April 15, 2023

Saturday, April 15, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

Please feel free to share.

Invite at least one other person to subscribe today! buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup

_______________________

💥💥💥 Breaking.

Supreme Court Briefly Preserves Broad Availability of Abortion Pill.

The temporary stay is meant to preserve the status quo while the justices study lower court rulings, and it did not forecast how they would ultimately rule.

WASHINGTON — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. issued an order on Friday temporarily ensuring that a common abortion pill would remain widely available while the Supreme Court considered whether to grant the Biden administration’s emergency request to preserve the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug.

The order was meant to maintain the status quo while the justices studied the briefs and lower court rulings, and it did not forecast how the court would ultimately rule in the most important case about access to abortion since its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade last June.

Justice Alito set a brisk schedule for the court’s consideration of the case. His order, an administrative stay, instructed the groups challenging the F.D.A.’s approval of the abortion drug, mifepristone, to file their brief by Tuesday at noon.

The stay itself is set to expire on Wednesday at midnight, meaning the court is very likely to act before then and could in the coming days further curtail access to abortion, even in states where it is legal. (New York Times).

_______________________

Joe is always busy.

Biden Overcome After Seeing Priest Who Gave Last Rites to Son Beau.

President Biden was in tears after the surprise meeting with the priest, Friar Frank O’Grady, who was given a last-minute security approval to meet with the president.

President Biden, who spent most of this week exploring his family lineage in Ireland, broke down in tears on Friday after an impromptu meeting with a person from his more recent past: the priest who had administered last rites to his son, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015.

Mr. Biden became emotional after seeing the priest, Friar Frank O’Grady, who was given a last-minute security approval for the meeting at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Knock, a sacred shrine for Roman Catholics, who have reported seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary and other holy figures there.

A White House official who confirmed the meeting called it “spontaneous,” in that Friar O’Grady’s presence in Knock was not known to officials who spent weeks poring over the details of the trip. According to the Irish Independent, Mr. Biden had one reply when he was told by Friar Richard Gibbons, the Knock Parish priest, that Friar O’Grady was living in Knock and working as a chaplain: “I gotta meet him, I gotta meet him.”

Friar O’Grady, a former U.S. Army chaplain, and had been assigned to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., when Beau Biden died at age 46. (New York Times).

_______________________

Kamala is always busy.

The Vice President spoke on Friday at the National Action Network. Touch 👇 to watch. 24 minutes.

_______________________

In case you were wondering . . .the man himself tweeted.

_______________________

More on Thomas’s benefactor, Harlan Crow.

Since when do Supreme Court Justices have benefactors?

Thomas didn’t report hundreds of thousands of dollars in vacations courtesy of Crow.

That’s one issue.

Crow paid Thomas for the Thomas homestead. Thomas didn’t report it.

That’s another.

Who the heck is Harlan Crow and what does his strange Nazi collection imply about him?

Clarence Thomas’ close friend Harlan Crow collects Nazi artifacts. The reason why could be even darker than it seems.

Billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow owns a sweeping collection of art and historical artifacts. In his estate in Dallas, Texas, Crow displays rare documents signed by historical figures including Christopher Columbus and George Washington, and original paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. 

He also has a collection of Nazi memorabilia, including two paintings by Adolf Hitler and a signed copy of Mein Kampf, as well as a garden (the “Garden of Evil”) filled with sculptures of dictators, including Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Josip Broz Tito.

The consumption of Nazi materials and aesthetics by members of the general public is not new. The term “Nazi chic” has even earned its own Wikipedia page. These disturbing forays into the human psyche may now have resounding political implications, after ProPublica’s reporting that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts and luxury travel from Crow.

According to Crow, he collects these items because “he hates Communism and fascism.” However, Crow is not displaying these items in the thoughtfully curated setting of a Holocaust museum. Instead, Crow is amplifying the resonance of objects closely associated with evil and antisemitism.

To claim that the purchase and display of paintings by Hitler demonstrates a commitment to genocide prevention and constitutes a memorial to the Shoah takes a great deal of chutzpah.

Whatever one thinks of Crow’s politics, the fact that he actively invites relics of such abhorrence into his home and displays them with pride indicates a bizarrely simultaneous disconnect with the legacy of the Holocaust and also a deep fascination with its horrors, almost to the point of reverence.

If not overtly espousing Nazism, collectors of such artifacts seem to have a perverse fascination with (or ambivalence to) human suffering. Crow’s amassment of statues of brutal dictators may speak to both his fascination with suffering and with cults of personality. His collection also reportedly includes paintings by Winston Churchill and former President George W. Bush. Because Churchill was a moral and tactical enemy of Hitler’s, with Bush falling somewhere between the two on an ethical spectrum, it’s likely that Crow’s attraction to art by all three stems from the paintings’ proximity to political power and global influence, not any aesthetic appreciation.

Crow owns Hitler paintings for the same reason he owns Monets and Renoirs; he owns a signed copy of Mein Kampf for the same reason he owns a book signed by Churchill. These items are status symbols which to Crow, on an unconscious level, grant legitimacy and purpose to his otherwise unconscionable existence of wealth accumulation and political powerbroking.

Where the Hitler artifacts stand apart, however, is that Crow, both as a businessman and a collector, is seemingly neither able to distinguish between good and bad, nor has the dignity to exclude the latter from his private collection.(Sam Weinberg, The Forward).

_______________________

#RedMeatRepublicans gather around another young traitor.

https://twitter.com/riotgrrrl_meg/status/1646860583604453376?s=61&t=I_Od53CbnPTsbLcD0baXPg

_______________________

Hillsdale College in Michigan, DeSantis’ role model for higher education.

The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars.

Conservative movements to reform education are often defined by what they’re against. At a recent public briefing, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, decried the imposition of critical race theory and mandatory diversity-and-inclusion training at the state’s schools. He pledged to counter “ideological conformity” and “administrative bloat.” On the other hand, when DeSantis and other Republican politicians try to articulate what they’re for—what exactly they want education to look like—one name comes up repeatedly: Hillsdale College.

DeSantis has said that he probably wouldn’t hire someone from his alma mater, Yale. But “if I get somebody from Hillsdale,” he said, “I know they have the foundations necessary to be able to be helpful in pursuing conservative policies.” In January, DeSantis’s chief of staff told National Review that the governor hoped to transform New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts school, into a “Hillsdale of the South.” One of the people involved in implementing the reforms is a dean and vice-president at Hillsdale.

Hillsdale College, a school in southern Michigan with roughly sixteen hundred students, was founded by abolitionist, Free Will Baptist preachers in 1844. Today, the college is known as a home for smart young conservatives who wish to engage seriously with the liberal arts.

The Hillsdale education has several hallmarks: a devotion to the Western canon, an emphasis on primary sources over academic theory, and a focus on equipping students to be able, virtuous citizens. There is no department of women’s and gender studies, no concentrations on race and ethnicity. It’s a model of education that some scholars consider dangerously incomplete. It’s also a model that communities across the country are looking to adopt.

In the past two decades, Hillsdale has vastly expanded its influence, partly through its ties to Republican politics. The college has had a presence in Washington, D.C., for fifty years, and in 2010 it opened a second campus there, largely for graduate students, in a row of town houses across from the Heritage Foundation.

The faculty includes Michael Anton, the former Trump Administration official known for his essay “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he wrote that voting for Donald Trump was the only way to save America from doom, and David Azerrad, a former Heritage Foundation director who has described America as being run on a system of “Black privilege.”

In recent years, speakers at Hillsdale events have included Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, then a circuit-court judge. Thomas, whose wife, Virginia, once served on the Hillsdale Board of Trustees, has referred to the college as “a shining city on a hill.” Alumni have gone on to serve in powerful government positions: Kevin McCarthy’s former deputy chief of staff, three Supreme Court clerks from the last term, and speechwriters for the Trump Administration all attended Hillsdale.

The school welcomes conservative provocateurs—Dinesh D’Souza and Andy Ngo, among others—to speak at events, publishing some of the talks in Imprimis, a monthly digest of speeches. In 2021, Hillsdale tapped two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—an open letter that advocated against widespread lockdowns early in the pandemic—to help launch the Academy for Science and Freedom, “to combat the recent and widespread abuses of individual and academic freedom made in the name of science.”

The primary architect of Hillsdale’s rise to prominence is the college’s president, Larry Arnn. “Education is the purpose of society,” he told me. “If you want to help, as a citizen, your country, I think that’s the way.” Last November, Arnn gave a speech in which he described education as a cultural battleground, arguing that public schools have recently “adopted the purpose of supplanting the family and controlling parents.”

To address this concern, Hillsdale has ventured outside of higher education, helping to launch K-12 charter schools nationwide. Arnn has set an ambitious mission for this project, one that suggests Hillsdale is only getting started in its fight to reclaim American education: “We’re going to try to find a way to teach anyone who wants us to help them learn.” (The New Yorker).

In the meanwhile, while Hillsdale is working to take over American education from K-12 on, this is happening in Florida.👇

Ron DeSantis quietly signs Florida's 6-week abortion ban into law.

The governor had no fanfare around the bill-signing, sending out a news release late in the night.

Gov. Ron DeSantis quietly signed legislation Thursday that would ban most abortions after six weeks in Florida, a move that will weigh on his likely 2024 presidential bid.

DeSantis said as far back as last month that he would sign the measure shepherded through the GOP-dominated Legislature, even as most public polling indicates a ban on abortions at six weeks of pregnancy is unpopular in both political parties.

The Florida law bans abortions at six weeks but creates new exemptions for rape and incest up to 15 weeks of pregnancy. It does not change existing exemptions for life and the health of the mother up to 15 weeks.

And this is happening too. Touch to watch.👇

_______________________

Thursday, a former occupant of the White House appeared in NYC for a deposition. Crowds of New Yorkers greeted him.

To watch and listen, touch below. 👇🥳

_______________________

While anti-Muslim bigotry persists across America, Minneapolis finds another way.

Minneapolis OKs dawn Muslim prayer call, 1st for big US city.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (AP) — Minneapolis will allow broadcasts of the Muslim call to prayer at all hours, becoming the first major U.S. city to allow the announcement or “adhan” to be heard over speakers five times a day, year-round.

The Minneapolis City Council unanimously agreed Thursday to amend the city’s noise ordinance, which had prevented dawn and late evening calls at certain times of the year due to noise restrictions, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. The vote came during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“The Constitution doesn’t sleep at night,” said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, after the vote. He said the action in Minneapolis shows the world that a “nation founded on freedom of religion makes good on its promise.”

Minneapolis has had a flourishing population of East African immigrants since at least the 1990s, and mosques now are common. Three of 13 members of the council identify as Muslim. The decision drew no organized community opposition. Mayor Jacob Frey is expected to sign the measure next week.

“Minneapolis has become a city for all religions,” said Imam Mohammed Dukuly of Masjid An-Nur mosque in Minneapolis, who was among several Muslim leaders who witnessed the vote.

Three years ago, city officials worked with the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque to allow the adhan to be broadcast outdoors five times daily during Ramadan. Prayers are said when light appears at dawn, at noon, at mid- to late afternoon, at sunset and when the night sky appears. In Minnesota, dawn arrives as early as before 5:30 a.m. in summer, while sunset at the solstice happens after 9 p.m.

The city allowed year-round broadcasts last year, but only between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. — typically excluding early morning prayer and sometimes night prayer.

At a recent public hearing, Christian and Jewish leaders expressed support for extending the hours for the adhan.

_______________________

While exclusionary laws and screaming aimed at Trans and nonbinary persist, Running finds another way.

Boston Marathon adds division for nonbinary runners this year.

For nonbinary runners, this year’s Boston Marathon isn’t just a running event. It’s a major milestone in the race for inclusion.
The 2023 race will include a nonbinary division for the first time in the marathon’s storied 127-year history. While other major marathons, including New York City and Chicago, also have nonbinary divisions, Boston remains one of the most prestigious events on the marathon calendar.


It’s considered a bucket-list marathon because the race requires most runners, including those in the new nonbinary division, to earn their way onto the course by meeting strict qualifying time standards.
“Hopefully this has ripples across the country and across the world — in the running world to begin and then hopefully beyond the running world,” said Cal Calamia, a 26-year-old inclusivity activist from San Francisco who will be one of 27 runners competing in the nonbinary division at Boston on April 17.


The London Marathon will also debut a nonbinary division at its race this year on April 23.

_______________________