By Bob Gaydos

Jeanine Pirro … headed for the door?

   What in the world happened to Jeanine Pirro? Did she sober up? Come out of a blackout and realize she was pimping for Donald Trump and didn’t want the job?

    Odds are — literally — that she won’t be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia much longer. At least those are the betting odds on Kalshi, a prediction platform which is the way many people apparently now react to the news of the day. Not by expressing approval or disapproval of the news, but by betting on the outcome. Orwell was right.

     How you feel about the news really doesn’t matter, apparently, if you can make a few bucks guessing on which side of the bed Trump slept on last night. And the odds in Pirro’s case are that he didn’t sleep at all when she contradicted him on his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool story.

     In one of the more surprising challenges to Trump’s  view of everything going on around him, Pirro dismissed the case against a former U.S. Olympic athlete who had been charged with carving up the bottom of the no longer reflecting pool with a knife, supposedly causing significant damage. That’s what the court papers filed by Pirro originally said.

    But Pirro last week abruptly dismissed the felony vandalism charges against David Hearn, 67, saying that the damage to the newly renovated pool was caused by the contractor, a friend of Trump’s, who got the renovation contract with no bid. A $14.7 million restoration project to be specific.

    Pirro conceded in court that the damage had actually been done by a rush job by a contractor trying to get the work done for the Fourth of July celebration, not by vandals.

    In response to Pirro’s dropping the charges, Trump posted, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking?” (Yes, he put a question mark at the end of that declarative statement.)

   The reflecting pool, of course, has been one of Trump’s pet projects in his campaign to destroy virtually everything worth seeing in Washington, D.C. Also, of course, Trump does not react well to being contradicted in public, especially by someone who he has appointed to a job, and especially if she is a woman.

    That’s why the odds on Kalshi of Pirro announcing her resignation or being fired before Sept. 1 were at 97 percent Monday morning. The odds spiked 21 percentage points over 24 hours. There was a 94 percent chance, the site said, that Pirro is gone before January 1, 2027.

    None of this is surprising to me. What I am literally stunned about is that Pirro did it. That she dared to contradict Trump publicly in such a high-profile case. She tried to blame the Interior Department for her change of mind, saying they gave her incomplete information when she first filed the charges against Hearn. They stuck to the Trump story (and probably kept their jobs) and said she got all the information available.

     Maybe Pirro actually read all the news stories saying experts doubted that vandals could’ve done the extensive damage to the pool, but that the contractor rushed the job and used the wrong kind of paint. Maybe she knew from experience that the judge wasn’t going to buy her vandalism argument. Or maybe she didn’t like the bar scene in Washington anymore or she just found it too difficult to keep lying so publicly on a daily basis.

    Or, maybe she’s been offered a seat along with Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, in a cabal of former Trumpers sensing an opportunity to get out before the you-know-what hits the you-know-what. The onetime loyal MAGA trio is trying to form a populist third-party, breaking away from Trump, accusing him of “betraying“ his base.

    Where have I heard that before?

     I still like my coming out of a blackout theory.

“Football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.” George Orwell, 1984 

By Bob Gaydos

  If I were a wagering man, and having missed out on the Pam Bondi firing, I would lay a few sheckles on the likelihood that Trump will flush Pete Hegseth next and label him an ineffective Secretary of War.

   You can do that legally. I just found out. Somehow, the presence of so-called Prediction Markets escaped my attention as I struggled to maintain my sanity in a world going mad by design. Ironically, these markets are prime evidence of that phenomenon.

     And it has been happening for some time, starting with legalized sports betting. In my opinion, the emergence of legalized sports betting, not only on game outcomes, but specific moments within the game, has seriously eroded the simple enjoyment, never mind the credibility, of sports. The lure of big gambling money has made sports more profitable and players understandably want and deserve a share of the added money. Bigger contracts then mean higher costs at the stadium. Betting on a field goal or strikeout holds the lure of quick money to pay for the beer and hot dogs.

    It’s all about the money.

    But apparently it’s no longer energizing enough for people looking for an escape and maybe some easy money to just place a bet on whether some college or pro player will make or miss a foul shot. Now apparently you can bet on whether the coach will be fired and arrested at a DWI Checkpoint on the way home. Maybe he’ll run over someone.

   What are the odds? Who cares? What have you got to lose? If he makes it home safely, you can always bet on when Trump is going to lower tariffs again. That’s a surer bet.

    It’s also one of the things wrong with prediction markets. Never mind manipulating the stock market, people in positions of power can affect world events. People in power, if they choose to, can manipulate world events. And people in power, if they are of a mind to do so, might let someone know when to expect some unexpected event.

   Like the United States attacking Iran. While Trump was killing 168 Iranian school girls by giving the order to attack, someone betting on the prediction market was making a killing by predicting the attack would happen on the day it would happen. You may recall that Trump had just previously said talks between the U.S. and Iran were moving along on the nuclear weapons issue and no military action appeared to be imminent. No hints. No warning. Just bombs and a financial bonanza for someone.

   Some governors have sued to ban prediction markets as a form of legalized sports gambling, which their states do not allow. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to simply ban prediction markets in this country, but the White House, of course, has no problem with them.

  With Trump, a former casino owner in charge, the house can literally fix the game. Like kidnaping the Venezuelan president, also apparently a coincidental lucky big payoff for some anonymous bettor. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Junior, have a major stake in a prediction market and Don is an advisor to another one, Kalshi. No likelihood of collusion here.

    But really, forget the fact that America is losing jobs, prices on everything, not just gasoline, are rising daily, young men are struggling to find work and hoping the draft isn’t reinstituted, farmers are being bailed out by the government that killed their markets and millions can’t afford healthcare. That’s just the day-to-day reality in Trump’s America. Prediction markets drag everything down to a lower level of humanity.

   Betting on war, assassinations, or some other form of others’ misfortune for personal financial gain is a dehumanizing activity. It’s immoral. A perverted version of no pain, no gain. As Orwell foresaw, it’s surrender disguised as entertainment. It’s like saying, as long as the world is so screwed up, I might as well try to make some money off it. 

    Forget it, pal. That game is rigged for the House, too.