With the ruling, abortion is immediately illegal in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North and South Dakota and Utah.

Wyoming, Mississippi, Idaho, Tennessee and Texas join w/in 30 days.

Feels like one giant step closer to balkanization.

https://twitter.com/GovKathyHochul/status/1540339336671121420

Abortion banned without exception for health of the mother:
AR, ID, MS, ND, OK, SD

Without exceptions for rape:
AR, KY, LA, MO, ND, SD, TN, TX

Without exceptions for incest:
AR, KY, LA, MS, MO, ND, SD, TN, TX

BREAKING Supreme Court overturns Roe. v Wade and gives states the right to ban abortion. "With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent."
Breyer/Sotomayor/Kagan

How did we get here?
You can thank Harlan Carter.
When he was a teen growing up on the border, he grabbed a shotgun and confronted three Hispanic boys his mother had seen loitering near their house.
He found them at a swimming hole and shot and killed 15-yr-old Ramon Casiano. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 3 years in prison, but after 2, a higher court let him out because the judge hadn't properly explained the definition of "self-defense" to the jury.

3 yrs later he joined the Border Patrol.

Had the pleasure of hanging out with @JEichstaedt recently and learned a lot about our eternal pursuit of happiness.

He breaks well-being into 4 domains
-satisfaction
-positive emotion (happiness),
-low negative emotion (stress and worry)
-meaning and purpose ("eudaimonia") Here is the importance of health...

Meet Harlan Carter.
When he was a teen growing up on the border, he grabbed a shotgun and confronted three Hispanic boys his mother had seen loitering near their house.
He found them at a swimming hole and after exchanging words, shot and killed 15-yr-old Ramon Casiano. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 3 years in prison, but after 2, a higher court let him out because the judge hadn't properly explained the definition of "self-defense" to the jury.

3 yrs later he joined the Border Patrol.

I’m in an Uber, watching to a clip of Putin on Twitter when my driver asks “You speak Russian?!”
His name is Lev.
Me moved from Moscow 30 yrs ago and thinks his adopted country doesn’t understand that Putin is not a president.
"He's a mob boss." “You want to know how this all started?” Lev asks.
I did.
“You ever been to the NASA museum in Houston?”
I had.
“I was shocked to see how many U.S. rocket parts are built in Ukraine.”

Here's a fun #InternationalWomensDay story that starts with this tough SOB.
He set out to build a bridge unlike any the world and it was going well until his foot slipped from a pier piling and got smashed by a ferry.
As he lost his toes, he refused to scream. Then John Roebling got tetanus and this brilliant engineer refused all medicine, insisting doctors only pour water on his bad foot.
His mind was sharp as his body seized and spasmed and before he slipped into a coma, he wrote out his plans...

The passing of Larry King has me reflecting on the art of the interview and how the best questions are

1. Lean. Avoid the conversational temptation to load the question with your vast knowledge, either to prove yourself or connect. (This gives the subject too many points to quibble which become off-ramps from the desired destination)

NEWS: Here are the executive orders @JoeBiden will sign on climate and the environment

-Biden will rejoin the Paris Agreement, singing an instrument that will be deposited with the U.N. later today. The United States will officially become party to the agreement in 30 days. @JoeBiden He will sign a broad executive order that will direct agencies to review emissions standards, take action on any regulations imposed under Trump that are deemed ‘harmful,’ and place a temporary moratorium on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Horrific new video obtained by CNN shows a MAGA rioter (in white hat and backpack) grab a DC Metro officer and pull him down Capitol steps where he is stomped and beaten with an American flag pole.
At one point they sing the Star Spangled Banner Can’t imagine a more fitting illustration of the 1775 Samuel Johnson line:
“(false) Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”

BREAKING: US Army Corps of Engineers denies a permit for Pebble Mine in Southwest Alaska, much to the delight of tribes, fishermen and nature lovers who have been fighting the massive Canadian-owned gold and copper project for decades.

cnn.com/2020/09/25/pol… Alaska's USACE Commander Col. Damon Delarosa said #PebbleMine “does not comply with Clean Water Act guidelines and concluded that the proposed project is contrary to the public interest.”

cnn.com/videos/travel/…

You know what it takes to get a ballot certified in most states?
-5% of all election machines are randomly audited to make sure the paper ballots match the tape.
-They double check the math at the local level.
-Then at the country level
-Then at the state level... Each of these steps is observed by both parties and paper ballots are kept in a vault.

