This Supreme Court decision just ended is sure to go down in history as one of the worst eras in the Court’s history, with so many bad decisions. Of course, for that ‘down in history’ reflection to happen, we have to have a future. This election has always been and is now more than ever a fight for that future.
We have to fight, we have to engage with voters, we have to donate, we have to volunteer,and we have to do it with passion. Here is a link to Yosef 52’s latest version of his periodic diary filled with links to help you contribute to making this election a massive Blue Wave and a total repudiation of Trump and the Republicans.
And here is a link to my Blue Wave Special at my Literate Lizard Online Bookstore. It features nearly 100 political book for all ages, discounted 20% through Election Day and meant to inspire and inform us in the task ahead. Below are the reactions of some of these authors on Twitter/X in response to yesterday’s Supreme Court Decision. This week’s list on notable new nonfiction will follow below.
Was just reviewing DC Circuit opinion, holding Trump NOT immune from prosecution. It would be odd that the person the Constitution directs “ take care that the laws be faithfully executed” would be the only person in America who could also openly defy them.
I think 60 percent of the Trump Jan 6 case remains prosecutable, but it will take us a year in litigation to get there.
They’ve given us the perfect referendum campaign. Do you want a king or a president. The memes and billboards make themselves.
The Supreme Court just created King Trump.
Call him King Trump, every single time.
King Trump will…
King Trump says….
King Trump plans….
Rep. Joe Morelle: I will introduce a constitutional amendment to reverse SCOTUS’ harmful decision and ensure that no president is above the law. This amendment will do what SCOTUS failed to do—prioritize our democracy.
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Rachel Bitecofer: Thats exactly what we need to do. File a 28th Amendment. Strip immunity and require anyone on a presidential ballot must first be able to pass an FBI background check and no convicted felons.
Use it to define joes reelection bid.
No Kings, Vote Biden
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Omg y’all. The point isn’t that Rs will block it. The point is that they will block it and we can wedge it as the defining issue of 2024. Read the damn book
Tristan Snell, author of Taking Down Trump: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully:
The only reason Trump didn’t execute or murder people while president is because people told him he couldn’t.
The Supreme Court just told him he can.
If the DC J6 case against Trump will now not go to trial until 2025, if ever — then Jack Smith should now unleash the rest of his indictments against Trump’s co-conspirators.
Here is John Roberts LYING at his confirmation hearing, where he said that presidents are bound by the law and not above the law.
Joshua Douglas, author of The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights:
The American people deserve to know whether Trump is convicted of a criminal act in trying to subvert the 2020 election before they go to the polls this year.Today the Supreme Court made that impossible.
And Madiba K. Dennie, author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, tweeted a link to a diary right here at Daily Kos by angryea:
"This was meant to be a book review of the excellent if infuriating The Originalism Trap by Madiba Dennie. However, the Trump Immunity ruling, among others, have pretty much made her argument irrefutable."
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, by Corey Brettschneider. In this propulsive and eminently readable history, constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by five presidents: John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon. Through their actions, these presidents illuminated the trip wires that can damage or even destroy our democracy. Brettschneider shows that these presidents didn’t have the last word; citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of “We the People.” This is a book about citizens—Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more—who fought back against presidential abuses of power. Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy. A welcome reminder, in a time of growing repression, of the power of well-placed dissent.:— Kirkus Reviews
- How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Be Civil Without the State, by C. L. Skach.
In How to Be a Citizen, Skach calls to move beyond constitutions. She argues that just as complex natural systems spontaneously generate order, we can, too. Looking to pandemic gardens, Reggio-Emilia schools, and community-driven safety patrols, she envisions not government by force, but society that is local, cultivated, and true. Grounded in six principles as simple as a call to spend time on a park bench, this book shows how community spaces, education, and markets can be reshaped to nurture cooperation and encourage flourishing. Equal parts personal, philosophical, and practical, How to Be a Citizen invites us to see society not as something imposed by law, but rather something we create together. “When a renowned constitutional scholar explains why the law, enforced by a hierarchy of power, is not enough and is sometimes even the problem, we need to listen. Skach describes brilliantly, with compelling examples, six ways to become better citizens and thereby improve our own wellbeing while helping to build a better world from the ground up. I recommend this book to everyone.”—Peter Gray
- The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change, by Debra Hendrickson. M.D. The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children. Children’s bodies are interwoven with and shaped by their surroundings. As the planet warms and their environment changes, children’s health is at risk. The youngest are especially vulnerable because their brain, lungs, and other organs are forming and growing every day, and because their physiology is so different from that of adults. Childhood has always been a risky period of life; throughout history, babies and children have met peril, from polio to famine, from cyclones to war. Yet they have never quite had to face, in quite this way, the potential loss of the future itself.
The Air They Breathe is not just about the health impacts of global warming, but something more: a soul-stirring reminder of our moral responsibility to our children, and their profound connections to this unique and irreplaceable world. "Most importantly, Hendrickson does not focus only on the negatives. She also highlights opportunities to build a better world for current and future children, making sure that there are paths forward for everyone." — Shelf Awareness
- A Sea Full of Turtles: The Search for Optimism in an Epoch of Extinction, by Bill Streever. Everyone alive today is witnessing a mass extinction event caused by the more than eight billion humans who share this planet. At times, it seems there is little hope. Climate change, resource exploitation, agrochemicals, overfishing, plastics, dead zones in our oceans, drought and desertification, conversion of habitat to housing, farming, and industrial infrastructure—we are, it seems, on an unalterable path that will continue to decimate biodiversity. A Sea Full of Turtles offers hope for those who care about our living world. Set in Mexico’s Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez), the book focuses on dramatically underfunded but highly successful efforts to protect sea turtles, and looks at how some humans have changed their relationship with nature—and how that change can one day end the extinction crisis. :The profiles of individuals leading conservation efforts offer reason for hope even as they make clear the direness of the sea turtle’s situation. Animal lovers will be galvanized."— Publishers Weekly
- The Secret History of Sharks: The Rise of the Ocean's Most Fearsome Predators, by John Long. Maybe send a copy to Trump. Sharks have been fighting for their lives for 500 million years and today are under dire threat. They are the longest-surviving vertebrate on Earth, outlasting multiple mass extinction events that decimated life on the planet. But how did they thrive for so long? By developing superpower-like abilities that allowed them to ascend to the top of the oceanic food chain. John Long, who for decades has been on the cutting edge of shark research, weaves a thrilling story of sharks’ unparalleled reign. “Rich with scientific detail and enlivened with stories from Long’s decades of fossil discoveries and cutting-edge research, this book is the work of a master scientist and storyteller. It will make you see sharks in a new way: not as blood-thirsty monsters that we should fear, but as nature’s ultimate survivors that can teach us about evolution and environmental change.”—Steve Brusatte
- The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness, by Tim Coulson. Have you ever wondered why you exist? What had to happen for you to be alive and conscious? Scientists have come a long way in answering this question, and this book describes what they have found out. It also examines whether our existence was inevitable at the universe’s birth 13.77 billion years ago—or whether we are just incredibly lucky. Covering physics, astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, the emergence of life, evolution, consciousness, the rise of humanity, and how our personalities are moulded by genes, chance, and the environment, the journey explains how the universe started as point of intense energy that over time, in our corner of the universe, resulted in our wonderful planet—and in you. "Tim Coulson’s book is a ripping yarn about the history of our improbable existence. It is fundamentally factual, with every inference evaluated in the context of the scientific method, highlighting the continuity of the thread across vast time scales that span physical, chemical, and biological events that led to who we are today. It is smart, informative, yet approachable and brimming with personal anecdotes and humor."
— Rosie Gillespie, Professor of environmental science, policy, and management, University California, Berkeley
- The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss, by Margalit Fox. In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country. “Fox effortlessly pulls the reader into the grimy world of Gilded Age Manhattan. At the center of it all, we meet one of the most distinctive lawbreakers I’ve ever encountered—Mrs. Mandelbaum was not only a schemer but a dreamer, who saw running a crime ring as the rare way a woman could get ahead in a ruthless metropolis. This book is so full of twists, it makes you want to break out the popcorn.”—Rachel Syme
- Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents, by Robert Schmuhl. From his first visit in 1941 to his last one eighteen years later, Churchill made himself at home in the White House, seeking to disprove Benjamin Franklin’s adage that guests, like fish, smell after three days. When obliged to be attired, Churchill shuffled about in velvet slippers and a tailored-for-air-raids “siren suit,” resembling a romper. In retrospect, these extended stays at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue take on a new level of diplomatic and military significance. Just imagine, for example, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky spending weeks at America’s most powerful address, discussing war strategy and access to weaponry, as Churchill did during the 1940s. “Robert Schmuhl admirably captures the vitality and cunning of Churchill’s D.C. residency with consummate skill, colorful anecdotes, and crisp historical analysis.” — Douglas Brinkley
- Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, by Nile Green. In the highbrow literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, a father and son spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Claiming to come from Afghanistan, Ikbal and Idries Shah parlayed their assumed identities into careers full of drama and celebrity, writing dozens of books that influenced the political and cultural elite. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned picaresque travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics. Above all, father and son told Western readers what they wanted to hear: audacious yarns of eastern adventure and harmless Sufi mystics—myths that, as the century wore on and the Taliban seized power, became increasingly detached from reality. “This scholarly and hilarious tale of the Shahs, father and son, and their decades of fabrications, is one of a kind. Nile Green is an exquisite writer, and his book is more droll, erudite, and delightful than anything the Shah family ever came up with.” — Peter Theroux
- A Gentleman from Japan: The Untold Story of an Incredible Journey from Asia to Queen Elizabeth's Court, by Thomas Lockley. On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men--led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher--traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Christopher's epic sea voyage had spanned from Japan, via the Philippines, New Spain (Mexico), Java and Southern Africa. On the way, he had already become the first recorded Japanese person in North America. Now Christopher was the first ever Japanese visitor to England, and no other would leave such a legacy for centuries to come. The story of Christopher is almost utterly forgotten and has never been fully told before. "Thomas Lockley takes the reader on a fascinating voyage of discovery, weaving the extraordinary story of a young Japanese man, Christopher, into the broader context of 16th century circumnavigation and global politics. As Lockley notes, many of the tensions between the West and East today stem from issues and problems that Christopher and fellow navigators experienced or witnessed four centuries ago."-- Naoko Abe
- The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East, by Barnaby Rogerson. At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender faultline in the Middle East. Rogerson's original approach takes the modern chessboard of nation states and looks at each through its particular history of empires and occupiers, minorities and resources, sheikhs and imams. The result is wide-ranging empathy, understanding, and insight—a book that is vital for anyone wishing to understand many of the current tensions in the Middle East today. "A history told with verve by a traveler, addressed to readers who may know little about the Middle East besides what they’ve seen on the TV news. To call this book 'timely' given recent events would be glib; as Rogerson shows, such history has been timely for centuries.” — The Daily Telegraph
- Catherine de' Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen, by Mary Hollingsworth. The life and times of Catherine de’ Medici—the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe—as seen through her often controversial role in religion and the arts.
A lavish promoter of the arts, Catherine patronized poets, painters, and sculptors; lavished ruinous sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces; and masterminded spectacular entertainments and tournaments that prefigure the splendor and ritual of the court of Versailles. Catherine maintained eighty ladies-in-waiting at court; it was rumored she used these women as bait to seduce courtiers for her political ends. Her admiration for the seer Nostradamus fueled claims of her love for the occult and the dark arts. Posterity has condemned her as the epitome of the scheming royal matriarch, her reputation tainted forever by her role in instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants in 1572. “The author skillfully keeps track of a huge cast of characters as she describes Catherine’s odyssey. With diversions into her generous patronage of the arts and architecture, Hollingsworth concentrates on dynastic politics and France’s gruesome religious war. A widely vilified queen receives a well-researched, mostly admiring biography.” — Kirkus Reviews
- 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, by Robyn Hitchcock. The great eccentric of British psychedelia—beloved by everyone from Led Zeppelin and R.E.M. to the late Jonathan Demme—pens a singularly unique childhood memoir. “A bright, nostalgic look at the exhilaration of 1967, this book—illustrated throughout with Hitchcock’s surreal sketches—will appeal to not only the author’s many fans but also anyone interested in the music and culture from the golden age of psychedelia. Wistfully reflective reading.” — Kirkus Reviews
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