Posted on July 20, 2026 by Scott Johnson in Iran, Trump Foreign Policy

Keane insight

In his interview with Joe Rogan last week, Vice President Vance promoted the line that the Israelis oppose blew up his beautiful Iran deal because they want “to keep the war going on indefinitely.” The editors of the New York Post responded with an obvious point:

It was Iran that broke the 60-day “comprehensive cease-fire” established by the Memorandum of Understanding by attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, period: No Jews involved.

The Post editorial also noted;

Vance went to other ugly places in his chat with Rogan: pretending that an open Israel-funded PR effort to counter antisemitism among younger conservatives somehow is actually a secret drive to undo peace with Iran and smear him; suggesting that the craziest Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories are true and Israel is part of the plot.

Don’t let the facts get in thw way when you want to blame the Jews. I’m sure President Trump appreciated Vance stirring the Epstein pot. That was equally well done.

On the first point, readers may recall that Vance thought he had made new friends among his Iranian counterparts negotiating the so-called Memorandum of Understanding. Retired four-star General Jack Keane is the former Army Vice Chief of Staff. He appeared on the Fox News Morning Briefing yesterday. A supporter of our effort to thwart the Iranian regime, he named no names of our “negotiators” who delivered the deal, but he found Vance’s error to be almost laughable. He chuckled as he made the point:

The [Iranian] negotiators and diplomats…always appear reasonable – they always want to coexist with us, and they’re always working against the hard liners. That has been the pattern for decades. There’s nothing new about that, although some of our negotiators being new to this think it’s new. It is not new. It is their pattern. And I don’t think there’s ever going to be a deal here that would be acceptable to President Trump….

Host Jacqui Heinrich blurted out the names that General Keane omitted.

There is more in the video of General Keane’s segment on Fox News below.

Posted on July 19, 2026 by Bill Glahn in 2026 Election, Amy Klobuchar, Democratic Socialists, Democrats, Fake News, Minnesota

The centrist trap

Media in Minnesota are desperate to win a fifth-consecutive election for governor for the Democrats. But they know that they have an uphill battle. So, they are working overtime to portray the Democrat nominee Amy Klobuchar (now a sitting U.S. Senator) as a moderate, centrist, middle-of-the-road politician. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is carrying this water by the tanker truck,

As Democrats move left, Klobuchar makes a business-friendly pitch in governor’s race:

Her pro-growth message comes as Democrats increasingly want corporations and the wealthy to pay more taxes.

Translation: the Democratic party is now in the full control of socialists, but you are supposed to think that Klobuchar is not as bad as some of them.

The article goes on for some forty (40) paragraphs, trying to create some daylight between Klobuchar and the far-left wing of her party.

As to what, exactly, is her “business-friendly pitch” or her “pro-growth message” are, I could not tease that out from those 40 paragraphs.

Truth be told, like every other institution in Minnesota, the state’s “leading,” “pro-business” institutions have been co-opted, to a greater or lesser extent, by the state Democratic (D-F-L) party.

The article quotes “Adam Duininck, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council.” I’ve known Adam for many years, back to his days fronting the local carpenters labor union and running the regional Metropolitan Council government unit, appointed by two successive Democrat governors.

Get a load of this,

The senator’s message appears to be resonating with some corporate leaders. Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck and Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford are among those who have donated to Klobuchar’s campaign.

A ten-second internet search of federal campaign finance databases confirm that Beck, personally, gives exclusively to Democrats and that Ford has been donating to Klobuchar for years before the current cycle.

Try harder.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Donald Trump, History, Leftism, Republicans

Is Trump Nixon 2.0?

At InstaPundit, there are interesting links and quotes about the fact that Richard Nixon is enjoying a renaissance among young Americans. Many young conservatives are re-evaluating Nixon, and comparing him with Donald Trump. Those observations are worthwhile, and I commend them to your attention.

There are obvious parallels between Nixon and Trump, including the fact that both came back from what seemed to be the end of their political careers, Nixon after he lost the 1960 presidential election, and then his race for Governor of California in 1962, and Trump after he lost the 2020 election. But what they really have in common is the intensity with which they were hated by Democrats. Democrats impeached Nixon and drove him from office over a scandal–Watergate–which in hindsight amounted to very little. And they impeached Trump twice, doing their best to chase him out of the White House, and then pursued him with absurdly weak criminal prosecutions after he left office.

The most interesting aspect of this parallel, I think, is that neither Nixon nor Trump was particularly conservative. Nixon’s administration was centrist if not liberal-leaning. During that administration the EPA came into being, and Nixon signed the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Nixon proposed a negative income tax that would give all Americans a guaranteed income. He also proposed a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan that would have required employers to furnish health insurance to all Americans. He issued executive orders that gave birth to affirmative action requirements in federal hiring and federal contractors. His administration ushered in OSHA and the Consumer Products Safety Commission. Three of his four Supreme Court appointees–Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell–were squishes. And, almost unbelievably, Nixon imposed the first wage and price controls in peacetime in American history.

I am going from memory, but I am quite sure that during his time in the wilderness, Nixon gave an interview in which he said that his big mistake was going into politics as a Republican. He told the reporter that he should have run as a Democrat.

So, although he first became known as a strong anti-Communist–hardly unusual in that era–Nixon was not much of a conservative. Neither is Donald Trump. It has often been said, and truly, that Trump is basically a 1990s Democrat. And he was, in fact, a Democrat in the 1990s. But our country has moved so far to the left since then that Trump’s administration is properly viewed as conservative, in most respects, by today’s standards.

So why, exactly, did Democrats hate Nixon and Trump so much more than their more conservative contemporaries? It’s an interesting question. I think the main reason is that both men represented that segment of the American people whom liberals hold most in contempt–the middle class. Nixon was famously the candidate of the Silent Majority, the Uncool. Likewise with Trump. Both men expanded the Republican electorate to include many blue-collar workers. The contempt that the Left showed toward both men was mostly cultural rather than political. An important part of the cultural divide is that both Nixon and Trump were overtly patriotic–the ultimate faux pas in the Left’s eyes.

I wouldn’t try to diminish the hatred the Left expressed toward other Republicans, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who were equally patriotic and, in Reagan’s case certainly, more conservative. But I do think there is something to the Nixon-Trump analogy, if only the fact that the Left’s hatred was wildly disproportionate to the policies those men actually pursued.

Others may have more perceptive observations; if so, please leave them in the comments.

Posted on by Bill Glahn in ICE, Illegal immigration, Judiciary, Minnesota

The habeas defiance

Joe Biden-appointed Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan leads Minnesota-based federal district judges in defying an 8th Circuit court of appeals’ ruling on the detention of illegal aliens awaiting deportation.

Aliens have been filing habeas corpus cases in record numbers, seeking release from ICE detention at facilities around the state as part of a nation-wide trend. We are approaching 1,400 habeas cases filed, just in Minnesota, since the first of the year.

In late March, the 8th Circuit (which covers Minnesota) ruled in a case that the applicable federal law, “shall be detained,” means what it says. I’ve been tracking some 232 habeas cases filed in Minnesota since that ruling was published.

In the two weeks since I last looked at these now 232 most recent petitions, more cases have been decided. In the past two weeks, two (2) more petitions have been denied, bringing the post-March 25th total to 25. Fourteen (14) more aliens have been released outright, bringing the number released to 61.

A couple of dozen aliens have been granted bond hearings in immigration court, which may or may not go in favor of the alien. A few dozen more cases have been dismissed. Of the dismissals, it’s not clear which side prevails more often: in one case the petition was dismissed because the alien had already been released. In another case, the petition was dismissed because the alien had agreed to voluntary deportation.

Around 90 cases are still pending, which sounds bad for the alien as they remain in custody, but it also means that ICE cannot deport them in the meanwhile

Four cases have been pending for more than 90 days, with another 16 cases undecided after 60 days.

As for Judge Bryan, he has been assigned 22 cases since March 25, releasing 16 aliens and denying zero (0) petitions. Bryan has been assigned just under 10 percent of the most-recently-filed habeas petitions, and he alone has produced more than 26 percent of the outright releases. To have your habeas case assigned to Judge Bryan is to win the judicial lottery.

