Despite RFK Jr.’s assurances that he’s absolutely killing it combating this pesky measles thing that resurfaced after decades under his leadership, the only thing that is being killed are American citizens who contract measles. While we first eclipsed the measles case count of 2025 in mid-summer of 2026, there has also been no slowdown of the disease as it rips through the country, now largely on the east coast. If you either do some math or feed the numbers into your AI tool of choice, the trend lines combined with the infectious nature of a disease like the measles will lead you to projections of something like 5,000 total cases by end of year, along with 5 or 6 deaths. That more than doubles the 2025 case count. RFK Jr. and HHS are failing us.

Part of that might because they’re too busy playing political games to actually do the work of combating this disease. The headlines around measles lately have all been around Pennsylvania, which is suffering an explosive outbreak of measles. 2 measles related deaths were reported there in the past few weeks, deaths that caused Kennedy to go full conspiracy nutbar on the internet and in the media, going so far as to suggest the deaths may not even have occurred, or otherwise weren’t actually caused by measles. The CDC publicly facing website designed to inform the public about the measles still to this day shows no recorded deaths this year from measles, even as a local coroner confirmed one death more than a week ago. This obfuscation was reportedly done at Kennedy’s direct request.

And, now, a the local coroner has confirmed a third measles-related death, this time of an unvaccinated woman in her 40s.

A 40-year-old woman who lived in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, has died from measles complications, the county coroner confirmed Sunday. It’s the third measles-associated death in a fast-growing outbreak that’s sparked a political clash between state and federal officials.

The woman died Saturday, according to a news release from the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office, which said it was working with the Pennsylvania Department of Health on the case. The woman hadn’t been vaccinated against measles, the coroner, Greg Furlong, confirmed to CNN.

Another needless death. This woman, who also had other contributing health issues included COPD and asthma, did not have to die. The MMR vaccine would have had an extremely good chance of saving her life and preventing her from being infected with measles to begin with. I will not speculate as to why she went unvaccinated. But I don’t need to speculate to know that dropping vaccination rates in Pennsylvania combined with, or as a result of, Kennedy and others’ decades-long crusade against life-saving vaccines with made up pseudoscience bullshit was a contributing factor.

I have no doubt the death of this human being will be written off and excused by the anti-vaxxer crowd, Kennedy included. The nature of the death will be disputed. The blame will be placed on her co-morbidities. Other even wilder conspiracy theories will be dreamed up by some, all to excuse Kennedy and those of like minds from any responsibility for a death.

Already the CDC is trying to blame state officials for not accepting its tainted “help.”

In some of her first public comments about the country’s measles outbreaks, Dr. Erica Schwartz, the newly confirmed director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement that the agency hadn’t been notified by Pennsylvania officials of the death.

“Despite repeated offers of assistance, Pennsylvania has not requested a CDC Epi-Aid, which would deploy epidemiologists and provide on-the-ground measles outbreak support,” Schwartz’s statement, shared with CNN by email, said.

Governor Josh Shapiro already explained why he isn’t asking the CDC for help. It’s because Kennedy has tainted the agency so badly that it exists in a place beyond trust. Asking for help from the CDC means Kennedy will also swoop in and make all kinds of confused and confusing statements about the safety of the measles vaccine, the best ways to combat it, and all manner of other nonsense. We’ve seen this play out in other states. It’s making a deal with, if not the devil, the devil’s consigliere.

I truly don’t know what it’s going to take at this point for there to be a groundswell of outrage against Kennedy such that it cannot be ignored by the current administration. People are getting sick and dying and the pace of both are accelerating rather than slowing down. The department tasked with keeping us healthy is making us sick. The administration tasked with protecting American lives is contributing to their deaths. This is insane.

And it must end.

It’s easy to get submerged by the wave of bad news generated by the current administration on what often seems to be an hourly basis. Ask me how I know. My time is pretty much split between whatever ICE is doing and whatever Flock is doing, which results a whole lot of bad law enforcement behavior going ignored because it’s almost impossible to see through the Trump flotsam and jetsam.

But this is one of those things that shouldn’t be ignored just because the Trump administration is perpetrating larger and longer-lasting harms on the nation on a daily basis. Call it American exceptionalism, but we’re still willing to do lasting harm at a local level without the involvement of MAGA officials or the people that love them.

Via Gabriel Malor on Bluesky, here comes more bad news on the qualified immunity front, courtesy(?) of the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court. Police misconduct that occurred nearly 50 years ago has been given an official judicial pass because somehow it was impossible for these officers to know that subjecting a fourteen year old person to two days of intense interrogation might violate rights.

The plaintiff is Johnnie Lee Savory, who was picked up by Peoria, Illinois cops on suspicion of murder. A massive amount of coercion was applied to Savory, which naturally resulted in an (involuntary and false) admission of guilt. The conviction was thrown out once because of this interrogation but a retrial ended in a second conviction for Savory. It wasn’t until after he was released on parole (2006) and pardoned by then-Governor Patrick Quinn (2014) that Savory was able to bring a civil rights lawsuit against the officers involved in illegally securing this conviction.

The district court refused to let the defendants walk away from this lawsuit, making it clear it had seen enough evidence to support Savory’s claims of rights violations. From the 7th Circuit decision [PDF]:

The officers and [hired private polygrapher Ed] Bowers moved for summary judgment, arguing that they were entitled to qualified immunity from liability for the unlawful detention, destruction of evidence, and coerced confession claims and that they were entitled to absolute immunity from liability for the fabrication of evidence claim. The district court denied their motion. It found that disputes of material fact precluded review as to the unlawful detention claim, that clearly established law put the officers and Bowers on notice that their tactics to purportedly coerce Savory’s confession were unconstitutional, and that a reasonable jury could find that the officers destroyed and fabricated evidence in violation of clearly established law.

In plainer English, a court within this same circuit looked at the relevant precedent and said officers should have known they weren’t supposed to do the things they did to Johnnie Savory.

These are the things they did:

It was a long interrogation. Officers Haynes and Pinkney began questioning Savory inside an interrogation room around 4:00 pm. At a certain point, Detectives Charles Cannon and John Fiers subbed in. Over the course of the interrogation, officers showed Savory photographs of the crime scene, ignored his question about whether he could go home, and accused him of lying.

[…]

That night, Savory was held in a detention center. Around midnight, the PPD notified Savory’s father that his son was being held. Savory fell asleep at about 1:30 am, and around 8:00 am he was taken back to the PPD to resume questioning. Officers again gave Savory Miranda warnings and then asked him rapid-fire and confusing questions. At 10:00 am, he met with his father. Later, at different points, Savory was forced to remove his clothing so that officers could pluck hairs from his body and to take another polygraph test. During the test, the examiner, Ed Bowers, got close to him, raised his voice, and accused him of being a murderer. After the polygraph, Savory stood by the window and cried. At 7:35 pm, about 29hours after the officers met him at his school, Savory confessed to the murders, though he made no mention of rape or sexual assault.

The cops liked Savory for the murder. The evidence, however, didn’t. After Savory recanted later that night, the cops retrieved a pair of pants from his father that had some blood on them. (As the decision notes, the pants were “unlikely” to have been worn by Savory due to their size. The rest of the evidence was similarly suspect, including supposedly damning testimony by relatives of the victim which was recanted two years after Savory had been convicted and sentenced. Those recanting their statements (with signed affidavits) mentioned being pressured by Peoria PD officers to finger Savory for the crime.

Savory challenged his conviction and asked for DNA testing of the pants used as “evidence” by prosecutors. The court granted the petition, only to discover that the PD had somehow “failed” to preserve this evidence.

In the end, the cops win. The Seventh Circuit looks at all of the above, along with existing precedent, and somehow decides these cops couldn’t have known that coerced confessions and evidence destruction were unconstitutional acts. The cops get a pass because Savory got Mirandized once during his 29 hours of detention and interrogation. And the conviction gets a pass because testimony — even coerced testimony — is given even greater leeway than the acts that generated the bogus confession.

At worst, the false testimony—but not the reports—caused Savory harm. But testimony is covered by absolute immunity.

Nice to know that even false testimony is immune from civil rights lawsuits. But even so, it should not have given a free pass to the officers (and their actions) that generated the false admission of guilt, as the dissent points out:

My colleagues err procedurally by reversing the district court’s denial of qualified immunity to the officers on Savory’s Fourth Amendment unlawful detention claim. And they err substantively by concluding it was not clearly established by 1977 that the officers’ interrogation techniques violated the Fifth Amendment. It clearly was, so the officers are not entitled to qualified immunity on this claim.

The dissent breaks this down to its simplest terms, which makes the majority’s ruling look that much worse:

It was clearly established in 1977 that police could not spend days berating a teenage boy into confessing to murder.

No shit, as the legal experts say. But it’s only the majority ruling that matters. And since this exists now, precedent dating back more than 50 years ago is replaced with a fresh set of easy outs for cops who illegally coerce confessions. The circuit took a step forward decades ago, but this iteration of the court has concluded that this one step was a step too far. And the only inference we can draw from this is that the circuit thinks it’s better to err on the side of cops who [direct fucking quote] “spend days berating” teens into “confessing to murder.”

Well done, Seventh Circuit. Thanks for nothing.

By now, calling Elon Musk a “free speech absolutist” is a joke. We have so many stories of him suppressing speech, or threatening, or suing people for their speech. At this point, anyone who still claims that Musk supports free speech is either (1) lying, (2) stupid, or (3) employed by him. So, it’s little surprise that he’s been threatening to sue basically everyone connected to Alex Gibney’s new documentary about Musk, using his favorite big bully of a lawyer, Alex Spiro:

In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, the company behind the film, Musk attorney Alex Spiro homes in on an exchange between Gibney and Ashley St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer who dated Musk and had a child with the billionaire.

St. Clair described text messages Musk sent her before the November 2024 presidential election in which he said he was “feeling more optimistic” about Donald Trump winning because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” When St. Clair asked for clarity, Musk said he planned on tapping “‘Lasers’ from space,” adding that “I have over 10 thousand lasers in space right now.”

But, Spiro’s threat letter tries to explain what Musk actually meant:

“Starlink’s satellites communicate by laser inter-satellite link; that is what ‘lasers in space’ describes,” he wrote.

So, hey, that sure sounds like an admission that Musk did, in fact, refer to “lasers in space.” Which would make St. Clair’s statement about receiving said texts true. And therefore not defamatory, because then the dispute is solely about what Musk meant, not what he actually said. “My client did send that text, but you’re reading it wrong” is pure SLAPP buffoonery.

Gibney is one of the most famous documentary filmmakers working today, especially when the subject is a powerful and controversial company or individual. He’s made well-regarded and award-winning documentaries on Scientology, Theranos / Elizabeth Holmes, Enron, Eliot Spitzer, and more.

So it’s no surprise that news of the Musk documentary — which kicked off its publicity run with a massive cover story in The Hollywood Reporter — got so much attention and interest. Including from Musk and his lawyers. Musk, as he is known to do, threw a bit of a hissy fit on X:

Curious how he would know “it misses” when he hadn’t yet seen it. Gibney had a similar concern… three whole years ago when it was first reported he was making this documentary and Musk called it a hit piece, to which Gibney responded:

But throwing a fit on X only gets you so far. Bullying people into silence is what SLAPP suits are for, and Musk has plenty of practice. In the threat letter, Spiro tries to paint Musk as a free speech supporter, even while threatening a SLAPP suit:

In the letter, addressed to Jigsaw Productions and dated Sept. 3, Spiro says they tried to contact the team “multiple times” and “requested an opportunity to present the facts in the normal fact-checking process that is the hallmark of ethical journalism.  You have refused to engage.”

The letter continues: “While we are ardent supporters of the First Amendment, and respect the reporting process, it has become abundantly clear that the motivations behind this piece are not the pursuit of truth, but something far different. This project did not begin as an inquiry. It began with a conclusion.”

“You are on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest,” Spiro wrote.

But, of course, the key line in the letter is effectively Spiro admitting that they know that the movie doesn’t actually accuse Elon of using “space lasers” to impact the election:

“Defamation does not require an express accusation.”

That alone is misleading. Yes, there are certain cases where defamation doesn’t require a direct accusation, but… those cases have to be pretty specific. What seems quite clear from all the context provided is that Gibney interviewed Elon’s ex, Ashley St. Clair, and she shared this exchange about the space lasers with him. And all the movie does is report St. Clair’s account of what Musk apparently texted her. Accurately reporting what a source says she was told isn’t defamation.

But Spiro is a blustering censorial bully, so of course he sent the threat letter to everyone associated with the film:

The letter puts not only Gibney and Jigsaw on notice but everyone involved in the film’s release, including HBO, Bleecker Street and Universal.

Gibney’s production studio has responded to the letter, and given that Gibney has battled Scientology, he’s not one who is easily intimidated by censorial bullies.

Jigsaw Productions has issued a statement in response to the letter: “Alex Gibney’s films are consistently recognized for their in-depth, fact-driven explorations of influential figures and corporations, coupled with his bold and engaging directorial style. This approach has garnered him international praise, an Academy Award among other accolades, and a reputation that The Times of London recently lauded as the ‘gold standard for fearless journalistic integrity.’ The right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures is protected by the first amendment — something that should be recognized and defended by all Americans, including the associates of Elon Musk, who has proclaimed himself to be a ‘free speech absolutist.’”

There’s an amusing side note to all of this, which is that one of Musk’s chosen “Twitter Files” writers, Michael Shellenberger, who hilariously is the “Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech” at Bari Weiss’s flailing University of Austin, appears to have helped kick off the legal threats, by claiming that the documentary promotes a debunked conspiracy theory:

Spiro’s letter (at least the parts revealed so far — the full letter doesn’t appear to be posted anywhere) echoes the points Shellenberger raised. Which is rich for a few reasons. The guy who spent years falsely claiming that “trust & safety” teams were the “censorship industrial complex” is now (1) whining about the promotion of conspiracy theories and misinformation, and (2) helping give Elon Musk (who helped Shellenberger by having him be a part of the Twitter Files team) ammo to issue SLAPP threats.

To be clear, I agree that the idea that Musk hacked the election is a nonsense conspiracy theory. It’s not how any of this works.

And it’s entirely believable that Musk said something intentionally cryptic about something mundane, as what he believed was a joke. St. Clair says she responded to the initial claim about space lasers with a terrible “joke” of her own: “wow, finally a focus on the Jewish vote” — a nod to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space laser conspiracy theory, which may well be what Musk was (weakly) riffing on in the first place.

None of which actually matters because nothing St. Clair says appears to directly accuse Musk of hacking the election. Instead, she was mostly curious how Musk appeared to have all sorts of real time voting data, and was hoping that the powers that be would investigate whether Musk had done anything he wasn’t supposed to.

And when St. Clair first revealed these texts earlier this year in a TikTok video, she insisted that not only did she have the texts, but that she had shared them with multiple people. She mentioned that included someone working on a bigger project — which seems likely to have been Gibney.

As we’ve discussed hundreds of times, for it to be defamation of a public figure (which Musk obviously is), the speech would need to be shared with “actual malice.” And that doesn’t just mean “they didn’t like him.” It means Gibney would have had to include the texts either knowing St. Clair made them up, or with serious doubts about whether she had, and running them anyway.

