December 19, 2023

Tuesday, December 19, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Driver who crashed into parked SUV in Biden's motorcade charged with DUI.

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden were unharmed after a car crashed into a U.S. Secret Service vehicle guarding his motorcade near his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Sunday night, the White House said.

The latest: A spokesperson for the Wilmington Police Department said on Monday that the driver, a 46-year-old Wilmington man, has been charged with driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol and inattentive driving.

• The department's investigation determined that it was an "accidental collision."

The big picture: After the crash around after 8pm ET, USSS agents quickly surrounded the car and pulled weapons on the driver, who held his hands up, according to a pool report.

Zoom in: The incident happened at the intersection across from the entrance of Biden's campaign headquarters after Jill Biden got into the first couple's vehicle, per the pool report that noted the president looked surprised as he stood near the vehicle.

• Footage from the scene showed agents helping the president into the Bidens' vehicle after the incident.

• USSS Special Agent Steve Kopek, an agency spokesperson, said in an emailed statement Sunday night there was "no protective interest associated with this event and the President's motorcade departed without incident."

What we're watching: Wilmington Police Department spokesperson David Karas said in an emailed statement late Sunday that the crash did not result in any injuries. (Axios).

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Kamala is always busy.

The Vice President will be on The Last Word with Lawrence O’ Donnell, 10 pm tonight.

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Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, to lie in Repose.

This 👆 happened yesterday but the funeral will happen today. Read here.👇

WASHINGTON (AP) — The late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and an unwavering voice of moderate conservatism for more than two decades, will lie in repose in the court’s Great Hall on Monday.

O’Connor, an Arizona native, died Dec. 1 at age 93.

Her casket will be carried up the steps in front of the court, passing under the iconic words engraved on the pediment, “Equal Justice Under Law,” and placed in the court’s Great Hall. C-SPAN will broadcast a private ceremony held before the hall is open to the public, allowing people to pay their respects afterward, from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The last justice who lay in repose at the court was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice. After her death in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, mourners passed by her casket outside the building, on the portico at the top of the steps.

Funeral services for O’Connor are set for Tuesday at Washington National Cathedral, where President Joe Biden and Chief Justice John Roberts are scheduled to speak.

O’Connor was nominated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan and subsequently confirmed by the Senate, ending 191 years of male exclusivity on the high court. A rancher’s daughter who was largely unknown on the national scene until her appointment, she received more letters than any one member in the court’s history in her first year and would come to be referred to as the nation’s most powerful woman.

She wielded considerable sway on the nine-member court, generally favoring states in disputes with the federal government and often siding with police when they faced claims of violating people’s rights. Her influence could perhaps best be seen, though, on the court’s rulings on abortion. She twice joined the majority in decisions that upheld and reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, the decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Thirty years after that decision, a more conservative court overturned Roe, and the opinion was written by the man who took her place, Justice Samuel Alito.

O’Connor grew up riding horses, rounding up cattle and driving trucks and tractors on the family’s sprawling Arizona ranch and developed a tenacious, independent spirit.

She was a top-ranked graduate of Stanford’s law school in 1952, but quickly discovered that most large law firms at the time did not hire women. One Los Angeles firm offered her a job as a secretary.

She built a career that included service as a member of the Arizona Legislature and state judge before her appointment to the Supreme Court at age 51. When she first arrived, she didn’t even have a place anywhere near the courtroom to go to the bathroom. That was soon rectified, but she remained the court’s only woman until 1993.

She retired at age 75, citing her husband’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease as her primary reason for leaving the court. John O’Connor died three years later, in 2009.

After her retirement, O’Connor remained active, sitting as a judge on several federal appeals courts, advocating for judicial independence and serving on the Iraq Study Group. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

She expressed regret that a woman had not been chosen to replace her, but lived to see a record four women now serving at the same time on the Supreme Court.

She died in Phoenix, of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness. Her survivors include her three sons, Scott, Brian and Jay, six grandchildren and a brother.

The family has asked that donations be made to iCivics, the group she founded to promote civics education.

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Update on laws and more affecting LGBTQ+ people.

The same people targeting abortions and abortion care are targeting LBGTQ+ people.

The Pope moves forward… not perfect but better than Republican legislators in America.

Pope says priests can bless same-sex unions, requests should not be subject to moral analysis.

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God’s love and mercy shouldn’t be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it.

The document from the Vatican’s doctrine office, released Monday, elaborates on a letter Francis sent to two conservative cardinals that was published in October. In that preliminary response, Francis suggested such blessings could be offered under some circumstances if they didn’t confuse the ritual with the sacrament of marriage.

The new document repeats that rationale and elaborates on it, reaffirming that marriage is a lifelong sacrament between a man and a woman. And it stresses that blessings should not be conferred at the same time as a civil union or even with the clothing and gestures that belong in a wedding.

But it says requests for such blessings should not be denied full stop. It offers an extensive definition of the term “blessing” in Scripture to insist that people seeking a transcendent relationship with God and looking for his love and mercy should not be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” as a precondition for receiving it.

“Ultimately, a blessing offers people a means to increase their trust in God,” the document said. “The request for a blessing, thus, expresses and nurtures openness to the transcendence, mercy, and closeness to God in a thousand concrete circumstances of life, which is no small thing in the world in which we live.”

He added: “It is a seed of the Holy Spirit that must be nurtured, not hindered.”

The Vatican holds that marriage is an indissoluble union between man and woman. As a result, it has long opposed same-sex marriage.

And in 2021, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said flat-out that the church couldn’t bless the unions of two men or two women because “God cannot bless sin.”

That document created an outcry, one it appeared even Francis was blindsided by even though he had technically approved its publication. Soon after it was published, he removed the official responsible for it and set about laying the groundwork for a reversal.

In the new document, the Vatican said the church must shy away from “doctrinal or disciplinary schemes, especially when they lead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.”

It stressed that people in “irregular” unions — gay or straight — are in a state of sin. But it said that shouldn’t deprive them of God’s love or mercy.

“Thus, when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it,” the document said. (Associated Press).

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s summary on Trump Going Full Fascist in New Hampshire.

December 17, 2023. Letters from an American.

It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy. 

On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship. 

Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.” 

Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people. 

Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s rights.

Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.

In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in. 

It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.

The White House today responded to Trump’s speech. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”

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What part of our history will America honor? and what part reject?

Arlington National Cemetery Will Begin Removing Confederate Memorials.

Hours after workers began removing a towering Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily halting the effort to dismantle one of the country’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land.

The memorial has been criticized for its sanitized depiction of slavery, and the plan to remove it from the country’s most famous cemetery is part of a militarywide effort to take down Confederate symbols from bases, ships and other facilities. Dozens of Republican lawmakers have opposed removing the memorial.

On Monday, as the work to remove the monument was getting underway, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that had been requested by a group called Defend Arlington.

The group, which is affiliated with an organization called Save Southern Heritage Florida, sued the Defense Department in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Sunday, arguing that the Pentagon had rushed its decision to take down the monument and that it had circumvented federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. It also said that the work would damage the surrounding graves and headstones. A hearing on the matter was scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Safety fencing was installed around the memorial over the weekend, and a spokeswoman for the cemetery said the disassembly work, which was expected to take several days, began on Monday morning before it was halted when the judge’s order was issued.

“The Army is complying with the restraining order and has ceased the work begun this morning,” the spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

The memorial was the latest such monument to be targeted for removal since the public backlash in 2020 against Confederate statues after the killing of George Floyd. That movement helped push Congress to establish the Naming Commission in 2021 to devise a plan to rid the military of statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy.

The Defense Department mandated that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be removed by Jan. 1, 2024.

It will go into storage until its fate is determined, the cemetery spokeswoman said.

The monument was funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that took a prominent role in mythologizing the Civil War as a “Lost Cause,” depicting the Confederacy’s rebellion as a noble defense of Southern values and painting slavery as benign. Like other monuments that the group funded, the Arlington memorial promotes the false narrative of the “loyal slave,” which has been used to justify and perpetuate white supremacy.

The monument stands in a section of the cemetery where the remains of Confederate soldiers are buried. It was dedicated in 1914 by President Woodrow Wilson, who had given his cabinet secretaries permission to segregate their departments, halting Black professional development in the federal government.

More than 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter last week demanding that Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, stop the removal of the monument. They argued that the memorial did not commemorate the Confederate States of America but rather the “reconciliation and national unity” between North and South.

The memorial, they wrote, was commissioned by the government to honor the “country’s shared reconciliation from its troubled divisions” and complemented a previous gesture in which Confederate remains were relocated to the national cemetery.

But to others, including the members of the Naming Commission, the intricate images and inscriptions etched into the bronze venerate the narrative of the Lost Cause. The memorial features a woman who represents the American South standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, according to the cemetery. Near the base are dozens of life-size Confederate soldiers alongside mythical gods and two enslaved African Americans.

One is a “mammy” holding the child of a Confederate officer, and the other is a man “following his owner to war,” according to the cemetery’s description.

“It’s the clearest example of a Lost Cause statement in a public space in the form of a monument,” said Kevin M. Levin, a Civil War historian who often gives tours of the cemetery. “Most confederate monuments are large equestrian monuments that honor a specific person.”

“I think what the United Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to see in Arlington was a nonapologetic vindication of the Confederacy,” he added.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy began planning for the memorial in 1906, said James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. The group, composed of descendants of men who had served in the armed forces or government of the Confederacy, raised money for scores of monuments and memorials that presented a romanticized view of the Confederacy and a sanitized take on slavery.

“The statue was a way of reminding Americans who was in charge in the South and what the true traditions of the South were,” Dr. Grossman said. “It’s one of hundreds of statues that were created across the South in the first two decades of the 20th century whose purpose was to make sure that everybody knows that this is a white country, and that slavery was legitimate and benign.”

Plans for the monument drew fierce opposition from civil rights activists and groups, notably the N.A.A.C.P. The depiction of the “mammy,” in particular, diminished the harm inflicted upon women whose families were destroyed under slavery, they said.

The monument at Arlington was among the most prominent memorials that the United Daughters of the Confederacy funded, and the symbolism of the location was potent. The cemetery was established on a former plantation that was seized from Gen. Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Nearly 200 enslaved people lived and worked on the plantation when Lee lived there, according to the cemetery.

Since 2020, hundreds of Confederate memorials have been renamed or removed from state and municipal lands. One such monument, a statue of Lee astride a horse, was taken down two years ago in Charlottesville, Va.

This year, it was melted down to be repurposed into public art.

Jalane Schmidt, a professor at the University of Virginiawho helped lead the campaign to melt that statue, said the argument for removing the Confederate memorial in Arlington was the same as for any other.

Monuments on public land, she said, “need to tell a story that’s inclusive of everyone and matches up with our democratic values.”

The cemetery will still include monuments to Confederates, in the form of hundreds of graves of fallen soldiers and the Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns, which is believed to contain remains of combatants from both the North and the South. (New York Times).

Oh, then this happened.

Judge halts removal of a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary injunction to stop the removal of a monument to Confederate soldiers on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

Workers had began to remove the memorial on Monday before U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston Jr. issued his order, saying that the plaintiff's lawyer represented to the court that the project involved the disturbance of gravesites.

A group called Defend Arlington, affiliated with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed suit Sunday in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Alston set a hearing for Wednesday.

The removal, which was scheduled to be completed by the end of the week, comes in response to legislation passed by Congress, and amidst efforts in recent years to take down symbols honoring slaveholders and Confederate leaders.

In 2021, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Defense to look at removing "names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia" commemorating the Confederacy.

Arlington's Confederate Memorial offers a "mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery," according to a report prepared by a commission set up in response to that legislation. The report notes that an inscription promotes the "Lost Cause" myth, "which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery."

The monument, designed by sculptor Moses Ezekiel, was erected in 1914 with congressional approval at the cemetery located across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

University of Maryland historian Leslie Rowland told NPR and WBUR's Here and Now that funds for the memorial were raised by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which existed largely to "vindicate Confederate soldiers and other members of the Confederate generation." They did so by "putting forward a sanitized, romanticized version of the pre-Civil War South," Rowland said.

Arlington National Cemetery had said that bronze pieces of the memorial would be removed, and its granite base would be left in place "to avoid disturbing surrounding graves." According to a press release issued before the court's order, the removal was to be finished by Dec. 22.

The plan to take down the monument has received pushback from some Republican leaders, including more than 40 members of Congress who've called for halting the removal. The Washington Post reported in September that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has asked the Virginia Military Institute to display the statue at a Civil War museum it operates. (NPR).

Stay Tuned.

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A cheerful note to greet the day.

Trump defamed E. Jean Carroll again after he was found guilty of “sexually abusing" her and defaming her. She sued again.

Giuliani followed his leader. He insulted Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss again after being found guilty of $148 million worth of defamation. They, in turn, followed E. Jean Carroll’s lead, and sued again.

Some folks don’t learn.

Touch to watch. 👇

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