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| Trump Harris |
The Only 2024 Presidential Debate
IMPORTANT FLORIDA ELECTION INFORMATION!
All requests to vote by mail made before November 8, 2022 have now expired! In Palm Beach County, to check to see if yours has, or to request a vote-by-mail ballot, call 561-656-6208, or visit the Supervisor of Election’s website at https://www.votepalmbeach.gov/. (Elsewhere contact your Supervisor of Elections.) Election Day falls within the always unpredictable hurricane season, so this is very important! Here are some important dates to remember:
Last day to register to vote is Monday, Oct. 7.
Last day to request a vote-by-mail ballot is Thursday, Oct. 24.
Deadline for County to receive mail-in ballots is 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 5 (Election Day).
Some early in-person voting sites will be available from Saturday, Oct. 26 until Saturday, Nov. 2. Check locations by contacting the Supervisor of Elections.
Election Day is Nov. 5.
JL
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Nameless Football Jerseys
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| Penn State Football Player |
Let me add Penn State to the list of college football teams that think they are so great that they don’t bother to put their players names on their jerseys, and therefore don’t deserve the support of anyone other than their most loyal alumni. There are many more, I believe. The bigger they are, the harder they will eventually fall. They just don't care.
Along with USC, Notre Dame, and of course the New York Yankees, their actions define ‘hubris’ or often unwarranted ‘arrogance.’ (Go look these words up.) These are not desirable qualities.
JL
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More on Justice Scalia’s 2008 Gun Control Decision
Continuing my layman’s commentary on Justice Scalia’s decision in D.C. vs Heller in 2008, I want to point out that Scalia knew what he was doing, and was almost apologetic about it.
Many laws exist for many years without courts deciding what they really mean. Justice Scalia’s position and opinion (that gun rights pre-existed militias) had not prevailed for almost 220 years, without being successfully reflected in SCOTUS decisions.
After recognizing that, and stating his opinion, Justice Scalia was almost apologetic about doing something to finally challenge the usually accepted position that the Amendment only pertained to enabling militias to be formed. Here is a quote directly from his opinion:
“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott 333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.[Footnote 26]
We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
So Justice Scalia knew what he was doing, but rather than let sleeping dogs lie, he made his choice (that gun rights pre-existed militias), one that was his honest interpretation of the law, but which also resulted in the proliferation of weapons and the deaths of many Americans. To do so was his decision, for him to live by, and for others to die by, often violently.
It was a terrible decision that he made, ignoring human lives, still trusting in the very protections (underlined above) provided by years of decisions which his opinion overrode. What he wrote is all the more unforgivable because he knew what he was doing. History will never forgive him.
Note the portions of his words that I have underlined.
JL
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More ‘Thumb on the Scale’ of Democracy – The Presidency
By now, from the previous posting on Jackspotpourri, you know that the composition of the Senate is heavily skewed toward the less populated States. And since the two Senators each State has, regardless of its population, also serve in determining the number of Electoral votes it has in choosing a president (one for each Representative and Senator), there is a ‘thumb on the scale’ there too.
All of this comes from the efforts of the slave-owning Founding Fathers, led by James Madison, in trying to preserve the power of those slaveholding States controlled by wealthy landowners. The rest of the States went along with it, wanting the Constitution approved at any cost, assuming that slavery would eventually ‘die on the vine’ and wither away on its own.
But the slaveholding States did not let that happen and were willing to destroy the Union (remember that the Nation is made up of independent States, supposedly ‘united’ together (E Pluribus Unum – One out of Many) and were willing to fight the Civil War to defend their independent position in order to preserve slavery, the basis of their economies.
And so we are stuck, even today, with a Senate giving a disproportionate amount of power to a minority of Americans, as the prior posting pointed out in regard to the Supreme Court, and as pointed out above, to the election of our president as well. That’s why solving problems like gun violence and abortion rights is so difficult.
The only solutions that I see, short of waiting for the Constitution to be modified over the next century (the ‘amending’ process takes many, many, years), are enormous, overwhelming, victories by Democrats in the election of the House, the Senate, the presidency, and State legislatures over the next few dozen years, starting on Nov. 5, 2024. If you agree with me, it is your job to make that happen!
(This article would be incomplete if it didn’t mention the ‘National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.’ This would call for States with a total of at least 270 electoral votes, a number sufficient to elect a president, to legislatively agree to submit all its electoral votes to the candidate who won a majority of the popular vote in the entire nation. This idea has been around a while and has been stalled with only sixteen states providing 209 electoral votes approving it, coming far short of the required 270 electoral votes to elect a president. This might be changed if the Democrats are able to take over additional State legislatures in November, enabling the Constitutional ‘thumb on the scale’ of the biased Electoral College to be bypassed. I am sure that if this happens, it will end up before the Supreme Court.)
JL
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An Obituary for Silverware
Prehistoric man didn’t have a drawer filled with eating utensils. All they had were very sharp knives, used to kill and slice up the animals they cooked and ate, and harvest the more stubborn vegetation they also ate. Stabbing a chunk of meat with a knife was the limit of the use of ‘silverware.’ Most of the time they just picked up their food with their hands and shoved it into their mouths.
Of course, this wasn’t possible with soups and mushier foods and created a problem, eventually solved when some genius invented the spoon to help with that, shortly after how to make a bowl, or even use a coconut shell for one, was discovered.
And this is the way people ate for thousands and thousands of years until the ancient Greeks invented the fork to hold meat steady while it was being cut with a knife. The later Byzantines eventually improved on this, learning to pick up cut-up meat and other foods with that fork and deliver it directly to their mouths, without their picking it up with their hands.
I find it very strange, these days, to see that mankind is returning to its original, ‘primitive,’ utensil-less, eating habits. It may have started when the British Earl of Sandwich ordered that his slice of meat be placed between two slices of bread back in 1762, so he didn’t have to get up from the card table and go into the dining room to eat.
Named after the Earl, handheld ‘Sandwiches,’ and their cousins, hot dog and hamburger rolls, are familiar to all of us. And silverware can be further avoided with handheld slices of pizza, wraps, tacos, and food stuffed into the pocket of a pita.
The prevalence of baked, mashed, or boiled potatoes, traditionally delivered to one’s mouth by a fork, has been surpassed by ‘french fries,’ another food that only requires the use of fingers, joining chicken wings in that messy category.
There are restaurant chains where the only food available comes on a handheld ‘hoagie’ or ‘sub’ role. I always have a supply of fajitas in my refrigerator which I use with cheeses, salads, and various spreads to deliver by hand to my tongue. The days of using that fork to gather up kernels of corn (‘niblets’) scraped from an ear of corn have been replaced by just grasping the salted and buttered cob with two hands and eating away at it, row by row. Only this afternoon, an employee in the place where I shop was passing out chips topped with guacamole for customers to sample and eat with their hands.
I think Prehistoric man might feel at home today.
(Footnote: The last remaining flatware manufacturer in the United States, Oneida, ceased operating as such in 2006, but some of their products are still produced in Oneida, NY, under the name of Liberty Tabletop by the Sherrill Manufacturing Company.)
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it (Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.) If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!
Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you. Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.
Strange “Hits’! The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore and Hong Kong has somewhat lessened. I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter. This is an election year. Spread the word.
JL
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