Cartoons Saturday!

Plus new music from Allison Russell and Margo Price, Hegseth and the media, Trump and the war.

Mar 14, 2026

Yes, it’s still somehow free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter, and if you are already a subscriber, let’s hear from you! Or share or recommend this newsletter to a friend. You can also, way down below, pledge a future payment for a paid sub, if we have to go in that direction. Thank you.

Matt Davies:

With war raging and the Oscars coming on Sunday, the NY Times looks back at the flap over Michael Moore’s acceptance speech in 2003 when he ripped Bush’s Iraq invasion shortly after it happened

Referencing Dylan and Hattie Carroll here:

The Lonesome Death of Daphy Michel

Haitian woman, 31, dies alone at Pittsburgh bus stop days after ICE released her to the streets far from home to perish. Rest in power, miss.

Military historian and strategic studies expert Phillips O’Brien, in a conversation yesterday with Paul Krugman:

I really think Trump believed he would’ve had a few days of air raids, decapitate the government, and that would be it. I just don’t think it entered their mind, and because no one stands up to him. Supposedly, there were some military warnings, people saying, ‘the Iranians might fight back and you have to have preparations in case they do. But he seemed to not take those on. And these are people who wear shoes that are too big for them to make him happy.
That story about Marco Rubio, that picture reveals a great deal about where we are. I don’t know how he kept them on, but he did and he was humiliated, because Trump gave him those shoes. If that is the culture you create around you, you’re gonna make really bad decisions. You know what I thought? I actually thought, and I’m not saying Trump is Stalin but it’s very much the culture Stalin had around him where he humiliated everyone around him by making them look and be faintly ridiculous. That was actually something he did deliberately. And what happened, of course, is that all they would do is reinforce all his prejudices. And that’s why you end up with Stalin saying, “Oh, Hitler’s not gonna attack me in June, 1941. Never! Not gonna happen!” And everyone around him going, “Of course Joseph, of course they won’t do that.” And that’s where we are. We basically have a Stalin-like court around Trump and we see the decisions that such a court makes.

The man who attacked a Michigan synagogue this week lost four relatives in a recent airstrike in Lebanon.

The Uncensored Library, an archive of writings from nations struggling with press freedom, housed within the video game Minecraft. It’s adding a section for the U.S.

Music

Allison Russell plans a new album this fall but released yesterday an EP with three songs, one original and two Sarah McLachlan covers, including this one: