Left Jabs

  My mother idolized Leon Botstein. She followed both his careers — as president of her beloved Bard College, and as the world-class conductor of the American Symphony. He has always been an impressive figure. I met him myself on two occasions. Once was at a Bard fund-raiser in Florida, where he was as attentive to my pre-teen sons as he was to my mother, whose annual donations were probably in the high two figures. The other time was at a talk he gave at the Romanian consulate in New York, on the subject of a rather obscure Romanian composer. He’s that kind of guy. So when Botstein’s name surfaced in the Epstein files, it got my attention. My first thought was that I was glad my mother didn’t live to see it. But then I thought about what her likely reaction might have been. Knowing Mom, I’m quite sure she would have defended him. She would have needed convincing beyond the collection of emails in the files, emails that are, in themselves, far from incrimi...

       We all know that Donald Trump lies with every breath, and that literally nothing he says can be trusted beyond the next sentence out of his mouth. Okay, we’re used to that. What we’re not used to, and need to be horrified by, is that the executive branch of the federal government is doing much the same thing. In matters affecting our health and welfare — literally our lives and deaths — all communication from our most vital agencies must now be assumed to contain MAGA propaganda. A culture of lies has taken over, and our own government cannot be trusted any further than we can trust Trump. Yes, there are many countries whose citizens have been through far worse, and for much longer than our single year in hell. They might be laughing at our panic, had not so many of them moved here to get away from the very thing they now see happening to their neighbors. But our homegrown, low-interest citizens have been a bit slow to see what’s going ...

       As Bleeding Minnesota continues to dominate both the news and our consciousness, there’s one episode that especially embodies the utter madness of the cultural spasm playing out in front of us. The January 18 th protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul has everything you’d want in a Trump-era legal crisis: institutional incompetence, political gaslighting, ostentatious cruelty, and bad faith everywhere you look. All the hits. Already, Pam Bondi is in way over her head, but that’s not stopping her. In her latest overreach, she arrested Don Lemon, last Friday, for his attendance as a journalist at that protest. If the stakes and the visibility weren’t already high enough, charging Lemon pushes them through the roof. I’m guessing Lemon planned for this. His brand has been more-or-less in limbo since his racially-tinged purge by CNN two years ago, and he knows that Trump, like dictators everywhere, lusts to see reporters stand trial. App...

  My apologies for taking off during this especially fraught week, though I’m not sure I could have added anything to the Minneapolis story that you hadn’t already read. So I’m going back to May of last year, when ICE was still stretching its muscles. I wrote then about GEO Group, which is currently making billions from building and operating detention centers for immigrants, or for anyone who might be confused with one. Plenty has been written about ICE, but not nearly enough about the corporate vampires profiting from its hideous mission. This piece adds a touch of context to what ICE is doing now.         When you go to the website of  GEO Group , the largest and most well-connected of the private prison companies, the headline that greets you on the home page reads: “Global Leader in Evidence-Based Rehabilitation.” If you were to go no further than that home page, you might think the company, based in Boca Raton, was all about “enh...

       It is now a virtual certainty that Pam Bondi’s corrupt DOJ will slow-walk the release of the Epstein files as long as it can, forever if possible. We have no way of knowing how that will play out. But the excavation of Jeffrey Epstein’s entire life has become a mini-industry, and we now know a whole lot more than we did, even a few weeks ago. No, we don’t have a smoking gun — video of Trump, say, in bed with an underaged girl or two — and it’s possible there won’t be. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some pretty juicy stuff jumping out of the files that have, despite Bondi’s best efforts, already been released. It will take a while for the pieces to fall into place, but there are plenty of storylines for ambitious reporters to follow. I am expecting astonishing revelations, though they won’t necessarily involve Trump. The Trump evidence will mostly remain unavailable until something, or someone, pries it loose. But in the meantim...

       Turns out, one of the hardest parts of watching my country descend deeper and deeper into darkness is the sheer embarrassment of it all. We’ve been reduced to a unique blend of stupidity and malevolence, and the rest of the civilized world doesn’t know whether to laugh at us or cry. Neither do I. My Canadian cousins and friends have real reason to fear the deranged impulses of a monster acting in the name of my country — and by extension, me — and I’m powerless to help them. I can tell them it’s ludicrous to think Trump would invade Canada, but do I really believe that? America is behaving like a playground bully with a nuclear arsenal, so I don’t know what I believe anymore. The Venezuela thing is mind-blowing on many levels, but I think it’s helpful to see it, not so much for what it is, as for what it’s not. Most of all, it’s not about oil. No matter how much bluster Trump brings to the subject, Venezuelan oil is not something the en...