Lincoln’s Birthday on Feb. 12 is not a national holiday, and it never has been. Nor is Lincoln officially remembered on a
federal President’s Day in late February. That’s just not the case, despite a widespread
belief to the contrary. True, people
have tried to make Lincoln’s birthday a US day of commemoration. One of the first was Julius Francis, a
shopkeeper from Buffalo, N.Y. Beginning in 1874, he made the public
remembrance of the 16th president his life’s mission, according to a 2003 Buffalo
News article on the subject. He
petitioned both Albany and Washington.
New York
went along and made Feb. 12 a state holiday. Washington and Congress did not. But in recent years, some states have ditched
Old Abe, in part because it falls near the federal holidays of Washington’s
birthday and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In 2009, the California
legislature passed a bill ending Lincoln’s birthday as a paid state holiday. Then there is the persistent legend of
President’s Day – a legend formed around a nugget of truth. In 1968, Congress considered the Uniform
Monday Holidays Act, legislation that aimed to shuffle certain US holidays
around so as to create three-day weekends and increased sell-a-thon
opportunities. Early drafts of this bill
did include a Presidents’ Day meant to supplant the existing Washington’s
birthday holiday. This name change was
suggested by one of the bill’s main proponents, Rep. Robert McClory, who was –
you guessed it – a Republican from Illinois.
But the bill stalled in committee. Eventually Congressman McClory dropped
his Presidents’ Day proposal to mollify lawmakers from Virginia,
who wanted Washington’s prerogatives preserved, according to an account of the
legislation in “Prologue,” a magazine published by the US National Archives.
Momentum was restored, and the bill passed, creating the framework of
three-day federal holidays Americans enjoy today. The name of the celebration on the third
Monday in February remains “Washington’s Birthday,” as is clearly stated on the
cover of the legislation.
Link to quiz on U.S. presidents at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2012/0212/Why-Abraham-Lincoln-s-birthday-isn-t-a-federal-holiday
Q. Who is this author? I was part of probably the last generation
ever to receive a classical English education. I read Latin and Greek and Old English, all
the ancient myths and medieval sagas and poems. I met the “knight errant” at its source. Then I took a law degree at university. I never intended to be a lawyer, but the
subject knit together all my nonfiction interests-history, politics, economics,
sociology… and language. Legal language
strives for concision and avoids ambiguity wherever possible. The result is inevitably dull, but all that
striving and avoiding really teaches a person how to write. So, at thirty-nine years of age, after maybe
thirty-five years of conscious experience, I sat down and opened the first of
my three legal pads on my dining room table and lined up my pencil and
sharpener and eraser and… thought some more, and came up with three specific
conclusions. First: Character is king. There are probably fewer than six books every
century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember characters. Same with
television. Who remembers the Lone Ranger?
Everybody. Who remembers any actual Lone Ranger story
lines? Nobody. So my lead character had to carry the whole
weight… and there was a lot of weight to carry. Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to
get on. I think the person who said that
to me was talking about investment issues-as if I had anything to invest-but it
seemed an excellent motto for entertainment as well. It’s a crowded field. Why do what everyone else is doing? So I was going to have to do something a
little different. It seemed to me that
the mystery series that were then well under way-and most that were just
starting out-were, when carefully analyzed, soap operas. (Which to me is not a derogatory term… Soap
opera is an incredibly powerful narrative engine, and soap operas had put food
on my table for eighteen years. Lots of it, and high quality.) If you
can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. I was going to have to avoid all that stuff. But, the third conclusion, and the most
confounding: You can’t design a
character too specifically. I knew in my
bones that to think too carefully would produce a laundry list of imagined
qualities and virtues and would result in a flat, boring, cardboard character. Jack Reacher came along. I was interested in dislocation and alienation, and I had
noticed that people who have spent their lives in the military have trouble
adjusting to civilian life afterward. It’s like moving to a different planet. So I wrote a character who had been first a
military brat, then a military officer, and was now plunged unwillingly into
the civilian world. And because the
books would be broadly crime novels, I made him an ex-military cop, in order to
give him plausible familiarity with investigative procedures and forensics and
so on. Those twin decisions gave him a
double layer of alienation. First, his
transition from the rough, tough world of the army made him a fish out of water
in civilian life, which situation was then further reinforced by any law
enforcement officer’s separation from the rest of the population.
A. The author is Lee Child.
Around 11:45 a.m. on Jan. 14, 2013, Justice
Clarence Thomas broke almost seven years of silence during Supreme Court
arguments. But it was not entirely clear
what he said. The justices were considering the qualifications of a death penalty defense
lawyer in Louisiana, and Justice Antonin Scalia noted that she had graduated
from Yale Law School, which is, by some measures, the best in the nation. It is also Justice Thomas’s alma mater. Justice Thomas leaned into his microphone, and
in the midst of a great deal of cross talk among the justices, cracked a joke. Or so it seemed to people in the courtroom. The official transcript confirms that Justice
Thomas spoke, for the first time since Feb 22, 2006. It attributes these words to him, after a
follow-up comment from Justice Scalia concerning a male graduate of Harvard Law
School: “Well – he did not —.” That is
all the transcript recites. Though the
transcription is incomplete, people in the courtroom understood him to say that
a law degree from Yale may actually be proof of incompetence. What follows in the transcript supports that
view. First, there is a notation
indicating laughter in the courtroom. The
stray set of four words attributed to Justice Thomas are in no sense a joke or
other occasion for laughter. And the
lawyer at the lectern, a Louisiana prosecutor named Carla S. Sigler, responded,
“I would refute that, Justice Thomas,” indicating that the justice had
articulated a proposition capable of refutation. Ms. Sigler had said earlier that the Yale
lawyer was “a very impressive attorney.” It is not unusual for Justice Thomas to
exchange banter with the members of the court who sit next to him, Justices
Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer. But those
communications are inaudible in the courtroom. This remark seemed meant for
public consumption. Justice Thomas has
offered various reasons for his general taciturnity. He has said, for instance, that he is
self-conscious about the way he speaks and has recalled being teased about the
dialect he grew up speaking in rural Georgia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/us/clarence-thomas-breaks-silence-in-supreme-court.html?hp&_r=0
The Supreme Court sunk the hopes of a Florida city Jan. 15 when it ruled that a houseboat was more house
than boat. The definition mattered
because while a house is subject to terrestrial law, a boat may be ruled by
maritime law. For Fane Lozman, who lived
on a floating
domicile formerly moored at Riviera Beach, Fla., the distinction proved
critical. After several disputes with
Mr. Lozman, city officials seized his property using provisions of maritime
law, auctioned it to satisfy his debts and—since the city itself was the
winning bidder—destroyed it. Mr. Lozman
argued that his pied-a-eau was no boat, and therefore the city’s entire lawsuit
was invalid. By a 7-2 vote, the Supreme
Court agreed. The 60-foot by 12-foot
dwelling “consisted of a house-like plywood structure with French doors on
three sides,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court. “It contained a sitting room, bedroom, closet,
bathroom and kitchen, along with a stairway leading to a second level with
office space.” It had no engine, and
could travel only by being towed. The
court previously has confronted such questions, deciding in 1903 that “the lack
of self-propulsion” may be a relevant fact, in 1926 that a wharfboat was not a
vessel but in 2005 that a dredge was. The
city’s argument that the aquatic abode could potentially ply the seas was not
dispositive, Justice Breyer wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and
Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and
Elena Kagan. “After all, a washtub is
normally not a ‘vessel,’” even though Mother Goose recalls a butcher, a baker
and a candlestick maker who used one for such purposes, the court
observed. Jess Bravin
Where each state stands on
gun-control legislation http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/14/state-by-state-gun-report/1834361/
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