A Fred Story

Here’s something I wrote earlier.  For full context, Fred is our eldest cat; he’s an old man now, and is probably not long for this world.  If you want to hear my voice when you read, it might help to know that I follow the Stephen Fry Jeeves and Wooster precedent and pronounce “valet” as rhyming with “mallet” rather than “ballet.”  A small detail, but then small details matter.

When I came out just now to perform my kitty valet duties, I wasn’t sure if Fred actually wanted to come in, so I just stared at him for a while, waiting to see if he’d paw at the door.  And, being Fred, he just stared back at me for a bit, then looked away and stared off into the distance for a bit, and, while I was waiting for him to make up his mind, I noticed a large bug flying around above and behind him a bit, and I wondered if he would turn around and try to grab it, and then I looked closer and realized it wasn’t a bug at all: it was a hummingbird.  A hummingbird, hovering maybe two or three feet off the ground, surely no more than three feet away from our oblivious cat, flitting side to side in that way that hummingbirds and dragonflies do: zipping a few inches then stopping dead still again, but of course they’re not still at all, because their wings are beating at lightning speed to keep them up in the air, but they’re also beating so fast that you can’t really see them.  And I wished I had my phone so I could take a picture, but I didn’t, and I didn’t bother to try to get it because I knew the moment couldn’t last, so I just watched, just for a few seconds, and then Fred pawed at the door and the hummingbird flew away and I went to let the cat in.

Doom Report (Week 69: Nice)

On Even More News this week, Katy, Cody, and Jonathan are joined by guest comedian Mary Houlihan.  It’s a great show, focussing on the reflecting pool debacle, the LA mayoral race, and especially affordability, and you should totally watch the whole thing, but there’s one part I wanted to call out.

You know how Trump was asked this week how much he cared about Americans not being able to afford things, and he said “not even a little”?  Well, okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; here’s what he actually said:

Reporter: To what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?
Trump: Not even a little bit.  The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon.  I don’t think about Americans financial situation, I don’t think about anybody.  I think about one thing.  We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.  That’s all.

Oh, I guess he actually used the exact words “not even a little” ... so not exaggerating at all, really.  And, a few minutes later, Cody says this:

Inflation all over.  Prices are up a lot over the past year.  And most of the high prices we’re seeing right now still aren’t because of what’s going on.  Like, that is yet to come; this is just other stuff.  Some of it’s like climate related and like weather related, where like certain things can’t be grown as easily—shipping and stuff.  Some of it is just like general inflation.  Some of it’s tariffs: specifically tomatoes are specifically because of his tariffs against Mexico.  And so all this stuff that was like “oh, prices are really high now because of this war”—it’s actually not yet because of the war.  It’s going to get so much worse.

To which Jonathan responds:

Everything with Biden was because, you know, everyone thinks the president has a “lower prices” button or a “lower inflation” button, which they don’t, really.  You know, you pass some legislation, you try to do some things, they got it under control.  The president doesn’t really have a lever to pull to do that.  But the president does have a few “make prices go up” levers to pull.  And Trump has pulled them all in the last year and a half.  He’s pulled the tariffs one, he’s pulled the start the war—zero inflation levers he has not pulled.

Gee, thanks Cody: being all truthful and incisive and shit and bringing us down.  Because, as Jonathan so rightfully notes, the president of the United States can only do so much that will cause prices to come down—and, to be clear, Trump has done none of that—but he has a shit-ton of things he can do to make prices go up, and he’s doing all those as fast as he can manage.  And it’s super-important for us all to remember how much price increases tend to lag behind their causes: Cody is, again, 100% correct in pointing out that our current shitty prices (except for the price of gas, which is tied much more directly to its inciting incident) are not because of the current idiotic thing Trump is doing in Iran—they’re because of the previous idiotic things Trump’s been doing, like imposing random tariffs and deporting half our immigrant workforce and making the other half too scared to show up for work.  By the time our prices start reflecting the fact that there’s a fertilizer shortage and the trucks that bring whatever produce is left to the market can’t afford fuel, Trump will be well onto the next idiotic thing.

It’s tough to find a silver lining in all that, but I’ll posit one anyway: even if Trump stops the war in Iran tomorrow—which seems ridiculously unlikely, as he’s making too much money off it—prices will still be terrible when it comes time to vote in the midterms.  Now, if only the Democrats can get their act together and connect the dots the way Magyar did in Hungary ...

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Other things you need to know this week:

• The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act continues to be a big story; this week Brian Tyler Cohen gives a more forceful discussion of the Court’s hypocrisy.  A lot of BTC videos tend to fall into the category of “impotent rage,” and I don’t recommend him nearly as often as I watch him for that very reason, but in this case the rage is justified, and, impotent or not, we all need to be on the same page about it.

• Continuing on that trend, in a highlight from this week’s Runaway Country, Alex Wagner talks to Stacey Abrams about how the Republicans are rigging our electoral system.  Chilling, but important to understand.

• And, in even more Supreme Court coverage, Last Week Tonight featured even more on the Shadow Docket.  I didn’t think John Oliver was quite as informative as all the previous sources I pointed you at (mostly two weeks ago, but also at least one last week), but, as always, he’s damned entertaining.

• Charlamagne tha God is back on The Daily Show’s “In My Opinion” segment, this time talking about Trump’s third term.  People keep saying it’s just a joke, but I have doubts, and apparently Charlamagne does too.

• Adam Kinzinger is now doing breakout videos of his day in review videos; sort of the “shorts” version, or a highlights reel.  But it’s basically just one story out of all the stories he mentioned in the longer video, which is nice, if that one story is the main thing I wanted you to watch the longer video for anyhow.  For Monday’s day in review, the breakout story is that Stephen Miller is, potentially, getting sidelined.  I’m not sure I’m too optimistic yet personally, but I had to chuckle when Adam introduced the story with this quote: “I’m not smiling; you’re smiling!”  Too real.

• I picked up on Gabe Sanchez, I believe, at the same time I discovered Brian Tyler Cohen: it was the writer’s strike, and I needed new entertaining takes on the news.  Sanchez was funnier than BTC, but not as informative, so I didn’t continue watching faithfully after the strike was over, and anyway Sanchez disappeared for while: posting hiatus, I suppose.  But I think he went and got himself a journalism degree while he was gone or something, because his video this week on Trump’s reflecting pool scam was really well-researched (and also pretty funny).  My one quibble: Sanchez seems to think Trump is using the racism as a distraction from the corruption, whereas I think he’s just getting less and less capable of keeping the racism in the closet as he gets older.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews Ben Rhodes from Pod Save the World, mostly talking about Iran.  In this show in particular, Jon says some really smart shit, and, despite his protestations, he really tends to jump out at one as a potential candidate for office.  Look, Jon, if you want people to stop asking you if you’re running for President, you’ve got to stop sounding smarter than all the other potential candidates.  Besides, the fact that he keeps saying he doesn’t want it makes him even more perfect for the job: as Douglas Adams famously wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”  Which only leaves us with those people who absolutely don’t want it.

• Hasan Minhaj interviewed Jennifer Welch this week.  If you don’t know her, Welch is an Oklahoma wine mom who was, in her words, radicalized by Kamala’s loss, and is now a pretty far left progressive.  Her background gives her some really great perspectives on what the Dems are doing wrong and how to fix it.  Long interview, but totally worth it.

• If you follow UK politics as closely as I have been lately, you’ll appreciate SNL UK’s cold open this week.  (And, if you don’t, you almost certainly won’t.)

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Is there hope this week?  I mean, in the sense that there’s always hope, I suppose.  Like Kat Abughazaleh, Graham Platner is demonstrating that, even if he loses, his candidacy will have accomplished something.  Over on Legal Eagle, Spencer the Scowl Owl posits that Kash Patel’s charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center will likely go down in flames like almost all the cases from this DoJ seem to.  Kinzinger seems to think that Trump’s gerrymandering plans will not be as successful as he hopes, and, while I’m not sure I’m on board with all that—the South Carolina victory, for instance, didn’t last long—it’s a pretty dream to live in for a bit.

My state’s primary is here, and there may be some candidates in there that give me some hope.  Haven’t had the chance to really dig into it yet, but I continue to choose to believe that there will be, until the moment I discover that there aren’t.  And that moment may never come: indeed, one might say that, hopefully, it won’t.  If you have a chance to look around at candidates in your state, see what hope you can find there.  There’s still some good people out there.  Find them, and vote for them.

Doom Report (Week 68: A Court with Sour Cream and Tomatoes Would Actually Be Way Better)

The rank hypocrisy of our Supreme Court has reached peak levels.  I thought that Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham refusing to confirm Merrick Garland eight months before an election on the grounds that it was “too close,” and then 4 years later confirming Amy Coney Barrett after early voting had already started—I thought that was pretty bad.  But now the Supreme Court, which had previously said that April before a November election was “too close” to allow changes—which had even claimed December before an election the following November was too close—has now told Louisiana that it can throw out votes that have already been cast in order to change their districts.  Brian Tyler Cohen and Mark Elias break down the details; it’s pretty rank.

