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The Evening Blues - 5-18-26

Submitted by joe shikspack on Mon, 05/18/2026 - 3:12pm


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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Lizzie Miles

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Creole blues singer Lizzie Miles. Enjoy!

Lizzie Miles w Kid Ory Band - Eh Là-bas

"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."

-- W. H. Auden

News and Opinion

When Killing Becomes Commonplace

Last week, when the Pentagon resumed its attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, the media barely noticed. The U.S. military has now destroyed 56 vessels and killed 190 persons. The killings began in September 2025 and have continued to this month. The attacks caused a stir a few months ago when one of the strikes disabled the boat at which the attack was aimed but failed to kill all the passengers. When a follow-up strike was ordered, it succeeded where the initial strike had failed.

The admiral who ordered the murder of the survivors told members of Congress in secret that he believed he was following orders. The secretary of defense denied that he ordered the survivors to be killed. Killing survivors is expressly prohibited by federal law as well as by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And, of course, ordering the killing of innocents is always unlawful. So, the Pentagon made two changes. It produced more lethal strikes so as not to be burdened with the problem of survivors, and it either stopped killing survivors or stopped revealing that it killed them.

The Navy rescued two survivors whom it failed to kill. But the Navy didn’t know what to do with them, so its legal team asked Department of Justice lawyers for guidance. They asked the DoD what evidence of crimes it had on these fishermen, whereupon the DoD was unable to provide an answer that would rise to the level of probable cause — the legal standard for charging and detaining anyone. At that point, the DoJ told the DoD to return these would-be victims to their home countries.

In 56 attacks, and one follow-up attack, only three persons survived. Two of them have hired American lawyers and have served notice of their intention to sue the federal government for its attempted murder of them.

A government is illicit when it violates the very laws it enforces. When the government breaks its own laws, it invites others to do so. When it kills innocents, it invites others to do so. It is always immoral and criminal for anyone intentionally to extinguish innocent human life. And now, President Donald Trump’s ordered killings are so commonplace, there is little coverage and less outrage. But we will see both when the killings come home.

US Sets Up Cuba INVASION: Claims DRONE THREAT To Key West

US Officials Work on Creating Pretexts To Attack Cuba

US officials are working to create pretexts for a potential war on Cuba, as President Trump has made clear that the island nation is in his administration’s crosshairs.

Late last week, US media outlets reported that the Department of Justice is taking steps to indict former Cuban President Raúl Castro, the brother of long-time leader Fidel Castro.

The reports said that the US may indict him over the downing of a plane belonging to a Cuban exile organization in 1996, which killed four people. The potential indictment comes as President Trump is overseeing a bombing campaign against alleged drug-running boats in the region, which has killed nearly 200 people, who were all civilians.

If the US indicts Castro, the administration could follow a similar playbook as it did with the attack on Venezuela, which was carried out to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Scott Ritter : The US Will Never Learn

Trump Admin Claims of Cuban Plans for Drone Attacks Denounced as ‘Ludicrous Pretext’ for War

Cuban officials said the Trump administration is making “increasingly implausible accusations” against the country as it pushes to justify, “without any excuse, a military attack against Cuba,” after an unnamed White House official told the news outlet Axios that the Cubans have been “discussing plans” to launch drones against the US.

“Cuba is the country under attack,” said the Cuban embassy in a statement, months into a ramped-up oil blockade by the US that has left the island’s electric grid in a “critical state” and forced frequent rolling blackouts as well as causing a healthcare crisis, with tens of thousands of people waiting for surgeries.

But in Axios’ article, the Trump administration official took pains to push the notion that the US, with its nearly $1 trillion-per-year military, could face attacks from the tiny Caribbean nation 90 miles south of Florida because officials there have been preparing defensive capabilities.

Axios reported that, according to classified intelligence it viewed, Cuba has acquired more than 300 drones and has been considering plans to attack the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, various US military vessels, and Key West, Florida.

The country has been acquiring drones from Russia and Iran since 2023 and has sought more aid from Russia in recent months, according to the report. Intelligence intercepts have also shown Cuba is “trying to learn about how Iran has resisted us,” the official said, referring to Iran’s use of unmanned aircraft, its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and its attacks on US military outposts in the Middle East in response to the US-Israel war on the country that began in February.

The Cuban embassy further responded with a reminder that “like any country, Cuba has the right to defend itself against external aggression.”


