On Wednesday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order instructing the National Park Service to “highlight important figures and chapters in women’s history.” “Women and girls of all backgrounds have shaped our country’s history, from the ongoing fight for justice and equality to cutting-edge scientific advancements and artistic achievements,” the announcement read. “Yet these contributions have often been overlooked. We must do more to recognize the role of women and girls in America’s story, including through the Federal Government’s recognition and interpretation of historic and cultural sites.”
Justice Ginsburg would be horrified at what’s happened since her death. And at the brazen moves that some right-wingers now openly champion, including barring women from voting and outlawing birth control. Everything she fought for is under dire attack.
RBG never gave up no matter what barrier or tragedy she was confronted with.
Talk about not sleeping. I doubt if she ever slept for 8 hours. If you haven't seen the documentary put out in late 2020 here is the IMDB link with the overview-
I'm glad someone feels like there is still hope. Personally, each notch in the Rethuglican lipstick case is convincing me that they mean business. Their business is not always executed according to the rule of law. Get ready for breeding camps.
Agreed. But I still cannot understand why she didn’t retire in time to preserve her seat for someone who wasn’t a radical theologically driven ideologue.
And if she had? Let’s not forget what happened to Merrick Garland’s nomination, followed by Barrett’s. I’m not sure it would have made any difference. I, too, regretted that she didn’t, but Mitch McConnell is a snake and I suspect he would have held up any nominee to replace her. The Republican playbook has long been to control the judiciary; McConnell saw his chance and grabbed it.
The notion that Trump, of all presidents, was able to nominate three supreme court justices is nauseating.
She did, but that was something like a decade before her death. I imagine she felt like she had unfinished business. And could Obama have mustered 60 votes for any nominee? His last nominee, in 2010, barely reached that threshold.
Wasn’t it Harry Reid (D-NV)that changed the Senate vote count for approval from 60 down to 51? That’s the new standard for SCOTUS candidates as we unfortunately now know.
In retrospect, it's easy to criticize her. I did. More than once. But maybe she didn't think she was really going to die so soon?
Perhaps she was just like most pundits and voters - who thought Hillary was obviously going to win the presidency. Even Trump was shocked that he won. Andy Borowitz reportedly overheard the Orange Menace comment upon his election: "Really? OMG what do I do now?" Soon he was receiving handwritten instructional notes (which he had read to him) from various titans of industry, Russian FSB agents and not a few bible pounders.
She stated her reasons publicly by asking how many people thought the Senate would confirm a nomination of someone like her. Of course, anyone paying attention knew that McConnell’s Senate would not have confirmed any Obama nomination to replace her.
The treatments given RBG were far more advanced than what was available to my mother-in-law. RBG actually lived with the disease for some time. RBG was human and human beings can't be perfect 100 percent of the time. She did what she considered best.
My wife died of pancreatic cancer in 2020. She was very active, 3 mile walk every morning, only sporadic abdominal pains, which both of us thought were gas. Then the pain become intolerable, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died about 3 weeks thereafter. It's an insidious disease and can sneak up on you. Of course I don't know how it presented in RBG's case.
Didn’t Obama try to convince her to retire during his term, which I recall offended her. I have a hard time forgiving her for that. She was old and ill. She should have seen that. I admire the work she did earlier, but I think not retiring was a real smudge on her record, and has led to a lot of what she fought for being rolled back. A lesson to us all - women are not immune from the seduction of power.
I’ve read that too. Given RBG’s history, I suspect it wasn’t power that seduced her, but rather the lovely ideal that the first woman president would name her replacement. That would have been so fitting.
Meanwhile, back here in the real world, there are real consequences to her inaction and miscalculation on that one. To be fair, most of us miscalculated that one. But for the future, I feel obligated to point out this missed opportunity whenever someone is rhapsodizing about RBG - I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive her.
Sorry, but I think the point is that it shouldn't matter which president appoints which justice. All judges are supposed to put aside personal opinions and biases in favor of the constitution.
Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch lied about adherence to stare decisis during their confirmation hearings; that's on congress. Those three never should have been confirmed no matter who or what McConnell put onto the floor. They should be sanctioned at the very least.
Thomas, Alito, and Roberts are corrupt, as reported by various journalists over the last two years. SCOTUS needs enforceable ethics rules to prevent rulings for sale.
SCOTUS also needs term limits or a set retirement age, either of which would have eliminated the inconvenient timing of RBG's passing.
All we can do about it now is to vote in a blue majority congress to put these needed guardrails in place. Personally I'd like to see Thomas required to fork over a fine equivalent to the value of all his trips and campers, not to mention Mama's house. The fine could be designated to be split among all the people held for more bail than they could afford. If it were up to me, I'd put Alito in stocks on the steps of the Supreme Court for a week. Let's see how much he loves 17th century jurisprudence then. We broke away from England to create a better system, not use the inferior old one to justify injustice! And Roberts... demote him to plain old Justice, and dock his pay for the rest of his time on the bench for not doing his job and because his wife makes a handsome living by peddling his influence. Maybe I should be appointed to replace Roberts as Chief?
George, I’m thinking that she realized that as long as Mitch McConnell was in charge, her successor would wait until there was a Republican in the White House. I’m sure that if she’d retired in 2013, McConnell would have found an excuse to not bring up a successor for a vote. She worked hard to stay in shape for a Democratic president with a majority in the Senate; but pancreatic cancer took her quickly.
I’ve commented on this, too. I think she resisted making a decision that was open politicization of the court, but I think she could have made a philosophical decision. Still, could she have KNOWN how skewed the R party would be willing to go? She trusted our bedrock system, but they’ve fractured that.
RBG may have hoped that she could do one more thing, fight one more fight. Alas, though she overcame numerous health challenges, her last stand was too short.
George, thank you! You are exactly right. She basically shot herself and her lifetime of work in the foot. She had Obama and a Democratic Congress in place and should have retired. This, unfortunately, mars her incredible legacy. She was human, afterall.
I have not read any accounts of why she decided to stay on the Court and certainly should have seen the right wing storm clouds forming.
A person can spend decades building a wonderful structure, but it only takes one day for a criminal with a gas can and a torch to burn it down.
Yes, totally with you, George. President Obama politely asked Justice Ginsburg twice if she would please retire, to care for herself better and also to make way for an appropriate replacement of his choosing. I have never quite understood her reasoning not to do so. If she had, maybe this country wouldn't be in the mess it's in right now. We'll never know.
McConnell had 9 months to appoint Garland as a judge, but said it wasn't enough time. A month before an election seems to be plenty of time for him, though.
Ruth Bader attended East Midwood Jewish Center. In 1946, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the 13 year old Bader had an essay, titled One People, published in the synagogue bulletin. She wrote:
We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions . . . We cannot feel safer until every nation, regardless of weapons or power, will meet together in good faith, the people worthy of mutual association. There can be a happy world and there will be once again, when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance." (The full essay is copied below.)
"East Midwood Jewish Center’s task today, as it was in 1924, is to transmit to new generations and the public at large the relevance and beauty of our religious traditions, and the Jewish emphasis on education, social justice, and our mutual responsibilities to each other."
The rabbi at EMJC was Harry Halpern. "At the EMJC, his sermons constantly educated, challenged and inspired the congregation both in terms of Jewish identity and larger social concerns such as the rights of minorities, and he "pleaded for intensive Jewish Education of the Day School-Yeshiva type long before private schools became fashionable. . . . He opposed the use of taxes to support private schools (including religious schools) during his chairmanship of the Social Actions Commission of Conservative Judaism, also speaking out against the idea as President of the New York Board of Rabbis. The Board of Rabbis resolution was especially opposed to the idea of public funding of private religious schools, calling such action a "violation of our understanding of the hallowed principle of church-state separation." He also supported "Rabbi Morris Adler of Detroit, Michigan, who took a strong stand against "any religious intrusions upon public education," Halpern personally supported this position, adding that it was a "long-established policy" of the organization. Halpern continued his opposition to religion in public schools through the 1960s, publicly supporting the Supreme Court ban on prayer in public schools." Halpern received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from the City College of New York in 1919 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1925. He also received both a bachelor and doctoral degree from Brooklyn Law School, studied at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and earned ordination as a rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), in 1929. He later received a Doctor of Hebrew Literature degree from JTS in 1951." It was a time when even Jewish men with advanced degrees were discriminated against in many professions, including the law. Many such men chose to serve as rabbis. (For a time during the depression my widowed grandmother, who had a small dress shop in which she was the only staff, helped support the families of her three brothers - one had a law degree, one a PhD in education, and the third a union leader and organizer who'd been murdered by the bosses.)
In the 1950s EMJC did open a Hebrew day school. In 2019, EMJC rented the school building to Urban Dove, "which had outgrown its space in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Urban Dove Team Charter School, serves students who have struggled academically in high school. Many of them are black or Hispanic."
I grew up at EMJC in the 1950s-60s. During Rabbi Halpern's long tenure. Eventually attending Hebrew school 4 afternoons, Sabbath services Friday night and Saturday, Sunday school, and Sunday afternoon youth activities, including woodworking. (In my public school only boys could take wood shop. Girls had to take cooking, sewing, and hat making.)
Ruth Bader's full essay.
One People
The war has left a bloody trail and many deep wounds not too easily healed. Many people have been left with scars that take a long time to pass away. We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions. Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.” In our beloved land families were not scattered, communities not erased nor our nation destroyed by the ravages of the World War.
Yet, dare we be at ease? We are part of a world whose unity has been almost completely shattered. No one can feel free from danger and destruction until the many torn threads of civilization are bound together again. We cannot feel safer until every nation, regardless of weapons or power, will meet together in good faith, the people worthy of mutual association.
There can be a happy world and there will be once again, when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance. Then and only then shall we have a world built on the foundation of the Fatherhood of God and whose structure is the Brotherhood of Man.
Lin- thank you for sharing RBG’s essay. I learned about the Holocaust at age 11, when my teacher gave me an assignment to write an essay on “The Holocaust: Could it Happen Again?” I asked my mother to explain that word and she just said “I’ll take you to the library.”
She dropped me off at the Cleveland Public Library, an enormous building I had never visited. The librarian pointed me to the card catalog room and I eventually found a little alcove where those books were stored.
It’s been 60 years but I can still remember the sun slanting through high windows, lighting up the dust (like ashes?) as I read through page after page of the horrors.
My mother picked me up at closing time and I asked “could something like this really happen??!” Her response, which I will never forget: “Some people think so.”
I don’t remember my essay, except that of course I said it could not possibly happen again. It was not as wise as RBG’s essay, and of course it has happened again and again. Different countries, different victims, but the horror was not banished as I believed - and RBG hoped.
What I read that day in the CPL - the first person accounts, the witnesses - has never left me. I wish I could believe “Never again!” But I cannot.
As a result of being a military dependent toddler in Germany during the Nuremberg trials and Berlin Airlift, I remember my parents, especially my mother, balancing the better history and friendliness of the German people with the popular ugliness they could fall into at least temporary support of leaders like Adolph Hitler. She reminded us he was more popular in Germany than FDR was in America. In fact Hitler seemed more popular with many repugnant Americans that supported the America First movement right up to Pearl Harbor.
Our families were long time Republicans (from the very founders on my wife's side, but were friends with and supporters of many Democrats (like Harold L. Ickes who had been a Republican).
The Berlin Airlift went a long ways toward making so many more Germans such better allies and partners in Democracies.
For the bigger story of all the logistics and aircraft maintenance challenges, see "The Air Force Can Deliver Anything! A History of the Berlin Airlift" which is available as a paperback at Amazon or a downloadable PDF at:
ThankYou. Your comment is such a profound personal insight and historical narrative.
You don't mention the year. In the late 1950s and early 60s the Holocaust was never mentioned in my Hebrew school classes and my public school history classes just about made it through WW I.
It was not spoken of at home. Relatives and neighbors with numbers on their arms were the least likely to say anything. As my mother and I were long time regulars at the public library, as a child I had permission to wander the adult stacks - ostensibly to fetch books for my mother, but in fact to explore. I came across one small paperback about the Holocaust. I never mentioned that I'd read it.
In my junior high (1970s), one of the teachers in the school was a holocaust survivor. She came to our history classes and spoke to us. I cannot imagine what that was like for her. We saw several films, very graphic, about the concentration camps. I can remember students vomiting. It was good that we were shown this, and that our teacher made it personal. Today? Perhaps it would be concluded that such history made students too uncomfortable so it shouldn’t be taught. We *were* uncomfortable. We *should* have been uncomfortable and also outraged, and determined that it should never happen again. We should have learned about slavery in the exact same way.
I believe it was 1962 or 1963. I never - before or after that time - heard the word Holocaust again in my classrooms or at home. It’s stunning how little modern history was ever mentioned in school. Unlike you, I am not Jewish and have/had Jewish relatives. But I have been a fervent supporter of Israel ever since and have done considerable volunteer work resettling refugees from the various and endless wars. Including sharing my home with refugees from the Balkan wars and now from Ukraine. I want so badly to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, though that boat has probably sailed due to arthritis limiting my mobility. ❤️
As they say "You don't have to be Jewish..." I visited the Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt, Austria. It was run by a young Austrian with, I think, a degree in theology and Ancient Near Eastern Languages. If I recall, he thought it would be a short gig until he got an academic appointment in his field. But he fell in love with the museum and community of visitors. It is a lovely museum with fine and well cared for collections and many outreach programs, especially for families and children. It is in what was the historic ghetto. A few houses away is the Landesmuseum Burgenland which provides a comprehensive understanding of the region's history and its evolution over time. Which interestingly elides any evidence of a Jewish presence. Except on the doorframes where you can see that mezuzahs have been gouged out of the stone. Both museums are in buildings originally owned by Jews. Now in a sense, Jews are still ghettoized in Eisenstadt. (Almost the entire Jewish population was eliminated during the war.)
I experienced an overt antisemitism in Vienna and Eisenstadt, which I never experienced in Berlin, Munich, or Dresden.)
Having immersed myself in the literature from the time I was 10 until college, I have never felt a need to take a course in the subject or visit the camps. The best books I've read are Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, The Retreat, and Tzili. Although Appelfeld escaped a forced labor camp as a child, his books never take you into the camps. But focus on peoples' response to society shutting down and shutting them out.
I think the US Holocaust Museum is well-done and wished every public school could finance class visits to Washington DC for civic and world history education. Done at the right age, with the right adult leaders, it could really make a difference in students’ lives.
I think we were there through late 1947 to late 1950 since we were there through the 48/49 Berlin Airlift and the 1950 Oberammergau Play (beautiful to many but, as my mother described it, possibly the most anti-Semitic it had ever been after Hitler's suggested changes for the 300th anniversary in 1934).
I was told the early Holocaust survivors that came to the US found few who wanted to listen to such dreadful stories, instead concentrating on the better things in life.
I saw the same in Cambodian professionals like a Doctor that worked as a helper in our Community College Aeronautics tool room. He like most others wouldn't tell his own children of the horrors their family faced.
It took a long time for survivors to be able to have those who hadn't experienced it really listen here in this country. In a way not discussing it until later years may have helped give time for the German public to sort out their future consideration for Jews. I was a bit surprised to find that Germany seems to have welcomed a higher percentage of returning Jews than other countries.
I had to look that up to believe it might be true. I was inspired to do so from watching the 2023 "Oppenheimer" movie and finding that the leading University for Physics was the Georg August University of Göttingen dramatically changed by the Great Purge of 1933. According to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_G%C3%B6ttingen#
"...in the 1930s, the university became a focal point for the Nazi crackdown on "Jewish physics", as represented by the work of Albert Einstein. In what was later called the "great purge" of 1933, academics including Max Born, Victor Goldschmidt, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Edmund Landau, Emmy Noether, and Richard Courant were expelled or fled. Most of them fled Nazi Germany for places like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Following the great purge, in 1934 David Hilbert, by then a symbol of German mathematics, was dining with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education. Rust asked, "How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?" Hilbert replied, "There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore."
For better or worse we got the best of German Physicists while they eliminated almost all of theirs. Maybe they appreciate them so much more now.
In 1950, playwright Arthur Miller and composer Leonard Bernstein led a petition to cancel the passion play. However, the townspeople defiantly restaged the 1934 play.
In the 1960s, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Paul Celan, and other prominent intellectuals called for a boycott due to the play's antisemitism. After Vatican II's attempted reforms (attempted because not accepted by many including in the American Council of Bishops, and such as Opus Dei - bedfellows Mel Gibson and Leonard Leo) even the Catholic Church asked for changes. Not much luck. It is a traveling show. When I lived in Carlinville Illinois (the cornfield 5 hours south of Chicago where Cary Grant got strafed in North by Northwest) public school children were taken to performances. The head of Blackburn College's psychology department had the license plate SS1934. Her husband who had been in that position had killed himself in full Nazi regalia. Each year she took his ashes to Bayreuth to visit with other fans of Hitler. Later Carlinville was named one of the best 100 small towns in America. Yikes!
What I remember was my mother using it as an example of outward appearances, pleasing to the eye, hiding the poisoned hearts and minds. She also thought we (as a people), could be as blind and likely to suffer a similar poisoning because we really weren't that different. It was already there in Germany as far as the Passion Play, but Hitler wanted to use it on steroids so much that he forced so many of the most capable people out of Germany and tried to kill more than the 2/3rds that he did.
Too many in the US were antisemitic but not that antisemitic and some like Harold L. Ickes (a good friend of my wife's grandfather), wanted to help by making it possible for much higher numbers of Jewish refugees to be able to be accepted in the then territory of Alaska as described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slattery_Report
I believe Ickes pressed for the most he thought possible, but it was not supported by many others, or even FDR who wanted a limit of 10,000 or 10% of refugees allowed into the US. The opposition he ran into, even for limits he thought possible, is one of the more disappointing revelations of our history to me personally.
Ginsburg might have been more resigned than horrified; she understood our country better than most when it came to how it treats of women. She was worried about Roe v. Wade, believed it could be overridden (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade.html). She wanted abortion rights granted because women deserve gender equality, not the argument in Roe v. Wade, which argued on the basis of women's right to privacy. I read that as she wanted legally established canon of law that women must get the bodily autonomy that men already enjoy.
Ginsburg also felt that decision was laid down so quickly it wouldn't stick.
She was right to worry, it turns out. Screaming that a "baby" is a clump of cells, and it is murder, overruns any woman's piddly right to privacy.
She was a fighter. I think she'd have saddled up and gone to war for the law she really wanted enshrined and never have resigned herself to accept second class status. I wish we could take abortion out of the equation and fight for equal rights for women across all facets of society - equal pay, equal autonomy, equal opportunity. Unfortunately I think the clump of cells infant is just a poster child for a much deeper misogyny. After all, NC may elect a governor who wants to take away women's suffrage.
Thank you, Sys. I started to watch it and realized I had seen it before. I agree that hope is not a utopian drug but a realistic stance. Obama kindled it. A lot of what's going on now is backlash to his only partial whiteness. I'm not even sure it's racism, but maybe atavistic fear of the other? Pragmatically speaking, though, the cause is less important than the remedy, and Ms. Clayton is a perfect standard bearer. So are Justin Pearson and Maxwell Frost. I actually think Biden is a beacon of hope, because he's evidence that age doesn't equate to antiquated thinking or mental incapacity. There are lots of people who carry the ideals of equality and opportunity - from Katie Hobbs to Pete Buttgieg to Jamie Raskin. Live on hope and get out the vote.
Justice Ginsberg, also said if you believe in something you must continue to fight for it . Like Hillary said , Justice Ginsberg pave the way for women. We must continue her ledgecy by not given up. Sure we have been pushed back, but doesn't mean we can't do nothing about it. There are thousands of women in this country that are angry and frustrated about Roe v. Wade and civil rights that are going to the polls to vote and let their voices be heard not only for their reproductive rights but for our Democracy. We have a tough fight ahead but I know we will win.
Michael Bales: Remember how Ruth Bader Ginsburg exclaimed that, if Trump were elected, she would emigrate to Canada.
RBG was criticized for saying that.
I -- and I believe you would agree -- thought her fear was perfectly reasonable.
My homeland is in the Rhineland. If I were single, I would move to the Rhineland. Oh, the friendships that are like first-cousins! I love those people. (Realistic, I am bilingual.)
I, for one, heartily seconded RBG: EMIGRATE.
One of my FAVORITE authors is Irmgard Keun ("Gilgi -- Eine von Uns", "das kunstseidene Mädchen," "Nach Mitternacht"). She emigrated from the Third Reich in 1936; Joseph Roth, her lover (and great author) wondered: "What took you so long?" She had fled to Oostende in Flanders.
Which created a problem in 1940, with the Third Reich overtaking the Low Countries. Irmgard Keun FAKED HER OWN DEATH: Even the London Times publicized that Irmgard Keun had taken her own life. But she slid her way back home in Köln (Cologne).
Irmgard Keun managed to stay hidden in plain sight.
Any time: Someone could have denounced her to the Gestapo.
She was cute and pretty, so that may have factored into people liking her around and not denouncing her.
But the Nazis had burnt and forbidden her work, so Irmgard Keun could not afford to be denounced.
From my Walloon (Belgian) Mom, I learned similar and even worse stories during the Third Reich.
No, at the time, from this background, I though RBG in 2016 was quite right: Trump elected: EMIGRATE.
Needless to say, we already have many strong and wise heroes who have been stepping up. I'm remembering that speech by Tom Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath:"Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there." Good people wont stop.
I agree and I am disgusted at how the spirit and legal insights of Ruth Bader Ginzburg has died with her. Just because the floppy brained McConnell cynically replaced her with a Catholic Zealot should not have interred her works with her bones.
She herself should be the basis for a volcano of protest.
After all Heather emphasizes:
Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
Yet solitary figure against injustice she fades into the mists.
We all have talent, however limited, to move our democracy along in the direction the founders envisioned when they urged us to work on forming a more perfect union.
I have one of those little wooden dolls of RBG, wearing her lace collar and holding a gavel in her right hand, standing on my desk. She is always there when I'm at my computer, working to build bridges so that those of us living in different silos can move forward together. Let us honor her memory, and let us learn about the women President Biden is honoring whose names may not be as familiar to us as RBG's.
I am the proud owner of an RBG Bobblehead. Last April/May she accompanied me on a 7000km road trip and never tired once. R.I.P. People all over were very interested in who this was.
I do wish that she had stepped down when she would have been safely replaced by another liberal justice. She had done enough wonderful things and the timing of her replacement couldn't have been worse. No one is indispensable -- right?
I agree that RBG should have retired, but there still would’ve been the Senate anti-Obama problem, and RBG would’ve needed 20/20 foresight to see the Amy Coney Barrett problem.
Yes, exactly. But she did not step down and made clear why; it was about her ego. She thought she was too important to die and too important to retire. We have all paid dearly for that, and Americans will be paying a larger and larger price for the next several decades. She was an extraordinary woman, a phenomenal jurist, and like the rest of us a flawed human being. But most of our flaws don't have the consequences that hers did.
Yes. Sadly missing from RBG's many talents was a crystal ball into a future in which Mitch McConnell would overturn all Senate precedent in order to block an Obama nomination from coming to the floor. And a future in which Donald Trump would be elected president.
RBG did foresee that the legal foundations of Roe were shaky. And in that she was tragically proven correct. Although the Federalist Society majority would have overturned Roe no matter what. Constitutionality and legal precedent meaning nothing to their ouija board decisions where the spectral hand of Founders long dead always points to decisions that benefit racist right wing religious extremist plutocrats and the populists who love them.
lin, excellent description of the Federalist Society....ouija board decisions....and yes, those always help out the regressives and so-called Christians. I gag every time I see a picture of the Supreme Court with religious wing nuts in the majority or see a decision from lower court judge who is a reminder of judge shopping. Then there is Loose Cannon in Florida presiding over the documents case. Yesterday i had the pleasure of blocking a wing nut who seems to think that hating Ds is part of being patriotic and "Christian."
If you're suggesting that Mitch could have held up a nomination for years, that seems to me a less than ideal explanation for RBG's behavior. It's not believable. Years (not ten months) of not holding hearings would have brought on a Constitutional crisis of considerable magnitude. Her argument that "they wouldn't get anybody as good as me" was spurious; nobody suggested we would get anybody like her. But Obama would have gotten a nominee confirmed if she had resigned in the year after he was elected. By not doing so RBG sullied her legacy beyond redemption.
I agree. She had a chance to step down and someone similar to her would have stepped in. I admired her work for equal rights. Did not admire her not stepping down. She was quite ill for years. Ego gets in our way so very often.
It seems peculiar to me Robert and TC, peculiar in the extreme and perilously close to the very discrimination she decried to be blaming RBG for not retiring. It was actually the unprecedented bias and political discrimination of one Mitch McConnell (who most would categorize as a man) which violated the entire country's expectations regarding considering nominees to the Supreme Court, the very bias and discrimination RBG struggled against her entire life.
Which is why Obama once invited her to the White House for lunch once upon a time. He was too gracious to ask the question but it was obvious that with recurring health issues that the timing would have been wise. We democrats are rarely wise enough to take the opportunity when it arises. Like in 2000 in Al Gore and Ralph Nader. Totally changed the direction of the nation for the worst and now we are witnessing the very real possibility of the end of constitutional law of fairness for all. I give it a 50/50 chance because Biden has shown an inability to fight dirty and clever. And that’s my opinion.
While there are many valid critiques of the Democratic party (particularly involving the Clintons). The more serious problem is a 'leftish' purity test demographic which views voting as an individual exercise in aspirational emotional self expression. While right wing voters understand voting is a joint exercise in taking power. The difference between 2016 and 2020 was the relative strength of third party candidates and the voters who love them. In 2024 they are back with a vengeance. Willing to risk putting Trump in office, again.
Well said. There is a lot I wish Democrats would "aspire to". But it's pointless if we don't win elections.
Every day that the DNC and the White House don't scream about the injustice and outrage of "Dobbs" is a wasted day. It's our super power. Because it is so awful.
lin, that is a great one paragraph assessment. What doomed Clinton was the " 'leftist purity' test" voters that refused to vote for her and either stayed home or voted 3rd party/write in Sanders. We have a recurring shining example of the "third party voters who love them" showing up here from time to time.
I agree of course. It’s their insatiable ego. In my youth, I once refused to vote the first time for Jimmy Carter because I felt he was assuming a pretty boy image of JFK. Imagine that. I didn’t vote for the most moral president in my lifetime at least the first time. I wonder how many young people will withhold voting because Biden is afraid of losing Jewish money for his continuing unmitigated support of Israel. And our refusal to demand and yes, I said demand that the Jewish state accept a real 2-state solution would have avoided the current crisis.
By moving the US embassy to Israel, negotiating the Abrahamic Accords without Palestine, and giving Netanyahu unconditional support, Trump helped set in motion forces resulting in Oct 7. Trump has a settlement in Occupied Territory named after him. Voters swayed to abandon the Biden coalition because of Netanyahu's war crimes, might consider that *that* is exactly what Netanyahu wants them to do. A second Trump term would be worse.
Until Biden, Jimmy Carter went furthest of any president in speaking up against unjust Israeli policy and in trying to be an honest broker between Israel and Palestine.
Re: "I wonder how many young people will withhold voting because Biden is afraid of losing Jewish money for his continuing unmitigated support of Israel."
You might want to read that over. A bit garbled but your meaning is clear and your charge inaccurate.
Biden can be fairly criticized for being too quick to send military aid through Executive action and too slow to pause military aid to Israel. It is unfair, at best, to say his caution is due to "Jewish money." It would be more accurate to cite the influence of both AIPAC and the Evangelicals on US policy towards Israel. (Their appropriation of Zionism for their own purposes is a disaster for everyone involved.)
A ceasefire is complicated to enforce. Halting military aid is complicated to implement. Politically and procedurally. Not even POTUS has God's power of "fiat lux" or Captain Picard's power to "make it so."
It is both Biden's strength and weakness to prioritize building consensus. Internationally and nationally. Although in both cases the catastrophe must end at the negotiating table. With Hamas and Israel. And at home with Republicans and Democrats.
Carter was the first president I voted for. It was the last time I voted for a winning president until Obama. During Bill Clinton's administrations, I cast my normally Democratic votes to Independent Candidates. In my youthful hope, I was really hoping that third parties could become more viable.
"It is difficult to believe that Jill Stein, all things considered, did not know precisely what she was doing."
Difficult to believe because Stein had to know. At best maybe she like many thought Clinton had to win. But Stein certainly knows now. And she's still at it and the stakes are higher.
In Stein's camp, followers believe 1. Their role is to punish the Democratic party for not picking candidates they approve of. 2. There is no difference between the parties. 3. By electing Trump they'll help make things so bad that there will be a socialist revolution.
They could do what the right wing did - transform the party from within. But that would take a lot of people doing a lot of work over a long time. Not as much fun as showing up once every four years to make news by making mischief. And having Putin fete you for your contribution to undermining democracy.
He needs to fight but I don't think he needs to fight dirty.
I suggest again that he break the Ferdinand Magellan out from mothballs and take it on a Summer whistle stop tour throughout our nation letting people know he connects with them at a down to earth level. Bring the truth to us in an open, clear and unmistakeable fashion.
No tricks embracing the flag or touting the Bible, just straight face to face honest talk. Ask his audience to submit their concerns in advance and address them when he gets to their stop.
It is an American tradition that has always been welcome, bringing both healing and victory.
It worked very well for Harry Truman. But that was pre-tech. I don't disagree with you. It's a solid idea. But his biggest opportunity is on TikTok. A tour of the nation would only be as effective as the media coverage. He would have to say "newsworthy" stuff to get broad attention. Unfortunately the MSM and social media are more impressed with stupid shit.
Bill, why would RBG expect she could NOT overcome the cancer plaguing her when she had helped to overcome her husband's cancer and gotten through her own pregnancies without letting go of her work and giving into her own physical burdens? One suspects it wasn't in her DNA.
Remember what Mitch and his republicans did to Merrick Garland’s nomination with more than enough time left in the year so there was never a guarantee that even had RBG retired, she would have been successfully replaced by another progressive candidate.
Mitch would have squelched any effort. He had the power. But he has hung on long enough to be bested by the most ignorant clown in our history. Almost enough to make me laugh if I weren’t crying.
I'll bet that Mitch has a few regrets that it's chump that won that round. I would have bet on Mitch, hard-hearted versus no heart. Well, hard heart just didn't have that charisma. Puke on both
The truth is: Mitch is perhaps worse than Trump and deserves as much punishment. Military deserters and traitors are shot and politicians should be too when they violate their oaths of office as seriously and Trump and Mitch have.
She could have retired in Obama's second year. Mitch could not have bottled up a nomination for two years. Even he would have known that was a step too far.
It is a shame that Justice RBG didn't step down sooner. Same with Diane Feinstein. Proof that power is almost impossible to give up voluntarily. But, we're still here and we can still do something and that something is to relegate TFFG to the dustbin of history. Let's help defeat the MAGA forces by supporting financially all of those U.S. Senatorial candidates in the swing states and some of the others: Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio. If you are in the stock market you have some "Biden Dollars" that you can contribute to "the cause."
And now we face the same potential issue with Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Will she read the tea leaves and act accordingly? Unlike the situation with RBG, Democrats control the Senate and could ensure her replacement, but, from the point of view of the present, that certainty ends a few months from now. She must retire while we can be certain Biden will pick her successor.
“The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
It is additionally infuriating that there are so many conservative women in power who are completely on board with taking American women backwards into repression and injustice. The rest of us need to step up!
True that. And the 58% I believe it was, of white women who voted for the Notorious and Vainglorious DJT in 2016, even in the wake of the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape.
The Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Lauren Boeberts, Kristi Noems, Elise Stefaniks, Erin Hawleys, Marsha Blackburns, etc., all sisters in the shameful and the shameless
There seems to be a bumper crop of maliciously stupid and selfish women around these days, and, Jesus, the Karen's! I am baffled as to why they are so un-human. I can only surmise that constant cuts and the dumbing down of our education system, combined with an un-embarassed shallow acquisitional mien is a factor. Americans just exist in an intellectual abyss, with a couple side orders of extra crispy low expectations.
We really need to stop using the term “Karen” in a derogatory manner, I have too many amazing friends named Karen and I think it hurts them and ultimately denigrates women in general. 🙏🏼
I would also like people to stop using "Brandon" as a derogatory term for President Biden. Who does these things? They are like juvenile bullies on the playground!
"Dark Brandon" actually has a fascinating history. The link below highlights how Biden and his team has embraced the phrase, which raised his popularity in the social media sphere.
Yes it does. But only because Karen was a popular name in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. The aging yuppies who demand to speak to the manager or call police on people because their skin is a different color need an acronym. Please leave some suggestions. I prefer using the letters G-i-n-n-i. Let’s get creative and have some fun.
I had a brief partner with that name when the news of the K in NYC Central Park hit the headlines. I helped her change her name to part of Karen.
She adopted it with glee.
Thanks again to these HCR letters, I’m being educated energized and good grief even enlightened by her detailed historical dates details and much much more. I feel so very lucky to be in such great company of comments and as a consumer of her information.
If you study the history of the women's suffrage movement, it didn't get a "head of steam up" until around 1912 when conservative white women pointed out to their husbands that they needed their wives' votes to help control "those others."
I must say here, Mr. D. that I beg to differ. Brushing (all) Americans with the same stroke is not true nor helpful, and I'll venture to say so without further explanation.
I am not a Mr., and try visiting another country and hearing their very serious concerns about 'what the hell is going on with the Americans?' to have clarified for you how much of a oblivious bubble we live in. The average American has no idea what is going on in other parts of the world, as much of our 'news' is about Trump, and other bad American actors. We should be a bit more concerned, I believe.
Someone I share my house with who has five degrees & is now at work on her MBA believes that having a facelift would change her life. She tried it once. Nothing absolutely nothing changed! Talk about stupid & dumbing down. It’s our consumer society: Cars that drive you, handbags that wear you, gold sneakers that walk you.
Malicious perhaps rides on ambitions for those that believe elbows and knees are created as weapons.
And I’m being kind there!! A whisper on stage will often garner more attention than a loud voice:-)
I feel empathy and sadness for your housemate that she has had so many educational successes and obviously worked hard for that, but still doesn't feel like she's ok enough. As an older woman, the one thing that has been uplifting for me is not giving a damn about what others think, within reason (haha). The pressure that women feel about appearances has been drummed into their/our heads all our lives, and certainly, similar pressures have been for men as well. But nobody can be there for us on our deathbeds, and so we can try to remember to make life ok for ourselves, whatever we kindly decide. Give her a firm hug, please, for me.
D Kitterman: Stockholm Syndrome? Proof that women can be as mean-spirited and bullying as men? Oh well, the nasty women are not the ones writing Project 2025, ruling against abortion rights, etc. We have a lot of catching up to do to be as numerous and nasty as the conservative men.
And there were so many more women that dared to get in RBG's way throughout her amazing career.
The patriarchy is still doing all they can to keep women from being, "All that they can be."
If you look at the wives of many of the US Presidents, they were often more intelligent than their husbands. Imagine Obama without Michelle or Biden without Jill or FDR without Eleanor or Lincoln without Mary Todd. And there were so many more.
Imagine me at 12 yrs. and my little 10 year old brother when my dad died with cancer.
My mom who had her own farmland and rental property when she married my dad was able to take care of us and successfully manage the farm, investments, etc....plus all the problems we contributed as we were growing up.
She was wise and strong and successful. She chose not to remarry.
Thank you, Gary, for sharing the names of other women who have served to inspire and to encourage.
💙 BigTents events. Tomorrow’s(April2) is with Galvanize.They have great messaging !
“Galvanize Action connects with moderate women to build a broader base for progress and an America that works for everyone. There are millions of women—most living in rural, small town, and suburban communities—who want progress on things like access to healthcare and climate, but whose civic impact does not always reflect those goals”
Maybe we need to think how far we have moved from the center and understand that America will never be a leftist or extreme progressive state and the ultimate direction is a backlash to the extreme right. Mark my words.
I get your point, Bill. But I must suggest that ideas that were considered "lefty" in the past are shared by most people now - as basic. Issues like reproductive rights, voting rights, a right to shelter, clean water, adequate food, a good education, healthcare...these are "progressive" goals and I consider them to be "centerist" and normal aspirations.
And then there is the giant one that is "progressive" and "lefty" - yet really just plain old normal survival "centerism" and common sense. Global Climate Change Catastrophes.
Almost everything the "left" has promoted ultimately was deemed normal and common sense. Equal rights? Women's right to vote? To own property? LGTBQ acceptance?
Sorry for the rant, but what many consider to be "leftist or extreme" is in my mind that place of normalcy where everyone and everything is treated properly - including the Earth.
At the risk of over simplifying, there is no "middle" anymore. There is Fascism - a society run by the rich who would destroy the planet for a few dollars - along with enslaving and persecuting the peasants... vs a Democratic Normal. It's binary now.
Then start practicing bowing to the fat orange blob. Do a few small bows at first in front of the mirror until you can do a 45 degree angle bow. After it becomes ritual, you won’t even remember the ole days of worrying about dirty air and water.
You said there is no middle anymore. If so, then this struggle ultimately moves to the right not the left. Even Plato once observed, “Tyranny follows Democracy.”
She helped us come so far, we can't lose it all now. I remember how women were treated in the days before her activism, and I am determined to do all I can to restore and extend our rights.
We shall not. Most of the U.S. population sides with you and me. The noise-makers take up a lot of space. People with a problem with flatulence, including verbal, usually do.
I was a single mom of three great boys, now grown men. The favorite pastime in high school years was getting the youngest to do an amazing rendition of George Carlin’s “Artificial Fart Under the Arm”.
He could do the armpit thing but also the more difficult, behind the knee. Memories…
Above and beyond the RBGs of our World, there are countless women around us who strive instinctively every day with inherent dignity and capacious empathy, for the betterment of their families, their friends, their societies, their Country, and only residually for themselves, who enrich the lives of so many people.
Not only that his rush to beat the 2020 election exposed his total hypocrisy from when he refused even to grant a hearing to Obama's choice in early 2016 (Merrick Garland), but that he chose someone (ideologue battle axe and rank perjurer) so far from RBG's integrity.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly and brilliantly made history -- for fairness, equal rights.
This so contrasts with the corporations that are making far-right history even worse now -- corporations such as Boeing cutting safety concerns, cheating the public just to make more money for more greedy billionaires. Corporations such as the idiot container ships cheating on their own safety devices so they slam into bridges, destroying them, murdering workers at night.
Project 2025 and the Chevron Precedent case show only more of the Mitch McTurtleface lack of ethics and massive hypocrisy that now threaten democracy even worse, intending as they do to gut workplace safety, health, and environmental agencies across America.
So it's fitting Heather honor RGB today. Some decent ones among us -- especially decent women -- when the orange wave yet threatens but poison, hate, and predation.
Karma is a bitch! I think I saw Mitch in a dream, reincarnated. He was drudging in primordial slime as an early turtle made in the image of his then maker, before evolution changed him into a sentient criminal.
I have several rescue turtles, all with some type of injury, missing legs from mowers, cracked shells, ruptured penises, horrors all. But they are all sweet, amazing, stoic little beings. But, dammit, McConnell does have that resemblance.
Seems our elderly friend from Kentucky is intent on rallying fellow Republicans who've been opposing aid to the embattled democracy, Ukraine.
I hate just about all Mitch has done in Washington, but standing up for ally Ukraine -- supporting them against barbarian Putin -- at least merits credit of some kind.
Not so sure, however, about "sentient." That's getting too close to human qualities, as if any of those might ever soften or begin to make up for those of the cold, calculating ghoul.
The lesson the "GOP" seems to have taken form Nixon's disgrace was to close ranks a cheat all the harder. They gained a lot of traction with it, as have tyrants that preceded them; but isn't that what exactly what our republic was meant to move away from?
Only, remember -- in about the same breath as Jefferson used the word "republic," he also used the word "education," or something to that effect.
Lincoln, in looking at the opening west, looked with the same eyes as Justin Morrill -- and the former in 1862 signed into law the latter's legislation to set aside public lands for a new, aspiringly high level of state colleges and land grant universities.
For more than a hundred years America prospered for that, from that. Until the crazed chambers of commerce in August, 1971, began to act on Louis Powell's memo to rid the colleges and universities of humanities, and turn them into property of the U.S.'s most vulgar, dehumanized commercial classes.
Yes, J L, America was meant as a haven for a new people, testing the notion that the people could grow something totally opposite the tyrannies and corrupted aristocracies of the old world.
The argument that those who aggregate the most coercive power, monetary, political, or violence-based, are the most legitimate leaders and indispensable benefactors of society goes way back, and very elaborate stories have been constructed to "prove" and maintain that charade. That so many people buy them illustrates the other side of issue, that some of the people can be fooled, at least in some very critical respects, most all the time. Real democracy is kinda out of control, which is point, but means it's not unfailingly wise. What is?
But democracy is, if run honestly, the most free and most just arrangement, so long as we aim for liberty and justice for all. Thus we are apportioned a share of choice, and of responsibility, for individual and social outcomes. The cure for foolishness is empathy and education, not the exalted whims of an overlord. Humans (myself included) are pretty capable of Doublethink; and genocide, slavery, and the misogyny starkly visible in our nation's founding demonstrates how jaw-droppingly dissonant human character can be. Yet we did not get stuck with a new king, same as the old king, and the founder's better angels installed in our constitutional conscience have, over time, guided a liberating if erratic social evolution.
Powell and Regan and a whole lot of shadowy money has gone into slandering democratic means and goals and reanimating rule by the rich and powerful It's ugly and we are fools to fall for it
Phil, it DOES come down to exclaiming to Mitch, like Joseph Welch to McCarthy before him during the Army-McCarthy Hearings, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”!!
It seems that the far right barbarians have left us with the necessity of putting so many things into law if not the Constitution itself simply for their lack of simple decency. One can no longer rely on "gentleman's agreements" or precedence.
More now than ever before, I am sure that 2024 is the USA women’s election. We can do more than elect Joe Biden; we can give him a congress with our vote.
Ginsburg's dying request was to have her replacement NOT be chosen by Trump.
"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed," Ruth Bader Ginsburg told her granddaughter, Clara Spera, in the days before her death, NPR reported.
We all know how THAT wish was honored by Congress.
Her death was untimely to be sure, but we should be grateful for the dozens of battles she fought and won over the years. The US is a better place, thanks to RBG, for all of us.
Yes, we need to remember her philosophy of endurance and resistance she quoted often from Justice Louis Brandeis, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” She also advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
The latter seems more difficult today but if we all pay attention to the truth rather than being distracted by the voices of destruction, we will offer a better country snd communities that move us forward. Currently
The best way to do that is to vote blue up and down the ballot. Do what you can - postcarding, find groups interested dealing with climate change or ridding us of gun violence. In other words to help create a future for those who come after us. I do believe people want stability and fairness and a chance to thrive.
Or a cop who lives in a part of the country where snow is not a regular enough event to insure that when there is snow (and we're talking between 4"-8" accumulation here with woefully inadequate snow removal/ice mitigation resources) 80% of the motoring public goes absolutely bonkers.
We had a forecast of 8” of snow that was exactly as forecast. You should have heard the cops going in service yammering about “should I chain up?” “I’m enroute the shops for a 4x4 unit.” (This was after command staff had decided to pull all the assigned 4x4 units out of patrol, for what it’s worth).
I think that top-down commercial media encourages inertness (passivity). Hate media encourages hate. What is encouraging about Prof. Richardson's blog is that she presents a provocative and meaningful theme and then all this happens. Democracy can't take place without meaningful conversation.
I think it goes deeper than that, JL. Meaningful conversation cannot occur when there are no common "truths" to discuss. My MNJ friends have told me, many times that "your sources are wrong, mine are right, and everything you think about us we think about you." There is no common ground.
I think that's where science comes in. We (foolishly, I think) tend to restrict the notion of science to a category of technical inquiry such a chemistry or cosmology approached in a very precise and formal way, as professional science must, but I think the essence of science is any identification of things that can be cooperatively observed and tested. HCR's footnotes are an example of that, as we can, if we like, read sources that she read and evaluate her interpretation of them. "Comparing notes" is another informal but useful way to justify some degree of confidence in one's own impressions. That can extend even into the subjective, "Do you think the sauce is too salty?" Impressions may vary, but we gain a degree of non-random information in such a consultation. Trial by jury is far from infallible, but it so far it seems like the fairest way to do it. And jurors, though human, are asked to consider only what can be "proved". We, over time, made collective re-evaluations of some of our prejudices, and agreed in a sufficient majority to change our laws. My father was born before women could vote thought the country, just one such example. Partly that revision marked more focused attention to evidence, but involved "soul searching" as well.
Inert people of America, wake up! Wake uuuup! The orange heads are coming! Let's have the rule of law, not the bloviating of the self-important: what a novel idea! Why delay?
A great tribute, Dr. Richardson to a great Associate Justice. RBG, will be long remembered for her accurate and moving agreements and dissents. You are both remarkable ladies - actually remarkable Homo sapiens - who will long be held in high esteem. Along with Eleanor Roosevelt, America has been fortunate to have you.
Though I am former G.O.P., there is change in the air. The recent behavior of the G.O.P. is much like the corrupt derivatives traders paying themselves millions in 2007: they knew and the current Republicans know that the jig is up and they are grabbing for everything they can before the new liberalism emerges. That change could happen this year.
In 2009, I watched the Repub money hogs who had screwed the pooch take the money and run, with Fox blaming Obama (the socialist) for the disaster. They just decided to double down, not admit they were wrong. The change in the air now is just them laying the blame on Biden, while grabbing what they can.
Jeri, I TOTALLY agree. It’s a pattern for the GOP. F- up the economy when they are running the country, then blame the Democratic successor for the mess. I don’t know why no one is writing about this in the MSM. Oh, wait, the GOP owns most of the media….
It's been a pattern since Hoover. In 1932, Will Rogers told the tale. "The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. Bit it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands." Mr. Hoover may have thought that money trickled down, but Reagan knew better. So do all the greedy cretins today.
I’m not so sure that we boomers are the only problem here. There will always be oligarchs and they will always buy politicians (and judges). Plenty of Freedom Caucus obstructionists coming up. And if we can’t get corporate money out of elections there will always be politicians who want to be bought. In fact, that’s the only way for some of those clowns to get rich.
I believe they're out there, searching for their opportunity or getting themselves ready. Be on the lookout and be ready to help - maybe today they're only 12, but their time WILL come.
I'm an optimist Marilyn and slightly younger than you (69). When Biden wins, hopefully Clarence and Sammy will exit the court and maybe Roberts as well. And with four more years, Biden could replace many Bush and Trump nominees on the Federal courts.
From Wikipedia-
As of March 22, 2024, the United States Senate has confirmed 190 Article III judges nominated by Biden: one associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 41 judges for the United States courts of appeals, 146 judges for the United States district courts and two judges for the United States Court of International Trade. There are 23 nominations awaiting Senate action: four for the courts of appeals and 19 for the district courts. There are two vacancies on the U.S. courts of appeals and 42 vacancies on the U.S. district courts,as well as 30 announced vacancies that may occur before the end of Biden's term (six for the courts of appeals and 24 for district courts). Biden has not made any recess appointments to the federal courts. Biden had the largest number of Article III judicial nominees confirmed during a president's first year in office since Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Jeri, I agree. They are having the time of their lives. This is the moment they lived for. And they will not retire when there is a Democrat in the White House.
Roberts is too young and has no obvious chicanery to his credit. Not so with the other two. My devout hope is that both Thomas and Alito are charged with the violations of law they have committed and choose to exit the court. The Roberts court will go down in infamy as the worst SCOTUS since Roger B. Taney's court, and may take the "all time" title.
He's got plenty to be accountable for, Shelby v. Holder amongst them. He's not accepted such "gifts" as Thomas or leaked information a la Alito. That was what I was referring to; extra judicial activities, rather than the indefensible position of voiding Civil Rights.
This really struck a chord. Even though born a generation after RBG, I experienced similar discrimination from schools and my parents. Though I graduated 7th in a class of more than 700 students, counselors lamented that I wasn't a man. My parents refused to fill out the paperwork so that I could receive my National Merit Scholarship. Though accepted at Duke, Northwestern, and McCallester College, but my parents wouldn't let me go. There were 4 of us in a single wage earner household. So, I'm sure we would have qualified for scholarships. My parents finally allowed me to attend the University of Illinois as long as I had jobs and paid most of my fees. My brothers got their total support to attend Notre Dame and Millikin. Meanwhile, I ran out of money and had to drop out. I married, gave premature birth to a daughter with Cerebral Palsy. I was fired from my first full-time job at Sears Roebuck and Company credit department because I'd hidden my pregnancy. Mind you, I'd scored the highest they'd ever seen on their employee aptitude test. They, too, lamented that I wasn't a man. They said I was management material.
RBG helped me too, though I was too late for the job protection while pregnant. But, in 1974, I took advantage of the fact that women could finally have credit cards of their own.
After putting my husband through Architecture School (and taking a lot of his elective courses for him while working as a waitress in a pancake house), I tried again for University. Northwestern refused me despite having previously accepted me because they said "married women with children didn't make serious students."
Finally, Mundelein College (now Loyola) accepted me. I barreled through in 18 months. Mundelein gave me credit for the courses I'd taken on my husband's behalf because I still had my notes and papers. I also got credit for a correspondence interior design course taken through LaSalle University. I hadn't realized that the correspondence course was from a legitimate university and that I had a two year Associate Degree (like one receives at Community College) through them!
Betty Prevender, a Mundelein professor, urged me to apply for graduate school at The University of Chicago. I was pleased that after a decade's delay, I had my College Degree. Ironically, my first post-College job was with the company that published Construction: Principles, Materials, and Methods. It was ironic, because the 800-page tome, was one of the textbooks that I'd read outloud to my dyslexic husband..
Just to get Professor Prevender from dogging me, I applied to the University of Chicago. They'd just turned down my Notre Dame graduate brother. So, I didn't expect to get in. But I did. But it was the end of my marriage, because my husband didn't want me to go saying that I would be better educated than him. Though I never said so, I already was. I'd not only completed my own degrees with great success but also read his textbooks outloud to him and taken most of his elective courses on his behalf--so I already was better educated. It turned out the textbook company offered 75 percent tuition reimbursement. Thus I became the single mother of a child with Cerebral Palsy who juggled child care, a full time job. and graduate study. At first, I was overwhelmed until I remembered that really that was what life had been like when putting my now ex-husband through school.
Went on to write four books, become the first woman hired by not only the textbook company but also a building trade magazine. What I never succeeded in doing was being paid equal to my male colleagues.
Christina, back in 1967 as a very young newly married girl—wasn’t quite a woman yet having just turned 18, my then husband (also very young) and I were having dinner with his folks (I loved them dearly) and his aunt who had come to visit from the Midwest. As we conversed, she said “how wonderful that you’re going to work and put Greg through college”. I paused a moment and replied “oh, no, we are BOTH going to school and work part time”. And, indeed, that’s exactly what we did!! Your perseverance and achievements are amazing!! Someday, maybe women will achieve pay parity.
Justice Ginsburg would be horrified at what’s happened since her death. And at the brazen moves that some right-wingers now openly champion, including barring women from voting and outlawing birth control. Everything she fought for is under dire attack.
Horrified but neither surprised nor demoralized.
Yes. That warms my heart. What a hero.
RBG never gave up no matter what barrier or tragedy she was confronted with.
Talk about not sleeping. I doubt if she ever slept for 8 hours. If you haven't seen the documentary put out in late 2020 here is the IMDB link with the overview-
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13387834/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_4_nm_4_q_ruth%2520bader
Thank you, Gary!
I'm glad someone feels like there is still hope. Personally, each notch in the Rethuglican lipstick case is convincing me that they mean business. Their business is not always executed according to the rule of law. Get ready for breeding camps.
If surprised, it would be because of when she died—could not live past the election
Agreed. But I still cannot understand why she didn’t retire in time to preserve her seat for someone who wasn’t a radical theologically driven ideologue.
And if she had? Let’s not forget what happened to Merrick Garland’s nomination, followed by Barrett’s. I’m not sure it would have made any difference. I, too, regretted that she didn’t, but Mitch McConnell is a snake and I suspect he would have held up any nominee to replace her. The Republican playbook has long been to control the judiciary; McConnell saw his chance and grabbed it.
The notion that Trump, of all presidents, was able to nominate three supreme court justices is nauseating.
KR, she had Obama in place with a Democratic majority during his 1st term. Bad timing on RBG’s part.
She did, but that was something like a decade before her death. I imagine she felt like she had unfinished business. And could Obama have mustered 60 votes for any nominee? His last nominee, in 2010, barely reached that threshold.
Wasn’t it Harry Reid (D-NV)that changed the Senate vote count for approval from 60 down to 51? That’s the new standard for SCOTUS candidates as we unfortunately now know.
I think Reid changed it for federal judges other than SCOTUS. McConnell is the one that changed the SCOTUS threshold.
Yes, that happened in 2017.
That’s simply wrong. Ginsberg could have resigned while Dems still had the Senate.
In retrospect, it's easy to criticize her. I did. More than once. But maybe she didn't think she was really going to die so soon?
Perhaps she was just like most pundits and voters - who thought Hillary was obviously going to win the presidency. Even Trump was shocked that he won. Andy Borowitz reportedly overheard the Orange Menace comment upon his election: "Really? OMG what do I do now?" Soon he was receiving handwritten instructional notes (which he had read to him) from various titans of industry, Russian FSB agents and not a few bible pounders.
She had pancreatic cancer. Death is swift and painful. She had to have known.
Knowing and accepting are two very different things. I still mourn her loss too much to criticize.
I would love to know Obama’s conversation with her about retiring, and her reasons for staying on.
She stated her reasons publicly by asking how many people thought the Senate would confirm a nomination of someone like her. Of course, anyone paying attention knew that McConnell’s Senate would not have confirmed any Obama nomination to replace her.
The treatments given RBG were far more advanced than what was available to my mother-in-law. RBG actually lived with the disease for some time. RBG was human and human beings can't be perfect 100 percent of the time. She did what she considered best.
My wife died of pancreatic cancer in 2020. She was very active, 3 mile walk every morning, only sporadic abdominal pains, which both of us thought were gas. Then the pain become intolerable, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died about 3 weeks thereafter. It's an insidious disease and can sneak up on you. Of course I don't know how it presented in RBG's case.
She wanted Hillary to choose the next judge.
I did, too.
Didn’t Obama try to convince her to retire during his term, which I recall offended her. I have a hard time forgiving her for that. She was old and ill. She should have seen that. I admire the work she did earlier, but I think not retiring was a real smudge on her record, and has led to a lot of what she fought for being rolled back. A lesson to us all - women are not immune from the seduction of power.
I’ve read that too. Given RBG’s history, I suspect it wasn’t power that seduced her, but rather the lovely ideal that the first woman president would name her replacement. That would have been so fitting.
Meanwhile, back here in the real world, there are real consequences to her inaction and miscalculation on that one. To be fair, most of us miscalculated that one. But for the future, I feel obligated to point out this missed opportunity whenever someone is rhapsodizing about RBG - I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive her.
Sorry, but I think the point is that it shouldn't matter which president appoints which justice. All judges are supposed to put aside personal opinions and biases in favor of the constitution.
Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch lied about adherence to stare decisis during their confirmation hearings; that's on congress. Those three never should have been confirmed no matter who or what McConnell put onto the floor. They should be sanctioned at the very least.
Thomas, Alito, and Roberts are corrupt, as reported by various journalists over the last two years. SCOTUS needs enforceable ethics rules to prevent rulings for sale.
SCOTUS also needs term limits or a set retirement age, either of which would have eliminated the inconvenient timing of RBG's passing.
All we can do about it now is to vote in a blue majority congress to put these needed guardrails in place. Personally I'd like to see Thomas required to fork over a fine equivalent to the value of all his trips and campers, not to mention Mama's house. The fine could be designated to be split among all the people held for more bail than they could afford. If it were up to me, I'd put Alito in stocks on the steps of the Supreme Court for a week. Let's see how much he loves 17th century jurisprudence then. We broke away from England to create a better system, not use the inferior old one to justify injustice! And Roberts... demote him to plain old Justice, and dock his pay for the rest of his time on the bench for not doing his job and because his wife makes a handsome living by peddling his influence. Maybe I should be appointed to replace Roberts as Chief?
Yes, term limits, set retirement age or rotating SC judges.
Well said
George, I’m thinking that she realized that as long as Mitch McConnell was in charge, her successor would wait until there was a Republican in the White House. I’m sure that if she’d retired in 2013, McConnell would have found an excuse to not bring up a successor for a vote. She worked hard to stay in shape for a Democratic president with a majority in the Senate; but pancreatic cancer took her quickly.
I’ve commented on this, too. I think she resisted making a decision that was open politicization of the court, but I think she could have made a philosophical decision. Still, could she have KNOWN how skewed the R party would be willing to go? She trusted our bedrock system, but they’ve fractured that.
I agree. It was selfish.
Because, Geoorge, she never gave up! Would that we had/have more like her! On the court and in the USA!
RBG may have hoped that she could do one more thing, fight one more fight. Alas, though she overcame numerous health challenges, her last stand was too short.
Your feelings are shared by many, George.
George, thank you! You are exactly right. She basically shot herself and her lifetime of work in the foot. She had Obama and a Democratic Congress in place and should have retired. This, unfortunately, mars her incredible legacy. She was human, afterall.
I have not read any accounts of why she decided to stay on the Court and certainly should have seen the right wing storm clouds forming.
A person can spend decades building a wonderful structure, but it only takes one day for a criminal with a gas can and a torch to burn it down.
Yes, totally with you, George. President Obama politely asked Justice Ginsburg twice if she would please retire, to care for herself better and also to make way for an appropriate replacement of his choosing. I have never quite understood her reasoning not to do so. If she had, maybe this country wouldn't be in the mess it's in right now. We'll never know.
McConnell had 9 months to appoint Garland as a judge, but said it wasn't enough time. A month before an election seems to be plenty of time for him, though.
1000% right.
My musical tribute tp Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the front steps of the Connecticut State Supreme Court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E47u3ZEMxYE
Bill Katz - "My musical tribute tp Ruth Bader Ginsburg..."
Beautiful!
That was great Bill!
Bill, that was great!
That was fabulous, brought tears to my eyes!
A truly charming gesture, Bill.
Impressive!
That us great, Bill. Thanks! ♥️
Beautiful tribute to Ruth. Thank you for sharing.
Ruth Bader attended East Midwood Jewish Center. In 1946, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the 13 year old Bader had an essay, titled One People, published in the synagogue bulletin. She wrote:
We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions . . . We cannot feel safer until every nation, regardless of weapons or power, will meet together in good faith, the people worthy of mutual association. There can be a happy world and there will be once again, when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance." (The full essay is copied below.)
"East Midwood Jewish Center’s task today, as it was in 1924, is to transmit to new generations and the public at large the relevance and beauty of our religious traditions, and the Jewish emphasis on education, social justice, and our mutual responsibilities to each other."
The rabbi at EMJC was Harry Halpern. "At the EMJC, his sermons constantly educated, challenged and inspired the congregation both in terms of Jewish identity and larger social concerns such as the rights of minorities, and he "pleaded for intensive Jewish Education of the Day School-Yeshiva type long before private schools became fashionable. . . . He opposed the use of taxes to support private schools (including religious schools) during his chairmanship of the Social Actions Commission of Conservative Judaism, also speaking out against the idea as President of the New York Board of Rabbis. The Board of Rabbis resolution was especially opposed to the idea of public funding of private religious schools, calling such action a "violation of our understanding of the hallowed principle of church-state separation." He also supported "Rabbi Morris Adler of Detroit, Michigan, who took a strong stand against "any religious intrusions upon public education," Halpern personally supported this position, adding that it was a "long-established policy" of the organization. Halpern continued his opposition to religion in public schools through the 1960s, publicly supporting the Supreme Court ban on prayer in public schools." Halpern received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from the City College of New York in 1919 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1925. He also received both a bachelor and doctoral degree from Brooklyn Law School, studied at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and earned ordination as a rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), in 1929. He later received a Doctor of Hebrew Literature degree from JTS in 1951." It was a time when even Jewish men with advanced degrees were discriminated against in many professions, including the law. Many such men chose to serve as rabbis. (For a time during the depression my widowed grandmother, who had a small dress shop in which she was the only staff, helped support the families of her three brothers - one had a law degree, one a PhD in education, and the third a union leader and organizer who'd been murdered by the bosses.)
In the 1950s EMJC did open a Hebrew day school. In 2019, EMJC rented the school building to Urban Dove, "which had outgrown its space in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Urban Dove Team Charter School, serves students who have struggled academically in high school. Many of them are black or Hispanic."
I grew up at EMJC in the 1950s-60s. During Rabbi Halpern's long tenure. Eventually attending Hebrew school 4 afternoons, Sabbath services Friday night and Saturday, Sunday school, and Sunday afternoon youth activities, including woodworking. (In my public school only boys could take wood shop. Girls had to take cooking, sewing, and hat making.)
Ruth Bader's full essay.
One People
The war has left a bloody trail and many deep wounds not too easily healed. Many people have been left with scars that take a long time to pass away. We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions. Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.” In our beloved land families were not scattered, communities not erased nor our nation destroyed by the ravages of the World War.
Yet, dare we be at ease? We are part of a world whose unity has been almost completely shattered. No one can feel free from danger and destruction until the many torn threads of civilization are bound together again. We cannot feel safer until every nation, regardless of weapons or power, will meet together in good faith, the people worthy of mutual association.
There can be a happy world and there will be once again, when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance. Then and only then shall we have a world built on the foundation of the Fatherhood of God and whose structure is the Brotherhood of Man.
http://www.emjc.org/13-year-old-ruth-bader-ginsburgs-essay-1946-emjc-bulletin/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Halpern
Lin- thank you for sharing RBG’s essay. I learned about the Holocaust at age 11, when my teacher gave me an assignment to write an essay on “The Holocaust: Could it Happen Again?” I asked my mother to explain that word and she just said “I’ll take you to the library.”
She dropped me off at the Cleveland Public Library, an enormous building I had never visited. The librarian pointed me to the card catalog room and I eventually found a little alcove where those books were stored.
It’s been 60 years but I can still remember the sun slanting through high windows, lighting up the dust (like ashes?) as I read through page after page of the horrors.
My mother picked me up at closing time and I asked “could something like this really happen??!” Her response, which I will never forget: “Some people think so.”
I don’t remember my essay, except that of course I said it could not possibly happen again. It was not as wise as RBG’s essay, and of course it has happened again and again. Different countries, different victims, but the horror was not banished as I believed - and RBG hoped.
What I read that day in the CPL - the first person accounts, the witnesses - has never left me. I wish I could believe “Never again!” But I cannot.
As a result of being a military dependent toddler in Germany during the Nuremberg trials and Berlin Airlift, I remember my parents, especially my mother, balancing the better history and friendliness of the German people with the popular ugliness they could fall into at least temporary support of leaders like Adolph Hitler. She reminded us he was more popular in Germany than FDR was in America. In fact Hitler seemed more popular with many repugnant Americans that supported the America First movement right up to Pearl Harbor.
Our families were long time Republicans (from the very founders on my wife's side, but were friends with and supporters of many Democrats (like Harold L. Ickes who had been a Republican).
The Berlin Airlift went a long ways toward making so many more Germans such better allies and partners in Democracies.
...and isn't it interesting regarding the handkerchief candy drops during the Berlin Airlift. If you're not familiar, here's a Smithsonian article about it. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sweet-story-berlin-candy-bomber-180965156/
A friend, John Durant knew him. John was interviewed back in 2018 when he was 91 years old and can be heard at:
https://www.hometownheroesradio.com/mp3/DURANTPOD.mp3
The interview (above) provides more interesting background and extra details than the story at:
https://www.hometownheroesradio.com/berlin-airlift-70-years-later/
For the bigger story of all the logistics and aircraft maintenance challenges, see "The Air Force Can Deliver Anything! A History of the Berlin Airlift" which is available as a paperback at Amazon or a downloadable PDF at:
https://media.defense.gov/2018/Jan/24/2001869016/-1/-1/1/The%20Air%20Force%20Can%20Deliver%20Anything%20a%20History%20of%20the%20Berlin%20Airlift.PDF
We were in the areas at the same time but didn't get to compare notes until 2001 or so.
ThankYou. Your comment is such a profound personal insight and historical narrative.
You don't mention the year. In the late 1950s and early 60s the Holocaust was never mentioned in my Hebrew school classes and my public school history classes just about made it through WW I.
It was not spoken of at home. Relatives and neighbors with numbers on their arms were the least likely to say anything. As my mother and I were long time regulars at the public library, as a child I had permission to wander the adult stacks - ostensibly to fetch books for my mother, but in fact to explore. I came across one small paperback about the Holocaust. I never mentioned that I'd read it.
In my junior high (1970s), one of the teachers in the school was a holocaust survivor. She came to our history classes and spoke to us. I cannot imagine what that was like for her. We saw several films, very graphic, about the concentration camps. I can remember students vomiting. It was good that we were shown this, and that our teacher made it personal. Today? Perhaps it would be concluded that such history made students too uncomfortable so it shouldn’t be taught. We *were* uncomfortable. We *should* have been uncomfortable and also outraged, and determined that it should never happen again. We should have learned about slavery in the exact same way.
I believe it was 1962 or 1963. I never - before or after that time - heard the word Holocaust again in my classrooms or at home. It’s stunning how little modern history was ever mentioned in school. Unlike you, I am not Jewish and have/had Jewish relatives. But I have been a fervent supporter of Israel ever since and have done considerable volunteer work resettling refugees from the various and endless wars. Including sharing my home with refugees from the Balkan wars and now from Ukraine. I want so badly to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, though that boat has probably sailed due to arthritis limiting my mobility. ❤️
As they say "You don't have to be Jewish..." I visited the Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt, Austria. It was run by a young Austrian with, I think, a degree in theology and Ancient Near Eastern Languages. If I recall, he thought it would be a short gig until he got an academic appointment in his field. But he fell in love with the museum and community of visitors. It is a lovely museum with fine and well cared for collections and many outreach programs, especially for families and children. It is in what was the historic ghetto. A few houses away is the Landesmuseum Burgenland which provides a comprehensive understanding of the region's history and its evolution over time. Which interestingly elides any evidence of a Jewish presence. Except on the doorframes where you can see that mezuzahs have been gouged out of the stone. Both museums are in buildings originally owned by Jews. Now in a sense, Jews are still ghettoized in Eisenstadt. (Almost the entire Jewish population was eliminated during the war.)
I experienced an overt antisemitism in Vienna and Eisenstadt, which I never experienced in Berlin, Munich, or Dresden.)
Having immersed myself in the literature from the time I was 10 until college, I have never felt a need to take a course in the subject or visit the camps. The best books I've read are Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, The Retreat, and Tzili. Although Appelfeld escaped a forced labor camp as a child, his books never take you into the camps. But focus on peoples' response to society shutting down and shutting them out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharon_Appelfeld
https://jguideeurope.org/en/region/austria/eisenstadt/
https://whichmuseum.com/museum/landesmuseum-burgenland-eisenstadt-26397
I think the US Holocaust Museum is well-done and wished every public school could finance class visits to Washington DC for civic and world history education. Done at the right age, with the right adult leaders, it could really make a difference in students’ lives.
I think we were there through late 1947 to late 1950 since we were there through the 48/49 Berlin Airlift and the 1950 Oberammergau Play (beautiful to many but, as my mother described it, possibly the most anti-Semitic it had ever been after Hitler's suggested changes for the 300th anniversary in 1934).
I was told the early Holocaust survivors that came to the US found few who wanted to listen to such dreadful stories, instead concentrating on the better things in life.
I saw the same in Cambodian professionals like a Doctor that worked as a helper in our Community College Aeronautics tool room. He like most others wouldn't tell his own children of the horrors their family faced.
It took a long time for survivors to be able to have those who hadn't experienced it really listen here in this country. In a way not discussing it until later years may have helped give time for the German public to sort out their future consideration for Jews. I was a bit surprised to find that Germany seems to have welcomed a higher percentage of returning Jews than other countries.
I had to look that up to believe it might be true. I was inspired to do so from watching the 2023 "Oppenheimer" movie and finding that the leading University for Physics was the Georg August University of Göttingen dramatically changed by the Great Purge of 1933. According to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_G%C3%B6ttingen#
"...in the 1930s, the university became a focal point for the Nazi crackdown on "Jewish physics", as represented by the work of Albert Einstein. In what was later called the "great purge" of 1933, academics including Max Born, Victor Goldschmidt, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Edmund Landau, Emmy Noether, and Richard Courant were expelled or fled. Most of them fled Nazi Germany for places like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Following the great purge, in 1934 David Hilbert, by then a symbol of German mathematics, was dining with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education. Rust asked, "How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?" Hilbert replied, "There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore."
For better or worse we got the best of German Physicists while they eliminated almost all of theirs. Maybe they appreciate them so much more now.
Oberammergau Play
In 1950, playwright Arthur Miller and composer Leonard Bernstein led a petition to cancel the passion play. However, the townspeople defiantly restaged the 1934 play.
In the 1960s, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Paul Celan, and other prominent intellectuals called for a boycott due to the play's antisemitism. After Vatican II's attempted reforms (attempted because not accepted by many including in the American Council of Bishops, and such as Opus Dei - bedfellows Mel Gibson and Leonard Leo) even the Catholic Church asked for changes. Not much luck. It is a traveling show. When I lived in Carlinville Illinois (the cornfield 5 hours south of Chicago where Cary Grant got strafed in North by Northwest) public school children were taken to performances. The head of Blackburn College's psychology department had the license plate SS1934. Her husband who had been in that position had killed himself in full Nazi regalia. Each year she took his ashes to Bayreuth to visit with other fans of Hitler. Later Carlinville was named one of the best 100 small towns in America. Yikes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberammergau_Passion_Play
What I remember was my mother using it as an example of outward appearances, pleasing to the eye, hiding the poisoned hearts and minds. She also thought we (as a people), could be as blind and likely to suffer a similar poisoning because we really weren't that different. It was already there in Germany as far as the Passion Play, but Hitler wanted to use it on steroids so much that he forced so many of the most capable people out of Germany and tried to kill more than the 2/3rds that he did.
Too many in the US were antisemitic but not that antisemitic and some like Harold L. Ickes (a good friend of my wife's grandfather), wanted to help by making it possible for much higher numbers of Jewish refugees to be able to be accepted in the then territory of Alaska as described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slattery_Report
I believe Ickes pressed for the most he thought possible, but it was not supported by many others, or even FDR who wanted a limit of 10,000 or 10% of refugees allowed into the US. The opposition he ran into, even for limits he thought possible, is one of the more disappointing revelations of our history to me personally.
Marge, thanks for sharing your story. Isn't it amazing how certain experiences stay with us and come to mind?
Isn't it also amazing that things we thought would never happen again are now possible and probable.
Look at Ukraine and at Gaza. It can.
And many more. Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia….
Amazing a 13 year old with such capacity to articulate. What was I doing at 13? Ah, being a rebel without a cause. lol.
You were preparing to write your RBG song! Well done!
More likely emulating that Russian statesman, Count Pistov. 🤬
She would fight like Hell. 🤨
Big things come in small packages. ✌️
Ginsburg might have been more resigned than horrified; she understood our country better than most when it came to how it treats of women. She was worried about Roe v. Wade, believed it could be overridden (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade.html). She wanted abortion rights granted because women deserve gender equality, not the argument in Roe v. Wade, which argued on the basis of women's right to privacy. I read that as she wanted legally established canon of law that women must get the bodily autonomy that men already enjoy.
Ginsburg also felt that decision was laid down so quickly it wouldn't stick.
She was right to worry, it turns out. Screaming that a "baby" is a clump of cells, and it is murder, overruns any woman's piddly right to privacy.
She was a fighter. I think she'd have saddled up and gone to war for the law she really wanted enshrined and never have resigned herself to accept second class status. I wish we could take abortion out of the equation and fight for equal rights for women across all facets of society - equal pay, equal autonomy, equal opportunity. Unfortunately I think the clump of cells infant is just a poster child for a much deeper misogyny. After all, NC may elect a governor who wants to take away women's suffrage.
I was really encouraged to watch this interview with the very young and dynamic head of the NC Democratic Party: https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/winning-north-carolina-in-2024-my?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thank you, Sys. I started to watch it and realized I had seen it before. I agree that hope is not a utopian drug but a realistic stance. Obama kindled it. A lot of what's going on now is backlash to his only partial whiteness. I'm not even sure it's racism, but maybe atavistic fear of the other? Pragmatically speaking, though, the cause is less important than the remedy, and Ms. Clayton is a perfect standard bearer. So are Justin Pearson and Maxwell Frost. I actually think Biden is a beacon of hope, because he's evidence that age doesn't equate to antiquated thinking or mental incapacity. There are lots of people who carry the ideals of equality and opportunity - from Katie Hobbs to Pete Buttgieg to Jamie Raskin. Live on hope and get out the vote.
Yes Michael, I agree ! justice Ginsburg definitely would be horrified by what’s going on now!!!
Justice Ginsberg, also said if you believe in something you must continue to fight for it . Like Hillary said , Justice Ginsberg pave the way for women. We must continue her ledgecy by not given up. Sure we have been pushed back, but doesn't mean we can't do nothing about it. There are thousands of women in this country that are angry and frustrated about Roe v. Wade and civil rights that are going to the polls to vote and let their voices be heard not only for their reproductive rights but for our Democracy. We have a tough fight ahead but I know we will win.
Michael Bales: Remember how Ruth Bader Ginsburg exclaimed that, if Trump were elected, she would emigrate to Canada.
RBG was criticized for saying that.
I -- and I believe you would agree -- thought her fear was perfectly reasonable.
My homeland is in the Rhineland. If I were single, I would move to the Rhineland. Oh, the friendships that are like first-cousins! I love those people. (Realistic, I am bilingual.)
I, for one, heartily seconded RBG: EMIGRATE.
One of my FAVORITE authors is Irmgard Keun ("Gilgi -- Eine von Uns", "das kunstseidene Mädchen," "Nach Mitternacht"). She emigrated from the Third Reich in 1936; Joseph Roth, her lover (and great author) wondered: "What took you so long?" She had fled to Oostende in Flanders.
Which created a problem in 1940, with the Third Reich overtaking the Low Countries. Irmgard Keun FAKED HER OWN DEATH: Even the London Times publicized that Irmgard Keun had taken her own life. But she slid her way back home in Köln (Cologne).
Irmgard Keun managed to stay hidden in plain sight.
Any time: Someone could have denounced her to the Gestapo.
She was cute and pretty, so that may have factored into people liking her around and not denouncing her.
But the Nazis had burnt and forbidden her work, so Irmgard Keun could not afford to be denounced.
From my Walloon (Belgian) Mom, I learned similar and even worse stories during the Third Reich.
No, at the time, from this background, I though RBG in 2016 was quite right: Trump elected: EMIGRATE.
My back up plan: Irish grandparents. Dual citizenship here I come.
Imagine Amy Coney Barrett taking her place...she's rolling around in her grave....
Needless to say, we already have many strong and wise heroes who have been stepping up. I'm remembering that speech by Tom Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath:"Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there." Good people wont stop.
I agree and I am disgusted at how the spirit and legal insights of Ruth Bader Ginzburg has died with her. Just because the floppy brained McConnell cynically replaced her with a Catholic Zealot should not have interred her works with her bones.
She herself should be the basis for a volcano of protest.
After all Heather emphasizes:
Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
Yet solitary figure against injustice she fades into the mists.
We all have talent, however limited, to move our democracy along in the direction the founders envisioned when they urged us to work on forming a more perfect union.
I have one of those little wooden dolls of RBG, wearing her lace collar and holding a gavel in her right hand, standing on my desk. She is always there when I'm at my computer, working to build bridges so that those of us living in different silos can move forward together. Let us honor her memory, and let us learn about the women President Biden is honoring whose names may not be as familiar to us as RBG's.
I am the proud owner of an RBG Bobblehead. Last April/May she accompanied me on a 7000km road trip and never tired once. R.I.P. People all over were very interested in who this was.
I do wish that she had stepped down when she would have been safely replaced by another liberal justice. She had done enough wonderful things and the timing of her replacement couldn't have been worse. No one is indispensable -- right?
I agree that RBG should have retired, but there still would’ve been the Senate anti-Obama problem, and RBG would’ve needed 20/20 foresight to see the Amy Coney Barrett problem.
If she had done so in 2013, when Democrats still controlled the Senate, a worthy successor could have replaced her.
Yes, exactly. But she did not step down and made clear why; it was about her ego. She thought she was too important to die and too important to retire. We have all paid dearly for that, and Americans will be paying a larger and larger price for the next several decades. She was an extraordinary woman, a phenomenal jurist, and like the rest of us a flawed human being. But most of our flaws don't have the consequences that hers did.
Yes. Sadly missing from RBG's many talents was a crystal ball into a future in which Mitch McConnell would overturn all Senate precedent in order to block an Obama nomination from coming to the floor. And a future in which Donald Trump would be elected president.
RBG did foresee that the legal foundations of Roe were shaky. And in that she was tragically proven correct. Although the Federalist Society majority would have overturned Roe no matter what. Constitutionality and legal precedent meaning nothing to their ouija board decisions where the spectral hand of Founders long dead always points to decisions that benefit racist right wing religious extremist plutocrats and the populists who love them.
Darn that missing crystal ball! It would have made such a difference!
lin, excellent description of the Federalist Society....ouija board decisions....and yes, those always help out the regressives and so-called Christians. I gag every time I see a picture of the Supreme Court with religious wing nuts in the majority or see a decision from lower court judge who is a reminder of judge shopping. Then there is Loose Cannon in Florida presiding over the documents case. Yesterday i had the pleasure of blocking a wing nut who seems to think that hating Ds is part of being patriotic and "Christian."
If you're suggesting that Mitch could have held up a nomination for years, that seems to me a less than ideal explanation for RBG's behavior. It's not believable. Years (not ten months) of not holding hearings would have brought on a Constitutional crisis of considerable magnitude. Her argument that "they wouldn't get anybody as good as me" was spurious; nobody suggested we would get anybody like her. But Obama would have gotten a nominee confirmed if she had resigned in the year after he was elected. By not doing so RBG sullied her legacy beyond redemption.
"By not doing so RBG sullied her legacy beyond redemption."
Seriously?
I think RBG like many people assumed Clinton would win. RBG could retire. And that as you say, even McConnell would have had to relent.
It is shameful that people sully RBG's legacy, because she could not foretell her own death and McConnell's infamy.
I agree. She had a chance to step down and someone similar to her would have stepped in. I admired her work for equal rights. Did not admire her not stepping down. She was quite ill for years. Ego gets in our way so very often.
It seems peculiar to me Robert and TC, peculiar in the extreme and perilously close to the very discrimination she decried to be blaming RBG for not retiring. It was actually the unprecedented bias and political discrimination of one Mitch McConnell (who most would categorize as a man) which violated the entire country's expectations regarding considering nominees to the Supreme Court, the very bias and discrimination RBG struggled against her entire life.
Mitch wasn't much of a secret. RBG knew who he was.
I humbly disagree. As I said above, she wanted Hillary to elect the next judge. She expected Hillary to win the election, as did I.
Which is why Obama once invited her to the White House for lunch once upon a time. He was too gracious to ask the question but it was obvious that with recurring health issues that the timing would have been wise. We democrats are rarely wise enough to take the opportunity when it arises. Like in 2000 in Al Gore and Ralph Nader. Totally changed the direction of the nation for the worst and now we are witnessing the very real possibility of the end of constitutional law of fairness for all. I give it a 50/50 chance because Biden has shown an inability to fight dirty and clever. And that’s my opinion.
While there are many valid critiques of the Democratic party (particularly involving the Clintons). The more serious problem is a 'leftish' purity test demographic which views voting as an individual exercise in aspirational emotional self expression. While right wing voters understand voting is a joint exercise in taking power. The difference between 2016 and 2020 was the relative strength of third party candidates and the voters who love them. In 2024 they are back with a vengeance. Willing to risk putting Trump in office, again.
Well said. There is a lot I wish Democrats would "aspire to". But it's pointless if we don't win elections.
Every day that the DNC and the White House don't scream about the injustice and outrage of "Dobbs" is a wasted day. It's our super power. Because it is so awful.
Two Washington Post headlines today.
"Democrats spar over registration as worries over young and minority voters grow."
"Many GOP billionaires balked at Jan. 6. They’re coming back to Trump."
lin, that is a great one paragraph assessment. What doomed Clinton was the " 'leftist purity' test" voters that refused to vote for her and either stayed home or voted 3rd party/write in Sanders. We have a recurring shining example of the "third party voters who love them" showing up here from time to time.
I agree of course. It’s their insatiable ego. In my youth, I once refused to vote the first time for Jimmy Carter because I felt he was assuming a pretty boy image of JFK. Imagine that. I didn’t vote for the most moral president in my lifetime at least the first time. I wonder how many young people will withhold voting because Biden is afraid of losing Jewish money for his continuing unmitigated support of Israel. And our refusal to demand and yes, I said demand that the Jewish state accept a real 2-state solution would have avoided the current crisis.
By moving the US embassy to Israel, negotiating the Abrahamic Accords without Palestine, and giving Netanyahu unconditional support, Trump helped set in motion forces resulting in Oct 7. Trump has a settlement in Occupied Territory named after him. Voters swayed to abandon the Biden coalition because of Netanyahu's war crimes, might consider that *that* is exactly what Netanyahu wants them to do. A second Trump term would be worse.
Until Biden, Jimmy Carter went furthest of any president in speaking up against unjust Israeli policy and in trying to be an honest broker between Israel and Palestine.
Re: "I wonder how many young people will withhold voting because Biden is afraid of losing Jewish money for his continuing unmitigated support of Israel."
You might want to read that over. A bit garbled but your meaning is clear and your charge inaccurate.
Biden can be fairly criticized for being too quick to send military aid through Executive action and too slow to pause military aid to Israel. It is unfair, at best, to say his caution is due to "Jewish money." It would be more accurate to cite the influence of both AIPAC and the Evangelicals on US policy towards Israel. (Their appropriation of Zionism for their own purposes is a disaster for everyone involved.)
A ceasefire is complicated to enforce. Halting military aid is complicated to implement. Politically and procedurally. Not even POTUS has God's power of "fiat lux" or Captain Picard's power to "make it so."
It is both Biden's strength and weakness to prioritize building consensus. Internationally and nationally. Although in both cases the catastrophe must end at the negotiating table. With Hamas and Israel. And at home with Republicans and Democrats.
Would you care to provide a road map.
Carter was the first president I voted for. It was the last time I voted for a winning president until Obama. During Bill Clinton's administrations, I cast my normally Democratic votes to Independent Candidates. In my youthful hope, I was really hoping that third parties could become more viable.
It is difficult to believe that Jill Stein, all things considered, did not know precisely what she was doing.
"It is difficult to believe that Jill Stein, all things considered, did not know precisely what she was doing."
Difficult to believe because Stein had to know. At best maybe she like many thought Clinton had to win. But Stein certainly knows now. And she's still at it and the stakes are higher.
In Stein's camp, followers believe 1. Their role is to punish the Democratic party for not picking candidates they approve of. 2. There is no difference between the parties. 3. By electing Trump they'll help make things so bad that there will be a socialist revolution.
They could do what the right wing did - transform the party from within. But that would take a lot of people doing a lot of work over a long time. Not as much fun as showing up once every four years to make news by making mischief. And having Putin fete you for your contribution to undermining democracy.
He needs to fight but I don't think he needs to fight dirty.
I suggest again that he break the Ferdinand Magellan out from mothballs and take it on a Summer whistle stop tour throughout our nation letting people know he connects with them at a down to earth level. Bring the truth to us in an open, clear and unmistakeable fashion.
No tricks embracing the flag or touting the Bible, just straight face to face honest talk. Ask his audience to submit their concerns in advance and address them when he gets to their stop.
It is an American tradition that has always been welcome, bringing both healing and victory.
It worked very well for Harry Truman. But that was pre-tech. I don't disagree with you. It's a solid idea. But his biggest opportunity is on TikTok. A tour of the nation would only be as effective as the media coverage. He would have to say "newsworthy" stuff to get broad attention. Unfortunately the MSM and social media are more impressed with stupid shit.
Bill, why would RBG expect she could NOT overcome the cancer plaguing her when she had helped to overcome her husband's cancer and gotten through her own pregnancies without letting go of her work and giving into her own physical burdens? One suspects it wasn't in her DNA.
Remember what Mitch and his republicans did to Merrick Garland’s nomination with more than enough time left in the year so there was never a guarantee that even had RBG retired, she would have been successfully replaced by another progressive candidate.
Mitch would have squelched any effort. He had the power. But he has hung on long enough to be bested by the most ignorant clown in our history. Almost enough to make me laugh if I weren’t crying.
Agreed, Jeri.
I'll bet that Mitch has a few regrets that it's chump that won that round. I would have bet on Mitch, hard-hearted versus no heart. Well, hard heart just didn't have that charisma. Puke on both
Puke on both indeed!!
Mitch and the Republican leaders did not have the decency to to pay their respect when RBG laid in state. Not one viewed her casket.
All appearances of decorum has vanished.
Thank you for that statistic. No surprise.
What else could one expect from an amoral bunch?
The truth is: Mitch is perhaps worse than Trump and deserves as much punishment. Military deserters and traitors are shot and politicians should be too when they violate their oaths of office as seriously and Trump and Mitch have.
She could have retired in Obama's second year. Mitch could not have bottled up a nomination for two years. Even he would have known that was a step too far.
Hind sight is such a luxury. Niels Bohr said: "I am especially bad with projections, especially ones about the future!"
Huh!? bruce, it sounds more like Yogi Berra than Niels Bohr!
Look it up, its Danish, as was Bohr, Yogi Berra, and many others, I just use Bohr, because it was originally Danish as is he.
Victor Borge was the best.
did he make the same comment?
No, just another Dane worthy of recall.
All of the above and a few more, for what is considered an old Danish saying
It is a shame that Justice RBG didn't step down sooner. Same with Diane Feinstein. Proof that power is almost impossible to give up voluntarily. But, we're still here and we can still do something and that something is to relegate TFFG to the dustbin of history. Let's help defeat the MAGA forces by supporting financially all of those U.S. Senatorial candidates in the swing states and some of the others: Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio. If you are in the stock market you have some "Biden Dollars" that you can contribute to "the cause."
Bill, I should have added Texas as well. My relatives there tell me that there is an excellent chance of Colin Allred defeating Ted Cruz.
Yes.
Yes, Virginia, getting rid of Ted Cruz would benefit the entire U.S.
I am sure that, if Justice Ginsburg were to exist on some other plane, she would be apologizing with regret.
And now we face the same potential issue with Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Will she read the tea leaves and act accordingly? Unlike the situation with RBG, Democrats control the Senate and could ensure her replacement, but, from the point of view of the present, that certainty ends a few months from now. She must retire while we can be certain Biden will pick her successor.
She was as close to indispensable as any one being can be.
There was a time where RBG could have been "safely" replaced? When, exactly, was that?
“The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
Perfect.
Oh, how we miss Justice Ginsburg.
We are Ruthless.
It is additionally infuriating that there are so many conservative women in power who are completely on board with taking American women backwards into repression and injustice. The rest of us need to step up!
True that. And the 58% I believe it was, of white women who voted for the Notorious and Vainglorious DJT in 2016, even in the wake of the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape.
The Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Lauren Boeberts, Kristi Noems, Elise Stefaniks, Erin Hawleys, Marsha Blackburns, etc., all sisters in the shameful and the shameless
There seems to be a bumper crop of maliciously stupid and selfish women around these days, and, Jesus, the Karen's! I am baffled as to why they are so un-human. I can only surmise that constant cuts and the dumbing down of our education system, combined with an un-embarassed shallow acquisitional mien is a factor. Americans just exist in an intellectual abyss, with a couple side orders of extra crispy low expectations.
We really need to stop using the term “Karen” in a derogatory manner, I have too many amazing friends named Karen and I think it hurts them and ultimately denigrates women in general. 🙏🏼
I would also like people to stop using "Brandon" as a derogatory term for President Biden. Who does these things? They are like juvenile bullies on the playground!
"Dark Brandon" actually has a fascinating history. The link below highlights how Biden and his team has embraced the phrase, which raised his popularity in the social media sphere.
https://people.com/politics/dark-brandon-joe-biden-meme-explained/
Morning, Lynell!
I love what they did, taking the NASCAR vulgarity and transmagorphing* it to their better purposes!
*Thanks to Calvin and Hobbes for that word!
Agree in principle. But when I hear "Dark Brandon" now, I smile. I recognize the good kind of power. Team Biden has repossessed the name!
Been there felt that.
Totally true. The Karen who went through my life left behind the keys to the life I have.
Yes it does. But only because Karen was a popular name in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. The aging yuppies who demand to speak to the manager or call police on people because their skin is a different color need an acronym. Please leave some suggestions. I prefer using the letters G-i-n-n-i. Let’s get creative and have some fun.
Let’s not
Needs a specific reference, though, like "Scotus-Ginni"
Yup, my dear late sister and a good lifelong friend: both Karens.
My wife and a lifelong friend as well, along with one of my first mentors in the Sheriff's Office.
Hi Ally,
I had a brief partner with that name when the news of the K in NYC Central Park hit the headlines. I helped her change her name to part of Karen.
She adopted it with glee.
Thanks again to these HCR letters, I’m being educated energized and good grief even enlightened by her detailed historical dates details and much much more. I feel so very lucky to be in such great company of comments and as a consumer of her information.
I agree, Gwen. I don't know the origins, and hopefully it will pass, but it is a thing.
If you study the history of the women's suffrage movement, it didn't get a "head of steam up" until around 1912 when conservative white women pointed out to their husbands that they needed their wives' votes to help control "those others."
I must say here, Mr. D. that I beg to differ. Brushing (all) Americans with the same stroke is not true nor helpful, and I'll venture to say so without further explanation.
I am not a Mr., and try visiting another country and hearing their very serious concerns about 'what the hell is going on with the Americans?' to have clarified for you how much of a oblivious bubble we live in. The average American has no idea what is going on in other parts of the world, as much of our 'news' is about Trump, and other bad American actors. We should be a bit more concerned, I believe.
We live in Southern Spain for 6 months a years and I can say there is A LOT of concern about what is going on in America!
I actually like and support both of your positions. Take it easy, but take it.
I think that media and money have a hand in that.
Someone I share my house with who has five degrees & is now at work on her MBA believes that having a facelift would change her life. She tried it once. Nothing absolutely nothing changed! Talk about stupid & dumbing down. It’s our consumer society: Cars that drive you, handbags that wear you, gold sneakers that walk you.
Malicious perhaps rides on ambitions for those that believe elbows and knees are created as weapons.
And I’m being kind there!! A whisper on stage will often garner more attention than a loud voice:-)
I feel empathy and sadness for your housemate that she has had so many educational successes and obviously worked hard for that, but still doesn't feel like she's ok enough. As an older woman, the one thing that has been uplifting for me is not giving a damn about what others think, within reason (haha). The pressure that women feel about appearances has been drummed into their/our heads all our lives, and certainly, similar pressures have been for men as well. But nobody can be there for us on our deathbeds, and so we can try to remember to make life ok for ourselves, whatever we kindly decide. Give her a firm hug, please, for me.
D Kitterman: Stockholm Syndrome? Proof that women can be as mean-spirited and bullying as men? Oh well, the nasty women are not the ones writing Project 2025, ruling against abortion rights, etc. We have a lot of catching up to do to be as numerous and nasty as the conservative men.
It IS astounding. Agree. But the only "Karens" I know are good ones.
And there were so many more women that dared to get in RBG's way throughout her amazing career.
The patriarchy is still doing all they can to keep women from being, "All that they can be."
If you look at the wives of many of the US Presidents, they were often more intelligent than their husbands. Imagine Obama without Michelle or Biden without Jill or FDR without Eleanor or Lincoln without Mary Todd. And there were so many more.
Gary,
Imagine me at 12 yrs. and my little 10 year old brother when my dad died with cancer.
My mom who had her own farmland and rental property when she married my dad was able to take care of us and successfully manage the farm, investments, etc....plus all the problems we contributed as we were growing up.
She was wise and strong and successful. She chose not to remarry.
Thank you, Gary, for sharing the names of other women who have served to inspire and to encourage.
Emily-- Your mother is an amazing woman. You are very fortunate to have such a great role model as well as your brother.
There are currently almost 11 million single mother families in the US. Many of them struggle financially and in other ways. So many amazing women.
Abigail Adams
SISTERS IN SHAME
💙 BigTents events. Tomorrow’s(April2) is with Galvanize.They have great messaging !
“Galvanize Action connects with moderate women to build a broader base for progress and an America that works for everyone. There are millions of women—most living in rural, small town, and suburban communities—who want progress on things like access to healthcare and climate, but whose civic impact does not always reflect those goals”
https://www.bigtentusa.org/event/galvanize/
Maybe we need to think how far we have moved from the center and understand that America will never be a leftist or extreme progressive state and the ultimate direction is a backlash to the extreme right. Mark my words.
I get your point, Bill. But I must suggest that ideas that were considered "lefty" in the past are shared by most people now - as basic. Issues like reproductive rights, voting rights, a right to shelter, clean water, adequate food, a good education, healthcare...these are "progressive" goals and I consider them to be "centerist" and normal aspirations.
And then there is the giant one that is "progressive" and "lefty" - yet really just plain old normal survival "centerism" and common sense. Global Climate Change Catastrophes.
Almost everything the "left" has promoted ultimately was deemed normal and common sense. Equal rights? Women's right to vote? To own property? LGTBQ acceptance?
Sorry for the rant, but what many consider to be "leftist or extreme" is in my mind that place of normalcy where everyone and everything is treated properly - including the Earth.
At the risk of over simplifying, there is no "middle" anymore. There is Fascism - a society run by the rich who would destroy the planet for a few dollars - along with enslaving and persecuting the peasants... vs a Democratic Normal. It's binary now.
Then start practicing bowing to the fat orange blob. Do a few small bows at first in front of the mirror until you can do a 45 degree angle bow. After it becomes ritual, you won’t even remember the ole days of worrying about dirty air and water.
I don't understand your comment. Working towards clean air and water will help the fat orange blob get elected? Help me out here.
You said there is no middle anymore. If so, then this struggle ultimately moves to the right not the left. Even Plato once observed, “Tyranny follows Democracy.”
And someone must have said that democracy follows tyranny. Which in the long arc of history has been the case.
I get your cautionary concerns. Whatever it takes to win. I am optimistic.
My daughter being one! To my chagrin.
She helped us come so far, we can't lose it all now. I remember how women were treated in the days before her activism, and I am determined to do all I can to restore and extend our rights.
We shall not. Most of the U.S. population sides with you and me. The noise-makers take up a lot of space. People with a problem with flatulence, including verbal, usually do.
Oh oh, now you're talkin' trash, Ned. Flatulence is not a problem. It is both a condition and an art form.
I was a single mom of three great boys, now grown men. The favorite pastime in high school years was getting the youngest to do an amazing rendition of George Carlin’s “Artificial Fart Under the Arm”.
He could do the armpit thing but also the more difficult, behind the knee. Memories…
How blessed you were. We were three boys too, and the sounds we could make were monumental!
That is a great one! 🤭🙂😉
I've read about a musician so talented in producing controlled, on-pitch farts that people came to concerts to hear it. Wasn't there a concerto?
Seems that most of my Y chromosome friends are of your belief, bruce.
What can I say? 😇
breaking💨
Above and beyond the RBGs of our World, there are countless women around us who strive instinctively every day with inherent dignity and capacious empathy, for the betterment of their families, their friends, their societies, their Country, and only residually for themselves, who enrich the lives of so many people.
This XY is particularly grateful
For the benefit of the MAGAt trolls reading this and taking names and making lists. Count me in also, I'm with you on that list. Resist!
So is this one.
Still rankles, what Mitch McTurtleface did.
Not only that his rush to beat the 2020 election exposed his total hypocrisy from when he refused even to grant a hearing to Obama's choice in early 2016 (Merrick Garland), but that he chose someone (ideologue battle axe and rank perjurer) so far from RBG's integrity.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly and brilliantly made history -- for fairness, equal rights.
This so contrasts with the corporations that are making far-right history even worse now -- corporations such as Boeing cutting safety concerns, cheating the public just to make more money for more greedy billionaires. Corporations such as the idiot container ships cheating on their own safety devices so they slam into bridges, destroying them, murdering workers at night.
Project 2025 and the Chevron Precedent case show only more of the Mitch McTurtleface lack of ethics and massive hypocrisy that now threaten democracy even worse, intending as they do to gut workplace safety, health, and environmental agencies across America.
So it's fitting Heather honor RGB today. Some decent ones among us -- especially decent women -- when the orange wave yet threatens but poison, hate, and predation.
Karma is a bitch! I think I saw Mitch in a dream, reincarnated. He was drudging in primordial slime as an early turtle made in the image of his then maker, before evolution changed him into a sentient criminal.
Poor turtles, so magnificently maligned
I have several rescue turtles, all with some type of injury, missing legs from mowers, cracked shells, ruptured penises, horrors all. But they are all sweet, amazing, stoic little beings. But, dammit, McConnell does have that resemblance.
But definitely not the winning personality. Just power plays ad nauseam. Sorry turtles.
I see some mitigating news just now, Jeri.
Seems our elderly friend from Kentucky is intent on rallying fellow Republicans who've been opposing aid to the embattled democracy, Ukraine.
I hate just about all Mitch has done in Washington, but standing up for ally Ukraine -- supporting them against barbarian Putin -- at least merits credit of some kind.
Give the devil his due
Not really, Jeri, maybe primordial turtles...yeah, okay.
Love every word of yours here, Bruce.
Not so sure, however, about "sentient." That's getting too close to human qualities, as if any of those might ever soften or begin to make up for those of the cold, calculating ghoul.
Agreed Phil, I misspoke. I should have said semi conscious?!
The lesson the "GOP" seems to have taken form Nixon's disgrace was to close ranks a cheat all the harder. They gained a lot of traction with it, as have tyrants that preceded them; but isn't that what exactly what our republic was meant to move away from?
Yes, J L, absolutely correct you are.
Only, remember -- in about the same breath as Jefferson used the word "republic," he also used the word "education," or something to that effect.
Lincoln, in looking at the opening west, looked with the same eyes as Justin Morrill -- and the former in 1862 signed into law the latter's legislation to set aside public lands for a new, aspiringly high level of state colleges and land grant universities.
For more than a hundred years America prospered for that, from that. Until the crazed chambers of commerce in August, 1971, began to act on Louis Powell's memo to rid the colleges and universities of humanities, and turn them into property of the U.S.'s most vulgar, dehumanized commercial classes.
Yes, J L, America was meant as a haven for a new people, testing the notion that the people could grow something totally opposite the tyrannies and corrupted aristocracies of the old world.
We sure seem to be hell bent on returning to feudal times, where the "lord and master" ruled the roost.
The argument that those who aggregate the most coercive power, monetary, political, or violence-based, are the most legitimate leaders and indispensable benefactors of society goes way back, and very elaborate stories have been constructed to "prove" and maintain that charade. That so many people buy them illustrates the other side of issue, that some of the people can be fooled, at least in some very critical respects, most all the time. Real democracy is kinda out of control, which is point, but means it's not unfailingly wise. What is?
But democracy is, if run honestly, the most free and most just arrangement, so long as we aim for liberty and justice for all. Thus we are apportioned a share of choice, and of responsibility, for individual and social outcomes. The cure for foolishness is empathy and education, not the exalted whims of an overlord. Humans (myself included) are pretty capable of Doublethink; and genocide, slavery, and the misogyny starkly visible in our nation's founding demonstrates how jaw-droppingly dissonant human character can be. Yet we did not get stuck with a new king, same as the old king, and the founder's better angels installed in our constitutional conscience have, over time, guided a liberating if erratic social evolution.
Powell and Regan and a whole lot of shadowy money has gone into slandering democratic means and goals and reanimating rule by the rich and powerful It's ugly and we are fools to fall for it
Fools indeed.
Phil, it DOES come down to exclaiming to Mitch, like Joseph Welch to McCarthy before him during the Army-McCarthy Hearings, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”!!
It seems that the far right barbarians have left us with the necessity of putting so many things into law if not the Constitution itself simply for their lack of simple decency. One can no longer rely on "gentleman's agreements" or precedence.
More now than ever before, I am sure that 2024 is the USA women’s election. We can do more than elect Joe Biden; we can give him a congress with our vote.
Here is the campaign slogan I suggest: "Down with Dobbs, Return to Roe!"
100%!
Ginsburg's dying request was to have her replacement NOT be chosen by Trump.
"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed," Ruth Bader Ginsburg told her granddaughter, Clara Spera, in the days before her death, NPR reported.
We all know how THAT wish was honored by Congress.
Her death was untimely to be sure, but we should be grateful for the dozens of battles she fought and won over the years. The US is a better place, thanks to RBG, for all of us.
Surely she was pragmatic enough to know that Mitch got a good laugh.
Yes, we need to remember her philosophy of endurance and resistance she quoted often from Justice Louis Brandeis, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” She also advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
The latter seems more difficult today but if we all pay attention to the truth rather than being distracted by the voices of destruction, we will offer a better country snd communities that move us forward. Currently
The best way to do that is to vote blue up and down the ballot. Do what you can - postcarding, find groups interested dealing with climate change or ridding us of gun violence. In other words to help create a future for those who come after us. I do believe people want stability and fairness and a chance to thrive.
Agreed. Just pretend it is similar to driving in the snow. Distracting, potentially dangerous, yet navigable.
Ned - spoken like a Minnesotan, whether you are or not! :-)
Or a cop who lives in a part of the country where snow is not a regular enough event to insure that when there is snow (and we're talking between 4"-8" accumulation here with woefully inadequate snow removal/ice mitigation resources) 80% of the motoring public goes absolutely bonkers.
We “pros” try to stay off the roads after the first snow. We know how hard it is for the newcomer drivers to avoid killing us! ;-)
We had a forecast of 8” of snow that was exactly as forecast. You should have heard the cops going in service yammering about “should I chain up?” “I’m enroute the shops for a 4x4 unit.” (This was after command staff had decided to pull all the assigned 4x4 units out of patrol, for what it’s worth).
I think that top-down commercial media encourages inertness (passivity). Hate media encourages hate. What is encouraging about Prof. Richardson's blog is that she presents a provocative and meaningful theme and then all this happens. Democracy can't take place without meaningful conversation.
I think it goes deeper than that, JL. Meaningful conversation cannot occur when there are no common "truths" to discuss. My MNJ friends have told me, many times that "your sources are wrong, mine are right, and everything you think about us we think about you." There is no common ground.
I think that's where science comes in. We (foolishly, I think) tend to restrict the notion of science to a category of technical inquiry such a chemistry or cosmology approached in a very precise and formal way, as professional science must, but I think the essence of science is any identification of things that can be cooperatively observed and tested. HCR's footnotes are an example of that, as we can, if we like, read sources that she read and evaluate her interpretation of them. "Comparing notes" is another informal but useful way to justify some degree of confidence in one's own impressions. That can extend even into the subjective, "Do you think the sauce is too salty?" Impressions may vary, but we gain a degree of non-random information in such a consultation. Trial by jury is far from infallible, but it so far it seems like the fairest way to do it. And jurors, though human, are asked to consider only what can be "proved". We, over time, made collective re-evaluations of some of our prejudices, and agreed in a sufficient majority to change our laws. My father was born before women could vote thought the country, just one such example. Partly that revision marked more focused attention to evidence, but involved "soul searching" as well.
Very disheartening, for sure!
Inert people of America, wake up! Wake uuuup! The orange heads are coming! Let's have the rule of law, not the bloviating of the self-important: what a novel idea! Why delay?
RBG was a hero to so many of us. So glad you wrote about her. If only she were still here!
A great tribute, Dr. Richardson to a great Associate Justice. RBG, will be long remembered for her accurate and moving agreements and dissents. You are both remarkable ladies - actually remarkable Homo sapiens - who will long be held in high esteem. Along with Eleanor Roosevelt, America has been fortunate to have you.
We will not see her like again, in my lifetime.
I’m almost 82.
Though I am former G.O.P., there is change in the air. The recent behavior of the G.O.P. is much like the corrupt derivatives traders paying themselves millions in 2007: they knew and the current Republicans know that the jig is up and they are grabbing for everything they can before the new liberalism emerges. That change could happen this year.
And they blamed Obama. The tea party took the albatross that was measured for W/Dickie and hung it around Obama’s neck.
I am afraid I do not understand your comment. Itrust what you are saying and your intent. I just need some guidance.
In 2009, I watched the Repub money hogs who had screwed the pooch take the money and run, with Fox blaming Obama (the socialist) for the disaster. They just decided to double down, not admit they were wrong. The change in the air now is just them laying the blame on Biden, while grabbing what they can.
Jeri, I TOTALLY agree. It’s a pattern for the GOP. F- up the economy when they are running the country, then blame the Democratic successor for the mess. I don’t know why no one is writing about this in the MSM. Oh, wait, the GOP owns most of the media….
It's been a pattern since Hoover. In 1932, Will Rogers told the tale. "The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. Bit it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands." Mr. Hoover may have thought that money trickled down, but Reagan knew better. So do all the greedy cretins today.
I will give it a 50/50 chance. A move to super majorities should be a no brainer for us but just let a democrat in to blow it.
I wonder whether the clog of boomer politicians refusing to retire has slowed the resurgence.
I’m not so sure that we boomers are the only problem here. There will always be oligarchs and they will always buy politicians (and judges). Plenty of Freedom Caucus obstructionists coming up. And if we can’t get corporate money out of elections there will always be politicians who want to be bought. In fact, that’s the only way for some of those clowns to get rich.
My gripe is that the politics on both sides feels pretty stale. Maybe fresher leadership would help.
Freshness alone does not guarantee good policy or competent administration.
Power corrupts, what does that fully mean? Is part of it the refusal to retire from the field?
I believe they're out there, searching for their opportunity or getting themselves ready. Be on the lookout and be ready to help - maybe today they're only 12, but their time WILL come.
I'm an optimist Marilyn and slightly younger than you (69). When Biden wins, hopefully Clarence and Sammy will exit the court and maybe Roberts as well. And with four more years, Biden could replace many Bush and Trump nominees on the Federal courts.
From Wikipedia-
As of March 22, 2024, the United States Senate has confirmed 190 Article III judges nominated by Biden: one associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 41 judges for the United States courts of appeals, 146 judges for the United States district courts and two judges for the United States Court of International Trade. There are 23 nominations awaiting Senate action: four for the courts of appeals and 19 for the district courts. There are two vacancies on the U.S. courts of appeals and 42 vacancies on the U.S. district courts,as well as 30 announced vacancies that may occur before the end of Biden's term (six for the courts of appeals and 24 for district courts). Biden has not made any recess appointments to the federal courts. Biden had the largest number of Article III judicial nominees confirmed during a president's first year in office since Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Clarence, Sammy and Robert’s retire???? Not in my life, but I’m old.
Jeri, I agree. They are having the time of their lives. This is the moment they lived for. And they will not retire when there is a Democrat in the White House.
Why would anybody even think that they would. They have achieved Nirvana. That may change.
Maybe one of them will be busted by the IRS?
I'd like to dream, but I just got a bill for $6,000 for the change in status as widow. An unexpected perk??? Bet Elon still pays zip.
That leaves me speechless.
I found a few words, unprintable
Roberts is too young and has no obvious chicanery to his credit. Not so with the other two. My devout hope is that both Thomas and Alito are charged with the violations of law they have committed and choose to exit the court. The Roberts court will go down in infamy as the worst SCOTUS since Roger B. Taney's court, and may take the "all time" title.
Doesn't Roberts have the voting rights take back on his resume.
Ask Sheldon Whitehouse about Roberts and false facts used to justify Injustice.
He's got plenty to be accountable for, Shelby v. Holder amongst them. He's not accepted such "gifts" as Thomas or leaked information a la Alito. That was what I was referring to; extra judicial activities, rather than the indefensible position of voiding Civil Rights.
This really struck a chord. Even though born a generation after RBG, I experienced similar discrimination from schools and my parents. Though I graduated 7th in a class of more than 700 students, counselors lamented that I wasn't a man. My parents refused to fill out the paperwork so that I could receive my National Merit Scholarship. Though accepted at Duke, Northwestern, and McCallester College, but my parents wouldn't let me go. There were 4 of us in a single wage earner household. So, I'm sure we would have qualified for scholarships. My parents finally allowed me to attend the University of Illinois as long as I had jobs and paid most of my fees. My brothers got their total support to attend Notre Dame and Millikin. Meanwhile, I ran out of money and had to drop out. I married, gave premature birth to a daughter with Cerebral Palsy. I was fired from my first full-time job at Sears Roebuck and Company credit department because I'd hidden my pregnancy. Mind you, I'd scored the highest they'd ever seen on their employee aptitude test. They, too, lamented that I wasn't a man. They said I was management material.
RBG helped me too, though I was too late for the job protection while pregnant. But, in 1974, I took advantage of the fact that women could finally have credit cards of their own.
After putting my husband through Architecture School (and taking a lot of his elective courses for him while working as a waitress in a pancake house), I tried again for University. Northwestern refused me despite having previously accepted me because they said "married women with children didn't make serious students."
Finally, Mundelein College (now Loyola) accepted me. I barreled through in 18 months. Mundelein gave me credit for the courses I'd taken on my husband's behalf because I still had my notes and papers. I also got credit for a correspondence interior design course taken through LaSalle University. I hadn't realized that the correspondence course was from a legitimate university and that I had a two year Associate Degree (like one receives at Community College) through them!
Betty Prevender, a Mundelein professor, urged me to apply for graduate school at The University of Chicago. I was pleased that after a decade's delay, I had my College Degree. Ironically, my first post-College job was with the company that published Construction: Principles, Materials, and Methods. It was ironic, because the 800-page tome, was one of the textbooks that I'd read outloud to my dyslexic husband..
Just to get Professor Prevender from dogging me, I applied to the University of Chicago. They'd just turned down my Notre Dame graduate brother. So, I didn't expect to get in. But I did. But it was the end of my marriage, because my husband didn't want me to go saying that I would be better educated than him. Though I never said so, I already was. I'd not only completed my own degrees with great success but also read his textbooks outloud to him and taken most of his elective courses on his behalf--so I already was better educated. It turned out the textbook company offered 75 percent tuition reimbursement. Thus I became the single mother of a child with Cerebral Palsy who juggled child care, a full time job. and graduate study. At first, I was overwhelmed until I remembered that really that was what life had been like when putting my now ex-husband through school.
Went on to write four books, become the first woman hired by not only the textbook company but also a building trade magazine. What I never succeeded in doing was being paid equal to my male colleagues.
Hard to "like" this, but brava!!
Ally, took the words right out of my mouth! Brava indeed!!!!👍🫶🏻
I admire your grit and determination! Thank you for sharing that.
Brava, Christina!
Christina, back in 1967 as a very young newly married girl—wasn’t quite a woman yet having just turned 18, my then husband (also very young) and I were having dinner with his folks (I loved them dearly) and his aunt who had come to visit from the Midwest. As we conversed, she said “how wonderful that you’re going to work and put Greg through college”. I paused a moment and replied “oh, no, we are BOTH going to school and work part time”. And, indeed, that’s exactly what we did!! Your perseverance and achievements are amazing!! Someday, maybe women will achieve pay parity.
Someday. Someday.