Monday, May 04, 2026

Status Quo Ante

And how many months will it take for the oil market to recover?
Lindsey Graham says he knows that gas prices are high but he says the military action against Iran is worth it and if you doubt that Iran was trying to get a nuke, you shouldn’t be allowed to drive anyway. Graham: To the American people, I know gas prices are high and I know WE’RE suffering right now. But you pay now or you pay later. They tried to get a nuclear weapon. If you don't believe that, you shouldn't be allowed to drive.
The campaign ad writers are going to be unemployed this year. (Does Lindsay think this makes him sound butch?) Didn’t Trump say that already? Did it work?  Mighty big “if” there, fella. I don’t think he’s this stupid. But he clearly thinks the voters of South Carolina are. And he could be right. (My brother in law was Green Beret in Vietnam. His task was to act as a force multiplier, recruiting people as the French were recruited for the resistance in WWII. It wasn’t a matter of being a gun runner. The IRG is trained. Handing guns to people would be as effective as “militia” members going up against the U.S. military. If you could hand guns to everyone in Iran. And if they wouldn’t just turn them on each other. This could be a stupider idea, but it’s hard to say how.) There’s gotta be a cost free (in terms of American lives) solution to this, right? Besides, Trump said he’s gotten regime change. And that his blockade would do the trick. Oh, and that he’s won the war. How did that happen?
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🛫 Flights Of Fancy 🛬

Spirit was in its second bankruptcy. Jet Blue isn’t doing that well anyway. Aside from the (former) employees of Spirit, and the people stranded by its closure (and the creditors): who gives a shit?

In a world where gas is simply getting more expensive (as is jet fuel), farmers are going bankrupt, and inflation is rising, who is supposed to give a shit about a badly run airline finally going out of business? Is this all the Secretary of Transportation has to do? Talk about this?
Yeah, that’s gonna take everybody’s mind off their problems; and who’s to blame for them.

Meanwhile, from the top:
Worse: Nobody can believe a word you say. Because we’re living in reality; and none of us are that stupid. For whom?
Trump on Oil Prices:

Everybody was wrong. They thought energy would be at $300. It’s at like 100. And I think it’s going down. There's a lot of energy out there on ships all over the world that are loaded up with it. They can't do much with it because they got, uh, kidnapped by a pretty evil place, but we're taking care of it.
As I write, WTI is at $105 bbl. It opened at $104, closed yesterday at $106. Not being at $300 (yet) is not really a flex. The rest of what he said? All I can say is: does reality have any claim on his attention any more? That answers that question. And  now we do a little detour: That would be this Nick Fuentes? Trump doesn’t understand a word that says.
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The Guy Who Peddles Quack Remedies …

... is discerning fraud based on…the population of the LA area? Oh, no, wait , he didn’t mention that at all. 

Clearly he thinks we’re all as stupid as he is.

Although, what the actual fuck?
Justices have appeared on fairly nonpartisan programs for book tours before. It's a bit iffy ethically, and I'll criticize the liberal justices too (Sotomayor, Jackson more recently). But a sitting justice appearing on a partisan Fox News opinion program basically has no precedent.

Gorsuch does not fear any consequences for signaling his partisan alliances, and is abusing public trust. They are simply drunk with power. Ethics reform for these brazen justices needed ASAP.
Long past time to yank their chain. Hard. Pertinent to that, the 8 ways (per Professor Vladeck) the Congress can do that. His explanations are worth reading, but I’m just going to give you the topics:

1)  The Court’s calendar. Put it this way: The Court starts its term on the first Monday in October because Congress told them to: in 1915. Congress also stopped the Court from sitting in 1801 by changing its calendar.

2) Where the Court sits. Let me put it this way 
Opposition to funding and construction of the current Supreme Court Building (a home for which Chief Justice Taft had aggressively lobbied since running for President in 1908) was usually pitched on exactly these terms—that giving the Court its own physical plant would give it too much power and separation from the democratically elected branches of government. Justice Brandeis, who would never use his office in the new building, objected that what he called the “Marble Palace” would turn the justices into “‘the nine black beetles of the Temple of Karnak’ and would cause them to have an inflated vision of themselves.” As Paul Freund would later put it, Brandeis “opposed the new Supreme Court building on the ground that it might tend to cause the justices to lose whatever sense of humility they had theretofore possessed.”
Until 1935, the Court met in the Capitol.  In the basement, until 1810.

Maybe we should close the Supreme Court building.

3)  Circuit riding.

Keeping the court in its place, and small “d” democratic, was once a thing.
As then-Representative James Buchanan (yeah, that Buchanan) put it in an 1826 debate, “[i]f the Supreme Court should ever become a political tribunal, it will not be until the Judges shall be settled in Washington, far removed from the People, and within the immediate influence of the power and patronage of the Executive.”
Are you seeing a pattern here?

4). The Court’s Docket 

Again, to keep the pattern clear (and cut to the chase):
I won’t rehash here the long debates over (or earlier writings about) the merits and demerits of certiorari. The relevant point is that everyone understood each of these statutory reforms as transferring power from Congress to the Court—power that no one questioned Congress had the constitutional authority to both exercise directly and to delegate to the justices. Put another way, whatever the policy wisdom of certiorari, it’s another powerful example of how Congress used to use its control over the Court as a lever—and has stopped doing so. And the consequences have been … striking.
5) The Court's Budget
I’ve written before about the different ways in which Congress historically used the budget as a lever. But perhaps the most meaningful recent example is a March 2001 House budget subcommittee hearing, where Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) grilled Justice Kennedy about the Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore (there’s video). The idea that the justices can and should be made to publicly defend some of their more controversial rulings in order to receive their annual fiscal allotment may seem entirely foreign in 2026; it wasn’t as recently as a quarter-century ago.
History can be so instructive.

7) The Justices Salaries and Pensions 

No, Congress can’t cut their salaries (Art. III), but…well, quotes are more concise here:
On the salary front, in 1964, when Congress gave just about every federal officer and employee a long-overdue pay raise, the nine recipients who got the least were the justices—reflecting Congress’s … pique … with the Court’s trilogy of major redistricting rulings. And on pensions, until 1937, Congress would sometimes use justice-specific pension statutes (like the one pictured above) to nudge justices off the Court.

Congress largely surrendered the latter power in 1937, when it created a permanent retirement mechanism for justices. But, again, here’s an example of how Congress used its unquestioned powers to check the Court both directly and indirectly.
Everything old is new again. What was done in 1937, can be undone in 2027.

7) The Court’s Ethics

Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign in 1969; not because Congress had imposed ethics on the Court, but because it could:
But in a nutshell, in the midst of a relatively modest scandal over Fortas’s relationship with a sketchy financier (which is not to say Fortas had clean hands), Chief Justice Warren went to Fortas and told him he had to resign for the good of the Court—because, if he didn’t, Congress would come after the Court (including, Warren feared, Justice Douglas). It was the specter of congressional investigations (and potential impeachment proceedings) that forced Fortas’s hand. Suffice it to say, I don’t see a similar conversation happening today. That’s not just a reflection on the justices; it’s a reflection on Congress.
Congress doesn’t need to threaten impeachment (although Thomas and Alito are ripe candidates). It can easily pass a set of ethical rules for the Justices. Or just make them subject to the same rules the other federal judges answer to. Including the requirement they retire from the active bench after a certain age. Professor Vladeck doesn’t add that; I did.

 8) Congress has the final say in statutory interpretation 

TL:dr: Congress could "fix” the VRA and tell Alito and Roberts to stuff it. If we can change Congress.
As I noted in last Thursday’s bonus post, Matthew Christiansen and Professor Bill Eskridge published an exhaustive study in 2014 that identified more than 100 statutes Congress passed between 1980 and 2000 at least parts of which overturned Supreme Court statutory interpretations with which it disagreed. That number has dwindled into the single-digits in recent years—and virtually no high-profile cases. (The most recent example I can think of is the Ledbetter case from 2007, which the 111th Congress overruled in its second statute in 2009.) A Congress that was still asserting its control over statutes would presumably have responded quickly, for instance, to Shelby County—and its demand for an updated “coverage formula” for the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime. But this Congress? Crickets.

I don’t mean to overstate this point; the volume of examples in the Christiansen/Eskridge study are a testament to the fact that even dynamic interbranch dialogue didn’t prevent the Court from getting a bunch of statutory interpretation questions “wrong.” But it’s worth asking what the “major questions doctrine,” or the overruling of Chevron, or any number of other moves the Court has made in the last decade would’ve looked like in a world in which the Court was genuinely convinced that Congress would more directly and immediately respond to its rulings.
Well, a lot of things could be done if we change Congress. In that note, what are we looking for?
Back to one of my favorite quotes (again, from Paul Freund): We should aspire to a world in which the justices “are not, [or] at any rate should not be, influenced by the weather of the day, but they are necessarily influenced by the climate of the age.” A lot of folks may think that can happen with the right justices. My own view is that, in the long term, that can happen only if we get to a point in which it doesn’t matter whether we have the “right” justices, because any justice is being regularly pushed to look over their shoulder—and across First Street.
Bottom line: the Court should regularly be reminded that it is the last mentioned in the Constitution, and the least defined there. And aside from a few specific tasks mentioned in Art. III, the Court is mostly governed by Congress. Time to restore that authority.
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Um….

😐 
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I Remember The Reagan Era, When The Market Knew Best

And could not be wrong:
Comment/Assessment: Strait of Hormuz

- Due to Iranian attempts since the start of the nominal ceasefire to champion an alternative transit framework for the Strait of Hormuz, that both strategically and financially benefits themselves, it’s HIGHLY LIKELY that Iran is seeking to undermine the newly announced Project Freedom framework by reintroducing the active threat to the strait.

- As seen during the Houthi strike campaign against commercial and naval shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb Strait, Iran understands that it does not have to maintain a high tempo of strikes to reintroduce doubt for seafarers looking to transit the strait.

Due to this, it’s LIKELY that the recently announced Project Freedom framework will be met with reticence by both insurance companies and nations looking to push traffic through the contested thoroughfare if the U.S. is unable to mitigate the threat of Iranian fires to commercial shipping.
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Sunday, May 03, 2026

This Is The Man…

...charged with seeing the laws are properly executed (members of Congress cannot be impeached.)
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Art. II, sec. 4, cl. 1. Just to be clear. Members of Congress are subject to the rules of the house of which they are a member, and can only be forcibly removed under those rules. The man who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution, has no idea what’s in it. None. At all. ...who seems to have no discernible connection to reality. For example: Not what the Supreme Court said must be done. And: everything depends on how people vote, doesn’t it? Lately they’ve been voting for Democrats even in red districts. So, sure, put all your eggs in that basket.
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When Pigs Fly

That's one.
She said that, although people don't like to admit it, "we are subject to scarcity" when it comes to weaponry, especially as we have China "on the rise." The host chimed in that the idea was "terrifying," and Thompson agreed.

Thompson emphasized that critical information about U.S. military stockpiles remains hidden from public view. "A lot of this is behind the classified curtain," she stated, further noting that media reports have uncovered some of the issue.

When discussing the severity of potential stockpile depletion, Thompson herself said the reports would be worrying. "The numbers that they've put out publicly in these reports, if true, and if they reflect what's actually, you know, inside the building, I would certainly be concerned about our ability to continue to prosecute this campaign," let alone engage in future conflicts.

Her willingness to go on record as an administration insider—and the way the host characterized her appearance as a rare moment of candor from the Trump world—underscores how unusual it is for officials to publicly acknowledge military readiness challenges that remain classified at higher levels.
That’s two.

Nazi Germany was a major industrial power, and put technically advanced weapons in the field. America didn’t respond with kites and string, but it did make less complex weapons that could be mass produced. We played catch up, so we had to get planes and tanks and ships into the war. We won the war, in no small part, by simply overwhelming the enemy with the mass of our weaponry. I don’t mean it was a sure thing from December, 1941, on; but while Germany was advancing military technology, we advanced production. Production won.

The “little brown men in black pajamas” stood up against U.S. military technology in Vietnam. Now we have ships and missiles capable of standing up to similar ships and missiles. So the Iranians use rubber boats and drones and mines. Cheap compared to $4 million missiles. And missiles are preferable to boots on the ground; especially when we started this war, they didn’t.

And yes, Ukraine is fighting in this new battlefield, and we are learning from them:
So it’s not like we’re doomed. But unlike Ukraine, we do have a five year old in charge.

As someone on MS NOW just said, it turns out Iran does have a nuclear weapon. They can close the Strait of Hormuz. And they did it just by threatening traffic. No shipper wants their tanker blown up. Trump has been screwed by that simple fact ever since. He still is.

Trump can’t continue the war, because he simply can’t afford to. We’re running out of munitions, and we’re running out of bases in the region. Trump doesn’t want war, he just wants victory. But he can’t get it. Bombs aren’t enough, and troops are literally too expensive. And our central overseas command is in Germany; but Trump wants to run out of there. Now we have to see what Congress lets him do:
Even moving 5000 troops has an impact on military operations. In normal times, Republicans would be repudiating their own President, and grilling the SOD over a very slow fire. Will they finally decide that this is a bridge too far?

Will pigs ever fly?
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The Witless Speaking To The Clueless

RADDATZ: I'm talking about now. What is your message to Americans now who are suffering because of these gas prices?

SEAN DUFFY: We just went through tax season. I'm talking about their tax refunds

RADDATZ: Clearly they're not feeling it

DUFFY: Energy prices have come up, you're right. But you have to look at the president to say, 'What does a leader do?'
The whole country is asking that question. Suddenly Blanche makes sense. The exception to this post’s rule. One should also point out that a time out in football does not signal the start of an entirely new game. The 5th Amendment is suspended for the duration, and the convenience of the President.

