Left Jabs

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The Streisand Effect Comes for CBS News

In 2003, Barbra Streisand — an artist I have long admired — made a ridiculous mistake, one that has echoed through the years. Annoyed that her cliff-top mansion in Malibu had been photographed from the air, and that the resulting photo had been posted online, she decided her privacy had been invaded. So in a fit of pique that we mere mortals can never hope to comprehend, she sued the photographer for $50 million. Never mind that the photo was one of many in an arcane technical collection that was documenting the erosion of the Malibu cliffs. Never mind that if you look at that photo today you wonder how the mansion hasn’t collapsed into the Pacific by now. And never mind that the lawsuit was quickly thrown out of court by a judge who then dinged Streisand for $177,000 in attorney’s fees. Forget all that. What matters about this incident is that before she filed the lawsuit, the photo had been viewed exactly six times online. Once the l...

The Epstein Files and Those Lingering Doubts

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...

The Press, the Government, and the Culture of Lies

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 ...

Don Lemon and the St. Paul Nine are Headed for Prime Time

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...

Immigration Detention Centers, and Other Euphemisms

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...

The Epstein Files Aren't Just About You-Know-Who

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...