To steal just a few thousand of votes would require a conspiracy of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of librarians, Little League coaches, pastors, farmers and firemen. Your neighbors.

With Biden up around 20K, Wisconsin Elect. Commish says only 300 ballots or so remain to be counted then they start the triple-checking canvassing process at local, county and state levels.

Lawyers on both sides tell us they doubt there will be a legal challenge. This guy agrees Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien says “The President is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so.”

There is no "immediately." They can't legally request a recount until canvas is complete which could take until Nov 17 at latest.

Never had the honor of meeting this man, but the more I learn, the more I admire.

His name is Konrad Steffen, son a Zurich tailor who fell in love with polar ice just as it began to disappear. On one research trip, an avalanche broke his leg and dislocated his jaw... ...but using an aluminum stake as a split and snowmobile for shelter, survived 24 hours.

He became one of the most beloved and respected glaciologists in the world, teaching at U. of Colorado but happiest in Greenland, working gloveless in -25° like an icy Indiana Jones.

A #Juneteenth shout-out to the memory of Matthew Henson.

Born to sharecroppers in Maryland and terrorized by the KKK, he attended a tribute to Lincoln at age 10 and heard a rousing call by Frederick Douglas to fight for education and equality. At 12, he became a cabin boy and sailed the world with a captain who taught him to read and write.

Years later, while working in a Washington DC clothing store he mentioned his experience to a customer named Robert Peary, who invited him on his next adventure.

Sometimes you have to climb down your own family tree to confront the kind of policing that is turning so many stomachs tonight.

That's me in a lovely christening gown and that is my Grandpa Frank between shifts as the leader of Milwaukee PD's notorious Tactical Squad in 1968. As a kid I knew him as a scary-gruff-but-lovable, first-generation John Wayne. Hero cop with a wall full of commendations and President of the Eagles Club

As a grown-up reporter I learned that the The Eagles Club was whites-only and his stories and souvenirs had another side.

This is a story about neighbors.

See that house?

Years ago, a family bought it for $60,000.

See the oil refinery next door?

It is owned by a Saudi Arabian company that made $111 billion profit last year, almost twice as much as Apple. It is called Motiva, it is the largest refinery on the continent and it is just one piece of the Escher-meets-Aliens landscape of Port Arthur, TX.

This town has been turning petrochemicals into American wealth and power for generations...but all that burning comes with a cost.

Spent the past couple days at the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas to take some pics and tell a rather amazing story... Run by nonprofit nature lovers, this place is a 100 acre pocket of amazing wildlife on the banks of the Rio Grande…

If you run out of political arguments with Uncle Rush, here's some fun Thanksgiving history to argue over pie:

Pilgrims and Puritans were as different as Sunni and Shia. While Pilgrims were radical separatists, Puritans were upset with the Church of England but loyal to England. But by modern definitions, both groups were socialists. They got off the boat, divvied up the land equally, passed the hat to build schools and meeting houses and saw government as an extension of God's will to create a "shining city on a hill."

I have some new reporting on the millions bottles of FEMA water we found going to waste on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico a year after Hurricane Maria forced millions of Americans to drink rain and creek water for MONTHS, triggering an outbreak of deadly leptospirosis... At first, FEMA blamed Puerto Rican locals. “The way it works is we get the commodities to the state, the commonwealth….Obviously with Maria, we had not a supply issue, we had distribution issues,” they said on a conference call

Our footage of the 30 million bottles of wasted water in Puerto Rico seems to have touched a nerve on this little website we call home.
(Deep inhale)
May I thread?.... I was here right after the storm and came back a month later. It was a humanitarian crisis unlike any I'd seen since Banda Aceh in '04 and Haiti in '10.