Friday, September 26, 2025
D+325/221/-1214
1978 New York District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley ruled that women sportswriters cannot be banned from locker rooms
1983 Soviet military officer Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov averted a worldwide nuclear war by judging a supposed missile attack from the US to be an error
1984 President Reagan vetoed sanctions against South Africa
2019 US income inequality was the widest it has been in over 50 years, with the worst levels in California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, and New York, according to new census figures
2020 Donald Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg
2023 Donald Trump was found guilty of fraud for inflating his assets in a civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James
In bed at 8, trying to relieve nasty, recurring pain near right kidney, up at 5:10, after a rough night with some time spent on LZB. 59°, high of 73°, a mostly cloudy day ahead.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 9:30 a.m. Trulicity injection at 9:45.
I filled the bird feeders this morning at about 7:45. As usual, the tube feeder still had some sunflower seeds and nuts in it, but the tray feeder had only seed shells. I also put out a new suet cake. This photo shows what I saw as I walked back to the garage: beautiful clouds floating in the air above me, white and light gray against the cerulean blue sky. It was 61° with no breeze. Seagulls were flying overhead and I hoped to capture their image in my photo, but no such luck. Taking the photo was tricky, holding, aiming, and triggering my heavy iPhone with its protective cover while holding the empty tube feeder filler and the other plastic container I use for the tray feeder. Any time I look up from the horizontal, I tend to lose my balance and fall down, a peril of old age. I survived the challenge.😊 I am deeply indebted to my old pal Janine Geske for triggering my newfound appreciation of the sky above me with her frequent FB photos of sunrises over Lake Michigan. She has enriched my life in this way and many others. Thanks, Janine.
James Comey has been indicted, another outrage. Trump's TS tweet:
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey … He was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts … He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation.”
Shame. Danger. The New York Times article by Alan Feuer, Jonah E. Bromwich, and Maggie Haberman worth copying nearly in full:
Trump Gets the Retribution He Sought, and Shatters Norms in the Process
The clearest way to understand the extraordinary nature of the indictment on Thursday of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, is to offer up a simple recitation of the facts.
An inexperienced prosecutor loyal to President Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most-reviled opponents. She did so not only at Mr. Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of both her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for raising concerns that there was insufficient evidence to indict.
The charges, which were filed around 7 p.m. in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., thrust the Justice Department into perilous new territory. The push for the indictment trampled over the agency’s long tradition of maintaining distance from the White House and resisting political pressure, and it raised the prospect of further arbitrary prosecutions pushed by Mr. Trump against his enemies.
Heightening the break-glass moment, the felony charges against Mr. Comey, who stands accused of making false statements and obstructing justice, were rushed into court as Mr. Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, hurried to beat the quickly approaching statute of limitations on Mr. Comey’s purported crimes.
The rush to prosecute Mr. Comey was the clearest example yet of how the normal process of justice has been reversed under Mr. Trump, showing how the president came into his second term with targets already in mind and ultimately pressured the Justice Department, over a degree of internal resistance, into finding a way to charge a former director of the F.B.I.
Ms. Halligan, who had been working as a top official in the White House staff secretary’s office and had previously served as a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, had until now never prosecuted a single case in her career.
Mr. Trump nevertheless appointed her as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday afternoon, after publicly berating Attorney General Pam Bondi on Saturday night for not moving more aggressively to prosecute Mr. Comey and two other figures who are longtime targets of his retribution campaign, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.
Although Ms. Halligan had not been fully briefed on the Comey case before arriving and despite an energetic effort by the career professionals under her to dissuade her from bringing charges, she did exactly that. In a highly unusual move for a top federal prosecutor, she personally presented the case against Mr. Comey to the grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The charges against Mr. Comey were filed around 7 p.m. Thursday in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
In voting to indict, the grand jury judged that the evidence it heard indicated that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Comey might have committed a crime. But prosecutors have expansive sway over grand juries, and it remains unclear, given the secretive nature of such bodies, how much the grand jurors were aware of the broader circumstances of the case.
