The situation with Iran continues to feel like Groundhog Day, except this time, believe it or not, there may actually be movement.

Earlier this week, I mentioned that I had heard from people in the know that the United States military was coiled to strike Iran and was looking for either provocation or justification to resume major military activity. That appeared to happen when Iran shot down an Apache helicopter that was escorting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. We also learned that more than 100 million barrels of oil had moved through the strait under U.S. protection over the last month.

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One of the reasons that caught my attention is that gas prices in the United States have been falling pretty dramatically. It was a head-scratcher. If the Strait of Hormuz was effectively stalled, then what explained the drop? Was it a global rerouting of supply? Was there a China component that had been negotiated and never publicly heralded? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, but the announcement about oil shipments at least provides part of the picture.

What’s more interesting is what happened next. After one night of military strikes, the second night was canceled. Donald Trump said that’s because we’re at the point of a deal, one that has supposedly been signed off on by all available parties in the region. It appears to resemble the memorandum of understanding that’s been floating around for weeks, although nobody really knows because we still haven’t seen the text. We don’t know if it’s real. We don’t even know exactly what it says.

The administration’s definition of success has been fairly consistent: Iran gives up its nuclear material and removes the nuclear threat. If that’s actually in the agreement, then it would be meaningfully different from what came before. The obvious question is what Iran gets in return. The reporting and public comments suggest that Tehran is focused on access to frozen assets and getting money quickly. Whether that money goes directly to Iran, whether it’s routed through humanitarian aid, and what conditions are attached are all questions that still need answers.

The strongest sign that something may actually be happening is coming from inside Iran. Reports indicate that FARS, the IRGC-controlled news agency, is acknowledging that a draft memorandum of understanding exists, that the United States has approved it, and that Iran is likely to do the same. The bigger question is whether any agreement can actually be enforced. Iran’s leadership appears splintered. We’ve seen officials make commitments before, only to have military figures or IRGC commanders move in a different direction. That’s why the real issue isn’t whether a deal can be signed. It’s whether anybody in Iran has enough authority to keep it.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:48 - Iran

00:08:38 - Interview with Karol Markowicz

00:36:19 - Update

00:37:19 - DeSantis and AI

00:42:56 - FISA

00:44:42 - Director of National Intelligence

00:47:17 - Interview with Karol Markowicz, con’t

01:07:27 - Wrap-up

California is inviting questions about its elections because of a problem that is entirely solvable: the state takes too long to count ballots. This LA mayoral race is just the latest example.

Let’s look at what happened. On election night, Karen Bass was at 30 percent of the vote. Spencer Pratt was at 28 percent. Nithya Raman was around 20 percent. Every model from respected vote-modeling people that I saw indicated that Raman would gain more than Pratt in the later votes, presumably giving her enough to catch up to a less-distant third place without surpassing Pratt’s campaign. Instead, we got an avalanche of late Raman support.

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The first vote drop had Raman running about 10 percent ahead of Pratt. The second was stronger. Then Friday came around, and things got really weird. Whether you want to ascribe malicious motives to it or whether it’s totally above board and legitimate, the fact that this is happening on Friday for an election that happened on Tuesday becomes suspicious when Raman gets 40 percent of the vote total in a drop. She’s not only running ahead of Pratt, she’s running ahead of Bass. The same thing happened Saturday. The same thing happened Sunday. Now Raman is through to face Bass in the general a week after this sort of outcome — even in LA — seemed unlikely.

Am I saying that somebody cured ballots after seeing the results? Am I saying somebody harvested ballots? No. I don’t know specifics, and nobody else does, quite frankly. I’m saying you don’t have to do this. Opening the process up this way is the reason you create suspicion. Is it odd? Yeah, it is odd. Even the people who thought Raman was going to overtake Pratt thought it would happen by the skin of her teeth at the very end. Nobody thought it was going to be over by the weekend. It’s beyond expectations.

I’m going to renew my call here, and it’s not just me saying it. You’ve got systems in America that process a lot of votes really fast, and the way they do it is not rocket science. Florida created a system after 2000 that handles a lot of early voting and a lot of vote-by-mail, but those ballots are processed before Election Day and then dumped into the results when the polls close.

If we’re in an era of declining trust in elections, then I don’t care how you think we got here. I don’t care if you think it was Chicago in 1960, hanging chads in 2000, Democrats in 2020, Elon Musk and Starlink in 2024, or any of the other election fraud theories that have floated around American politics. What I care about is creating a system that we can all look at and say, “Seems like what happened.” I don’t think California is close to having that, and it’s only going to get worse if we don’t make some big changes ahead of 2028.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:22 - California Results

00:13:57 - Interview with Bill Scher

00:35:08 - FISA

00:38:06 - Walz and Ellison

00:41:19 - Dems’ New Super PAC

00:44:09 - Interview with Bill Scher, con’t

01:13:13 - Wrap-up

A new Graham Platner story dropped today, and it answers one question while opening about a dozen others. The reporting centers on an ex-girlfriend from his time in Washington who describes behavior that she says included being yanked out of cabs, shaken by the shoulders, blocked from leaving rooms, and subjected to bizarre conversations about violence and power. The Platner campaign does not appear to dispute many of the specifics. Instead, it continues to insist that none of this amounts to sexual assault. Their strategy is obvious: keep this campaign alive until July 10, the last day under Maine law that Democrats could replace him on the ballot.

The problem is that the list of people the campaign says are actually the problem keeps getting longer. First it was the former campaign manager. Now it’s an ex-girlfriend. The campaign has gone out of its way to point out that the woman worked in Republican politics years ago. Maybe that’s relevant, maybe it isn’t. What matters politically is that this is now the second woman in a week whose allegations are being dismissed while the campaign asks everyone to focus on Graham Platner instead. Meanwhile, the campaign’s own internal polling reportedly has him four points ahead of Susan Collins. That’s not exactly reassuring when a public poll from late May had him up nine. If you’re releasing a poll to save a candidacy and it shows you’ve lost five points, that’s not great.

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The bigger issue remains the stuff we still don’t know. The dating stories are damaging, but the Kik story is the Pandora’s box. That’s the ugly stuff. What’s behind that door? The potential answer is why this scandal continues to dominate the conversation. Platner’s goal now is simple: survive the primary, survive the next month, and make it to July 10. If he’s still standing then, Democrats may have no choice but to circle the wagons.

Elsewhere, there was a polling shocker in Ohio. A Fox News poll found Sherrod Brown leading Senator John Husted by eight points, 53 to 45. If we start seeing more polls like that, Democrats may have found one of their best pickup opportunities. Brown is a known quantity in Ohio. If the environment continues to improve for Democrats, it may not matter how exciting or energetic his campaign is. He could simply coast on familiarity and favorable conditions.

California, meanwhile, continues to count ballots at a pace that seems designed to test the limits of human patience. The governor’s race is still unresolved, and Los Angeles mayoral results remain in flux. What frustrates me is that this is a choice. California mails ballots to everyone and allows ballots to arrive days after the election. Fine. But there’s no reason the ballots already in hand couldn’t be processed faster. Instead, the state releases vote drops so slowly that candidates can spend weeks appearing to lead or trail before the public gets anything close to a final picture. I genuinely think that’s bad for democracy because people are not wired to watch somebody lead by eight points and then potentially lose weeks later.

That brings us to Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman. Prediction markets currently have Raman favored to make the general election despite Pratt holding second place. I don’t understand the math. Raman gained ground in the latest vote drop, but not nearly at the pace she would need to overtake him. Maybe future batches change that. Maybe they don’t. But when prediction markets start pricing in outcomes that don’t seem to match the publicly available numbers, people begin assuming something else is going on. That’s another reason the endless California count is so damaging. Even if everything is perfectly legitimate, the process encourages suspicion in ways that simply don’t seem necessary.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:20 - Graham Platner

00:09:22 - Ohio and California

00:14:58 - Interview with Reese Gorman

00:30:18 - John Bolton

00:32:01 - Todd Blanche

00:34:26 - College Sports Bill

00:41:28 - Interview with Reese Gorman, con’t

01:01:43 - Wrap-up