Extra, Extra
Make America Great Gatsby Again: The Courts have been pretty good about striking down some of the Trump administration’s most egregious policies. The problem is that the administration has been pretty good at stretching things out long enough to still do a lot of damage. In the NYT, Stephen I. Vladeck explains why The Courts Alone Can’t Save Us. “The courts can do only so much when the goal of imposing a policy isn’t to win so much as it is to break things and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The Great Gatsby,’ to ‘let other people clean up the mess they had made.’ For all of the judicial interventions we’ve seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground.”
+ Load Bearing: There are good drone stories like this from the NYT (Gift Article): Drones Will Do Some Schlepping for Sherpas on Mount Everest. And there are disturbing drone stories like this from Wired: Low-Cost Drone Add-Ons From China Let Anyone With a Credit Card Turn Toys Into Weapons of War.
+ Hungary Like the Wolf: “A new anti-LGBTQ law banning Pride events and allowing authorities to use facial recognition software to identify those attending the festivities was passed in Hungary on Tuesday, leading to a large demonstration on the streets of Budapest.” And a simple matter of fact paragraph: “The move by Hungarian lawmakers is part of a crackdown on the country’s LGBTQ community by the nationalist-populist party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.”
+ Impeachy Keen: The idea of impeaching judges because you don’t like their decisions is so noxious that the suggestion drove Chief Justice Roberts to chime in. But the idea is not noxious to the world’s richest man, and in politics, money talks. Musk Donates to G.O.P. Members of Congress Who Support Impeaching Judges.
+ Leaving Afghanistan: American George Glezmann freed by Taliban more than 2 years after arrest in Afghanistan.
+ Czechs and Balances: “You can measure the value of Voice of America by its worldwide audience of 361 million and how totalitarians hate it, or you could simply measure it by the impact it had on a skinny-as-a-wight kid named Martina Navratilova, listening to it on a red plastic radio in a small Czech country village, under the tank treads of a communist regime that would have stamped out her thin existence.” Sally Jenkins in WaPo (Gift Article): For a young Martina Navratilova, Voice of America was a beacon. (For a couple hundred years, so was America.)
+ Parquet Floorplan: Wyc Grousbeck led an investment group that bought the Boston Celtics for $360 million in 2002. He just sold the team for $6.1 billion.
