"Maybe Democratic voters could hate Republicans if the media, including the Post and Waldman, were not always pointing the finger at 'Democrats' for not passing the things that people want."

"All Republican politician[s] are united in blocking any constructive things proposed by Democrats, and of course they are joined by Manchin and Sinema. Those people, not Biden or the majority of Democratic legislators, are why the program is not advancing. What if the Post and other papers ran true stories about how Republicans are preventing anything from getting done and encouraging Trumpism, instead of stories and columns about Democrats failing to remake the government without a real majority in the Senate?"

That's the top-rated comment on "Opinion: Democrats are being dragged down by their discontent" by Paul Waldman in The Washington Post.

Isn't that amazing — though, paradoxically, not surprising — that a WaPo reader perceives the newspaper as biased against Democrats and in need of a strong correction toward blaming Republicans? 

Only "true stories" are requested, so I presume the commenter feels centered on principles of good journalism.

The saddest part of the comment is the beginning: "Maybe Democratic voters could hate Republicans...." That seems to mean that the goal is hate. The Post needs to stop interfering with the flow of hatred. The commenter thinks that Democrats have a capacity for hate, but it's underdeveloped — underfed by The Washington Post.

In Norway, a man who murdered 77 people — who was sentenced to only 21 years — is seeking release after 10 years in prison.

You may remember Anders Behring Breivik, who hunted down children at a Labor Party summer camp. The sentence was 21 years because that was the maximum permitted, though the judge was able to add a provision for "preventive detention," based on his future danger to society. But, technically, he's eligible for parole, and he's taking advantage of this access back into the public eye.

WaPo reports that it is "unlikely that he will ever be released." His presentation to the court reflects an awareness of that: His lawyer says he's "not expected to show remorse," and he's having a "neo-Nazi leader" testifying for him. And if he sticks to his past courtroom behavior — as seen in his litigation over his prison conditions ("isolation in a three-room cell — equipped with video games, a DVD player, a typewriter, books, newspapers and exercise equipment") — he'll give a Nazi salute.

"My sense is that a law or regulation is at best an opening bid. Is it binding, legally or morally? Maybe..."

"... but the presumption should be neutral at best, or, realistically, highly skeptical. After all, laws and regulations are the products of legislators and bureaucrats, who are presumptively corrupt and dishonest. And everybody know that, really."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, commenting on Ilya Somin's "Martin Luther King on the Ethics of Resistance to State Authority/Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan offers a valuable summary of King's thought on these issues." 

Somin's piece is at Reason. Excerpt:

The obvious criticism of views like King's is that many people may have poor judgment about which laws are unjust. For example, those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 likely believed that enforcement of the laws against doing so would be unjust, because (in their view) Donald Trump had a right to stay in power. Similarly, both left and right-wing terrorists often believe they are justified in violating laws against murder and assault.

But the risk that individual citizens may be mistaken about matters of justice has to be balanced against the danger that government can be wrong about such things, as well. Even in democratic societies, there is a long and awful history of the latter. Throughout American history, many more people have been killed and oppressed by unjust exercises of government power than by individuals acting on mistaken assumptions about which laws are morally defensible. The toll of slavery and segregation (both imposed by law) alone easily outweighs that of all morally motivated private disobedience to law combined. The extent to which people should defer to the government's judgment on questions of justice depends heavily on how good that judgment is. All too often, the answer is that it is, at best, highly unreliable.

I'm not agreeing with everything I'm quoting. I'm offering it as worthy of contemplation and debate. 

"The British man shot dead in the Texas synagogue siege was investigated by MI5 in late 2020, Whitehall sources confirmed to The Times."

"Malik Faisal Akram, 44, was the subject of a 'short lead investigation' for at least four weeks.... The authorities were already facing questions about why Akram was able to travel to the US, where he purchased a handgun, given he had a criminal record for offences including violence... Akram, from Blackburn, who once ranted about the September 11 attacks, was part of MI5’s pool of 40,000 closed subjects of interest.... The case was closed before it progressed to a full-blown inquiry involving intrusive techniques such as eavesdropping.... When he travelled to the US in late December, Akram was not on the Home Office warnings index, the watchlist that allows police at airports to intercept would-be passengers of concern. Sources said that it would be 'disproportionate' for someone assessed as being no threat to be on the list."

The London Times reports.

I'm sure you've read elsewhere that the rabbi engineered the escape — which involved throwing a chair at the armed hostage-taker. I like this justifiably proud statement by the rabbi, Jeffrey Cohen: "We escaped. We weren’t released or freed." 

"So bleak. We had a few tornadoes come by this way over the weekend, and the sky looked happier than that."

Says a commenter, Rt41Rebel, looking at yesterday's sunrise photographs. The cloud conditions at sunrise are crucial to my sunrise photography, but they can give a false impression of what will happen later in the day. We had a lovely hike in Blue Mound State Park in the early afternoon, and there was a nice — not excessive — infusion of sunlight. 

Meade photographed me climbing the winding trail toward the end of a 4-mile hike:

Notice the slashes of sunlight:

"Did these work for anyone?"

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"At oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's best questioners, sometimes... just shuts down... Still, her anger is often palpable, the color literally draining from her face. "

"And Justice Stephen Breyer on occasion just holds his head.... There isn't a lot of love lost among the court's six conservatives either.... If you watch carefully, you can see conservative eyes rolling from time to time.... [M]any of the conservatives are vying for the position of intellectual leader of the conservative majority, while the chief justice privately worries about going too far too fast. There are, in addition, some long and perhaps not so buried resentments among the conservatives. Alito on occasion barely conceals his disdain for Roberts.... In recent decades, the court has built its legitimacy on a certain degree of moderation — giving the left some of what it wanted and the right some of what it wanted. The left got gay rights and gay marriage, and some limits on presidential power exercised in the name of national security. And the right got expanded religious liberty and expanded free speech, which brought with it expanded corporate spending in elections.... But... the court's conservatives detest each other in the same way that the justices did in the 1940s. Back then, they couldn't agree on anything because, as [Noah] Feldman notes, 'they hated each other.' and even though they might have been able to to reach a consensus, they didn't 'because the hatred was so deep.' To cite just one example of how bad it was, Justice Felix Frankfurter called Justice William O. Douglas 'one of the completely evil men I have ever met.' And Douglas referred to the Austrian-born Frankfurter, who was Jewish, as 'Der Führer' and that was during World War ll."

Writes Nina Totenberg in "Supreme Court justices aren't 'scorpions,' but not happy campers either" (NPR). 

The "scorpion" quote refers to "9 scorpions in a bottle," a famous phrase that Totenberg doesn't give a source, perhaps because it's so famous, but perhaps because the usual attribution — to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — seems incorrect. Noah Feldman's book "Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices Paperback" begins with the quote "The Supreme Court is nine scorpions in a bottle," attributed to Alexander Bickel, law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952–53, and drops this footnote: