steeterville. I bet her parents don't even let her bring her laundry home to the mansion. (She lives with the CEO of the Onion.)

Sketchy? It stinks as an old professor of mine used to say, like a dead fish in Denmark.

10/ All of this was totally foreseeable. Frankly, it’s why previous presidents weren’t so stupid to start a war like this. Trump has lost control of the war. His best course now is to cut his losses and end it. That’s the only way to prevent an even bigger disaster.

9/ CRISIS FOUR: Trump has no endgame. Iran and its proxies can create chaos indefinitely. So what’s next? A ground invasion?This would be Armageddon. Thousands of dead Americans. Declare false victory? Then the new Iranian hardliners in charge just rebuild what we destroyed.

8/ Other potential flash points lurk. So far, the Houthis in Yemen have been relatively quiet. Probably not for long. They can project power into the Red Sea. For Syria, this is the worst time for Trump to strike Iran. Syria could explode again.

7/ CRISIS THREE: A broader, regional war is breaking out as Iranian proxies in Lebanon hit Israel and those in Iraq target the U.S.. Israel is now threatening a massive ground invasion of Lebanon, which could become its own new crisis.

5/ CRISIS TWO: We can destroy Iran’s missiles but not all their drones, and war today is drone war. Iran can hit oil sites in the region indefinitely because they posses so many cheap, weaponized drones. And they are. They blew up a critical Oman oil depot two days ago.

4/ What about naval escorts for tankers? This is a possibility, but it’s harder than you think. First, it would require our entire navy. 100 tankers need escorting each day. Second, if we can’t destroy the mines and drones, our ships are at risk too.

3/ Right now, Trump has no plan to reopen the Strait. And a plan may not exist. The assets Iran uses to harass and attack tankers - thousands of small drones, speed boats and mines - cannot be eliminated. They are too numerous, too spread out and hidden.

2/ CRISIS ONE: Trump believed Iran would not close the Strait of Hormuz. He was wrong. And now oil prices are spiking. If the Strait stays closed, a global recession will result. It actually may already be too late. Gas prices are the first to spike, but food prices are next.

It’s crystal clear now that Trump has lost control of this war. He badly misjudged Iran’s ability to retaliate. The region is on fire. 1/ I’m going to explain to you in this🧵what I’ve learned - in part from closed door briefings - about the four biggest current crises.

6/ If Trump paid any attention to the Ukraine War he would have noticed how warfare has changed. But he didn’t. And he blundered. Worse, the Gulf states are running out of interceptors to stop Iranian missiles and drones - meaning that soon more oil sites will be vulnerable.

kicking the problem down the road is often good policy, because by the time you get to it again you're better equipped to respond to it

Good developers I know love Claude. But then they’re good developers. It’s when you let the good developers go that bad stuff happens… bsky.app/profile/dann...

"Oops he went on the nazi podcast" wasn't oppo, it was "well I googled if he went on the nazi podcast and whaddya know he did" whenever someone gets around to dropping real oppo still putting even odds some version of this is a part of it

this was an attempt to cargo cult the traditional trapping of the presidency into this clown show, but his brain could only do that for 20 seconds before donnie reasserted itself

service secretaries have literally nothing to do with operational anything aaaaaahhhhhhhh

Generic Ballot Polling: DEM: 50% GOP: 41% Public Sentiment Institute / Feb 28, 2026

I think they've some times said that he has mis-spoke. Once I remember even a mistruth.

It’s been a decade and the media hasn’t once said trump is a liar, or has lied, or is lying when he lies so I assume they’ll both sides this too

maybe the media can take five minutes off from warhumping to register that the president could very obviously not give less of a shit about The Troops

I have never seen a politician more directly copy this speech in my life

The most spectacular thing about this is how many people in the replies, QPs, and comments elsewhere did not read all three of these screenshots. 🤦‍♀️

They paid a foreign policy advisor? I’m assuming they thought “we’re getting these questionnaires & don’t want to answer them ourselves,” so they hired some guy who just graduated college, & he wrote whatever he wanted & they never read what he wrote But again, they paid a foreign policy advisor?

I love how people are saying versions of “I’m glad those are her positions” when the takeaway should be that the campaign chose to not affirm those are her positions, and Dropsite quotes someone saying that in fact those are not her positions.

It’s not good for your campaign if the candidate has to clarify a statement or position at 10:30 on a Friday night.

There’s “man rich people suck” and then there’s this level of irresponsibility where everyone is basically Enron and it never ends wells

That cap-wearing three-named NYU grad/humanities prof at Bates or Bowdoin, the one who said something about Trump not sending Americans to war in the Middle East? Yeah, fuck that guy all the way to hell.

Petraeus really feels like the inflection point for the death of shame in American elite circles. If you just keep talking as though nothing happened even as all the sordid, lightly treasonous details keep pouring out you get to keep your seat at the table.

The guy who leaked classified war plans on Signal is mourning our war dead with the flag emoji and a Wal-Mart-ass slogan the South Park guys parodied 20 years ago.