Open Thread July 4, 2023

Yesterday, I seriously overslept – by choice – but it did cut into my working time. I’ve been having some issues with pain cutting into both my sleeo time but, even more to the point, into the amount of actual rest/recovery I get when I am asleep. I ran the TENS for extra time today, which has helped – I don’t suppose this will resolve the issue, so I’ll keep on it. On a brighter note, The New Yorker decided to run a group of 9 Name Drop quizzes together, all of them on literary figures (which helped up front), and I actually got all of them. Not spectadularly – five of the nine on the las clue and the rest somewhere between the socond and the fifth – but I’m still quite pleased about it. (I bombed the daily one, though.)

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

Axios – Scoop: Hunter Biden’s lawyer roasts IRS whistleblowers in message to GOP chair
Quote – Why it matters: The White House has been struggling to answer questions about the IRS agent transcripts over the past week, but Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell is now taking the lead in fighting back against the Republican-led committee. The letter comes after Chair Jason Smith last week released transcripts of interviews with two IRS agents who claimed that the investigation into Hunter Biden was improperly handled along with a purported WhatsApp message that showed Hunter leveraging his father to close a business deal.
Click through for article (and full 10-page letter). I’m glad they are pushing back – no that anything we say will get through to MAGAt cultists, but there are sane people out there who need to get exposed to facts.

Letters from an American – June 30, 2023
Quote – It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder. Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”
Click through for full letter (as always, click “Continue reading”). It’s an historian’s view of the SCOTUS’s recent prejudicial decisions in the context of out history.

Food For Thought