2 July—Among the reactions to yesterday’s disquisition, Clarence and the blow job, was one from Sheepishly Anonymous, who wrote: “Among young American males in Vietnam (and maybe elsewhere in Southeast Asia) during the 1960’s, the availability of both a steam bath and blow job in the same package led to questions like this: ‘Hey, wanna go for a steamjob and blowbath?’”   

And a reader who had played French horn with a men’s college brass band (when there were men’s colleges) reminisced that the band director’s strategy to lure musicians was to post notices headed “BLOW JOBS” that told the eagerly horny brass players to be sure to come with their instruments. Great paronomasia or what?

Also following up on yesterday’s disquisition, today would be Thurgood Marshall’s 117^th birthday, had he not died at 84 in 1993. You’ll recall that his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1991 opened the chair now shamed by Clarence Thomas.

On the subject of shame, then, Connecticut U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy was “shaking with fury” on YouTube this morning over “the most monstrous legislation [he’d] ever voted on in his time in Congress” in the aftermath of the Senate’s passage of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The shame’s not on Sen. Murphy, mind you, but on the Republican senators and of course Trump’s vile vice president who cast the memorably disgraceful deciding vote.

Sen. Murphy understated the case when he called the antisocial omnibus legislation “repulsive” and “a moral abomination.” Of course he’s absolutely right. No doubt about that. But what did he expect from a Senate majority comprising Republicans most of whom are so afraid of their tyrannical, unstable lord and master’s wrath they likely crap their pants at the mere prospect.

In addition to being a disgusting, indefensible moral abomination, moreover, the repulsive OBBBA is perhaps the most fiscally irresponsible legislation ever passed by either house: The catastrophe excreted by the Senate adds about a trillion to the three-plus-trillion-dollar calamity thrown up by the House of representatives in May.

America’s credit rating already has been embarrassingly downgraded from the very best (AAA and Aaa) to banana-republic status by major agencies because of well-founded concerns about the metastasizing national debt and the country’s (in)ability to manage its financial obligations. To put it mildly.

As things stand now, the inept Trump-fearing, sociopathic Republican majorities in both houses of Congress now are paving the way for inept Trump-hating Democrats to take over the majorities in 2026. But Trump will still be tyrannizing everybody until 2028. Unless . . .