Doom Report (Week 44: We Don't Have to Settle)

Here in Week 44, it’s not like we’re surprised any longer by how insane everything is.  And, yet, still: this week was pretty fucking crazy, even by Trump regime standards.  This week, a guy who had a journalist chopped up with a bone saw partied in the White House, several hardcore MAGA supporters called out the President for accusing someone of getting remarried too soon, Marjorie Taylor Greene called it quits, Trump called a female reporter “piggy,” the real estate lawyer masquerading as a US attorney got caught forging documents, the bill to make Trump do the thing he said he totally wants to do but won’t do without a bill making him do it which he told everyone to vote for just so he could claim that’s the only reason they voted for it passed, and Trump called for the execution of several members of Congress.  Luckily, the Even More News crew was on top of all that shit and provided not one, but two, excellent breakdowns of all the lunacy.  Is MAGA turning on Trump?  I remain skeptical.  Stil, it’s comforting to know that, after all this time: they’re still incompetent.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another indispensible week in review from Adam Kinzinger.  The heights of insanity this week are covered in just the right amount of detail.

• Legal Eagle has an excellent explanation of how Khanna and Massie finagled the discharge petition to force the vote on releasing the Epstein files.  It was way more complicated—and clever—than I understood.

• Robert Reich has a quick video this week on the hilarity of the CEO of McDonald’s complaining that no one has enough money to buy their crappy products any more.  One of the most frustrating things about late-stage capitalism is that it’s not only terrible for working people, but, in the long term, the billionaires are screwing themselves as well.

• On this week’s Weekly Show, Jon interviews Sherrill and Spanberger, the governors elect of New Jersey and Virginia (respectively).  The two women, who, it turns out, are old friends, are surprisingly optimisitic, but also honest in their assessment of the challenges they face.

If you need some hope this week, I invite you to listen to Kat Abughazaleh, who spoke at the Lincoln Memorial this weekend.  Here’s a taste:

So, to our representatives: we don’t want any more excuses.  We don’t want to hear that impeachment is unpopular, because it’s not.  And guess what? You’re a leader.  You better lead.  We don’t want to hear that you’re worried about your reelection.  Our lives are more important than your campaign.  And you don’t deserve our votes: you earn it.

But definitely go watch the whole thing; it’s inspirational.  And, as she concludes:

Good things are possible, and, no matter what anyone on TV or on the Hill tells you, we don’t have to settle.

Preach on, sister.

Doom Report (Week 42: Politics Is Something We Do)

This week, the MAGA crowd all seemed utterly shocked that people were upset with them.  I mean, all they did was take away food from hungry children—globally, let’s not forget—steal money for research into children’s cancer, cause millions of Americans’ health insurance premiums to more than double, make everyone’s grocery bills higher, and used that money to create a combined $60 billion tax break for the top 0.1%.  Why would people be pissed off at them?  They seem to have forgotten the attitude of “we don’t care whether we’re popular or not” and now are scrambling to justify, ignore, or doomcry (depending on the individual) the fact that Democrats beat the pants off them in this week’s elections.  I mean, they whupped their hides real good, to quote John Cleese in A Fish Called Wanda: the NYC mayoral and VA and NJ gubernatorial elections have gotten all the press, but there were gains all over the country.  In Georgia, Dems broke up the Republican monopoly of the Public Service Commission (if you need more info on why that’s important, Hank Green did a great video on it before the election), which is the first time Dems have won a state government seat in nearly a decade; Colorado voted to fund free meals in public schools; Maine voted down proposed voter suppression measures; and, in the New York county that’s home to Syracuse, a 12-5 Repub legislature just became a 10-7 Dem one (including one winner from the Working Families Party), an event which a headline on syracuse.com described thusly: “Onondaga County GOP seeks answers after stunning losses. The consensus: Trump is a problem”.  Hell, the Dems even won in Mississippi, where they broke a 13-year Republican supermajority in the state Senate (hey: progress, not perfection).  Even more telling, the margins by which some of these candidates won is pretty amazing: 13 points for Spanberger in VA, nearly 14 points for Sherrill in NJ, and, despite what some Cuomo supporters seem to think, Mamdani beat Cuomo so badly that even getting all of Sliwa’s votes wouldn’t have made any difference.  Now, for sure, I’m worried that Dems only came out ahead because the MAGA crowd didn’t think they needed to bother cheating, and I absolutely don’t think next year’s elections will go that smoothly, but I’m willing to just stop a bit and bask in the MAGA tears for a bit.

Although possibly the most interesting interview this week had nothing to do with the elections: Jordan Klepper interviewed Scott Galloway on The Daily Show on Wednesday.  Galloway is an author, professor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, but, most importantly for his new book Notes on Being a Man, a father to two boys.  With how much ink has been spilled—and YouTube commentary has been spewed—on how young men voted, and how they’re being radicalized by assholes like Andrew Tate, and how they’re avoiding intimacy and living with their parents and etc ad nauseum, I think Galloway’s book could not come at a better time.  It’s been challenging for us to admit that young men—they of the class who have traditionally had all the adantages in our society—are today struggling.  Some seem to think we’re negating or disavowing discrimination against women by admitting that young men have problems.  But, as Scott puts it:

We can absolutely acknowledge the huge challenges that women still face while acknowledging that. if you go into a morgue right now and there’s five people who’ve died by suicide, four are men.  And I would offer up, Jordan, that if any group was killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group, we would move in with programs.  But because my generation registered so much unfair prosperity, we are holding young men accountable.  And it’s resulting in a country that’s not going to continue to flourish.

You really should listen to the whole thing.  But, if you only listen to one part, make it this one:

People under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy.  People my age are 72% wealthier.  Because we figured out—old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money.  And when Congress is a cross between the Land of the Dead and the Golden Girls, you have a $40-billion child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120-billion cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.  We need a more progressive tax structure.  You know what would be the biggest help to men, to young men—would be universal child care.  Because when men are most vulnerable, in terms of self-harm, is the year after they get divorced.  And why do young people get divorced?  It’s not a lack of shared values.  It’s not infidelity.  The most common reason for divorce is economic strain.  And we keep transferring money from young people to old people.

But really do watch the whole thing.  Galloway is spitting fire in this one.

This weirdly ties into another interview, if a much longer one: British YouTuber Jimmy the Giant interviews Gary Stevenson, who I’ve mentioned a few times.  Jimmy I’ve never mentioned before; I’ve only ever even seen him on YouTube once before, and that was back in January on Pod Save the UK, when he told the story of how he got sucked into the alt-right scene, and then, as Nish Kumar put it, “de-radicalized” himself.  While I was mainly watching for Gary, whose opinions I always find informative, Jimmy dropped this bomb:

Sometimes people will look at these lot, like the far right lot, and they won’t give them the same grace that they might give, say, gang members.  And I do sometimes notice that on the left, where I would say it’s quite easy for, I don’t know, a lot of us to look at someone who is in a gang or something and be like, the reason they’re in a gang is because of various scenarios, they’re not evil in their heart, they’re just a person that has fallen into this kind of lifestyle, blah blah blah.  But then you’ll look at, maybe the far-right rally, and there will be comments like “these are disgusting gammons, these are like gross blah blah blah.”  And I’m like sort of thinking, you know, we understand the reasons why people do bad.  The same for like al-Qaeda.  Like, I can understand how that movement formed.  I can say it’s evil, awful, but I can understand how it formed, how it took power, and how it controls people’s lives and forces people to do awful stuff.  But some people don’t extend—I don’t know if this is widely held, but I do notice it sometimes—they don’t extend that same generosity and compassion to the far right.  Because, again: it’s always the same thing.  These people have fallen into these movements because of a lack of something in their life, usually material, or their culture feels like it’s been eroded because, I don’t know, their fucking high street has two shops left and they’re a vape shop and a betting shop.  And, it’s like, you understand, you gotta remember, these are people that are not perhaps deeply into politics, or deeply well-read, or deeply understand these movements, they just feel fucked, they feel like their life sucks, and some guy’s coming along giving them some smooth talk.  And you don’t, I guess, judge the person who gets swindled for a car for a smooth talking salesman.  You don’t judge them.  You’re like “the salesman was a dickhead.”

And I will admit that I’m sometimes guilty of this myself, despite the fact that I used this exact analogy in my pre-election post about what Kamala should have said in her Bret Baier interview.  But, upon reflection, I think Jimmy is really onto something here.  When these young men get red-pilled, we probably shouldn’t be blaming them or assuming they’re just racist and/or misogynist shitheads.  As Nish once said on a different Pod Save the UK episode (and I quoted back in week 10), “We have no scope in our hearts to have a conversation that white men could also be radicalized.”  Yep, I think he might be onto something.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.  I disagree with his take on the air traffic controllers, but I’m not going out of my way to defend Sean Duffy, so I’ll let it slide.

• Hank Green talks about the government shutdown and people losing SNAP benefits.

• SNL’s take on the press conference where a man fainted was, typically, amusing.

• Cristian Farias is back on Legal Eagle, this time covering the contrast between circuit court judges and the Supreme Court.  There’s some inspiring stories in there.

• The Weekly Show explores how the Dems will fuck up their gains, with Chris Hayes and David Plouffe.

If you need even more hope than I’ve already given you, just go listen to Mamdani’s victory speech.  I honestly don’t know if he’s going to be able to do all this shit he’s claiming to be able to do, but, damn: it sure sounds good. 

I’ll give you some highlights, but you really should listen to him say it.  He’s a brilliant speaker.

Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come.

And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back.  We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price.  Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party.  And too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.

As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.  They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system.  We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more.  They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.  In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.  Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.  Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall.  Your struggle is ours, too.  And we will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-semitism where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong.  Not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.  No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us.  Now it is something that
we do.

Hell.  Yes.

Doom Report (Week 40: A Nazi Streak, from Time to Time)

On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Heather Lofthouse and Rober Reich talk about the guy with a “Nazi streak” who, surprisingly, had to withdraw from consideration from the second job that Trump wanted to give him (I believe he’s still retaining his first job).  Stephen Colbert compared this to a casserole with a streak of poop.  Seth Meyers compared it to a waiter telling you about tonight’s special, which comes with a streak of poison.  But Reich, with his typical optimism, focussed on the Senate Republicans finally taking a stand.  He and Heather had this exchange:

Robert: Even Senate Republicans ... said this is too much.
Heather: Even though he’s a Trump loyalist. So that gave me a little bit of—
Robert: Yes, there’s a bottom.
Heather: Oh ... yeah.
Robert: There is a bottom, at least for the Senate Republicans.
Heather: Right.  Um—
Robert: No, that’s that’s good news, and we should celebrate the good news.

I’m not sure I’m taking away as much hope as Reich seems to have, but I respect the perspective.

Other things you need to know this week:

• As usual, Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is invaluable for understanding the latest debacles.

• Seth Meyers has takes A Closer Look at Trump’s new construction project.  Where’s the money coming from?  Maybe from the $230 million he plans to pay himself.

• The Even More News crew has some views on the Graham Platner controversy, although they don’t come to any actual decisions; their take on the Argentina bailout is more on point.

This week Alex Wagner’s new show Runaway Country debuted ... as a YouTube “podcast” in the Crooked Media network (which also encompasses Strict Scrutiny and Pod Save the UK, two shows I regularly recommend here).  The first episode (titled “How Trump Broke America’s Justice System”) is out, and it’s pretty good, if you can spare just over an hour (closer to 45min, if you crank it up to 1.25x and skip the ads).  I like Alex, though I’ve never watched a single one of her network shows, because I don’t watch network news.  But she shows up on Colbert or Meyers every now and again, and I always enjoy her political takes, so I gave the new show a shot.  Don’t know if I’ll become a regular viewer, but I certainly don’t feel I wasted my time watching it or anything.

But I mainly mention it because Alex is the latest in a long line—which includes Trevor Noah, Mehdi Hasan, Francesca Fiorentini, Don Lemon, and even Tucker Carlson—to abandon network news shows and transition to online media.  For years, the YouTube and Twitch and TikTok crowd have been telling us that broadcast and cable is dead, but it seemed like it would be a long, lingering death where the patient continues to do quite well, thank you.  Lately, though, corporate America has been hastening the demise by pushing out anyone who is even remotely controversial—and, since the vast majority of corporate America is right-wing, anyone who is even remotely progressive—which only makes their shows boring and even more unwatchable than they were before.  Now, as I say, I was never a fan of network news anyway, but I continued to watch The Daily Show and Colbert (they’re literally the only reasons I keep paying for Paramount+) and Last Week Tonight; Meyers and Kimmel I’ve already transitioned to just watching YouTube clips.  But now Colbert is cancelled and will be gone in May, and I don’t see John Oliver being long for this world either, now that HBO Max is on the chopping block.  I mean, I ditched my cable a long time ago, so I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I bid farewell to Paramount+ and just start watching The Daily Show on YouTube as well.

Of course, the online streaming industry has a lot of issues too, and there’s too many of them, and most of them are too expensive, but YouTube is still free at least (you can certainly pay for YouTube Premium, but it’s far too much money to avoid the ads that any decent ad blocker will take care of for you for free), and, if that’s where all the content is going anyway ...

It’s an interesting time, certainly.  I don’t know what will eventually happen, but I’m interested to see how it all shakes out.

Doom Report (Week 39: No Thrones, No Crowns, No Kings)

This week, there was yet another No Kings rally.  The Trump regime—supported by his sycophantic pet Congresspeople—desperately tried to characterize it as a “Hate America” rally, or some violent protest organized by “Antifa,” an organization which can’t atually organize anything, since it doesn’t actually exist.  This doesn’t seem to have worked (partially because of pushback from many folks online; try Christopher Titus for an example, if you don’t mind the profanity), and early reports suggest that this may be the biggest protest in American history.  There were some impressive speeches given: Brian Tyler Cohen’s was good; Bill Nye the Science Guy’s was better; and Mehdi Hasan’s was thunderously excellent.  Hopefully this is a good sign that the tide is turning.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger gives us another great week in review.

• The Supreme Court is back in session, and Strict Scrutiny will tell you all about how tragic that is.

• On his Substack, Robert Reich gives an excellent, if chilling, summary of where we are today.

• For a really good summary on Marjorie Taylor Greene, news orgs (including Fox “News”!) finally putting their foot down, and just how racist (and how old) the “Young” Republicans are, the Even More News crew has you covered.

I’m a little late reporting on this one, but Zack Polanski (leader of the UK Greens) interviewed Gary Stevenson (from Garys Economics) on his podcast Bold Politics.  Politics in the UK is very interesting, in my opinion, and it also has a lot of things to teach us here in the US about our own politics.  The Reform Party (that’s sort of the UK version of MAGA) is set to swallow the Conservatives (their version of the Republicans), and Labour (their version of the Democrats) is struggling to remain popular and relevant, but losing because they refuse to jettison their reliance on billionaire donors.  Sound familiar?  The difference, of course, is that, in the US, we’re stuck with two parties, so the MAGA movement had to literally eat the Repubs from the inside out, and the Dems are not much threatened by the diaspora of progressive enclaves that have nowhere else to go.  Whereas, in the UK, Reform is an entirely new party, and the Conservatives aren’t really going anywhere; they’re just being gradually made irrelevant.  And, likewise, there are more left-leaning parties in the UK that can threaten the long-established domincance of Labour.  There are the Liberal Democrats—called the Lib Dems, for short—and there are the Greens.  Both these parties have gained in popularity and power lately, similar to Reform, but the Greens are the clear winners between the two.  (There’s also a neotonous new party that’s trying to birth itself, but it’s yet unclear if that will actually pan out.)  With the new attention came a new election for head of the Greens, and Zack Polanski was the winner.  He’s charismatic and agressively pro-worker; we think of the Greens as being focussed on the environment, and the UK Greens certainly are that, but not to the exclusion of all else.  So Polanski is an interesting figure.

Stevenson is as well.  You may recall I pointed you at a video of his last week; he’s a working class guy who grew up poor, got a Bachelor’s at the London School of Economics, became a millionaire being a trader for Citibank, got a Master’s at Oxford, and now just spends his time hammering home a single message: tax wealth, not work.  He says he’s run the numbers, and there is just no way to keep the economy afloat without taxing the rich.

The entire interview is well worth watching: the two don’t always agree, but they’re always civil, and it’s obvious they have a tremendous amount of respect for each other.  But it’s a long video, so I’ll mention a few highlights for the impatient.

On the topic of people complaining that figuring out how to tax wealth is too hard, he paints this analogy:

I am the guy who has been to the bottom floor of the Titanic, and seen the massive hole in the bottom of the ship and the water flooding in, and I am going up to the top and saying, “There’s water flooding into the bottom of the Titanic.”  And I have people saying to me, “Oh, but fixing the bottom of the Titanic is difficult.”  You know what I mean?  And there’s people saying to me, you know, maybe we should do other things, other than fix the bottom of the Titanic.  You know, and then a lot of people frustratedly say to me, why don’t you fix the bottom of the Titanic?

