Knowing it was gone

A colorful September morning in Glastonbury, by Michelle Cowbourne.

It's been back in the news that Netanyahu knew, and didn't tell his security people. JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the militant group attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Israeli newspaper report. UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke with Netanyahu 10 days before the attack and said Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time, was planning an operation, the Haaretz daily said. Bin Zayed said it would lead to bloodshed and could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations, the newspaper reported. But Netanyahu 'reacted with relative calm,' according to Haaretz, which said he assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario and a possible attack was more likely to come from the occupied West Bank." (And here's Josh Marshall's take.) We already knew this from earlier reports that Israel's own border-spotters had said something was immanent, but he knew it was something big.

"'Massive Betrayal': Fury at Newsom and Bonta Over Merger Deal With Paramount: 'Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top.' A coalition of state attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta reportedly reached a deal on Monday to let Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery proceed, an outcome that press freedom advocates and antitrust campaigners condemned as a disaster for journalism, entertainment industry workers, and American democracy. The deal, which is set to be formally announced later Monday, will pave the way for the creation of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, helmed by the son of a billionaire megadonor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. If the merger is finalized, the resulting media behemoth would control nearly 30% of both wide-release theatrical film distribution and basic cable channel licensing in the US. The combination would also put CNN under Ellison's control, heightening press freedom concerns that have intensified since Paramount's takeover of CBS." Please don't let him be the Democratic nominee.

"Crucial Hearing on Team Trump's Contempt for the Rule of Law: Entire D.C. Circuit takes up administration's effort to force Judge Boasberg to stand down. On Tuesday, the full D.C. Circuit will hear argument in a case that began on a Saturday evening in March 2025, when a federal judge ordered two planeloads of Venezuelan men returned to the United States and the administration, hours later, handed them to a prison in El Salvador instead. Eighteen months later, the only question before the court is narrow, and worth stating precisely, because the government has spent great energy twisting it into something else: may Chief Judge James Boasberg continue to inquire into whether the administration knowingly defied his order? The case has taken a long, tortuous path to Tuesday's hearing. It is important in itself, but the stakes reach past it, to whether this administration set out to buck the law from the first days of Trump 2.0. That's why I left my usual seat in the journalist's box and signed onto an amicus brief in the case, one of twelve former Justice Department officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, who think Boasberg should be allowed to do his job."

"Naomi Klein: 'Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist': She's tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explains how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursuit of power. Naomi Klein's new book starts on a mountaintop with two 'faithful men gathering an audience to share their vision'. It's a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for weapons there, everyone in it rich. One of the men has tears in his eyes as he describes its beauty. The opening scene of End Times Fascism, co-written with Astra Taylor, is not a metaphor, however. The men are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The year is 2026, the mountain is Davos. The paradise city will be called New Gaza. The World Economic Forum get-together in Davos, Switzerland, has always had a twin purpose – to provide a platform for the super-rich to describe all the good they are doing on poverty and climate, and to give us a glimpse into their enviable lives. This year what we witnessed was, quite brazenly, the world's richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave."

Jay Willis at Balls and Strikes, "Samuel Alito: Disenfranchising Millions of Voters Is No Big Deal If Mister Trump Wants It: For Alito and Thomas, there is no greater injustice than Donald Trump not getting what he wants, when he wants it. For months, President Donald Trump has been coping with his myriad failures and plummeting approval ratings by trying to make it harder for people to vote his party out of power in the 2026 midterms. To that end, in March, he issued an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to draft a rule that would upend vote-by-mail procedures in dozens of states, and effectively block the agency from processing ballots that do not comply with the rule's exacting requirements. Trump did not attempt to hide his motives for doing so: Legal restrictions on mail-in voting, he told Republican lawmakers, would 'guarantee the midterms' for a party that is otherwise in danger of losing them badly. A series of lawsuits ensued, given that the Constitution (1) divides the power to administer federal elections between Congress and the states and (2) very much does not allow elderly conspiracy theorists to arrogate that power on account of their fixation with the results of a presidential election they lost more than a half-decade ago. And fortunately for anyone who cares about maintaining some semblance of representative democracy in this country, in a three-sentence order on Monday, the Supreme Court left in place a federal district court order that blocks the Postal Service's rule from taking effect in time for the 2026 midterms. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas noted their dissents."

