Reads for Monday

 It looks like ProPublica won the Pulitzer for its coverage of abortion law restrictions/bans.

AP report on the Pulitzer.

Along the same lines, the whack jobs from the antiabortion movement, almost all of them male, want the death penalty for women who have abortions.

These are mostly the "Christian reconstructionist" whack jobs who are pushing this.

The birthrate/marriage rate ain't coming back, dudes.

____________________________

To call Trump the Bird Brain of Alcatraz is an insult to birds, animals that are highly intelligent.  Trump is off his rocker nuts:

This is even more batshit insane, if that is possible. 

_______________________

A Few Reads for Sunday

 I want to note the death May 1 of comic Ruth Buzzi, a fixture on the late sixties/early seventies show Laugh-In and later on, Sesame Street.  She was 88 years old and died at her home in Texas, according to her agent.

Snip;

Part of an all-star ensemble on a show that claimed a definitive role in the cultural zeitgeist, Buzzi appeared on "Laugh-In" from 1968 to 1973, earning a Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a series, miniseries, or motion picture made for television as well as several Emmy nominations in the process.

The show, replete with flower-power aesthetics and a raunchy sensibility, showed off Buzzi's knack for physical comedy above the neck, her characters often contorting their faces for the sake of caricature.

Ruth was born in Westerly, Rhode Island, in 1936. Her husband Kent Perkins, who married her in 1978, survives her.

Kentucky Derby 2025 Results

 On a somewhat off track, Sovereignty has won the 151st Kentucky Derby for Godolphin Stable.   Journalism, the favorite, came in second, while Baeza came in third.

Baeza, as longtime racing fans know, is named for jockey great Braulio Baeza (born 1940), who,  despite all his many wins, is perhaps best remembered for riding the second-place horse in the legendary 1973 Belmont Stakes, Twice a Prince.

The time was 2:02.31.  Impressive on this condition of track.  The early fractions were quite fast.

Bill Mott is the trainer.  Junior Alvarado is the jockey for his first Kentucky Derby.

The winner's pedigree is here.  Bernardini is the broodmare sire.  He won the 2006 Preakness and Travers.

The race via NBC Sports YouTube channel:

Blood Horse link

151st Kentucky Derby Miscellaneous

 At 31 years of age Silver Charm is still going strong at Old Friends in Kentucky.  He has been there for many years.   He is also the oldest living Kentucky Derby winner, having won in 1997.  

The race:

The horse who defeated him in the 1997 Belmont Stakes, denying him the Triple Crown, Touch Gold, is still alive and is also at Old Friends.

Snip:

Though Silver Charm led the Belmont with an eighth of a mile to go and looked poised to become the first Triple Crown winner in 19 years, Touch Gold accelerated past him in the last 75 yards to win by half a length. 

Now, Touch Gold lives one paddock over, where a romantic fan can at least imagine the two old rivals carrying on a decades-long argument about who was actually better.

Remarkably, they both still look robust and healthy, which is in no small part thanks to the detailed health care and nutritional support the horses receive at Old Friends. Even though Silver Charm is long past his athletic glory and his coat is much whiter than people remember from his racing days, he still makes a good impression and seems like a horse with plenty of life left in him.

____________________

The morning line favorite  for this year's Kentucky Derby, my 65th is Journalism.

American Pharoah, who won this race on the way to the 2015 Triple Crown, has a son  in the race named Publisher.

_____________________

Last year, Steve Haskin wrote a piece for Secretariat.com analyzing and explaining why Secretariat's Belmont record will never be broken.

___________________________

Friday Reads

 Charles Koch is now complaining about how bad things are going in this country despite the fact he and his crackpot "libertarian" cohorts and foundations that he funded were the cause of it.

___________________________

Reads for Thursday

 Texas Republicans are working very hard to make sure no women of childbearing age live in the state.

________________________

The Leonard Leo dipshits on the USSC  seem like they are going to allow public money to go to private schools.

___________________________

Some Reads for Wednesday

 You know the old saying, "If you can't say anything nice about somebody, don't say anything at all."  This saying is apt for the one-time Marxist-turned right-wing author and commentator David Horowitz, 86, who died yesterday at the age of 86.

At least his one-time associate, the late Peter Collier, had the saving virtue of writing children's books after he finished with co-writing with Horowitz those right-wing screeds that were called "biographies" about the Kennedys, the Fords, and the Rockefellers. I can't say the same with DH. He was insufferable, clearly going to the right because there was more money in it.

He used to post on a thread at the old Salon Table Talk discussion board (I really miss that board--it was the best), which was about him and his writings (he had contributed some articles/opinion pieces over there years ago). I once took him to task for writing right-wing screeds and trashy "biographies" for purely monetary reasons. I boasted I took my copy of his shitty Kennedy book and tossed it in the dumpster. He took umbrage to my knowing what he REALLY was, and he tried to talk down to me, but it didn't work.  I will never forget what he posted:  "This sandbox is history."   I had his number a long, long time ago.

Horowitz died of cancer, according to his fourth wife, April.  He lived in Colorado.

Snip:

David Joel Horowitz was born on Jan. 10, 1939, in New York City, in Queens. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were schoolteachers and members of the American Communist Party. They quit the party in 1956 when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin. 

 David grew up “a sheltered child in a Marxist bubble,” he later wrote, attending a May Day parade at age 9. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1959 and a master’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. He helped found Root and Branch, a campus-based New Left magazine.

While living in London in the mid-1960s, he wrote a leftist critique of the Cold War, “The Free World Colossus,” which excoriated the United States as imperialist.

_____________________

No surprise the Trump DOJ is planning to target abortion rights activists.

___________________

Some Reads for Monday

 This is very old news, but today was the first I had heard of the death of journalist Megan Marshack, who was 70 when she passed away from kidney and liver failure last October, just weeks before her 71st birthday.  She was a journalist for many years, but unfortunately for her, she lived in infamy as having been with former vice president Nelson Rockefeller when he collapsed and died in his apartment in 1979.  He, too, was around 70 years old at the time.  It was rumored she was his mistress, but she never talked about the relationship publicly.

In her later years, she married a fellow journalist when she moved back to California, but he died from injuries from a car accident in 2023.  Marshack even penned her own obituary, which is at the link.

Snip:

Marshack was born on Halloween, 1953 and was adopted by Sidney Robert and Credwyn Patricia Marshack. She is survived by her younger brother, Jon, a water quality scientist with the California State Water Boards (retired), and his husband, The Rev. Rik Rasmussen.

Marshack left New York in 1998 and met her late husband, Edmond Madison Jacoby, Jr., a journalist and editor, in Placerville, CA when they both worked for a local newspaper. They were married in August 2003 at the county’s Main Street Courthouse. Marshack covered many proceedings at that courthouse, where she was declared by both prosecutors and defense attorneys as a fair and even-handed reporter always eager to learn more about the intricacies of the law. The Superior Court judge who performed the wedding ceremony once commented that Marshack “never got a ‘three-strikes’ case completely right, but never made the same mistake twice.”

Marshack always viewed journalism as a chronic illness inflamed by the insatiable itch of curiosity. She warned students about the vicissitudes of the lifestyle saying, “If there is anything else in the world you can think of to do, do it.”

___

It sounds like she had a very good life despite all the rumors.

______________________________