2 February—Is it any surprise that Nicolas Maduro, the scumbag dictator whom the United States doesn’t even recognize as the legitimate president of Venezuela, is positively delighted to take back the 600,000 refugees from his contemptible regime whom Donald Trump, America’s home-grown scumbag dictator, is deporting from his own revived and re-energized tyrannical regime? It’s a given that the involuntarily repatriated refugees will suffer severe consequences in Venezuela.

(Just as an aside, if Maduro can serve a third term illegally, Trump must figure, what’s to stop America’s juggernaut dictator himself from doing it too? And look at all the other tyrants past and present the orange autocrat can use as exemplars.)

To take our collective mind off scumbag dictators, at least for a little while, what a thrill it was to discover that John Larson, the long-term incumbent congressman representing Connecticut’s First District, moonlights as a tenor with various opera companies between East Hartford and D.C. and also performs at weddings, bar mitzvahs, baptisms, brises, funerals, and caucuses of both parties to supplement his meager congressional income. (The poor guy’s $174,000 salary—plus fringes—hasn’t been raised since 2009. For shame!)

As it happens, just last week, while visiting the State Capitol, in the middle of some political gab session or other, the talented congressman felt a song coming on and couldn’t hold it in. So an alert photographer captured Maestro Larson hitting and holding the notoriously magnificent high C in “Nessun Dorma.” It appeared not to impress his rather blasé audience of fellow Democrats, however. But Republicans surely would have reacted . . .