Cartoons Wednesday!

Plus Kimmel and Krugman and a Woody sellout.

Jun 17, 2026

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.

Jimmy last night:

Of course, everyone is talking about Trump’s reflecting/swimming pool in D.C. turning green—the usual “everything he touches dies”—and then desperate attempt to reverse that.

Ohman:

Brodner:

Bagley:

Paul Krugman on the scent and descent of Musk:

At the end of trading yesterday the stock market placed almost as high a value on SpaceX, which went public last Friday, as it did on Microsoft, and slightly more than it placed on Amazon, which made $78 billion in profits last year.
What can explain this valuation? Many investors appear to believe that Musk is a wizard who can conjure up world-conquering inventions on a regular basis. But while Musk has done some impressive things, his track record for more than a decade has been one of failed venture after failed venture. And his current big ideas, like data centers in space, fundamentally don’t make sense. A recent Government Accountability Office report is carefully worded, but as I read it basically says “this is another Hyperloop [Musk’s absurd, failed attempt to reinvent public transportation].”
So the moral here is that SpaceX is essentially all about hype. It is, in effect, a $2.75 trillion meme stock. The only winners will be those who got in early, stoked a market frenzy, and exit before the bottom inevitably falls out.

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Heather Cox Richardson:

In Chicago, a case against six protesters for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a detention facility protest fell apart in May when the judge discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. Then the prosecutors tried to hide evidence of their misconduct by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.
As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case against the “Broadview Six,” saying: “I have read hundreds—if not thousands—of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

Woody Approve?

Just an update since I mentioned the event a couple of times last week: The first preview of my upcoming PBS film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad” as a benefit for Rivertown Film here in Nyack on Monday night proved to be a smashing success, with a sellout crowd of nearly 200 folks. Perhaps the highlight was the fabulous and moving performance of five songs by Tom Chapin and the Chapin Sisters (Lily and Abigail), including “Deportee” and “Pastures of Plenty,” and then with the local All Together Now Chorus they led the audience in raucous renditions of “All You Fascists” and “This Land Is Your Land.”