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I Am Overwhelmed by All That is Going OnUsually I work on what will appear on the next Jackspotpourri during the three or four days between its postings. And that is what follows in today’s posting, despite a deluge of fresh material worthy of inclusion being present at the time I am posting this supposedly fresh posting of Jackspotpourri.
I am overwhelmed and just don’t have the time to include all of it today. But here is a summary of what Jackspotpourri is NOT covering today. It’s up to you to check out these vital issues on your own! Do a little 'googling' to find the pertinent postings.
• Paul Krugman writes about the delays at Newark Airport being a symptom of Elon Musk’s elimination of supposedly unnecessary government jobs.
• Three eminent professors, including Yale’s Timothy Snyder, alarmed at what is happening to our government, have left the country, accepting positions at the University of Toronto, according to the New York Times.
• President Trump’s speech before Saudi leadership at Riyadh marked our abandoning efforts to encourage countries with undemocratic governments from trying to do things the way we do and more or less, agreeing to deal with despots. This was covered in two essays in the Free Press blog.
• The Supreme Court is about to consider what Birthright citizenship, bestowed by the 14th Amendment, really means. Opponents of Birthright citizenship look to what they claim was its more limited intent, (just for freed slaves). If so, does ‘intent’ apply to the 2nd Amendment as well, where its ‘limited’ intent was spelled out in its first thirteen words?
• Retired conservative judge J. Michael Luttig claims that that ‘the courts are holding and will continue to hold,’ but President Trump ‘will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, ‘No more.’ Heather Cox Richardson says that they are indeed ‘rising up’!
I have my doubts.
JL
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Ignorance No Handicap
The preceding posting on Jackspotpourri identified President Trump as being an ignorant person, citing a few examples. To make up for that deficiency, throughout his life, Donald Trump has successfully polished his skills as a huckster, a salesman, a glad-hander, a ‘wheeler-dealer,’ and a peddler of snake-oil remedies with sufficient resources to repel any detractors with seemingly unending and costly litigation. This skill ultimately enabled him to be elected to the nation’s presidency not once, but twice.
Another ‘ignorant’ President, Andrew Jackson, achieved the same result by letting the voting population be convinced that his military victory at New Orleans in the War of 1812 validated his leadership abilities, at a time when the nation was groping around seeking leaders to follow in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers. It took until Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 for one to be found.
JL
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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor Says Lawyers Must ‘Stand Up’ and ‘Fight This Fight’
In pointed remarks, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience of hundreds of lawyers last Thursday at a program at Georgetown University’s Law School that she had joined them as “an act of solidarity.” I believe she said this to make it clear that she was not speaking in her role as a Justice of the Supreme Court, but as a lawyer, to fellow lawyers.
As reported by Adam Liptak in the New York Times, her remarks came against the backdrop of immense stress on lawyers from the Trump administration.
“If you’re not used to fighting, and losing battles, then don’t become a lawyer,” she said. “Our job is to stand up for people who can’t do it themselves.”
“Right now,” she added, “we can’t lose the battles we are facing.”
Justice Sotomayor spoke in general terms, but her remarks came against that backdrop of immense stress on lawyers and the legal system from the Trump administration. That tension included a string of executive orders from President Trump retaliating against prominent law firms, stripping their lawyers of security clearances, barring them from entering federal buildings and discouraging federal officials from interacting with the firms.
She was once a summer associate at one of those firms, Paul Weiss, which led the way in striking a deal with the administration, prompting criticism that it had sacrificed its principles to protect its bottom line. Many other leading firms followed suit.
Justice Sotomayor indicated that she had a different conception of what lawyers ought to do. “We need trained and passionate and committed lawyers to fight this fight,” she said. “For me, being here with you is an act of solidarity.”
(It took about two days for the ignorati at FoxNews, noting her remarks, to receive their marching orders from the White House and unleash a barrage of criticism of Justice Sotomayor.)
JL
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How the Conclave Chose Pope Leo XIV
Among the many articles about Pope Leo XIV, what occurred during the ‘secret’ Conclave that elected him is best described in a New York Times article that you can read by CLICKING HERE or copying and pasting https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/world/europe/conclave-vote-pope-leo-robert-prevost.html?algo=reverse-chron&block=3&campaign_id=142&emc=edit_fory_20250511&fellback=false&imp_id=5880844909334050&instance_id=154335&nl=for-you&nlid=78918068&pool=channel-replacement-ls&rank=5®i_id=78918068&req_id=1305417648555655&segment_id=197752&surface=for-you-email-channelless&user_id=02fa158150d34dc186b01b1b8ec7a224&variant=holdout_fye_channelless on the browser line of your device.
It’s the sort of article that will prompt some of its sources, mostly Cardinals who had participated in the Conclave, to tell the article’s writers, of which there were four, that they didn’t think what they had said to them would end up in print. Separately, none of these Cardinals violated their vows of silence, but putting two and two and two and two together added up to eight, and that is what the New York Times printed.
JL
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Stopping Trump’s Authoritarian Overreach, Achilles Heel Again … and Mothers Day
Heather Cox Richardson’s May 12 posting on ‘Letters from an American’ ripped into the rotteness of the Trump administration, highlighting its attacks on ‘habeas corpus,’ (the rights of those accused of crimes, including any held in detention, to have their day in court), as well as violations of the Constitution’s prohibition on Presidents’ taking gifts, and other transgressions, amounting to ‘authoritarian overreach.’
I’ll quote one line from that posting:
‘It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach.’
‘Hoping’ is not enough though, and too many of them still reside in an imaginary alternate Trumpian reality. Dependence on untrustworthy Republicans not remaining quiet in the face of their Party’s acceptance of unconstitutional behavior and disregard of the Constitution’s checks and balances is an inadequate life preserver for our democracy!
These Republicans who are ‘not on board the MAGA train’ may hold the future of our democracy in their hands. Read Professor Richardson’s full postings by CLICKING HERE or visiting https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
This is what happens when our representative democracy bares its ‘Achilles Heel’ to the poisoned arrows of those who do not believe in it.
Permit me to again (Jackspotpourri has gone there before) remind you that the root of our democracy’s ‘Achilles Heel’ consists of an undemocratic Senate whereby every State, regardless of population, has two Senators, and that this heavy ‘thumb on the scale’ of democracy extends further into the composition of the Electoral College in voting for a president, who makes appointments to the Supreme Court, confirmable by that unrepresentative Senate as well. Oy!
Back in 1789, this was a massive ‘bribe’ paid to those States whose economies were dependent upon slavery to entice them to support the Constitution. But ever since the Civil War, slavery is no more, and there is no reason to preserve the results of that ‘bribe’!
We will approach having a true representative democracy only [1] when the President is elected by a popular, nationwide, vote, and [2] State representation in the Senate becomes population-based, as it is in the House of Representative.)
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To honor Mothers Day, Professor Richardson in her May 10 posting described an elderly neighbor whom, as she aged, illustrated the necessity of making friends with succeeding generations through the ‘mothers’ of each generation.
She wrote that ‘I watched her lose my grandmother's generation and then work to make friends with my mother's generation. And when they, too, died, she set out, in her eighties, to make friends with my generation. Every day was a new day.’ There's a lesson there.
JL
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Please Pardon Me for Demonstrating, Maybe
The other day, twenty-five demonstators at the Capitol protesting threatened MAGA cuts in Medicaid funding were arrested and others forcibly removed by Capitol Police because It is against the law to protest inside congressional buildings.
Okay, then what about the hundreds who invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021, doing millions of dollars in damage, and who were arrested and convicted, only to be pardoned by the President? Trump and his supporters cannot have it both ways.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Please Read This!
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered daily ‘paper’ newspaper (currently the Palm Beach Post, a Gannett publication) and what appears in my daily email. Be aware that when I open that email, I take these steps. 1. I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or two emails I still get each day at my old email address to see from where they are being sent. Without reading 99% of them, I usually immediately delete them. 2. I then go to the email arriving at jacklippman18@gmail.com. Gmail enables ‘Promotion’ emails to be so designated and separated out. I believe their criteria are whether or not they end up asking for donations or if they are no more than advertisements. I ignore most of these emails without reading them, deleting them. A very few, perhaps one or two a day, get moved over to the two or three dozen other emails which I will actually open.
Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want. Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). I do not use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri because I am in the dark about the techniques used and possible sources AI has mined to develop them. Sources with their origin clearly identified to me still follow, and these are what I use in composing Jackspotpourri postings. (In doing searches on Google, I have found that these AI summaries can sometimes … but not always … be avoided by saying so in your search. For example, instead of searching for ‘FDR’s New Deal,’ I might search for ‘FDR’s New Deal – No AI.’ This is a work in progress.)
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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.
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.
JL
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