• We have a fenced-in back yard and a friendly, somewhat clueless Yorkie-poo. This has made our yard a kind of sanctuary for chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and groudhogs. Willow is enough of a canine presence to keep most predators out of the yard, but not an actual threat to any of these various tomato-thieving species living in our yard.
In previous years, I’ve caught our resident groundhog red-handed in the vegetable patch just outside our back door. “Go get him!” I’d tell Willow, opening the door. “Sic!”
She doesn’t know “sic.” It’s not in her vocabulary or in her nature. The groundhog wouldn’t even bother running away at full speed. It would just sort of amble back to its home under our back-yard shed, unconcerned. Willow will occasionally chase a squirrel or a rabbit, but she never convincingly pursued that groundhog. She caught up to the rabbit once and managed to give it a poke with her nose — the same friendly greeting that once got her sprayed by a local skunk.
This spring, though, we have something new. The burrow under the shed is no longer home to a family of groundhogs, but to a family of foxes. The other night, Willow and I spied a teeny, adorable kit rustling through the leaves in the other side of the fence, so I thought there must be a fox family living there in the woods nearby.
But no. Friday morning the ‘vixen saw the Mama Fox right outside our back door, successfully hunting a chipmunk under the patio. She (the fox) carried it back to the shed and scampered underneath.
This will be interesting. I assume Mama Fox is aware of Willow and, like the prior occupants of that space, has correctly recognized she’s not a threat. But the shed is now the subject of enthusiastic curiosity and sniffing when I take the dog out back, and I’m a bit worried that Mama may get defensive. So we’re being careful, especially after dark when the little ones might be up and about.
The good news, I suppose, is that with the apparent eviction of the groundhog and the bad news for the chipmunks this entails, we may have better luck this summer actually getting to eat some of our tomatoes and cucumbers.
• “‘Concerned’ Evangelicals Plan To Meet With Trump As Sex Scandals Swirl,” NPR reports.
This is a meeting between white evangelical “leaders” and President Trump about what he and they can say to keep their flock in line as faithful, unwavering Republican voters. It’s a meeting about talking points, spin, and coordinating their stories. It’s about damage control. This is Zedekiah and the other court prophets colluding with Ahab before Jehosophat shows up to make sure they’re all on the same page.
The biggest news about this story is that one of these so-called “leaders” asked to speak anonymously. It’s a very, very rare thing in that crowd for anyone to not desperately want their name in the paper or their picture on the TV.
• Unaccredited Christian colleges are scammy. Some are more scammy than others.
• “The Price of Innocence,” by Joseph Neff for The Marshall Project, is heartbreaking and enraging. Half-brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown of North Carolina are both intellectually disabled. They were falsely accused, dubiously convicted, and then incarcerated for more than 30 years before previously ignored DNA evidence exonerated them.
“Then things went bad.” The settlement money that ought to have secured a decent measure of financial security for the brothers was carved away by an assortment of unscrupulous lawyers and others who saw the two men as easy prey. It seems like every institution that ought to have protected these vulnerable men instead betrayed them, over and over.
You may remember this case from when it was invoked by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who singled out these brothers in 1994 as the ultimate example of why he supported the death penalty. Scalia’s argument wasn’t really an argument on that point, merely a grandstanding assertion. He described their case as that of an: “11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat.” Then said: “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!”
It was, Scalia argued, self-evidently just that Henry McCollum and Leon Brown be executed for this horrific crime. Yet they were innocent and Scalia’s understanding of the facts of the case was spectacularly wrong.
You and I will be wrong about many things in our lifetimes. But neither you nor I will ever manage to be as completely wrong and at the same time completely arrogant in our certainty about that wrongness as Antonin Scalia was in that case.
• Terrific piece of reporting and storytelling from Max Londberg about a 30-year-old cold case: “Beyond ‘Satanic Panic’: Agent has theory on 30-year mystery of missing Kansas teen.”
The case remains unsolved, but a retired special agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation thinks he knows what happened. Timothy Dennis is generous toward the local police who spent years chasing dead-end theories. “Some leads are strong, some aren’t,” he says, as charitably as possible. But if Dennis won’t say it, Londberg’s report makes it clear: The initial investigation focused on imaginary monsters — Dungeons & Dragons players, kids in Iron Maiden T-shirts, etc. — instead of the reality-based police work that might have solved the case.
That’s always a problem with Satanic baby-killers. All the time and energy spent chasing imaginary monsters is time and energy not spent doing something real.
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