Sunday, June 28, 2026

Doom Report (Week 75: The Attorney General Does Not Respond Substantively to Any of These Arguments)


On Monday, Kier Starmer announced his resignation as UK Prime Minister.  If you don’t know who he is, think of him as the British Chuck Schumer: ostensibly progressive, disturbingly pro-genocide, beholden to corporate interests, and desperate to maintain the status quo.  And, as it turns out, people just aren’t interested in the status quo any more.  The status quo kinda sucks.  So I suppose it isn’t surprising that its defenders are starting to go down.

Why should you care?  Well, I just gave you a hint: the Labour party, as I often say when I talk about British politics, is sort of like our corporate Democrats.  They too are married to the status quo, and suckle at the teat of corporate donors.  They can’t advocate big changes, because the people that fund them don’t want that.  Haven’t you ever wondered why you see many companies—and almost all billionaires—giving money to both Democrats and Republicans?  It’s because they’re hedging their bets: no matter who wins, they’ll be owed a favor.  And the favor is almost always tax breaks for the rich, reduction in the social safety nets, keeping labor laws and financial regulations to a minimum ... that sort of thing.  The sort of thing that makes them richer and us poorer.

So, if supporters of the status quo are starting to lose—anywhere in the world—I call that a cause for celebration.  We need some status up in here that ain’t so quo: some status perturbātus, even.  Ten years ago, Bernie Sanders was a crazy guy with kooky hair whose ideas were completely unrealistic; today he’s usually considered an elder statesman and sometimes even the most important voice in the Democratic party—despite the fact that he’s not even a Democrat.  (While Sanders has run as a Democrat in two presidential campaigns, he has officially been an independent since leaving the Liberty Union Party in 1977.)  AOC is a political rockstar.  Mamdani is, openly, a Democratic Socialist, and the 3 NYC candidates he endorsed for the House of Representatives all won their primaries, which all but guarantees that they will win the seats.  The billionaires and centimillionaires are running and losing; the bartenders and union organizers are running and winning.

For a long list of all the things Starmer did wrong as Prime Minister, you could consult Owen Jones; he’s a bit biased, but thorough.  For some historical perspective on why Starmer’s replacement will be the 7th PM in 10 years, check out Pod Save America’s interview with Ben Rhodes.  For even more perspective on how the Starmer story is relevant to US politics, I’d recommend Jamelle Bouie’s Takes™.

For a deeper dive on the “Mamdani as kingmaker” angle, Zeteo has interviews with all 3 candidates, Adam Conover’s new Factually subsegment (yet unnamed) talks to Brennan Lee Mulligan and Ed Zitron, and, ever dependable, Owen Jones is back again, this time talking to Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • This week, our Drama Queen in Chief blew up an endangered species: a bipartisan bill.  Adam Kinzinger explains why.
  • If you happen to live in Wisconsin, you should probably watch this “breaking” Strict Scrutiny video.  At under 20 minutes, it’s a fantastic—and fantastically informational—capsule of how the rightwing nutjobs are going after your supreme court judges.
  • If you want a deeper dive into the recent Supreme Court shenanigans, a couple of my streams crossed recently when Kate Shaw from Strict Scrutiny showed up on Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know.  The interview is pretty great, but even if you only watch the first 8½ minutes you’ll learn a hell of a lot.
  • More Perfect Union has a fantastic video on the scam that is fintech non-banks.  This is why the answer to the question “how much money should I keep in my PayPal account?” is another question: how much can you afford to lose?

What, not enough hope for you right in the opening bit?  Very well.  This week, a US District Judge ruled in favor of independent journalist Katie Phang.  Phang, a former mainstream journalist—and, prior to that, a lawyer—who, like so many of her colleagues, left (or was ousted) amid corporate meddling, had decided back in April to sue the Department of Justice for not fulfilling the terms of the Epstein Transparency Act.

