A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.
This week's featured post is "All Americans Need Pride Now".
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. To me the week's most disturbing quote was from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Testifying before a Senate committee, Mullin was asked (by Chris Murphy) whether he would commit to following court orders. Mullin could not say yes. Instead, he said he would follow orders he believed were legitimate, but not politically biased ones. In other words, he will be the judge of what the law says. That's not how the rule of law works.
- Climate change. El Nino continues to build, threatening record heat this summer.
- Iran. Nothing new to report: Trump keeps saying Iran is defeated and a deal is at hand that will achieve all his goals. Iran keeps refusing to act like it's defeated. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the world's oil reserves continue to sink.
- Ukraine. Phillips O'Brien's biweekly updates continue to be the easiest good way to keep track of this conflict. Ukraine's growing drone-and-missile campaign is making it increasingly difficult for Putin to claim that everything is OK.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about budgets
The Senate passed the Republicans' reconciliation bill. It needs to go back to the House now, where there may yet be some snags. Prevailing opinion is that it will wind up on Trump's desk by the end of the week.
If you remember, originally this was about whether Congress could stop ICE and the Border Patrol from being rogue agencies that terrorize American cities and run concentration camps. But as so often happens, once the train started rolling a lot of other controversial issues got attached to it. So it's easy to forget that this all started when Trump's storm troopers murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats then proposed tying funding to some common-sense limits, the kinds of limits all other law-enforcement organizations already follow, like not wearing masks and going to a judge to get warrants.
Republicans refused to compromise on this, so the funding had to be dropped from the big appropriation bills that funded the rest of the government and then the rest of DHS. By going the reconciliation route, Republicans no longer needed Democratic votes, so they added a nasty kicker to the bill: It funds ICE for three years rather than the usual one. So if Democrats retake Congress in the fall, they won't be able to defund this rogue agency. In essence, the reconciliation bill puts ICE beyond the power of the voters.
For a while the bill included money for Trump's White House ballroom and the fund to pay off the thugs who rioted for him on January 6. But those provisions were too toxic even for Republicans, so they were removed. Acting AG Todd Blanche went so far as to say that the administration was dropping the proposed thug-fund, but he wouldn't put it in writing, and Democrats failed to get explicit language into the reconciliation bill disallowing the fund. Trump says he still loves the idea, so we'll see it again, either after he signs the bill or maybe after the fall elections.
But that dispute is about the current year's budget. By October Congress will need to pass next year's budget, where Trump wants to raise defense spending from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Timothy Snyder observes that this kind of increase doesn't make sense in any conventional frame.
Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.
It's not like this is a Sputnik moment and we suddenly realize our potential adversaries are way ahead of us. It's not like $1 trillion represented a whittled-down military that needs to be rebuilt. It's also not like there's an upswelling of public opinion demanding more defense. If you asked Americans what they want the Pentagon to spend $500 billion more on, you'd draw a blank from the vast majority of voters. And virtually nobody would volunteer to sacrifice their own benefits -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. -- to pay for a bigger military.
So why then? Snyder has a theory:
The military budget proposal ... makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.
and 60 Minutes
The story so far: Skydance Media, controlled by the Trump-allied Ellison family, bought Paramount Global, giving them control of CBS. The merger raised anti-trust issues, so Paramount paid a bribe to Trump (and fired Stephen Colbert after he used the word "bribe" on the air) to let it go through.
The Ellisons then turned CBS News over to Bari Weiss, whose experience was mainly as a opinion writer for print media. So she begins her career in broadcast journalism at the top, as head of the organization made great by people like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. I don't have to summarize Weiss' career, because John Oliver already did.
Weiss' career has centered on claims of "liberal media bias". So since taking over, Weiss has shifted CBS Evening News to the right, which has been disastrous for its ratings: CBS is never going to win over Fox News viewers, so all they have done is alienate the viewers they already had.
This week, she brought her wrecking ball to 60 Minutes, the most popular news show on television. Of course, she had already messed with 60 Minutes before, in December. Hours before its scheduled airing, she pulled Sharyn Alfonsi's outstanding report on the CECOT prison in El Salvador that Trump was deporting people to. After the episode was leaked by a Canadian broadcaster, garnering Weiss a lot of bad press, she relented and let the episode air (with a few changes) four weeks later. Stephen Miller demanded that the people responsible for the report be fired, which Weiss at the time did not do.
But a week ago Thursday, heads began to roll, beginning with Alfonsi, but also including correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Last Monday, correspondent Scott Pelley told the executives what he thought about their moves, and was subsequently fired himself. (Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Anderson Cooper had left the show voluntarily in mid-May.)
Friday, the remaining correspondents -- Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim -- said they plan to stay on. But their joint statement was hardly a vote of confidence in the new leadership.
