March

A short post on the month of March, since the end of the month falls midweek:

I walked at least 10,000 steps every day in March.

I walked over 364,000 steps, my biggest month ever and more than 50,000 steps over my goal of 310,000 steps.

My biggest day was the third Thursday of the month, when Jubilee Democrats meet, and I walked 18,700 steps.

I have now walked at least 10,000 steps every day for 63 days in a row, and 87 of the 90 days this year. When I started this walking bit, I wanted to average at least 10,000 steps per day, not take 10,000 steps every single day. I am not the sort of person to be that dedicated to a goal, so I thought that some days I would come up a little short, and others days I would make it up. The problem with that was, it did not work, and I got behind. To get back on track, I settled into a routine that has allowed me to go a little over 10,000 steps every day, and I usually stick to that routine. When I don't, I find that I do not want to give back any of my progress, nor do I want to end my streak now, so I found ways to make up any missing steps and get to 10,000. It's working, so I will stick with trying to make it every day.

The Supreme Court Is Not Legitimate

I suspect that a great number of Americans feel, as I do, that decisions made by the current Supreme Court are not legitimate due to the way the court was assembled, and that, due to the current makeup of the court, decisions do not represent the last word on constitutional questions, but rather represent temporary politically-motivated choices that in many cases need to be swept away as soon as we get a legitimate court.

A few reasons:

• Before Merrick Garland, we could complain about the members of the court and the bad decisions they sometimes made, but everyone on the court had been put in place through a process that is laid out in the Constitution. But when Merrick Garland was appointed, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans decided that the Senate's duty to confirm justices meant that they could just choose not to confirm or even consider anyone for an indefinite period of time. Forget the nonsense McConnell said about it being the last year of Obama's presidency; the timing was completely arbitrary, made up to fit the situation, and McConnell happily tossed the whole idea aside when he had the chance to confirm Amy Coney Barrett right before an election. The Senate had plenty of time to consider Garland - way more than enough time - and McConnell never explained what was magic about the one-year rule he claimed he was adhering to.

The non-confirmation, non-consideration of Merrick Garland created a constitutional crisis. We no longer have a reliable method of filling Supreme Court vacancies in the United States because of Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate. It only works now if the president and the Senate majority are in the same party. We could go ten years, maybe more, without anyone being confirmed. Certainly Democrats have no reason to ever confirm a Republican president's appointee, because the Republicans stole a seat, and Democrats want it back.

And if you think, well, what McConnell did was fine because the Constitution grants him the power to do what he did, consider what McConnell himself would have said if Democrats had pulled a similar stunt, and you will realize that even Mitch McConnell does not believe it was legitimate, no Republican actually thinks it was legitimate, and no one anywhere thinks it was legitimate. It was all just a convenient bit of hypocrisy.

• The court does not represent the majority of the American people, nor does it reflect the results of our elections. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but six of the nine justices on the court are conservatives, and five of them, enough to swing any court decision, are probably more conservative than at least 90% of Americans. There is a huge disconnect between how the American people have voted and what they got in the Supreme Court. Part of that is the Electoral College, part is bad luck, and part is Mitch McConnell's dishonesty. There may be another part, that Justice Kennedy retired while we had a Republican president, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg stayed on until she died while a Republican was president.

Whatever the reasons, we voted for Democrats for the last 28 years, and we got a Supreme Court that is dominated by extremist Republicans. It is about as far as possible from what we all voted for, and their decisions as a whole reflect that disconnect with America.

• Clarence Thomas should not be on the Supreme Court. Never mind that he almost certainly sexually harassed Anita Hill and lied about it during his confirmation hearings. Set aside that he is a political activist and extremist who is one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices ever, completely out of step with the country.

Clarence Thomas's wife is a far right-wing political activist who was deeply involved in trying to override the 2020 presidential election result and install the loser as the illegitimate president of the United States. It is fair for us to assume that Clarence Thomas knew what she was doing, and that he did nothing to prevent the effort to overturn the Constitution. It is also fair for us to believe that he was on board with the coup attempt. We already know that Thomas not only refused to recuse himself from a case before the court regarding the January 6 congressional committee, he was the only justice to vote to prevent the committee from getting records they were seeking. With his wife involved in the effort to nullify the election, he should have recused himself, and the decision not to was just corrupt.