“Those from the US who seek the submission and, in fact, the destruction of the Cuban nation through military aggression and war, do not waste a single moment fabricating pretexts, creating and spreading falsehoods, and distorting as extraordinary the logical preparation required to face a potential aggression,” said the embassy.

Journalist José Luis Granados Ceja, who is based in Mexico City and covers Latin America for Drop Site News, emphasized that “Cuba has the right to self-defense.”

“It would be arguably be wise for Cuba to incorporate a tool that has proven to be an extraordinary effective weapon and a powerful tool of dissuasion as part of its self-defense strategy,” said Granados Ceja.

Axios said the classified intelligence “could become a pretext for US military action” that President Donald Trump has expressed an interest in taking numerous times, before acknowledging toward the end of the article that “US officials don’t believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests.”

Rather, the intelligence showed that Cuban officials “have been discussing drone warfare plans in case hostilities erupt as relations with the US continue to deteriorate”—suggesting they could use drones in self-defense if attacked by the US.


The reporting carried echoes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s rationale for attacking Iran in February. He stunned legal experts days after the war began by explaining that the US had decided to wage war on the Middle Eastern country because it feared Iran would retaliate after Israel began attacking it.

“The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us,” Rubio said.

The claim that Cuba’s reported preparations make the island a threat to US security “is a lie—with purpose,” said David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International.

“Marco Rubio and his stenographers at Axios are manufacturing consent for the invasion of Cuba,” said Adler. “To fall for this flimsy propaganda is to fail the most basic test of civic literacy. And the stakes are millions of Cuban lives off our coast.”


Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long sought regime change in the socialist country.

Axios’ reporting came days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba to pressure officials into complying with US demands, likely including political and economic reforms, heightening fears that the US could be planning a military attack unless the country complies.

White House officials also told CBS News Friday that the Department of Justice is preparing to criminally indict former Cuban President Raúl Castro for shooting down planes that belonged to a US group that had flown into Cuba’s airspace in the 1990s. In January, US forces invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro, bringing him to the US where he was charged with drug trafficking, and pleaded not guilty.

Former Obama administration staffer and Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor said Sunday that “lots of signals pointing towards an imminent US regime change operation against Cuba.”

“The latest,” he said of the Axios article, “is this blatant effort to launder a pretext for war through the media.”

John Mearsheimer: Toward All-Out War With Both Russia & Iran

Cuban Envoy Draws ‘Red Lines’ Amid Specter of US Invasion and DOJ Targeting Castro Like Maduro

Cuba’s top diplomat in the United States on Friday underscored the inviolability of her country’s sovereignty amid tenuous negotiations with the Trump administration and mounting fears that the US is planning to criminally indict a former Cuban president and possibly invade the island to abduct him.

Cuban Chargé d’Affaires Lianys Torres Rivera told The Hill that her country’s socialist government is open to negotiating with the US, but that “the only exception is our sovereignty, independence, and right to self-determination,” adding that “those are the red lines.”

Torres Rivera acknowledged that ramped-up US pressure—including President Donald Trump’s invasion threats and tightening of the internationally condemned 65-year economic embargo—is inflicting tremendous suffering on the Cuban people.

“It’s difficult. What the Cuban people are enduring these days is difficult,” she said. “They are under a collective punishment from the US.”

The Cuban government said Thursday that Trump’s oil blockade has left the island and its 11 million people without fuel—a situation United Nations experts last week described as illegal “energy starvation.”

“We have reorganized the whole country, the healthcare system, the education system, the transportation system, to keep the basic services running,” Torres Rivera told The Hill. “But it doesn’t mean that they are running normally. They are running under huge stress.”

Still, “a serious country that respects yourself... won’t put on the table your political system or your internal order that the people of our country decide in a sovereign way,” she stressed.

The delicate balancing act Cuba is being forced to perform was on stark display on Thursday as Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana for talks aimed at pressuring Cuban officials into complying with demands that critics say would inrfinge upon the nation’s sovereignty. These likely include political and economic reforms, releasing political prisoners, and ending or weakening Cuba’s alliances with US adversaries including China, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.

It was a bitter pill to swallow for Cubans, as the CIA was behind myriad efforts to topple their government, from assassination attempts against revolutionary leader Fidel Castro to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to supporting Cuban exile terrorists who carried out deadly attacks that Havana says killed thousands of people.

Further stoking fears of aggression from the Trump administration,r unidentified US officials told CBS News that the Department of Justice is preparing to criminally indict 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro for the 1996 shoot-down of planes belonging to the subversive US-based group Brothers to the Rescue after they violated Cuban airspace.

Some observers noted the 1976 midair bombing by US-based anti-Castro militants of Cubana de Aviacion Flight 455, a commercial airliner carrying 73 passengers and crew. The CIA, under then-Director George H.W. Bush, knew that Cuban exiles were plotting to blow up a Cubana plane, but did not warn Havana. The perpetrators of the bombing eventually made their way back to Florida, where they were welcomed as heroes.

Others surmised that the reported planned indictment is a pretext for a US invasion and arrest of Castro similar to January’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on dubious—and partially retracted—narco-terrorism allegations.Thirty-two Cubans, including

military and police officers providing security for Maduro, were killed by US forces during the abduction operation.

“To me, this signals that the Pirate State could be planning another kidnapping operation against Cuba like they did in Venezuela,” British journalist Richard Medhurst said in response to the reporting, referring to the US. “This is the lawless behavior they want to normalize around the world.”

ACLU head of digital engagement Stefan Smith said on social media: “Remember Maduro and Venezuela? If you’re a foreign leader indicted in American courts, we claim the right to send the military to kidnap you. Indictment is permission to invade.”


Following his visit to Cuba, Ratcliffe said that negotiations “will not stay open indefinitely,” remarks that followed numerous threats by Trump to “take” Cuba.

“Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want,” the president said in March as his fuel embargo caused blackouts that brought deadly suffering to the most vulnerable Cubans, including sick people and children.

Torres Rivera insisted that protests over the blackouts don’t mean Cubans won’t rally in defense of their homeland.

“When they are enduring 20 hours of blackouts, they have grievances, and they express it,” she told The Hill, cautioning US officials against a “wrong reading” of the demonstrations.

“We are preparing to defend ourselves,” Torres Rivera said, adding that a US invasion “could be a big mistake. It could be a bloodbath.”

“We don’t want Cubans dying in Cuba,” she stressed, nor “any American soldier.”

EU Split on Russia Talks; Russia Conducts Huge Ukraine Strike Reports New Weapon Hits Dnipro; Iran

Alastair Crooke : Israel's War Unraveling America

UAE blames Iran or its proxies for drone strike fire near nuclear plant

The United Arab Emirates has blamed a fire near its nuclear power plant on a drone launched by Iran or one of its proxies in what the UAE called a “dangerous escalation”. The fire was just outside the Barakah nuclear plant and caused no injuries or radiation alerts, with the emirate’s nuclear regulator saying there was no radioactive leak or risk to the public.

But it came at an extremely tense moment in the sixth week of a ceasefire in the Iran war, with peace talks stalled and Donald Trump voicing impatience at the deadlock. “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!” the US president wrote on his Truth Social site. According to Axios, Trump met national security advisers on Saturday at his golf course in Virginia and is due to meet his national security team on Tuesday to discuss options.

Trump also spoke to Benjamin Netanyahu before an Israeli security cabinet meeting to discuss Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, amid widespread speculation in Israel that the Iran war will restart in the absence of signs of compromise.

The UAE’s defence ministry said the drone that targeted the Barakah plant was one of three that “entered the country from the western border direction”. It said the unmanned aircraft had hit “an electrical generator outside the inner perimeter of the Barakah nuclear power plant in the Al Dhafra area”.

“Investigations are ongoing to determine the source of the attacks, and updates will be disclosed upon completion of the investigations,” the ministry added. Anwar Gargash, an Emirati presidential adviser, made clear that he believed Iran or a regional proxy were the perpetrators.

‘Clock Is Ticking’: Trump Again Threatens To Restart Bombing Campaign Against Iran

President Trump on Sunday repeated his threat to restart the bombing campaign against Iran if the country doesn’t accept his demands for a deal.

The president told Axios reporter Barak Ravid that the “clock is ticking” and that if a deal isn’t reached soon, the Islamic Republic is “going to get hit much harder,” a threat he reiterated in a post on Truth Social.

“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!” the president wrote.

Trump also discussed the situation with Iran during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who convened a meeting of his security cabinet afterward. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have been clear that they’re eager to restart the full-scale bombing campaign.


The word "ceasefire" is becoming increasingly meaningless thanks to our Israeli "allies."

Lebanon Roadside Bomb Wounds 4 Israeli Troops as War Continues to Escalate

The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire may have been extended this weekend, but that doesn’t mean fire has in any way ceased, nor indeed that the ongoing Israeli invasion of Lebanon isn’t moving ever deeper into the country. In the first day since the extension was announced, Israeli troops killed at least 18 Lebanese and wounded 124 others. This included an attack on a medical center which killed multiple paramedics.

