Doom Report (Week 32: Target on Their Back)

I’ve said before that I was a bit surprised that so many companies instantly caved to pressure from Trump on the whole DEI thing, after pointing out way back in Week 1 that all companies really care about is their bottom line, and diversity boosts that.  Of course, I forgot, apparently, that companies are run by people, and people are emotional creatures who don’t always make the most amoral, profit-increasing decision.  Well, it looks like Target has become the poster child for the finding out phase of jettisoning DEI, with their CEO announcing his departure amidst a loss that some estimate at over $10 billion.  The Target boycott is discussed in typically amusing fashion by Josh Johnson, if you’re willing to enjoy a longer video (with, to be fair, a lot of trenchant observations and really funny quips).

Now, some articles understand that Target’s decline is tied to its reversal of DEI policies, but a surprising amount don’t.  Yes, the anti-DEI measures happened, and subsequently profits declined, but of course correlation is not causation.  Both things could have been the result of a third factor, or it could just be a complete coincidence.  It frankly amazed me that I found so many articles that claimed the DEI policy change was completely unrelated to the drop in profits, or just failed to mention it altogether, like an entire cadre of financial reporters are sitting somewhere with fingers in ears, saying “la la la I can’t hear you!” in a too-loud voice.  But here’s the thing: Target’s profits increased shortly after they first instituted their DEI-friendly policies.  Sure, that too could be a coincidence, but those who desperately cling to the correlation-not-causation principle often forget another important principle: Occam’s Razor, which tells us that, all other things being equal, the most simple explanation is usually the correct one.  It’s not always true, of course, but in this case we might want to revisit William of Ockham’s original formulation: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”  I think some of these financial guys are multiplying the hell out of some entities up in here.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Apparently, you can’t get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

• On one of this week’s Even More News episodes, Trump reports that “people are saying” that maybe we need a dictator.  Just floating the idea, you understand.  More amusingly, the transcript of Ghislaine Maxwell’s conversation with Todd Blanche has her trying to convince us that Trump was a “gentleman.”  As Cody and crew point out, it would have been way more believable if she’d said “well, of course he was a sleazy asshole, but never with any underage girls.”  But calling the Miss-Teen-USA-dressing-room-crashing, if-she-weren’t-my-daughter-I’d-be-dating-her, sleeping-with-a-porn-star-while-his-wife-was-home-with-a-newborn, grab-’em-by-the-pussy guy a gentleman ... it’s such a laughably obvious lie that it might as well have a flashing neon sign pointing to it saying “PARDON PLEASE!”.

Apparently, Robert Reich said this in 1995:

The steady decline of the median wage in this country and the widening gap between the people at the top and the rest of us threatens the stability and the prosperity of this nation.

I suppose that, in 1995, people thought he was nutso.  How on Earth could a wage gap threaten our national security?  But then the CEO pay went from 30x that of the average worker to 350x, and a bloviating orange idiot who knew who to say all the right things managed to get himself elected twice, and now we’re cozying up to Russia and North Korea and pissing off our allies.  So, you know, he looks like a fucking psychic from our present day vantage.

The only question is, will the Democrats learn the right lesson?  So far, it seems like, every time they get beat, they decide that they need to act more like the other guys and completely miss the fact that people are just voting against whoever’s in charge and not changing anything.  I wish our hopes and dreams for a secure future weren’t pinned on the Democrats, who are just as useless as the Republicans but way less effective.  But I’ve yet to see any realistic chance for any third party or independent candidate, so I guess it’s the Democrats or nothing.

And, yes, we have people such as Bernie and AOC and Mamdani showing the way, but Bernie’s been doing that decades with no traction, and Mamdani can’t even get the support of his fellow New York Democrats.  You know, on this week’s Coffee Klatch, when talking about what is probably the very speech I quote above, Reich says that

The saddest and heartbreaking aspect to me is that the road we were on ... carried with it the inevitability of somebody like Trump.  If it hadn’t been Donald Trump, it would be another demagogue.  ... we couldn’t have stayed on the path we were on.  And maybe we needed something like ... Trump to shake us up—to, to wake us up.  We were taking so much for granted.  We were taking democracy, the rule of law, due process, the economy: we were taking it all for granted.  And we can’t, and shouldn’t, do that.

Now the only questions is, are the Democrats awake yet?

Doom Report (Week 31: Don't Forget to Bring a Towel)

Look, I don’t actually watch South Park much any more.  I thoroughly enjoyed it back in the day, and I always respected the fact that they weren’t afraid to be shocking.  But there’s a difference between not being afraid to be shocking, and just being shocking for the sake of being shocking.  And the latter can grow thin over time, in my opinion.  So it was that I gradually watched it less and less, even though I continued to appreciate their chutzpah.  But they’re having a bit of a resurgence these days, and I may have to starting watching again.

But, for now, I’m just watching the clips of South Park that they show on Pod Save America.  And, while I’m not the biggest fan of Favreau, Lovett, and Vietor (as witnessed by how rarely I reference them in these Reports), I do enjoy some of their stuff, and I confess I really get a kick out of them really getting a kick out of South Park lately.  The saga of Donald Trump’s “teeny tiny penis” is one of those over-the-top, shock-for-shock’s-value bits that dampened my enthusiasm for South Park in the first place, so that’s not the part that interested me.  But what I really loved was the saga of Towelie visiting DC to kiss Trump’s ass (as so many world leaders have been doing this year), accompanied by this shot of the perpetually stoned, anthropomorphic towel arriving in Union Station:

And what strikes me about this is, it’s the type of image you’d expect to see in a show about Franco’s Spain, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Pinochet’s Chile, or Idi Amin’s Uganda, or, in more modern times, Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey.  Soldiers everywhere, citizens mostly in hiding, air of menace hanging thick in the air.  And, yes: South Park is exaggerating the situation in DC, and yes: it’a a friggin’ cartoon.  But against those counterpoints, I’ll tell you two things Donald Trump said this week.  After patting himself on the back about how well his military deployment in DC is going, he continued:

And after we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe also.  We’re going to make our country very safe.  We’re going to make our cities very, very safe.  Chicago is a mess: you have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent.  And, uh, we’ll straighten that one out, probably next.

And, while hosting Zelenskyy in the White House, when Zelenskyy notes that they can’t hold elections while they’re being invaded by Russia, Trump interrupts:

So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections.  So let me just say three and a half years from now—so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections.

And, if you don’t find that chilling, then I fear you just haven’t been paying enough attention.

Other things you need to know this week:

• This week’s Strict Scrutiny covers just how much Trump can and cannot do as regards deploying the military in DC (and other cities).  Although I think we need to institute a new rule: any statement that contains “the president is not allowed to” must also include the word “allegedly.”  You know: just to cover all your bases.

• Robert Reich gives you 5 things you can do to stand up to the current fascism.

• Adam Kinzinger talks briefly about the raid on John Bolton’s house by Trump’s DOJ.

Is there hope this week?  I’d like to find hope in the fact that Sherrod Brown, who represented Ohio in Congress for over 30 years before being defeated by a Trumpist last year, will not be retiring, but rather running again next year to fill the Senate vacancy left by JD Vance.  The Republican who beat him, by the way, is an immigrant from Colombia who can be summed up trivially by this exact sequence of paragraphs in his Wikipedia page:

In 2016, Moreno called Trump a “lunatic invading [the Republican Party]” and said he could not support a party led by “that maniac”.  In a now-deleted 2016 tweet, Moreno wrote, “He attacked immigrants, tries to silence the press, & appeals to the darkest part of human nature”, then asked his followers whether he was describing Trump or Adolf Hitler.  He wrote in a tweet that he had written in a vote for Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential election.  During a 2019 radio interview, Moreno said, “there’s no scenario in which I would support Trump.”

By 2024, Moreno was a Trump supporter, received his endorsement for Senate, and said, “I wear with honor my endorsement from President Trump.”

Beyond the triumph of crass opportunism, though, Brown is looking at an entirely different race next year than last year.  And he’s a left-wing populist, not a corporate Democrat, and therefore hopefully not as ineffectual.  Mirroring that divide, over in Maine, oysterman and bartender Graham Platner is going to challenge Susan Collins, she of the Trump-has-learned-a-“pretty big lesson” after his first impeachment.  Remember how she predicted he would “be much more cautious in the future”?  Yeah, that didn’t work out so well.  And, while Platner is still a big unknown, we can at least take comfort that Fox “News” is calling him “Maine’s Mamdani.”  So the call to action is being heeded.  Will it be sufficient?  Well, I guess it all depends on how many soldiers Trump can deploy between now and then ...

Doom Report (Week 30: We Need a Sandwich-Proof Vest)

In what may be the weirdest story of the week, Jeanine Pirro, perhaps best known for being the drunk racist aunt of Fox “News” until she was appointed US attorney for DC, has declared that a man who threw a sandwich at an ICE officer will be charged with felony assault.  It is at this point in these reports that I would typically make a comment pointing out how ridiculous the previous sentence is.  In this case, however, I’m not sure I can enhance the inherent ridiculosity of the news story itself.  Best take: Brian Tyler Cohen and Glenn Kirschner, the latter of whom points out that the officer was wearing a bulletproof vest.  So I guess it could get more ridiculous, after all.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger’s back with another “week in review.”  His perspective as a sane Republican is an important one to have, I think.  If you want a deeper dive on his point that Ukraine is absolutely not losing the war, he has a good video on that too.  It gets a bit repetitive in places, but he also brings a perspective as a former military man—he was a fighter pilot longer than a Congressman—that’s quite incisive.

• If you want to understand the ongoing situation with the Texas Democrats and efforts to arrest them, Liz Dye has you covered over on Legal Eagle.

• Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer interviews Gavin Newsom about ICE showing up at his press conference.

• BTC has what’s probably the best take on Trump’s cajoling for a Nobel Peace Prize.  He is, as always, a bit over the top in his liberal bias, but if you can look past that it’s an amusing summary of the situation.

One thing that I wish more of these shows would do is just take the time to go to Wikipedia.  For instance, both Some More News and Last Week Tonight have talked about former Lois & Clark actor Dean Cain apparently deciding to join ICE after a recruitment video of his went viral.  But neither of them noted the most insane part of the story: Cain’s birth name is Dean Tanaka, and members of his family were put into internment camps during WWII.  Apparently Margaret Cho picked up on the irony here, but no one else seems to have bothered to check the Wikipedia page, where you could have learned in about two paragraphs that Dean Cain is now in the Bizarro World position of having to arrest his own grandparents (figuratively speaking).  Cho nailed it when she said:

You have never been white, and no matter how many of these white activities you participate in, it’s never gonna make that happen.  No matter how racist you are.  No matter how wrong you act.  You will always be wrong—but never white.  Dumbass.

Over 30 years since her early stand-up days, but Margaret’s still got it.  Good to know she’s still out there serving up truth with a side of funny.

Doom Report (Week 29: The Flame in which there Lives the Gerrymander of the Human Soul)

Of course the big story this week is: gerrymandering!  You can see the original gerrymander up above; it was named after Elbridge Gerry, who happened to be the governor of Massachusetts in 1812, when that slice of Boston that was deemed, at the time, to look like a (mythological) salamander but was actually a state Senate district first began to attract some negative attention.  If you need more information on gerrymandering in general, there’s a great Hank Green explainer video on the topic which he titled “The Massive Fraud that’s Tearing America Apart.”  It reminds me of a quote from Earl Warren that I believe I heard in Deadlocked that, despite presiding over Brown v Board of Education, he always felt his most important case was the lesser-known Reynolds v Sims, which promulgated the “one person, one vote” philosophy.  Although that had to do with creating unequal districts with regard to population size rather than gerrymandering, it’s still telling that this bastion of liberal justice felt that the most important issue facing us was fair representation.  Also note that this first instance of gerrymandering—or at least the first to be called that—was done by Democrats.  But, like many things invented by Democrats, the Republicans have taken it to a whole new level.

And, so, the Democrats in the Texas state legislature have left the state to avoid having to vote in a special session called by their governor after he got a call from Trump asking him to redraw the state districts in order to get him 5 more Republican seats in next year’s mid-terms.  (And, if you need more information on this bit of gerrymandering in particular, Zeteo has you covered.)  It amuses me that Republicans can call for these Democrats to be arrested for “not doing their jobs” while at the same time desperately fleeing from Washington DC in order to avoid having to vote to release the Epstein files.  But I shouldn’t be surprised: at this point, all shame has been genetically bred out of the Republican party.  What’s really keeping me shoving the popcorn in my mouth is the current showdown between director of the FBI Kash Patel, who has said he will help round up the Democrats, who are hiding out mostly in Chicago, and Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who is standing firm in his stance to protect those same Democrats from arrest.  I mean, if you pitched a TV series where state troopers arrest FBI agents for kidnapping, sparking a second American civil war, I think you’d have a bidding war on your hands.  Gripping television, for sure.  Let’s see how it goes.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another “week in review”; I don’t think this week is quite as good as the previous two, but he’s still a good resource.

• This week’s Some More News is an exhaustive indictment of the mendacious tactics of ICE.  Turns out that, while we already knew that ICE was lying, some of the things they’re doing are downright despicable.  Long, but worth it.

• In another of those “crossing the streams” moments, Brian Tyler Cohen interviews Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan.  BTC is smart, but he does have his blind spots, and his insistence that the Democrats’ problems will all be over if they just build a media ecosystem to compete with the Fox “News” empire is one of them.  Here Mehdi makes an excellent counterpoint: “We often say—you and I will rightly say, ‘oh, New York Times isn’t covering the story; it’s not on its front page’.  But to be fair to New York Times, the New York Times needs, kind of, quote/unquote permission to do that.  And the way they get permission to do that, in our system, is they need a senior Democratic politician to hold a press conference and ask questions or hold a hearing in Congress.  ... liberal Democratic parties will say, ‘oh, the media is just ignoring the story’.  And I’m not defending the media: I’m the last person to defend mainstream media.  But you also have to ask questions about the Democratic party.  If the leadership of the party is not pushing this at the same time, it allows the media to move on.”

Sometimes we find our messages of hope in the unlikeliest of places.  This week, the Judge John Hodgman podcast released the live show that they recorded in Burlington Vermont the day after Election Day.  His “obscure cultural verdict” was a the first paragraph of a post by feminist author Rebecca Solnit (this was a Twitter post, but, weirdly, you can no longer see the original post, which I’m sure is just a coincidence and not Elon Musk desperately trying to erase all trace of opinions that disagree with him).  I’ll repeat it for you here:

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them.  You are not giving up, and neither am I.  The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.  You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in.  Remember what you love.  Remember what loves you.  Remember in this tide of hate what love is.  The pain you feel is because of what you love.

It certainly has felt like a tide of hate lately.  But, as Solnit reminds us, everything we can save is worth saving.

Doom Report (Week 28: Not Quite Total Recall)

Back in Week 25, the guests on The Weekly Show were Tony Gilroy and Mike Duncan.  (I actually thought I wrote about it at the time, but I guess not.)  Now, Gilroy was there because he’s the creator of Andor, a “science fiction” show which, many point out, is eerily parallel to our own current experiences in many ways.  Duncan is a bit tougher to describe: he started a podcast called The History of Rome way back in 2007.  As a historian, he was able to parlay that into 179 episodes across 5 years.  His next project was Revolutions, a series of deep dives into the various revolutions which have shaped the world: the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and 4 others.  This brought him to 2022, when he had not run out of revolutions, but he had run out of steam.  So he took a break, and then came back in 2024 with “The Martian Revolution.”

Now, obviously, this is not a real historical event, but rather a piece of elaborate science fiction.  But of course Duncan knows how to make it sound like a real historical event, complete with references to biographies and other secondary sources, controversies debated by competing historical viewpoints, larger-than-life personalities who are revealed to be just human after all, and everything else you could imagine.  I thought the whole thing sounded intriguing, and I decided to give it a listen.  In two episodes, I was hooked.  Two weeks and 27 more episodes later, I have emerged from nearly non-stop binge listening to tell you that you too must listen to this amazing piece of “fiction.”  And I put that in quotes rather advisedly, because, like Andor, it has a number of eerie parallels to current events, even though (like Andor) it was conceived and entirely written before President Musk started destroying everything.  And, yet, there is a character in “The Martian Revolution” who is an almost perfect Musk analog.  It’s almost like Musk himself is a tired stereotype instead of a tech genius.

Throughout the series, I kept seeing the parallels to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution, and I’m sure I’d have seen parallels to others if I knew more about them.  But it was hearing the echoes of our current American political landscape that intrigued (and disturbed) me the most: not just the CEO with tunnel vision cutting services and jobs that he had no understanding of, but the rule of the gerontocracy, the exploitation of the poor by the upper classes, the blindness of bean-counters making organization-wide decisions with catastrophic consequences, the inevitable in-fighting among the oppressed leading to movements being hijacked by selfish interests.  Each episode is pretty short, so it doesn’t take much investment to figure out if it’s for you.  But, trust me: it is.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Two great videos from Adam Kinzinger this week: the first, another great weekly news roundup (where, thankfully, “Jizz-lane” is replaced by “Jih-lane”: still wrong, but much easier on the ears) and, the second, a stirring condemnation of masked ICE agents.

• On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews Peter Beinart, a Jewish author who has been quite vocal lately (he showed up on several of my feeds this week, but this is likely the best introduction to him).  He takes the insane position that Jews should not be supportive of starving children—go figure.  Here’s a perfect quote that sums up Binart’s essential point: “And I know a lot of people caricature a lot of these people who care about Palestinian rights and freedom as, like, being anti-Semitic.  But to be honest, the vast, vast majority of people I meet, they strike me as, like, the kind of people who would have stuck up for us when we were in trouble, the kind of people who are willing to risk something because when they see people suffering and being abused, they act.  And those are the people who I want to be around.”  Amen.

• Also on Monday’s Daily Show, Stewart talks about Trump’s accusations against every black person he could think of, and a special guest shows up.  Exquisite commentary.

• On this week’s episode of Strict Scrutiny, Kate and Leah cover the motion by Chief Justice Roberts to stifle a FOIA request from Stephen Miller which, as Leah describes it, “seems to be a backdoor way to try to seize power over the federal courts by asserting that these entities, which are critical to the functioning of the courts, are actually executive branch entities subject to presidential control.”  The incisive observation from Kate exposes the hypocrisy of Roberts and the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court: ”... this seems like a pretty big indication that John Roberts is aware that things may not be purely on the up and up in the federal executive right now.  And he is kind of letting us see that when it is his institution at stake, not, say, those who by statute independently protect consumers from products that try to hurt us.”  Preach on, professor.

Where is the hope this week?  Well, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that it’s the Wall Street Journal that keeps fucking with Trump over the Epstein business.  He claims he’s suing them for one of his ridiculous amounts (I believe it’s actually $10 billion in this case, which is basically so large as to be meaningless).  But I wonder how long that suit will stand ... likely exactly as long as it takes to realize that Rupert Murdoch is not Disney, or Paramount, and he isn’t likely to roll over and throw money at Trump’s temper tantrum.  Because, if the suit goes on any longer than that, then discovery kicks in, and all of a sudden WSJ actually produces that utterly bizarre birthday letter that he wrote to Epstein.  And something tells me that people actually seeing this letter, which so far we’ve only heard described, would be really bad for ol’ Trumpy.

But what’s still breaking my brain is why.  Murdoch is, after all, the owner of Fox “News,” quite possibly the #1 reason we’re stuck with this idiot in the first place.  So why this sudden 180?  The only thing I’ve been able to figure—and I stress that this is a complete guess—is just that Trump is suddenly threatening Murdoch’s wealth and ability to continue making obscene amounts of money with all his tariff bullshit.  Remember, as far back as January Murdoch and the WSJ called Trump’s tariff policy “the dumbest trade war in history.”  Maybe Murdoch is cutting his losses and deciding that, as much good as Trump is doing him and his fellow billionaires, it isn’t worth the risks.  Maybe Murdoch will be the one that finally brings down the Teflon Don.  Not holding my breath, but a man can dream.

But I’ll leave you this week with a quote from Andry Hernández Romero, as read by Leah Litman (again, on this week’s Strict Scrutiny).  You may recall that Romero was the gay hairdresser who was, like Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, caught up in the Trump regime’s fervor to deport innocent immigrants.  At the end of last week, he was finally released from the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador.  As Leah reports:

I wanted to read a quote from him upon his release, when he learned that people continued to call for him to be released and drawing attention to his case.  So he said, quote, “It fills me with so much peace, so much comfort, so much tranquility that I was never alone from day one.  There were many people who worried for me.”

And, as Kate went on to say:

I do think that it can feel like you’re toiling in the dark and it’s totally futile to—whether you’re posting on social media or actually marching with signs—but continuing to call for the return of individuals detained at CECOT, whether or not any individual action has any kind of causal connection to what ultimately happened, A) it meant a lot to the people who, like Andry Hernández Romero, but also the other hundreds of men who, not only whose friends and families, but a lot of people in the kind of public at large, continued to press for the release of, but also I do think it matters from the perspective of policy makers and kind of the diplomatic effort, such as it was, that actually did kind of result in people actually being released from these horrific conditions.

So never doubt that these efforts are having an impact.  Sometimes it seems like it can’t possibly be enough.  But for the people who have been un-disappeared—for Romero, for Abrego-Garcia, for Khalil and Ozturk—for them, it matters quite a lot.  And that’s worth fighting for.

Doom Report (Week 27: The Fact that We Even Have to Care How to Pronounce It Is Disturbing)

Nearly 1200 years ago, there was a guy named Ghislain who got himself made a saint.  His Wikipedia page doesn’t really go into what he did that was so saintly—I’m neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox, but I always thought you had to do some miracles or something like that to get canonized.  And, hey: maybe he did drop a miracle or two here and there, but there’s no mention of it on Wikipedia.  Actually, the article reads like someone lifted it straight out a medieval text, with sentences like “He soon entered into relations with Waltrude, who was induced by him to build a monastery at Castrilocus, his former place of refuge” and “The intercourse between Ghislain and Aldegonde brought about a perfect understanding between Maubeuge and the monastery founded at Ursidongus under Ghislain’s direction.”  Wacky stuff.

