2 September—Thomas Jefferson is said to have uttered the political platitude, “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” He probably did say it on any number of occasions, but there’s no record of it. And if he ever wrote it, it’s disappeared.

Joseph de Maistre, on the other hand, a European conservative monarchist contemporary of Jefferson’s (the two probably never met), actually wrote in an 1811 letter, “Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.” Of course, he meant, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”

It’s likely, moreover, that Plato, Confucius, and political wonks back to the dawn of civilization had lamented and otherwise observed that people tend to get the government they deserve, whatever it may be and however it may come about.

But who’s to say what government any nation, any body politic, any group of people, any individual may deserve? Does anyone deserve to be tortured, victimized, or otherwise oppressed, for instance, even if he allows himself to be or encourages it, usually through gullibility and ignorance, with lack of organization thrown in for good measure? They invariably go together, if you didn’t know.

Also, if you didn’t know, of course it’s about the unquestionably most incompetent, corrupt, unprincipled charlatan Donald Trump and the most incompetent, corrupt, unprincipled administration colluding with the most incompetent, corrupt, unprincipled congress and the most incompetent, corrupt, unprincipled federal judiciary ever inflicted on the United States at the same time.

Certainly incompetence, corruption, and lack of principle taken individually are objectionable and abhorrent in government and society in general. But the triple whammy is absolutely terrifying. Especially in America, to be sure. But it goes far beyond America’s first—and one would hope only—tyrant and his self-serving, self-dealing, self-gratifying cadre of flunkies.

So of course we deserve better . . .

1 September—A woebegone trio of critically, perhaps terminally myopic gatekeepers guarding the Hearst RepublicanAmerican’s critically, perhaps terminally myopic editorial-page masquerades as what Hearst dignifies as the moribund rag’s editorial board. Their critically, doubtless terminally myopic conservative hero of the day, judging by the critically, conservatively myopic syndicated columns polluting the editorial page, appears to be a creep called Josh Hammer.

If you’ve never heard of Josh Hammer, don’t let it bother you. You haven’t missed much. In all events, his creep credentials are clear as can be in the first paragraph of his column in yesterday’s newspapers, titled (sadly, with some justification) “Clarence Thomas played the long game. He won.”

Hammer gushes, “An important new book by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, ‘Going Further,’ calls attention anew to the life and career of the single greatest living American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Come again? Repeat in bold italics: “the single greatest living American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”

That’s what it says. Read it and laugh. Read it and weep. Read it and puke.

True, that sickening panegyric comes directly from Ted Cruz himself, and it’s only one of the superlatives the Texas senator with resurrected presidential aspirations heaps on Thomas, beginning with the long title of his mawkishly hagiographic opus, “Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas,” and including undeserved kudos like “a true American hero,” “an extraordinary American hero,” “one of the most consequential Americans ever to live,” and “one of the most consequential figures in the history of the United States.”

Unfortunately for the history of the United States, the last one doesn’t appear to be far from the truth. Notwithstanding the catastrophic effect on the republic of Donald Trump’s three SCOTUS appointees, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, with the cooperation—make that collusion, complicity, connivance—of fellow Yalie Samuel Alito has gone above and beyond all reason and moderation to subvert the Constitution and American principle and decency. They haven’t needed Trump to wreak their havoc. But he has made it much easier . . .

31 August—“Anschluss” is simply a German word meaning “union” or “connection.” But it took on sinister association and implication in March 1938 when Adolf Hitler sent German troops into Austria and annexed it to Germany.

Irrelevant though it may be, it’s worth noting that Hitler was Austrian by birth but fled his homeland to Germany (which, of course, he adopted enthusiastically) in order to evade the draft because his father couldn’t find a podiatrist to manufacture calcaneal bone spurs on demand.

It’s relevant, on the other hand, to note that Austria, although only about one sixth the area of Germany (some 32,377 to 181,742 square miles) and with about a tenth of its big nasty neighbor’s population (about 6.8 million to 68 million), held impressive gold and foreign currency reserves as well as vast natural resources, including a skilled labor force, vital for Hitler’s illegal war preparation.

For the record, the addition of Austria increased Nazi Germany’s land area by some 18 percent. And Austria divorced Germany on 27 April 1945, three days before Hitler offed himself.