The whole thing is classic Musk: the guy stomping around pretending to be a free speech absolutist, using his vast resources to try to bully everyone connected with the film into silence, and in the process, only making sure that many more people hear about the documentary, and are interested in seeing it when it hits theaters on October 16. Great marketing chops there, Elon, helping drive more attention to the film…

The truth continues to come out, and not via Truth Social. Everything former Olympian David Hearn might need to pursue a malicious prosecution lawsuit against the Trump DOJ has been leaking more steadily than the botched Lincoln Reflecting Pool repair job itself.

This time, it’s the contractor admitting its repair job didn’t go as planned, which means most of the stuff Trump (and his toady at the Interior Department, Doug Burgum) claimed to be the work of anti-Trump vandals was just shoddy workmanship.

The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times.

[…]

[T]he documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.

The time frame for these revelations is the “past two months.” That would jibe with the DOJ’s decision to (sort of) drop its prosecution of David Hearn. Those court filings made it pretty clear that any alleged “vandalism” was actually just the result of a mishandled resurfacing effort floating to the surface of the pool.

Still, the DOJ has refused to fullly dismiss charges against alleged vandals with prejudice, which would prevent it from re-filing charges should Trump still demand some (metaphorical) public hangings in response to his administration’s failure to ensure this job was handled competently, promptly, and under budget.

At this point, Atlantic Industrial Coatings is on its third attempt to produce an “American flag blue” undercoating that won’t immediately divorce itself from the application area and float to the surface, where it can be easily grabbed by visitors to the reflecting pool, like David Hearn and the handful of others who have been criminally charged for daring to handle physical manifestations of Trump’s hubris.

While there may have been a few people doing a bit more than grabbing pieces of reflecting pool flotsam, the documents delivered by the pool repair contractors make it clear no serious “vandalism” ever took place.

The documents also show that Atlantic did blame vandals for cuts in the caulking around the pool’s edge that National Park Service workers had previously reported to the police. But the company did not link those cuts to the peeling of the blue liner on the pool’s floor, which Mr. Trump repeatedly blamed on “sick people” wielding knives or razors.

Now, there are real and serious questions about who knew what and when. According to the dismissal documents filed by US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the Department of Interior apparently deliberately withheld documents linking damage to the pool repair contractors, rather than “sick people” who were apparently able to slash 250′-350′ cuts into the pool lining undetected.

Since the DOI head (Doug Burgum) has done nothing but ape and amplify Trump’s lies about pool vandalism, the burden of proof (or proof of buried proof) falls back on the Interior Department. As for Trump himself, it’s hard to tell what exactly has happened here, but it’s easy to believe Trump wasn’t made aware of this evidence until long after he’d doubled-down and his “vandalism” claims.

After all, Burgum didn’t bring this evidence to Trump’s attention, preferring instead to fully engage with an obviously false Trump narrative. It took a visit to the Oval Office to fully apprise Trump of the situation, at which point Trump doubled down again, while trying to distance himself from the zero-bid contractor he previously referred to as the ultimate in patriotic pool repair surfaces.

It probably doesn’t matter how this all shakes out on the Trump side. Trump is going to continue to post his way through this, vocalizing whatever brief synapse flashes flicker through his lizard brain, hoping against hope to push completely through the facts and emerge victorious in yet another one of his Wars on Undeniable Facts.

As for David Hearn and those similarly situated, these documents will buttress claims of malicious prosecution. While the DOJ may be able to honestly claim it wasn’t aware of these facts until after it had secured indictments, it won’t change the malicious prosecution math because prosecutors are, at minimum, supposed to gather all relevant facts well before trying to pursue criminal charges. That the DOJ — under the direction of US Attorney Jeanine Pirro — decided its priority was assuaging Trump’s vindictive bloodlust rather than actually pursuing justice isn’t going to help it much when the people falsely accused of federal crimes start fighting back.

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By now it’s old hat to point out that the mainstream media bends over backwards to pretend that Donald Trump is a “normal” president. The number of times you could point to the coverage and question how the media would cover things if a Democratic president did anything even remotely similar is impossible to keep track of.

But there were two separate things that happened at Trump’s fake GOP “midterm convention” (there was no convention, it was just a rally) and the way the media handled each tells you plenty about how stupid things have become. First up, Trump stated that if the Republicans win the midterms, every American would get a $5,000 check. This is both illegal and ridiculous.

It’s illegal because 18 USC 597 makes it a crime to offer an expenditure to induce someone to vote a particular way — which is precisely what dangling $5,000 checks in exchange for a Republican Congress is. It’s ridiculous because Trump promises this kind of bullshit all the time and never delivers. Here’s a compilation of him making unfulfilled promises of “dividend” checks over and over again:

The proper way to cover this story is something along the lines of “President Trump, facing dismally low approval ratings, tries to illegally bribe voters to support the GOP.” The checks are never going to happen, and everyone (including Trump) knows it’s never going to happen. But, instead, the mainstream media pretended that this was a serious proposal worth taking seriously.

Yes, some of those headlines express skepticism, but within the range of normal policy proposal skepticism. The NY Times coverage, for example, focuses on what “experts say” about the proposal, and how much it would cost (over $1 trillion) and that it would require Congressional approval. It gets quotes from people to argue both the pros and cons of the whole thing, and literally says “it’s complicated” after asking whether such payments “could face legal challenges.” It even tries to “both sides” it by comparing it to a totally distinguishable situation where — in the midst of COVID shutdowns — some Democrats expressed policy support for general stimulus checks.

Then, the next night, in his next speech, the President of the United States — who has spent years falsely accusing others of “rigging elections” and “cheating” despite the near total lack of evidence of any significant voter fraud in the US — had people pledge allegiance to him personally (not the flag, not the Constitution, not America, but to him personally). He then literally told them to cheat and commit voter fraud in the election, before adding that anyone who doesn’t vote (presumably for MAGA candidates) would go to hell.

“Please raise your right hand,” Trump told a stadium packed with his supporters as he was met with some laughter. 

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends,” he continued.

“I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. I don’t care,” he said. “I am going to go out and I am going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on Nov. 3rd or we are going to vote before that.” 

Trump said it went without saying that people would vote Republican.

“OK. So help me God,” he concluded the pledge.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell,” he added. “You know that, OK? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you. So please go and vote, because together we will defeat the communists.”

Here’s video of the first part of that, with the pledge and telling everyone to cheat and commit voter fraud:

And yes, Trump defenders will claim that he was joking. And everyone is laughing. Or they will claim that he’s only saying this because (as he notes as he says it) he claims (falsely) that the Democrats are cheating. But this kind of facetiousness is the whole point: to anyone offended, he can claim he was joking and mock you for taking him literally, while the MAGA faithful hear it and know exactly what he means.

Frankly, if any Democratic president (or, hell, almost any other Democratic politician) did either thing — having supporters pledge loyalty to them personally, or telling them to cheat in the election — it would generate headlines for weeks. There would be all sorts of hand-wringing among the pundit class about how un-presidential it was, and how the president is expected to bring decorum and support election security and isn’t supposed to be part of a personality cult.

Hell, when Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, the NY Post had a freakout that he would do so on a stage with Greek columns, attacking him for acting like a Greek god with the headline: “Temple of Dem on Mt. O-Lympus.”

But the mainstream media basically played the whole thing down. There were a few headlines about it, but mostly side stories, or just the video clip, not a story about the statement or what it means. But just look at the NYT’s “midterm” coverage the day after (this screenshot is from Friday morning):

Nothing in any headline or promo line gets at the pledge or the demand to cheat. The main article goes with the title that he’s “a bit tired of politics” (which is hardly newsworthy), and then the text totally plays down what Trump actually said:

In 2026, he closed out an unusual midterm convention organized in his honor by saying he was a little bored of politics. He seemed more interested in telling supporters to swear on something holy — which seemed to be himself — that they would go out and vote for Republican candidates in November.

“Please raise your right hand,” Mr. Trump instructed a rowdy crowd of thousands inside a Dallas arena on Thursday evening. Many of them complied. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” (Mr. Trump usually frowns on election fraud.)

He added: “I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.”

And that’s basically it on the topic. Even the parenthetical “usually frowns on election fraud” is laughably misleading. All of this just seems like an attempt to sanewash the insane.

Yes, covering every crazy thing that Trump says or does makes you seem like you’re crazy too. But it’s incredible which stories the media focuses on and which they minimize. These two examples in quick succession make it clear that in an attempt to make the Trump presidency seem more “normal” than the out-of-control authoritarian cult-of-one-man that it actually is, they will treat an illegal and ridiculous bribe as a legitimate policy proposal, while burying the part where he has supporters swear fealty to him personally and then tells them to break the law.

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.

That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

Streaming TV prices hikes are coming so fast and furious, they’re outpacing many of the ridiculous traditional cable TV price hikes we saw during the cord cutting revolution:

“Over the course of the past 12 months, streaming rates have collectively risen 11.8 percent. The biggest year of increase was 2023, when the streamers shot up an average of 17.7 percent. A Hollywood Reporter analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows cable and satellite prices, by comparison, rose an annual average of 3.9 percent — excluding a deregulation surge of the late 1980s, when the index peaked at 14 percent. But that was a seismic shift provoked by a federal intervention rather than, say, because Widow’s Bay is a good show, or “we’re pretty sure we can get away with this.”

That shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Many of the same cable TV executives that enshittified traditional cable TV have moved on to streaming. And all the same quarterly growth pressures still apply. It’s not good enough to offer a good, affordable product people like; impossible scale is a siren song that, sooner or later, leaves many of these companies thrashed on the rocks.

There remain some notable positives though. Users are still free to subscribe to a streaming service, binge watch everything of interest, and then cancel to save money. That’s a big improvement from the traditional days of the bloated cable TV bundle.

Initially, streaming TV providers saw significantly higher customer satisfaction scores that big TV providers like Comcast. But that’s slowly changed over the last few years, as frustration with streaming TV grows and traditional cable TV providers try a little harder to improve. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores now show tech companies and traditional cable companies neck and neck:

“The results arrive during a period of rising subscription costs and mounting consumer fatigue. Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey found that 73% of streaming consumers are frustrated with rising prices, around 40% cancel at least one paid service each year, and 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if monthly costs rose by just $5. The average subscribing household spends $69 per month on four streaming video services.”

What happens next? Well you can see that with growth saturated, media giants have started shifting their attention to mergers and consolidation, just like traditional cable, phone, and media companies did. That means even more price hikes to pay off debt, significant layoffs, and corner cutting that results in lower-quality overall product.

I suspect once they’re more meaningfully consolidated and fully enshittified, they’ll find some creative way to make cancelling and resubscribing annoying, especially if the U.S. continues its steady trend of lobotomizing its regulators at the behest of corporate power.

That could most likely come in the form of telecom and media companies merging and then tethering your subscription tightly to wireless phone and internet discounts. Or simply going the AOL route and make cancellation annoying as hell. Who is going to stop them? The Trump FTC?

Ultimately this enshittification will result in more and more users flocking to free or cheap short form video alternatives. Or simply reverting to piracy, at which point (and I’m sorry to keep beating this dead horse) all the execs responsible will blame everything (VPNs, generational entitlement, China) but themselves.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the problems with the latest court ruling against Elon Musk:

Heads I win, tails you lose

Problematic law is passed:

A) Company or individual rushes a legal challenge out so they aren’t accused of waiting too long and having their challenge thrown out as a result. However because they rushed it their filing has one or more serious flaws and is thrown out as a result anyway.

B) Company or individual carefully crafts their legal challenge, doing exhaustive research to make sure that their challenge takes into account legal precedent and applicable laws, a process which takes a while and means their legal challenge takes a week, weeks or a few months depending on the size of the relevant legal minefield that needs to be navigated and is accused of taking too long with their filing and having it tossed as a result.

I loathe being on Elon’s side on anything and especially on a case like this where he’s suing because his AI was removing clothing from pictures of real people but I simply cannot agree with the judge’s reasoning in shooting down his legal filing against the law due to the absolute mess it’s likely to cause and the significant power judges would have to decide what counts as ‘too late’ on legal filings.

Elon may be a world-class asshole and loser but taking a hatchet to the legal system and inventing out of whole cloth new requirement to undermine his legal filings is crossing the line because other people have to deal with the resulting havoc and unlike Elon those people might not deserve or be able to deal with the mess.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about the new time limit on Microsoft’s cloud gaming offering:

What kind of “ultimate” gamer plays less than 15 hours a month? I’m guessing many gamers would exhaust a 5-hour limit in one day. Microsoft are sending a clear signal here: cloud gaming is not to be taken seriously.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Paramount astroturfing support for its merger:

What would it even mean, really, to “move Paramount out of California?” Pack up all their multitudinous studio shit and flatbed-convoy it to Texas (or wherever else)?
How much would that cost their dumb asses?

I kinda want to see them do it, just to see them have to deal with the self-inflicted headache.

Next, it’s Nimrod with a simple comment about ICE’s pathetically low vetting standards for new hires:

It’s probably easier to get a job with ICE than it is to vote by mail.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about the DOJ refusing to dismiss its reflecting pool case with prejudice:

Somebody should tell the DoJ that doing something without prejudice is kind of woke.

In second place, it’s MrWilson making a small edit to another comment about the macho nonsense from Hegseth’s DOD and other federal agencies:

But I guess that’s what happens when an entire political ideology is obsessed with penises led by dicks.

FTFY

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from MrWilson, this time in response to another commenter who corrected our use of “less” when it should have been “fewer”:

To be fair, “fewer” is used for things you can count and Republicans can’t count fictional illegal voters, so…

Finally, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to that comment:

If Republicans could read, they’d be very upset with you for implying they can’t count.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week in 2016

• Warner Bros. Issuing Takedowns For Its Own Site Is No Laughing Matter
• Roger Ailes Hires Peter Thiel’s Favorite Lawyer To Threaten NY Mag For Its Stories About Him
• ICE Denies FOIA Request From Lawyer Because It Might Help Her Better Defend Her Client
• After Massive Cable Industry Lobbying And Disinformation Effort, The FCC Is Forced To Weaken Its Cable Box Reform Plan
• Terrible Ruling: EU Decides That Mere Links Can Be Direct Infringement
• The Copyright Office Acts As Hollywood’s Lobbying Arm… Because That’s Basically How It’s Been Designed

This Week in 2011

• MPAA’s Bogus ‘Piracy’ Numbers Mean It Thinks Downloaders Would Buy 200 More DVDs Per Year
• How Sweden Dismantled Many Of Its Online Civil Rights At The Orders Of US Content Industries
• Europe’s Copyright Strategy: Have Europeans Send As Much Money As Possible To US Companies
• Puerto 80 Responds Forcefully To DOJ’s Claims Concerning Domain Seizures
• Sarkozy Routes Around Parliament, Ditches Net Neutrality, Forces Copyright Clauses Into All ISP Terms Of Service
• EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright

This Week in 2006

• Surveillance Gets Smarter
• Is It The Job Of HP’s Chairperson To Spy On Other Board Members?
• Judge Sees Through Federal Face-Saving Attempt, Tosses Out Phone Unlocking Charges
• HP Board Spying Not Just Limited To HP Board Members
• Bertlesmann’s Napster Settlement Could Make Things Difficult For Investors
• There’s A Good Reason Why Online Sites Shouldn’t Be Liable For The Actions Of Its Users