Following up on what I wrote earlier today about future hostage releases, I think we’re started to see some of what I described. Yesterday, Hamas released a video of three elderly male Israeli hostages. Just a short time ago Palestinian Islamic Jihad released a video of two other hostages, one 79, another 47. PIJ is a separate group. It’s been known since the beginning that a smaller subset of the hostages are in their hands. It’s unknown the extent the two groups are coordinating their strategy in terms of the hostages or how much influence or control Hamas has over PIJ’s decisions about the hostages it’s holding.

So far these videos have basically been the hostages demanding their own release, pretty obviously coerced. In the one just released by PIJ the elderly man appears to have his hands handcuffed or tied behind the chair he’s sitting it. As yet they don’t seem to contain any threats. But we can likely expect more of this. When you’re on the ropes you use what you have. And what they have is hostages.

Today Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones turns 80.

For years it’s been impossible to venture onto social media without seeing memes about Richards’ death-cheating immortality: the often gaunt hollowed visage, the legendary drug use, urban legends about recurrent full blood transfusions. Richards’ legendary junkiedom has been decades longer in the myth-making than the reality. As best as the various histories and memoirs inform us, Richards spent about a decade addicted to heroin, from around the age of 25 to roughly 35. There were recurrent clean-ups for tours, relapses, or just decisions to start shooting heroin again. He eventually kicked the habit in stages after a notorious drug bust in Toronto in 1977, which could have sent him to prison for years. In other words, that supposedly central thing about the man actually ended going on half a century ago. Of course, there are drugs and drugs. Richards continued to drink, smoke grass, snort cocaine for years while seemingly weening himself of the vices over time. He even quit smoking at some point during the COVID pandemic.

Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for Ron DeSantis’s official super PAC and top cheese of the DeSantis campaign, has resigned. As usual, there’s lots of talk about cronies getting lavish sums of money. But really it’s never a good situation when your billionaire backers have given you massive amounts of money and your campaign is flat-lining.

Lindsey Graham isn’t representative of much of anything good these days. But precisely because he’s now representative of fairly conventional GOP foreign policy thinking I found these remarks notable. I saw them in a round-up in Haaretz but they’re from Meet the Press …

We finally have access to the apology letters written by Sidney Powell and Ken Chesebro that they agreed to write as part of their plea deals in the Fulton County election subversion case. There’s another from a guy named Scott Hall. But you’ve never heard of him. So we’re not going to discuss his other than to say his letter was pretty good and ran five paragraphs.

Here’s Sidney Powell’s.

As I reread my post below about staying on the attack, I realized I hadn’t defined what it means to “attack,” perhaps not even entirely to myself. Attacking isn’t saying mean things or criticizing someone or calling them out. An attack is something that compels a response. If it doesn’t do that it wasn’t an attack or not one that mattered. Don’t hold me to a universal definition. Some attacks are designed to overawe an adversary to the point they’re unable or afraid to respond. But this basic definition helps us understand what counts and what doesn’t.

In politics today we spend a lot of time doing things that don’t matter. Criticizing Trump, insisting how outrageous the latest statement is — none of that matters. It’s true. It doesn’t compel a response. A big part of Trumpism is driving cries of outrage. Those cries may be good for other things. It’s not an attack. It’s not an action in any political context.