Palm Nut

Winemaker, skier, golfer, Mets and Jets fan.

[Luke Miani @LukeMiani]

> save $15M a year by cutting a screwworm monitoring program

> screwworm outbreak almost immediately

> $1B to combat it

Government efficiency

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

JD Vance promoting his book about finding his way back to faith while helping manage Situation Room meetings on how to cover up for pedophiles is about as Republican as it gets.

[Palm Nut @palmnut]

@anishmoonka Now do Phil Rosenthal… back in my Hollywood days a friend at CAA said he saw a check for $45 million that was marked as the first of 11 installments when the syndication deal for Everybody loves Raymond was made.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

There’s more evidence of Trump being a child rapist than there is evidence of voter fraud.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Hasan Piker: “There’s two major lies Republicans tell all the time. Number one: Immigrants do crimes in overwhelming numbers. That’s a lie. The evidence is the exact opposite. The evidence shows migrants are responsible for a much lower share of crime per capita than documented citizens are. The second biggest lie is there are far too many people voting in this country and we have to restrict them. The problem is far too little people are voting. Voter fraud, not a problem. The real problem is voter suppression”

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Bari Weiss built her entire public identity on the proposition that cancel culture was destroying American discourse. She wrote about it. She founded a publication around it. She championed the Intellectual Dark Web as brave thinkers being silenced for saying forbidden things.

Scott Pelley said factually true things, without yelling, without cursing, without threatening anyone, in a staff meeting. He said Bilton had slender qualifications. He said Weiss was murdering 60 Minutes. He said these things because they are true and because saying true things in rooms where powerful people prefer comfortable silence is - per Weiss's own stated philosophy - exactly what journalists are supposed to do.

She fired him.

JVL names what this exposes precisely. They never wanted to end cancel culture. They wanted to control it. Some forbidden ideas - the ones MAGA likes - must be protected and platformed. Other ideas - the ones Bari Weiss dislikes - are genuinely verboten. Say them out loud and you lose your job.

The Pentagon press office is now classified. Tim Miller was threatened with FARA for sharing a public news report. Comey is being prosecuted for seashells on a beach. The federal workforce faces proposed NDAs. Pelley was fired for refusing instructions to broadcast unverified assertions and then saying so in a meeting.

The through line is not chaos. It is a consistent, documented project to determine who gets to speak, about what, to whom, and under whose authority. Cancel culture was never the target. It was always the tactic. Weiss just proved it by doing the thing she built her career opposing, the moment she had the power to do it.

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

[The Sting @TheStingisBack]

Some classic Chevy Chase lines from Fletch, which is 41 today.
Under the laughs, it’s a tight, well-built detective story: drug trafficking, murder-for-hire, and a film-noir backbone; just brighter, with punchy one-liners.
Might rent it tonight. I’ll charge it to the Underhills.

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

This week alone:

DOJ opens an investigation into the woman Trump raped.

The White House is caught steering a $620 million contract to Don Jr.’s firm.

The Pentagon hands out a $10 billion contract after Trump buys stock in the company.

Foreign governments are caught funneling hundreds of millions into a random JPMorgan account tied to Trump’s “Board of Peace” with no oversight.

It’s just Thursday.

The corruption isn’t hidden anymore. It’s happening out in the open.

[Democratic Coalition @TheDemCoalition]

These quick thoughts by Michael Jochum on the disturbing reason Trump gets as much support as he does is a must-read 👇

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.

I don’t wonder anymore. I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.

If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.

If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.

If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.

It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”

And that’s the part that should chill us.

Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?

Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.

Now the mask is off. Now we know.

And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.

– Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Trump is now reportedly responsible for roughly 27.7% of the entire U.S. national debt accumulated under all presidents combined.

That is an astonishing figure historically.

The national debt just crossed $39 trillion.

President Trump has added roughly $12–13 trillion to the debt across his two terms in office.

That’s approximately 30% of ALL U.S. national debt accumulated since 1789.

In 2016, Trump said he would pay down the national debt “over a period of eight years.”

Instead:

- First term: +$7.8 trillion
- Second term: roughly +$4–5 trillion already

And yes, COVID affected first-term spending.

It does not explain adding another trillion dollars every five months without a pandemic.

A political movement built on:
“fiscal conservatism”
“small government”
“balanced budgets”

has now overseen the largest debt expansion tied to any single presidency in American history.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Imagine if Biden:

• Created a $1.8 billion slush fund to hand out to rioters who assaulted police officers

• Banned the IRS from auditing him, his family, and his companies

• Accepted a $400 million luxury jet from a foreign monarchy

Pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted police officers

• Openly promoted his own meme coin while in office

• Had family members cutting international business deals while he was in office and directly profiting from them

• Repeatedly “joked” about staying in office past two terms

• Repeatedly praised Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong Un

The outrage would never end.

The fact that people are becoming numb to this level of corruption is insane.

[Patrick Skinner @SkinnerPm]

This is so corrupt that the lawyers who crafted this should be disbarred & removed, the acting AG who signed it should be disbarred & removed, and the president who orchestrated it all should be impeached & removed & finally at long last made irrelevant.
Staggering corruption

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Don Lemon: “If Barack Obama had sued his own government, settled with himself in secret, created a billion dollar fund with no congressional oversight to pay his political allies. What if he did that? They would’ve had him in chains before sundown. The National Guard would have been called in. Impeachment articles would have been filed. Can you imagine Fox News?”

[Karl Rosenfeld @kneerecon]

1 Whenever a reporter asks Trump something he feels is a criticism of him, he calls them terrible and nasty, their paper or station fake, and most of all he tells them they should be ashamed of themselves. What our thin skinned, moronic, narcissistic president doesn’t understand

[Palm Nut @palmnut]

@CPowers14 More preposterous than this?

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

The collapse of trust in science is going to go down in history as one of the most sad, bizarre, and destructive social contagions of modern times.

We fed billions, cured diseases and powered nations - yet people ran toward conspiracies instead.

[💙🌊 Zero Dark Twenty-Nine 🌊🌊🖋️🧫 @herotimeszero]

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing people that Republicans are good for the economy.