It's 2022 in America:

 We live in the Wild West.

 We condone violence.

 Gun fighters & bullets reign.

"In the coming months and years, SCOTUS will be weighing cases on affirmative action, gun rights, voting restrictions, immigration, environmental regulation, and the separation of church and state. Rulings on many of these issues won't be hard to guess, however often the Justices insist they are guided merely by their close and unpredictable readings of foundational texts."      
-- with attribution to Margaret Talbot

"To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitutional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice."      
-- with attribution to Jill Lepore 

The greatest threat to the U.S. is domestic terrorism.

What makes people think they can just have a shootout?

"Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America" by Ira Shapiro

The Founders gave the US Senate many functions, but it's one fundamental responsibility is to provide the check against a president who threatens our democracy. Ira Shapiro documents the pivotal challenges the Senate faced during the Trump administration; he argues that the Senate's failure to provide leadership represents the most catastrophic failure of government in American history.

This book, Ira Shapiro's third book on the US Senate, shines a spotlight on Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell has considerable skills, but the story of the Senate's rot is first and foremost the story of Mitch McConnell.

"McConnell is no 'political hack'; he is a superb political strategist and tactician who never lost an election... he is the most powerful Senate leader in history. Very few people, including presidents, have put more of a stamp on our country. What McConnell lacks is a moral compass that would cause him to rise above political calculation.

"McConnell's amoral and ruthless behavior was not apparent during his early years in the Senate. Beginning with Barack Obama's presidency, McConnell began immediately to transform the Senate into a bitterly partisan, paralyzed body where no effort would be made to overcome the divisions, he used and misused the rules to stymie Obama nominees, and he filibustered every initiative big and small."

Shapiro guides the reader through the "lowlights of Donald Trump's presidency when McConnell threw out the 'regular order' to accomplish his (and Trump's) ends. The Senate was a body where truth no longer meant anything and hypocrisy was the norm; with no oversight from Senate Republicans, McConnell over and over again saved Trump's presidency.

"The problems in the Republican party and the U.S. are larger than Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, but individuals can matter in shaping the environment and determining the course of events. Mitch McConnell has mattered - he's mattered in a way that ensures he will be in the top list of villains when the history of this period is written."

with attribution to Norman Ornstein

Nineteen "good guys with a gun" (nineteen armed police officers) in Texas afraid  to take on a lone gunman who was slaughtering children and teachers in their classroom at school.

What we sow that also will we reap.

What we plant in our thinking bears fruit.

We are reaping what we have sown.

"For most of American legal history, the consensus of the Supreme Court was that the right to bear arms was not an individual right, but rather a right for those called to military service, the militia."

In recent decades, that centuries long opinion of the Court has been under attack by special interest groups attached to the gun industry.

In 1991, in response to that relentless attack, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a consersative, said that the attack on the Court's centuries long consensus on the Second Amendment has been "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

The former Chief Justice said the idea that there was an individual right to bear arms was "a fraud," that if he were writing the Bill of Rights now (in 1991), "There wouldn't be any such thing as the Second Amendment -    "

Let Chief Justice Burger's words sink in: "the subject of the Second Amendment has been one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.        
But we are stuck in a loop on guns - and it's a fatal loop.    
Now when bad guys start shooting our kids, we shrug at the carnage... 
There are children who die,      
those who are witnesses,      
and those who fear the future.      
To keep our guns, we have decided to accept the sacrifice.      
-- with attribution to Maureen Dowd. NYT

Discussions about whether classroom doors lock or whether they open in or out, single point entry to schools and not propping doors open are all a form of victim blaming.

Schools are not the problem.

Arming classroom teachers is not the solution.

An armed police officer passed on the chance to shoot a gunman outside Robb Elementary School; well-equipped officers entered the school almost immediately and then pulled back once the gunman began firing inside the classrooms - nineteen armed police officers stood in the hallway outside classrooms 111 and 112 during the attack on students and their teachers.

What planet do SCOTUS justices live on?

Just what we need, more guns on the street.

Is this what our founders envisioned would "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"?

Our constitutional right of privacy is gone with the sweeping decision of a corruptly seated radical court.

Are there no repercussions for perjury?      
Republican candidates for SCOTUS believed perjury is permissible to secure confirmation.

The crises continues.  It is the constant partner of democracy.  Our democracy is saddled with the likes of a cutthroat party that knows how to go for the jugular.  It is lead by the man behind the curtain, McConnell and all the silent supporters like Paul.  I am afraid democracy will always be in danger as long as the democrats and their supporters refuse to fight fire with fire,

You can't stop slings and arrows with flowers.

I fear for my grandchildren.

The crises continue.      
Our republic is at stake.    
We are saddled with sweeping decisions by a corruptly seated radical court.      
Congress insists on running on issues they refuse to solve.    
What are we yearning for?   to live in the Wild West where women die in childbirth ? ? ?      
or maybe civil war ? ? ?

Freedom comes with a cost.    
NATO formally invited Finland and Sweden to join.      
The world does not know what to expect from the U.S. 
We continue to be an unpredictable player on the world stage.    
There seems not to be much common ground in our country.

"Frightening" (to use Elena Kagan's word).

"I cannot think of many things more frightening," Elena Kagan concluded in her dissent about SCOTUS decision which appoints itself the rule-maker on climate policies. "Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change." 

Let those who have a different story testify under oath.

Mass shooting in Highland Park -

I hear young people saying they might try to move out of the U.S.

(brain drain out of the U.S.)