This afternoon I saw an ad being run by a SuperPAC supporting Dan Osborn (“Nebraska Values PAC”) against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) of Nebraska. It’s a brutal ad about a brutal crime. (You can watch it here.) A woman identified as “Jody S.” speaks over a montage of a crime scene imagery explaining that in 1993 an intruder broke into her home, tied her to her bed and violently raped her while her children listened to everything. A man named John Arias was arrested, pled guilty, was convicted and sentenced to prison. We then fast-forward to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts casting the deciding vote as the member of a pardon board that ultimately pardoned Arias. Jody S. notes that Arias told her she would never be safe from him and that he was now off the state sex offender registry and allowed to own a gun. She also notes that she wasn’t even informed about the pardon until after it happened.

I tend to be hard-hearted about political ads. I watched this one a few times to make sure I had the details right. It’s hard to watch; in a way it’s more hard to listen to. The ad has stark black and white imagery and has audio of Ricketts announcing, in an uncomfortably chipper tone, his vote during the hearing: “But with that you’ve got your pardon.”

This morning the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether the Trump administration will be subject to a contempt of court inquiry for not stopping and turning around the deportation flights in the original Alien Enemies Act case, which began way back in March 2025, when the Trump administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

Each side — the Trump DOJ and the ACLU — was given 30 minutes, but the oral arguments ended up lasting nearly three hours.

The top line: The en banc court is likely to rule against the Trump administration and allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to proceed with a contempt of court inquiry.

As I noted a week ago, we can’t know whether the current polls will be predictive of the November election results. But the polls themselves are at least speaking with a clear voice. I want to note two things that appear to be moving in unison: consumer confidence and the Republican position on the national generic ballot.

Here’s the trend line from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin …

The House has already left town. The Senate is heading home this week. With the midterms just around the corner, GOP lawmakers are giving up on doing any more legislating and skipping town to try to mobilize their demoralized voters.

TPM’s congressional reporter Emine Yücel has chronicled all the drama for us. Emine joined publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube Live at 2 p.m. ET to talk through what Congress has actually done — and failed to do — this session.

Check it out:

I’m figuring this will end up as a big mistake. You probably know about the big NYT expose about Sen. Roger Marshall’s record as an OB/GYN suing hundreds of his patients over often very small delinquent bills and having a significant number of them arrested. Democrat Adam Hamilton is now running an ad on Youtube which describes one of those cases, a woman named Meischa Zimmerman who was arrested in 2011 and, according to her, handcuffed while eight months pregnant and in front of her two year old child. Marshall just sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter calling the ad false and defamatory and demanding it be taken down.

This seems like it will be a textbook case of what has come to be called the “Streisand Effect,” in which the effort to block some kind of publicity or attention simply has the effect of calling more attention to the original issue.

This has gotten very little attention, as far as I can tell. But it sounds quite sleazy and another example of the US government becoming a de facto investment arm of the Trump Corporation/TrumpaNostra. Lukoil, the Russian oil company, put up for sale most of its foreign assets outside of Kazakstan about a year ago. This was in response to new US sanctions. Carlyle Group and a couple other bidders have wanted to purchase these assets but approvals have been stalled in regulatory approvals in Washington. Now a group lead by billionaire financier Todd Boehly is close to securing the deal. Partnering with him are, according to The Financial Times (paywall), a group of “Gulf power brokers with ties to the Trump family” and … the US government itself, in the form of the US International Development Finance Corporation.

The current CEO of the DFC is Ben Black, son of Leon Black, a decades-long Trump pal and business associate, who is deep, deep into the Epstein saga and controversies.

The Trump-connected families are …

Here’s our text for the day on the LLM/AI “boom”, which is now the center of the US economy and to a great degree the center of political power as well.

Four years into the AI boom, the companies selling it are cutting prices. Microsoft, Amazon, Workday and Figma are offering discounts and free access to hold on to customers drifting toward Anthropic and OpenAI, and the two labs cut prices on their newest models by as much as half.

The discounting has a plain explanation: EY says only one in 10 companies can show AI’s return on its income statement. The cost of building AI kept rising. Anthropic is negotiating a single data center lease that would require at least $40 billion, and Blackstone concedes no one has mapped out who will buy all the debt.

The takeaway: AI is getting cheaper to buy just as it becomes more expensive to build. How that gap closes, whether through vendor margins, credit markets or Anthropic’s coming IPO, will shape the boom’s next phase.

I want to flag your attention to this note written by computer scientist and AI researcher Yoshua Bengio. It was sent to me by TPM Reader LG. Bengio is one of the most cited and highly regarded AI domain experts in the world. I have no independent ability to judge his views. But I believe this characterization is objectively true. I note this simply to establish that Bengio isn’t some random or obscure person. Right or wrong, he’s a major voice in the field.

You should read the note yourself. It’s concisely written, short and accessible with a basic layman’s familiarity with AI.

Let me highlight a few points. One is an issue that has resonated most with me in my recent speed-run self-education about LLMs. In the news we often hear that researchers told the LLM to X but it did Y. So it went “rogue” or disobeyed. There are several levels of problems with this framework.

Here’s a secondary issue we’re currently seeing in a number of races in red states. Take the Kansas Senate race. Who knows if this is really in play? But the last two polls of this race actually show Democrat Adam Hamilton with a nominal lead (+1 or +2). But there’s an issue here with Sen. Roger Marshall (R), the incumbent senator. And it goes beyond Marshall. In a lot of solidly red states you’ve got a generation of politicians who’ve never seen a contested partisan election. If you get the GOP nomination, you’re the senator. Period. And in some states, getting that nomination can have a significant machine dimension to it.

Yesterday, after a federal court forced the White House to readmit three news organizations to the White House, Donald Trump ordered the Secret Service to bar CNN from a flight today to a college football game in Knoxville. Right-minded people get infuriated and understandably so. But I would like to encourage you to see it in a somewhat different light.

Trump went to war against Iran because he was upset, disequilibriated by his declining popularity and power at home. Now he is boxed in by, defeated by Iran and pouring all his energy into a fever run of monument buildings and renamings. The news organization bans are just another part of that same storm of acting out. More failure, more ego-soothing. The guy is doubling down on what actually accounts for a larger part of his unpopularity and likely midterm drubbing than people realize. Yes, gas prices, diesel prices are driving him lower and lower. Just as much, I would argue, is Trump’s constant performance of “People Care About X, Trump Cares About Y”. His enemies can claim he only cares about himself. He’s far more convincing when he says it himself. Everyday. Through his own actions. You’re more spun up about the particular offenses. Most voters are seeing his priorities, and attempted demonstrations of power that look increasingly silly, often pitiful and cringey. He’s in a regressed feedback loop. It’s turning the people whose support he needs against him more every day.