It’s also relevant that before sending in his loyal Wehrmacht, which was offered no military resistance (because Austrian troops had been ordered to stand down), Hitler had essentially bullied Austria by all the usual means, including but not limited to severe military threats, and installed his own puppet, pro-Nazi government—which, among other things, sent Berlin a fabricated telegram requesting troops to restore order. Hitler’s annexation of Austria was approved in April 1938 in a retrospective plebiscite manipulated, as usual, through deception, disruption, and denial.

Hitler’s Austrian connection brings to mind Donald Trump’s Venezuelan connection—and without the least bit of straining to find similarities, as it happens. It is Trump and his hero and exemplar Hitler, after all. Cutting to the chase, then, we know about Trump’s typical self-dealing in Venezuelan oil.

But Venezuela also is exceptionally rich in iron ore, bauxite for aluminum, and coltan (columbite–tantalite, so-called “blue gold”) for electronics and batteries. And of course Trump has done deals—export and licensing agreements and who knows what else—for those vital and valuable commodities.

And lest we forget, there’s lots and lots of gold in them thar Venezuelan hills—estimated at well over 2,000 metric tons, in fact. And sure as shootin’ Trump’s faithful flunkies have fiddled deals that, among other things, allow “U.S. entities” to purchase, transport, and sell Venezuelan gold “under U.S. jurisdiction and oversight.”

Who needs Hitler? We have Trump . . .

30 August—Ned Lamont’s latest dingbat stratagem to convince Connecticut voters he’s losing it or lost it already and is more unfit than ever to run our sorry little state with his equally unfit and irresponsible fellow Democrats is his questionable executive order (no. 26-2) that created the Connecticut Career Pathways Commission—allegedly “to modernize and connect education, training, and careers across the state,” whatever that may mean—and his summary appointment of Miguel Cardona to run the absolutely, unquestionably stupid bureaucratic superfluity.

Connecticut’s wayward public education juggernaut has at all levels—pre-school through university—been ludicrously, shamefully mismanaged and allowed to get away with all manner of indefensible, inexcusable insults to the education establishment itself (pupils, students, teachers, many professors, some non-university administrators) as well as taxpayers for decades (at least), so it’s no surprise that Lamont should have called back his screw-up education wunderkind to partake of the lucrative spoils.

You may recall that Lamont had made Miguel Cardona Connecticut’s education commissioner in 2019 and that President Joe Biden, right after being elected in 2020, was good enough to relieve the state of the burden of Cardona’s ineptitude by making him the U.S. Secretary of Education.

You may also recall that Cardona’s most noteworthy achievement and only claim to fame as federal education czar was his possible involvement—which, it must be said, he has strenuously denied (whether you believe it or not)—in the National School Board Association’s comparison of protesting parents to domestic terrorists, set forth in a lengthy September 2021 letter to Biden, begging for DOJ/FBI help, for which the NSBA apologized when it came to light.

So the case against a third term for Ned Lamont certainly gets better and better. But leave it to Connecticut Republicans to help the Democrat governor get re-elected anyway . . .

29 August—This received from a Monitor reader who evidently still reads the Hearst RepublicanAmerican: “Have to agree with Joyce from West Virginia about rubbing the plastic bag between hands for easy opening. It does work. Yes, I read Heloise daily. She’s definitely more informative than what passes for editorials in the Republican-American.”

Amen.

So yesterday—in the interest of journalistic integrity—I rubbed a couple of plastic produce bags at Aldi and a couple more at Stop & Shop. No luck at Aldi. But evidently I rubbed the Stop & Shop bags the right way and/or the type of polyethylene film they were made from (there are a few types, you can tell the difference, and it’s anybody’s guess which type will be available any given time in any given produce department) was more receptive to being rubbed.

Because the spit-on-fingers stratagem wasn’t necessary at Stop & Shop. Yesterday, anyway.

So let’s second-guess Heloise again. This morning “Bill in Chesterfield, Mo.,” recommends tung oil over mineral oil for cutting boards because of its shiny finish and says “it’s safe for food.” But Bill is lucky to be alive. And not because the nuts and other parts of the tung tree (Vernicia fordii) are toxic before they’re processed—because pure tung oil isn’t in fact toxic.

