Iran Killed Two American Soldiers in Jordan. Congress Sent a Resolution Nowhere.
Plus: we bombed the oil route, then hosted the signing for the detour. And Sunny Hostin's bodycam.
It’s Monday!
This is one of my favorite things I saw on X this weekend. I also miss QT hot dogs and Braum’s. IYKYN
BTW, I got some news and changes coming, so keep an eye on your inbox!
Let’s get into the news.
In today’s Read:
Two soldiers dead at Muwaffaq Salti, one missing, nine straight nights of U.S. strikes on Iran. Congress passed a war powers resolution in June that it never sent to the White House, because it couldn’t.
Iraq and Syria signed a $4.5 billion deal in Washington to route oil around the Strait of Hormuz. The war closed the strait. Chevron is building the detour.
Bodycam footage caught Sunny Hostin listing her credentials to police while her son got a trespassing ticket. The right ran it everywhere. The left didn’t run it at all.
Quick Rundown: Trump wants to tariff Canadian smoke, a secret deportation court woke up after 30 years, the Tate brothers face 59 UK charges, a body turned up at a house owned by Ayanna Pressley’s husband, the Vances had a baby, and Spain won the World Cup.
Iran Struck a U.S. Air Base in Jordan and Killed Two American Soldiers.
The Story.
On Friday, Iranian ballistic missiles struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, hitting a cluster of containerized housing units where U.S. troops were sleeping. The Pentagon identified the dead this morning: Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, and 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii. Both were air defense artillery. One service member is still missing and four were medevaced.
The IRGC claimed the attack. A separate American death was reported in northern Iraq during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone. The U.S. answered the same night and has now run nine consecutive nights of strikes on Iran. Back in June, the Senate passed a war powers resolution 50 to 48 with Cassidy, Collins, Paul, and Murkowski crossing over, after the House passed its version. The resolution is not legally binding, and it was never sent to the White House for a signature.
The Left’s read. A war spiraling with nobody holding the wheel. NPR led on the deaths and the missing soldier, and Time collected the bipartisan criticism. Senator Tim Kaine: “Congress has definitively said this war is illegal.” Chris Murphy is calling the NDAA a backdoor authorization, and a coalition of antiwar and civil liberties groups is pushing lawmakers toward the appropriations route.
The Right’s read. The cost of stopping a nuclear Iran. Fox and Breitbart led with the sacrifice and the retaliation, and the Washington Examiner reported the strikes on the IRGC units behind the attack. On authorization, the administration's position hasn't moved since spring: the president has what he needs under Article II.
What both sides are skipping. That June vote. The left keeps describing it as Congress declaring the war illegal, which is doing a spectacular amount of work for a concurrent resolution that carries no force of law and never went to the president’s desk. The right keeps waving it off as noise, which lets it skip the fact that ten of its own members thought the mission needed a limit. And neither side will touch the only question a mother reading this actually needs answered: what the objective is, and how anyone knows when it’s met? Nine nights in, nobody has said.
A 19-year-old from Carrollton is dead. A 25-year-old from Ewa Beach is dead. They were asleep in a housing container when the missiles came in; one is still unaccounted for, and four more went out on medevac. Whatever you think about this war, this is a devastating loss. Pray for these families.
Now, the legality fight. Quick context, because the language is doing a lot of lying. The War Powers Resolution is a 1973 statute, and presidents of both parties have treated it as advisory since the ink dried, because Article II hands the commander in chief real authority and every White House since Nixon has said so out loud. Obama ran Libya past the clock. Clinton ran Kosovo past the clock. Neither one got called a constitutional crisis by the people running that phrase now. And this administration is making the identical argument, not a new one: back on May 12, Hegseth told Lisa Murkowski at a Senate Appropriations hearing that the president doesn't need Congress to keep going, because Trump "has all the authorities he needs under Article 2." Same position, different jersey. So when Kaine says Congress "definitively said this war is illegal," what he means is that both chambers passed a resolution that has no legal force, that nobody sent to the White House, and that couldn't survive a veto if they had. That isn't a law. It's a press release with a roll call attached. Congress is basically Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
I’m not defending the war. I’m refusing the frame. There’s a difference, and it matters, because the frame is what lets everybody off the hook.
Here’s the part the antiwar caucus doesn’t want to say into a microphone. Congress has exactly one lever that has ever worked, and it isn’t a resolution. It’s money. Cut the funding line for Central Command operations against Iran and this ends in a week. That’s not a theory, that’s how the Boland Amendment worked, that’s how Congress finally shut off Vietnam in 1973 and Somalia in 1994. Every member who voted for that June resolution knows it. So why the resolution instead of the appropriation? Because a resolution is free. You get the floor speech, the C-SPAN clip, the fundraising email, and zero fingerprints if it turns out three months from now that the strikes worked. Voting to defund a shooting war while Americans are in the field means owning what happens next. Nobody wants that one on their record.
So where does that leave a busy reader trying to figure out whether to be alarmed? Not at “the president is acting illegally.” Iran put ballistic missiles into a building full of sleeping Americans. Of course we hit back. Any president of either party is ordering that strike by Saturday morning, and the people pretending there was a version of this week where we didn’t are not being serious.
The harder question is the one nobody in either party has answered in nine nights. What ends this? We have run this exact loop before. Negotiate, sign, watch it come apart, act shocked, start over. So is a deal actually available here, or are we buying the next intermission? Nobody will say. And there are no benchmarks anywhere on the table, nothing a voter can point at and say, okay, that part’s finished, bring them home.
Here’s where my head is, and I’m still turning it over. Hormuz is the only card Iran has left. Not the enrichment, not the proxies, the strait. And the strait is the exact thing an American consortium started building around on Friday, one story down in this issue. Which makes me wonder whether this doesn’t end at a negotiating table at all. It ends when the oil no longer has to sail past them, and every night between now and then is a waiting room. That’s a long wait to spend in a housing container at an air base most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
Watch whether Kaine or Murphy actually files a defunding amendment on the NDAA, or whether the resolution stays the whole strategy. Watch whether any of those four Senate Republicans put their names on an appropriations rider. And watch whether the White House ever gives the country a stated objective, or keeps running the war on nightly strike counts.
Two soldiers came home in flag-draped cases this weekend. Congress answered with a document it never mailed.
Iraq and Syria Signed a Pipeline to Route Oil Around Iran. They Signed the Same One in 2007. And Again in 2010.
The Story.
On Friday, Iraq and Syria signed a memorandum in Washington to rebuild the Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline, which would carry crude from northern Iraq to Syria's Mediterranean coast and skip the Strait of Hormuz entirely. The line runs about 800 kilometers, was built in 1952, moved up to 300,000 barrels a day, and has been dead since the 2003 invasion.
Projected capacity now: 2 million barrels a day. Rebuild cost: somewhere between $4.5 billion and $8 billion. Officials put the build at two to three years, roughly 36 months for a wholesale replacement. Chevron is implementing it as part of a U.S.-led consortium, and the pipeline was one piece of roughly 50 agreements Iraq signed with American companies during the prime minister's visit, valued near $60 billion. Energy Secretary Chris Wright presided. The context: Iraqi production has fallen from 4.2 million barrels a day in February to 1.9 million in June, and traffic through Hormuz has collapsed to about three vessels a day against a normal count near 110.
The Left’s read. A war-driven scramble. CNBC and Axios covered it as an emergency workaround for a shipping crisis, with Bloomberg framing the U.S. backing as a play to weaken Iran’s grip on the strait. The unspoken half: we broke the market, now we’re selling the repair.
The Right’s read. Strategy working as designed. The Washington Examiner ran it as a straightforward win against Iran’s chokehold on the strait, and Townhall treated Chevron’s involvement as proof American industry is lined up behind it.
What both sides are skipping. The clock, and the last two times somebody signed this exact deal. Iraq and Syria agreed to rehabilitate this pipeline in December 2007 and handed the job to Stroytransgaz, a Gazprom subsidiary, which never turned a shovel; the contract was voided in April 2009. They agreed again in 2010. Nothing was built. Add a route running through a Syria whose government is barely three years old, across terrain that was an active war zone inside the last decade, and the honest description of Friday is a signing, not a pipeline. Neither side will say who eats the loss if the bet goes bad: Chevron, the U.S. taxpayer, or the Iraqis.
Let me lay the sequence out, because nobody covering it will put the dates in one paragraph. The U.S. starts bombing Iran. Iran squeezes Hormuz. Iraqi exports crater by more than half. And then the Energy Secretary stands at a signing ceremony in Washington while Chevron picks up a $4.5 billion contract to build the road around the problem.
