oh great. now i have to change “■■■■■ was a total failure” to “■■■■■ was almost completely a total failure.” and the bumper stickers were already ordered. sigh
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April 30, 2024 (Tuesday)
This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again.
Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.”
“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.”
Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy.
Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.
Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective.
Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time.
President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign.
In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States.
By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”
In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative.
News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series.
Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts.
For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.
Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.”
Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.”
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and surely not an attempt to stamp out international workers day…
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May 1, 2024 (Wednesday)
Today, Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks—earlier than most women know they’re pregnant—went into effect. The Florida legislature passed the law and Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed it a little more than a year ago, on April 13, 2023, but the new law was on hold while the Florida Supreme Court reviewed it. On April 1 the court permitted the law to go into operation today.
The new Florida law is possible because two years ago, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the modern court decided that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level.
Immediately, Republican-dominated states began to restrict abortion rights. Now, one out of three American women of childbearing age lives in one of the more than 20 states with abortion bans. This means, as Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, put it in The Daily Beast today, “child rape victims forced to give birth, miscarrying patients turned away from emergency rooms and told to return when they’re in sepsis.” It means recognizing that the state has claimed the right to make a person’s most personal health decisions.
Until today, Florida’s law was less stringent than that of other southern states, making it a destination for women of other states to obtain the abortions they could not get at home. In the Washington Post today, Caroline Kitchener noted that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year obtained abortions in Florida. Now, receiving that reproductive care will mean a trip to Virginia, Illinois, or North Carolina, where the procedure is still legal, putting it out of reach for many women.
This November, voters in Florida will weigh in on a proposed amendment to the Florida constitution to establish the right to abortion. The proposed amendment reads: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” Even if the amendment receives the 60% support it will need to be added to the constitution, it will come too late for tens of thousands of women.
It is not unrelated that this week Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, along with other Republican attorneys general, has twice sued the Biden administration, challenging its authority to impose policy on states. One lawsuit objects to the government’s civil rights protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. The other lawsuit seeks to stop a federal rule that closes a loophole that, according to Texas Tribune reporter Alejandro Serrano, lets people sell guns online or at gun shows without conducting background checks.
In both cases, according to law professor and legal analyst Steve Vladeck, Paxton has filed the suit in the Amarillo Division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where it will be assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump appointee who suspended the use of mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, in order to stop abortions nationally.
Last month the Judicial Conference, which oversees the federal judiciary, tried to end this practice of judge-shopping by calling for cases to be randomly assigned to any judge in a district; the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas says it will not comply.
And so the cases go to Kacsmaryk, who will almost certainly agree with the Republican states’ position.
Republicans are engaged in the process of dismantling the federal government, working to get rid of its regulation of business, basic social welfare laws and the taxes needed to pay for such measures, the promotion of infrastructure, and the protection of civil rights. To do so, they have increasingly argued that the states, rather than the federal government, are the centerpiece of our democratic system.
That democracy belonged to the states was the argument of the southern Democrats before the Civil War, who insisted that the federal government could not legitimately intervene in state affairs out of their concern that the overwhelming popular majority in the North would demand an end to human enslavement. Challenged to defend their enslavement of their neighbors in a country that boasted “all men are created equal,” southern enslavers argued that enslavement was secondary to the fact that voters had chosen to impose it.
At the same time, though, state lawmakers limited the vote in their state, so the popular vote did not reflect the will of the majority. It reflected the interests of those few who could vote. In 1857, enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia explained that there were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote. “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.” State legislatures, dominated by such men, wrote laws reinforcing the power of a few wealthy, white men.
Crucially, white southerners insisted that the federal government must use its power not to enforce the will of the majority, but rather to protect their state systems. In 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Act, they demanded that federal officials, including those in free states, return to the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Black Americans could not testify in their own defense, and anyone helping a “runaway” could be imprisoned for six months and fined $1,000, which was about three years’ income. A decade later, enslavers insisted that it was “the duty of the Federal Government, in all its departments, to protect…[slavery]…in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority extends.”
