Derp State

 Yesterday, we had a really comical turn of events in the Senate. Eric Schmitt - who I think used to be a DA - was grilling Jack Smith about his work in trying to prosecute Trump for a few of his many crimes. He sprung a "gotcha" moment on him about attending an Atlanta Hawks game and conspiring with Atlanta DA, Fani Willis. Smith was perplexed, while Schmitt railed and called him a dirtbag.

Amy Klobuchar - and I LOVE that it was a woman who had to explain sports to this huffy He-Man - noted that Smith was at an Iowa HAWKEYES game, not an Atlanta Hawks game. I mean the HBO series Veep was not intended to be a documentary.

This is in some ways a failure of staff. Schmitt absolutely should apologize (but won't), but his staff likely put this Goat Rodeo together. The two goombahs holding up the visual aid for Schmitt's attack certainly look like freaking morons.

However, this isn't just an issue with Schmitt's staff. Among the many aspects of Trump's attack on his own country is the evisceration of competent people who simply work for the government. Forget the rank incompetence of RFK or Hegseth, government runs on staffing and bureaucrats and having good ones really does matter. Trump, being an idiot, has elevated idiocy as a prerequisite for working in the GOP. Sure, there are a bunch of stupid GOP Senators - Ron Johnson, Tommy Tuberville, Mike Lee and now Eric Schmitt - but their staffs are also apparently a bunch of morons, too.

Some of this isn't unique to the GOP. Mary Peltola's staff was apparently full of Gen Z whiners. But the stupidity? That's a hallmark of Trumpistan. 

Hey, Is This Sustainable?

 Anthropic's IPO has been leaked. Apparently, they ran a $42,000,000,000 loss last year and wants to take on $518,000,000,000 in cloud computing capacity. Those are billions of dollars.

But certainly they will make that back, right? Revenue has to be expanding?

It is! Revenue increased 12 fold last year!

To $4,600,000,000. 

That debt to revenue ratio is bonkers, but that IPO could cover all that debt, because nothing is real anymore or something. The important thing to note is that data center and AI build-out is the only thing sustaining economic growth right now and it's definitely, definitely not a bubble. Nope, not all. Having almost ten times more debt than revenue is completely normal.

The Blue Wave

 Josh Marshall suggests that one reason why we may see a massive blue wave this November is that the increasingly bad environment for Republicans is making previously deep red areas competitive, and the candidates from those areas have no real political chops. The one case he keeps pointing to is Kansas, where Adam Hamilton is running a strong campaign against Roger Marshall. Marshall recently decided to fight back against Hamilton's ad that suggests that Marshall - an OB/GYN - had a woman arrested for a $50 unpaid bill. By suing to stop the ad, Marshall draws MORE attention to the claim. 

An even better example is Ken Paxton in Texas. Talarico is a very strong candidate, but Paxton is clownishly bad. Aside from the rank criminality and lack of an demonstrable ethics, Paxton has recently committed some egregious own goals. First, he defended himself against charges that he let a child predator off the hook with a one day sentence by noting that the judge actually imposed a 60 day sentence. For a guy who repeatedly raped a child. Next up, he wants to build data centers all over rural Texas. Few things unite Republicans and Democrats these days, but everyone hates data centers.

As Marshall noted originally, these guys usually only have to win the primary in a deep red state and the general election takes care of itself. Now that they are facing actual electoral competition, they don't know what to do.

The Economics of AI

 Josh Marshall has a summary of how AI is likely unsustainable economically, especially as no one really WANTS it enough to pay the prices that can justify the massive expenditures. Yes, I have colleagues who overly rely on AI (and that mildly infuriates me - do your job), but most of us are forced to imbibe the torrent of AI shit whether we want to or not.

I concede that it's a remarkable search engine, but I was fine with Google and a little bit of extra work. I;m not especially interested in paying for something I don't want.

While I may be an outlier (I'm almost certainly an outlier) I'm not THAT much of an outlier. The question is not whether the AI bubble bursts, but when.

Gen La-Z

 I hesitate to indulge in generational nonsense where one story becomes an indictment of an entire cohort of people who number in the tens of millions.

