Tuesday, June 10, 2025

No sidebars about billionaires buying elections

My Sunday viewing was the Tony Awards, celebrating the best on Broadway. It looks like a lot of great shows appeared over the last year – and I saw shows on Broadway last summer before the season began. My goodness, the Tony Awards show was so gay! Close to the top was a song from Death Becomes Her. I was sure the words were “Everything I do is for the gays.” While I was glad they wanted to do something for all of us (and it was quite the spectacular number), I wondered if I heard it right. So I found the list of songs for the show. The lyric is actually, “Everything I do is for the gaze,” in which the woman sings about the length she will go to attract attention. The similarity between “gays” and “gaze” is, I’m told, totally intentional. The show Operation Mincemeat was introduced by one of the actors, who assures us that he is male and is playing a female character. I think it was Jak Malone, who won for best actor in a featured role. Cole Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary! and the outfit he wore for the Tonys was a gown revealing much of his chest – and ample chest hair. He won for best actor in a leading role in a play. A photo of that gown and chest hair is here. The playwright of Purpose, which won best play, thanked his husband, as did a few other winners. The show Maybe Happy Ending is a look at a different kind of love, that between two robots. It won best actor in a leading role in a musical for Darrin Criss, best direction of a musical, best book of a musical, best score for a musical, and best scenic design for a musical. I’ll put that one on my list of shows to see. One of the shows nominated for best revival of a play was Romeo + Juliet. It’s worth a mention because Romeo is played by Kit Connor. He played Nick, one of the gay lovers in Heartstoppers. This version of R+J looks like the Montagues are white and the Capulets are not. My friend and debate partner might be interested that one of the shows nominated for best revival of a musical was Pirates! The Penzance Musical. It strays somewhat from the Gilbert and Sullivan original – it is set in New Orleans and the song I saw featured washboards – so I don’t know if my friend is a purist and would avoid it or might enjoy a new interpretation. I know the big news this past weekend is about Los Angeles and I’ve accumulated a lot of browser tabs about the story. Alas, I don’t have time for the whole story this evening. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the guy mistakenly included in a raid and deported to El Salvador. The nasty guy and his minions admitted the error, but refused to return him. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Abrego Garcia is back in the US, where he went straight to a detention facility. Attorney General Pam Bondi has charged him with a human trafficking horror story based on “recently found facts.” Einenkel describes the charges as “bogus.” At least Abrego Garcia will be able to defend himself in court. Though I won’t get to the weekend news, the big news last week, before the LA story took over, was the breakup between the nasty guy and Elon Musk. There was a genial moment when Musk was given a sendoff as he officially left his government role to return to private business. Emily Singer of Kos reported that the relationship began to sour when Musk called the Big Brutal Bill an “abomination” for not cutting government spending enough – or maybe because it will cut the EV mandate, which Musk’s Tesla company benefits from. The nasty guy responded. Musk declared that without him the nasty guy would have lost the election and Democrats would have controlled both chambers of Congress. Lovely when two huge egos get into a catfight. Alex Samuels of Kos said that Tesla got caught in the crossfire. It’s shares dropped 14% after the spat. Then the nasty guy threatened to end all of Musk’s government contracts and subsidies. And Musk responded by saying he would fund a primary challenger for every Republican who voted for the Big Brutal Bill. Musk had one more shot, that the nasty guy is named in the Epstein files and that’s the real reason why they haven’t been made public. The Epstein files are about the sex trafficking that Jeffrey Epstein offered to rich people. There are a lot of photos of the nasty guy and Epstein together, even some with the two and scantily dressed women I don’t know of evidence that the nasty guy was a customer. Musk is implying there is evidence. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos exlrrp posted a meme that says, “So elon musk has known about trump and the epstein files but was fine to keep it a secret as long as he got his way? He is no good guy. Not by a long shot.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about all the ways the nasty guy and Musk could damage each other. Musk installed loyalists through the government. The nasty guy could fire them. The nasty guy can cancel all Musk’s government contracts, worth many billions, and prevent new ones from going to Musk. The nasty guy could reinstate all the government investigations into Musk’s businesses. The spat has many Republicans in a tizzy. Do they declare their loyalty to the nasty guy and lose their campaign funding from Musk or have his vast cash used against them? Or do they align with Musk and face the nasty guy’s great wrath? I love such dilemmas. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet from Brian Stelter:
As every political junkie in America watched the Donald Trump-Elon Musk alliance shatter into a million X-shaped pieces, consider what was assumed and baked into the news coverage and commentary.
Stelter then quoted a document (not identified). Here’s part of the quote:
>> Reporters and analysts openly talked about all the ways that Trump might now turn the levers of government to punish Musk, without much talk of the legal or ethical implications. >> Talking heads also speculated that Musk might tweak the X algorithm to push anti-Trump messages into users’ feeds, again sidestepping all the implications. >> No one seemed overly surprised that the richest man in the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars to sway an election and now has buyers’ remorse. There were hardly any sidebar stories about the consequences of billionaires buying elections.
Down in the comments are many cartoons about the spat.

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