excerpts from Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

     You may write me down in history    
     With your bitter, twisted lies,        
     You may trod me in the very dirt      
     But still, like dust, I'll rise.

     Just like moons and like suns,      
     With the certainty of tides,      
     Just like hopes springing high,      
     Still I'll rise.

     Did you want to see me broken?      
     Bowed head and lowered eyes?      
     Shoulders falling down like teardrops,      
     Weakened by my soulful cries?

     You may shoot me with your words,    
     You may cut me with your eyes,    
     You may kill me with your hatefulness,    
     But still, like air, I'll rise.

     Out of the huts of history's shame    
     I rise    
     Up from a past that's rooted in pain    
     I rise  
     I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,    
     Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

     Leaving behind nights of terror and fear    
     I rise      
     Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear    
     I rise    
     Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,    
     I am the dream and the hope of the slave.    
     I rise    
     I rise      
     I rise.

Who is Josh Hawley appealing to?

Former assistant US Attorney and conservative National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy said Josh Hawley's arguments are "meritless to the point of demagoguery."

The Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson with bipartisan support to the Supreme Court.  
She will be sworn in to replace retiring Associate Justice Stephen Breyer and join the Supreme Court at the start of its next term in October.      
Ketanji Brown Jackson's judicial temperament showed throughout arduous hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
(The Senate galleries were full to overflowing with spectators to witness the confirmation vote.)
(More than 1000 guests were accommodated to take turns witnessing the hearings before the judiciary committee.)

Senator Josh Hawley continues his rampage throwing sand in the eyes of everyone not willing to do things his way. He voted against aid for Ukraine and yet stands on the Senate floor rebuking President Biden for failing Ukraine. 

And there young Dick Durbin was, a 14-year old kid standing by the hospital bed where his father at age 53 died gasping for breath, after two packs of Camels a day.    
His father's death led to what decades later, Dick Durbin called his proudest accomplishment: his leadership in the fight against tobacco. In 1987, as a junior member of the U.S. House, he introduced a bill to ban smoking on airplane flights. Although the entire Democratic and Republican leadership was against the measure, amazingly it passed, on a bipartisan roll call vote.        
"Why? Because the House of Representatives was the biggest frequent-flyer club in America."    
It was a tipping point in public opinion. A key Senate committee chair was up for election that cycle and polled the question: turned out that banning smoking on planes and in other public places was very popular.    
The bill passed in the Senate and was signed into law.

Today is another proud day in Dick Durbin's life: Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the Supreme Court with bipartisan support.

from The Borowitz Report: "Minutes after Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to SCOTUS, Senator Ted Cruz said, 'Make no mistake, the slippery slope started today. Judge Jackson was confirmed for the flimsiest of reasons---she is qualified.' "

Senator Marsha Blackburn asked KBJ to define "woman".    
Given the biological and legal complexities---wiser people than I say it was reasonable for KBJ not to venture a definition; the Senator and her Republican colleagues seemed jubilant.      
Senator Cruz asked KBJ how she could possibly rule on cases involving gender if she couldn't "determine what a woman was."

"Senator, I know that I am a woman," KBJ said. "I know that Senator Blackburn is a woman. And the woman I admire most in the world is in the room today---my mother." KBJ gave an answer that reached not only back to her childhood but forward to hopefully decades on the Court.

"Amid all the partisan noise, KBJ had her own message. She knows who she is, and doesn't need any Senator to tell her."

with attribution to Amy Davidson Sorkin, THE NEW YORKER

"Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton who has written extensively on war crimes, observed that Senator Tom Cotton invoked Robert Jackson 'understanding nothing about what he did at Nuremberg. Justice Robert Jackson negotiated the rules which gave the Nazi defendants the right to defense counsel, and in his opening address emphasized that they would get a fair opportunity to defend themselves.' One of his most enduring opinions was his passionate dissent in the Korematsu case, from 1944, in which the Supreme Court, to its shame, effectively sanctioned the internment of Americans of Japanese descent. (The Court finally renounced the decision in 2018, when Donald Trump's efforts to institute a 'Muslim ban' made it newly relevant.) Robert Jackson called the internment 'racial discrimination,' and warned of the danger of putting aside constitutional rights in the name of wartime exigency. It's Ketanji Brown Jackson who is carrying on his legacy---not Tom Cotton."

with attribution to Amy Davidson Sorkin who quoted Gary Bass in her article "The Ketanji Brown Jackson Hearings May Be Only The Beginning, THE NEW YORKER, April 9, 2022.

One nation under constant fire:

We are the only creature that cries,   
yet we accept living under fire as an American right.    
Why do we not value the pursuit of life?

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself."      
There is nothing quite like the feeling of fear welling up inside us.      
When there is pain, and/or uncertainty ahead, it is faith, and/or hope that make it possible for us to move into, and/or endure, a dangerous situation.

A call to uncommon courage.    
What will we do here and now? Simply stand looking on?    
The choice is ours: to be good for nothing - or - good for something.

There are some who want to be all things to all people, they hold their opinions close.      
Now might be the time to rock the boat: the time has come when silence is actually harmful.  
The choice to engage is ours.

Day after day we see and hear more evidence of the attempt to overthrow our government on January 6. The evidence is clear: Donald Trump, Republican members of Congress, White House officials, and the right wing media helped plan it and stoke the fires beneath it.    
If we care about our country we must acknowledge the ongoing, existential threat to the safety and security of our country. 

"The document is authentic." -- Chief Justice Roberts

"We ask our classmates, and the community of Princeton, to protest the logic that ties us to a constitutional originalism which resists any movement toward justice but, rather, moves us backward. As Jill Lepore so aptly put it in The New Yorker, ' Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That's a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.' "  
excerpt from response by Princeton women of '72 to their classmate Associate Justice Samuel Alito

Finland announced their landmark decision to apply for NATO membership.

Incubation times vary for sea turtles, but the average incubation is around two months before hatching occurs. After laying her eggs the mother turtle's work is done. Young turtles must survive on their own.

Please do not compare my mothering to a sea turtle's.

"A mom giraffe is pretty nice, until the fetus drops. She'll birth a newborn baby calf, then kick him 'til he walks."

The Finns and Swedes coordinate their formally neutral defense policies closely. Sweden too is moving toward joining NATO, reversing its longstanding commitment to non-alignment.

I am not Jewish, please correct me where I err.     

It is my understanding that Jewish law not only permits abortion, in certain cases it requires abortion.

In recent years Christians have won exemptions from health care laws.      
For the last two decades courts have recognized that religious exemptions are mandated by the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the many state versions of it.    
Courts are not arbiters of religious doctrine.

Now with the prospect of criminalizing abortion, religious exemptions will need to be granted to Jewish women. The mainstream of Jewish law overwhelmingly holds that life begins at birth. Some Orthodox authorities oppose abortion on demand, but Conservative and Reform Jews require an exemption in all cases. Compliance with laws that ban abortion is in direct conflict with the practice of Judaism. The question of whether an act is religiously permissible is distinct from what the government allows or prohibits.

with attribution to Rabbi Jay Michaelson