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The aftershocks of the Jan. 6 insurrection to block Congressional certification of the U.S. Presidential election will reverberate for many years. In the short run, there may be additional efforts to violently disrupt President-elect Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20, in addition to domestic terrorism activities aimed at state and local governments and other institutions. Such concerns have re-focused public expectations that leadership across all major institutions, public and private, must take sustained actions to support democracy.
The Jan. 6 insurrection has transformed the nation’s political conversation and moved the support for democratic values to the top tier of advocacy. It has subsumed and reset the context for other key national priorities such as responding to the pandemic, climate change, economic renewal and social justice.
to such splendid weather before the traffic
crashed back over us again in torrents
and I lost you in the slanting rearview mirror.’’ From “A Break in the Weather,’’ by Paul Mariani (born 1940), an American poet and professor emeritus of literature at Boston College
“It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.’’
Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), U.S. Supreme Court justice and solicitor general and perhaps best known as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, which served as a coda to a long stretch of Fascist brutality. Now we face less coherent but violent actions from American Neo-Fascists led by Trump.
Sands founder and CEO Adelson dies
By Staff | Jan 16, 2021
LAS VEGAS (AP) – Sheldon Adelson, founder, chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, has passed away at the age of 87 from complications related to treatment for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma , the casino company announced Tuesday.
At one point the third richest man in the world, Adelson brought singing gondoliers to the Las Vegas Strip and went all-in betting Asia would be a bigger jackpot than Sin City.
He was the son of Jewish immigrants, raised with two siblings in a Boston tenement, who over the second half of his life became one of the world’s richest men. The chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation brought singing gondoliers to the Las Vegas Strip and foresaw correctly that Asia would be an even bigger market. In 2018, Forbes ranked him No. 15 in the U.S., worth an estimated $35.5 billion.