After the Civil War, Republicans in charge of the federal government set out to end discriminatory state legislation by adding to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing that states could not deny to any person the equal protection of the laws and giving Congress the power to enforce that amendment. That, together with the Fifteenth Amendment providing that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Republicans thought, would stop state legislatures from passing discriminatory legislation.
But in 1875, just five years after Americans added the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court decided that states could keep certain people from voting so long as that discrimination wasn’t based on race. This barred women from the polls and flung the door open for voter suppression measures that would undermine minority voting for almost a century. Jim and Juan Crow laws, as well as abortion bans, went onto the books.
In the 1950s the Supreme Court began to use the Fourteenth Amendment to end those discriminatory state laws—in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision that prohibited racial segregation in public schools, for example, and in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Opponents complained bitterly about what they called “judicial activism,” insisting that unelected judges were undermining the will of the voters in the states.
Beginning in the 1980s, as Republicans packed the courts with so-called originalists who weakened federal power in favor of state power, Republican-dominated state governments carefully chose their voters and then imposed their own values on everyone.
Just a decade ago, reproductive rights scholar Elizabeth Dias told Jess Bidgood of the New York Times, a six-week abortion ban was seen even by many antiabortion activists as too radical, but after Trump appointed first Neil Gorsuch and then Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the balance of power shifted enough to make such a ban obtainable. Power over abortion rights went back to the states, where Republicans could restrict them.
Trump has said he would leave the issue of abortion to the states, even if states begin to monitor women’s pregnancies to keep them from obtaining abortions or to prosecute them if they have one.
Vice President Kamala Harris was in Jacksonville, Florida, today to talk about reproductive rights. She put the fight over abortion in the larger context of the discriminatory state laws that have, historically, constructed a world in which some people have more rights than others. “This is a fight for freedom,” she said, “the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have their government tell them what they’re supposed to do.”
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The federal judiciary has long opposed any rules or laws that encourage or allow so-called forum shopping. I guess we’re chucking that out the window now along with the Supremacy Clause.
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May 2, 2024 (Thursday)
More than 2,000 people have been arrested at protests on college and university campuses around the country opposing Israel’s military strikes on Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, and the subsequent humanitarian crisis there. It is unclear how many of the protesters are students, as many of those arrested have not been affiliated with the universities, or how many of the arrests will result in charges—sometimes arrests at protests are designed simply to clear an area.
The roots of today’s protests lie in an investigation by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The committee announced the investigation on December 7, two days after its members spent more than five hours grilling then-president of Harvard University Claudine Gay, then-president of University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill, and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sally Kornbluth on how their universities were handling student protests against Israel over its military response to Hamas’s attack of October 7.
Led by Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Republicans on the committee insisted that the universities were not protecting Jewish students. The university presidents responded that they deplored antisemitism, that students had the right to free speech, and that they took action against those who violated policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation. But in their defense of free speech, they admitted both that hate speech against Jews and others is sometimes protected and that they had sometimes made bad calls.
The Republicans’ interest in protecting Jewish students on campus overlapped with their opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that they associate with Democrats. Burgess Owens (R-UT) said DEI initiatives protect Black students at the expense of others. “I just remember a couple of years ago when we were dealing with Black Lives Matter,” he said. “Try to talk about Blue Lives Matter, Jew Lives Matter, Arab Lives Matter—they call it racist. It’s time for us to focus on what’s happening on your campuses.”
Stefanik called the testimony “pathetic” and, along with 74 other members of Congress, demanded that Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resign. On January 2, following accusations she had plagiarized scholarly work, she did. Her resignation followed that of Liz Magill. “TWO DOWN,” Stefanik wrote on social media.
Two days after the university presidents’ testimony, Stefanik announced that the House Education and Workforce Committee would be investigating universities. “We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage,” she said.
On February 12 the committee informed Columbia it was next up. Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik had been unable to testify with the other presidents in December and gave her testimony to the committee on April 17, along with co-chairs of the Board of Trustees Claire Shipman and David Greenwald and former dean David Schizer over the university’s response to antisemitism.
In an April 16 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Shafik wrote that “antisemitism and calls for genocide have no place at a university…but that leaves plenty of room for robust disagreement and debate.” She said she prioritizes “the safety and security of our community” and that while the attack of October 7 had a “deep personal impact” on the Jewish and Israeli communities, there was also a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, and the war was “part of a larger story of Palestinian displacement.” She explained that Columbia had defined a space for protests to enable those they upset to avoid them.