Yet...

The story about Mary Peltola that was published recently is ridiculous. Even worse, it makes me agree with Yglesias, and I hate to do that. Basically, Peltola could lose her temper and shout at people. She also had staffers help with personal chores like feeding her pet chameleon. Some of the things she said were what can be termed "problematic" like using the words retard and fag. You can understand why young staffers fresh from college would find that off-putting and troublesome. 

What I can't understand is why the fuck they went to the press. 

If you have a boss that uses language that you don't like, you can confront them, consult someone else in the organization or quit. House members have chiefs of staff; talk to them if you're afraid of your representative. Tattling to the press over something as fundamentally meaningless - in an election year, where Peltola might hold the key to a critical Senate majority - represents a sense of entitlement that is inexcusable.

There's a lot of memes that circulate along the lines of: "I wake up and work 40 hours a week so that I can afford basic goods like food and shelter. Isn't that fucked up?" There's a sense that somehow our jobs should cater to us. Some of this likely comes from remote work during Covid and the realization that a lot of that 40 (or 60) hour work week feels like wasted time. I get it. We are all the main characters in our own story and it sucks to discover that we are background players - NPCs - in the grand scheme of things.

I do wonder if there isn't at least a little merit in the criticism of education - and college education in particular - that we basically coddle these kids and make them feel like oh so special wonderchildren. Then - when they confront the demands of adulthood - they crumble. I suppose that's why, despite the degraded commercialization of many college and even high school sports - there's still a place for sports. Sometimes you lose and it sucks, even when you prepared hard and did everything right.

The whole bonkers Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar that got backlash for ending their mask mandates on Saturday night is an example of people who cannot brook anything that doesn't cater to their personal whims. The world does not bend to your personal preferences - yet many colleges actually do create these sort of country club experiences with luxury dorms and decked out student unions and health clubs that kids come to expect as their due. That's just unrealistic.

I remember seeing a t-shirt that said "Bring Back Reasonable Bullying." Obviously, no, don't bully. However, we have to end the tripwire sense of "harm" that makes every single inconvenience a hate crime - especially those around language - if we want to have people who can actually live in the world and not their fantasy version. 

Escalation

 The details of what appears to be a plot to use truck bombs against RAF Fairford airbase in Britain are still coming into focus. We know that that base has been used by the US Air Force to strike Iran, but we also know that Russia has been testing the tolerance of NATO countries for provocative attacks. Still, best guess is that this is either the Iranian government or someone allied with them, Maybe Tehran didn't know, and these were people acting of their own accord. 

If Iran is behind it, that's a major escalation, but it does seem to fit into a pattern of escalation. The advances of Houthi militias to the Red Sea, the attacks on Saudi Arabia and the general unwillingness to negotiate a deal suggest that Iran simply does not worry about a major escalation at this point. It suggests that they have taken the measure of Donald Trump and realize that he has surrendered in all but name. Bored with the distraction that his war has caused to his ballroom project, Trump has waddled off the scene and left the region grappling with how to deal with the mess he made.

Again, if this is Iran, they feel perfectly comfortable targeting a British airbase, because they feel that NATO will not bail Trump out of his mess. They know the alliance is fractured. This might suggest that the Iranians had help from Russia to achieve the same result. Again, entirely speculative at this point. Maybe it was some dipshit leftists cosplaying at revolution.

Trump is both a moral and physical cowards, so there is a scenario where we find out who did it and do nothing, because the midterms are already looking ugly for Trump's GOP. While I certainly want the war with Iran to end, at some point, the US will need to respond to Iran's increasingly bold moves and stop rolling over and showing its belly after being kicked by the mullahs of Tehran.

Debtor's Prison

 David Frum - a conservative conservative, not a Republican/Trump conservative - make the case that among the myriad crisis brought by Trump and the GOP, the looming issue of debt is perhaps the most critical. Trump - who made a living off declaring bankruptcy - seems to want to do the same with the United States. The result would be catastrophic, but hey, why should we worry that Trump would do something stupid and self-destructive.

The rise in interest rates are going to hit everyone. This is...bad, and the next Democratic President will have to be a Bill Clinton-type who can extricate us from this disaster and then reap no goodwill for doing so until his presidency is over.

Fundamentally Wrong

 I think Yglesias is way off base here with regards to Iran, but then again, this is an area where he usually is wrong. He thinks that Democrats will struggle to find a way out of the Iranian morass, should it linger until 2029. His argument is that while Democrats will want to resolve the issue, Iranians won't trust the American public not to elect another mouth breathing moron to scuttle any deal that Dems strike.

This is such a perfect example of Murc's Law, where only Democrats have agency or responsibility.

As it stands, Iran is mighty big pissed at the US for bombing their cities and killing their leadership. As bad as oil prices are, the Iranian economy is in the shitter. The primary reasons that they are holding out are that the fundamentally distrust Donald Trump for legitimate reasons, and they are willing to make their populace endure really tough times in order to drag him down.

If this situation is still smoldering in 2029, the Iranians will be looking for an exit, too. They can't keep going on this route indefinitely either. What's more, Democrats will be able to draw on international partners and institutions in ways that Trump can't. 

Framing the problem as "Iranians can't trust Democrat, because Republicans" misses Iran's motivations to punish Trump. He's the guy that opened this disaster. They may have qualms about a future Republican administration, but they will have strong incentives to come to the table, once Trump - who cannot be trusted at all - is no longer on the other side of it.

Life Expectancy

 Paul Campos gives us an update on Trump's actuarial odds. Basically, as a rich guy with long-lived parents, Trump can expect many more years. Of course, actuarial tables are just statistical approximations of predictions. Trump certainly doesn't look or sound healthy. Being president is the most stressful job on earth. One commentator said that while it's stressful, Trump doesn't actually DO the job. I don't think that's quite right. Trump doesn't engage with policy or it's effects - his diesel export ban is just pure Trumpist stupidity - but the stress of the job is the demands it put on you that cannot anticipate. In fact, all his little building projects are just a way for him to manage the stress; his ballroom is just an act of self-soothing. That doesn't mean it will work to reduce his stress/

The other stark reality is that Trump is in obvious cognitive decline from a pretty low pre-existing baseline. That does not mean he's about to die. There is certainly a likely future of Trump having the sort of health incident that an 80 year old man who eats fast food, is morbidly obese, who gobbles aspirin like they're candy and does have a stressful job where he suffers accumulating narcissistic wounds would be expected to have. A post-stroke or heart attack Trump should be removed via the 25th Amendment, but that would requite a GOP Congress that isn't in the thrall of the man.

When Woodrow Wilson had his stroke, his wife and staff basically took over the running of the government for weeks. I am not confident in the nest of snakes in the Executive Branch pulling off something similar. Instead, I think we might be in for something akin to the morbid puppetry of Mitch McConnell's "return" to the Senate. 

Deranged Trump Syndrome

 Krugman was famously called "shrill" for his warnings about - I believe - the Iraq war. Today, I'm sure there are still people who think he's shrill, and apparently that includes the editors of the NY Times who fired him.

Today, I'm sure there are those who have found him shrill and alarmist when he talks about Trump. Yglesias is an example of someone who will concede that Trump is really bad, but not that he is dangerously bad, even insane. Krugman isn't afraid to call Trump deranged, because he's not afraid of being "shrill."

There are two problems with treating Trump as a normal political phenomenon. The first is that Trump has always been a dictatorial dick. He was somewhat restrained in those impulses his first time through, but now he has the GOP so cowed that he has been able to shit all over the Constitution. 

The second is that he is so surrounded by sycophants that he's unable to relate to reality in a meaningful way. The more bad news he gets about his personal status, the more unhinged he becomes. 

Democracy v Oligarchy

 There is a clear sense that the mass of voters would prefer different policies than the self inflicted harm of Trump's erratic "policies." The Downballot notes that the historical trends of primary turnout suggest a 13 point advantage for Democrats this fall. Some of that advantage comes from disgust with Trump, which is running quite high. An autocrat unwilling to listen to criticism isn't likely to make popular choices or correct course.

The question really at this point is about money. In the olden times of "normal" politics, industries would lean one way or another in their contributions, because they wanted certain outcomes that aligned with one of the two parties. They would not, however, go all in on one party, because if that party gets locked out of power, then they can get hosed. (You see a similar dynamic with Netanyahu's bear hug of the GOP, which - along with his war crimes - has alienated Democrats to the point where supporting Israel is now a net negative in the Democratic Party.)

The problems that Democrats currently face is that Trump is vindicative prick who uses the powers of his office to punish his foes. If you give to Democrats, you could wind up seeing licenses yanked or meritless prosecutions initiated against you. That is usually reserved for Trump's public antagonists though. If you quietly give to the DNC, I don't think Trump will come after you.

The second issue is more problematic. The combination of Crypto Bros and Tech Lords who have moved decisively behind Trump and who have mountains of cash and a desire to be protected. Interestingly, this is less true of AI companies, who seem to be asking for regulation. Crypto, though, is a fundamentally bullshit industry whose main purpose sure seems to be criminal. The idea that Iran is using crypto to evade sanctions and fund their war industries, while Trump acts to insure no oversight of crypto is just a perfect distillation of the corruption and incompetence of Trump 2.0. 

It seems pretty clear that the broligarchy will spend heavily in behalf of the GOP this October. The question will be whether that makes a dent in the roiling anger of the American electorate.

Wow

 Broadcast news networks are suing Trump over the expulsion of outlets he doesn't like. Sure, yeah.

Five broadcast networks have agreed to suspend pooled coverage of the White House: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and...

...FOX.

That's going to sting and congratulations to Fox for finally becoming a journalistic outfit, even at the most basic level. 

Russia, Russia, Russia

 Things are looking dicey in the increasingly hot war between Russia and Europe. When Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time in 2022, I did a primer for the school, and I confessed that I couldn't understand what Putin was doing. Invading a sovereign country is not acceptable behavior and Russia was not strong enough to act as a global hegemon. The US and China can possibly survive international condemnation, but Russia is not the Soviet Union. Whatever Putin hoped to achieve would be counterbalanced by the global response.

We are now over four years into Putin's "special military operation" and there are no signs of Putin bending to the geopolitical reality of his situation. Some of this is because of the aid he's received from China, North Korea and Iran, but undoubtably, Putin is banking on having a friend in the White House.

The links between Trump and Putin are similar to so many other Trump scandals. It's all out there in the open, like Don Junior having his wedding parties paid for by a Putin-aligned oligarch. The brazenness of it - and the pure volume of shit like this - make it hard to really generate public outrage over the naked corruption and the aligned agendas of Trump and Putin. 

That's the situation today, with Trump both mired in his dumbass war with Iran and naturally sympathetic to Vladimir Fucking Putin. 

Now, for whatever reason, Putin sure looks like he's threatening war with NATO. Trying to figure out what he's thinking is difficult. First of all, he's largely losing in Ukraine. While there's a decent argument that the Ukrainian Army is the best in Europe at the moment, it's still relatively small compared to the rest of Europe. Why would Putin add to the forces arrayed against him? Even without the US support, NATO would seem primed to add to the defeats that the Russian military is currently experiencing.

The other reason that this is mystifying is that Putin's real successes have come in the grey spaces of informational warfare. He's boosted right wing parties and candidates from Trump to Brexit to Marine Le Pen to Alternative for Deutschland. He actively worked to help Trump get elected in 2016 (and we have to assume did so again in 2024), and that is his greatest strategic victory ever. Trump has done more to degrade Russia's (and China's) most powerful geopolitical rival than any other measure Russia could have taken.

Why attack Europe if you will cut the legs out of that effort within Europe? Especially given the weakened state of your armed forces?

I suppose he could think that an attack on the Baltic States could fracture NATO, but I don't think it will - with the exception of the United States. Then again, there are still enough "national security Republicans" left to be a bulwark against that - not to mention how Trump's capitulation to Putin would play in the midterms. I suppose he could look at the coming midterm and think he's squeezed everything he can out of Trump, but again, why would throw away his greatest achievement to expand a war that he's already losing?

