Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films, including the current “The Atomic Bowl.” Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of those books, thanks. Or recommend this Substack to a friend!
Opening, as we often do, with Stephen and Jimmy.
This is no biggie, at least judging by media coverage: The last nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired this morning. For the first time since 1972, there are no limits on the size of their arsenals. Drink!
Meanwhile, universities and state officials are now formally surveilling classrooms, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses—and, yes, tip lines for students to complain. This will go well.
The best news of the day, if midterm elections are actually allowed to go forward this November: The Supreme Court cleared the way for California to use a new congressional map designed to help Democrats balance the seat-grabbing in Tezas.
![May be an image of the Oval Office and text that says 'a "I think we're already well into dictatorship. It's just a question of whether [Trump] will ahead and basically disrupt the '26 elections, which I think he's made it clear he has every intention of doing So I think that this should be five-alarm fire for everybody." WHYY [npr FRESH AIR now. a -Robert Kagan, Atlantic writer AP/AllisonRobberl Robbert'](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Yvp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe7257388-9e50-4155-9c6f-df07148cb0ea_1080x656.jpeg "May be an image of the Oval Office and text that says 'a \"I think we're already well into dictatorship. It's just a question of whether [Trump] will ahead and basically disrupt the '26 elections, which I think he's made it clear he has every intention of doing So I think that this should be five-alarm fire for everybody.\" WHYY [npr FRESH AIR now. a -Robert Kagan, Atlantic writer AP/AllisonRobberl Robbert'")
By now, you’ve read or heard a good deal about the massive Jeff Bezos-ordered staff cuts at The Washington Post. Goodbye sports and books and foreign correspondents and all photographers, and much else! There’s a lot of response out there from past Posties like former editor Marty Baron and ace reporter Ashley Parker who referred to it as ”The Murder of The Washington Post.” But we will let the cartoonists have their say here.
Steve Brodner, commentary and cartoon:
Washington DC is without a newspaper tonight.
By the time The Washington Star ceased publication after 129 years in 1981, The Washington Post had climbed the heights of journalistic achievement, from challenging Joseph McCarthy to defeating his love child, Nixon to proving a formidable counter to their spawn, Trump. In the mass die-off of newspapers, Jeff Bezos pretended to protect the essential nature of journalism there. Until he didn’t. In the corrupt pursuit of favor from a mob regime, he has gutted and, in Ashley Parker’s words, murdered the Post.
Nick Anderson:
Goris:
Heather Cox Richardson:
Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.
This exists: youngish, pre-stardom, Helen Mirren performing “The Good Ship Lollipop” in a 1981 movie, “The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu,” and I believe that is Peter Sellers watching.
On Colbert last night, a cover of Paul Simon’s “Obvious Child” by I’m With Her, who won two Grammys (Grammies?) earlier this week
From Tunes to Toons
Wuerker:
Telnaes:
Wilcox:
Photo Finish
From my camera to you, “Class Trip to Berlin Wall.”
All true, but left me feeling down today. May enough of us take action to correct our ship of state.
Rather than murder, I think what we have seen is the disconnection of the life support system of the Brainwashington Pest.
Long before Bezos took it over, it was well known as the CIA's Favorite Newspaper because its editorial page consistently ran defense of that servant of Empire's murders, overthrows of governments insufficiently toady to the U.S. corporate elite, drug-dealing to supplement its budget and finance its illegal black ops (so as to hide them from Congress and the public, and preserve the all-important, if self-serving, deniablity), and so forth. Like the equally craven New York Times, it never met a U.S. aggression or war, almost always based on lies that the legacy press duly passed on unaltered to their respective readerships, to protect the criminals from accountability, that it didn't enthusiastically support and cheerleader for.
The Post helped lead the pile-on against prize-winning publisher Julian Assange, the founder of the truth-exposing online organization WikiLeaks, which they accused of "endangering the troops" by publishing "Collateral Murder," the eyewitness account of deliberate war crimes carried out by gung-ho U.S. troops in Iraq in 2010 (in the face of overwheming evidence to the contrary, including from the Pentagon itself, that they declined to publish), spreading vicious lies and smears in the service of discrediting the publisher and his project for its genuine journalism that shone a bright light on the disgraceful propaganda industry of which it and the Times were the most prominent exponents.
The [Dorian] Gray Lady and her consort found nothing to object to in the build up to the war on Iraq based on lies, and helped sell the war through serving as a stenographer for Dubya and Cheney throughout the attacks and their aftermaths (just as it did with the unprovoked U.S.-engineered mass jihadist destructions of Libya and Syria by terrorists trained by the CIA, Mossad, and MI6.
it consistently denied that Russia had a grievance about the expansion of NATO, and that it was provoked into the invasion of Ukraine, as even Kissinger had predicted it would be, and as the neocons who forced the issue intended.
Long after it's moment in the sun during Watergate, like a one-hit movie star living on memories of its past reputation, it used its power to not only suppress, but to order the publisher to pulp all the copies it could recover, of the exposé Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire, by Deborah Davis, in which an appendix revealed that Ben Bradlee, the editor at the time of Watergate, had previously been a stooge of the CIA during the Rosenbergs' ordeal — that in Paris, he had been assigned to convince Europeans that this execution of two Jews (at least one of whom, Ethel, was known by the judge, the prosecutor, and the FBI, to be innocent of the spying charge, and was simply charged to induce her husband to confess and name names; when that didn't work, they blithely went ahead and electrocuted her anyway, making her two sons orphans). did not indicate that the U.S. was falling into fascism, despite McCarthyism and other means of suppressing the Left.
[ Bradlee angrily denied the charge, although Davis provided documentation, and Graham, who was a close friend and admirer of President Reagan and his wife, apparently used her connections to persuade the publishing company, Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, to destroy all the copies. Davis subsequently sued, won the suit, and it was then republished by a small publisher.]
The Post's stable of op-ed writers tilted steeply to the Right, including an open advocate of torture (in1984!); and, unlike the Wall Street Journal, the paper, whose motto mockingly proclaimed that Democracy Dies in Darkness, refused to run even a single real leftist in the interest of balance.
In short, Bezos took a propaganda rag and made it even moreso. I doubt that there are very many liberals and leftists that will miss the neocon and neolib Washington Post