RELIGIOUS HOLY DAYS

  This weekend is truly a holy one; Easter Sunday preceded by Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Friday night is also the First Passover Seder celebrating the beginning of the Jewish Passover; the fleeing liberation ( a better choice of words) of the 12 tribes from Egyptian slavery.

   Passover is a “family holiday” celebrated in the home  with the Seder a combination of a religious service with a traditional meal inserted.   Guests and even outsiders are often welcomed to participate.
  The service is led by one of the elders but often others present are asked to read portions of  the Haggadah  and there is a certain portion where 4 questions are asked, traditional read by the youngest present.

  The questions are as follows with the answers which refer to either slavery or freedom.

1) On all nights we need not dip even once, on this night we do so twice!

     Slavery: The salt water into which we dip the karpas (potato, onion, or other vegetable) represents the tears we cried while in Egypt. Similarly, the charoset (fruit-nut paste) into which the bitter herbs are dipped reminds us of the cement we used to create the bricks in Egypt.

    Freedom: Dipping food is considered a luxury; a sign of freedom — as opposed to the poor (and enslaved) who eat "dry" and un-dipped foods.

2) On all nights we eat chametz or matzah, and on this night only matzah!

     Slavery: Matzah was the bread of slaves and poor, it was cheap to produce and easy to make.

     Freedom: Matzah also commemorates the fact that the bread did not have enough time to rise when the Jews hastily left Egypt.

3) On all nights we eat any kind of vegetables, and on this night maror!

     Slavery: The maror (bitter herbs) reminds us of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.

4) On all nights we eat sitting upright or reclining, and on this night we all recline!

      Freedom: We commemorate our freedom by reclining on cushions like royalty.

 

KEEP INTERESTED

  March 29 the first day of the 2018 baseball season which starts too early in the year and lasts too late. Snow days at either end are not uncommon. And both NCAA and pro basketball are still being played as well as the NHL season in April and Football in September.

  The plus is that we met fans no longer have to wait until next year like us old Brooklyn Dodger devotees.

  The revolving door continues in DC. Yesterday announced Twitter by POTUS, Veteran’s Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was fired. A sightseeing trip with wife billed as a business trip is unacceptable especially when an excuse is needed.

  The other non-Stormy/ Mueller news is the fact that over 20 states (NJ included) have filed suit against the Department of Commerce to block a question on citizenship to appear on the upcoming census questionnaire. Although not prohibited by law this question has been omitted since 1950.

  It is feared by the industrial states with a large number of immigrants both legal and illegal that both groups will be afraid to answer to question are thus undercounting the numbers living in these states. This will affect needed federal grants as well as Medicaid funds received.

 Although non-citizens are not able to vote the numbers of Congressmen allotted to each state is based on population not voters; thus these mostly Democrat leaning states will lose representation if people don’t participate in the census.

  This issue is both a political and economic one for us.

THAT 2ND AMENDMENT

  John Paul Stevens a retired SCOTUS justice today in an NY Times Op-Ed article called for the repeal of the 2^nd Amendment. That would of course require a new amendment approved by 2/3rds of both houses and the ratified by3/4s or 38 states to be law.

  Stevens wrote: “Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”----

“For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well-regulated militia.”---------

“During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my life.

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.”

  I tend to agree with Stevens that the intent of the Constitution Framers was to assure a “well-regulated militia” instead of a Federal Army which they feared as a threat to democracy. The question of “individual self-protection” was not an issue or consideration.

  In 2010 in a dissent Stevens wrote: The reasons that motivated the framers to protect the ability of militiamen to keep muskets, or that motivated the Reconstruction Congress to extend full citizenship to freedmen in the wake of the Civil War, have only a limited bearing on the question that confronts the homeowner in a crime-infested metropolis today.

 In 2008 Nathan Kozuskanich a Constitutional maven noted, “Whatever one may think about originalism as a theory, there is little question that any evaluation of its potential depends on the degree to which it accurately reflects history. “He documented, through an exhaustive search of newspapers, pamphlets and public records of the time that the term “bear arms” was reserved for militia action and never used in the context of an individual’s right to own a gun for hunting or personal defense. For example, Rhode Island required that men ages 16 to 50 “bear Arms in the respective Trained Bands whereto by Law they shall belong.”

 Others do have contrary opinions which should be expressed but the ultimate action has to take place in a congress that is susceptible to a powerful NRA lobbing.