Sunday, August 9, 2026

Doom Report (Week 81: Money out of Politics, Money in your Pocket, and Medicare for All)


This week, Michigan held its primaries, and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Senator.  He won it despite being a Muslim American (should he defeat his Republican opponent in November, he’ll be the first Muslim American in the Senate); he won it despite his primary opponent ceaselessly running ads showing her with Barack Obama (despite the fact that Obama never endorsed her); and, most of all, he won it despite outside PACs spending nearly 11 times more money on his opponent.  With over $80 million spent on the race, it was the most expensive Senate primary in US history.  Around $54 million of that was spent on his opponent’s behalf, and $30 million of that came from AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobbying group.  Once upon a time AIPAC throwing money at a race meant the other guy was going down.  Just ask Cori Bush: AIPAC defeated her two years ago for the comparatively economical price tag of $9 million.  But defending the bombing of Palestinian children is more expensive these days.

So El-Sayed said he wouldn’t support sending arms to any state committing genocides, even if it happened to be Israel, and that put the target on his back.  But, this time, the target failed.  So maybe now he’ll be able to stop talking about Gaza and get back to his primary campaign message, which was always: money out of politics; money in your pocket; Medicare for all.  Maybe he will: his opponent has conceded and endorsed him, which is more than a defeated Republican would have done, so that’s something.  But she spent months stirring up people against him and accusing him of antisemitism, so it could well be too little too late at this point.

But I’m not counting El-Sayed out just yet.  He’s a strong progressive who often gets lumped in with the Democratic Socialists, even though he’s not one.  In this respect, he’s a bit like Bernie Sanders, who is often considered the most progressive Democrat in Congress, despite the inconvenient fact that he’s not a Democrat.  But association with Sanders is a big part of what earned El-Sayed the label of “socialist” ... and, just maybe, a big part of what propelled him to an underdog victory.  If you want to hear Bernie talk about El-Sayed’s victory, check out his video on the topic.  But let’s not count out El-Sayed just being a smart, charismatic campaigner: you can watch him convince hesitant voters in a recent More Perfect Union video to see his raw talent and skill.  So the question may just come down to whether AIPAC and its allies are willing to spend money on a Republican to avoid having more Democrats stand up to them.  Let’s hope not.

But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • A really good Even More News this week, covering the El-Sayed win, plus point-by-point dismantling of RFK Jr’s latest round of lies.  Returning guest Kaveh Hoda is the perfect accompaniment for this episode: like El-Sayed, he is a doctor, and an American of Middle Eastern heritage (Hoda is Persian-American where El-Sayed is Egyptian-American, but I suspect they’ve faced many of the same prejudices).
  • And, speaking of Adam Kinzinger, there’s this short video about accountability that he released Monday.  It reads like a campaign ad, but he doesn’t appear to be running for anything: he’s just campaigning for eliminating corruption.  Can’t really argue with that.
  • Gary Stevenson did an interview on PoliticsJOE, where he’s still talking about taxing wealth not work despite saying for the past several weeks that he’s going to take a break from talking about such topics.  Best quote: “There’s nothing more powerful that the rich could ever do to protect themselves and their wealth than to make the poor selfish.  Because the poor are individually incredibly weak.  And the rich are individually incredibly strong.  And the only power that the poor and ordinary people have ever had to protect themselves from the rich is strength in numbers.  And they only use that power if they act collectively.  ...  You know, if the rich can convince the poor to be as selfish as they are, then they will eat you alive.”

If the victory of El-Sayed is not hopeful enough for you, let me also share my favorite news snippet of the week (although if you watched either the Even More News episode or the “Kinzinger Report” linked above, you’ve already gotten a bit of a preview).

One of the first defeats of a Trump-backed candidate of the year happened this week: a Navy veteran who worked in intelligence as well as federal law enforcement, a man born in Michigan to generations of auto-workers, with the full-throated endorsement of Trump, lost ... to a man who had already dropped out of the race, possibly because he couldn’t figure out how to operate the FEC website (it also might have been the fact that he raised less than $2,000 for his campaign).  How on earth did this happen, you might ask?  Well, the dropout was named Tom Smith, and the Trump endorsee was named Amir Hassan.

Now, you might discount the obvious reason that everyone is talking about.  “Oh, poo!” you might say: “surely Trump voters wouldn’t reject someone—that he had endorsed!—just because of his name.”  And you might have a good argument that this is only speculation ... until we get to Laura Loomer’s tweet.

If you don’t remember who Loomer is, first of all: congratulations! I can tell that your news diet is much healthier than mine.  Secondly, if you really want to know who this Queen of All Nutjobs is, I’ll send you back to week 60 where I highlighted a Some More News piece on her.  Short version: of all the crazy, racist, rightwing MAGA nutjobs, she is the craziest, most racist, rightwingiest, and MAGA-ist, and she has the ear of the President, regularly costing people their jobs when she feels they don’t toe the company line well enough to suit her.  So what did this deranged nutjob say about Hassan?  Here’s just a taste:

“Amir Hassan” claims he’s not a Muslim, but it doesn’t matter.  His name sounds like he’s fresh off the boat and MAGA voters reject the Islamic infiltration of our country and party.

This should be an eye opener to Trump’s advisors that we don’t want Muslims, Arabs or anyone who may even sound Arab or Islamic serving in office.  We are done with the Islamic takeover of our country, but they won’t pass this message along to President Trump.

And:

Dude should have changed his name.  If my name was Amir Hassan and I wasn’t a Muslim, I’d be changing my name as soon as I turned 18.

I will never vote for anyone with an Islamic name.  Neither will most of President Trump’s voters.

So, I dunno—maybe there’s something to this name theory after all ...

Look, as Kaveh pointed out on Even More News, when you train your base to just automatically assume anyone with a Muslim-sounding name is bad, you get what you pay for.  Don’t even get me started on why a Black man would seek the endorsement of the White House white supremacist—there’s obviously enough petard-hoisting to go around.  And I love how Loomer is careful to blame Trump’s advisors and not him: she knows wherefrom her crazypants bread derives its crazypants butter.  No, really: the whole thing is just amazingly, poetically justicial, even down to the poor Smith, who I guess now has to figure out how to operate that website after all.  Hopefully this means the Democratic candidate will have an easier time of it.  But, for now ...

For now I’m just happy to have something to chuckle about.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Doom Report (Week 80: The Undeserving Others)


While watching the MAGA performance—and there really is no word for it other than “performance”—at the Fauci hearings, I had a bit of a revelation: I think I finally understand the MAGA movement.  It’s the Revenge of the Revenge of the Nerds.

If you don’t know Revenge of the Nerds, it’s a movie from my youth, and, honestly, it has not aged well: realistically, the vast majority of the 80s “raunchy sex comedies” tend to read to modern audiences as “sexual assault”, and I would never try to talk anyone out of that viewpoint.  I’m not here to say that this is a marvel of modern cinema or anything.  But I do think that, if you look at the overall plot and don’t peer too closely at the inherent mysogyny, it has something to say about the changing times.  In the summer of 1984, when Nerds was released, I had just graduated from high school, and the word “nerd” was still a vicious insult.  The movie posits that the nerds, traditionally downtrodden and dismissed, could actually “win”, somehow.  That they could come out on top while the jocks, who have dominated our culture for decades if not centuries, might actually find that brawn doesn’t always beat brains.

And, lo, it is now 42 years later, and I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the nerds have won.  On the most recent Forbes list of billionaires, the top 6 richest people in the world—half of the top twenty, in fact—have “Technology” listed under the “Industry” column.  Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg: even Larry Ellison’s fortune comes from Oracle, which is a fairly nerdy product.  And the dominance of “nerd culture” has been acknowledged by most, in article after article.  And, for every movement, there is a backlash.

And watching rightwing nutjob senators picking on Anthony Fauci, who is certainly a big ol’ immunology nerd, reminded me very forcefully of watching Stan and Ogre picking on Lewis and Gilbert.  They gleefully dissect passages from Fauci’s diary, which he was foolish enough to leave on a government server, and they seem to want us to believe that we should be outraged—outraged, I tell you!—that this gentle nerd was starstruck by his unlikely fame and meeting celebrities such as Julia Roberts.  Oh, the scandal: that a nerdy guy who thought he would spend his life toiling away in obscurity would write cringey sentences in what he thought was a private diary that no one would ever read once he suddenly started meeting movie stars ... what an arrogant prick.

I’m not saying I recommend you watch any of the hearings.  Fauci is an 85-year-old man, so this is not just nerd-baiting, but also elder abuse.  Given that the entire goal of the rightwing nutjobs is to trick him into saying something they can use against him, his counsel has (quite wisely) advised him against saying anything other than taking the Fifth.  So the entirety of it is watching despicable people with no morals relentlessly bullying a little old man, who also happens to be a gentle nerd, and who can’t respond to their mockery.  I mean, I suppose if you get your rocks off watching lunkheads beating the shit out of kids with glasses in the schoolyard and taking their lunch money, maybe you could find it entertaining.  But it really is disgusting, in a visceral, stomach-churning way.  And the way they struggle to score performance points, because they have no actual evidence to present ... almost everything they say presumes that the COVID vaccine was deadly, and that COVID itself wasn’t so bad, and they don’t offer any evidence to support that wild theory—as if they could—they just start with that as a given and start throwing the punches.  Senator Bernie Moreno tries to shame Fauci while remaining utterly silent about his own son-in-law—who has thrown scalding water on the Senator’s daughter and broken his granddaughter’s collarbone—because the son-in-law is part of the Republicans’ very slim majority in the House.  (Note: bare hours before I wrote this, Moreno finally spoke out against his son-in-law.  But I don’t think that story will attract the same attention as his viral clip of yelling at Fauci “Who the fuck do you think you were ...?”)  And, trying to recreate the impactful moment from Pam Bondi’s hearings where she was invited to turn and look at the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the Senators at this hearing demanded Fauci turn and look at his “victims,” who included members of an anti-vaccine advocacy group and Fox “News” host Laura Ingraham.  It was theatre, but not the entertaining kind.  It was a bunch of people who are seething that the nerds have conquered the culture and taken over the system taking petty shots at one particular nerd to make themselves feel better.  I’m sure it makes them feel strong.

Adam Kinzinger excoriates the Republicans for their performance, and let’s not forget that he knows this system inside and out due to his 12 years as a Congressperson.  The Even More News crew takes an even deeper dive into the ridiculosity, with the added bonus of an interview with the president of the Fair Elections Center afterward.  Or, if the Even More News segment is too long, Jordan Klepper breaks it down for you in just over 10 minutes on this week’s final Daily Show episode.

I find it interesting that most of those rich nerds I mentioned previously are doing all sorts of physical training and makeovers to try to divorce themselves from their origins.  They want to pretend they were never nerds, and now they want to bankroll the aggrieved assholes who are desperately trying to hold on to their place in history by abusing and trying to make small the people who will inevitably supplant them.  It’s pitiful, in some respects, but it’s still nauseating to watch the temporarily powerful beating up on those who were just trying to do the right thing.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • For a bit of a longer discussion, Cory Doctorow is back, this time on The Weekly Show, being interviewed by Jon Stewart.  My favorite quote: when Cory talks about why people end up voting for the “Fascist Party”, he says “You just become a sucker for people who show up and say ‘undeserving others’ are the reason you don’t have what you need.”  And the thing I found the most chilling about that is, we’re assuming that that message is bullshit.  But it’s not.  It’s just that the “undeserving others” are not the immigrants: it’s the billionaires.

For a small measure of hope this week, I’ll point you, yet again, at the swampy morass that is now our national reflecting pool.  Now that it’s become just a clusterfuck of incompetence, the rightwing nutjobs are acting like it’s dumb that liberals are incessantly talking about this issue ... pretending like it wasn’t their incompetent nutjob president who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it in the first place.  He wouldn’t shut up about how awesome it was going to be, and how cheap it would be, and how he knew all the best people.  Remember “Our Pool Is Bigger Than Skyscrapers”?  And then, as it turns out, it was decidedly less than awesome, cost about 20 times what he said it would, and “the best people” turned out to be rejected Batman villains.  So he immediately pivoted to claiming that vandals had destroyed his pool with a box cutter.  You know: people just traipsing through the 2,000 foot pool using knives to cut things underwater.  Stuff that’s totally plausible.  They even stared arresting people over it.

But a funny thing happens when you arrest someone and have to go to court over it: there’s this annoying thing called “discovery” where the accused (and, better yet: the accused’s lawyers) get a chance to look at all your documents.  So, in the most predictable conclusion ever, the Department of the Interior was forced to admit that the lining of the pool was coming apart long before anyone started sticking their hands into it, and that it was because of shoddy workmanship, and that they knew about it, and that they arrested people anyway.  Could Jeanine Pirro lose her license to practice over this?  Could Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum lose his job over it?  Will it make any difference in regards to the massive damage this regime is doing?  No, probably not.  But it’s fun to watch anyhow.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Sunday, July 26, 2026

Doom Report (Week 79: Electrify the Pendulum)


This week, The Daily Show celebrated its 30-year anniversary.  Over the course of 30 years—which is longer than any of my children have been alive, longer than any job I’ve ever had, longer than any house I’ve ever lived in, longer than any relationship I’ve ever had outside my family—I’ve seen nearly every episode of the show: most of the Craig Kilborn episodes, all but perhaps a few of the Jon Stewart episodes, every single Trevor Noah episode as far as I know, and almost surely every episode hosted by a guest host or a rotating correspondent.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the 30th anniversary episode was its 4,134th.  Even if I managed to somehow miss 134 of them (which feels like a very high number to me), 4,000 episodes at roughly 20 minutes per episode (that’s a half-hour broadcast show minus the commercials) is over 1,300 hours of my life devoted to this show.  And it’s still going, and, in my opinion, it’s still as vital as ever, so I don’t mean this to sound like a eulogy, but the retrospective summary of the last 30 years that they put together really got me thinking about what the show has meant to me.

