September 4, 2026
"Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses, and I say this, it's so insulting to him, but I might as well say it."
"The surrogate mother’s rights over the fetus she is carrying are greatly curtailed and she loses all rights to the baby she delivers."
In 2019, when Andrew Cuomo sought to legalize commercial surrogacy, Steinem wrote:
A state that medicalizes and rents out female bodies — with third party profit as a motive and little or no regulation of risk to the women egg donors and surrogate wombs — jeopardizes a woman’s fundamental right to health and freedom and puts profit ahead of the long-term welfare of the fetus.The use of the word "medicalizes" made me wonder what Steinem thought about hormone and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria.
The driver may be drunk, but it's the cop whose speech is slurred.
Comments don't seem to be working for the last hour or so.
This is like the way if you mock someone for making a typo, you'll make a typo.
The guys at @PodSaveAmerica laugh at JD Vance for not knowing what the academic definition of a blood libel is—and then immediately demonstrate that they know even less about it than he does...
— H.A. Hazony (@HAHazony) September 3, 2026
Instant Karma. pic.twitter.com/LFN6HY6rAx
September 3, 2026
Sunrise.
That's my only photo. I saw a flash of lightning and chose to head back home. But Meade made a target of himself out on the dock, and he kept going all the way to the primary vantage point. There, he took this:
And he made an awfully nice video:
"We’re like Adam and Eve trying to build the futuristic garden of Eden where you can just exist and your world takes better care of you than you could yourself."
"Ha ha. Wouldn't it be funny if I started it up again? 18 years have passed!"
Unsaid things.
That's a favorite tag of mine and I've even blogged about the tag.
In 2014, I said: "I feel that I've found the psychic key to my favorite tag: 'unsaid things.'... Did you know that before I started blogging I believed myself to be a person without political opinions? I used to read the New York Times every day and feel that I had no opinion. It was such a distinctive feeling — no opinion was my opinion — that for a while, to counteract it, I challenged myself, upon reading at least one article a day, to arrive at an opinion. What do I think of that? In blogging, early on, I had to tell myself to stop before moving to the next item and write one more sentence. You have to say something about that. I had to make it a discipline: To write one more thing...."
And in another 2014 post, I wrote: "Unsaid things is one of my favorite topics, and things that fall into this category are things that, aptly enough, most people would leave unsaid. There's a convention in human society not to outline the secret motives of others. As long as someone hasn't actually said something, you ought not to act as though you know what that thing is. But I'm here to transgress on that convention. I think I can and should do it...." (7 reasons why are said at the link but I will leave them unrepeated here.)So naturally, I'm powerfully drawn to this article by Ariana Eunjung Cha in The Washington Post: "The 'Gen Z stare' — and the decline of saying things out loud/We’re speaking fewer words every year. Scientists worry what that’s doing to our brains" (gift link).
"Gloria Steinem, lodestar of the modern women’s movement, dies at 92."
In a tribute to feminism, the obit waits until the 6th paragraph to tell us how she looked: "With her willowy physique, her fashionable miniskirts and her straight, parted hair, she brought glamour as well as passion to her work, challenging the popular perception of feminists as bra-burning radicals."
Paragraph 8: "Ms. Steinem burst to the fore in the 1960s not as an activist, but as a high-flying freelance journalist for publications including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Vogue. She experienced firsthand the sexism that she would later fight on behalf of other women. Ms. Steinem recalled a taxicab conversation between the renowned writers Gay Talese and Saul Bellow, in which she said Talese remarked in her presence, 'You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.'"
Here's the NYT obituary: "Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92/She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large" (gift link).
The NYT tells us how she looked in paragraph 4: "For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world."
September 2, 2026
"Trump is going to get his ballroom — even if courts conclude it’s illegal."
When the ballroom case was argued before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in June, Judge Patricia A. Millett asked... If the government were to move very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty... was it true that “nothing can be done” by the courts?
Yaakov Roth, a Justice Department lawyer, did not try to duck the question. “I think that’s right, yes,” he said....
When the case reached the Supreme Court last month, the challengers warned the justices that Mr. Trump had “decided to try to outrun judicial review.” In response, Solicitor General D. John Sauer did not exactly deny the charge. He crowed that a 250-person crew had been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and that the project, which he said included key security upgrades for the White House, had passed the point of no return....
It's in the structure of things that the Executive has speed as a tool. Remember when Justice Robert Jackson quoted Napoleon — "The tools belong to the man who can use them"?


