War!
Bombings in Iran escalate the controversy about the use of troops – both abroad and here at home.
If you’d like these posts delivered directly to you, subscribe to the Decisions newsletter now!
A short newsletter this week – out of town visiting, so a little less time to write.
Iran
Late Saturday night, we learned that President Trump approved U.S. military attacks on Iran. From NBC News reporting: [1]
President Donald Trump said Saturday night that Iran’s major nuclear enrichment facilities were “completely and totally obliterated” after the United States dropped bombs on them — and warned that American forces would carry out further hostilities if Tehran does not negotiate a peace settlement.
The airstrikes, which targeted the Fordo, Natanz and Esfahan nuclear sites, are the first time the United States has conducted a direct military attack on Iran, and they further escalated a military conflict between Iran and Israel that began on June 13.
U.S. Navy submarines also launched 30 Tomahawk missiles into Iran.
Trump’s claim about the result of the strikes could not be independently confirmed.
Bipartisan opposition have led members of Congress to propose a War Powers Resolution to force Congress to weigh in on the use of force. From Fox News reporting: [2]
Co-sponsors of the War Powers Resolution, Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif, and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., were quick to criticize President Donald Trump for greenlighting attacks on three nuclear sites in Iran Saturday night.
"This is not constitutional," Massie said, responding to Trump's Truth Social post announcing the strikes on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan in Iran.
The bipartisan War Powers Resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives this week as strikes between Israel and Iran raged on, and the world stood by to see if Trump would strike.
Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gone further, saying that Trump’s Iran strikes constitute “grounds for impeachment.” [3]
Dodgers
NBC News reported on federal agents being turned away by the Los Angeles Dodgers: [4]
The Los Angeles Dodgers announced Thursday they blocked federal immigration agents from entering their stadium as dozens of anti-ICE protesters gathered outside the sports venue.
On social media, the MLB team said that federal agents working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at the stadium and “requested permission to access the parking lots.”
“They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization,” the Dodgers said, adding that their game against the Padres will go on at the stadium as scheduled.
ICE responded to the Dodgers on social media: “False. We were never there.”
Demonstrators standing outside the stadium’s gates were seen holding signs and chanting “ICE out of L.A.” and “ICE go home” as several dark SUV vehicles stood on the opposite side of the road. Some of the federal agents appeared to be wearing Homeland Security uniforms.
Lakers
The Buss family sold their majority share of the Los Angeles Lakers to businessman Mark Walter, who is also majority owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The sale is at a valuation of $10 billion, making the Lakers the most valuable NBA franchise. Jerry Buss bought the Lakers, along with the Los Angeles Kings franchise and the Forum, for $67.5 million in 1979. [5]
The return for the Buss family investment is about 11.5% annually. Interestingly enough, the S&P 500 increased at a 9.3% annual return over these same 46 years. [6] Had the Buss family invested their money in the S&P 500 index, their investment would have reached $4 billion on its own.
But they would have 10 fewer world championships.
Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award–winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the New York Times bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation and Twilight of the Elites. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children.
From the description on Amazon: [7]
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
GIF Game
Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man
Notes and Sources
[1] Dan De Luce, Alex Koppelman, Courtney Kube, Gordon Lubold, Tom Winter, and Jonathan Allen, “U.S. strikes Iranian nuclear sites, Trump says,” NBC News, June 21, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-strikes-iranian-nuclear-site-trump-says-rcna213781
[2] Deirdre Heavey, Alex Miller, and Elizabeth Elkind, “'Not constitutional': Congress invokes new War Powers Resolution to reject Trump's strikes on Iran,” Fox News, June 21, 2025, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/unconstitutional-congress-evokes-new-war-powers-resolution-reject-trumps-strikes-iran
[3] “Ocasio-Cortez says Trump Iran strikes 'grounds for impeachment',” NBC News, June 21, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/ocasio-cortez-says-trump-iran-strikes-grounds-for-impeachment-242042949738
[4] Nicole Acevedo, Jacob Soboroff, and Andrew Blankstein, “Dodgers block ICE agents from entering stadium in Los Angeles,” NBC News, June 19, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/dodgers-block-ice-agents-from-entering-stadium-in-los-angeles.html
[5] Alex Sherman, “Los Angeles Lakers owners sell majority stake in the team at $10 billion valuation,” CNBC, June 18, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/lakers-owners-buss-family-sell-majority-stake-valuation.html
[6] “S&P 500 - 100 Year Historical Chart,” Macrotrends, retrieved June 21, 2025, https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data
[7] Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call, Penguin Press, New York, 2025, https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Call-Attention-Endangered-Resource/dp/0593653114
Decisions with Mic Farris
Seek Truth. Honor Differences.
