Sultan Rahaman, M.D.

Tesla Model 3 with FSD v14.3.3 and EAP (Early Access Program). Solar energy and Powerwall.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Trump is exactly what we knew he was. The harshest questions and criticisms of journalism today and history tomorrow are about how a generation of Republican politicians, partisan media, and US voters willingly chose to ignore it for power.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

This statement is only true if Israel can do it on their own. As of now, they cannot and they are not.

Currently, Israel is only able to take action with our support and our resources—because of this, we should be calling the shots.

We aren’t, and that’s the crux of the issue.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇱 Hold these three facts in your head at the same time, because Washington apparently can't...

Fact one:
The Pentagon reportedly raised Israel's counterintelligence threat level to "critical," the highest designation that exists.

That's the tier reserved for top adversaries like China and Russia, rating Israel above every American ally and above some of America's actual enemies.

The White House calls the reporting "false" and Israel categorically denies it, but the accounts are sourced to multiple current and former U.S. officials across two major outlets.

Fact two:
Netanyahu sent a personal letter to Rep. Marlin Stutzman endorsing a resolution to phase out U.S. military aid over a decade and replace it with what he called, in his own words, "my plan": a shift from aid to joint defense partnership spanning missile defense, AI, drones, and cyber.

Fact three:
A separate but parallel measure, Section 224 of the defense bill, would mandate structural integration: joint weapons production, linked military systems, and shared data between the two countries.

Two distinct legislative tracks, one direction: permanent entanglement with the country the Pentagon just reportedly flagged as a critical espionage threat.

Any functioning political system would treat fact one as disqualifying for facts two and three.

You do not wire your military networks into a government your own intelligence agencies say is running an "unhinged" collection campaign against your officials.

Counterintelligence 101 forbids it.

If China's leader sent a personal letter to a congressman describing his plan for U.S.-China defense integration while the Pentagon caught Chinese spyware on American officials' phones, every name attached to the bill would be under investigation by Friday.

Israel does both in the same month and gets a committee markup.

That gap is the most precise measurement we have of how compromised the system actually is.

Source: NYT, Reuters
Writer: Daniel

[Acyn @Acyn]

Welker: Do you think anyone who attacks police officers on January 6th should get taxpayer money?

Trump: I can tell you this, 97% of those people, you look at them, the FBI or whoever it was, you had a lot of crooked cops. They had FBI agents ushering them in. You had a bunch of dirty cops.

Welker: There’s no evidence of that.

Trump: Try looking at the tapes.

Welker: 172 people did plead guilty to assaulting police officers.

Trump: You know why they pled guilty? They were told they were going to jail for 15 years. They pled guilty because they were frightened. They went down and ushered into a building.

[Edward Luce @EdwardGLuce]

Trump told me this a couple of hours before Bibi struck Iran. He has turned himself into a prisoner of other people's decisions.

[Patricia Marins @pati_marins64]

Iran launches symbolic missile attack against Israel, which retaliates strongly

After Iran launched a symbolic attack against Israel in protest against the attacks on Beirut, hours later it was Israel's turn to retaliate, this time indeed with violence and hitting more than 10 targets in Iran, including Tehran airport and Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Kermanshah, Karaj, and some other areas in western Iran.

Israel used air-launched ballistic missiles from Iranian airspace and also dared to launch cruise missiles from ships stationed in the Mediterranean. The White House said the US had no part in the attack; however, strangely, American tanker planes were seen in the air. Refueling whom? It wasn't my motorcycle.

There are two questions at this moment: One is that since the Iranian retaliation did not hit targets in Israel in a significant way, it is very likely that Iran still has a serious problem with the refurbishment and upgrade of its long-range missiles.

And the other is that perhaps the US has not only reinstated THAAD radars and others but also added more batteries brought from Asia that were positioned in advance in the corridors.

Be that as it may, the current situation forces Iran to retaliate and show that it possesses real means of inflicting damage on Israel. There will be no ceasefire in Lebanon in the way Iran desires, simply because Israel saw the quantity of missiles that Hezbollah accumulated in a short period of time and will not allow that again.

Israel has its own agenda, its own interests, and they are completely antagonistic to the peace plan that has been discussed. Trump is trying to save his political skin, but Netanyahu will impose his agenda and Trump will be dragged along by it.

But while Trump isn't dragged along, Iran seems to be wanting to settle scores with Israel, launching a new wave of missiles along with Yemen, which, by all accounts, has also decided to launch missiles against Israel. It remains to be seen what the level of these attacks will be. In the last few instances, the Houthis launched merely symbolic attacks. 

Join my substack and support my work:
https://t.co/pVpY5mNsE9

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

This war has been humiliating for Trump and American power generally. And when Trump announces he is going to call Netanyahu and tell him not to retaliate, and within hours Netanyahu retaliates, the humiliation just compounds.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Israel has now responded militarily to Iran, defying Trump’s publicly expressed wishes. Israeli commentators have been explicit that Israel could not allow Iran to establish a new regional equation—one in which Tehran successfully extended deterrence over Lebanon.

But by defying Trump, Israel has done more than challenge Iran’s new equation; it has also undermined Trump’s credibility.

The ball is now back in both Tehran’s and Trump’s court.

If Israel’s defiance carries no consequences, it will reinforce the view in Iran that Trump either cannot or will not restrain Israel. From Tehran’s perspective, a deal with Washington has little value if the United States is unable—or unwilling—to curb Israeli actions. An unconstrained Israel would only increase the likelihood of renewed conflict and continued efforts to draw the United States back into war.

Trump, meanwhile, appears unwilling to spend the political capital necessary to rein in Netanyahu—beyond angry phone calls and tough public statements— unless he knows that he has a deal with Iran.

Taking on Israel is no easy task in Washington. From Trump’s perspective, it is only worth doing if an agreement with Iran is already secured. In short, Trump is willing to restrain Israel to preserve a deal, but not to obtain one.

Read the full analysis here: https://t.co/FO7te8oqu9

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇮🇷🇮🇱 What just changed tonight?

This is the first time Iran has struck Israel in response to an Israeli strike on a 3rd country. Not Iran itself, but Lebanon.

The significance is structural. Iran's deterrence used to mean: strike Iran and Iran strikes back. Tonight it expanded to: strike Lebanon and Iran strikes back.

That's a fundamentally different equation. One that extends Iranian hard power as a check on Israeli military action across the entire region, not just over Iranian territory.

For decades Israel has operated with near-impunity because no regional power had both the capability and willingness to impose real costs on its military actions abroad.

If that equation has genuinely shifted, every conflict in the region, including Palestine, has a new variable in it that wasn't there yesterday.

If you still thought Israel is calling the shots think again.

Source: Trita Parsi on Substack / Writer: Oliver

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

President Trump’s rhetoric towards Israel is the correct response but Bibi laughs it off because we are still giving Israel $3.8 billion annually, access to our most sensitive technology, & spending around $1 billion a day on this war.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

A couple of hours before Israel struck Iran, I told @AJEnglish that if Israel defies Trump and strikes Iran, it isn't Iran's deterrence that is put under question, but Trump's credibility since he had so explicitly told the Israelis not to strike.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Maybe because he literally just put an entirely unqualified political hatchet man in charge of the DNI — while we’re at war — and the only reason he could give was that he would look into the “stolen” election bullshit? He’s making hugely important decisions based on a lie. That seems worth paying attention to. He also tried to set up a compensation fund for people who, inspired by his promulgation of that lie, laid siege to the Capitol. Oh and the only legislation he cares about is all wrapped up in his delusions about how elections are stolen. I can keep coming up with reasons. But the fact that the president still thinks his lie should drive policy and personnel (several J6ers work in the administration) that makes it relevant, imho.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Bari Weiss interfered with 60 minutes that asked that the protesters be made "to look more violent."

Let that sink in.

Scott Pelley: “Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent?”

[Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari @RepYassAnsari]

Trump is too emotional to be president. Also, per the interview he ran away from this morning, he’s clearly still planning on his $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists. Republicans need to grow a spine and stop enabling this disgusting corruption.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The world is getting tired of this man.

Not tired in the way you get tired of a bad TV show. Tired in the way you get tired of a dog that barks at nothing, bites the postman, and then rolls over completely flat the moment someone actually pushes back. Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed master of the deal, stormed off the set of Meet the Press this morning after NBC’s Kristen Welker had the extraordinary audacity to ask him questions. Factual ones. About his own policies.

He called her “darling,” ripped off his microphone, and left.

This is the man who dodged military service with a bone spur diagnosis so convenient it might as well have come with a receipt. The man who cannot name a single foreign leader he has genuinely stood up to. The man who goes absolutely feral at female journalists and folds like a deck chair the moment Putin, Xi, or a Supreme Leader in Tehran raises an eyebrow.

His war with Iran has been a catastrophe dressed up as a victory lap. He launched it. He had no plan for the day after. He bombed things, declared triumph, and then discovered that Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz and has absolutely no intention of giving that up for free. Every deadline Trump has issued has dissolved. Every ultimatum has been quietly extended. Iran now sits on the most valuable leverage in the global economy and uses it like a cash register, adding new demands every week while the man in the White House responds with angry posts on a social media platform that fewer people use than a regional Ohio newspaper.

The last time anyone successfully negotiated a deal with Iran, it took two years, a team of the finest diplomats in the Western world, and a level of patience and precision that this administration could not locate with both hands and a map. That deal, the one Trump ripped up without apparently reading it, contained limits on uranium enrichment, inspector access, and a clear framework for walking things back. Was it perfect? No. Was it dramatically better than the current situation, in which Iran now holds the global economy by the throat ahead of the US midterms? Substantially. Embarrassingly. Obviously.

Iran is not begging for a deal. Iran is choosing between deals, slowly, while the clock runs in their favor.

Even MAGA is starting to notice. The base that cheered every bomb drop is now sitting at petrol stations and supermarket checkouts doing the maths on what this war has actually cost them. Inflation is back. Interest rates are moving. Supply chains are straining and the worst has not even arrived yet. Right now, markets are running on buffer stocks and spare capacity. The moment those warehouses empty, the real pain begins.

In the meantime, the President of the United States is storming off television sets because a journalist asked him to account for his own decisions.

The bone spurs are acting up again.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

He lies like the rest of us breathe

[Rep. Melanie Stansbury @Rep_Stansbury]

THIS ⬇️ is why we have a free press. To all our journalists out there—and especially our women journalists (we see you!)—don’t stop asking the hard questions! 💅

[Joe Scarborough @ScarboroughNow]

63 federal courts threw out all of Trump’s BS claims.
All of them. The Supreme Court rejected all of Trump’s BS claims. He now screams and cuts off interviews because he constantly lies about elections being rigged. He’s projecting again.

[Mary L Trump @MaryLTrump]

Donald had a temper tantrum on national television and walked out of an interview simply because Kristen Welker presented him with a basic fact.

Note to other journalists: now is the time to pile on. He won't be able to handle it.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

The biggest story in America is a president who has completely lost touch with reality. Who thinks the FBI let all the January 6 rioters into the Capitol, that he really won the 2020 election, that the Iran War is going well. Who, when occasionally confronted w reality, panics.