We want to express how sorry we are that these principled, fair and honest journalists were treated so shabbily, with such indecency. Tanya deserves to be celebrated, not cruelly cast off. Draggan too. It’s been heartbreaking. But, we have decided to stay on. We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure. That is simply, categorically not the case. Here’s why we’re are staying: We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.
Pelley gave an interview to the NYT where he fleshed out some of his previous claims of political interference from Weiss.
[A]bout four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.
This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.
Jay Rosen is an insightful observer of journalism. Here's his take: Maybe CBS looks so chaotic because no two executives are playing the same game.
If you follow the mess at CBS, don't dismiss the possibility that Ellison thinks he's been clear about playing nice with Trump, while Bari Weiss thinks she can get by with "Center Right," while Nick Bilton thinks it's Mike Wallace all over again— but super digital. All at once.
and the SpaceX scam
Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX) will become a publicly traded company on Friday. This is sketchy for a bunch of reasons.
- If the stock trades at anything like the asking price, it will be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever, raising $75 billion for the company and valuing the full enterprise at $1.75 trillion. That would launch SpaceX into the top 10 corporations by market capitalization, roughly the same size as Saudi Aramco and ahead of both Facebook and SpaceX's sister-company Tesla.
- Elon Musk's stake will be worth over $800 billion, making him the world's first trillionaire.
- The asking price wildly overvalues the stock. The company is still losing money hand-over-fist, with a $4.3 billion loss in the most recent quarter. With no profits to go by, investors might evaluate the stock by its revenues. SpaceX's asking price clocks in at 95 times revenues, compared to 20 times for a hot tech stock like Nvidea.
- Musk has occasionally used SpaceX as a piggy-bank for Tesla. In 2025 SpaceX bought $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks, representing 6-9% of the total sales of that marketing disaster.
- Stock exchanges have bent their rules to get SpaceX into their indexes. That means that index funds (which are considered safe investments for retirement accounts) will be forced to buy the stock, no matter how overvalued it is.
- Due to owning higher-vote shares, Musk will control 80% of the votes in any shareholder decision, so he can do anything he wants with the company. Fine print in the SpaceX prospectus means that minority shareholders have very little recourse if he mismanages the company.
When you put it all together, Musk is essentially defrauding America's retirees. Here's how the fraud works: Musk has a small-but-loyal following of investors who think he can do no wrong. By only offering a small percentage of SpaceX's shares in the IPO, he has created a situation where their opinion of SpaceX's worth can become the market price. Then, index funds will be forced to buy some sizeable percentage of all the shares available, creating an artificial demand that will pop the stock higher -- at least temporarily.
The whole scheme is self-referential: People want to get in on the over-valued IPO, because they anticipate being able to sell at an even higher price to the bigger fools in the index funds.
When the market manipulation is over and the stock collapses, your 401k will be left holding the bag.
At the moment, here's what you need to do: Check your retirement accounts to see if you have any Nasdaq or Russell index funds. If you do, sell them and move the money to an S&P 500 index, because that index hasn't changed its rules to let SpaceX in prematurely.
In pro-capitalism propaganda, the great entrepreneurs' quest for wealth creates more wealth than they can capture for themselves, so all of society benefits. This may have been true at certain points in capitalism's history, but we're past that now. Our current oligarchs are so powerful that they not only capture all the value of their innovations, they suck wealth away from the rest of us.
It's worth noting that Musk has profited in the past by scamming the public. Remember DOGE? Musk was going to save the taxpayers $2 trillion in a single year by finding and eliminating government waste. In reality, he saved nothing.
What did the people in America actually get as a result of DOGE? Chaos at Social Security field offices, uncertainties about veterans’ access to critical care, the end of civil rights enforcement in schools, limited staff to go after corporate billionaire tax cheats, an unstaffed consumer complaint database leaving people vulnerable to bank scams, the end of foreign aid programs that led to the death of hundreds of thousands across the globe, and so much more. And that's only what we've seen so far...as time goes on, we will see the impacts of the loss of expertise and capacity across federal agencies.
But in the process Elon walked away with more government contracts and untold quantities of illegally procured government data. Not a bad return for the $290 million he spent getting Trump elected.
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I usually minimize Trump-acting-out stories, because they happen so often and get a lot of coverage without me. But the last few minutes of his Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker stand out. Trump makes a series of unfounded claims about Democrats cheating in elections, both his 2020 loss to Joe Biden and this week's California primary. Welker keeps insisting that he provide evidence for those claims -- which he does not have because his claims are false. Trump responds by getting angry, insulting Welker, and leaving the set.
It amazes me the deductions many people never make. If you ask a guy for evidence and he starts sputtering insults, it seems obvious to me that he has no evidence. Similarly, if a detention center keeps out people who are legally entitled to inspect it, they must be up to no good in there. How can anyone deny that?
Trump's former national security advisor John Bolton, who turned against Trump and has consequently been prosecuted, will plead guilty to retaining classified information. Bolton appears to be one of the rare Trump enemies who is actually guilty of something, unlike E. Jean Carroll, James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, Jack Smith, and a host of other people Trump's Department of Injustice has been investigating and/or prosecuting simply as harassment.
The cartoon points out the irony of Bolton going down for something that Trump did much worse, but got away with after he won the election and took over the government.
Another crime Trump commits himself is insider trading. This week Trump pardoned a former Republican congressman convicted of insider trading. He made hundreds of thousands by trading stocks based on his inside knowledge of upcoming mergers.
A study says that deploying the National Guard to Washington D. C. has had very little effect on crime.
This doesn't surprise me, because I've been to D. C. recently. The Guard seems to be there for show. I saw some troops deployed on the National Mall in daytime. That's a high-traffic area that has got to be one of the safest places in the city. However, one night after dinner in a restaurant, I had to walk across the Mall after dark. This actually did make me nervous, though nothing happened. But the Guard was nowhere to be seen.
I concluded that the point of the deployment is for a lot of people to see the guardsmen and think "Trump is protecting us." If nobody is around to see them, though, they don't need to be there.
The NYT reports on Israel's use of white phosphorus in Lebanon. I had thought this was a war crime in itself, but apparently the substance is itself legal, and only becomes illegal when it's used in populated areas.
The Times does its best to tip-toe around accusing Israel of war crimes, but the photos in the article show white phosphorus plumes with buildings in the background.
After the first half-dozen happened with no political consequences, the Navy's strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs have started to seem normal. It's easy to forget that these are murders. Now we're up to 200 or so of them.
Fascinating article about how America's huge national debt interacts badly with the problems Trump caused in the world economy by attacking Iran. First, Jay Martin explains why the debt is not a problem in normal times:
Countries around the world - Japan, the UK, China, South Korea, and dozens of others - hold roughly $9.4 trillion worth of these American IOUs. They bought them because Treasuries are safe, liquid, and denominated in dollars. For decades, this system worked beautifully. The U.S. borrowed cheaply. Foreign governments parked their savings in a safe asset. Everyone won.
But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created a situation where lots of our creditors need to cash out at the same time: Oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates have seen their revenues drop without any corresponding drop in expenses. Oil importers like Japan need to pay more for imported oil. They all need to sell their Treasury bonds to raise cash.
Meanwhile, the US also needs to sell Treasuries because we don't pay enough tax to cover our spending. (The government is running about a $2 trillion deficit this year. If a Democrat were president, this would be a big deal.)
So what happens when the number of sellers go up and the number of buyers doesn't? Prices fall. Or (saying the same thing another way) buyers are in a position to demand higher interest rates. And if the world economy seems fragile now, picture it operating with higher interest rates.
There's tough competition to be the least qualified person in a Trump cabinet meeting, but we're about to have a new leader: Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.
Pulte is a third-generation real estate guy and has no experience in intelligence. (The legislation establishing the DNI position lists experience as an essential qualification.) He has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency where he pleased Trump by cooking up mortgage fraud cases against Trump enemies like Letitia James and Adam Schiff. The James case was dismissed by the judge and Schiff has not been indicted.
We can expect Pulte to do two things as acting DNI: fire a lot of people and use the awesome powers of the intelligence agencies to harass more Trump enemies. We can only imagine how happy China and Russia will be to see America's intelligence agencies masterminded by this bozo.
Most of us have heard about the leveling off of American life expectancy. Lately it has had some negative years and positive years, but the overall trend has been flat: up only a quarter of a year in the 2010s, compared to an average of 1.75 years per decade in the previous five decades. A variety of explanations have been floated: Covid, deaths of despair, bad diet, and so on.
A recent study looks deeper than the year-by-year mortality stats. It tracks generational cohorts and how their death rates compare to previous cohorts at similar ages. They found something interesting and worrisome: The cohort born in the 1940s had the lowest death rates per year. The 1950s cohort (mine) was only slightly worse, but marked a turn-around.
Among all the findings, the most alarming concerns Americans born after 1970. At the ages these people have already reached, roughly 30 to 49 depending on the cause of death examined, they are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born just before them were dying at those same ages. Colon cancer, strongly tied to obesity and diet, is a particular concern, with death rates rising at younger ages beginning with cohorts born around 1955 and worsening from there.
Because the post-1970 generations are still relatively young, they represent a small percentage of total deaths, and so their effect on the nationwide life-expectancy averages hasn't really shown up yet. But it will. Whether anything similar is happening in similar countries isn't part of this study, but in recent decades they have been pulling away from the US averages.
and let's close with a stunt
In honor of the NBA Finals, Jimmy Fallon recaps recent news while using the names of all 30 NBA teams.
