For the Record: Tennis, Anyone?

 

When History paused, sometime between 2009 and 2016. Via Courts of the World.

Four Dorics pic.twitter.com/D2vcNoron6

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 8, 2020

Four Dorics beat Two Corinthians.

— Unnamed Democrat (@UnnamedDem) December 8, 2020

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:

First Semester Report Card @AOC

US History F
Econ 101 F
Math 101 F
Meteorology F
Interpretive Dance A https://t.co/lkM1PCTkLe

— Eric Bolling🇺🇸 (@ericbolling) March 31, 2019

She knows perfectly well what happened, as she has noted before at her Facebook page. https://t.co/8lGzxUIH1F This is a trivial flub, not ignorance. pic.twitter.com/v5dJqCxDYF

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Eid Mubarak

No pictures to be found of Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, but the Thomas Jefferson Foundation offers these alternative Barbary States officials, in a 19th-century engraving.

Eid Mubarak from President Donald Trump, who has decided to celebrate by not holding the traditional White House iftar celebration, for the first time since 1996. I don't think this necessarily means he's anti-Muslim in particular. After all, he refused to attend the White House Passover seder, a tradition since 2009, though it did take place. His Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren didn't go either, but apparently had their own private feast.

As Dinesh D'Souza pointed out, moreover,

He doesn't celebrate Divali, Parsi New Year or Confucius' birthday either https://t.co/4KXEq4Bdpj

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 25, 2017

So perhaps he is hostile to religion in general. He doesn't go to church much either (twice since the inauguration) and he doesn't look hella comfortable when he's there (see below).

A curious thing about the Ramadan iftar, though, is about the first White House iftar, in 1805, when President Jefferson had a dinner during Ramadan for Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, envoy of the Beylik of Tunis, and scheduled it for sunset instead of the normal 3:30 so that the ambassador would be able to eat. The State Department had a posting about this, according to the Houston Chronicle—

A state department website posted about the first White House iftar, held by President Thomas Jefferson in 1805

and Wikipedia, but it seems to have been scrubbed, and yesterday the President's friends at Breitbart put up an angry denial that any such thing ever happened—it's FAKE NEWS!

A supremely bad idea

Justice Joseph Rucker Lamar (1857-1916), via New Georgia Encyclopedia.

In the bizarre storm breaking out last night over whether it's proper for a president in the last year of his term to nominate a Supreme Court justice, with Chuckles Grassley claiming such a thing hadn't happened in the last 80 years even though he himself had voted for one of them (Anthony Kennedy, in 1988; the others in the last 80 years are Brennan, 1956, and Powell and Rehnquist, from the Nixon year 1972), a point of some significance got lost.

In the normal case a new justice is named when an old justice retires, and is available to serve, however crankily, until the new justice is confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The really problematic situation, where there are only eight justices and the strong possibility of failing to reach a majority in an excessive number of cases, only happens in the much rarer event of a justice's death or resignation with immediate effect.

So Dr. Google and I would like to report: Scalia is the first justice to have died during an election year since 1916, when Joseph Rucker Lamar of Georgia died in the middle of term on January 2, and on January 29 Woodrow Wilson "surprised the nation" by nominating Louis Brandeis to succeed him. Brandeis took rather a long time to confirm, until June 1, for some reason or other—

Praxis makes perfect

Paul Rosenberg in Al Jazeera:

Everyone has an ideology, whether they know it or not. But when your ideology has you - that's when you're an ideologue. It's not a matter of "extremism" but of rigidity and blindness - detachment from reality. Which is why Barack Obama is one of the most ideological presidents we've ever had. And being imprisoned in his "pragmatist" ideology is key to his numerous pragmatic train wrecks, as well his less-noted failures to even take on several really big, really significant problems....[C]ommon sense is no match for cultural hegemony, what political theorist Antonio Gramsci essentially described as ideology in drag as common sense. Obama's root problem is his deep unwillingness to engage in hegemonic struggle, to face his adversaries' failures, call them out by name, and show how we can do better.

I've noticed that too. If you're looking around for a little hegemonic struggle, don't even bother looking at the White House. It turns out that Barack Obama is totally different from Angela Davis, can you beat that? It's like he's not even a Marxist, for Pete's sake! Oh, wait...

Then again imagine, if you will, that you're the Marxist president of the United States and that David Gregory, say, asks you on camera one Sunday morning what you're up to. Do you come out and tell him you're all about hegemonic struggle? "Gosh, Dave, I guess I'm pretty much focused on that hegemonic struggle, or I guess I should say counter-hegemonic, since I aim less at taking hegemony over than at dissolving it, so the working class can start producing its own organic individuals and culture, know what I'm saying?" Or do you waffle into that world of undifferentiated change and problems don't have an R or a D next to them, etc., etc.?

Thought so.