Watsonville farmland, 247 acres of broccoli, beets, and lettuce by the ocean that flooded out last year and this.

With lots of private, state, and Federal funding, 65 acres of Beach Ranch is being turned back into the tidal wetlands it once was, offering a buffer and protection for the other coastal areas and leaving room to retreat further if need be into the other acres that will be rented out for farming as long as possible. Migratory birds will still have their estuary as the slough downstream gives way. Other farms will have greater protection as the area calms the sea and absorbs winter storm runoffs.

Sometimes money can buy common sense.

Today’s announcement. Harris. And now Walz. Integrity, honor, calling out to the best in all of us–and the joy! The officer turned teacher and coach turned Representative turned Governor saying, ‘Yeah I’m a monster, I fed the kids so they could learn.’ You knew he knew what he was talking about in those classrooms, he’d seen it.

And if you feed all the kids, nobody feels singled out and embarrassed for being visibly poor at that lunch room counter, no lunchboxes get accidentally left on the bus, no parent has to scramble to make sandwiches in the morning while trying to get a distracted kid out the door–and the mass production of food means it actually costs less anyway.

An avid hunter who got gun regulations passed in his state, a politician who is willing to say that kids shouldn’t have to worry about being shot in school–and he has done and will do everything he can about it.

He got criticized on Fox for looking older than he is and Walz just laughed, Yeah, you’d lose your hair too if you ran the high school lunchroom for twenty years!

We’ve got this. But don’t take my word for it and never take it for granted. Vote!

Fire-sky rainbow at sunset. (And no, we’re nowhere near the fires.)

Kind of looks like the arc of a firefighter’s hose, reaching as high and as far as it can go.

The air is so seeded that, with the fog rolling in for the night, it’s supposed to rain any second now. Not even a hundredth of an inch, just enough to draw a few Dalmation spots on the ground below.

(Walks outside, holds a hand upward, a single drop lands on it.)

So some of the Republicans have been saying loudly that Biden should quit, be 25thed if need be, because clearly his decision not to seek reelection means he’s too old and feeble to continue in office. They’re claiming the Democrats are covering up his decrepitude.

The lies get tiresome, don’t they. But hear me out on why they’re pushing that.

It’s because if Biden did leave now, Harris would be President and would need to pick a vice president. Which both the House and the Senate would then have to approve by simple majority vote, per section 2 of the 25th Amendment.

Mike Johnson would be a single heartbeat away from the Presidency, and Mike Johnson would be the one whose job it would be to call a vote in the House to vote on that VP pick.

Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t think he would McConnell that vote?

A refusal to vote on a nominee should be legally considered a de facto confirmation. Make the members of Congress do their jobs and put their names to their votes. That should be one of the first reforms come January; democracy demands it.

I do think he would have won. But passing the torch and letting the next generation shine to the world was absolutely the right thing to do. The Presidency ages one as it is and the telomeres were growing short.

Never since George Washington have we had a President who felt he could win the next election but chose not to run in it for the sake of the country’s well-being. My late Republican Senator Uncle Bob was right: Joseph Biden is a very good man.

I was glad when Kamala Harris ran for California Attorney General, ie finally a statewide office so I could  vote for her, and I have every chance since.

I’m really, really curious who the new VP candidate will be!

I got a breaking news email right as it was happening, and could not not look. It took me straight back to Reagan’s face in pain and hand in the air as the Secret Service gave their all to protect him from the crazy who had just shot him.

I wish harm on no one. Ever. It hurt to see him hurt.

My attempt at prayer, though, could only be an honest, Lord, I…I’m… so sorry that I’m having a really hard time praying for him because I know he would only twist it towards evil intentions if he could and I know what he intends to do to innocent people (again–how many years did those little kids live in metal cages thinking their mothers had abandoned them? While depriving each side of information of where the other had been taken? And that’s not even starting on the whole January 6 and dead cops thing and the vice president who won’t run with him again because he, y’know, tried to kill him), so I’m just going to leave it up to You. You know what’s best for him and for the whole country, and I’m asking for You to bless all of us in this horrific moment and especially the critically hurt and the families of the dead. Forgive me my hesitancy. I know that even that man is one of Your children. I’m trying. Thank You for being better than me.

Maybe we’ll finally now vote out the people who voted to allow the convicted, the violent, the underage, and the mentally ill to have war-level weaponry. Maybe we can fund taking care of the mentally ill again. Maybe we can value the life of a child above a gun. Maybe we can pass the bill sponsored by Senators Hinreich and King to allow no sale nor gifting of any automatic-type weapon from here on out: let the current owner register it, have it as long as they’re in good standing with the law, and have it die along with them someday.

And then I checked the updates: every single Democrat expressed their horror and their prayers for Trump’s well-being and safety, Biden, Pelosi, Harris, Obama, on down to the state level. Every single one. Their prayers. They are better than I, and it humbles me.

So it comes down to, yes I want his well-being and safety, too–and I want the country’s. And eventually I was able to offer up a real one of my own.

