It was a grueling several days for RFK Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health nomination, and Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director, who both entered the congressional gauntlet last week to face a furious Democratic Party. RFK was a conspiracy theorist, they said (ok true), and guilty of receiving legal kickbacks from lawsuits targeting pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile, Kash was a strongman, and a cop-hating J6 conspiracy theorist. Both men expertly answered questions with internet virality in mind. “You have two minutes,” Kash said to Amy Klobuchar.  “You don’t want me to sue pharmaceutical companies?” RFK asked Liz Warren. But arguing Trump is anti-cop after years of defund discourse? While Bernie Sanders defends Big Pharma? Some advice for the Democrats who ever want to win another election: stop focusing on Trump’s hires, and figure out what you actually believe.

Last week, SoCal news outlets reported that (1) a new ordinance may require Pacific Palisades landlords to replace burned down apartments with low income units, making displaced residents “ineligible to return because they won’t meet income requirements”; and (2) investigators “determined recent wildfires in La Jolla, Mission Valley and Rancho Bernardo started in homeless encampments.” There’s enough ambiguity in the ordinance’s text that I'm hopeful regulators will clarify it doesn't apply to the Palisades rebuild, but the fact that it’s even reasonable to worry that the wildfire victims won't be able to come back because their homes will be replaced by permanent housing (that they will forevermore have to subsidize with their tax dollars) for the very crack addict assholes who may have just burned down their neighborhood is super enraging and infuriating! That's it, that's the take — I'm afraid I need to touch (our dry, combustible, mismanaged) grass now.

Bookshop.org just launched a new e-book platform to “take on” Amazon and support indie bookstores. CEO Andy Hunter from Brooklyn (obviously) thinks book lovers shouldn’t give money to a “billionaire trying to be in a space race with Elon Musk” who’s “kissing Trump’s ring,” but plans to nicely ask Amazon to support his lil’ website’s titles on Kindle before lawyering up. Trashing and threatening the guy you’re begging to let you live? Andy’s not a strategy genius. But I genuinely love indie bookstores, so I do have a soft spot for underdog stories like this. I’m also a realist, and this thing is undoubtedly doomed. Sure, David defeated Goliath with a sling and a stone, but Goliath didn’t have a global supply chain servicing a literal everything store alongside the world’s largest cloud computing platform worth a combined $2.5 trillion. May the odds be ever in your favor, Andy.

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