Israel issued yet more evacuations for villages in southern Lebanon today, and officials announced their intention to advance deeper into southern Lebanon, citing the threats posed to troops occupying the southern south of Lebanon if they didn’t occupy the slightly further north parts of southern Lebanon.

Overnight, four Israeli soldiers were reported wounded in a roadside bomb in southern Lebanon, one seriously so. The IDF said the soldiers were successfully evacuated to a hospital, and that they’re unclear if Hezbollah planted the bomb recently, or at some point before the various ceasefires.

Larry Johnson: Giant Mushroom Cloud Blasts Over Israeli Defense Company – What We Know

Winning? Republicans support a war that's pummeling ‘Main Street’

If you ask President Donald Trump, he is winning the Iran war, implementing a “comprehensive plan to end the Gaza conflict,” and making serious progress on ending the war in Ukraine. So much winning — on Main Street, in the Persian Gulf, and everywhere else. But pollsters will tell you that Americans are largely against the war in Iran and feel the president hasn’t really explained why the U.S. is there. Moreover, 60% now have an unfavorable view of our “iron clad” relations with Israel, and a majority have low trust in Trump’s decision-making regarding Ukraine and Russia.

These are negatives that could obviously affect his party in the approaching midterm elections. Wary of these problems, Republicans are rushing to try and look attentive to affordability problems exacerbated by America’s war in the Persian Gulf. But they’re still not touching the war itself with a ten foot pole. Not exactly a recipe for political success.

Case in point: Trump and Republicans are pushing for a federal gas tax holiday that they hope will give travelers some relief from skyrocketing gas prices, though experts are doubtful it will. Meanwhile, President Trump wants Republicans on Capitol Hill to get behind a housing affordability bill that was passed by the Senate in March and that he would like the House to now approve, despite pushback from Democrats and some in his own party. Republicans also hope to pass a massive agriculture spending bill that will ease pressure on American farmers.

Yet this president, his vice president, and their party refuse to publicly acknowledge the root of these problems, namely, the combination of the war in Iran knocking out oil and gas infrastructure and the supply chain blockages caused by the Hormuz Strait closure. Instead of serving their constituents and facing reality, Republican members are flailing. Not wanting to fall into the president’s crosshairs by asserting their war powers and demanding he declare war or get out (Republicans have stopped every single resolution from passing in that regard), they make excuses and deliver White House talking points.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) says that, thanks to Republicans' tax cuts, we will have “a golden age for Main Street.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) insists that those tax cut benefits in the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed last year will be kicking in at any moment. Unfortunately for them, the midterms are less than six months away.

Trump BLASTS His Own Voters Who Say Economy Is Worse

Trump’s trade commission is using fear to silence dissent

Is there something “radically left” about being anti-Nazi? That was the question a judge put to the lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, which has no good answer. This week, the FTC abruptly settled its case with Media Matters for America, a media watchdog the FTC had been investigating over its reports about pro-Nazi content running alongside ads on X. Those reports drove advertisers off the platform and prompted X owner Elon Musk to threaten a “thermonuclear lawsuit”.

Four months after Andrew Ferguson took the FTC helm, having explicitly vowed before his appointment to stand up to “the radical left”, his agency sought communications records from Media Matters. Ferguson described his agency’s logic at an antitrust conference in April 2025, noting that his investigative tools are “expensive when applied to you even if we don’t win at the end of the day, so knuckle under”. This is not a description of law enforcement but rather a textbook definition of lawfare at its finest.

The FTC does not have a mandate to investigate first amendment disputes like this one. Nor do state attorneys general. Yet Ken Paxton of Texas and Andrew Bailey of Missouri also launched fraud investigations into Media Matters after pressure from Stephen Miller, now deputy White House chief of staff. The courts ultimately forced the FTC and the attorneys general to retreat. But the investigations were still wildly successful. Why? Because the point was never necessarily to win in court. The point was to chill speech, drain resources and make opposition painfully expensive.

Meanwhile, Musk’s X followed through on its threats, filing antitrust lawsuits against both Media Matters and the advertisers that fled the platform. One of Musk’s principal targets was the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or Garm, a coalition created after the livestreamed massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, to help advertisers avoid placing ads next to extremist content such as the pro-Nazi material documented on X. A federal judge in Texas dismissed Musk’s lawsuit earlier this year, finding that advertisers had simply exercised independent business judgment in deciding not to advertise on X. But by then the damage was already done. Garm’s dissolution was announced in August 2024, days after the lawsuit was filed, under the weight of the legal assault. Victory in court came too late to prevent the chilling effect.

What is happening here is bigger than any single lawsuit or merger review. It is the emergence of a system in which oligarchs and the state work together to discipline critics, reward loyalists, and reshape the media environment to serve those in power.

Lauren Boebert suggests Trump withheld funds to Colorado over prosecution of election denier

Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert suggested that Donald Trump blocked funds for a clean drinking water project in her state over the prosecution of election denier Tina Peters.

Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, commuted Peters’ nearly nine-year prison sentence on Friday, ordering her release on 1 June. The former Colorado county clerk had allowed unauthorized people to access voting records amid efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Boebert welcomed the commutation the same day, taking some credit, but giving even more to Trump. “I’m proud of the relentless pressure my office and I applied, working hand-in-hand with President Donald Trump, to highlight Tina’s case and demand fairness,” the congresswoman wrote. “This outcome would not have been possible without the continued pressure and advocacy from President Trump who always knew Tina deserved fairness under the law.”

In comments to 9News Denver on Friday, Boebert also said that she hoped the release of Peters would convince Trump to stop blocking funds for a federal project to bring clean drinking water to Colorado. “We were told that Tina was the reason we couldn’t get water,” Boebert said, an apparent reference to Trump exerting on Colorado’s governor the same kind of pressure he put on Ukraine’s president in 2019, when he withheld congressionally mandated military aid to try to force Ukraine to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden. Trump was impeached for that scheme in 2019.

The ONLY WAY We Can Take Government Back From Billionaires & Zionists! w/ Larry Johnson


the horse race


Thomas Massie RIPS Pro-Israel Billionaires Ahead Of Tight Primary

Trump attacks Massie as Republican critic describes ‘desperate’ attempts to oust him from primary

With two days to go before the next big test of Donald Trump’s iron grip over his party, the president went head-to-head on Sunday with his nemesis, Thomas Massie the Kentucky congressman who is in a fight for his political life in Tuesday’s Republican primary.

Over an eight-hour period starting in the early hours of Sunday, Trump took to his bully pulpit on Truth Social to taunt Massie, one of very few senior Republicans who has dared to defy him. Massie is the “worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman in the history of our Country”, the rant began, followed by a mid-morning exhortation to Kentucky voters to “vote the bum out on Tuesday”.

Massie has been a consistent thorn in Trump’s side, voting against his signature tax and spending cuts bill, helping to force the justice department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, and insisting on congressional oversight over the military actions in Venezuela and Iran. Now he faces a bruising primary against his Trump-endorsed challenger, Ed Gallrein.

Undeterred by Trump’s lurid attacks, Massie put on a brave face on the Sunday political show This Week on ABC News. “I’m the only one they haven’t been able to bully,” he said, adding: “I’m ahead in the polls, and they’re desperate … That’s why the president’s losing sleep and tweeting about this.”

Massie insisted on CNN that he was buoyed up by the support of anti-abortion and gun rights groups in the state, and by millions of dollars in donations from grassroots voters. By contrast, he blamed super-wealthy donors including Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer and what he called the “Israeli lobby” for bombarding Kentucky with money to unseat him.

Republican Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy loses primary after Trump intervenes to oust him

The Republican senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary on Saturday, as voters in Louisiana opted instead to advance two challengers to a runoff election after an extraordinary intervention by Donald Trump to oust the incumbent.

Cassidy’s bid to win the Republican party’s nomination for a third term in the deep-red state was imperiled by his decision to vote in favor of Trump’s conviction after the January 6 insurrection. In what was widely seen as an effort to rehabilitate his standing with the president, Cassidy last year cast the deciding vote to advance vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, flying in the face of the senator’s support for immunizations and training as a physician.

Earlier this year, Trump encouraged the US representative Julia Letlow to enter the Senate race, and offered his endorsement in a bid to unseat Cassidy that now has paid off. Trump lambasted Cassidy on Saturday morning, calling him “a disloyal disaster” and “a terrible guy” on social media. Trump criticized the senator’s impeachment vote and said “he’s going to get CLOBBERED”, adding that Letlow was “a winner who will NEVER let you down”.

With 98% of the vote counted, the Associated Press reported that Letlow received 45.2% of the vote in the primary, against John Fleming, the state treasurer and former US representative, who received 28.3%. Cassidy came third with 24.4%. The race now heads to a runoff scheduled for 27 June.

Establishment Attempts to Paint Platner as ‘Rich Kid,’ Ignoring ‘Ultra Wealthy’ Susan Collins’ Millions

In an extensive New York Times profile and interview published Friday and Saturday, the newspaper dug into what it called US Senate candidate Graham Platner’s “complex class story” and asked how he can consider himself part of the “working class” considering his relatively privileged background.

The presumptive Democratic Maine candidate scoffed at the line of questioning as he pointed to the wide gap between his financial situation and that of people who have questioned his authenticity—as well as that of his opponent, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

“I get a chuckle out of the fact that a lot of folks in this political system who come from incredible amounts of privilege and wealth are the first ones to be like, ‘Are you really
working class? You’re just out there not making a lot of money and working on the ocean, but your dad was a small-town attorney,’” Platner told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the Times’ podcast The Interview. “Does that mean that you can’t actually represent working people?”

As the Times reported Friday, Platner is “the son of a Dartmouth College-educated lawyer, the grandson of a famed Connecticut architect, and a graduate of a private high school,” with a mother who owns an “upscale restaurant.” His family and his in-laws contributed financial help when Platner and his wife purchased their home and when they pursued in-vitro fertilization in Norway, having found the treatment unaffordable under the United States’ for-profit healthcare system.

Platner, who is a first-time political candidate and a Marine combat veteran, owns an oyster farm, and according to his financial disclosure forms, the Times reported, “The bulk of his income appears to come from the nearly $60,000 in tax-free disability benefits he qualifies for each year after serving four combat tours.”

The Times noted that both Republicans and Democrats who had supported Platner’s primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, have attacked him over his background and suggested he is wealthier than he lets on.

One Mills supporter, former Maine Democratic Party chair and corporate lobbyist Tony Buxton, was quoted as saying, “This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence.” Buxton is with the firm Preti Flaherty, which represents a company that aims to build a data center in Maine; Platner supports a nationwide moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers.

Contrary to Buxton’s remarks, according to financial disclosures, Platner would be the fifth-least wealthy US senator should he be elected in November. His and his wife’s combined net worth is below $100,000.


Ryan Grim, co-founder of Drop Site News, wondered whether the Times would ever send “three reporters to report on the kind of life Susan Collins has lived versus Graham Platner the last 20 years.”

“Tally the private planes, very nice restaurants, millions in wealth accumulation, and stack them next to each other and compare,” he suggested. “That would be balanced.”

According to Collins’ financial disclosures, the five-term Republican senator’s current net worth is $9.6 million, with up to $1.8 million directly in the bank last year. More than $342,000 of her wealth comes from interest and dividends from one of the best-performing stock portfolios in the Senate—a portfolio that is in her husband’s name, a spokesperson told the Times.

Collins has opposed a ban on stock trading for members of Congress and their spouses.

The senator’s financial disclosures also show that the $4.8 million she holds in corporate stocks include Amazon, United Health, and Visa—a company that would directly benefit from Collins’ vote this past week against protecting consumers from overdraft fees.

While the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s (NRSC) recently asserted that Platner is an “out-of-touch rich kid,” the Democrat’s campaign told the Times that his Republican opponent is “ultra wealthy.”

“I don’t think you could come up with a better avatar for the long-serving, self-enriching establishment politician than Susan Collins, who raises an immense amount of money outside of the state of Maine,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “She takes an immense amount of money from [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. She takes an immense amount of money from special interest groups and fossil fuel companies, and she has a very high-performing stock portfolio. I think a lot of people look at that in Maine and say, ‘I don’t think that that is actually the politics I want representing me.”

Despite the NRSC’s attack on Platner as a “rich kid,” polls and data suggest that many of the 41-year-old candidate’s peers can relate to his personal financial background, with millennials reporting in numerous surveys that their lives are more financially precarious than their parents’ were at their age, due to rising costs and debt.

“It’s a lot harder for young people today to save up for markers of the American Dream than it was for previous generations,” Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, told CNBC last year.

According to the Times and his detractors in the political establishment, wrote Maine-based writer Andy O’Brien, “Graham is this privileged rich kid, but he needs help paying for healthcare and housing. How is that not relatable?”

“I’ve been to a number of Platner’s town halls and one of the most common themes are older Mainers talking about the lack of economic opportunities for their adult children and grandchildren,” O’Brien wrote. “Many of these young people are still living at home, even though they have jobs, because they can’t afford to rent or buy a home in Maine. Many of them struggle without affordable healthcare and childcare to allow them to work. At a recent town hall in Appleton, a local teacher told Platner that she had been teaching for 30 years in the area and still had $100,000 in student loan debt that kept compounding interest.”

The Times reporters appeared taken aback by Platner’s definition of “working class,” one that the newspaper called “an expansive interpretation.”

“My definition of working class these days is essentially anybody who makes money from wages,” he told the Times. “If you work for a living and you go out and put in hours and you pay taxes just like everyone else, I think that’s quite fair.”

He alluded to his exchange with the reporters in a conversation with The Lever’s David Sirota before the articles came out.

While his grandfather was a successful architect, he suggested, the family’s financial prosperity hasn’t been carried down through subsequent generations.

“My mom is still working because she has no money,” he said. “And we’re trying to figure out, quite frankly, if she can’t sell her restaurant, she’s got no retirement. My wife and I, we’re not broke, but there’s no money at the end of the month.”

“You could make $25 million a year in this country, you are way closer to somebody living in poverty than any of the billionaires,” he told Sirota. “And these New York Times reporters were like, ‘Well, that’s a really expansive vision of ‘working class.’ I’m like, ‘You know what else is expansive? Wealth inequality.’ Because all of us don’t own anything, and a couple people own damn near everything.”


To Garcia-Navarro, he said: “You are working class if you make your money from work and wages. The world of wealth disparity has become so intense that there are just so many people now who are sitting on so much money who do not work. They make money off their investments. They make money off their wealth.”

“I know it’s an expansive definition of ‘working class,’” he added, “but I think you need to have an expansive definition when we have the most expansive margin of wealth inequality in the history of the country.”

‘They may draw racist maps, but we are the south’: thousands rally in Alabama for Black voting rights

Thousands of people from across the country descended on Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, on Saturday. They arrived by bus, by car and by plane to gather for the All Roads Lead to the South rally, following the supreme court’s Louisiana v Callais decision last month, which essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act and severely limited protections against voting discrimination.

Organized by a coalition of national and local civic engagement groups, the rally took place outside the Alabama state capitol building, in the same plaza where the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches – three nonviolent demonstrations in support of Black voting rights – are enshrined.

“We’re here, Montgomery, not at a stopping point, but at a starting point,” Steven L Reed, mayor of Montgomery and the first Black person to hold the position, told the crowd. “We’re here in this city because of the spirit, because of the courage and because of the commitment of our forefathers and foremothers who got us to this point.”

“We need to fight with all we got,” said Charlane Oliver, a Tennessee state senator who protested the state’s redistricting by standing on her desk last week. “They may draw some racist maps, but we are the south, this is our south. The south belongs to us. The south got something to say, and we gon’ speak real loud and clear in November.”

Throughout the event, spontaneous chants of “vote, vote, vote” emerged from the audience. For many attendees, being at the rally was personal. Their family members fought for voting rights. Now, they said, it’s up to them to take up the banner.


the evening greens

Experts sound alarm as North America’s bees start swarm season unusually early

After a series of record-breaking US heatwaves, the 2026 bee swarm season in North America has started 17 days earlier than last year, pushing beekeepers to adapt to a rapidly shifting season while raising new questions about how honeybees are responding to the climate crisis. According to a new report published by Swarmed, a tracking network of more than 10,000 beekeepers, focused on safe and ethical honeybee relocation, this year’s unusually early swarm season follows several years of record colony declines worldwide.

Bee swarming is a natural reproductive process that typically occurs in spring in response to overcrowding and limited space within the hive. During swarming, a colony splits into two or more groups as the original queen leaves with approximately half of the worker bees to establish a new hive, while the remaining bees stay behind to rear a new queen.

The early start to this year’s swarm season follows the largest honeybee die-off in recorded US history, when beekeepers reported losing more than 60% of their colonies last year. Such an impact has hit the US agriculture sector particularly hard, as it relies heavily on bees for crop pollination, which contributes roughly $15bn in added crop value.

The early start to this year’s swarm season follows the largest honeybee die-off in recorded US history. Recent research has pointed to the parasitic varroa mite, which appears to be increasingly resistant to the chemicals used to control it, allowing the pest to spread viruses by attaching itself to worker bees.

Mateo Kaiser, Swarmed’s managing director, said: “We saw a very warm winter in the west this year and … this is having an impact on bees. They are waking up earlier and in many parts of California, they are building up their populations already in January, December, and that is leading to swarms way earlier than normally.” Explaining how the mites weaken hives, Kaiser said: “As the baby matures, the varroa mite is eating the fat body of the bee and so a weaker bee is born and the colony overall is weaker and more susceptible to disease.” He noted that bees traditionally stop laying eggs during winter, creating a natural pause that helps suppress mite populations by limiting places for them to reproduce. But warmer and shorter winters may be disrupting that cycle, with some colonies now breeding year-round and swarming earlier than usual – conditions that could also accelerate varroa mite reproduction.

US plan for Colorado River could cut up to 40% supply for Arizona, California and Nevada

The US government has proposed a plan for the drought stricken Colorado River that could cut up to 40% of current supplies to Arizona, California and Nevada, as the waterway’s reservoirs continue to plunge to critically low levels. A top Arizona water official shared details of the Trump administration’s plan at a state meeting on Wednesday.

Under the 10-year plan, which will be finalized in June, the annual amount of water delivered to Arizona, California and Nevada could be slashed by up to 3m acre-feet, according to Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona department of water resources. The reductions would be evaluated every two years. Three million acre-feet of water is enough to supply 6 million to 9 million households for one year, more than the number of homes in Arizona and Nevada.

Buschatzke said the federal plan would be either implemented under existing Colorado River law or through agreements among the states. He said federal officials had indicated that water cuts across the three lower-basin states would be based on the “priority of the law of the river”. That law, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, gives California the highest priority for water use. Buschatzke described the proposed federal cuts as “sobering”.

“That’s us, that’s Arizona, and potentially CAP going to zero,” said Buschatzke, referring to water flows on the Central Arizona Project, a canal that transports Colorado River water to central and southern Arizona. The Colorado river supplies water to some 40 million people in the American west. The plan comes months after the seven states that depend on the river’s dwindling supply missed a February federal deadline to agree upon how water cuts would be divided. The river has lost about 27.8m acre-feet of groundwater in the last 20 years, largely owing to overuse. A record snow drought this year further exacerbated the issue.

The river’s upper basin states, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, have been resistant to water reductions. The states maintain that those downstream, California, Arizona and Nevada bear responsibility for the water’s shortages and thus should carry the burden of cuts.

Minnesota deploys national guard to help fight wildfires in northern region

Minnesota’s national guard has been activated to help battle wildfires burning in the northern part of the state after the department of natural resources requested additional support. Governor Tim Walz authorized the deployment by issuing an executive order that declared a peacetime emergency.

“Unpredictable and fast-moving wildfires are putting Minnesota communities at risk,” Walz said in a statement. “This emergency declaration ensures we can fully mobilize the resources needed to protect lives, support evacuations, and help communities respond and recover. I’m grateful to the firefighters, members of the Minnesota National Guard, and all our first responders working around the clock to keep Minnesotans safe.” Through the activation, guard members will contribute staffing, equipment and other aid to support firefighting operations and broader emergency response activities.

Two of the most significant blazes currently burning are the Stewart Trail fire near Two Harbors, which has grown to an estimated 355 acres (145 hectares), and the Flanders fire in Crow Wing county, estimated at about 1,200 acres. Crews throughout northern Minnesota faced a demanding Saturday as dry, windy conditions fueled several new wildfire outbreaks. By Sunday afternoon, the Minnesota Incident Command System (MNICS) reported that the Stewart Trail fire had reached 30% containment.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some of which defied fair-use abstraction.

Names of Some US Boat Strike Victims Revealed

UNRWA secretly rescued Nakba archive from Gaza amid Israeli bombardment, transferred it to Jordan

Iran War: More Speculation that US Will Restart War, Along with Possible UAE Operation Against Key Iran Island, Big Explosion at Israel Weapons Factory; Yet More on Imminent Real Economy Damage

Who’s Fortune Is Trump Talking About?

Ukraine Fires Hundreds of Drones at Moscow

Trump Leaves China With Little In Hand

A Little Night Music

Lizzie Miles - A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Lizzie Miles - I Hate A Man Like You

Lizzie Miles - Bill Bailey

Lizzie Miles - Someday Sweetheart

Lizzie Miles - My Man O'war

Lizzie Miles - Electrician Blues

Lizzie Miles - I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate

Lizzie Miles - You're Always Messin' 'Round With My Man

Lizzie Miles - Basin Street Blues

Lizzie Miles - Tishomingo Blues

Lizzie Miles with Bob Scobey's Band - Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone

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