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Mother of all Days: Sunday Reads 

Posted: May 14, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: just because |14 Comments


It is Mother’s Day y’all, so Happy Day to all the Mothers out there. 

Sorry if I don’t push the holiday any more than that…

Some links today:

  
Only a couple tweets on the current events. I can’t take much more than that. 

Holy shit. I guess I was able to share more than I thought I could. You can see why the post is late. I was up most of the night watching the Twitterverse. 

 
Happy Mother’s Day 

This is an open thread. 

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14 Comments on “Mother of all Days: Sunday Reads ”

  1. Minkoff Minx says:
    May 14, 2017 at 11:32 am

    Happy Mother’s Day. Hope everyone enjoys the day.

  2. NW Luna says:
    May 14, 2017 at 1:14 pm

    I know some of you are ahead of me, but I was still hazy on the difference and advantages/disadvantages between an independent commission and a special prosecutor. This was a helpful review.

    A Special Prosecutor Is Not the Answer

    Rather than an inquiry focused narrowly on criminal conduct, the way to resolve questions swirling around President Trump and his associates is to impanel an independent commission.
    In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, many are demanding a special prosecutor into the Trump-Russia connection. It’s not appreciated enough that such an appointment could well turn into a shield for wrongdoing. A special prosecutor could wrap the investigation of the Trump-Russia matter in secrecy for months and years—and ultimately fail to answer any of the important questions demanding answers.

    Of all the types of independent investigation that have been suggested, a special prosecutor is the most likely to disappear down rabbit holes—the least likely answer the questions that needed to be answered. A select committee of Congress or an independent commission of nonpartisan experts established by Congress can ask the broad question: What happened? A select committee or an independent commission can organize its inquiry according to priority, leaving the secondary and tertiary issues to the historians. A select committee or an independent commission is not barred from looking at events in earlier years statutes of limitations. A select committee or an independent commission seeks truth.

    A special prosecutor, by contrast, seeks crimes. The criminal law is a heavy tool, and for that reason it is thickly encased in protections for accused persons. The most important protection from the point of view of the Trump-Russia matter is the rule of silence. A prosecutor investigating a crime can often discover non-criminal bad actions by the people he is investigating. If those bad actions do not amount to crimes, the prosecutor is supposed to look away.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/a-special-prosecutor-is-not-the-answer/526662/?utm_source=twb

    • quixote says:
      May 15, 2017 at 12:36 am

      I’ve also seen it argued that an independent commission is too easy to turn into a way to study it to death. Examples: the 9/11 Commission, the one on JFK’s death (Warren?). They don’t find anything and they take two decades doing it.

      I don’t know if anything will work at this point. There should have been three Repubs of conscience by now in the Senate to create a majority for dealing with this case of high treason by a President.

      There aren’t.

      The Founding Dads foresaw many pitfalls, but they missed the possibility of a whole branch of government failing. They were too busy hedging against the stupidity of the voters to allow them to be the final check on politicians.

      • Sweet Sue says:
        May 15, 2017 at 11:08 am

        And, so they gifted us with the Electoral College-swell.

      • NW Luna says:
        May 15, 2017 at 1:50 pm

        Good points. I then read something from ShareBlue on how unlikely it’d be for a Republican Congress to allow an independent commission and that we’d be better off with an independent prosecutor, at least at first. I’ll take whatever we can get.

        Founders guarded against the stupidity of voters but didn’t imagine the stupidity and complicity of the politicians.

  3. NW Luna says:
    May 14, 2017 at 1:26 pm

    Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them

    For me, as for many daughters, the time before my mother became a mother is a string of stories, told and retold: the time she got hit by a car and had amnesia; the time she sold her childhood Barbie to buy a ticket to Woodstock; the time she worked as a waitress at Howard Johnson’s, struggling to pay her way through her first year at Rutgers. The old photos of her are even more compelling than the stories because they’re a historical record, carrying the weight of fact, even if the truth there is slippery: the trick of an image, and so much left outside the frame. These photos serve as a visual accompaniment to the myths. Because any story about your mother is part myth, isn’t it?

    After finishing my most recent novel, in part about mother-daughter relationships, I put out a call on social media for photos from women of their mothers before they were mothers. A character in the book, a young artist, does something similar, so I’d thought a lot about what the process might be like. I wasn’t prepared, however, for how powerful the images I received would be.

  4. NW Luna says:
    May 14, 2017 at 1:28 pm

  5. dakinikat says:
    May 14, 2017 at 5:28 pm

  6. Fannie says:
    May 14, 2017 at 7:31 pm

    Hope you all had a very nice Mother’s Day.

  7. dakinikat says:
    May 14, 2017 at 9:25 pm

  8. dakinikat says:
    May 14, 2017 at 9:36 pm

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