Sunday, August 16, 2026

Doom Report (Week 82: A Toll in the Strait of Hormuz Forever)


This week, a couple of NBA dropouts signed up for the Culture Wars: they’ve announced that, since the WNBA doesn’t currently have any standards on the admission of trans women, they will pronounce themselves female and seek to join the league.  Yes, they are, apparently, attempting to re-enact the plot of that classic comedy, Lady Ballers.  What’s that, you say? never seen that movie?  Good for you: it’s a detestable piece of rightwing nutjob propaganda dressed up as a movie, brought to you by the God-damn-we-wish-we-could-have-made-it-in-Hollywood failures over at The Daily Wire.  (If you really need to know how bad it is, Some More News has you covered.)

There’s good coverage of this from (of course) Even More News—including talking about the even more detestable new movie from Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire crew—as well as from Brian Tyler Cohen.  To call what these no-names are doing a “stunt” is an insult to people like Evel Knievel and Super Dave Osborne.  Personally, I wish the WNBA would just say “sure!” and then let them try out.  Apparently these men think that (much like the plot of Lady Ballers), they would obviously win if they were playing against women.  But I have a feeling this fantasy might turn ugly once it collides with reality: just ask Bobby Riggs how that worked out for him.*  So make these guys put their money where their mouths are, I say.  After getting relentlessly embarrassed by the women and failing to make the cut, they likely wouldn’t want to talk about this bullshit ever again.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • On this week’s Strict Scrutiny, Melissa and guest Elie Mystal cover Todd Blanche’s confirmation, Jeanine Pirro crashing and burning (yet again), subpoenas for journalists, and more.  I adore Elie; you may recall me mentioning him back in week 6, or my original discovery of him waaay back in December of 2023, when I had a brief discussion of third parties back before the Doom Report was even a thing.  My favorite moment this time was when Elie just goes off on Republicans: “We have to stop thinking that Republicans will ever grow a spine and stand up to this president, right?  Even the ones that the president has humiliated, even the ones that the president has kicked out of his inner circle, even the ones, as in the case of Tillis and Cornyn, that the president has literally taken their jobs away, they’ll never grow a spine.  If they had a spine, if they had a conscience, if they had decency: they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place, right?  You don’t become a Republican because you have decency.  You don’t become a Republican because you have a spine, because you have commitment to the people.  You become a Republican because you are a spineless coward who lives to lick boots.  And that’s who Cornyn is.  And that’s who Thom Tillis is.  And that is who they will always be regardless of what this particular president does to them.”  Now, is this perhaps too harsh?  My favorite person who proves that “conservative” is not the same as “rightwing nutjob” (i.e. Adam Kinzinger) might say that it is.  But I mainly just admire Elie’s passion: preach on, brother.
  • Whereas in Friday’s “Kinzinger Report”, Adam covers Trump getting shut down on his Harvard lawsuit, the toll the Iran War is having on our sailors,** for a decade longer than he was in Congress, even), and more, including Mamdani’s program to get Broadway tickets into the hands of underprivileged schoolkids.  Like most conservatives, Adam can’t pronounce “Mamdani”, but, the difference is, he keeps trying till he gets it right.  And that’s why we love him.
  • I love it when my streams get crossed.  This week, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know meets More Perfect Union: Hasan interviews John Russell, whom I’ve talked about many times in these Reports, most recently in week 78, where I enumerated all the previous weeks that I mentioned him, so just go look at that one to see all those.  In fact, Hasan brings up most of the pieces I’ve covered in the Doom Reports in this very interview.  A bit of a longer time investment, but well worth it in my opinion.
  • And, speaking of More Perfect Union, this week they had a video exposing the scam that is home insurance.  If you’ve ever wondered why you keep having to pay more for insurance only to get denied more often, this explains it all.

On Tuesday, PBS published an interview with the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.  Needless to say, this is not a group which grants a lot of interviews, so it was a big deal ... and yet almost no one I watched covered it.

