Season 4, Episode 2
Aug 5, 2026
Belle
Change your habit for just a month or two, and all of a sudden, you've got yourself a new and different habit.
Overheard
Save the fetus - starve the child
Honor the soldier - abandon the veteran
Enrich the corporations - fleece the worker
Protect the abuser - blame the victim
Quote the bible - ignore the lessons
It's the Republican way
The Chill Factor
Donald Trump's renovations for the Reflecting Pool haven't worked out.
Trump could blame himself — he's the one who ordered it. Instead, he offered stories about vandals.
We're used to Trump falsehoods. When they are turned into federal charges — like this one did — it should freak us out.
On July 2, federal prosecutors charged David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympian, with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.
Hearn had made a "a violent effort" to damage the pool, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said.
A month later, Pirro's office told the court she wanted to drop the case.
It turns out, Pirro said in a court filing late Friday, that the pool's well-documented problems probably weren't a result of vandalism. Instead, they were likely because of "hasty and botched work" performed by a contractor.
A standard news management rule of thumb is that you put out embarrassing news right before the weekend, when it's least likely to get noticed. And most of the coverage of the Hearn case has indeed focused on the embarrassment it is generating for the Trump White House. Primarily because up until now, Pirro has been a loyal Trump supporter.
But if we treat this story like a standard-issue optics narrative for the Trump White House, we're doing it wrong. Because this is something much more important: It's the Trump White House using federal prosecutors as a tool to punish perceived enemies.
In a normal administration, this would be a giant story. The fact that we're treating this like business-as-usual should be a giant story, too.
The story of the Reflecting Pool, and Trump's obsession with it, has been well told. The shortest version is that last spring, the Trump administration ordered a poorly conceived renovation using contractors without experience doing that kind of work. So instead of a clear pool with an "American flag blue" bottom, the pool became an algae-infested bog.
But Trump wouldn't acknowledge that his plan hadn't worked. Instead, he insisted that rogues had attacked the pool with a box-cutter and somehow gouged a "300-foot slit" in the pool's lining.
That made the pool a "Trump says thing that's obviously not true" story — the kind that initially seemed unique back in 2017, when he insisted that his lightly attended inauguration was actually the world's biggest. Now that kind of tall and easily disprovable tale just elicits shrugs.
Last month, Pirro turned Trump's fibs into something much more serious by using them as the basis for a felony charge (her office later charged three other Americans with misdemeanors for similar theoretical offenses).
In Pirro's motion to dismiss the charge against Hearn, she argues that she was misled by Trump's Department of the Interior, which oversees the pool. The DOI initially provided "less than fulsome information" about the case, Pirro said. So her office didn't really understand what had happened until late July — weeks after a grand jury had indicted Hearn.
That's silly. Throughout the spring, story after story from mainstream news outlets reported that Trump's attempt to transform the pool was misguided, poorly executed, and had made things worse. Just as important: Trump's claims about vandalism weren't remotely plausible.
So, again: It's one thing not to correct Donald Trump when he says things that aren't true (Trump continues to insist that VANDALS are the cause of the pool's problems, as he argued on Truth Social this weekend; when I asked his press office for comment Monday, they referred me back to his post. He told reporters Monday that Pirro "made a mistake.")
It's another thing to tell stories about the president that don't seem to be true. But turning a Trump falsehood into a federal criminal charge is something very different.
It's also not the first time we've seen federal prosecutors turn themselves into Trump-branded prosecutors. The New York Times, for example, has documented hundreds of flimsy charges the administration has filed against immigrants and protesters during its ICE crackdowns in the last year. Almost half of those have fizzled, the Times reports: "Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them."
The Times itself has been the subject of a Trump legal campaign — last month Trump's Department of Justice filed subpoenas against Times reporters who'd written about security issues with Trump's new Air Force One, then dropped them after getting scolded by a federal judge.
In the Hearn case, it's tempting to brush this aside: After all, Pirro dropped the charges. The system worked, right?
But Hearn, whose case attracted support from prominent allies, should never have had to face a felony charge — and to take on the legal, reputational, and financial obligations fighting that charge entails — in the first place.
So the fact that the federal government has seemingly conceded that it brought a bogus case shouldn't give anyone comfort. It should make you wonder how many dubious charges Donald Trump's prosecutors have filed so far — and how many more we'll see while he's in office.
Becoming Unstable
No hurricanes. No storms. No tropical depressions. Nuthin'.
Now we hear a lot of, "Gee - this is happening instead of that, and we're not at all sure why."
Google - "what good comes from hurricanes?"
Despite their destructive power, hurricanes play a vital role in Earth's natural systems by redistributing heat from the equator, ending droughts, replenishing freshwater supplies, and delivering essential nutrients to coastal and marine ecosystems.
There are no hurricanes.
And we are so fucked.
Even a relatively calm season can end up leaving a lasting mark.
The peak of hurricane season is little more than a month away, and the front page of the National Hurricane Center website prominently displays a blank map of the Atlantic Ocean that says “Tropical cyclone activity is not expected during the next 7 days.”
The most active time of the year for tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic extends from August through October with a peak on Sept. 10 — but for now the basin remains unusually quiet.
El Niño is playing a major role, with record-warm water pooling across the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean. Because of this pattern, the Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be quieter than normal — and perhaps among the tamest on record.
The most recent super El Niño years, in 2015, 1997 and 1982, featured four, three and two Atlantic hurricanes, respectively — all below the seasonal average of seven.
Rising air over the unusually warm Pacific strengthens upper-level winds that sweep into the Atlantic. There, the winds act like a hedge trimmer, constantly pruning the tops of storms before they can organize and intensify. Dry, dusty air from Africa’s Sahara has also recently hindered storm development.
But hurricane season is a marathon, not a sprint, and a season that’s been relatively calm can still produce a devastating storm.
As the season’s peak nears, the area north of the Caribbean to the East Coast of the United States is one to watch for storms — farther away from El Niño’s harsh winds.
Losing Confidence
When do we finally start to understand that the whole investment industry has become more scam than real?
The scam has been there from the beginning when some guys got together under that buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan 235 years ago and started betting on each other's fortunes.
It was always there, and it always followed a fairly predictable pattern of boom-n-bust, which is why FDR's smart guys put in some rules and regulations, which built an amazingly strong country with an amazing strong middle class - all of which gave us about 60 years without a major panic or depression.
But now, it looks for all the world like the scam rot outweighs the legitimacy content by an ever-widening margin.
Gotta ask yourself: How is it that Main Street keeps going deeper into the shitter while Wall Street keeps livin' in high cotton?
There's a bad moon on the rise.
Key Points
- SpaceX shares fell on Wednesday after the company’s jump in spending rattled investors.
- Space X said its capital expenditures jumped sixfold to $18.4 billion in the second quarter.
- CEO Elon Musk said SpaceX would hit $1 trillion in annual revenue in 2030 versus a previous forecast of 2031, as he tried to allay investor fears.
In SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday, Elon Musk’s space firm said its capital expenditures jumped sixfold to $18.4 billion in the second quarter. This figure was ahead of analyst expectations, with the majority of the spending going towards AI.
The company’s stock closed at just over $125 on Tuesday, sitting below its $135 IPO price. It is well off its more than $200 all-time high that was hit shortly after its listing.
Investors have been on edge this earnings season as concerns rise about whether large tech companies can prove their multibillion-dollar investments are yielding returns.
While SpaceX’s own models are seen as behind OpenAI and Anthropic, the company is positioning itself as an alternative cloud player by renting out the computing capacity that it is building with Nvidia
chips.
SpaceX’s CFO Bret Johnsen looked to allay investor fears over capex spending. The company has been “efficient” with its spending, he said on an earnings call.
“On the AI compute side, we’re able to deploy capital in such a way that we’re getting less than a one-year payback,” Johnsen added.
The share price fell even as SpaceX narrowed its losses and promised significant future revenue. Musk said SpaceX would hit $1 trillion in annual revenue in 2030 versus a previous forecast of 2031.
“SpaceX wants to tell the story they’re the market leader ... But people still have these questions: how quickly can they grow? How big are the costs going to be before this thing gets to profitability?” Steve Westly, founder of The Westly Group and a former Tesla
board member, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Wednesday.
The company is contending with another potential market-moving event on Thursday — the expiration of insider lock-ups. This means that insiders can finally sell a portion of their shares.
About Last Night
When even Van Jones sees it, you have to know something is afoot. Of course, when was the last time that guy got anything right?
But hey - the times they are a-changin'.
The midterm elections in November will determine control of both chambers of Congress and will also see the election of dozens of governors and other state and local offices. Before then, voters must choose nominees for each of these offices, making their picks in primary elections throughout the spring and summer in all 50 states.
Follow our coverage of every election.
Aug 4, 2026
Mr Global
I'd like to say I can't believe we have to go back and re-litigate the pandemic, but it's what these fuckin' idiots do - it's all they've got, and it's all they know how to do, so I have to believe it.
So sick of this shit.
Hawk
Those slush fund checks aren't coming either - no matter what kind of fuckery Blanche pulls. Token payments for a small number of super thugs maybe - but the rest goes in Trump's pocket.
And the timing of the cuts that Republicans built into The Big Bamboozle Bill will dump the shit on red states after the midterms, and guess what - the Democrats are going to get blamed.
And the timing of the cuts that Republicans built into The Big Bamboozle Bill will dump the shit on red states after the midterms, and guess what - the Democrats are going to get blamed.
We are the stoopid country.
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