Who Are We Negotiating With? Where Are the Iranian People? Va Guv: Not Just Redistricting! Aims at Electoral College. Singing Duo: Barack & Zohran. More
What’s the latest with the Iran negotiations?
Well, the Iranian regime has “rebuffed” President Trump’s plan for a new round of peace talks in Pakistan. The pretext for the “rebuff” is that the U.S. has seized an Iranian vessel in the Gulf of Oman.
The seizure on Sunday came hours after President Donald Trump renewed his threats of broad attacks on Iran’s infrastructure if no deal is reached in talks expected this week in Pakistan.
Oil prices jumped by 5 percent overnight into Monday amid the escalating tensions, while stock markets in Europe were down before rallying.
In a statement Monday, Iran’s military command denounced the U.S. seizure of the ship as an act of “piracy.”
Mainstream media members said to be kicking themselves for letting Iran beat them to the “piracy” meme.
Who are these rebuffing Iranian rulers anyway? The most important story on the Iranian war is this one from the New York Post—it reports that, according to analysts, the Islamic Guard has taken full control of Iran, sidelining “moderates,” so-called:
Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader has effectively taken control of Tehran’s military and negotiation team over the weekend, analysts said.
IRGC Commander Maj. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi and members of his inner circle have allegedly taken charge of the Islamic republic, as evident by Iran’s attacks on ships trying to sail through the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran’s refusal to join peace talks with the US this week, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank said.
Vice President J.D. Vance will try again for negotiations. The New York Post asks, “What’s the point?” of negotiations, especially if the Iranians don’t bother to show up. What of the Iranian people? “Iranians Haven’t Rallied to the Regime. They Still Loathe the Ayatollahs,” according to Matthew Gould at the London Telegraph. Shouldn’t this factor into negotiating a future for Iran? Former Ambassador Gordon Sondland says Trump understands that dealing with the Iranian rump regime is “like breaking a wild horse.”
Another mass shooting, this one in Shreveport, La., where Shamar Elkins, 31, killed eight children—seven were his own children—and gravely wounded two other people (his wife and the mother of four of his children) before turning the gun on himself. Elkins “had mental health problems and had recently expressed suicidal thoughts.” Elkins had spoken of “his demons.”
There should be a discussion of mental health issues, but we should also note (without in any way lessening culpability of Elkins) that this looks like a crime that reflects an America devoid of healthy social norms (from NYT story):
[Elkins’ mother] said she was not extremely close with her son. She had Mr. Elkins when she was a teenager and struggling with a crack cocaine addiction, so she left him to be raised by a family friend, Betty Walker. Ms. Elkins reconnected with her son more than a decade ago.
Virginia Democrats vote tomorrow over a Governor Spanberger-endorsed redistricting plan that will virtually eliminate Republican representation for the purple state:
Virginia Democrats hope the new congressional map they’re asking voters to approve Tuesday will flip four Republican House districts, delivering 10 of 11 seats in a state former Vice President Kamala Harris won with just 52% of the vote in 2024.
The plan dramatically reworks entire sections of the state, slicing up deep blue districts in the Washington, DC, suburbs and around Richmond, and creates a new district running along the Blue Ridge Mountains that connects liberal cities.
Heavily Democratic northern Virginia would be carved into five separate districts, with districts that pinwheel from outside Washington to hoover up conservative rural areas of the state. The new 7th starts in northern Virginia and stretches so far that it splits in half to avoid picking up more Democratic turf around Charlottesville that can go into a different district. The result resembles a lobster with a long skinny tail and two wide claws.
But the drastic redistricting plan isn’t all the Virginia Governor has up her sleeve. In a Washington Post opinion piece (“The Electoral College is on the Ballot in the Midterms“), Jason Willick writes:
A surprisingly partisan turn by Virginia’s Democratic governor [Ms. Must: surprising? C’mom],Abigail Spanberger, in support of gerrymandering has been widely publicized. But another, potentially more explosive progressive electoral experiment in the Old Dominion is flying under the radar.
Last week, Spanberger signed legislation entering Virginia into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), an initiative that aims to fundamentally change the way the United States elects presidents without amending the Constitution.
Spanberger’s signature brings the NPVIC from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of live politics. And this half-baked rewrite to a centuries-old institution of American democracy could invite a constitutional crisis. The implications deserve more attention before voters go to the polls in November and potentially bring the NPVIC over the finish line in time for the next presidential election.
Mollie Hemingway’s new book, “Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution,” hits bookstores tomorrow. The Federalist’s M. D. Kittle has an explosive tidbit from Hemingway’s book—that the liberal Supreme Court Justices slow-walked the release of the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, even though this imperiled the conservative Justices, especially Alito, who wrote the majority opinion:
“Hemingway wrote that Kagan, an Obama appointee, angrily confronted Breyer, a Clinton appointee, in May 2022 behind closed doors after at least one justice, Samuel Alito, had asked his liberal colleagues to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats,” Fox reported. “Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request, Hemingway wrote.”
Hemingway wrote that “Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking,’” according to Fox.
The Singing Socialists. Don’t miss this cute picture of former President Barack Obama and current New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in their first joint appearance, singing “The Wheels on the Bus,” as they plug Mam’s free childcare scheme. Alas, the wheels are already coming off as Mamdani rolls out his vision for government Mamdani Marts. Don’t Eat the Rich: “Mamdani, Scapegoating the Rich Won’t Fill a $5.4 Billion Budget Hole,” by the Editors of The Free Press, suggests that declaring war on the rich, who pay 40% of New York’s bills, will be counterproductive.
Commentator Mary Katharine Ham suggests that Republicans could benefit in the midterms from MAHA mothers, who are concerned about the health of their families. But what about the notion that RFK Jr.’s vax ideas have made measles worse? Alex Berenson’s “The Truth about Rising Measles Cases – From a Physician” raises the possibility that health bureaucracies are not reporting measles outbreaks accurately.
Apparently, the Left really is willing to die on Transgender Hill. A courageous young man tells the legislators who are considering a bill to penalize therapists for discussing alternatives to “gender affirming” interventions about his experiences:
In 2023, a new endocrinologist suggested he stop taking the drugs to see whether that would resolve his problems. Around the same time, he began questioning what doctors had told him over the years after reading leaked internal reports from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, which he said revealed doubts about the science behind the treatments.
This led Skinner down “a rabbit hole of research essentially.”
“And I had found that there was, you know, no — low quality to no evidence to doing this to me,” he told Fox News Digital.
Skinner said he eventually stopped treatment, but years later still suffers from urinary problems and sexual dysfunction that he attributes to the drugs. He said those lasting effects are part of what now drives him to speak out.
In “The Return of ‘We Missed the Story’,” Beckett Adams explains why the press didn’t publish what it knew about Eric Swalwell.
