It's happening... six months after the deadly January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, crews are taking down the protective "wall" surrounding Capitol Square. This is the final temporary security structure put in place following the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The process began yesterday (Friday) and is expected to be done by Monday morning. If necessary, the security structure can be reinstalled.    
The Capitol will remain off-limits to most members of the public.

The big LIE keeps getting bigger.    
The wall of LIES keeps getting higher.    
Trump delivered another avalanche of LIES about the 2020 election.     
He peddled the same falsehoods that sparked the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol   
and set off a nationwide GOP-led clampdown on voting rights.     
Echoing Trump's falsehoods, state lawmakers have enacted nearly 30 laws since the 2020 election that restrict ballot access (Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law).

The sad reality is that the majority of the GOP seems more than willing to continue building the wall founded on the big LIE.

Democrats must address the big LIE and the GOP which is enabling and reinforcing the wall that separates and threatens our democracy. The stakes are high. The big LIE and disinformation, and the chatter about insurrection continue.

Liz Cheney is breaking fundraising records:
confronting the big LIE how lds her in good stead 
as she works to break through the wall of LIES    
                    to  ONE  reality.

Merriam-Webster defines insurrection as "an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government."

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as "an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence." (Just because some people might have been swept up in the moment and didn't take part in organizing themselves or were bad at organizing doesn't mean there wasn't organization. What's more, organization is a broad term that could seemingly even be read to include the actions of those who incited others. One might quibble about "an organized attempt" but January 6 was organized at least to the extent that many of the indictments lay out in detail and the bipartisan Senate report lays out in discussing the missed warning signs.)

West's Encyclopedia of American Law defines it as "a rising or rebellion of citizens against their government, usually manifested by acts of violence."

What unites all three of the definitions is that the actions are directed against the government. The definitions cite actions taken "against civil authority or an established government," "to defeat their government and take control of their country," and "against their government." That's what makes January 6 not just a riot, but an insurrection. There was an effort to change control of the government by force -- yes, the government two weeks hence, but all the same, to change control of the government by force.    
-- with attribution to Aaron Blake, The Washington Post

The wall is being erected around the Capitol tonight.

Our minds should never be so open that everything falls out, but these days Americans are building walls in their brains that protect opinions from scrutiny and reckoning with "the" truth, as in accurate facts. The central problem of our time is intellectual relativism; no longer are there facts and truth and rational thinking - mere opinions are accepted as my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth which cannot be suppressed.

In a country where opinion replaces truth, we have a political party claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen. This is both intellectually fraudulent and morally problematic.

The U.S. is home to citizens walking around with their own version of scientific truth in the midst of a pandemic; citizens declaring their personal liberty to be anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers - "their truth" threatening public health.

How do we disagree with someone's "truth"?

The burden of governance is real.

Is governance possible when communication is not?

Trump built walls to protect his empire; from inside the walls, he provokes the danger that threatens our country.

"Mercy is the dynamite that blows down walls."

In the political realm we are in a place that is beyond mercy.

Is Magnus Carlsen so good at chess that it's bad?

In chess there are three categories of error -
inaccuracies, mistakes, blunders

"Uninterrupted dominance offends the audience's mediocrity.    
"There's an arc that sings.    
"People want great, but great with complications -
"exaggeratedly human, but not superhuman."      
-- Cathal Kelly

My grandsons disagree with Cathal Kelly.
They will continue to watch Magnus Carlsen play as World Chess Champion
and they'll also watch Alireza Firouzja, an 18 year-old chess grandmaster, currently ranked number 2 player in the world, representing France, who they expect will overtake Magnus Carlsen in the next 5 years or so.

I have been reminded the Yankees were dominant in baseball from 1936 to 1964--appearing in the World Series 22 times in those 29 years. And yet they attracted millions of fans partly because of their dominance.

How sad to believe that scientists, scholars, historians, journalists devote their lives to deception,

and that a reality TV star with decades of fraud and documented lying is seen as a beacon of truth and honesty.

The composition of the Supreme Court is a fortress against balancing legal considerations. Five justices (and too often the chief justice) find so much agreement among themselves, serious deliberation is not necessary for them to reach consensus.

Hard as Justice Breyer tried to find common ground on SCOTUS, he will retire from a lopsided court where five of the justices seem unwilling to even try to reach for common ground, to the point of paying no heed to Chief Justice Roberts if he's not with them.

Now is the time for the GOP to tear down the Trump wall and reclaim the Party of Lincoln.

The Republican Party has no platform - their purpose is to stonewall the Democrats, then say Democrats do nothing. There has to be a way to shine a light on Republican obstructionism.

Democrats play too much defense.

They allow Republicans to tell the public what Democrats are not doing; Mitch McConnell says it out loud: twice he's promised to hold Democrats to one term in the White House / the wall failed when Obama was president).