* I had difficulty getting the images to work in this post. Odd stuff kept popping up. Then, as a reader Michael Todd gently noted, I discovered I’d used a picture of Sinclair Lewis in place of Upton Sinclair.
In working to correct the problem, I discovered no photos of Upton Sinclar with his typewriter. So, here we have Upton Sinclair, without typewriter. How embarrassing.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
One might be filled with hope at the prospect of the administration of President Obama. Science issues that have been ignored for too long may once again rise to due consideration. Friends in health care worry that it will take four or eight terms of diligent work to undo the damage done to medical science by neglect of spending and budgeting during the last eight years.
I take a little hope in this: Maybe we can get an update of the planting zones maps relied on by farmers, horticulturists, and backyard gardeners.
Plants cannot be fooled by newspaper reports. Plants are not partisan in political issues. Plants both respond to and clearly demonstrate climate change. To those who wished to suppress or deny climate change, suppressing the hardiness zone maps may have seemed like a good way to win a political debate.
Robust discussion based on the facts, a casualty of the past eight years, ready to be resurrected.
From the library of Life Magazine images available for sale through an agreement with Google: “Marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, 1952.” Photo by Hank Walker. [Photo no longer available at that site; this is the same image, I believe]
Five weeks away from the inauguration of Barack Obama, I wonder what Oring’s postcards could tell us? Where is she now?
Check out her website, I Wish to Say. Maybe your classroom could support a similar project from your students. What do these cards tell us about Americans? What do they tell us about our electoral process? What do they tell us about our hopes and fears? DBQ, anyone?
Two of several hundred postcards from Americans, collected by Sheryl Oring (and typed by her) to send to "the next president" -- who we now know will be Barack Obama.
Michael Kountoris, Eleftheros Typos, 1st place in the Lurie/UN Cartoon Awards, 2008
Of the 13 cartoons, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and honorable mentions, at least six touch on environmental topics. Is this a representation of a the cartoons published in the past year?
All the cartoons honored deserve your viewing — go see them here.
The award is offered annually by the UN Correspondents Association in honor of Ranan Lurie, who probably still is the most widely syndicated cartoonist in history. A sample of Lurie’s work, below the fold.
How well does your classroom incorporate technology that helps students learn better, or faster, and helps prepare them for the age into which they will graduate?
In a conference today [December 5, 2008] the Supreme Court will reconsider together whether to take on a suit challenging the eligibility of Barack Obama to be president of the United States under a sometimes-arcane section of Article II of the Constitution.
Is Barack Obama a “natural born” citizen of the U.S.?
In the building where “Equal Justice Under Law” is engraved high over the front door, poker-player Leo Donofrio’s challenge will be examined to see whether at least four of the nine justices of the Court think he has enough of a case to actually merit a hearing. Justice David Souter rejected Donofrio’s case earlier, so this is a hail-Mary play on the part of Obama’s opponents.
Equal Justice Under Law, the West Pediment of the U.S. Supreme court. AAPF image
The Court takes seriously the principle engraved over the door, however. This is the same Court that ruled earlier this year an accused terrorist and all-around bad guy held at Guantanamo Bay has the right to a writ of habeas corpus over the objections of the Most Power Man in the World, U.S. President George W. Bush. The humble, gritty, or even unsavory history of litigants does not limit their rights under the law.
Leo Donofrio in his usual office. Leo Donofrio image
So the question is, what sort of case does Donofrio have against Obama’s eligibility?
Would Justice Clarence Thomas have agreed to bring this case to the conference if it doesn’t have a chance to succeed?
I’ve not lunched with Thomas in more than two decades, so I can’t speak with any inside knowledge. Historically, the Court, and indeed all the federal courts, have agreed to examine cases like this often simply to provide an authoritative close to the issue. In this case, the outright hysteria of the anti-Obama partisans suggests the issue should be put to bed if possible.
Under usual Court procedures, we won’t learn the results of the conference until Monday. I would not be surprised if the results are announced today, just to promote the settling of the issue.
Does Donofrio have a case?
I don’t see a case. It’s clear that Obama is a U.S. citizen now. Donofrio’s argument is rather strained, and sexist. He claims that Obama’s father having been a British subject in 1961 (Kenya was not yet independent), Obama had dual citizenship at birth — and, further, Donofrio alleges, this dual citizenship trumps both Obama’s birth on U.S. soil (which should be dispositive) AND Obama’s mother’s U.S. citizenship, conferring a special status that doesn’t meet the intentions of the framers of the Constitution.
Donofrio’s claim is odd in that it would grant a lesser-status to children of legal immigrants than is allowed by law to children of illegal immigrants, or temporary visitors. It also is bizarre, to me, in the way it dismisses Obama’s mother’s existence as a factor in Obama’s citizenship status — and while equal rights for women were not wholly obtained in 1961, no one has successfully argued that the citizenship of the father trumps that of the mother in citizenship cases.
Donofrio is arguing that Obama’s dual citizenship at birth disqualifies him from holding the presidency, technically, in a very narrow reading — though Obama would have absolutely every other right of a natural born citizen.
A couple of observations:
First, this is not an easy issue to litigate. Standing is the easiest way for a federal court to avoid a decision — what harm can a citizen claim from letting Obama be president? It’s difficult to find an injury even were Donofrio’s claims valid. No blood, no foul. No injury, no standing to sue. It is upon this basis that most of the cases against Obama’s eligibility have been tossed out, as Donofrio’s has been tossed, twice already.
Second, it is unclear what entity enforces the eligibility clause of the Constitution, or indeed, whether any entity can. For most of the summer Obama’s critics were pressuring the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to do something, even though the FEC lacks a quorum of members to do anything. More to the point, there is nothing in any law that confers on the FEC the function of checking the citizenship status of any candidate. Sometime in October they finally figured out that state secretaries of state might have a role, since they set up the ballots in each state.
I admit I thought that, until I reflected on the issue of the electoral college. In U.S. presidential elections, voters do not vote directly for president and vice president. Instead, we vote to elect people who will be the electors who decide — electors of the electoral college. The history of this institution can be found elsewhere. For the sake of these suits, however, it means that the secretaries of state have no role at all in the eligibility of the candidates. They rule on the eligibility of the electors, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. Some states even list the electors on the ballot.
But in any case, it means Donofrio is suing the wrong entity, even if we can’t tell him what the correct entity is.
Third and most important, Donofrio is asking for U.S. citizenship law to be overturned in a most inconvenient time and place. Dual citizenship is a bar to very little in American life. There is an assumption that people who hold that status are fully American citizens, absent a showing of contrary facts. There are no contrary facts in evidence from Donofrio, nor from anyone else, despite promises of the revelation of conspiracies.
In short, Donofrio is arguing that there is, somewhere, somehow, some information that Barack Obama is not the shining patriot his life story reveals. Donofrio doesn’t know what that information is, or where it might be found, but he thinks maybe the State of Hawaii is complicit in a conspiracy to hide this information, which is hidden on the hand-written records of Obama’s birth in 1961. You might think Donofrio has watched “National Treasure” a few too many times, and whether it’s that movie or some other source, you’d be right — paranoid suspicions of conspiracy are not the stuff good court cases are made of.
The dozen or more cases against Obama’s eligibility all suffer from this astounding, dramatic lack of evidence. Is there an affidavit from someone who alleges that Obama’s citizenship should be called into question? If so, they’ve not been presented to any court. (Obama tormentor Corsi claims to have interviewed Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, and he alleges she said through an interpreter that Obama was born in Kenya; oddly, he didn’t bother to get an affidavit from the woman, nor from anyone else — and others who listen to the tape think she thought Corsi was asking about the birth of her son, not grandson. This is not solid evidence.)
This is not an issue solely for the hysterical. Lawyers and scholars have looked at the issue through the years, and intensely this year, and arrived at the conclusion that Obama is perfectly eligible for the presidency.
November 24 was the 149th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “big book,” On the Origin of Species. If history studies turning points, that’s one date that needs to be remembered.
Twain had a comment on recent actions at the Texas Education Agency:
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
– Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win a Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.
Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.
Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.
Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.
Both men are worth study.
Twain, on prisons versus education: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900
Churchill on the evil men and nations do:
“No One Would Do Such Things”
“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”
—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.
November 30 is the anniversary of the birth of Mark Twain, born 1835 (a year of an appearance of Halley’s Comet). The photo was taken in the spring of 1894 in the laboratory of inventor Nikola Tesla, and originally published to illustrate an article in the legendary Century Magazine, by T.C. Martin called “Tesla’s Oscillator and Other Inventions,” in the April 1895 issue.
Mark Twain, in the laboratory of his friend, the inventor Nikola Tesla, 1894 - photo in public domain to the best of my knowledge (See Wikimedia)
Who is that to Twain’s right in the photo? Tesla?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It struck me today: Don’t the political events of the past year make a powerful argument that there is an afterlife, and that Molly Ivins is finally taking control of some of the supernatural strings?
There’s more. This one post could be the source for a fun Documents Based Question for practice in an AP class, history or economics — maybe English, too?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Thanksgiving? Texas had it first. No kidding (unless you count the Vinlanders, who probably were grateful to be out of Greenland, but left no records that they ever actually had a feast to say so — but see the comments in the posts linked at various places).
Last year, Mrs. Bathtub was in the hospital. We sprang her before dinner, but barely. This year, #2 son is off in the wilds of Wisconsin — the first Turkey Day he’s spent away from home and family. We empathize with the families the first colonizers left behind.
Still, there will be dinner with the family, thanks for the endurance of storms and trials, reflections on good times past, and hopes for the future.
Who was first between Plymouth and Jamestown? No, the pilgrims did not tie their ship to Plymouth Rock; no, the Prudential logo is the Rock of Gibraltar, not Plymouth . . . and more travel stuff, from today’s New York Times.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
