lleged to have done are the things he was found guilty of, probably they wouldn't even take it to court. I think it was basically technically prostitution with women who clearly were, according to their own text messages, women who were consensually involved. That's it.

Now, I don't obviously I'm the worst one to talk about the legal stuff, but what I think is true is that he was accused of a technical crime in which there was no alleged victim because the victim has a text record of being consensually involved in all that stuff. So I asked a question on X. Is it too soon to talk about a pardon? Because here's my take. I'm not defending Diddy. I'm not a fan of his work and I certainly would not defend him beating up his ex in the hallway of the hotel. But that wasn't apparently what he was being tried for. I don't understand why. Seems like that would have been the obvious thing to try him on. But again, probably because the woman was not pressing charges. Do you even need to press charges if it's on video and we can all see it? I don't know how that works.

But so just to be clear, I don't think he's a good guy. And I'm sure he's been involved in things which if we knew for sure what he was doing, we'd say to ourselves, hmm that looks pretty bad. All right, so I'm not defending him, but I will defend the following standard, which is you don't treat Diddy worse than you would treat anybody else. And it sort of looks like they're treating him worse than they would treat other people. Because if someone else had been accused and convicted of only these things, we'll find out. If the judge gives him serious jail time for what he's been convicted of, I feel like a pardon is completely in order.

And Trump was asked about it. Steve Doocy asked about it in one of Trump's open Oval Office events just yesterday, I think. And Trump said he wasn't really paying attention to the case. So he didn't have an opinion on it. But I always forget that Trump had lots of interesting friends in the past. He lost a lot of them when he ran for office. But he actually was friendly with Diddy. So it's not a stranger for Trump. It's somebody he knows pretty well. But I guess Diddy probably changed when Trump ran for office. So Trump did not rule out a pardon, but he had also not looked into pardoning Diddy.

Now, depending on what I hear about what's going on with him, I might be in favor of the pardon. It's probably too soon to have a hard opinion on it, but I wouldn't want to see him treated in a way that would not be normal for anybody else to be treated. That seems like a reasonable standard. So we'll see.

Anyway, why in the world does he not get bail? Does anyone know why he doesn't get bail? The judge's reasons were that he can't demonstrate that he is not a danger to the community. Who can do that? You know what I can't do? I can't demonstrate that I'm not a danger to the community. Can you? How would you possibly demonstrate that? You could demonstrate what you are perhaps simply by being that, but how do you demonstrate that you would not do something dangerous? That's not even a real thing.

And they also say he's a flight risk. To which I say, a flight risk? Really? How in the world would he get on a flight? I guess a private flight. But he doesn't seem like a flight risk to me. He seems like somebody who worst case scenario might serve another year or two and then he's back in business. So is that a flight risk? I don't know. He served a year. If they told him that his record would be cleared and he could go back to his good life if he served one or two more, would that be enough for him to make him leave the country and become, you know, live in some place where they don't have an extradition treaty, which wouldn't be fun. I don't know. So keep an eye on that.

So give me an update. The big beautiful bill allegedly there was going to be a vote this morning and it's postponed. The early reporting is that they had the votes so they hadn't done the vote but they knew that they had the commitments for the vote to get it passed. And of course that was after Trump had private conversations with some of the holdouts. Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall listening to Trump convince the final holdouts? Do you think there was any threatening going on? Probably. There was probably a lot of threatening going on. Some would call it blackmail, but I think it was just if you don't vote for this, you know, I will destroy you.

But it also might have been, and I think this is more likely, well, maybe equally likely, it might be equally likely true, that Trump convinced them that they'll do some serious deficit reduction in the upcoming budget process, which is a bigger process. So do you think the holdouts got a commitment that some of the DOGE stuff would be taken more seriously than it is in this bill? I don't know. We'll see. We don't know what they said.

But I was looking at people reporting what the big beautiful bill has in it because it got tweaked by the Senate a million times. And by the time it goes back to the House to see if they're okay with the Senate tweaks, we members of the public, we don't have any idea what's in that thing at this point. So I thought, well, I'll dive in and I'll see just some obvious questions. Like one of the things the bill allegedly does is it removes a tax on Social Security. Do you believe that? Do you believe the big beautiful bill eliminated taxes on Social Security? Because I saw online that it does. Well, probably not for me. There's some kind of an income cutoff and I would be above it. So if you're still working and you're getting a regular paycheck, it won't take much regular paycheck for you not to be eligible for the no tax on Social Security. So even something as simple as that, is there or is there not a tax on Social Security? You would have to do a deep dive to figure out where you stand in that. Do you even know? Do you even know if it applies to you?

Same with a number of other topics. So we've got this big beautiful bill that the public does not understand. The pundits, some might, some won't. But here's what I call the perfect situation. You know, if you look at the incentive of the people in Congress and you say, "Are they doing it for the money or are they doing it to keep their jobs?" You know, why do they vote the way they vote? Well, I would submit to you that the ideal bill for Congress is one where the public doesn't understand anything about what's in it. Because then both sides can criticize it with wildly misleading claims about what it does and doesn't do. And the public will not really have the time or interest or even ability to look at the details of the bill.

And if you're going to depend on watching the news or watching social media or watching even me and then oh well I'll watch my favorite pundits who seem really smart and they'll talk about the bill and then I'll know if I like it because the pundits said this or that is a good idea. Do you think the pundits, even the ones that you agree with, do you think they understand what's in the bill and all the implications? No, they don't. Very few might. Very few might. But you won't even know which the few are because the Republicans are all going to say the same thing.

If you talk to any Republican or anybody who supports Republicans and you say, "Did you cut Medicaid?" What will the Republican say? They would say, "Cut Medicaid? No, we protected it." And then they would give their argument that you don't understand about well you know it's for a lot of the people kicked off would be migrants and stuff and then you would walk away saying oh nobody's being kicked off of Medicaid that's not even a thing. It's just the people who shouldn't have been there. Waste and abuse, the non-citizens who you believe should not have been eligible, the people who refuse to work even though they're able-bodied. And so you're going to go away with the Republican view of it that nothing got cut and in fact it got strengthened by protecting against abuse.

And then if you happen to be a Democrat and you watch any of the Democrat-leaning news or social media, it will say that the mean old Republicans cut Medicaid and they will not specify who got cut. They'll just say it's a big ass number like 12 million or something. And then they'll say, "Well, 12 million people will lose their health care." And they'll act like it could be people, you know, and able-bodied people. And neither of those I would say that neither of those takes are accurate. It's just that you can say anything about a bill that people aren't going to look into on their own. So the two sides will just have the two different movies running. Which one's true? I'd say neither.

You know, I've heard the argument on both sides and then I've also read what the news reports about it and I would say to me it looks like neither side is telling the truth, but they don't need to because they know that their people will accept their version as the truth and then they'll just parrot it because our opinions are assigned to us. We don't come up with them on our own.

Anyway, so I was looking at what it would do to my taxes and pretty good. It looks like it might help me. But then I look at the SALT taxes. Yeah. The state and local taxes deduction that used to be there and then it was taken away. Taken away from the blue state residents like me but now it's back but there are all these caps on it so it doesn't make any difference to me you know if your house is above a certain level or your income is you don't get any o