Supreme Court rejects theory that would have meant radical changes to election rules

Under the theory advanced by North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders,  state lawmakers throughout the country would have had exclusive authority to structure federal elections, subject only to intervention by Congres

 Virginia Woolf is nothing to be afraid of. Neither is Lag Capsulotomy. Speaking from experience.

 

‘Journeys of the Mind’ is an enthralling account of a scholar at work

Historian Peter Brown’s autobiography vividly depicts a life centered on the most enviable of pursuits: Humanistic research and the reading and writing of scholarly works 

Review by Michael Dirda

June 9, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

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Back in the 1970s, I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Cornell University enamored of medieval European literature. With excellent teachers, I studied Old and Middle English poetry, chivalric romances written in medieval French and Middle High German, Icelandic sagas — not the most obvious preparation for a future literary journalist. I even signed up for a seminar entirely devoted to Pope Gregory the Great’s 4,000-page commentary on the Book of Job. Partly because of Gregory’s sheer strangeness — in one memorable passage he compares the sinner to a testicle of the Antichrist — I found myself growing increasingly fascinated by the patristic era, the years between 200 and 700 AD when the Fathers of the Church, most notably Saint Augustine, were hammering out, explicating and defending the tenets of Christian doctrine.

Late antiquity, as it’s more generally known, had long been painted as the period of Rome’s decline and fall, Byzantium’s stagnation, and classical culture’s enfeeblement and eventual descent into monkishness and barbarism. By the 1960s that depiction of a supposedly crude and irrational age was at last questioned, then revised and finally dismissed, to a large degree because of a historian named Peter Brown.

 In today's musical culture would Elvis Presley fit in? I have no idea because I know nothing of today's music world, but I tend to doubt that Elvins would fit in

 Being a top-down conceptual thinker is not inherently better than being a bottom-up detailed, inductive, thinker, but it's what some of us are.

Being a conceptual, verbal thinker rather than a visual thinker is simply what some uf us are..

Seeking the theoretical mind of God is not for everyone, but it is for some of us.

 Saturday marks one year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision that widened the gulf between Americans who can acquire an abortion and those who cannot. In the time since Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ability to obtain medication or procedural abortion has largely become predicated on which party controls a state’s government, as well as an individual’s personal and financial capacity to travel significant distances. The disjointed patchwork of abortion restrictions has increased confusion for providers and patients alike, exacerbating inequities in access affecting millions of Americans nationwide.

The New Republic

 

Dilettante

1. a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.

   "a wealthy literary dilettante"

   Similar:

   dabbler

   putterer

   tinkerer

   trifler

   dallier

   amateur

   nonprofessional

   nonspecialist

   layman

   layperson

   Opposite:

   professional

   • ARCHAIC

     a person with an amateur interest in the arts.

 

Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6

An ecosystem of true believers is promoting a tale of persecution rather than prosecution that has migrated to the heart of presidential politics.

 

The End of RoeCreated Two Unequal Americas

A year after Dobbs, it’s clear who is suffering the brunt of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Add to your s

The conventional telling of American history used to be painted in primary colors: a cheerful and triumphal narrative about an exceptional country. Over time, in at least some quarters, that telling became more complex, reframed around the struggle to make good on the promises of democracy. But even in that more nuanced narrative, Native Americans tend to be absent, as are their histories of struggle, survival, dispossession and self-determination.

In his new book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” Ned Blackhawk, a professor at Yale University, confronts that absence. In its place, he offers a sweeping account of how Native Americans shaped the country legally, politically and culturally at every turn: from the earliest notions of self-governance held by British colonists, to the writing of the Constitution, to the westward expansion that would seed the Civil War and beyond.

-WaPost

 It seems to me that Trump wanted  to be indicted possibly thinking that this was his best chance to break reeleced and avoid jail.  How  will this play  out?

 It stands to reason that once the Republicans succeeded in corrupting the Supreme Court confirmation process to pack it with far right justices they would turn their attention to the Justice Department. What good is having a partisan High Court, after all, if the Justice Department (DOJ) is going to refuse to do the bidding of whatever Republican is in the White House? If you want to truly corrupt a democracy you need to do it holistically to ensure that all the levers of power are working together.

It's been a long time coming but it looks like Republicans believe they've finally found their moment. They're now openly announcing their intention to discard all the rules and norms that have governed the arms-length relationship between the president and the DOJ for the past 50 years. Donald Trump made that clear in his speech at his Bedminster Golf Club on Tuesday night:

-Salon.com

 

Republican leaders have a lot more power to achieve their goal of decimating American government from the inside, making the use of violence feel less necessary to MAGA activists who would like to see democracy destroyed.

-Salon.com

 As a long-time admirer or Robert Kennedy it pains me to rad about RFK. Jr. The leaf fell far from the tree.

 They should be at least a little bit of weirdness in all of us. If not you are vapid and not worth my time. One of my weird traits is using grammar for effect. I’d rather you be too weird than have absolutely not a little weirdness you is not embarrassed to show

 I just woke up. Excuse me. Just kidding. I've been woke since the 70's.

Ice Cream Sunday

 There is a community about 6 miles north of my hometown of Winfield that had a store that sold good ice cream and we would ride up there on Sunday afternoons for a treat. Ice cream on Sunday afternoons is always on my mind. Feeling mellow and relaxed at the ice cream store in Pelham. Cake batter and caramel.

 Trump is finally indicted by the Justix=ce Dept.  37 counts.

 Among my extensive collection of Bibles are my father’s Bible from the 60’s, my first Bible, and the Bible presented to me in 1985 by Moyna. She suggested I start reading it.  

 

In surprise ruling, Supreme Court says Ala.’s voting maps unfair to Black residents

The decision likely means a second Democrat could be elected from the state. And it could boost challenges of maps drawn by Republican-led legislatures elsewhere.

-WaPost

Biden Insstructs

 

Biden’s theory of MAGA helps explain this outcome. Biden ran in 2020 on the idea that the country faced an existential threat from the far right, highlighting white supremacy, political violence and President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on democracy. This year’s reelection launch highlighted the assault on the Capitol and cast “MAGA extremists” as a threat to American “freedom.”

However, in promising to restore “the soul of the nation” in the face ofthis threat, Biden has continually distinguished between MAGA Republicans and more conventional ones. This approach has been criticized by those of us who see much of the GOP as extreme and dangerous — after all, many elected Republicans helped whitewash Trump’s insurrection — and think Biden’s characterization of non-MAGA Republicans plays down that broader threat.

But Biden’s reading served him well in the debt limit standoff. Contrary to much criticism, Bidenworld believes that refusing to negotiate at the outset was key: It forced Republicans to offer their own budget, which created an opening to attack the savage spending cuts in it.

Notably, Biden and other Democrats relentlessly characterized those cuts as destructive and dangerous in the MAGA vein. Bidenworld did believe that some MAGA Republicans were willing to default and force global economic cataclysm to harm the president’s reelection, a senior Biden adviser tells me, but also that many non-MAGA Republicans ultimately could be induced not to go that far.

Michael Tomasky in The New Republic

 Well, I’m officially not scared of the Freedom Caucus anymore.

The big losers in this debt deal? Not Joe Biden, by a long shot. Politically, he’s the biggest winner. Not Kevin McCarthy. He did what politicians normally do—he cut a deal—and he’s still the speaker. Not the Democratic Party’s left; 46 of them voted against the bill, but that was all orchestrated so that some Democrats could protest the cuts in the deal while Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made sure the party as a whole backed their president. I’m certain Pramila Jayapal, the House Progressive Caucus chair who voted “no,” supports Joe Biden no less fully today than she did yesterday.

No—the losers are the Freedom Caucus. Remember six months ago? Two months ago? They were going to kill this deal, submarine their own speaker, cost him his job, and send the country into default and the world into economic chaos. They held all the cards. They drew blood out of McCarthy’s flesh during the speakership vote and held the sword of Damocles over his head. The conventional wisdom, which I believed along with everybody else, was that the red-hot backbenchers were going to foment a coup against McCarthy if he dared to cut a deal with the enemy.

 So you think I’m weird, huh? How’s this for evidence?

I like to drive Southern country two lane -highways to get my bearings. It’s like touching my roots. It’s my way of communing with nature. It’s like a religious experience.

Today I drve state highway 69 from Tuscaloosa to Jasper. Never made this drive before. Won’t make it again ever and it was’t transformative, but it was almost supernatural.

This stretch of highway 69 is twisting and winding, and it doesn’t let up all the way to Jasper.

Close trees hug the highway almost all the way. Few houses. No gas stations for at least 50 miles. Lots of small and deserted churches with adjacent cemeteries with the long forgotten buried. I say a prayer for all of them as I pass by. Few cars along with me or passing the other way

It occurs to me I could be in a Deliverance setting. Locals stop me, tie me up, and make me squel like a pig. No one here with a bow and arrow to save me. But I make it.

My mind starts tripping. Sir Paul McCartney’s long and winding road. Willie Nelson on the road again like a bunch of gypsies going down the highway. Cormac McCathy’s apocaplyptic “The Road.” This deserted road would make a good candidate for an apocalypse. But mp automobiles up on blocks or discarded refrigerators in from yards so few houses. On these county roads I am always aware that there are always deer on the side of the road waiting for a chance to dart in front of my. One false move on this never-ending twisting road and I’m in a ditch maybe days before somebody finds me. But I make it to I-22 after passing thru Oakman with no red lights and no homo sapiens in sight.

I-22 and a sigh of relief. You have to be there to understand the goose-bumping thills.

 So you think I’m weird, huh?  How’s this for evidence?

I like to drive Southern country two lane -highways to get my bearings.  It’s like touching my roots.  It’s my way of communing with nature. It’s like a religious experience.

Today I dry ve state highway 69 from Tuscaloosa to Jasper.  Never made this drive before.  Won’t make it again ever and it was’t transformative, but it was almost supernatural.

This stretch of highway 69 is twisting and winding, and it doesn’t let up all the way to Jasper.  

Close trees hug the highway almost all the way.    Few houses.  No gas stations for at least 50 miles.  Lots of small and deserted churches with adjacent cemeteries with the long forgotten buried.  I say a prayer for all of them as I pass by.  Few cars along with me or passing the other way

It occurs to me I could  be in a Deliverance setting.  Loads stop my, tie me up, and make me squel like a pig.  No one here with a bow and arrow to save me.  But I make it.

My mind starts tripping.  Sir Paul McCartney’s long and winding road.  Willie Nelson on the road  again like a bunch of gypsies going down the highway.  Cormac McCathy’s apocaplyptic “The Road.”  This deserted road would make a good candidate for an apocalypse.    But mp automobiles up on blocks or discarded refrigerators in from yards so few houses.  On these county roads I am always aware that there are always deer on the side of the road waiting for a chance to dart in front of my.  One false move on this never-ending twisting road and I’m in a ditch maybe days before somebody finds me.  But I make it to I-22 after passing thru Oaken with ho reed lights and no happen sapiens in sight.

I-22 and a sigh of relief.  You have to be there to understand the goose-bumping thills.
 

 

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Shared with Friends; Except: Linda Alexander Hester, Stephen Jennings

One of my literary friends stunned me yesterday when she told me that she had never read Huckleberry Finn. This is a person who reads without ceasing and has graduate training in literature.

As soon as I recovered from my shock and regained my composure, I recommended a three-step program.

1) Admit you have a problem. You haven't read this essential American classic, the book that Hemingway said was the founding document of American literature (next to that bartender's book on mixing drinks). Isn't the first step always to first admit that you have a problem?

2) Clear your reading docket to make room for this classic.

3) Read the darn book. And read the original, not Alan Gribben's expurgated version. You can handle it. The irony of the matter is that if Twain were here he would probably chuckle and say, "You can still be happy without reading it. But I would be pleased if you did."

You'll feel better about yourself afterwards. I promise.

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Shared with Your friends

We were pleased to take bags of cat litter to the Shelby County Humane Society in Columbiana. They said they were completely out! We like all animals but are cat people at heart. We have two wascally strictly indoor cats both with medical problems; otherwise, we'd likely have more. Support your local humane society!6;

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