Author: A.T.

Six Links For Your Consideration

1. A Virtual Conversation with Heather Cox Richardson and DNC Chair Ken Martin — next Monday at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific.

If you’re not happy with total MAGA control of the government, blow $25 and sign up for the call!

2. A Deeper Look (Literally): What Trump’s “Big Strike” Did and Did Not Achieve.

3. It “likely only set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by months.”  Here’s hoping Trump’s efforts to bring peace to the Middle East succeed.

4. Should Iran instead foolishly decide to activate sleeper cells it claims it has positioned here, never fear: an eager 22-year-old oversees the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention.

5. Senator Alex Padilla addresses his colleagues . . .

6.  . . . including “knee-jerk moderate” Lisa Murkowski.  Might she caucus with the Democrats?

VERU vs TSLA

Suggested here at 52 cents three months ago, VERU remains, at 66 cents, an interesting speculation.  My friend who suggested it notes the large short interest in the stock — a bad thing if the shorts are right and it goes bust; a great thing if they at some point decide to cover their short positions to avoid ruin.

What has my friend excited is that (he writes):

Two of the three drugs competing with VERU’s Enobosarm reported results recently that dramatically underperformed.  VERU’s 3 mg dosage (taken in pill form) reduced loss of muscle mass by 97.2% . . . while Scholar Rock’s intravenously administered drug and Regeneron’s injected drug reduced muscle mass loss by only 50.0% and 51.3%, respectively!!!   Neither of these two competing drugs improved total weight loss significantly, either, as compared to Enobosarm!!!

So, as against two of the three competitors, he reports, our drug is way more effective — and taken in pill form.

As for the third, he writes:

Lilly’s drug (IV induced) (data expected 11/2026) that they acquired from Versanis for $2 BILLION is in my opinion the only drug still in the running to compete with Enobosarm.  If VERU could be worth the same $2 BILLION, then, with 147 million shares outstanding ($2 BILLION/147 million = $13.60) VERU share price target might reasonably be $5 or $10 or $15 — no?   A 10X or 20X.

Highly speculative, but — I would argue – not as nuts as TSLA.  (See: Tesla Stock Valuation Looks Insane.)

Could TSLA, currently valued at over $1 trillion, reasonably be imagined to jump 10- or 20-fold in the next two or three years, to $10 trillion or $20 trillion?  I don’t see it.

Might its market cap fall to just (say) five times that of Ford and GM combined?  That I could imagine — and would cut its share price in half.

And what if Tesla were one day worth only twice Ford and GM combined?  Stranger things have probably happened.

 

Weekend Reading

ICE believes it will never face accountability again.

The principles of policing . . . versus a police state.

A few last words about the MAGA man from Garrison Keillor, who concludes:  “I apologize for this ugly column. I shouldn’t have written it. I promise not to do it again.”

To which we can only respond: “No!  Encore!  Encore!”

WEEKEND LISTENING

Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Transgender Care for Minors

Should state governments be empowered to overrule the decisions of parents, children, and their doctors?  Yes, rules John Roberts: in America individual liberty extends only so far.

 

Oh, My

Okay, I’m basically taking the day off, but because many of you are allies of the LGBT community — for which I am truly grateful, and for which, in my view, the country is better off — I offer these two items:

An anecdote from Star Trek’s George Takei re Howard Stern.  Oh, my.

The review of a new play I was leery about attaching my name to (you’ll instantly grasp why when you see the title) (and also because my support was so minor, it didn’t seem any credit was warranted, let alone a photo with the cast on Monday’s opening night) but the cast and script and direction and staging are BRILLIANT and I’ve never seen anything better.  Plus, it’s at Playwright’s Horizon, a non-profit, so I’m not trying to enrich myself by selling you a ticket (which may be impossible to get after that review, anyway).

Happy Pride, everybody.

IMPORTANT BONUS

I attended a small fundraiser with DNC Chair Ken Martin last night.

He was so good.  We are in extraordinary hands.  I know things seem bleak, and the Party, adrift — but if you had been there, I think you would have left feeling, as all of us did: this guy gets it.  This guy is going to make it happen.  This guy deserves our full support.  And you know what?  We’re going to win.

(Though having now finished Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, I have to tell you it’s really hard not to be really angry with the very small handful of people who allowed this tragedy to unfold in the first place.)

 

A Quick Poem

By Leo Herrera, read at the protest I attended yesterday:

Trump vows changes to immigration crackdown to protect migrant farmers, hotel workers.

Well, that’s a start.

Who knows?  Maybe he’ll expand it to include health care workers, construction workers — and anyone else who isn’t an actual criminal.

Kind of what Obama did while he waited for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

(The Senate passed it 68-32 in 2013, but House Republicans, knowing it would pass there, too, wouldn’t allow it to come to the floor for a vote.)

(Biden, too, could have signed a tough bill — the Senate vote was 57-43 — if only Trump hadn’t wanted the crisis to continue, to use as an election issue.)

Support the opposition!

 

I Mean, Just — Yikes

Unfolding as I type — Israel and Iran.  My own view is that we never should have pulled out of the deal Obama struck with Iran.  But even if I’m right, that’s spilt milk.  Dare we hope Iran’s religious tyranny will be toppled and its people welcomed into a world of peace and prosperity?  (And that Israel’s religious extremists will somehow loosen their grip?)

Meanwhile, what otherwise would have been today’s lead story:

Pete Buttigieg on the handcuffing of a United States Senator (100 seconds).

In a related note:

JD Vance lays out the plan (60 seconds).

Have you found your Saturday peaceful protest?

Click here!

More than 2,000 of them are now planned.  If the two I’ve attended recently are any guide, you’ll have fun and feel good about having joined in.

No Kings!

(Or as the Brits and some other countries with kings are styling their protests in sympathy with ours: “No Tyrants!”)

 

“I Hereby Retire From Satire”

Andy Borowitz yesterday:

I swear I am not making this up. Tonight Trump will go to the Kennedy Center to see “Les Miserables,” a play about a mass uprising against a tyrannical king. I hereby retire from satire.

The Big Beautiful Bill — 90 must-watch-and-share seconds.

Beware LA Protest Mis-info

There is a lot of misinformation going around about the LA protests, from both the left and the right.

If you have time: Heather Cox Richardson in Conversation with Secretary Buttigieg.  Superbly thoughtful people.

Have you found your Saturday protest?  Click here.  And join today’s call!

 

Crypto Corrupto . . . And Pride

But first . . .

Barack: “It won’t be as easy as just shouting” (60 seconds). 

Imagine!  A President who respects the role of Congress.

AOC:

Fox News and the right wing would have you believe that my American values are something out of the communist manifesto.

But I don’t believe in healthcare, labor, and human dignity because I’m an extremist.

I believe these things because I was a waitress.

Because I’ve worked double shifts to keep the lights on.

Because I did lose a parent to cancer and I saw my mom open the hospital bill a couple of days later.

Because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind.

I don’t want any of us to live like this anymore. We deserve better.

 

And now . . .

Sawyer Hackett: How Trump personally profits from the tariffs Congress never authorized (90 seconds).

And:

Trump Profits Like No Other President

When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.

Thirty-one years later, after dinner at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about first lady Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice. . . .

The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and is opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.

Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.

And Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Trump personally.

By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals. . . .

Retorts the White House: “The American public believes it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”

Really?

The dollar is our superpower.  We just print money and the world accepts it — “as good as gold.”

(Our other two?  The “soft power” we accumulated over 80 years, beginning with the Marshall plan, a mix of generosity and moral clarity that Trump tossed into the trash.  And our unmatched “hard power,” the kind that tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong-Un rely on.)

Yet Trump is doing all he can to weaken the dollar (and strengthen crypto).

Our enemies are thrilled.  Trump doesn’t care.  He’s long crypto.

And that Qatari 747?  Sure it’s a white elephant costing $23,000 an hour to run . . . but that will be the taxpayers’ $23,000 if he becomes president for life like Putin and Xi.  Or chickenfeed if he has to pay it himself out of the billions he’s accumulating as President.  He made money bankrupting casinos.  He’s making money bankrupting America.

PRIDE

> Sally Ride — first woman in space, closeted until death — debuts Monday.  Here’s the trailer.  Here’s a review.

> Gina Ortiz Jones won San Antonio’s mayoral race Saturday.

How the world has changed now that gays and lesbians don’t have to hide who they are and we can love and celebrate straight people, as we always have, but their LGBT+ brothers and sisters, too.  As someone one recently noted: “Homosexuality has been observed in over 1500 species. Homophobia is found in only one: humans. So based on science, the only thing that’s unnatural is homophobia.”