This should be a gut check moment for responsible Republicans — if any are left — to step back and take a deep breath before more violence erupts. But sadly, most Republicans don’t seem to care what furies they have unleashed in their devotion to the principle that their supreme leader must remain above the law.

-Max Boot in the WaPost

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not a Nation of Immigrants - Notes

 The book takes its title from President Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants which she claims inspired the idea of looking at our country this way.  She says this only partly true.  More of us are descendants of settler colonialists and decendants of slaves than immigrants.

So the opinion that we are a nation of immigrants is false according to this historian.  That we live in a nation of opportunity---founded and built  by immigrants---became a convenient response by the ruling class and brain trust to the 1960's demands for decolonization, reparations, justice, and social equality.

This widely-accepted feel good myth deflects from our settler colonialism, slavery, genocide, and white  supremacy origins.

The author purports to tell the true, complex and sobering history of these United States.

 Some people run their mouths before they have the facts; some politicians run their mouths before they have the facts. Some people don't care about the facts. After all, there's endless fundraising to be done. But her emails!

 In my new book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” I traced the actions of GOP leaders who essentially created the Trump era by removing the guardrails of our political system. Dick Cheney was one such leader.

Liz Cheney speaks rightly of the primacy of truth to a free people. But her father abandoned the truth in the most profound way, starting a war on the basis of lies. Liz Cheney denounces the evil of preying on patriotism. But her father was a key figure in a White House that politicized the 9/11 attacks and portrayed the administration’s opponents as traitors.

-Dana Milbank in the WaPost

 by Caroline Pineda in the Wa Post

(AP)

Bought for $50,000, mint Mantle card drawing bids in excess of $6 million

Mickey Mantle 1952 mint rookie card being auctioned for millions.

Anthony Giordano had spent two years looking for a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card before his 15-year-old son, Ralph, stumbled upon the “finest known example” at a 1991 baseball card show at Madison Square Garden.

The card, which Giordano purchased for $50,000, is expected to sell for more than $10 million when the auction closes Aug. 27. With just over two weeks left, the bidding has exceeded $6 million — already a record figure.

On David McCullough

 He followed “The Greater Journey” with “The Wright Brothers” (2015); “The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017); and his most recent book, published in 2019, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West,” which provoked sharply critical reviews in The Times and The Washington Post as part of a wider controversy. “A new generation of historians, scholars and activists took to social media to accuse McCullough of romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans,” wrote The Associated Press.

-Daniel Lewis

The Republican War on Reading

 

But as always happens when reactionaries pull their censorship pants on, the main focus is reading. Spoiler: They hate it. Authoritarians have always been suspicious of reading, because it is such a private act. A reader, after all, is alone with the text and their thoughts. It's very hard to control what kinds of "dangerous" ideas — such as that people of color and LGBTQ people are full, complex, interesting and often contradictory human beings — might start to form in that space. This is exactly why we so often in history see a reluctance to let oppressed groups of people, such as women or racial minorities, have access to literacy or higher education. And it's also why Republicans have gone on an anti-reading rampage in the wake of their barely literate leader, Donald Trump, losing the 2020 election. 

-Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com