But consider that pure, non-toxic tung oil doesn’t in fact impart a shiny finish to wood or anything else on its own. Bill’s shiny finish is actually a function of toxic additives to most commonly available brands of tung oil. And mineral spirits and other drying agents further add to non-pure tung oil’s toxicity. So while pure tung oil is indeed safe to use on cutting boards, it doesn’t produce anything like a shiny finish.

Who wants stuff to slide around a glossy cutting board anyway? But if you do, there’s always the beeswax-mineral oil combo.

While we’re niggling, “Karen C., via email,” who’s 62 and has “a lot of hiccups on a regular basis,” dispels her bouts of singultus with peanut butter, about which she doesn’t go into detail. But Karen does assure Heloise and readers that “peanut butter is the only (and fastest) thing that works for me.”

Without descending into semantic superlative relativity, then, briefly consider the exclusionary meaning of “only.” And then forget about it. But one wonders if Karen had or has tried other nut-based butters in the interest of variety and science.

And don’t remind us that peanuts are legumes rather than nuts . . .

28 August—Six years before Martin Luther King Jr. told the world about his dream, on this day in 1957 South Carolina racist U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, a Democrat at the time who conveniently converted to the Republican communion in 1964 and insisted he wasn’t a racist, launched into his infamous whole-day-long blabbering filibuster against President Dwight Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act, the first federal legislation on civil rights since Reconstruction.

After all the jockeying and compromises necessary to get the legislation passed, the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which focused on voting rights and bureaucracy, was realistically a pretty small step for mankind. But it was a step in the right direction and paved the way for President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, ended racial separation in public places, and made job discrimination illegal. And then some.

Thurmond, who had in preparation of his oratorical surprise (yes, evidently he hadn’t told even his racist colleagues) taken steam baths to dehydrate himself so as to preclude piss breaks, had to quit his filibuster 18 minutes into the second day because he had run out of fetid gas.

Back in the day, by the way, since the practice’s formal codification in 1917, senators were required to actually hold the floor to filibuster, which meant no excuses or breaks at all. And it took a two-thirds vote of those senators present to invoke cloture. In 1959, the two-thirds requirement was ever so briefly extended to the entire Senate membership. Now, of course, since 1975, cloture for most legislation requires only three-fifths—but of the entire Senate membership, i.e., the notorious 60 votes.

Democrats and Republicans alike—but mostly Democrats—are responsible for fiddling and corrupting the cloture rule, which consequently fiddles and corrupts filibuster itself. And of course Donald Trump wants to further corrupt filibuster (as he’s corrupted everything else) for his own benefit. But the Republican Senate leadership doesn’t appear to be caving for the orange ayatollah. Yet.

Back to Strom Thurmond’s monumental racist filibuster, then, it set a record which hasn’t been broken. And the 1957 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate 72 to 18, all the 18 being racist southern Democrats, only two hours after Thurmond shut his mouth.

And lest you think that New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour performance last year broke Thurmond’s reprehensible record, Booker’s well-founded critique of the Trump administration was a protest speech rather than a legislative filibuster. Booker evidently didn’t resort to steam baths to dehydrate himself.

So what about Depends? Don’t ask . . .

27 August—The conservative, usually clever political cartoons (euphemized as editorial cartoons) and bilious right-wing propaganda and invariably offensive defenses of the indefensible (masquerading as editorials, syndicated columns, op-eds, and letters to the editor) in the Hearst RepublicanAmerican are usually entertaining to read even as they raise one’s hackles. Certainly the crap on the editorial page (pages on Wednesdays and Sundays) is predictably Republican rather than American, with a token Democrat, liberal, or non-conservative, non-Republican letter or op-ed stuck in every now and then just to give the editorial page (pages on Wednesdays and Sundays) a feigned appearance of journalistic integrity, if not objectivity or bipartisanship.

Among the non-political quotidian fluff in the Hearst RepublicanAmerican, then, is the syndicated “Hints from Heloise” column. Heloise and her constantly evolving band of enthusiastic volunteer contributors don’t ordinarily raise one’s hackles, to be sure, and the column is always entertaining, even if the hints aren’t particularly helpful or informative. Every now and then, though, there’s even a useful hint—usually a corollary appended by Heloise Jr. (Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans) herself to a half-baked suggestion contributed by a senescent devoted reader of the column since Heloise Sr. (Heloise Bowles, who died in 1977) started writing it over six decades ago.

So what? And well you may ask. So Heloise’s enthusiastic volunteer contributors obviously believe their enthusiastic volunteer contributions are the summum bonum—the highest good—of domestic practicality and helpfulness as well as social politesse. And then some.

Yesterday, for instance, Al, an enthusiastic volunteer (who reads Heloise’s column in the San Antonio Express-News) contributed a suggestion that readers ask employees (of unspecified businesses) who don’t wear name tags what their names are. “It’s more personal and shows that you really care,” after all. But do you really care? And often employees remain anonymous by their or their employers’ preference for security reasons.

An another enthusiastic volunteer, Joyce (who “enjoys” Heloise’s column in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel, in what turns out to be West Virginia), “in the grocery store, rub[s] the plastic bag between her hands, and it automatically separates the sleeve so that I can open it.” Certainly more sanitary than licking your fingers. Problem is, it doesn’t work.

And yesterday’s winning hint—a “Grammar sound off”—same from Stevie K. in Centerville, Ohio, who’s clearly impressed with himself or herself: “As a former senior technical writer/editor for a research institute, a published author, a freelance editor, an instructor of professional business and technical writing at universities and colleges, and a substitute high school English teacher,” Stevie is “appalled at the number of Americans who cannot write or speak proper English.”

Me too.

As Stevie told his or her “university students, when I see a glaring grammatical error in a promotional flyer for a bank, for example, my faith in the bank vanishes. How can I trust a bank to manage my funds if the bank can’t even catch mistakes in its correspondence? Poor grammar equates to unprofessionalism.”

Absolutely and without a doubt, how indeed?

Stevie means “equates with unprofessionlism,” of course, but you don’t quibble with a former senior technical writer/editor for a research institute, a published author, a freelance editor, an instructor of professional business and technical writing at universities and colleges, and especially a substitute high school English teacher . . .

26 August—The good news is that Bob Fisher was finally sprung yesterday after the state appellate court last week overturned his ludicrously unjust conviction last year for manslaughter for shooting and killing 39-year-old crazed drunk Matthew Bromley in self-defense because the 78-year-old lawyer (twice the drunk assailant’s age, if you hadn’t noticed), not in the prime of health, was clearly unable to retreat from his assailant in his law firm’s parking lot, as required by ridiculous Connecticut statute, before resorting to so-called deadly force.

(Connecticut’s Castle Doctrine, for all it’s worth, says that there’s no duty to retreat inside one’s own home or work place. And a parking lot is considered part of a work place. But not for purposes of self-defense and Castle Doctrine, of course. Typical.)

Fisher, whose name is misspelled “Fischer” in many news stories and was a certified firearms instructor, is “free” on $50,000 bond, on the condition he possesses neither firearms nor ammunition as all the court crap continues.

As things stand now, the unrelenting state’s attorney, whatever his name may be, intends to continue his harassment of the old, physically unfit, innocent lawyer—probably because a gun was involved in the never-should-have-been-tried non-crime and anything involving firearms excites Connecticut prosecutors and Democrats beyond all reason.

For the record and in the interest of completeness, while most witnesses to the incident in the Cramer & Anderson parking lot confirmed that Bromley had been the aggressor, one delusional (or imaginative) witness gave it a different spin: “I don’t believe that this is self-defense because the younger male did not have a weapon. I think the older male could’ve punched the other guy and settled it that way rather than shooting him. It just didn’t seem like it was that violent of an attack.”

Obviously. According to the prosecutor and jury, anyway. Shame on old Fisher for not punching young Bromley and running away.

And what would you do if you were armed with a gun, knife, axe, truncheon, blackjack, brass knuckles, or other weapon possibly considered illegal in Connecticut at the discretion of police or prosecutors and were attacked by a demented stranger? In Connecticut, you’d probably be best off by allowing yourself to be beaten to death . . .

25 August—On the first day of his second reign of terror and error last year, Donald Trump autocratically renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The world and most Americans still call it the Gulf of Mexico. And just today, Ayatollah Trump is threatening to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America because Ontarians and other Canadians aren’t taking kindly to his trademark bullying.

