Looks like it's "curtains"...

...for Phyllis Curtin, an American soprano who died at age 94. There will be no more curtain calls for her.

(Sorry.)

Paul Ryan seemed positively...

...shocked -- shocked! -- the other day at Donald Trump's comments about a federal judge's Mexican heritage. They were "out of left field," gasped the Republican Speaker of the House.

From an article in the Times this morning, "Democrats Jump on Allies of Donald Trump in Judge Dispute" (my emphasis):

No prominent elected Republican came to Mr. Trump’s defense unreservedly. And others found themselves wondering aloud what it would take — what Mr. Trump would have to say or do — for Republicans who have endorsed him to start jumping ship.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, another former primary rival of Mr. Trump’s, urged Republicans who have backed Mr. Trump to rescind their endorsements, citing the remarks about Judge Curiel and Mr. Trump’s expression of doubt on Sunday that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the same lawsuit, given Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim noncitizens entering the country.

“This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” Mr. Graham said. “If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it,” he added. “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

And yet:

It remains very unlikely that ambitious Republicans and those on the ballot this year will publicly break with Mr. Trump until it becomes politically advantageous for them. At the moment, Mr. Trump enjoys wide support from the sort of rank-and-file Republican voters whom elected officials are loath to antagonize.

In a speech on the Senate floor as Congress returned from a break, the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, sought to yoke Mr. Trump to his counterpart, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — and to every Republican running this fall. Mr. Reid pointed out that Mr. McConnell, interviewed on NBC on Sunday, had “repeatedly refused to say Donald Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel’s ethnicity are racist.”

“This is precisely the type of failure that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place,” Mr. Reid said. “That’s because the hate emanating from Trump’s mouth reflects the Republican Party’s agenda here in the United States Senate for the past seven and a half years.”

And Sen. Reid is right; although I would say it's been much more than the last seven and a half years. I think you could trace today's Republican Party meltdown all the way back to the early 1990s and its treatment of Bill Clinton, the "accidental president."

Do I have to remind anyone that Clinton was impeached over an extra-marital affair with another consenting adult (who came on to him)? Or do you still think it was because the president "lied under oath"?

Both are wrong. Clinton was closer to the truth when he said his impeachment was a "coup d'etat." In other words, since Republicans couldn't beat Clinton at the ballot box they tried to defeat him by other means.

(I think that's when I first soured on the GOP. If you can't win in the marketplace of ideas maybe you should rethink your ideas.)

Republicans, through their media arm, Fox News, and from talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, have been dumbing down and thus creating Donald Trump's voters for over twenty years now. The chickens, as they say, have finally come home to roost.

And the establishment, for its part, has been mostly silent.

(By the way, that clip above isn't evidence of John McCain's courage -- his response should be considered baseline behavior. If someone tells you the earth is flat, you don't get points for telling him it's round.)

Let's see: Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and now Paul Ryan. Nope -- not one of them has stood up to what used to be called the "lunatic fringe." It's now just known as the "Republican Party base."

It's true: you reap what you sow.

The presidential election...

...will be held on Tuesday, November 8, exactly five months from Wednesday. Where do we stand?

Tomorrow Hillary Clinton is expected to clinch the Democratic nomination with a victory in New Jersey, before the polls in California even close.

Forgetting the Electoral College for a minute, in which the Democrats have a big advantage, here are just a few numbers to put it all in perspective.

Donald Trump won the Republican nomination with 11,676,355 votes out of 28,055,109 cast (before tomorrow's contests). That's about 42 percent of the total. That's a plurality, of course, but only of a party that represents about 42 percent of the overall electorate. Or, only about nine percent of the roughly 126,000,000 votes cast in the 2012 presidential election. In other words, Mr. Trump will have to persuade almost 50 million more Americans to vote for him in the general to exceed Mitt Romney's total in 2012.

Now, admittedly, that's a little misleading. After all, Romney only garnered a little over 10 million votes (52 percent) in the Republican primary of 2012 and managed to take over 47 percent of the popular vote against President Obama. So the election will probably be a lot closer to 50/50 in November.

But right now, according to Election Betting Odds, Hillary has about a 70 percent chance of winning vs. less than 25 percent for Trump. And if last week -- in which Trump struggled while Hillary seemed to gain confidence -- is any indication, Clinton could even exceed Obama's 2012 margin.

P. S. I'll say last week was the one in which Donald Trump finally peaked.

The Unfortunate Name...

 ...of the Day belongs to John Birch, the owner of Wyeth, a high-end furniture store in SoHo.

Don't look now, but...

...Sen. Jefferson Sessions of Alabama (sounds like a Confederate general) just vaulted into third place in the betting on Paddy Power for Republican vice president:

Newt Gingrich, 6/4
Scott Brown, 7/2
Jeff Sessions, 4/1

So who is this guy? Well, his Wikipedia page begins like this (all emphasis mine):

Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III (born December 24, 1946) is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. First elected in 1996, Sessions is a member of the Republican Party.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III? Now that really sounds like a Confederate general!

From 1981 to 1993 he served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. President Ronald Reagan nominated him to a judgeship on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama in 1986, but he was not confirmed. 

Not confirmed to the Federal bench, huh? Is that a red flag? I don't know; you tell me:

At Sessions' confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, four Department of Justice lawyers who had worked with Sessions testified that he had made several racist statements. One of those lawyers, J. Gerald Hebert, testified that Sessions had referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" because they "forced civil rights down the throats of people."

Thomas Figures, a black Assistant U.S. Attorney, testified that Sessions said he thought the Klan was "OK until I found out they smoked pot." Sessions later said that the comment was not serious, but apologized for it. Figures also testified that on one occasion, when the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sent the office instructions to investigate a case that Sessions had tried to close, Figures and Sessions "had a very spirited discussion regarding how the Hodge case should then be handled; in the course of that argument, Mr. Sessions threw the file on a table, and remarked, 'I wish I could decline on all of them,'" by which Figures said Sessions meant civil rights cases generally. 

Figures also said that Sessions had called him "boy." He also testified that "Mr. Sessions admonished me to 'be careful what you say to white folks.'"

Sessions became only the second nominee to the federal judiciary in 48 years whose nomination was killed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I wouldn't worry about it, though, because a recent piece in the Daily Caller reassures us, "Jeff Sessions: Donald Trump Will Attract Black And Hispanic Voters In General Election."

He should know about how "the blacks" and "the Hispanics" will vote, right?

What about Sen. Sessions's career in the Senate?

Sessions was ranked by National Journal in 2007 as the fifth-most conservative U.S. Senator, siding strongly with the Republican Party on political issues. He supported the major legislative efforts of the George W. Bush administration, including the 2001 and 2003 tax cut packages, the Iraq War, and a proposed national amendment to ban same-sex marriage. However, he was one of 25 senators to oppose the establishment of TARP. He has opposed the Democratic leadership since 2007 on most major legislation, including the stimulus bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he opposed both of President Barack Obama's nominees for the Supreme Court.

Sen. Sessions, 69, is a good ol' boy from the Deep South with one of the most conservative records in the Senate whose background on civil rights prevented him from a federal judgeship.

Sounds perfect.

The Tom Toles...

...cartoon of the day.

The Ironic Name of the Day...

...is actually the name of a school: Welborn Elementary in Kansas City, KS, where 89.3 percent of the students receive a free or discounted lunch.

From an article in the Times, "Kansas Parents Worry Schools Are Slipping Amid Budget Battles" (my emphasis):

Some school principals say they are resigned to making do with what money they have. At Welborn Elementary School in Kansas City, classes are held in two aging buildings and students dash back and forth during the day. Teachers keep a watchful eye on them as they cross an active parking lot between the buildings.

“I don’t need much,” said Jennifer Malone (above), the principal, one recent afternoon. “I just want a building.”