Cue the Moby Dick jokes....

Senator Lisa Murkowski was convinced at the last minute to become the deciding vote for the Republican budget by the inclusion of a big tax break for (are you sitting down?) whaling captains. No, really -- whaling captains. As I said, the jokes really just write themselves on this one. Democrats instantly came up with two catchy names for all the Alaska-specific pork Murkowski extracted from her fellow Republicans: the Kodiak Kickback, or the Polar Payoff.

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It's not exactly front-and-center in the news, but Republicans have entered a budgetary crunch time in a big way. The outcome is going to be extremely significant to hundreds of millions of Americans, but reporting on it is time-consuming and detail-oriented, so it's a lot easier to just chase whatever shiny object Donald Trump trots out for the press instead.

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Maybe Donald Trump missed his calling in life. Maybe he secretly dreams of running a car dealership lot. Previously, he turned the White House lawn into a showroom for Teslas (as he showed his tenuous grasp of the English language, saying: "It's all computer!"). Now he has erected two very tall flagpoles on the White House grounds, complete with the sort of giant flag one usually sees from a highway to signify an auto dealership. Which means our title this week pretty much had to be based on the maxim: "Let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes!"

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It has been a week of dangerous precedents being set -- and it's not over yet.

One precedent that didn't get much media attention (but which is truly disturbing) was Donald Trump giving a nakedly political speech to American soldiers in uniform, where he pre-screened the crowd for both looks and ideology. One memo sent out before Trump arrived specified: "No fat soldiers." Another stated: "if soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience, then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out."

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The most important battle over immigration policy isn't being fought on the streets of Los Angeles right now, but rather over the airwaves. This is the fight for public opinion, and it could go either way. If the public largely sides with Trump's immigration tactics, it will strengthen his hand. But if the public decides the tactics go too far then it will weaken him in the long run. How the events of this week are ultimately seen by the public could be the deciding factor. Is Donald Trump and his administration doing what the voters elected him to do, or is he vastly overreaching in a dictatorial fashion? That's the entire rhetorical battle in a nutshell.

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The Beach Boys were one of those rare iconic bands that pretty much everyone loved to some extent or another. To put it another way, you could play their songs at any random party and it'd be rare than anyone objected. There aren't many such bands around (Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, maybe the Steve Miller Band and a handful of others) and their rarity is due to their being able to create music that was pretty universally appreciated. It's pretty hard to hate a song like "Good Vibrations," right? Their harmonization was second to none as well. Their music was dated, to be sure (it arose from the surf craze of the 1950s), but it was the best of the era (although Jan and Dean fans might quibble with that statement, to be fair). For the most part, it just made people happy to hear it. Which is exactly why Brian Wilson will indeed be missed.

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The world's richest man and the world's most powerful man got into an online fight yesterday, which began when Elon Musk tweeted out: "Donny Trump is a poopyhead!" -- to which Donald Trump immediately responded: "No YOU'RE the poopyhead Elon!!!"

Well, no. That's not actually how it happened. But it's not that far from the reality, sad to say.

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So there's a public gathering in Washington this week that aims to fix what's wrong with the Democratic Party. It is called "WelcomeFest" and is yet another effort to make the party "more moderate" (they talk of being "partisan centrists"), while admittedly trying to emulate the amount of energy from the progressive side of the party. One of the founders of the "Welcome Party" summed this up: "We respect the very robust and multifaceted effort on the progressive faction of the party over the last few years. They had a lot of clear coherency behind it, and there was a lot of action. We are essentially just trying to emulate that faction of the party." However, one has to wonder what they really mean when they talk of being centrists and moderates, since the lion's share of the funding behind the effort comes from Democratic deep-pocket donors, instead of being supported by any sort of authentic grassroots effort.

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Donald Trump seems to now be in full retreat on his trade war. Which is good news, since American consumers are the ones who would have paid the price for it all. The strategy for other countries to follow is becoming clear now -- just wait Trump out, and eventually he will cave on his own, due to political and economic pressures increasing on him over time.

This strategy worked wonders for China, as last weekend Trump dropped his tariff levels against the country by a whopping 115 percentage points. This was precisely what China had been demanding he do before any trade negotiations could even begin. All they had to do was wait.

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There are plenty of things wrong with the proffered gift (to Donald Trump from the rulers of Qatar) of a luxury 747 airplane to serve as a sort of interim Air Force One. For starters, Qatar has "historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level." For another, it's one of many Middle Eastern countries "that horribly abuse women and L.G.B.T. citizens" -- a country that "oppress[es] women, gays and people of different faiths." You could get even more specific: "You talk about women and women's rights? So these are people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money." These complaints merely scratch the surface of the wrongness of accepting this plane, but they are relevant because they are all quotes from Donald Trump himself, castigating Hillary Clinton for accepting contributions to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and other Middle Eastern countries.

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