It’s been one of those weeks where the news cycle felt like it was personally trying to give me material. Let’s get into it. But, first, how about some music.
The Cubs Look Like a Team Taking Shape — If the Pitching Staff Ever Shows Up
I want to be optimistic about this Cubs team. I really do. There were stretches this year where it genuinely looked like a 100-win club. Then pitching happened.
The rotation has basically been gutted. Cade Horton, who looked like an ace in the making after a strong rookie campaign, needed UCL surgery just two starts into the season. Justin Steele’s already out. Matthew Boyd has been banged up. And just this week the Cubs lost Jameson Taillon to a hamstring strain (out until after the All-Star break) and then placed both Edward Cabrera and Ben Brown on the IL in the same week — Brown’s been arguably the team’s best starter this year, so that one stings. At one point the rotation was down to 40% of its Opening Day starters.
The numbers back up the eye test: since early May, Cubs pitching has posted a 5.17 ERA, worst in baseball over that stretch, and they’ve allowed the most home runs in the majors. The offense cooled off at almost the exact same time, and the combination dropped a team that was 15 games over .500 down to break-even — reportedly the fastest collapse of that kind since the 1996 Padres.
There’s still talent here. The lineup’s deep, Pete Crow-Armstrong has been fun to watch, and the front office isn’t ready to wave the white flag on the trade deadline yet. But until this pitching staff stops bleeding bodies, I’m not going to pretend this is a finished product. It’s a team taking shape, alright — just very, very slowly, and with a lot of ice packs.
About That “Vandalized” Reflecting Pool, Mr. President
So the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a shiny new “American Flag Blue” coating this spring, and it has since turned into a swampy, peeling, algae-filled mess. Trump’s explanation: vandals. He’s claimed someone cut a 350-foot slit into the lining with a box cutter, and pointed to a handful of arrests as proof.
Here’s the part that makes this hard to take at face value: on May 7, while the new coating was still curing, Trump’s own motorcade — his roughly 20,000-pound limo plus a fleet of armored SUVs — drove straight across the drained pool so he could inspect the paint job. The White House even posted a celebratory video of it.
Fact-checkers and pool industry experts have been pretty clear-eyed about this: nobody can definitively prove the motorcade caused the failure, but it’s absolutely one of the plausible culprits, alongside a rushed installation timeline and surface prep that may not have given the polyurea coating time to properly cure. Polyurea isn’t designed to be driven over. FactCheck.org dug through the timeline and found that the National Park Service was already flagging bubbling and damage to the lining well before the vandalism arrests the White House cited. The administration, for its part, hasn’t released the evidence it claims to have.
Maybe vandals really did take a knife to part of it — that’s apparently a real, separate incident. But blaming the whole soggy debacle on saboteurs while conveniently leaving out the bit where the President personally drove a small motorcade over wet paint? That’s some main character energy.
“Separation of Church and State Isn’t in the Constitution” — Technically, Sure, But…
There’s a clip going around from an Oval Office event this week where Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, standing next to Trump, declared that the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, and that public officials should no longer have to answer to it.
He’s not wrong about the literal text. Those exact words aren’t in the document. But that’s a bit like saying “fair trial” guarantees don’t exist because the Sixth Amendment never uses that phrase — the concept is very much there even if the wording isn’t.
The First Amendment bars Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” and the Supreme Court has built decades of precedent on top of that Establishment Clause — cases like Everson v. Board of Education (1947), which extended the principle to state governments, and Engel v. Vitale (1962), which struck down state-sponsored prayer in public schools. This isn’t some made-up activist phrase; it’s grounded in actual binding case law.
And then there’s Thomas Jefferson. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, he wrote about the First Amendment building “a wall of separation between Church and State” — reassuring a religious minority that the government wouldn’t have the power to favor one denomination over another. So the phrase didn’t come from nowhere; it came from one of the actual authors of the era explaining what the Establishment Clause was supposed to do. You can debate how far that wall should extend, but pretending the underlying principle doesn’t exist because of a wording technicality is a stretch.
iHeartMedia Just Gutted Local Radio — and I Don’t Think Radio Survives the Decade
iHeartMedia has spent this week laying off on-air talent and programmers across dozens of markets — some smaller cities lost essentially all of their remaining local hosts. It’s part of a previously announced cost-cutting push targeting $150 million in annualized savings, and executives are framing it as “evolving” how stations are programmed by leaning harder on centralized, tech-driven content instead of local voices.
Translation: more syndication, more voice-tracking, fewer actual humans in your local market.
Honestly, I don’t think this is radio choosing efficiency so much as radio reading the room. Between Starlink-enabled connectivity basically everywhere, SiriusXM in every other car, and on-demand podcasts and streaming letting people build a perfectly curated audio diet, traditional broadcast radio’s value proposition — being whatever’s on, whenever you tune in — keeps shrinking. I’d genuinely be surprised if terrestrial radio as we know it is still a meaningful presence in ten years. It’ll probably stick around in some zombie form for AM news/talk and emergency broadcasts, but the local DJ on your morning commute? That’s an endangered species.
Why I’m Waiting for Supergirl to Hit Streaming
I had a ticket bought for Supergirl this weekend. Then the reviews started rolling in, and I started having second thoughts.
The consensus isn’t “this is a disaster,” but it’s not good either — reviewers are pointing specifically at the script and dialogue as the weak link, calling it overwritten and generic, with a villain that doesn’t land and humor that doesn’t quite work. Variety’s review was especially brutal on the writing. Even outlets that liked Milly Alcock’s performance as Kara are pretty unified on the script being the problem.
Here’s the thing that bugs me: James Gunn is DC Studios’ co-president, and reporting confirms he was personally protective of how Superman’s dialogue was handled in this film — he didn’t write or direct Supergirl itself, but he clearly had input. So it’s not like nobody with quality-control authority was in the room. And yet here we are with another DCU movie getting dinged for the writing. I thought the whole pitch of the rebooted DCU was tighter creative oversight across films. Maybe that oversight just doesn’t extend evenly to every script. Either way — streaming watch for me on this one.
Thomas Massie Says the Quiet Part Out Loud on Election Fraud
Thomas Massie made a pretty blunt comment this week while sparring with his own party over the SAVE America Act: Republicans currently hold the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House — and Massie pointed out how strange it is to be simultaneously screaming about election fraud while holding every lever of power that a rigged system would supposedly be denying you. “We won all the damn elections,” as he put it.
It’s a fair point, and it’s backed up by the actual research. The Brennan Center for Justice — which has been tracking this for two decades — has consistently found voter fraud incident rates somewhere between 0.0003% and 0.0025%, depending on the study. A federal GAO review in 2014 reached the same conclusion: a literature review across multiple studies found only a handful of confirmed in-person fraud cases out of literally hundreds of millions of votes cast. The oft-cited stat is that an individual American is statistically more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter impersonation fraud.
And there’s a structural reason fraud or rigging a presidential election is so hard to pull off in the first place: U.S. elections aren’t run by one central authority — they’re administered by thousands of separate county and state election offices, each with its own equipment, its own paper trails, and its own bipartisan poll watchers and canvassing boards. To “rig” a national election you’d need to coordinate fraud across an enormous number of independently run jurisdictions, all monitored by representatives of both parties, with audit trails at nearly every step, and somehow have it go completely undetected by local officials of both parties, courts, and outside observers. It’s not impossible to imagine isolated fraud — and it occasionally happens, in small, almost always caught instances — but moving a presidential outcome through fraud at scale would require a conspiracy bigger and more disciplined than anything that’s ever actually been uncovered.
Which brings me to Bill Maher. In a sit-down with JD Vance this week, Maher laid out what he called his “deal breaker” for the GOP: “Either we win or they cheated. That shit has to stop.” He’s right. An election framework where your side losing is, by definition, evidence of cheating isn’t a belief about election integrity — it’s a belief that you can’t lose legitimately. That’s a much bigger problem than anything actually showing up in the fraud statistics.
Alright — that’s the roundup. I’m off for a mini-vacation with some good friends, so I’ll be unplugged from all of the above for a bit (the Cubs’ pitching staff will probably need an X-ray tech on retainer by the time I’m back). Catch you on the other side.