You remember the Epstein Transparency Act, right?  That’s the one that Trump fought so hard to squash, eventually succumbing to political pressure and claiming he’d supported it all along.  His actions towards the 4 Republicans who joined with Democrats to force the discharge petition seem to belie that though: Greene resigned from Congress, Boebert had a crucial water pipeline for her state vetoed, Mace lost her gubernatorial bid when Trump endorsed a challenger, and Massie lost his primary for re-election when Trump did the same to him.  Still, the Act was passed, and signed into law, so the administration’s strategy quickly changed to ... just ignore it.

Deadlines have continued to come and go, with little movement.  The law says that only victims’ names may be redacted, but millions of documents were released with the victims’ names clearly visible and the alleged perpetrators’ names redacted.  And there are, allegedly, nearly 3 million more documents that are simply ... missing.  The DoJ has tried everything, from “they don’t exist” to “they exist, but they’re all duplicates” to “they’re about a whole different guy named Epstein”, but so far no one is buying it.

And that includes Katie Phang, who I rarely reference in these Reports (basically only once, back in week 55).  But she does good journalism, and I watch her sometimes.  And, with her legal background, she came up with an interesting approach to getting these missing documents released.  See, the main problem with any sort of court case to hold the DoJ’s feet to the fire is one of standing—standing being that legal doctrine of who has the right to bring the case.  Congress could certainly claim that right, since they passed the law that the DoJ is ignoring, but that seems pretty unlikely.  Could just any ordinary citizen claim to be harmed by the failure to follow the law?  Not likely.  But Phang had a different approach: she’s a journalist, you see, and she can’t do her job if the DoJ doesn’t provide those documents which they are legally required to provide.  She’s suffering economic harm due to the illegality.  That gives her standing.  Or so the theory goes: the DoJ, obviously, claimed it was bullshit.  But the judge agreed with Phang and, on Friday, issued a preliminary injunction that, by July 2nd, Blanche had provide a few, specifically enumerated documents, unredacted, or provide legal justification for why he couldn’t, within the bounds of the law.  Which is going to be quite tough to do, I’m thinking.

Watch the video so Katie can explain it herself, but I suspect that Blanche is either going to have to pony up, or start ignoring the courts again.  I’m betting on the latter, myself: I mean, what is the court going to do if he doesn’t provide the documents? issue an arrest warrant for the Acting Attorney General?  Seems unlikely.  But even an ignored court order is worthy of hope, if it’s against the Trump regime and so ironclad that the only thing they can do is ignore it.  They already tried arguing for extensions and got shot down.  So I’m curious what will happen come July 2nd.  I doubt it will be everything we want, but it should at least be interesting.









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Sunday, June 21, 2026

Doom Report (Week 74: Chase the Remaining Confederates into Mexico)


This week, Trump decided that if the Iran deal didn’t work out, it’s JD Vance’s fault, and we got more news about why we paid $15 million for a pool that, under 2 weeks after it was ostensibly completed, was full of even more algae than it had been before the renovation started.  Brian Tyler Cohen ponders whether it has anything to do with the no-bid contract that was awarded to a company apparently run by a cartoon villain—as BTC puts it, “he looks like Mike Lindell and the Penguin had a love child”—while, on The Daily Show, Jordan Klepper reports on the real reason: it’s sabotage.  As Jordan notes: “algae sounds a lot like al-Qaeda.”

The Even More News crew (that’s the first link I threw at you above) put it more succinctly: “If this was the TV show, it would be a funny C plot ...”  So I suppose we have to laugh.  The alternative is too dark to consider.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • It was Juneteenth this week.  On What a Day, Jane Coaston takes the opportunity to break down Pete Hegseth’s racism, and, at the end, she tells the story of Juneteenth in a beautiful, and beautifully succinct, fashion.

More Perfect Union launched a new series this week called “Big Ideas”.  Its inaugural episode was on co-ops.  Now, you may recall, way back in week 47, that MPU did a video where they sent perennial reporter John Russell to Italy, to report on co-ops there.  And I called that video, which talked about how things were being handled in a foreign country, with the benefit of laws and infrastructure that we just don’t have, hopeful.  How much more hopeful is it to see realistic people talking about the possibility of that type of system being imported into our own country, in terms that make you believe it could actually happen?  Watch it for yourself and see.  Personally, I think it may just be the most hopeful video I’ve seen in this entire series.

