"But her emails!" is back in the news again
When Clinton used her email for official business, it was completely normal behavior, even at her level of government. Small professional services businesses (like the Clinton Foundation) ran their own email servers, and people used their personal email for work.
It was utterly innocent behavior that the Republicans just pretended was shady. Republicans like to do that.
We’re seeing the same strategy today with transphobia and hysteria over immigration and migrants. Trans people, immigrants and migrants threaten no one, but Republicans are just making shit up and getting their supporters worked up over nothing. Jumping at shadows — but there aren’t even any shadows. It’s jumping at nothing.
71-year-old Donald Gorske has eaten two McDonald’s Big Macs every day since 1972. That’s 35,000 Big Macs. He’s saved the receipts and cartons, stacked in his basement.
I still sometimes think about something John Gruber said on Daring Fireball when Gorske was in the news for eating his 25,000th Big Mac in 2011:
My first thought when I heard about him was that he must be either an idiot or an asshole. But now I think not. I think maybe he’s a lucky man — someone who found the perfect food to suit his taste, an obsessive who never tires of it, and it happens to be cheap and readily available almost everywhere in the world.
Merchant of Menace: Trump and the Jews (Robert Kuttner / The American Prospect) — “This will not end well.”
The Signal leak reveals the depth of the Trump administration’s loathing of Europe (Andrew Roth / The Guardian) — Vance and Hegseth are little boys cosplaying as conquering generals.
The life and death of artist Thomas Kinkade
“Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade, who died from an overdose of alcohol and Valium 13 years ago, is the subject of a new documentary, “Art for Everybody,” by Miranda Yousef.
Kinkade’s fans adore him, made him a ubiquitous cultural icon and built him a financial empire. But he was an alcoholic, accused of multiple instances of sexua harassment, and lost a $3 million court case for defrauding gallery owners, writes Veronica Esposito at The Guardian
“One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,” Yousef told Esposito. “You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.”
Kinkade’s story engages questions about “what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand,” Esposito writes.
Arguably Kinkade’s most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the “Painter of Light” moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.)
YouTube: If Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and performed “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked." (Jared Goldsmith) Brilliant!
“Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies” by Tom De Haven is one of my all-time favorite novels. I recommended it highly to a friend yesterday. That caused me this morning to revisit this review of the novel that I wrote for reactormag.com way back in 2010.
Two years after the review was published — 13 years ago — someone left a question in the comments, and no one answered that question, so I answered now.
It’s always a kick for me to get a response like that to some ancient comment, years later; hopefully “sarahp,” who left that question in the far-away year of 2013, will feel the same way.
Ami Angelwings:: “The original Dear Abby was a badass, esp for her time, she was a champion for queer acceptance in her column and was very big on telling parents to listen and accept their children instead of punishing and fighting with them. But also this response is a banger. Top 10 advice columnist responses of all time.”
Walking Tashkent (Uzbekistan) — I love Chris Arnade’s travelogues, served with political philosophy, discussion of why we don’t build things in American anymore and outstanding photography of ordinary street scenes,
“Trump loves Big Tech: So much for the ‘Khanservatives.'" (Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr) — The anti-big-tech wing of the Trump coalition, which included JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Matt Goetz, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, can eat shit and like it.
More US states are reporting measles cases as deadly anti-vax lies spread
Melody Schreiber / The Guardian: Measles deaths include a 6-year-old girl, whose parents appeared on a video spreading deadly anti-vaccine lies soon after her death. They appeared in a video with Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organiation previously headed by RFK Jr.
“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” said the girl’s mother, referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. “The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it,” she said of her four other children.
“It’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be,” the father said through a translator. Both parents fought back tears throughout the interview.
“The measles wasn’t that bad” — but all four of their kids got it and one died. Heartbreaking.
Every time I empty my computer bag to search for something small I feel like a cartoon character pulling out progressively more ridiculous objects: a horseshoe, concertina, capuchin monkey riding a unicycle.
Thousands of “Kennedy Files” documents posted online this this week disappointed assassination conspiracy theorists, but “historians are finding many newly revealed secrets." ( Jennifer Schuessler and Julian E. Barnes / NYTimes) — Documents reveal the pervasive influence of the CIA.
The Underlying Problem (Hamilton Nolan) — “This is happening because some people are too rich.”
The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.
And it’s not just Musk:
We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions.
What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler (Political Wire)