Half Way Through Fascinating Book. Much More.

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A LOT OF JOKES ABOUT BLONDE FEMALES FLOAT AROUND THE INTERNET BUT SOME MAY BE SURPRISED THAT THERE IS A WHOLE GROUP OF JOKES ABOUT MEN THAT MANY DO NOT SEE.

ENJOY THIS OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN.

One day my housework-challenged Husband decided to wash his Sweatshirt. Seconds after he stepped into the laundry room, he shouted to me, 'What setting do I use on the washing machine?'

'It depends,' I replied. 'What does it say on your shirt?'

He yelled back, ' Denver Broncos !'

And they say blondes are dumb...

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'It's just too hot to wear clothes today,' Jack says as he stepped out of the shower. 'Honey, what do you think the neighbors would think if I mowed the lawn like this?'

'Probably that I married you for your money,' she replied.

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Q: Why do little boys whine?

A: They are practicing to be men.

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While creating husbands, God promised women that good and ideal husbands would be found in all corners of the world........

......then He made the earth round, and laughed and laughed and laughed. 

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It is increasingly obvious, most liberals are nothing but  liars. They care only for themselves and power.

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I am half way through the current book I am reading.  Here is a partial review OF: "The Pursuit of Happiness. How classical writers on Virtue Insure Humility.

Ben Franklin was a very structured man.  He devised a series of "do's" he lived by in order to achieve happiness.  He relied heavily on Cicero and a preacher named Tillstson to develop his philosophy which allowed him to pursue happiness and eventually  led him to join Samuel Adams and Jefferson as the authors of our Declaration of Independence. 

Over the past 200 plus years, Americans seem to have lost our discipline and now find ourselves where we are.

Ironically, as for Jefferson he had 3 accomplishments of which he was proud.  

They were The Establishment of The University of Virginia, becoming Governor of Va. and the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The latter was his proudest accomplishment.

He drew his philosophical inspiration from Cicero and believed a healthy mind rests in reason. He had immense respect for Wilson and particularly Madison and respected them for their Scottish educational background. He also respected the thoughts of women.  His views were formed around the time of the protests against stamps and the right to protect one's home from unwanted occupation.

He also  believed all men were created equal but was an avowed hypocrite because he owned slaves and preferred personal comforts over morality.

His father, Peter,  was uneducated but he admonished his son to never ask others to do what you can do yourself.

Jefferson was brilliant without question.

As for George Washington, he was probably the nation's greatest hero and a true patriot. He considered Hamilton like a son.

He prevented the army from mutinying because Congress did not pay them.  His father, Augustine, had a classical education and died in 1743 when George was 11.He was raised by his mother and she was hyper critical causing him to become stoic. He spent his entire life learning to control his temper. He was exceptionally brave.

Congress eventually succumbed and met their financial and moral obligation in full and upon Washington's death he too settled with his debtors, freed his slaves, endowed schools for their education but was concerned whether citizens would rise above their greed and place the nation's interest above their own.

He was willing to listen to all before making his decision and was concerned partisan politics would harm the nation He reluctantly served a second term and asked Hamilton to redraft his Second Farewell Speech due to his concerns.

His self-mastery led to his industriousness and he divided every day into four sessions and adhered to them throughout his life.

He crafted his famous Letter to The Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I drafting it from the old testament quoting Micha.

What I have drawn from all of this is that simple phrases undergirded the foundation of America and our belief that the pursuit of happiness was predicated on reason, selflessness and a desire to place nation above self.

Brilliant and well educated were our founding fathers and  mostly  drew their philosophical thoughts  from Cicero. That said, I submit  we have strayed from our roots and no longer are a nation of virtue. Lamentably, we no longer place nation above self, nor are we willing to use reason as the basis of forming decisions.

Another matter that leaves me querulous is why, since women are half the equation of marriage, the Declaration of Independence does not recognize them as the equal of men? Since they are from "Venus" and Man from "Mars" I remain  perplexed even vexed.  What a waste of thought and arrogance.

Furthermore, I believe we have drifted away from " home plate" and are paying a dear and unnecessary price.  We have a republic if we can keep it said Ben.

Madison rejected Socrates and populist passion and instead embraced cool deliberateness based on his belief Athenians embraced mobile intentions.

MADISON BELIEVED IT CRITICAL TO FOCUS ON LONGER INTERESTS VERSUS SHORT TERM GRATIFICATION FOR A SOCIETY TO PURSUE AND ENJOY PEACE OF MIND AND TRANQUILITY.

MADISON AND HAMILTON LABORED OVER THE FEDERALIST PAPERS IN ORDER TO PROMOTE HARMONY AND HAPPINESS  AMONG THE 3 BRANCHES. (READ 62 AND 78.)

MADISON WAs GREATLY  INFLUENCED BY HIS FATHER, PHILIP.

At the time of Jefferson's election. historians concluded  he gave the greatest inauguration speech in support of why citizens could be trusted to to govern by reason not passion..

However, Jefferson's election caused a split with John Adams but eventually they laid  aside their animosity  and engaged in an extensive period of letter writing expressing their commonality of views.  Both concluded, as their lives came to an end they had lived well and experienced tranquility and the pursuit of happiness.

Meanwhile, Jefferson continued to be a slave owner. and his amoral and hypocrite stance haunts us to this day. 

Coming back to John Adams, he too was cut from the same cloth. From age 11, till he died at 81, he too kept a diary of his daily desire to pursue happiness through, what the authors call, Stoical self mastery. He said to his son in 1827: "A dairy, if honestly kept is one of the best preservatives of Morals."  He too had a hot temper and struggled, as did Washington, to control it. He was most self-critical and beat himself up for not living up to his potential.

John's mother, Abigail was stern and and preached the foundation of virtue is religion and quoting from the Ten Commandments drove him that he should base his upon the phrase : "Though shalt Love thy Neighbor as thyself." 

And:

John Quincy Adams, Christian Nationalist

A religious reading of the Declaration of Independence has a long pedigree.

By Samuel Goldman

The term “Christian nationalism,” as Orwell said of “fascism,” has no meaning except insofar as it signifies “something not desirable.” Take Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla’s contention earlier this year that “the one thing that unites” so-called Christian nationalists supporting Donald Trump is the belief that “our rights as Americans” come from God, not “any earthly authority.”

Ms. Przybyla later conceded that the Declaration of Independence states that “all men” are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” If that’s Christian nationalism, it follows that the U.S. is a Christian nation. Christianity and biblical religion are essential to the American political tradition. They don’t, however, operate as many claim they do.

There is ample precedent for a religious interpretation of the Declaration. On July 4, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams described it as the culmination of a Christian revolution. In “theories of the crown and the mitre,” Adams proposed, “man had no rights.” The discovery of inalienable liberty of conscience in matters of doctrine led to a re-evaluation of man’s obligation to ecclesiastical and civil powers. Whig reformers took tentative steps against “the oppressors of church and state” in Britain but still saw freedom as a privilege. The natural basis of rights was recognized only in America, where the government was founded on “a social compact formed upon the elementary principles of civil society, in which conquest and servitude had no part.”

For some critics, this involved a rebellion against divinely ordained hierarchy. According to Adams, it was the basis of “genuine Holy Alliance,” in contrast to the spurious piety of contemporary European autocrats. The Declaration, he insisted, wasn’t merely an assertion of national independence. It was a providential event akin to the establishment of the biblical Israel.

Adams’s account wasn’t unusual. As historian Miles Smith argues in his book “Religion and Republic,” religious interpretations of national identity and purpose were widespread in the states. Today we might read the Declaration, which doesn’t include specifically Christian references, as an expression of Thomas Jefferson’s skepticism about divine revelation and institutional religion. Yet the Continental Congress revised his draft to include references to the “Supreme Judge of the world” and to invoke the support of “divine Providence.”

Despite the text’s denominational neutrality, it has a Protestant character. Deriving authority from a covenantal agreement among men but under God emerged from Protestant interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. What began as a theory of church government was eventually applied to politics. Many Catholics in America embraced this notion in political matters, a decision that created recurring tensions with church hierarchy. At the same time, Protestants had to rethink their traditional suspicion of so-called papists.

This rethinking was possible because the Protestantism that emerged in the U.S. was different from its European counterparts. By contemporary standards, it was “liberal” in its acceptance of denominational pluralism and institutional separation of church and state, at least at the national level. It was also “progressive” in its enthusiasm for science, hostility to despotism, and confidence in improving the human condition through practical reforms.

Jews also played a distinctive role in the new American dispensation. Unlike in Europe, they were recognized as citizens from the founding. The ubiquity of the Bible wove Jewish stories and texts into American Christianity, and not only among white men. Religious narratives of liberation and redemption became central to African-American culture and politics.

If Adams celebrated these qualities, others feared disaster. In his forthcoming book, “American Heretics,” Jerome E. Copulsky investigates those who feared the U.S. wasn’t Christian enough. In the 19th century, that included defenders of state churches. More recently, critics have contended the Declaration makes too many concessions to the principle of consent, which Adams saw as the document’s glory.

These debates scramble familiar ideological categories. Rather than pit religious obligation against individual rights and faith against reason, they express an old American hope that such tensions can be eased through self-government. The presuppositions on which this hope was based were derived in part from British Protestantism and older Christian traditions. Yet the result was neither Christian nor nationalist in the way they’re understood today.

Adams’s words remind us that reconciliation has always been a feature of the American enterprise. We’d do well to heed his encouragement “to bless the Author of our being for the bounties of his providence, in casting our lot in this favored land; to remember with effusions of gratitude the sages who put forth, and the heroes who bled for the establishment of this Declaration.”

One doesn’t need to be a Christian nationalist to believe something miraculous happened in Philadelphia in 1776. Yet appreciation for that event should make even secular Americans wonder whether there are forces at work in history that transcend human understanding.

Mr. Goldman is an associate professor of political science and executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University.

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What the Supreme Court’s Immunity Decision Means for Trump

Court says a president is absolutely immune for actions in his core constitutional authority

By Sadie Gurman

The Supreme Court gave former President Donald Trump a sweeping amount of protection against criminal prosecution, ruling that a president can’t be charged for doing the job as outlined in the Constitution and has the presumption of immunity for other actions he takes while in office.

In its decision in Trump v. United States, however, the court said a president can be prosecuted for unofficial acts, and in Trump’s case related to the 2020 election, the trial judge must now sort out what constitutes official and private conduct.

Why did the Supreme Court grant the immunity?

The court said a president needs broad protection so he can “execute the duties of his office fearlessly and fairly” and so that his decision-making isn’t “distorted” by the threat of prosecution. Criminally prosecuting a president for an official act would intrude on the executive authority he has under the constitution’s separation of powers, the court said. The court ruled 6-3, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority and Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a fiery dissent.

“It’s to allow him to operate without looking over his shoulder or hearing footsteps every time he does so,” said Stan Brand, former counsel to the House who has represented several Trump associates.

It is a little murky.

“Distinguishing the President’s official actions from his unofficial ones can be difficult,” Roberts wrote.

The court said a president is absolutely immune from actions in his core constitutional authority—which includes activities such as granting pardons, appointing cabinet officials, engaging in foreign relations and acting as commander in chief.

Everything else is presumptively privileged if it can be characterized as falling within the outer perimeter of his responsibility as president. The same broad standard gives presidents protection from civil lawsuits.

But a court could determine that some conduct—such as campaign speech or fundraising—constitutes an unofficial act, for which there is no immunity. 

What does it mean for the Jan. 6 case against Trump?

The case is in serious jeopardy. The court threw out parts of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump, including that he improperly tried to use the Justice Department to advance his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“This thing is a little bit like Swiss cheese now,” Brand said. “Whether there’s enough of a case left to go to trial and under what conditions remains to be seen.”

For other allegations at the core of the indictment, including Trump’s efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to alter the election results, the high court said the trial judge needed to determine whether any of the charges could continue or should be dismissed because they are based on his official acts.

“Whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct,” the opinion said.

That alone could stall the case for several months, and the court added so many new conditions for prosecutors that a trial is unlikely before November’s election. The court said that the judge can’t ask about Trump’s motives in determining whether an action is official or not, and prosecutors can’t use official acts as evidence that Trump committed a crime through unofficial ones.

What does it mean for the other cases Trump faces and will there be any other trials before the election?

