Category: Thurber

4.7.2025 – no authority

no authority
justification or grounds
facts say otherwise

In the matter of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, District Judge Paula Xinis wrote:

“As defendants acknowledge [United States Dept of Justice though the person who had the guts to acknowledged this has been put on leave], they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” Xinis wrote.

She said it was “eye-popping” that the government had argued that it could not be forced to bring Abrego Garcia back because he is no longer in U.S. custody.

“They do indeed cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person — migrant and U.S. citizen alike —to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction,” Xinis wrote. “As a practical matter, the facts say otherwise.”

I should point out that House Speaker Mike Johnson has declared, “We in the Republican Party are the law-and-order team. We always have been, and we always will be, the advocates for the rule of law.”

Mr. Speaker … facts say otherwise.

Someone needs to refresh their memory.

See more Thurber Drawings at formuggsandrex

3.23.2025 – what it must be like

what it must be like
live where feel antipathy
to your own country

In the article, The New Yorker at 100: ‘We live in a world of misinformation … a lack of verification. Our readers want what we do’, written by Andrew Anthony for the Guardian, the editor of the New Yorker Magazine is quoted thusly:

Even so, [David] Remnick says he’s not experienced anything before like the second term of Donald Trump.

“It’s not one event,” he says. “It’s 10 events a day. It’s 20 astonishing posts on Truth Social in a given week.

I lived in the Soviet Union for four years and one of the things that always emotionally struck me was what it must be like to live in a place where you feel such antipathy to your own country.

One feels a sense of shame to hear one’s own president brand a heroic figure like Zelenskyy a dictator, and to see how he deals in an opposite way with Vladimir Putin.

But how to cover that on a human level, on a factual level, on an institutional level, is a challenge.”

Growing up in America, I remember a joke told about a feller in China who wanted to move to America.

When he applied for his visa, he was asked, “Don’t you love your Country?”

“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Country!”

“Don’t you love your Government?”

“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Government!”

“Don’t you love your Leaders?”

“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Leaders!”

“So why do you want to leave?”

“I want to live somewhere where I DON’T HAVE TO SAY THAT!”

Why does it feel like we are going to find out what it’s like to live outside that somewhere.

See more Thurber Drawings at For Muggs and Rex.

3.18.2025 – are vast and complex

are vast and complex
reaches between cat feet of
Fog and Remembrance Rock

Adapted from a letter by James Thurber to a Librarian in Asheville, North Carolina on January 30th, 1952, where Thurber writes:

Nobody ever gives me time to get things done, and such a project as yours can’t be batted off. I wouldn’t want to start writing in January something about Carl Sandburg to be finished in January. He may seem as easy to describe as a face carved on a mountain, but there are vast and complex reaches between the cat feet of the “Fog” and ‘‘Remembrance Rock.” I like to think of him informally, without putting on my stiff Sunday critical shirt and shoes. He was up here not too long ago, playing his guitar and singing, sometimes with me, late into the night, although it seemed early. I was proud to have taught him a new verse about Casey Jones, who went through Toledo on an open switch. He is an American institution, not easy to describe within the limits of January. Let the glib boys do that, and give him my love and fond wishes that he will go on forever.

Mr. Thurber also remembered the evening singing with Sandburg with a drawing.

Just fun thinking of the two of them in the same room.

Fog you ask??

Fog is …

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Remembrance Rock is Carl Sandburg’s only novel. Sandburg described it as an epic, weaving the mystery of the American Dream with the costly toil and bloody struggles that gone to keep alive and carry further that Dream.

And there are vast and complex reaches between the two.