Here’s my concession, and it’s a real one. A pipeline is the best call. Routing Gulf crude around a strait that one hostile navy can plug is sound policy on any day of any administration, and this idea has been kicking around for years. If it gets built, gas gets cheaper and Tehran loses its best hostage.
Here is the issue. Two to three years is the estimate. Thirty-six months, at somewhere between four and eight billion dollars, laid across a country that had a civil war going in this decade. And the last two crews who signed up for this job never broke ground. In 2007 Iraq and Syria handed it to a Gazprom outfit that sat on it until the contract was voided in 2009.
They tried again in 2010. The pipe is still empty. So when the coverage tells you a Hormuz workaround got solved Friday afternoon, what actually happened Friday afternoon is TBD. Ask me in 2029.
That timeline should change how you read the war, too. If the strait is the only card Iran holds and the workaround is three years out, and Iran’s word cannot be trusted, then anybody selling you a quick resolution is doing arithmetic that’s not mathing.
So currently we stand at. Fifty agreements. Sixty billion dollars. Chevron at the table. That’s the largest transfer of reconstruction money in the region since Iraq itself, and it happened in one afternoon while the country was watching casualty coverage. The right is calling it strength, which skips that our own bombs created the opening. The left is calling it opportunism, which skips that they’d have taken the same deal in a heartbeat. Both of them are burying the actual reader question, which is who eats the loss if a pipeline running through post-civil-war Syria gets blown up in year two.
Watch for a groundbreaking date, because a signed memorandum with no start date is what 2007 looked like too. Watch whether the consortium’s full membership gets disclosed or stays behind “U.S.-led.” And watch the Hormuz traffic count, because if shipping recovers fast, the urgency argument that justified all this in one afternoon evaporates and the contracts are still standing.
We closed the road, then sold the detour. Least we could do is print the receipt.
Sunny Hostin Says Cops Endanger Her Son and Privilege Shouldn't Save Anyone. Then the Bodycam Rolled.
The Story.
On June 16, MTA police stopped Gabriel Hostin, 24, on active Metro-North railroad property near Station Plaza in New Rochelle, New York. He told officers he'd been running, saw a hill, and headed up it. Bodycam footage published by the New York Post on July 17 captures his mother, "The View" co-host Sunny Hostin, on the phone during the stop, identifying herself as a co-host of the show and a former federal prosecutor, and telling officers her son is a Harvard graduate, a Yale researcher with no criminal record who teaches fourth-grade geometry.
Officers said the offense could have supported an arrest but they reduced it to a violation because he cooperated and wasn't standing between the rails. Hostin later wrote the district attorney asking that the case be dropped, saying there was no visible "no trespassing" sign at the incline and that her son made an "honest mistake." She is also listed as his attorney on the court docket.
Gabriel is due in New Rochelle City Court on July 31. Timing worth holding onto: the footage published Friday, "The View" airs at 11 a.m. Eastern, and the show's last new episode before summer hiatus is Friday, July 25.
The Left’s read. Nothing so far. TMZ ran the footage as celebrity filler and the tabloids picked it up over the weekend, but no major left-leaning outlet has touched it as a media-credibility story. "The View" has not addressed it, though in fairness the tape landed after Friday's show. Today is the first episode where it can come up.
The Right’s read. Do you know who I am. The Daily Caller put “I’m A Former Federal Prosecutor” in the headline, Breitbart ran the video, and PJ Media went straight at the privilege angle given how much airtime she’s spent on the subject.
What both sides are skipping. The officers. The right is running a hypocrisy clip and the left is running nothing, so neither one is describing what’s actually on the tape: professionals doing a de-escalation by the book, downgrading a chargeable offense because the kid was polite. That’s the footage. And it will never air on the show that lectures eight million viewers a week about what a traffic stop does to a Black family.
Start with what’s actually on the tape, because it’s the part everyone is treating as background and it’s the entire point. A young man is somewhere he isn’t supposed to be. Officers stop him. He’s polite, he answers the questions, he has no record. They could have arrested him. They wrote him a violation instead and sent him home. That’s the encounter. And it is how these encounters go, every day, all over this country, for people who cooperate. Which is the precise claim Sunny Hostin has spent a decade telling millions of women is a lie.
She has said on that stage that she fears for her son because he is Black. That the system treats him as a threat before it treats him as a person. That a stop like this one is where boys who look like him get hurt. Then the stop happened, on camera, with a timestamp. Patient officers. A downgraded charge. A kid driven home.
Now the phone call, and this is the last generous thing I have. Any mother makes it. When “police” and “your son” land in the same sentence, something ancient takes the wheel and you dial. Nobody has to apologize for that.
But she didn’t call and ask them to be fair. She called and told them who she was. The View. Former federal prosecutor. Harvard. Yale. Fourth-grade geometry in the South Bronx. That is not a mother pleading, that’s a résumé being deployed, and then she followed it with a letter to the district attorney asking him to make the whole thing go away. This is a woman who has lectured this country for years about people who believe their money and their title should buy them a different set of rules. She reached for hers in under two minutes.
So the hypocrisy runs on two tracks and she laid both of them herself. Track one: the system is rigged against her son. Well, the bodycam says otherwise. Track two: nobody should get a pass for who they are or who they know. Yet, she asked for one, in writing, on letterhead.
Hostin is one of the most divisive people on television right now, and the divisiveness makes her money. Race is the lens she runs every story through, whether it fits or not, and the whole operation runs on convincing a daytime audience that their country is hunting their children. It’s a race hustle with a hair and makeup budget. Then a camera on an officer’s chest in New Rochelle recorded twenty minutes of the opposite, and the hustle has nothing to say.
And in case you are wondering, here is the clock. The footage went up Friday, after that morning’s episode. Nobody at that table has ducked anything yet. Today is the first chance.
So let’s make it a test instead of an accusation. Did CNN cover it over the weekend? Did MSNBC? Did any outlet that ran a solid week of policing segments this spring find sixty seconds for a tape of an actual stop? No. That’s four days of quiet from every newsroom that treats this subject as a calling.
Which leaves the table itself, and a countdown. Five new episodes remain before “The View” goes on summer hiatus July 28. Gabriel’s court date is July 31, three days into the blackout. So there is a real window, it’s short, and it closes right before the part with legal consequences. If it doesn’t come up by Friday, it isn’t going to come up at all, and the hiatus does the work an apology would have.
That’s the real story here. One ticket in Westchester is nothing. A daytime program that shapes how millions of women understand cops, courts, and their own kids’ risk, running a narrative that its own host’s bodycam demolishes, is not nothing. Nobody at that table will have to say “I was wrong.” They’ll just have to run out the week.
Now to those who have been saying “Great, this proves the FCC should strip The View of its news designation.” No. I said it Friday, and I’ll say it again. A government that gets to decide which shows count as journalism is a weapon, and the people cheering it today will be crying about it in four years when somebody else is holding it. Distrust the show all you want. Don’t hand the government a dial.
The fix for a program that won’t show you the tape is you, watching the tape. Lucky for you, that’s the entire business model of this newsletter, and it’s cheaper than a regulator.
Watch this week’s five episodes, because after Friday the show is dark until September and the question expires. Watch whether the DA quietly drops the citation after a letter from a television host who is also counsel of record, because that outcome is its own story. And watch which conservative outlets running the clip this week say anything about the FCC’s Disney investigation, since the two land in the same building.
The tape shows the system working exactly the way she’s paid to insist it never does. She has five shows to mention it. I’d bet the hiatus gets there first.
The Vances had a baby, the first born to a sitting vice president in about 150 years. Alec Neel Vance was born July 19 at Walter Reed to JD and Usha Vance. He joins Ewan, 9, Vivek, 6, and Mirabel, 4. The last child born to a sitting VP was in the 1870s.
Trump wants to tariff Canadian smoke. With more than 100 million Americans under air quality advisories for the second straight summer, the president accused Canada of "willful negligence" and said the pollution cost would be added to the tariffs Ottawa already pays. He called Prime Minister Mark Carney, who said both countries share responsibility. The U.S. Forest Service confirmed this week that at least two fires in Minnesota's Superior National Forest crossed north into Canada, and U.S. acreage burned in 2026 stands at 3.7 million against a ten-year average of 2.7 million. Both men then spent Sunday afternoon in the same box at the World Cup final at MetLife, with Claudia Sheinbaum and Gianni Infantino, under an air quality advisory. Apparently the topic came up.
Nick Sortor@nicksortor🚨 JUST IN: President Trump says he CONFRONTED Canadian PM Mark Carney today over toxic wildfire smoke at the World Cup, says he may CHARGE them for damages "I told him, 'you've got to STROP these fires from coming in and poisoning our air. Our air has been POISONED.'" "Maybe12:28 AM · Jul 20, 2026 · 1.48M Views1.8K Replies · 3.02K Reposts · 21K LikesSpain won the World Cup. Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute to beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium, Spain’s second title after 2010. They conceded one goal the entire tournament, the stingiest defensive run in World Cup history. Trump attended. Messi’s last World Cup ended without a shot on target.
Barstool Sports@barstoolsportsSPAIN ARE WORLD CUP CHAMPIONS ONCE AGAIN 🇪🇸10:06 PM · Jul 19, 2026 · 134K Views31 Replies · 82 Reposts · 1.39K LikesTaco Bell's lettuce carried a parasite, and the recall is much bigger than the headline. The CDC and FDA named shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell as the source of a cyclospora outbreak in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia: 1,644 infections, 94 hospitalizations, no deaths, with onset dates running from May 13 to July 13. Cyclospora is a parasite that causes weeks of watery diarrhea and relapses if left untreated, which is why the case count kept climbing for two months before anyone identified a source. Taylor Farms de México pulled the lettuce July 17 and Taco Bell dropped the supplier nationwide. The part the coverage keeps burying: the company's own recall notice covers 27 states, not five, and includes bagged lettuce sold in grocery stores. More than 30 states have logged cyclospora infections this year, on pace to pass the 2019 record of roughly 4,700. Go check your crisper drawer; eat more beef.
Taylor Farms@YourTaylorFarmsAn Update for You
2:55 AM · Jul 20, 2026 · 1.44M Views1.4K Replies · 1.02K Reposts · 7.82K LikesA secret deportation court woke up after 30 years. The Justice Department filed the first-ever petition to the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a classified-procedure federal court created in 1996 that had never heard a case. The single-page filing doesn’t name the respondent. At a hearing Thursday, Chief Judge Joan Ericksen questioned “the nexus that the government alleges between the actions of the respondent and the specific sections and subsections it invokes.” The court limits a subject’s access to the evidence against him.
The Tate brothers were arrested in Miami on 59 UK charges. U.S. Marshals took Andrew and Tristan Tate into custody July 18 on a sealed extradition warrant. The Crown Prosecution Service charged Andrew with 42 counts including rape, human trafficking, indecent images of a child, and assault, and Tristan with 17 including sexual assault and trafficking. The alleged conduct spans 2010 to 2017 across seven complainants. Both deny the charges and say the arrests are political.\
Breaking911@Breaking911Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami following a UK extradition request over more than 50 charges, including allegations of rape, trafficking, assault, and other offenses.2:00 AM · Jul 19, 2026 · 1.73M Views1.06K Replies · 893 Reposts · 7.46K LikesA body was found at a rental property owned by Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s husband. Boston homicide detectives are investigating after an unresponsive person was found Saturday at a seven-bedroom house on Malta Street in Mattapan owned by Conan Harris. The property is listed for sale at $1.15 million. Pressley and Harris do not live there, no cause of death has been released, and no arrests have been made. Pressley’s office offered condolences.
Mario Nawfal@MarioNawfal🇺🇸 Rep. Ayanna Pressley (of "The Squad") just had a dead body discovered at her husband's property... Her husband, Conan Harris, was sentenced to federal prison in 2006 for drug trafficking, serving a 10-year term. He later became Deputy Director of Public Safety for the3:50 PM · Jul 19, 2026 · 59.1K Views82 Replies · 372 Reposts · 843 Likes
That’s The Read!
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.
I’m left thinking about Taylor farms and the false positive for the disease causing bacteria and apology from the FDA- damn that’s a big mistake that could really destroy a- well a big ag business, and if it was a false positive did it really come from the lettuce or something else?
My take is- stay away from the fast food places 😊 🥦 eat more broccoli 🤣 I have a lot in my garden right now
lol
And I can’t believe people watch the view anyway, those ladies are just so annoying and whiny and everything else