Wednesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

Before get started on the politics news, I want to note the passing of a fine actor, Val Kilmer. He was only 65.

Bruce Weber at The New York Times (gift link): Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65.

Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered, she said.

Youthful Val Kilmer

Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Mr. Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in the slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.

He gave a vividly stylized performance as Jim Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.

Mr. Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), in which he played an unseasoned F.B.I. agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Mr. Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise….

But by then another, perhaps more interesting, strain of Mr. Kilmer’s career had developed. In 1986, Mr. Scott cast him in his first big-budget film, “Top Gun” (1986), the testosterone-fueled adventure drama about Navy fighter pilots in training, in which Mr. Kilmer played the cool, cocky rival to the film’s star, Tom Cruise. It was a role that set a precedent for several of Mr. Kilmer’s other prominent appearances as a co-star or a member of a starry ensemble. He reprised it in a brief cameo in the film’s 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”

He played the urbane, profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993), a bloody western, alongside Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton as Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp. He was part of a robbery gang in “Heat” (1995), a contemporary urban “High Noon”-ish tale that was a vehicle for Robert De Niro as the mastermind of a heist and Al Pacino as the cop who chases him down. He was a co-star, billed beneath Michael Douglas, in “The Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), a period piece about lion hunting set in late 19th century Africa. In “Pollock” (2000), starring Ed Harris as the painter Jackson Pollock, he was a fellow artist, Willem de Kooning. He played Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell), in Oliver Stone’s grandiose epic “Alexander” (2004).

There’s much more at the NYT link.

Anthony Breznican at Vanity Fair: Val Kilmer, a Magnetic and Mercurial Star, Dies at 65.

Val Kilmer had such intense magnetism that he could make a flyboy villain charming. He could make a smug young genius endearing. He could make a frontier gunman dying from tuberculosis not just tragically romantic but somehow sexy. In a career spanning four decades, the actor both embraced and shattered the expectations of a Hollywood leading man. Even after years battling throat cancer, which robbed him of his voice and heartthrob physique, Kilmer still managed to deliver one more emotional performance that bookended his adventurous onscreen life.

That was Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, in which Kilmer reprised his role as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, the fighter pilot who serves as the chief rival to Tom Cruise’s naval aviator in the blockbuster 1986 original. Both men were still just starting out as actors at that point. Kilmer had broken through as a spoof of Elvis Presley in the 1984 spy farce Top Secret! and was the high-IQ slacker in 1985’s Real Genius when he took on the role of the hotshot antagonist. In the sequel, set decades later, Iceman is an admiral in charge of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, and he and Maverick have long patched over their youthful clashes to become not just friends but brothers in arms. Kilmer was several years into his cancer treatments in real life, and no longer able to act full time, but Cruise went to great lengths to incorporate him in the story, making Kilmer’s declining condition a part of the character. It brought an emotional closure to a pop culture story that had already resonated with millions around the world, and was the last time moviegoers saw Kilmer onscreen. It was not just a goodbye to Iceman, but a goodbye to the actor as well.

Kilmer succumbed to pneumonia and died on Tuesday at the age of 65.

He never tried to hide his health struggles, and in 2021 participated in the documentary Val, which chronicled his day-to-day activities recovering from various treatments that left his voice a raspy whisper and drained his strength. His son, Jack Kilmer, narrated the story by reading his father’s words. “I have behaved poorly, I have behaved bravely, I have behaved bizarrely to some,” read one self-reflective line. The movie included old VHS footage Kilmer recorded of himself and his friends, documenting his life on movie sets and his wild-child approach to creativity. It was that willingness to take risks and challenge himself that made him unpredictable and surprising as a performer. Kilmer was many things in his life, and those watching him never knew what to expect.

Read the rest at Vanity Fair.

Democrats had a good day yesterday. Senator Cory Booker inspired with a record-breaking filibuster, and Democratic candidates overperformed in special elections in Florida and won control of Wisconsin Supreme Court with the election of liberal judge Susan Crawford.

NBC News: Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech ignites a Democratic base ‘desperate’ for a fighter.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., wanted to do something extraordinary. He knew Democratic voters were desperate for it.

So he took to the Senate floor with little fanfare and went on to deliver a marathon speech — excoriating the Trump administration for lawlessness and undermining American values and in the process breaking the record for longest Senate speech ever, yielding Tuesday after 25 hours and 5 minutes.

It was a cathartic moment for a vast swath of demoralized voters across the country, who tuned in amid hunger for some action by the opposition party beyond the traditions of business as usual.

