SINCERETALK

American Conservative Managing Editor Jude Russo has no patience for President Donald Trump or his lieutenants proposing endless U.S. intervention in Iran for the foreseeable future. He also has no love for their deft use of labels to deny the obvious. “Let’s all give a hand for Marco Rubio, secretary of state, favored champion of the White House, and all-around cretinous worm,” said Russo . “The Amazing Plastic Man — the adjective refers to his flexible principles, not his increasingly inflexible face — was hitting the airwaves this Monday morning to articulate the latest version of what the Trump administration regards as its war aims. Excuse me, military operation aims; President Donald Trump has figured out the One Weird Trick around constitutional checks on executive war powers. You just have to use the right words!” “Well, the war is — this operation, okay — and that’s what this is — is about very specific objectives,” Rubio told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Rubio was ther...

President Donald Trump is in a state of political “free fall,” argued an expert on Tuesday, but that does not mean Democrats are poised to capitalize on it. “Donald Trump is in trouble,” wrote Time Magazine senior correspondent Philip Elliott . “Poll after poll show him posting his worst numbers yet. Record crowds took to the streets this weekend in the single largest day of political protest in the nation’s 250-year history. His Department of Homeland Security remains shuttered because his allies in the Republican-led Congress cannot sort out a spending plan. Construction projects like a West Wing ballroom and proposed Miami skyscraper of a presidential library are roundly mocked. Gas prices seem to be coasting toward $5 a gallon, consumer confidence is in freefall, and the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran remains deeply unpopular.” Yet despite these theoretical advantages, Elliott warned that Democrats could “stumble” in trying to retake the Senate and House of Representatives...

President Donald Trump is acting like a man who does not believe it matters whether what he does hurts his party in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, according to a recent report. "Fourteen months into a second term defined by the president's heightened ambition and a dearth of dissenting voices, Trump remains in what can only be defined as YOLO mode,” wrote Politico journalists Alex Gangitano, Eli Stokols, and Megan Messerly on Monday . “But the lack of restraint from an executive who won't have to face voters again has put his party in danger of losing the House and possibly the Senate too." On Iran, Gangitano, Stokols and Messerly pointed out that Trump’s handling of the conflict is disliked by roughly six out of ten voters, and yet he is still proceeding undeterred. As a result Trump's "unconventional approach could make his fears about a Democratic-controlled Congress in the final two years of his term something of a self-fulfilling prophecy....

Homeland Security staffers are not done attacking their disgraced ex-boss, Kristi Noem. Speaking with The Daily Beast for a new report, "top officials" revealed that they were driven "to extremes" to try and hide their conversations from the former secretary, revealing that an overtly "toxic" environment led many to fear they were being watched. According to "one experienced staffer," Noem and her informal lieutenant, Corey Lewandowski, created the "most toxic" work environment they had ever experienced at DHS's headquarters in Washington, D.C., riddled with "distrust, abuse, and corruption." Because of this, sources revealed how "top ICE bosses" took extreme measures "to mask their private discussions, amid fears they were being monitored." These measures involved the use of a high-tech "sound machine" gadget, which the outlet likened to a piece of espionage out of a James Bond film. ...

Five South African women have been arrested at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, after they were allegedly found to be carrying drugs. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/Lx0ir2A via sinceretalk

The rand has already lost nearly 8% of its value in March, putting it on course to surpass the 7% “Nenegate” crash in December 2015, when former President Jacob Zuma fired Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/UyPbmI1 via sinceretalk

Rob Schneider, the 62-year-old former 'Saturday Night Live' star turned conservative activist, has become the latest public figure to advocate for mandatory military conscription—despite never serving in the armed forces himself. In a lengthy social media post , Schneider invoked President John F. Kennedy's famous words about public service before pivoting to his central argument: America should reinstate the military draft for all citizens aged 18 and older. "Each and every American, at eighteen years of age, must serve two years of military service," Schneider wrote, suggesting that young people could fulfill this obligation either domestically or through overseas deployment. The actor's proposal comes as the Trump administration wages war in Iran —a conflict that has raised concerns about potential conscription among younger Americans. The irony is notable: both Schneider and President Trump have avoided military service throughout their lives. Trump ...

The Department of Justice has awarded Michael Flynn, the retired three-star Army general who served as Trump's National Security Advisor for less than a month, a $1.25 million settlement—a decision that legal experts are comparing to outright theft of taxpayer funds. Flynn's settlement, announced this week , compensates him for what the Trump administration is characterizing as wrongful prosecution. The irony is stark: Flynn pleaded guilty under oath in 2017 to intentionally making false statements to the FBI. He admitted to the crime in court with a lawyer present, with a judge confirming his understanding of what he was confessing to. Trump later pardoned him in 2020. Now, with a new Trump administration in place, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has agreed to hand over more than a million dollars in public money to a man who has already admitted guilt. "I really do not understand how you justify th...

After eight hours of complex surgery, a team of doctors in Mankweng, Limpopo, has successfully separated conjoined twin boys in a first-of-its-kind surgical procedure in the province. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/VSq2Q35 via sinceretalk

Trump regret is unquestionably on the rise, but one pollster did not expect it to be so far-reaching that it could have handed the White House to Kamala Harris. G. Elliot Morris, the organizer behind the March 2026 monthly Strength In Numbers/ Verasight poll, discovered that one out of every eight Trump voters from 2024 has buyer’s remorse. And when asked how they would vote in a do-over, enough respondents were willing to go with Harris. “Even ‘small’ regret percentages (13 percent is not an obviously high number) can have big impacts on close elections,” said Morris, explaining that a voter who switches candidates actually swings the margin by two votes (one fewer for their side, one more for the other). Meanwhile a voter who moves to a third party or just stays home, disgusted, costs their candidate one point. “…. [T]he partisan asymmetry in the 2024 vote regret really matters for electoral strategy and narrative purposes,” said Morris. “If we do the math on a 2024 election...

Former George Bush speechwriter Tim Miller said President Donald Trump has spent his last two terms basking in two very powerful superpowers that have saved him from his every mistake. But Miller told “Jim Acosta Sow” host Jim Acosta Friday that Trump has singlehandedly deep-sixed his own magic within the span of a month. “Trump's superpower through two terms has always been that if something's going bad he can just declare victory, say everything is fine and start doing something else. And his cult members, the MAGA base, will be with him. The people who don't pay attention that closely won't really notice what happened.” It doesn’t matter when Trump announces plans to invade a NATO ally and claim the island of Greenland. He just moves on to the next thing and MAGA forgives and forgets — or even normalizes it. “And so, he has been able to do that in a way that other politicians struggle with because they'd worry about their credibility,” said Miller. “Trump ...

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice appears to be catching his habit of playing loose with the facts. But the problem for his federal attorneys is they’re delivering their bogus info to judges who appear to take issue with it. U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel wiped DOJ attorneys in a Thursday decision and schooled them on the importance of honesty in research when submitting arguments. As part of “Operation Metro Surge,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested thousands of noncitizens transported them to a holding facility, flew them across the country, and pressured them to sign self-deportation documents — all without the opportunity to speak with an attorney, said the judge. But “due process is not a game of keep-away,” said the judge. “ICE recognizes detainees’ right to access counsel in theory and written policy, but not in practice. Instead, it has placed obstacle after obstacle in front of detainees and their attorneys, blocking communication betw...

Conservative Dispatch CEO and editor Steve Hayes visited Bonita Springs, Florida, during campaign season and says he found the kind of political personalities you get in “Trump country.” Former U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn was one of the first personalities Heyes shined a light on trying to nab Florida’s 19 th Congressional District. In his article, titled “Meet the Has-Beens, Never-Weres, and Felon Locked in a Trumpy Primary,” he makes clear he is not impressed. “That Cawthorn is a viable candidate — indeed, given his name recognition and MAGAworld celebrity status, he’s considered a real contender—says a lot about the contest in this dark red corner of Florida’s Gulf Coast and about the state of the Republican Party in the Trump era,” said Hayes, recounting Cawthorn’s congressional service beginning “with a rousing speech to the pro-Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” where he praised the mob’s “willingness to fight, declared the 2020 election fraudulent, and later...

President Donald Trump does not have many Republican critics left in Congress — but one of the few who remains recently told The New York Times that he views his upcoming primary as a “litmus test” for his own party. “He told me that he thinks if he wins, it will embolden his colleagues to oppose Trump on policy issues they truly care about,” the Times’ Catie Edmondson told Katie Gleuck in a Wednesday interview . Edmondson was discussing her recent interview with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been an outspoken critic of Trump for invading Iran and concealing files related to the late convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “That being said, and what I hope came through in the piece, is that Massie, and his relationship to his district, are unique. Even if he wins, I’m not sure how many of his colleagues would rush to follow his lead given how much outside money is being spent against him.” Massie is not alone among Republicans in Congress who stand up to Trump, althou...

Podcaster and former reality show star Angie “Pumps” Sullivan said she grew up in a Republican home and stayed true to the faith, until around the time she discovered the immorality and low IQ of candidate and later President Donald Trump. “I grew up a Republican. I was raised by Republicans that are now MAGA,” Sullivan told Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller. “[But] … my entire life blew up and I had to reexamine how I viewed my religion, evangelical Christianity, and that spilled over into politics.” It is with the candor of personal experience, then, that Sullivan admits the Trump administration has “let complete nut jobs that are not tethered to reality into positions of power.” “Like, we have the dumbest people in the world in positions of power,” Sullivan told Miller. “When you really look at it, you go around the cabinet and you think this is the biggest collection of dip—— I have ever seen in my entire life. … It would be hard to try to even get a collection of dip—— that are d...

A longtime conservative writer is not quite ready to give up on President Donald Trump’s war in Iran — but even he admits that the Republican is acting like “a lame duck and getting lamer.” In a Tuesday editorial that labeled America’s 45th and 47th president as a “wild card,” Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. argued that Trump is a “lame duck and getting lamer” who, as a result, is “betting on luck” to get him a series of major policy achievements. “His war aims run athwart the Napoleonic dictum: If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna,” Jenkins explained. “Disapprove of George W. Bush but he took steps and mobilized the resources to make sure he met his stated goals in Iraq. And luck cuts both ways. Like history’s most notorious foreign-policy gamblers, Mr. Trump is unlikely to quit while ahead.” When Trump’s anti-war supporters express bafflement at his sudden warmongering, Jenkins observed that Trump was never actually an isolationist, but rather exults ...

President Donald Trump’s billionaire ally and military technology supplier, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, says he is an expert on the Antichrist — but actual experts disagree. “Thiel’s evangelism is another example of how the right has strategically co-opted Christian religious teachings to provide support for their autocratic tendencies, as well as their fears about technology being limited through ‘woke’ beliefs,” Anthea Butler, chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, wrote in a Tuesday editorial for MSNOW . Earlier in the piece, Butler broke down the components of Thiel’s religious philosophy, identifying them as a “mishmash of his political and personal beliefs about technology, civilization, race and democracy. And his views on the antichrist range from the disturbing to the nonsensical.” Thiel, a businessman in the military-industrial complex, “believes the antichrist will push the world toward peace using the fear of war” and “use peace to slow ...

President Donald Trump is a habitual liar who may also suffer from serious mental illness, a seasoned journalist argued on Monday — but the mainstream media is too cowardly to call it out. “For a while now, I’ve been imploring the leaders of our top news organizations to call out Donald Trump’s derangement,” wrote Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch and former journalist at The Huffington Post and The Intercept . “My argument is simple: It is the central, underlying explanation for everything else they’re covering.” Yet, as Froomkin pointed out, “They won’t do it. Their arguments: It would appear partisan; We don’t want to take sides; And (more reasonably) we prohibit the use of language associated with mental illness unless a person has been diagnosed as mentally ill. (I wrestle with a variation of this last one myself: How do you call him insane without stigmatizing insane people?)” Even though Froomkin can understand journalists being reluctant to discuss mental illness, Froomk...

President Donald Trump’s surprise war against Iran did not factor in the implications of an important consideration, and a foreign policy expert who “war gamed” this conflict is calling it out. “Kasie, I've war-gamed the Iran war plan a number of times across multiple administrations,” Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant under both President Barack Obama and Trump himself, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Monday . “And I think what the administration said earlier — a 4-to-6-week military campaign — was about right. If you're going to degrade Iran's defense industrial base, the missiles, the drones, everything, it takes 4 to 6 weeks.” Yet there is one variable that did not happen in those war games, and it makes a big difference. “The one thing that usually did not happen in those war games was that on Day One of the campaign, you took out the entire Iranian leadership,” McGurk told Hunt. “Tha...

What began as a simple WhatsApp message among a handful of Bible study women in Mossel Bay has turned into a milestone journey stretching from the shores of Cape Town to the heart of Johannesburg. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/CHxwWYJ via sinceretalk

Green Scooters founder Fezile Dlamini alleges the Industrial Development Corporation unfairly rejected his electric vehicle company’s funding applications over eight years while approving R69 million for a white-owned competitor. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/kVaUdKQ via sinceretalk

This week, Trump said that he’d do whatever is necessary to ease the oil crisis. He also assured America that the crisis “will be over soon.” Bull----. The problem isn’t just that Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz . It’s also that Iran, Israel, and the United States have all inflicted — and continue to inflict — serious damage to the oil and gas infrastructure of the Middle East. This damage will take months if not years to repair. At one point on Thursday oil prices jumped to $119 a barrel before falling back to around $111 a barrel — all but guaranteeing that the price of gas at the pump will continue to rise, as will the prices of many other products and services indirectly affected by oil prices. What we are now witnessing is one of the grossest military and political blunders in modern history. It’s not hard to understand why Trump is trapped in Iran. He doesn’t listen to anyone outside his small circle of sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear. But there’s some...

Everything from this week’s edition of City Press in one convenient place. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/b9msfJz via sinceretalk

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice wasted no time filing charges against podcaster and former CNN anchor Don Lemon and other people for daring to interview a pastor at an anti-ICE protest inside a Minnesota church. A mere two days after a Jan. 18 protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, the DOJ filed a criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, on Jan. 20. Those charges targeted eight protestors (later expanded to 30 defendants) with violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and conspiracy to violate rights. On March 18, the court sought to delay the trial, designating it “complex within the meaning” of the law, and excluding the Speedy Trial Act to give the parties adequate time to prepare. But now Trump’s perpetually understaffed attorneys are seeking to delay information submission deadlines an additional 90 days. This, said Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko, is surprising. “… [The] Court is troubled...

After being President Donald Trump’s “bestie” for ages, British leaders are trying to leap out the window at his approach, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde . Parliament member Nigel Farage’s, is trying to “consciously uncouple from Donald Trump,” despite being “most firmly lodged ” up his backside for “the past decade,” said Hyde. “Nigel’s made such a massive, self-satisfied show of his real estate in the presidential large intestine for 10 years now that I actually don’t think non-surgical extraction is possible at this stage. He doesn’t just get to walk away whistling. The only way out is a full Faragectomy. I’ll give the president a piece of drone fuselage to bite down on,” Hyde said. Hyde said Farage is not the only British leader trying to duck the U.S. president “ as Operation Epic Facepalm rapidly unspools .” “A whole posse of Britain’s political and pundit class greeted Keir Starmer’s failure to jump two-footed into Israel and the US’s Iran operation as a truly calam...

When award-winning journalist and media founder Katherine Couric drops a bomb, she can do it with minimal investment and maximum understatement, reports the State . The target of her derision this week was the fawning adoration from a Melania Trump fan who posted a clip from the First Lady’s maligned “Melania” documentary. The clip depicts Melania riding in her car while singing along to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." The person who posted the video claimed the sing-along clip, with its overlong shaky interior car-scene footage of Mrs. Trump’s feeble voice trickling out karaoke from a back seat, was the poster’s "favorite" part of the movie. He added that the scene of Melania’s uncommitted performance — interspersed with its camera phone-style shots of the rear bumpers of Trump’s expensive security detail — made her look like “a real person.” To this, Couric, delivered the one-word response: "Riveting." “Couric's cheeky one-liner garnered a...

President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles , announced on Monday through the president that she was diagnosed with breast cancer — and reports indicate the White House is worried about how it will get by without her. “Wiles’ diagnosis has generated fresh anxiety among aides and allies who describe her as perhaps the sole irreplaceable figure in Trump’s orbit — and the only one capable of imposing order on a White House led by a famously unmanageable commander in chief,” CNN reported on Thursday. One longtime Trump adviser told the publication, “She’s basically doing what we were told was impossible. I don’t know what any of us — especially the president — would do without Susie.” CNN described Wiles as a “constant presence” in Trump’s White House, frequently attending his sensitive meetings and high profile public events. In a White House where Trump wishes to be the center of attention, Wiles is skilled at staying out of range of the cameras, providing assistance while n...

President Donald Trump’s 19-year-old son Barron is reportedly close friends with Justin Waller, an influencer in the so-called “manosphere” who preaches mistreatment of women. In the new Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere , the 40-year-old Waller bragged that he had befriended Barron and in general joined Trump’s “inner circle.” “I had dinner with Barron at Mar-a-Lago,” Waller said. “I met Donald that night. I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago four or five times.” Manosphere influencers like Waller preach the belief that men are inherently superior to women and should be able to control women’s lives. They argue for patriarchal values in which women exist only to serve men domestically and sexually. Waller specifically advocates one-way monogamy wherein women are expected to be faithful to men but men are socially permitted to sleep with as many women as they desire. Waller is not the only manosphere influencer to find his way into Barron Trump’s good graces. In Decembe...