One of the single most corrupt acts in American history

My Sunday movie was Twilight’s Kiss, a love story between two senior men, both with families. One scenario is two men who realize late in life that they are gay. That’s not the case here. Pak, 70, appears to have been cruising for quite a while. Hoi, 65, is a member of a group of senior gay men petitioning for a gay nursing home. Figuring out the setting of this film took me a while. Pak drives a taxi and doesn’t want to retire. In addition to “TAXI” on the side of the car there are Chinese characters. But he drove on the left, so this isn’t China. But their speech didn’t sound like Japanese. I realized what it was only a moment before the movie confirmed it – it’s set in Hong Kong. Pak has a wife, a daughter about to be married, and a son with his own daughter. Pak picks the girl up from school and they all frequently eat together. He doesn’t want to lose all that. Hoi, newly retired, was divorced a long time ago and raised a son on his own. That son, with wife and daughter, is now a member of a conservative Christian church. Hoi doesn’t want to lose that either. Pak meets Hoi in a park. Hoi wants more than a quick release. They become lovers, hiding it from their families, taking time together when they can. It’s a tender story. I enjoyed it. I finished the book We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian. I bought the book because I heard it had the same setting as the author’s book You Sound Be So Lucky which I read and discussed here. At the time I didn’t recognize that book is the sequel and still didn’t until I was done with this book and reread the opening of the other and saw character names I recognized. As in many series like this – a gay romance, well any romance – additional books in the series focus on a different couple with the main characters of one story serving as side characters in the next. The setting is 1958-1959 New York. As in the other book one of the characters is a reporter or writer for the New York Chronicle newspaper. In this case it is Nick. He’s there when the owner’s son Andrew III shows up and is assigned to the news room, where Nick works. Andy looks so lost and inept that Nick befriends him and serves as mentor. Their friendship deepens. When Andy can’t stand to live in his deceased mother’s apartment anymore Nick offers his spare bedroom. Nick is deeply closeted (this is a decade before Stonewall). That his older brother Mike is a cop only makes that worse. When Andy, who was engaged to a woman before she called off the wedding, begins to realize he is queer and has fallen for Nick, there are a lot of issues to work through. Andy is about to inherit the paper, though he feels he’s not cut out for the job. Will Andy being Nick’s boss work? Can Nick allow himself to love and consider a future when the society is so homophobic and he could lose so much? But this is a romance. It follows the formula, complete with happy ending. I enjoyed it, though I’m souring on romances and their formula in general. Sabrina Haake of the Daily Kos community lists the huge amount of grifting the nasty guy has been doing, from the “astonishing” number of stock trades quite likely based on insider information to the gilded phone he offered that now has updated terms that say thanks for your deposit but the phone may never actually appear. He’s even more corrupt than the infamous New York Tammany Hall. Emily Singer of Kos reported on those stock trades.

Financial disclosures released this past Thursday show Trump’s investment portfolio included over 3,600 stock trades made in the first three months of 2026. Wall Street experts say that the trade volume is so large that it looks more like a hedge fund’s balance sheet than that of a singular trader—especially the president of the United States. It also raises serious questions about insider trading. Trump’s stock portfolio is not in a blind trust, and many of the stocks he bought and sold were from companies whose leadership he has worked closely with in his capacity as president, including Intel, Nvidia, and Oracle. “I’m baffled,” Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance, told Bloomberg News. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

So, of course, the nasty guy is against passing a law that would ban members of Congress and the president from trading stocks. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy dropped his lawsuit against the IRS, where he demanded $10 billion for leaking tax returns. There is all kinds of wrong with that lawsuit, including he was essentially suing himself. Instead, he “settled” for a $1.776 billion (yeah, we know where that number comes from) “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate those who attacked the Capitol back in 2021 and were jailed for their crimes. Other grifty aspects of this deal: The money is to be disbursed by a committee and the nasty guy has control of the membership. The deal was not reviewed by a court. There will be no reporting of how much was given to whom, so fraud is almost guaranteed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Democrats do it too and this deal is just like an Obama-era settlement. Needham documents the important differences that show why one is legal and the other is pure corruption. NPR host A Martínez talked to reporter Carrie Johnson about the case, giving more detail than Needham had supplied. NPR host Leila Fadel spoke about all this with former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick.

FADEL: I'm curious if you agree with the assessment we just heard from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that this is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history. SANDICK: I do agree with it broadly. Nothing like this has ever happened before. For a president to sort of reach with his, you know, with one hand as the litigant and with another hand as the person who controls the government. And to take almost $2 billion and intend to use it, with almost no controls, to provide, you know, settlements, I guess is what they'll call it, to people who were engaged in the January 6 insurrection. So there's - I've never seen anything like this before.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman’s Substack:

This is what Democrats so often lack: Not something they can talk about today, not a proposal they can make, not a failure of the other side they can point to, but a big idea that helps voters understand and articulate both what the problem is, and most importantly, who is to blame. It’s the corruption, stupid. Trump’s corruption? Yes, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s a system, a rot, a disease, an explanation for nearly every complaint voters have. Corruption is why you can’t afford health care, why prices are too high, why there aren’t enough good jobs, why the government keeps failing at the things it’s supposed to do, and so much more. This is the big idea Democrats have been looking for.

Alas, a problem is that Democrats, by taking donations from billionaires, have been corrupted. Katie Rogers tweeted a link to an article in Vulture with the title and subhead:

The Feed is Fake That “viral” song, movie, influencer, and celebrity drama you scrolled by recently was likely the result of a stealth marketing campaign.

Rogers added a quote from the article

Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds — which is most of them, most of the time — can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.

A week ago Kos of Kos discussed a comment by the nasty guy made at a time when his approval ratings are quite low as voters blame him more and more for the bad economy.

President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter Tuesday, “To what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” It’s a fair question, right? ... “Not even a little bit,” he answered. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran: they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Kos says though the statement seems ludicrous it is among the most honest things he’s said. It’s also a gift for Democrats In Friday’s pundit roundup Dworkin quoted John Stoehr and his Editorial Board:

In the run up to the midterm elections, the Democrats accuse Donald Trump of broken promises. Among other examples, they cite rates of inflation that have wiped out wage gains. But the president kept his promise. A majority of voters wanted whiteness to be dominant again. That’s what he’s doing. The problem is that whiteness causes ruin, even for those who vote for it. You can’t have one without the other, but they didn’t believe it, because, to them, whiteness is prosperity. What they’re mad about now is their own desire backfiring on them. If the Democrats win in November, which seems likely, the leadership will have incentive to control everything rank-and-file Democrats say for the purpose of seeming reasonable to these voters, therefore retaining hopefully their support in advance of the 2028 election. The problem is there’s no way to seem reasonable to Americans who desire freedom from consequences.

A nation of private opulence and public squalor

I finished the book To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers. I’ve read several of Chambers’ other science fiction books and enjoyed and wrote about them. This one is a novella, only 140 pages. The title comes from words by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim that went on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977 saying that humanity (or at least its artifacts) leave the solar system...

to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.

The story is of four astrobiologists who go to another solar system to study four planets that might have life. That is wrapped up in a report they send back to earth. The story isn’t so much conflict and resolution, but a description of what an astrobiologist might do in their setting and how they would go about doing it. I enjoyed the story and if this kind of science fiction is your thing, you might enjoy it too. A week ago Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported that Democrats in New York have reached an agreement to tax multimillion-dollar second homes. The money raised, perhaps up to a half billion will help pay for the affordability issues Mayor Mamdani wants to address. He announced the plans for the tax in front of the $238 million penthouse owned by billionaire Ken Griffin. Of course, Griffin and other billionaires had a few things to say. They described Mamdani’s words as “Just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” That it’s a message to “resent success rather than trying to emulate it.” They called Mamdani a communist and un-American. I see that phrase “resent success” and think Mamdani isn’t resenting success as he is opposing the oppression that billionaires do to get that much money, then refusing to support the society that helped them get it. This past Monday Willis reported on words by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the response by Jeff Bezos, the guy made rich by Amazon. AOC had said:

You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.

Bezos replied through the editorial board of the Washington Post, the paper he owns and has bent to his will.

If someone becomes a billionaire selling expensive shoes, it’s because people want and are willing to pay for them. That’s something to celebrate, not admonish. ... To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential.

I’m amused that the Post editorial board included the word “legitimately.” Bezos certainly got his billions legally. But he did it by overworking and underpaying the people who work for him. That’s ethically wrong. Also, the editorial board sidestepped the possibility that a company can sell shoes, even expensive ones that people will pay for, and then make sure all the employees and suppliers are paid well, even if the CEO doesn’t reach the billion dollar level. Every Thursday Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quotes a bit from the late columnist Molly Ivins. Today, Bill posted:

The conservatives have been preaching this Me First stuff as though life were a race to the finish and the only object is to pick up as much money as you can. It doesn’t work—not even if you wind up with a lot of toys. As another noted economist said, we are becoming a nation of private opulence and public squalor. Look, we all do better when we all do better. You raise the minimum wage, it works for everyone. —May, 2006

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bob Flaherty of The Bulwark. The topic is the “autopsy” of the 2024 campaign that the Democratic National Committee shelved. It was said to be a detailed assessment of the Harris campaign. Flaherty wrote:

My understanding—based on Dem-world hearsay—is that the truth is stupider than the fiction: No autopsy was released because there is no actual autopsy. The members of the “autopsy team” were in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together.

Flaherty added that he wonders what an actual 2024 autopsy would have said. Yes, 2024 was the year that incumbents around the world were thrown out of office.

We underestimated then—and are underestimating now—just how disillusioned people are. There was and is a pervasive sense that nothing works and the institutions holding us up have failed. Media, government, business—no one trusts anyone anymore. For reasons both of Democrats’ own making and from simply being incumbents, the Democratic brand sucked.

I think people are disillusioned because Democrats seem to be beholden to billionaires as much as Republicans are. Historian Timothy Snyder, in his “Thinking about...” Substack discussed Superpower Suicide. The war with Iran, which is utterly unethical and utterly self-destructive, suggests the nasty guy’s foreign policy is superpower suicide. I think Snyder came up with the term and readers asked him to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

To explain Snyder listed thirteen traditional bases of state power and what the nasty guy has done with them. Here are some of them. Of course, Snyder has a much fuller explanation. 1. A superpower must be a state. It has institutions of law and other things. But the nasty guy sees it as a commercial opportunity. (Or a grifting opportunity.) 2. The power must be used for the good of the people. The nasty guy sees the power to be used for the good of himself. 3. The state must be able to maintain itself, to have a line of succession. Democracy can provide that. The nasty guy has declared he wants to stay in power indefinitely. 4. The right people have to be in charge. There is a tension because those who gain authority want to pass it to their children, which is why Roman Catholic priests are celibate. The source of qualified people is usually civil service or the military. The nasty guy gutted the first and is firing the competent ones of the second. 5. Education is the way to refresh society and help citizens understand the challenges of the world. The nasty guy is attacking them. 6. A great power forges an alliance with science. The nasty guy is shutting down research. 9. A great power practices diplomacy to understand other countries. The nasty guy trashes it. 10. A great power has allies. They may change as national interest changes. But the nasty guy damages alliances based on personal whim. 12. A superpower tends to win confrontations. The nasty guy loses a lot and others see his actions as loss (see: TACO and then Iran).

After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable. The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

In Sunday’s pundit roundup Kev quoted Michael McFaul, writing for his own Substack, about the growing cracks in Valdimir Putin’s rule of Russia. The top reason is his failure in Ukraine. That war has now lasted longer than the Soviet’s war against Nazi Germany. I hear he’s losing ground. He hasn’t achieved regime change. Instead of stopping NATO expansion he hastened it. The Russian economy is stagnating, a combination of recession, inflation, and budget crisis. The lifting of oil sanctions in response to the closed Strait of Hormuz won’t produce enough cash to make enough of a difference. The military is eating too many resources. Demographic challenges are worse because so many young people have fled or have died in the war. How long until this might remove Putin from power is not discussed.

Living a life void of love and compassion is not a happy life

My Sunday movie was Project Hail Mary and I went to an actual movie theater this afternoon to see it. This is a movie for the big screen. The story, adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is about Ryland Grace (which means actor Ryan Gosling is in every scene) solving a science fiction problem. A microbe is nibbling on the sun (yeah, that’s a scientific stretch, but let’s go with it) and the decreasing heat and light will cause the death of humanity in thirty years. Scientists determined a lot of nearby stars are also dimming. But one, Tau Ceti, isn’t. So the scientists of the world want to send a crew there to figure out why that star is spared. Grace is a middle school science teacher. In his past he wrote a paper proposing life could exist in other forms that don’t need water. It got a cool reception in the scientific community. But now his way of thinking might be a help, so he is forcefully recruited for the project. At Tau Ceti he wakes up from a coma on the spaceship, quite disoriented (of course) and finds the rest of the crew is dead. He doesn’t seem to know how to run the ship and I wondered why they would send a man into space without thorough training. The reason is eventually explained. He sees another ship nearby, a being from another affected star also looking for a solution. But this being appears to be made of rocks, confirming the paper other scientists rejected. That turns the story into a first contact story, then into a buddy movie as Rocky (what else are you going to name it?) helps Grace in trying to find the solution. The spaceship is, of course, named Hail Mary. IMDb tells me that gives us “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s a fun story, though one must let the problematic science slide on by. The filmscore by Daniel Pemberton (who I hadn’t heard of before) is pretty good too. So are the special effects. The film deserves its box office take (close to $328 million so far). Even seven weeks since it opened the theater was reasonably full. Before seeing the movie I saw there are related videos on YouTube. First is 19 minutes of behind the scenes, how they did the stunts and special effects. This included exploring the puppetry of Rocky, the large array of sounds used in the score, and the wire work to simulate weightlessness. It is pretty good (not great). One person wondered isn’t Ryan Gosling old enough to be Ryan Goose? Second is a 27 minute video of the science mistakes in the film. This is by Hank Green, who apparently has done a lot of these sorts of videos. He asked his subscribers for science problems that pulled them out of the movie. Green begins by saying he very much enjoyed the film. He sees it as hopeful that so many diverse people came together to solve a problem and that some people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. Also, if the film was extra careful to get the science exactly right it would likely be unwatchable as a story. That’s important in an Andy Weir story where science plays an integral part in the story. The thing that got most of the attention was Grace uses a centrifuge and puts two vials in adjacent spots, which could introduce a wobble into the machine. Grace, a scientist, should know to put the vials on opposite sides. Related, Grace rarely uses an isolation chamber when dealing with the microbes. That’s dangerous when he’s the only human on board and if the microbes sicken him there goes the chance to save humanity. There are scenes where Grace is weightless and others where spins up the ship to get gravity. But exactly which plane of rotation is used isn’t consistent. But Green wasn’t all that concerned about it. Green thought Weir having the bad guys, the microbes eating the sun, also serving as fuel for the spaceship was a pretty cool idea. There was one aspect of the science not being right that I caught and Green didn’t mention. That is ships in space move differently than they do on earth. In space once the rockets stop thrusting the ship doesn’t stop, it keeps going at a constant speed. And some of Grace’s maneuvering (he wasn’t trained as the pilot) didn’t move as a spaceship should. It’s a highly enjoyable film, even if the science isn’t quite right. Grace and Rocky are great buddies. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, discussed toxic masculinity. Her discussion was brought on by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing an anti-DEI bill and claiming that white males are discriminated against. Witkowski wonders why white male politicians keep seeing white males as victims even while they say it’s weak to be a victim. But the oppression isn’t coming from DEI, but from white dudes telling other white dudes (like her son)...

they have a god-given duty to be violent and misogynistic and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t look like them. Toxic masculinity is at the helm in this country, and we’re headed straight for a tiny fishing vessel that we’re going to blow up just for fun because we think it’s cool to kill people.

She is teaching her son “Cruelty is not strength. Empathy is not weakness.”

As any human with a heart and soul knows, living a life void of love, compassion and care for others is not a happy life. Yet the message in this country being fed to white, heterosexual, cisgender men is that the key to a good life is seizing power from wherever you can get it, especially from people who have less power than you. Fuck love and other sissy s---. Unsurprisingly, this makes these men very unhappy. And their unhappiness is blamed on immigrants and drag queens and women who wear pants and complain about being called “honey” in the workplace. And so they must oppress them. It’s literally a cycle of abuse.

I can hear a lot of men feeling “I’m not happy.” They may not know themselves well enough to recognize they aren’t happy because the manosphere doesn’t talk about happiness or feelings. Instead of trying to find things that make them happy they lash out at the things the manosphere tells them are the cause of their unhappiness. They don’t see the cause of their unhappiness is what the manosphere is telling them.

The entire Trump administration is the perfect encapsulation of this. A collection of mediocre, mostly white males engaged in a never-ending dick measuring contest. That’s literally all they know how to do.

Last Friday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos commented on the recent Callais decision by the Supreme Court that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She wrote the decision was based on a statistical error, which is an alarming thing to base such a sweeping and harmful decision on. But Justice Alito, the decision author, doesn’t care about such things as truth when destroying democracy. The statistical error was fed to Alito by the Department of Justice. What they said in their brief on the case was: “Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections,” as Needham phrased it. I won’t go into Needham’s details of the flaws that went into that statement. But this is an example of Alito taking anything he can get to claim that racism is totally fixed so the VRA is no longer necessary. I think Justice Roberts made that claim when they first started gutting the VRA, prompting a strong rebuke in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent. But even if the DOJ statement were true, that does not imply that black people are not an oppressed minority in Louisiana and thus don’t need protections when districts are drawn. Alas, Alito has shown us many times who he is. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Grossman provided links to articles that show “the judges denied facts, distorted law, and contradicted themselves” in crafting the Callais decision. I haven’t followed the links. He then wrote:

Republican partisans on the Supreme Court created a pretext to gut the Voting Rights Act so the former Confederate/Jim Crow states, and red states more broadly, could manipulate maps to lock Black Americans and other minorities out of government representation. After the decision, multiple Republican-controlled states rushed to do exactly that. Then Republican partisans on the Virginia state supreme court created a pretext to prevent Virginia Democrats from responding in kind.

Many months ago I wrote that it seemed like Alligator Alcatraz was going away. That’s the deportation detention center built in the Florida Everglades in eight days. Alas, my reading of whatever I read, was not correct. The facility is still there. Needham reports that it may really be dismantled now. After it was built there were lawsuits saying the environmental reviews were not done. The federal government sidestepped the issue saying it was a Florida facility, not one of the feds. But to make that statement stick in court the feds could not contribute to running it. Say goodbye to $600 million. Which means Florida has to pay for it with a cost of $1 million a day. And Gov. DeSantis is resenting the expense. Needham discussed what $1 million a day, well, just $1 or $2 million (a piddling amount), could do for many other programs in Florida, but DeSantis wasn’t going to direct money to such things as food banks.

DeSantis’s ongoing quest to either impress Trump, be Trump, or both has jammed him up here. His unique combination of malice and incompetence meant that the Trump administration could always fake him out, and now the state is left holding this very expensive bag.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Robert Kagan of The Atlantic. Kagan noted that previous military failures – early WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq – didn’t prevent the US from keeping its dominance.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.