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.
“Todd Blanche having his conformation vote at 4:00 AM tells you everything you need to know about how Republicans in Congress operate. They reserve their most toxic moves for the dead of night.” Confirmation…conformation….same thing.
Meanwhile, on another shortfall, Lucian Truscott IV:
The whole running out of ammunition thing is being treated like a problem that can be managed, rather than the complete fuck up that it is. Even when they arrest or kill a mass shooter, police find their houses or cars stuffed with thousands of rounds of ammunition, the great fear being, of course, I can’t run out of ammo.
That fear, apparently, did not exist in the Pentagon run by Secretary Shake-Me-Up-Another-Chocolate-Martini Hegseth.
I mean, you just don’t make these kinds of mistakes! Everything in the military has to be counted, and then counted again, and it has to happen every single day. When I was a lieutenant in the Army, I was weapons officer of an Infantry company. My job as weapons officer was to enter the arms room where all our rifles, pistols, and machine guns were kept, and count the weapons and the ammunition, box by box, and sign a formal weapons report on a special DOD form each day certifying that I had counted all those weapons and all that ammo, and it was present and accounted for, listing specific numbers of each. Every. Single. Day.
The punishment for lying on the weapons report, for falsifying the numbers, was five years in the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks. That is how seriously the Army took accounting for weapons and ammunition.
and Heather Cox Richardson:
Lara Seligman and Yoko Kubota of the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence assesses that the depletion of U.S. munitions has made it more likely that Russia will try to fracture the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance in the next few years by attacking a NATO nation.
Global affairs columnist David Rothkopf wrote today in the Daily Beast that replenishing the munitions stockpiles Hegseth and Trump have depleted will take years and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Rothkopf reports that experts in the military and former employees of the Defense Department consider Hegseth’s record “to be the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history. And,” Rothkopf wrote, “that’s saying something since this is the country that gave us the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, blank check support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, and drunken sailor levels of defense spending that have actually weakened us while, in so doing, strengthening our rivals worldwide.”
and Brodner:
Music Pick
Neil Young with a brand new 11 1/2 opus over forthcoming album in the vein of his “Comes a Time” period, with autobiograpical/topical lyrics… and read about it here.
From Tunes to Toons
Bramhall:
KAL:
Anderson:
Goris:
Chappatte:
Sack:
deAdder:
Photo Finish
Sunrise over the Hudson
Gee, you give the Sec. of Defense job to a DUI-hire who's last position was weekend anchor at Fox News and this is what happens. We can be shocked but not surprised. And unfortunately, our enemies take note and plan accordingly. That's another great photo, Greg!
I really liked the cartoon with Blanche and the crossed fingers. REALLY....I don't believe anything that comes from this administration.