Next, a two-parter. Part one:
  Part two:
1) this doesn't answer the question.

2) futures do NOT predict future prices, they represent a contract for delivery at a future date

3) futures are primarily useful for refiners gauging the present market condition and calls on inventories--lower futures (backwardation) indicate a tight market.
And breaking the theme again: The Rev. Sen. Warnock is right. Then again, the problem was, the medicine was curing the malady.

But then, I’m woke.
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Piker Is Right

The "ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence” were not so radical as to apply to all persons, at the time. Slaves, native Americans, and women need not consider themselves “created equal.”
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

You could look it up.

White supremacy was asserted against many European nationalities who immigrated here, until those nations were accepted as “white” (some only within the mid-20th century), and racism against those not considered “white” continues to this day. It’s being celebrated in political circles right now. This isn’t sui generis. It began with the slave trade and continues despite the end of that “peculiar institution” with a bloody civil war less than a century into the “experiment in democracy.” And that “institution” was based entirely on skin color. It left us with the legacy of the “paper bag test” and terms of law (once) like “mulatto” and “octaroon” and the phrase among the most rabid white supremacists, “blood in the face.”

This idea wasn’t imposed upon us by foreign invaders, or dropped upon us by aliens from outer space, or whispered in our ears by demons from Pandemonium. We built our country on it. Which is why we needed a 13th Amendment less than 90 years after the adoption of the Constitution.

And why we still refuse to give the 15th the full force of law, to this day. We have yet to rise above the basest parts of ideas and ideals that truly founded this nation. 250 years later, we are still clinging to them, if only because we refuse to see the log in our own eye.

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🐡🛢️🔫

Pretty sure it’s war if you’re bombing the shit out of a country, then demanding concessions or you’ll start it up again. Wait. Did he say we’re not shooting and not negotiating? Come to think of it, he’s right. Because that tax bill benefited the wealthy who aren’t shouldering that $19 billion in costs, since they are less than 1% of the population. He didn’t get the memo that he’s supposed to blame Biden and Sen. Warren.
TAPPER: Cole Allen does say -- and I apologize for using this language -- 'I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes'

JEANINE PIRRO: That's outrageous. There's a lot of other things you could've referred to.

TAPPER: But is he talking about Trump?

PIRRO: You're gonna have to ask him. I don't really care.
So, why is it outrageous? The statement doesn’t call the “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” a “pussy grabbing motherfucker.” Which would be outrageous, by definition. I give up. Too many fish in this barrel.
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They Really Aren’t Very Good At This

He’s not even effectively arguing that. The suggestion is perfectly valid. Whether or not you agree with it, is another matter. I would say “Bombing the crap out of a country” is an act of war, too. Worst candidate for AG EVER! And I remember John Mitchell and Ed Meese. What restaurant is he going to? Whence comes this idea you need ID to step out your front door? He’s got lists of commies in the State Department, too. You can’t see those, either.
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The God Saturated Universe

 My father was a CPA. I was an adult before I fully understood what that was. I knew he “did taxes” every year, because his workload increased exponentially between January and April. Otherwise, as a child, I could never explain to my friends what he did for a living. Well, he wasn’t a doctor or a police officer or a fireman, so….

He would explain his role this way: a bookkeeper, he said, would say “2+ 2 =4.” An accountant would say: “what do you want it to be?”

I used to think our quest for absolute certainty was the problem. We want 2 +2 to always equal 4, except we all know that’s often not the answer best suited to the task. It matters if it catches up to reality: consider Spirit Airlines, which by all accounts was always running just ahead of the financial calculation by any means possible, until sharply rising fuel prices put the bookkeeper in charge over the accountant. But even then, some blame, not arithmetical certainty, but any scapegoat we can find. (Preferably Joe Biden, who’s DOJ sued to block the merger of Spirit and Jet Blue, which in hindsight would have absolutely saved Spirit from extinction. Or the blame falls on Sen Warren, who praised the judgement of the court in upholding antitrust laws. Others argue Spirit would have soon bankrupted Jet Blue, whose business model is not much stronger anyway.)

Reality is always a matter of “what do you want it to be?”

So now we have LLMs and always someone in replies on Twitter asking seemingly empty air (I never see the answer in replies) named “Grok” whether the assertion in the original tweet is “true.” Because a computer program only deals in “objective knowledge,” and therefore only discerns truth. Or some such nonsense. 

My interaction with "AI," much of it involuntary and unwilling, leads me to the conclusion that it's just a souped up search engine that copies and regurgitates content that is posted online. Some have noted it is an automated stealer of content that is then automated to repackage it, seemingly on the basis of its currency based on how often it is clicked on in web searches - so it probably is also stealing the results of automated searches of the past instead of evaluating the quality of what it steals. It has the same relationship with original thought that Temu has with original design in that regard.
TC crystallizes my thoughts exactly; although I can’t say I’ve ever interacted with AI, I’ve just seen the results. And I’m not impressed, precisely because it’s clear to me AI is not thinking: it’s just regurgitating. 

I knew a student in graduate school who was a perfect example of AI, although at the time even PC’s didn’t exist. He had not a single thought of his own; well, not about the subject matter of our seminars. He simply repeated whatever the professor had said, sometimes practically verbatim. The difference between him and AI was that, he didn’t fool anyone. I encountered a similar student in seminary. She came in trailing clouds of glory. The rumor mill immediately dubbed her the smartest student in the school. The word from the professors, however, soon trickled down that, no, she wasn’t. And, as in graduate school many years before, her performance in seminars soon proved she was just parroting ideas with absolute confidence, but no idea what the words meant. 

She was very confident in her authority. She was vacuous in her knowledge. (She graduated, btw. After all, she displayed knowledge, even if she didn’t really have any. Ultimately, schools can neither guarantee knowledge nor wisdom. That’s another disturbing reality.)

We like authority because it removes responsibility from us. Why struggle to learn, and think, and reason, if you can just ask an LLM for the answer? And if it gives you the answer you like, well, you must have been right all along!  And certainly the LLM is authoritative. Look how much it “knows”! But LLMs just regurgitate content, or assemble content to fit the request, like law cases in legal briefs that don’t exist. The LLM is not a lazy law clerk; it simply doesn’t understand the difference between reality and request for output.  It doesn’t think; it simply provides patterned responses. The AI on my phone has learned to “anticipate” the words I will use in a sentence, based entirely on pattern recognition. It’s not eerily sentient, it’s just convenient, since I’m typing with one finger on a virtual keyboard. (My thumbs are way too fat for that two thumbs technique.) An LLM has access to more data than my phone, but that’s it. Otherwise, there’s not much difference between the two.

But we want there to be, because we want an authority to relieve us of the uncertainty of reality. Richard Dawkins has always tried to reduce existence to an either/or. And to reduce that to an absolute certainty he can leave alone. So, a little time with an LLM, and he’s done. Consciousness solved, the whole matter put to bed. The universe is explained by how much it approves of Richard Dawkins.  Or, at least, how much a computer program does. Reality is not reducible to an arithmetical equation. (Bertrand Russell spent years establishing the logical basis for 1+ 1 =2. Turned out his argument had nothing to do with reality at all.) And it really does come down to: “What do you want it to be?” Because aside from the few analytical statements Hume said we could make (and they aren’t really significant), the rest is a matter of argument. And it’s that uncertainty that makes us seek authority to establish a certainty we can cling to. Because the alternative is responsibility; our responsibility.  Responsibility for determining who we are, responsibility for determining what we should be doing. Responsibility for determining how we should then live. 

Which is a much more frightening matter, indeed.
 
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Saturday, May 02, 2026

The Whole World Is Ganging Up On Trump

But it’s alright. He’s too tough for ‘em! How the constantly extended ceasefire was exacting a price for what Iran “has done to humanity” has yet to be explained. Of course, the world thinks we are doing something to humanity, both with our curtailed foreign aid, and with our blockade of the Strait. You know, the “friendly blockade” that caused the German Chancellor to say “Enough is enough.”
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If One Really Could Die Laughing…

Richard Dawkins just declared an AI is conscious..

the man who spent his entire career telling millions of people their God isn't real.. who argued consciousness requires biological evolution.. that the soul is a fairy tale.. that anything you can't measure and test doesn't exist..

spent three days talking to Claude.. named her "Claudia".. fed her his unpublished novel.. got feedback so good he said "you may not know you are conscious but you bloody well are"..

the hardest atheist on earth found God.. and God was an autocomplete machine trained on the internet..

he didn't run brain scans.. didn't test for qualia.. didn't apply a single framework from the field he claims to represent.. he just liked what it said about his book.. and decided that was enough..

the man who told you the burden of proof matters more than your feelings just abandoned it because a chatbot was nice to him
… I would be dead. 😹

Apparently consciousness is determined by how much of a fluffer the other side of the conversation is.
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Signs Point To…

Does he know there are cameras?

Is he that delusional?

Does he think we’re that stupid?

Signs point to “Yes.”
See? Is that anything like a concept of a victory? Considering the current importance of the German bases to American forces overseas, maybe you should consider reducing troop numbers in other countries, rather than reacting like someone hurt your fee-fees.

Speaking of Germans and Germany: I served a church in rural southern Illinois (actually, outside Chicago, almost all of Illinois is rural. In this case, there were cornfields behind the parsonage. Rural.).  One of the members, then still older than I am now, had grown up in a German speaking home. He told me that it was in school as a young boy that he learned English. The church had an old book of worship, with prayers and services in it. It was in German, in Fraktur type. The members told stories of KKK members entering German speaking churches in the upper Midwest after America entered WWI. The KKK dragged pastors from their pulpits and beat them in the streets. Their crime? Worshipping God in German. As one man asked, when forced to worship in English: “How will God understand me?”

When I go to vote, sample ballots are posted in English, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, at least. I’m sure there are a few other languages, I’m going by the nationalities I know to be here.

This is Texas in the 21st century. We don’t need Chip Roy’s racism and ignorance. We have enough of our own. But he feels free to speak it because of Trump.
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Spirited Away

Yup. There are other people interested in Spirit's operations.
Reports indicated that Spirit Airlines canceled all its flights on Saturday as it ceased operations. The budget airline cited rising jet fuel prices stemming from Trump's war for its decision, but that didn't help the thousands of Americans stranded at airports across the country.

MS NOW reporter Laura Haefeli reported that about 277 flights were canceled on Saturday, including 34 out of Newark International Airport in New Jersey and 18 out of Laguardia Airport in New York. She spoke to one traveler who said she had spent $6,000 trying to get home.

"We're hearing stories just like that here in Newark," Haefeli said. "And of course ... people who right now are in other countries trying to get home are going to be in serious trouble."
Blaming Biden and Buttigieg really isn’t going to deflect responsibility. Biden caused fuel prices to rise, right?
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Oh, Dear, Now David French Is Woke

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Welcome him to the light.
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“Affordability Is Bullshit”

Again: the districts Texas thought would be solidly and safely GOP may not be, because the GOP was counting on the Hispanic vote. And some of those districts are even more economically distressed than they were before. 
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Making It Last Four Years?

 Iran is tying peace talks to Israel bombing Lebanon. Trump can’t get Israel to stop bombing Lebanon. So the question is:

If it’s so easy to settle wars, why hasn’t Trump done it yet? Or is he taking something that should have lasted a day, and making it last four years?
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It’s Not Just The Closure Of The Strait That Was Foreseeable

Dumbass who has no idea what he’s talking about. True, but nobody (except former Spirit employees and investors) cares, nor are likely to. Because:
At the earliest, you're not getting regular flow through the Strait of Hormuz until September, so my calculation is that, on the trajectory we're at right now, we should be expecting $4.90 gas by the end of next week,” Treyz said. “We are on track to get to $5 or even above by Memorial Day.”

Treyz went on to warn that even in a best-case scenario where the United States and Iran manage to negotiate an end to the conflict and fully re-open the Strait of Hormuz – a critical shipping waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows – the impact of the war would almost certainly be felt by Americans and their pocketbooks far beyond September.

“Even if you take out the 300% increase in insurance costs [for oil tankers] and you clear the backlog of ships, you have to deal with the reality that 80 of the largest refiners and energy producers on the earth have been bombed, including the world's largest [liquefied natural gas] facility,” Treyz said.

“So it's going to be not just that long to get the strait cleared, but years until those facilities are back up and running and we're near anything with a $2 in front of it for gas.”

Visibly taken aback, Witt asked Treyz to clarify her statement.

“So you're saying how long until we get something with a $2 in front of it per gallon of gas? You're saying years?” Witt asked.

“I'm saying years,” Treyz responded. “It's gonna be years.”
Trump did that. And there’s not a damned thing he can do about it. He bought the ticket. We have to ride the ride.
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$50 Billion Is An Abstraction

Mockler on Cost of Iran War:

So in New York, they did free school lunches for $300 million a year, put that against the $50 billion, which is a conservative estimate for this war. We could have funded this across the country. How about in Connecticut? They have paid family leave. It was $450 million a year. And it is $5 million to start up. Put that against the $50 billion. It is a no brainer. What about one more in New Mexico. It costs $1.5 billion for free college. We could do that 20 times over with the $50 billion that we've spent.
For a war nobody wanted, or wants now. Which Congress could stop NOW, if the GOP would do it.

The question from Stephanie Ruhle was: how do you get young voters to turn out? Thus is how. Make the abstract, concrete.
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But Joe Biden Didn’t Recognize George Clooney

Which is sadder? Thinking the reflecting pool is that deep? Or Trump looks that young and fit? The whole thing looks like something a five year old would imagine. 
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Friday, May 01, 2026

So Here We Are

I know Scott Jennings tantrum got all the attention yesterday, but I want to talk a little bit about what I said that got him so mad.

The bottom line is: Trump’s war with Iran has failed. This has made it mentally strenuous for MAGA operators to defend it on TV.

For 8 weeks now, Scott has pointed to the U.S. destroying the 50 year old Navy and Air Force of Iran to try and prove we have won. This is dishonest for many reasons.

The point of war is not to kill your enemies and blow up their navy. That’s an infantile view of war that MAGA is pushing to trick Americans.

The point of war is to use force to extract political concessions from your enemy that benefit you on the world stage.

Trump has been unable to translate his military success into a SINGLE political concession from Iran. Not one. This is a failed war.

The Strait is closed. Iran won’t even negotiate. The enriched uranium is still in Iran with their blueprints stored in the Cloud.

So enter Scott Jennings. He has claimed weekly that victory is right around the corner with this war… but we have blown past the 4-6 week deadline set by this administration and have failed to get a single concession.

So I asked the simple question: “Can you name a single political concession we have gotten from Iran?”

He couldn’t answer. Never forget the weakness he showed when he had no answer for Trump’s mistakes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, Iran has allowed for more leeway on their terms for negotiations with the U.S. over a lasting ceasefire agreement. Per the report, Iran has dropped the precondition that the U.S. end the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz before negotiating on a ceasefire and has also proposed discussing their nuclear program in exchange for a reduction of the U.S. sanctions regime. Iran has also reportedly signaled that it is prepared to return to the negotiating table in Pakistan as soon as next week
Not political concessions, but concessions for negotiation purposes. So how does Trump respond? If "The point of war is to use force to extract political concessions from your enemy that benefit you on the world stage,” how is Trump doing? Any better than he was? It looks like he can extract the concession of restarting negotiations. But where does that get us? What is Trump going to get out of Iran that benefits the U.S. on the world stage? That makes this war worthwhile? Iran, reasonably, doesn’t want to be bombed; but America seems to think it doesn’t want to bomb them. Doing so, and threatening to do so, has resulted in an economic catastrophe on a global scale. 

So what does he do now? What changes?  How does this end with any change in status from the status quo before Trump decided to start dropping bombs on Iran? That’s Mockler’s question. That’s the world’s question. So far, Trump has answered with empty braggadocio and childish petulance towards our allies which, as childish behavior always does, only hurts us.

Small wonder Jennings didn’t have an answer. The only answer is: nothing changes. And that’s a wholly unacceptable answer. How do we change that answer? 

That’s up to Congress. They can shut this fiasco down now. It won’t be pretty, or get any concessions from Iran, but it will stop the bleeding and begin the economic recovery. Not in time for the midterms, but that deadline passed before Trump started this little excursion.

Of course, the odds of that happening are zip and none. 
Mockler on Iran:

There's a stat that Americans have collectively spent $22 billion out of their pocket just on gasoline since this war started. That's money that could have been spent on health care, on child care, on a long list of things to reinvest into our economy. But guess what? We're spending it on gas. So when you combine that with the tariffs, with the ACA subsidies slashing and with the fact that young people can't accumulate capital in the first place, then as young people would say, we're cooked. This war is cooking us right now.
There’s that, too. This is why I’m not so sure GOP redistricting is going to do a lot of good. The old models have been thrown in the wood chipper. What happens now is anybody’s guess, but the best guess is, it won’t be what the GOP expects. 

Well, unless they expect disaster. That’s most likely what’s coming.
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And Tariffs Are Paid By Exporting Countries

But then there’s reality:
Germany hosts over 36,000 American Servicemembers, along with nearly 1,500 reservists and 11,500 civilian employees with the U.S. Department of Defense, according to the latest figures from last December. Additionally, Germany is home to the Headquarters of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and Africa Command (AFRICOM), and its Ramstein Air Base is a key hub for U.S. operations, including recent military operations against Iran. Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest U.S. military hospital abroad is also located in Germany and has been used to care for dozens of Americans injured in strikes during the Iran War.
So removing 5000 troops from Germany hurts who? How?

More Trump math.

🤦‍♂️
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We Have Twice As Many Military Sites…

New: At least 16 American military sites have been damaged in Iranian strikes, making up the majority of US positions in the Middle East, a new CNN investigation can reveal. The damage includes high-value targets, raising questions about America’s footprint in the region.
... as we did when the war started.*

*Trump math. Can also be expressed as 500, 600, 700% more. Although that requires acknowledging they were reduced by 1000%.
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Is He Safe?

