SAY WHAT? - In the latest sorry tableau exposing the dumb-and-dumber fraying of our national discourse, we just witnessed the "gloating performance art" of ever-tawdry Marjorie Taylor Greene in court, where she was trying to prove she's not too insurrectionary to be in Congress. Facing a legal challenge from a coalition called Free Speech for the People, Greene on Friday became the first purported member of Congress to publicly testify under oath about the Jan. 6 riot, which at the time she was a big fan of. Fresh from her triumphant reporting to Capitol Police of a "threat of violence" from a Will Smith gag by Jimmy Kimmel - "Officer? I'd like to report a joke" - Greene appeared in an Atlanta courtroom to fend off the group's charge that, under a post-Civil-War-era 14th Amendment barring from office anyone who's "engaged in insurrection or rebellion," she cannot run for re-election. Greene, of course, had responded to the challenge with her usual grace and reason. In a lengthy Twitter post, she ranted about "destroying democracy," "killing people's free speech," "nasty arrogant elites," "communists," "LOSERS," "slander," "a very dangerous attack on our Republic," and, seemingly without irony, "political platforms that (entertain) conspiracy theories and lies invented by one party against another."

SAY WHAT? - This week marks the 108th anniversary of what Wallace Stegner called "one of the bleakest and blackest episodes of American labor history," when armed thugs hired by John Rockefeller Jr. burned down a tent encampment and machine-gunned the families of striking coal miners in Ludlow, CO, killing at least 26 - including 15 women and children who suffocated in a pit - for the crime of seeking to be treated as human beings. The attack on April 20, 1914 against 1,200 striking mineworkers was the culmination of a long struggle in Colorado coal country, where the United Mine Workers had been organizing a diverse workforce of thousands of miners, many Greek, Mexican and Italian. Most worked for the massive Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. owned by the Rockefellers, America's richest family, who despite growing public revulsion for the excesses of the Gilded Age still ran CFI like the Robber Barons they were. Miners died in the hundreds in cave-ins and from disease, working 12-hour days, seven days a week, for 80 cents per ton of coal; they got no pay for the so-called "dead work" of prepping a mine to minimize its hazards; they had to live in company shacks in company towns, shopping at company stores using company scrip, guarded by company thugs who ruled towns like concentration camp kapos.

SAY WHAT? - Offering a fiery master class in how to fight back against GOP bigotry and fear-mongering, Michigan Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow just excoriated a slimy GOP colleague who, wielding her party's rabid, pervert-themed smear of the day, charged her support for LGBTQ kids, teaching history and recognizing the reality of American racism is JUST LIKE wanting to "groom and sexualize kindergartners."

The deranged attack by lawmaker Lana Theis is part of a loathsome national trend by Republicans who, seeking new weapons in a ceaseless culture war, now glom onto labeling anyone who disagrees with them or their vision of a fascist Christian theocracy a pedophile, a fan of pedophiles, or a "groomer" for pedophiles, just like QAnon says.

One visible practitioner of this dubious art is dimwit Klan Mom Marjorie Taylor Greene, who opposed SCOTUS Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson by declaring any lawmaker supporting her "is pro-pedophile just like she is." Dems, she babbled, are "the party of pedophiles...the party of princess predators from Disney... the party of...their identity, and their identity is the most disgusting horrible evil thing happening in our country" - one more reason we love the nuanced discourse of participatory democracy so much.

SAY WHAT? - Faced with horrific, mounting evidence of their atrocities in Ukraine - bombing schools, playgrounds, orphanages, maternity hospitals, train stations with missiles marked "For the Children"; summary executions and other "grave abuses"; dumping thousands of bodies of burned, tortured, hands-tied civilians into pits, wells, mass graves or leaving them strewn in the streets of razed cities; raping women, teenagers, children; driving almost two-thirds of Ukraine's children, five of 7.5 million, from their lives, with nearly half of those remaining beset by hunger and likely most by lifelong trauma - charged with what are deemed these “unspeakable crimes,” Russia has dug deep into full, mad, staggering denial: Nothing to see here. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy broadcast images from Bucha of "evil on earth” - civilians shot and killed in the back of the head, hands tied behind them -charging perpetrators be held accountable: "This is how the Russian state will now be perceived. This is your image." Western leaders concur.  Britain termed Russian crimes "truly barbaric”; Biden has called them "genocide" and joined efforts to bring war crimes charges. Still, Russia blindly denies and refutes. Watching the same bloody images at the U.N., Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia cited “flagrant inconsistencies" by Western media and Ukrainian “terrorists” and argued, "You only saw what they showed you.”

SAY WHAT? - This weekend marked the surrender of the Confederate Army under "that genteel butcher Bobby Lee" to Ulysses S. Grant, and the end of a Civil War that in the sordid name of Southern white supremacy cost four years and 630,000 lives. On Sunday April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army of North Virginia, fighting for the unholy right to own other human beings as property, to General Ulysses S. Grant; the ceremony at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House, VA took an hour and a half.

Days before, Grant had ridden west to ask Lee's cornered band to surrender, declaring any "further effusion of blood" would be solely on Lee's traitorous hands. Lee declined, but did ask about a possible peace agreement; the gentlemanly Grant offered a possible military surrender instead. On that Sunday, writes Heather Cox Richardson, admirably bringing the historic down to human scale, Grant woke with a migraine, having spent the night treating it with mustard plasters that didn't work: "In the morning, Grant pulled on his dirty clothes and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing." Lee, ever the brutal but elegant plantation owner, had dressed grandly in dress uniform, expecting to be taken prisoner; instead, under the surrender's generous terms, his military leaders were spared criminal trials, and handsomely fed. Notes Thomas Levenson, "Looking forward, not back, is no new trope in American politics."

SAY WHAT? - In a blessed move acknowledged by Chuck Schumer as not just years but generations overdue, the Senate confirmed eminently qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman and first public defender to serve on the Supreme Court; her confirmation will also mark a tipping point for a Court that will now, for the first time in its 233-year history, no longer have a majority of white men. The well-earned  ascendance of Jackson, in a final tally of 53-47, was made just a bit sweeter by being presided over by Kamala Harris, this country's first female Vice-President of color; you could see her trying not to smile at the vision of women of color taking over the whole damn joint, and not a moment too soon. Harris later said the occasion made "an important statement about who we are as a nation," or at least, perhaps more accurately, who we aspire to be. Many others likewise rejoiced, from a beaming Cory Booker to members of the Black Caucus in "Black Women Are Supreme" t-shirts to Rep. Ayanna Pressley celebrating the signal to black girls that, "We belong everywhere."