Friends,

Today’s weather is so beautiful that Heather and I decided to have our coffee klatch outside on the Berkeley campus. Much to talk about — including the giant initial public stock offerings of the Artificial Intelligence behemoths Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, in coming weeks, expected to generate over a trillion dollars each. AI may create all sorts of fabulous things, but it’s also dangerous as hell, and the window is rapidly closing on what can be done to stop AI from eating our jobs and destroying the human race.

We also talk about Trump’s 10 days — the House voting to end his war in Iran (or get authorization to continue it), the courts ordering his name off the Kennedy Center and pausing his $1.8 billion Thug Fund, entertainers bailing out of his 250th anniversary megalomaniacal show on the mall, his endorsee losing Iowa’s governor’s race — and what it means for the future of his pathetic lame-duck presidency.

So please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join the conversation.

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Friends,

Heather is back (after a grueling week; we wish her mother a speedy recovery).

Today we take a deep dive into Trump’s Department of Injustice, now headed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who’s criminally prosecuting Trump’s enemies — including private citizens such as E. Jean Carroll.

We also examine Trump and the Republican Party’s obsession with testosterone — part of the so-called “manosphere” — which includes the scheduling of UFC cage matches on the White House’s South Lawn, denigrating Democrats such as Senate candidate James Talarico as being “low T,” ridiculing LGBTQ+ people, Trump and Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth’s hyper-aggressiveness, and Trump’s fear of strong women who stand up to him.

We also discuss the blatant corruption of the Trump regime and its relationship to the horrific U.S. economy.

So please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in the conversation.

Friends,

Sorry for being a bit late this morning.

Today Michael and I take a deep dive into Trump’s corruption — beginning with CBS’s merger deal with Skydance that was conditioned, in part, on its canceling Stephen Colbert’s show (which is why I’m wearing a T-shirt I got when I appeared on Colbert’s “The Late Show”).

We then examine whether Jeff Bezos — the fourth-richest person in the world — is a knave or a fool for going on network television claiming that the richest 1 percent of Americans pay 40 percent of all taxes (a Trump-like lie).

And, as long as we’re talking about rogues and corruption, we look at Trump’s Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s $1.8 billion Trump slush fund and immunity from all future IRS audits — and its political fallout.

All that and more on today’s Coffee Klatch. So pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in the discussion.

(Heather will be back next Saturday.)