The one exception: this week’s Coffee Klatch.  There’s no Robert Reich this week, but W. Kamau Bell sits in with Heather Lofthouse, and he’s always great.  As he says in this episode: “I never thought I’d quote the Iranian ... Revolutionary Guard: you know, if you check Trump’s pockets and bank accounts, he’s doing great.”  Specifically, the commander was talking about the way Trump is handling the war, and what he said was this:

As soon as the stock market closes, they start hostilities.  When the stock market opens, they send positive messages to raise stock prices.  All the while, they are buying and selling the stocks themselves.  If I was in the place of the American Congress, I would call for an investigative committee to compare the assets of Mr. Trump, his family, and his inner circle before the war to their assets after the war.

Which ... yeah.  Kind of embarrassing that we have to hear it from the “Death to America” folks, but there you have it.  As Kamau also says in this Coffee Klatch episode: “When I was a kid ... there was generally a country that we made fun of for being run ridiculously.  There would be like a country ... that’s the international punchline.  ...  It’s us.  We’re the ridiculous country now.  That even the—like you said—the Republican [sic] Guard guy could be, like: they are really messing up over there.”

Also this week, Election Profit Makers is back, after a 4-month hiatus.  There’s a fair amount of diarrhea talk (which is only to be expected from David Rees), and a fantastic metaphor for the reflecting pool,*** and then they too talk a bit about the war in Iran.  Here’s David’s take on the current situation:

We’re going to pay Iran money to stop making fun of us online, basically, and then we’re going to give them a toll in the Strait of Hormuz forever.  That’s my understanding of the current state of play.

Mild hyperbole, perhaps ... or then again maybe not.  Here’s the Revolutionary Guard commander’s assessment of how we’re doing so far:

The longer this war lasts, the more experience we gain.  We had never seen a real war to gain real experience to learn how to fight with America.  In these five months, we have learned how.  We have also seen how the American military is weaker than what we perceived.

All the Trump flunkies say that Trump is keeping us safe by ensuring that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.  I think what Iran is demonstrating that they don’t need a nuclear weapon to kick our ass.  Not sure how safe that’s keeping us.

Not sure this counts as a note of hope (unless of course you happen to be Iranian).  But, on the other hand, the chances seem increasingly slim that this war will be over by the midterms, and that may have a distinct impact on the election.  So, as fucked up as it is, maybe we can eke out some positive outcomes from this debacle.  Certainly it would be better if people didn’t have to die for us to get there.  But it seems like reducing the power and influence of the assholes who are prosecuting the war that’s killing all the people—primarily for the purpose of lining their own pockets—maybe that’s about the best we can hope for.



__________

* Fun fact: I’m actually old enough to remember this match, and how upset my dad got over Billie Jean King’s victory.  Kind of a punch to the gut when your deeply held misogyny gets upended in real time.

** Remember: Adam himself was in the armed forces, for a decade longer than he was in Congress, even.  So he has particular empathy for stories that impact our troops.

*** Specifically, David says: “Everybody knows about the Washington Monument, right, because it’s phallic, and it thrusts up into the sky, ...  The pool is sort of the inverse of the Washington Monument; a pool is a receptacle, right? ...  The Washington Monument is the daddy, and the reflecting pool is the mommy, and the Lincoln Memorial is the baby, because Lincoln represented the best of our country.  And there you have the whole nuclear family.”











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Sunday, August 9, 2026

Doom Report (Week 81: Money out of Politics, Money in your Pocket, and Medicare for All)


This week, Michigan held its primaries, and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Senator.  He won it despite being a Muslim American (should he defeat his Republican opponent in November, he’ll be the first Muslim American in the Senate); he won it despite his primary opponent ceaselessly running ads showing her with Barack Obama (despite the fact that Obama never endorsed her); and, most of all, he won it despite outside PACs spending nearly 11 times more money on his opponent.  With over $80 million spent on the race, it was the most expensive Senate primary in US history.  Around $54 million of that was spent on his opponent’s behalf, and $30 million of that came from AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobbying group.  Once upon a time AIPAC throwing money at a race meant the other guy was going down.  Just ask Cori Bush: AIPAC defeated her two years ago for the comparatively economical price tag of $9 million.  But defending the bombing of Palestinian children is more expensive these days.

So El-Sayed said he wouldn’t support sending arms to any state committing genocides, even if it happened to be Israel, and that put the target on his back.  But, this time, the target failed.  So maybe now he’ll be able to stop talking about Gaza and get back to his primary campaign message, which was always: money out of politics; money in your pocket; Medicare for all.  Maybe he will: his opponent has conceded and endorsed him, which is more than a defeated Republican would have done, so that’s something.  But she spent months stirring up people against him and accusing him of antisemitism, so it could well be too little too late at this point.

But I’m not counting El-Sayed out just yet.  He’s a strong progressive who often gets lumped in with the Democratic Socialists, even though he’s not one.  In this respect, he’s a bit like Bernie Sanders, who is often considered the most progressive Democrat in Congress, despite the inconvenient fact that he’s not a Democrat.  But association with Sanders is a big part of what earned El-Sayed the label of “socialist” ... and, just maybe, a big part of what propelled him to an underdog victory.  If you want to hear Bernie talk about El-Sayed’s victory, check out his video on the topic.  But let’s not count out El-Sayed just being a smart, charismatic campaigner: you can watch him convince hesitant voters in a recent More Perfect Union video to see his raw talent and skill.  So the question may just come down to whether AIPAC and its allies are willing to spend money on a Republican to avoid having more Democrats stand up to them.  Let’s hope not.

But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • A really good Even More News this week, covering the El-Sayed win, plus point-by-point dismantling of RFK Jr’s latest round of lies.  Returning guest Kaveh Hoda is the perfect accompaniment for this episode: like El-Sayed, he is a doctor, and an American of Middle Eastern heritage (Hoda is Persian-American where El-Sayed is Egyptian-American, but I suspect they’ve faced many of the same prejudices).
  • And, speaking of Adam Kinzinger, there’s this short video about accountability that he released Monday.  It reads like a campaign ad, but he doesn’t appear to be running for anything: he’s just campaigning for eliminating corruption.  Can’t really argue with that.
  • Gary Stevenson did an interview on PoliticsJOE, where he’s still talking about taxing wealth not work despite saying for the past several weeks that he’s going to take a break from talking about such topics.  Best quote: “There’s nothing more powerful that the rich could ever do to protect themselves and their wealth than to make the poor selfish.  Because the poor are individually incredibly weak.  And the rich are individually incredibly strong.  And the only power that the poor and ordinary people have ever had to protect themselves from the rich is strength in numbers.  And they only use that power if they act collectively.  ...  You know, if the rich can convince the poor to be as selfish as they are, then they will eat you alive.”

If the victory of El-Sayed is not hopeful enough for you, let me also share my favorite news snippet of the week (although if you watched either the Even More News episode or the “Kinzinger Report” linked above, you’ve already gotten a bit of a preview).

One of the first defeats of a Trump-backed candidate of the year happened this week: a Navy veteran who worked in intelligence as well as federal law enforcement, a man born in Michigan to generations of auto-workers, with the full-throated endorsement of Trump, lost ... to a man who had already dropped out of the race, possibly because he couldn’t figure out how to operate the FEC website (it also might have been the fact that he raised less than $2,000 for his campaign).  How on earth did this happen, you might ask?  Well, the dropout was named Tom Smith, and the Trump endorsee was named Amir Hassan.

Now, you might discount the obvious reason that everyone is talking about.  “Oh, poo!” you might say: “surely Trump voters wouldn’t reject someone—that he had endorsed!—just because of his name.”  And you might have a good argument that this is only speculation ... until we get to Laura Loomer’s tweet.

If you don’t remember who Loomer is, first of all: congratulations! I can tell that your news diet is much healthier than mine.  Secondly, if you really want to know who this Queen of All Nutjobs is, I’ll send you back to week 60 where I highlighted a Some More News piece on her.  Short version: of all the crazy, racist, rightwing MAGA nutjobs, she is the craziest, most racist, rightwingiest, and MAGA-ist, and she has the ear of the President, regularly costing people their jobs when she feels they don’t toe the company line well enough to suit her.  So what did this deranged nutjob say about Hassan?  Here’s just a taste:

“Amir Hassan” claims he’s not a Muslim, but it doesn’t matter.  His name sounds like he’s fresh off the boat and MAGA voters reject the Islamic infiltration of our country and party.

This should be an eye opener to Trump’s advisors that we don’t want Muslims, Arabs or anyone who may even sound Arab or Islamic serving in office.  We are done with the Islamic takeover of our country, but they won’t pass this message along to President Trump.

And:

Dude should have changed his name.  If my name was Amir Hassan and I wasn’t a Muslim, I’d be changing my name as soon as I turned 18.

I will never vote for anyone with an Islamic name.  Neither will most of President Trump’s voters.

So, I dunno—maybe there’s something to this name theory after all ...

Look, as Kaveh pointed out on Even More News, when you train your base to just automatically assume anyone with a Muslim-sounding name is bad, you get what you pay for.  Don’t even get me started on why a Black man would seek the endorsement of the White House white supremacist—there’s obviously enough petard-hoisting to go around.  And I love how Loomer is careful to blame Trump’s advisors and not him: she knows wherefrom her crazypants bread derives its crazypants butter.  No, really: the whole thing is just amazingly, poetically justicial, even down to the poor Smith, who I guess now has to figure out how to operate that website after all.  Hopefully this means the Democratic candidate will have an easier time of it.  But, for now ...

For now I’m just happy to have something to chuckle about.









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Sunday, August 2, 2026

Doom Report (Week 80: The Undeserving Others)


While watching the MAGA performance—and there really is no word for it other than “performance”—at the Fauci hearings, I had a bit of a revelation: I think I finally understand the MAGA movement.  It’s the Revenge of the Revenge of the Nerds.

If you don’t know Revenge of the Nerds, it’s a movie from my youth, and, honestly, it has not aged well: realistically, the vast majority of the 80s “raunchy sex comedies” tend to read to modern audiences as “sexual assault”, and I would never try to talk anyone out of that viewpoint.  I’m not here to say that this is a marvel of modern cinema or anything.  But I do think that, if you look at the overall plot and don’t peer too closely at the inherent mysogyny, it has something to say about the changing times.  In the summer of 1984, when Nerds was released, I had just graduated from high school, and the word “nerd” was still a vicious insult.  The movie posits that the nerds, traditionally downtrodden and dismissed, could actually “win”, somehow.  That they could come out on top while the jocks, who have dominated our culture for decades if not centuries, might actually find that brawn doesn’t always beat brains.

And, lo, it is now 42 years later, and I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the nerds have won.  On the most recent Forbes list of billionaires, the top 6 richest people in the world—half of the top twenty, in fact—have “Technology” listed under the “Industry” column.  Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg: even Larry Ellison’s fortune comes from Oracle, which is a fairly nerdy product.  And the dominance of “nerd culture” has been acknowledged by most, in article after article.  And, for every movement, there is a backlash.

And watching rightwing nutjob senators picking on Anthony Fauci, who is certainly a big ol’ immunology nerd, reminded me very forcefully of watching Stan and Ogre picking on Lewis and Gilbert.  They gleefully dissect passages from Fauci’s diary, which he was foolish enough to leave on a government server, and they seem to want us to believe that we should be outraged—outraged, I tell you!—that this gentle nerd was starstruck by his unlikely fame and meeting celebrities such as Julia Roberts.  Oh, the scandal: that a nerdy guy who thought he would spend his life toiling away in obscurity would write cringey sentences in what he thought was a private diary that no one would ever read once he suddenly started meeting movie stars ... what an arrogant prick.

