Showing posts with label Mitch McConnell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mitch McConnell. Show all posts

Sunday, February 14, 2021

REPUBLISCUM - APPARENTLY THERE IS NO LIMIT TO LOW

 

So now 43 Republiscum Senators have ignored their oaths to support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. These 43 Republiscum have endorsed the January 6th attack on the U. S. Capitol, defended the criminal who incited that attempted putsch and allowed an attack meant to do away with American democracy to spawn further attacks.

T. S. Eliot had it correct:

This is the way the world ends    
This is the way the world ends   
This is the way the world ends   
Not with a bang but a whimper.  
 

American democracy didn't entirely die today with the whimpering, simpering Republiscum of the Senate but we are picking up speed on the downhill roll toward Fascist Dictatorship. The brakes are not only off, the lines have been cut. There is nearly nothing to halt the rush toward Fascist Dictatorship. If not The Orange Führer it will be some other Republiscum Führer in waiting. Perhaps the Führer will be Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley or some as yet unknown craven villain who wishes nothing but power and has no regard for decency or law.

To return to Eliot's Gerontion once more, the Republiscum who acquitted The Orange Führer, they...

...are the hollow men    
 ...are the stuffed men 
 Leaning together 
 Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
 

The 43 Republiscum, the hollow men and women voted alphabetically as follows:

  1. John Barrasso (WY) 
  2. Marsha Blackburn (TN) 
  3. Roy Blunt (MO) 
  4. John Boozman (AR
  5. Mike Braun (IN) 
  6. Shelley Moore Capito (WV)
  7. John Cornyn (TX) 
  8. Tom Cotton (AR) 
  9. Kevin Cramer (ND)
  10. Mike Crapo (ID) 
  11. Ted Cruz (TX)
  12. Steve Daines (MT)
  13. Joni Ernst (IA)
  14. Deb Fischer (NE)
  15. Lindsey Graham (SC) 
  16. Chuck Grassley (IA)
  17. Bill Hagerty (TN)
  18. Josh Hawley (MO)
  19. John Hoeven (ND) 
  20. Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS)
  21. James M. Inhofe (OK)
  22. Ron Johnson (WI)
  23. John Kennedy (LA)
  24. James Lankford (OK)
  25. Mike Lee (UT) 
  26. Cynthia M. Lummis (WY)
  27. Roger Marshall (KS)
  28. Mitch McConnell (KY)
  29. Jerry Moran (KS) 
  30. Rand Paul (KY)
  31. Rob Portman (OH) 
  32. James E. Risch (ID)
  33. Mike Rounds (SD)
  34. Marco Rubio (FL)
  35. Rick Scott (FL)
  36. Tim Scott (SC) 
  37. Richard C. Shelby (AL)
  38. Dan Sullivan (AK)
  39. John Thune (SD) 
  40. Thom Tillis (NC)
  41. Tommy Tuberville (AL)
  42. Roger F. Wicker (MS)
  43. Todd Young (IN)

Following his vote to acquit The Failed Orange Führer of the high crime of trying to invalidate a free and fair election by sponsoring and inciting an armed insurrection at the U. S. Capitol, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech excoriating The Failed Orange Führer for exactly those crimes. Some might be willing to gloss over McConnell's reaction as "cognitive dissonance". Some, less kind and more psychologically oriented, might say that McConnell is "bipolar". His attack on The Failed Orange Führer is neither of those facile things. The attack was simply McConnell's baying at the Republiscum electorate that he's now the pack leader of these curs. (My apologies to dogs, even the worst of them, for the insult to all canines that a comparison to Mitch McConnell entails. Then again, I'd have to apologize to reptiles had I compared him to some particularly obnoxious reptile.)

Some neo-Nazis speak of "taking over the Republican Party". Those idiots are 60+ years too late. As late as 1974 there were remnants of a "Republican Party" but that ceased to exist by the time we had reached 1996. The old money, Republiscum Old Guard (now asking themselves what happened in meetings of The Lincoln Project) that had been bankrolling the Tea Party and Birther loonies convinced themselves that they, and their sock puppets like Mitch McConnell, still controlled the Republiscum Party that they had lovingly built out of racists, bigots, neo-Nazis and other scum over decades. They stitched together the Evangelicals, anti-abortionists, gun nuts and conspiracy cultists into a large minority and then committed themselves to suppressing voters in the good, old fashioned way that Strom Thurmond, John Stennis, George Smathers, Richard Russell, William Rhenquist and George Wallace had done in the 1950s and 60s. Keeping legitimate, mostly minority voters out of polling places gave the look and tallies of a majority to their minority party.

What the Republiscum Old Guard in their wealth and entitlement hadn't foreseen was that this Frankenstein monster they had built would go off on its own to lay waste the countryside and, incidentally, the Capitol building, at the behest of one they considered a loud-mouthed one of their own, The Failed Orange Führer.

The Old Guard Republiscum and Mitch McConnell are no more in control of the Republiscum Party than I am. They, like the Krupps, Mengeles, von Witzlebens and Hugenbergs in the Germany of 1933 sit in, let's call it a skybox, overseeing the chaos below and thinking that they control the monster they've unleashed. Down in the field of retail politics they are not in control of their monster's rampage. They will find out how little control they have only when the monster breaks down the door to their "skybox" and defenestrates the lot of them. Let's hope, for our own sakes even though it save the Kochs, Mercers and Mellon-Scaifes among others, that we have our own Nürnberg Trials before the monster does yet more damage.

Saturday, January 2, 2021

CROCODILE TEARS

 

During the 2020 election some adherents of the Republiscum Party have drawn back in horror at the actions of the Orange Führer and collected themselves into a sort of political kaffeklatsch called "The Lincoln Project". This Neo-Fascist Liberation Front is opposing the re-election of the Orange Führer in a fuddled flurry of regret and crocodile tears. They are the precise equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein recoiling in horror at the monster he has created. 

Many years ago one of my dearest and oldest friends had to put up with meetings her partner held with his friends to discuss Marxism and other Lefty ideologies over wine and snacks. She called them "The Bourgeoisie Liberation Front". Basically they were pretentious "Limousine Liberals" who couldn't afford a 10-year old Volkswagen Beetle but had hopes. The Lincoln Project recalls that to me because they seem to be the Neo-Fascist right wing's answer to that old group of chit-chatters.

Let me say at the outset that all opposition to the Orange Führer has been and will continue to be good opposition regardless of whence it comes. I applaud their advertising and interventions on behalf of the Orange Führer opponents. The enemy of my enemy is definitely my friend...through November 3, 2020. Yet while I am pleased to get in the proverbial bed with these folks I think a "bundling board" is necessary lest we get too close and I become infected with the syphilitic Neo-Fascism of which they are carriers.

As usual with these blog posts, let me take you on a brief and admittedly jaundiced (Because it's factual) view of history.

The Republican Party (they hadn't yet become scum) came together from four disparate groups following the election of 1852. In that log cabin in Ripon, Wisconsin were "free soil" westerners, abolitionists and representatives of the essentially defunct Whig Party.  Their candidate in the 1856 presidential election, John Charles Fremont, carried the Whig and free soil strongholds of New England, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. He also carried New York despite New Yorker Millard Fillmore's candidacy that claimed only Maryland's electors. Fillmore, who had started his career in the bigoted, conspiracy drenched Anti-Masonic Party, was the candidate of the American Party. Democrat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania became president and perhaps our most ineffectual holder of that office. Once the American Party better known as the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and racist Know-Nothings showed an ability to win votes in the east and border states the nascent Republican Party quickly allied themselves with that rabble.

The rest is, as they say, history. Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with but 40% of the popular vote in 1860 yet he got us through our Civil War, preserved the Union, established that we were once and for all United states and ended all slavery within our nation. After his assassination in 1865, at the very moment of victory, the Republican Party began morphing into the Republiscum Party of today.

The Republican Party inherited from the defunct Whigs a tradition of putting forward candidates who were war heroes (some with thin claim to any heroism). In the aftermath of our Civil War Republican candidates for national office continuously "waved the bloody shirt" which, beside claiming wartime service and heroism, also pointed out that Democrats were not the Party that "saved the Union".

