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.)

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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 Thursday’s “Closer Look,” Seth Meyers notes that even Fox “News” seems frustrated with the Iran ceasfire edging.

• More Perfect Union took AOC to talk to conservative voters.  You can see them realizing in real time that she’s not what they’ve been told she is.  Go figure.

• Robert Reich has a short video this week on our current doomloop of Presidential elections.  It’s an accurate, succinct description of our situation ... and how to fix it.

• 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.

• Meanwhile, on this week’s Some More News, Cody and crew talk about “What Happens When MAGA Is Confronted With Reality” (hint: it does not go well).

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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.

Doom Report (Week 71: A Dream You Dream Together)

Salesmen are the biggest suckers in the world.

You wouldn’t think that.  You would think that salesmen are the people who do the suckering, and therefore they would know all the tricks and see them coming a mile away.  You would think that.  You would be wrong.  Speaking as someone who’s spent a bunch of time in corporate America, and even ran my own business for a while, I have spent a lot of time with a lot of salesmen, and one of the most curious things about them is that they will buy just about anything.  From practically anyone.  If there were some sort of study that ranked different types of people by percentage of deals in which they got scammed, salesmen would certainly be at the top of the graph.

And of course I’ve noted that Trump is just a particularly sleazy salesman in these Doom Reports before ... over and over again, even (and even, once, pre-Doom-Reports altogether).  There are a lot of tells for this, if the hawking of steaks and bibles and gold sneakers wasn’t already a dead giveaway.  See, salesmen have these tricks that they rely on, and, if you’re unlikely to to run into the same customer twice, that’s fine.  But when what you successfully conned people into buying was your election to the presidency, then everyone gets to see you do the same tired tricks, over and over.  And one of Trump’s all-time favorites is promising that something will be ready in “two weeks.”  Have you ever noticed that whatever Trump is talking about—health care plan, infrastructure week, Epstein files, end to the Iran war—no matter what it is, it’ll totally be done in two weeks.  Two weeks is kind of the perfect time: it’s short enough that people will say, “oh, sure, we can wait two weeks,” but long enough that people will likely forget about it before the deadline actually arrives.  So Trump uses it ... a lot.

This week, Trump used it again.  In this interview (covered by Brian Tyler Cohen), he says:

... if we didn’t hit that with the B2 bombers, Iran would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks from that date because they were ready to go.

Now, BTC is primarily focussed on the fact that this is Trump’s answer to “why don’t you see any urgency in trying to bring down gas prices?”  But I wondered something else.  Where did Trump get this “two weeks” from?  I mean, maybe he made it up entirely: that certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him.  But, if he did actually get it from somewhere, where did it come from?  Not from his own government intelligence sources.  But, in February, Trump got a visit from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  And we know for a fact that Netanyahu has been saying that Iran will have a nuclear weapon in “a few years,” “a few months,” or “a few weeks” for the past 30 years.  This is a very well known phenomeon: in fact, one article refers to him as “the man who cried bomb”.

So my theory is, Netanyahu used Trump’s favorite trick—it’ll happen in “two weeks”—on him ... and Trump bought it: hook, line, and sinker.  No way to know for sure, of course, but my experience with salesmen tells me it’s all too plausible.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Legal Eagle has another video on Trump’s slush fund for insurrectionists, this time featuring Lawfare reporter Anna Bower.  This is the first time I’ve seen reported that the fund literally says it can only be used for people targeted by “the sustained use of the levers of government power by Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents.”  So people can keep making jokes that all the people illegally targeted by Trump’s DoJ should apply for some of this money, but they can’t do that: the money can’t be used for victims of Republican administrations.

• Adam Kinzinger theorizes on whether Texas could end up electing a Democratic Senator for the first time since 1988.  In fact, should James Talarico beat Ken Paxton—one of the most corrupt politicians of our time not named “Trump”—he’ll be the first Democrat to win any statewide election in Texas since 1994.  For what it’s worth, both Pod Save America and Jamelle Bouie agree with Kinzinger that Talarico has a real shot.  All because Trump decided to meddle in the primary over his dislike of John Cornyn.  Let’s hope it comes back to bite him in the ass.

• Leah Litman from Strict Scrutiny shows up on a breaking-news episode of Runaway Country to talk to Alex Wagner about the DoJ’s pointless case against E. Jean Carroll.  Obviously they have no shot at winning, but, just like their cases against Comey, Jerome Powell, and Letitia James, the harassment is the point.

• Want to know how Elon Musk is rigging the stock market to force you to fund his SpaceX IPO?  Then you should watch the More Perfect Union video that explains it all in moderately easy-to-understand terms.  Chilling.

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Here’s a little bit of lighter news.  As part of Trump’s 250th birthday celebration for America, the “Great American State Fair” was announced this week, with the first round of headliners being country star Martina McBride, “Everybody Dance Now” singers C+C Music Factory, infamous plagiarist Vanilla Ice, infamous lip-syncers Milli Vanilli, “Bust a Move” singer Young MC, true legends from the 70s through the 90s the Commodores, Purple Rain co-stars Morris Day and the Time, rapper Flo Rida, and Poison frontman Bret Michaels.  And, if you’re thinking “whoa ... that’s a whole lotta 90s going on there,” you’re certainly not alone.  On the other hand, if you’re thinking “whoa, I’m kinda surprised some of those people agreed to perform at a Trump venue” ... turns out you’re not alone there either.  Because, it turns out, many of those folks had no idea they were supposed to perform at a Trump venue: some knew they’d hired to perform, but not the details; others say they were never contacted at all.  And so Young MC is out, Day is out, McBride is out, the Commodores are out, Michaels is out, C+C Music Factory appears split on the decision, and, as for Milli Vanilli, the non-lip-syncing singers say they were never in in the first place.  Flo Rida is getting shit from his fans, but so far has not responded with anything other than emojis; Vanilla Ice, meanwhile, has surprised no one by saying he’d play for pretty much anyone—“I’ll go play for Putin and I’ll play in Iran if you want”—which apparently he thinks is a defense.

