On Monday, the United States launched “Project Freedom” in the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, it was all over.
We’re not any closer to ending Donald Trump’s foolhardy war against Iran. But the S&P 500 is up 11% since the bombs started dropping, and that’s really what it’s all about, right?1
The three of us were in a mood yesterday, with Aliza threatening to take up smoking and Karoli just utterly disgusted with the avalanche of corruption. And I confessed to being kind of checked out, because I’m embarking on a big vacation next week and instead of reading my stack of Rick Steves books I have to pay attention to what the big orange dumb**k in the White House is doing daily and I’m tired.2
But we did manage to cover some news:
The new price tag for Trump’s ballroom
The new price tag for the war (it’s costing us a LOT more than the government has told us
The Callais decision, redistricting, and the sheer racism underpinning it all
More 2026 election news (fallout from Indiana, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Chedrick Green in Michigan, and California’s train wreck of a gubernatorial race).
We also talked about an interview Neil Gorsuch gave this week, and Karoli has a few more choice words to say about that.
View the podcast above, or listen below:
Aliza’s California Adventure
This week, Aliza mentioned how much she enjoyed visiting Karoli and me in Southern California last month - and I promised to post some photos. So here you go.
Note: I am neither a mathematician nor an economist and that figure was calculated by Google Gemini, so maybe it’s correct? But it feels right.
I think the entire world is exhausted. Also: more F-bombs than usual this week.
