Arise, ye prisoners of want!

"The Old Church by the River" is by Frits Thaulow (1847-1906). You can find more of his work here.

"Senate Democrats Have Been Handed a Tool to Stop the Big Beautiful Bill Thanks to a Republican vote to stop California from setting its own auto emissions, Democrats can challenge virtually any Trump administration action, and eat up time on the Senate floor. [...] The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress. That means the Senate would never have the ability to take up executive branch or judicial nominations, or legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that recently passed the House. Senate Democrats could put the chamber into permanent gridlock, and thereby save 14 million people from losing their Medicaid coverage, save millions more from loss of SNAP benefits, while also forcing the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire. That's the level of hardball that can be played here." But will they?

The Supreme Court surprised a lot of people by deciding that Trump can't just deport people without due process, in a 7-2 decision. The 2 dissenters were, of course, Alito and Thomas, and Scott Lemieux makes an interesting point: "The question of whether Trump is primarily symptom or cause is settled by the fact that Trump's most uncritical lickspittles and enablers on the Court are the two he didn't appoint."

And this is an over-optimistic headline, but "Supreme Court tie vote dooms taxpayer funded Catholic charter school: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended a publicly funded Catholic charter school in Oklahoma, dividing 4-4. The outcome keeps in place an Oklahoma court decision that invalidated a vote by a state charter school board to approve the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation's first religious charter school. But it leaves the issue unresolved nationally. The one-sentence notice from the court provides an unsatisfying end to one of the term's most closely watched cases."

The mayor of Newark, New Jersey was trying to do his job to inspect an ICE facility that was operating without proper permissions or standards, and three Congress members from the state were given a tour of the place, and as they all left, they were suddenly swarmed by officials and shoved around and the mayor was arrested. About ten days later, Homeland Security posted a short video in which they claimed one of them, Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, body-slammed officials and was being charged. I've watched videos of the event from various angles and what I see is police attacking elective officials who were performing their duties.

"'Indiscriminate, Unrestrained, Brutal': Former Israeli PM Calls Gaza Assault 'War Crimes': Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he now believes his country's relentless assault on the Palestinian people amounts to 'war crimes' and must be stopped. Addressing the people of Israel in an article written in Hebrew and published by Haaretz on Thursday, Olmert, who served from 2006 to 2009, condemned current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for 'waging a pointless war, without a clear goal or plan, and with no chance of success,' according to Google's translation of the piece."

"The New York Times Really Asked Ms. Rachel If She's Paid By Hamas: The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper's purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accurso, the popular children's entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, might be financially compensated by Hamas. Griffin-Accurso's grave sin is that she wants Israel to stop starving and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. For this, she has become the target of a pro-Israel contingent so committed to suppressing any support for Palestine that they have abandoned basic human dignity. Griffin-Accurso has spoken out on the crisis for a while on her Instagram page, and in the past week, she posted a number of statements that promote organizations which aid children suffering from violence and hunger, including malnutrition in Gaza and famine in Sudan."

RIP: "Susan Brownmiller, author, dies at 90 "— I didn't always agree with her, but she certainly changed the way we talk about rape.

RIP: "George Wendt: Actor who played Norm Peterson in the hugely popular American sitcom Cheers" — It always amused me that his role was so universally acknowleged that Quark's bar in Deep Space Nine had a regular alien patron named Morn.

RIP: "Loretta Swit, who played 'Hot Lips' Houlihan on M*A*S*H, dies aged 87 [...] The growing awareness of feminism in the 70s spurred Houlihan's transformation from caricature to real person, but a lot of the change was due to Swit's influence on the scriptwriters. 'Around the second or third year I decided to try to play her as a real person, in an intelligent fashion, even if it meant hurting the jokes,' Swit told Suzy Kalter, the author of The Complete Book of M*A*S*H. 'To oversimplify it, I took each traumatic change that happened in her life and kept it. I didn't go into the next episode as if it were a different character in a different play. She was a character in constant flux; she never stopped developing.'"

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have been roaming around on a book tour for their re-branded version of neoliberalism called Abundance. Most people seem to have figured out what it is, but it's nice to see a comprehensive review of their points in Sandeep Vaheesan's "The Real Path to Abundance" at Boston Review. This is a longer read but definitely worth the time to see a thorough response. A little taste: This is the blind spot running through all of Abundance's anecdotes: the limits of the private sector. The primary conceit is that in many areas, the private sector is ready to invest—and to invest big—if politicians would only lift public barriers standing in their way. There is little evidence that is true. In reality, corporate executives and managers make investment decisions based on expected profits. Even when zoning restrictions are favorable, developers evaluate a range of investment options before committing to construction. They are looking not only for positive returns but for higher returns than alternative options. Homebuilders, in particular, will not build unless they have reason to think they can achieve sufficiently high profits—those that outperform land banking, speculation, or other forms of investment. The much-touted housing boom in Austin is a case in point: after a few years of above-average building activity led to modest rent reductions, residential developers reduced construction substantially. The burst of construction made only a small dent in the dramatic increase in rents since 2010."

Matt Stoller makes some good points about "Monopolies and Fascism [...] Neumann's book, therefore, was received warmly. For Neumann, a key driver of the rise of the Nazi movement was monopolization, because he saw it as a system of economic control that was totally compatible with, and indeed encouraged, the rise of an authoritarian government. He noted that the Weimar Republic oversaw a massive merger wave; chemical giant IG Farben was a result of the combination of six firms in 1925. The Social Democrats, he argued, failed because they 'did not see that the central problem was the imperialism of German monopoly capital, becoming ever more urgent with the continued growth of the process of monopolization. The more monopoly grew, the more incompatible it became with the political democracy.' In the U.S., however, our antitrust laws saved our democracy. 'In Germany,' Neuman wrote, 'there was never anything like the popular antimonopoly movement of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.' The Sherman Act, in other words, wasn't perfect, but it did stop the rise of fascism. This kind of influence is obvious in decisions at the time, which had deep moral rhetoric. In 1945, Judge Learned Hand ruled that Alcoa was a monopoly, noting that 'among the purposes of Congress in 1890 was a desire to put an end to great aggregations of capital because of the helplessness of the individual before them.'"

Video: It's been interesting watching right-winger Piers Morgan repeatedly have Mehdi Hasan on his show to argue about whether Israel is committing a genocide. It was even more interesting to see Morgan finally give up and admit that Mehdi is right.

Video: Cory Doctorow's keynote speech about how people like Bill Clinton and Kier Starmer have helped destroy our privacy and control of our lives and possessions.

"The New War On State Regulators: After kneecapping and culling federal agencies, corporate interests have a coordinated plan to defang government protections, state by state. As Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies take a sledgehammer to federal agencies, corporate interests are mounting a coordinated effort to dismantle state rules and regulations — backing legislative efforts to kneecap state watchdogs' ability to enforce everything from environmental protections to worker safeguards. This means that as guardrails for consumers and workers are dismantled on a federal level, states are in danger of losing their ability to pick up the slack. In 15 states this year, according to a review by The Lever, lawmakers have introduced so-called 'judicial deference' laws, which would stack the deck against state regulators and allow corporate America to swiftly challenge and strip away state protections ranging from restrictions on pollution to consumer safeguards."

Hamilton Nolan, "Infinite Contempt For Working People Is Not an Acceptable Default Position [...] Why do I cast the average corporation—employers! Bestowers of life-giving healthcare coverage!—in such harsh terms? Because, as someone who writes about labor issues, I have become aware of the fact that we accept from these companies a sort of hostile, mean behavior towards their own employees that we would never tolerate if companies were, in fact, people, as the legal fiction claims. Major corporations spend huge sums of money on advertising and public relations to give themselves the warm halo of entities that have human personalities, and yet they act towards their own workers—their valued team members, who are their highest priority, etcetera!—in a bestial way that is a rejection of the most basic form of shared humanity. The ability to convince the general public that the standards of common decency that we all expect from one another do not apply to the entire field of business is one of the greatest tricks capitalism ever pulled."