"Can the States Stop the Corporate Domination of Our Politics? States giveth corporations the right to exist, so the states can taketh away their political spending power—or at least, Hawaii and Montana are trying. [...] Corporations derive their power from the states where they are chartered. For that reason, virtually every state can curtail the corporate domination of politics. Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the mastermind behind the 'Corporate Power Reset,' a legal framework for states to leverage their existing authority to end the era of corporate and dark money in politics—all without amending the Constitution, or waiting around for the Supreme Court to reverse its decision in Citizens United. This framework, which is rooted in 200 years of corporation law, was the focus of a paper Moore authored in September 2025."

Rick Pearlstein, "Bush's War Is Finally Over: One of the not-original points I will be making in The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way is one stressed by the CIA's Al Qaeda expert Mike Scheuer in the years after 9/11: that, far from attacking the U.S. because of some vague hatred of 'our freedom,' as George W. Bush liked to say, but instead because of his 'hatred for a few specific U.S. policies and actions,' most prominently that George H.W. Bush persuaded Saudi royal family to turn the birthplace of Islam and home to its holiest shrines into a base to wage war against Muslims. Perpetuating that, Scheuer argued, guaranteed Islamic militancy would keep metastasizing, including among those not yet radicalized. Another not-original point I make, in a chapter I call 'The 9/11 Lobotomy,' is that, as the writer Francesca Newton recently pointed out that, as opposed to 'crime,' 'terrorism is named for the animalistic response it produces.' Terrorists want that response.One wise old critic somehow managed to evade the censors in the weeks after 9/11 by pointing this out in real time. John Leonard complained from his perch as cultural critic on CBS Sunday Morning, 'The purpose of terrorists is to dominate and humiliate...Terror wants derangement'—and so we gave it to them, and in the silliest of ways. One way was surrounding the possibility of a disciplined approach to regional security in the Middle East by lashing out, serially, in dumb wars, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and now, simply tragedy compounding into farcical tragedy, in Iran."

"Family of Tierra Walker—Who Died After Being Denied Abortion Care—Sues Texas AG Ken Paxton: State officials 'have imposed a merciless blanket prohibition on abortion that intimidates doctors into inaction,' says the lawsuit. 'Too many pregnant Texans have already died preventable deaths.' [...] On December 30, 2024, Walker's son 'found her in bed, not breathing,' the complaint notes. 'It was his 15th birthday.' The teenager, as well as Walker's husband, mother, and aunt, who is responsible for her estate, are all involved in the wrongful death suit—the first of its kind, linking a 'preventable death' to an abortion ban, according to The 19th. In addition to Paxton, who is running for US Senate with support from President Donald Trump, the family is suing Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales, Texas Medical Board Executive Director Stephen Brint Carlton, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and three doctors who treated Walker before she died. 'During the four months of her pregnancy, as she suffered through seizures, blood clots, and one hypertensive crisis after another, Ms. Walker repeatedly asked for an abortion to save her life,' explains the filing. 'Defendants associated with University Health responded only 'your baby is fine,' disregarding Ms. Walker's deteriorating health and constitutionally protected right to life.'"

'Stunning' Level of Support for Universal Health Care: Jayapal: Even more people want Medicare for All than did last December, a new poll shows. Medicare for All is a winning policy supported by the vast majority of Democratic voters that can give the party a boost, including in battleground states, according to a new survey from Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and her political action committee. The Medicare for All PAC survey found that not only do 94 percent of Democratic voters support a universal public health insurance program, but so do a majority of moderate and independent voters. It also found that Medicare for All is a winning issue in battleground states, where Jayapal said progressives are constantly told to moderate their messaging on universal health care. Overall, 60 percent of participants said they favored Medicare for All, up from 54 percent in a similar but not identical survey last year. Even in the more conservative battleground districts, support remained at 55 percent, 'well ahead of partisanship in those districts,' Jayapal told reporters on a call last week."

EXCLUSIVE: The right's 'war on woke' is a cash grab on state treasuries—including Alaska's: [...] A major conduit for that corruption is the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a small but powerful nonprofit that convenes Republican state treasurers and auditors, right-wing activists, and Christian finance executives to strategize over how to defeat liberals and weaponize state treasuries against allegedly woke corporations, while steering state treasury money to their ideological allies. Much of their “War on Woke” consists of boosting the fossil fuel industry and crushing efforts to mitigate climate change, under the notion that corporate safeguards are bad business. "

"The Century-Old Legal Fiction Costing America $35.5 Billion a Year: The international corporate tax system treats the subsidiaries of major corporations as independent businesses, allowing these companies to pay tax where they say and not where they actually play. One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax. Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, research, production, and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes that Apple's subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies. They are constituent parts of a single commercial enterprise. Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest. That legal fiction does more than misdescribe how multinational businesses operate. It is routinely exploited to shift profits away from the places where real economic activity takes place and into jurisdictions where little or no tax is paid. This not only erodes public revenues, but also undermines the level playing field by giving multinational corporations tax advantages that purely domestic businesses cannot replicate."

RIP: "Robin Morgan, Voice of Radical Feminism, Dies at 85: She edited the landmark 1970 anthology 'Sisterhood Is Powerful,' led Ms. magazine and helped build the institutions of the modern feminist movement." There's absolutely no question that she was important and we loved her a lot, but she did some messy stuff, too. And I will never be that young again. (This photo gallery actually has pictures from when she was a child star, which I remember reading about but never saw myself.)

"The Deplorable Extremism of the So-Called 'Moderates': The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations. [...] What's so 'moderate' about supporting genocide? Politicians are also routinely dubbed “moderate” when they're running interference for extreme income inequality and deadly healthcare inequities – helping to block popular policy options like tax hikes on the rich and Medicare for All, which is supported by three-quarters of Democrats. The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations. In the real world, the so-called “moderates” are aligned with a status quo that continues to inflict widespread suffering and preventable death at home and abroad."

"The Left and Right Share a Moral Theory of Exploitation: A new study finds that people across the political spectrum share a remarkably similar understanding of exploitation: the unjust use of power to secure unequal outcomes. [...] And yet our research finds that this picture is simply false, at least when it comes to exploitation. When asked what they think exploitation is, participants on both the Left and Right agree. And perhaps surprisingly, the pattern that emerges is one that vindicates the common claim of those on the Left that exploitation involves one party's unjust use of power to gain at the expense of another. The results of our study provide a striking vindication of the Left's structural critique of economic relations. And as we will argue, they suggest a way forward for the Left's political strategy." I normally don't link to paywalled pieces, but that 's the gist right there.

"We used to be able to buy things in this country: Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy. Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item that costs $5.99, and navigate the emotional complications of feeling like both a suspected criminal and an entitled ass. The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods. When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we'll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works."

"Saluting a Matriarch—25 Years After Nickel and Dimed: Barbara Ehrenreich's thesis has become even more resonant since the book's 2001 release. 'The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.'' This is from Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 masterwork Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year, when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague, as we created a media organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.

"Exploration Log 17: Interview with Loïg J. F. Pascual on 1970s-1980s Feminist Science Fiction Fandoms [...] More than just an interview about his specific area of research, Loïg dives into the larger history of feminist fanzines and the vital role of fan culture in the creation and memorialization of genre. Enjoy!"

Watch the movie about how modern money actually works and why detractors of MMT neither seem to understand it nor are accurately representing it to the public. Finding the Money

Clip file: "Jewish man mistakes two Israeli tourists for Palestinians and opens fire on them in Miami", because I obviously need to remind people that antisemitism is not the only form of deadly bigotry we face.

And: "Barney vs. Bernie: Sanders Is the Real 'Progressive Who Gets Things Done'," because there are still people railing about how do-nothing grifter Bernie Sanders had no business running against the magnificent Most Qualified Candidate in the World and they need to be reminded that not everyone sees them that way.

Buffalo Springfield, "Expecting to Fly"