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Friday’s Forum
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25 responses to “Friday’s Forum”
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As always, Heather Cox Richardson brings the receipts.
This is the anniversary of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
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The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
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Reacting to that nomination (of Robert Bork), Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.
And yet in 2026, here we are.
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Is this a controversy where you live?
What is a Flock camera—and why is everyone freaking out about it?
Flock cameras are everywhere—and now some people in Houston are tearing them down. But why?
The license plate-reading surveillance cameras have become a major source of debate across the country, with critics warning they create a massive government tracking network while law enforcement agencies say they are a powerful tool for solving crimes.
In Houston, that fight has moved from city council meetings and online debates to the streets. Four Flock cameras have recently been vandalized or removed, prompting a Houston Police Department investigation.
It is estimated that there are over 3,800 Flock cameras across the Houston area, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.
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I heard about Flock cameras only very recently — too many concerns to try to summarize. Here are a couple of recent pieces from the ACLU on the subject:
Surveillance, Profits, and the Police, and
Flock Safety Credibility Lost as it Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police Departments, and Public Across the Country
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Wally Funk, aviation pioneer who became oldest woman to go to space, dies at 87
Wally Funk, who fulfilled a dream 60 years in the making when she became the oldest woman to fly to space in 2021, died Wednesday night in her Grapevine home. She was 87.
Funk, raised in Taos, N.M., was among a group of women who underwent the same physical and mental tests as America’s first male astronauts but weren’t chosen by NASA to go to space.
But at 82 years old, Funk flew alongside billionaire Jeff Bezos as his company Blue Origin launched its first crewed mission from West Texas.
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A discussion about how Platner was recruited came to my attention this morning and it is kind of insane.
Part of the problem is the casting-call approach to candidate recruitment; I heard that they started by looking at a lobsterman who’d donated to Bernie Sanders, then moved on to oyster farmers.
But the bigger problem — besides the truly egregious absence of vetting — was not taking the time to do candidate development. Compare Moraff’s approach with that of Amanda Litman, head of Run for Something. She’s also supporting unconventional figures to run for office, some of them white men! (James Talarico was a Run for Something alum.) But Run for Something isn’t throwing neophytes into high-profile national races. They’re helping people run for local and state office, and those who shine there can move on to bigger things. That process is a lot more laborious and time consuming, but far more effective in building a Democratic bench.
When you look at the start of the related article, you boggle at the hubris:
Last July, in a small town in coastal Maine, a couple of progressive, self-styled recruiters of economic populists showed up at the blue-shingled house of Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits.
They knew his name from local labor organizers and activists, and they had watched a video on the internet of him talking about oysters. Struck by his left-leaning ideology, his working-class affect and his gravelly voice, they became convinced that he could win a Senate seat in Maine — and quickly persuaded Mr. Platner of the same.
The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine — Morris Katz — told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.
But a clutch of people who cared about Mr. Platner were telling him something else. They worried about his mental health, amid his ongoing efforts to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They feared this trio of out-of-state operatives was a dangerous combination of inexperienced and overconfident. The worst-case scenario, they thought, wasn’t running for Senate and losing — it was destroying the life he worked hard to build.
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No idea if this is real or not but it’s certainly believable.
https://x.com/GOP__Ls/status/2075354352047321105 -
I have been enjoying the audiobook version of Winter in Madrid By C. J. Sansom. It’s set primarily in WWII Spain and explores the intersection of fascism, communism, socialism, capitalism, and just plain common sense in a time of radical beliefs. Not a hard read, just a good summer read–and relevant in our current political climate.
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So much winning…I mean whining…
https://apnews.com/article/trump-housing-bill-77ec340dcdd676c46c458813b461b1af?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share -
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Yup. He’s fundraising with the devil.
No word on the length of the spoon.
But it should be easy for him to put his mouth where his money is.
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I can picture how the boy toy talks sweetly to Klaus Barbie.
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Passenger partly sucked out of the cabin when the window shattered.
Details are sketchy and contradictory. News reports mention an uncontained engine failure threw off pieces, one of which struck and shattered the window. Something similar to what happened on a Southwest flight a few years ago.
Ok, but reports yesterday also said the plane stayed aloft to burn off fuel, landing only about an hour after the incident. I don’t think it’s indicated to burn off fuel after an engine failure. I’m pretty sure the protocol is to land ASAP if one engine fails.
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The timeline I saw is it landed about an hour after taking off. Looks like they held for maybe an extra 10 minutes to get below max-landing weight.
They would’ve been concerned about max landing weight, as with only one engine they had very little thrust reverse available. Going full reverse on one side only can skew the plane around, potentially running off the edge of the runway. They would’ve calculated the landing with brakes only, and the calcs for landing distance without thrust reversers and above max landing weight aren’t in the graphs, and they surely didn’t want to spitball that.
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Apple is suing OpenAI for stealing trade secrets.
OpenAi comments: “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” which is a lie. Everyone’s interested in the competition’s trade secrets, if any.
I wonder two things:
1) if a process or development is not patented or not in the process of being patented, is it even protected legally? And wouldn’t that be protected through confidentiality agreements with employees?
2) Why doesn’t OpenAI just ask ChatGPT to design their hardware? 😀
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Go to Turkeieio (Turkey?) get a revolver https://www.shootingnewsweekly.com/revolvers/nato-leaders-flummoxed-by-turkish-python-clones-given-to-them-after-ankara-summit/
https://nationalpost.com/news/carney-says-engraved-gun-from-turkeys-erdogan-not-what-i-expected (Canada not what i expected)
In my world, be blessed and afraid this counts. .
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