Look, I’ve talked before about the misnomer of “fake news”: sure, in the Kilborn era, it often was (although note that, even then, there was enough for the retrospective to find a clip or two), but then things changed.  The Daily Show doesn’t report fake news.  It reports real news, in a way that some people want to refer to as fake.  They seem to believe that, if you can laugh at the news, that can’t possibly be real.  Or maybe they just need to denigrate it to justify their own lack of humour.  Maybe they’ve been drowning in their own sombriety so long that their fatalism just won’t let them accept that it might even be possible to consider another way.

Well, for me, The Daily Show (and the many other shows, podcasts, and YouTube channels it’s inspired) is the only way I can keep track of what’s going on in the world and stay sane.  I never watched the news as a child, and even throughout the bulk of my adulthood ... right up until the Towers came down, and then I decided I had been foolish and, like many other Americans, started watching the news obsessively.  And you know what I discovered?  It’s just not good for you.  Not conducive to your mental health (and, sometimes, not your physical health either).  Somehow, we’ve designed the news to be depressing, and frightening, and rage-inducing: it imparts a sense of existential dread ... by design.  Surely we can see that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this model.  Surely it can’t be too radical a concept to want to be informed in a way that makes us laugh, even when we have to laugh through our tears.  And study after study after study shows that viewers of “satirical” news shows are better informed than those who watch “real” news.  And the only thing about that that continues to boggle my mind is that anyone is surprised by these findings.  What are you more likely to remember: a barrage of facts spewed at you by a very serious person in a serious suit, or a real zinger that simultaneously taught you something?  Humour invests facts with a “stickiness” that raw regurgitation can never aspire to.

And so, for 30 years, I’ve been watching The Daily Show, along with all its spiritual successors, and it’s a huge part of the information that I gather every week for these Doom Reports.  Every single week I have to restrain myself from exclusively sending you clip after clip from them just to spread the love.  But some weeks, it’s practically impossible.  Here’s just a sampling of what they have for us this week:

Here’s hoping we get another 30 years.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • For another take on the whole communism bullshit, see also this week’s Armageddon Update.
  • The rightwing nutjobs seem to think they can convince America that you should have to show your passport to vote by pointing out that you need your driver’s license to use your Unlimited Pasta Pass at the Olive Garden.  Besides the very real disconnect that a driver’s license is much easier to come by than a passport, Seth Meyers makes the compelling case that “unlimited pasta isn’t a constitutional right, you fucking bozos!” in Wednesday’s “A Closer Look” segment.
  • The Even More News crew covers the pasta pass as well, in addition to the whole bizarre meltdown the nutjobs are having over The Odyssey.  Best quote on that topic comes from SMN head writer Dave Bell (filling in for Katy Stoll), who, when talking about the nutjobs’ prediction that the Christopher Nolan blockbuster wouldn’t make any money going down in flames, notes “It’s like watching them fight the ocean, where you’re like: it doesn’t even know you’re there.”
  • Have you ever wondered why your taxes keep going up but government services keep getting worse?  Well, Garys Economics explains the reason (spoiler: it’s wealth inequality—tax wealth not work!).

Where shall we go for our note of hope this week?  Why, back to The Daily Show, of course.

About a year and a half ago—in other words, just after their disastrous defeat to Trump—the Democratic National Committee announced an election for a new chairperson.  The two candidates were Ken Martin and Ben Wikler.  I watched interviews with both: Martin appeared on Brian Tyler Cohen’s channel, while Wikler sat down with Jon Stewart.  Now, besides the fact that Martin wasn’t bright enough to book The Daily Show, I was strongly rooting for Wikler for more concrete reasons: Wikler had an interesting, coherent vision for the future of the party, while Martin was ... fine.  Nothing particularly wrong with him, he was just ... I dunno, a bit bland.  Didn’t seem like he really wanted to shake things up, and, given the state of the party, that seemed like a bad idea.

Sadly, Martin won, and turned out to be exactly the sort of useless establishment politician that I feared he’d be.  If you need proof, take a look at how badly he bungled the DNC’s “autopsy report” for the 2024 election.  Basically, any time you hear a politician say “we need to keep looking forward,” it means they’re trying to cover up how badly someone fucked up, which you’d instantly realize by looking backwards.  It means that they’ve decided they utterly—and willfully—refuse to learn anything from their mistakes, and fully believe that, if they only continue to do the same thing over and over again, only harder this time, they will surely achieve a different result.  People like Ken Martin are why I don’t put much stock in the idea that the Democrats will save us from the rightwing nutjobs that have body-snatched the Republican party.

But Wikler, rather than taking his defeat lying down, decided to write a book.  His success was in Wisconsin, where he was state party chair.  In 2018, Wisconsin had a Republican governor, a Republican supermajority in the legislature, and a 5-2 conservative state Supreme Court.  Today, they have a Democratic governor, bare Republican majorities in the legislature, and a 4-3 liberal Supreme Court.  And, while Wikler is quick to point out that he was only one member of a larger team, he oversaw that transition.  The national DNC was not ready to win that hard, apparently, but, just in case they’ve changed their minds, his new book This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy contains the blueprint.

So this week he sat down with Jon once again for another interview.  And I thought he said some really trenchant things: about unrigging the system, about fixing the Supreme Court, about fixing all the gerrymanders.  Perhaps it’s best summed up by this quote:

The pendulum swings in American politics.  But what the right does is, when it swings their way, they catch it, and they grab it.  And they don’t want to let it go.  And you need to electrify the pendulum so that you cannot grab the thing and stop it from moving.

Now if only the Democrats would start listening ...









Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Sunday, July 19, 2026

Doom Report (Week 78: What We Want to Show New Yorkers Are Results)


The big story this week was that ICE is back murdering people again.  They seem to think that, as long as they’re not murdering white people, no one will notice.  And I suppose we should be pleased that they have been proven wrong.  Even More News covered the first murder last week, but they clipped just that part of the discussion this week, and then covered the second murder as part of a larger discussion on Monday.  What a Day talked to David Bier, the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, while Strict Scrutiny spoke to Andrea R. Flores, founder of Securing America’s Promise.  And Adam Conover, doing his yet-untitled Friday roundup of the news, spoke to American Prospect editor David Dayen and Semafor columnist David Weigel about this, as well as other topics (such as the surprisingly-lack-of-fallout from the Graham Platner situation I mentioned last week).

I don’t have too much to add to all that, except to say this:  Coming into the United States illegally is a Class B federal misdemeanor.  That’s equivalent to shooting a deer on federal land out of season (or without a license), or driving recklessly (or drunk) on a military base.  Imagine that you did one of those things, and then, later—perhaps years later—a van full of masked thugs, in plain black clothes and sunglasses, forced you off the road and started pointing guns at you and yelling at you to get out of your car.  And, under those circumstances, if you panicked and tried to drive away, would it be okay for those people to shoot you dead?  I mean, sure, people will say you shouldn’t have panicked, and you should have complied (with the non-uniformed, armed, masked men), but does that make it okay for them to murder you?  I’m having a lot of trouble buying what the Stephen Millers of the world are selling.

Of course, the other major news is that Lindsey Graham died.  I personally have had a lot of difficulty dealing with this news.  On the one hand, Lindsey was a human being, and I hate for anyone to just die like that, and I also am getting to the age where people dying at the age of 71 seems like they’re gone too soon.  Certainly he was 13 years younger than Mitch McConnell, who everyone swears is still alive, and 9 years younger than Trump, who at the very least is still walking and talking, if not particularly lively.  On the other hand ...  Look, if you want to hear from someone who actually liked Lindsey but still isn’t afraid to call him on his bullshit, Adam Kinzinger has you covered, and if you want to hear from someone who really didn’t like him and is perhaps a bit too joyful to call out his monstrous side, Owen Jones is happy to oblige (and, if you need something a bit more down the middle, What a Day’s Jane Coaston spoke to staff report for The Atlantic Matt Viser).  For me, I just have a very clear memory of Lindsey saying this:

This will stand the test of the time.  This is the last year of a lame duck president, and if Ted Cruz or Donald Trump get to be president, they’ve all asked us not to confirm or take up a selection by President Obama, so if a vacancy occurs in their last year of their first term, guess what? you will use their words against them.  I want you to use my words against me.  If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said “let’s let the next president, who whoever it might be, make that nomination” and you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.

But it didn’t stand the test of time.  It didn’t stand the test of four years.  The exact scenario that Graham described actually happened, and when people pointed out that Lindsey Graham said “let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination”, he replied “the rules have changed as far as I’m concerned.”  So I’m going to honor Lindsey’s wishes and hold his words against him.  I’m sorry to say that I cannot say I’m sorry to hear of his passing.  (Well, insofar as he may have been a deeply closeted gay man who was also an anti-LGBTQ+ politician, I suppose I’m not even that sorry.  But still a little bit sorry.)

It’s also been an interesting week in that we’ve had a bunch of stories about the economy this week.  I mean, the economy is always a topic for discussion, but it’s rare to see this many stories hit, and all be this good.  If I have a favorite economist, it is surely Gary Stevenson, who I’ve discussed many times throughout this series, most recently in week 72 where I actually used his catchphrase (“tax wealth, not work”) as my post title.  In this week’s episode of Garys Economics, Gary breaks down how the media is helping billionaires steal all our money, and how we need to talk about wealth inequality to actually start doing something about it.  If I had to pick a second favorite economist, I would certainly choose Kyla Scanlon, who I’ve mentioned twice in this series: in week 26, when she spoke to Jon Stewart, and in week 57, when she spoke to Hank Green.  This week finds her on Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know, talking to Hasan about why you can’t afford a house (and also, a bit, about how to pronounce the word “housing”).  And, if I had to pick a third favorite economist ... well, I’d probably look at you like you were crazy—who has a third favorite economist?—but, push comes to shove, I guess I’d go with Autsan Goolsbee, for his genial nature and casual style at explaining complex economic matters.  This week, he puts those skills to good use on The Weekly Show by explaining to Jon Stewart how the Federal Reserve works.  And, finally, if we leave the realm of economists and hop over to the domain of economic reporters, I find it hard to beat More Perfect Union’s John Russell, who I’ve mentioned at least 3 times in this series (week 3, where he interviewed people in Springfield Ohio, week 12 when he covered the Bernie/AOC “fight the oligarchy” rallies, and week 47, when he traveled to Italy to figure out how co-ops work).  This week he’s in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, figuring out what happens when the ultrarich make it so no one can afford to live near them.  Spoiler: it ain’t good.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Another fun story this week (for certain definitions of “fun”) is the explosive diarrhea outbreak.  For more info, Michael Kosta of The Daily Show breaks it down for you.
  • What Adam Kinzinger has now decided to dub the Kinzinger Report had a pretty solid episode on Friday.  He covers Trump’s released “proof” of election fraud after his unhinged speech this week, the betting scandal with Trump’s teleprompter operator, more reflecting pool bullshit, the Todd Blanche confirmation hearing mega-fail, and maybe even one or two other bits and bobs.
  • On LegalEagle, Devin Stone covers Elon Musk’s child genocide denial.  It’s interesting to tackle this from a legal perspective, though of course there’s nothing wrong with simply looking at it from the Elon-is-just-a-whiny-ass-bitch perspective.
  • I hardly ever give you really long videos to watch, but What Now?, which is Trevor Noah’s interview show, had Cory Doctorow on (he of the “enshittification” coinage).  And I love Trevor, and was sad to see him leave The Daily Show, and I also love Cory, and think he’s one of the smartest people talking about technology today, particularly on the topic of AI.  Most AI commentators are either way too pro-AI, or way anti-AI.  Cory, on the other hand, is, as Goldilocks would say, just right.  And, on top of all that, he is very good at explaining how late-stage capitalism is causing the vast majority of our problems.  This interview is hilarious and also terrifying; yes, it’s quite long, but just about every moment is a real banger.

Is there hope this week?  Well, up in New York, Zohran Mamdani has been actually achieving successes for his constituents on a near-daily basis.  The best criticism the rightwing nutjobs have come up for this thus far is to scream “Socialism!” and hope no one responds “yeah ... and?”  Because, when what you’re offering is more of the same old shit that’s made everyone’s lives miserable for decades, and what the other guy is offering is real solutions to the real problems of everyday people, what you call one side vs the other starts to lose all relevance.  BTC interviewed Mamdani about housing this week, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of what New York’s Democratic Socialist mayor has accomplished: he’s lowered crime rates, delivered a rent freeze, announced a new childcare initiative ... hell, he even got 100,000 potholes filled in 100 days, including at least one, apparently, which he filled himself.  I think that people are soon going to start saying, “if this is what socialism means, sign me up.”

And that’s probably a good thing.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Sunday, July 12, 2026

Doom Report (Week 77: Preaching and Practice)


A lot of the coverage this week has been about Graham Platner.  And I could point you at some of that coverage—oh, I could point you at so much coverage of that—but I’m not going to.  Because this week I’m reminded of something I used to say a lot: opinions are like assholes—everybody has one, they’re all different, and they all stink.  Now, I don’t say that so much any more, and I’ve never said it as part of these Doom Reports, because I’ve always sort of thought that my job here was to filter out those shitty opinions and actually point you at the ones that don’t stink.  But, on this topic, we truly have reached the nadir: none of the takes are any good.

Some people are saying that Platner’s vetting was not sufficient.  Well, no shit, Sherlock.  In other news, water is wet.  Some people are saying that maybe his accuser is a Republican plant, which feels like the epitome of wishful thinking.  Some people are saying that this is a good thing, because he wasn’t as popular as people were saying anyway, which feels like utter bullshit rationalization.  Some people (mostly the rightwing nutjobs) are saying that liberals will elect just any old scum ... isn’t that right, Mr. Grab-em-by-the-pussy-President?  (The aforementioned president, by the way, is not saying that: he’s expressing sympathy for Platner, due to his extensive experience being accused of sexual assault.)  Some people are saying that we should have never gotten behind a guy with a “Nazi tattoo.”  And this particular take is one of the absolute shittiest, because I’m almost positive that none of them have actually seen the tattoo in question and wouldn’t have been able to identify it as being Nazi-related if their lives had depended on it.  Some people are saying that it’s disgusting that people continue to support him while absolutely everyone who ever supported him has called for him to drop out and others have said that they never liked him from the beginning while pretending they weren’t pinning all hope of defeating Susan Collins on him for the past 6 months.  Look, the truth is ...

Actually, none of us really know the truth.  There’s a woman, and she says she really hates to do this because she really wanted to vote for him, but she has to let us know that Platner sexually assaulted her.  And she’s remarkably credible, and Platner’s denials are ... not that ... and at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not—well, it absolutely does matter to her, and to him, and to his wife and family, but it doesn’t matter from the perspective of the election.  He has to step down, because he’s not a Republican.  If he were a Republican, of course, he could keep right on running, and probably win.  But he’s not, so he must step down, and he probably should have done it with a bit more alacrity, and his procrastination is quite possibly the most damning evidence of his guilt.  He’s not acting like a guy who is hurt by a false accusation; he’s acting like a white guy that you likely didn’t want to be alone with in a bar even before he was caught doing something really horrible.  So he’ll exit the race, and we’ll get ... shit, I dunno, we’ll get someone else, and maybe they’ll be good, or maybe they won’t, and maybe we’ll end up losing the opportunity to replace one of the least useful Senatorial incumbents (and that’s saying something!), who was also possibly the most vulnerable.  Or maybe it’ll all work out anyway.  That doesn’t matter.

I think what matters is, this guy was a flawed human being, a person who, at the end of the day, we can’t possibly vote for, but that doesn’t change the fact he said some things which were pretty amazing. I talked about him a number of times in these reports—week 31, week 54, week 66, week 67, and week 69—and I even called him an “excellent candidate.”  I have no problem admitting I was wrong (there was, obviously, information that I was lacking).  But that doesn’t change the substance of what he was saying.  That substance is what the people of Maine were voting for, and I certainly hope that whoever replaces him will have the same substance.  What worries me is that people already seem to be trying to learn the wrong lesson from this.  You know how Hollywood works?  There’s a surprise hit, and all of a sudden every movie is a copycat of that one, until we’re all sick of the movies, and finally someone has the balls to make something different, and it becomes a huge new hit, and the lesson that the Hollywood execs learn is: start making rip-offs of the new movie.  Likewise, part of the vetting of Platner was this theory that here is a person who has made some mistakes, but that’s fine: he’s owned up to them, apologized for them, is comfortable talking about them.  That shouldn’t preclude him from ever being able to run for anything, because, if it did, only perfect people would be able to run for office, and those don’t exist.  And now everyone is rushing to learn the “lesson” that we shouldn’t try to run candidates that have problems.  I think this is a remarkably foolish lesson.  I think a better one would be, try harder to find the problems that all candidates, inevitably, have, and then see if any of them are things that are unforgiveable, like it is in Platner’s case.  But let’s don’t demand perfection: that’s a recipe for disappointment.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Nine months before the first Doom Report, I wrote a short post about the concept of ”vibecession”.  And, regularly throughout the series, I’ve revisited the topic whenever some experts seemed to agree with my theories: from week -9 to week 14 to week 26.  This week Some More News has the best explainer I’ve seen about why the economy feels so terrible even when the traditional numbers seem to be saying we’re all doing great.

On the Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews special prosecutor Jack Smith (a.k.a. “the deranged Jack Smith”, as Trump is wont to call him), and former Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who had the job before being replaced by very normal person Kash Patel.  The most inspiring thing about these interviews is how utterly ordinary these people are.  They’re hardly deranged at all.  These are men who believe in the law, and aren’t interested in all the political shenanigans that are being foisted on them, and the stories they tell are in many ways heartbreaking: agents persecuted for things they cannot control, pushed into leaving jobs they love because they refuse to bend the rules, cowed into not prosecuting cases for fear of angering the higher powers.

So where is the note of hope?  It is, quite simply, that, despite all those things, those people still want to serve the American public.  The people that have left or been forced out are just biding their time, waiting for this weird political moment to be over so they can rejoin the government agencies that have spat on them, because that’s just how dedicated they are.  And, to cap it all off, Brian tells this story:

Brian: ... so I was riding to work.  Um, and I was going the speed limit: I promise.  It was 50 miles an hour.  Two-way ... street.  Hit a deer.  I had no time, nowhere to go.  And so, at 50 miles hour, I took a short flight and a longer slide and tumble.
Jon: Wow.
Brian: Bike is fine, importantly for me and my my mindset.  Um, but I’m fine, too.
Jon: All right.  Deer—deer is okay (important to me)?
Brian: I don’t—it, surprisingly, ran off: I never saw it again. ...  Um so, but what happened next after I realized that I was okay?  I stood up, and traffic stopped, on both sides of the street, and everybody emptied those cars—it was rush hour in the morning.  The first person to me was an African-American female in her 50s, let’s say.  Second person, young blonde woman in scrubs.  The third, fourth, fifth people were in the car that would have killed me if I went into oncoming traffic, filled with Hispanic laborers.  None of them asked who I voted for, ... my sexual orientation, my religion: they didn’t even ask my name.  All they saw was a dude in America who needed help and they helped me.  And that in that moment—and every moment in the last week and a half—has kind of like cleared the fog for me as far as all of the things I consume responsibly, and I think it is on those consumers—it’s on the communicators as well, in the organizations you talked about, and it’s on us—but it’s also on the consumers to be responsible and don’t just believe the first headline that you see, but read diversely, broadly, and don’t just get sucked in to what the algorithm is telling you how to think.
Jon: Brother: preach—preach.

Preach indeed.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Sunday, July 5, 2026

Doom Report (Week 76: Happy Birthday, America)


This week the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on birthright citizenship.

And this is a good thing: don’t get me wrong.  But to imagine that we should be praising the Supreme Court for one ruling when their other rulings are doing such damage is ludicrous.  Even on the same day as birthright citizenship, they upheld a ban on trans athletes and struck down a major campaign financing limitation.  Not to mention the other insanities they’ve engaged in throughout the term, such as overturning the precedent that safeguarded independent agencies (well, except for the one that controls their retirement accounts), and gutting the Voting Rights Act (the latter of which I covered three weeks in a row).

And many have been reporting that the decision was 6 – 3.  In fact, the decision that the Constitution guaranteed birthright citizenship was only 5 – 4.  As Melissa Murray of Strict Scrutiny said in their emergency episode:

... this decision means that five people—five fucking people—on the Supreme Court decided that the proposition that the Constitution says what it says is actually meaningful.  That’s it.  Just five people.  Five to four.  We are literally doing constitutional law by a single vote.

As for why that should disturb you, Leah Litman puts it this way a bit later in the video:

So reactions to it being 5 – 4: in my view it should be an absolute scandal.  Rarely does the court do something that surprises me.  I thought, 7 – 2, maybe 6 – 3, and OMG it is 5 – 4.  And that is obviously an invitation to just try it again.

For more good explanations into why this “victory” is still very concerning, including some great analyses of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s excellent response to Clarence Thomas’ insane dissent, try Jamelle Bouie’s Takes™ or Cristian Farias reporting for Legal Eagle.

Other things you need to know this week:

In the realm of hope, I will point you to Mamdani’s Fourth of July speech, to demonstrate the promise of Democratic Socialism, and also to Adam Kinzinger’s Fourth of July reflections, to demonstrate that even some conservatives know the score.  And, from Bernie Sanders, a breakdown of our current political moment, that actually made me feel hopeful for a change.

A happy Independence Day, to my fellow Americans, and a plea to all the rest: we’re not all as dumb, and/or greedy, and/or racist, as the loudest among us are.  Promise.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Sunday, June 28, 2026

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


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

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

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

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

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

Other things you need to know this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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









Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Sunday, June 21, 2026

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


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

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

Other things you need to know this week:

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

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

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









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Sunday, June 14, 2026

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


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

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

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

Other things you need to know this week:

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

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

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

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

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

You, of course, can do what you like.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Sunday, June 7, 2026

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


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

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

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

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

Other things you need to know this week:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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









Posted by at No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)