Cartoons Thursday!

Plus: Kimmel, Klepper and Krugman, and music by Carla Olson, Mick Taylor and The Chapin Sisters.

Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the 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.

Kimmel not cancelled yet:

Jordan Klepper crashes Trump’s UFC fiasco for The Daily Show:

Newt Gingrich still a joke:

President Trump has achieved something many thought impossible: forcing the Iranian dictatorship away from the Obama-Biden path of appeasement without committing America to a massive ground war.

George Conway:

As I’ve been saying, impeachment and removal will ultimately have to happen, and enough Republicans will ultimately be forced to support it. But if Democrats fear talking about it now, they will make the path more difficult, delay the ultimate outcome, and prolong the damage.

Paul Krugman:

The United States just lost a war. Just lost it bigly, as Trump used to say. It’s an astonishing story. We went up against Iran, which was definitely not a major military power or a major economic power, a sort of middle-ranked power, if that, and utterly failed to achieve our war goals.

In the process, we inflicted a lot of damage on the world economy and depleted our stocks of high-tech weapons that will take years to replace. Altogether, immense damage was inflicted on Iran, but Iran has clearly emerged stronger. The United States has emerged humiliated.

The attempts by Trump and minions to pretend that it was a victory don’t help. They only make the United States look not just humiliated but delusional. So that’s a big deal. It has large implications for US power and influence going forward as well…

So where does Europe stand here? In a rational world, the rise of China and the coordinated, concerted, efforts of the United States and Europe to deal with that rise would be the central story of geopolitics in the year 2026. Unfortunately, things are not rational. And so we have a belligerent, erratic United States with Europe largely on its own.

But Europe being on its own is not nearly as impossible to imagine as it used to be. This is a world that has tilted towards China. That’s probably the biggest story. But it is also, in effect, tilted towards Europe because it’s tilted away from us here in the United States.

Music Picks

Stunning version of Woody’s “Pastures of Plenty”—one of the greatest songs of the past century—by the fabulous Chapin Sisters with Papa Tom at our Nyack event on Monday around the preview of my upcoming PBS film “The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” to benefit Rivertown Films. They also want “Deportee” and others. Video: Glenn Schloss.

Moving on, premiere screening of my film coming to the Autry Museum in Los Angeles this Sunday at 1:30. If any of you out there in L.A. area contact me there may be comp tickets available. Besides screening the film, the wonderful Carla Olson, former Textones leader and solo artist and collaborator (see below) will sing. Here’s Carla live with the great Gene Clark and a song she wrote “The Drifter”:

And rocking live from her legendary partnership with the Rolling Stones’ best guitarist (sorry Keith), Mick Taylor:

From Tunes to Toons

Anderson:

Ohman:

Goris:

Photo Finish

From my camera to you: Luxembourg Gardens, Paris.