Other district judges fall along a spectrum, with some showing a higher share of releases, and others with a higher share of denials. However, Bryan stands out with his conference-leading 16-0 record.

We have our first three-peat customer of 2026, Oluwadamilola Ogooluwa Bamigboye of Nigeria. He is facing federal felony criminal charges in a “kidnapping” case involving an ICE agent late last year (File No. 25-cr-477).

He has filed two habeas cases so far in 2026: File Nos. 26-cv-2102 and -3321. His first habeas petition was denied by Judge Laura Provinzino, who is overseeing the criminal case. Bamigboye is appealing that habeas denial to the 8th Circuit.

This go around, his new habeas case was assigned to a different judge, so perhaps he’s caught a break.

Third time’s the charm?

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Crime, Liberals

You Can’t Arrest Him! He Went to Harvard

Sunny Hostin, lawyer turned far-left television personality, is a creature of privilege. She is paid handsomely for daily smears directed at Republicans in general and President Trump in particular. No doubt her bubble is as unsullied as they come.

So she was shocked when her 24-year-old son was arrested. Police apprehended Gabriel Hostin trespassing on railroad tracks in New Rochelle, New York. Sunny tried to talk the cops out of the arrest:

“My name is Sunny Hostin and I’m one of the co-hosts of ‘The View’ and I’m a former federal prosecutor,” the 57-year-old mom can be heard saying to the responding officers in the bodycam footage obtained Friday by The Post.
***
“That’s my son. He’s a Harvard graduate, he doesn’t have a criminal record,” she said to another cop while on the phone.

Sunny raced to the scene to talk to the officers in person.

After being detained on the tracks, the cops and Gabriel Hostin make their way to a nearby street, when the TV personality arrives on scene, doubling down on defending her son.

“I’m a former federal prosecutor. He knows. He’s a Harvard grad who teaches 4th grade geometry to South Bronx kids,” Sunny Hostin argues to one of the four apparent responding officers.

Hostin seemed to think that going to Harvard gives one immunity from arrest:


The officers explained that the offense warranted arrest:

The cops said their “hands were tied” — adding that if they didn’t spot him along the tracks, someone else would have.

“Because it is an arrestable offense. I want to make that clear, okay? Where you were on the tracks is an arrestable offense,” one MTA cop can be heard asserting in the bodycam footage.

“We’re dimming it down to a trespass violation because you were in the right-of-way, you weren’t in the gauge or anything, which is the middle area where the tracks were on,” one officer says.

Gabriel has a court date coming up, and it appears that his mother is representing him. So she must have kept her law license.

Liberals love to chatter about privilege, maybe because they so often enjoy it. Then, too, there is the left’s obsession with credentials. Going to Harvard apparently functions like a magic shield, fending off criminal charges. I suppose the ideal of credential as talisman also helps to explain the importance of DEI to the left.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Crime, Medicaid, Trump administration

Fraud: More Than We Can Imagine?

The U.S. government spends more than $900 billion annually on Medicaid. How much of that money is stolen by criminals? HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. pegs the theft total at $100 billion. I am going to embed the entire quote in the tweet below:

RFK JR: “We shut down 800 hospices. You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.”

“We started looking at these hospices in Los Angeles, and the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”

“We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients. They were just addresses.”

“The guys who own them, they were Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe who were getting the patient numbers. They were stealing them from doctors’ offices.”

“They were also going into poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and they’d say to the people, ‘We’ll give you this $375 flat-screen TV. You give us your patient number and we’re going to enroll you in this hospice. You don’t ever have to go. We’re just going to enroll you,’ and then we’ll charge Medicaid $6,000 a month forever. And the guy never dies, of course, because he was never sick.”

“We didn’t get a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”

The theft is incredibly brazen. And I suspect Kennedy’s $100 billion estimate may be low. In Minnesota, the authorities have estimated that at least one-half of the total spending on 14 Medicaid programs went to fraud. While our state government is uniquely incompetent, it may well be that other states approach those numbers. The fraud is probably less with regard to bills from doctors, clinics and hospitals, but there too, it is substantial, usually in the form of upcoding.

