Left Jabs

       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...

        I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations...

  It was Jimmy Kimmel who nailed it, on the air, on the night after the ’24 election: It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go. For healthcare, for our climate, for scientists, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO and democracy and decency. It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too, you just don’t realize it yet. As I wrote that day — the first time I used this quote — Kimmel has thoughtfully provided us with a scorecard for tracking the depraved actions of the depraved junta now trying, cruelly but ineptly, to rule us. Let’s call it the Kimmel List, shall we? Each item on it rates its own primal scream. Going down the list, I found myself with plenty ...