24 June—Four years ago today the United States Supreme Court decided in its ultimate, indisputable, and infinite arrogance that women do not have a constitutional right to abortion. The entirely expected decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization enthusiastically trashed SCOTUS’s ultimately, indisputably, and infinitely arrogant 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that women do in fact have a constitutional right to abortion, thereby superseding and striking down any and all state laws to the contrary, which was fortified by the Supremes’ Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision in 1992.
The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wasn’t appointed to SCOTUS until 1993 and was a staunch albeit judicially restrained pro-choice advocate and supporter of abortion rights among other good causes, nevertheless quite rightly criticized the Roe v. Wade decision as judicial overreach. While she didn’t insist that the right to abortion should have been enacted by explicit legislation, she did reckon that the Roe ruling should have been founded on different constitutional principles
Put simply, judicial overreach occurs when judges effectively make laws rather than simply interpreting them, thus interfering with, disrupting, or even negating the roles of the executive and legislative branches of government, exceeding courts’ constitutional judicial authority and compromising—unbalancing—the Constitution’s implicit balance of power. (Like the president usurping the functions and powers of the legislative and judicial branches. But we won’t go there.)
However they may rationalize it, then, many judges at all levels overreach whenever they think they can get away with it. A little power does a lot to inflate an ego and magnify one’s hubris. It’s human nature. To be sure, the appeals process is supposed to put a brake on judicial overreach, inter alia. But in practice and reality the overreach of appellate courts and judges is directly proportional to their juridical position.
And the appellate court and judges in the highest juridical position, the ultimate court of last resort, the superior authority whose decisions—for better or worse—are final and binding on all other courts, is of course the United States Supreme Court. Well, as we’ve seen, SCOTUS decisions are final and binding only until they aren’t.
Stare decisis—let the decision stand—is the doctrine of precedent, of making final decisions, the practice of not reversing, vacating, or overruling prior decisions—for better or worse. For the record, SCOTUS has reversed, vacated, or overruled its own decisions—for better or worse—well over 200 times.
Also for the record, since SCOTUS overruled and reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, legal abortions in the United States have increased by almost 25 percent. And if more people practiced continence and chastity—or at least contraception—fewer abortions would be necessary . . .
23 June—The maleficent mullahs in Tehran are doing a particularly spirited virtual victory lap around the Strait of Hormuz—make that the world—as they gloat over the ceasefire agreement they foisted on Donald Trump’s totally inexperienced, incompetent, demonstrably unqualified team of faithful flunky negotiators. The agreement, of course, is nothing more than a toothless memorandum of understanding, known as a MOU.
As an initialism the letters of MOU are pronounced individually, “m-o-u.” As it happens, though, MOU should in this instance more appropriately be construed as an acronym, in this case a French word, pronounced “moo,” meaning “soft,” as in weak and spineless. And don’t forget the TACO acronym, Trump Always Chickens Out.
Of course, Trump and his flunkies continue to lie about what they insist is the United States victory over Iran and the magnificent MOU. But they lie about everything, so what else is new?
On the other hand, over 92 percent of 3,644 Israelis randomly surveyed by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Agam Institute see the writing on the wall, that Iran won the war, and 83 percent realize that the military campaign and diplomatic fiasco that totally ignored and dissed Israel has weakened Israel’s long-term security.
Leave it to Trump.
Meanwhile, back in Connecticut, remember Kosta Diamantis, the former Democratic state representative and politically appointed deputy budget director and head of school construction who last October was found guilty by a jury in the Bridgeport Federal District Court on all 21 counts he’d been charged with? Well, Kosta is still awaiting sentencing in September for that verdict as well as a whole new and unrelated second federal trial in December on other extortion, bribery, and tax fraud charges.
So it’s not surprising that Kosta has applied to his presumed hero and exemplar—and hoped-for savior—Donald Trump for a pardon. Kosta applied some time this year—records don’t indicate exactly when but it’s obviously ahead of sentencing—for a pardon after completion of sentence. Trump’s decision on that is pending, but given his execrable history of giving pardons to former elected officials, like once-convicted Rod Blagojevich and twice-convicted John Rowland, don’t bet against it.
Evidently Kosta, who is currently out on half-million-dollar bail, doesn’t expect and isn’t asking to avoid jail time—doubtless in a minimum-security country club slammer. But he reckons that a pardon of any sort would allow him to keep his $75,000 state pension. (Only after Rowland’s conviction did the Connecticut General Assembly pass legislation to deprive convicted felons of state pensions, so his pension, currently about $53,000, is intact.)
Who said crime doesn’t pay?
22 June—Alan Greenspan, who died today at 100, could have made a career in music (he studied clarinet at Juilliard) but chose instead to follow his father into economic consulting. He was appointed to five terms as Chair of the Federal Reserve by four presidents, first by Ronald Reagan in August 1987, then by George Bush 41, Willy Clinton, and George Bush 43. And of course he was known as Maestro.
Having led the Fed through two recessions and the 11 September aftermath, Greenspan retired from the Fed in January 2006 on the best of terms and with a stellar reputation, so he didn’t get to be reappointed by Bush or Barack Obama. That may have been to his—and the world’s—advantage, since his Ayn Rand-influenced laissez-faire policy of deregulation is considered by many to have been largely responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, the most severe banking and general economic disaster since the Great Depression. But let’s not dwell on negatives. And he admitted his error. But you wonder how one non-autocrat could have so much power.
Alan Greenspan’s working relationship (and notable bipartisan rapport) with Clinton and his administration—and after Greenspan’s retirement from the Fed as a private consultant and commentator with Barack Obama and his administration—was not only pragmatic, prioritizing compromise and what observers call institutional stability over ideological purity, but appears to have been genuinely amicable, despite obvious ideological differences. The good good old days.
On the other hand, although Greenspan and Donald Trump were on common ground about things like tax cuts, with Greenspan regularly praising Trump’s huge corporate cuts, and general deregulation, they clearly differed on little things like populism, isolationism, free trade, immigration, and—of course—the independence of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan called Trump’s populism “a shout of pain” rather than a workable economic strategy, for instance. And he said that Trump’s tariff-based protectionist trade wars, particularly against China, would lower the standard of living of average Americans. Was he right or was he right?
While Greenspan generally avoided criticizing Trump in public, he observed on more than one occasion that he’d rather turn off his hearing aid than listen to the ignoramus-in-chief discuss the strength of the U.S. dollar. Ahead of the 2016 election, while not naming Trump directly, he described the political environment as the worst he’d ever known and kvetched that the country was being undermined by crazies. Was he right or was he right?
After the 2016 election Greenspan headlined, “I couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was not my candidate.” Was he right or was he right? But with 20/20 hindsight . . .
21 June—Sumer is icumen in at 4:24 this morning. Astronomical summer around Litchfield anyway. As you may have read in the 20 June 2024 disquisition, “sumer is icumen in” means “summer has arrived” in the West Saxon dialect of Middle English. And since many West Country folk have been voicing their fricatives (S, F, Th [as in thin] as Z, V, Th [as in that]) for a couple of millennia, “sumer” likely would have been pronounced “zoomer” when the ditty was written in the 13th century, quite as it is today by stereotypical natives of England’s West Country as well as movie pirates.
There are numerous orthographical and phonological inconsistencies in the one contemporary mediaeval manuscript that contains “Sumer is icumen in” (Harley 978 in the British Library), but don’t let it bother you. Because we’re going to Oxford (where a dialect not far from West Saxon is still spoken by stereotypical oppidans) with Donald Trump. Make that for Donald Trump, since as far as is known Trump has never visited Oxford, not the university, the city, nor any of the 31 Oxfords in the United States. And none regret it.
In 2018, UK Prime Minister and Oxford alumna Theresa May allowed Trump to hold forth at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, just a few miles from Oxford, where he was greeted with considerable smaller protests than the ones organized for him in London, but he probably didn’t make it to Matthew Arnold’s poetically licensed “City of Dreaming Spires.”
Among the nightmarish Gothic spires, then, running between High Street (known as The High) and Merton Street (known as Merton Street), is a very narrow thoroughfare—essentially an alley—that’s open only to pedestrians and pedal bicyclists. It’s called Magpie Lane. And that takes us back to the 13th century and Donald Trump.
First, Merton Street, named for the college it fronts, got that name officially only in the last century. Before that, from the 18th century, it was called King Street. And originally, at the time “Sumer is icumen in” was written, it had been called St. John Street.
That takes us to Magpie Lane, which officially got that name only in 1927. Before that, it was known as Grove Street, having acquired that name in the 19th century, when it replaced Magpie Lane, presumably after the demise of the pub with a magpie sign.
So what does all that have to do with Donald Trump? Remember the Access Hollywood recording in which he bragged, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”? Who can forget it?
Well, when “Sumer is icumen in” was written in the 13th century, what’s now called Magpie Lane in Oxford had been Gropecunt Lane.
Right up Trump’s alley. Had Trump known that, you wonder, would he have made a pilgrimage thither?
(In the interest of historical, nomenclatory, and etymological accuracy, it must be noted that Oxford wasn’t the only municipality in England to have boasted a Gropecunt Lane. At a time when streets were commonly named for their functions or activities and people were less priggish, prudish, and uptight, knocking shops tended to be located—often centrally located—on Gropecunt Lanes. And no city and town didn’t—doesn’t—have sex workers.)
20 June—It’s not generally known that way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries New York City was home to some 100 breweries, roughly twice the number that made Milwaukee famous, making New York the brewing capital of the United States in the good old days. Work at the breweries attracted immigrants from Germany and many of them settled in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East Side that naturally came to be known as Germantown.
(Apropos nothing, although Yorkville wasn’t by any means exclusively German, the German American Bund was headquartered there in the 1930s.)
Yorkville remained pretty much a proletarian enclave within the ultra-fashionable Upper East Side until the notorious Third Avenue El (an elevated subway line, so to speak, that no one remembers fondly) was taken down in the 1950s, dramatically reducing noise pollution and allowing sunlight through. And that was one of the factors that led to the gentrification and fashionablization of Yorkville.
The Second Avenue El had been demolished in 1942, but that’s irrelevant. Second Avenue is tangentially relevant, however, because it was there, near 88th Street, that Elaine’s Restaurant flourished for almost a half-century from the early 1960s until namesake proprietress Elaine Kaufman died in 2011.
And Elaine’s is relevant because while the restaurant’s menu wasn’t in any way distinguished, memorable, or, for that matter, particularly savory, it was patronized by glitterati. Celebrities—largely performing and literati glitterati—hung out at Elaine’s to mingle with other celebrities. And the great unwashed and wannabes were allowed in by Elaine to be seen with celebrities and get their autographs.
Among Elaine’s regulars in the 1980s were the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Donald Trump. (Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell wouldn’t show up until the 90s.) Trump would conspicuously be seen with his wives, assorted arm candy, or various VIPs. Bernstein would normally be seated in a booth alone or with someone in the arts—but invariably surrounded by admirers seeking his attention or autograph. Or both.
For whatever reason, Trump had never met Bernstein. In fact, he didn’t even know who Leonard Bernstein was. And of course Bernstein didn’t know who Trump was. Why should he? But Trump was impressed by all Bernstein’s admirers. More to the point, he envied Bernstein’s admirers.
So one day in the mid-80s Trump casually sauntered over to Bernstein’s booth and introduced himself. Of course Trump’s name meant nothing to Bernstein. Why should it have? But, being a mensch, he introduced himself to the clod as Lenny Bernstein. And they exchanged pleasantries.
Finally, Trump, eager to learn the secret of Bernstein’s popularity, asked him what he did.
Modestly and hesitatingly, Bernstein told Trump,“I’m a conductor.”
“Gee, that’s great, Lenny,” Trump condescended to Bernstein. “What railroad do you work for?”
19 June—Today is National Dental Health Day, commonly known as Juneteeth. It should be, anyway.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on the night of 19 June 1953 in the single electric chair in New York State’s legendary Sing Sing Prison, Julius first with no problem, followed by Ethel—who shouldn’t have been executed in the first place—whose ordeal was rather more gruesome.
Twenty-five years later, on 19 June 1978, the Garfield comic strip achieved nationwide distribution. And two decades ago the Garfield strip appeared in over 2,600 newspapers in 80 countries. Now its syndication is down to some 2,000 rags and declining, quite deservedly. Because the Garfield syndicated comic strip, which along with most of the fat feline’s still-flourishing franchise has been owned by notorious Paramount Skydance Corporation since 2019, has lost its brilliance and charm.
We’re told that Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, is still actively involved in the strip, but judging by the lackluster and rather strained content and lazy artwork you wouldn’t think so. Garfield’s artwork, like that of most comic strips these days, is digital.
The Garfield strips, more than any others we’ve seen, in fact, appear to be created entirely by digital means, with no manual input, by layering one stored image, from a database, of, say, a variable part of Garfield’s body, on another on what’s called the canvas. Thus, for instance, the fat cat may appear in one panel with his paw on a table and his mouth closed, and in the next panel with his paw in the same position—i.e., the same graphic file—but with his mouth open.
The white text balloons are added the same way, with appropriate text inserted as required. And while text normally dictates graphic, we shouldn’t be at all surprised if the text of many Garfield strips were in fact devised to fit a convenient graphic.
Digital graphics certainly can be fiddled with over-hyped artificial intelligence, but most are done with simple old-fashioned digital cutting-and-pasting, just as in antediluvian times we used really old-fashioned scissors or X-Acto knives (or single-edge razor blades) and rubber cement or wax.
While we may miss old-fashioned analogue line art and hand-coloring on boards, there’s nothing wrong with the purely digital approach to newspaper comic strips, to be sure, and it doesn’t appear that Paramount Skydance is trying to hide Garfield’s total digitization. Or that anyone else gives a damn.
The real problem with Garfield, though, is that, as we said earlier, the strip has lost its brilliance and charm. As cats go, Garfield at 48 is well past his prime. And he’s clearly not doing at all well in his Paramount Skydance dotage. So perhaps he should be put out of his—and our—misery . . .
18 June—Judging by the terms of the just-executed (for all it’s worth) ceasefire-cum-giveaway memorandum of understanding Donald Trump and his equally unqualified, inept, questionably motivated flunkies have “negotiated” with—in this instance, apparently accepted from—Iran, it’s clear that Iran has won the illegal war started by Trump to help his former pal Bibi Netanyahu defend Israel and continue to put off his trial for corruption. It’s an international bar fight.
For the record, history shows that aggressors lose more than half—60 to 70 percent—of the wars they start. While the regime of Iran certainly is evil and corrupt (just like the current regime of the United States, it must be noted), in this case Iran is the victim pure and simple. Yet that nasty nation doesn’t deserve anything like the $300-plus billion in reparations as well as other favors Trump has proffered just to squirm out of a situation he never should have stuck his nose in.
In simple terms, Trump, the self-proclaimed brilliant deal artist, is giving away the store. Because, as the gastronomic acronym concisely puts it, TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out: The unstable schoolyard bully makes dire threats, only to delay or renege, usually in order to give him more time for avert a backlash which would adversely affect what he thinks will be his golden legacy. And, of course, his Nobel Peace Prize.
We’ve seen Trump chicken out time and again. Take Greenland, for instance. Or not. And regime change in Iran. Or not. It’s easier to pay off the wicked mullahs and slink away from the fight Trump started for his own reasons than to admit he seriously screwed up. To be sure, Trump, true to character, threatens to drop a bomb on the Iranians’ heads if they don’t live up to the great deal they gave Trump. Definitely Nobel Peace Prizeworthy.
And then there’s the ex parte aspect of Trump’s deal with Iran that gives the avowed anti-Zionist theocratic Islamic republic virtually the whole megillah and more [sic]. Israel and Hezollah haven’t been involved in negotiating the noxious memorandum of understanding, yet Trump has determined that Israel and Hezbollah will cease their hostilities forthwith.
Hezbollah naturally loves the ludicrous lopsided deal because now Iran can pump more ill-gotten gelt into its anti-Israel warfare. And of course Hezbollah has no intention of ceasing fire on the little nominally secular Jewish state. And naturally Israel is royally—and justifiably—pissed for that very reason, as well, of course, as that Trump’s flunkies made the lousy deal behind Netanyahu’s back.
So it remains to be seen what Netanyahu and Israel will do about it . . .
17 June—It was on this day in 1994 that the FIFA World Cup soccer games began, held in the United States for the very first time. And you can bet that all the non-American players, officials, and spectators had a much better time than they’re having this year under Donald Trump’s second reign of terror.
Clearly not a fan of football with a round rather than pointed (and thus misnamed) ball, no helmets and only minimal other body protection, and a continuously running clock with no team-called breaks, O.J. Simpson on the very same day led a televised motorcade of a score of California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles Police Department cars on State Route 91. In actual fact, it was O.J.’s pal and NFL teammate A.C. Cowlings who was driving—his own 1993 Bronco, which was a twin of O.J.’s. And O.J., in the back seat, was holding a gun to A.C.’s head. Do you wonder why the guys had identical Broncos?
And do you wonder why so many cops joined in that vehicle chase and delight in joining others? Well, the rozzers claim it’s to handle contingencies, safely deal with the suspect or suspects, and coordinate tactical measures like roadblocks.
One example is what the police call “tactical containment,” using multiple cars to box in a fleeing vehicle or block highway exits and street intersections. But you wonder how they’re going to do either of those things when the fuzz are following—behind—the fleeing vehicle—where the fleeing vehicle has been rather than where it’s going.
In other reminiscence, then, on this day in 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette, by that time an ancient 67, having survived the vile French Revolution, and the last surviving major general from the American Revolutionary War (having been appointed to that rank at the age of 19 by commander-in-chief Lieutenant General George Washington) laid the cornerstone for the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, which had been fought 50 years earlier, mostly on Breed’s Hill. Lafayette was on his farewell tour of the grateful nation, having been invited over by President James Monroe.
Lafayette died back in Paris at 76 of pneumonia, after catching a severe cold in a rain of terror . . .
16 June—Eleven years ago on this very date, as he announced his candidacy for President of the United States, Donald Trump lamented, “Sadly the American dream is dead,” and then promised to “bring it back . . . bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.” But he naturally qualified that with “If I get elected president.” He further promised that one of his first actions as president would be to build a “great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall.”
Trump threw in, among other minutiae, that he’d scrap Obamacare, which he termed—with more than a little justification—a “disaster” and “a big lie,” and replace it with a “much better and much less expensive system. And he promised to radically reduce education spending because—again with more than a little justification—“people are tired of spending more money on education per capita than any other country.”
And, lest we forget, Trump stole—make that repurposed—Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which Willy Clinton had used in passing when he announced his own candidacy in 1991, “I believe that together we can make America great again,” and went on to use in his 1992 campaign. (If you didn’t know, by the way, “together” is an alien concept as well as a dirty word to Trump.)
Of course, nobody took Trump seriously because not only had he mooted running for president on a number of occasions, but even then he was known to be a high-functioning narcissistic con man and crackpot whose claim to political prominence was founded on his signature “birther” libel that Barack Obama was a foreigner and thus ineligible to serve as president.
But then Trump brilliantly—magnificently, in fact—weaseled his way to the Republican nomination and vituperated and demagogued his way to the presidency with the help of the least marketable candidate the Democrats could have fielded against him.
We can only hope that all the harm Donald Trump has perpetrated and wreaked upon the nation and the world can be undone before it’s too late. Meanwhile, here’s a short video The Guardian produced in 2016:
15 June—In a typically Trumpish (as opposed to Trumpian, which may imply more dignity than is warranted in anything involving Donald Trump) display of vainglorious arrogance, the tarps still cover the Kennedy Center portico palimpsest following the court-ordered removal of “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND.” Nor has the staging been taken down. It’s Trump’s way of giving the bird to the courts and the public, reminding us that he never admits defeat. And, while his flunkies haven’t yet appealed to SCOTUS, he may well be waiting for what he hopes are his SCOTUS pals to order the restoration of the inappropriate line in a shadow-docket ruling.
And while we’re vilifying the scumbag-in-thief (i.e., giving him his due), wasn’t it typically Trumpish for him to obtrude his contemptible name before the late John F. Kennedy’s? Trump’s flunkies would doubtless—and correctly—claim that it was less complicated and costly than rearranging “THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.” But, as with inappropriateness, when has cost ever bothered Trump and his flunkies? And now that the staging and tarps have served their stated purpose, will the courts order their removal?
Leaving Trump to fester, then, today is the 811th anniversary of the Magna Carta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Freedoms, commonly called Magna Carta without the definite article and the Freedoms limitation because Latin has no definite articles and the freedoms are questionable. So here’s the Monitor’s annual updated Magna Carta birthday disquisition
Magna Carta was drafted by Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury in 1215 (because there were no Protestants at the time) as a strategy to preempt a revolt and make peace between autocratic albeit weak and unpopular King John and a group of 40 refractory barons who were really no better. No surprise that John didn’t willingly accept the terms of what’s regarded as Europe’s first written constitution.
Of course, Magna Carta was written in Latin. English nobles tended to be somewhat better educated and less illiterate—but not necessarily more intelligent—than most commoners (i.e., peasants) in the thirteenth century. In fact, it’s likely that inbred nobles suffered from pronounced intellectual disability and diminished cognitive ability. And that’s the case to this day.
Mediaeval English nobles and royals spoke French but not necessarily Latin or English, while commoners (i.e., peasants) spoke English but probably not Latin or French. That’s the way the church and government officials liked it. So it’s doubtful that all the barons were actually able to read and/or understand what they were signing and forcing on the king.
That’s like present-day legislators voting on—usually in favor of—bills without understanding or even bothering to read them. Especially long bills like budget implementers in the Connecticut General Assembly and the asinine Big Beautiful Bill Act in the U.S. Congress, cornucopias of all sorts of unpleasant, unpalatable surprises. And let’s not forget Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s injunction to the U.S. House Democrat majority in 2010 to “pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Plus ça change . . .
Simply put, then, among the thousands of words detailing feudal and legal stuff (to use the generic historical term) Magna Carta stated that the king had to obey the law (like everybody else except dictators, including American presidents, according to the Supreme Court) and that even most common people (i.e., peasants) had certain—albeit limited—rights. Plus ça change . . .
Magna Carta promised to protect the church’s rights (a sine qua non in the old days, carried through to the U.S. Constitution, thanks to which those rights are still abused), protected the nobles (the only people who really mattered) from illegal imprisonment, and provided for access to relatively swift justice. It also guaranteed other silly populist nonsense like no taxation without representation.
Magna Carta stated but didn’t guarantee that there could be no punishment without lawful trial and conviction and protected the rights of women and children who inherited property. It also gave the lords the right to declare war on the king if he didn’t abide by the terms of the contract. That provision was supposed to be implemented through a council of 25 barons in what was essentially a non-legislative form of impeachment.
No surprise that neither King John nor the barons stood by their signed and sealed contractual commitments. Politics as usual. And, frankly, constitutions and laws in general still tend to be honored as much in their breach as in their observance. Plus ça change . . .
Not quite as stupid or weak as he may have been characterized in popular literature, King John was able, a couple of months after the signing at Runnymede, to bribe Pope Innocent III, the capo di tutti capi in Rome, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s boss at the time, to annul Magna Carta—on the perfectly legitimate ground that John had signed and sealed it only under duress. Predictably, that led to the First Barons’ War. And Magna Carta was amended and reissued in 1216. And 1217. And 1225.
