* * *
More on Heat Advisories - Heat stroke can be fatal.When the National Weather Service, or what’s left of it after staff reductions, declares a ‘Heat Advisory,’ it is best to change your plans accordingly. It isn’t enough to just stay out of the sun and consume a lot of liquids. Indoor activities in air-conditioned homes, especially for senior citizens, are the way to go. This is a health issue. Heat stroke can be fatal. It’s a good time to pull down that book you’ve been meaning to read from the shelf or check out available movies on TV.
JL
* * *
ICE is Big, Very Big, Much Too Big
 |
| One of the many ICE recruiting posters, aimed at exiting law enforcement personnel, much to the distress of County Sheriffs, and other police chiefs, who presently employ them. |
Here’s an excerpt (the first few paragraphs) from the USA Today article carried on the front page of the Palm Beach Post on August 5.
‘Dangling bonuses of up to $50,000, federal officials are launching a massive recruitment campaign to hire more than 14,000 immigration agents, attorneys and other employees to help execute President Donald Trump’s border crackdown.
‘The president is newly flush with billions in funding and wants to deport one million people a year with the help of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“America needs you,” reads one of the ICE recruiting ads, featuring a finger-pointing Uncle Sam, evoking World War I recruiting posters. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.”
‘The federal spending plan finances the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents, making ICE the single-largest law enforcement agency in the country, larger than the FBI, DEA, ATF and other agencies combined. For comparison, the FBI has only abou13,700 special agents, according to the Justice Department.”
This recruiting drive is taking place during peacetime! I don’t know if the funds authorized for this include the purchase of brown shirts.
So what are YOU going to do about it? Make your Representative in Congress state their position! That's what! Congress has 'the power of the purse' in our government. The President must respect it or find another job.
Of course, if you honestly believe that America has been invaded by criminals and predators, you are part of the problem!
JL
* * *
Desperation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
President Trump is getting desperate. His sinking popularity is driving him further into attacking democracy. Why else would he urge Republican-dominated States to try to pull off non-scheduled emergency re-gerrymandering of Congressional districts in time to pick up seats in the House in 2026? If he can’t win legitimately, he does not hesitate to encourage his acolytes to break the rules or change them? And Texas Republicans dutifully follow his instructions.
They don’t recognize, as former Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis says in his recent posting, that ‘You can’t gerrymander your way out of a grocery bill.’ (Try checking out Nellis’ ferocious postings at https://endlessurgency.com/about . That’s ‘urgency,’ not surgery)
Trump also dislikes the less than rosy numbers coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His remedy for that: Fire that agency’s long-time head and install someone who will release numbers more to his liking.
And this extends to those he has himself appointed like his head of the Food and Drug Administration, who was pressured into quitting after three months on the job.
But Trump is very comfortable taking some of the advice of those just as out of touch with reality as he is, like ‘influencer’ Laura Loomer. She’s crazier than the President is, answering to no one, which gives him some sort of comfort in what he does.
Nevertheless, the President likes to make up his own facts when the real ones don’t suit him. Check out this very thorough piece from the New York Times about the facts that he makes up. CLICK HERE or copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/us/politics/trump-bls-jobs-facts.html on your browser line. But don’t laugh at it. A majority of American voters cast ballots for electors pledged to him in 2024, and they must share the blame.
It occurs to me that you might want to forward this New York Times piece to anyone you know who might have been seduced by Trump’s lies.
* *
A desperate president is a dangerous president because he might carry out acts of desperation that affect both domestic and foreign policy. The saga of Donald Trump will not end well for our country, and that is the conclusion Thomas Friedman seems to be reaching in his latest New York Times opinion piece. To read it, CLICK HERE or copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20250805&instance_id=159918&nl=the-morning®i_id=78918068&segment_id=203275&user_id=02fa158150d34dc186b01b1b8ec7a224 on your browser line.
In it, Friedman includes the following in regard to the firing of a long-time Professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point:
"And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.”
So Trump, dedicated to ‘easier wrongs,’ had her fired.
There is plenty of fuel for pessimism around and little for optimism in view of the ability of the misinformed and misguided to elect the wrong people to office. And they are not limited to Texas and Florida. I suspect that you know some of them. They are all around us.
JL
* * *
Voting Rights Act Will Get to SCOTUS
The 1965 Voting Rights Act enabled States to create Congressional Districts designed to counteract the gerrymandering in some States that resulted in reduced representation for people of color. Now this issue is headed to the Supreme Court.
Professor Heather Cox Richardson in her August 5 posting described it as follows:
‘Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether a Louisiana district map that took race into consideration to draw a district that would protect Black representation is unconstitutional. About a third of Louisiana’s residents are Black, but in 2022 its legislature carved the state up in such a way that only one of its six voting districts was majority Black. A federal court determined that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the legislature redrew the map to give the state two majority-Black districts.
A group of “non-African American voters” immediately challenged the law, saying the new maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment because the mapmakers prioritized race when drawing them. A divided federal court agreed with their argument. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in.’
It is odd that those who traditionally object to the 14th Amendment’s guarantees against racism are now looking to it for protection in their efforts to preserve racism.
My guess is that the politically-biased SCOTUS will vote that the remedy the Voting Rights Acts provided in situations like this is unconstitutional. We shall see.
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
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.
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
More on the 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. Most are from vendors which I may have used years ago. 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 ‘Promotion’ 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.
3. Then I read my email.
Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine (or other search engines) 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). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
After such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than the AI summary. I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
JL
* * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment