Mitch is alive, Lindsey isn’t, Donald . . .
13 July—It appears that 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell is really still alive, even though he hasn’t spoken to anyone but a few close comrades. Instead, utilizing a classic kidnapper’s stratagem to prove a kidnappee is alive, Mitch’s press release includes a photo of him smiling and holding a Washington Post newspaper that—if not Photoshopped, of course—confirms it was snapped yesterday. And Mrs. McConnell, also smiling, is holding on to Mitch.
Mitch explains why he was hospitalized a month ago and is now in an unnamed rehabilitation facility, and assures us that it wasn’t a heart attack or a stroke, tumors, or hemorrhages. He apologizes for his silence: “You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older. Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct—I can’t help it.” And he reminds us that his childhood polio has left him with mobility challenges that “haven’t exactly gotten easier to manage with age.”
We’re with Mitch all the way about hesitating to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older and go a step further in asserting that all life challenges haven’t exactly gotten easier to manage with age.
For better or worse, since he’s no longer a Trumpublican, it looks like Mitch McConnell won’t be voting in the Senate for at least a little while. But whomever Trumpublican South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster picks to replace the late Senator Lindsey Graham is likely to vote with Trump all the way. Pity is putting it mildly.
So Senator Graham’s cardiac arrest was triggered by an aortic dissection—rupture—due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Evidently he was aware that arteriosclerosis affected other members of his family. And that’s all we know.
The good news is that a few hours before Senator Graham died, Donald Trump told him, “I’ll see you, like, soon.” As Hamlet put it, “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished . . .”
Flying Scotsman and Big Boy
12 July—South Carolina Trumpublican convert Senator Lindsey Graham died last night, probably from cardiac arrest, having turned 71 on Thursday. Trump will miss him.
I can’t remember anything about the first time I traveled on a train pulled by a steam locomotive, as it was in 1943, during World War II, and I wasn’t much over a year old when my mother, older brother, and I went to Texas with my father, who was an Army medical officer on an indirect route to Europe.
The last time I traveled on a train pulled by a steam locomotive was in 1962, and I remember it well. It was my first time in the UK, when I, as is my wont, made it to King’s Cross railway station in London just in the nick of time (because it was very early in the morning, only 10 o’clock) to catch the Flying Scotsman to Waverley Station in Edinburgh, actually named after the series of Walter Scott’s novels.
Back in the day, the Flying Scotsman wasn’t only the express rail service between London and Edinburgh, but also the steam locomotive that pulled what the Brits call coaches. It was (and still is) what’s known as a Pacific-type locomotive, 4-6-2 in Whyte notation, with four leading wheels, six driving wheels, and two trailing wheels. Nothing to sneeze at, to be sure.
A 4-6-2 Pacific isn’t bad for the Brits on their tight little island, but it’s positively dwarfed by Union Pacific’s 4-8-8-4 behemoth known unsurprisingly as the Big Boy. There were 25 Big Boys built between 1941 and 1944 to haul 100-car, mile-long (plus) freight trains up fairly steep grades unassisted. Eight Big Boys are still around, of which one has been restored and runs for excursions and as a museum.
Big Boy’s unique 4-8-8-4 configuration was dictated by the massive power that necessitated not only the front set of eight driving wheels to be articulated in order to negotiate curves engineered for shorter wheelbases, but a four-wheel leading truck for stability entering curves and a four-wheel trailing truck to support a huge firebox. (Like the beloved 4-6-4- Hudson.) The tender also was specialized, with a seven-axle articulated wheelbase and other advanced features.
While Big Boy—Union Pacific 4014—spends most of his time west of the Mississippi, he did come east on this year’s coast-to-coast tour. But, given the limitations and condition of Connecticut’s rail infrastructure, he didn’t venture here.
Here are pictures of the Flying Scotsman and Big Boy. Do they need captions?
Good news and other news
11 July—Unsolicited good news miraculously turned up in my email yesterday, along with the usual political stuff, phishing lures, dating porn, and other spam. It was from The Gospel Mag, a digital-only publication that provides daily devotionals, scriptural verses, and other goodies necessary for or at least relevant to propagation and maintenance of the Christian faith. Amen.
If you didn’t get the pun, “gospel,” from Old English “godspel,” means “good news.” And The Gospel Mag must not be confused with The Gospel Magazine, a bi-monthly real printed periodical based in the United Kingdom since 1766, available online only in archival PDFs.
In all events, this is the first revelation, so to speak, I was privileged to receive from The Gospel Mag. It’s evidently a new translation of the popular verse 31:24 from the Old Testament Book of Psalms, “זְקוּ וְיַאֲמֵץ לְבַבְכֶם כָּל־הַמְיַחֲלִים לַיהוָה,” which the King James Version claims means “Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the LORD.”
The effect of modern biblical exegesis on the artistic science of translation is positively astonishing.
Moving on, then, today is Bowdler’s Day, remembering—if not celebrating—the birth in 1754 of Thomas Bowdler, the English physician who, with the help of his equally censorious, puritanical, misguided sister, deleted words and passages from Shakespeare’s plays they considered improper for women and children and inspired the U.S. Federal Communication Commission to ban perfectly innocent content from radio and television.
As it happens, the Bowdlers did quite well with The Family Shakspeare. So Tom similarly expurgated Gibbon’s licentious Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but died before he could finish, so his nephew finished the travesty and also biographied Uncle Tom.
On this day in 1804, Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in the illegal Weehawken duel. Hamilton got off the first shot but missed—intentionally, it’s believed. But Burr’s ball pierced Hamilton’s liver and lodged in his spine. And Hamilton died the next day. Burr is revered in Litchfield because he was the first student at his brother-in law Tapping Reeve’s little South Street law school.
And Captive Nations Week begins today. It’s an official observance ever since Ike signed it into law in 1959, demonstrating solidarity with nations under the control of governments deemed by the United States as “authoritarian.” Sadly, it brings to mind the Greek aphorism “γνῶθι σεαυτόν,” “know thyself.”
With Donald Trump allowed to run roughshod over the Constitution, who are we to judge?
Litchfield real estate story
10 July—Earlier this week the USPS’s infallible scanner in Springfield printed the wrong destination code on an envelope not addressed to me or my extortionate PO box. So, after giving the wayward envelope to the appreciative clerk on duty, being curious (i.e., nosy), I googled the addressee.
And this is what came up on the Litchfield municipal website for the addressee’s property tax and on three real estate websites for the address:
According to the Town of Litchfield, the real property in question has a net and gross assessment of $567,230. The gross assessment represents the statutory 70 percent of the property’s strict (presumably appraised) valuation; the net assessment reflects local exemptions, deductions, and credits, as for veterans and poor old folks. Evidently the addressee-property owner is neither a veteran nor old and poor. And the tax, due 1 July but billed dilatorily and in all events not delinquent until 4 August, which is irrelevant, is $11,628.
The street address comes up on the three biggest real estate websites. As off market, of course. And this is what they say:
Zillow.com, the biggest of the real estate websites by visitor traffic, cautiously lists only the “tax assessed value,” which of course is $567,230, rather than even a Zestimate®, which Zillow says is its “estimate of a home’s market value, incorporating public records, MLS data and user-submitted home details into Zillow’s proprietary home valuation model.” But Zillow warns that a Zestimate “is not an appraisal and can’t be used in place of an appraisal.” Fair enough, but “shouldn’t be used in place of an appraisal” would be more to the point because people are people. And since the property is off market, there are no user-subitted details.
Next, Realtor.com, which is actually owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp but licenses the Realtor trademark from the National Association of REALTORS® and is right behind Zillow.com in visitor traffic, lists the property’s “estimated value,” “based on tax assessment records, recent sales prices of comparable properties, and other factors.” And that estimated value is $693,000. You wonder what the comps and other obviously deep dark secret factors are.
Last, Redfin.com, smallest of the big three real estate websites visitorwise, estimates the property at $1,015,109, adding that it’s “up $675K since last sold,” “up $91K since June,” and that “this home’s estimate is 114.7% higher than the average sale price ($473K) of 5 comparable homes.” You wonder about the Redfin algorithm’s choice of comps, too, as well as its adjustment algorithms. The seven-figure price certainly makes sense. But up $91K just since last month?
And if you’re wondering, the property in question was indeed last sold for $340,000. In 1995 . . .
Is Mitch McConnell?
9 July—Not that it matters, but a month after his cardiac arrest, heart attack, stroke, or other unspecified medical emergency has retiring Kentucky U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell really spoken with three selected Republicans—his former aide Scott Jennings, his successor as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and dependable Trumpublican Whip John Barrasso—the three of whom and only the three of whom, as far as we know—claim he has?
If Mitch is in fact able to communicate (or do anything at all) during his alleged convalescence, why hasn’t he been allowed to communicate with, say, his fellow Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul, who gleans updates on his colleague’s condition “through the grapevine,” as Dr. Paul puts it.
(Brings to mind Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei who hasn’t been seen in public since he got the job in February. Is he alive?)
And Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been trying to speak with Mitch or at least find out how the old guy is doing and as the CEO of his state has every right to be kept informed. You might even say it’s the governor’s responsibility to be kept informed. On second thought, though, Beshear is a Democrat, so he must obviously be kept out of the minuscule privileged GOP—but not Trumpublican—loop and doesn’t have a right to anything in an otherwise reliably Republican state.
It’s not that Gov. Beshear could appoint a replacement should Mitch be unable (for whatever reason) to serve out the last few months of his undistinguished and often dis graceful term, mind you. Because in 2024 Kentucky’s veto-proof Republican-majority legislature relieved him of a governor’s traditional power to appoint a successor, making it only the fourth state to exclusively require a special election for that purpose.
You wonder why they’d have done or even seen a need for a nasty move like that. Could it possibly have had anything to do with Mitch’s triple bypass in 2003 and, more to the point, the unfortunate public “neurological events”—probably TIAs despite the Capitol physician’s public diagnosis of “occasional lightheadedness” caused by dehydration, blah blah, blah—in 2023, one mini-stroke in D.C., the other back home in Kentucky?
And let’s not forget Kentucky’s extremely popular Democrat governor in his second term.
Nor should we forget that in 2016 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked—on irrational and unreasonable but politically expedient grounds—the merest consideration of Merrick Garland’s nomination by Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat made available by Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death. Not that the GOP majority would have confirmed Garland, to be sure, but it was a possibility.
Shame on Mitch McConnell for abusing his considerable power and the public trust. And his fairly recent break with Trump—only after he decided to retire, of course—doesn’t absolve him . . .
Nixon and a scummy liar calling scummy liars scummy liars
8 July—First, in 1972, when I arrived in Litchfield, the town’s population was 7,450. In 54 years it’s grown some 12 percent to about 8,300, with commensurate growth in the number of real estate parcels, taxable personal property, and residents’ motor vehicles registered (as required by law) in Connecticut.
In 1972, Litchfield’s tax collector had a side-handle adding machine and a manual typewriter and during the tax season Isabel Rylander, who had served eight terms as a state rep, inter alia, worked with a part-time assistant to get the tax bills out in plenty of time. And the bills always but always arrived in June, well before taxes were due on 1 July (plus the month’s grace period, of course).
In 2026, Litchfield’s tax collector has computers, digital data bases, the internet, contracted printing and mailing services, a full-time assistant, and two part-time assistants during the tax season. And this year the tax bills weren’t even mailed until 1 July—into the month’s grace period.
Now to Nixon. It’s Col. John Nixon of Pennsylvania, Richard Nixon’s son (really), and not to be confused with Brig. Gen. John Nixon of Massachusetts. And 250 years ago today, in Philadelphia’s State House Yard—now known as Independence Hall—Col. Nixon delivered the very first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. And of course it was received very enthusiastically.
And now to a scummy liar calling scummy liars scummy liars. As if you don’t know. In his declaration of nullification in Ankara early today—the laughable ceasefire agreement, the useless MOU with Iran—Donald Trump bitched that “it’s just a waste of time dealing with them, they’re liars.” And he went on to describe the mullahs as “scum” and “sick people.”
Of course, Trump is absolutely right. (Isn’t he always? Just ask him.) But doesn’t “liar,” “scum,” and “sick” bring someone else to mind?
So in addition to Trump, Graham Platner certainly fills the liar, scum, sick bill. Platner has excreted slimy negative vibes from the moment he announced his intention to unseat Maine U.S. Senator Susan Collins last year. And the Platner vibes have been getting slimier and negativer by the hour. Yet the Dems and Bernie Sanders stuck with him until the latest rape accusation. Why? Are they so desperate? Or do they reckon Senator Collins isn’t really all that bad?
On the other hand, isn’t even a weirdo like Graham Platner innocent until proven guilty?
The commies are coming! The commies are coming!
7 July—He who veers from an intended disquisition is scooped. The Monitor’s art department created this editorial—i.e., political—montage on Sunday for posting yesterday. (We don’t do cartoons.) But Mount Trumpmore came up. So the post was rescheduled for this morning.
But—wouldn’t you know it!?—this morning’s Margolis & Cox editorial—i.e., political—cartoon pictured colonially dressed Donald Trump on a horse, shouting “The commies are coming! The commies are coming!”
Ah well.
To belabor the point, then, Margolis & Cox brilliantly exploit the incongruity of Trump on a horse. Can you imagine Trump on a horse? Pity the poor horse, for starters.
On the other hand, isn’t the verisimilitude of Trump in a golf cart on the Capitol lawn pretty good, too? And pity the poor golf cart . . .
Another Trump monument
6 July—So Donald Trump spent America’s non-250th big birthday bash weekend doing what he does best. Continuously. Without surcease. All the time. He misrepresented, misstated, exaggerated, just plain lied; criticized, insulted, vilified, just plain bitched; boasted, bragged, flaunted, just plain grandstanded; congratulated himself, indulged himself, served himself, just plain gratified himself. In public.
And he put his formerly and conveniently bone-spurred foot in his fat mouth when he proclaimed, “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty . . . the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” Boy, did he get that wrong.
Because without hesitation or doubt, the real mortal threat to American liberty, “the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” is Donald J. Trump.
Public masturbation is a trait not uncommon among narcissists and megalomaniacs. It’s a product and concomitant of exhibitionism, of course, and reflects sociopathic problems with impulse control and an overweening sense of entitlement.
It’s common practice for dictators to plaster images of and monuments to themselves throughout their dictatorships as means not only of self-gratification but also of fostering quasi-religious devotion among both their enthusiastic followers and oppressed masses. Think of Caligula, Nero, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong Un, and of course Donald Trump.
If you didn’t know, Trump has them all beat with his noisome image defacing public places and official federal items like passports and national park passes, on which latter his disgraceful mug replaces images of nature. And of course Trump and his evil spawn have monetized his image and everything else even tangentially connected with him, too numerous to detail here.
And now we learn that Donald Trump has decided to put himself on Mount Rushmore alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. And he’s assuring everybody that it won’t cost the taxpayers one red cent because his oligarch flunkies will foot the whole billion-dollar bill. But his administration flunkies are nevertheless fiddling with ways to sneak several to many billions of bucks for the grandest monument to himself.
But, you’re thinking, Trump’s repellent puss can’t be carved on Mount Rushmore for geological as well as legal reasons. The National Park Service, for instance, has noted that the remaining granite is too unstable to carve and any dynamiting or drilling might even destroy the existing worthy presidential faces.
In that case, all Trump has to do is fire and hire until he gets what he wants. The Supreme Court told him he can do it, after all.
And in 1994 Congress passed an act banning any further carvings of Mount Rushmore. But if the increasingly uncooperative Trumpublican majorities don’t heed their master’s order to rescind it because it was obviously passed without any consideration of Trump, he’ll just tell them where to go an issue an executive order to give him his way.
In all events, here’s a sketch of what is henceforth to be known as Mount Trumpmore that was filched from the West Wing:
Printed Declarations
5 July—Shortly after the Monitor went to press (so to speak) yesterday, we received this link from a particularly attentive reader in the UK to an excellent, delightfully concise piece in The Times, known in the U.S. as The Times of London.
https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=f4f9418f-7e77-4345-8ab6-3dc4f6208c55
Here’s the subject of the story, the rare printed copy of the Declaration of Independence recently discovered by chance at the UK’s National Archives. It’s one of the 11 known surviving Exeter Declarations printed in New Hampshire, also known as Exeter Broadsides because of the size of paper they’re printed on, just over 15 x 19 inches. The one in the UK National Archives is the only Exeter Declaration not (currently) in the United States.
The so-called Exeter Declarations were printed in Exeter (where the prep was to open six years later) between 16 and 19 July 1776 by Robert Luist Fowle for his newspaper.
For the record, there are three other copies of the Declaration of Independence at the Kew National Archives in London. They’re the somewhat less rare so-called Dunlap Broadsides, a skosh bigger than the Exeter ones. About 200 of them were printed the night on 4 July 1776 right in Philadelphia by newspaper publisher John Dunlap. Only 26 are known to survive . . .
America’s 250th: fake news
4 July—When does life begin? We’re celebrating America’s 250th Independence Day, so why should that theoretical question that unfortunately has become a religious and political bugbear be of interest today? Well, it’s precisely because America’s 250th birthday is being celebrated today that it should be of interest.
Because, first, today—4 July—shouldn’t be celebrated as Independence Day; and, second, America’s 250th birthday doesn’t really occur in 2026.
Independence Day is supposed to celebrate—wait for it—the birth of the independent American republic. (You’d be astounded how many native-born, allegedly educated Americans don’t know that.) It’s supposed to commemorate the day in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence, thus severing the 13 revolting American colonies’ political ties to Great Britain.
Problem is, after Richard Henry Lee on 7 June 1776 introduced the resolution “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved,” and Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston were tasked with drafting an instrument formalizing the resolution, only 12 of the 13 colonies voted in favor on 2 July because New York abstained pending instruction from Albany. That instruction wasn’t given until 9 July and received in Philadelphia until 15 July. (Given the abysmal condition of the King’s Highway at the time—reminiscent of Connecticut roads now—the courier or couriers made pretty damn good time.)
Yet the impetuous but strategically and diplomatically astute Continental Congress went on record as officially approving the Declaration on 4 July and claiming it had passed unanimously in order to project a united front to Great Britain and foreign powers. But the fact remains that New York didn’t cast its vote in Philly until 11 days after 4 July.
And that’s not all. Despite the insistence of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin (and, given the political sheep-flock instinct, probably others) from the get-go that a copy of the Declaration had in fact been signed on 4 July, in 1796 Thomas McKean, a delegate from Delaware, pointed out that some signers weren’t present at that time, including several who weren’t even elected to Congress until after that date. And his assertion has pretty well been confirmed by subsequent research.
Moreover, while the seditious text had without doubt been approved in July, the formal engrossed (artistically lettered) vellum copy of “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”—the one now in the National Archives Museum (unless Donald Trump has surreptitiously sold it to one of his Arab pals and replaced it with a fake)—wasn’t signed until 2 August, and then by only 50 of the 56 delegates at an official signing ceremony. Five of the remaining delegates made it back to Philadelphia later in 1776 to do the dirty, but the aforementioned Thomas McKean didn’t get there to add his signature until late January 1777.
So much for Independence Day the Fourth of July. Now to give shorter shrift to 1776 as the year of the nation’s birth. Although the Second Continental Congress had declared independence on 4 July 1776 or thereabouts, the United States of America wasn’t recognized as a free, sovereign, independent state under international law and by the Kingdom of Great Britain until the Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783 by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay for the Yanks and David Hartley (inventor, close friend of Franklin, MP, opponent of American war) for the Brits, officially ending the American Revolutionary War. (As a point of interest, the Kingdom of Great Britain wouldn’t become the United Kingdom until 1801, when it merged with the Kingdom of Ireland.)
So there goes 1776 and today as the one big beautiful semiquincentennial. So what about celebrating the sestercentenbnial in 2033? Maybe, maybe not. Because the United States didn’t officially become the republic we know today—or something like it, anyway—until the Constitution that’s being abused today took effect on 4 March 1789, superseding the highly imperfect Articles of Confederation, which had been adopted in 1777 and ratified in 1781 largely as a defensive measure.
So the bisesquicentennial, America’s 250th birthday, should actually be celebrated on 4 March 2039. Because, despite a few false pregnancies, as it were, America’s life clearly began on 4 March 1789 . . .
Trump and pussy
3 July—There can be no question that Donald Trump is by far the most autocratic and corrupt president the republic has ever suffered. He clearly abuses the office, which he unashamedly regards as a vehicle for immunity and profit. And the SCOTUS-enabled grifter-in-chief’s loyal weaponized taxpayer-funded flunkies unlawfully continue to lay the trumped-up groundwork for nullifying election results (among other things) that don’t suit their narcissistic master’s tyrannical agenda.
Isn’t it all about him, after all?
But like any animal Donald Trump has visceral urges and needs that must be dealt with and assuaged. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go, as they say. Especially when you’re Donald Trump and so full of it. “And,” as the notorious embarrassment to America has famously boasted, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab the pussy and use her litter box.”
All well and good, you say, but doesn’t Trump realize that he hasn’t taken down his pants? Give him a break, we say, he’s 80 years old . . .