Meanwhile, Bruce Springsteen and the Foo Fighters have announced the Power to the People festival, where they will be joined by Rage Against the Machine frontman Tom Morello, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Killer Mike, the Dropkick Murphys, and many others.  It’s a few months later than Trump’s bullshit, so one can’t call it proper counter-programming, but the contrast in lineup is striking (and purposeful).  Once again, the MAGA motto of “we don’t need anyone” is proven impotent.  As Yoko Ono once said:

A dream you dream alone is only a dream.  A dream you dream together is reality.

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 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 66: What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? The Shadow Docket)

If you don’t know what the “shadow docket” is, you probably should.  See, sometimes our Supreme Court just issues a ruling: no trial, no arguments, and—most crucially—no explanation.  The most we get is the count of how many justices concurred and how many dissented, and sometimes the dissenters will write up a little “this is bullshit!” screed so that we observers know it’s not us who’s crazy for thinking this entire process is kinda skeezy.  Ostensibly, the purpose of the shadow docket is for emergencies: situations where a full hearing would take too long and the situation needs an immediate decision.  In practice, this particular court often uses it to agree with the Trump regime without having to explain itself.  Better yet, since the media tends to focus on the flashy trials with all the belabored arguments, shadow docket decisions can often fly under the radar.  Just a quick vote among the rightwing nutjob justices, give the mad king what he wants, and move swiftly on to an issue where they can say “no” to Trump (e.g. tariffs, birthright citizenship) and preserve their aura of “independence.”

So I know what it is, but I always thought the shadow docket was this thing that had always been around, and this court was just perverting it for their own sleazy agenda.  But, no: turns out that the shadow docket was, in fact, entirely invented by our very own current Chief Justice, John Roberts.  And, according to a new exposé on the origin of the shadow docket, it was, in fact, invented because Roberts didn’t care for something Obama wanted to do.  Quick! the government is about to favor real people over corporations in this one, very narrow case!  This is an EMERGENCY!

You can get full debriefs on the New York Times story from either Takes by Jamelle Bouie or Strict Scrutiny’s Leah Litman and guest Steve Vladeck (or preferably both), but definitely don’t sleep on this further example of how the rightwing nutjobs are twisting our institutions to their whims.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• On Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart breaks down Trump’s performance in the Iran War.

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• If you heard that Tucker Carlson “apologized” for supporting Trump and you think that maybe you should take that with a grain of salt, you’re not alone.  Listen to a shorter take from Jane Coaston and Tim Miller on What a Day, or get the full diatribe from Katy, Cody, and Jonathan over on Even More News.

• On Mehdi Unfiltered, Mehdi Hasan has a pretty good interview with Maine Senatorial candidate Graham Platner.  Worth a watch, especially if you’re lucky enough to have the chance to vote for him.

• Ben McKenzie is everywhere.  You may recall that I mentioned last week that the actor-turned-economist was on The Weekly Show; well, this week he shows up on The Daily Show for a shorter chat with Michael Kosta and also on Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know, where Hasan has a chat with him that is every bit as informative (and as long) as the Jon Stewart interview, and maybe even a bit more entertaining to boot.

• The Some More News crew republished a highlight from an old episode that breaks down Stephen Miller’s weird origin story.  If you missed it the first time around, you should definitely check it out (and, even if you saw it way back when, it might be worth a refresher).  Dude is a very creepy, very weird, not-quite-human racist of the highest caliber.  Not that high-caliber racism is something to be proud of.  Although Stephen Miller likely would be.

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As I write this, the attempted shooting of Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is too new to have much coverage of it in the channels I frequent.  Brian Tyler Cohen has a pretty decent take on it here, and he notes that the primary fallout seems to be Trump saying, “see? this is why I have to have a ballroom.”  Which ... no.  It’s so inordinately ridiculous that it is (once again, as Mehdi Hasan is fond of saying) a thing that if proposed in the writer’s room of a political comedy—much less a political drama—would be shouted down for being too outrageous to be believed.

Some seem to want to view Trump’s apathy towards the multiple people who want to kill him as a sign of how tough he is, how resilient in the face of opposing odds.  I don’t know, man: I kinda think that when your response to “this person wanted you dead, sir” is “great! now how can I turn this to my advantage?” ... that might be a sign you’ve got some deeper issues.  Like maybe you’re one of those psychopaths who believe that other people don’t actually exist, so obviously you can’t be killed.  Or maybe you’re one of those people who think they’re living in a simulation.  Or maybe it’s just that your pervasive narcissism won’t let you consider anything that doesn’t benefit you.  Whichever way it is, it doesn’t seem like it’s something we should be admiring.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about the attempted shooting next week.  In the meantime, if you want to feel relieved that our country has not yet succumbed to political violence at the highest level, that’s a laudable emotion to cultivate.  And, if you also want to allow yourself a brief moment to think that these half-assed morons trying to kill our president need to get a bit more competent ... well, I won’t tell anyone.

Doom Report (Week 64: Most Vagy Soha! Now or Never!)

Remember in week 58 when I talked about the Gorton and Denton by-election in the UK?  Well, Garys Economics is back from hiatus, with a deeper dive into the impact of this Green Party win.  And he covers why this one little election is both meaningless and explosive, because it’s a thing that, in his words, should have been impossible.  Now, I don’t agree with him entirely—for instance, note that he keeps on insisting that the British system has been designed for 250 years to force elections into the shape of two-horse races, but he never mentions that one of the parties he’s considering to be one of those horses didn’t even exist 10 years ago, which pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of that theory.  Plus, I find his desperate pleas to Labour (who are, in my consistent analogy of US to UK politics, the equivalent of the corporate Democrats) somewhat amusing.  Remember, Gary isn’t really a member of Labour in the same way that BTC or the Pod Save America guys actually are Democrats: he just wants his ideas to win, and he thinks Labour is his best chance of achieving that goal.  But his description of how the Greens were able to capitalize on the failures of Labour are pretty inspirational: if Reform can replace the Conservatives in the same way that MAGA took over the Republican party, then maybe the Greens threatening Labour is a sign that progressive Democrats have a chance of taking over the Democratic party.