Trump’s lawyers can use the ruling to argue that three other criminal cases he faces should be dismissed because they involved official conduct, experts said, and they could see some success. A Manhattan jury in May found him guilty of 34 felonies for falsifying records to cover up a hush payment; trials in the other cases are unlikely before November.

When Trump’s lawyers floated an immunity defense before that trial, the judge denied it as too late. Still, the former president could raise the issue in any appeal.

Smith, the Justice Department special counsel, has also charged Trump with willfully keeping classified material after he left the White House and obstructing the government’s efforts to get it back. That case has moved slowly, with no trial date in sight, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could limit that case, too.

Trump is also facing a state racketeering prosecution in Georgia over alleged election interference that could implicate some of the same troubles now facing Smith’s federal case. The Georgia case is on pause amid a continuing battle over whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from the case.

What did the dissenting justices say?

The court’s liberal dissenters were outraged. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the majority opinion makes a mockery of the commonly held principle that no one is above the law.

“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” Sotomayor wrote. Beyond Trump’s criminal case related to the election, she said the ruling would have “stark” long-term consequences. “This majority’s project will have disastrous consequences for the Presidency and for our democracy.”

In her own dissent, Jackson described the ruling as overly vague, saying it makes it nearly impossible to know when and under what circumstances a president can be held accountable for crimes. The majority, she said, had broken “dangerous new ground.”

“For every allegation, courts must run this gauntlet first—no matter how well documented or heinous the criminal act might be,” she said.

What does it mean for President Biden and other future presidents?

Trump has spoken openly about prosecuting his rivals, suggesting that if re-elected, he could use the Justice Department to go after the Biden family and others.

“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said in an interview last month with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The Supreme Court’s ruling could make that harder, experts said.

It could also pave the way for future presidents to go unpunished by the criminal justice system for almost anything, said Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor and former public-corruption prosecutor.

Under the court’s framework, he said, conduct like ordering the elite SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, a hypothetical that came up multiple times in the course of Trump’s appeals, could be considered legal.

“A president with bad motives and bad character can pretty easily cloak bad actions in official conduct and have no fear of prosecution,” Eliason said.

This explanatory article may be periodically updated.

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Takes Back Control

This term Roberts moved the law to match his priorities—and didn’t worry about getting liberal justices on board

By Jess Bravin

WASHINGTON—Congress might be gridlocked and the post debate White House reeling, but at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts showed himself firmly in charge. 

That was clear Monday with Roberts’s resounding declaration of presidential immunity for Donald Trump. The term that just ended wasn’t merely a conservative triumph but one that moved the law to match the priorities of the chief justice. 

In a series of watershed opinions, Roberts led the court’s conservatives to curb federal power. The court raised barriers to regulations that impose costs on businesses and property owners—at the expense, liberal dissenters argued, of the government’s ability to confront emerging national problems. 

At the same time, Roberts and his majority clipped the wings of prosecutors and private citizens to seek legal sanctions against officeholders. Decisions reduced the scope of federal bribery law and benefited Trump—and those of his followers who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But when it came to issues Roberts found less urgent, such as imposing further restrictions on access to abortion or regulating social media to promote conservative viewpoints, the chief justice approved ideological cease-fires through procedural rulings that left hard choices for another day.

Presidential power and regulatory rollback “are the areas he cares about,” says David Strauss, faculty director of the Supreme Court clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “Gun rights, abortion—those aren’t as high on his list.”

According to the Empirical Scotus blog, in the 2023-24 term Roberts was more frequently in the majority than any other justice: in 96% of argued cases. 

As chief, when in the majority Roberts has the power to assign the opinion to any of his colleagues; he chose himself for some of the most consequential. Those included Trump v. U.S., which found that former presidents enjoy sweeping immunity for crimes they might have committed while in office, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overruling a 40-year-old precedent so as to increase federal judges’ authority to overturn federal agency regulations. 

Other decisions, including another issued Monday that the Trump case overshadowed, have likewise altered the rules of decision to shift power from regulators and Congress to the federal judiciary that Roberts heads.

