John Oliver on Saving PBS and NPR, Plus Two Netflix Picks

And a Patti Smith demo and birthday salute to Gene Clark.

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films. Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of my books, thanks!

Thanks to John Oliver for covering the Trump de-funding of PBS and NPR last night.

Obviously hits close to home as all four of my films since 2021 have found a found on PBS. Here’s an ad for the latest they posted this past week. You can watch streaming for free.

From Heather Cox Richardson last night:

Today, an ideology of “aristocracy” justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.

Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the “ultrarich” are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people.

And from the Associated Press:

The federal government on Saturday dismissed charges against a Utah plastic surgeon accused of throwing away Covid-19 vaccines, giving children saline shots instead of the vaccine and selling faked vaccination cards.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on the social media platform X that charges against Dr. Michael Kirk Moore, of Midvale, Utah, were dismissed at her direction.

Moore and other defendants faced up to 35 years in prison after being charged with conspiracy to defraud the government; conspiracy to convert, sell, convey and dispose of government property; and aiding and abetting in those efforts. The charges were brought when Joe Biden was president.

We enjoyed the new Richard Linklater flick just up at Netflix, “Nouvelle Vague,” dramatizing the odd if endearing filming of Godard’s “Breathless.” The NY Times has a guide to the many famous figures who appear.

We also liked the surprisingly popular 4-part series “Death By Lightning,” also via Netflix, on the assassination of President James A. Garfield (Michael Shannon) by Charles Guiteau (Matthew McFadyen), with Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) roaring along.

Author/historian T.J. Stiles, a Facebook friend, hailed the series but happily provided a few fact-checks, just some of them here:

Chester Arthur is so over the top. He was not a gangster. He was a politician. Fun, though, and I’ll allow it because the gangster stuff serves as shorthand for machine politics. OK.

Though donors were becoming a bigger and bigger deal by 1880, the party still funded itself through a 2% “assessment” on the salaries of spoils-system office holders.

In fact there were numerous Black delegates to every Republican convention from 1868 on. The Republican Party in the South was heavily Black. There were still Black members of Congress! This is not something that is hard. Did you know there was a Black-led drive for a Black vice-presidential nominee in 1880? Got a few votes at the convention.

Finally, enough with the constant F-word. Something broke inside all of us because of “Deadwood,” which taught us to think of profanity as a mark of verity. It isn’t. Yes people swore. But “respectable people” didn’t carpet F-bomb.

You’ve surely heard about the 50th anniversary package marking Patti Smith’s “Horses.” It includes this demo for RCA for her “Gloria” cover (expanded to “In Excelsis Deo”).

Today would have been ex-Byrd Gene Clark’s 81st birthday, but he was gone way way too soon. As I have noted here before, I was big fan of his solo work. Here are two of his classics, much later covered on the first Robert Plant/Allison Krauss album, “Through the Morning Through the Night” and “Polly.”

From Tunes to Toons

Photo Finish

From my camera to you, let me know what you think. Today: “California Calla, 2025.”