The other major result of the Civil War was an officer corps which started off as politically connected, gained the friendship, counsel and support of the business men who greatly profited from the war and ensuing Reconstruction, and who later advanced the veteran officers' post-war careers. This situation created a cadre of staunchly Republican, exceptionally wealthy men who always had ambitions to wield power and often had ambitions to front for that power as office holders. 

Not that ambition is an inherently bad thing or, contrary to the proverbial, that money is inherently evil. No insentient and insensible object is inherently evil though such objects do frequently bring out the evil in those who desire and accumulate them. Fighting to the death (usually someone else's) to keep increasing one's wealth, power and serve ever expanding ambitions, that is the very definition of evil. So it came about that cadre of staunch Republicans in the decades following the Civil War morphed inexorably from the Republican Party of Lincoln into the Republiscum Party of Mitch McConnell and the Orange Führer.

As the Republican Party morphs into a club for monied, elitist scum you get the violent suppression of voting and civil rights of Afro-Americans through segregation, Ku Klux Klan violence and "Jim Crow" Laws once the Republican Party turned their backs on the black folks they'd just fought to free, so that they might get Rutherford B. Hayes elected president in early 1877. You get the murderous suppression of workers' rights both with private armies of "Pinkerton Men" and with Federal troops in multiple cases and even the aerial bombing of strikers in the 1920s. You get often violent suppression of the rights of small farmers seeking fair prices for their goods and agricultural workers seeking fair wages on industrial farms. You get financial scandals involving government officials, major banks, public funds and massive corruption every 3 to 5 years and major Depressions about every 20 years. You get a political party that represents an ever diminishing portion of the population that seeks to stay in power by sowing fear, hatred and division between religious, ethnic, racial and economic groups with common interests in order to keep their opposition fragmented and weak. Throw in a generous helping of suppressing the voting rights of non-whites and you get, by 1920, The Republiscum Party.

Yes, I will admit that there have been individual bright spots in the Republiscum Party's record of darkness over the last century but all of them have flashed brightly only to be enveloped in darkness and amnesia. Robert M. LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick, Elliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus, Pete McCloskey and a number of others. Besides a love of their country and Constitution and a profound sense of decency the other thing that these Republicans, except Pete McClosky, have in common is that they are all dead.

The Republiscum Party has relentlessly moved to positions that would be familiar to the fascists of the 1920s and '30s, Benito Mussolini or Fransisco Franco. At the same time they have adopted the vilest tactics of the Nazi Party's rise in the 1928 to 1933 period. Take any speech on immigration by any Republiscum office holder over the last 20 years and substitute the word "Jew" for "immigrant" and you will find something entirely consistent with Brown Shirts goosestepping by torchlight at Nürnberg. Compare the tactics of Nazis in the Reichstag before the fall of the Weimar Republic with Mitch McConnell's tactics of obstruction since 2011 and you will find what I wish I could say is an uncanny correlation. A sizeable number of Republiscum supporters style themselves as "Patriots" in much the same way as a majority of evangelicals style themselves as "Christian" though in neither case do their alleged patriotism or Christianity relate in any substantive way to the tenets of our nation or the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

From out of this noisome cesspool of fascism called the Republiscum Party now rise some "Never Trumpers" and newly annointed "Not Anymore Trumpers" like Jeff Flake and Ben Sass, Bill Kristol and George Will and the "Team" at The Lincoln Project. I am happy to find that there are members of the Republiscum Party who reject our Orange Führer. With any luck at all some or even all of them actually support our Constitution and have a modest belief in democracy though those qualities have been in drastically short supply amongst Republiscum for the last 60 years.

These are people who have polluted the airwaves with their right-wing screeds, who have worked to steal the 2000 election, which is, by the way, the only presidential election in the United States that has been stolen from its rightful winner since 1876, who have sewn the seeds that the Orange Führer has been reaping. To say that the Orange Führer is an aberration, something inconsistent with the Republiscum Party that has sought to ruin our nation and destroy democracy itself since the 1920s is to be blind to history and those in The Lincoln Project that have worked mightily to bring a neo-Nazi scum like the Orange Führer to power. These are the very people who have derided progressive taxation as an assault on enterprise when it is the very source for enterprise. These people in The Lincoln Project have promoted the insane theory that giving ever greater wealth to the few raises the standard of living for the many. They have promoted authoritarian approaches to policing, justice for and decency to the poor and middle classes setting the one against the other. They have sewn division of region against region, race against race, religion against religion and neighbor against neighbor for the sole purpose of fragmenting an electorate that might otherwise rise up against their failed and self-serving policies. They have promoted and enacted a militarization of local police forces turning those who should protect and serve all our citizens into an occupying army that murders the poor and minorities with impunity.

Now, at long last, when their vicious, anti-democratic policies have reached the goal for which they have worked so mightily to achieve, now they expect us to forget their rush toward totalitarian plutocracy has achieved its goal and a piddling, mewling sop to the democracy, in which they do not at all believe, will make us forgive all their fascism.

On leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin supposedly answered a call from the crowd asking, "Do we have a republic or a monarchy?" by saying, "A republic if you can keep it." If we simply thank The Lincoln Project's founders and adherents and welcome these vipers back into the life of our nation we are not only failing to keep our republic but failing to deserve it as well.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

MODERATION IN...NOTHING


Two years ago I listened to a lot of news up to and following the 2018 mid-term elections. One of the tropes that kept coming up was the "demise of the Moderate Republican". It seemed to be something that news outlets enjoy discussing and airing interviews with self-appointed experts and even alleged Republiscum Moderates. The problem with this Republiscum Moderate trope is that it comes 50 or 60 years too late, possibly even more. The only reason that some Republiscum look "moderate" is that, like Ivory Soap, the Republiscum Party is 99 and 44/100ths per cent pure fascist shading over to full Nazi. If you're a Republiscum elected official who doesn't think that our military should be shooting refugees from Central America, you're a moderate because you only want to make it impossible for those same refugees to gain acknowledged refugee status and ultimately become U. S. citizens. The only way that is "moderate" is in contrast to the "build the wall and shoot anyone who tries to climb over" vast majority of Republiscum.

I'm sorry, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and a few others but you would have been right-wing extremists in 1950 and Goldwaterites in the early 1960s. Now that the vast majority of your colleagues are goosestepping to whatever tune The Orange Führer is tweeting you look moderate but you are absolutely, definitively not anything like moderate. Jeff, brokering a week of seriously curtailed investigation of Brett Kavanaugh and then voting for the alcoholic, rapist, ultra-right-wing bastard is not the stuff of which moderation is made. You may be a fascist looking for some cover in case we ever get a U. S. version of the Nürnberg Trials but that is not the stuff of moderation.


I have been paraphrasing General Philip Sheridan for decades saying the only good Republiscum is a dead Republiscum. That doesn't mean I or anyone should go out and start shooting Republiscum. By ignoring sensible precautions to control the corona virus pandemic the Republiscum will be making plenty of dead Republiscum without my or anyone's intervention. What I mean by that phrase is there are plenty of good Republicans but they are all dead: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Robert LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick and Elliot Richardson to name but a few. All moderates and even Progressives of their day but they are all dead.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair because Pete McCloskey is still alive at 93 and William Ruckelhaus only died last November at 87. Some might point out that Mitt Romney passes as a moderate but that is sort of like saying that Albert Speer wasn't much of a Nazi. Mitt, whether governor of Massachusetts or senator from Utah, is a vacuum filled by whatever makes Mitt look good for the moment. That self-serving thing of the moment can then be whisked away in the slightest breeze from a different direction. Mitt Romney is the walking, talking personification of there being no "there", there.

Currently the Republiscum Party has committed itself to Trumpist dictatorship. Mitch McConnell has been running the U. S. Senate with a playbook cadged from the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Parliament. Like the rise of the Nazis in 1929-33 there is no concern with venality and corruption in government as long as those corrupt, venal Republiscum in question adhere to the Republiscum Party line. There is no concern with actual violation of the Constitution so long it is a Republiscum who's violating it.

There are some differences between the Republiscum of today and the Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s. For one they don't resort to assassination, so far as we can tell. They just make as many legitimate voters as possible ineligible to vote so that their inability to attract a majority, one they congenitally despise anyway, won't be a bar to elective office.

Unless I am somehow mistaken, along with every dictionary and close to two hundred and fifty years of political rhetoric in this country, "democracy" means "government of the people, by the people and for the people" just to add in Abraham Lincoln's apt phrase. Keeping "people" from casting votes on specious and spurious grounds is the very definition of "anti-democratic", that is opposite to democracy itself. But that doesn't bother the Republiscum. They are only interested in the oligarchs who fund them and in hugging a flag now and then for show or using a Bible as a prop and means of paying no taxes.

The Orange Führer and his Republiscum allies like Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton decry voting by mail as an invitation to vote fraud. They ignore the fact that many states have used vote-by-mail for a decade or more without any hint of voter fraud. Meanwhile the only confirmed case of voter fraud in the nation over the last fifty years was a systematic action by the Republiscum Party in one Congressional District in North Carolina in 2018. If we are worried about vote fraud, it is the Republiscum Party whose actions we must vigilantly check, not the individual voter mailing in a ballot.

When the demos, the Greek word for the people, take to the streets peaceably because, regardless of our skin color, we have had more than enough of police abusing their power by murdering citizens, most often citizens of color, the Republiscum start screaming about riots and suppressing dissent. I seem to recall that their attitude was a bit different when smaller demonstrations by the Astroturf "Tea Party" group their oligarchs funded were carrying idiot signs that read things like, "Keep Govt out of my Medicare!" The Orange Führer's attitude toward protesters was different when neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of their number used his car to murder and maim protesters. Also, it's particularly interesting to watch the talking heads of the Volkische Beobachter (i. e. Fox News) scream about violent protesters when time after time in Minnesota, Colorado, Washington and California it has been police who have initiated the violence or the Republiscum and "Libertarian" supporters like the "Proud Boys" or the "Boogaloo Bois" (spelling and, more broadly, education are not the strong suit of these thugs) who have infiltrated peaceful protests and initiated violence.

The fact is that the Republiscum have no shame and no moderation at all. They incite and condone violence in defense of their anti-democratic attempts to establish a neo-Fascist oligarchy in the United States. There is no instance in which we can rationally speak of a "Moderate Republiscum". Like fairies, demons and unicorns the "Moderate Republiscum" simply does not exist except in the rhetoric of some news networks desperate to fill air time. How "moderate" is the Mussolini-style Fascist when compared with his Simese Twin brother the neo-Nazi anyway?

Thursday, June 11, 2020

MISCELLANY, JUNE, 2020


Let's get this out of the way quickly: Donald Trump is an intellectual micro-midget who is incapable of governing himself, let alone the United States. He is an embarrassment to the nation and a danger to it as well. Trump is a congenital Fascist. Eighty years ago we combined with Britain, the Free French and forces from many other nations to defeat Fascism in Europe and the Far East. It is crime for us to allow Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Republiscum Party to bring Fascism to America and it is also an insult to the men and women, living and dead, who fought Fascism in the 1920 through 1945 period. If we want to honor "The Greatest Generation" we must remove these Fascists from government no later than the November elections if American Democracy is to survive.

I have been homeless for just over a year. I currently live in a dorm in a shelter run by a Calvinist fundamentalist religious group. We are in Washington State. The manager of our shelter expressed his distress at the "tyrannical orders" of Governor Jay Inslee in March when sensible regulations for controlling the Corona Virus came down. I am in one of three dorms with ten other men who are either pigs or babies when they are not being bigots. The fellow, a young man with very serious physical and mental problems, in the bed next to mine spent months saying that he'd decided he was Jewish because Jews are all rich and control the world. He also uses the word "Negro" as if it were the even nastier variant on that term. The fellow next to him is very sympathetic to him and is also a big Trump supporter. Two others of my dorm mates are very distressed that NASCAR has banned the Confederate battle flag.
You, dear reader, if there are any dear readers out there, need to know this background because this morning (June 11, 2020) I awoke at 7:30 A. M. to find myself utterly alone in the dorm. That situation is so completely unusual that my first reaction was, "Well, finally The Rapture has happened and I get my choice of cars!"
Sadly, about ten minutes later one of the Confederate flag supporters came back and my plans for a road trip evaporated.