Anyway, he may have been Germanic, but he died in Belgium, very close to the border with France.  And apparently it became a not-awfully-common-but-not-unheard-of name among the French-speaking peoples in Europe.  And, if you wanted to name your kid after this saint, but your kid happened to be a girl, you would just tack an “e” on at the end and call it a day.  Now, in “most of France and in Belgium,” you would pronounce the first syllable of this name as “ghee,” like the clarified butter.  The second syllable is pronounced “lehn,” with a bit of a nasal vowel and not much of the actual “n” sound, which I happen to do a passable job at because I have a friend from France whose name is “Alain,” and that’s pronounced the same way (although mostly he just gives up and lets us dumb Americans call him “Alan”).  The dumb American way for the second syllable of this name, though, is usually just “lane.”  So, overall: “ghee-lenh” or “ghee-lane” if you don’t want to sound pretentious and French.  But note that the source I linked to also, however, mentions that “in the south of France and in Canada,” the name is more commonly pronounced with an initial syllable like “jeez” (second syllable unchanged).  But nowhere does anyone pronounce it like “jizz.”  Unless you’re a dumb American pundit talking about Ghislaine Maxwell.

Because this person really has dominated our new cycle this week.  She is, in many ways, a fascinating figure, if you look at the totality of her life beyond just the horrific things that she probably (almost certainly) did for Jeffrey Epstein, a man who she never married (or perhaps more fair to say he never married her: the farthest he would go, apparently, was to refer to her as his “main girlfriend”), but will forever be associated with.  Her Wikipedia page tells us that she was born to non-native Brits living in France (specifically, the north of France, so the “ghee” pronunciation is presumably the correct one).  Her mother was originally French; her father had been born in what was then Czechoslovakia.  (Her father, by the way, has a whole interesting background as well: a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, he built a media empire in Britain, served in Parliament, died at 68 while pissing, nude, off the side of his yacht—presumably he had a heart attack, fell in the ocean, and drowned—was buried in Jerusalem at a lavish funeral attended by heads of state and heads of intelligence, including the Prime Minister of Israel, and then was discovered to have been embezzling from his companies’ pension funds.)  Ghislaine was their ninth and youngest child; two days after her birth, one of her older brothers was in a car crash that left him in a coma for six years, after which he died.  So that was her life up until age six.  Prep school, university at Oxford, dabbled in women’s clubs and business, possibly caught up in some of her father’s shady schemes, citizen of the US and the UK and France, lived in New York City off a Liechtenstein trust fund of 80,000 pounds (which is close to $300,000 in today’s money) per year.  Somewhere in there she managed to learn to fly a helicopter, which came in handy for transporting Epstein to his private island.  And her father’s yacht—remember, the one he died pissing off of?—a 180-foot, nearly 3,000 horsepower behemoth “equipped with a jacuzzi, sauna, gym and disco,” was named the Lady Ghislaine.

But, as Dear Leader Trumpy has proclaimed, this is all very boring.  “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” he said, and then immediately started whining about how Obama rigged the election that he won.  C’mon, guy: it’s one thing to claim that the election that you lost was rigged, but the one you won?  Shit’s getting weird.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger delivers another good roundup of the week’s news.  I think Kinzinger started off slow, but he’s picking up steam, finding his footing.  Other than the unfortunate “jizz-lane” pronunciation, I’m quite enjoying his take.

• Two good videos from Adam Conover this week: one, an astute summary of the (coming) fallout from the Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery (that name is really starting to grow on me), and, as an added bonus, a really incisive video comparing the fight for trans rights to the gay rights movement.

• In another bangin’ “In My Opinon” segment from The Daily Show, Charlamagne tha God asks, “does Trump have dementia?”  I suppose we can’t conclude definitively one way or the other, but Charlamagne brings the receipts.

• This week’s Weekly Show was pretty decent, but I mainly want to draw your attention to the outro segment, where Jon breaks down the interview with his producers.  Researcher and associate producer Gillian Spear is, as she so often is, the star of this one, throwing out banger after banger.  On House Speaker Mike Johnson’s whiplash-inducing change from demanding transparency in the Epstein case to just going along with whatever Trump says: “I mean, for Mike Johnson, morality and transparency is telling your son what porn you’re watching. Starts there; ends there.”  On Trump’s reaction to realizing that he couldn’t actually follow through on his threats to cancel President Musk’s contracts, because DOGE had fired everyone who might step in to take over: “And who led that charge, in some respect? It’s almost like—the guy that we have to give all our money to ...”  Stewart is entertaining, but Spears is who keeps me coming back for more.

• I absolutely adore that, even in the midst of all of Trump’s (very successful) attempts to flood the zone with shit, More Perfect Union is still putting out videos exposing everyday, ordinary corporate greed.  This time on the chopping block: why Spotify sucks.  To hear the prick who runs Spotify say shit like “I did this, not because I thought we could make a ton of money.  I did this because I cared about the problem.  I cared about music, and I cared about compensating artists fairly” and then to hear that he is worth nearly $10 billion and that many artists get paid, not pennies, not tenths of pennies, not even hundredths of pennies, but thousandths of pennies per stream ... it’s infuriating.

Finally, on this week’s Strict Scrutiny, the ladies are making excellent use of their time during the Supreme Court’s summer break.  While talking about how the Supreme Court keeps validating Trump by telling him “hey, we won’t say that what you’re doing is legal ... but we absolutely affirm your right to keep doing those potentially illegal things while we think about it,” Kate told this story:

And on the “impossibility of unringing the bell” point, I thought Kim Lane Shepley had a really evocative metaphor in a piece she wrote for The Contrarian about this, and I want to quote it in its entirety.  So she says, quote, “Think of the executive branch before 2025 as an aquarium in which various agency fishes were swimming around, acting like a government.  Trump inserted a blender into the fish tank because he asserted that he has the Constitutional power to create “fish soup.”  ...  So it matters, says Kim, if the court allows the blender to be turned on while it decides the legal question of whether the constitution in fact permits the president to make bouillabaisse.  Though it’s easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, the reverse operation is impossible.  So allowing Trump to turn on the blender while waiting for an answer about the soup decides the case.  Literally, I think that is what the administration has been doing since January 20th, but in particular in this case, turning on the blender and the lower court saying, like, “No, no, no.  You can’t do that.  We have to decide if you can make the soup.”  And the Supreme Court saying, “Go ahead and make the soup.”

Which, you know, is probably the best summary of the situation I’ve heard thus far.

They also have a guest, Rachel Barkow, who wrote a book about mass incarceration.  What she focusses on are several court cases where the Supreme Court decided—possibly improperly—to enable mass incarceration by curtailing liberties that should be enshrined in our Constitution.  And, while she doesn’t state this explicitly, what this discussion made me ponder was this:  We’ve managed to make imprisoning people easy (and profitable), so sending people to prison is a default outcome of most of our court cases.  But if prisons were difficult and/or expensive, we’d probably find other options.  It really makes you believe that we could have been better if it weren’t for a few errant Supreme Court cases, and then perhaps you can make the jump to: we still can be better, if we work at it.

And that’s about all the hope I can muster for you this week.  Maybe next time there’ll be more.

Doom Report (Week 26: It's the Economy, Stupid)

I’ve often said that there’s nothing wrong with the concept of Communism; it’s just the implementations that tend to go badly.  It turns out that implementing communism in a pure form is basically an impossibility, because people are gonna people, and they will always pervert the system.

