He was on a tear with his opening monologue. The AI-generated clip he showed at the beginning was scaringly good in how realistic it was. Not the content of course, which was hilarious, but how the video seemed so seamlessly genuine.
Kimmel seems to be really getting under the skin of Trump and his cult members in right wing media.
After summit meetings of the kind we just had with Trump and Xi Jinping, sometimes there is a joint communique and signing ceremony outlining what the two sides agreed upon. That did not happen, leaving observers scratching their heads as to what the point of the meeting was. Immediately afterwards, Russian president Vladimir Putin also went to China and the contrast between that and the barrenness of the Xi-Trump meeting was quite stark. They not only issued a joint communique, they also had a joint signing ceremony of all the agreements arrived at.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin issued a joint condemnation of “irresponsible” US foreign policy on Wednesday, warning of “a drift back to the law of the jungle”.
…The exchanges between Xi and Putin were notably warm and Wednesday’s summit appeared to be more substantive than Xi’s meetings with the US president.
In their joint statement, Xi and Putin said they looked forward to further bilateral cooperation ranging from artificial intelligence to the protection of rare tigers, leopards and pandas.
…The spectacle of the leaders of the cold war superpowers – each weakened by conflicts of their own making – flying thousands of miles to sit down with Xi in the Great Hall of the People underlined the Chinese president’s status on the global stage.
Xi and Putin went into their summit with a long record of close cooperation. They had already met more than 40 times, and Xi has described the bilateral relation as “without limits”.
The two leaders scolded the US for undermining global stability, in particular for seeking to develop a “golden dome” missile defence system, and for allowing a nuclear arms treaty to lapse in February.
…Xi and Putin then attended a signing ceremony for numerous documents spanning technology, trade, scientific research and intellectual property.
As usual, on his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver nicely explains how these rapidly growing online betting markets like Kalshi and Polymarket (that I have previously discussed here) work and why they are such a menace.
Warnings are being issued that gambling in the US is getting out of control because of the ease with which the new apps can be used to make bets on pretty much anything at any time.
Gambling addiction is spiraling “out of control” in the US, a leading campaigner for stricter guardrails has warned, as experts from around the world are set to gather in Boston to push for more regulation of the industry.
The rapid expansion of online gambling, prediction markets and sports betting platforms, “demands a public health response”, according to Harry Levant, director of gambling policy at the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), urging policymakers to intervene.
“You regulate the distribution, the speed, the type, the access to the product, because the product is what’s dangerous,” he said, calling for gambling to be treated like alcohol or tobacco. “The problem is the product, not the people,” said Levant. “We have a crisis here.”
…Sports betting has been legalized in 39 states and Washington DC since the landmark 2018 supreme court ruling.
…On both the federal level and in numerous states, legislation has been introduced to regulate online gambling. One of the bills that will be talked about on Friday is the Safe Bet Act, introduced in Congress by Tonko and Blumenthal, which seeks to establish “minimum federal standards” for legal sports betting and seeks to impose limits on marketing, introduce affordability checks and restrictions on apps using artificial intelligence to track players and create bets.
Trump has fired the secretary of the navy John Phelan. Phelan’s only qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a rich crony of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein but his replacement Hung Cao, who previously lost two races for Congress in Virginia, while having military experience, is also seriously weird.
Cao’s record, however, is not without controversy. During his 2024 candidacy, for example, USA Today reported that the Republican, a decorated Navy veteran, “made repeated references to becoming disabled after he was ‘blown up’ in combat,” although his military record did not support those claims.
…Complicating matters, shortly after launching his Senate campaign, Cao also expressed concerns about, of all things, witchcraft.
During one 2023 interview, Cao said witches had “taken over” a California city, and he wanted to prevent similar problems in the commonwealth.
“We can’t let it turn like this,” he said during an interview with a Christian pastor. “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become — they took out the ‘Christ,’ it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really — Monterey is a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”
Melania Trump is, to be frank, a boring person. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I myself am a boring person and can recognize my kind. But there is something almost robotic in the way she looks and moves and talks, like an animated mannequin, that makes you think that she is so tightly controlled that she will never do anything spontaneous or unexpected.
So it took observers by surprise when in an extraordinary development yesterday, Melania made a statement to White House reporters where she denied allegations and innuendos linking her to Jeffrey Epstein, and said that these were the products of mean-spirited liars trying to tarnish her good name. She also said that the emails exchanged by her with Ghislaine Maxwell were just casual correspondence. She also issued a plea for Congress to take public testimony from Epstein’s victims, which some of the victims and Democrats on the appropriate committees have seized upon.
The first lady also called on Congress to take sworn testimony in a public hearing from Epstein victims. Several victims did meet with the House oversight committee in a closed session last fall.
“We agree with First Lady Melania Trump’s call for a public hearing with the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Robert Garcia of California, ranking member of the House committee on oversight. “We encourage Chairman Comer to respond to the First Lady’s request and schedule a public hearing immediately.”
Trump is notorious for talking tough and making threats, taking impetuous actions, and then when he finds that he cannot carry out the threats or gets severe blowback, backtracking. Perhaps the most blatant example of this was with the tariffs which changed from day to day on his whim but he has also done that with things like saying he wants to take over Greenland, a bit of braggadocio that seems to have slipped into the memory hole when Denmark and other European countries presented a united front opposing the move. He does not even talks about it anymore.
As another example, take Trump’s threat to Iran on Saturday that if they did not open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours he would launch attacks on their oil infrastructure. This caused a sharp rise in oil prices and a massive drop in stock prices (one of the few things he cares about) and so he then said that thanks to Iran starting talks with the US, he was postponing the action.
Oil prices, which had been rising after Trump threatened over the weekend to strike Iranian infrastructure unless Iran opened the strait of Hormuz, dropped sharply. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 10% to $101 a barrel. The UK month-ahead gas prices fell 6% to 142p a therm.
The US president said on his social media platform Truth Social that the US and Iran had “very good and productive conversations” over the past two days regarding “a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East”.
He said: “Based on the tenor and tone of these in-depth, detailed, and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.”
This caused stock prices to bounce back yesterday. (One thing I do not understand is why investors react to the words of Trump. He is such a liar and so erratic that it would seem pointless to make decisions based on what he says he will do in the future. And yet it appears that many of them do.)
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SNL had Jeremy Culhane play Tucker Carlson giving his take on some of this year’s nominees. I have not seen any of the films but I thought Culhane really nailed the impression of Carlson, from his facial expressions to his rhetorical tics and right down to his weird laugh.
SNL also had a skit that was based on the hospital drama The Pitt except that it was a hospital that was run on RFK Jr’s crackpot ideas.