If the shit your party is doing is so bad that the only way you can win an election is to cheat this much, that might be a sign that you’re on the wrong side of history.  While it does seem clear that, on a level playing field, the Democrats would completely destroy the Republicans in the upcoming midterms, it also seems pretty clear that we’re not going to get that level playing field.  The story of Hungary (see week 64) still provides a modicum of hope, but let’s remain sober as to the amount that the Republicans are trying to rig the game.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Strict Scrutiny had two breaking-story short videos this week (because that’s the hell we live in now): Leah breaks down Alito’s hissy fit over Ketanji Brown Jackson calling him out, and Leah and Melissa break down the catastrophe that is the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision.

• Speaking of legal stuff, Legal Eagle’s Cristian Farias has even more on the gutting of the Voting Rights Acts, including my favorite quote about this, from Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”  Plus, despite the numerous videos I pointed you at last week, Cristian has the best overall explanation of what actually happened.

• And, for some direct results of that Supreme Court decision, check out Zeteo’s Prem Thakker interviewing Tennessee state rep Justin Pearson.

• Adam Kinzinger has switched from doing the week in review to doing a day in review every day (I think this is another sign of our current hellscape).  They can’t all be winners, of course, but there were a couple of good ones this week: his Cinco de Mayo update talks about Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom being voted on while rural hospitals close, and another update covers paying for pardons and more info on rising oil prices.

• Another banger SNL cold open: to Colin Jost’s excellent Pete Hegseth and Aziz Ansari’s spot-on Kash Patel, host Matt Damon brings a damn fine Brett Kavanaugh.

• A good Some More News this week, all about Trump’s attempts to rewrite history.

• Ben McKenzie continues to be everywhere by showing up on We’re Not Kidding with Mehdi Hasan.  And he’s still good every single time.

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If you’re looking for some hope, there was a very successful set of local elections in the UK this week: very successful for the progressive left, that is.  Now, to be fair, it was also a fair bit successful for the Reform party, which is the UK equivalent of our MAGA Republicans, but in the end Reform did not win nearly as much as was predicted: the Greens dominated in England, and Plaid Cymru (pronounced “Plad Cumree”), the Welsh Nationalist Party, did the same in Wales.  If you want full details, Owen Jones has a predictably gleeful breakdown of the results.  And, again, to be completely fair, these are local elections: sort of the equivalent of our statewide elections.  But I think we’re learning in our own country that these local elections end up having an outsized effect on our national elections, so I’m choosing to view this news as a sign that things are changing from the bottom up, at least in the UK.  And I continue to believe that gains in the UK can portend gains in the US.  Am I right?  No clue, yet.  Perhaps in November we’ll find out.

Doom Report (Week 67: Big, Strong Men with Big, Hard Muscles)

So, I’m watching Zeteo this week, and Mehdi Hasan is interviewing Naomi Klein, and, while talking with her about unlikely alliances between progressives and rightwing nutjobs, he brings up the infamous Mamdani-Trump meeting in the White House.  And this is not really an “alliance” ... but on the other hand Mamdani did get something out of it, so the characterization is not wholly unreasonable.

But what actually struck me was this offhand comment from Mehdi:

I mean what’s so interesting about that—apart from the fact that Donald Trump looks at Mamdani the way he looks at no one else.  Mela—he doesn’t look at Melania the way he looks at Mamdani.

And a little bomb went off in my brain, and I instantly thought about how I’d heard people poking fun at this comment of Trump’s, from his 60 Minutes interview after the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

I also saw a lot of very strong, uh, physically strong, really attractive law enforcement people come through those doors.  And frankly, it made me feel very safe.  Very, very safe.  There’s nobody going to get by them.

“Really attractive”?  I mean, at the time I didn’t think that much of it—this is, after all, a recurring theme with Trump.  Remember when he said that ICE agents “just happen to have much larger, and harder, muscles than most”? or when he spoke about deploying the National Guard into DC by saying “we have very big, strong, good-looking soldiers standing around, and I think they make the place look better”?  Many people have commented on how much Trump focusses on appearance, and the consensus seems to be that this is typical narcissist behavior: focus on the skin deep, ignore the deeper stuff.  So this was just more of that ... right?

Except that now all sorts of explosions were going off in my head: this guy hates women—I mean, really hates women—and even his own female supporters will admit that.  And it seems like he’s always going on about how attractive men are.  Sure, he supposedly had sex with a porn star, but the main thing we know about that encounter was that he wanted her to spank him.  Sure, he has children, but then so did many men in the European monarchies who are, in retrospect, considered to have been gay.  What if ...

