In other words, Jack Smith went big. This is not a trivial case and these are not trivial charges.

…and then there’s news that the case has been assigned to Judge Canon… hmmm…

https://open.substack.com/pub/morningshots/p/indicted-again?r=3lmw0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Today the White House called out “some elected officials” for “trying to block the Administration’s effective measures because they would rather keep immigration an issue to campaign on than one to solve. —[Letters from an American, January 30, 2023]((https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-30-2023)

(The) Biden… administration… (is) taking to the road to tout their successes to the country… If they can bring the Republican base around to support their economic policies, they will have realigned the nation as profoundly as did FDR and Theodore Roosevelt before them.

2022-10-10

What caught my attention…

In Times Square and Sunset Strip, “American Gurl” Subverts Femininity… as i have stated before, i have an interest in all things feminine…

In contrast to a “singular idea,” the artists in “American Gurl” offer myriad depictions of women in America. Ayanna Dozier’s “Softer” (2020) critiques the societal demands that African-American women “soften” themselves, specifically through their appearance. Christine Yuan’s “Hoyeon as the International Woman of Mystery” (2022), originally commissioned by Vogue, casts Korean model and _Squid Game_ star Jung Ho-Yeon as an Irma Vep-style vamp who remakes herself for international (read American) consumption. “iGurl” (2022) by Sarah Nicole François is a disturbing digital vision of endless surgical enhancements in search of bodily perfection. “Can we keep up with the aesthetic pushed onto us?” questions Ahmed. “Can these surgeries actually work on us as fast as we can change ourselves online?” Other participating artists include Christelle de Castro, Kasey Elise Walker, Kitty Ca$h, and Leila Jarman.

Art Writing as an Extension of Life

As an arts writer, I am always envious when I find that someone has articulated not only art theory itself, but the way it is a natural part of life for someone who takes joy in the consideration of art. Chris Kraus did this brilliantly in _I Love Dick_(Semiotext(e), 1997); Morgan Meis does this with equal (and completely different) brilliance in _The Drunken Silenus_ (Slant Books, 2020). Randall manages this feat, as the title suggests, by contemplating 12 female artists who are important to her life.

With analysis that is either deeply intuitive or directly informed by personal experience or encounters, Randall presents the life of an artist as both subject and narrator. _Artists in My Life_dissolves the fourth wall between artist, art object, and viewer, offering a welcome approach to arts writing as an extension of how artists live.

The US Could Get Its First National LGBTQ+ History Museum… i only wonder how it will get through congress with so much anit-LGBTQ+ sentiment among conservatives…

A national museum dedicated to American LGBTQ+ history and culture could be coming to Washington, DC. United States Representative Mark Pocan introduced a bill on September 29 to establish the National Museum of American LGBTQ+ History and Culture, potentially as part of Washington, DC’s Smithsonian Institutions. Pocan is a Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.

The bill establishes an eight-person committee to conduct research into the potential museum, including how much its collection would cost and whether it should in fact be part of the Smithsonian. If the bill passes, the committee will have 18 months before presenting their findings to the House of Representatives, who will then vote on a second bill to establish the museum.

Nevada GOP Secretary of State Candidate Promises to Make Trump President in 2024

At a rally for Nevada Republican candidates on Saturday, Republican nominee for secretary of state Jim Marchant promised that he and his fellow GOP nominees, if elected next month, would reinstall Donald Trump in the White House in 2024.

“We’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood beside him.

Judge Blocks State Abortion Ban As Attempt “To Completely Eliminate The Rights of Ohio Women”

… who thought Gilead couldn’t happen…

According to affidavits submitted in the lawsuit, two additional minors who suffered sexual assault also had to leave the state for abortions. Cancer patients and other women with severe complications were also denied abortions. The Ohio Capital Journal summarized the evidence last month:

  • The descriptions include those of three women who threatened suicide. They also include two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant. 
  • Another three examples were of women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they couldn’t get abortions in Ohio. 
  • And in three cases, debilitating vomiting was caused by pregnancy—so bad in one case that a woman couldn’t get off the clinic floor. But neither could these women get abortions in Ohio, the affidavits said.

National Constitution Center Project Offers Constitutional Amendment Proposals with Broad Cross-Ideological Support

In 2020, the National Constitution Center sponsored a constitution-drafting project in which   it named three groups to produce their own revised versions of the Constitution: a conservative team, a libertarian team, and a progressive one—each composed of prominent academics and other experts on constitutional law issues. The exercised revealed some important points of agreement between the three teams (even though they also predictably  differed on other issues). This year, NCC reconvened the three teams and asked them to come up with a list of constitutional amendments they could jointly agree on.

… and these were…

  • Term limits for Supreme Court justices
  • Making impeachment easier (would actually make starting impeachment harder, convicting easier)
  • Legislative Veto (wherein the legislature could veto executive action)
  • Eliminating the requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen
  • Making the Constitution easier to amend in the future

… most make sense on the face of it… the rest make sense upon reading the explanations…

10-04-2022

HCR this morning mostly about the mounting trouble for various actors on the far right and the challenge to democracy… the noose closing around 45’s neck and the violence he seeks to sponsor to distract and prevent… it is a race to see if he becomes president before he is jailed, in which case he would never be jailed… the Oath Keepers go on trial… Moore v Harper was heard by SCOTUS… the conservative judges are flirting with giving states absolute rights to determine elections… the so called “independent state legislature” doctrine is being determined… 45 has been definitively tied to withholding documents from the government by a witness… Herschel Walker continues to melt down…

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

… read with interest Zeba Blay’s review of Blonde… her main complaint is that it fetishize Monroe’s pain to no good purpose and that the movie was boring… H agreed with that assessment… i did not… i thought it effectively showed the appalling behavior of patriarchal males while not pandering to that behavior with highly erotic (to most people) scenes… to the extent that nudity and sex were in the film, and there was lots of both, it wasn’t very titillating, at least not to me… still, one needs to pay attention to women on the subject because they know things men will never know about being a woman in a patriarchal society…

Sidelined No More: Reading List of Fiercely Political Women… so many books one could read… so little time… the article makes an extensive argument that women still are not taken seriously when they write about politics seriously and offers up a selection of books by women authors past and present…

Among the Washington Post’s columnists, who mostly cover politics, 57 are men and 26 are women. In the last two months, the New York Times’s opinion pages published 77 political analyses by men and only 29 by women. Half of those women-authored pieces had a male co-author.

