Month: November 2021

I'm not really in Houston, of course. That's just where my airplane landed. After taking a few pictures of the Houston skyline I drove to my real destination: Lafayette, Louisiana, where I planned to take pictures of the swamps and bayous.

As it happens, that hasn't worked out very well yet. I spent all day Tuesday driving around bayou country and really didn't see very much swampiness at all. I think that on Wednesday I'm going to drive over to Biloxi to see what it has to offer, and then circle back to New Orleans, which I've never visited. On Thursday, after doing a bit more research, I'll tackle the swamps again.

In the meantime, here's sunrise over a small river that runs through sugar cane country, of which I saw plenty.

There's not a lot of good news for Democrats this morning. However, consider the standard reasons on offer for Dem losses in Tuesday's elections:

• Biden's "botched" withdrawal from Afghanistan.
• Endless Democratic wrangling over the social spending bill.
• Growing concerns over the economy (inflation, shortages, etc.).
• White backlash to liberal wokeness.

The good news is that Afghanistan will fade; the spending bill will pass eventually; the economy will recover; and wokeness might actually get a well-deserved reining in.

The bad news is that the party in power almost always loses midterm elections no matter what they do.

You may now decide for yourself whether to feel hopeful about 2022 vs. just slitting your wrists now so you don't have to see it.

I'm off on one of my little photography expeditions this week. Marian and the cats are holding down the fort in Irvine.

But where am I? Let's make it easy this time. . .

I am genuinely puzzled by the Texas abortion law currently in front of the Supreme Court.

Suppose it was aimed at some other constitutional right. What if California made it illegal to engage in vaccine denialism? The state has plenty of legitimate interest in this, and the spread of a deadly virus is colorably an act of violence, which brings Near v. Minnesota into play.

But instead of the state enforcing the ban, citizens were allowed to sue deniers for $10,000 in statutory damages.

Would anyone give this the time of day? Or would it be instantly laughed out of court?

What am I missing? Why is this whole thing being taken seriously?

I have many pictures of lizards, but this is the first one where the lizard stuck its tongue out at me. I guess it didn't approve of me taking its picture.

The Washington Post has a zillion-word feature today about how the insurrection of January 6 played out:

Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m., when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol....The Capitol was under siege — and the president, glued to the television, did nothing. For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack.

....During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol. Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall. Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob. [Etc.]

....Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout, he repeated the lie that the election was stolen.

As for Tucker Carlson's absurd claim that the whole thing was a false flag operation, even Trump flunky Kevin McCarthy knew better:

Trump falsely claimed to McCarthy that the rioters were members of antifa, but McCarthy corrected him and said they were in fact Trump supporters....“You’ve got to hold them,” McCarthy said. “You need to get on TV right now, you need to get on Twitter, you need to call these people off.”

Trump responded, “Kevin, they’re not my people.”

McCarthy told the president, “Yes they are, they just came through my windows and my staff is running for cover. Yeah, they’re your people. Call them off.”

If your stomach can handle it, read the whole thing.