Since his first term in the White House, Mr. Trump has wanted prosecutors who would follow through on his desire to use the legal system to punish his perceived enemies, mostly in vain. He often railed to his own advisers and on social media about those he wanted to face charges but who were never prosecuted — among them, Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of State John Kerry.
But in his second term, Mr. Trump has recruited Justice Department officials who share his sense of persecution and has been emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling granting him a broad form of immunity from prosecution. That has allowed him to effectively lay waste to the post-Watergate norms that for nearly half a century have kept presidents from intervening directly in the affairs of the Justice Department.
In the past eight months, Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has summarily fired scores of prosecutors and agents who worked on the criminal cases that he faced while he was out of office. And he has often used those cases as a justification for seeking retributive prosecutions not only against Mr. Comey, but also against other opponents like Ms. James, who pursued a civil case against him in New York, and Mr. Schiff, who while serving in the House led impeachment hearings against him.
But the two-count indictment against Mr. Comey is the most far-reaching and public example of the second Trump administration’s efforts to co-opt the criminal justice system. And while Mr. Trump’s allies see it as an overdue and legitimate effort to hold Mr. Comey accountable for what they consider an abuse of power, it could well go down as a moment when a fundamental democratic norm — that justice is dispensed without regard to political or personal agendas — was cast aside in a dangerous way.
“What we are seeing is the almost wholesale collapse of the Justice Department as an organization based on the rule of law,” said Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a former department official who now teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.
That Mr. Trump could successfully initiate such a case also increases the potential costs of opposing him, an expansion of presidential power that could chill public dissent across the country.
Notes about Lindsey Halligan. Apparently, she was raised Catholic. She went to a Catholic high school and college. She studied broadcast journalism in college and twice entered the Miss Colorado USA competition, a semi-finalist in 2009 and third runner-up in 2010. She met DJT at his golf course in West Palm Beach and started representing him in connection with the classified documents case.
Peggy Noonan has an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal, titled Charlie Kirk and the New Christian GOP. In it, she writes:
[T]he GOP is becoming a more explicitly Christian party than it ever has been . . . As I watched the Kirk memorial I thought: The people in that audience are the sons and daughters of the patronized Christians of that old White House. They had a seat at the table then but are at the head of the table now.
In the Charlie Kirk memorial, I saw a shift in some new way into a more self-consciously Christian GOP, one composed of Christians and those who like or don’t mind them, or feel what they stand for on policy is constructive. The other party will be everyone else.
In the Charlie Kirk memorial, I saw a shift in some new way into a more self-consciously Christian GOP, one composed of Christians and those who like or don’t mind them, or feel what they stand for on policy is constructive. The other party will be everyone else.
Reservations? Of course. If it’s true, it feels European—the “Christian Democrats”—and not American. As a Christian, I see things through a Christian lens, but big democracies demand many lenses to maintain peace in the political sphere. Modern democracies get through in part by not letting the lines get too vivid, the demarcations too sharp. A big blur can be helpful. But that would be another column. What I think I see evolving is big. That wasn’t just a memorial; it was a stepping forward in a new way of Christians and the Republican Party.
As a member of Noonan's Everybody Else party, this is frightening. She is Irish Catholic and a practicing one, a member of St. Thomas More parish on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She is also a long-term Republican, one of Ronald Reagan's excellent speechwriters, maybe the best. Reading her words, however, one has to wonder who she had in mind as the Christians and whom she excluded. I wrote on 9/13/25 about the radically different kinds of Christians, those who find the heart of their religion in the parable of the Good Samaritan and Matthew 25: 31-46 (What you did for the least of these, . . .), and those who are grounded in the theology of John Calvin, including his favoring small government, and how that teaching evolved in America through the Southern Baptists and their favoring Black slavery.
