FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 3.1.20

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 11h 17m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 37.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred ninth day.

  On this day in 1781, the Articles of Confederation goes into effect after being ratified by all thirteen states.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jane Chong writes of Donald Trump’s Strange and Dangerous ‘Absolute Rights’ Idea:

That claim is a favorite Trump refrain, and like a brake warning light, it tends to signal that the car is no longer safely in contact with the legal road. In May 2017, after The New York Times reported that Trump had spilled highly classified information to Russian government officials, he tweeted that he had “the absolute right to do so.” In December of that year, when asked whether the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails should be reopened, Trump invoked his “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” Six months later, in June 2018, Trump tweeted that Robert Mueller’s investigation was “totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” and that if push came to shove, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.”

….

This is a profound misunderstanding of the American constitutional system. Within that system, rights protect individuals against incursions by the state. The assertion of “absolute rights” by the country’s chief executive stands this concept on its head by purporting to insulate state conduct, however arbitrary and transgressive, from review or even critique. The idea is incompatible with the design of Article II, which vests the president with conditional, circumscribed authority to ensure that the laws are “faithfully executed.” Some of that authority is his alone to exercise—for example, only the president can grant pardons, command the armed forces, and recognize foreign states. But to the extent he misunderstands or abuses that authority, the Constitution facilitates challenge by the other branches. In extreme cases, that challenge is supposed to take the form of impeachment and removal.

Allison Keyes writes Harriet Tubman, an Unsung Naturalist, Used Owl Calls as a Signal on the Underground Railroad:

Many people are aware of Harriet Tubman’s work on the Underground Railroad and as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. Fewer know of her prowess as a naturalist.

At the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park in Church Creek, Maryland, Ranger Angela Crenshaw calls Tubman “the ultimate outdoors woman.” She even used bird calls to help guide her charges, eventually helping some 70 people, including her parents and four brothers, escape slavery.

“We know that she used the call of an owl to alert refugees and her freedom seekers that it was OK, or not OK, to come out of hiding and continue their journey,” Crenshaw says. “It would have been the Barred Owl, or as it is sometimes called, a ‘hoot-owl.’ ‘They make a sound that some people think sounds like ‘who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?’ ”

See link to Barred Owl at the Audubon website for information about the bird, and the bird call, Tubman so effectively used.

Everything You Didn’t Know About Eagles:

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