I’m not going to focus hard on one topic this week, friends. At least I don’t think I will. I never know until I get down to the third paragraph, so we’ll see.

Snowden. Was asylum for Edward Snowden worth canceling a summit about? The administration says that is not the only reason, but there can be little doubt it was a (if not the) deciding factor. Our own senator in New York, Schumer, used some pretty incendiary language about Russia, saying they had “stabbed us in the back”, which is way over the top for him. This is not a place we want to go.

Best remind ourselves that the Russia we have today is the one we worked toward building yesterday. Putin is the beneficiary of a strong presidency established by Yeltsin in the 90s with our enthusiastic support (back when we had them privatizing state assets for pennies on the dollar and creating what was then the most dramatic demographic self-implosion in many decades). Remember how he shot the Russian Parliament full of holes? Well, now we’re just staring our own blinkered foreign policy in its beady eyes. The authoritarianism, the anti-gay laws – it’s pretty disgusting. But then, have we broken with Saudi Arabia yet? Their laws are worse.

At the movies. Network biopics are almost invariably stupid and disposable, particularly about political figures. So the proposed NBC mini-series about Hillary Clinton seems like a dumb idea to me, and the right (including rare food disease Reince Priebus) is using this nebulous project as a talisman for all of their fantasies about the liberal bias of Hollywood, network television, etc. It’s always someone else’s fault when you lose, isn’t it, Reince? Last we heard from Republicans on biopics about Hillary was how overjoyed they were about the hatchet job served up by Citizen’s United, the litigation over which had such a happy outcome in the Supreme Court. Then there was the whining about a proposed miniseries about Reagan that wasn’t hagiographic enough for their tastes. Get a life, for chrissake.

Right. Not a lot to say, but I said it.

luv u,

jp