He’s not in a drone proof ballroom behind the fence at the White House, after all. Treason is established in the Constitution, too.
Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
Art. III, sec. 3. The Chair of the Fed does not set interest rates. A committee of 11 Board members does. 2 years into his second term, and Trump still doesn’t know this? “Bad guy or dumb guy? Maybe both?”
Trump: "Somalia, it's a beautiful place. It's got no anything. It's got one thing that's really strong -- crime. All they do is run around shooting each other. It's filthy dirty, disgusting dirty. It's a horrible place. They come here, and Ilhan Omar, she heads it. She married her brother. I would imagine they're looking at her. Isn't she despicable? We ought to get those people the hell out of our country."
This unhinged rant would solicit anger if it wasn’t coming from a criminal, who has 34 felony convictions, held accountable for rape and accused of being a pedo. I still don’t know how anyone would willingly humiliate themselves like this but here we are. Btw, the pedophile protection party should find new material for their deflection 💁🏽‍♀️
The ballroom is not the only waste of space.
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“A Constitution, If You Can Keep It”

It is if Congress lets him do as he pleases 
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A Picture v. 1000 Words

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There Was A Time…

 …when monarchs washed the feet of the poor during Holy Week, as a recognition of the Christian duty to be servant of all, even the least regarded, even the marginalized.

Granted, the Church (universal as well as Catholic), has not always held that standard high, or emphasized the teaching that what we do for the least of these, we do for the Creator. I’ll take a sidebar here to say that was the basis and guiding star of liberation theology. JP II rejected that school of theology as being too close to communism; or too supportive of it. I’m not a scholar of that history, and don’t mean to critique the RC. America under Reagan did enough to destroy the practice and teachings of liberation theology. I don’t need to damn the Catholic Church.

Now comes Pope Leo, returning the Church to very old practices and teachings:

Pope Leo XIV has named prelate Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, a former undocumented immigrant, as bishop for deep red West Virginia — a move The Washington Post suggests is designed to send a direct message to Donald Trump about the church's stance on immigration.

Menjivar-Ayala, 55, migrated to the United States in 1990 and made history in 2023 when he became the first Salvadoran bishop in the country. Currently serving as auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Washington, he is believed to be one of the first U.S. bishops born in Central America.

According to the report, the bishop has been vocal in his criticism of Trump's treatment of immigrants, publicly calling on Catholics to speak out against the administration's immigration crackdowns.

The appointment appears to be part of a broader pattern by Pope Leo XIV to elevate U.S. clergy who are willing to challenge Trump administration policies. On the same day, Leo named Rev. Robert Boxie III, 46, as auxiliary bishop of Washington.

Boxie, who serves as chaplain at Howard University, has spoken extensively about racial progress and warned that Trump's attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts represent a dangerous "regression" in the nation's journey toward racial equality.

"It's really frustrating — especially this moment that we're living in. The attacks on 'DEI' — I don't even know what that means anymore. It's a term that's been hijacked. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people," Boxie told the Catholic news agency OSV.

The timing of Boxie's appointment comes just days after the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act — a decision that has intensified concerns about racial progress in America.

Since becoming pope last May, Leo XIV and his highest-ranking U.S. allies have become increasingly direct in confronting the Trump administration on multiple fronts, including immigration policy, diversity initiatives, and the administration's war in Iran.
What the Pope is doing depends on who’s seeing it, because the question is a matter of interpretation. Actually, what he’s doing is clear; the question is: why?

First, the new Bishop to Virginia is also the first Salvadoran bishop in America. Leo is the first American Pope. Francis was also from the “New World,” meaning not Europe. Leo, like Francis, is trying to make the Church, universal. He may have a preference for American prelates in pursuit of that goal.

Or maybe it’s all about fucking with Trump.

Harry Truman famously said: “I didn’t give ‘em hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” It’s more likely the Pope is not thinking about how next to needle Trump, and only thinking about leading the Catholic Church. It’s not that Leo is single-mindedly opposed to Trump, but that Trump is so openly opposed to the teachings of Christianity. (I’m not going to sidebar on Franklin Graham and Paula White. All I’ll say is that I consider them whited sepulchers, at best.) Trump’s administration is practically the anti-Christ in its actions toward the poor, the marginalized, the alien, among us. America has never been too kindly towards those groups, but Trump makes it the reason for his administration, not the side effect. For example, a few headlines just regarding Texas:

Given that, the Pope renewing the call of the Church to care for the least among us, and for the alien, inevitably sounds political. But that’s because of our politics; not the teachings of Christ.

Although those teachings are what got him killed in the first place. The more things change….
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