The ongoing saga of the Oakland A’s impending move to Las Vegas continues to demonstrate what’s wrong with using taxpayer money to subsidize professional sports teams.

Several NSA whistleblowers, and later most notoriously Edward Snowden, tried to warn us that “The government unchained itself from the Constitution as a result of 9/11.”

Silvio Berlusconi was born a middle-class boy, the son of a bank clerk. He was successful in the construction business, anticipating the now commonplace demands of middle-class families: greenery, silence, tranquility, being “in the city” and, at the same time, outside of it. He then invented commercial television in Italy, in a time of government monopoly. It was David versus Goliath. He then bought a soccer team (AC Milan) and got it to win the unthinkable, helped to set up a start-up bank and, eventually, founded a political party. Everybody thought the political party was an oddity, a little toy aimed at leveraging political protection for his media empire. He won his first election, and repeated this feat twice, becoming Italy’s longest-serving prime minister.

On Saturday, June 3, 2023, President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA) into law. The new budget law does two things. It suspends the U.S. government’s statutory debt ceiling until January 1, 2025. It also reduces a portion of the federal government’s planned spending over the next ten years.

On the 9th of June, authorities made public a 37-count indictment against Donald Trump. The full text, courtesy of Politico, can be found here. Also charged in the indictment is Waltine Nauta, Trump’s valet. This indictment is nothing like Alvin Bragg’s pathetic effort to bring state criminal charges against Trump in Manhattan. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is in charge of the Trump document-concealment case, is the real deal. He has served as a state and federal prosecutor, chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015, US Attorney in Tennessee, vice president of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America, and chief prosecutor in The Hague, where he investigated war crimes in Kosovo. Alvin Bragg he is not.

On June 7, under threat of subpoena, Biden Labor Secretary nominee Julie Su testified to the House Committee on Education and Workforce. The nominee was asked about California’s Proposition 22, which rolled back the main provisions of AB-5, the 2019 law targeting independent workers. 

2023 is becoming a very bad year for the Oakland Athletics. The A’s have gotten off to one of the worst starts of any team in any season of Major League Baseball. Home game attendance at the Oakland Coliseum is so bad that a collegiate baseball team, the Portland Pickles, is outdrawing them in the 2023 season.

Along the American River Bike Trail in Sacramento, herds of goats devour the grasses and shrubs that provide kindling for wildfires. The goats, an eco-friendly alternative to chemical herbicides and machinery, may soon be sent packing. 

“The University of California at Berkeley has chosen Chesa Boudin, former San Francisco District Attorney, as founding executive director of the UC Berkeley Criminal Law & Justice Center.

A remarkable new working paper shows the household finances of student loan borrowers have become more burdened by debt during the last three years. Although many have been excused from making payments since 2020, many of these borrowers responded to that relief by taking out other kinds of loans.