Opening the hearing, committee chair Foxx said: “Since October 7, this Committee and the nation have watched in horror as so many of our college campuses, particularly the most expensive, so-called elite schools, have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.” Stefanik called out tenured professor Joseph Massad of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department, who called the October 7 attack a “stunning victory.”
Shafik responded by condemning the professor’s statements. “Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months…. We do not, and will not, tolerate antisemitic threats, images, and other violations…. We have enforced, and we will continue to enforce, our policies against such actions,” she said.
Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned Shafik about discrimination against pro-Palestinian protesters. She noted that Israel-born assistant professor Shai Davidai was accused of harassing pro-Palestinian students; Shafik said they have had more than 50 complaints about him and he is under investigation.
On April 17, the same day the Columbia officials testified, pro-Palestinian protesters organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a self-described “coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation”), Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace set up a camp at the university. It garnered little attention; the April 18 New York Times did not mention it. According to Sharif, the school warned protesters they would be suspended if the encampment was not removed. They stayed. On April 18, according to New York mayor Eric Adams, Columbia officials called in New York City police to disband the protest. They arrested more than 100 people, including Representative Omar’s daughter, a Columbia student. The arrests were peaceful.
University faculty and community members were shocked by the resort to law enforcement at a place known both for learning and debate and for its history. In April 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, a week of protests after students learned of Columbia’s support for weapons research and its plan to construct a seemingly segregated gym in a nearby community had led New York City police to crush the demonstrations with violence.
In the days after the current arrests, nearly a dozen student and faculty groups released statements or open letters objecting to the police presence on campus and supporting students’ rights to free speech and peaceful protest. The protest encampment sprang back up.
At the same time, Jewish leaders warned that antisemitism was increasing. Rabbi Elie Buechler, of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, urged Jewish students to return home for Passover, which began April 22, and to stay there for their own safety.
In the next weeks, protests sprang up around the country, with protesters generally demanding that university administrators divest from investments in Israel or in companies that sell weapons, technology, or construction equipment to Israel, and cut ties to Israeli universities. They have tended to turn their anger against President Joe Biden and his administration, whom they blame for what they call a genocide in Gaza. Universities have responded in a variety of ways, from discussion to armed law enforcement officers.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have insisted that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas and have continued to provide Israel with military defenses, whose importance in stopping the war from spreading showed on April 14, when those defenses shot down virtually all of the weapons Iran launched at Israel. They are working hard for a ceasefire, with Blinken currently in the Middle East and a proposal on the table that Israel has accepted but Hamas has not.
The administration has also stood against the initial policy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration to cordon off Gaza without food, water, or electricity, and has pressured Israel into permitting humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has also firmly opposed Israeli plans to attack Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter, and has stood firmly in favor of a Palestinian state, which the protesters have not indicated they endorse.
On April 24, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) visited Columbia, where he called for Shafik to resign. On Monday, April 29, he and Republican leadership met to discuss how they might reenergize the party and gain traction now that their impeachment effort against Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has flopped, the conference is bitterly split, their control of Congress has resulted in one of the least productive congresses in American history, and their presumptive presidential nominee is being tried for election interference that involved paying off women with whom he had extramarital sex. They settled on campus antisemitism—although Trump’s open embrace of white nationalists makes this problematic—and the campus protests as a sign that Democrats are the party of disorder.
On that same day, 21 House Democrats wrote a letter to Columbia’s trustees demanding they “act decisively, disband the encampment, and ensure the safety and security of all of its students.” That night, protesters took control of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where they broke windows and vandalized furniture. About twenty hours later, police in riot gear arrested them. Arrests across the country climbed.
Yesterday, Representative Foxx announced that her committee’s antisemitism investigation will expand into a Congress-wide crackdown on colleges. In a press conference, she said she had a clear message for “mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders. Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students. American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.”
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that right-wing politicians jumped on the Kent State shootings of May 1970 to defund colleges and universities, while a “law and order” backlash helped to give Republican president Richard M. Nixon a landslide reelection in 1972.
Today, President Biden addressed the protests, saying they “test two fundamental American principles. The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.”
Biden called for lawful, peaceful protests and warned: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest…. Dissent is essential to democracy,” he said, “But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education…. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”
When asked, he told reporters he did not think the National Guard should be involved in suppressing the protests.
Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu of the New York Times reported today that Russia, China, and Iran are amplifying the protests “to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the United States,” as well as to “undermine President Biden’s reelection prospects.”
It is unclear if the protests will continue during the summer, when fewer students will be on campus.
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I can’t help but notice that the four university presidents called to testify before Congress were all women.
Yeah…sorry, protests are meant to be disruptive. They don’t really work if they don’t at least inconvenience people. I am absolutely opposed to violence, but if your protests aren’t causing some disorder, you’re not doing it right. From the original Boston Tea Party to Stonewall, successful protests have always been disruptive.
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No, we are expected to disagree politely and so as not to inconvenience or disrupt anyone too much. IMHO, this is where the idea of uniparty gains some credence, because when the MAGAts and Biden are seen to be sort of saying the same thing, it is just infuriating. Both are pretty much saying “quiet, children, let the adults talk.” Biden says this while patting them on the head, MAGA while punching them in the face, and this is a difference, but no one seems to be listening. In the end, the generation that lived through Kent State and the whole uprising of the 60’s seems to have not learned from it, and the younger folks in power seem to be utterly ignorant of those occurrences. The whole thing is maddening.
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The thing is, even if the protests were completely “polite”, the students would then be told they’re not protesting in the right place. It doesn’t matter how accommodating you are, they’re going to come up with a reason why you’re not protesting the right way until you’re left with no choice but to not protest, which is their whole goal.
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Yep. The problem as they see it is that the “wrong” people are running things in academia. They’re keen to get rid of all these women getting above their station… they can go back to teaching grade school where they belong, as far as they’re concerned… They shouldn’t be running Harvard or Columbia… that’s only for white men… /s
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Has anyone already posted the Powell Memo? I apologize if this is a repeat. The actual memo and related articles, etc., are linked in this article:
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I don’t think so… Thanks for the link!
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Fucking Lewis Powell. That memo should have kept him off the Court. Nixon first asked him to accept a nomination to the court in 1969. Powell turned him down because, as a corporate lawyer, (a) it would be a pay cut, and (b) he didn’t think he was qualified. He was right about that second one, although he did come down on the right side of Roe v. Wade. But like most conservatives, it was because of a personal experience. He had known someone who died from an attempted self-induced abortion.
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I first heard about the memo in seminary. How did I go 50+ years without even knowing about it? 
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The same way I didn’t hear about it until a couple of years ago. They don’t teach this shit.
ETA: And a lot of that is because the media has been perpetuating this idea that Supreme Court Justices are these unimpeachable, objective arbiters of the law who always deal in good faith and are the most trustworthy people in government. The last few years have destroyed that image, but that image was always false. They are human. Every last one of them. And as such, they are capable of the same failings as the rest of us. It has always been that way. All the way back to John Marshall, at least. He was directly involved in the events that led to the lawsuit in Marbury v. Madison, and he wrote the majority opinion in that case, where he said Marbury was in the right, but the Court didn’t have the power to do anything about it. Does that bullshit sound familiar?
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May 3, 2024 (Friday)
It has been quite a week of news, and I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who’s tired. So I figure it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to look elsewhere for a bit of a break. Tomorrow is the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, and in its honor, I’m posting a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. It has no deep meaning…it’s just fun. And it was totally fun to research, too: I watched hours and hours of Mr. Ed and reading television history to try to figure out what made it such a popular show. This remains one of my favorite things I ever had a hand in writing.
- Traveller
General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.
- Comanche
Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.
- Beautiful Jim Key
Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia—buttons, photos, and postcards—or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”
- Man o’ War
Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss—to “Upset”—came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.
- Trigger
Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.
- Sergeant Reckless
American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.
- Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.
8 ) Black Jack
Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands—a U.S. brand and an army serial number—recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.
- Khartoum
Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him… and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
- Secretariat
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.”
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