Male domination of writing on politics in America is most extreme in the conservative press. In the National Review, 90% of the recent political analyses were by men, and the quarterly Claremont Review of Books—which prides itself on being the intellectual heart of the American right—has gone two and a half entire years without publishing a single feature essay written by a woman.

The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, a moral one. Readers are denied something by this exclusion. Sometimes women have an especially intimate way of writing about politics that’s both close-up—examining the psychology and the erotics of power—and carries an interesting objectivity and distance, thanks, perhaps, to their own history of being distanced from the political sphere.

… relative to HCR’s post above is J. Michael Luttig’s piece in The Atlantic arguing that the “Independent State Legislature” theory is bunk…

If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.

That as many as six justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with the independent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling. There is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.

The state supreme court’s decision under the North Carolina constitution is conclusive under that constitution, and it is only reviewable by the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States thereafter for a determination of whether that decision violates the federal Constitution.

All of which goes to confirm that the Constitution neither contemplates nor permits federal constitutional commandeering of the states’ constitutions and their judicial processes. Rather, it contemplates and provides only for federal judicial review of the state supreme courts’ state constitutional decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court for consistency with the United States Constitution.

… we will know next summer how bad the current iteration of SCOTUS is… there is, unfortunately, reason to be concerned…

Putting your money where your mouth isn’t?…

… from Required Reading on Hyperallergic…

… from the Official Development Assistance By Regime Context (2010-2019) report…

What Stood Out, Week 32

In the world of wordsmithing:

  • I have been reading Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog a few pages at a time. That’s how it is with poetry. I need to go low and slow. As if I am smoking a brisket, but poetically. This take on Photography stood out to me:

    Photography is akin to medieval thinking: it values the instant, is based on the microcosm, the atom which mirrors the whole, the DNA which identifies. To see is to arrest the world, to save it from submersion.

    Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

  • I learned about Eve Babitz from this article in The Atlantic.

    Eve Babitz was one of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los Angeles: essayist, memoirist, novelist, groupie, feminist, canny ingenue.

    Babitz was four inches short of that 5 foot 11, but she had other attributes that made her presence, and her femininity, impossible to ignore. Her most explicit attempt to address this challenge was “My Life in a 36DD Bra, or, the All-American Obsession,” a piece she wrote for Ms. in April 1976.

  • And there was this interview with [Lisa Taddeo on Death, Desire and Her “Super Dark” View of the World](https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/14293/lisa-taddeo-on-her-short-story-collection-ghost-lover?utm_source=Link&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=RSSFeed&utm_term=lisa-taddeo-on-death-desire-and-her-super-dark-view-of-the-world “Lisa Taddeo on Death, Desire and Her “Super Dark” View of the World”) in AnOther Magazine.

    Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (2019) was a work of devastating brilliance, flooring readers with its illuminating investigation of female desire. She spent eight years creating this compelling feat of literary reportage (which is currently in production as a new television series starring Shailene Woodley as the author). Immersing herself in the stories of her three subjects, Sloane, Lina, and Maggie, Taddeo moved cross-country multiple times, bearing witness to these women’s lives as they unfolded, exhaustively recording their testimony and speaking to those closest to the book’s trio of central figures. What emerged was a complex, candid, and deeply compassionate portrait of labyrinthine female sexuality.

    I purchased Three Women for Kindle. Anything to do with feminine sexuality attracts me. I expect to be titillated by it but also hope to be educated by it.

In the world of film:

  • A review of ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’

    It’s just that modern competition revolves around the ability to claim persecution: In a land of modern strivers granted wealth and power the likes of which the world has never seen, she who can lay claim to the greatest number of handicaps and the lowest number of privileges is Queen Victim.

    A competition based on the greatest number of handicaps and least number of privileges strikes me as an apt metaphor for the present moment in America in lots of ways.

  • Why Japanese Director Kinuyo Tanaka’s Films Are Criminally Overlooked

    Kinuyo Tanaka: A Life in Film, it explores the outstanding works of one of the country’s first-ever female auteurs – whose incredible and under-seen films have been newly restored in 4K. A screen icon in her own right (highlights from her incredible acting career, including collaborations with nearly all of the aforementioned filmmaking giants, are to be shown in September), Tanaka defied the male gatekeepers of the industry to carve out her own career behind the camera. She thrived in the process, delivering works that matched those of her male counterparts and often surpassed them.

    Though her directing career was short (Tanaka completed six films in nine years in total), the stories she told were vital tales of female agency and desire that were essential to the cinematic development of one of the world’s great filmmaking nations.

  • Lena Dunham’s new film, Sharp Stick, seems like a must see to me, but then I am easily sold by the promise of sex on the screen. Still, this review in Hyperallergic and the fact that its Dunham, promises humor and intelligence in addressing the subject of a young woman setting out to loose her virginity.

In the World of my daily walks:

Leaf chatter as a breeze moves through the trees. Crickets. Cicadas.

In the world of art:

I liked Lucy Johnson’s - Reality Breakdown photography series.

Lucy Johnson (b.1986) is a UK artist who works in sound and visual art. Her work explores themes of the sublime, the mundane and the absurd in the human experience. She has self published two photo zines with imprint Pearl Press and her sound work has featured in The Wire, NTS Radio, Tusk Festival, Fact Magazine and Index Festival (Yorkshire Sculpture International). Alongside soundtracking her own visual art, she collaborates with artists of different disciplines in creating audio visual projects, some of which appear on ‘Soundtracks Vol.1’, released by Opal Tapes in 2020.

  • A Show Traces Philip Guston’s Impact on Contemporary Artists - I have long been a fan.

    A Thing for the Mind at commercial gallery Timothy Taylor takes an altogether more creative approach to demonstrating influence, one informed less by strict historical evidence than by the curator’s creative interpretation based on painterly themes and similarities.

  • Two Santa Monica Artists Create a Legacy Through Potlucks

    The backyard potlucks followed a consistent formula that worked because so many people stepped up to contribute and help out. Around 6pm on a Saturday night, a long table filled up with potluck delicacies — both store bought and homemade — while a drink table was stocked with wine and beer. Jon and his tech crew would set up for the artist slideshow as Kim greeted visitors in her studio at the back of the house.

    It’s always about connecting with other people. When we connect, when we talk face to face, that makes a difference.

In the world of human rights:

  • Telling the Devastating Stories of Pre-Abortion Ireland(https://lithub.com/telling-the-devastating-stories-of-pre-abortion-ireland/)

    Decades on from the writing of Irish laws that caused the death and enslavement of women, the deaths and abduction of their babies, and the decimation of their families and communities, we are seeing similar laws being rewritten in America—the land of the free and a country that was once a sanctuary for Irish women fleeing shame and judgment in their country. And it’s slowly dawning on us that history can repeat itself if we let it. It’s down to us to tell the stories that help us to move forward, not back.

** In the world of politics:**

  • News of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago of course stands out. Of particular interest to me is this speculative line Heather Cox Richardson draws to Saudi Arabia in her August 11 Post.

    … what springs to mind for me is the plan pushed by Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and fundraiser and campaign advisor Tom Barrack, to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

    It seems clear that items of significant national security import were illegally removed from Washington and brought to Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know why or by whom, but the presumption is 45. We know that 45 is venal so the suspicion is that the materials were to be used for profit. Or perhaps have been. There appears to have been nuclear secrets among the materials.

    I detest the very idea of 45. That so many embrace him unquestioningly is baffling and frightening to me.

  • I whole heartedly agree with this article in The Dispatch on Liz Cheney’s integrity. She is a shining example of politics with integrity. If 45 is brought down and the anti-democratic forces in this country are turned back, it will be because of her. She has changed my idea of what to look for in a politician. Integrity first, then policy. Polling makes it clear she will not be nominated by the Republican Party in Wyoming to her seat in congress. That is sad. What is it about humanity that values loyalty over integrity? I’ll take Liz Cheney any day. If she runs for president I may well vote for her because I see her as the sanest way out of the mess we are in.

  • Tilting Our Politics Back Toward Democracy

    It seemed important to quote extensively from this article in The Bulwark:

    These constant struggles over eligibility and access are part of our constitutional birthright. The beauty in the story of America is not found in an uncritical adherence to the Founders’ design but, rather, in the struggle—in various groups’ demand, often resisted by others, that our democracy be more participatory and inclusive. For those who love liberal democracy, the one thing worse than letting vox-pop stars (election deniers, for example) touch our democracy is cutting off their access to it.

    Such unchecked anti-democratic actions are made possible by the toxic partisanship driving the country apart—today’s version of the factions about which James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10. More than half of adults view other Americans as the biggest threat to their way of life. Approximately half of Democrats and Republicans view the other as immoral, and a recent study shows partisans view their political opponents as more unintelligent than immoral, more “stupid than evil” as it were. These views make it easier for people to excuse the illiberal undertakings of elected officials because such activities are deemed necessary to defeat the existential threat presented by the other side.

    In contrast to this understanding of our political history as a series of deviations from a model republic—an understanding hardly convincing for the 90-plus percent of us who would not have been permitted to vote at the time the Constitution was first implemented—there is the other understanding I described earlier, which sees our political history as a never-ending struggle over eligibility and access. This alternative understanding makes it possible to look at our system of government with clear eyes to assess whether it has tilted too far toward democracy (toward becoming a tyranny of the majority) or too far away from it (toward becoming a tyranny of the minority or of minorities). Each direction carries risks.

    But pulling off a republican democracy that puts the demos in the driver’s seat will require trust and investment in the people—not an easy undertaking given the foundation of our democratic culture. But failing to do so will ensure we get more of the type of representatives Madison warned us about in Federalist No. 10: “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, who may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”

    We seem to be squarely in that place now. And the election deniers winning Republican primaries and state election offices with the intent of undermining our democracy out of self-interest may soon put the ridiculousness of the vox pops to shame.

    I struggle to resist the thought that people on the far right are “more stupid than evil.” I don’t always succeed. My assessment of the situation is that they are afraid of the brave new world that could be. The Multiarchy. They loose some privileges in such a world. It’s existential. It’s sad. I hope we can come back from the brink of civil war and make constructive choices. I have good and bad days on this. Like Democracy itself in the present moment.

  • In other 45 related news, this observation from Heather Cox Richardson:

    It is an astonishing thing to see that a former president, the person who was responsible for faithfully executing the laws of our nation, has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

    Referring to his deposition in New York State this past week.

  • How Trump’s top general worried the Hitler-curious president was seeking “a Reichstag moment."

    The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

    “Which generals?” Kelly asked.

    “The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

    “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

    But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.

    I remember worrying at the time that 45 would succeed in corrupting the military. It seems my worries were warranted, but then i knew that.

I think this is a good place to stop.

July 24, 2022

… 231.2 lbs…

… Heather Cox Richardson about the accomplishments of the administration, which are considerable… and yet, the people are not happy and Republicans may succeed in steering us to a one party state…

Love or hate what Biden has done, he has managed to pull a wide range of countries together to stand against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian attack in Ukraine, and he has managed to get through a terribly divided Congress laws to make the lives of the majority better, even while Republicans are rejecting the idea that the government should reflect the will of the majority. That is no small feat.

Whether it will be enough to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government is up to us.1

… i believe in the messy multiarchy… i hope more people can look at what is going on and support democracy… i am pessimistic about that…

… last night we watched Blue Bayou, a movie centered on the deportation of a Korean American who was adopted but for whom the appropriate paperwork had never been completed… apparently there are 25K to 50K adoptees from foreign countries that have the same problem… how is it possible that there isn’t some kind of understanding in the system that it isn’t the adoptee’s fault that the paperwork was not done or done properly?… how are we so tied to the rules that we can’t see our way to making an exception for this class?… how are we sending people back to countries they have never known and can’t even speak the language?… i read the wikipedia write up on the movie and learn that a law passed in 2000 made many in this legalization limbo citizens, it did not cover those 18 and older at the time…

… i read about bird flu killing tens of thousands of seabirds… i wonder if this is something related to climate change… i read the article to the end… it’s not… i remember B warning us that the flu was going around and to mask and glove up when we cared for the chickens this past winter… i wonder about the meat birds coming… tomorrow i think…

… because we have at least one in town, this article on Little Libraries caught my attention… the trend started in Wisconsin as a memorial to the mother of Todd Bol, who was a schoolteacher…

monkeypox continues to grow as an issue around the globe… i feel like i am reading too much about this new disease of concern… i have read it is only spread through direct contact… is that changing?…

an article on Tony Wang in Ain’t Bad… i almost don’t click on it, but then do… wait… i know this guy’s work!… he showed at the last Salon… he showed the very work published in the article… he was testing the sequencing… way to go Tony… hope we see you again!…


Kitchen and Coffee after a walk down Main Street… not many pictures… not much that inspired an effort… it’s Sunday so i treat myself to hot chocolate… it is a spiritual experience… i really have to try making it at home…

… published yesterday’s notes… getting ready to publish yesterday’s group of photos… the things i look at… pay attention to… Gilbert O’Sullivan, _Alone Again (Naturally)_ playing on the sound system…

… haven’t heard that song in a long time…

… signs of Beacon Open Studios around town… wanted to go to some of the studios but the heat dampened my enthusiasm… lots of evidence of people in town… lots of cars parked on streets adjacent to Main Street, where they aren’t during the week… not as many people on the street as there are when the weather is better…

… it’s no longer projected to be 100 today… top out at 96 or 97… cooler tomorrow but more 90 degree weather heading our way next week…

… some more Etel Adnan…

Within seconds, X rays and gamma rays have hit us at light speed. A cloud of nuclear particles at 5 million miles an hour engulfs everybody’s brain. We are monitoring the universe in real time.2

… i read from dot to dot… making my way slowly through the book… usually, there is a passage that jumps out… today it was the above… the idea of monitoring the universe in real time… do we have nuclear particle receptors and don’t know it?… will we one day figure out how to tap into them?… will our minds then expand to be the universe?… will we loose our selves when this happens?… will it be hive mind?… i think about how, in my society, everything is geared towards being the unique, outstanding (good or bad) individual… we are to brand ourselves… make ourselves into a recognized and marketable quantity… is this the right way to think about being?… should we, instead, enjoy our selfness quietly… i oscillate on this… being part of the fabric, undistinguished, doesn’t bring resources… it does bring community?…

… just now i am thinking about how the patriarchal Oligarchs want to remake American society… i hope we can stop them…


… paid the bills…

… edited this morning’s pictures…

… bought the makings of ratatouille at the farmers market… especially wonderful dish in the summer with fresh vegetables… i will cook it on the Green Egg with the hope that it will develop a smokey flavor on top of the oven caramelized flavors this recipe develops… i post my intentions to Micro.blog and Facebook…


  1. Heather Cox Richardson, July 24, 2022 ↩︎

  2. Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan ↩︎

July 23, 2022

…232.2 lbs…

… the dogs get me up at 3:30 AM… wanted to stay in bed till 4 but… Fiona pacing the room… i think an animal was passing through our neighbor’s yard… the other day we saw a skunk family pass through… we seem to finally have secured the perimeter of our fence so Fiona isn’t getting out and animals aren’t getting in… except for squirrels…

… H has become determined to attract humming birds to the yard… we’ve had many sightings of them this year… we have flowers in the garden they are attracted to… she wants them to come to the feeders… so far, not much activity there… we have many feeders now… she is trying to find the perfect one… i hope they come to her feeders…

… we made pizza on the green egg last night… tending a fire more bearable than i would have thought in this heat… today and tomorrow are the peak of the heat wave… high 90’s… 100 predicted for tomorrow…

a story in Hyperallergic about a mural in Queens defaced by Sony Spider Man additions and now restored

… the mural, “Queens is the Future,” created by Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel…

https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/07/QITF-After-restoration-in-2022_Photo-by-Eve-Biddle_Courtesy-of-Eve-Biddle-and-Joshua-Frankel-scaled.jpg?resize=1568%2C1176&quality=100&ssl=1

an article about Abby Manzella, a micro fiction writer and host of Micro, a podcast… her 400 word piece, Lepidoptera, mentioned… a story about a little girl in the midst of a pandemic… she wakes up with butterfly wings one day… a paragraph about how she writes into her phone at night to get ideas off her mind… how this one emerged almost fully formed… i think, yes, i write into my phone… i have been trying to write more… this will be inspiration…

… this from Maria Popova in the Marginalian this morning…

By the time we can even begin answering for ourselves the question of whether or not is worth living, myriad things have been answered for us by the fundamental forces that have conspired into the confluence of chance that is our self. None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.1

… the post is about Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, To The Young Who Want To Die… wait another day… see what’s coming around the corner… wait another day…

… i, myself, have never been suicidal… depression is not frequent with me and never very deep… i once played with suicide, as a kid, in the basement of my parents home… i made a noose… attached it to the steel beam supporting the joists of the house and carefully lowered myself to feel the noose tighten around my neck… i had no intention of swinging from the beam… i only wanted to know what it felt like… when i think back on it, i think… what if i had slipped and hung myself… the world would have thought i was sad… there would have been no clue as to why… i would have seemed a generally happy boy… i don’t think my troubles with my father had started by then, beyond his being a strict disciplinarian… there is a short story in this… i should try to write it… something involving Schrodinger’s cat… am i alive or dead?…

an article in Mother Jones about an article in Axios that H told me about yesterday… it’s about how the MAGA group plan to remake government when they get in office… fill it with cronies… and then leave the subsequent administration with the choice of doing their own cronies make over or returning to the bureaucratic state of olden times… i think, what makes them think there will be another administration if that plan is successfully carried out?… this would be the mostly white patriarchy taking over and never letting go… this would be the end of the multiarchy… oh god, why must we contend with this shit?… 45 must never be responsible for anything in government again…

an article about Pelosi’s planned trip to Taiwan and China’s threat to retaliate “forcefully.”… there seem to be so many ways the world could go sideways right now…

another review of Nope further reinforces that i want to see it… H feels the same way…

Ukraine is winning… i read the article… i nod to its arguments… it lightens my mood a bit, but, i wonder, i still don’t see the end game where Putin retreats with tail between legs… another one that could easily go sideways…

a Jonathan Blaustein review of the photobook Kyanite Miners… i don’t share his opinion of the book… it’s slick, corporate, meant to promote the mining company… it’s competent… i don’t think it is pushing any boundaries…


… Kitchen and Coffee… the handsome bleach blond dude barista… he is less personable than the women… i wonder how women customers respond to his handsomeness?… he reminds me of a young Paul Hollywood…

… as i walk down Main Street i am thinking about writing a short story about a boy toying with a noose… i am thinking that i will write multiple stories within a story, one where the boy toys with the noose, satisfies his curiosity and then takes the noose apart and goes on with his life… another in which he slips and accidentally hangs himself… others in which various plausible scenarios play out, including that he wishes to die, is not only playing with the idea of death… could be a very interesting story…

… i am liking my return to routine and structured workflow… for so many weeks things were moving all about… i was making pictures, writing, but not in the routine and rhythmic way i am now… i have started posting titled journal entries on a daily basis… each day i publish the previous day’s entry… they are Notes On Attention Paid… each day i am posting a selection of photographs taken that day… they are also Notes On Attention Paid… it’s that simple…

… on the way here, a bunch of male sexual performance enhancement packaging on the ground… i photograph all of them… one has the words “rock hard” on it… i don’t know, sounds painful to me… anyway, i am thinking today’s image post will include a number of them, may be only them…

The starting point of infinity is always at the center, where mind resides. Behind an image there’s an image. Nothingness is Being’s foundation, put on stage by poetry, which makes the erotic and the intellect meet. It’s not life, it’s alive.2



  1. To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem ↩︎

  2. Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan ↩︎

July 20, 2022

… we unearthed some crab mac and cheese from the freezer last …night… so good… had seconds and did more snacking than i should have… also, a couple of vodka tonics and wine… all together, a bit calorific… more exercise yesterday than other days…

… just looked up the weather… mid 90’s through Sunday, when temps are projected to hit 100… not so unusual this time of year…

… some struggle with Lightroom yesterday… but got work done… wound up with not much to do in afternoon…

… HCR about SS deletion of texts from Jan 5 and 6… about 45 still trying to overturn election… about the election fraud investigation in Georgia… Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers being formerly censured by the Arizona Republican Party… for doing the right thing… protests in front of the Supreme Court where a number of legislators were arrested, including Carolyn Maloney, AOC… Lauren Robel filing a misconduct complaint against Todd Rosita who went on Fox News and said the doctor treating the ten year old rape victim had not done proper filings with the state when she had… the house passing a bill to protect gay marriage… will the senate follow?… 54 Republicans unwilling to go on record against gay marriage… 70% of all Americans and 55% of Republicans support gay marriage… including, i recently learned… Liz Cheney…

… then there is the Idaho Republican party which has included a plank in it’s platform that abortion is illegal in all circumstances, including those in which the mother’s life is at stake and the fetus won’t survive … Scott Herndon, running for the Idaho Senate sponsored the platform amendment saying…

“For the last 49 years we have essentially lost the argument in the culture because we have focused on abortion as the termination of a pregnancy and not the termination of a living human being,” Herndon said to fellow delegates, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. “We will never win this human rights issue, the greatest of our time, if we make allowances for the intentional killing of another human being.

… a man of course… doesn’t have to deal with the consequences… how could any woman support such a stance unless blinded by the Christian Patriarchy… this kind of stupidity makes the best case against religion of any kind… so much unnecessary suffering…

… another article reviewing the landscape of abortion battles across the nation… suggest sthat several polls show Dems picking up momentum in spite of Biden Administration poor approval ratings and a number of issues that normally drive voters away from the party in power… this all actually has the feel to me of an issue that will rapidly settle itself into national legislation as the horror stories start to proliferate… question is… who will be in control after 2024…

Among overall registered voters, 41 percent said they would prefer to see a Democrat-controlled Congress after the midterms, while 40 percent said they would opt for a Republican-controlled one. Republicans led by 1 percentage point among likely voters. The poll was based on responses from 849 registered voters in early July.

… this from an article on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Buddhism…

Most music has a structure and purpose leading to a resolution.

… this struck me immediately as a condition of life… we want structure, purpose and resolution… so much of our entertainment industry is built on telling stories with structure, purpose and resolution… but what if such a thing is an illusion at best?… we are only passing through… there is nothing about individual lives that is a resolution to anything… we are all part of a greater flow and we do our best to swim within that flow in ways that give us hope and purpose… or at least i do… lately i have struggled with hope… struggled with purpose… in part… this is a condition of getting older… as time on earth runs short, we wonder what our purpose was?… we wonder, was there any meaning to it?… more from the article…

One can engage the sand mandala on many levels; its beauty, its precision, the mastery required to produce it, or the patterns and protection it offers towards awakening. But in the end, we cannot hold onto any of these as the mandala is destroyed and dispersed as a reminder of our own impermanence and return to our primordial source.

… i come to the end of my personal feeds so i suppose it might be time to go for a walk… make some pictures… get a coffee or hot chocolate… maybe down by the river today…


… later, after a long walk by the river… K&C… intense delicate tattooed barista at the helm this AM… she remembers me from last week… i commented on her tattoos favorably last week… still like them this week… she remembers me like we have seen each other more than once, which i don’t think we have…

… i start writing in my analog journal, then switch here… if i were to write something more penetrating, i would only need to copy it here… i don’t think the analog method offers enough perceptible benefit to make it the prevalent place to write…

… it is hot chocolate this morning… i decided the effort of the walk required it… also, needed something to feed my energy level…

… crying baby… my their voices can be so penetrating!… hard to tolerate… my immediate thought is get the baby out of here… this is peaceful morning time… why does the kid get to interrupt it that way?… it’s not a generous response… my ultimate tolerance is more generous… she walks down the aisle with her mother and gives me a charming almost smile while looking at me intently… mom takes her outside where she will be less of annoying if she cry/screams again… thank you mom…

Reading Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, this…

Not ever hesitating, waves surge to reach human speech. They propose a truce. When we forget Ahab and converse only with Moby-Dick, the universe will manifest itself in full clarity.

Moby Dick… one of my favorite reads… the message, forget human hubris and insanity, commune with nature, this is our salvation, or could be, if we’d dispense with appetite culture… if 45 is Ahab, are we Moby Dick?, no, we are the unwitting and unwilling among the crew… where then is Moby Dick?… the multiarchy… the misunderstood mythical beast… yes it is we who are being hunted to be extinguished…

… mother with baby, this one not a toddler, not noisy, not screaming just to hear itself scream…

… and the following paragraph from Sea and Fog

And the sea ceased to be because it became the sea, and we stopped at the station of impermanence, and rose from our bewilderment to witness the junction of the past with the present.

… and this…

The uncontrollable desire to think the fleeting elements of the world, to fuse them into images, into words, is probably the most hypnotic of all Eros' manifestations.

… i find a Paris Review article on Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan… i read this quote…

“My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.”

… i think about my own practice and how i seem lost right now… i am encouraged to reengage…


Heather Cox Richardson, July 19, 2022

Idaho State GOP Says Abortion Should Be Illegal, Even When Used to Save a Woman’s Life

The abortion law fight grows in Texas and Wet Virginia. Here’s what you missed

Awakening with “A Love Supreme”

Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan

July 19, 2022

… no alcohol last night… told myself in the morning i would not and i did not… wasn’t strongly tempted…

… storms came through yesterday… rain… H said not enough… need to up the watering time for yard… lots of fireflies in the back yard… i like to step out and watch them for a bit when i let the dogs out in the evening…

… M, B and i set up the coop for the meat chickens… we installed heat lamps even though it’s going to be in the 90’s this week… the little chicks like it around 100, so the heat lamps… will be needed at night for sure… B put on lipstick to help us… i think, “that isn’t needed,” but she thinks so, so it is…

… HCR wrote about how extreme the Republican Party is right now… she ended with some indication that it might be rebounding against them…

… Claes Oldenburg dies at the age of 93… i was not a big fan, my interests run more to rendering the sublime… but, that i have always been aware of his work says something…

Claes Oldenburg, best known for his large, playful works of everyday objects — from a clothespin and a flashlight to a baseball bat and a fried egg — died on the morning of Monday, July 18 at his home in Manhattan, where he was recovering from a hip injury last month. He was 93. The artist’s death was confirmed by Paula Cooper and Pace, the two galleries that have long represented him.

… reading a review of a book about female art monsters… Letters to Gwen John, by Celia Paul… Ceila Paul was the lover/muse of Lucien Freud… Gwen John was the lover/muse of August Rodin… both had art ambitions… Gwen John, Rodin aside, had the greater dedication it appears… she conceived and birthed a child which she promptly turned over to her mother so she would not be distracted by motherhood… Paul decided to become a mother… just now, H’s mother comes to mind…

John organized her life much like the archetypal male art monster, severing family ties and forgoing marriage and children. Any other way of life, in her view, would be antithetical to art. Just as a monk renounces earthly pleasures to access the divine, the artist sequesters herself to access genius. “Your goal was Great Art,” Paul writes to John, “and you knew you had to make sacrifices to attain it.” John would have been disinterested in — if not repulsed by — Paul’s decision to become a mother, despite the untraditional rationale behind it. Her pregnancy was an act of beneficence: “I had wanted to get pregnant so that I could comfort my mother, who was grieving for my father,” she writes.

… i have tried to be dedicated as a photographic artist… i have struggled to do that lately… i am trying to give up alcohol so the struggle is less… i am trying to get back to the creative routines that have sustained me… i am trying to overcome H’s indifference and sometimes hostility to my art practice…

… Dia art workers seeking a Union… this has become something of an epidemic in the art world… i am guessing it is much needed… unions in general seem to be resurgent…

Approximately 135 part-time and full-time workers at the Dia Art Foundation petitioned to unionize with Local 2110 UAW on Friday, July 15. Their organizing efforts are the latest in a wave that has swept cultural institutions across the nation, with recent labor developments at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

… low wages are cited though they are paid a minimum wage of $16 an hour… the article is poorly written getting some factual information wrong… like locating Storm King Art Center in Beacon, which it is not… across the river, yes… not in Beacon… did i say i live in Beacon?…

… a review(?) of a novel published 90 years ago… Now in November by Josephine Johnson… set during the great depression, won the Pulitzer Prize… youngest person to ever win the prize, one of the too few women to win it…

This is the same America that loves a good bootstrapper success story, but this trope Johnson sidesteps, focusing instead on the precariousness of working-class life, when a slip, a fall, a burn, or a broken bone can begin a slow slide, the way the cost of medical care and absence of a social safety net still sink working people today. The shame of watching others suffer without being able to help weighs heavily.

… the horridness of the extreme conservative republicans, who would do away with that social safety net and condemn poor people to servitude…

In many ways, the drought and devastation of the Dust Bowl in Now in November rhyme with our modern experiences of climate change, when a tipped electric line can send a tidal wave of flames surging across the landscape, licking hundreds of homes from the map.

… did you know the Gimlet cocktail originated, at least in part, as a treatment for scurvy?… i did not… excerpts from the book, Doctors and Distillers, The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails, by Camper English…

Proposed antiscorbutics (scurvy preventatives or cures) included rice, beans, sulfuric acid, vinegar, molasses, cinchona bark, mustard, opium, mercury, rhubarb, hops, juniper berries, seal carcass oil, scurvy grass, and especially sauerkraut or horseradish. Fermented beverages like spruce beer, regular beer, and cider, plus fizzy soda water and rum punch were quite often employed. So was gargling with urine, which probably didn’t help with the foul-breath issue. Other ineffective treatments included purgatives, bleeding, sweating, bathing in animal blood, and—surprisingly often—burial of a person up to the neck in sand.

Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial is used in place of fresh lime juice in some dive bars and homes, though it contains sweeteners, preservatives, and added coloring. The ingredient was immortalized in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 book The Long Goodbye, in which a character states, “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

… i am amazed at how many bad mistakes i find in articles from supposedly serious places about thoughtful things… i mean, mistakes that one re-reading for editing purposes by author or other should catch… and many are articles that had no reason to be rushed to print… what gives?…

… more reading of Hannah Arendt…

… an article on inflation and climate change… it feels we are heading to a bad time on that front…

In Italy, the hot and dry conditions are expected to destroy a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal fodder — at a minimum. Locusts have descended on the island of Sardinia in the worst invasion in three decades, hurting the production of hay and alfalfa. The European Commission recently downgraded its soft-wheat harvest estimates from 130 million tons to 125 million tons—more bad news amid a food shortage precipitated by Russia’s blockade on exports from Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest exporters of grain.)

Across the world in China, a record-breaking heat wave is causing major problems. Roofs are melting, residents are relocating to public cooling zones in underground air-raid shelters, and health workers are strapping frozen food to their too-hot hazmat suits. The Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo has warned that the heat could further hurt the production of corn and soy, worsening inflation. These crops are used to feed pigs, and early-season failures have already sent the price of pork, China’s staple meat, soaring.

… the desktop computer still pretty slow and crashed on me once… but i got some photos edited from this morning… not a stellar batch but a few good ones…


Heather Cox Richardson, July 18, 2022

Claes Oldenburg, Whose Sculptures Transformed the Everyday, Dies at 93

Letters to Gwen, Celia Paul

“A Book About Thirst.” Josephine Johnson’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel

How Trying to Find a Cure for Scurvy Led to the Gimlet

Searing Summer Heat is Driving Food Prices Higher Still

Liz Cheney for President?

I have been having the thought, frequently and steadily, that a Liz Cheney run for President might be the best pathway to holding on to our Republic and the freedoms that we have enjoyed for so long.

The odds of her being nominated seem long to me. However, if she threw her hat in the ring, I think we might want to help her. And by we, I mean centrist independents and moderate Democrats.

I say this knowing that she holds policy positions that are antithetical to a lot of what I believe in. My calculation is this. At present, the political landscape looks poor for Democrats in 2022 and in 2024. The Biden administration currently has a very low approval rating and conditions don’t look good for improvement in the next two and a half years. We may be looking at a scenario where, even setting aside the state level voting shenanigans, it is going to be difficult for Democrats to win the presidency again. Hopefully this will improve, but it’s prudent to think about the what ifs.

So far, the front runner for the Republican nomination is 45. It’s possible that the 1/6 committee is making a dent in his support, but it remains strong, grounded in willful ignorance as it is. The other alternatives, so far, are Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbot. I have no confidence that either of them would be the kind of reverent constitutionalist that Cheney is. We are talking about the survival of the republic here and Cheney is the only one I trust on the Republican side to insure that.

I am convinced that we cannot allow a MAGA Republican to win the presidency in 2024. I am pretty sure any such candidate will shred the constitution while in office. Certainly 45 would.

Add to this mix that 45 and his MAGA horde are gunning for a constitutional crisis should he (or DeSantis or Abbot) be nominated but loose.

Bottom line, a MAGA candidate either wins and then causes a constitutional crisis, or they loose and cause a constitutional crisis. Both scenarios are grim.

On the other hand, should Cheney find a way to capture the nomination, she can be counted on to uphold the constitution in victory or defeat. And, I would argue, if you really want to return the Republican party to an honorable and reasonable participant in our two party system, she needs to win. The non-MAGA Republicans will need that validation for her principled conservatism to be viable. She also needs time as leader of the party to clean out the worst of the MAGA rats.

If she were to be nominated, run and loose, we would avoid a constitutional crisis. However, a loss would allow the MAGA folk to continue to fester and the party could easily swing to the dark side again.

I have been conducting my own non-scientific survey of liberal friends and, interestingly, many of them are having the same thoughts I am. Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the major Democratic donors that are supporting Cheney in her fight to keep her house seat in 2022. We have all come to the same conclusion, Cheney is looking like a clear pathway out of the disaster we are heading for.

The question independents and liberals will need to ask themselves if she is the Republican nominee in 2024, who is best positioned to save the Republic? And if the answer is Liz Cheney, can we play the long game and overcome our aversion to her policies and vote for her? The choice to me is Cheney now and live to fight for a more liberal society another day. The alternative could seal off any possibility of the multicultural society we have been heading for, for a very long time.

Forget Abortion, Democrats Should be Messaging About Birth Control

For Democrats who are passionately pro-choice, here is a hard truth: You are not going to turn the scores of millions of voters who find the topic uncomfortable into militant pro-choice activists…

Take Away the President’s Immunity

You think?…

Various motivations may feed into Trump’s electoral calculation for 2024, but one in particular is coming into focus. In seeking office, he would be seeking legal immunity.

Closing remarks by Liz Cheney at her recent debate with those who seek to replace her in Wyoming.

Think what you will about her voting record, Liz Cheney is a hero. If we get past this moment in history without the loss of democracy, she and I will disagree about almost everything, but, “long may she run,” to quote Neil Young.

It’s been a tremendous honor—the highest honor of my professional life—to represent the people of Wyoming for the last five and a half years. I am a conservative Republican. I’m going to work hard to earn the vote of every Wyomingite in this election. And I think it’s important for people to know that I believe that the most conservative of conservative principles is fidelity to our Constitution.

In Wyoming, we ride for the brand, and our brand is the United States Constitution. So, I’m going to ask people for their vote. I’m going to work hard to earn that vote.

But people need to know something about me. I will never put party above my duty to the country. I will never put party above my duty to the Constitution. I swore an oath under God and I will abide by that oath. I won’t say something that I know is wrong simply to earn the votes of people to earn political support.

That’s what the voters of Wyoming deserve. That’s what the voters of Wyoming demand. That’s the kind of respect that we owe the voters of this great state.

We need to recognize that if we are not faithful to the Constitution, if we embrace lies, if we embrace the lies of Donald Trump, if we tell the people of Wyoming something is not true, we will soon find ourselves without the structure and the basis and the framework of our Constitutional Republic.

If we don’t abide by the Constitution when it is politically inconvenient, then we will not have the Constitution as our shield when we need to defend our First Amendment rights and our Second Amendment rights.

So, I’m asking for your vote and I’m asking you to understand that I will never violate my oath of office, and if you’re looking for somebody who will, then you need to vote for somebody else on this stage because I won’t.

I will always put my oath first."

Heather Cox Richardson

July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Liz Cheney to Run Against Trump?

As the hearings of the January 6 committee get closer… to implicating Donald Trump criminally in the violent attack on the US Capitol, the former president is reportedly considering announcing a 2024 presidential bid earlier than he might have.

The MAGA Grocery King of Southwest Florida

“If they try to steal the next election, the ’22 elections, I’m all in. We don’t want to talk about what that is…I have enough guns to put in every single employee’s hands. I hope it never gets there.”

Heather Cox Richardson, June 30, 2022

This is so depressing…

In the one term Trump’s three justices have been on the court, they have decimated the legal landscape under which we have lived for generations…

Why I am not angry about Roe v. Wade

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, there has, predictably, been a lot of expressive reaction on social media, especially by women. One woman proclaimed it was the “boomers” fault. Another woman suggested that if men got angry as women do about this issue, this would never have happened.

The first accusation is barely worth dealing with because it is absurd. Let’s just say that my wife and I are boomers, have been pro choice the whole way, have voted in every election, local and national, have done our share of joining protests on women’s issues and were not outliers in our generation.

The second is a common complaint that women have about the men in their lives, who don’t get how important reproductive rights are to them, and men in general, who enjoy the privileges of being male and never have to suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.

My wife replied to this woman’s post. She said she tried to explain it to me but I didn’t get it even though I am one of the “good ones.”