At some point, one begins to wonder whether a central purpose of our government is to fund crime. If the purpose of an institution is what it does, supporting and encouraging criminals would seem to be an important aim of our government, both federal and state.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Iran, Trump Foreign Policy

Strait escalation

I have been following developments in our conflict with Iran via the dry daily Iran updates posted by General Keane’s Institute for the Study of War. This is the second paragraph of ISW’s July 18 update (emphasis in original, footnote omitted):

An Iranian missile attack on a base in Jordan killed two US service members on July 17. A third service member is missing in action. Unspecified US officials told Western media that the attack took place at Muwaffaq Salti Airbase in Azraq, Jordan. It is not clear which missiles Iran used in the attack. Two US officials said that Iran struck the base earlier this week and the US service members suffered minor injuries.

The deaths of our service members appears to have provoked an escalation in strikes by our forces that have been intensifying over the past few days in any event. Centcom announced that we launched launched retaliatory strikes to punish the regime for targeting Americans and to degrade its ability to target shipping. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Saturday that the loss of the servicemembers would stiffen the U.S.’s resolve.”

The ISW update also reports (emphasis in original, footnotes omitted):

Iran is adapting to US defenses by firing high-speed, maneuverable missiles at US bases in the region, which highlights the threat that the advancement of Iran’s ballistic missile program poses to US national security interests. US officials told the Wall Street Journal on July 18 that Iran is using missiles that “travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth.” Iranian leaders have expressed interest since at least the Iranian strikes on Israel in April and October 2024 in employing maneuverable reentry vehicles in order to improve the relatively low accuracy of Iranian missiles. All ballistic missiles have a circular error probable (CEP), which is the “radius of a circle, centered at the intended target, within which 50 percent of the missiles would be expected to impact.” The stated and publicly known CEPs of Iranian medium-range ballistic missiles are between 20 and 500 meters.

A maneuverable reentry vehicle can be used to evade anti-ballistic missile systems or improve the accuracy of ballistic missiles by altering their trajectory during the terminal stage of flight. Iranian leaders examined using maneuverable reentry vehicles and other technical improvements to missile accuracy after the 12-Day June 2025 War. Such improvements could make individual projectiles harder to intercept and more destructive. Iran still struggled with relatively poor missile accuracy in its strikes against Israeli military targets in March and April 2026, however, which likely pushed Iran to deploy cluster munitions at a greater scale in order to maximize damage.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia are likely supporting Iranian efforts to target US bases in the region. US officials told the Wall Street Journal on July 18 that they are concerned that the PRC and Russia are supporting recent Iranian targeting of US assets. Both countries have supported Iranian targeting during the conflict thus far. Iran used an advanced reconnaissance satellite purchased from the PRC in 2024 to target US military assets and bases across the Middle East in spring 2026, according to the Financial Times in April 2026. The Washington Post separately reported in March 2026 that Russia was providing Iran with the locations of US military assets, including warships and aircraft, to support Iranian attacks against US forces. Russia is also reportedly sharing advanced drone tactics with Iran to support Iranian attacks against US forces and assets. Iran likely continues to rely on its key partners to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of its attacks.

As for escalation, we are reportedly sending dozens of refueling aircraft to Israel ahead further attacks on Iran’s forces and, according to the X post below, we may have gone a step beyond previous attacks with our most recent strikes.

UPDATE: In lieu of the unreliable X post I concluded with originally here, see the NBC News, see the NBC News story “U.S. strikes bridges around key port in Iran, expanding campaign in battle over Hormuz” (“Tehran hit back with new attacks on U.S. allies in the Middle East on Friday, including a first direct attack on a Syrian base”). Apart from the anouncement of the service members lost to the Iranian strike at our base in Jordan yesterday, Centcom’s most recent post is below.

Centcom has also just announced the death of an American service member in northern Iraq during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian attack drone. The Cenctom post announcing the death of this service member is below.

Centcom has also announced the death of an American service member in northern Iraq during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian attack drone.