We, as good old capitalist Americans, can easily see this.  We even get to point to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the conversion of China to an at least partially capitalist system, and say “look! they failed—we were right all along.”  But you also have to consider that it’s difficult to get a clear picture of a system that you’re currently submersed in, just like Stephen Hawking’s goldfish trying to formulate scientific laws about objects moving outside their bowls.  The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that implementations of capitalism can also never be pure, and they too may inevitably fail.  If you hear people talking about “late-stage capitalism,” this is what they mean.  Critics of the term say it’s impossible to know whether capitalism is actually on its last legs, but it seems pretty clear to me that the American implementation of it, at least, is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

This was the topic of The Weekly Show this week, where Jon Stewart interviews two economists, Clara Mattei and James Robinson.  Throughout the interview, it becomes clear that Mattei is quite liberal, and Robinson is a secret conservative.  But the initial discussion about the capital class vs the working class—or, as some call them, makers and takers—is what really drew me in.  Because we don’t live in a pure expression of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations any more than the Soviets lived in a pure expression of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  There is no “free market” in America, as Jon is quite fond of pointing out (and does so again quite articulately here).  There are earners and owners (which feels a bit more charitable than “makers and takers” to me), and the government intervenes on behalf of the owners constantly, while intervention on behalf of the earners is decried as socialism and moral hazard.

And this, it seems to me, is where the system must inevitably fall apart.  Because the owners have already been so successful at extracting all the wealth from the earners—as Mattei reminds us at one point, “three people own more than 150 million Americans”—that soon there will be no more wealth to extract, and no more earners to extract it from.  If the workers can’t make a living and can’t get sufficient healthcare, it sure does seem like we’re headed for a future shortage of workers.

Another thing they talk about is economic growth, and they point out that “capital accumulation, which is economic growth—we tend to call it economic growth because it sounds less political; it sounds more kind of neutral.”  And this dovetails nicely with my own thoughts from a year and a half ago when I wrote about vibecession.  All the economic indicators show that our economy is booming, because it is ... for the ultra-wealthy.  See, the problem with our traditional economic indicators is, they measure dollars.  If they were somehow measuring people, then the very tiny minority of billionaires would be statistically insignificant next to the rest of us.  But in terms of raw dollars, the growing inequality in our society means that the ultra-wealthy overwhelm the lower and middle classes (put together, even).  So the economic growth indicators can seem positive even while the majority of the people are starving.  In my vibecession post, I posited that we should probably start using different economic indicators.  So far, no luck on that.

Another topic essayed by Stewart and his guests is austerity.  And, as they point out, “austerity” always means austerity for the workers: no one ever seems to propose that the billionaires suffer any austerity.  Worse, austerity often means helping the capital class, because that supposedly stimulates the economy.  Forget the fact that nearly fifty years of trying trickle-down/supply-side economics has never worked.  Seriously: not once, in fifty years.  What other philosophy has failed so blatantly for so long and yet people still keep doing it?  And it doesn’t help that the capital class has managed to cloak its deeds in increasingly complex terms.  So when government passes all these laws and rules about “depreciations” and “capital gains” and “derivatives” (etc etc ad nauseum), it’s often difficult for the working class to figure out how badly they’re getting screwed.  This has nothing to do with the owners being smarter than the earners, of course; it’s just that the owners have nothing better to do than sit around and invent more and more byzantine financial instruments.  Meanwhile, the earners have actual work to do: they don’t have time to try and understand all this investment bullshit.

The contrast between the two economists is extreme, and in many ways Jon is balanced between them.  While he agrees with Clara on most points, he thinks her alternatives to capitalism (such as those practiced by native peoples) are far too idealistic, and that her ideas can’t scale to an economy of our size.  And he’s probably right.  But James goes too far in the other direction.  I called him a “secret conservative” because he starts out agreeing with Jon—and even Clara, to a certain extent—and waits about half an hour (almost exactly halfway through the interview) to drop this gem:

And I think, like—I’m not denying anything that Clara says—but I think if you think about the big picture, you know, the United States has actually been better at solving those sort of problems than Nigeria, or Colombia, or any poor country in the world has been.  Any country in the world has elites that want to rig the game in their favor.  And boy, have they been more successful in Colombia, you know, than they have in the United States.  I think that’s the big picture.  You know, and, in fact, you know, there are all these problems.  I agree.  But if you look at the last 100, 150 years, yeah, you have to fight.  You have to fight for your rights.  You have to fight for wages.  You have to fight to get the government to pay attention to you.  But that fight has been much more successful for ordinary people in the United States than it has in Colombia.  And I guess that’s what I said here.

In other words, James is starting out from the perspective that “America’s not doing so bad” ...  which is just demonstrably untrue.  And his “proof” is logically unsound—in fact, in the clip, you can hear (and see) Clara snort and say “of course.”  Because “other places suck worse” is not proof that it doesn’t suck here.  “Sucks less” is a far cry from “doesn’t suck,” and the inability of people to distinguish between those two never ceases to amaze me.

But James really proves his perspective is suspect when he tries to sell us this line about Elon Musk:

What was it that drove him to take over this whole DOGE?  He was not trying to make money.  He actually lost enormous amounts of money.  He was doing it because he’s a libertarian, because he’s ideologically driven to oppose anything the government does, I think.

And, stunningly, neither Jon nor Clara calls him on this bullshit.  He wasn’t trying to make money?  I suppose it was just coincidence, then, that he just happened to quash 65 federal investigations into his companies, potentially saving him $2 billion in fines and liabilities? or that he used his time in the government to try to steal a $2 billion contract from Verizon and to award himself over $13 billion in Space Force contracts?  Somehow I think he’s coming out okay in the long run ...  Not to mention, “he lost money doing it”—even if that were true (which I doubt: see previous points)—is only relevant if Musk understood that he was going to lose money before he started DOGE.  Now, given everything that we all now know about President Musk (and we know way more than we ever wanted to, I’m sure we can all agree), do we honestly think that he said to himself “this is going to cost me a bunch of money, but I’m going to do it anyway, because of my principles!”?  Or do we think it more likely that, because he is a complete narcissist, it never even occurred to him that anyone would come to hate him so much that it might cost him money?  I refer you to the interview where Musk was pissed at Tim Walz for saying he had started watching the Tesla stock price drop to add a little pick-me-up to his day.  Listen to what he says there: the only explanation he can come up with as to why someone might be pleased to see his company’s stock in the toilet is that they must be “evil.”  He literally can’t think of any other reason.  But that guy predicted that cutting over three-quarters of a million jobs would get people upset at him?  Yeah, right.

So, it was a great show about our economy, and that was after Stewart interviewed Kyla Scanlon on Monday’s Daily Show; her new book In This Economy? is apparently a great resource for understanding economics at a very accessible level.  And you know what the one thing is that gets pointed out in both interviews?  The reason the working class is always the one that gets screwed is because they don’t have lobbyists.  Which is depressing enough.  But the real bombshell Scanlon dropped was this one, when Jon asked her why we can’t choose demand-side solutions vs supply-side ones:

Scanlon: It’s a tough sell, politically.  Like, it’s a tough narrative.
Stewart: So this is a political problem, not an economic problem?
Scanlon: Most economic problems are political problems, at the end of the day, yeah.
Stewart: That’s—but they never say that.
Scanlon: Why would they?

I can’t think of a more succinct summary of our system (both economic and otherwise).

Other things you need to know this week:

• On Tuesday’s Daily Show, Nick Offerman does his first “In My Opinion” segment, and he talks about our National Parks.  In regards to Trump’s plan to charge foreigners more to visit the parks, which is estimated to bring in about $90 million, Nick had this response: “So let me get this straight, Mr. President: you cut 267 million to get back 90 million?  Now, I’m no mathematician, but I believe that’s called ‘shitting the bed’.”  Definitely worth the watch.

• In this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich tries out the line that Trump is the Deep State.  Despite bringing a few receipts, I’m not sure that message is going to break through.  Still, I gotta respect the hustle.
• It’s a longer video, but if you want a really articulate—and also hilarious—summary of the Trump-Epstein debacle, Josh Johnson has you covered.

I wish I had a note of hope to end on, but in reality the item I must leave you with is one of defeat.  Stephen Colbert announced this week that The Late Show has been cancelled by Paramount.  He’ll finish out his contract through May of next year, then the entire show will be dismantled.  Now, Paramount is claiming that their reasons are strictly financial, but it sure does seem related to Paramount’s decision to pay (at least) $16 million to settle a meritless lawsuit, a move that many (including Colbert himself) called a bribe.  Certainly Adam Kinzinger thinks the two are related.  We may never know, and I certainly hope Colbert finds a new outlet, but this is not particularly encouraging for an informed populace.  The Daily Show is also owned by Paramount, so they could be next on the chopping block, and honestly, no one is safe.  Brian Tyler Cohen has started pointing out that YouTube could shut off access to his videos at any time, and Google is certainly pro-Trump these days.  Jimmy Kimmel’s bosses at Disney have already showed a predilection to doing as Trump asks, and the jury is still out on Warner Bros (owners of HBO Max and consequently Last Week Tonight).  Once upon a time, you could only trust the big corporations when it came to accurate news; now we’re entering a time when you can only trust anyone else.  And, since Joe-Blow-with-a-blog could be a MAGA nutjob just as easily as a crusader for truth, you can’t really trust them either.

They used to say “democracy dies in darkness,” but then the Washington Post got bought by Jeff Bezos.  Now it seems we’ve passed democracy’s twilight and are moving into dusk.  I don’t think we’ll miss these things until they’re gone—isn’t that always the way?—but I feel pretty confident we will miss them.  So let’s make the most of Colbert while we still have him.  The future is looking kind of dim.

Doom Report (Week 25: You Got a Bit of Epstein Conspiracy Slop on You There)

So, obviously the biggest news this week was the Trump regime suddenly proclaiming that, in fact, there are no Epstein files.  Now, on the one hand, this is more amusing than newsworthy: the Epstein files are a conspiracy theory invented by right-wing nutjobs, and now many of those right-wing nutjobs are in charge of the government, and they’ve kind of been forced to admit that there are no Epstein files, and so the right-wing nutjobs who didn’t get into the government are now convinced they’ve been co-opted by the Deep State or some such twaddle.  So, it’s a bit of cosmic irony to hear people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino—who, in both cases, derive their qualifications to run the FBI from their experience doing MAGA podcasts—go from spewing this nonsense to now having to try to quash it.  But, I gotta tell ya: I never belived there were any Epstein files ... until Trump said there weren’t any Epstein files, and now I know they exist.  Or, if you’d like to hear that put with more gravitas (and some legal perspective), you can listen to Brian Tyler Cohen and his frequent guest, litigator Mark Elias.  It’s weird times we live in.

And, also, the doom predicted in last week’s report has now come to pass: the Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery is now law.  The Daily Show has a good summation of the consequences, and Christopher Titus summed it up rather succinctly as “Republicans kill people”.

Sadly, I have no time to inform you further, or depress you further (which at this point is just redundant), but I will point out that this week’s Strict Scrutiny contains this gem:

So, I know a lot of folks saw—and we have mentioned—the eyepopping statistic that political scientist Adam Bonica compiled a week or so ago, finding that from May 1st to June 23rd, federal district courts ruled against the Trump administration 94% of the time, and the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration the same 94% of the time.  Just, like, pretty stunning data.  And, look: there are some caveats to the data, in that the administration only asked the Supreme Court to take up a small subset of the cases that they lost, ones where they thought they could make some kind of procedural argument that they could notch a win on.  But it’s still, like, that track record and this big win at CASA is hugely emboldening.

Because that’s just what we needed: Trump to be emboldened.  He was such the shy wallflower before.

In terms of hope, you’ll have to settle for something aspirational I happened to catch from an unusual source this week.  While listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, I was struck by something said by guest Jan Jensen, college women’s basketball coach who has mentored many WNBA stars, including Caitlin Clark (jump to about 23:35 for the quote):

I believe the best thing in life is, if you can get a team—I’d like to think if you can get a society—to be celebrators of each other, that’s the hardest thing.

It surely must be the hardest thing, but just the concept of our society becoming celebrators of each other is quite encouraging.  I think we might have to kick a few people out first, but surprisingly few.  At least I continue to believe that to be true.

Doom Report (Week 24: Another Rough Week)

Everyone else has come up with their funny takes on the ridiculous name of the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—from the “One Big Ugly Bill,” which just feels lazy, to the “One Big Bullshit Bill,” which is only mildly better, to ever more convoluted wordplay—but so far I haven’t personally settled on one.  How about ... the “Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery”?  What—too much?

Well, in case you still don’t have sufficient concept of just how bad this will be, Hank Green has a good explainer on its financial impact, while John Oliver on Last Week Tonight explains the rest in his inimitably entertaining fashion.  Meanwhile, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse on the Coffee Klatch this week give even more context, including making the point that the (at least!) 11 million people who will lose access to Medicaid won’t actually lose it until after the next mid-terms, which is a level of political cynicism that’s shocking even in today’s climate.

And, since this bill will make ICE’s budget bigger than the entire military of Israel (and, excepting only 15, every other country in the world too), Jesse Thorn recently repeated his call to donate to Al Otro Lado, which I originally reported on in Week -4.  Especially if you both feel helpless to effect any change and also have some money to spare, please consider donating.  It could mean the difference in people getting lawyers or being held in concentration camps.

On Election Profit Makers this week (jump to around 28:45 for the exact quote), David Rees used the OBBB as the backdrop to the the juxtaposition of Mamdani winning in NYC and Jeff Bezos’ conspicuous-consumption wedding.  It’s quite a contrast between the class strata in our country.  As David put it:

... this budget is the perfect document that kind of summarizes, or codifies, the vibes that we get when we see a socialist win the primary in New York and then we see Oprah Winfrey and Ivanka Trump having fun at a foam party in Venice ...

It’s a startling mental image, for sure, and reminds us that Left and Right is not nearly so interesting a division in our country as Ultra-Rich and Working Class.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Be sure to check out the Zeteo panel on the deportations in LA.  Mehdi Hasan hosts Brian Tyler Cohen, Van Lathan, and LA city councilwoman Nithya Raman.  Among many others, Mehdi’s comment on masked ICE agents is quite incisive: “Am I the only one who thinks it’s absolutely insane and also weirdly hilarious that the people who screamed about not wanting to wear masks for 5 years are now wearing masks all the time?”

• Speaking of masks, Spencer from Legal Eagle does a deep dive on the legality of mask-wearing by law enforcement.

• Also on Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan interviews Brad Lander about the attempts to smear Zohran Mamdani with charges of antisemitism.

• Michael Ian Black (now of the American Have I Got News for You) had a great video this week on the Daily Beast where he explains the bizarre position that MAGA has put us liberals in: while we want to be the iconoclasts, now we’re reduced to defending the institutions: USAID, the IRS, the Post Office, etc.  Weirdly, we’ve become the conservatives.

Not a whole lot of room for hope this week, sadly.  The best I can muster is this: in the Zeteo video I mention above, Van points out:

We’re living in times of kidnappings and gulags.  We’re living in times of bodily autonomy being gone.  We’re living in genocidal times.  We’re living living in times of blockades and starvations ...

And, while it’s not a direct response to the above, I can’t help but find this exchange between Mehdi and BTC a useful and inspiring counterpoint:

MH: What advice are you giving them when you’re doing your monologues, when you’re interviewing people?  What do you
want them to hear?
BTC: Fight, fight, fight, fight.

Good advice, if difficult to follow.  Still, one could do worse than to donate to Al Otro Lado, and prepare to fight.

Doom Report (Week 23: A New Hope)

When I was a kid, my mother told me the story of King Canute.  Now, the actual story is that the king’s advisors kept flattering him and telling him that he could command anyone (and anything) in his kingdom, and he was trying to teach them a lesson by showing them otherwise.  But often the story gets repeated that the king himself was delusional and thought he was capable of commanding anything.  Either way, the bulk of the story is about the king going down to the ocean and commanding the waves to stop.  Which, of course, they don’t.  And then, depending on which version of the story you’re getting, either the advisors feel foolish and chastened, or the king gets a lesson in humility.  Now, I honestly can’t recall which version my mother told to me as a child, but it was the delusional king version that sprang to my mind when I heard about Trump saying that Israel was not going to drop any more bombs on Iran.  As The Guardian explained:

After a phone conversation with Netanyahu, Trump returned to the platform [Truth Social] to announce: “ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran.  All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran.  Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect!”

Minutes later, explosions were reported by Iranian media around Tehran and in the north of the country.

Because, yeah, dude: the waves are not going to stop for you.  Dumbass.

The best explainer videos on the Iran situation I’ve seen are Seth Meyer’s A Closer Look segment early in the week, and then the Even More News crew’s take from mid-week.  If you prefer to learn about whether or not Trump’s actions were legal (spoiler alert: they were not), try Legal Eagle, where Spencer will explain the whole thing for you in quite entertaining fashion.

And, because we live in the worst timeline, there were not one but two emergency episodes from Strict Scrutiny this week.  The thing that is always the most frustrating to me about the Supreme Court is that they do things now that they obviously would never do if there was a Democrat in the White House.  In some cases, things that they literally already refused to do when Biden was President.  But no point listening to me blather on it about it: Kate, Melissa, and Leah explain it so much better than I ever could.  They cover the decision against Planned Parenthood on Thursday and the decision limiting nationwide injunctions on Friday.  And also a few thoughts on how Amy Coney Barrett is not the moderate that many (including me, back in Week -4) had opined she might be—in restrospect, that was a melange of foolish hopefulness and naïvete.

BUT! I’m actually going to leave you with two pieces of hope this week.  First of all, remember the first person Trump’s regime disappeared for having opinions?  I know it’s difficult, as there have been so many by this point, but cast your mind back to Week 8, and the disappearing of Mahmoud Khalil.  ICE agents kidnapped him right in front of his 8-months-pregnant wife and renditioned him from New York to Louisiana.  And they’ve kept him there for the intervening fifteen weeks, even refusing his request to attend the birth of his first child.  But, this week, finally, a judge ordered him released.  The wheels of justice move ever so slowly, but they do move.

And the second piece of hope?  The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was won this week, not by former governor (and current sex pest) Andrew Cuomo, despite spending nearly $25 million dollars and gaining the backing of many high-level Democratic leaders who really should have known better.  No, the Democratic primary was won by a self-described Democratic Socialist, a man born in Africa of Indian and Indian-American parents, a man who, should he win the general election, will be the city’s first South Asian mayor, first Muslim mayor, and youngest mayor in over a century: Zohran Mamdani.  And there’s a very good chance he will win the general—in normal times, the winner of the Democratic primary could just be assumed to be the next mayor, but in this election both disgraced former governor Cuomo (found to have sexually assaulted 13 employees by a state investigation) and disgraced current mayor Eric Adams (indicted by the federal government for bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy to solicit contributions from foreign nationals) have announced their intention to run as independents, and the days when such things were disqualifying for public office are long behind us.  So we should not count our chickens before they’re hatched, but it’s a hopeful sign nonetheless.  And we know what a good thing it is by the reactions of the protectors of the status quo.  The crazy right-wing nutjobs are proclaiming that Mamdani is a Communist who will usher in Sharia law, without understanding (or perhaps caring) about the oxymoronic nature of such claims.  But the establishment Democrats are just as panicky.  As Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse put it in this week’s Coffee Klatch:

Reich: They’re worried about somebody like AOC, or, you know, Mamdani, or Bernie Sanders for that matter—anybody who actually is talking about what’s happened to the economy and why—
Lofthouse: And who refuses to take corporate dollars and who is supremely authentic—
Reich: And who wants to raise taxes on big corporations and the wealthy in order to pay for what people need instead of doing the opposite, which is what Trump is doing ... So obviously corporate Democrats are worried.  Good.
Lofthouse: Good.

And, I have to tell you: any time the leaders of both sides hate a candidate, you can bet your ass that that’s a candidate of the people.  Check out Zeteo’s announcement of Mamdani’s win for some trenchant analysis.

So we may be well on our way to an actually progressive mayor of New York, one who believes in providing free services to its residents and favoring people interests over corporate interests.  And, after some of the mayors they’ve had to suffer through up till now—from Giuliani to Adams—it should be a welcome change.

Doom Report (Week 22: There Seems to Be No End to the Snippets)

In 1980, the year that Donald Trump turned 34, a group named Vince Vance and the Valiants released a song called “Bomb Iran.”  A Weird-Al-style parody of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” (except of course Weird Al would never record a song this mean-spirited), it had its moment in the sun, and some people seemed to enjoy it a bit too much.  We can’t say for sure, obviously, but somehow I imagine that Donald Trump was one of those people.  And now, 45 years later, he’s finally achieved that dream.  Heaven help us all.

So, this is, perhaps, how World War III begins.  On the run up to this armageddon-adjacent move, Trump was playing very coy.  In one interview, he said:

I mean, you don’t know that I’m going to even do it.  You don’t know.  I may do it.  I may not do it.  I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.

Various punch lines have been attached to this clip, the most common being “nobody knows what you’re going to do ... including you.”  Or, in the Seth Meyers A Closer Look segment I linked to, Seth retorted “Yeah: and that’s bad.”  But no one seems to have had my reaction, which was: no, of course the reporter doesn’t know what you’re going to do—that’s why she’s asking you, you moron!  I agree it’s frustrating that Trump is treating World War III like a commercial break cliffhanger, but it’s also irksome that he still doesn’t seem to understand how press conferences work.

And this news has not been without controversy.  First and foremost, it seems to contradict everything Trump has been saying about war in the Middle East for the past 20 years or so.  (If you need a refresher on exactly what that was, Brian Tyler Cohen has a montage for you.)  Secondly, there is zero evidence that Iran is actually any closer to getting nukes now than it has been for the past 30 years; Jon Stewart eviscerates Netanyahu’s constant wolf-crying in a Daily Show episode from all the way back on Monday, not to mention Tulsi Gabbard testifying that Iran wasn’t close, only to have Trump proclaim that he knew better than her (although where he’s getting this information if it’s not from his intelligence experts is a bit unclear).  And even some of the most loyalist MAGA-ites have been making rumblings: Marjorie Taylor Greene opposed the move, and Tucker Carlson even took Ted Cruz to task in a completely hilarious interview.  (If you want to see a fun take on Tucker and Ted’s little spat, I recommend the Even More News crew’s.)

But the most infuriating thing is that we had a deal with Iran: Obama made it ten years ago.  But then Trump blew it up because it was something that Obama had done, and we never made a new one.  Jon Stewart covers this very well in this week’s Weekly Show with guests Christiane Amanpour from CNN (whose father was Iranian) and Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama.  Not to mention that the entire reason Iran hates the US is that we overthrew their democracy way back in 1953.  We’ve been trying to topple the government we directly caused to come to power ever since, and we’ve never succeeded ... not there, and, realistically, not anywhere else either.  TIME has a good article outlining why this current effort will also fail.

But that, of course, is logic, and common sense, and understanding of history, none of which our current president has.  He announced the bombing via social media (because of course he did) and ended with an all caps screed that “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”  The cognitive dissonance is palpable.  As Mehdi Hasan said in his interview of Iran expert Trita Parsi:

I mean, Trump is posting tonight on his post “now is the time for peace,” which is a typically Orwellian American imperialistic position: we get to bomb you, and then say now is the time for peace.

But I suppose this is what bullies do.

Other things you need to know this week:

• There were no shortage of people contrasting Trump’s very sad birthday parade with the No Kings Day protests; probably Seth Meyers provides the best one on A Closer Look.

• Some More News had a great explainer video on ICE: its history, and why it’s so problematic.

• The Supreme Court banned gender-affirming care in Tennessee; the ladies of Strict Scrutiny had an emergency mid-week episode to discuss the decision and its repercussions.

• Hank Green goes into a rabbithole of how Congress sneakily uses budget reconcilation to change laws, using an actual example in Trump’s idiotically named budget bill, still currently in the Senate.

Hope is a precious resource right now, so I think you’ll have to settle for schadenfreude this week.  As BTC puts it in his video title, “Mike Lindell hit with multi-million dollar defamation judgment.”  If you ever got tired of the My Pillow guy blathering on about all the evidence he had of the fraud in the voting machines, this may put a smile on your face.

I hope that we don’t proceed further down the path to World War III.  Not holding my breath on it, but we can hope.  Till next week.

Doom Report (Week 21: Third-World Lawlessness)

So our wannabe dictator has decided that you should not look over there, where Elon Musk is calling him a pedophile, but rather over here, where people are protesting the insanity of ICE rounding up, not criminals, but day laborers, farm workers, people showing up for court dates, and even elementary school children.  How dare people assemble peacefully to object to the government trying to arrest children! 

Now, since “here” in this case is the actual city where I actually live, I’ve chosen to take this personally.  Oh, not because of the ICE raids: it’s hard to feel singled out on that count when they’re shutting down meat packing plants in Nebraska and roofing companies in Florida.  And not because of the military either: while LA may be the first, it certainly won’t be the last, and anyway they’re ripping up the roads in DC even as I’m typing this.  Is it because they threatened to arrest my governor, or because they manhandled and handcuffed my senator, throwing him to the floor because he tried to ask a question at a press conference where noted dog-murderer Kristi Noem had just said that homeland security had come to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of its mayor?  Nope—although those things are very bad.  No, I take it personally because they are creating the crisis they are supposedly responding to.

I hear people like Robert Reich and Jimmy Kimmel say “there is no crisis here.”  But that’s not true.  There’s a crisis now, because Trump and his cronies—in particular Stephen Miller—made damned sure there was one.  They sent in the National Guard without the permission of—over the express objections of, even—the governor, for which they were already on shaky legal ground, and then threw in some Marines just for fun.  The majority of them have nothing to do, and even nowhere to sleep.  Now reporters are getting shot with rubber bullets (and be sure to watch the left side of the screen to see the cop deliberately turn to shoot her), and government SUVs are threatening to run people over to elicit reactions of “violence” from the surrounding crowd.  The President of the country is publishing screeds about arresting everyone wearing a mask while the majority of mask-wearers are the ICE agents people were protesting in the first place.  And, as Jimmy Kimmel said: “Putting out a fire you purposefully start doesn’t make you a firefighter: it makes you an arsonist with a hose.”  Even Hank Green—typically known for videos about science, not politics—had this insight:

This is a situation that inevitably will create conflict.  And in my opinion this is a situation that is intended to create conflict.

(You should probably watch the whole video.  It gives a really incisive overview of the strategic aims of Trump & Vance.)

Trump said at Fort Bragg that what’s happening in California is “invasion and Third-World lawlessness”—well, it sure is, because he’s invaded us, just like a Third-World tinpot dictator.  And, even after all that, the real situation is still not as bad as he’d like us to believe.  One of my personaal heroes, Lou Wilson, is also Kimmel’s announcer, and he, as Jimmy put it, “went downtown today [June 12th] where all hell isn’t breaking loose” and showcased the contrast between the peaceful protesters and the military presence.  As Lou put it when talking about the Marines, “the general vibe I get from them is boredom and a sense of ‘what are we doing here’.”  The crowd Lou showed was pretty tame, since it was a lull in the protests; if you’d like to see a bit more active scene, Brian Tyler Cohen (who, like Kimmel, Lou Wilson, and most of the Some More News crew actually lives here) went down yesterday for the merger of the ongoing local protests with the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests where he spoke quite eloquently, as well as showing the (entirely peaceful) crowds being fired up to show their support for, you know, not being invaded by a guy with (as BTC put it) “small dictator energy” who seems to think Third-World lawlessness is what America’s been missing for the past 250 years.

But, hey: don’t believe what you can clearly see with your own eyes.  Just believe what they tell you.  Watch the video where the FBI grabs Senator Padilla and drags him out of the room; note that the first words out of Padilla’s mouth are “I’m Senator Alex Padilla.”  Yet Noem’s department later tweeted that Padilla “interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself.”  As Devon notes in his excellent breakdown of the whole incident, this makes perfect sense:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command ...
— George Orwell, 1984

But I’m not “the party.”  I’ll tell you to make your own decisions.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Zeteo had a great interview with civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about “copaganda,” by which he means that the harms the media tends to focus on pale in comparison to the ones they never mention.  A simple example he gives: “There was one viral video of a shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco of a guy on a bicycle that spawned 309 news stories around the country.  During that same period, there was not a single national news story about the far larger wage theft cases against Walgreens from stealing from its own employees.”

• If you’d like to know about the Trumped up charges (quite literally, in this case) against illegally deported, newly returned Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, both Devon from Legal Eagle and Brian Tyler Cohen did excellent videos this week.  My favorite was when the reporter interviewed by BTC (who was in the courtroom when the government presented its “case”) noted that they asked the judge to deny bail because Abrego-Garcia was a flight risk.  And the reason they gave for him being a flight risk?  Well, if the judge lets him out on bail, ICE would just pick him up and deport him!  Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up (because people would call you an idiot for saying such moronic things).

It’s a difficult week to find much hope to leave you with, but I’ll defer to the exemplar for why not all old white guys are bad: Bernie Sanders.  He put out a short video this week which he ended with these words:

If there was ever a time in American history when we need to come together, now is that time.  If we continue to fight for the basic principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice, I am confident that we will not only get through this unprecedented crisis in modern history, but that we will lay the foundation for a better and more just America in the future.

I can’t say I share his confidence, but, then again, if people had taken him seriously for the past 40 years, we wouldn’t be in this mess.  So I guess we have to take him seriously now.