Firehose #200: Happy (Founding) Fathers Day!

Also: The White House goes after Batya!

I hope you Fathers out there had as wonderful a Day as I was fortunate to experience—taking a lap around Staten Island with my girls on a history-boat with appropriate Semiquintennial thematics! Which was yet another reminder of something that apparently took a visiting German soccer fan to persuade the political neurotics out there: America is the antidote, domestic travel is your friend, and patriotism intensifies the further your gaze avoids Washington, D.C. As was underlined Friday by Bill Maher:

* Maher’s testimony about the Bicentennial being awesome precisely because many things kinda sucked in 1976 will not be unfamiliar to readers of my Reason work. Nor to those who caught my convo this week on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie:

* We’re now less than two weeks away from the 250^th. Are you America-maxxing hard enough? My old war-photographer pal Jim Lowney sure the hell is, as evidenced by his documentations Saturday from Monmouth, N.J.:

* Before we go any further, I must reiterate a correction that I made in the comments of episode #562 (weirdly, scores of thousands of you still don’t have a paid subscription, and thus are deprived of our world-beating Comments and Chat, plus the back 80% of our Members Only episodes). Basically, I mashed up the details of two controversial Trump 2.0 pardons: Trevor Milton (whose last name is not, as my baseball-addled brain put it, “Wilson”) and Paul Walczak. Click on their names for the tawdry details.

* I was on firmer ground that episode suggesting that the Trump/Euro-righty relationship to watch is with the ball-busting Italian PM Georgia M-e-l-o-n-i (no relation to Lou). Hoo boy, is it. Trump in a dubbed interview with an Italian TV station reportedly said that Meloni at the recent G7 meeting “begged” to have her picture taken with him. Signora was not amused:

* Speaking of paywalled Members Only content, here’s this week’s M.O. YouTube clip, of Batya! reluctantly conceding that the Iran deal smells like ass:

* A day later, our favorite Ungar-Sargon had ditched the reluctant part: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in. We’re watching the Tucker Carlsonifcation of our Vice President in real time.” This drew a withering rebuke from … the Official White House Rapid Response account!

The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV is show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper. Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.

* Enjoying our new political hate-follow, Darializa Avila Chevalier? I will freely confess to not having ever heard her admittedly fantastic name until earlier last week, when I was asked to comment on the New York CD 13 primary race by Mike Pesca on his Not Even Mad podcast (where I was paired with Anthony Weiner). Everything DAC does is unintentionally hilarious, like making gentrification a central issue even though….

Avila Chevalier also defended her identity as a transplant who moved to New York City from Florida to attend college at Columbia. “I didn’t have to be born here to belong to this fight, because this community chose me, and I am choosing it back,” she said.

We shall see what kind of electoral pull Big Papi has in NYC….

* Kmele and the Tangle crew meditated on fatherhood this week:

* He also did that thing on CNN:

* We briefly touched on baseball/Pride controversies in #562; some thots from Ethan Strauss and Billy Binion.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

John Cassavetes’s Husbands is the most perfect of Father’s Day movies, despite not being about fatherhood at all. It’s a film that also hits differently depending on what stage of life you’re currently passing through. Cassavetes himself stars alongside Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara as family men set off on a multi-day bender following the sudden death of a close friend. On the surface, it’s a series of fly-on-the-wall scenes of men behaving badly, but ultimately it reveals three humans reckoning with their lot in life in very different ways. Shot over the course of six long months in 1969, Husbands was the subject of its very own BBC “making of” documentary, and the bender appeared to still be going strong when the trio promoted the movie on the Dick Cavett Show. Eminently watchable for the visceral performances alone, Husbands is an unpredictable, claustrophobic, artistically indulgent work of genius that reveals something new with every viewing. Watch for free on the Internet Archive or buy the BluRay; here’s the trailer, in which the studio is desperately trying to make the movie seem “fun” so they can make their money back:

* Comment of the Week comes from Justin, the end is nigh!:

You guys should get John Larroquette on the show

Sendoff: How long ago was the golden age of postwar harmony groups? Long enough that the last surviving Beverley Sister, Teddie Beverley, finally stopped surviving this past week at the ripe old age of 99. Teddie (born Hazel), her twin sister Babs (Babette), and older sister Joy, were the Andrews Sisters of England, singing wholesome-sounding close-harmonies for the we-just-beat-the-Nazis crowd. They began singing together professionally as the Chimery Sisters while teenagers during the war, then after a winning a contest to promote Ovaltine, a BBC producer snazzed up their names, and off they went. Christmas/novelty hits galore (including a fab version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”), and just enough flirty innuendo to keep the boys coming back. At their peak, they were the highest-paid female entertainers in the UK, until Teddie got preggers in 1967 with her waterskiing-champion husband. They reunited as in the ‘80s as an oldies act, performed for the Queen’s golden jubilee in 2002, and ended up working the gay-club circuit in the aughts. No better way to celebrate Pride than streaming the Sisters!