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. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming via PBS.
The New York Times:
Google Maps has updated to label Lake Ontario as Lake America for users in the U.S., following an executive order signed by President Trump last week amid an escalating trade war with Canada. He leaned into his decision, posting an A.I.-generated video depicting geese sporting his signature hairstyle, armed with semiautomatic weapons and shooting the guns under a sign that read “Lake America.”
de Adder’s response:
Never thought I’d live to see this from the lifetime conservative:
Axios:
A potential 2028 presidential run by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has exposed long-simmering divisions within the Democratic Socialists of America.
Why it matters: The socialism movement’s leaders are increasingly at odds over who should speak for them, what policies they stand for — and whether to support AOC, whom some dismiss as more establishment than insurgent, Axios’ Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein report.
AOC was the focus of internal fights this summer: The national DSA voted to keep more control of the group’s 2028 endorsement process, which some local chapters saw as an attempt to stop a quick AOC endorsement.
Paul Krugman:
We have developed a system where not only do we enormously favor the interests of people who already have vast amounts of money, but we literally favor malefactors of great wealth, to use Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase. We literally favor people who not only have enormous amounts of money, but cheat, who don’t pay their taxes, who break the rules.
This is not America. The general public still very much believes that people should pay the taxes they owe. We are not a country that valorizes, that rewards, or that honors people who cheat. But we have become a society that in practice does reward people who cheat.
What does that do to our social cohesion? What does that do to our sense of ourselves as a nation? I think in some ways the moral decay is worse than the numbers, which is saying a lot.
A reminder for you folks in L.A. area: My new film, “Hollywood Bomb,” will screen at the Topanga Film Festival next Sunday evening (and then in Beirut two nights later) . I have not posted the trailer here before, so now:
Music Picks
The good old Marsh Family seems to be popular with you folks, so here is a brand new anti-Trump parody, to the tune of Alanis’s “Ironic”: “Isn’t It Moronic?”
61 years ago today my pick as The Greatest Album Ever was released…naturally, that was Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” But of course he had gone electric” a few months earlier with “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Here’s a newly posted “isolated tracks” exploration of that song, which starts with what could be called a full blast instrumental, no vocal, take.
From Tunes to Toons
Riddell/The Guardian
Bramhall
Campbell:
Photo Finish
From my camera to you: “Television Man,” Giacometti at the Guggenheim, NYC
Great cartoons and music.
Loved the parody from the Marsh family, spot-on. Cartoons are wonderful as usual!