Author: A.T.

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.”

 

 

Three Easy Don’ts + Six Sobering Minutes

1.  Don’t specify your pronouns unless you think people need guidance.  It’s one thing to be supportive of gender nonconforming people; quite another to play into MAGA hands and lose elections.  For more on this, see: Enough With The Pronouns.

(If you have any doubt that we should support gender nonconforming people, watch this straight Navy flyer’s 60-second appeal.)

2.  Don’t spread the TACO meme.  I’ve been thinking this from the minute I first heard it and should have spoken up sooner: ‘TACO’ is an awful political slogan, and it could backfire terribly.

3.  Don’t vote with Oportun management.  This applies only to those bought OPRT before May 27 and should thus have received an e-ballot from your broker (probably this past Wednesday around 3am or 4am, if you’re searching for it).  I voted AGAINST retaining the first two board members and FOR the third, whom management recommends you reject.  (On the remaining questions, I voted FOR.)

If management defeats the challenge, I’d hope the stock doubles over the next year or two.  If the challenge prevails, I’d hope it quintuples.  (Needless to say: only with money you can truly afford to lose.)

BONUS

With all that’s going on . . .

. . . a fake wrestling entrepreneur tapped to head the Department of Education, a Fox News host tapped to head the Department of Defense, Chainsaw Musk battling with our twice impeached Commander-in-Chief — three examples that barely begin to scratch the surface . . .

. . . one would be forgiven to think (if one hadn’t just lost one’s job or weren’t about to lose access to healthcare or hadn’t lived through our last stagflation) that’s it’s all just a reality TV show of sorts, and really kinda fun.

This six-minute video about Alfred Hugenberg — of whom I had never heard — could make such a person think twice.

It will enrage anyone who thinks that I’m suggesting Trump is a modern-day you-know-who.  As Al Gore recently said, “I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it.”

I get it, too.  (And I apologize that Thursday’s link was broken.  Here are the 90 seconds I meant for you to see.  And here’s a transcript of to Gore’s full speech.)

That said, try to find six minutes to watch.  The parallels strike me as significant.

 

Three Good Ones

But first . . .

MUST-MUST-MUST -READ TOM FRIEDMAN

And now, three good ones . . .

1.  Watch what this guy has to say (90 seconds).

If only the votes had been counted in Florida, way back when — especially the tens of thousands of “over votes,” thrown out because people had punched Gore’s chad but also written in his name down below — he would have been our 43rd president.

There would have been no war in Iraq, the Court would not have become a tool of the right, the Voting Rights Act would not have been gutted, Roe would not have been overturned, climate change would have been confronted, we’d have been trillions of dollars less deep in debt, and inequality would have not reached the level required to allow a demagogue to seize power.

2. Take another 90 seconds for THIS guy, with his 610 plastic cups.  (Hint: it’s not about plastic cups.)

3.  Heather Cox Richardson on not just Ukraine’s amazing Operation Spider Web — which you already know about — but also on Darren Beattie, a Trump appointee I’d never heard of.  Speaks volumes.

OPRT

If, like me, you own a bunch, you’ll want to read management’s pitch for your vote . . . and Findell’s pitch to vote against management.  My hope is that Findell’s WHITE ballot prevails.  We could see a $30 stock in a year or two.  But even if it doesn’t, and management hits the $1.10 – $1.30 per share earnings it projects, the stock at $6.50 seems awfully cheap.