Like, what if Trump is secretly gay?

And, yes: I know I’m slandering gay men by even suggesting such a thing.  But, hear me out.  What if he is so deeply closeted that his sexuality is a secret even to himself?  His urges so deeply repressed that even he dare not look too closely at them.  That might explain his interest in women primarily as exploitative, primarily for the shock value: that perhaps he thinks of women as arm candy, that he expresses interest in them only because that’s the thing men are supposed to do.  And I’m not trying to imply that all gay men hate women, but I do believe that, in order to want to oppress a group, you first have to have a disinterest: an ability to see them as less than human.  Somehow I feel like we were one trauma away from knowing the name “Donald Trump” as one of our most prolific serial killers.  At the very least it would explain all the drooling over other men’s rock-hard abs.

So that’s my revelation for the week.  Probably nothing to it, but it’s a weird possibility to ponder—a real brain-bender.  And, just to add synchronicity to epiphany, Michael Che made this joke on last night’s SNL “Weekend Update”:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she thinks it’s possible that America has already had a gay president.  And, here’s a guess: maybe it’s the one obsessed with ballrooms and the Village People.

So if the worst thing you can say about my insane idea is that I’m on the same wavelength as Michael Che, I’ll take that.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• The Supreme Court basically gutted the Voting Rights Act as being too discriminatory against white people.  There’s a plethora of coverage on this, because it is vitally important that everyone understand how bad it is.  So you can hear Mark Elias (normally found on Brain Tyler Cohen’s channel, but here appearing as one of the lawyers who actually argued the case) talk about it on Scrict Scrutiny with Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, or you can hear Leah talk about it on What a Day with Jane Coaston, or you can hear Jane return the favor by appearing on Strict Scrutiny with Leah, or you can hear Jamelle Bouie talk about it, not once, but twice.  And you should definitely listen to at least one of those, and probably all of them.  If the Republicans manage to hold on to the House in the upcoming election and you can’t figure out why ... this is it.

• The other big legal news, of course, is indicting James Comey over seashells.  Leah Litman covers it on Strict Scrutiny, Lize Dye covers it for Legal Eagle, and Kate Shaw visits The Bulwark to talk about it as well.

• In leftover legal news, remember how last week I was all about the NYT’s exposé on the shadow docket?  Well, Legal Eagle also wanted to get in on that one, so this week Cristian Farias covers the shadow docket leaks.

• Some people feel that the shooter at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was a staged event.  That seems doubtful, but it’s completely understandable to think it.  For one thing, the flurry of coordinated messages that went out about the ballroom immediately afterwards is insane.  Cody Johnston covers this in Monday’s Even More News, where he notes: ”... we know that there’s this built-in apparatus where you have like 50 to 100 MAGA accounts on like these group texts, with people in the White House coordinating messaging.  So, when this happens, the message goes out: ballroom, we’re doing ballroom today.  And so, they all do it.  And so it seems very coordinated, because that part is ...”  Seth Meyers also covers it in a “Closer Look” segment this week, if you want a shorter version.

• SNL has an amazing cold open this week, with Colin Jost reprising his excellent Pete Hegseth and a surprise spot-on impression of Kash Patel from Aziz Ansari.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon interviews Graham Platner.  And, later in the week, his main opponent in the Democratic primary, former Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.  So it looks like we’re definitely getting a Platner vs Susan Collins race in November, which hopefully he will prevail in.

• In another banger “In My Opinon” segment on The Daily Show, Mo Amer explores the inherent weirdness of Islamophobia.

• Look, I understand that Ben McKenzie (who I mentioned both last week and the week before) is hawking his new movie, and that’s why he keeps showing up everywhere, but, damn: he’s good, every single time.  This week, he shows up on the Coffee Klatch, with Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse.

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This week, King Charles paid a visit to the US, and spoke to Congress and in various other venues.  Josh Johnson covers this on The Daily Show, and Seth Meyers did yet another “Closer Look” on the topic, but the truly incisive coverage this week was, I think, from Brian Tyler Cohen.  What Charles said was this:

The US Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

And BTC follows that up with this:

First of all, the irony is not lost on me that even a literal king is more democratic than the president of the world’s oldest continuous democracy.

And, at the end of the day, that sort of says it all.  Oh, sure: there’s plenty to make fun of when it comes to the British royal family—certainly SNL UK had some fun spoofing Charles and Camilla in this week’s cold open—but even the King of England knows that our madman is a bridge too far.  Here’s hoping we work it out soon as well.