Subsequently my wife tried to engage me about whether men had “skin in the game” and why men were not as supportive of women as they should be on this issue. I told her I wasn’t ready to engage with her about this because, truthfully, I was parsing why I wasn’t angry and hadn’t come to a place where I was confident in my answer. This post is an attempt to understand myself on this question.

Let me begin by copping to my own anger baggage. Anger is hard for me. It is hard for me to express it. It is especially hard for me to experience it. I grew up in constant fear of the explosive, dominating and unforgiving anger of my father. Though he was never physically abusive, he certainly was emotionally abusive. I lived my whole life in fear of that anger whenever I was around him. It only ended when he died last summer. As a result, other people’s anger makes me very uncomfortable.

My first marriage was to a woman who used anger the way my father did. She became irrational and was willing to escalate any argument to whatever place it took to shut me up and shut me down. The reverberations with my father were extraordinary in retrospect.

So yes, anger is not my favorite emotion.

I was married to my first wife for about 11 years. Towards the end of our marriage we got pregnant and we chose to abort the pregnancy. It was a sad time in my life. I was glad that the option to abort was there, but sad that our relationship was in such a miserable state that the idea of introducing a child into the midst of it was inconceivable. It was the only time in my life that I fathered a child. Every now and again I wonder about the child that might have been. Yet I know we made the only choice that made sense.

So yes, I’ve had skin in the game.

My reaction to loosing the constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion is complicated by my belief that abortion is morally problematic. I don’t believe in any God. Still, I believe there is right and wrong (as well as many shades of grey between). Violence is almost never right. Certainly it’s not right when it is a choice one is not forced to make. But things get complicated when, regardless of the choice made, violence will be done.

A good friend once said to me, “I’m pretty sure abortion is violence.” My personal experience with abortion confirms that. Abortion is violence to the fetus, violence to the woman and, sometimes, violence to the man. I believe that abortion should be available as a family planning option, but I am most in tune with President Clinton’s formulation, it should be available, safe and rare.

Moving on to jurisprudence, I have read a lot of articles in the past year about the Roe v. Wade decision. I have landed on the side that it was not well founded jurisprudence. Ruth Bader Ginsberg made that point, repeatedly. She also felt it got decided too soon and in a way that cut off the national conversation that might have evolved into a more workable compromise. The abortion landscape in those days could be horrific, especially for women who lacked resources. I don’t fault the women who pushed it forward to a decision in the only way that seemed possible. But, it was a decision vulnerable to overturning because of flaws in its jurisprudence. The coming decades will be sad and unfortunate for many women in the position of wanting or needing an abortion. My hope is that we will pick up the conversation we didn’t finish having before and come out the other side with better jurisprudence all around. The current jurisprudence, founded on selective originalism as it appears to be, and issued by a court stacked with conservatives who are out of touch with what the majority of the country wants, is no less vulnerable to a future, less conservative, court.

My wife is angry with the conservative justices who maintained at their confirmation hearings that they believed in stare decisis and have turned out to be, in her opinion, liars. Committing to stare decisis as a general principle, which is what I believe they did, is not the same as committing to Roe V. Wade as law that should be viewed as settled. I was not at all surprised they overturned Roe V. Wade. I expected them to.

During the run up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a good friend confided to me that they despised Donald Trump, but didn’t know if they could bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton either. I looked him straight in the eye and said the only issue that should matter is the Supreme Court. The next president was likely going to replace more than one justice (who knew it would be three?). Not showing up, or making some kind of protest vote, failed to recognize the peril of the moment. To me, in that election, that was the issue worth thinking about. That was the issue that one had to vote on. It was, of course, bigger than Roe V. Wade. A conservative court could make all kinds of rulings that would undo the more liberal interpretations of the constitution that make room for the multicultural society I believe in. And that was the point of installing originalist judges on the court. I saw it then and I see it now. I tell everyone who cares to listen that the issue of gravest concern now is democracy itself. We must show up in the next two election cycles. We must vote for democracy. If we don’t, we will loose it.

So, what makes me angry to the extent I do get angry? I am angry with all the moderates and independents who failed to see that the Supreme Court was the central issue and either didn’t show up or made a protest vote in 2016. I am angry with people who allowed themselves to be deluded into voting for Donald Trump and the news outlets that deluded them or pandered to their ratings with false equivalency programming that suggested that 45 wouldn’t be so bad. I am angry with the mostly white Christian Patriarchy’s desire to push their minority viewpoint on the rest of the country. I am angry with Ruth Bader Ginsberg who wouldn’t step down during the Obama administration so that she could be replaced with a judge that would carry on her liberal jurisprudence.

And, in this moment, I am in despair, because I see the same thing lining up to happen again, only this time, democracy is at stake. The mostly white Christian Patriarchy and the wealthy white would-be-oligarchs are not interested in Democracy and are on the verge of successfully taking it down. That is what we are facing in the next two election cycles.

If anger over abortion rights is the issue that brings you to the table to fight for democracy, so be it. But please understand. It is not the central issue. The erosion of democracy is. We are in a determinative moment in history as we struggle to hold on to democracy, and with it, the multicultural rights so many fought so hard to acquire.

Heather Cox Richardson, June 21, 2022

The theme of the day was our election systems, and how Trump’s attack on them continues to threaten our democracy.

In the US, there is only one issue come November, no matter what your tribe.

The walls of all three of our institutions of democracy were scaled and breached on that appalling day. And almost two years thence, one of America’s two political parties cannot even agree whether that day was good or bad, right or wrong.

Judge M. Luttig

Read Full Statement

On the Knife’s Edge of Democracy

We Americans no longer agree on what is right or wrong, what is to be valued and what is not, what is acceptable behavior and not, and what is and is not tolerable discourse in civilized society.

Judge M. Luttig, prepared statement, 1/6 committee.

Heather Cox Richardson, June 16, 2022

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD):

“New evidence is breaking every single day now. Suddenly, a lot of people want to tell the truth.”

Did Trump Know He Was Lying? Who Cares?

Asking whether Trump knew the election was free and fair is like asking whether a komodo dragon prefers smooth jazz or hip hop. It’s a category error.

Every person in a democratic republic has a duty to ascertain the truth as best they can and that means questioning the pap that they are fed nightly. It means letting the light of skepticism peek under the blanket of certainty every now and then.

I only wish stating the obvious and pointing out individual responsibility for assessing truth and accuracy would make better citizens of the many who are not. But it’s not about being good citizens for so many of us. It’s about being on sides and wanting your side to win whatever the cost.