... because I understand, and have understood, one single thing, which is that inequality of wealth is rapidly increasing and it will accelerate because that’s what compound interest does.  And if nothing is done, in 20 years the 0.1% will own everything.  That’s not—and I’ve made millions of pounds betting on that one thing.  ...  I’m not claiming to be an expert on everything.  I’m telling you one simple thing.  If you don’t do anything about rapidly increasing inequality of wealth, then in the relatively near-term future—10, 20 years—the 1% will own absolutely everything.  And that will make everything unaffordable.  That will make living standards collapse.  It will make England look like India, look like South Africa, look like Brazil.  That’s the truth.

Now, I don’t know about you, but, when put that way, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.

I’ll leave with this, another long quote from Gary.  For this quote, what you need to know is that Nigel Farage is sort of the UK version of Trump, if it had taken Trump much longer to get himself elected.  For a long time, Farage drove a lot of news cycles (primarily just by having incendiary views) without ever being elected to anything.  But he finally got into Parliament last year, and many (including Gary) think he’s on track to be Prime Minister once Labour finally collapses.  Here, Gary is telling us what needs to happen for things to change:

So then what you have, then, is a vacuum, because what has been the accepted status quo, and still is the accepted status quo from these kind of elite economists and politicians, is become totally valueless.  So then suddenly there’s a vacuum for ideas and, really, then, whoever has the loudest idea in that new vacuum will win the day.  And I think it’s pretty obvious what the loudest idea is at the moment, not just in this country, but across the world, which is, you know: Farage, Reform, the Far Right, the Alt-Right, whatever you want to call them, they’re entering that vacuum.  And at the moment the centre—and to a degree the left, you know (present company excepted)—have not really been able to craft a story of “we recognize the country is broken and we are going to offer you a way out of it.”  So there there’s this absence of a story.  What you have, really, is the centre is, like, stubbornly refusing to accept this story is dead, which means the centre is dead until it accepts that.  The right has a story, and the left is—there’s a lot of they haven’t really figured themselves out yet, you know what I mean, and I think the story on which the left can win—and you know I will continue to try to convince the centre that the centre can win on this as well—is inequality.  It’s inequality.  It’s fixing a taxation system which is patently unfair, where billionaires pay lower rates than cleaners.  You know what I mean?  It’s an obviously unfair tax system.  ...  It’s a massive opportunity.  Because the truth is, you know, I think Farage looks like he’s going to win the next election, ...  There’s 66 million people in this country.  There’s, I don’t know, 45 million people who can vote, and they’ll win it on 7, 8 million votes.  And that is because there is just an absence of an alternative story.  And what an opportunity.  What an opportunity.

Will there be anyone in the UK who can capitalize on this opportunity? will there be anyone in the US who can do the same?  I honestly don’t know.  But the fact that there are still people—like Stevenson, like Robert Reich—who can still see these dark times as an opportunity for positive change, that we might emerge from this cesspool as a stronger society ... that gives me just a touch of hope.  And hopefully it does you as well.

Doom Report (Week 38: Little Doom Bits)

Things you need to know this week:

• Yet another excellent week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• The Even More News crew welcomes Roy Wood Jr (of the US version of Have I Got News For You) to talk about Trump’s ridiculous “anti-ANTIFA” meeting.

• SNL is back, and their assessment of Pam Bondi’s performance at the Senate hearings this week are, as usual, spot-on.  “My name is Pam Bondi.  I spell it with an “I,” ’cause I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions.”

• Jon Stewart interviews the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton.  I did a deeper dive on this interview in my other blog post.

• Although Gary Stevenson of Garys Economics is talking about the Labour Party in the UK, much of what he says is directly applicable to the Democrats here in the US as well.  Labour is about as popular as the Democrats—which is to say, not very—and this week, Gary covered how to rehabilitate the party.

This week was mildly less crazy than most we’ve had thus far this year.  Let’s hope that pace (or lack thereof) continues.  With the Texas National Guard showing up in Chicago, and perhaps soon to arrive in Portland, I have doubts.  But we can always hope.

Doom Report (Week 37: No Fatties, No Beardos)

This week I think everyone wants to talk about the government shutdown, but I find that remarkably boring: the Democrats finally found some balls, which they will promptly shoot themselves in, because the point of a shutdown is to make sure everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault, and, even with the Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office, the Dems are so bad at messaging that the Republicans will inevitably convince everyone that they had nothing to do with this shutdown at all.  So I find that a foregone conclusion, and thus: boring.

No, to me the interesting thing that happened this week was Hegseth and Trump addressing all the generals.  Now, I’ve yet to figure out if this is a totally unprecedented conference, or whether it’s something that happens every year, but usually in secret, for obvious security-related reasons (I’ve seen it reported both ways), but, either way, the amount of utter batshit crazy that was spewed onto these poor military commanders is not just stunning, but also just plain bone-chilling.  The Even More News crew sums it up very well, especially highlighting the depth of shit we’re in by butting this quote from Hegseth:

We fight to win.  We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.  We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.  We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.  No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement: just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for war fighters.

up against this quote from Trump:

Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within.  We’re under invasion from within.  No different than a foreign enemy, ...

Yes, our President told our generals that they were to treat his enemies as the enemies of our country directly after our Secretary of Defense (playacting as the Secretary of War) that they should hunt down those enemies with overwhelming violence and maximum lethality while ignoring the rules of engagement.  Sure, the government is shut down, but I think that the fact that His Great Orange Bloviatedness wants to send American troops into your city to murder you might be slightly more problematic.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Seth Meyers also covers the “enemy within” speech to the generals in A Closer Look this week.

• Adam Kinzinger has another good weekly news round-up.

• Some More News this week did a really great assessment of the death of Charlie Kirk and its impact on our national conversation.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews David Faris and Tim Miller.  Normally, I put Miller into the same bucket as Kinzinger: former Republicans who left that party because of the MAGA takeover but are still sane—in other words, the few remaining voices of reason on the conservative side.  But I take exception to his characterization of the Dems as being too focussed on the “one trans girl that is in on the lacrosse team.”  The Dems didn’t focus on that at all: the Republicans did.  Now, do the Dems suck for allowing Repubs to define them in this way?  Of course.  If the Democrats were half as smart as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, they would just point out how immeasurably creepy it is for these old white men to be so obsessed with the bodies of trans children—hell, the SS women have said “leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks” so often at this point that they’ve literally made a shirt out of it.  But, point being: this is not something you can really blame the Dems for.

• At a very dense 90 minutes, I’ll still recommend one of Jamelle Bouie’s “favorite things” from the end segment of this week’s Strict Scrutiny: How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult from the Elephant Graveyard.  It’s surreal, and occasionally sounds like a PhD thesis, but it really is quite revealing of the Joe Rogan extended universe and how it got to the weird place it is today.

Our message of hope this week comes from an opinion from First Circuit Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, as read by Robert Reich on this week’s Coffee Klatch:

First of all, the judge gets, you know, one of these crazy, all handwritten, all in caps: “Trump has pardons and tanks ... what do you have?”  So, it’s a threatening note he gets.  Well, what does the judge do?  He puts this threatening note right on the top of his opinion.  And then the judge writes,

“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.

Together, we the people of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution.

Here’s how that works out in a specific case—”

Just in case we were all thinking that everyone had given up.  Apparently, a few people are still fighting.  For which I’m thankful.

Doom Report (Week 36: Back to Only as Bad as It Was 2 Weeks Ago)

Well, Jimmy Kimmel’s “cancellation” lasted barely a week, and Trump threw fits about the return and threatened to sue Disney (again).  Nearly everyone I follow weighed in on what the cancellation and return means (or doesn’t mean), including John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Josh Johnson, Adam Conover, Robert Reich, and Brian Tyler Cohen.  I think the general concensus is that the fight is far from over, but that public outcry snatched victory from the jaws of political intimidation.  Also several of them noted that the consolidation of the media landscape is really not making this easier.  Well, easier for aspiring dictators.  But not for the rest of us.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another good week in review.

• There was a Charlie Kirk Memorial Rally, apparently.  The Even More News crew breaks it down for you.

• In equally bizarre news, there is apparently such a thing as “Escaltategate” now.  Seriously, what a whiny bitch.  For full details, you can consult Seth Meyers or Jimmy Kimmel.

• On The Daily Show this week, Leslie Jones’ explores systemic racism and how the MAGA crowd is trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

• Apparently, Trump is sending troops into Portland now.

• And, in other breaking news, the Supreme Court allows Trump to fire an FTC member.  Strict Scrutiny has an emergency video that explains the ramifications pretty clearly.

• I mentioned Steve Burns’ new podcast Alive last week.  The first two episodes weren’t particularly political, but, in the third, he asks Representative Ro Khanna what’s happened to the American Dream?

I suppose our hope for the week is that Kimmel is back on the air.  Now, as I said last week, I’m not the greatest fan of the man, though he has been known to make me chuckle.  But, like most everyone else, I agree that he really knocked it out of the park with his first monologue back.  As I write this, the YouTube version is closing in on 22 million views; if you aren’t yet one of them, you really should check it out.  Trying to be funny after some dark event has occurred is a tricky thing to manage, but I think Kimmel hit all the right notes: he is just as emotional when talking about Kirk’s actual death as he is biting when referring to the right-wing ghouls trying to capitalize on it.  The accolades are all well-deserved.

Doom Report (Week 33: Steal Like No One's Watching)

This week, while being interviewed by Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan said:

A judge this morning said Donald Trump violated that law by putting the National Guard on the streets of LA against the governor’s recommendation.  So on the same day, literally the same day, that a judge is saying, what you did in LA was illegal, he comes out and says, “Well, I’m going to do it in Chicago, too.”  And he said today, “I may go back into LA.”  What a weird world we live in, Jim ...

He goes on to note:

Most people go, “Oh, I broke the law; hope no one notices.”  He says, “I broke the law, and I’m going to do it again and again.”

And this ties in with something I was pondering last week, but hadn’t yet well formulated.  Once upon a time, when the government did bad shit, you could expose them.  We used to have movies and novels where the heroes just have to get the story to the New York Times or Rolling Stone or Mother Jones, and then the evil politicians won’t be able to continue their evil plans.  In fact, we don’t even need to restrict ourselves to fiction: remember All the President’s Men (book or movie, take your pick), where reporters met informants in dimly-lit underground parking garages?  Just expose the story and that’ll put the brakes on a lawless President.  Seems almost quaint in retrospect.  Now, when the government does something bad, or illegal, or horrifying, they just don’t care who knows.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Josh Johnson has really been the rising star of the making-fun-of-the-news scene this year: if the YouTube clips of his stand-up tour are any indication, he’s doing entirely different routines in every city, keeping up with the frenetic pace of the news while keeping a very sharp edge.  His facility with words calls to mind a fusion of rappers with a complex flow, such as Nas and Lateef the Truthspeaker, with some of the best of the old-school British purveyors of comedic wordplay, such as John Cleese and Stephen Fry.  He has a way of relating the insanity of the Trump regime with personal anecdotes that are extremely relatable, blending it all together until the absurdity is manifest.  This week, he talks about the reasons that people voted for Trump in a way that I hadn’t considered before: that maybe people just “felt like there was no one looking out for them; that slowly everything that was their quality of life and everything that they earned was eroding away piece by piece.  Right?  And that they just needed someone to step up who would stand in the way of all that, and wouldn’t be swayed by it.”  I think what he’s saying is that the Dems and the Repubs are all locked into the status quo, and people just wanted someone who would say “fuck you” to everybody and do whatever the fuck they wanted.  And boy did we get that.  Maybe it’s not quite as good as we hoped it would be.

• Hank Green explains why your electric bill is going to get very, very bad, and how the Republicans will blame green energy for it.

• More Perfect Union is killing it this week.  They have two excellent videos exposing the bad shit that continues to fester behing all the bad shit that Trump is doing: one on Musk’s “self-driving cars” scam, and one on how to make tons of money in the stock market (hint: it’s by buying and selling whenever Congress does).

If you’re only going to watch one thing this week, I encourage you to spend an hour watching Hasan Minhaj interview the former head of USAID.  This is an organization that’s saved over 90 million lives over the last 20 years; now, it’s completely gutted.  Best estimates are over 300,000 lives lost because of this so far this year.  Here’s the stark reality that Dr. Gawande lays out:

You had people in a hundred offices around the world: those are shut down.  The organizations that they worked with that had expertise, local organizations in different countries and large organizations around the world, they’ve terminated their staff.  There’s a bank account that has billions of dollars in it that now has shifted to the State Department; who knows whether that’ll be spent appropriately, but there aren’t the people there anymore to to make this program work.  Sixty years of experience of an agency that’s built up these capabilities.  Now, if you turn that back on, it would take you years, if not decades, to rebuild.

Watch Hasan’s reaction to this pronouncement.

I wish there was a note of hope to leave you on this week, but, to echo Dr. Gawande, “What I am simply trying to do is bear witness to the destruction at at this moment.”  So keep looking ahead to a time when this is over, keep trying to laugh as best you can at the absurdity of it all, but never lose sight of the wanton destruction wrought by the hands of a few capricious and callous billionaires.

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 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.