Volume 266 | No. 18

Mon, May 23

2012—A mentally-unstable PNSY employee sets a fire that destroys the billion-dollar U.S.S. Miami. 1976—The Washington Post reports that Rep. Wayne L. Hays’ (D-Ohio) mistress, on his payroll at $14,000 a year, admits she “can’t type…can’t file, [and] can’t even answer the phone.” 1971—President Nixon meets with the milk cartel. For a $2 million campaign contribution, he OKs a $100 million increase in the cost of milk. 1969—Drunk, homesick U.S.A.F. Sgt. Paul Meyer steals a C-130 from Mildenhall, UK and heads for Langley, Va. He crashes into the English Channel—possibly shot down. 1950—The UAW and GM sign the Treaty of Detroit. Workers get better benefits but …

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This Is Not the Culmination of the Right-Wing Legal Movement—It’s the Dawn of It

The unelected hard-right faction now in power on the Court is poised to allow the most restrictive laws possible to be applied to women’s bodies while ruling hands-off of regulating corporations whose products are harming our planet. by Lisa Graves The reactionary, right-wing legal movement powered by dark money appears to be on the brink of achieving a nearly 50-year goal of reversing Roe v. Wade. The leaked draft opinion obtained by Politico confirms the worst fears of anyone who took the reactionary right at its word: It’s simultaneously not a surprise and a punch to the gut. The most partisan Supreme Court justices in …

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Woe Is Me!

by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I have been struggling to find something worth writing about. What is the point? Nothing changes. I’ve written multiple essays about the madness of our uniquely U.S. gun culture; but Americans keep dying at the wrong end of firearms in record numbers, and in most states it’s easier to acquire and carry a firearm than it was ten years ago. I’ve written multiple essays about the need for the Democratic Party to get its collective head out of its ass and start functioning effectively to counter the insidious and pervasive evil that has become the Retrumplican Party, yet the Democrats keep …

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Judge Proves That Justice Is, In Fact, Blind
—and Dumb, Too

Superior Court Judge Andrew Schulman sentenced four climate activists on Friday, May 13th. The four had held up a train in Bow in December, 2019. To be clear, there were no horses or six-shooters involved; no looting of passengers took place. The four guilty parties just stood on the tracks and, by doing so, delayed the arrival by four and a half hours of a trainload of coal at the Merrimack Generating Station. Once it arrived, the coal was burned, generating electrical power in the process. That power was sold, generating a profit which, we presume, was distributed to shareholders—a very small fraction of the …

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Culture War Memorial Day

Memorial Day is coming pretty soon. It will be here in ten or eleven days, depending on whether you count the day itself. That’s a point one could argue either way. If we have learned anything since a Black man was elected President, it’s that people can argue about anything, and come to blows over nothing. Our seniority obliges us to keep posterity in mind when we write the news. We must imagine that some part of our readership is as yet unborn. That part comes easily enough; one might even say we were born for this.* It’s getting more and more difficult, though, to …

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