My 6 a.m. thoughts center on radically competing understandings of Christianity or of Judeo-Christian values coinciding with radically competing political orientations, the thought that one kind of Christian and Jew votes Democratic and another votes Republican. I stick with the Christians because it's the only religious tradition that I am deeply familiar with. For some Christians, the heart of their personal religion is Matthew 25: 31-46 - What you did for the least of these, you did for me and the parable of the Good Samaritan at Luke 10:25-37. For evangelical Christians, the most important biblical themes are salvation by grace through Faith alone, sin and the human need for redemption, and the divide between the 'saved' and the everyone else. Faith, belief, being born again, a personal relationship with Jesus, all predominate over "good works" such as those described in Matthew 25: 31-46 and Luke 10:25-37. I think it's accurate to say that evangelicals focus more on the inherent sinfulness of mankind, described by John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion:
“We are so vitiated and perverted in every part of our nature that by this great corruption we stand justly condemned and convicted before God.”
“There is nothing in us that is not defiled.”
“Our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil that it can never be idle.”
“The human heart is so steeped in sin, that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness.”
“The will is so entirely vitiated and corrupted in every part, that it can produce nothing but evil.”
These statements emphasize Calvin's belief in our species' utter depravity since the Original Sin in Eden. On the other hand, he believed, with St. Paul, that governments were divinely instituted to preserve order, punish evil, promote justice, and also to organize, regulate, and enforce care for the poor. Importantly, Calvin distinguished between those who were poor through no fault of their own (e.g., widows, orphans, the disabled, the unemployed through economic conditions) and those who were idle, disorderly, or willfully dependent. In America, because of our long history of White Supremacy, the notion of the "unworthy" poor easily converted to "shiftless" Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and Indians. Among many evangelical Christians influenced by Calvinism, government programs designed to address and remedy our long history of invidious discrimination against racial minorities were disfavored as encouraging "shiftlessness" and dependency. This was especially true of the Southern Baptists, who split from northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of slavery. It's Southern Baptists, and their religious kin, that I most identify with the term "Evangelical Christians," who favor personal responsibility, limited government, “states’ rights” and local control—language that cloaked resistance to racial equality.
Welfare and anti-poverty programs from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (e.g., Medicaid, food stamps, housing aid) were resisted in this culture because they were seen as disproportionately helping Black communities and expanding federal power. By the late 1970s, the SBC was central to the rise of the Religious Right. The turning point came when the IRS moved against the tax-exempt status of segregated “Christian academies” (private schools founded to avoid integration). Many Southern Baptists rallied to oppose this. Leaders like Jerry Falwell (a Baptist pastor) and others framed the issue as government intrusion into religious freedom, but the context was often resistance to integration and programs benefiting Black Americans. Over time, the SBC has become aligned strongly with the Republican Party and now with Donald Trump, emphasizing opposition to welfare programs, affirmative action, and race-based government interventions. What we don't see emphasized among these Christians is Matthew 25: 31-46 and Luke 10: 25-37, It is solely through Faith, Faith alone and not good works, that salvation comes. The charitable, compassionate deeds described by Jesus in Matthew and Luke are not required to get into Heaven, and in any event, are deeds to be performed by individuals and perhaps by churches, not by governments. The evangelicals oppose the governmental social programs supported by most mainline Protestants and by the Catholic Church. Increasingly, however, Catholics are voting with the evangelicals, and right-wing Catholics hold important and powerful positions in the national government.
Although I started writing these thoughts at 6 this morning, and added to them at different times during this day, which accounts at least in some part for its incoherence.😞
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. Kneller's Happy Campers by Etgar Keret. Spurred by the fact that it's due back at the libary today, I finished it. I also loved it. Terrifically funny. I'm not sure what it is in addition to funny. It's "about" suicide, death, Heaven, Hell, God, and what else. That's what I need to think about. I really enjoy reading Keret's writing; it's hard to put down. Strange, weird, allegorical, surreal, interesting, and so readable.
