The Best of the Rest of the News. — A Dangerous Deal Behind Closed Doors: Is Trump Letting Putin Reshape U.S. Foreign Policy? — Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0: Will Trump Confront Putin, or Fold? — Will Colombia be the next country Trump invades or whose leadership he tries to decapitate? — America’s Healthcare Collapse Is Here, and It Was Written Into Law. — Another death in ICE custody: How many more before anyone is held accountable? — Meet the new Kyrsten Sinema: John Fetterman.

Or arrested and dragged off by ICE...at least not yet... This afternoon, our internet provider lost all functionality for much of the city of Portland for several hours, business service included, and took us entirely off the air about 20 minutes before the end of the show. A few listeners and viewers were freaking out on social media and in comments, wondering if I’d finally been arrested and dragged off by ICE or worse. And, in fact, I will be gone for a little while and intended to announce it at the end of the show but we crashed before I got to it. Our good friend Jefferson Smith will be filling in for me for the next week. Again, I am not in a detention center! (At least yet.) What’s going on is that I have a brand new book coming out on July 7, and Louise and I have a bunch of details we must take care of so we’re taking a few days off. But don’t worry, we’ll be back on the air a week from Monday.

What he saw from inside the system, and why his departure signals that the guardrails are collapsing faster than anyone on the outside fully understands… Trump is dismantling our American democracy with alarming speed and the resignation of the Trump-appointed Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, is a symptom of it. Kent, a hardcore MAGA Republican who ran two failed, Trump-endorsed campaigns for Congress before Trump put him in charge of counterterrorism, was adjacent to the very highest levels of our national security apparatus, had all the inside information, and not only resigned but salted the earth on his way out, writing: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." As I've noted in previous articles, Saudi Arabia and the UAE wanted America to strike Iran and had collectively given billions to Kushner and Trump. Netanyahu desperately needed a war with Iran to insure his re-election this year to keep him out of prison. And Putin wanted the Strait of Hormuz closed so the price of oil would go up and rescue his floundering economy.

As bombs fall and soldiers die, Jared Kushner is reportedly seeking billions from the same Gulf states pushing America toward conflict… There are several clear winners from Trump's attack on Iran: — Russia, who can again fund their violence against Ukraine with new oil revenue and now claims their unprovoked attack on that nation is consistent with this new Trump Doctrine; — Saudi Arabia, which has long hated Iran and lobbied since at least 2008 for the US to attack that country; — the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has similarly pushed America to attack Iran since at least 2010; — the American defense weapons industry, which is making additional billions; — Don Jr. and Eric who have taken a big position in a drone-manufacturing business, getting them in on the Pentagon gravy train; — Donald Trump himself, who's succeeded in largely pushing Epstein off the front page; — and Benjamin Netanyahu, who's called for American strikes against Iran since 1992 and will stay out of prison as long as the war continues.