Episode #1064: Colonel Vodka
First Broadcast: 9/21/26
On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, Congressman Thomas Massie, a lame duck Republican representing the 4th District of Kentucky, introduced a resolution in the House to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on eight different counts of "high crimes and misdemeanors," covering acts ranging from the launch of the illegal war against Iran, to defying Congress's orders to stop the war, to bombing a school in Iran and killing at least 200 civilians in that bombing during that war, to killing hundreds of people extrajudiciously (or, what most people would call "murdering people") by bombing dozens of boats in the Carribean and elsewhere, to killing survivors of these bombings instead of rescuing them, to increasing the likelihood of more civilians being killed and more troops being fired upon in the future, to attempting to suppress the free speech of civilians, to kidnapping the leader of a foreign country--this resolution has everything! The very next day, on Wednesday, September 16, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House for the next month and a half, postponing all possible votes on this resolution until after the midterm elections in November. Coincidence? Will a majority of Congress vote in favor of impeaching Hegseth when the vote eventually happens? Why do some Republicans only feel free to do the right thing when their political careers are over? Will we finally get meaningful oversight of the Executive branch if a Democratic majority wins both houses of Congress this year? Will the midterms be as big a blowout as I'm hoping they will? We'll all find out in less than 50 days, won't we?
Episode #1065: Vacuum Tubes
First Broadcast: 10/5/26
When we recorded this episode, the 12 attorneys general who had sued Paramount Skydance to block its proposed merger with Warner Brothers Discovery had reached a settlement to allow the merger to go forward, and Paramount was attempting to sell debt to fund the deal while waiting for a judge to approve the settlement--an approval which has since come to pass. Needless to say, we at Free New York don't approve of this kind of media consolidation, especially the kind that puts four different news outlets like CBS, CNN, HBO, and Comedy Central (yes, I count those last two as news outlets, thanks to The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight) under the same roof. But, wait! There's more! Well over 300 different media properties will now call this new mega-corporation home, and that doesn't sound good for anyone. After all, if that many media outlets are all owned by the same parent, aren't they only creating the illusion of difference instead of maintaining their own individual visions? What can consumers do, if all their media choices turn out to be different angles of the same choice? I guess Jello Biafra's advice still holds: "Don't hate the media: Become the media!" We're trying, man! We're trying!
Episode #1066: Haiku About Mangoes
First Broadcast: 10/12/26
Will A.I. kill us all? It's a question that's on many people's minds lately, but who do you trust for the answer? People like Jacob Coxon, for example, say that A.I. software is becoming too dangerous to use, and has the potential to kill off all humans in less than a decade; but other people like Ed Zitron think Coxon and his ilk are just inflating the hypothetical dangers of A.I. in order to boost their own careers (Coxon notably hasn't divested from A.I. stocks, remember). People within the A.I. industry point to thought experiments like the paper clip problem (where an A.I. tasked with creating paper clips ends up using every resource in the universe to do so, eventually battling humans who try to stop it from completing its task) as examples of how A.I. is infinitely more dangerous than we realize. In comparison, the consensus of experts who aren't directly connected with A.I. companies seems to be more restrained, in that the potential for A.I. to do malicious things exists, but that requires people to give it the instructions that allow malicious behavior in the first place. This brings up the question: Why are A.I. programs being trained with malicious behavior anyway? After all, if A.I. programs can only refer to the data they're given for reference (much like the Star Trek villain Trelane, whose only knowledge of Earth was what he could see through his telescope, and therefore several hundred years out of date; or the tweet about how someone who has only seen the movie Boss Baby would think any other movie would have strong "Boss Baby" vibes), why give them any data at all that could help them make humanity extinct? Peraonally, I'm much less concerned with A.I. destroying us than I am with people becoming over-reliant on A.I. to the point where they just accept whatever the A.I. tells them, without question, like Michael Scott in The Office blindly following his GPS instructions to drive into a lake; or lawyers who have chatbots write their legal briefs that end up including "hallucinated" citations for cases that don't exist; or students who don't review the work that chatbots generate for their school assignments, missing the results of the instructions teachers added to specifically catch students who used chatbots; or people who are fooled into thinking the chatbots they're conversing with are real humans, and end up putting their lives at risk because of their delusions. Maybe we're better off unplugging all this stuff until we're smart enough to use it responsibly? HA! Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking when I said that.
Episode #1067: Walker Beware
First Broadcast: 10/19/26
Did you watch the one and only debate between Democratic New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, who's running for re-election this year, and Republican Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who's challenging her for the office? If you did, maybe you came away from it as underwhelmed as I did, since I didn't see anything that would change my mind about voting to keep Hochul in office and keep Blakeman and all other Republicans as far away from public office as possible as long as President Donald Trump is defining what it means to be a Republican these days--not that I was ever inclined to vote for a Republican before Trump either, but I'm even less so now than I ever was in the past. On the one hand, it's refreshing to see politicians who aren't camera-ready running for office, because then I think they might be spending their time on their jobs than just trying to look good on TV or TickTock or wherever. On the other hand, when you see someone like Jon Ossoff, or Abdul El-Sayed, or Troy Jackson talking and giving full-throated defenses of their lefty perspectives, it can make one envious of the good choices Democrats can make elsewhere this November. Then again, not everyone can be as lucky as us New York City residents who have Zohran Mamdani as our mayor! REMEMBER TO VOTE! Things might get better if you do!
Episode #1068: Hey, Stop That
First Broadcast: 11/2/26
Did you make it through the speed run of Halloween, the change from Daylight Saving Time, and the Marathon all in one piece? Good! Now, all you have to do is make it through the election, and you're home free (for now)! If you didn't vote early, don't worry! You can still vote on Election Day! Need some incentive to get to the polls? How about the revelation that a man from "DOGE" who cancelled so many USAID contracts and fired so many federal employees might not have been officially employed by the federal government in the first place? I'm no expert, but if you were fired by someone who doesn't work where you work, were you ever really fired? Almost sounds like a zen koan, doesn't it? Could mass firings like this explain why the FDA only made 5% of the inspections of foreign food facilities that it was supposed to make in 2025, which could also explain why so many food recalls have been happening since Trump's second term began? Could this be one of the reasons why food prices have increased so much recently, getting so high that some people feel hamburger is now just as much of a luxury as steak? I'm also aggravated by how Ito-en's iced teas have increased in price, but perhaps that's just a symptom of how practically everything is more expensive here now--and the tariffs, bad diplomacy, and the Iran War certainly aren't helping any! As Network famously put it, "Things are bad!" That's one of the many reasons why we need as many people as possible to vote to remove every Republican supporter of Trump out of office that you can, and vote in as many Democrats and others into office that you can in order to put the brakes on the shitshow that Trump 2.0 has become--you know, those "checks and balances" that we heard so much about, growing up? Perhaps, when Democrats control the Congress, they can help put a stop to more frivolous lawsuits like the ones the Department of Justice filed against California, or Alaska, or Cassidy Hutchinson, or whatever Trump has up his sleeve to claim that the 2026 elections are somehow "rigged"? Honestly, if you knew that your vote could potentially help stop Trump and his Republican cult's fascism directly in its tracks, why would you not do it? PLEASE VOTE, WHILE YOU CAN, ALREADY!
Episode #1069: Wave, Tsunami, Rout
First Broadcast: 11/9/26
Good news, everyone! In an epic victory that surpassed even many Democrat's expectations, Democratic candidates won elections up and down the ballot across the country on Tuesday, and by the end of the night they had won sizeable majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a majority of governorships that were up for grabs, in addition to many other state and local races. In the process, Democrats flipped 4 governor's offices, as well as 43 seats in the House and 7 seats in the Senate, which could end up being 9 Senate seats when the vote counting finally ends. James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton and Gina Hinojosa defeated Greg Abbott in Texas; Abdul Al-Sayed defeated Mike Rogers in Michigan; Eileen Laubacher defeated Lauren Boebert in Colorado; Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio; Troy Jackson defeated Susan Collins in Maine; and Kathy Hochul defeated Bruce Blakeman in New York, among many elections nationwide, in what was broadly interpreted as a mass rebuke of the cruel, ineffective, and corrupt policies of the second term of Republican Donald Trump's presidency. Examples of the depth of this revolt were too numerous to count: Democrats won Senate seats in both of the Carolinas; a Democrat won a Railroad Commissioner seat in Texas; a 19 year-old Democratic student at Arizona State University won the Maricopa County Clerk race in Arizona; and an openly gay Ukrainian-born Democrat defeated a three-term incumbent Republican in the 5th Congressional district in Indiana, a district that Trump won by almost 17 points in 2024. This collection of victories could lead to all sorts of good things--a check on Donald Trump's fascist vision of the presidency probably being the most urgent--but perhaps the most consequential outcome could be the passage of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact by enough state governments to put it into effect, which would mandate states that make up a majority of votes in the Electoral College to pledge their votes to the national winner of the popular vote of the Presidential election, which would effectively bypass the Electoral College without needing to abolish it, and prevent any outcome like the ones in 2000 and 2016--where the winner of the popular vote did not become President--from ever happening again, or at least as long as the compact doesn't get repealed in any of the states that have passed it in the meantime. Is this the first nail in the coffin for Trump and his cult? I don't know, but if Democratic voters can keep up this enthusiasm in 2028 and beyond, then we have a real shot at becoming a functioning democracy again, and I, for one, am looking forward to it!