When I tweak the folks who run the shelter in which I now live, please don't misunderstand. They are good people and are expressing their faith in the way truest to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as set forth in the Book of Matthew 25th Chapter. Their failings all centre around getting bogged down in the Old Testament prophets, the Revelation of St. John and the letters that purport to be from Paul of Tarsus. They believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of god but have no compunctions about editing it to comport with their belief that demons are abroad in the land. I choose to know them by their acts rather than their failings though I still like pointing out the absurdities of those failings.

I have some hope that the Corona Virus in the United States is natures way of weeding out the Republiscum. I encourage "Red" states to abandon sensible virus control measures especially in towns and counties with big Republiscum majorities.

Isn't it great that Stephen Miller looks like the villain he is?

Remember how we were sold William Barr as a solid defender of law and an adult in the room? Remember how we were sold first Dubya and later Trump as a "business man" who would bring a responsible business perspective to government? Now, I ask you, do you really think that we aren't going to order some other dose of Republiscum snake oil in the future?

Yes, I know I was getting the Trump matter out of the way at the start but there's just too much of it to to fold into one paragraph.

I am so relieved that Donald Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine. It is supposed to be dangerous for the elderly, you know.

I'm glad that Donald Trump refuses to wear a mask in public. It wouldn't improve him any and might allow inattentive people to mistake him for a decent human being.

Let's give a cheer for the unsung hero Warren G. Harding. When his administration was rife with corruption and beset by scandal he had the decency to die in office.

I have been going to demonstrations and singing We Shall Overcome for 60 years. Now, thanks to cell phone videos, we just might.

Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins so why do we expect him to act nobly now?

How come we don't see anti-vaccers out demonstrating against creating a Corona Virus vaccine?

The Republiscum are constantly talking that our sovereignty is threatened by international treaties and organizations while they threaten our Constitution. Could there be a connection there? A distraction?

Can we agree that Twitter is for Twits?

I have fallen in love with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Rachel Brosnahan (Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel respectively). What more can a man want than a lovely, smart woman who is sexy, sensual, funny and talks dirty?

Republiscum believe that patriotism means wearing a flag pin or hugging a flag while trampling and then pissing on the Constitution. Over a century ago Ambrose Bierce wrote that Dr. Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. He then corrected Dr. Johnson by definitely stating that it is the first refuge of a scoundrel. The Republiscum prove Bierce correct every minute of every day.

Once we include African-Americans and Latino Americans, the black and brown peoples who are our neighbors, brothers and sisiters, in "All Lives Matter" we can use that slogan. Until then Black and Brown Lives Matter is something to push for.

Wouldn't it be nice if the CHRISTIAN Fundamentalists actually followed Jesus of Nazareth?

If this world is the creation of the Judeo-Christian god, then isn't it a bit presumptuous to be so all fired up and eager for the "End Times" and the destruction of their god's handiwork? Wouldn't it be more respectful to step back and let their god get on with his or her work and take things as they come?

The United States has had over 100,000 deaths from CoVid-19 with the death count rising daily. Is anyone surprised that that total could have been much smaller if we weren't led by a congregation of fools who despise science and think that mental illness is caused by demonic possession?

And, by the way, bad Christian Rock is redundant. It falsely implies that there is good Christian Rock which, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, does not exist. I know this from a year's worth of experience.

If you've been stuck at home since mid-March and need something to do, read a good book -NOT THE Good Book. Read a novel that you've never read before by an author you've never read before. If you have children at home, read to them. Read them Harry Potter or the Oz books of L. Frank Baum or the Gormengast books or Lord of the Rings or something else that's age appropriate like Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins or The Saggy, Baggy Elephant or A Child's Garden of Verses. Reading is what got us to the heights we've reached so far. Not reading is what got us Republiscum and Donald Trump.

While I'm on the subject of reading, a couple of years ago I waded through Herschel Parker's 2 volume, 1937 page biography of Herman Melville. The other day I came across another quotation from Ambrose Bierce that fits that work exactly. The quotation is , "The covers of this book are too far apart."

Well, that's all for now. I'm sure that there will be more to recommend or skewer in July.