Well, here is the logical result of decades of media consolidation, where corporate greed slams into journalistic independence. CBS News entered a new period of turmoil yesterday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said that he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence. Via the New York Times:
In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.
“60 Minutes” has faced mounting pressure in recent months from both President Trump, who sued CBS for $10 billion and has accused the program of “unlawful and illegal behavior,” and its own corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS News.
Now, you knew this had something to do with Trump, right?
Bob Kennedy announced he will be using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States. Seems like the surveillance state is here! Is this legal? Via The New Republic:
The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases to give to the secretary of health and human services, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said Monday. The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.
The NIH is also working on an agreement to secure Medicare and Medicaid data, according to Bhattacharya, who said that select outside researchers will be able to access and study, but not download, the collected data from the registry.
Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals under his tenure. The department’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a study to examine links between autism and vaccines, even though medical experts have long debunked any such connection.
It never fails - Republicans vote against a social service program (food, healthcare, disaster relief) because they think it's only greedy blue states that ask for "handouts" when in actuality it is the blue states that subsidize the red states disproportionately and red states (ie, Trump voters) that rely on these programs almost entirely.
In today's FAFO: Tom Cotton, blowhard Senator from Arkansas, who voted against disaster relief five times is now begging Donald Trump to "reconsider" his denial of disaster relief for Arkansas after his very red Trump-supporting state was hit with damaging tornados.
You know who would not have cut off FEMA funding? Kamala Harris. Even for deep red states.
But I digress.
Cotton joined the rest of the Arkansas elected officials in writing a groveling letter to Trump begging for that sweet, sweet gubmint money.
Trump has refused to budge. The letter from the government said:
"Based on our review of all of the information available, it has been determined that the damage from this event was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies. Accordingly, we have determined that supplemental federal assistance is not necessary."
Poor Chuck Grassley. The man survived The Spanish American War, The Palmer Raids, trench warfare, Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and the invention of indoor plumbing—but he may not survive the MAGA mob he helped create. Feels like all these once-sorta-respectable Republicans who whored out for MAGA should have re-read Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" in recent years.
At a town hall that looked less civic engagement and more an exorcism gone haywire, Grassley got torched by at-least-some-formerly-Trump-loving constituents furious over the kidnapping of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man dumped in El Salvador, thanks to Trump’s no-due-process death pact with the local tyrant, President Bukele. Turns out, even red-hat loyalists don’t love it when innocent Americans get shipped to concentration camps to live among murderous gangs. Especially when it's just b/c Chuck bows to Trump, who's playing footsie with autocrats for fake “immigration policy.”
As Grassley stood there blinking like someone just asked him to explain TikTok, it all became painfully clear. The MAGA beast Chuck fed, housed and protected is now eating him--and many other soulless sellouts of the GOP--alive. Not even that folksy Iowa drawl or the fact he's a barely sentient being at this point can save him from the blowback of backing a fascist.
Fox business analyst Charles Gasparino said that JD Vance is now going to be an executor, (with a gun?) negotiating trade deals with our foreign partners after the markets crashed again on Monday.
The White House is doing damage control to curtail the stock market collapse for at least for a few days. The A.I. Press bot claimed a deal with China may be imminent and "Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he expects “there will be a de-escalation” in President Donald Trump’s trade war with China in the “very near future.”
.
The inclusion of JD Vance is beyond the pale in this disgusting MAGA soup of dreck.
Gasparino admitted Trump is scrambling to put together deals.
Any deal to stop the destruction of the US economy.
GASPARINO: Here's what we know, and this is from my sources close to the White House, people inside the White House.
What they're saying is simply this. They are scrambling to do deals.
They would like to do a deal with China, OK? However, those talks are, you know, I think some of the press on this that it's a deal is imminent.
You saw some of that way overblown. This has to do with China, from what I understand, coming to the table and negotiating as well. So there's a lot riding on China's participation.
Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out!
Dennis the Menace, 4/23/25
Dennis, while you’re distracting your father with these inane questions, Mr. Wilson has gotten the jump on him: look at him, he’s already sound asleep! Another total Wilson victory unfolds while the Mitchells pointlessly contemplate hypotheticals! It’s unclear if Mr. Wilson has dozed off because the company is boring or if “mini-chess” played on 5×5 board simply can’t hold his interest, but either way he’s come out on top, by losing consciousness so he doesn’t have to listen or talk to you anymore.
Gil Thorp, 4/23/25
Uh oh, is Gil’s son Jami using his “shining” powers to recognize that Gil is slowly become one with the ghost “Pops”, or that perhaps he’s always been Pops, in a “time is a flat circle but you come out taller at the other end somehow” situation? More on this story as it develops, but if it doesn’t develop, don’t blame me, I’m not a ghost expert.
Probably born in 1813 in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Smith was a mixed race man. His mother was part Black and part Native and his father was white. He grew up in Philadelphia and educated in Quaker schools. He moved to Boston in 1836 and got a job as a headwaiter in a hotel. This hotel, the Mount Washington House, happened to be the favorite hangout of Charles Sumner and his allies, such as John Fatal. It was a place where you could be in mixed race company fairly openly, as it was when the Black Fatal was with the white Sumner. They started talking to Smith and he was interested in everything going on and he became a quick convert to the abolitionist cause.
Smith made his own small fortune with a very successful catering company, often working Harvard events. He became a pretty important figure in the Boston abolitionist community. It’s always worth noting that Boston wasn’t nearly as much of an abolitionist city as it gets made out to be in popular memory. It’s true that it was the home of American abolitionism, along with places such as New Bedford and Rochester, but these people were still a small minority of the population. After all, William Lloyd Garrison, who was also a friend of Smith, had to be jailed on night in Boston–to prevent his lynching by other Boston residents sick of hearing his rants against slavery. So it might have been safer to be an abolitionist in Boston than other places, but that’s not the same as it being a comfortable place.
Anyway, Smith was involved in all the Boston anti-slavery activities. That included his home being an active stop on the Underground Railroad, which was necessary after 1850 due to the Fugitive Slave Act meaning that just being in the North was no longer safe for escaped slaves. If they needed to earn money, he would employ them in the catering business. If they needed money for a fast escape, he would give it to them. He very much believed in the use of violence in opposing slavery and carried around a gun and knife that he would brandish during speeches to prove the point. I am sure liberal nonviolence fetishists would condemn him today for such actions. But no one was taking a slave back to slavery if he could help it and that included killing to prevent it. Slaveowners knew this too and that’s why Boston became a no-go zone for slave catchers after the first mass resistance to them appeared, which Smith was involved in. Smith for instance was asked to provide catering for the soldiers there to bring the captured slave Anthony Burns back to the South. He flat out refused to feed slavers.
Smith stated in one speech:
If liberty is not worth fighting for, it is not worth having. He advised every fugitive to arm himself with a revolver – if he could not buy one otherwise, to sell his coat for that purpose. As for himself, and he thus exhorted others, he should be kind and courteous to all, even the slave-dealer, until the moment of an attack upon his liberty. He would not be taken ALIVE, but upon the slave-catcher’s head be the consequences. When he could not live here in Boston, a FREEMAN, in the language of Socrates, ‘He had lived long enough.’ Mr. Smith, in conclusion, made a demonstration of one mode of defence, which those who best know him say would be exemplified to the hilt.
Now, Smith’s catering business plunged at the beginning of the Civil War when, for reasons that are unclear to me, Governor John Andrew refused to reimburse him for his services to the 12th Massachusetts Regiment, who he had cooked for over a three month period. I don’t know if there was an issue of preapproval here or what. But the state did not reimburse, Smith took on massive debt, and he never got out of poverty again. That’s sad. He still had some relations with Andrew too. Andrew was still governor at the end of the war and Smith was part of the group leading the call to create a memorial for Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts. It took a long time to make this happen but of course Augustus Saint-Gaudens finally got the commission and completed one of the great iconic pieces of American public art in 1897. If you’ve never seen it on Boston Common, make sure you do so the next time you are in Boston.
Smith also became the rare Black lawmaker, even in Massachusetts, serving one term in the state legislature in the mid-1870s. He got sick pretty quick after that though. He did play an advisory role on the issues that created the Civil Rights Act of 1875, working with Sumner on it. But of course the Supreme Court would soon eviscerate that superb law. However, Smith did not live to see that. He died in 1879, at the age of 66.
Joshua Bowen Smith is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
If you would like this series visit other abolitionists, you can donate to covered the required expenses here. James Sheppard Pike is in Philadelphia and William Still is in Collingdale, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
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