VIDEO OF THE DAY: Terrifying new Trump executive order leaks
Brian Tyler Cohen and legal expert Mark Elias break down the horrifying implications of the wildly unconstitutional 17-page draft executive order drawn up by Trump and his allies to declare a state of emergency and steal the 2026 midterms.

Take Action: Tell Congress: Stop Trump’s illegal war in Iran!

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“Small children who knew nothing of politics or wars”
Mahmoud Aslan, Drop Site News: “Mohammed Shariatmadar stood outside the wreckage of the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran on Saturday morning, unable to process what he was seeing. His six year-old daughter, Sara, a second grade student, was among dozens of girls killed when the school was bombed in the first few hours of the war launched by the U.S. and Israel on Iran. In the immediate aftermath of the strike he remained standing in the shade of a cracked wall, staring at the ground and ignoring the commotion around him. He didn’t approach the building, which had been sealed off, but he didn’t move away either. His hands knotted together, then separated, then knotted again, in a repeated motion.

Every time a paramedic emerged or an ambulance moved, he quickly raised his head, then returned to staring at the ground. He asked no one a direct question. He was only waiting for his daughter’s name to be called. When families were finally directed to a gathering point to receive the bodies of their children, he slowly moved forward. When asked if he needed help, he shook his head silently and waited for his daughter’s body to be brought out.

‘I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this,; Shariatmadar told Drop Site. ‘We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars. And yet they are the ones paying the highest price.’

Some 170 students were inside the building attending morning classes when the missile struck. At least 108 people were killed, according to the public prosecutor’s office in Minab, many of them schoolgirls between seven and 12 years old. It was unclear if it was a U.S. or Israeli strike. On Saturday, CENTCOM’s spokesperson said they were “looking into” the reports. ‘My heart is broken,’ Shariatmadar said. ‘For Sara and for all the children we lost today. I want the world to know that the children are the real victims. Every day that passes without a solution increases the pain and the suffering for the families and for the children alike.’

Take Action: Chip in to help elect Mallory McMorrow to the US Senate!

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Virginia voters can stop Trump’s election rigging — and level the playing field
Virginians For Fair Elections Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are trying to rig the 2026 midterms by pressuring red states to redraw congressional maps behind closed doors — cutting voters out of the process and stacking the deck before a single ballot is cast. Virginia has a chance to do something different. A proposed, temporary constitutional amendment would give voters — not politicians — the final say. Under the amendment, proposed congressional maps would be made public, and Virginians would be able to review them and vote on them before any maps take effect. Now, Virginians for Fair Elections is launching a statewide effort to make sure voters know what’s at stake — and to ensure Virginia leads by protecting fair representation instead of following Trump’s rigged playbook. Will you chip in today to help level the playing field and defend our democracy?

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Donald Trump, warmonger-in-chief
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: “So they finally did it. Of all the dumb, pointless wars the United States has waged in the Middle East, the one it launched against Iran may go down as the dumbest and most pointless. This is a war that didn’t need to happen; even the man waging it doesn’t seem to know why he launched it. Of course it was Trump who launched this war. Trump, the ‘peacemaker.’ Trump, the ‘Dealmaker-in-Chief.’ Trump, whose political ascent was built on attacking George W. Bush’s destructive war on Iraq; who warned incessantly his political opponent would start a war with Iran.

Let’s be very clear about this: the United States is in this war because Trump was determined to drag the country into it no matter what. Mere hours before Trump launched it, the foreign minister of Oman, which was mediating the last-ditch talks on a nuclear deal that took place yesterday, revealed the enormous concessions the Iranians had made in negotiations: not just agreeing to not stockpile uranium, making it impossible to build a bomb, but diluting the uranium it currently holds and agreeing to full verification by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

These concessions would have gone well beyond what Barack Obama had extracted in his Iran deal, and they came paired with an explicit vow that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon — something that its leaders have constantly said over the decades, and repeatedly so over the past week. Didn’t matter. Trump spent the week lying that the Iranians were refusing to make that promise, and in one of his last public statements before launching the war, lamented how they had supposedly failed to move far enough in negotiations. Trump had a deal if he wanted it, and one he could have spent the rest of his life bragging was better than Obama’s.

But he didn’t want it. There is no universe where this war serves the interests of the United States. The lives of thousands of US troops are now at risk, while a number of US bases in neighboring Gulf states have already been attacked in retaliation by Iranian drones and missiles, as the war has dramatically escalated and swept up neighboring states in less than half a day. There are signs that Iran plans to make good on its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, and which at best would spike consumer costs and worsen the US affordability crisis Trump is already ignoring, and at worst would trigger a global recession.

And for what? The encircled, isolated, and faraway Iran poses no serious threat to Americans, who live oceans away and are protected by a military that is funded roughly forty times the sum that Iran recently spent on its own armed forces.

In fact, now that the war is finally happening, war hawks are quite happy to admit that Iran is militarily way outmatched by the United States. This is precisely why the United States and Israel have gotten away with unprovoked attack after unprovoked attack on the country over the past decade, and faced only theatrical retaliation that, until last year, was carefully calibrated and telegraphed to let the regime save face while avoiding a war it did not want to fight. We don’t know what is coming next, and neither does Trump, as much as he hopes he can make a quick and clean exit from the events he has set in motion. We can say one thing for sure, though. Trump is far from the scourge of the neocons, as his most ardent fans had hoped and believed. Trump is the neocon-in-chief.

Take Action: Tell your Secretary of State: No ICE at the polls!

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It can now be plainly said: Trump is planning a November coup d’etat
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic: “Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off? Well, we’re now beginning to see.

Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post reported Thursday that pro-Trump ‘activists’ (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration ‘are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.’

The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures. With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: ‘Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.’

That is true. But remember: Between tariff ‘Liberation Day’ (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed. So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping.

The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead. And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.

That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post, to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier. That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.

Take Action: Demand Congress stop Trump from causing the next recession!

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War, what is it good for?

Food for thought

The Sunday Wrap-up

Hope…

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