As we slide into the holidays, our politics podcast is on a three-week hiatus. But I have some terrific book chats lined up, each one accompanied by a short news summary. Neil and I will be back and ready to rock on January 9 to evaluate the fresh hell breaking loose in 2026!
Country music star Dolly Parton arriving at a Hollywood premiere in January, 2012. Photo credit: DFree/Shutterstock
We begin this episode with a clip from a 1977 Barbara Walters interview, in which Parton skillfully parries a stereotype about White people who grew up poor in the American South.
News summary:
The man who right wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos has called “The most ostentatiously useless and embarrassing government employee in the history of the nation”—that’s right, Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino—has resigned as of January. “Bongino expressed deep satisfaction earlier this month after the FBI arrested a suspect in the Jan. 6 pipe bombing case. He said he pressed the bureau to solve the case and got regular updates from the lead investigator,” Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian write at MS NOW. But as a podcaster, Bongino had stoked conspiracy theories that the pipe bombs were a false-flag operation. When asked by Fox’s Sean Hannity about the discrepancy, he said “that as a podcaster, he was paid to give his opinions, but now at the FBI, he was ‘paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.’” Rumor has it Bongino is returning to podcasting. (December 18, 2025)
This week saw a furor about a two-part profile of Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles by Chris Whipple of Vanity Fair. Wiles, a political consultant who is normally very backstage, let drop a number of frank comments about the President and the clown car that surrounds him. The outrage has been predictable—except for White House attacks on photographer Christopher Anderson, whose closeup of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose lip gloss did not conceal injection marks, presumably the residue of a cosmetic procedure.
The suspect in the mass shooting at Brown University, a Portuguese man who may also be responsible for the murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro, has been found in. New Hampshire storage unit, an apparent suicide.
Today’s guest: Martha Ackman, the author of Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton (MacMillan, 2025)
Claire notes some of the similarities between Dolly Parton and an earlier female artist Martha Ackman explored, Emily Dickinson. You can read about the famous reclusive poet in These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton, 2020).
Dolly Parton’s big break was on The Porter Wagoner Show. It was where she learned her craft, but also became aware of how fiercely she would have to fight to make a career in the male-dominated country music industry.
Dolly has described her childhood in her autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (HarperCollins, 1994).
Claire and Martha also discuss Dolly making books available to children through her Imagination Library.
Rumors about Dolly’s private life include speculation about whether she has been sexually involved with a close woman friend: she denies them. We discuss how Dolly’s support for the LGBTQ community, her unusually supportive husband who preferred the backstage, and the difficulty in describing love and loyalty between women, have fed such rumors.
You can learn more about Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband for almost 60 years before his death this year, here.
Claire notes that her favorite song is White Limozeen, from the 1989 album of hte same name, because it reflects her commitment to her family and community.
Short takes:
Changes to Medicaid under H.R. 1 will affect Black and Brown communities disproportionately, but also whole institutions designed to serve low-income people. “Community health centers like Harlem United serve as the few sources of dental care for low-income populations in New York City,” Neela Jain reports in The Amsterdam News. “Across the city, many neighborhoods lack enough dental providers to meet the needs of populations eligible for Medicaid, according to the federal government,” Jain writes. “The majority of shortage provider areas are located in the city’s predominantly low-income communities of color.” (December 18, 2025)
Does Donald Trump want us all to get cancer? Liza Featherstone, citing numerous policies and regulations that have been abandoned across federal departments, says yes! “How can the Make America Healthy Again crowd put up with all this? They can’t,” Featherstone concludes at The New Republic. Some MAHA Moms “are now circulating a petition to fire EPA chief Lee Zeldin, who has allowed chemical industry insiders to relax restrictions on harmful chemicals. One of the groups circulating it, Moms Across America, is calling EPA the ‘Everyone Poisoned Agency.’ MAHA also takes issue—rightly—with Zeldin’s approval of new pesticides, including two that contain PFAS, a.k.a. ‘forever chemicals,’ which have been a major target of the MAHA movement.” (December 18, 2025)
In his shouty, untethered televised speech this week, President Donald Trump announced something he called “warrior dividends,” checks for $1,776 dollars that would go out to members of the military. In fact, according to Thomas Novelly at Defense One, Congress appropriated an extra $2.9 billion in reconciliation funds to supplement troop housing allowances, and Trump is just rebranding it as a holiday gift. “The $2.9 billion meant to subsidize the basic allowance for housing, the monthly payment to cover troops’ off-base expenses such as rent, mortgage, and utilities known as BAH, comes as some service members have struggled to make the most of the benefit,” Novelly writes. And it isn’t the only funding gone astray. “Senator Elizabeth Warren,D-Mass., and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., issued a report last week highlighting $2 billion diverted away from the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department for border enforcement—including redirecting funds for barracks, maintenance hangers, and elementary schools.” (December 18, 2025)