Among the chief’s goals, “increasing judicial power would be at the top of the list,” said Deborah Pearlstein, who directs the program in law and public policy at Princeton University. “The number of his decisions that cite Marbury v. Madison to say what the court’s power is, is remarkable,” she said, referring to the foundational opinion written by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803. Roberts cited Marbury in both the Trump and Loper Bright opinions he wrote. 

The latest term was a striking contrast from two years ago, when the chief justice stood alone in an effort to find middle ground on abortion rights. 

Where Roberts proposed rolling back Roe v. Wade without fully eliminating women’s right to end unwanted pregnancies, his five fellow conservatives pressed ahead to overrule a 1973 precedent they declared was wrong from the start. Three liberal dissenters gave no ground on what they considered a fundamental individual right. 

In the 2022 case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Roberts’s solo opinion futilely urged his colleagues to heed “a simple yet fundamental principle of judicial restraint: If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” 

The sentiment recalled his 2007 Atlantic magazine interview, when he said he was “committed to broad consensus” among the justices because closely divided decisions diminish public respect for the court as a legal institution rather than a political branch. 

Now in his 19th year as chief justice, Roberts made clear that, in certain fields, reaching what he considered the most correct result was more important than finding a way to bring at least one liberal justice into the fold—even as public approval of the court, particularly among Democrats and independents, hovers at historic lows.

The chief justice brooked no compromise this term when it came to his view of the constitutional framework—one that gives political actors leeway to act without fear of legal consequences and limits government ability to intervene in free-market decisions. 

In other cases, however, Roberts proved willing to let difficult questions linger so as to build broader consensus, rather than push for sharper outcomes likely to further divide the court.

Abortion was one such area. The justices heard their first abortion cases since overruling Roe, and in both suits found technical reasons that kept the court from deciding whether the procedure should be limited even further under federal law. 

In one, the court unanimously threw out a suit intended to curtail access to the abortion drug mifepristone, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, finding that the activist plaintiffs, who neither use nor prescribe the medication, had no legal standing to get their arguments into court. And it dismissed a case pitting Idaho’s strict abortion ban against the Justice Department, which argued that a federal hospital law authorized doctors nationwide to perform emergency abortions when necessary to preserve the physical health of a woman experiencing a medical crisis.

That decision, Moyle v. U.S., saw the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, assert that federal law prevails. Their most conservative colleagues, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, contended that Idaho’s ban takes precedence. 

Roberts, joined by the two justices who most frequently vote with him, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, took the view that the differences between federal and state law were too cloudy to resolve—a position that sent the dispute back to the lower courts for further proceedings.  

But when it came to Trump, Roberts went the whole nine yards. Backed only by a bare majority of his most conservative colleagues, the chief justice chose to demarcate vast zones of protection for Trump and future presidents accused of wrongdoing, bypassing blistering liberal dissents and even criticism from Barrett, the court’s most junior conservative. 

Roberts held firm even though there were paths to resolve the cases that may have generated nearly unanimous judgments. In March, for instance, all nine justices voted to overrule a Colorado Supreme Court decision disqualifying Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment, which bars former officeholders who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from future office. In Trump v. Anderson, the court unanimously agreed that states lack the authority to enforce the provision against presidential candidates.

But in an unsigned opinion, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh went further, suggesting that the only way the insurrection clause could be implemented would be through federal legislation—a doubtful prospect in a divided Congress. Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson filed an opinion arguing the majority needlessly closed off other potential methods of federal enforcement, such as through the judiciary. Barrett took the same view in a separate option—although she chided the liberals for amplifying their “disagreement with stridency.”

On the term’s final day, Roberts delivered his landmark ruling granting Trump expansive immunity for alleged crimes committed through his official acts as president. Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined him in full. 

Barrett joined most of the Roberts opinion, but dissented from a section that limited the evidence prosecutors could introduce against Trump. She suggested another approach could have brought greater consensus, carving out a core of presidential immunity that didn’t enable the vast range of criminality the majority had excepted from prosecution. “The Court, the dissenting Justices and the Special Counsel all accept that some prosecutions of a President’s official conduct may be unconstitutional,” she wrote.

Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Kagan and Jackson, didn’t end with the traditional valediction, “respectfully,” which signals potential agreement in future cases. 

She chose something more ominous: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

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