Worth considering, in any event.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• If you need to understand why the Supreme Court isn’t being “reasonable” when it seems poised to hand Trump a defeat on birthright citizenship, the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, as always have you covered.  Plus, a lot of glee over Bondi’s firing, which is always fun to listen to.

• Meanwhile, over on Legal Eagle, Chaos Lawyer Liz Dye gives you even more reporting on Bondi’s ouster (shorter, but with just as much glee), while Spencer the Scowl Owl breaks down whether threatening a genocide is legal (spoiler: it is not).

• Adam Kinzinger gives us a really concise breakdown of the stunning corruption of the Trump regime.  You probably know most of this already, but it’s a good refresher.

• Even More News had a pretty great Friday episode, with Dr. Kaveh Hoda (who happens to be of Persian descent) talking about our demented President’s actions in Iran.

• Wondering how California’s proposed “billionaire tax” would work?  Let Robert Reich explain it to you.

• Christopher Titus reports on Bruce Springsteen’s tour and how the Boss may be our greatest American hero right now.

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Often I write these reports on Saturday for posting the next day, so, if good news shows up on Sunday, you’ll never hear it from me: it arrived too late.  But, occasionally, I don’t get around to the writing till Sunday, and, even more occasionally, that happens to align with the arrival of some hope.  Today is one of those rare Sundays.

Today, Viktor Orbán lost re-election in Hungary.  And not by a little: in Hungary’s 199-seat Parliament, Orbán’s party is likely to retain only 55.  This was a blowout.  And maybe that portends something for our own situation.  Because there’s a very good reason that I’ve mentioned Orbán multiple times in these Reports (weeks 5 and 31 in particular): Hungary has been the template for how to do a rightwing takeover of a liberal democracy.  We share some of the same political consultants with them, even.  Hell, JD Vance even visited Budapest to urge Hungarian voters to support the now-defeated would-be dictator.  Could it be that Vance and the rest of the Trump regime are scared of what this defeat might mean for them?  Brian Tyler Cohen and Ben Rhodes (cohost of Pod Save the World) seem to think so.  They posit that Hungary will, perhaps, follow the example of Brazil and start holding some people accountable, and then that will, perhaps, be an inspiration to the Democrats, should they ever get their shit together sufficiently to win another Presidential election.  This may all be wishcasting, of course—and I continue to believe that the Democrats are a poor, poor substitute for the political party that we actually deserve—but it’s a pretty fantasy, and at least the first step in that long road has been taken.  That’s worth celebrating, I’d say.

Doom Report (Week 62: A Twelve-Year-Old with a Phone)

This week, Trump set an ironclad deadline of 48 hours for Iran to stop restricting ships from the Strait of Hormuz (presumably he meant US ships, since Iran isn’t restricting anyone else).  About 40 hours later, he came out to say “I’ve actually been talking to a top guy in Iran—I don’t want to tell you who he is; he lives in Canada, you wouldn’t know him—and now I’ve extended the deadline.  The new deadline is right after the stock market closes on Friday.”

Just another TACO Tuesday.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Best coverage of the ICE-at-the-airports debacle is coming from The Daily Show.  From the guy who stood in line for 9 hours to the best response ever to the possibility of missing a flight, Jon and Josh have you covered this week.

• Legal Eagle is having another great week.  Anna Bower covers the insanity that is the DOGE bros deposition footage.  Then, Liz Dye breaks down the even more insane, utterly brilliant saga of the NJ “triumvirate”.  It’s brilliant because of the one NJ federal judge who got so fed up with their bullshit that he became an absolute rockstar by having one lippy government lawyer forcibly removed.  When you get to the part in the video where Judge Quraishi tells the laywer, Mr. Coyne, that he’s not allowed to speak, freeze frame it on the court doc.  Liz doesn’t read this part, but you can:  Coyne: “I would ask —”  Court: “No.”  Coyne: ”— that the Court allow me to speak.”  Court: “Nope.”  Fucking. Rockstar.

• I don’t often link to the Armageddon Update, because you have to be in the right mood for Christopher Titus’s particular brand of pissed off (and often offensive) takes on things.  But this week’s is not to be missed.  He’s literally the only  source (among those that I regularly watch) to point out that apparently, our country is now insolvent.

• Adam Kinzinger has a short video with a trenchant take on the corruption in the prediction markets.  A billion and a half in one trade ... I’m sure it was totally legit.

• Last week we got the legal take on the Afroman defamation case.  This week we get Josh Johnson’s take.  Very different perspective; just as funny.

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This week on The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Alastair Campbell, a British journalist and former speechwriter for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.  His podcast with fellow Brit Rory Stewart (who was also interviewed on this show back in week 14) is a bit like Pod Save America, but if one of the Obama guys had, instead of starting a podcast with 2 or 3 other Obama guys, chosen a Bush guy for contrast.  It’s a good interview, and you should totally watch it, but, as is often the case, the good stuff happens after the interview is over and Jon is talking to his producers Lauren Walker, Brittany Mehmedovic, and Gillian Spears.  Here they reference a point that Alistair made where he claimed that (Canadian Prime Minister) Mark Carney is now receiving more phone calls from Trump than he’s making:

Gillian: It was interesting what he said about Carney, too, which is that—I mean, whether or not it’s true—that Trump has been calling him more than he’s been calling Trump since he showed a little bit of courage.  And, I don’t know, it’s kind of similar to what you said about Kaitlan Collins once, which is that maybe he kind of has respect for people that push back a bit.
Brittany: Mamdani.
Lauren: Exactly.
Jon: Yeah.  That’s exactly right.  Those are three very good examples.  And I do think that there is some of that.  And I can believe it because Donald Trump is, if nothing else, a 12-year-old with a phone.

