“Their Plan Is Insane”: Dem Senator Warns About Next Stage in Iran War

A group of senators was briefed on what the next phase of the Trump administration’s war on Iran will look like. One of them thinks it’s “insane.” 

Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, offered those remarks at a Middle East Institute panel on Wednesday. 

“I will just say this: Their plan is insane.... It will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law,” Murphy said. “There’s been open reporting as to what we may be planning, and the civilian infrastructure that we may be targeting.... They have been asked by the president to develop a plan. Whether they believe it will work or not, I do not know. But the plan that they have developed will lead, in my view, to a prolongment and an escalation of this war that will be devastating for our security interests.” 

President Trump is expected to ramp up operations against Iran after the midterm elections, with anonymous sources saying the U.S. has already begun warning its allies about a renewed military campaign. Last week, Israeli sources told ABC News that they discussed intensifying the blockade on Iranian oil exports and bombing petrochemical sites with the United States. Murphy’s comment seems to be confirmation that there is an escalation in the works. 

That would likely result in more Iranian civilians dying, more of their infrastructure being destroyed, more U.S. soldiers dying and being wounded, and continued high fuel prices. It would also further expose Trump’s false promises about the conflict, which appears to be developing into our next forever war. And the primary goal of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability does not seem to have actually been achieved.  

President Trump personally helped failed right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro flee to the United States, according to a new report in The New York Times.

Bolsonaro, who would have faced multiple criminal investigations if he stayed in Brazil, landed in Miami Wednesday after losing Brazil’s presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But he wouldn’t have made it without the Trump administration’s help.

Bolsonaro and his family were able to come to the United States on a special kind of parole usually reserved for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” after he apparently showed Homeland Security an expired diplomatic passport. His next step will be applying for a green card, a process which an administration official said will be fast-tracked in a manner similar to his brother Eduardo, who was granted permanent residency last year.

Bolsonaro flew from Argentina to Ecuador before finally landing in Miami—and he did it all on a private jet handled by Jason Miller, a White House communications official, an unnamed administration official told the Times.

Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered Bolsonaro to hand over his passport by Monday given that he was under criminal investigation for a massive money-laundering scheme. The senator was reportedly convinced that he would be arrested following his election loss. His father, Jair Bolsonaro, is currently serving out house arrest in Brazil for attempting his own version of January 6. He also fled to Florida in late 2022 briefly before his arrest.

Trump has been close with the Bolsonaros, both personally and politically. On Monday, he claimed without any proof that the election had been “rigged” against Bolsonaro. “It looked like another rigged election, frankly,” he told reporters. “Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked very bad to me.”

Bolsonaro has yet to concede the election to Lula, and declared himself the leader of Brazil from the United States in a letter on Wednesday.

Starlink’s Ukraine gambit might have been part of an attempt to force the war-torn country to cough up more cash.

Earlier this month, Starlink’s satellite-supplied internet service suddenly dropped its connection over Ukraine as Russia barraged Kyiv with missiles. Starlink founder Elon Musk initially blamed the lapse on the recent decisions of the U.S. military and President Donald Trump, but then Trump also refused to take responsibility. Musk finally confessed Saturday to slowing down the region’s Starlink connection, claiming in an X post that Ukraine had violated Starlink’s terms of service by using the internet connection to attack Russia.

But a report published by The Atlantic Thursday indicates that there could have been another reason that Musk’s company decided to pull the plug. U.S. officials told the magazine that when Washington inquired about the outage, Starlink “advised switching to an upgraded contract to restore Ukraine’s access.”

The blunder has put both Ukraine and Starlink in a fraught position. The company’s apparently unreliable connection has jeopardized the safety and sovereignty of tens of millions of Ukrainians as they attempt to fend off Russia’s invasion, while also displaying for the entire world that Starlink’s services aren’t all they were chalked up to be. It has also revealed that the fate of entire nations rests in the hands of the world’s first trillionaire.

