Good morning, and welcome to Saturday, May 16, 2026. Today, among other things, is known as Armed Forces Day. Today is also National BBQ Day, National Chartreuse Day, World Whiskey Day, National Fiddle Day, and National Classic Movie Day. It’s also the day of the Preakness Stakes — the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, and it runs annually at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland, on the third Saturday of May.
1220: King Henry III lays the foundation stone for a new Lady Chapel, the start of the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey.
1860: Republican convention selects Abraham Lincoln as the presidential nominee.
1866: Congress authorizes the nickel 5-cent piece, replacing the silver half-dime.
1876: Pharmacist Charles E. Hires presents Hires Root Beer at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
1891: George A. Hormel establishes George A. Hormel & Company.
1939: Rochester, N.Y., issues the first food stamps.
1946: Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, and Herbert Fields’ musical Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman and featuring “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” opens at the Imperial Theater in New York City.
1961: At the 13th Emmy Awards, The Jack Benny Show, Raymond Burr, and Barbara Stanwyck win.
1965: The Campbell Soup Company introduces SpaghettiOs under its Franco-American brand.
1966: Capitol Records releases the Beach Boys’ 11th studio album Pet Sounds; the groundbreaking work includes hit singles “Sloop John B,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “God Only Knows.”
1974: Helmut Schmidt becomes West German Chancellor.
1975: Capitol Records releases the Wings single “Listen to What the Man Said,” featuring jazz saxophonist Tom Scott; it reaches number one in the U.S. and Canada, and hits the top ten in four other countries
1977: Five die as a New York Airway helicopter topples onto the Pan Am building in New York City.
1981: “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes hits number one for nine weeks.
1986: Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, premieres.
1991: Queen Elizabeth II becomes the first British monarch to address a joint session of Congress in Washington.
Birthdays today include: William H. Seward, secretary of state and governor of New York; Levi Parsons Morton, American ambassador and politician; David Edward Hughes, British-American inventor of the microphone; Philip Danforth Armour, founder of Armour Foods; Henry Fonda, stage and screen actor; Margret Rey, German-American author, illustrator, and the creator of Curious George; John Holland, actor; Studs Terkel, writer, historian, and radio host; Woody Herman, jazz clarinetist and composer; Liberace, pianist, showman, and actor; Harry Carey Jr., actor; Billy Martin, baseball player and manager; Jack Dodson, character actor; Isaac “Redd” Holt, jazz and soul drummer; Yvonne Craig, actress; Billy Cobham, Panamanian-American jazz drummer; Robert Fripp, British progressive rock guitarist and composer; Barbara Lee, pop singer; Darrell Sweet, Scottish hard rock drummer; Alto Reed, saxophonist; Jock Bartley, singer-songwriter, and guitarist; Pierce Brosnan; Richard Page, singer and bassist; Debra Winger, actress; Tucker Carlson; and one that will make some of us feel old: Gymnast Olga Korbut is 71 today.
If today’s your birthday too, have a great day.
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Let’s establish some background on The New York Times and Walter Duranty. You’ll see why soon enough.
Duranty was known mostly for the lies he told on behalf of his Moscow masters, of course, denying the Holodomor — Stalin’s engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. While Ukrainians were dying by the millions, Duranty filed dispatches denying the famine was happening at all, famously writing that he saw “no evidence of actual starvation.” He also served as a useful propaganda vehicle for Stalin’s regime more broadly, whitewashing Soviet atrocities and lending them the prestige the Times’ masthead had at the time. He even went so far as to discredit actual reporters who went to Ukraine and reported the massive starvation happening.
He even won a Pulitzer prize in 1932 for his lies, a prize the Pulitzer board has repeatedly refused to revoke. As far as I’m concerned, that has forever revoked the value of that prize in much the same way as handing a Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, who won it by accomplishing nothing whatsoever, negates the value of that prize. Let’s ignore that particular rabbit hole for now.
It’s also known that Duranty held antisemitic views — both in private writings and publicly defending (in 1938) Nazi Germany’s expulsion of Polish Jews in language critics later viewed as cold, dismissive, and at least overly sympathetic to German geopolitical motives. Many critics of the time argued that his willingness to excuse totalitarian abuses extended to antisemitic persecution when it suited Soviet or geopolitical narratives as well.
So today, we find that The New York Times — proud ancestral home of the morally repugnant Walter Duranty — is pulling out all the stops to defend his spiritual successor, the equally abhorrent Nicholas Kristof, who now is going to bat for an equally repugnant group: Hamas. And wonder of wonders, Kristof is also a Pulitzer winner. As Instapundit’s Sarah Hoyt often says, this is my shocked face.
Obviously, I need to explain the Kristof story. Rather than offending my own senses by reposting Kristof, I’ll clue you in by way of Eli Lake’s Free Press piece posted the other day:
Are Israeli prisons deploying trained dogs to r*pe Palestinian prisoners? According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the answer appears to be yes.
In a lengthy column published Monday, Kristof recounts a sordid tale from a source he identifies as a “Gaza journalist.” He writes that on one occasion, the journalist “was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”
Kristof is not the first reporter to level this charge. Some news outlets like Al Jazeera and the BBC have also reported anonymous victims claiming to have witnessed or experienced r*pe or abuse by dogs in Israeli detention centers. The allegations gained momentum last month when the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released a report that claimed the practice was systemic based on interviews with anonymous victims. “Israeli forces have also employed animals, particularly trained dogs, to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, aiming to violate their dignity,” the report says.
Uh huh. It’s interesting that Lake puts the BBC and Al Jazeera on the same level. I tend to agree with that assessment of late, but that’s another column. By the way, Lake’s column is worth wading through in full.
You couldn’t find Antifa in Portland but you were able to find Israeli Jewish rape hounds?
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 12, 2026
Yeah, really. Something of a trend, there.
It’s said that a cook is only as good as his ingredients; I suppose we can transpose that to “A reporter is only as good as his source.” So let’s look at the source Kristof used, shall we?
So the @nytimes runs a story supporting Hamas lies. Even suggesting the IDF trains dogs to rape people.
The first person the article story relies on is Sami al-Sai.
I found his FB account. Here he is celebrating the Hamas attacks on October 7.
The NYT spreads Hamas lies. pic.twitter.com/PfeUtqQ80k
— David Collier (@mishtal) May 11, 2026
All that said, it is mind-melting to me that a publication that tolerates, nay, celebrates and defends such nonsense, continues to exist in the only city on earth that has more Jews living there than does Tel Aviv.
Thought for the Day: Intuition is underrated.
Have a great day. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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