And I thought to myself at this point: there’s something to that ...  But I would say it’s more like the mean girl in high school who has utter disdain for her sycophants, but anyone who doesn’t give a shit whether or not she likes them must be so cool she just has to get to know them.  And you might think, that’s a pretty shallow take on the guy who is currently running our country, to which I would respond ... well, yeah.  Obviously.  Welcome to the presidential cabinet of Heathers.  Now we’re just waiting for our Veronica to arrive.  How very.

Doom Report (Week 61: A Worthless Pile of Shit)

You know, when I described the conversation that started these Doom Reports, the one where my friend explained all the reasons why “some” people would have voted for Trump, I never mentioned the whole going-to-war thing.  That’s because that post was primarily me trying to detail all the things my friend said that I thought were wrong ... and, when my friend said that Trump would keep us out of wars in the Middle East where Kamala wouldn’t, I actually thought he was right.  I mean, I had some hope that Kamala would be better on Palestine than Biden had been, but I was under no illusion that she was anything more than an establishment Democrat: a younger one than most, perhaps; one with a more fiery disposition and more apt to want to shake up things than most, perhaps; and not an old white man, like most, which can actually go a long way towards making a difference.  But, still: an establishment Democrat, and, at the end of the day, establishment Democrats always side with Israel.  Whereas, based on Trump’s first term, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to invade places even when the opportunity presented itself; plus there was all that rhetoric about being the peace president, etc etc.  Not that I believe anything that comes out Trump’s mouth, for the most part ... still, even the most prolific liars tell the truth sometimes, and this seemed like it might be the one thing he was actually sincere about.

More fool me.

So far, 13 American service members have died because the last person to speak to Trump that particular day, apparently, was Lindsey Graham.  And, since Trump always does whatever the last person in the room suggests to him was his own brilliant idea, and since the only two things that seem to excite Graham are putting ultra-conservatives on the Supreme Court and killing people in the Middle East, we’re now at war in Iran.  Or, excuse me: we’re at excursion.  Many people theorize that Trump just misheard the word “incursion” and no one around him is brave enough to correct him.  This makes sense—they’re all such chickenshits that they’re wearing the wrong size shoes (and note that Graham is also on that list).  But Graham is positively giddy with warmonger-fever, and he’s echoing Trump’s threats (or Trump is echoing his) that Iran is only the beginning.  Well, I suppose Venezuela was the beginning, not even counting all the places he bombed that didn’t rise to the level of being news enough for us to notice.  Point being, Cuba is apparently up next, and who knows if he’ll even stop there?  Good thing we didn’t elect the hysterical woman, eh?

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Other things you need to know this week:

• On Legal Eagle, Spencer the Scowl Owl breaks down the Afroman defamation case.  You may have not have heard of this case yet, but, trust me: you need to.  It’s priceless.

• Adam Kinzinger reacts to Trump’s reaction to the death of Robert Mueller.  As they used to say on Fat Albert, Trump is like a school in the summertime: no class.

• Kat Abughazaleh lost her primary, though she came second by only about 3 points.  It’s disappointing, but Kat outlines all the reasons she still considers this a victory.

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If you haven’t seen the viral clip of the Pennsylvania Trump voter’s current opinion of her candidate, you have to watch it.  Once you’re done with that clip, you can back up and watch the whole Closer Look segment if you like—it’s a pretty good one—but that clip is required viewing.  Seth responds “you know what, ma’am? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you’re actually a hero, and we should all take a page from you” and he’s absolutely right.  This woman, and all the people like her—and I sincerely hope my friend is among them—are what is giving me hope this week.  Because, to quote Piglet, sometimes things seem like really good ideas and aren’t.  And people figuring that out is worth celebrating.

Doom Report (Week 60: He Wishes They Had More?)

This week, our moron-in-chief tried to claim that Iran somehow got some of our Tomahawk missiles and then used one of them to bomb themselves.  This somewhat implausible story came in this speech, wherein he was attempting to deflect the accusation that we bombed a girls’ school in Iran.  Specifically, he said:

Well, I haven’t seen it and I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around is used by, you know, is sold and used by other countries.  You know that.  And whether it’s Iran, who also has some Tomahawks, they wish they had more, but, uh, whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk, a Tomahawk is very generic.  It’s sold to other countries, but that’s being investigated right now.

Oh, they’re very generic, are they?  Well, I suppose that, except for the part where they’re only manufactured in the US at a cost of $2.5 million and can only be sold to foreign countries through a complicated legal process ... yeah, super generic.  If you want reactions to this speech, you could have the “Armageddon Update” one (short but crude), or the Have I Got News for Your Ears one (longer, but ... well, honestly, still kinda crude).

The funny part is, when I first heard this part of his speech, I thought he’d said ”... Iran, who also has some Tomahawks, I wish they had more ...”  Which would have been insane.  But I didn’t question it.  The man is so dementia-coded at this point that it’s hard to try and make sense of anything he says any more, so you can pretty much believe he’d say anything.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Legal Eagle had two great videos this week from their military legal expert, Spencer the Scowl Owl.  The first was an excellent take on the illegality of the war in general, and the second was on the possibility that our bombing of that girls’ school may have been a war crime (answer: it’s complicated).

• On Runaway Country, Alex Wagner interviews Stephanie Ruhle, who provides a good breakdown of the DoD/Anthropic battle.  I thought it was a very balanced take.

• Kat Abughazaleh turns all the attack money coming in from AIPAC into a stand-up routine.  I hope she wins this thing—she has certainly fought the good fight.

• On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse interview E. Jean Carroll.  Reich fawns over her a bit, but she really is quite remarkable in her ability to handle what happened to her and turn it into victory.

• Normally, when I talk about the Some More News crew, I’m pointing you at Even More News, their twice-weekly show covering current events (it used to be only once per week, but then, you know: Trump).  Their main show, however, is more of a deep dive into a particular topic (similar to what John Oliver does on This Week Tonight).  This week’s Some More News is a profile on Laura Loomer.  And it explains so very, very much.