"Andrew Cuomo Is Worse Than You Even Know: The former governor is a corrupt sexual harasser with a pro-corporate agenda and a proven track record of deadly negligence. He will do nothing to improve New Yorkers' lives. Why on Earth is he a contender for mayor? [...] While Cuomo was hailed for his leadership during the pandemic, and was even touted as a sex symbol in parts of the media, he in fact made catastrophic missteps in responding during the pandemic's early days that seriously worsened the death toll in New York. Cuomo initially said the 'seasonal flu was a graver worry' and his spokesperson 'refused to say if the governor had ever read the state's pandemic plan.' As the pandemic raged, the state was dealing with $400 million in Medicaid cuts that Cuomo had supported, and had lost 20,000 of its 73,000 hospital beds due to 'budget cuts and insurance overhauls.' [...] When Cuomo was first elected he 'pursued a decidedly un-progressive agenda[…] passing austerity budgets, targeting public-employee unions, cutting taxes on the wealthy, going to bat for charter schools,' according to City Limits. No surprise, then, that Cuomo 'rake[d] in money from corporate, hedge fund, and real estate interests.' As Politico reported, Cuomo dismissed the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy and introducing a state-level single payer program. The Alliance For Quality Education was scathing about Cuomo's record, writing in 2021 that he 'has been on a mission to underfund high need public schools ever since his first year as Governor, when he cut over $1 billion from schools, while giving a tax break to millionaires.' [...] For years, Cuomo even helped ensure that his own party was kept out of power in the state Senate, and 'encouraged [an arrangement] that allowed the Republicans to remain in leadership even after the election of a Democratic majority.' He wanted to guarantee 'that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn't be handing over power to New York City Democrats.' Cuomo also tried to hobble progressive political power in other ways. After the Working Families Party worked out a deal with Cuomo, getting progressive concessions in exchange for not running a challenger to him on its ballot line, he 'reneged on those commitments and set out to destroy the party.' Journalist Ross Barkan says that 'an organized progressive wing of the party was terrifying to him.'"

It's always seemed obvious that Betty Boop was based on a black performer so it's nice to see that she's being played by a black woman on Broadway.

Tony Babino, "L'Internationale" (swing jazz version)

Surely, you know it surely won't stand the light of day

Dreamlike Serenity in Blue and Purple by Olya Enina is from the Contemporary Portraits collection.

I can't even begin to list the outrages the Trump administration is committing against people in America, but I'm listening right now to Sam Seder's interview with Jeremy Scahill and it sounds like because Trump is incredibly transactional, ego-driven, and corrupt, he may actually be shifting the politics in the Middle East in a less horrible direction. (You can also read Scahill's interview with an actual Hamas official here.)

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that Elon wants to go to Mars because billions of years from now the sun is going to incinerate the Earth. If he'd said, "So we need to learn how to get into space and this is a first step," I might have been slightly mollified, but he never did. And, to be quite honest, if I still believed it was possible for humans to ever create machines that would take us to the stars, I could only do so if I still believed we would evolve first into the kind of society that was genuinely cooperative and collaborative and not the horrible, competitive, dog-eat-dog kind of world Elon Musk and the people like him have given us. This is not the Star Trek timeline, the Bell Riots never happened, and the Earth, if it is still here, will burn up along with Mars. But we'll probably have died out long before that happens.

In explaining why the administration had just fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, a year before her ten-year term was set to expire, the White House spokesblonde said, "There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the Library for children and we don't believe she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well." She thinks it's a lending library for kids?

"Hamas Launches Unprecedented Legal Case in Britain, Demanding the Government Remove its Terror Designation: In a legal filing, a Hamas founder argues that the group has the right to use armed resistance to achieve Palestinian liberation—and that Britain is crushing honest debate about its aims. In an extraordinary legal filing submitted Wednesday in London, Hamas argued that the British government should remove its designation of the movement as a proscribed terror group and recognize its legitimate role as a Palestinian resistance movement engaged in a struggle for self-determination and liberation. A top political leader of Hamas rejected allegations that the movement is an anti-semitic terror organization, asserted that Hamas poses no threat to Western nations, and argues that the political organization has never engaged in an armed operation outside the boundaries of historic Palestine."

Radley Balko "On 'unleashing' the police" makes the excellent point that Trump's recent order to "unleash the police" doesn't make much sense since we have no evidence that the police feel "leashed"—or restrained in any way—to begin with. "As for the executive order itself, it is heavy on bluster and short on details, like most of Trump's orders. Some of the measures are nonsensical, like 'indemnifying' police from damages. (They're already indemnified by taxpayers in more than 99.9 percent of such cases.) For others, it isn't clear if he's referring to federal or state and local police. Trump also provides no funding for his demands. Some would violate the law, such as charging progressive prosecutors for failing to prosecute some crimes to Trump's satisfaction. Others, like directing law firms to do pro bono work defending cops accused of wrongdoing, are both unconstitutional on their own and build on previous executive orders that are also unconstitutional (as a federal court emphatically declared just this week). Still others would require approval from Congress. How much of this agenda is actually feasible depends on whether Trump is willing to push through these barriers, and whether the federal courts are willing to stop him. That, however, is true with or without an executive order."

"The Supreme Court Approved Trump's Trans Military Purge in the Most Shameful Way Possible: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for President Donald Trump to purge transgender people from the military in a brief, unsigned order that did not bother to provide any reasoning. All three liberals dissented. With this decision, the Trump administration may now enforce a sweeping ban on military service, prohibiting the enlistment of transgender people and expelling those who are currently serving. The forced removal of these service members—who joined the military on the good-faith belief that the U.S. government welcomed their service—will mark one of the most sweeping acts of government-imposed bigotry in modern times. And the Supreme Court's shameful, unexplained approval of the policy is certain to weaken the armed forces by pushing out thousands serving their nation honorably."

"Leftist Online Creators Say They've Been Detained and Questioned Over Anti-Trump Content: 'No U.S. citizen should be detained by law enforcement, at the border or anywhere, because of their protected speech.' 'It happened,' said progressive online political commentator Hasan Piker on Sunday in a cryptic post on the social media site X—one that suggested he wasn't altogether surprised when he was detained for several hours by border agents at a Chicago airport after flying back to the U.S. from France. He explained to his 1.5 million followers later that he had been stopped by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents 'for additional questioning.' [...] The questions over the two-hour period suggested that the Trump administration has been following Piker's commentary, which has recently included vehement criticism of U.S. support for Israel as it bombards and starves the people of Gaza. 'They straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently,' Piker said. '[The agent] kept saying stuff like, do you like Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a terror group or a resistance group?'"

Hm, what's my new Senator been up to? "Alsobrooks, RFK Jr. spar during testy Senate hearing: U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks squared off against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a testy Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday, continuing her campaign against the controversial cabinet head. 'Sir, you are the wrong person for this job,' Alsobrooks flatly told Kennedy." Good. If you can't make law, at least make noise.

"Consenting Sexual Activity at Sex Clubs and Parties in the UK is About to Become a Crime: The Crime and Policing Bill 2025 aims to infringe your freedom and control your sex life"—and it's more than just sex parties: "Under NEW CLAUSE 2: if you paid to be in the same room as someone and expect to be sexually aroused by their activity then it is a crime. Even if you everyone is clothed and there is no touching each other."

RIP: "Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88: The Vatican said Francis died of a stroke that put him into a coma and led his heart to fail." He was the best Pope of my lifetime, I'll give him that. Mind, this isn't saying a lot, but still. In any case, right-wingers are upset that the new pope, an American who has named himself Leo XIV, talks like someone who was actually raised on the teachings of Jesus.

RIP: "Will Hutchins, Star of ABC's Sugarfoot, Dies at 94. The onetime Warner Bros. contract player also appeared in two Elvis films and played a New York City landlord and Dagwood Bumstead on short-lived sitcoms." OK, he was no big deal, but I just always liked Sugarfoot, he was the cutest of the prime time cowboys.

ROT IN PERDITION: Alan Simpson died just before I had my little accident and I'd almost forgotten about it, but you really shouldn't miss Eric Loomis' remembrance of this horrible monster.

"Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram: A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history. [...] Despite Meta's awareness of Israel's aggressive censorship tactics for at least seven years, according to Meta whistleblowers, the company has failed to curb the abuse. Instead, one said, the company 'actively provided the Israeli government with a legal entry-point for carrying out its mass censorship campaign.'"

"Douglas Murray's 'Expertise' Is a Sham" In On Democracies and Death Cults, Murray offers a straightforward 'good versus evil' account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He does this by excluding every piece of information that undercuts his thesis and even spreading outright falsehoods. [...] Instead of discussing the question 'Who is an expert?' we should always ask a different set of questions, namely: 'What is the argument being made and what is the evidence provided in support of it?' It doesn't matter who has been to Israel, it matters what the proof for their claims is. (After all, both Murray and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been there, but they reached very different conclusions.) The focus should be on Murray's thesis and the support he provides for it. Plenty else is irrelevant: the fact that he's spent time in the region, the fact that he has a posh British accent, the fact that his book is a bestseller, the fact that the Times of Israel calls it important. We must zero in on what Murray is arguing and whether it happens to be true. When we do, we quickly see that his argument is nonsense and filled with deception. "

Zeteo has made a film of their investigative report on Who killed the US journalist & Why did Biden cover it up? "A new documentary film reveals the identity of the Israeli soldier who killed the Christian American journalist, as well as a shocking US cover-up. Exclusive interviews with former Biden officials reveal that in order to protect its relationship with Israel, the administration 'failed' Abu Akleh. Former Wall Street Journal Middle East reporter Dion Nissenbaum and longtime foreign correspondent Conor Powell conducted a months-long investigation that uncovered the hidden identity – and fate – of the Israeli soldier who killed Shireen Abu Akleh." You can watch the first 8:55 for free from the link.

Cory Doctorow is still on the case of how enshittification happened and how to fight it with "Who Broke the Internet? Part II: The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like 'greed,' nor by economic concepts like 'network effects,' nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards 're-intermediation.' Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of policies that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet. [...] This week's episode of "Who Broke the Internet?" focuses on those IP laws, specifically, the legislative history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law whose Section 1201 bans any kind of disenshittifying mods and hacks. [...] DMCA 1201 has its origins in the mid-1990s, when Al Gore was put in charge of the National Information Infrastructure program to demilitarize the internet and open it for civilian use (AKA the 'Information Superhighway'). Gore came into conflict with Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton's IP Czar, who proposed a long list of far-ranging, highly restrictive rules for the new internet, including an 'anticircumvention rule that would ban tampering with digital locks. This was a pretty obscure and technical debate, but some people immediately grasped its significance. Pam Samuelson, the eminent Berkeley copyright scholar, raised the alarm, rallying a diverse coalition against Lehman's proposal. They won – Gore rejected Lehman's ideas and sent him packing. But Lehman didn't give up easily – he flew straight to Geneva, where he arm-twisted the UN's World Property Organization into passing two "internet treaties" that were virtually identical to the proposals that Gore had rejected. Then, Lehman went back to the USA and insisted that Congress had to overrule Gore and live up to its international obligations by adopting his law. As Lehman said – on some archival tape we were lucky to recover – he did 'an end-run around Congress.'"

HILARIOUS: "Thanks to DOGE, Gumroad's founder has a second job with the VA [...] To hear it from Lavingia, the Elon Musk-backed DOGE was a shortcut in a direction he already saw himself going. Years ago, during the Obama administration, he applied to the United States Digital Service, the predecessor organization to DOGE, only to find the hiring process arduous. While he officially works for the VA, DOGE gave him an inroad into government work that didn't force him to go through a complicated vetting process." Yes, that's right, this wealth-creating genius thinks he's fit to handle the VA when he was too lazy to complete the application process to work for the government, so he took a short-cut.

ASTONISHING: The Lever interviewed Art Laffer, and this guy really thinks that his clever tax cut plans really improved life for Americans, including minorities. Oh, and he solved he housing market problems in Los Angeles! This guy drew a line on a napkin and he thinks it's more real than the massive homelessness problem he helped create.

Tom Jones and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, "Long Time Gone"