Trump Bleeps the Press

And they sit there and take it. Plus new music by U2 and Tom Waits and anothe hummingbird.

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. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran. By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number to 14. Three military officials said that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list — three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq — because their deaths occurred after Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.

On Trump’s White House Correspondents Dinner speech last night:

Jim Acosta: “This dinner is a disgrace. Trump’s rambling, unhinged speech is full of hate and spite. Just spewing nastiness at his usual targets. Let’s not sanitize how truly ugly it was. This would be a great moment for members of the press to get up and walk out.”

Susan Glasser: “FirstAmendment. If journalists won’t stand up for it, hard to ask everyone else to.”

Trump on Springsteen: “What the hell happened to that guy? He looks like hell. I’m sure he does not like the way I look. I don’t look so bad... The tour has been renamed: ‘Bored in the USA.’” The remarks were met with silence from the room.

NY Times:

As the hour stretched on, his speech turned harshly political and quite vicious. He mocked the appearances and careers of individual reporters, some of whom were in the room, but much of the speech had little to do with the press. He widened the aperture to target his longtime political enemies, politicians and celebrities who had nothing to do with the dinner.

“I hate some people,” Mr. Trump said as he started in on Adam Schiff. Others who came in for a drubbing included Rosie O’Donnell, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Chris Christie and Jerry Nadler. The president wasn’t telling jokes so much as he was repeating attack lines one hears at a standard MAGA rally.

There was little laughter in the room as the president’s speech took on a harder edge. Not many people chuckled when he compared the “really beat-up faces” of UFC fighters with those of Bette Midler, Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen.

Mr. Trump seemed to realize he was losing the room. After a joke he told about the gerontocracy on Capitol Hill bombed, he said: “That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech. It was the only good one, and that went down with not exactly great laughter.”

Music Picks

New U2 single for the summer, “Fireflies,” added propulsion by Martin Garrix.

Michael Stipe has unveiled a new song, “Hum Desiderata,” exclusively on the online sound exhibition platform Joyfully Waiting.

The hip music/film/TV site Consequence just named “Boots on the Ground” by Tom Waits and Massive Attack as the greatest song of the first half of this year. I featured it a few months ago, but here again:

My new film Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS and airing over many stations.

From Tunes to Toons

Goris:

Anderson:

Bennett:

Bagley:

Horsey:

Photo Finish

Continuing our week of my hummingbird photos. Commentary by Barbara Bedway:

Late July and the resident hummingbirds are mighty feisty, buzzing one another off the feeders and plunge-bombing from the trees any interlopers on the firecracker plants. It’s the month when science writer Ed Yong’s description of them as “small bundles of sass and fury” pretty much captures their allure. We hang 2 feeders to promote sharing, but it’s all in vain: millions of years of evolution tells them, “I need to fight to protect this food source.” Our feeders are just another flower to them, in danger of imminent depletion, and worth their forever wars.