Both King John and Pope Innocent III died in 1216. In 1225, 17-year-old King Henry III signed and sealed a Magna Carta reissue that differed from the original version in that, inter alia, it was no longer seen as having been executed under duress, but was freely granted in exchange for taxation (of course) and dropped the clause that allowed barons to enforce it even by seizing royal property. Of course.
The 1225 Magna Carta was considerably shorter than the 1215 original—37 chapters to 63—and became the one that eventually influenced constitutional law. One of the two copies of Magna Carta in the United States is a 1297 reissue bought by David Rubenstein at auction in 2007 and loaned to the National Archives in D.C., where it’s on public display. The other copy, a 1300 reissue, was discovered in 2023 in the Harvard Law School Library, where it’s not on public display.
If David Rubenstein rings a bell, he’s the cultured billionaire philanthropist who was fired by Donald Trump from his position as chairman of the Kennedy Center to be replaced by Trump’s favorite philistine ignoramus, himself.
Back to Magna Carta, even though it may have been an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution (through the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which fraudulently calls itself the Constitution State), Magna Carta’s significance and influence tend to be overstated by historians and commentators.
More to the point, contrary to the etymology presented in Mel Brooks’s historic epic movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” King John, terrible monarch and despicable person though he may well have been, did not—repeat, did not—give his name to toilets. Don’t laugh. Okay, laugh. But it was over two decades ago that a presumably serious website about history and language actually presented that specious etymology as a fact. If it’s on the internet, it has to be true even though it often isn’t. In all events, that website got flushed down the john long ago.
And that’s precisely where Donald Trump belongs . . .
14 June—Donald Trump turns 80 today, so here’s a very special birthday greeting for him from the bottom of our heart: Left ventricle. And no happy returns, you miserable unprincipled, irredeemable scumbag. In fact, do the nation and the world a favor, and no returns at all.
With the de rigueur birthday pleasantries out of the way, then, let’s go back to Trump’s notorious name allegedly being removed by court order from the Kennedy Center. Has it really been done? And if it has in fact been done, why has it required the complicated and tedious erection of scaffolding to hold the crew as they simply unbolted the bronze letters, when the installation of the inappropriate philistine moniker was accomplished with a few cherry pickers being driven in? (And even then one would have sufficed.)
First, Kennedy Center Executive Director, Chief Operating Officer, and Trump flunky Matt Floca filed a sworn affidavit yestermorn certifying that the center’s Trump-picked board of fellow flunkies had fully complied with the court order and removed “all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump,” thus restoring the building’s historic and proper title, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Certainly we’ve learned not to trust Trump or his flunkies, even with sworn affidavits. (When Trump says one thing and Iran says another thing, for instance, whom do you believe?) And with huge tarps hiding everything, we’ve got to wonder. But tarps had in fact concealed the installation of the name of shame back in December. And an unidentified WTOP radio reporter evidently was able to peer through a slight opening in the huge tarps (which, surprisingiy, weren’t disfigured with Trump’s image) without being shot, and saw that the letters “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” were no longer affixed to the building.
The official explanation for the scaffolding and tarps is that they were required to comply with OSHA—known to the real world as OSHIT—regulations and shield workers from expected severe thunderstorms, which did in fact materialize as Trump was being deleted from the marble portico very early Saturday morning (a harbinger of things to come), as well as to shield gawkers from debris and sparks from the demolition. So you wonder why cherry pickers had been acceptable for the installation in December.
As it happens, there’s no record of OSHA inspecting the installation or removal of “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND.” So can the scaffolding be a manifestation of Trump’s masterful showmanship?
And in addition to the unlikely explanation for scaffolding superseding the cherry pickers, why are the blue-striped tarps still hanging over the portico after Trump has been erased? And when will they be taken down? Will it take another court order?