Sunday, November 8, 2026

Doom Report (Week 94: Everyone Is Better Than This and It Is So Incredible)


Obviously the only story this week is the historic triumph of the Democratic Party in Tuesday’s midterm elections.  Celebratory coverage is everywhere, from The Daily Show, where Michael Kosta proclaimed:

Look, Democrats didn’t just win the midterms yesterday.  They made the midterms their bitch.  They won the Senate.  They won the House.  They won governor’s races.  They won Best Animated Picture.  They won the rigged claw machine at the arcade.

to “A Closer Look”, where Seth Meyers said:

Guys, I’ll be honest, I was all prepared to come out here and say something like, “Look, there was a lot of hype and Democrats didn’t live up to expectations.  But narrowly retaking the House is still a good thing.”  Because, you know, waiting for the Democrats to have success can make you feel like you’re Matt Damon trying to grow a fucking potato on Mars.

But last night it was potatoes for everybody.

to the “Kinzinger Report”, where Adam Kinzinger points out that

Trump doesn’t exactly deserve any praise for accepting the result of a fair election, but, for the sake of the country, I’ll take it.

(and then goes on to give a very efficient breakdown of how the MAGA coalition disintegrated).  From the eloquent, such as Abdul El-Sayed’s acceptance speech, where he says:

And we prove once again just how big America really is.  Because where else but in America can a doctor named Abdulrahman Mohamed, (say it) a child of immigrants, raised by his father and his Daughter-of-the-American-Revolution stepmother, get elected Senator from America’s greatest state?  They tried to confuse you.  So, let me just set the record straight:  I love America.  I know exactly what America gave to me.  I saw it up close on trips to my family’s native Egypt.  In a 15- hour journey, I’d cross 10 years difference in life expectancy.  I didn’t have to go 15 hours: I could go 15 minutes to Detroit or Pontiac and cross that same difference.  It’s why I became a doctor.  America vaccinated me against diseases that killed an aunt and uncle I never got to meet.  It gave me incredible public schools.  It gave me a public university education.  It paid my medical education through the NIH.  I love America.  But I love America enough to ask her to be America for all her kids.

to the viscerally satisfying, such as when Brian Tyler Cohen says simply

... yesterday is a testament to what happens when you not only fight back, but fight back when everything is stacked against you.  Fight when the entire federal government and right-wing media machine and trillionaire funding are aimed at you.  And we fucking won.

And I encourage everyone to revel in those sentiments.  But I’ll also note that there were plenty of more cautious assessments of the situation.  Such as over on LegalEagle, where Devin says, somewhat soberly:

So, take a breath, enjoy it.  You have earned it.  But if you’re an incoming Democratic member of Congress, please enjoy it slightly faster, because you have work to do.  Because winning this election was necessary, but it’s not sufficient.  Voters have given Congress the power to start holding this administration accountable.  Whether they use it, though, is an entirely different question.

And even Abdul’s victory speech, ebullient though it was, ends like this:

Abdul: Winning a single US Senate seat was never the goal.  The goal is to use that seat to transform our politics.  Because it’s high past time that we get money out of?
Crowd: Politics!
Abdul: Put money in your?
Crowd: Pocket!
Abdul: Pass Medicare for?
Crowd: All!
Abdul: The beauty and soul of America is that we the people are what America is all about.  We deserve an America for all her kids.  So, Michigan: let’s go build it.

See, here’s the thing.  In 2016, the voters gave the Democrats a message: business as usual is not okay.  You keep talking about making our lives better, but you end up taking the corporate money and doing nothing.  So we’re going to elect the crazy racist: crazy he may be—and certainly racist—but at least he’s not business as usual.

And then in 2020, the voters said, “okay, the crazy racist isn’t working out so hot: hey, Dems, try again.”  But here’s the thing: the Dems never got the message.  They decided that what they needed was a moderate, a centrist, a very much business-as-usual sort of guy.  Biden was a good person, a person with a strong moral core, but, in the end, I’m pretty sure that history will lump him in with Jimmy Carter: nice guy, well-intentioned, certainly not as bad as his critics claimed ... and ultimately ineffectual.

So, in 2024, the voters sent the Dems another message—well, not so much a second message as a repeat of the first one, only louder this time.  More insistent.  And, this past Tuesday, at least some Democrats proved that they were (finally!) getting the memo.  Now the question is, can these few elected officials who reject the corporate bullshit, who reject the idea that change must be slow and incremental, who reject the idea that nibbling at the margins of problems is sufficient ... will those few be sufficient to make a difference?

Because, less than 24 hours after the most stunning electoral victory since the Watergate years, the Democrats have already started the very difficult work of figuring out how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  For instance, Joy Reid’s interview of Wajahat Ali opens with this quote from Hakeem Jeffries, who will likely be the new Speaker of the House:

The American people don’t want us to get even.  They want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive.

The fuck we don’t!  What we want is for you to learn to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, dipshit.

Meanwhile, on What A Day, Jane Coaston talks to Jamie Raskin, and they had this exchange:

Jane: So, first question: you will likely be running the House Judiciary Committee.  Who’s getting investigated first?
Raskin: Don’t know.

Motherfucker!!! you goddamn well should know.  These rightwing nutjobs started on Project 2025 three years before they needed it.  And you idiots don’t know what you’re going to do in six months?!?

And here’s Robert Garcia, who will be the head of the House Oversight Committee—and who somewhat infamously, on election night once the extent of the slaughter was known, delivered the ominous two-word tweet “LAWYER UP”—being interviewed by Brian Tyler Cohen:

As far as what what our first bill will be, you know, obviously that hasn’t been decided yet.  I think obviously the leadership is going to get together and kind of iron that out ...

MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!  Love the aggressive talk in the tweet, but that can’t make up for this ridiculous (and potentially fatal) lack of foresight.

Because as Jon Stewart pointed out to Sarah Longwell on this week’s Weekly Show,

... I think MAGA was also a repudiation of a feckless Democratic leadership, and a government that wasn’t responding, you know, to the needs of the populace in a way that was agile enough.  And we can’t go back to that.  The repudiation of MAGA last night cannot be seen outside the context of the repudiation of whatever that—and I’ll frame it as the neoliberal status quo Democratic governance of the past.

And you should watch the whole interview—Sarah’s origin story, of realizing she was gay while working for the execrable anti-gay-marriage crusader Rick Santorum, and not knowing how to explain it to her family or friends and even herself, and then watching Santorum’s arguments being completely dismantled by Jon on an old Daily Show episode, and how that helped her come out, is really amazing and touching—but at least listen to the part of the interview I quote above.  Sarah’s answer was that she thinks this centrist / progressive split is overblown: the campaigns of people like Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas were neither.  They were, instead (according to Sarah, at least), humanist.  Talarico, a seminarian, and Hamilton, a megachurch pastor, ran faith-based campaigns that foregrounded “love thy neighbor” principles.  For someone like Longwell, who likely still considers herself a Republican despite the fact that she left the actual party long ago (and cofounded The Bulwark, a haven for never-Trumper conservatives), this is likely a pretty appealing approach.  And, in fairly conservatives states such as Texas and Kansas, that’s the type of Democrat that’s needed to win.  In more liberal places, the religious allusions may not be necessary—may even be unwelcome, in places that have learned to be suspicious of organized religion, often for good reasons—but the message still needs to be one of change.  The message needs to be: we know your life sucks, and we want to fix it.  And we have ideas on how to do that.  And those ideas can work.  That has to be the message, regardless of location, electorate, or historical voting preference.

And then somebody better damned well deliver on that message.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • If you missed the whole Haley Stevens drama, The Daily Show has you covered.
  • In yet another “Closer Look”, Seth Meyers covers the Republican doomerism and recriminations.  I was going to say “gleefully covers,” but ... no, yeah, actually “gleefully covers” is probably pretty accurate.

Well, I got all my negative feelings out up at the top so that we could end, as I like to do, on a note of hope.  And, honestly, there is no greater note of hope than the elections themselves.  Here’s a list that Katie Phang gave us on Wednesday:

Let’s run through this unprecedented morning we find ourselves in.  And the firsts, as I call them.  The first Native American woman senator is my dear friend, Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota right now, Peggy Flanagan.  The first openly gay male United States senator we have in Chris Pappas.  Our first Muslim senator is Dr. Abdul El-Sayed from Michigan.  And Dr. Annie Andrews, South Carolina Democrat: our first elected female US senator from that state.  One of them that really got me in the feels: Keisha Lance Bottoms will be Georgia’s first black governor, the first female governor of Georgia, and the first female black governor in United States history.  Deb Haaland will lead New Mexico as the first Native American woman governor.  Gina Hinojosa will be the first Hispanic governor of Texas.  Xavier Becerra, the first Latino governor of California.  Amy Acton, the first female elected governor of Ohio.  Amy Klobuchar as well, Minnesota’s first female governor.  I mean, we keep adding to that roster of firsts.  And as I said last night during the live stream, what a what a time to be alive.  And what a time to be the mother of a 12-year-old Korean-American child who gets to look at the composition of Congress and say, “She looks like me.  She is me.”  I mean, you know, it is a gift that we get to give each other, is it not?

And Alex Wagner added to that list on Runaway Country:

The state of Kansas, which has been sending Republicans to Washington since the year 1932 AD, now has a Democrat and pastor named Adam Hamilton going to the Senate.  ... James Talarico is the state’s [Texas] first Democratic senator in 38 years.  ...  Flanagan is now the nation’s first indigenous woman to be elected to the US Senate, and she may soon be joined there by another indigenous politician, Democrat Mary Peltola of Alaska (that race still has not been called as of this recording time).  ...  Iowa turned bright blue in the course of just one evening as voters there chose Democrat Rob Sand for governor and Democrat and Paralympian Josh Turek for the US Senate.  ...  Then there was Maine, where five-term moderate slash Trump appeaser, Republican Susan Collins, could not make a miracle happen this time. In January, Democratic challenger Troy Jackson will be taking over Susan Collins’ Senate seat ...  Democrats flipped more than two dozen districts. Bobby Pulido, a Democrat and popular Tejano singer, won a district on the US Mexico border that went to Donald Trump by 18 points two years ago, making Pulido part of the stunning rejection of Donald Trump at the hands of Latino voters.  In Florida, three of the dummy-manders, courtesy of outgoing Republican governor and high-heel enthusiast Ron DeSantis, went in the opposite of their intended direction: Democrats picked up all three seats.

That episode of Runaway Country, by the way, is a longer video than I normally point you to; it’s well worth watching all the way through (Alex interviews BTC, and that’s a fun time), but at least watch the 8-minute intro.  It’s cut with many snippets of acceptance speeches, including this beautiful moment from James Talarico:

Hate can’t lower our energy bills.  Hate can’t teach a child to read.  Hate can’t build a future.  But what hate can’t do, love can.  Love can heal what’s broken in America.

But, lest you be worried that messages of love might indicate we’re in for more milquetoast Democrats, check out Pod Save America’s live show on Friday (again, a longer video, but at least watch the first minute-and-a-half: it’s triumphal), where Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett interview Abdul El-Sayed, who has this to say:

... it’s so uncommon in our politics that you’re like “you’re being crass and obnoxious, so I’m just going to be crass and obnoxious back because you’re an asshole.”  But it’s not to be crass and obnoxious because that’s how you want to do politics.  It’s that you have to be crass and obnoxious back because otherwise what happens is that that system of politics will persist.  And when you stand up to a bully, what tends to happen is they will back down.  And when they back down, we all get to decide where we want to go.  I would rather—I mean, you all know me well—I’d rather have an extensive policy conversation about the monopsony power of Medicare for all, but, if they want to do schoolyard politics, all right: let’s throw down.

And, if that doesn’t sound hopeful to you, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

Personally, I watched the livestream from the Some More News crew.  It was six hours long, so I won’t throw you a link to all that, but it was a pretty uplifting watch: Katy, Cody, and Jonathan were joined by Francesca Fiorentini (who did a really funny Haley Stevens impression), and, toward the end, by Nick, their tech guy who now lives in Texas.  Nick never shows up on camera, but he was a bit overwhelmed and inspired by how well things went in his home state.  And these guys had all (well, maybe not Nick, but mostly all) agreed to take a shot every time the Dems flipped a seat, so by the end of the stream they were all very much lit.  My partner wasn’t really watching with me, but she was in the room and occasionally paying attention, and, at one point, she looked up at the screen and said “is Cody crying?”  Because, yes: yes, he was.  And, because he was very emotional, and very drunk, he couldn’t be articulate (although, ironically, still articulate enough to say “I’m not going to be articulate tonight”), and all he could say was “we are better than this, we’ve been better than this” over and over.  But, I know what he meant.

And so, apparently, did Robert Reich, who, on this week’s this week’s celebratory Coffee Klatch, expressed it thusly:

I’ve been worried—a piece of me has been worried—that maybe the country had changed.  Maybe this was not the America that I grew up in, and was hopeful for, and an America that clung to the basic ideals that I held—hold—dear: social justice, rule of law, democracy, equality.  But maybe I was (temporarily!) wrong.

‘Cause I’ve been feeling that way too.  I felt it most keenly after election night in 2024.  My assumptions that, yes: there were racists, and yes: there were Christian nationalists, and yes: there were douchebags who only cared about making money and holding power, but most people were decent, and good, and not hateful ... those assumptions were sorely challenged in 2024.  It’s why I had that conversation with my friend; it’s why I wrote that first blog post; it’s how I ended up starting this whole Doom Report series.  Because I started to question myself: maybe it’s not the case that most of us are decent and it’s just a few complete assholes that try to run everything.

But now, like Cody, like Robert, I am refreshed, and more than a little relieved, to find that maybe—just maybe—I was right in the first place.  As Heather Lofthouse says in the Klatch: “More than 100 women are now going to be in the House of Representatives for the first time ever.”  When discussing the fact that Scott Colom will almost certainly be the new Democratic Senator from friggin’ Mississippi, Michael Lahanas-Calderón points out that “the last time Mississippi elected a black person to any statewide office was in Reconstruction, and they left office in 1881.”

So maybe that Talarico guy is onto something.  The politics of hate has failed.  Let’s try love for a while.









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Sunday, November 1, 2026

Doom Report (Week 93: Last Stop Before the Midterms)


Last week, I shared an inspirational speech from Barack Obama.  Apparently, all the Republicans got out of that was that he was insulting the Cheesecake Factory.  Insert facepalm emoji here.

Good coverage on the faux outrage from Jimmy Kimmel in Monday’s monologue (including Trump’s comments on Nicki Minaj’s “beautiful ass”), from Adam Kinzinger on Monday’s “Kinzinger Report” (including a few other stories), from the Even More News crew on their Tuesday episode (including information on the ways the Trump regime is already starting to meddle in the elections), and most of all from Seth Meyers, who covered the initial response on Monday’s “A Closer Look”, the escalation on Wednesday’s “A Closer Look”, and Obama’s firing back on Thursday’s “A Closer Look”.

Obama’s reaction was, indeed, the best part of the story.  To quote his full remarks:

But that was the interesting thing about how the administration responded to the speech I gave the other day.  They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices.  They did not argue with that.  They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families.  They didn’t say anything about that.  I accused this administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption.  They didn’t say anything about that.  The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison.  That part didn’t bother him.  But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments.

Of the faux outrage, he said this:

That’s the game they’ve been playing for the last two years: just keep throwing distractions out there—attacks, fabrications, phony outrage—and hope that you won’t notice that your bills are higher and your life is tougher.

And ain’t that the truth.

Other things you need to know this week:

In just a few days, you will—hopefully!—be voting.  I won’t tell you to vote for Democrats, because Democrats suck.  But you may wish to consider voting against the Republicans.  If you need a reminder of why, I invite you to consult my colleague John Oliver on last Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, where he discusses how the rightwing nutjobs have parasitized the Republican party.  But I suspect you don’t really need that.

If you happen to live in California, I’ll direct you to my colleague Adam Conover’s discussion of our prospective wealth tax.  He explains how it will work, and how you need to vote to make sure it passes.  No point in explaining why you want the billionaires to actually start paying their fair share: I think we can take that as a given.

But, no matter where you live, the most important thing is that you should vote.  My colleague Adam Kinzinger has some rousing words about how your vote is more powerful than you think.  At under six minutes, it’s short and sweet, and rather inspirational.  After pointing out that our founding fathers didn’t always get along—and that, in point of fact, a couple of them even shot each other—he goes on to say:

Now, I want to talk to some of you directly.  So, if you voted for Donald Trump, I’m not here to yell at you.  You looked at the country, you didn’t like what you saw, and you did something about it.  You voted.  Good.  It’s exactly what you’re supposed to do, by the way.  That’s the system working.  But here’s what the founders also understood.  A vote is not a lifetime contract.  It’s a job offer, and you actually get to review the performance.  So look around with your eyes open and ask yourself: did you get what you were promised?  Are the people that you sent there, are they working for you or are they working for him?  If the answer is no, you don’t owe anybody your loyalty.  Not a party; not a person.  Changing your vote is not betrayal.  It’s not admitting you were stupid.  It’s the most American thing you can do.  It’s the boss saying, “I gave you a shot and you blew it”—and you’re actually not going to be alone.  When people move together and they move together in big numbers, they don’t just send a message, they change who’s in the room.

So, here’s what I want you to do.  Don’t treat voting like a chore.  Treat it like what it is: it’s a celebration.  Take your kids.  Take your neighbor.  Wear the sticker.  Post the picture.  Vote early if your state lets you.  Make a plan if it doesn’t.  Because, somewhere, 250 years ago, a bunch of men who couldn’t stand each other agreed on one thing: that you, not them, would get the final word.  They trusted you with it.  Now, let’s prove them right.  Election day is Tuesday, November 3rd.  You’re the boss.

Looking forward to the results.









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Sunday, October 25, 2026

Doom Report (Week 92: Moral and Spiritual Genius)


If a corporation puts out an advertisement with a blatantly false claim, they get sued, or fined by the government, and they mostly lose.  True, the penalties they have to pay often don’t amount to much when stacked against their corporate profits, but, the point is, action can be taken.  If a candidate—or, increasingly, a dark-money PAC—puts out a campaign ad with blatantly false claims ... nothing happens.  Oh, sure, there’s the occasional outcry and media backlash.  But, in general, in a political campaign, just can just lie ... and get away with it.

The number of completely ridiculous lies that Republicans are spewing about Democratic candidates is reaching fever pitch right now, and the complete lack of consequences is starting to boggle my mind.  From the pointless (“Talarico is a vegan!”) to the absurd (“Ossoff supports abortion after birth!”) and everything in between, the blatantness and shamelessness is practically dizzying.  But surely there is a special place in hell reserved for the racist ones.

Look, I’m not saying I believe in God, Christian or otherwise.  But a hell of a lot of the racists claim to.  I assume they don’t, really, because otherwise they’d be terrified to openly shit on 85% of the humans that their God created and then expect to get rewarded for it in some afterlife.  It might be one thing if they had a holy book to point to to say that they were the chosen people.  But, in reality, their holy book says that the chosen people are the Jews, and they hate them just as much as any of the non-white people.  So it’s always felt a bit weird to me.

So the blatantly racist claims are both the hardest for me to comprehend, but also the easiest, because I grew up in a racist family in a racist community, surrounded by racists.  So, while I don’t really understand them, I know there’s a fuck of a lot of them out there, so it isn’t surprising that some of the biggest lies about candidates are reserved for the Muslim-American ones.  Such as Abdul El-Sayed, who is obviously a terrorist—just look at his name!  I mean, this is like the definition of racial stereotyping.  (For a more full discussion of the racism going on here, and El-Sayed’s surprisingly calm response to it, see Mo Amer’s “In My Opinion” segment on The Daily Show this week.)

The truth, of course, is that the Democratic candidate for Michigan Senator was born and raised in Michigan, just outside Detroit; in high school, he played lacrosse, was on the wrestling team, and was captain of the football team; and, as he points out in his interview with Jon Stewart on this week’s Weekly Show, his little brother is, through his stepmother, a direct descendant of Abigail Adams.  He got a PhD from Oxford and an MD from Columbia, and he’s worked as a professor of epidemiology and the director of the Detroit Health Department.  But none of that makes him sound like a terrorist, so his opponents would rather focus on the fact that he is a Muslim, his father is an imam, and that his half-sister once tweeted, in 2012, that their mother had worked with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 70s (which is, as it happens, a decade where the Brotherhood was renouncing violence and concentrating on charitable works).  Oh, and also his middle name is Mohammed.  So, obviously a terrorist.  Duh.

So, the Republicans sent a guy named Tommy, former aide to Josh Hawley, son of Bobby Jindal’s campaign manager, to a town hall El-Sayed was conducting, and had him stand up to ask if El-Sayed would renounce the Muslim Brotherhood.  The resulting back-and-forth is ... well, “chef’s kiss” is honestly a bit of an understatement.  I encourage you to watch the full exchange, but here’s the gist of it:

Abdul: Do you know what the Constitution of the United States is?
Tommy: I have one simple question: will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?
Abdul: Sure.  Yeah, absolutely.  But I want to—I want to answer the question that you’re asking.  Why are you asking the question?
Tommy: Well, because they’re a terrorist group.
Abdul: Okay.  No, no, but what are you implying?  Do you assume that I wouldn’t?
Tommy: Yes.
Abdul: Why not?
Tommy: Because I have not heard you disavow them yet.
Abdul: Have you disavowed them?  I haven’t heard you disavow them yet.
Tommy: I disavow them.
Abdul: Do you? great.  But here’s the thing about it.  You’re asking the question because, implicitly, you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right?  You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow or that I’ll have some higher order allegiance than to the Constitution.  Correct?  Tommy, is that what you imply?
Tommy: Yes.
Abdul: Why would you think that about me?
Tommy: Because I have not heard you dis—
Abdul: No, no, no, no.  Why would you actually think that about me?
Tommy: Because I have not heard you dis—
Abdul: But I just did.  But why would you actually think that?  Why would you—have you asked everybody in your life if they disavow them?
Tommy: I have not.
Abdul: So why are you asking me?
Tommy: Because I have not heard you dis—
Abdul: No, no, no.  Answer the question, Tommy.  Everybody knows the answer to it: answer the question.
Tommy: Because I have not heard you dis—
Abdul: All right.  So, let me just tell you.  Let me just tell you.  I’m going to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States.  And that Constitution guarantees us all the right to practice whatever faith we want, or no faith at all.  And now you assume, Tommy, that because I am Muslim that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.  That’s your assumption; that’s implicit in the question.  And what’s interesting to me is that this is not the first time people have asked those kinds of questions, because—do you know who John F. Kennedy is?  Do you know who that is, Tommy?
Tommy: I do.
Abdul: All right.  Do you know what he was asked as the first possible Catholic president of the United States?  What did they ask him?
Tommy: [indistinct]
Abdul: You don’t remember?  You should read history.  Tommy, when he ran for president, he was asked whether or not he was going to have allegiance to the Pope at the Vatican because, of course, he’s Catholic.  And his answer, famously, was that he was not running to be a Catholic president; he was running to be President and happened to be Catholic.  I’m not running to be a Muslim Senator.  I’m running for the US Senate, and happen to be Muslim.
...
Abdul: Now Tommy, I’m going to ask you about your faith.  Are you a man of faith?
Tommy: I am.
Abdul: And what faith do you practice?
Tommy: I am a Christian.
Abdul: You’re a Christian?  ...  Do you live by Christian doctrine?
Tommy: I would say so, yes.
Abdul: Good.  And you try as hard as you can to live by Christian doctrine, right?
Tommy: Yes.
Abdul: Do you think I have to live by Christian doctrine?  Do you?
Tommy: Up to you.
Abdul: It’s up to me, right?  Why?  Why is it up to me?
Tommy: Because we have free will.
Abdul: Right.  Free will.  And also in this country, what else do we have?
Crowd: Freedom of religion.
Abdul: What else do we have, Tom?
Tommy: [indistinct]
Abdul: No, I mean, you’re asking me about my allegiance to the Constitution.  It’s the Constitution, my guy.  We have a Constitution and that Constitution guarantees you the right to live by your faith and guarantees me the right to do the same.  And the reality of it is this: I’m never going to tell you what faith you can or couldn’t practice.  I want to protect your right to practice your faith as you choose as a Christian man.  The only question though is that it seems like you don’t want to protect my right to practice as I choose to.  So I’m going to ask you: do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?
Tommy: I do not.
Abdul: You don’t disavow that?  So I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.  Best of luck to you.

As you can imagine for such a viral moment, a lot of great coverage on this: from Jamelle Bouie, who titled his video “Abdul El-Sayed Gives a Masterclass in Answering Bad Faith Questions”; from Brian Tyler Cohen, on Wednesday’s “Another Day” segment; and from Tuesday’s episode of Even More News, whose video also takes time to poke some fun at JD Vance’s pretty awful town hall.

Somehow I think Tommy’s daddy and his former bosses are not going to be too happy with him.  Hey, Tommy: just tell them that they asked for a “gotcha” clip, and you delivered them a “gotcha” clip ... it’s not your fault you were the one that got got.  In the battle of wits, you can’t help it if you were unarmed.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Jon Stewart’s Daily Show interview on Monday was with David Corn, who was there to talk about Trump’s man crush on Putin, which has apparently been going on for years.
  • A shorter Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know this week (due to lack of guest): “We Need to Talk About Zohran”.  Mamdani, that is.  Muslim socialist, beloved mayor, and the man that Trump goes starry-eyed over: Zohran does it all.

And, if you need even more hope than that MPU video (and/or you haven’t gotten sick of Brian Tyler Cohen yet), BTC has yet another great video this week, this time excerpting some of Obama’s speech at an Ohio rally.  And Obama is the “hope” guy, so I think it’s appropriate.  I think it’s been long enough that I’d forgotten just how inspirational that guy can be.  The whole thing is quite good—both Obama’s remarks and BTC’s commentary on them—and I encourage you to watch the whole thing.  My favorite point of BTC’s was this one, right after Obama pointed out how Pete Hegseth was “very focused on important matters, like the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops, and and livestreaming executions, because that’s how he thinks you cultivate that manly warrior spirit.”  To which BTC responds:

And he’s right.  They’re self-obsessed narcissists.  Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.  Pete Hegseth is a weak man’s idea of a strong man.  RFK is a dumb man’s idea of a smart man.  Trump talks so much about central casting, but the subtext is that central casting is for actors: not the real thing.  It’s not real life.  When your principal asset is how you look as opposed to what you know, then you end up with this clown car of of an administration.  This is a White House that is DEI for pretty people.  And frankly, if the president of the United States has shown us anything, they’re not even pretty.

And my favorite Obama moment comes right at the end:

We need to remember the words of a 25 year old preacher who gave a sermon in 1954, where he said: “If we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind.”  That was Martin Luther King Jr. at 25 years old.  He said, “We haven’t learned how to be just.  We haven’t learned how to be honest and kind and true and loving.  And that is the basis of our problem.  The real problem,” he said, “is that through our scientific genius we have made a world of neighborhood, but through our moral and our spiritual genius we failed to make it a brotherhood.”

And, Ohio, what was true then is true today: yes, we need to lower costs, we need to put money in people’s pockets; yes, we need to end this war, and the corruption in Washington.  But we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation.  If we don’t return to some of those old-fashioned virtues, if our fundamental attitude to each other is to try and hurt other people so they don’t hurt us first, if we’re we’re driven by fear instead of by hope, if we think it’s okay to snatch children from parents, or cut programs for the aged or the infirm so the powerful can get whatever they want, we will continue to fester in anger and division.  And I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being angry.  And I’m tired of being divided.  I want to reach out and shake my neighbor’s hand.  I want to get to work doing something for somebody else.  We didn’t get into this moment overnight.  We won’t get out of it overnight.  And none of us should pretend that any single person in any single office is somehow going to save the day for us and that the rest of us can just go back to acting the same way.  We’re going to have to all make some changes.  But, Ohio, here’s what I know:  this election can be a start.

Here’s hoping the hope guy is also a prophet.









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Sunday, October 18, 2026

Doom Report (Week 91: Yeah, But That Was Different)


Once upon a time—by which I mean a little over two years ago—I told this story about my record-collector father:

In our family, he’s somewhat infamous for shitting on my and my brother’s musical taste.  For everything from rap to heavy metal—and, in particular, for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which he has an inexplicable hatred of—he can be heard to proclaim decisively “they can’t sing, they just scream” and “it sounds like a bunch of stray cats fighting” and sometimes just “that just isn’t music, son.”  And, once, after he’d said that, I reminded him that he grew up in the motherfucking fifties: during the foundational years of rock-n-roll, when parents holding their ears and decrying their children’s choice of listening material is practically a stereotype.  “Dad,” I pointed out as gently as I could, “isn’t ‘that’s not music’ exactly what your parents said to you when you were young?”  And he furrowed his brow, and shook his head, and responded, with zero irony or self-awareness whatsoever, “yes, but that was different.”

And, as I ponder the weeks’ news, I have to wonder: is it just a coincidence that my father is a conservative Republican?  Not a rightwing nutjob—mostly—but a staunch conservative nonetheless.  So maybe it’s something about that type of personality that leads people to fall into this trap, over and over again.  Because, it occurs to me that I also wrote a short post a bit over two years ago where I talked about the college protests against Israeli genocide.  (Hard to believe that that started even before Trump, although not before Mike Johnson’s tenure.)  If you’ll allow me the supreme indulgence of quoting myself a second time in one post, here’s what I said about the lack of irony that university administrators were showing when they decided to bring in the police and the National Guard to “calm things down”:

... it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!”  Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

And this pattern keeps on being repeated, again and again.  Joe Biden’s kid got around $3 million from a Ukrainian company, and that was the ultimate expression of nepotism and grift, but when Tump’s son-in-law got $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, that was different.  When Trump was prosecuted for something he absolutely, unquestionably did, that was weaponization of the Justice Department, but when Trump’s DoJ brought charges against James Comey—and Letitia James, and Jerome Powell, and on and on—which were so badly constructed that they were essentially laughed out of court, that was different.  When Obama saluted with a coffee cup in his hand, it generated reams of rightwing outrage.  But when Trump refused to take his hat off while attending the dignified transfer of the first troops killed in his new forever war, Fox didn’t even show the footage ... because that was different.

And, sure: maybe some of this is deliberate hypocrisy and obfuscation, especially for the hacks over at Fox “News”.  But if we’re talking about the regular people that, say, Jordan Klepper is interviewing at Trump rallies, I believe they sincerely think this.  If your guy does it, it’s bad; if my guy does it, well, that’s different.  Many of our comedic commentators have opined that we now live in a post-irony society, and maybe that’s true.  Many have mourned the death of civility, and maybe that’s true too.  Or maybe it’s just that the inability to indulge in self-introspection, to recognize in yourself the same faults you easily call out in others, is endemic to a certain kind of political viewpoint, and that all those other things are not cause, but rather effect.

Or at least that’s what I’ve been pondering lately.  It’s just a thought.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • On Tuesday’s episode of Even More News, Katy, Cody, and Jonathan cover the federal raid on Ilhan Omar’s home, plus their take on the Talarico conspiracy theory, and a few other bits and bobs.
  • Three good “Kinzinger Report"s this week:
    • On Monday, Ukraine takes out a significant Russain Internet asset and all of a sudden there were a lot fewer bots on the Internet (go figure), Trump wants to give Putin money to try to drop the price of diesel (but it’s probably too late), and more.
    • On Thursday, Adam covers the latest MAGA infighting, this time between “lawyer” Alina Habba and “director” of the Kennedy Center Rich Grenell, Talarico showing up to a debate that Paxton was too chickenshit to attend, and more.
    • Finally, on Friday, Adam tells us about the January 6th Memory Project, which rescued all the DoJ documents on Jan 6 before the Trump regime started taking them down.  Best quote: “They can’t erase history.  That’s what his project proves.  The administration pardoned the rioters, fired the prosecutors, and scrubbed the record, but they couldn’t make the facts disappear.”  Plus, as always, more.

A bunch of longer videos this week!

  • W. Kamau Bell is back with Robert Reich (and, this week, Michael Lahanas-Calderón) on the Coffee Klatch.  This time they cover just how fast a press secretary can get canned, more about the raid on Ilhan Omar, and their take on the midterms.