Nearly every Republican the reporters talked to tried to somehow blame Trump’s opponent for the thing that Biden was most horrified by, to use the shootings as a political tool towards power for their own, to blame blame blame and falsely accuse of the most vile accusations.

And that level of gaslighting is how we ended up here in the first place.

One of the things I like about the Fourth of July is that it’s celebrated on the actual Fourth of July.

Not when it would make a long weekend, much though that would be nice, but with a firm declaration that it’s not about having time off nor about the distractions of the day, it’s about our whole country celebrating together the actual privilege it is of having this democracy that belongs to all of us, every single person from every background and all of us in it together with every person’s vote of the same importance and impact as every other person’s vote.

A certain former reporter who is a private pilot mentioned in his Substack the case of the Southwest plane (NBC link) that went into a Dutch roll a few weeks ago, and explained how that had happened. He linked to a video (YouTube) of it actually happening to another flight years ago. Yow.

Which led to a brief exchange with him, because on one of our flights a week ago our Southwest plane suddenly dipped way down to the left and then immediately after, way down to the right. We were sitting at the front (the pilot in that first link said you would feel it at front and back but not so much in the middle) and all the passengers around us were looking at each other, like, What was THAT.

And then the plane seemed to straighten out and be okay.

I asked him, Do pilots always report those incidences? Are they required to?

His answer was, typically, no, unless they thought it had damaged the plane or was a sign of damage. But there are ways of anonymously reporting them, designed to protect those who do so. It is possible our case could have been turbulence–and it was possible we would hear more about it in the coming weeks.

Turns out not even Southwest knew about that recent case right away. But when they did they took it to Boeing and said This is your problem. This piece should never have had power mid-flight.

You know, there’s a reason I routinely say a prayer for the pilots and crew members before every flight. I don’t usually feel like it’s actually needed other than for my feeling like I’ve done my very small part towards a safe journey for all.

But I guess you never know.

It’s not just twelve. It’s not even just 34. It’s 408 individual decisions, after hearing and observing and considering all the evidence and asking for a repeat on salient points and then coming to a unanimous decision of unanimously guilty.

Even from the guy who at the outset said he got his news from the former guy’s website: thirty-four of those decisions were made by him.

As Doonesbury cartooned re Nixon years ago, GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!

Knowing all that the little mobster’s minions were capable of, those jurors chose to vote what they knew to be true for our children’s children’s children’s sakes as well as ours. They are heroes.

An hour later, my phone rang.

A driver had zoomed through a right-on-red and suddenly found my kid on the hood of their car, waved hi as the pedestrian slid off, and kept on going.

The car coming up behind him was an ambulance. A picture got taken of the guy’s license plate and they called another ambulance and the cops.

The ER said no breaks found, and that is a very very good thing, but it’s going to hurt for awhile.

Meantime, the jury in New York City decided that there would be no breaks in the rule of law no matter what the defendant’s former title was–not on their watch!

Jamie Raskin, former Constitutional law professor, later impeachment manager in the House, wrote a piece for the New York Times.

Most of us have heard of the insurrectionist flag Samual Alito flew at his beach house and the upside down US flag (also a symbol co-opted by the January Six-ers) at his home. He claims the latter started after his wife had had a tiff with a neighbor and that she did it; but his story keeps changing. (Edit: new details here.)

Meantime, the Supreme Court majority has refused for months to rule on Trump’s absurd claim of absolute immunity, including, it was spelled out, the right to assassinate his opponents.

Which, a year from now, could include the Supreme Court itself.

Senator Durbin wrote to John Roberts asking that Alito recuse on the immunity case.

Alito himself wrote back defying him.

For those who don’t get the Times, Raskin said that there is another option: the Justice Department can request that the other members of the Court require Alito to recuse.

And here’s why that’s possible: there was an elected Chief Justice in West Virginia fourteen years ago who had a case before him of a coal executive who had donated millions to the campaign that got that judge that judgeship. Not cool.

So Congress passed a law stating that in cases where there is a reasonably perceived lack of impartiality, judges and justices–specifically including those on the Supreme Court–can be required by law to recuse themselves and it spelled out how that is to be done.

The Supreme Court Justices can do it themselves, whether Merrick Garland moves on this or not, but if he does, then, by law, they must order that recusal.

And it wouldn’t just be Alito. Clarence Thomas’s wife allegedly funded transportation for busloads of insurrectionists and Thomas was the sole vote backing Trump’s effort to keep his Presidential records out of the hands of the Congressional January 6 investigative committee.

So now we’ll see whether the other members of the Supreme Court will choose to uphold the Constitution and the law. Now that the rest of us know what that one says.

Or not.

VOTE. Our democracy depends on every single vote.

4/20/2024 is the same backwards and forwards. His birthday number is, too.

Aid approved at long long last by the House of Representatives for Ukraine’s survival was the best present he could have asked for.

We went to a barbecue at a friend’s, where I offered a young mom a hummingbird finger puppet and found out it was her daughter’s third birthday. Everybody sang the song to the both of them as she happily waved her new pet bird way high and I’m sure to her it was singing, too.

I came home and planted future-8-foot-high sunflower seedlings at the fence line in celebration of the news of the day, back there where it turns a corner.

I called the realtor this morning and thanked him for the gloriously dark night last night.

I just looked: there is a light left on, but it is muted as if on the far side of the house and with no direct line of sight between bulb and us. That’s so much better than how things were that I’m not going to complain.

Karma reminds me of the time when we woke up at the usual hour in the morning to a message on our answering machine from next door: Sandy was pleading in vain with us to wake up and turn that thing off somehow.

One of the charms of our late ’99 Chrysler minivan was that about every 18 months its alarm would totally randomly start blaring, and when it did it would keep on going till you–get in the screaming car that first time, run through the owner’s manual, go why??, scramble back out, put the key in the driver’s and only the driver’s side door, twist it the wrong way, hold, let go, quick do it again–and at last blessed silence.

Of which there was none that night for Sandy, her visiting son and daughter-in-law, and their young triplets who were all having to get up at 3 a.m. to catch their flight to Thailand.

I’ve written about the day there that they were going to go to the beach, but somehow it just all fell apart and they didn’t go…And then how Sandy was gone a month past when she was expected back and everybody was worried. Had anyone heard? No.

She had decided an older white woman driving one of the relief trucks into stricken rebel territory wouldn’t be shot at by anybody’s soldiers during the aftermath of the tsunami they had just just missed being swept away in at Phuket.

Wow. Linda Greenhouse nailed it.

When a woman wants an abortion, for medical reasons or social no matter how dire, it’s her fault and her problem.

When a couple is denied in vitro while trying to have a baby, there is a man being denied what he wants–and that is why Republicans in Alabama and the like are scrambling to affirm and reinstate in vitro in spite of their Supreme Court judge’s invocation of anti-Constitutional theocracy re zygotes.

I will say it again, the Mormon Church’s official stance on abortion is that it is between a woman, her doctor, and her God. Nobody else’s opinion should rule re pregnancy but the one who has to live it.

He asked us, and nobody knew.

He asked them, and they knew who.

He grew up where I did and went to the same Cabin John Regional Park that we knew well.

They changed the subject (I remember that discussion and thinking, but that’s not what he’s asking, folks) and talked about climbing in the fighter jet or riding the train. I silently remembered being able to watch a beehive at work from inside the train building and being reassured the bees could only exit to outside.

Everybody remembered the Porky the Litter Eater‘s trash-mouthing: you push a button and you get to hear the recording of Porky telling you that he likes to eat trash. You put paper in his mouth and it whooshes away. I remember us kids standing in line to get a chance to feed him and listen to his loud Oink oink oink!

And there was a totem pole.

As a kid I wasn’t sure what to make of all those faces looking woodenly over us: did they approve? The grownups said it was carved by hand, and that was cool, so, okay.

So here’s this guy who paid more attention to it than I ever did, who now lives in Alaska and credits some of his interest in the place to that totem pole, and who had always wondered what the story was behind how a children’s park just outside Washington, DC got one installed. A genuine Native totem pole. What it had meant to–somebody, enough to get it there.

Fifty-eight years later the history of it seemed lost to time.

So he posted to a group in Alaska, and right away got, My father-in-law helped carve that! They had not only not forgotten there, they still had the program from the ceremony.

Alaska Public Media has the story. And a photo of the guy at Cabin John Park, and man does that take me back.

So then I found this description of why totem poles were built and what they represent. The art of creating them started making a comeback after it finally became illegal to loot them and sell them to museums out from under the communities.

The Cabin John one was commissioned and paid for and that father-in-law got to work on it as an 18-year-old apprentice. I hope he made many more. I just love that he was right there when his daughter-in-law got to tell him, Hey, Dad, people in Maryland want to know about that one you made them!

(Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”)

I was talking to my mom tonight and at one point she was marveling: her great grandson lives with her.

Right, right…

Looking at time in the other direction, her great grandfather was in the group of pioneers who with their covered wagons went ahead and scouted out the Salt Lake valley and reported back to those gathered in Iowa that it was a good place to move out to.

(A side discussion, yes I remember about the Missouri Compromise balancing free states and slave states, and how the Mormons were growing in number in Missouri enough to risk outvoting the slaveholders and thus overthrowing slavery throughout the country at the ballot, thus their homes were burned, they were shot at, their leader was among those killed, and the governor issued a decree that all Mormons were to be shot on sight. That law stayed on the books until the 1970s, when a drunk driver who killed a young mom tried to get off on the grounds that she was Mormon–which embarrassed the state into rescinding it.

So.

Her great grandfather was born four years after the War of 1812. He was not only later the first mayor of Salt Lake City, he was there before Brigham Young.

And his great granddaughter, now 93, takes good care of herself and still does volunteer work. Her great grandson gives her a lift to the grocery store every week.