Cartoons Wednesday!

Plus music picks, Colbert and Kimmel and HCR and Talarico.

Mar 11, 2026

Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter, and if you are already a subscriber, let’s hear from you, thanks! Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books, including award winners and the bestseller “The Tunnels,” and writer/director of four acclaimed films for PBS since 2021. He was senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy for many years.

We’ll open again with Jimmy and Stephen last night, both get to Hegseth’s shellfish splurge:

Some additional commentary, by Nicholas Kristof in NY Times:

One of the costs of this unnecessary war on Iran is that it sucks up all the attention so that few pay attention to the ongoing abuses in Sudan, Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine, Congo and elsewhere.

Dems flipped another state house seat yesterday, this time in NH. Since Trump’s 2024 election: Democrats have flipped 28 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped 0.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, administration officials gave a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the war in Iran. Democrats who spoke to the press afterward appeared to be furious.
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told reporters he was coming out of the briefing “as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate. I am left with more questions than answers, especially about the cost of the war. My questions have been unanswered. And I will demand answers because the American people deserve to know.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted on social media that the administration appears to have no goals for the war except continued bombing, and no plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate, expressed his concerns about the Iran war on CBS Mornings yesterday. “As a millennial, I saw how military disasters like the Iraq War robbed this nation of young lives, of billions of dollars of our moral standing in the world, and I worry that our current leaders are repeating those same mistakes,” he said.
“I was in Sand Branch, Texas, which is a community south of Dallas that doesn’t have running water. It doesn’t have basic sewer infrastructure,” he continued. “So every dollar we spend bombing people in the Middle East is a dollar we’re not spending in Sand Branch, Texas, or in our communities here at home.”
“We’re always told that we don’t have enough money for schools, or for health care, or for our veterans. But there’s always enough money to bomb people on the other side of the world. And so we can support the democracy movement in Iran. We can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, all without bombing innocent schoolchildren, or sending our American troops off to die on the other side of the world.”