Pun Salad

Hey, the live-action Lilo & Stitch worked well for me. And I gotta say this looks good too:

Hope it's true to the original. And not like Snow White.

Also of note:

• Don't be fooled by the headline. The Options Market is not about those sliver futures I hope you own. Kevin D. Williamson looks at the unfortunate fact: "We have an indecisive president—and it is decision time."

  Donald Trump, whose gift for self-contradiction is often demonstrated within a single illiterate clause of a single dotty sentence, to say nothing of a full speech, insisted on the 2024 campaign trail that he would be a peacemaker, that he would end the Russian war on Ukraine in a matter of hours (the Ukraine peace plan must be filed in the same folder as Trump’s health care program, three weeks away from completion for a decade now) and achieve peace throughout the Middle East, too.

  But he also averred (as his press team has been reminding us) over and over that he believed Iran must be prevented from getting a nuclear weapon.

  Trump is, famously, a man who likes to keep his options open. (Ask Mrs. Trump. Or Mrs. Trump. Or Mrs. Trump. Or the star of Porking with Pride 2.) Whether his dangling the promise of negotiations with Tehran was part of a strategic rope-a-dope to help Israel pull off its brilliant assault on Iran or whether it was something more like happy happenstance hardly matters, inasmuch as it was Trump doing what Trump is instinctually inclined to do: stalling. It was, from Trump’s perspective, a win-win: If the Iranians came to the table before the Israeli attack, then he could play peacemaker; if they came to the table after receiving a good beating, then he could extract more humiliating concessions than he might otherwise have dared; if the Israelis were wildly successful, then Washington’s hand would be strengthened by Iran’s degradation; if the Israelis met catastrophe, then Trump could—and surely would!—insist that things would have gone better if they had listened to him.

  Who knows, a decision could have been made by the time you read this. It could have been made while I've been typing this.

  [2025-06-22 Update: Well, as it turns out, KDW's "indecisive" slam apparently turned out to be well off-target. We'll see how this plays out, but … ]

• Did my eyes just roll clean out of my head? The Federalist shakes its pom-poms for the latest example of Trump bein' Trump: Trump Calls For Special Prosecutor To Probe Rigged 2020 Election.

  Didn't we litigate this out the wazoo already? Yes.

  And didn't Trump get skunked? Yes.

  And didn't Fox pay Dominion Voting systems a whole bunch of money for lying about this stuff? Yes.

  But:

  President Donald Trump is calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the rigged 2020 election, polluted by everything from suspect absentee ballots to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “Zuckbucks.”

  “Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING,” Trump wrote on Friday on Truth Social.

  Geez, did Sidney Powell finally release the Kraken? Nope.

  It's nice to remember that our President, in addition to being indecisive, is also delusional, at least on this.

• "But all the cool kids are doing it!" One of my Facebook friends from high school will occasionally post crazed leftist bullshit. That's OK, it's very occasional. But it's nice to be reminded that our President isn't the only delusional one; check out this Substack article She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.

  Yes, it's the funhouse-mirror image of Trump's election denial. And you can almost imagine without reading; it's gonna be (to quote myself) "one of those dot-connecting conspiracies, corkboards with ragtag newspaper clippings, pushpins, and connections in red yarn."

  The mastermind of this half-vast conspiracy? Leonard Leo, onetime owner of Tripp Lite, maker of uninterruptible power supplies! Which was sold to Eaton Corp! Which had a partnership with Peter Thiel. And…

  To most, Tripp Lite was just a hardware brand—battery backups, surge protectors, power strips. But in America’s elections, Tripp Lite devices were something else entirely.

  They are physically connected to ES&S central tabulators and Electionware servers, and Dominion tabulators and central servers across the country. And they aren’t dumb devices. They are smart UPS units—programmable, updatable, and capable of communicating directly with the election system via USB, serial port, or Ethernet.
  

  ES&S systems, including central tabulators and Electionware servers, rely on Tripp Lite UPS devices. ES&S’s Electionware suite runs on Windows OS, which automatically trusts connected UPS hardware.

  If Eaton pushed an update to those UPS units, it could have gained root-level access to the host tabulation environment—without ever modifying certified election software.

  … and, well, it goes on like that for awhile. I almost suspect it's a wicked parody of 2000's Kraken Konspiracy Kids, but it seems legitimately deranged. The substack also has "She won" parts II and III, so they're really putting some effort into it, and I'm sure they would appreciate your attention.

• My heart won't let my feet do things that they should do. James Lileks has a useful guide for the conflicted wedding planner: Best & Worst Wedding Dance Music.

  There are two kinds of music you’ll hear at wedding parties.

  1. The modern songs the couple’s demographic cohort likes, and

  2. Good music

  Yes, I’m trading in tired topes again, trotting out agist notions of taste and quality, but I have the advantage of being objectively correct. When the modern music comes on, everyone stands around, waves back and forth, and sings along to the droning melody with a sense of generational solidarity. Good for them. But when the old stuff comes on, everyone jumps up and hits the floor. And I mean everyone. The twenty-somethings can be seen doing the Hustle with grandma, risking cracked hips with merry abandon. The Father of the Bride starts pointing like Travolta. Hoots and whoops as Mom . . . gets down, as they said so many decades ago.

  He goes on about ABBA, "Sweet Caroline" (BAHMP BAHMP BAHMP), Zager and Evans, Don MacLean, …

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