Tucker Carlson apologizes for the role he played in getting Trump elected. “I’ll be tormented by it for a long time.”
Paraphrasing Elmore Leonard: Wonderful things can happen when seeds of discord are planted in a garden of assholes.
Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent newsletter is a parade of Trump greatest hits.
Trump has called public attention to his ballroom about a third of the days this year, more frequently than he’s talked about healthcare insurance or affordability. And the focus on the ballroom increases as the year progresses.
Regarding the Iran war, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”
Evidence of insider trading over Trump’s war announcements, with “a consistent pattern of spikes” in market activity “just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” And there’s a similar pattern of insider trading over Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement a year ago.
A Saudi sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Sen. Jon Osoff (D-GA) said Kushner is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion…. And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East…. The rules are for us, not for them.”
Meanwhile, the other Trump boys and Whiskey Pete Hegseth are getting rich selling weapons for the war. “I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights,” Osoff said.
I haven’t been closely following Katie Porter’s campaign, or the California Gubernatorial race in general. None of her behavior outlined in this Washington Post article seems very bad — it’s merely rude. I suspect she’s being held to a different standard because she is a woman. For a man, her behavior would be seen by many voters as strength.
One of the many spots that FBI Director Kash Patel liked to get hammered is an exclusive club in Las Vegas called the Poodle Room.
The Poodle Room is associated with the Fontainebleau Hotel, and I walked past the discreet entrance in the lobby. when I stayed there last month.
Unfortunately, the Poodle Room is not a place where there are lots of poodles and you can play with them.
Excellent headline at The Register: World’s blandest man steps down from CEO job to spend more time in tastefully appointed home. And a good article under the headline, by Matt Rosoff.
Palantir issued an ominous, 22-point corporate manifesto. “… reads like the ramblings of a comic-book villain.
Hamilton Nolan: “This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at—given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect.”
NASA turned off more instruments on Voyager 1 to keep it going. The spacecraft launched in 1977. An American triumph, for all humanity.
Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it. By Cory Doctorow. Trump’s bonehead maneuvers are driving the world toward solar power, away from dependence on American technology companies and putting spine into the Democratic Party. “Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let’s take the wins.”
Here’s a nice view I saw while walking the dog one morning a few weeks ago.
