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.
I’ve posted parody songs by this group of oldsters beforeand you seem to enjoy so here is a new one, “The President is a Clown” sung to “Camptown Races.” But I am a sucker for the “doo-dah doo=dah” refrain as for almost all the 1970s at Crawdaddy I was the creator and editor of its cherished political news section “The Crawdoodah Gazette.”
Heather Cox Richardson on an incident where, if it happened to Biden, Fox News would be mocking him for this escape-via-catering-cart for the next two years
An exclusive story tonight by Dan Lamothe, John Hudson, Andrew Ba Tran, and Joyce Sohyun Lee in the Washington Post revealed the utter cowardice behind Trump’s authoritarian aspirations.
Leaving Türkiye on July 8 after the NATO summit, the day after he had renewed strikes on Iran, Trump made a show of switching from the newly outfitted plane given to the U.S. by Qatar to an older plane that had served as Air Force One before Trump got the Qatari jet. The journalists who were traveling with the president and some of the White House staff moved with the president to the older plane for the leg of the trip that would take them to Britain.
But the journalists report that Trump and some of his aides secretly left the older plane in a container lowered into an airport catering truck and were transferred to a smaller plane for the trip.
There had apparently been credible Iranian threats against Trump’s life, and so officials turned to a plan to hide him, even from senior U.S. officials. To do so, they left the journalists and staff on the plane that would use the Air Force One call sign, turning them into a decoy for an Iranian strike. White House staffers instructed journalists to lower their shades when they entered the plane.
Trump secretly reboarded the bigger plane in Britain and was filmed coming down its stairs, suggesting he had been on the flight. Then he boarded the Qatari jet, along with the press pool and the staffers who had been on Air Force One, for the trip from Türkiye. On the flight, Trump briefly spoke to reporters, who asked why they had been asked to lower their window shades on the previous flight.
It was “because you’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags that we have to deal with,” Trump said. He added that there are threats against his life “all the time” and that “I’m number one on their list, before you. But if I go, you go. Right?” “Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”
Steve Brodner comments:
Paul Krugman on claims that Democrats want to bring socialism to USA where it has existed for decades:
If Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism.
And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care?
The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare.
What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites.
Music Picks
Just posted a very fine version of classic folk song “Freight Train” from Rhiannon Giddens’ album coming next month.
When I saws] that this song was labeled as “classic” and live from over the weekend by the popular indie rock bank Wet Leg (from Isle of Wight), I gave it a listen and then wondered what the excited Pale Ale kids in audience would think of the Velvet Underground—from 60 years ago.
VU 1966:
Or their live peak in 1969.
My latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.
From Tunes to Toons
Wuerker:
Ohman:
Golding:
Anderson:
Two by Goris:
Sack:
And someone had some fun with this:
Photo Finish
In honor of the beloved, popular, very ill Big Bear Lake bald eagle “Jackie” who passed away yesterday amid worldwide attention at the Ojai Raptor Center: My photo below from a cousin on the Hudson off Piermont. Truly an honor to watch one of these in person, especially knowing their importance to Native Americans centuries ago in this and other areas.
Krugman is so right about health insurance companies. To me, there is something parasitic about most organizations that decide to pursue profit above all else-as the goal in every decision
Good music, very good cartoons, and excellent photo of the eagle.