“It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people did for another.”
-#DDay veteran Andy Rooney on the young 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy 82 years ago.
Required watching for every young person today!
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
George Orwell, 1984
On September 11, 1974, a ten-year-old boy named Stephen Colbert lost his father and two of his closest brothers, Paul and Peter, when Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crashed into a cornfield hillside just three miles from the Charlotte, North Carolina airport. Only 13 of the 82 people on board survived. In a single afternoon, the youngest of eleven children in a warm, intellectually curious Catholic household went from a boy surrounded by laughter and big family energy to a kid sitting in a suddenly very quiet, very dark home with only his grieving mother for company. The two leaned on each other in a way that most people never experience. Lorna Colbert held herself together not out of bitterness, but out of a fierce, quiet love, and Stephen watched that and absorbed it into his bones. He later said his mother was never bitter, just broken, and that her example became the blueprint he carried for the rest of his life. For years, though, the real weight of the loss stayed buried. He floated through prep school detached, unbothered by the things other kids cared about, because nothing felt quite real anymore. It wasn't until he went off to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia that the grief finally cracked through, and it hit him hard. He dropped from 185 pounds down to 135 during his freshman year, barely eating, barely functioning, consumed by a sadness he had held at bay for nearly a decade. But something remarkable happened on the other side of that collapse. He found theater. He found improvisation. He found that making people laugh was actually a way to connect with human suffering rather than run from it. He transferred to Northwestern University, stumbled into the world of Second City, and slowly built himself into one of the most empathetic, genuinely funny voices in American media. He later reflected that losing his father and brothers gave him an awareness of other people's pain that allowed him to love more deeply and connect more honestly with what it means to be human. That is not a small thing. That is everything. Via Chronicles Through Lenses
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Ever since Donald threw his latest unhinged temper tantrum about me (again), folks have been telling me I've mysteriously vanished from their feeds. It appears the deeply unwell narcissist is so terrified of dealing with me in Congress that he’s begged @elonmusk to throttle my account.
This kind of pathetic desperation is nothing new. But I need YOU to help me beat Donald and Elon at their own game. Don't let a malignant sociopath and his billionaire enabler silence us.
Please like, retweet, and click the link below to support my campaign. Let's give him something to really cry about.
https://t.co/NiW1Ro2kZa
JUST IN: John Eastman, the conservative attorney who helped devise President Trump's last ditch strategy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has officially been disbarred, per the California Supreme Court.:
#Peace is everyone’s responsibility, beginning with civil authorities. To govern means to love one’s own country as well as neighboring countries. The commandment “love your neighbor as yourself” is equally applicable to international relations! #ApostolicJourney#Cameroon https://t.co/C4zkA2S0YB
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't invoke Weimar Germany as a rhetorical flourish. She cited a specific scholar by name in a footnote: Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who observed the Nazi legal system from the inside, smuggled his manuscript out of Berlin in 1938, and published "The Dual State" at the University of Chicago in 1941.
Fraenkel's framework is precise. The Nazis didn't immediately collapse Germany's legal system. They left courts functioning - particularly in contracts and economic matters - while placing Jews and political enemies in a separate lawless zone where no legal protection applied. Most Germans lived in the law-bound "normative state." The targeted lived in the "prerogative state." The facade of normalcy was the mechanism of control.
Jackson invoked Fraenkel to name what the court's Republican majority is doing in real time. In 21 consecutive shadow docket cases, the six conservative justices have let Trump opt out of the law - often with no explanation given at all. They blessed ICE racial profiling without citing a single legal justification. They allowed Trump to ignore $4 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. They stripped lower courts of the ability to issue universal relief, meaning only those with resources to file individual lawsuits get protection from illegal presidential action.
Constitutional law professor Evan Bernick put it plainly: "The court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power."
Jackson's dissent is not hyperbole. A footnote citing a 1941 manuscript about Nazi legal architecture is a Supreme Court justice blowing the cover on what her colleagues are building.
Lord, just in time for election season. Keep him out of Democratic politics, y’all.
I’m calling it, he’s going to try and be a political pundit. And some stupid network is going to give him airtime.
I renew my invitation for everyone to join me for the Prayer Vigil for Peace, which we will celebrate in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, April 11, at 6:00 PM Rome time. #PrayTogether#Peace
For the first time since 1994, the Pope is personally carrying the Cross for all 14 Stations of the Cross, as Pope Leo XIV leads the Via Crucis at Rome’s Colosseum in the first Good Friday of his Pontificate.
Last night, I watched Nuremberg about the prosecution of Nazi high command after World War II. Everyone in America should see it.
This morning, a friend of mine who wants to remain anonymous, sent the following to me:
As an American Jew, I never thought I would hear this sentence in America:
The government is asking for lists of Jewish students.
They say it’s for protection.
They say it’s to investigate discrimination.
They say it’s well-intentioned.
Maybe.
But history doesn’t begin with what governments say. It begins with what they collect.
Right now, a federal agency is demanding names and information about Jewish students and faculty as part of an antisemitism investigation.
That may sound bureaucratic. Technical. Even reasonable.
But let’s be honest about what it is:
A list of people, identified by religion.
And once a list exists, it can be used.
Maybe not today.
Maybe not by this administration.
But by the next one. Or the next.
If a future government believes America should be a “Christian nation,” what happens then?
Do those lists determine who votes?
Who gets admitted?
Who gets hired?
Who is “other”?
Do they become tools for exclusion?
For pressure?
For conversion?
For silence?
We don’t have to imagine this.
Jewish history has seen it, again and again.
That’s why even today, Jewish students and civil liberties groups warn that creating such registries crosses a dangerous line, one that “can easily be weaponized.”
Because the danger isn’t just intent.
It’s precedent.
It’s normalization.
It’s the quiet shift from:
“We need information” to “We need to know who they are.”
I believe in fighting antisemitism.
But I also believe this:
You don’t protect a minority by cataloging it.
You protect it by defending its rights, including the right not to be listed.
Because once a government starts making lists of Jews, history tells us it rarely stops there.
As CBS retreats from radio - which 233 million Americans use - NPR remains on and the audience is up.
The main CBS product was a short hourly newscast.
NPR’s hourly news is on your local station - and also available on demand! Hit Play on the NPR app
https://t.co/BuZ5QaBTWM
Tonight, Congress will vote to lower the age to prosecute minors as adults from 16 down to 14 in DC.
Let me get this straight:
Congress wants to prosecute 14 yr. olds as adults, but they don’t want to prosecute adults who sexually abuse 14 year olds?
Release the Epstein files.
Official birth certificates cost money to replace. Passports cost $165. Naturalization documents cost $550. The SAVE Act turns these fees into hidden taxes on your constitutional right to vote. Republicans are making voting expensive on purpose. #SaveActIsPayToVote
TWEEPS: The SAVE Act requires passports and birth certificates just to vote. Those cost money. When politicians make you pay money to exercise a constitutional right, that’s a poll tax.
I need 1,000 fast RTs and replies using #SaveActIsPayToVote
Please and thank you! 🙏💪