• Another pretty decent week in review from Adam Kinzinger.  He’s still way more hawkish on the war than I’m comfortable with, but at least he recognizes how moronic it was that Trump never bothered to convince the American people that it was a good idea.

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And that’s where I’ll hang my hope this week.  Fun fact: this is the only war (since we started tracking such things) where a majority of the American public didn’t support the war at the beginning of it.  Even Vietnam, apparently, was at least somewhat popular when we first went in.  But not this one.  Because even when Trump tries the wag the dog strategy, he still can’t help but fuck it up.  As many people have said (including Elie Mystal, W. Kamau Bell, and Jamelle Bouie), our one saving grace is that we have incompetent fascists.  If we were being run by competent fascists, we’d be toast by now.

Doom Report (Week 59: Introducing: the Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas)

This week, Kristi Noem got fired ... or at least shunted off to an imaginary job that never existed before she got booted from Homeland Security.  Many people seem happy about this, but I agreed with Luke Burbank, who was a guest on this week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me; when host Peter noted that people at DHS were rejoicing that Noem was no longer their boss, Luke replied “I mean, they’re not replacing her with Obama—just as a heads up.”

No, sadly, they are in fact replacing her with senator Markwayne Mullin—you know, the guy who said “this is war!” and then a minute later said “We haven’t declared war!” and then finally had to admit that “okay, well, that was a misspoke.”  So, a veritable brain giant.  The press has taken advantage of this opportunity (again) to note that Markwayne’s first name is just two regular names jammed together, making clever remarks like “maybe Mark thinks this is war but Wayne is like ‘nuh-unh’.”  I feel comfortable saying this is an easy joke to make just based on the number of times I heard it this week.  Personally, I think if my name were “Markwayne,” I would pronounce it “Mar-kwayne” and claim it was of African origin.  I suspect Mullin is racist enough to be offended if anyone were to call him that.  Shame, really: it might elevate him from Oklahoma redneck to worldly sophisticate.  At least until he opened his mouth.

On Strict Scrutiny this week, Leah Litman interviews international law expert Rebecca Ingber to talk about all the ways Trump is breaking international law with his war in Iran (spoiler: it’s a lot).  The quote that struck me this time around was when Leah said this:

And this is all after we were assured the manosphere’s opposition to Kamala Harris wasn’t about misogyny or misogynoir, but just about how men didn’t want to go off and fight reckless wars.  And the manosphere was obsessed with this idea that Kamala Harris would send us into wars and Trump wouldn’t.  That was part of many people’s cover stories; I mean, JD Vance had an op-ed in 2023 that said Trump’s best foreign policy: not starting any wars.  And it was transparent bullshit and utter misogyny that got us here, to an attack that includes an air strike on a girls’ school that reportedly killed 85 students.  That misogyny helped bring to power a president who literally launched a military strike against a girls’ school.  And that is one of the images that, at least to me, will be most associated with these attacks.  And the violence and depravity related to and resulting from the misogyny was just very hard for me to miss in the first 24 or so hours of this entire thing.

Note that there are many different estimates floating around of how many elementary school girls we killed.  85 is the lowest one I’ve heard.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Colbert had an excellent summary of the war situation.

• On this week’s Coffee Klatch, returning guest W. Kamau Bell stepped in for Heather Lofthouse.  Always worth a watch when Kamau shows up.

• On Zeteo’s Mehdi Unfiltered segment, Mehdi Hasan interviewed David Hogg, Parkland school shooting survivor and founder of Leaders We Deserve (you may recall I talked about him a bit two weeks ago).  Here, he goes into even more detail on how the current Democratic party is not meeting the moment, and, in his opinion, how it needs to change to do so.

• I first heard about the incident at the BAFTAs where someone shouted the N-word at Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan on Pod Save the UK, but it took Josh Johnson to really put it into context in his new Daily Show segment “In Too Deep.”  The person who shouted it has Tourette’s, causing many people to view this as a case of diversity vs neurodivergence.  But watch Josh’s excellent summary to find out why it’s much more than that.

• I almost skipped Adam Kinzinger’s week in review (again) this week, as I didn’t find it quite as incisive as usual.  Remember that not only is Kinzinger a conservative, but he’s also a veteran (as his standard intro notes, he was an Air Force pilot for nearly twice as long as he served in Congress), and he tends to be much more hawkish on military matters than I typically go for.  But I still think it’s important to highlight diverse opinions, and this one wasn’t terrible, so here you go.

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What with World War III looming, and efforts to cheat at the midterms ramping up, hope is hard to come by this week (again).  Let’s take Cristian Farias’s Legal Eagle video on ICE getting repeatedly slapped down in court as perhaps the best we can do.  Even though the Supreme Court’s decision to ban nationwide injunctions has turned ICE’s illegal deportations into a court-choking legal armageddon, Cristian underscores some of the best work from our federal judges.  He opens the video with a litany of scathing opinions from the judicial system:

“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt—again and again and again—to force the United States government to comply with court orders.  One way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.”

“The laws of decency condemn such villainy.”

“The undersigned will not sit idly by and allow this intentional misconduct to go on.  It ends today!”

“The court will not allow those who relied on this Nation’s promise of safety to be met instead with handcuffs!”

And that’s just a small sample.  These are federal judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Donald Trump.  And they are fed up with the Trump administration.

Sometimes it’s hard to be satisfied with small victories when there are so many issues that are so much bigger, and they’re all going very badly.  But sometimes small victories is all you have.

Doom Report (Week 55: Mountainish Inhumanity)

This week a lot of the focus has been on the latest release of the Epstein files:

• Christopher Titus has perhaps the best summary of the disgustingness.

• Seth Meyers has a “Closer Look” segment that covers this as well as a few other tidbits that this tried to push out of the news cycle.

• Even More News covers Elon Musk bragging about how he could be a much better pedophile than Epstein if he wanted to.

• Have I Got News For You explores some of the many names revealed in the files.

• Katie Phang wonders if the reason Paul Weiss was the first big law firm to cave to Trump was because their chairman was in the Epstein files.  Seems plausible.

Over in other countries, politicians are being held accountable.  Not so much here.  Here, Trump says that the 3 million documents released so far totally exonerate him, despite his being mentioned thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times.  And his minions wander around saying that he’s answered enough questions about Epstein, while all the answers he gives are just that people need to move on and journalists need to smile more.  And I know that many are focussing on the rank misogyny in this comment, and that’s a fair thing to focus on, but I wish more people would ask what kind of psychopath smiles while asking questions about underage victims of rape and abuse?

And there are still 3 million more documents to come.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Stephen Colbert talks to “Melania Trump” about her new movie opening.  Laura Benanti’s Melania impression is one of the most brilliant bits of personification I’ve ever seen, and this piece is one of her best.  There are at least 3 times during this 7 minutes that I laughed out loud at disturbing volumes.  Laura nails the insouciance, the apathy, and the casual disdain for Trump along with the whole rest of the world.  Melania is often seen as a somehow sympathetic figure, as if she’s being held hostage or something.  But, as Josh Johnson noted this week, she’s a grown-ass woman who both seems to hate Trump as much as we do and also is fully in it for the money just as much as he is ($28 million of the documentary’s $40m price tag went straight into her pocket).  Two things can be true.

• Sir Ian McKellen was on Colbert this week, and he did an insanely amazing (and amazingly topical) speech from Shakespeare that somehow captures our current zeitgeist perfectly.

• Why do I keep on pointing you at Adam Kingzinger’s week in review even though he’s a conservative and I disagree with him at least once in every appearance he’s ever done?  Because he’s smart and articulate, because knowing that even conservatives are not okay with the current regime helps keep us sane, and because it’s crucial to remember that, no matter how much they try to frame it so, this is not a debate of Democrats vs Republicans.  This is Democrats and Republicans—and independents, and libertarians, and progressives—vs crazy MAGA rightwing nutjobs.

• I’m surprised we didn’t get more coverage about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that MAGA was “all a lie.”  I suppose that’s Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy showing some successes.  But Jane Coaston over on What a Day has you covered.

• The arrest of Don Lemon should also probably not be overlooked.  Legal Eagle’s Devin Stone has a pretty great summary.

• Also over on Legal Eagle, chaos lawyer Liz Dye tells us how Project 2026 will be even worse, and then Cristian Farias recaps the story of the 5-year-old kidnapped by ICE.

• Best coverage of Trump’s über-racist tweet was probably from Pod Save America.  Although they were much kinder to Tim Scott’s response than fellow Republican Adam Kinzinger was.

• Tired of hearing Trump blather on about the “8 wars” he’s stopped?  Strict Scrutiny gets Tommy Vietor to break down the bullshit for you.

• There was a bit of coverage of the regime’s ridiculous “coal mascot”; wanna know why coal is never coming back?  Hank Green has you covered in his aptly titled video “Coal Is Extremely Dumb”.

• In today’s “let’s be educated” segment, Pod Save the UK interviews economist Ann Pettifor, and this little old lady spits fire about how the US fixed the world economy in the FDR era and then fucked it all up again in the Nixon era.  Well worth watching even if you’re only a casual student of economics.

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If you didn’t listen to that Ian McKellen speech I linked above, first of all, what’s wrong with you?  It’s a brilliant performance, even impromptu as it was.  It’s a speech about “strangers,” which is Elizabethan-speak for foreigners—immigrants.  In the scene, Sir Thomas More (lawyer, judge, philosopher) is trying to calm a mob who are ready to drive out the strangers from their country, at the point of a knife if necessary.  At one point, he asks them: should you succeed, what would that get you?

What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Or, to sum up: violence breeds violence.  What you give out will surely come back to you.

More continues the metaphor.  What if you were evicted from your country, and you found yourself in a foreign land, now yourself the stranger, now yourself chased by an angry mob ...

That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

“Mountainish inhumanity” seems like a pretty good description of the Trump regime.  And, you know, when Shakespeare himself is calling you out, using the voice of Gandalf, that might be a pretty convincing sign that you’re on the wrong side of history.

Doom Report (Week 53: What if the answer isn't to run faster?)

On this week’s final Daily Show episode of the week, Josh Johnson discusses some of Trump’s campaign promises, and how he seems to have kept them all ... but only if he was talking to himself and not to the American public.  The most stunning one was how he promised everyone that his administration would make them rich.  Whereas, in reality, he’s managed to enrich himself to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars.  Billion.  With a “B.”  That’s over 18 thousand times the average annual salary of Americans that live in my state; it’s closer to 30 thousand times the average salary of Americans in Mississippi, which happens to have the lowest average salary in the country.  Now, on the one hand, that’s nothing compared to how much Elon Musk made in 2025.  But Musk’s “job” is billionaire, so that’s what you’d expect.  Trump’s job—ostensibly—is to be our president.  Traditionally, we haven’t thought of that as a get-rich-quick scheme.  But leave it to Trump to change those expectations.

The real story, of course, is the shooting of a second bystander in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti.  The absolute best coverage of this, in my opinion, was from an unexpected quarter: Legal Eagle has a video from just earlier today where Devin breaks down while breaking down the incident.  Powerful, emotional, and excellent legal perspective.  Journalist Jamelle Bouie also has an excellent summary (including some historical context) on his new “Takes” series.  Much like the shooting of Renee Good, I’m sure you’ve seen the video by now: it’s everywhere on the Internet.  Pretti is the fifth person shot and killed by ICE agents while observing or fleeing from them.  He is the second white person, and, unlike Renee Good, the die-hard MAGA supporters can’t even claim lesbianinsm or “pronouns in her bio!” as justifications for the murder.  He was a VA hospital intensive care nurse, which has had the adminstration really scrambling to figure out how to make him out to be the bad guy.  The only thing they’ve been able to settle on is that he was carrying a concealed weapon, but this is even more problematic for them that in the Renee Good case: he had a permit for the weapon, and he never unholstered it.  And the MAGA base are Second Amendment fanatics: being able to be armed in order to protect yourself from being attacked by tyrannical govermnent overreach is what they fucking live for.  So this is a death that has even the NRA on the side of the victim, and maybe that finally signals some changes on the horizon.  It’s disgusting to me that it’s only once the white people starting getting killed that anyone payed any attention, but that’s the country we live in, so maybe it will finally make a difference.  But let’s not also forget the 3 people killed by ICE last year: Silverio Villegas González and another Mexican immigrant whose name was never even released, and Keith Porter, a black man shot on New Year’s Eve.  As Devin says: “they’ll come for the best of us, but ... we can fight back.”

