Today is Friday, March 8, 2024. There was a reason not to watch the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s rousing State of the Union address and that was the repugnican response itself to brittle Katie Britt’s disingenuous address to the American people from her kitchen. Republicans themselves reacted with responses ranging from the baffled to the satirical to the appalled in an article by Martin Pengelly for The Guardian. This tepid response from the Alabama senator just illustrates how dysfunctional the entire party of Dump actually is.

An unnamed “Reputin” strategist told the Daily Beast, “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.” An unnamed Dump adviser told Rolling Stone, “What the hell am I watching right now?” These represent just some of the range of opinions from repugnicans themselves toward their own Alabama senator’s reaction to Biden’s sterling speech.

“In his address, Biden used his bully pulpit effectively, attacking Republicans in a fiery speech and inviting a strong response.” However, Britt’s speech, delivered with overt theatricality, oscillated in tone between the wholesome and the wholly horrific, which did not land well even in her own party.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Trump aide turned never-Trumper, said, “Senator Katie Britt is a very important person – I do not understand the decision to put her in a KITCHEN for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.”

Other critics of Britt’s speech said that Britt’s response was “so disappointing,” “way too dramatic,” and “the up-and-down emotion was bizarre.” An anti-Trump conservative columnist, Tom Nichols, said of Britt: “There is no way that this Katie Britt address does not end up as part of the Saturday Night Live cold open.”

Julia Ioffe, Washington correspondent for Puck News, said that the vibes she got from the senator’s cringeworthy speech were that of having a sleepover at another friend’s house and seeing your friend’s mom is “drunk, crying and rambling about the national debt.”

The clueless Alabama senator then described meeting a migrant woman who told her that she was being “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12,” and who, Britt said, spoke of being repeatedly raped “on a mattress in a shoebox of a room.” And here Britt displayed the shocking hypocrisy surrounding the party of Dump when she mentioned to Americans that the worst thing that can happen to a woman is being sexually assaulted all the while encouraging women – women – to vote for a convicted sexual predator!! Does this “Stepford wife,” as others have characterized her, understand the ultimate irony here of her supporting an adjudicated sexual predator for president? How dumb is that?

Just to remind those women who have to vote for president in November, just last month, the presumptive Reputin nominee for president was ordered to pay $83.3 million in a civil defamation case arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true.” Accused of sexual assault or misconduct by more than 20 other women, Drumpf also faces trial this month on 34 charges arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, who claimed they had an affair.

After reading this article, I’m elated I didn’t waste my time on hearing Britt’s speech.

As for the party that has disgraced itself so much since grasping onto Drumpf’s orange hair since 2016 and never letting go, Democrats took them to task for offering absurd criticism of Biden’s address last night. An article in Alter Net addresses House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ reaction to Biden’s speech by David Badash entitled “‘Get lost. You’re a joke.’: Top House Democrat mocks Republicans upset by Biden SOTU.”

The President’s speech has now been widely praised on the left, and even by some on the right, but it’s the MAGA branch of the party that has taken offense to Biden’s very effective address. Those in Trump’s side pocket declared Biden was too “loud,” or appeared to be “angry” and “shouting.” Others called the address too “political.”

Jeffries wrote this on X, formerly Twitter, “President Biden showed up, delivered a forceful speech and smoked the MAGA extremists. My dude.”

At a press conference today, Jeffries called House Republicans’ behavior during the State of the Union “a complete embarrassment.”

He held particular contempt for blonde bimbo Marjorie Taylor Greene, saying that MTG “shows up in campaign paraphernalia.” As all of you who have seen the address, it was this “fashion plate” who appeared in a red hat and other political accessories and clothing, who really should have been expelled from the chamber, in my opinion.

U.S. Jamie Raskin remarked that Greene was “in direct violation of the rules of the House by wearing campaign insignia on the House floor.”

“And then these people want to lecture Joe Biden because he delivered a strong and forceful speech that made them uncomfortable because he exposed their lies and shamelessness,” Jeffries stated. He added, “We have one message for extreme MAGA Republicans who want to lecture us about decorum: Get lost. You’re a joke.”

The House Minority Leader then showed a poster of Congresswoman Greene in full regalia, acting out at the State of the Union. He then showed a picture of expelled Congressman George Santos who was present at Biden’s speech. This fool not only showed up at the event last night, he declared he is running again for Congress. Is this guy for real? we wonder.

Today I saw a remarkable film, Cabrini, about the pioneering Italian American nun, Frances Xavier Cabrini, who was canonized a saint by the Catholic Church some three decades after her death from malaria at age 67, in 1905, in Columbus Hospital in Chicago.

Directed by Alejandro Monteverde, who directed Sound of Freedom most recently, the 2-and-a-half-hour movie expertly captures the human being behind the well-known name and who she really was. The Italian actress Cristiana Dell’Anna turns in a stunningly effective, movie-star performance in a film that is reminiscent of old-fashioned religious biopics such as Song of Bernadette and Joan of Arc.

As portrayed by Dell’Anna, Cabrini is a small, sickly immigrant who lived in a time when the patriarchy’s word was first and final (especially within the male-dominated Church), yet became an unstoppable force who would not take no for an answer as she built some 67 hospitals, schools, and orphanages around the world. We hear about Cabrini’s lasting legacy in a voiceover at the end of the movie; the film deals with Cabrini’s life long before the shrines and the tributes.

Initially, we see the ambitious nun lobbying Pope Leo XIII (the great Giancarlo Giannini) to send her to China to establish missions, but he tells Cabrini that New York City needs her help first. It seems that children are dying in the streets, orphaned, in the filthy and violent slums of Five Points and it’s where conditions are so intolerable that even the rats have it better than Italian immigrant families, as one observer puts it. (This later becomes a rallying cry and a newspaper headline.)

Facing racism, sexism, and institutionalized poverty every step of the way, Cabrini is determined to build a facility that will provide health care and education to the local immigrant community, and she’s in it for the long haul – even though her lungs are compromised after surviving a near-drowning as a young girl in Lombardy, Italy. A physician has already told Cabrini that it would be a miracle that she would even live for more than a couple of years.

The screenplay by Rod Barr does descend into some melodrama, especially when Cabrini befriends the sex worker Vittoria (Romana Maggiora Vergano) who must resort to violence to escape the clutches of her brutal pimp and eventually becomes a Mary Magdalene figure as she hitches her wagon to Cabrini’s holy mission. Another strong character in the film is Archbishop Corrigan (David Morse) who clashes with the formidable nun many times in New York as he warns her not to upset the balance of power and encourages Mother Cabrini not to rattle too many cages, like the villainous bigot of a mayor, wonderfully essayed by John Lithgow, who underestimates Cabrini’s willpower. (At one point, the mayor begrudgingly says, “You would have made an excellent man.” Cabrini replies, “Men could never do what we do.”) Even though this sounds corny, you kind of want to applaud.)

There are many scenes of Cabrini ministering to the orphaned children and lobbying second-generation Italian immigrants for funding for her many projects, especially a new hospital for immigrants in New York that would offer the best care for this country’s new citizens. Dell’Anna conveys Cabrini’s strong faith and her resolve, and her bravery in standing up to prejudice and misogyny, without turning her into a one-dimensional superhero in nun’s clothing. The cinematography is appropriately golden hued. And the musical score is quite stirring.

I learned that in September of 1946, two months after Mother Cabrini was canonized, more than 100,000 gathered at Soldier Field in Chicago for a Holy Hour celebration.

One quibble that I had with the film was that the five other nuns who joined Cabrini in her holy mission in the New World are not given any exposition at all. We don’t really know the other nuns as characters here and that’s a weakness in the script, I feel.

However, I found the film stirring overall and I recommend it, especially in these fraught times when immigrants are still being demonized by a party that is un-American itself. Here in this film, it was Italians who were decried and spat on by “native”New Yorkers. Lithgow has many imprecations to utter in his encounters with Cabrini at the beginning. But he begrudgingly comes around at the end.

Stay safe and be well.

Here Atticus is scrunched once more under the dishwasher for some reason only known to himself.