And for a Democratic Party that has been lost in the wilderness since its bruising defeat to Donald Trump last fall, it offered a rare moment of hope to pursue what may be its only chance of slowing Trump down: inspiring a mass popular uprising against him.

“There’s a lot of people out there asking Democrats to do more and to take risks and do things differently,” an exhausted Booker told reporters after he walked off the floor. “This seemed like the right thing to do. And from what my staff is telling me, a lot of people watched. And so we’ll see what it is. I just think a lot of us have to do a lot more, including myself.”

Throughout Tuesday afternoon, Booker was trending across social media, including on TikTok, BlueSky and even Elon Musk’s X.

The speech got over 350 million “likes” on Booker’s TikTok livestream of his remarks, according to his office, including more than 300,000 people viewing them across his platform at once. It prompted over 200 stories from New Jerseyans and Americans in response. And it drew over 28,000 voicemails of encouragement on Booker’s office phone line, along with public accolades from Democratic luminaries like former Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker.

Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American: April 1, 2025.

For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

Senator Cory Booker

On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.

Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”

On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.

Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”

“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”

Click the link to read the rest.

PBS on the Florida and Wisconsin special elections: Wisconsin and Florida special elections provide early warning signs to Trump, Republicans.

A trio of elections on Tuesday provided early warning signs to Republicans and President Donald Trump at the beginning of an ambitious term, as Democrats rallied against his efforts to slash the federal government and the outsize role being played by billionaire Elon Musk.

In the marquee race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, the conservative judge endorsed by Trump and backed by Musk and his groups to the tune of $21 million lost by a significant margin in a state Trump won in November. And while Florida Republicans held two of the most pro-Trump House districts in the country, both candidates also underperformed Trump’s November margins.

The elections — the first major contests since Trump’s return to power — were seen as an early measure of voter sentiment as Trump works with unprecedented speed to dramatically upend the federal government, clashing with the courts and seeking revenge as he tests the bounds of presidential power.

The party that loses the presidency in November typically picks up seats in the next midterm elections, and Tuesday’s results provided hope for Democrats — who have faced a barrage of internal and external criticism about their response to Trump — that they can follow that trend.

On the Wisconsin Supreme Court race:

Trump won Wisconsin in November by 0.8 percentage points, or fewer than 30,000 votes. In the first major test since he took office, the perennial battleground state shifted significantly to the left.

Sauk County, northwest of the state capital of Madison, is a state bellwether. Trump won it in November by 626 votes. Sauk shifted 14 points in the direction of Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal favorite backed by national Democrats and billionaire donors like George Soros.

Besides strong turnout in Democratic-heavy areas, Crawford did measurably better in the suburban Milwaukee counties that Republicans rely on to run up their margins statewide.

Elon Musk in Green Bay, Wisconsin pretending to be a Cheeshead

Crawford won Kenosha and Racine counties, both of which went for Trump over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. She was on pace to win by 9 percentage points.

In interviews with more than 20 voters in Waunakee, a politically mixed town north of Madison, several Democrats suggested without prompting that their vote was as much if not more of a repudiation of Trump’s first months in office as it was a decision on the direction of the state high court….

Others disliked the richest man in the world playing such a prominent role.

“I don’t like Elon Musk spending money for an election he should have no involvement in,” said Antonio Gray, a 38-year-old Milwaukee security guard. “They should let the voters vote for who they want to vote for instead of inserting themselves like they have.”

Elon Musk went all out trying to win Republican control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Michelle Cottle at The New York Times: Elon Musk Made an Election About Him. Wisconsin Said, ‘No, Thanks.’

Musk and his related groups dropped more than $20 million on boosting the conservative candidate, a former state attorney general, Brad Schimel. (Those $1 million sweepstakes giveaways were especially shameless.) Musk held a town hall/rally in Green Bay on Sunday, where he urged folks to back Schimel, and he pitched the race as “one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”

In helping make this probably the most expensive court contest of all time, Musk also turned it into a referendum on himself and his role in the Trump administration. Schimel, bless his heart, could have been the greatest candidate in the history of democracy — he wasn’t — and it wouldn’t have mattered. This became all about Elon, with a dash of Donald Trump thrown in.

Wisconsinites’ response: No, thanks, bruh. Despite Musk’s hysterical warnings and cheesehead preening, Schimel’s opponent, Susan Crawford, won by about 10 points, securing the court’s liberal majority.

Cottle says that anxious Republicans should grasp this opportunity to get rid of the unlikeable multi-billionaire.

Musk has his money-drenched tentacles wrapped tightly around the president. To start disentangling him and moving him toward the door, Republican lawmakers need to make the case that he is hurting Trump’s popularity — and threatening the G.O.P.’s unified control of Washington. Musk’s expensive Wisconsin flop is a big, red warning flag for Republican members to wave. They’d be wise to seize the moment while this failure is raw, missing no opportunity to remind the president what a political loser his buddy is turning out to be.

Waiting will only make the situation worse. DOGE is just getting warmed up. There’s no telling how much more damage Musk will do — to the nation and to the Republican Party — by the time a smattering of elections are decided this November. The mass layoffs of federal workers are already expected to damage Republicans’ fortunes in the Virginia governor’s race, seen as a key political bellwether.

And by next year’s midterms? Let’s just say voters can go to bloodthirsty from adoring in a flash when people start messing with their Social Security and Medicaid.

At Public Notice, Liz Dye has an interesting piece about Musk and Trump: Elon Musk is the autopen. And Trump is Incompetent.

“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” President Trump told reporters on March 22. In the span of a week, the president “forgot” that he invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport hundreds of people to a Salvadoran gulag.

“Other people handled it, but Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that,” he mumbled vaguely.

The media framed the debacle as a clever effort to “downplay his involvement” in the ugly episode, rather than evidence that the president is totally checked out and letting other people run the government.

And yet, just five days before his own memory lapse, Trump “declared” his predecessor’s pardons of the January 6 Committee “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because Biden was too senile to understand them….

The post is part of an ongoing campaign to undo Biden’s presidency by claiming that he was too incompetent by the end to exercise actual power, and some unnamed, shadowy figure was running the White House instead. It’s shockingly inappropriate, of course. But the juxtaposition is even more jarring as we are daily confronted with a president who is disengaged from the details of his job, preferring to outsource most of his authority to an unelected billionaire….

Undoing pardons is not a thing. Not even if Biden used an autopen. As the Supreme Court made clear in Trump v. US, the president’s exercise of his “core” powers, specifically the pardon, is unreviewable. But Trump is captured by internet memes, and so he’s thrilled to amplify the “autopen” conspiracy currently flooding the rightwing media ecosystem.

Old Man Trump

“The person that operated the autopen, I think we ought to find out who that was because I guess that was the real president,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 20.

Read the whole thing if you have time, but here’s the meat of it:

Trump, who, at 78, is just three years younger than Biden, is clearly decompensating before our eyes. And yet, even as he free associates on live television, back-formulating justifications for orders he’s obviously never read, the right leans ever harder into the story of Biden’s supposed incompetence….

Trump doesn’t know what he’s signed when it comes to pardons, executive orders, or anything else. He’s outsourced the job to an unelected billionaire who is currently slashing through the government, bragging on social media about feeding entire federal agencies “to the woodchipper.” Elon Musk leads cabinet meetings, dispatches his henchcoders to take over agency after agency, and purports to cancel federal contracts at will. He has no statutory authority, but claims only to be acting as an extension of the president….

In short, Musk is the autopen, illegitimately usurping executive power while claiming to be a mere extension of the president, mechanically recording his wishes and codifying his orders. And so, to compensate, Trump leans into the old, familiar foil.

It’s not the Trump kids who are trading on their father’s position to enrich themselves. It’s Hunter Biden. It’s not the Trump administration storing classified information on unsecured devices. It’s Hillary Clinton. And it’s not Donald Trump who signs whatever his aides put in front of him, no matter how corrupt. It’s Joe Biden.

I think she’s right. Trump is spending most of his time posting on Truth Social, playing golf, and fantasizing about annexing Greenland.

The Washington Post: White House studying cost of Greenland takeover, long in Trump’s sights.

The White House is preparing an estimate of what it would cost the federal government to control Greenland as a territory, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, the most concrete effort yet to turn President Donald Trump’s desire to acquire the Danish island into actionable policy.

While Trump’s demands elicited international outrage and a rebuke from Denmark, White House officials have in recent weeks taken steps to determine the financial ramifications of Greenland becoming a U.S. territory, including the cost of providing government services for its 58,000 residents, the people said.

At the White House budget office, staff have sought to understand the potential cost to maintain Greenland if it were acquired, two of the people said. They are also attempting to estimate what revenue to the U.S. Treasury could be gained from Greenland’s natural resources.

One option under analysis is to offer a sweeter deal to the government of Greenland than the Danes, who currently subsidize services on the island at a rate of about $600 million every year.

“This is a lot higher than that,” said one official familiar with the plans, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that remain in the works. “The point is, ‘We’ll pay you more than Denmark does.’”

Trump has said repeatedly that the United States will “get” Greenland.

“100 percent,” he told NBC News on Saturday. Asked whether it would involve force, he said that there is a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that “I don’t take anything off the table.”

If only the Democrats could take the House and Senate in 2026, they could impeach this insane monster.

I know this is getting long, but I need to include one more outrage: the decimation of public health infrastructure.

Rolling Stone: Inside Trump and RFK Jr.’s Health Agency ‘Bloodbath.’

The Trump administration gutted federal health agencies on Tuesday morning, as thousands of employees received layoff notices, following Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement last week he was planning to lay off nearly 10,000 workers.

More than 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were cut. Staffers with decades of experience received emails at 5 a.m. on Tuesday that they were being placed on administrative leave and would no longer have access to their buildings, effective immediately. In the Washington D.C. area, thousands of federal workers lined up outside office buildings to see if their badges worked, as they hugged each other in tears.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, is attempting to gut the agencies and remake them in his image. These cuts will allow HHS to consolidate not only authority but messaging, as many of the departments affected involve communications departments. The massive layoffs are part of Donald Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce, and parallel what Elon Musk is doing with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which claims to be streamlining the federal government, but is gutting entire agencies. Musk’s DOGE has celebrated the cancellations of NIH grants, something Senator Cory Booker decried during his record-breaking filibuster on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, entire divisions were completely obliterated in a move that shocked HHS staffers. Hundreds of researchers studying diseases like HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases were laid off. “I cannot think of a worse idea than firing the people who help keep us healthy and safe from disease,” Senator Raphael Warnock said on X. This comes at a time when the U.S. is suffering from a nationwide measles outbreak….

“It’s so chaotic,” says a CDC employee who received notice Tuesday morning that she was being placed on administrative leave and would be terminated in June. (She asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal retribution, so she’ll be referred to by the pseudonym Samantha.) “The amount of knowledge that is being purged today at CDC is just tragic.” [….]

Samantha, who worked at the CDC’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice (DEHSP), says her entire division was eliminated. That includes the Asthma and Air Quality Branch, the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch, the Climate and Health Activity branch, and the Water Food and Environmental Health Services, among others. Approximately 2,400 employees have been impacted in the CDC.

“They are firing whole organizational units,” says Samantha. “These are people that have 30 years of service, people with children, veterans, there was no thought put into trying to retain people that have institutional knowledge.”

One more from Wired: Doctor Behind Award-Winning Parkinson’s Research Among Scientists Purged From NIH.

Several top scientists charged with overseeing research into disease prevention and cures at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were notified that they were subject to a reduction in force on Tuesday as part of a devastating purge of federal employees carried out by US Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., WIRED has learned.

Multiple sources at the NIH, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, confirmed Tuesday afternoon that at least 10 principal investigators who were leading and directing medical research at the agency had been fired. Among them is Dr. Richard Youle, a leading researcher in the field of neurodegenerative disorders previously awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his groundbreaking research identifying mechanisms behind Parkinson’s disease.

The Breakthrough Prize ceremony, often referred to as the “Oscars of Science,” was last year attended by Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has served as the tip of the spear in President Donald Trump’s campaign to eliminate large swaths of the federal workforce….

Multiple NIH sources tell WIRED the layoffs include—in addition to labor, IT, and human resources personnel—several accomplished senior investigators at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), top scientists at the National Institute on Aging, and several researchers noted for their work in HIV, emerging infectious diseases, and child brain and neural disorders.

At an NINDS town hall meeting on Tuesday, leadership at that institute expressed confusion about the cuts, saying they were blindsided by firings of principal investigators, or PIs, who lead research teams. NIH has approximately 1,200 PIs across its 27 centers and institutes. “To get rid of 11 of our senior PIs … we’re hoping that’s a mistake, because we can’t figure out why they would want to do that,” said Walter Koroshetz, director of the NINDS, according to a source present at the meeting.

The labs affected by the layoffs include those involved in clinical trials as well as preclinical studies. It is unclear, NIH staff said, what the plans are for the data they’ve accumulated or what will happen to patients involved in ongoing trials.

I’ll end there. What do you think? What’s on your mind today?