Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.
Molly Jong-Fast: “What if we’re all just passengers on the decoy plane?”
Trump yesterday in a speech on Long Island: “Chuck Schumer, who's a Palestinian. He's a full-fledged Palestine. In fact, I'm looking for Palestinian garb. I'm going to send it to him for his birthday.”
Big NY Times piece today on one of my favorite politicians:
‘The System Reeks’: For a Half-Century, His Populist Message Has Not Changed
At 73, Sherrod Brown is mounting a comeback bid in Ohio. He is one of the Democrats his party is counting on to retake control of the Senate.
And one of my non-favorites, via Arizona Republic:
Former senator Kyrsten Sinema disclosed having sex multiple times with her then-married former bodyguard Matthew Ammel in various cities across the country in a deposition as part of her “homewrecker” lawsuit she is facing in North Carolina.
Lucian Truscott IV:
What has happened on the USS Abraham Lincoln is our clarifying moment. Everything that has gone wrong on that ship is the responsibility of failed leadership that goes right to the top. We have a president who in a time of war is obsessed with erecting monuments to himself, putting his name on buildings, putting marble and gold leaf all over the White House, punishing people he considers enemies, enriching himself and his family, and playing golf at public expense.
Everyone in the military sees this. Everyone knows what Trump’s inattention to the war and to them represents. He had fired generals and admirals who have experience and replaced them with ideologues who swear loyalty to him and not to the Constitution. Leadership at a basic level, especially in the military, is a copycat business. Trump doesn’t care about people in the military, so the leaders beneath him don’t care. That is why sailors and soldiers and airwomen and men and Marines are suffering….
Here is the reason that the USS Lincoln is in so much trouble as a combat vessel: The president, the commander in chief, doesn’t care. He thinks people in the military are suckers and he treats them that way. He is wrong. Everyone in out military, and the sailors and Marines on that vessel deserve to be treated with respect and honor. That isn’t happening, and it’s why the U.S. military has lost the war Trump started with Iran.
The First Attack Ads….
Happy to report that my award-winning and Emmy-nominated 2022 film is being re-aired by PBS stations around the country starting in October with timely lessons for the midterms: “The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair.” It’s especially fitting as anti-socialist and anti-Communist rhetoric from GOPers spread.
In 1934, famed writer, and longtime socialist, Upton Sinclair swept the Democratic primary for governor of California, leading a mass End Poverty movement. To defeat him that fall, his opponents created one of the dirtiest, and most influential, campaigns in U.S. history, and Hollywood took its first all-out plunge into politics. Anti-migrant, anti-socialist and anti-communist charges dominated the campaign and drew national attention. The film shows how the 1934 race marked the rise of “spin doctors,” false or manipulated news, and the modern campaign techniques that continue to dominate political campaigning in 2026 and beyond.
Revered MGM producer Irving Thalberg ordered the creation of the first “attack ads” to appear on a screen, a forerunner of today’s media-based politics. “THE FIRST ATTACK ADS” reveals highlights from the three “Thalberg shorts” along with interviews with participants in the Sinclair campaign and observers of the crucial impact of those shorts and their influence right up to 2026. Web site with responses to the film here. It’s based on my award-winning Random House book “The Campaign of the Century.”
A five-minute clip via PBS here:
Music Picks
New cut from forthcoming album by Sheryl Crow, here with Jesse Welles. As Rolling Stone puts it:
”The protest track urges listeners to take history into account when considering what the future might hold and what power they hold in shaping it. ‘What if everyone took a civics class?/I’m not sure I know anyone who’d pass,’ Crow sings. ‘But how we live today comes from the past/If we forget, it could slip from our grasp.’”
From Tunes to Toons
Telnaes:
Sack:
Koterba
Sheneman:
Margulies:
Photo Finish
From my camera to you: “Bases loaded, Glavine throws the pitch, Shea Stadium.”
It would be great if the cowards happen to touch themselves with their electric gloves on. An itch, even an insect can help with that.
Sheryl has wisdom and always has. 💯 agree with @Andre Shumpert.