"Moonlight Surf" by Charles Vickery, American painter (1913-1998)
Don't let anyone con you into thinking Colbert was fired for having bad ratings. As with Phil Donahue before him, he was top-rated and it was all about politics. And the Writers Guild has called for a bribery probe.
"This Is the Worst Supreme Court Decision of Trump's Second Term: On Monday, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had protected immigrants from removal to dangerous countries where they could face torture and death. The Trump administration argues that it can expel immigrants to 'third countries'—places where they have never stepped foot—without any semblance of due process so long as they've been deemed 'deportable' by an immigration judge. The government specifically seeks to banish them to unstable countries in the throes of violence, including South Sudan and Libya. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, prohibited the government from carrying out this scheme without providing immigrants with basic due process rights: Murphy ordered officials to tell immigrants where they would be deported, and to let them object on the grounds that they would face torture there. SCOTUS has now stripped away those protections, allowing the government to expel immigrants without notice or a hearing. The court took this dramatic step not in a written opinion, but through an unsigned order on its emergency docket. In so doing, the court effectively nullified the Convention Against Torture, which the Senate ratified in 1994, as well as multiple federal laws implementing the treaty's guarantees. The justices' intervention in the case, DHS v. D.V.D., also sent a profoundly disturbing signal to the Trump administration that it will face no penalty for brazenly flouting lower courts' commands."
"Terror in New York as Muslim who cares about the poor wins mayoral primary: Did I mention he's brown? In a terrifying turn of events, a brown Muslim jihadist has defeated everyone's favourite corporate sex pest Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary to be New York mayor. The intifada has truly reached American shores... Zohran Mamdani holds disturbing views such as genocide is wrong and poor people should be able to afford food. Chillingly, he plans to create city-owned grocery stores that would drive food prices down. Personally, I think the poor should rummage through restaurant bins for leftovers like they do in civilised countries."
All you need is the headline and subhead. "'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid: IDF officers and soldiers told Haaretz they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes. Netanyahu, Katz reject claims, call them 'blood libels'"
"Samuel Alito saw a picture book he didn't like: Among a torrent of Supreme Court decisions today came one involving a picture book. Well, that's a little reductive, but also not really. The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, centered on if a school had to give parents an opportunity to protect their children from such dangerous things as picture books involving LGBT+ themes on the off chance it inhibited the parents' rights to practice their religion. Without getting too far into the weeds with regards to the facts of the case, the case involved several families in Montgomery County, Maryland, who argued that the local schools adding books with LBGT+ content to the language-arts curriculum impinged upon their religious rights, specifically as parents. You see, the school district did not offer parents a way to opt their children out of lessons involving the books, even if they cited religious reasons."
"What We Learned From The New York Times' Anti-Zohran Crusade: The most powerful newspaper in America doesn't care about American democracy. [...] The incident is revealing not only of the profound institutional rot at the Times—not to mention its deep racist streak—but also of the general crisis of American democracy. At a time when the Trump administration is setting up a police state and network of concentration camps, the most important newspaper in the country is working hand in glove with a gutter racist, along with numerous wealthy interests and billionaire Trump donors, to smear a democratic socialist mayoral candidate. One must conclude that they view one threat as greater than the other."
"Crypto Week Revealed the Dittohead Congress: There are no 'hard-liners' in the Republican conference. And nobody interested in standing up for the institution of Congress either. On January 20, it was reasonable to suggest that the legislative output of Donald Trump's second term would be as thin as the first, primarily due to the unwieldiness of the Republican coalition. The recent history of the House of Representatives suggested total dysfunction; they couldn't even keep a Speaker for an entire term. House Democrats provided deciding votes for essentially all the major bills in 2023-2024, amid splits between mainstream Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus. For a while, it seemed like Trump was operating on the principle that Congress was not worth dealing with. He could rule through edicts and executive orders and never trifle with the need to pass laws. The Supreme Court was all too willing to give whatever he scribbled on paper the force of law, anyway, so why bother with Capitol Hill. But Trump eventually realized that Republicans in Congress were as willing to shrink in subservience to him as the Roberts Court. That includes the Freedom Caucus, whose vaunted principles no longer exist, if they were anything beyond cheap talk. Already they have passed a presidency's worth of lawmaking in one deeply unpopular bill, with little pushback. This week, Republican lawmakers decided to hand over the power of the purse to the president, while rubber-stamping action on crypto that Trump is openly and brazenly using for self-enrichment."
"UN Statements Undercut New Israeli Report on 10/7 Sexual Violence: The Dinah Project had to come up with an entirely new standard for evidence to continue to claim sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. This month, the Dinah Project—an Israeli organization—published a new report widely described in Western media as a thorough look into sexual violence by Palestinian militant groups on October 7, 2023. The document, however, contains scant new evidence and largely aggregates existing reports, many of which have been discredited or called into question. Instead of marshaling new evidence, it argues that less should be needed: The report spends the bulk of its 80 pages presenting a legal argument for a lower evidentiary standard to prosecute Hamas for war crimes over the alleged systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war."
"EXCLUSIVE: Internal Documents Detail Hamas Proposals That Preceded Trump’s Belligerent Rant: Trump and Netanyahu threatened to launch even more violent 'alternatives' to ceasefire negotiations as Hamas political leader blasts U.S.-Israeli 'blackmail." Hamas’s top political leader Khalil Al-Hayya delivered a blistering speech Sunday night, accusing the U.S. and Israel of plotting to sabotage yet another potential ceasefire agreement to end the Gaza war. 'We state clearly: There is no point in continuing negotiations under the siege, genocide, and starvation of our children, women, and people in the Gaza Strip,' Al-Hayya said. 'We will not accept that our people, their suffering, and the blood of its children be sacrificed for the occupation's negotiating tricks and the achievement of its political goals.'"
I hadn't really wondered where the unsourced claim that Hamas has stolen all the food from Gaza was coming from (we already knew), but even The New York Times finally got around to this one, "No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say: For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza. But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter. In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population." Which is why Israel was doing everything it could to prevent them from bringing in aid and finally got the US to defund UNWRA, the only organization that was competent to do it — and replace it with something they slapped together to lure innocent aid-seekers to be shot at by the IDF instead. The emergency in Gaza has finally become so un-ignorable (I'm not sure why - these people managed to ignore 2000 pound bombs) that even people like Amy Klobuchar, who only a couple of weeks ago was posing with Netanyahu himself, and Hillary Clinton, who not long ago was doing the rounds with the fake story about how Arafat turned down the perfect deal, have suddenly decided the Palestinians need to be sent aid. Naturally, Israel has suddenly demanded to know why the UN isn't bringing aid into Gaza, after they were forced out and had their facilities blown up and their workers murdered (by, of course, Israel). The response of the internet has been, basically, "Do you really expect us to fall for this?"
"Bringing Back Nonvoters: Today on TAP: A new poll finds that most people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 are economic progressives who were looking for leadership but didn't find it. One of the great mysteries of recent politics is why some 19 million Americans who voted in 2020 sat out 2024. This was the opposite of what happened in 2018, when revulsion against Trump and a huge upsurge in organizing increased Democratic turnout and flipped 41 House seats. About 67 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 voted Democrat for the House. The surge lasted just long enough to elect Joe Biden and narrowly flip the Senate. So why the collapse in 2024? Contrary to a lot of conventional wisdom, the explanation was not voter apathy." Indeed, these appear to have been high-information voters who'd been put off by the Democrats' feckless performances.
RIP: "Bill Moyers, former White House aide and PBS journalist, dies at 91: Bill Moyers, a soft-spoken former White House aide turned journalist who became a standard bearer of quality in TV news, died Thursday in New York. He was 91. Moyers' son William told the Associated Press his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital after a long illness. Moyers began his TV career in 1971 during the early years of PBS after serving as a leading advisor and press secretary to President Johnson. He spent 10 years in two stints at CBS News in the 1970s and '80s. He was editor and chief correspondent for 'CBS Reports,' the network's prestigious documentary series, and an analyst for the 'CBS Evening News.' He also did a turn as a commentator on 'NBC Nightly News' and was a host of the MSNBC program 'Insight' in 1996. But Moyers was often frustrated with the restraints of corporate-owned media and returned to non-commercial PBS each time. [...] According to a 1965 profile in Time magazine, Moyers was a key figure in assembling Johnson's ambitious domestic policy initiatives known as the Great Society. He shaped legislation and edited and polished the work of Johnson's speechwriters. [...] Moyers left the Johnson White House in 1967 as he was disenchanted with the escalation of the Vietnam War. He went on to become publisher of the Long Island, N.Y., daily newspaper Newsday, raising its stature in the journalism industry, before his first tenure at PBS." There's a nice tribute from Brian Stelter here. I have been dreading this moment, although I knew he was mostly retired, but I knew so many of our most valuable voices were running out of time, and I don't know how they can be replaced.
RIP: "Connie Francis: Pretty Little Baby singer dies at 87 [...] The musician, whose hits included "Stupid Cupid" and "Who's Sorry Now", had recently enjoyed a resurgence after her 1962 song "Pretty Little Baby" went viral on TikTok. [...] In 1960, she became the first woman to top the Billboard Top 100, with the bluesy ballad "Everybody's Somebody's Fool"." To me, her most memorable song was the one Katie Halper used to such good effect after Gloria Steinem made that embarrassing remark about how so many girls were supporting Bernie Sanders because that's where the boys are.
RIP: "American musical satirist Tom Lehrer dies at 97: Lehrer, a Harvard-trained mathematician, wrote darkly humorous songs, often with political connotations, that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s." I think the first one I learned as a child was "We Will All Go Together When We Go, but of course we all added "The Masochism Tango" and the ever-popular "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" and so many others.
Radley Balko at The Watch, "The police militarization debate is over: Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force. For about 40 years now, civil libertarians have been warning about the threat posed by police militarization. For the past 20 years, I've been one of them. My position has long been that a soldier is trained to annihilate a foreign enemy. A police officer's job is to promote public safety while protecting our constitutional rights (or at least it's supposed to be). These skills are not interchangeable. They are, in fact, often in direct contradiction to one another. And it's dangerous to conflate the two. There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. In many ways, it's a debate that dates back to the founding era, when British soldiers stationed in the streets of colonial American cities — Boston in particular — led to animosity, anger, and eventually violence. It was a precipitating factor in the Revolutionary War, it's a big reason why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and it's why the Founders were deeply distrustful of standing armies. In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.
"A Practical Fanatic" is Sam Adler-Bell's review of a book on William F. Buckley. "Bill was never a stickler for facts — as a debater, he judged information by its usefulness not its truth value — and from Kendall, an O.S.S. officer during WWII, Buckley learned a more sophisticated justification for his innate carelessness: psychological warfare. It didn't matter that McCarthy was a heedless font of calumny; 'slanders and smears were best understood as strategically useful,' writes Tanenhaus, 'perhaps even necessary disinformation.' That McCarthy damaged and demoralized the enemy was reason enough to back him. Asked in 2019 why Buckley and company never seemed to care about McCarthy's lies, George Will told Tanenhaus, 'I think it's grounded in the oppositional mentality. The feeling that we are a church militant in an unconverted world and we have to watch our back.'"
Very short videos: "30 Days of US Healthcare: Learn more about this topic and much more in Dr. Glaucomflecken's Incredibly Uplifting and Really Fun Guide to American Healthcare" — keep these handy to send to people who still just don't get it.