Cartoons Tuesday, Plus the Return of John Oliver

And we awaken to the early stages of "Golden Slumbers"

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre.” Watch trailer for acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: both as @gregmitch. You can subscribe to this newsletter for FREE—so SEE LINKS to read about/order his books at bottom of this newsletter.

After a couple of months off, we were pleased by the return of John Oliver but the big news for many of you, who don’t subscribe to HBO/Max, is that the show, or at least its main segment, is now back on YouTube—a practice HBO dropped a couple of years ago. And this week, a great one. For example, the revelationKristi Noem did not shoot her puppy—actually the dog’s head exploded after she addressed him with her whiny talking points.

And don’t miss the “Hostitle Takeover” song at the end which has now gone viral, see below.

Believe we, we are done with “SNL 50” and Paul McCartney for awhile but since so many watched the big finale on Saturday here are three early versions of his “Golden Slumbers” you have probably missed.

When he was still writing it and tried it out on George and Ringo (John was in the hospital after a car mishap) during the “Let It Be” sessions.

Early recorded attempts:

Isolated strings and horns

Musk Rat Ramblin’ Toons

Steve Brodner:

Bonus, from The Onion:

ARLINGTON, VA—Expressing unease with his customer’s obvious level of inebriation, local bartender Benny Waller confirmed Friday that he had been forced to take away Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s security clearance.

“Look, buddy, you’re in no condition to be getting behind a desk at the Defense Department right now,” the proprietor of local dive bar the Anchor reportedly told a stumbling, belligerent Hegseth while reaching into the Cabinet member’s pocket, pulling out his security credentials, and placing them in a locked box behind the counter. “It’ll be safer for everyone if you go home and sober up before accessing any national security secrets or entering restricted areas of the Pentagon. I’m sorry, but in your current state, it would be irresponsible of me to let you operate a department with an $850 billion budget and a nuclear arsenal.”

Some of Greg Mitchell’s books, you might order one or more to help sustain this FREE newsletter (links to to Amazon but most also available elsewhere), in no particular order.

>The best-selling “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall—and the Historic Films JFK Tried to Kill” (Crown, 2016).

>Award winning “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (The New Press, 2020).

>Another award winner (and considered a “classic” by many election nerds and others), “The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics” (Random House, 1992, and later editions).

>”So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq” (Union Square Press, 2008), with a preface by Bruce Springsteen, Forword by Joe Galloway).

>”Tricky Dick and The Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Sexual Politics and the Red Scare” (Random House, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book.

“Vonnegut & Me,” an inexpensive (some would say cheap) little ebook recalling my interviews with the author and humorist in the 1970s, including a much-anthologized profile of the author by one Kilgore Trout.

>Best-seller “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial,” with Robert Jay Lifton (Putnam’s, 1995).

>”Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and the Greatest Movie Never Made” (Sinclair Books, several updated editions), inspired my award-winning film of the same name.

>”Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried” (Sinclair Books, 2024), companion to my PBS film on the 1937 police murder of striking steel workers and activists in Chicago.

>”Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment and the American Conscience,” with Robert Jay Lifton (Morrow, 1999).