Attacking the Baltic States in order to link up to Kaliningrad and "restore" the old Soviet borders would seem deeply flawed strategic thinking, but so was invading Ukraine - or attacking Iran. He could blunder into World War III because he fundamentally doesn't understand that state of play right now, and by "he" I mean both Putin and Trump. 

The Miser of The Attention Economy

 This John Dickerson piece examines how Trump has dominated the attention economy since he came on the scene. He does it by trolling and blustering and shattered norms - norms, by the way, that were really pretty solid. You really shouldn't shit on a Gold Star family. You really shouldn't say we are no better than Russia (though that is now accurate in some ways). Trump's political power stems from his utter shamelessness to say and do things that no other occupant of the White House would dream of.

Ultimately, the question will become "Can someone else harness that power of shameless attention-grabbing behavior?"

I think the answer is most likely no. 

The first and most obvious reason is that people are largely sick of Trump's shit. One of the appeals of Joe Biden was his basic decency. I do think that a fundamentally decent candidate will have a lot of appeal in 2028. I do not think the GOP will be able to nominate someone like that, because increasingly, Trump creates the reality within the GOP electorate. Sure, some Republicans are creating distance, like I noted yesterday, but that distance isn't from Trump, but rather the "bad boyars."

So, I think some preening jackass like Ron DeSantis or some other creature will emerge from the Republican side. In fact, if I were an ambitious but relatively decent Republican, I would sit 2028 out. If this backlash grows, Republicans will be toxic by 2028. On the Democratic side, I think the aggressiveness of a Gavin Newsome will not be as appealing as the sort of earnest decency of a Jon Ossoff or a Pete Buttigieg. 

Meanwhile, Trump - I believe - is finding himself starved of attention and adulation. That's why he wants to make the midterms about himself and have rallies. It's also why he's banning news organizations from the White House Press pool. Frankly, the only proper response from every legitimate news outlet is to boycott the White House pool. Trump is "making headlines" by banning CNN, but if the Times and Post and Journal and ABC and NBC all boycott his press briefings, then it will be HIM who is starved of oxygen.

The press has been abysmal during the Trump years - as a broad institution. They insist on analyzing his vomitous utterances as policy or as coherent statements of presidential intent. This guy is incapable of being forthright and honest, but the press treats him as if he were a normal politician who bends the truth and occasionally bends it too far. That's...incompetent.

So, they should just boycott the lie-filled hatefest from the briefing room. They can cover what is being said but what does their presence there add? If they ask a legitimate probing question, they will be lied to and called names. Why are they there? Nothing of value comes from their presence.

Instead, they should strike back by denying Trump the one thing he truly craves and which they conspire to give him: attention.

The proper way to deal with a misbehaving toddler is to place them in time-out. They want attention, even negative attention, so you deny it to redirect their behavior. 

Toddler-in-chief Trump needs a time out. 

Breaking Ranks?

 Richardson notes how many Republicans are starting to break with MAGA. She doesn't front this point, but this is a variation of the the "scheming vizier" or "bad boyars, good tsar" idea. This is a meme, really, from centuries ago, where anything good that happens is because of dear leader, but anything bad is because of the advisers around him. 

The Republicans who are endorsing Democrats aren't breaking with Trump. They are breaking with some policies - like mass, indiscriminate deportations or the Iran war - that poll poorly, and blame them on misguided advisers. They realize that they cannot attack Trump directly, or they will lose their office like Thomas Massie and others who have stood up to Trump. "Gosh, whomever decided that we needed to wage trade wars sure was misguided, and Trump should stop them from advising him anymore." This is so self-evidently stupid, I don't know what to say.

The thing is, Trump isn't exactly on the ballot. The embattled GOP reps who are trying to distance themselves from Trump's catastrophic reign of error are having to tie themselves in knots. I do wonder if anyone will buy it. MAGA will be pissed for calling out the obvious racism and misogyny in their ranks, but I don't know if doing that will win the dissenters any votes.

Still, 35% approval is too high for these vicious clowns.