I’m not saying I recommend you watch any of the hearings.  Fauci is an 85-year-old man, so this is not just nerd-baiting, but also elder abuse.  Given that the entire goal of the rightwing nutjobs is to trick him into saying something they can use against him, his counsel has (quite wisely) advised him against saying anything other than taking the Fifth.  So the entirety of it is watching despicable people with no morals relentlessly bullying a little old man, who also happens to be a gentle nerd, and who can’t respond to their mockery.  I mean, I suppose if you get your rocks off watching lunkheads beating the shit out of kids with glasses in the schoolyard and taking their lunch money, maybe you could find it entertaining.  But it really is disgusting, in a visceral, stomach-churning way.  And the way they struggle to score performance points, because they have no actual evidence to present ... almost everything they say presumes that the COVID vaccine was deadly, and that COVID itself wasn’t so bad, and they don’t offer any evidence to support that wild theory—as if they could—they just start with that as a given and start throwing the punches.  Senator Bernie Moreno tries to shame Fauci while remaining utterly silent about his own son-in-law—who has thrown scalding water on the Senator’s daughter and broken his granddaughter’s collarbone—because the son-in-law is part of the Republicans’ very slim majority in the House.  (Note: bare hours before I wrote this, Moreno finally spoke out against his son-in-law.  But I don’t think that story will attract the same attention as his viral clip of yelling at Fauci “Who the fuck do you think you were ...?”)  And, trying to recreate the impactful moment from Pam Bondi’s hearings where she was invited to turn and look at the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the Senators at this hearing demanded Fauci turn and look at his “victims,” who included members of an anti-vaccine advocacy group and Fox “News” host Laura Ingraham.  It was theatre, but not the entertaining kind.  It was a bunch of people who are seething that the nerds have conquered the culture and taken over the system taking petty shots at one particular nerd to make themselves feel better.  I’m sure it makes them feel strong.

Adam Kinzinger excoriates the Republicans for their performance, and let’s not forget that he knows this system inside and out due to his 12 years as a Congressperson.  The Even More News crew takes an even deeper dive into the ridiculosity, with the added bonus of an interview with the president of the Fair Elections Center afterward.  Or, if the Even More News segment is too long, Jordan Klepper breaks it down for you in just over 10 minutes on this week’s final Daily Show episode.

I find it interesting that most of those rich nerds I mentioned previously are doing all sorts of physical training and makeovers to try to divorce themselves from their origins.  They want to pretend they were never nerds, and now they want to bankroll the aggrieved assholes who are desperately trying to hold on to their place in history by abusing and trying to make small the people who will inevitably supplant them.  It’s pitiful, in some respects, but it’s still nauseating to watch the temporarily powerful beating up on those who were just trying to do the right thing.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • For a bit of a longer discussion, Cory Doctorow is back, this time on The Weekly Show, being interviewed by Jon Stewart.  My favorite quote: when Cory talks about why people end up voting for the “Fascist Party”, he says “You just become a sucker for people who show up and say ‘undeserving others’ are the reason you don’t have what you need.”  And the thing I found the most chilling about that is, we’re assuming that that message is bullshit.  But it’s not.  It’s just that the “undeserving others” are not the immigrants: it’s the billionaires.

For a small measure of hope this week, I’ll point you, yet again, at the swampy morass that is now our national reflecting pool.  Now that it’s become just a clusterfuck of incompetence, the rightwing nutjobs are acting like it’s dumb that liberals are incessantly talking about this issue ... pretending like it wasn’t their incompetent nutjob president who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it in the first place.  He wouldn’t shut up about how awesome it was going to be, and how cheap it would be, and how he knew all the best people.  Remember “Our Pool Is Bigger Than Skyscrapers”?  And then, as it turns out, it was decidedly less than awesome, cost about 20 times what he said it would, and “the best people” turned out to be rejected Batman villains.  So he immediately pivoted to claiming that vandals had destroyed his pool with a box cutter.  You know: people just traipsing through the 2,000 foot pool using knives to cut things underwater.  Stuff that’s totally plausible.  They even stared arresting people over it.

But a funny thing happens when you arrest someone and have to go to court over it: there’s this annoying thing called “discovery” where the accused (and, better yet: the accused’s lawyers) get a chance to look at all your documents.  So, in the most predictable conclusion ever, the Department of the Interior was forced to admit that the lining of the pool was coming apart long before anyone started sticking their hands into it, and that it was because of shoddy workmanship, and that they knew about it, and that they arrested people anyway.  Could Jeanine Pirro lose her license to practice over this?  Could Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum lose his job over it?  Will it make any difference in regards to the massive damage this regime is doing?  No, probably not.  But it’s fun to watch anyhow.









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