Wednesday Reads

KY Senator Rand Paul, pandering to the GOP's dwindling base, diagnoses impeachment as dead on arrival.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene's previous statements provides more evidence she is completely unfit to hold public office.

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The far right goes way further back than the 1980s, I'm afraid.

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No surprise there are snitches in the radical right.

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For your reading pleasure is this list of people who have so far been arrested and charged in the January 6 insurrection of the U.S. Capitol.

A better source is here.

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Obituary:  Noted actress Cloris Leachman, 94, who won both Emmy and Oscar awards for her performances, has died of natural causes.  She played all kinds of parts, but she had a particular flare for comedy.  Her best-known role was as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  She was one of the last surviving major cast members of the series, which ended in 1977.  Gavin MacLeod will be 90 next month, Ed Asner is 91, and Betty White just had her 99th birthday.

She had her own spinoff series, Phyllis, which lasted a couple of seasons.

Snip:

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Leachman received working experience as a child at the Des Moines Little Theater. By age 15 she was appearing on local radio stations. She won a special scholarship to study broadcast drama at Northwestern, where she stayed for while before returning to Des Moines to finish high school. She returned to Northwestern with a theater scholarship this time but dropped out and entered a beauty contest, eventually finding her way to the 1946 Miss America pageant. 

Moving to New York, she landed a role in a quickie movie, “Carnegie Hall,” and just missed out on landing the female lead in the Broadway comedy “John Loves Mary” to Nina Foch. For a while Leachman understudied in such plays as “South Pacific” and “Come Back Little Sheba.” She studied at the Actors Studio and made her Broadway debut in 1948 in the short-lived production “Sundown Beach.” She attracted notice as Cecilia in a Theater Guild production of “As You Like It” with Katharine Hepburn that ran for six months.

Her role in “A Story for Sunday Evening” brought her good notices in 1950, and she played Broadway for eight months in the 1954 Jean Kerr/Eleanor Brooke comedy “King of Hearts.” She also played Nellie Forbush in a special revival of “South Pacific.” 

More steady training came via live television. She was a regular on the early series “Charlie Wild, Private Detective” (1950-52), and she excelled at bad girl roles. She also made guest appearances on TV series including “Gunsmoke” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”