Rumsfeld Gone, Cosby Out, Trump's Man In

Plus antiwar music to send Rummy off in style from Neil Young, John Fogerty, Steve Earle, Sheryl Crow & Johnny Cash, plus a new song from Amy Helm.

Here we go for today, kicking off with Barry Blitt’s response to Bill Cosby being freed from prison on a technicality. Don’t forget to share, tweet, comment, subscribe (it’s free).

News & Politics

The Onion: “Senate Passes Bill Wishing Younger Generations Best Of Luck Stopping Climate Change.”

Colbert last night called Trump impeachment lawyer Bruce Castor, whose errors led to Bill Cosby’s release, an “actual devil’s advocate.”

L.A. Times: "A TV interview of an Oakland violence prevention official was interrupted by violence on Monday when two armed suspects attempted to steal the crew’s camera and equipment."

The Trump Org’s chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney's office at 6:20 a.m. ET today, after a grand jury returned sealed indictments charging him and the company with unspecified (and no doubt disappointing in severity) tax crimes.

Courting disaster: We await what could be big voting rights and campaign finance decisions from the Supreme Court today.

“The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth,” by The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta: “A Michigan Republican spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud, but all he found was lies.”

Trustees for the University of North Carolina voted 9-4 on Wednesday, with loud protests outside, to give tenure to New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones several months after refusing to consider her proposed tenure.

Sporting propositions: Starting today, Axios relates, NCAA athletes can earn money from their name, image and likeness without losing their eligibility. “You're going to start seeing athletes participating in national ad campaigns, promoting brands on social media, starting their own youth camps and even launching businesses.”

C-SPAN released its fourth historians survey of presidential leadership and found that Trump ranked fourth to last in terms of best national leaders. He leads only Pierce, Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Obama is 10th from the top and Dubya somehow no worse than 29th.

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday called for an investigation into Tucker Carlson's laughable claims that the NSA was spying on him as part of a plot to kick his show off the air. Friend of this newsletter David Folkenflik of NPR asked Carlson for proof. Carlson said his "word" was proof enough. "Carlson did not answer NPR's questions of whether he was in contact with people in Russia or Ukraine over the 2016 elections, the president's son Hunter Biden, or any related matter," Folkenflik added.

And breaking today: McCarthy threatens to strip any GOP member of their committee assignments if they accept an offer from Pelosi to serve on the 1/6 commission.

Thomas Boswell, a revered baseball writer for decades, has posted a farewell column after 52 years at the Wash Post.

The Yale School of Drama will be tuition-free "in perpetuity" thanks to a $150 million donation from billionaire David Geffen.

Actor James Franco has agreed to pay more than $2.2 million to settle a pair of lawsuits, including one from two former students of his acting school who said he had subjected them to sexually exploitative auditions and film shoots.

A beer and a shot: Budweiser is officially expanding its free beer giveaway to inspire people to get the vax ahead of July 4. That news was announced by good old Bill Pullman, who reprised the presidential speech from Independence Day.

Rummy Dealt Us a Bad Hand

As you know, it’s now a known known that Donald Rumsfeld has died. Architect of the Iraq war based on lies, co-conspirator in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civlians, fond supporter of torture—if there is an upstairs, and Rumsfeld meets the Man up there, he will finally face the war crimes tribunal he has long deserved. Amid the disgracefully fond farewells from the media, the NY Times at least got around to: “Rumsfeld waged a costly and divisive war in Iraq that ultimately destroyed his political life and outlived his tenure by many years. But he never expressed regrets.”

George Packer, who often wrote well on that war, put it better at The Atlantic: “Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly…. Wherever the United States government contemplated a wrong turn, Rumsfeld was there first with his hard smile—squinting, mocking the cautious, shoving his country deeper into a hole. His fatal judgment was equaled only by his absolute self-assurance. He lacked the courage to doubt himself. He lacked the wisdom to change his mind.”

My friend Scott Horton posted on Facebook, “For nearly two decades he was the most despised man in Taos, NM.” Scott lives out there. “Waiters in local restaurants used to outdo one another in writing ‘please drop dead’ on his service napkins. And now Donald Rumseld has indeed dropped dead.”

Or as one Twitter wag put it, “Donald Rumsfeld is survived by the love of his life, the Iraq War.”

Below, a few antiwar tunes to send him off state appropriately.

Neil Young was the most prominent to release a semi-concept album, Living With War. Songs included “Flags of Freedom,” “Living With War,” “Shock and Awe,” and below, “Let’s Impeach the President (for Lying).”

John Fogerty, who wrote the classic “Fortunate Son” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” released the aptly titled “Deja Vu All Over Again.”

Steve Earle took on the “Fortunate Son” theme more directly in “Rich Man’s War.”

Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day” was recorded in 1996 but she trotted it live after the Iraq invasion, and did a duet with Johnny Cash.

Song Pick of the Day

First song, autobiographical, from new album by Amy Helm, Levon’s kid and recorded in his barn/studio up near Woodstock….

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.