Ceasefire Expires. Gingrich: Iran’s Familiar Playbook. Why Won’t the WNBA Define ‘Woman’? Mangione: Is ACA Deadly? Death of Jason Arday. California Basket Case. More.
Good-bye to the feckless “memorandum of understanding” between the U.S. and Iran. It’s fair to say there hasn’t been any notable understanding. The memorandum expires today:
Monday marks 60 days since the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding that called for a wider deal to be reached between the two countries within that period. However, after various flare-ups and promises of an imminent accord, there do not appear to be any concrete plans to end the conflict.
Meanwhile, intercepted communications and other intelligence suggest a strategic shift in Iran towards escalation. While U.S. leaders attempted to build support for the memo of understanding …
Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight. …
Arab intelligence officials have picked up evidence—including communications between Iran and militia allies in countries such as Yemen and Iraq—of a strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., officials familiar with the findings say. Alarming weaker Gulf countries like Kuwait, Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory….
Their overriding goal is to inflict enough pain to ensure the kind of attacks Iran has endured with the 12-day war last year and the continuing conflict aren’t repeated.
We’ve been here before, says former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in a New York Post story with this headline: “Iran betting it can outlast Trump if Dems take Congress, Gingrich says: ‘Trying to win in America politically’ like North Vietnam.”
From the report:
Iran is wearing down the American public to defeat the US politically — attempting to copy North Vietnam’s playbook against President Trump, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich theorized that Tehran is banking on Democrats roaring back to power and opening a bevy of investigations into Trump that will keep him distracted from achieving his military objectives.
Iran, however, is more isolated than ever before. Axios has a scoop on President Trump’s secret backchannel to Iran’s hardcore Revolutionary Guard. There has been a lot of coverage about conditions on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and its long deployment. Admiral Brad Cooper praised the crew of the U.S.S. Lincoln for a “performance for the ages.” President Trump has ordered a major cut to U.S.-South Korea drills as North Korea ramps up missile tests. National Review notes a certain oddity about the president’s post on this. Arab allies are joining Trump administration in calling for Israel to drop opposition to Gaza plan.
“Boys Will Be Boys—but in the WNBA?” is the headline of a Wall Street Journal editorial. Calling the WNBA “a reality show punctuated by basketball,” the Editors deal with Enes Kanter Freedom’s bid to be drafted by the league, which refuses to define what a woman is:
The WNBA Collective Bargaining Agreement says that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” But the league nowhere defines “woman.” Mr. Kanter argues the WNBA’s official position is that a “woman is anyone who claims to be one.”
This calls to mind Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” The WNBA could box out Mr. Kanter if it adopted the definition of the International Olympic Committee. The IOC said in March that women’s sports for the 2028 games will be limited to biological females, determined by a one-time gene screening to test for a DNA segment on the Y chromosome.
Yet until the WNBA does, Messrs. Kanter and White are having some fun. The pair’s greatest contribution to women’s basketball could be forcing the league to come up with some rule that keeps them out.
Meanwhile, City Journal asks: “Can the WNBA Define a Woman?“
In “Luigi Mangione and Democrats’ ObamaCare Deflection,” Allysia Finley explains how hospital consolidation hurting care and increasing prices is the result of the Affordable Care Act. Finley makes a fascinating link:
When Democrats talk about healthcare, they can sound eerily like Luigi Mangione, who on Friday confessed to murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood in 2024 and pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking.
Prosecutors say Mr. Mangione wrote in a notebook that he was rebelling against “the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel.” “Like the thousands of people who have reached out since this tragedy to share their own experiences, he believed that the system had failed him and destroyed his life,” his lawyer said.
Look no further than a recent white paper by Senate Democrats, which takes aim at “corporate greed” and “Big Insurance.” The title page features a health insurance document with a red stamp “DENIED,” an echo of the inscription on shell casings that Mr. Mangione left at the crime scene.
The report laments that “health care has become unaffordable for millions of Americans even when they have insurance.” Wasn’t the Affordable Care Act supposed to make healthcare affordable? In reality, the law’s regulations have driven up costs by fueling consolidation.
Ms. Must is a D.C. resident who has not seen a drug deal go down or a knife pulled on a city bus for quite some time. Yes, I saw both on a bus ride between trendy Adams Morgan and Woodley Park. So, I was especially interested in this Daily American Press story on the efforts of local authorities to thwart the Trump administration’s crime fighting in the District, which begins:
The Justice Department unleashed a blistering response to District of Columbia Council members who demanded governors recall National Guard troops from the nation’s capital, calling their actions “impotent theatrics” as violent crime plummets 44 percent under federal deployment.
In “Scott Bessent Makes the Economic Case for Mass Deportations,” Townhall’s Dmitri Bolt makes the case for the policy that is probably number one on the Left’s hate list: deportation of people here illegally. Indeed, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul appear intent on making New York’s immigrant situation worse.
As you may have heard, Jason Arday, Cambridge University’s prized DEI representative, was found dead. Such a terrible waste. Brendan O’Neill calls Arday’s “death dreadful – and enraging” in the London Spectator:
Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of “decolonization” and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unraveled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies.
The death of Arday is not only dreadful – it is enraging. It feels like a catastrophe foretold. Indeed, some of us wondered out loud if Arday had friends around him as the media storm over his alleged fabulism grew and went global. It was reckless in the extreme for the intellectual elites to fashion a new “black genius” and then say “Oops” when his carefully curated legend started to fray at the seams. They condemned him with their fawning.
This is the poisoned chalice of the state religion of diversity. … It handpicks member of “the oppressed” for moral attainment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials.
Did Betty Friedan convince generations of American women that they were miserable and depressed? Inez Feltscher Stepman explores this possibility in “The Myth of the Miserable Housewife.” The Impossible Dream: “What If AOC Took a Vow of Silence?” by Kathryn Jean Lopez. Dystopia: “California is an American nightmare – and the future of the US Left,” by Joel Kotkin. Kotkin notices: “The once-Golden State is home to the two leading contenders for the 2028 Democratic nomination. It’s also a basket case”
