Yesterday I went to TriMet to reestablish lift access in my chair. The ten minute appointment took over three hours. Today the Home Health Nurse is scheduled to come before noon, so this this goes up late, that’s why. Tonight I’m expecting an experience that could be considered Angellic.
Fantasy Football Report:
This weekend it’s playoff time in Lefty Blog Friends, our own Fantasy Football League. Kudos to our top three players in the regular season: Patty Monster, Seth, and Vivian. Condolences to the two players who did not make the playoffs: Dusty and Pam. We look forward to your return next year. Here’s the playoffs bracket.
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: Elahe Izadi runs down the well-documented efforts of Our Founding Fathers Themselves to ensure that yes, religious freedom even extended to Jews and "pagans" and Muslims.
So unlike Jews and Catholics, Muslims were discussed in the hypothetical — and often with negative opinions, including those held by Thomas Jefferson — to show "how far tolerance and equal civil rights extends," said Denise Spellberg, author of "Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders."
"In the formation of the American ideal and principles of what we consider to be exceptional American values, Muslims were, at the beginning, the litmus test for whether the reach of American constitutional principles would include every believer, every kind, or not," Spellberg said in an interview.
Ending collusion between the state and any state-preferred religion was not just Jefferson’s own objective, but the stance that would be codified in law and in the Constitution. There are ample writings to prove that non-Christian religions were specifically intended to be protected, and anyone who has the slightest intellectual interest in the American version of freedom of religion has read through them already. A few were in my old high school history textbook—but that was back in Ye Olden Days, so I have no knowledge of whether such quotes and letters have been scrubbed by the forces of Texas Jeebus, in the books your own offspring are thumbing through today.
The point is, there’s simply no way to claim you know either the Constitution or what America’s religious freedom was intended to "mean" unless you are aware of Jefferson’s own efforts to ensure sweeping inclusivity and that Jefferson was not operating in an intellectual vacuum but from a broader intellectual and legal movement to do that thing, both within the states and when the time came to piece together the national version people now carry in their shirt pockets.
Share this with Republican friends and family, and hope you aren’t uninvited for the holidays.
From The New Yorker: In what has become a tradition in the nation’s capital, the United States Congress on Monday notched the third anniversary of doing nothing in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
As on the first and second anniversaries of the tragedy, lawmakers took up no new measures to prevent future mass shootings in the United States, and instead chose to mark Newtown’s third anniversary with a day of inaction.
In that respect, the third anniversary of Newtown resembles the thousand-plus days that came before it, during which Congress took no action on guns except to periodically vote down expanded background checks.
Andy knows whose hands are bloody.
From Upworthy: A few days ago in a Bloomberg interview, businessman Michael Moritz was asked about the scarcity of women working at his company, Sequoia Capital.
His responses — among them that the firm is seeking women but is "not prepared to lower our standards" — were described by many as "open mouth, insert foot." Similar remarks across sectors and industries have been described this way, too.
But this foot-in-mouth characterization is wrong: It suggests that the speaker fumbled his words and misspoke.
What’s happening when Moritz talks about "lowering standards" is not a clumsy handling of speech. It’s this: In that moment, a deeply hidden synaptic pathway is temporarily illuminated.
When asked about Sequoia’s lack of women, Moritz said they were looking to hire more. But "what we’re not prepared to do is lower our standards," he said. Now, no one had asked, "Are you willing to lower your standards?" No: That was the question he heard when he was asked about hiring women. That was the association he made automatically.
Here, then, is a map of his synaptic firings: women → lower standards.
With the exception of Republican politicians and pundits, hiring women are is more likely to lead to higher standards.
Cartoon:
In case you haven’t been noticing lately—because Jon Stewart is no longer keeping his eye on Fox, and Trevor Noah can’t or won’t hold Fox’s feet to the fire—Sean Hannity is still a complete d-bag. So nice to know that some things never change in this crazy, mixed up, ever-changing world of ours.