We’re waiting for the Gulf of Trump and Great Trump Lake

In other news, then, it’s no surprise that Ayatollah Trump’s faithful flunkies haven’t told the whole truth about what their lord and master did after being snuck out of Turkey in a garbage truck. Yes, they told the great gullible unwashed it was a food truck, but we know better. And although Trump certainly (and obviously) would have felt quite comfortable in a food truck, a garbage truck is always more appropriate for trash. And—scoop!—Natalie Harp was in the garbage truck with Trump.

So it turns out that Ayatollah Trump and Miss Natalie took another unpublicized detour, this one to Switzerland, where she squeezed him into a pair of sumo-size lederhosen before the lately inseparable couple were helicoptered in a heavy-lift Sikorsky Super Stallion to the Bernese Alps, where Natalie, evidently a lover of Alpine yodeling, made this short video for their private delectation. Don’t ask how the Monitor came by it.

Here’s a rough translation of the surprisingly frank lyric:

I don’t give a damn about the world at Easter.
I don’t give a shit about money.
I go on vacation in the mountains, laughing at dwarves.
I don’t threaten anybody at Easter.
I’m plain and simple, just an idiot.
I don’t give a damn about the world.

Easter? And don’t miss Trump’s left hand at the end of his performance . . .

24 August—It’s 212 years ago today that 4,500 battle-hardened British troops, fresh from the Napoleonic Wars across the Pond, commanded by Major-General Robert Ross, routed a poorly trained, disorganized, politically compromised 7,000-man American militia contingent under Brigadier General William Winder in the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland, and marched six miles southwest to what was then simply called Washington City, within the federal District of Columbia.

When they got to Washington, in retaliation for the Yanks having torched public buildings in York, Upper Canada (what’s now called Toronto, Ontario), the Brits delighted in torching what was then called the President’s House as well as the U.S. Capitol, the Treasury building, and the Library of Congress, which at the time housed only about 3,000 legal and other reference books for the use solely of senators and representatives. That’s why it was called the Library of Congress, after all.

President James Madison and First Lady Dolley had fled the city before the Brits arrived, Dolley having saved the full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington by having it cut out of the frame that was bolted to the wall.

A torrential downpour accompanied by thunder, lightning, and powerful winds that knocked down trees, blew off roofs, and even tossed cannons (which may in fact have been a tornado), helped put out the fires and motivated General Ross to get the hell out before the Yanks could regroup, so his troops retreated to His Majesty’s ships patiently waiting in Chesapeake Bay. The Brits had never intended to occupy Washington anyway, just to exact revenge for York. Kind of a pissing contest, like Donald Trump is having with Mark Carney (and the rest of the world).

If you care, Washington, DC, as we know it, didn’t into existence until 1871 by Act of Congress and consolidation. And the President’s House, whose cornerstone had been laid in 1792, later came to be called the Executive Mansion and was popularly known as the White House from 1798 because of the whitewash slathered on its sandstone walls to protect them from moisture and freezing. But it wasn’t until 1901 that President Theodore Roosevelt made the White House the official name of the president’s residence.

We won’t speculate on Donald Trump’s plans to rename the White House or the nation’s capital after himself. The whitewash has in all events been supplanted by paint. Except by Trump’s vituperative press flunkies, of course, who slather it on incredibly thick whenever they have the chance.

After torching Washington, General Ross was shot and killed by a Yankee sharpshooter a month later at the Battle of Baltimore, which the Yanks won and during which Francis Scott Key wrote the words to what would become the national anthem . . .

23 August—While I was incarcerated in the intensive care and cardiopulmonary care units of St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport earlier this month, I was able to listen to good music on my cell phone and laptop computer. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that several people in both units—young cleaners, CNAs, nurses, and physicians—were enthralled by the music, the likes of which they had never heard before. Incredible but true.

Suffice to say, after inculcating an appreciation of real music in the appreciative staffers, I copied lots of it to their cell phones. It was a good feeling. My weak heart and pulmonary edema weren’t wasted.

I can’t remember all the music that attracted the kids at St. Vincent’s, but here’s some of it. So just listen and enjoy: