Quote of the Day.
“My faith took on new meaning on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, where I was knocked to the ground, essentially by what seemed like a supernatural hand. And I would like to think that God saved me for a purpose, and that’s to make our country greater than ever before.” The former president at a campaign rally on Monday.
And then there is this from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American yesterday
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
In an echo of her husband Sinclair Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939,…she later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said….. “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
Think about this last sentence/quote and then go back and read my above Quote of the Day. It scares the hell out of me.
A cease fire is needed before the region starts exploding.
Per the NY Times, a top U.S. official said on Monday that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could only be resolved through fully enforcing an 18-year-old United Nations resolution, which calls for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon and for the Lebanese militant group in effect to be disarmed along the border.
The official, Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s de facto envoy on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, spoke during a visit to Beirut, his first since the Israeli military launched a sweeping offensive against Hezbollah last month. Israel’s military campaign against the armed group has set off a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, displacing around a fifth of the population, and killing more than 2,400 people over the past year, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
“The situation has escalated out of control,” Mr. Hochstein told reporters in Beirut, the Lebanese capital. He said that the White House aimed to reach “a comprehensive agreement” that would see the full enforcement of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
I have said it before, and I will say it again. It is time for the U.S to stop supporting Netanyahu and his war. He has every incentive to keep the war going because he knows that his ability to remain as prime minister will stop the minute the war ends. Once he is out as prime minister, he will be held accountable for the crimes of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust that he has been indicted for prior to the start of the war.
Muscle Shoals
Last week I watched the documentary Muscle Shoals on You Tube. It is an outstanding story of the creation of the famous recording studios of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a sleepy little town in northwest Alabama on the Tennessee River.
Filmmaker Greg Camalier premiered his documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013. It is about Muscle Shoals sound, and features Rick Hall, FAME Studios, and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (Swampers) who had founded the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios. The film includes interviews with Percy Sledge, Wilson Picket, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Steve Winwood, Bona, Alicia Keys, and many others.
It is an amazing story of how these white rock musicians from northern Alabama created two of the greatest recording studios of our time. It became a place where some of the greatest talents in the world wanted to record their music with Rick Hall and the Swampers (as the studio band was known)
I was amazed to find out that the Swampers were the studio band who worked with Aretha Franklin to record most of her hits. At one point in the documentary, it tells the story of Paul Simon calling the studio saying he wants to make a recording with those great black musicians only to be told that he was more than welcome to come and record but he was going to be disappointed to find out the musicians were old white guys.
The documentary ends with Alicia Keys recording a song while playing the studio piano. For an Alicia Keys fan, this was the icing on the cake.
Here is the link to the documentary on You Tube. It is well worth your time. It is my Orchid and Video of the Day.
The first amendment is not there to be cherry picked.
From Joyce Vance Civil Discourse today.
Currently, abortion is prohibited after six weeks in the Florida, making it all but inaccessible, as few women know they are pregnant that early. Exceptions for rape and incest are available until 15 weeks, but access depends on “documentation.” And, as in other states where exceptions for the patient’s health exist, confusion and fear of legal action mean care isn’t always forthcoming.
But Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF), the coalition supporting the adoption of Amendment 4, had to go to court last week to protect its ability to run ads in support of the measure. They sued Florida’s state health department in federal court, alleging it shut down a television ad they placed.
The Florida health department sent cease-and-desist letters to local news stations to keep them from running the ad. A University of North Florida poll indicates that 60% of voters support Amendment 4. That is both the threshold of votes in favor it would need to become law and a number that could have interesting implications for the presidential race in Florida.
The First Amendment prohibits the government from placing prior restraints on speech, and core political speech, like the debate over adopting a constitutional amendment, is highly protected. Jessica Rosenworcel, the Federal Communications Commission chair, condemned the cease-and-desist letters, saying, “The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment. Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”
The cease-and-desist letters were signed by John Wilson, who was the general counsel for the health department until he resigned several days after sending the letters. Today we learned more when he filed an affidavit in the case, where he swore under oath that Governor Ron DeSantis’ office ordered him to send out the letters and that he subsequently resigned rather than send out more of them. This would seem to put responsibility squarely on the governor’s doorstep.
The first amendment is not something we choose to support when it is convenient. It is part of the core of this country. It is what separates democracies from authoritarian governments. Our soldiers have died protecting this right.
Governor Desantis gets my Onion of the Day for his trying to “cherry pick” when the first amendment applies to his policies and political likes and dislikes.
I love when our justice system works
From the Washington Post as appearing in today’s Detroit News.
A federal judge has ordered Rudy Giuliani to place numerous assets, including cash, jewelry and his New York apartment, into a receivership controlled by two former Georgia election workers as they seek to collect a $148 million defamation claim against the former lawyer for the former president.
The 24-page ruling orders Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, to place the assets into a receivership within seven days. But U.S. District Court Judge Lewis J. Liman of New York ordered the “immediate turnover” of Giuliani’s apartment on the Upper East Side, which is already for sale.
Liman also orders Giuliani to take legal steps that would allow the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, to seek an estimated $2 million in legal fees Giuliani has said he is owed by the former president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee for his work leading the former president’s post-2020 election legal challenges.
“The Court finds transfer and receivership is appropriate here as it will allow [Freeman and Moss] to stand in [Giuliani]’s shoes with respect to the former president’s campaign in order to effectively pursue that claim,” the judge wrote.
How to go from America’s Mayor to bankruptcy and disbarment in 20 years.
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Quote of the Day: See the above by the former president.
Orchid of the Day: Muscle Shoals the documentary
Onion of the Day: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for “cherry picking” the first amendment.
Question of the Day: Michigan or Michigan State on Saturday?
Image of the Day: Muscle Shoals the documentary. See above for the link.