\n“[Obama in his presidential farewell address] said ‘All of us, regardless of party, should throw ourselves into the task of rebuilding our democratic institutions.\u201d He said that strengthening our democracy \u201cdepends on our participation; on each of us accepting the responsibility of citizenship, regardless of which way the pendulum of power swings.’ It\u2019s likely that in that moment he didn\u2019t fully envision how critical the role each of us plays as a private citizen was about to become. But we see it now. We have risen to that challenge once and we can do it again.”<\/p>\n
Then yesterday, Steve Schmidt’s column was titled “Be Not Afraid.”<\/a> Personally I would have said “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. But Be Not Paralyzed.” But he has a long and inspiring quote from FDR in it which is worth some time. It starts about halfway down the page.<\/p>\n Yes, both are Substack.<\/p>\n Oh, and ICYMI, Kim Davis has been court ordered to pay $200 grand in attorneys’ fees and expenses to [just] one of the couples to whom she refused a marriage license.<\/p>\n I also got a phone call from my one cousin who does not and will not own a computer – so I need to either phone or write to her (and I think you all know how I feel about phones.) She was responding to my very late Christmas card which she just received. We had quite a chat. She is the cousin who is the same age as I (there are two older and one younger.)<\/p>\n And in antici[ation of tomorrow…<\/p>\n Yesterday, I noted that we can stop saying “Trump** is still ahead of Joe in the polls.” The latest from 538 gives Joe a 2-point lead. That’s not much, but it’s something – not enough for compacency. Not that anything would be good enough for complacency when it comes to Trump**. But the day before, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":50381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4553,3866,3811],"class_list":["post-53746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-campaign-2026","tag-history","tag-personal","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/1-6.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"