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The used car salesman speaks ...

President JD Vance in Peachtree City, Ga., on Aug. 21.Megan Varner / Getty Images file

Peter Thiel's creation is hedging on presidential aspirations, thus possibly compromising the most important resource on his becoming president in 2028, money.

WASHINGTON — A high-stakes challenge to campaign finance restrictions being heard by the Supreme Court on Tuesday has the potential to fizzle because of Vice President JD Vance's reluctance to reveal whether he will run for office in 2028.

That, at least, is what one of the lawyers will tell the justices during the oral argument, which concerns limits on how much party committees can spend in coordination with candidates.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority has long been skeptical of campaign finance restrictions on free speech grounds, and Republicans have often brought challenges against them.

Vance, who was among those challenging the spending limits in the case before the court this week, has been equivocal about his plans in various public remarks, most recently in an interview with NBC News last week.

Roman Martinez, whom the court appointed to defend the restrictions when the Trump administration announced it would not do so, says the case is moot, meaning it should be dismissed and the current restrictions should remain in place.

One of Martinez's key arguments, outlined in court papers, is that Vance, who originally challenged the regulations when he was a Senate candidate, no longer has a stake in the case because he is not currently a candidate, nor has he announced any intention to be one in the future.

"Vice President's Vance's claim is now moot because he has repeatedly stated that he has no concrete plan in place to run for any particular office in 2028," Martinez said in an email.

Don't worry, this 1990 Yugo's a gem.

Yugo Ciao in Kragujevac

Thinking about summer :)

Tiny wild daisy

Reaching out ...

Lilly

Just resting

A touch of yellow

Woosley Hall - Thinking Xmas :)

Woosley Hall - A treasure for the ages. The glee club Xmas concert awaits:)

A ceiling for the ages

Organ - Bach would approve

Details. Details, Details :)

I think I've seen enough ...

Pete Hegseth Official portrait, 2025

A house GOP representative finally spoke the truth about Hegseth and it's about time. 

Don Bacon doubles down on Hegseth criticism: ‘I think I’ve seen enough’

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) took his criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a step further Friday, claiming the Pentagon chief’s recent decisions have “ruined his credibility.”

“I’ve been on the record already,” he told Politico’s Dasha Burns, who also hosts “Ceasefire” on C-SPAN. “After Signalgate, I think I’ve seen enough. What I really wanted to see was someone take responsibility — own to a mistake.”

“And then when he blamed the media or the, you know, the journalist for the story, it just — it ruined his credibility,” he added.

The Nebraska Republican noted that Hegseth “had some issues” going into confirmation hearings, after President Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon. But, once he was confirmed, Bacon continued, he wanted to give the former Fox News host “a fair chance.”

“But I — what I’ve seen is what I call just poor decision-making,” the lawmaker, who will retire at the end of the term, told Burns.

His remarks come after a watchdog report released earlier this week found that Hegseth endangered the troops and violated department policy by using his personal cell phone to send classified information about a pending strike on Houthi targets in Yemen through the Signal app.

It's time for Hegseth to go, now. 

Gerrymandering writ large

A map of Texas’ congressional districts during a hearing in Austin in August.
Credit...Brandon Bell/Getty Images

The supremes did it again, codifying the dubious practice of gerrymandering writ large. The term toadies applies to the big 6, the grammatically correct crew certifying the fact this is the worst sc in history.

Only two decades ago, all nine Supreme Court justices agreed that extreme partisan gerrymandering could violate the Constitution, though they differed on what courts should do about it.

On Thursday, by contrast, the court’s conservative majority allowed Texas to use voting maps made to disadvantage Democrats in the 2026 election, without a hint of constitutional difficulty. To the contrary, the majority chastised a lower court for not taking the state at its word that politics, not race, motivated the maps. The court, it said, had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith.”

In the space of a generation, then, the Supreme Court’s attitude toward partisan gerrymandering has shifted from tolerating it as a necessary evil to embracing it as savvy politics.

The shadow docket strikes again.

In an unsigned opinion on Thursday, over the dissents of the three Democratic appointees, the majority protected the state’s new maps, overturning a lower court’s finding that race was improperly used to draw them. Indeed, the majority chastised the lower court for not taking the state at its word that politics rather than race inspired the maps.

Any questions?

Why AZ?

Note: The numbers currently shown for TSMC and Amkor are projections.Sources: Greater Phoenix Economic Council; Maricopa Association of Governments; Arizona State University.
Jacqueline Gu/The New York Times

Let's think about this. Outside of the fact Ronnie eliminated the ability of the US to make anything anymore and the fact TSMC is doing the drill here is ... tech needs water, lots and lots of water and AZ "ain't" got any. Combine this with climate change and AZ becomes uninhabitable within the next 20 years. If I were doing the drill, Michigan and it's connect to the Great Lakes makes sense. Cold as hell in the winter but, Michigan will endure as the northern and southern tiers of the world will thrive while the center will not. Nature finds a way, always.

The computer chip factories rising from an empty expanse of the Sonoran Desert test the concept of immensity. The complex is under construction across 1,149 acres, an area larger than New York’s Central Park. It represents an investment of $165 billion, making it one of the most expensive undertakings on earth.

Here on the northern edges of Phoenix stands a display of the American reach for industrial self-sufficiency. The factories are engineered to make advanced computer chips — the brains of modern manufacturing. Those chips will power data centers that deliver artificial intelligence.

American political leaders celebrate the presence of the plants as insurance against geopolitical turmoil and disasters like pandemics. Whatever happens, the nation will have its own supply of computer chips.

But the company at the center of this enterprise — one cast as vital to national security — is not American. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, the global leader in the industry, has marshaled the investment, the people and the know-how to turn these plans into reality.

The question remains ... why AZ?

Factoid. Another reason for Michigan. Fabs run hot, really really hot so having
said tech reside in cooler climes saves energy, right?

And so it begins ...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repositioned the social media giant as an AI company.

Vincent Feuray | AFP | Getty Images

And so it begins. Meta is the first AI company starting to see burning through capital at stratospheric rates with no verifiable ROI is not smart but don't worry, OpenAI, and significant others, are next as AI is finally beginning to be seen as not the end all and be in terms of how the world does business
as civilization moves further into the 21st century. 

Meta Platforms shares popped about 4% higher on Thursday after Bloomberg reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was looking to make significant cuts to the company’s metaverse resources.

Bloomberg said that executives have considered budget cuts as high as 30% for the unit, citing people familiar with the talks.

The move would be notable for the Facebook parent company, which changed its name to Meta in October 2021 to signal its pivot beyond social media.

Zuckerberg said at the time that “the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started.”

The proposed cuts would likely include layoffs, according to Bloomberg, which said the cuts were part of budget planning for 2026. The cuts will likely hit the company’s virtual reality group.

Meta declined to comment on the report.

Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash

But, as I have covered before, AI experiences diminishing returns, meaning that AI development costs increase exponentially. As such, the AI boom threatened to drain these tech giants of all their liquid cash. So, the industry switched to equity financing, which involved selling off shares to raise enough cash to keep the lights on. However, this quickly devolved into the infamous circular financing deals between OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, CoreWeave and Microsoft, which, in the end, wasn’t even enough cash to cover the spiralling costs of AI.

So, over the past year, Big Tech has turned more and more towards debt financing, or taking out loans, to cover their mounting AI costs. To give you an idea of how rapidly they are taking on debt, Big Tech is predicted to spend $400 billion on AI in 2025 and has issued $200 billion in AI-related bonds (or debt) so far this year, with half of that happening since September.

AI costs are really spiralling out of control. AI expenditure is set to double next year. By 2028, Morgan Stanley predicts that the AI industry will spend $2.9 trillion, the vast majority of which will require debt financing. According to J.P. Morgan, the AI sector will need $1.5 trillion in bonds (or debt financing), to cover the costs of constructing planned data centres alone.

To understand why, we need to understand what a bond is and how it relates to Credit Default Swaps (CDS). Stick with me; this gets juicy, I promise.

Bonds are a way for a corporation or a government to raise funds by directly selling their debt to investors. It is basically a corporation or government saying, “Give us your money now, and we will pay it back plus interest over time.”

But many investors want to mitigate the risks of their bonds. After all, if the government or corporation defaults on this debt, there is no way for the investors to get their money back.

This is where CDS comes in. These are effectively insurance policies for people who hold bonds, typically issued by investment banks or similar. So, if a bondholder is worried the government or corporation isn’t going to pay out and will fold on their obligations, they take out a CDS. This will cost them an annual premium, which is confusingly called a spread, based on how risky the debt is considered to be. Spreads are usually presented as a percentage cost of the bond value, so if a CDS has a spread of 1%, it will have an annual premium of 1% of the value of the bond covered. But in return, if the bond issuer defaults, the organisation providing the CDS will reimburse the full bond value.

Well, the entire future of AI depends on bonds.

And so it begins - K. Vonnegut

The man has a problem ...

The man has a problem ...

The publisher of the Franklin children's book series has rebuked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after he posted a meme of the anthropomorphic turtle firing on drug boats.

Hegseth's social media post from Sunday shows the turtle, clad in tactical gear, standing on a helicopter and aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at one of several boats in the water below. It's designed to look like an edition of the children's book, but titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet Meeting at the White House on Dec. 2. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

& this ...

A Pentagon watchdog has determined that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked the safety of U.S. service members by sharing sensitive military information on the Signal messaging app, according to a source who has reviewed the forthcoming inspector general report. 

The report, which is expected to be released as early as Thursday, was launched after a journalist for The Atlantic revealed in March that he had been added to a chat on the encrypted messaging app in which Hegseth and other top officials were discussing plans for U.S. airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen. 

A summary of the report provided to NPR finds that had a foreign adversary intercepted the intelligence discussed in the chat, it would have endangered both U.S. service members and the mission at large.

Time for Pete to go, now.

All taken away ...

Jacob Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development: ‘It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection … So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.’ Photograph: Michael Swensen/The Guardian.

Drip, drip, drip, the damage done to this once great nation continues unabated,
perpetrated by The Donald in ways staggering the imagination. 

‘Deeply demoralizing’: how Trump derailed coal country’s clean-energy revival

Biden earmarked billions for former coal communities in Appalachia
– and his successor came and took it away

For a moment, Jacob Hannah saw an unprecedented opportunity to make Appalachia great again.

In 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities. The objective was to lay down building blocks for the region to transition from extractive industries like coal and timber to a hub for solar and other advanced energy technologies, with a view to long-term economic, climate and social resilience.

But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American liberal hoaxes.

“We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” said Hannah, 33. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive. So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.”

Yes it is.