I look forward to more “Big Ideas.”  Lord knows we some right about now.









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Sunday, June 14, 2026

Doom Report (Week 73: Oh ... hey, Lindsey)


This week, one of the bigger stories was Trump falling asleep at the Nicks game; best coverage probably from Kimmel this time around.  He also covers the (still dragging on!) California primary (which we discussed last week).  Of course, there was lots of coverage of him storming out of the Meet the Press interview (or at least as close to “storming out” as an overweight 80-year-old can manage); for that one, I’ll recommend Even More News, though Adam Kinzinger’s coverage is pretty good as well.  But if you need to hear about both those at once, try Seth Meyers’ “Closer Look” from Monday.

And, look: I know that this picture is more than a week old at this point, but I’ve been waiting a week for someone to point this out, and no one has, so I have to do it myself before I explode.  While showing the picture above, Trump says of the Empire State Building “So, if you lay it on its side, it would take two or three of them to fill it in.”  Now I want you to look at the numbers on the chart.  The Empire State Building is listed as 1,454 ft tall: twice that is 2,908 ft (much less thrice that, which would be 4,362 ft).  The pool is listed as 2,030 ft.  Now, I have no idea if any of these numbers are actually correct, but, you know what I do know?  2,908 ft would not fit in 2,030 ft.  Math, people.

(Also, as Cody from Even More News pointed out, “Our Pool Is Bigger Than Skyscrapers” would be a pretty good band name.)

Other things you need to know this week:

  • The last couple of weeks, Brian Tyler Cohen has been experimenting with bringing back his explicitly comedic segment titled “Another Day”.  In general, BTC lacks the comedic chops of most of the folks I watch, so I haven’t been highlighting these segments here, but occasionally he gets off a good one.  This week, that was the Friday episode, in which BTC (who recently was honored by the Trump regime by being added to an enemies list) covers the preparations for a UFC fight on White House lawn.  A particularly funny one, well worth watching.
  • On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews Quinn Slobodian, who wrote the book (literally) on Muskism.  A lot of amazing historical perspective in this episode:
    • Quinn: “So Donald Rumsfeld, September 10, 2001, stands in front of the brass at the Pentagon and says the Cold War is over, but there’s a new enemy.  And the enemy is us.  It’s like the old one: it’s top down, it’s hidebound, it’s too centralized, it’s not flexible, it can’t think on its feet.  We need to now fight ourselves.”  The next day the towers came down.  The next year, Musk starts SpaceX.  The year after that, Thiel starts Palantir.
    • Quinn: “Interestingly enough, just six years later, Barack Obama comes into office ... as, of course, the anti-war president.  And one of the forgotten things about that moment is, he said one of the ways we’re going to be less militaristic is we are going to make ourselves less dependent on fossil fuels.  We’re going to unplug from Middle Eastern oil. ...”  Jon: “How did that work out for us, Quinn?”  Quinn: “Well, there was a world historical problem, which was fracking is discovered just a couple of years after that.”
    • Insert your favorite facepalm emoji here.

You may recall from week 71 that I warned you about Musk’s SpaceX IPO, and specifically pointed you at More Perfect Union explaining how he plans to make you fund it, by slipping it into the indexes that your retirement and investment funds are using, even though there’s usually a mandatory waiting period of a year or more.  Even More News has an episode this week covering just how ridiculously inflated the IPO statements are.  My favorite quote:

... this was in the New York Times today:  Quote, “SpaceX has promised that its total addressable market, which is its revenue opportunity, if it captured all the demand across its various industries, is the largest in human history at 28.5 trillion dollars.  The figure, which depends on SpaceX proving that it can put AI data centers in space and develop factories on the moon, dwarfs China’s annual gross domestic product by more than 8 trillion.”  So, this is just like high fantasy shit.

Happily, the S&P 500 has rejected the proposed rule changes to fast-track SpaceX’s inclusion, but the Nasdaq-100 and the Russell 1000 have not.  SpaceX will hit the Russell in September or December; it will enter the Nasdaq in just 15 days.  At that point, if you have funds tied to either of those indexes, your retirement or investment money will begin depending, to an outsized degree, on Elon Musk’s fantasies.  To make matters worse, indexes almost always have a “float requirement”, which means that a minimum amount of the stock must be available to the public.  This amount is typically anywhere from 10% to 50%.  But SpaceX’s float is closer to 3% to 5%: Musk and his cronies are hoarding the vast majority of the stock.  So, when SpaceX becomes part of those indexes, all the funds that track those indexes will be forced to buy SpaceX, even though there’s a very limited pool of stocks to buy.  Essentially, Musk has engineered a situation in which there will be low supply and high demand.  Which means the price will go up.  And, while there’s reporting that Musk himself can’t sell his shares for a year, his fellow early investors, atypically, can—and many of those are his friends and even family.

Look, I’m not here to offer you investment advice: that would be probably illegal and certainly unethical.  I’m just letting you know that I, personally, will be scouring whatever meager funds I have (401k, HSA, etc) and making damned sure I’m not invested in anything that’s going to be forced to give money to the world’s first trillionaire, who is, sadly, not the world’s first not-so-secret Nazi billionaire.

You, of course, can do what you like.









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Sunday, June 7, 2026

Doom Report (Week 72: Tax Wealth, Not Work)


When I was a kid (which was, admittedly, half a century or so ago), surely one of the most famous newspaper headlines in the world was “Dewey Defeats Truman”.  This is a headline from 1948, which is long before I was born—hell, my mother and father were two and three years old, respectively.  But not only did my parents learn about this headline, but even I did: some 25 years later, the power of the headline was not yet lost.  But now we’re closing in on 80 years later, and we, as a society, have not retained the lesson.

You, dear reader, perhaps do not understand the lesson either, because you most likely have no idea who Dewey is (and you might even be a bit hazy on Truman).  If you need a refresher, Truman was chosen to be FDR’s third vice-president; if Wikipedia is to be believed, he was specifically chosen because FDR’s second vice-president was considered too liberal to be president, and Roosevelt knew he wasn’t long for this world.  So WWI veteran and US Senator from Missouri Truman was chosen to carry on after FDR’s death.  Roosevelt and Truman ran together in ‘44, and Truman served only 82 days as VP before FDR died and passed the torch.  Truman served out the remainder of the term, and, in 1948, he ran under his own ticket.  Meanwhile, the Republicans ran the exact same candidate they had in ‘44: one Thomas A. Dewey, federal prosecuter, District Attorney of Manhattan, and most recently governor of New York.  By all counts, he was quite a good governor, but not popular enough to be a serious challenge for the juggernaut that was FDR, who beat him by 7.5% in the popular vote and over 300 electoral votes.  But Truman was a much tighter race, complicated by inveterate racist Strom Thurmond running under the “States’ Rights Democratic Party” (I suppose the “We Wish We Could Bring Back Slavery Party” was a bit too on-the-nose).  It was a tight race: polls showed Dewey with a strong lead right up to the end of October, and bookies were giving 15:1 odds for anyone foolish enough to bet on Truman.  As election day wound down, Truman went to sleep early, with everyone in his administration already looking for new jobs.  Again according to Wikipedia, when Truman woke up at midnight and flipped on the radio, the news told him that while he was ahead in the popular vote, there was no path to victory in the electoral college.  A lot of people called the election before all the votes were counted, including the Chicago Daily Tribute, which printed their early edition with the fateful headline.  And, not only was the headline famous, but the resulting picture, of newly elected President Truman holding up the newspaper and grinning madly was equally well-known ... once upon a time.

The headline and the picture were—once upon a time—a cautionary tale: a warning against rushing to judgment when it came to elections.  Because votes take time to count: they just do.  And we let ourselves deploy all sorts of electronic machines to help us count the votes faster and then, for some bizarre reason, we decided that paper ballots and hand counting were safer, but we forgot how much slower that was, so here we are demanding our votes be counted in the slowest way possible while simultaneously demanding that count be finished in the timeframe to which we’ve become accustomed.  And, when that doesn’t work (because, how could it?), people start claiming that something must be fake, that someone must be cheating.  Or, hell: maybe they just say those things as a way to delegitimize the election while knowing perfectly well that it’s all bullshit.  Either way, as the folks over at Even More News put it: “Oh Look, They’re Claiming Election Fraud Again.”

If you want a better explanation of why we don’t have the primary reults from California’s primary yet, Elex Michaelson, former local LA anchor who now works for CNN explains it to Brian Tyler Cohen better than I ever could.  Runaway races get called early because however many votes there are left can’t possibly change the outcome; tight races go down to the wire.  That’s just the way it is.  Let’s all chill and wait for the votes to be counted.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Another pretty good Adam Kinzinger day in review on Monday, covering why we should stop believing Trump when he says we’re “really close” to a deal in Iran (although why anyone was believing him in the first place, I have no clue), Trump getting smacked down over his Kennedy Center rename, more tittering over the Freedom 250 debacle, and some uncomfortable facts about how the ATF is no longer going after illegal gun dealers. To be fair, it wasn’t all good: he ends it with what I felt was an irrelevant attack on Jill Biden’s new book.  But everything up to that point was pretty awesome.


For some more positive news from the UK, Garys Economics breaks down the Jeff Bezos interview, including yet another banger metaphor.  You may recall back in week 39 that he compared people whinging about how hard it was to create wealth taxes as somewhat like saying “yeah, I know there’s a hole in the bottom of the Titanic, but it’s really hard to fix a hole in a ship while we’re sailing in it; let’s do something else insetead.”  Which I thought was apt, trenchant, and poetic, all in one.  This time he compares Bezos responding to “why don’t we tax you more?” with “why don’t we just tax working people less?” like so:

This is a bit like you and I go to a restaurant, and you know that I’m, like, loaded because you’ve been reading the Daily Mail, and you are, like, struggling for money.  And you say at the end of the meal, “Hey, listen, you know, how about maybe, you know, you cover this one?”  And I say, “Listen, forget about that.  I’ve got a better idea.  I’m not going to pay for it.  But how about you ... don’t pay for it?”

Which is also kind of brilliant, and points out the idiocy of what Bezos is saying.  He’s just trying to distract you.  “What, you want me to pay more?  Quick! look over here!”

And to top it off, Gary put out another video where he says that some prominent folks in the UK are starting to absorb his ideas, even if only via osmosis.  He talks about an essay from Tony Blair and the responses from Labour by saying this:

So Tony Blair, for those who don’t know, UK Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, I think, came out and basically said the way to fix the, economy is to, like drink a massive fucking glass of AI and deregulate everything.  Which is great intervention from Tony Blair: thanks for that.

And there are responses from Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, and from Andy Burnham, and from Wes Streeting, who are the most, the 2 best-known candidates for Prime Minister.  And all of these guys came out and said, “Why the hell are you not talking about inequality?”  I want to read a couple of quotes from what Wes Streeting said.  Now, I want to make it clear in all this, I’ve never met Wes Streeting; I’ve never met Andy Burnham; I’ve never met Keir Starmer.  So, I don’t know any of these guys.  But people say that Wes Streeting is on the right of Labour and is not the kind of guy who wants wealth taxes.  But listen to what Wes Streeting, the most unexpected guy, has been saying about the economy in the last week.  Wes Streeting says, “Inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping Western democracies, is actually their cause.  It is vital to tip the balance of taxation away from work towards wealth.”

So, at least in the UK, Gary’s message of “tax wealth, not work” is finally resonating.  Will we see something similar here in the US soon?  One can only hope.









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