Contrary to Musk’s position, Ukraine’s actions were anything but offensive. Russian ballistic missiles slammed two plants supplying heat and electricity to Kyiv and damaged a residential building in the capital city. At least nine people died in the attacks, Ukraine’s State Emergency Services shared in a Telegram statement.

Ukrainian officials suggested that the strikes could have been prevented if they received the proper intelligence—but there was only radio silence. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that U.S. officials claimed their defense systems had failed to detect the missiles because of “bad weather,” but Kyiv did not buy the excuse.

The intelligence error occurred days after Trump brokered an eyebrow-raising deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Moscow, effectively offering the country an economic lifeline that would allow Russia to continue the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was publicly critical of the arrangement, sparking a multiday harassment campaign in which the Trump administration called Kyiv and other European capitals, threatening to cut off military intelligence sharing and weapons deliveries unless Ukraine stopped attacking Russian oil refineries.

The story behind Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile attack ad just keeps getting worse and worse. 

Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s long-estranged mother, Donna Arthur, reportedly appeared mentally unwell while filming a campaign video for her daughter’s opponent, sources told Zeteo. Those sources described Arthur as “far gone” and “in bad shape.”

Court filings obtained Thursday by NBC News gave a startling further look into Arthur’s mental health struggles in recent years. In 2022, she faced animal neglect charges after she hoarded 20 cats in her sedan where she lived, and one kitten died in her care in 2021. According to court transcripts, Arthur exhibited a belief that animal rescue workers were conspiring to abduct her cats, and accused a humane society officer and an animal rescue worker of “stalking” her in order to steal her pets.  

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Acton said, “It’s very clear that our mother—who I have not seen since I was 12, my brother was nine—is not well, and I do hope she gets the things she needs.”

“I think this was exploitive to do that to someone in her condition,” Acton added of the ad.

Ramaswamy moved forward with the ad spot against the advice of his own team, and ignored publicly available information that Arthur had abandoned her children in order to skip town with her husband, who was indicted for allegedly raping Action when she was less than 13 years old. 

The 62-year-old biological daughter of Cledith “Bud” Arthur, Acton’s stepfather and alleged abuser, said Wednesday that she believes Acton’s story and claimed that he had also raped her late sister Christine years before he married Acton’s mother.

President Trump has spent hours running massive political decisions—like the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—past artificial intelligence chatbots like Elon Musk’s Grok. Now Democrats are demanding the records of his chats.

Representatives Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, wrote a five-page letter to President Trump on Wednesday pressing for answers on his chatbot use, whether it be Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other such tool.

“We are writing to ask whether you have actually been soliciting advice from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, in order to help you carry out your official duties as President of the United States. If so, we are writing to inform you that any prompts that you, your staff, or advisors in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) have submitted to AI chatbots … are the sole property of the United States and legally must be preserved for posterity.”

It was reported earlier this month that Trump and then-adviser Elon Musk “spent hours” asking Musk’s Grok chatbot questions about Trump’s legacy. At one point, Trump consulted Grok about how Venezuelans would react to the U.S. capturing Maduro. Grok told him that Venezuelans would celebrate the move, and a month later the U.S. did exactly that. According to Time, Trump thought the chatbot was ingenious.

Raskin and Garcia called the episode “troubling.”

“You consulted Grok—but not Congress—on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone,” they wrote. “To the extent any of your Administration’s myriad blunders, such as launching a war on Iran, are attributable to overreliance on AI, the American public deserves to know what advice was rendered and records of that advice must be preserved.”

The Democrats also noted the use of AI in the military strike that killed 123 schoolchildren in Minab, Iran, as well as other issues with Grok, like allowing users to create child pornography.

Trump’s predilection for artificial intelligence has been well documented, from racist memes of the Obamas to depicting himself as Jesus Christ. That his AI obsession extends to actual policymaking that determines whether innocent people live or die is bleak, but unsurprising.

Still, as Raskin and Garcia noted in their letter: “If the American President is relying on the policy advice of a Musk-designed, Hitler-friendly chatbot with a predilection for child pornography in order to carry out his official duties, Americans have a right to know.”