Jill Biden on New Memoir, 49-Year Marriage, 'Heated Rivalry,' More
Center Left
Former first lady Jill Biden joins TODAY's Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones to share stories and memories from iconic photos taken throughout her life, including her 49-year marriage with Joe Biden, her connection to the White House's East Wing, and bidding for a cameo in Season 2 of “Heated Rivalry.”
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley confronted new executive producer Nick Bilton and another CBS executive Monday morning in what Guardian US media reporter Jeremy Barr described as a "heated meeting," pushing back forcefully on last week's mass firings at the storied newsmagazine.Pelley didn't mince words about who he held responsible."She's murdering 60 Minutes," Pelley said of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, according to Barr. "She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that."Producers were present and showed support for Pelley during the meeting, Barr said.The firings Pelley pushed back on included veteran correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, fellow correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich — all ousted last Thursday as Weiss installed Bilton, a tech journalist and TV news outsider, to lead the broadcast.Pelley's outrage has been building for months. When Weiss pulled Alfonsi's CECOT segment just hours before its scheduled December broadcast — after it had cleared every internal editorial and legal review — Pelley lashed out in a staff meeting. "She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously," he said at the time, according to The New Yorker.On Wednesday night, just hours before Alfonsi was formally fired, Pelley saluted her from the stage at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards at Lincoln Center.Critics have accused Weiss of spiking the CECOT story to placate the Trump administration, a charge her allies deny. Alfonsi, who has hired a litigator, called her ouster "a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting."
Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.What could possibly go wrong?There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.Their efforts worked; just 10 years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)The railroad corporations claimed that because they were taxed at different rates on property they owned in Santa Clara and Santa Ana counties in California, they were “persons” being denied the “equal protection of the law.” The Court determined that the California constitution already dealt with tax issues like that, giving the railroad the relief they wanted, but there was no federal action at all.However, the lie about corporate personhood buried in the headnote took root and lives on to this day. For example, yesterday afternoon I asked DuckDuckGo’s AI the question:“Who won the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court decision?”And the answer I got back was:“The Southern Pacific Railroad Company won the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, affirming that corporations are considered ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”None of that is true, but it was nonetheless the basis of the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision written by Lewis Powell himself (of “Powell Memo” fame), claiming that because corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment right to free speech — they could spend big bucks to swing elections. In that decision, the Court majority footnoted:“It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U. S. 578 (1896).”Because corporations don’t have mouths to speak with, Powell reasoned, their money served the same purpose.
In today’s newsletter: What an unprecedented scheme reveals about an increasingly uninhibited leadership – and what it might mean for American democracyGood morning. It has been two weeks since details of a settlement in the case of Trump v the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) first emerged. An out-of-court agreement with the US president created a $1.8bn fund for the Trump administration to dish out at its discretion. In response, the outrage has been unrelenting.Critics argue the result stinks of cronyism and corruption, effectively a “scheme for the Trumps to reward political friends while indirectly benefiting the family”. There has been rare pushback from within Trump’s own party: more than a dozen Republican senators have reportedly urged the administration to change course. YouGov polling found a majority of Democrats and Republicans oppose the fund.UK politics | A trove of government documents about Peter Mandelson contains no record of any measures taken to mitigate serious security concerns over his appointment as Washington ambassador, the Guardian has learned.Health news | A daily pill can double survival time in patients with the world’s deadliest cancer, according to the results of a clinical trial that experts are saying is a “gamechanger” and one of the biggest breakthroughs in decades.Lebanon | European leaders have condemned Israel’s expanding incursion into Lebanon, after its military captured the medieval Beaufort castle and Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to push even deeper into the country.Employment | An Indian citizen who came to the UK to work as a care worker through the post-Brexit visa scheme has been awarded nearly £30,000, because his employer failed to give him a single day of work for a year.UK news | Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams was forced to sit in silence on stage at an event at Hay festival, after lawyers advised her not to speak because of ongoing legal action brought by Meta. Continue reading...
The F.B.I. Support Network offers legal, mental health and job search services to current agency employees. Its founders say the work force is incredibly strained under Kash Patel.
President Donald Trump has tapped David Venturella, a former ICE official and executive at the private prison company GEO Group, to replace Todd Lyons as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. GEO Group saw its profits jump from $32 million in 2024 to more than $254 million in 2025 as the Trump administration expanded government contracts with ICE jails nationwide.
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, says private prison companies have an “intricate” relationship with ICE. “It’s really a revolving door,” she says, pointing out that Venturella worked for ICE under Presidents Bush and Obama, then went to GEO Group before this latest appointment by President Trump. “It’s really hard to see where the interests of ICE end and those of private prison companies begin,” says Ghandehari.
