The heat wave is back with highs forecast of 86° today, 93° tomorrow, and 91° Thursday. A pipe broke in the only handicapped bathroom that is safe and easy for me to transfer, when I’m not wearing George. It’s now out of order. I hope they fix it before the weekend. It’s a major pain. I want to try to get some sleep this afternoon, as fireworks will keep me up tonight.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 6:14 (average 6:11). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Alternet: Don’t Call It the Trump Administration—This Is a Regime
Trump has no desire or intention to govern. He wants to rule and make his word our command.
I disagree. The Trump Administration is not a regime. It’s a Reich. RESIST!!
From Daily Kos: In Arizona—where Confederate monuments continue to be on public display despite pleas from residents to have them removed—a trial over whether state Republicans intentionally discriminated against Latino students by ending a Mexican-American studies program in public schools started last week. Commemorating history is fine so long as it’s white history, apparently:
The Arizona trial strikes at the issue of how to teach students about race and social injustice in public schools that often exemplify the country’s inequality. After Arizona conservatives moved to eliminate the classes, Hispanic educators and activists have come to Tucson to champion the battle over ethnic studies as one of the country’s most pressing and under-the-radar civil rights issues.
“This was an innovative program, your honor,” Jim Quinn, a lawyer representing Tucson students, told Judge Tashmina. “It was snuffed out for all the wrong reasons.”
The program’s proponents have argued that the course was instrumental in boosting both grades and self-worth of Latino students, with research showing “the program’s students graduated at higher rates and performed better on state tests.” But Republican state legislators, seeking a safe space from brown people, were having none of that, in 2010 “passing a law prohibiting classes that encouraged the overthrow of the U.S. government; encouraged racial resentment; treated students as members of a group rather than individuals; or were aimed at a specific ethnicity.”
I can understand why Alaska does not offer Mexican-American studies, but around 30% of Arizona’s population is Latino. Banning it there is just an act of Republican Racism. RESIST!!
From Politico: The American War of Independence was fought from April 19, 1775 (Lexington and Concord) to September 3, 1783 (the Peace of Paris), and although Massachusetts and some other states observe the first of those dates as Patriots’ Day, neither has become a national holiday. It’s July 4, of course, that reigns as our undisputed Independence Day—the occasion for picnics and parades, festivities and fireworks, and star-spangled, red-white-and-blue kitsch. That was when the representatives at the Second Continental Congress, the 13 colonies’ newly formed governing body, signed the Declaration of Independence, our nation’s founding document, which is still often read aloud, 241 years later, at July 4 celebrations across the land.
Since 1776, the Declaration of Independence has assumed a near-biblical status in America’s national mythology—its opening paragraphs memorized by schoolchildren, its formulation of liberal principles of equality and self-government venerated by citizens of all political stripes. It still provides a trump card for its chief author, Thomas Jefferson, who in recent years has been increasingly scorned for the libertarian elements of his thought and for his slaveholding.
But in truth the Declaration wasn’t quite the singular achievement we remember it to be. As it turns out, nearly 100 other “declarations of independence” had already been issued in the months leading up to July 4th, 1776, by states, towns, counties, and assorted other bodies. The Declaration of Independence endorsed at the Continental Congress that July wasn’t a bolt out of the blue: It was more like a final draft in a loose, many-centered, wide-ranging process, authored not by one man but by a chorus of voices in a fledgling nation whose people had caught independence fever and were suddenly proclaiming it with contagious enthusiasm.
I didn’t know that. I declare independence from Fuhrer Drumpfenfarten! RESIST!!
Cartoon:
