A Wounded Captain, an Open Door, and a Warning to Tehran.

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(Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)

A pilot, stabbed by the man in the seat beside him, made it to the cockpit door and got it open. That may be the reason everyone aboard flydubai Flight 1073 lived to talk about it. Now the question is who else had a hand in that cockpit. President Trump made clear Thursday what happens if the answer turns out to be Iran. “Oh, they’ll be hit very hard, don’t worry,” Trump told reporters. “They know what happened. They’ll be hit very hard.” He was careful to say the investigation isn’t finished. He made less effort to hide where he

The Government Got Smaller, and the Sky Stayed Up.

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(Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

The federal government is the smallest it’s been since 1966. The country is fine. That’s the news in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. About 2.7 million civilian federal workers. Down from roughly 3 million when President Trump took office. More than 300,000 jobs, gone. About 11% of the whole. Most of it happened in year one. Then the number held. Think about 1966. LBJ was building the Great Society. Washington was learning to answer every problem with a new office. The country had fewer than 200 million people then. Now it has more than 330 million. Per citizen,

When a Collapsing Regime Writes to American Voters.

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(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Twenty-five pages. That’s how long it took Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to tell Americans how to vote. The letter dropped Tuesday at a press conference in Tehran. English and Farsi. Five weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms. The delivery man was Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The audience was American students, professors, journalists, and voters. The message fits on a bumper sticker: The war is Trump’s fault. It’s Israel’s fault. Fix it in November. Mohebbi called the president a habitual liar. Insanely greedy. The letter warned that America’s economy is on the brink, the dam

A Chokehold Slips, and Tehran Gets Restless.

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(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Iran’s best weapon in this war hasn’t been a missile. It’s been a map. Hormuz is narrow. The world’s oil has to pass through it. Tehran knows that, and since February it has played the strait like a card: squeeze it, spook the markets, wait for Washington to deal. The card is losing its value. The U.S. Navy and the Gulf producers have gotten good at this. They fend off attacks. They slip around them. They get the tankers through. The numbers show it. Middle Eastern crude exports this month are near their highest since the war began. Kpler says

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