3/5/24

 Monday, March 5, 2023

Fulguration

Post-op

In bed at 9:30, awake and up at 4:30.  38°, drizzle, high of 43°.  The wind is NNE at 19 mph, 14-20/34. wind chill is 29°.  0.35" of rain in the last 24 hours.  Sunrise at 6:20 at 97°E, sunset at 5:46 at 263W, 11+26.  Solar noon at 12:02 p.m., altitude 41°.

Treadmill; pain.   I had the best night sleep's in a long time.  I took 2 8-hour Tylenol at about 9 p.m. and did 2 complete rounds of my PT stretches during the day, concentrating on gentle stretching, not pushing it.  The shoulder joint and deltoid muscle are still painful when I lift my arm and otherwise somewhat achy, but better than yesterday and the preceding days and weeks.  No significant pain or ROM problem with the right wrist.

I'm grateful for anesthesia, a clean operating room staffed by OR personnel who are hopefully well rested, well fed, and relatively stress-free, mindful of the children and adults in Gaza's shattered hospitals enduring amputations and other procedures without anesthesia, lying on dirty floors, tended to by exhausted, shattered medical personnel.

Why we're cynical about 'the rule of law.'  From yesterday's newsletter from Heather Cox Richardson, discussing the Supreme Court's decision leaving Trump on the Colorado ballot:

Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote that “in the course of unnecessarily deciding all of these questions when they were not even presented by the case, the five-Justice majority effectively decided not only that the former president will never be subject to disqualification, but that no person who ever engages in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States in the future will be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, notably did not recuse himself from participating in the case.

There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking. 

For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts. 

Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

To Be a Jew Today, After October 7th is a long opinion piece by Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman in this morning's WaPo.  He probably should have been more specific: To Be an AMERICAN LIBERAL Jew Today, After October 7th.  His essay is a worthwhile read.  It points out how for many older American Jews, both the Holocaust and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel became central to their identity and their ideology, somewhat akin to Christianity's idea of the Passion and the Redemption.  The comments after the essay are even more interesting.  In them,  I learned the term mahapach, referring to the seismic shift in Israeli politics in 1977 when Menachem Begin and the Likud Party took power away from the Labor Party of David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir.  It reminded me of the two images of Israel in people my age.  The first is Israel as a secular, socialist state idealized by the kibbutzim.  The second is a state characterized by religious domination, oppression, and apartheid.  The commenters point out the practical impossibility of a religious state being a democratic, liberal state.  Some of the comments also reinforced in me the thought that in many ways Israel and the United States are doppelgangers, each deeply divided and each subject to excessive influence by religious nationalists.  Israel has the settlers and the religious Zionists; we have the Evangelicals and Christian Nationalists.  Israel has Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich; we have Trump, Steven Miller, MAGA cultists, CPAC, and suchlike.