Our President received a well-covered setback in court last week, concerning his ability to keep Congress from seeing his tax returns, but he also got smacked down in two other rulings. A federal district judge stayed his rule denying green cards to folks who've ever received certain forms of public assistance -- calling the rule "simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification" -- and another federal district judge declared unlawful the "national emergency" declaration he used to fund a vanity border wall, and said he'd block the plan after getting input from both sides. Victories are hard to come by, but they do sustain us through tough times.
Georgia Southern University students burn books by a Latina author after a "contentious" Q-and-A she held there. Book-burning is as much constitutionally-protected speech as flag-burning, but I won't linger too long on that point, nor will I linger too long on how kids look like Nazis when they burn books, or the university's apparent ignorance of their in loco parentis rights -- rather, I'll linger, as is my habit, on the fact that anyone who burns books because they think they should have all the say about everything is a whining, diaper-loaded brat loudly advertising not their "toughness" but their insecurity. You know, like our President.
FAIR finds most of our big "liberal" media news organs strangely uninterested in studies finding that our military is a major driver of climate change. I'd long supposed that our obsession with building and moving was the main driver behind climate change, but I hadn't actually considered that our obsession with war-making plays a comparable role. And just as more efficient drive trains in automobiles got cancelled out, emissions-wise, by an increase in their construction, our military's honest efforts to combat climate change is likely to be cancelled out by the next 47 wars our politicians want to fight. And our "liberal" media loves war, so you won't hear about it from them.
On the heels of our surprise withdrawal from Syria/leaving of the Kurds to destruction at the hands of Turkey, Stephen Zunes at TruthOut reminds us how often our government has used the Kurds like a wet dishrag. And not just during the Persian Gulf War, either! We've also given Turkey truckloads of help in oppressing their own Kurdish population, all 15 million of them. (Mr. Zunes doesn't address it here, but the Kurds also did fight for the Allies in World War II, despite the impression our President may have given you. They fight the Nazis, they fight ISIS -- what does a brother have to do?)
Finally, in case you were wondering, Thom Hartmann at TruthOut reminds us how our Founders felt about impeachment. Long story short: our Founders obsessed about corruption, and how much damage an "executive" or "magistrate" (they weren't calling him "President" yet) could do. You probably already knew that in a general sense, but it's good to have it spelled out. Elbridge Gerry -- who ultimately didn't sign our Constitution because it didn't (yet) include a Bill of Rights -- spells out the need for "the necessity of impeachments" most plainly: "(a) good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them."
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