Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 50 years for the story around abortion to go from “Did you hear about X? I heard she was on the flight to New York” last Tuesday to driving your best friend to the clinic to putting your daughter/granddaughter/niece on a flight to New York. Legal abortion, nationwide, 1973-2021.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Privileged Woman version of abortion in the U.S., of course. The flight to New York out of Columbus was well-known in my suburban high school. It left early, which left you all day to visit the clinic, get the procedure, wait through recovery and get back to LaGuardia in time for the late-afternoon plane back home. I knew a few women — girls — who did that. A woman my sister’s age told me about her own pre-Roe abortion; it took place in a hotel room in Missouri, and it was awful, but it was as safe as a hotel-room abortion can be.

Then came Roe, and for a while we had three clinics in Columbus to choose from. The women I know preferred the one near Ohio State, for the protective coloring of blending in with a bunch of other college-age women. The peace and quiet didn’t last long, because once the anti-abortion movement got ramped up, you had to run a gantlet of screaming lunatics. Early in my career, you could call up a doctor you knew worked in a clinic, do an interview, and he wouldn’t have to worry about being shot in the head at church. That didn’t last long, either. By the time I got to Fort Wayne, those people feared for their lives, and why shouldn’t they? “Pro-life” activists shot up their clinic. So they stopped doing abortions at all (one was my own gynecologist) and left it all to the sad clinic downtown, with the circuit-riding doctor who came in from Illinois one day a week. Eventually, that clinic had to relocate, and then shut down.

Hoosiers, what was the name of that Operation Rescue guy? Wait, it’s coming back — Wendell Brane. As I recall, he and his wife suffered from secondary infertility, i.e., they had one child, but couldn’t conceive another. So did the main editorial writer at my newspaper who most often inveighed against abortion. His wife was a real piece of work; at a work party she whined to me about how unfair it was that this reporter and that editor were pregnant out of wedlock, but she couldn’t have a second. I thought of telling her the Lord works in mysterious ways, but just nodded and held my tongue.

Anyway, anecdotally I’ve noticed a lot of infertility issues among anti-choice activists: It’s not fair! They also believe that every woman who has an abortion spends the rest of her life In Quiet Mourning, waiting for her breast cancer to arrive. I’ve never had an abortion, and I can’t speak with certainty about anyone else’s interior life, but the ones I’ve known who seemed OK afterward. Mad at the men in their lives, who often behaved abominably, yes. But the idea that they weep for their lost little angel? Haven’t seen it, myself. (Miscarriages are another story, although even that varies wildly along a continuum of gestational age and religious devotion. I wonder if the serious Catholics who’ve miscarried ever ask themselves why God aborted their baby. Probably not.)

So this week Roe was effectively overturned. I mentioned above that I speak from the Privileged Woman’s perspective, and still do. If Kate or another young woman of my acquaintance needs this service, I’m fully prepared to buy — and able to buy — a plane ticket or drive across the bridge or whatever else I have to do to help them out. The unborn bay-beeeez (sorry, that’s always how I say it in my head) that will be born due to this will be born poor and disadvantaged, although maybe a lucky few will be adopted by Betsy DeVos types, at least as long as their mothers took good care of themselves through their pregnancies.

I expect Susan Collins is terribly, terribly disappointed in Brett Kavanaugh right now. Well, fuck her. Fuck them all.

If you’re looking for something to get a sense of what we’re up against now, I recommend “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always,” which you can probably find on a streaming service somewhere.

Why am I so low-level angry today? This is why. Also, at this:

You gotta admit: Having the president who almost certainly has bankrolled the most abortions engineering the SCOTUS that overturns Roe v. Wade is next-level irony that even Alanis couldn’t fit into a song. (Or maybe it’s just so dumb it could only be real life.)

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) September 2, 2021

OK, then. Tomorrow is Friday, and I think this will be the last one for the week for me. See you Sunday/Monday, and have a great weekend.

Well, this is not good:

BRUSSELS — The European Union is set to advise member states that they should reintroduce travel restrictions for visitors from the United States, three E.U. officials said on Sunday, as coronavirus infections and hospitalizations have surged in the U.S. in recent weeks.

Starting Monday, the officials said, the United States will be removed from a “safe list” of countries whose residents can travel to the 27-nation bloc without additional restrictions, such as quarantine and testing requirements. The suggested restrictions, made by the European Council, will not be mandatory for member countries, and it will remain up to those countries to decide whether or not to impose them.

Not mandatory. So there’s a chance that…France, say, might decide to allow only vaccinated Americans in. So the lights aren’t out on our trip yet. But they’re growing dim.

Feeling smug about only booking places with generous cancellation policies. But very blue about missing beaujolais nouveau season in France. All fingers crossed.

I’m not here to whine, because holy shit New Orleans:

A slow-moving Hurricane Ida has left all of Orleans Parish customers without power due to “catastrophic transmission damage,” according to Entergy New Orleans.

The intense storm had caused all eight transmission lines into the New Orleans area to go down, spokesman Brandon Scardigli said in an emailed statement. That created a load imbalance that knocked all power generation in the region offline, Scardigli said.

A million people without power in not just one city, but an entire region. This is gonna get ugly. I’m not a big fan of nostalgia, but I’m recalling the aftermath of Katrina, and not just what happened, but how ugly and discordant the national discussion around it was: Sure it’s terrible what’s happening there, but they had the chance to leave and they didn’t, so? :::shrug::: But we’ve grown so much and learned so much since then, right? I’m sure it’ll be much better this time.

A steamy, oppressively hot weekend that ended with a banger of a thunderstorm. Alan was off fishing all weekend, and said his experience was the same, only a little cooler. He had to shelter from a huge one under some trees (yeah, I know) and actually bail his drift boat, because it was coming in so fast. We’ve had at least half a dozen, maybe 10, of these storms this summer. The most recent one before this was…Friday, I believe. A short one that cooled things off by maybe a degree or two until the sun came out and heated all that rainfall into steam. A friend and I stopped at a free techno show for a bit; the artist, an EDM musician, if turntables count as instruments, was launching his own weed brand and announced a pop-up show at the last minute. He threw free samples to the crowd and I marveled at our changing world.

However, I also marveled at the lack of masks, the close quarters (although still outside) and the flying sweat droplets. So we didn’t stay long. I’m booking a test on Wednesday, anyway.

The last storm broke the back of the heat, at least. Cooler today, then mid to high 70s the rest of the week. Ahh.

While we welcome Monday, let’s keep a good thought for Louisiana — the good parts, anyway.

I see Alex posted the excerpt from the Miss America book in yesterday’s comments, about the year Vanessa Williams won. It’s very good; if you haven’t used up your WashPost clicks this month, I recommend you spend one on it.

I attended, and covered, the Miss A pageant the year before that. I always have had abysmal timing, but 1982 was the year Miss Ohio was a local girl, and that’s the year the paper decided to send me. I flew to Philadelphia and then took a puddle-jumper to A.C., and there I was, at Miss America.

And yes, you can hum those last six words in the tune of the famous song. But that year, and I believe Vanessa’s year as well, it was not sung as the newly crowned Miss A took her first walk. It had something to do with firing Bert Parks and maybe he had copyright? Can’t recall. But the song that year was called “Miss America, You’re Beautiful,” sung by Gary Collins, Parks’ replacement. It didn’t go over well, and a deal was struck with Parks and “There She Is” came back.

I’m sure I’ve told all these stories before, so I won’t bore you. But as far as Amy Argetsinger’s excellent history goes, she notes an old Texas pageant coach told his own charge, well before they arrived in Atlantic City, the following:

“Miss New York is going to win,” he said. “She will be the first Black Miss America.”

I don’t doubt it, because even I had heard that. It wasn’t that the fix was in, but rather, that the timing was right. Various parties had been pestering the pageant for years for its lily-whiteness and retro ideas about femininity, etc., and they were under the gun to show nuh-uh, they were so not racist, and along came Vanessa Williams, and she was…perfect. Black, unmistakably so, but light-skinned, blue-eyed, fine-featured, tawny hair. She was Black, but entirely in the Miss America mold. And she could sing, god, she could sing. Looked great in a swimsuit. The whole package.

After my year at the pageant, I would read anything I could find about it, and I saw an interview before the ’83 pageant with Debra Maffett, who had won the year I was there. Miss California, wore the famous Lucky Swimsuit, another one you could tell was going to be in the top five just by looking at her. And even she said, in that interview, that “the time was right for a black Miss America.” My point being: Vanessa Williams was someone everyone saw coming.

That was such a weird week, hanging backstage at the pageant, doing interviews with any Miss who would consent to one, and they all consented, knowing the worth of a little press. I was the same age they were, and yet, they were…so. So polished, so sparkly, so…not charismatic, more like packaged. No other woman my age wore her hair the way they did, unless she was a TV news anchor or something, curled and teased and sprayed into a helmet. None of my friends wore that much makeup. And none of my friends read Time magazine like Talmudic scholars read scripture, so they could drop an opinion on Israeli foreign policy on cue. They were weird. I am an outgoing person, but couldn’t imagine being friends with any of those creatures, except maybe Miss Florida, who came in a bad girl (DUI) and left one, too. You could see the real person inside, trying to escape. The rest held their own actual personalities in with shellack – polish, nail and otherwise, foundation, sequins.

It was an old trick, the day of the swimsuit photo shoots for the wire services, for one of the Misses to jump into the pool they were all posing around, knowing that picture would lead the photo package (and ruining one’s hairdo, so you were effectively excused from doing any more). Miss California did that. I looked her up today: She’s a Trumper, and I see hints of QAnon lurking around there.

Anyway, that would have been roughly 39 years ago, and Miss A is so different now…wait, didn’t the pageant go bankrupt? I can’t remember. But when I saw Miss Michigan at the auto show a few years back, she had a couple of visible tattoos. In her introduction, she was quite the little spark plug. And a women’s studies major. What a hoot.

Another 90 degree day. Considered going out in it? And thought better. Happy Wednesday.

I think today’s post should be, in honor of all the people dying from Covid because they refused to get the vaccine? A roundup. Let’s begin in…Florida:

A Florida mom lost two sons to COVID-19 within 12 hours of each other after they failed to get vaccinated.

Lisa Brandon told News4Jax that she and her sons Aaron Jaggi, 35, and Free Jaggi, 41, who lived with her, got sick with COVID-19 in late July.

While Brandon got better, both of her sons got worse and had to be hospitalized and eventually put on ventilators after developing double pneumonia. Free died on August 12, followed by his brother just hours later on August 13.

Lisa, to her credit, had been vaccinated.

Phil Valentine, radio host who, well, you know:

Valentine had been a skeptic of coronavirus vaccines. But after he tested positive for COVID-19, and prior to his hospitalization, he told his listeners to consider, “If I get this COVID thing, do I have a chance of dying from it?” If so, he advised them to get vaccinated. He said he chose not to get vaccinated because he thought he probably wouldn’t die.

After Valentine was moved into a critical care unit, Mark Valentine said his brother regretted that “he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination.”

This guy’s wife just died, but guess what he did?

A Republican legislator in Maine who lost his wife to COVID-19 last week appeared at a rally on Tuesday that featured a GOP colleague who compared the state’s Democratic governor to a Nazi doctor who performed deadly experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.

State Rep. Chris Johansen, who emerged in the early days of the pandemic as a fierce opponent of public health-related restrictions, joined a group of lawmakers at the event in Augusta. State Rep. Heidi Sampson delivered a speech to the crowd that baselessly accused Gov. Janet Mills, who has introduced a vaccine mandate for health-care workers, of operating a government campaign to test “experimental” vaccines on unknowing citizens.

Stephen Harmon, mocked vaccines? Died.

Texas GOP leader says vaccines don’t work? Died.

I was seeing these all weekend.

Here’s a video, where a central interviewee — spoiler alert! — dies. But not before saying he hasn’t been vaccinated because “I’m basically a libertarian,” even though there is absolutely nothing about being a libertarian that would preclude a person from being vaccinated. The video is actually really good; you should watch.

Besides watching the proudly unvaccinated drop like flies, it was a hot, steamy weekend and wasn’t good for much other than staying inside, so I read an old John D. McDonald book and a bunch of other things. How about you?

Made some time to watch “Malice at the Palace,” a short (about an hour) documentary about the infamous brawl between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers. It was Nov. 19, 2003, and I remember it mainly because Alan had a job interview in Detroit that day, and they’d made him an offer. We were moving to Detroit. Then I came downstairs that Saturday morning, turned on the TV and found it looping on almost every channel.

We laughed and laughed – hey, it’s our new home! What a crazy place! And beyond the usual anniversary pieces, the tiresome Albomesque chin-scratching about Our Violent Society and Won’t Someone Think of the Children, I haven’t thought much about it since.

So I’m glad I watched. And I came away feeling bad for laughing. I hadn’t thought enough about what it meant to the players who were suspended, losing millions of dollars and being derailed for an entire season. And I certainly hadn’t given enough consideration to the jerkoff fans who started the thing, in particular the guy who threw the cup that set things off. His name is John Green and while he expressed regret, I can’t say I felt much of it coming through the screen.

The players, though – that was rough. Ron Artest, who appeared to have a few mental health issues. Jermaine O’Neal, all sweetness and regret. Stephen Jackson, still pissed. And so on.

Of the woefully unprepared security team, we will say little, other than to echo O’Neal’s contempt that one of the cops didn’t recognize Reggie Miller and came close to giving him a mace facial. True, he wasn’t dressed in his uniform – he had a broken finger – but he was in a very nice suit and trying to break things up; you’d think even a suburban cop would realize a 6-foot-7-inch black man in a suit with courtside access was not just another rioter.

(I once stumbled across a stray piece of video from a couple years back. Miller, who has moved on to sports broadcasting, was walking across a court in an empty arena, hours before a NCAA championship game was to start. A few balls are scattered around the floor. Miller is, again, in a nicely tailored suit. He picks up a ball, dribbles twice, shoots and drains it, from well into the three-point zone. Does it again, does it again, does it five times, each time nothing but net, outside the line. All of this is captured by a photographer he doesn’t see. After he’s shot all the balls within reach, he walks off to wherever he was headed. It’s such a pleasure to watch someone who is that good at what he does, doing what he does. And I’m not even a sports fan.)

The worst offenders, of course, are the media. The word “thug” comes up again and again in the coverage, while people in suits sit in front of cameras and opine straight out their asses. Having been an out-the-ass opiner myself, I know the job often requires you to have opinions about shit you know little to nothing about. Still. Man, I’m glad I don’t have that job anymore.

Anyway, it’s on Netflix, and well worth an hour of your time, sports fan or not.

And with that, we await the weekend. The sunrise was lovely this morning, but it’s gonna be a hot one. Stay cool.

I look in the mirror, and I look one way. I look OK. Presentable, anyway. Good enough for what I need to do that day. Then I pass a reflection in a store window, in a mirror at the gym, or on a Zoom camera, and all I can think is: Who’s the old fat lady?

A friend says when we look in our own mirrors, we have our own presets. We know what we’re supposed to look like, and so we see ourselves that way. But other mirrors tell the truth. This is a very strange conversation, but it makes as much sense as anything. It’s like the United States, when we tell ourselves we live in the greatest nation in the world, the land of freedom and opportunity, and all of that is our preset. I heard an interview with an Afghan woman on the way to work out this morning. She was spitting with anger at how betrayed she feels by the United States, and who could blame her? She’ll probably swing from a rope before too long, if she isn’t killed some other way, for the crime of being educated, English-speaking, intelligent.

I saw a tweet by Ted Cruz, jeering at the CNN correspondent covering the fall of Afghanistan. She’s female, and she wears an abaya on the streets when she’s working. Cruz jeered at her “burkha.” It’s not a burkha, you dumb fuck, Mr. Harvard, it’s an abaya. Didn’t we learn this after 9/11? An abaya is a full-length dress, usually black, worn with a hijab, but leaving the wearer’s face uncovered; a burkha is the garment that covers everything and the wearer can only look through a crocheted screen. That’s three terms of art about Islamic religious dress for women; is it so hard to remember? I remembered, and I didn’t go to Harvard.

But of course, not remembering, calling everything you don’t like a burkha — because we agree that’s the most medieval garment, the worst one — is its own mirror. It says, who gives a fuck what these awful people call their outfits? The guy can probably expound on different styles of cowboy boots, but can’t be bothered to step outside his comfort zone, even to sound smarter than he is.

I turned off the radio on my way back from the pool. It was a lovely morning, and I wanted to enjoy it, feel thankful that I don’t live in Afghanistan or Haiti. There will always be a Haiti. You have to enjoy good fortune when you have it.

How can it only be Tuesday? It feels like it should be next Thursday.

Two pieces of bloggage today, neither of which has anything to do with Afghanistan, Ted Cruz or Haiti:

Do you talk to your dog? (Of course you do.) What sort of voice do you use? And when your dog talks back (of course it does), what kind of voice does it use? The WashPost investigates:

Most nights, as he is about to go to sleep, Josh Lieberthal gets into an argument with Werner Herzog. It is often over the pillow, which the 30-year-old communications specialist refuses to cede.

“You gave me part of your pillow,” the argument goes, in the German director’s soft, accented timbre. “The pillow is actually part mine, now.”

The voice belongs to Lieberthal’s dog, Rocky — a 5-year-old wheaten-poodle mix, or “whoodle” — with whom he and his fiancee share a bed. The argument is one that Lieberthal has with himself. Rocky’s voice, which Lieberthal provides, is that of the 78-year-old director of “Grizzly Man,” which just seems to suit his dog.

…He doesn’t remember when, or how, or why he — er, his dog — adopted a thick German accent, dropping the “w” and “th” sounds, but he and his fiancee do it all the time now. Even, occasionally, when they’re not with their dog.

“I feel like a crazy person,” he says. “But at the same time, this is just so normal for us.”

Of course it’s normal! Our last dog, Spriggy, had his own fantasy sitcom, the scripts for which we would sometimes improvise as we dressed for work. It was called “The Spriggy Show, starring Spriggy! Co-starring Alan and Nancy” and the episodes usually involved Spriggy getting into some sort of mischief and escaping all consequences. There was the one where Spriggy called the state of Michigan and ordered a truckload of sand to be dumped in our back yard. That one came after a blissful camping weekend where he ran wildly on some sandy riverbanks. There was the one where he talked the dumb hound dog next door, Samson, into letting him climb up the bigger dog’s back so Spriggy could raid the dumpster at Casa d’Angelo, the nearby Italian restaurant.

“Are we gonna get in trouble, Spriggy?” Samson would ask in a Southern accent. “Hey, can I get one of those meatballs?” Spriggy, deep in the dumpster and speaking with his mouth full, would reply that he couldn’t find any. “And his head pops up, and he has spaghetti hanging off it,” Alan would say. “Hmm, good note,” I’d say. “Make sure to tell the writers’ room.” More from the Post:

Sarah Coughlon, 27, has an ongoing bit with her girlfriend that their dog, Maurice, is the manager of the Bedford-Stuyvesant WeWork.

“He’s also sort of bumbling and, no offense to WeWork, but they seem sort of bumbling. And so I think he’s, like, kind of overwhelmed,” Coughlon says. “He’s really doing his best.”

Maurice, a mix that Coughlon describes as “a German shepherd that has beagle ears,” has a Midwestern accent for reasons that Coughlon cannot explain and always refers to his owners as “the ladies.” Coughlon, who works in advertising, doesn’t even go to a WeWork. Maybe this whole weird comedy bit comes from “trying to sort of make sense of the fact that our home that’s like our sanctuary suddenly becomes a workspace and that my girlfriend becomes my officemate. And that’s a weird relationship for us to have,” Coughlon says. “I think we are sort of trying to mediate that through the dog.”

“The ladies.” Cracks me up.

And if you watched “The White Lotus,” which was a very very fine HBO limited series that ended Sunday, you might want to read this interview with writer/creator Mike White.

And that’s it for the midweek. Enjoy talking to your dog.

Finally, after a week of heat and storms and blackouts, we got our ottering in. It was worth the wait, a perfect Pure Michigan day. The water was cool but refreshing, the sky a fathomless blue and there was a fairly craptastic band playing at the microbrewery across the street from the park. They were wheezing through “Live With Me” as we arrived; what makes a cover band think they can handle the Rolling Stones, anyway?

But in the river we couldn’t hear anything but the wavelets hitting the seawall and one another’s voices, catching up and taking the news of the day apart like a rotisserie chicken. It was a good time.

Then we had a couple beers at the microbrewery, just as the band was getting into “Dance to the Music,” and if there’s any band other than the Stones that a cover band shouldn’t attempt, it’s Sly & the Family Stone.

But enough about that.

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban. A trillion dollars and in a week or so it’ll be like we weren’t there at all, except for all the weapons and vehicles and god knows what else is left behind. What a goddamn failure.

And what a way to start the week. I’m enjoying your comments in the last thread about all of this, if “enjoying” is the right word for it. It’s a grim moment. The dumbest people on my timelines are all Biden-Biden-Biden, but even their hearts don’t appear to be all the way in it. The truly dumb ones have a mendacity and cynicism that’s nearly breathtaking.

Meanwhile, in Covid news, conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, who “expressed skepticism” about social distancing, vaccines and masks, now has the bug himself and is on a ventilator. The lord moves in mysterious ways.

Time to start Monday.

The Derringer family trip to France is now on day-to-day status. I’m not afraid of navigating the country in a mask, but I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to see a lot of Closed signs, either. So: Day-to-day. We applied for our Covid passes today — yes, vaccine passports! — and are keeping our fingers crossed.

Fucking Delta. Ah, well. What can you do besides get vaccinated, follow the rules and watch the world collapse because FREEDUMB? And lack of access, true; let’s be fair. Still. God knows what this burning, flooding world will be like by next year. Might as well go to France now. We’ll play the odds, and the odds aren’t bad, at least against getting sick. Seeing the Louvre? That’s still up in the air.

We had another storm yesterday, and another fierce one overnight, and another mini-storm this morning, and there’s a 40 percent chance of more tomorrow. Then we get a break, maybe.

When it comes to climate change, I think we have fucked around, and now we’re finding out.

And yet what other end were we expecting?

The temperature maps are terrifying, the prognosis for the future not much better. So let’s go to France. Maybe Spain next year. I hope I have a trip to Asia in me before my knees give out.

But as the city of Detroit’s motto says (in Latin): We hope for better things.

Between Monday’s power outage and Tuesday’s heat and Wednesday’s heat and Wednesday night’s storms and Thursday morning’s storms and GOD WHAT IS NEXT I’m kinda looking forward to the weekend, how bout you? And I have little to say other than I’m tired.

How about you?

Why do the weekends go so fast? It seems like 10 minutes ago I’d dragged Alan to a Delray dive for some tacos and Modelos, and 30 seconds ago I was ordering a pizza instead of cooking on a Sunday night. In between, lots of heat and humidity, a storm, errands, blah to the blah. But weekends are never blah, at least not when you’re out under the sun and in a pool and otherwise enjoying summer.

So into August we gallop. Five weeks until France. I’m staring to feel like Rhoda Morganstern when she’s offered a snack: “No thanks. I have to lose 10 pounds by 8:30.”

Saturdays are generally my favorite part of the weekend: Farm market, solitary breakfast at the coney island, food prep, vague hopeful anticipation at what’s ahead over the next 48 hours. And even though it turns out to be some book time and some looking-at-the-thunderstorm time and a little bathroom-cleaning, it’s still a weekend, and it’s great.

But now it’s Monday. Going ottering with Bill later this afternoon, as it’s going to be a scorcher. It’ll be nice to catch up and maybe watch a freighter go by. The Canadian border opened today, so if for some reason we end up there, it’ll be somewhat less illegal than it was last week. The Canadian-side customs workers staged a slowdown Friday, and the lines to cross the Ambassador Bridge were insane. We drove around picturesque Delray for a while before we left, but nearly got ensnared in it. Definitely pee-in-a-bottle time for a lot of truckers.

The pleasant days leave me less time to think about hell-yes autocrats hanging out in Hungary, listening to Tucker Carlson say, and I wish I were kidding:

Tucker: “I love America, I think my country is the best in the world. But don’t tell me America is more free than Hungary.”

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) August 7, 2021

Rod Dreher is, of course, one of the leading “intellectuals” pushing this idea, that Hungary does autocracy right because it keeps out Muslims and represses gays. I’ve been reading this guy for years, and early on it became clear what his animating force is: Fear. He’s afraid of everything, so it figures he’d be right at home in a place where Big Daddy is always looking out for you.

Later that day, Brother Rod tweeted an article by John Derbyshire (who he calls “Derb”) in VDARE, the explicitly racist and white-supremacist publication. When he was immediately called on it, he spent hours calling all his critics crazy because he didn’t know anything about VDARE, he just thought the piece was good. Hours and hours later, he finally deleted it. How is it possible that I, a shlub in Detroit, know what VDARE is, and not a leading intellectual of conservative America? It is to puzzle.

The incident did give me a reason to poke around the explicitly racist conservative mediasphere for a while. Steve Sailer wrote a piece on racial differences vis-a-vis athletic achievement, linking it to the Olympics and with the headline, “Arguing With the Inarguable.” This is well-trod ground – I guess that’s why it’s “inarguable” – and it’s the sort of thing that might be interesting in the hands of a non-racist, but there you are.

Some people on Twitter are asking why this story isn’t making a bigger splash, and I don’t have an answer other than TSF, i.e. Trump Scandal Fatigue:

WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.

Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.

The investigations were opened after a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that continuing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.

Whatever happens, I hope the full weight of the Justice Department’s internal affairs division (whatever it’s called) falls on Jeffrey Clark’s head like a ton of shit.

And with that, I suggest we get Monday under way. But first, breakfast.

Another E-day in the books. This was my third, and I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of it. There was lots of time to read the manual between voters yesterday; turnout was pathetic. The city clerk is estimating 11 percent. In the no-shows’ defense, it was a pretty lackluster slate. The mayor faced no serious opposition, the council candidates were…council candidates, and the city charter revision was at the city-governance-nerd level, an unlikely demographic in the precinct I worked, which draws from a pretty low-income part of the city. People arrived before and after work hours in health-care scrubs and the sort of uniforms that suggested employment other than in the C-suite.

But that they showed up at all was something of a miracle — walkers, canes, unsteady gaits — and as always, I think of how we can make voting easier, encourage more people to participate, make them understand how important it is, even in lackluster cycles. In other words, to do the work that the entire GOP, top to bottom, is trying to thwart.

It’s already reasonably accommodating. Proposal 3 of 2018 brought in a lot of election reforms here in Michigan, and as a lowly poll worker, I’m always struck by what is the overarching principle of elections and the ten million rules around our procedures, i.e., the right to vote is hard-won and shouldn’t be stripped away lightly. This is why my ass gets chapped when the brain-dead among us post snarky, recycled social media memes that ask why you need to show an ID to get on a plane, but not to vote. To which I reply, first, you do have to show ID to vote in Michigan, but sometimes people lose IDs, or just don’t have them for whatever reason. Should they be denied the most fundamental right of democracy because they misplaced their wallet? (Republicans: Yes! They’re irresponsible, except when it happens to me, in which case it’s just a misfortune!) So we have the affidavit system, etc. Also, getting on a plane isn’t the same as voting, so just shut up about that.

Anyway, I hope we followed all the procedures correctly and there won’t be the usual spate of pearl-clutching around the inevitable mistakes. (There won’t be, because this was a Detroit city election, and the pearl-clutchers don’t care about Detroit.)

My co-workers this time were lots of fun. The chairman for my precinct was, I learned in a series of revelations spread out through the 16-hour day, a sailor-mouth coffee drinker who used to ride motorcycles and sometimes will live for a couple days on healthy snacks rather than actual meals, and has been divorced twice. He also digs classic rock and subscribes to the Nation, which at the end was maybe the funniest of the day. He read the latest issue off and on, then pressed it on one of the other workers with a hearty endorsement. When the men’s-room door was unexpectedly locked, he speculated almost instantly that maybe a junkie had gone in there, locked the door for privacy to shoot up, and had OD’d and died within. Interesting conclusion! But it turns out it was just an accident. Before the custodian came to remedy the situation, he used the ladies’, which he said “smelled much nicer” and was also “pretty.”

So that was E-Day III for me, and I hope I have a few more. I leave you with this helpful illustration from the operations manual. Recall that one of the more ignorant complaints about the November fiasco at the TCF Center in Detroit is that GOP poll challengers were “locked out” of the room where the absentee counting boards were working. They were not, of course; there were at least a couple hundred already inside when the room reached capacity and security prevented any more from entering. But the people screaming outside and pounding on the windows were not trained challengers; I guess they’d qualify as poll watchers, but my point here is that as in most other election-related practices, there was a procedure in place and they did not respect it. Happy Wednesday, all.