Happy Hummingbird Day!

Plus our usual cartoons, new music from Peter Gabriel and a Cindy Berryhill classic.

Yes, it’s still somehow free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of four films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. You can also show appreciation by pledging a small sum if we go partly “paid” one day.

Well, this is different:

Cornell President’s Car Bumps Into Students After Confrontation Over Gaza

After a debate over the war, students say the university president hit them with his vehicle. He says he was the victim in the incident.

But I have to love this, from NY Times:

The Gift of Getting Weirder With Age

It becomes easier to embrace your authentic (and eccentric) self.

But back to war and peace, with Heather Cox Richardson:

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said yesterday he would not challenge Trump’s novel interpretation of the War Powers Act, in part, he said, because Senate Republicans have given him no reason to. Republicans have no interest in voting to support Trump’s unpopular war, and yet don’t want to buck Trump. So they are choosing to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities.

…and Paul Krugman

I’m not a young kid and I remember Vietnam and body counts. And a lot of what Trump says is reminiscent of the body counts. We have destroyed—actually, it turns out that we were much less successful in destroying their missiles and drones than a lot of the claims. In any case, that is not what it’s about.

But Trump just has this, I have the ability to carry out violence, so surely I can’t be losing this war if I can do violence and they can’t do equivalent amounts of violence in return. Except the problem is that it’s not what they can do to America’s military. It’s what they can do to oil tankers that try to exit the Persian Gulf….

The moral, intellectual, emotional collapse of the Republican Party is in a way a bigger story than Trump. I mean, yeah, he’s a world-class, bizarre, dangerous person, but what makes him able to do this is the submissiveness of his party.

The celebration of a guy who is an absolute disaster at presidenting—he has led, more or less single-handedly, on his own decisions, his own faith, his own judgment, he has led America into one of our worst strategic defeats in our history. He took on this relatively small military power in Iran, figuring that he could destroy the regime and install his people in a few days, and he lost the war….

I mean, Marie Antoinette had nothing on Trump. Here we are, people are complaining about gas prices, there’s a war, and he’s always obsessed with his gilded ballroom. And yeah, I think that for him, it’s an escape. He fantasizes about giant ballrooms.

Music Quicks

First cut from forthcoming Peter Gabriel album, “Won’t Stand Down.”

This is not new but a fun classic from the “anti-folk” days, “Damn, I Wish I Was a Man,” by Cindy Lee Berryhill and inspired in part, she said, by reading Woody’s “Bound for Glory.”

From Tunes to Toons

Anderson:

de Adder:

Davies:

Molina:

Photo Finish

We host several hummingbirds every spring and summer, who visit our deck thanks to feeders managed by my wife and several firecracker plants. We certainly look forward to their return, and yesterday one or two surprised us with their first visit—eerily on exact same day as last year. Hummingbirds do (occasionally) migrate back to familiar spots but we like to think they are all old friends. Photo from last year below. There will be many new ones coming.