Quiet Man

Rome Hartman, a longtime 60 Minutes producer who retired last year, praised Pelley as “among the all-time greats of CBS News and of 60 Minutes”. He also called out Weiss and Bilton for terminating Pelley because he pushed back aggressively during a staff meeting, despite the anti-cancel culture positioning of Weiss’s company the Free Press. “We SHOULD wrestle over important stuff,” he wrote in a text message. “The irony is flammable!”

Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties. But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix. So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent. This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper. It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe.

In his earlier guise at “The Colbert Report,” Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to cheekily characterize lies of the Bush administration. Looking ahead to a post-“Late Show” era, whatever comes next for CBS—which was greeted Thursday by the chalk message “Thank you Stephen. And fuck you CBS and Donald Trump” outside the theater—the short term could become a case of truthiness and consequences.

Watching the Wheels: Finding Meaning and Purpose in Paterson

The outcry from the White House on Monday was the latest instance of a president who has himself made inflammatory remarks about matters of life and death defining what sort of speech he deems acceptable in America. He recently gloated over the death of Robert S. Mueller III — “Good, I’m glad he’s dead!” — and seized on the murder of Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, at the hands of their own son, to suggest that “Trump derangement syndrome” may have been responsible.

I believe that a person who has changed or rehabilitated deserves a second chance, but Swalwell is showing that it would have been a mistake for House Democrats to fend off the expulsion vote. Swalwell hasn’t taken full responsibility and spent a statement that should be about apologizing to the people he hurt, including the alleged victims, who are never mentioned, raising a complaint about due process.  Eric Swalwell is an attorney. He knows that there is no right to due process in Congress. The fact that Swalwell brought up due process suggests that he is going to go the Donald Trump route and claim that he was politically targeted and denied his rights.  Women are the majority of the Democratic Party and the backbone of the party.  Eric Swalwell showed that he is still only thinking about himself as he resigns from Congress, which is why there should be no place for Swalwell in the Democratic Party now or in the future.

Ms. Bondi herself has been a terrible spokesperson and symbol of the department — disrespectful of its honorable traditions, dismissive of critics, intolerant of dissent — and this was demonstrated most clearly with her inept handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter. After Ms. Bondi misled the country about her initial disclosures in the case, Congress responded by passing a law forcing the Justice Department to release its files on the pedophile and his allies. Ms. Bondi’s delayed, inconsistent and generally incompetent response to the law achieved the seemingly impossible goal of uniting congressional Democrats and Republicans — in disgust with her performance. (Evidently, Mr. Trump was unimpressed as well.) Still, the deeper problems with Ms. Bondi’s leadership rested at the level of policy. Under Ms. Bondi, the Justice Department had all but stopped doing its job of prosecuting crime. Case loads are way down, and so are the numbers of prosecutors — almost certainly a result of Ms. Bondi’s leadership. The main reason for these changes is that instead of charging actual criminals, Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department has remade itself as the legal auxiliary of President Trump’s disastrous immigration enforcement practices.

Trump repeats that former President Barack Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion in cash. It is a familiar line. The money belonged to the Iranian government and had been frozen for decades in the U.S. He then rips anew into the Obama-era nuclear deal, which he pulled out of in 2018. But he never mentioned that as part of the deal, Obama got 97 percent of Iran’s nuclear stockpile out of the country, something Trump has not yet accomplished.

Trump is now caught in the oldest trap of modern warfare – believing a swift, surgical military operation will yield quick, enduring political results. The Soviets did it in Afghanistan; the US in Iraq in 2003; Putin did it in Ukraine, and is still fighting. Whatever force a military fails or succeeds in applying at the start, the people it is attacking have greater commitment to defending their lands and homes.

When a commander tells subordinates that a war may be part of God’s plan, he or she is not merely offering a private meditation on theology. That commander is speaking from a position of authority in which disagreement carries professional risk. The devout Christian may nod along happily. The Jew, the Muslim, the atheist, or the merely skeptical may feel rather less enthusiastic about joining a campaign framed as a step toward the Rapture.

While President Trump recited a litany of Iranian attacks on American interests back to the hostage crisis during the Carter administration, he made little effort to argue that any immediate threat had prompted the latest U.S. and Israeli strikes. He repeated the allegation he made in the State of the Union address that Iran was working on missiles that could soon reach the United States, but the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded, in a 2025 report, that no decision had been made by the Iranian government to pursue an intercontinental ballistic missile. While Trump repeated that Iran could never be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons, he did not attempt to make the case that Iran was closer to producing one.