I’m not going to say it was the brightest spot in my week, but it was a bright spot, and I thought it worth sharing.  Saturday Night Live was dark this week, but SNL UK was not.  And we were treated not only to another great Andy Burnham impression from SNL UK regular George Fouracres, but also James Austin Johnson shows up to do his classic Trump.  Johnson does a little fourth-wall breaking as well, marvelling at how you can say “shit” on British television (“very weird”) and having a bit of fun with the fact that Fouracres also did the impression of the previous Prime Minister, Keir Starmer (“please Keir Andy, please Andy Fouracres ...”).  But my favorite bit was this exchange, after one of Johnson’s spot-on stream-of-consciousness ramblings:

Burnham: Mr. Trump, do you have a point?
Trump: Not usually, no.

It’s a quick 6 minutes out of your day for a few chuckles.  Not a bad exchange.









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Sunday, October 11, 2026

Doom Report (Week 90: Didn't Get in the Way of Growth; It Got in the Way of Greed)


I’ve talked about Gary Stevenson many times (specifically, in weeks 38, 39, 42, 43, 49, 72, 78, and 81).  One of the things he’s expressed frustration about is that the field of economics has been stuck for decades in a model that just doesn’t work any more.  Thus, we have a bunch of PhDs running around—and, as Gary points out in week 49, mostly coming from wealthy backgrounds—telling us how to “fix” the economy using techniques that only make it worse.  And, when people like Gary point out that their theories are outdated, they disparage him and tell him that no “real” economists agree with him, so he must be wrong.

Except that things are, slowly, changing.  More and more often we’re starting to talk to economists who understand how our growing wealth inequality and rampant monopolies turn the “free market” into something that can’t possibly work the way the old-school capitalists described it.  Gabriel Zucman (weeks 86 and 89), Kyla Scanlon (weeks 26, 57, and 78), and Clara Mattei (week 26) are all speaking Stevenson’s language, decrying the staid academics who have gone before.  And, this week, Jon Stewart speaks to another one: he interviews Kathryn Anne Edwards on this week’s Weekly Show.  I found a lot of what she says to be simple common sense: much more so than what our “traditional” economists arew spewing.  There are lot of great quotes here (including the one I used for the title of this post, and another where she says she’s “optimistic out of spite”), but my favorite is this one:

I like to turn on my, like, heartless, economist, sarcastic voice and be like, listen: I also hate children.  I hate their mothers, but I hate kids, and I don’t want to invest in them any more than you want to invest in them.  Those snot-nosed little devils, they’re ... vectors of disease.  But I’ve got to give them daycare if I’m gonna get more hours of work out of their mom, which is good for the economy.

And so I can, like, code switch ...

And I think that’s what we need: more progressive economists who know how to appeal to the heartless conservative traditionalists in their profession.  And I think we’re starting to get them.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • More solid “Kinzinger Report"s:
    • On Moday, Adam talks about Senator John Kennedy—or, as Michael Ian Black from Have I Got News For You? is fond of referring to him as, “Senator Foghorn Leghorn”—talking about Trump going from “zero to A-hole in 3 seconds”, Ka$h Patel chasing conspiracy theories, and more.
    • On Thursday, he covers the bizarre fact that a convicted, incarcerated election denier is now handling federal election security.  To understand that weirdness, you need to remember that Tina Peters, a county clerk in Colorado, was convicted in 2024 on seven charges of tampering with election machines in the 2020 election.  In 2025, Trump claimed to have pardoned her, even though these were state crimes, for which a federal pardon doesn’t apply.  In June of this year, Democratic(!) governor Jared Polis commuted her sentence and let her out of prison.  Now she’s meeting with Trump and advising him on plans to seize ballots if the midterms don’t go his way.  I cannot agree more with Adam’s response: “Trump couldn’t pardon her state crimes, so he threatened Colorado’s federal funding until the governor, Jared Polis, commuted her sentence.  He said she was remorseful.  Jared, if you’re watching this: you’re an idiot.”  (Plus more on the Guilfoyle scandal, and other bits and bobs.)
  • Kinzinger also has strong opinions about Pete Hegseth’s proposed execution livestream.  As Adam points out, we currently have a government who seems to think the way to look tough is to kill people: by bombing boats, by encouraging ICE to murder citizens, and now by conducting televised executions.  Can’t say I disagree with Adam on any of his points: both that the target may deserve it, and that it’s bringing us that much closer to living in Idiocracy.
  • Have you ever wondered why Congress sucks so much?  Well, no: you already know why it sucks.  Except, maybe you don’t realize how bad it truly is.  Let Some More News educate you.  Soooo many awful things going on on Capitol Hill.

On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse are joined by their digital strategist Vishal Shankar, and they’re talking about what the Democrats’ chances are of retaking the Senate.

Now, I will once again stress that I am not a Democrat.  The Democrats are run by greedy corporate bastards, just like the Republicans, are led by ineffectual cowards such as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries (just like the Republicans), and, in my view, are at minimum equally responsible for the sorry state our of country.  In fact, one could make an argument that they’re even more responsible in some ways: after all, it was a Democrat who failed to prosecute Trump when he had the chance, allowing him to run out the clock until he could regain power; it was a Democrat whose idea of Supreme Court reform was talking it to death and taking no actions; it was a Democratic administration that spawned multiple failed programs (such as rural broadband) that gave the Republicans something to point to when begging the American people for another bite at the apple.  “Politics as usual” has utterly failed, and I don’t feel confident at all that putting the Democrats back in charge will result in any meaningful changes.

Sadly, they’re the best option, because the Republicans’ response to the fact that politics as usual have failed is to make politics thoroughly unusual: by bilking the government for all the money they can, elevating racism to national policy, and lying about everything, even things that don’t matter a whit (see also: reflecting pool).  So leaving the Repubs in charge would certainly be far worse, and that means I have to root for the Dems to take the Senate.  Yay.

So what are the odds?  In January, the answer to that question was “slim to none.”  But, weirdly, the answer these days is closer to “it’s a toss-up.”  The Democrats are currently 3 seats down in the Senate, so if they gain 3 seats, they tie, but that does them no good because JD Vance is the tie-breaker.  If they gain 4, they’re technically in the majority, but that realistically does them no good because John Fetterman seems to have forgotten he’s a Democrat (sort of like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had an idiot lovechild).  So the Dems, realistically, need to flip 5 or more seats, while not losing any (or at least only losing as many as they beat that magic number 5 by).  Not gonna lie: it’s tough.

On the “not losing” side, the 3 close states are Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed (who we talked about mostly in week 81, but also in weeks week 82 and week 84) is looking strong but not a lock; New Hampshire, where Jeanne Shaheen used her retirement to cover her cowardice when she and 7 other Dems caved on the government shutdown (cf week 43), so now Chris Pappas (current NH Rep and first openly gay man to serve NH in Congress) holds a narrow lead over John Sununu (former NH Senator who was ousted by Shaheen back in 2008, and son of Bush Sr’s chief-of-staff); and Minnesota, where Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan (who was notable for speaking out after the Renee Good shooting: see week 51) is in close to a dead heat with MAGA nutjob and former sports reporter Michele Tafoya.  I feel cautiously optimistic about most of those—Sayed’s opponnent is a current Rep who’s voted for Trump’s agenda many times over and yet is now trying to distance himself from him; Flanagan’s is a proper nutjob who once posted that she was embarrassed to admit she lives in the state.  Sununu is probably the toughest opponent: he’s done the job before and wasn’t always in lock-step with his party (according to Wikipedia, he joined with Dems to filibuster the Patriot Act and voted against the Defense of Marriage Act).  Still, overall positive.

The possible flips are more varied.  Texas is getting all the press, where James Talarico (who we started noticing way back in week 6, and continued to cover in weeks 19, 34, 57, 71, and 86) has the good fortune to be up against one of the most hated men in Texas politics—and, let’s not forget: Ted Cruz is from Texas.  Still, that race is just barely out of the margin of error (in Talarico’s favor), and may well have shifted again by the time you read this.  Kansas is a toss-up, as is Nebraska, as is Iowa (we talked about Iowa’s Dem candidate Josh Turek in week 89).  Lindsey Graham’s supremely ignorant sister is, somehow, leading her Democratic opponent in South Carolina; on the other hand, former Governor Roy Cooper is all but a lock in North Carolina.  In Maine, the detestable Susan Collins trails her opponent very slightly, but the new bribery allegations (see last week) don’t look good for her.  In Ohio, Democratic-Senator-until-last-year Sherrod Brown is back to oppose the guy appointed by the governor to fill JD Vance’s seat, and has a slight lead, plus more money in the campaign bank.  As does Mary Peltola in Alaska, the first native Alaskan to serve in the House of Representatives, and now showing a pretty decent edge in becoming the first to do so in the Senate as well.

None of these are a guarantee (apart from North Carolina, which most agree is a done deal).  Some of these are places where voters consider voting Republican a part of their cultural identity: Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988; Kansas hasn’t done so since 1932.  Dan Osborn in Nebraska is running as an independent to avoid association with the Democratic party.  So it’s not the individual races where we’ll get our hope this week: it’s the plurality of them.  We’re talking about nine opportunities to flip a seat, where we only need five (or six, if Pappas can’t hold the line in New Hampshire).  Those are still not great odds, but it’s a real chance.

And that’s more than we’ve seen in a long time.









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Sunday, October 4, 2026

Doom Report (Week 89: Could It Then Be that University of Iowa Is the Hawkeyes?)


This week, I got a flyer in the mail explaining why I should vote “no” on California’s proposed wealth tax.  It boiled down to 2 points:

  • There are no taxpayer safeguards!  Perhaps ... but then again the only taxpayers targeted are the billionaires, and I’m not sure they really need any “safeguards”.
  • Billionaires will flee the state, costing billions to the budget!  So, first of all, millionaire/billionaire flight is a myth: a fantastical fable concocted by Ayn Rand for the purpose of selling Atlas Shrugged and its sequels.  But, secondly: the problem that the wealth tax is trying to solve is that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.  So, if they did flee ... would we even notice?

For a better response to this bullshit narrative than I can come up with off the cuff, watch this video from economist Gabriel Zucman (who you may recall from his similar video with Robert Reich three weeks ago).  A thorough debunking.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue from Thursday was a real banger, including Trump’s weird new racial stereotype of Hispanics and Pete Hegseth’s even weirder “high-T” rant.
  • Not to be outdone, Seth Meyers’ “A Closer Look” on Thursday was pretty good too: the sliminess of reusing a campaign ad and making you and I pay for the airtime, plus Ken Paxton caught admitting that Trump isn’t really helping his numbers.
  • In the “longer videos this week” category, this week’s Weekly Show has Jon Stewart interviewing Josh Turek, Democratic candidate for Iowa’s Senate race.  You may recall last year when current Iowa Senator Joni Ernst gained some fame (or infamy) by responding to constituents’ criticism of her support for cutting their health care by pointing out that “we all are going to die”.  That was last May; by last September, she had decided not to run for re-election (surprise, surprise).  So now Paralympian and Iowa state Rep Turek has a very good chance to flip her seat.  Let’s hope he succeeds.

The best thing to come out of this week was the humiliation of Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt.  Today’s GOP (or at least the rightwing nutjobs therein) seems obsessed with Congressional hearings as theater—remember back in week 80 when it was Fauci’s turn in the barrel?  These hearings aren’t designed to actually achieve anything.  They’re just designed to spawn viral moments so the nutjobs will look good on YouTube.

And, this week, Eric Schmitt engineered such a moment, in the hearing of Jack Smith.  You remember “deranged” Jack Smith, right?  He was the special prosecutor in two of Trump’s court cases: the insurrection case, and the classified documents case.  So, obviously Trump hates him, so therefore all the rightwing nutjobs have to hate him too.  Thus the hearing, and thus the viral moment.  Except ... Schmitt’s virality has been for putting his foot in his mouth.

I can’t even properly explain how moronic this was.  Watch the coverage yourself: start with Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Closer Look”, then check out Jordan Klepper on Wednesday’s Daily Show.  If you can stop laughing long enough, you could then move on to Alex Wagner talking to Leah Litman on Runaway Country, Brian Tyler Cohen’s Tuesday coverage, and the Friday episode of Even More News.  (This latter one, with guest Alex Pearlman, also covers the very disturbing story of the Cornell 7.)  Both BTC and the SMN crew also cover the fact that Schmitt later appears on several rightwing nutjob podcasts where they apparently had gotten the heads-up about Schmitt’s “gotcha” moment but not heard about the actual end result.  And does Schmitt correct them?  No, of course not.

Amy Klobuchar says to Schmitt:

I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag and not get the teams wrong.

To which I can only respond: oh, I dunno ... it’s much more entertaining when they don’t.









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Sunday, September 27, 2026

Doom Report (Week 88: Reduced to the Equivalent of Bees Buzzing)


This week, the opposition to the Paramount-Warner-Brothers merger fell apart.  California Attorney General Rob Bonta had sworn to oppose the merger to the end ... or at least until he could wring some serious concessions from the Ellisons, rightwing nutjob billionaires of the Trumpiest order.  But, in the end, he just ... caved.

Why?  Well, we can never know for sure what’s in a man’s mind, but there’s a good chance it’s because the Ellisons threatened to move Paramount to Nashville.  Basically, they said they would pick up the entire studio and physically move it across the country, taking all the jobs with it.  This was a ridiculous thing to threaten, because it wasn’t even remotely realistic.  Paramount was already in danger of having to pay penalties for every day they didn’t complete the merger—back when they thought Trump was the only thing standing between them and completion, they were willing to agree to some ridiculous stuff to get the merger done—so the idea that they would incur additional costs of multiple millions of dollars just to spite a few states’ attorneys general was ludicrous.  Trump had been in their pockets—or they were in his—or maybe both; doesn’t matter—so the resistance from the 12 states AGs, including Bonta, was unexpected.  And they were about to be hemorrhaging money, so this threat of “let us do what we want or we’ll bleed even faster!” didn’t seem to have a lot of actual force to it.  But then Gavin Newsom, current governor of California, started saying Bonta should settle.  And then Xavier Becerra, soon to be next governor of California, said Bonta should settle.  Then Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles, joined in.  And, eventually, Bonta caved.

There are some pro forma concessions, but most of them lack any teeth.  Best coverage on this from Adam Conover, who has a personal stake in it, being on the board of the Writers Guild.  Short version: because of all the debt Paramount is taking on due to the merger, layoffs will be unavoidable.  So, while “you’ll lose jobs if you don’t let us do this” seemed pretty implausible, “you’ll lose jobs now that you have let us do this” seems almost inevitable.  And, look: while I live in California, and even very close to Hollywood, I don’t personally know that many people in the industry ... I’m unlikely to be personally impacted by this decision.  But I’m still royally pissed off at Newsom, radically disappointed in Bonta, and Becerra just lost my vote.  (Not that I’ll vote for Hilton, of course—I’ll just have to leave that race blank on my ballot.)  This is a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

And I have just one request.  In two years, there will be a crowded primary for the Democrat candidate for President, and I can almost guarantee that Gavin Newsom will at the head of that pack, begging for your vote.  He will want you to forget about this merger altogether, and, if anyone brings it up, he will want you to believe that all the jobs that will inevitably be lost, all the lowered wages from lack of competition and all the lost opportunity from movies not getting made, and all the loss in news coverage by having CNN run by the same idiots that have crushed the reputation of CBS News—all that, Newsom will claim, all that was Rob Bonta’s fault.  Nothing to do with him.

Let’s not let him get away with that bullshit.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Then, on Thursday’s Kinzinger Report, Adam is back, and covers the judge who blocked Trump’s press ban, but, more interestingly (at least in my opinion), the MAGA podcasters talking about Trump less and less, and the shifting landscape of the Senate races.  Plus, as always: more.
  • More Perfect Union has some ideas on how to tax the rich.  It’s not “tax wealth not work,” but they’re good ideas anyway.  Worth checking out.
  • Last week’s Last Week Tonight has John Oliver covering why UnitedHealthcare is so bad.  Remember when that really hot guy shot a corporate CEO way back in week -7 and everybody cheered him on instead of condemning him?  This explains why, much better than I did at the time.

In petard-hoisting news, Trump fucked around and found out what happens when the press refuses to cover you.  The now-classic NewsMax clip where Trump sounds like a hive of angry bees due to the lack of microphones is covered eloquently by Desi Lydec at The Daily Show, Brian Tyler Cohen in “Another Day”, and Seth Meyers in “A Closer Look”.  If you want more in-depth coverage on what Trump himself literally called “the ban on the Free Press” (and people say he never tells the truth), you could try Jon Stewart from Monday’s Daily Show or Monday’s Even More News, but, trust me: there is no greater satisfaction than hearing this admission from the flustered NewsMax announcer:

Okay, so there is no microphone because—there’s no microphone because the pool cameras aren’t there.  So maybe, Tim, this is one example of it backfiring just a little bit.

Or, as Desi responds:

I’m sorry.  You’re going to have to speak up.  I can’t hear you over the sound of you stepping on your own dick.

The Republicans may have lost their ability to detect irony (and to feel shame), but the universe, it seems, has not lost its ability to mete out a bit of poetic justice.









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Sunday, September 20, 2026

Doom Report (Week 87: Brave, Brave, Brave Mike Johnson)


I think the top story this week is—certainly should be—the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s half-baked scheme to fuck with mail-in voting.  Let’s not give the Supremes too much credit here: I’ll refer you back to week 78 where Kim Scheppele explained how captured courts will rule against an autocrat (especially when the autocrat can get the desired result in alternative ways) in order to maintain a veneer of legitimacy.  But it’s still a bit of welcome news (for a change).  Good coverage on this story from Brian Tyler Cohen (also includes good info on how to check your voter registration), Tuesday’s “Kinzinger Report” (also includes our new oil crisis, and more), and, of course, Strict Scrutiny’s breaking news segment.  The ladies have fun breaking down the bad (i.e. the unhinged dissent from Alito and Thomas, plus the almost-dissent from Coach Kavanaugh) in this overall good decision.

Another fun thing this week: the “return” of Mitch McConnell.  Best coverage here from Pod Save America and Jimmy Kimmel’s Tuesday monologue (which also has a pretty good montage of Trump falling asleep, plus some coverage of Don Jr’s Russian oligarch wedding party).  If you want a much longer discussion of McConnell and his place in the gerontocracy, try this week’s Some More News.  Written and filmed before the reappearance, but still incisive.  The reappearance itself was ... a bit weird.  Mitch McConnell looks like someone shot him full of that Joker drug that freezes your face into a grinning rictus then hooked him up to a marionette frame, and now he’s being Weekend at Bernie’sed straight into Congress.  To call it “creepy” would be underselling it.  Watch the clips yourself and you tell me how lively he looks.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Wonder why McDonald’s sucks lately?  More Perfect Union tells you why.

This week, as BTC reported on his “Another Day” segment on Wednesday, Mike Johnson bravely ran away.  Again.  Brian covers this very well in the video, but it very much reminded me of the Ballad of Brave Sir Robin (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail).  If you feel like celebrating our vertebrae-challenged, poultry-inclined Speaker of the House, I invite you to sing along; I’ve written some fresh words for the classic tune.


Bravely bold Mike Johsnon rode forth from the Capitol.
He was not afraid to vote, O brave Mike Johsnon!
He was not at all afraid to be voted down in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Mike Johsnon!

Brave Mike Johnson ran away.
Bravely ran away, away!
When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Mike Johnson turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Mike Johnson!

Enjoy.









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