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Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence. The biblical text is a source of handy quotes to the extent it advances those aims. But he’s neither smart enough nor serious enough to mine the text in any serious way. He’s just a different version of Jules Winnfield. ~Josh Marshall

I went to high school with Charlie Ergen. He was two years older, so he was a senior when I was a sophomore. He was on the basketball team and student council and was senior class president. We didn’t share any classes or extracurricular activities. He graduated with a BA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and got an MBA from Wake Forest U. He was briefly a  professional gambler, playing poker and blackjack. In 1980 Ergen, his future wife Candy, and Jim DeFranco started EchoSphere Corporation. They drove around the   Denver   metro area selling   satellite dishes   from the back of a truck. Charlie also founded Dishnet and Echostar. In 2000, he first appeared in   The World's Billionaires   by Forbes with a net worth of $11.2 billion, making him the 21st richest person in the world at the time. Charlie Ergen is still a gambler: “ Satellite cable pioneer Charlie Ergen made a big bet on spectrum and eventually found a buyer in SpaceX. The stock p...

Look, I’m a member of the church of the second chance.   "I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent" (Luke 15:7). But perhaps you’ll forgive me for being cynical about MTG’s recent turn on Trump. It’s pegging my crap detector. “ The former congresswoman reposted a social media post on Saturday from Trisha Hope, a self-described “J6 activist,” who wrote that the details surrounding the July 2024 assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, including the perfectly-timed photo of Trump and Trump’s refusal to talk at length about it, are weird.   “Hope added that Corey Comperatore, who was the only person killed during the assassination attempt when he was shielding his wife and daughter, was killed to be “used in the plot,” otherwise people would think the shooting was a hoax. “Extremely important post worth the read and consideration,”  Green...

RFK Jr says   "Many of us have come to the conclusion that [the] government actually lies to us." On that, I agree. Our government lied us into the Vietnam war and lied about the ending: Nixon took a deal in 1973 that he could have had in 1969. The Bush Administration lied us into the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq based on fake claims of WMDs and collaboration with al Qaeda that ended up spawning (a) an Iran-aligned government and (b) ISIL/Daesh. The Trump Administration lied us into the current war with Iran. And JFK Jr is lying about vaccines, autism and the virtue of red meat consumption. “We shouldn't be confused -- MAHA is not a public health strategy. If it were, it would not come alongside plans to underfund care or undermine confidence in science and proven treatments. Its goal would be to move every American toward evidence-based public health practices. “Rather, MAHA is a highly disciplined political and  omnichannel marketing strategy  seemingly d...

When our daughter was applying to colleges, she visited a bunch of college campuses but ended up applying to only two. One was Washington University in St. Louis, which was only a few blocks from where she grew up. The other was Colorado State University in Ft Collins, which she saw on her big college campus tour. Since my wife worked at Washington U, our daughter could have attended WU tuition-free. And Wash U’s tuition benefit extended to any college or university at half of the Wash U tuition, which was equal to or exceeded the tuition at any state university.  Friends of ours at the time said that surely, we would make her go to Wash U. When I asked why, they told me: “because Wash U is a great university.” Here’s the deal. When people talk about a “great university,” they’re usually referring to the research reputation of the university. And the top universities are research universities. Since research is always and everywhere a cost center, universities have to subsidize res...

A couple years back, I attended a town hall hosted by my House representative, Gabe Amo. During the Q&A, a gal who I judged to be in her 20s referred to the current economic situation as “hyperinflation.” That was nonsense, of course. Hyperinflation is defined by prices rising ofer 50% monthly.     Historic examples of hyperinflation include   Hungary in 1946 (41.9 quadrillion % monthly), Zimbabwe in 2008 (79.6 billion % monthly), Yugoslavia in 1994 and Weimar Germany in 1923, where currency became nearly worthless. I’m old enough to recall the double-digit inflation of the early 1980s, and I wouldn’t call that hyperinflation, let alone the inflation of the early Biden years. Where does this come from? In a think piece over at TPM, Josh Marshall takes a stab at this. “ I was reminded of this because in   the new episode of his Strength in Numbers podcast G. Elliott Morris proposes   that if you look at recent economic history through the different prism of “...