What do early polls tell you in an election year? If anything, either a trend reversal, or big time lying may be needed, should polls shade away your sunlight.

 Link. If you call it a survey instead of "poll," does that suggest it has greater gravitas?

Ham handed propaganda mandate by a dildo in a suit (Branden Carr - know him, love him, Trump's FCC puppet). Hegseth says, roughly, "Ditto to the dildo."

 

A suit, a paycheck, and a duty to King Trump.

 

And a flag pin made in China. Screen capture of tweets, as tweeted here:

Well the screen capture put a banner thing in the middle of Trump pablum. Big deal. Not enough cause to try a cleaner recapture.  You get the drift. Always more words than needed. 

THE DRIFT: Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don't mess with "Mr. Inbetween." (Bless the old Hollywood/Broadway/Trumpian tune.) 

You, readers, have the above tweet link if text entirety matters to you. 

Try search = Brendan Carr posts that he may cancel spectrum permits of 'mainstream news' outlets for 'misleading' coverage

The audacity of these shitheads astounds. We will rip out your throat, figuratively, if you disdain chapter and verse, our way and no other.

That is saying your freedom of speech is crap where we don't even want to get it on our jack boots. That is unacceptable. The same Administration is after free speech by  ICE protesters in a church, as if "CHURCH" outweighs all else on the scales of good and fair speech. What a pile.

If you don't find that tweet stream highly offensive, try Guardian, here. 

Pete Hegseth on Friday again claimed the US military campaign against Iran has been an unprecedented success, using a Pentagon press conference to accuse journalists of downplaying Washington’s supposed gains on the battlefield.

Speaking alongside the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the US defense secretary claimed Iran had been left without a functioning air force, navy or missile defense network after 13 days of strikes, and said the combined US-Israeli air campaign had hit more than 15,000 targets since the war began.

“The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime’s military in a way the world has never seen before,” Hegseth told reporters.

He said Iranian ballistic missile production capacity had been “functionally defeated” and that their leaders were cowering underground, because “that’s what rats do”. In fact, some of Iran’s most senior leaders – including the president, Masoud Pezeshkian; the security chief, Ali Larijani; and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi – were today seen on video marching through Tehran for the annual Quds Day rally.

 [...] Throughout, Hegseth repeatedly criticized news coverage of the war, at one point proposing alternative headlines for TV coverage.

“What should the banner [on TV] read?” he said. “How about ‘Iran increasingly desperate’?”

One journalist said they had been denied entry to the press briefing, along with all print photographers. That is reportedly because some photos published of Hegseth have been deemed “unflattering”.

Singling out CNN by name, Hegseth said: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” Ellison, a Trump ally, is the frontrunner to acquire CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros Discovery, and has reportedly told Trump administration officials he would make sweeping changes to the network should the deal close.

As has been his habit at these briefings, Hegseth concluded his opening remarks with an appeal to divine providence, asking Americans to remain “on bended knee” in prayer for US troops and saying he served “God, the troops, the country, the constitution and the president of the United States – and answer only to those”.

Big guy in the sky on our side, Mr. Petey says it is so, and loose your broadcasting license if skeptical. God sides with those who threaten broadcasting licenses. That's a proven fact. Trust me.

Hegseth/Trump v Anthropic Claude - Whether anyone can still pump the brakes — or whether anyone with the authority to do so even wants to — remains the open question of our time. The technology has once again outpaced the law. Only this time, it’s not just a mobile phone backdoor. It’s the entire kill chain.

As cogent a chain of history examination as Crabgrass found online. The headline is a merger of two short ending paragraphs, where the entire story shows it as a good summary for a headline.

Where this goes

As of March 5, 2026, [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei has reportedly resumed talks with the Pentagon, telling CBS News: “We are trying to deescalate the situation and come to some agreement that works for us and works for them.” He added: “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.”

But the ground has shifted. OpenAI already signed a deal with the Pentagon without Anthropic’s restrictions. xAI is moving onto classified networks. Defense tech companies are dropping Claude preemptively. The supply chain risk designation hangs over Anthropic. And sources say the government would seize the technology before it would let Anthropic pull the plug.

[Palantir's] Maven’s arc tells you everything. A $70 million pathfinder project. Seventy-five lines of Python code trained to spot 38 types of objects in drone footage. Google walked away. Palantir picked it up, codenamed it “Tron,” and spent six years turning it into a $1.3 billion AI war engine that processes classified intelligence from 179 sources, generates targeting packages at machine speed, and now sits at the center of a shooting war.

The Google employees were right. In 2018, those 3,100 workers who signed the letter against Project Maven were written off as naive idealists who didn’t understand national security. Eight years later, the program they warned about is selecting bombing targets in Iran using AI that processes intelligence faster than any human can review. They didn’t stop it. They just lost the chance to shape it.

In his 2017 announcement of Project Maven, Deputy Secretary Work wrote that the Pentagon needed to “move much faster” on AI to maintain advantages over adversaries. Eight years later, Maven is identifying targets in a war with Iran at speeds that outpace human cognition. By summer, if the Pentagon gets its way, every single target will originate from a machine.

The story is statistically uncertain military targeting decisions by the in-place AI, with less than 90 sec human overview on average, is only a partly reliable tool.

Reading the full item, and finding other discussion of the blackballing of Claud on a whim and fancy power play - the Trump/Hegseth ongoing paradigm - is easy research left to readers and their favorite search tools. This item frames the players and the situation in a way that better sense can be made of other web reporting.

One other report worth special note, Politico questions the logical coherence of the Hegseth/Trump power play. As in, this does not hang together and make any sense. 

 

 

 

God's on our fucking side because Hegseth says so. Pete, stay on facts, not that line of BS. It is inappropriate. It is presumptive, and an insult to secular thought.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf_TKeZdPFY

Caine, alone, should speak. He is not a fucking idiot.

Caine knows facts matter, not offensive commentary from an idiot.

Hegseth needs a shorter leash. Caine could cool it a little too. Chest pounding is not what we should want to hear. Why, timeline, etc. Not this anecdotal puffing.

It is no help to brag, and say "All is well, and the troops are special." But that's what the breifing was, and then questions.

UPDATE: In Heller's Catch 22 there was a character whose first appearance was as Lt. Schisskopf, whose speciality was organizing parades, and who later became Supreme Commander Schisskopf. Keeping the same name throughout. 

FURTHER: A real threat to good sense. 

  

Yahoo News carries a feed suggesting that the "Why now" question for the Iran War is that Iranians were hardening sites at a rapid pace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6vcGzlhyzc 

That would suggest that Bibi, while crying "Wolf" several times too many over the Iran Bomb worry, was able to engage Trump's joinder. As Rubio said.

So, NoBomb! That's okay, it makes some sense. But regime change with son of Shah, when Shah Sr. was run out for being cruel and counterproductive, makes zero sense. As a backup perhaps, with the thought some pocket of resistance inside of the Iran theocracy might be workable as a new regime.

But . . . Fat chance.

All we get are daily recitations of warfare happenings, with no context, because a context might inform defensive decisions in a counterproductive way. So we are mushrooms of the military minds. Who know best?

As a report of warfare happenings the Yahoo link helps, but it is a little picture where the big picture is withheld, or does not even exist - which way we can only guess.

How long? How costly? How paid? What's "victory" defined as; or will it be call it a win and quit, at some point short of any decisive ending? We guess. It is all we can do.

 

 

Misc links, given blind, to get them posted. Only the first has been reviewed so far by Crabgrass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDKdtQhB3CU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4En7Qai8O4  Sorry -- already given in an earlier post - well worth the time to view -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWaoon6lZM0 

The first was worth the time to view. The other two are other one is believed to be. Expected to be.

One more - yet to be posted as a viewable item: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6vcGzlhyzc -- eagerly anticipated

 

Hegseth and Caine hold a presser which touts brevity and strength. How to weigh that is like a grand jury. With only one side talking, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. [UPDATED]

This is not to say any evidence to the contrary strongly or weakly exists.

Given our people at risk, the hope is the tone and tenor of the presser holds true.

But again, that one prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

Both speakers emphasized fixed objectives and the intent to not get mired into a long standing stalemate. They both expressed the notion that we are not getting mired.

Let us hope so. That their statements prove accurate.

Link.

____________UPDATE_____________  

Democracy Now! Col. Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, paints a more equivocal picture including speculation Bibi and crowd will go nuclear if pressed too hard in suffering. The messages differ.

FURTHER: BBC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-zhn2y-UEQ 

FURTHER: Try search =  third carrier iran war

Might a third carrier increase the adventure's cost? Likely so. War is hell. 

Trump and Bibi know that. Everyone has a perspective. https://houseofsaud.com/us-third-carrier-persian-gulf-iran-strikes-saudi-arabia/

https://houseofsaud.com/us-iran-war-unconditional-surrender-saudi-arabia-endgame/

https://houseofsaud.com/siege-of-gaza-induces-transatlantic-realignment-u-s-and-saudi-arabia-drawn-closer/ 

? 

___________FURTHER UPDATE__________

PiPress: https://www.twincities.com/2026/03/11/us-iran-war-strikes/

https://www.twincities.com/2026/03/11/trump-ohio-kentucky-visit/ 

https://www.twincities.com/2026/03/10/prosecutor-georgetown-ethics/ 

guns and butter: https://www.twincities.com/2026/03/10/trump-sewage-leak-infrastructure/ 

FURTHER: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/11/which-countries-have-seen-the-highest-petrol-prices-since-the-iran-war 

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/11/israel-continues-to-pound-lebanon-hits-dense-area-of-central-beirut 

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/11/europes-hard-right-fractures-over-us-israel-war-on-iran