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Speaking of Jamelle Bouie’s “Takes”: he had one on the Insurrection Act, and one on why we need to treat ICE the same way we we treated the KKK..

• Jon Stewart’s episode of The Daily Show this week gives us a very moving assessment of our current situation.

• Another good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Let’s also not forget that this week was the Davos debacle, where Trump told German-speaking Swiss onlookers that if it wasn’t for the United States they’d all be speaking German now, and also called Greenland “Iceland” about 4 times in a row.  Seth Meyers has a pretty good summary in his first Closer Look on the topic.  He followed that up with second Closer Look later in the week, where he notes that, after all that bluster, we now appear to have “made a deal” which is exactly the same deal we had before all the insanity started.  But, seeing as how that’s exactly what he did with China and Canada and Mexico, I’m not sure why we should be surprised.

• Owen Jones also covered Davos, including Candian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s incredible speech declaring the end of American hegemony.

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Over in the UK, the Greens are now the third largest party in the country, beating the Conservatives (a.k.a. the Tories), who used to be one of the two largest parties by a large margin.  But the Greens are on the way up and the Tories are on the way down, and they apparently just passed each other.  Now, before progressives get too excited, the Reform party (that’s the one that’s even farther right than the Tories) has become number one, so it’s not like it’s progressive utopia over there.  But (as I’ve said before), if Labour is the Democrats and the Conservatives are the Republicans, then Reform is the MAGA movement: it’s just that they can actually have a separate party over there rather than having to hollow out the Repubs/Tories from the inside out.  So the UK is lagging a bit behind us, but they’re well on their way to getting there.

Except ... what the UK has that we don’t, apparently, is a corresponding movement on the progressive side.  And their new(ish) leader, Zack Polanski—who I talked about back in week 39—is a dynamic, interesting figure who has the charisma of an AOC or a Mamdani, but has the infrastructure of a whole party behind him.  They just released a new ad (what they call a “political broadcast” across the pond), and it’s stunningly good.  Seriously; go watch it.  It’s under 3 minutes long, and it’s all the hope I’ve got for you this week.

Doom Report (Week 50: Beginning a New Era?)

So I guess we’re at war with Venezuela now?  Kat Abugazaleh gives us the full progressive take on the situation, while Adam Kinzinger gives a more conservative position, supporting the military for a job well done while wondering WTF the regime is trying to accomplish.  I tend to lean more towards Kat than Adam, personally, though I will concede that Maduro was a terrible person who certainly didn’t deserve his position.  But, as even Kinzinger wonders, will Trump install the properly elected president of Venezuela? or will he just take over the government and rape it for all the oil he can get away with before his term is up?  I suppose we’ll find out ... though I suspect we could make a pretty good guess right now.  (Also, between writing this and posting it, I think we already found out.  Sigh.)

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another good crop of videos this week: the one I linked above, why Russia isn’t winning the war in Ukraine (despite what Putin would have Trump believe), and, as always, the week in review.

• Christopher Titus gives us a year-end update, with his usual panache and venom.

I plan to do a proper look back on the horrors of Trump’s first year at some point, but of course the year isn’t quite over yet: that’ll come in about 2 weeks.  So perhaps I’ll have time to put something together in that time.  In the meantime, something good actually happened this week too: while most of New York was celebrating the ball drop in Times Square, Zohran Mamdani was being sworn in as the city’s first Muslim mayor, youngest in nearly a century, and possibly the most progressive since Fiorello La Guardia was elected in 1934.  If you haven’t already, listen to his inauguration speech.  His opening words: “My fellow New Yorkers, today begins a new era.”  And I think we could all use a little of that action.

Doom Report (Week 49: Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000?)

During the holiday season, many people like to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.  I don’t care for it personally—too sappy for my tastes—but I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum.  Although I’d like to note that critics at the time agreed with me—the story of how it became a beloved Christmas classic is a fascinating one.  But certainly Robert Reich really likes it, as he’s noted many times in various videos and on the Coffee Klatch.  And, this year, he’s offering us a video where he uses the Frank Capra classic to illustrate the problems with wealth inequalities.  He focuses on a scene where George (played by Jimmy Stewart) challenges the assumptions of the greedy Mr. Potter, who views the ordinary citizens of Bedford Falls as resources to be exploited.  And Reich, turned black-and-white and digitally inserted into the scene, interrupts to make comments such as this one:

George is right.  When working people get a shot at a decent life and at better jobs with higher wages, they have more money to spend.  That spending grows the economy and helps businesses thrive, creating more jobs.  It’s a virtuous cycle.

and this one:

Here’s the point that Mr. Potter never understood.  Even wealthy people like him do better with a smaller share of an economy growing rapidly because everyone is doing better, than with a bigger share of an economy growing slowly because so many are barely making it.

Geez.  No wonder that, as the story of the film I linked above notes:

... the FBI and Senator McCarthy’s paranoid House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) even investigated It’s a Wonderful Life for allegedly having communist leanings.  They viewed the film’s protagonist George Bailey’s story to be rife with subversive tendencies such as demonising capitalist bankers, and including subtle attempts to magnify the problems of the ‘common man’ in society.

I guess McCarthy would be pretty damned happy with our situation today.  (Certainly, he would have been a Trump fan, what with Trump having been mentored by McCarthy’s old buddy Roy Cohn.)  The capitalist bankers are still occasionally demonized, I suppose, but that doesn’t matter, since they can make as much money as they like, crash the economy with no consequences, break the law without facing any accountability, and receive government bailouts that they use to pay executive bonuses.  And the problems of the common man?  Why, even the Democrats seem to be stuck in a mode of trying to convince the common man that they just don’t understand how good they got it.

And, look, I’d actually love to blame this all on the greed of the billionaire class, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think a big part of it is something I just heard from Gary Stevenson this week, even though it’s from an interview he did earlier in the year.  The channel he did it on decided to repost it as an end-of-year treat, and I’m so glad they did: Gary’s plain-spoken way of breaking down the complexities of our economic situation never fails to enlighten.  And, in this interview, right near the beginning, he points out that a big part of the problem is that economists are all from wealthy backgrounds.

So, what kind of people go into that world?  If you actually look, economics PhD is the least social-class-representative PhD in the whole country.  And it’s obvious why, because if you’re poor and you’ve got a very good economics degree, you’d be kind of mad to do a PhD, because you can make so much more money in the city, right?  And then the end result is—it drives me mad—I did this two-year masters at Oxford; you know, it’s like a hundred posh people in a building talking about how’s the economy working while inequality is going like that, which means that their lives are becoming unbelievably richer, poor people are struggling to eat, and they’re just saying everything’s fine.

Not saying that excuses the behavior, of course, but at least maybe it helps explain it.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has a whole slew of really great videos this week.  He discusses Trump’s successful takeover of 60 Minutes, he explains why the regime dropped most of the Epstein files on the day before Christmas Eve, and of course the usual excellent week in review.

• Jimmy Kimmel did a holiday message for Channel 4 in the UK.  I thought it was quite lovely.

• Josh Johnson has an extremely hilarious take on the recent Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles.

This wasn’t technically last week, but I just got around to watching the episode of Alive with Steve Burns where he interviews Daryl Davis, a black man who’s made something of a career of sitting down and talking with KKK members.  Now, Steve’s new podcast (which I’ve mentioned before, back in weeks 35 and 36) has had some great guests, and the conversation is always interesting, but this one is just incredible.  I had never heard of Davis before, but trust me when I tell you that his story is insane, fascinating, and inspirational all in one.  Apparently he’s on a mission to deconvert the entire Klan, one member at a time, and he’s making a serious dent.  Here’s how he explains how he does it:

So, you you’ve heard the saying “one’s perception is one’s reality.”  Okay, so, that’s true.  Whatever somebody perceives becomes their reality.  Even if it’s not real, it’s their reality.  Keep in mind you cannot change anyone’s reality.  All right?  What is real to them is real to them: you you cannot change it.  And if you try to change somebody’s reality, you’re going to get resistance, because they believe whatever it is they think is real and you’re going to get pushback, okay?  What you do is, you offer them a different perception, or perceptions, plural.  If they resonate with one of those perceptions, then they will change their own reality because their perception becomes their reality.

And if a black man convincing over 200 Klansmen to hang up their robes isn’t a message of hope, then I don’t know what is.  Happy holidays.

Doom Report (Week 48: An Alcoholic's Personality)

This week, Trump gave a rather unhinged “emergency” speech, wherein he lied so often that, as Seth Meyers noted, the poor CNN fact-checker was out-of-breath trying to address them all.  It spurred Christopher Titus to release an extra Armageddon Update which not only addresses that, but also contains a rather touching tribute to Rob Reiner.  Because, you know, another thing Trump did this week was to act like a stereotypical psychopath by pretending other people aren’t real, and/or like a stereotypical old man by ranting in public without really caring who he offends, by claiming that Reiner was murdered because of his “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.  Which is only not victim-blaming because of the technicality of the fact that Reiner wasn’t killed by a fan of Trump.  I mean, I don’t think Reiner’s son is a fan of Trump, although he may want to consider joining up, since he would no doubt get a pardon that way.

And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous “release” of the Epstein Files on Friday.

Other things you need to know this week:

• I’m not sure Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is quite as good as usual, but I’d still recommend you watch it.  It’s only about 10 minutes and has a pretty good summary of most of the week’s news.

• If you want good coverage of the insane Susie Wiles’ Vanity Fair interview, I recommend the Pod Save America video on the topic.  Or, for a quicker, punchier take, try Seth’s “A Closer Look” segment.

• More Perfect Union has a brilliant video on Sam Altman’s “just trust me bro” strategy towards AI (and his other ventures as well).

• If you want to see our fucked up situation through some foreign eyes, I recommend the year-end wrap up of the UK Have I Got News For You.  The best bits of British politics include several amusing digs at our bloviated commander-in-Cheetos.

• Along those lines, Pod Save the UK also has a year-end wrap-up.  This one is less of a clip show and more of a look back on the year’s events.  Less US stuff, but, if you have an interest in the parallel slide into autocracy in the UK, this is a good one to watch.

This week’s SNL cold open was pretty good: as recreations of deranged Trump speeches go, it’s tough to beat James Austin Johnson.  Few others can capture the madcap leaping from subject to subject like he can, and he gives his most unhinged performance to date, to match Trump’s most unhinged speech.  But honestly this week’s “Weekend Update” segment is probably the better one; it’s a sad state of affairs when even SNL is giving us better news that the so-called “traditional” media, but, with CBS already captured and CNN soon to follow, that’s the world we live in.

So it’s tough to feel hopeful at this point in the cycle.  Texas will move forward with its gerrymander, because that’s the Supreme Court we have.  Of course, one possible outcome there is that the Repubs overestimate their recent gains with Latine voters and end up creating a dummymander.  After all, Latines might not be as eager as last time to vote for the party that keeps rounding up all their relatives and disappearing them.  Honestly, the most hopeful development I’ve seen lately is that Miami elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years, and she (also Miami’s first female mayor ever) won by nearly 20 points.  The hold the Repubs have on the system is fragile, and growing more so by the week.  I don’t expect they’ll go down without a fight, but hopefully it’s a fight we’re all willing to participate in.