At this point he should resign. There is no reason for Americans to think he will make decisions honestly and fairly.

We need a new way to  fill the Supreme Court. The current system is broken. The current court is broken.

This week, I made my 10,000 steps every day. On Monday, I hit 1,750,000 steps, one quarter of the way to Miami. Today I made it to Willis Coulee, halfway across Montana, equidistant from Cooper Pass at the Idaho border and Alzada, Montana, a census-designated place (I'm getting used to that term) next to the Wyoming border. Also, I'm now 50,000 steps ahead of my target pace.

I'm happy with my progress.

 

18,000 Steps Hurt My Feet

Thursday I walked over 18,700 steps for the second time this year. The first time was four weeks earlier, also a Thursday, and for the same reason: Jubilee Democrats meet in our community lodge on the third Thursday of each month, and I walked to the lodge and back, which adds 7,000 - 8,000 steps on top of my usual routine.

My feet felt a little ragged by the end of the day, and the next morning. I may resort to soaking them in the future.

Chess club is not meeting now, but if they start again, they also meet in the lodge on Thursdays, so I could end up taking 18,000 steps every Thursday. Almost certainly will have to take better care of my feet if that happens.

I have made it to White Sulphur Springs, Montana, the county seat of Meagher County, Montana and a town of 955 people. Elevation is over 5,000 feet; I am past the continental divide, but Montana seems to have plenty of mountainous country. There is museum of local history here that used to be a house and looks like a castle, built in the late 1800s. If I ever go in person to White Sulphur Springs, I will stop.

I believe that I wrote before that three towns I am most familiar with in Montana are Butte, Bozeman, and Billings, because they are all major towns along I-90. I passed north of Butte a few weeks ago and have now passed north of Bozeman, so I am ticking off the milestones. I will walk through Billings next month.

A few weeks ago, I laid out where I thought I would be at the end of each of the next few months as I crossed Montana, and I figured Checkerboard, Montana was my goal for March. Checkerboard is now four days away, with twelve days left in the month. After my slow start, I am surprised to find myself optimistic about getting to Miami much earlier than I had planned.

If my feet hold up, I will.
 

Watson, Montana

I was going to open this post by writing that Montana is not really all unpopulated, and that in part I am walking through very remote areas only because that's the way Google Maps decided I should walk, but then I looked it up, and in fact not many people live in Montana. The population is a little over one million, which is really small considering Montana is the fourth largest state. It is the third least densely populated state after Alaska and Wyoming, so fewer people per square mile than North Dakota, Nevada, Nebraska, Idaho. Not very many people.

It makes sense then that I keep finding myself in or near really small places, places that would never be bold enough to call themselves towns or to even aspire to township. I am actually 10 miles short of Watson, Montana, which according to Google is not a town or even a census-designated place, as we have encountered previously, but rather a "populated place." By the look of it, even that description may be overstating the case.

I found another picture of Watson, besides the one above, that was a more run-down looking cabin, although it may have just been this one from a bad angle. I like to think that this picture represents one of the nicer local neighborhoods.

Once again, I walked over 10,000 steps every day this week and averaged over 11,000. I feel like walking is getting easier as I do it more, and I am looking forward to the weather getting better. I started this project last October, so the weather was questionable to start and then got worse. From now until November will be a good stretch to get plenty of steps in.
 

The Iraq War

The Iraq War was the event that really got me involved in politics. Before we started gearing up for war, I was a registered Democrat, but I had voted for the elder George Bush, once, and I considered whether to vote for George W. before deciding that Al Gore clearly shared more of my political values.

I have never considered voting for a Republican for president since. By the end of W's first term, I was a committed Democrat who would never go back. More than that, I was really amazed that anyone would vote for that man for a second term, and I began to predict the downfall of the Republican Party on the grounds that you could not sustain a political party based on lies, because the American people would eventually realize the truth.

Turns out, maybe they never will. A surprising number of Americans don't seem to care much about reality. That was unexpected.

When we went to war, I believed that Iraq had some chemical weapons at least, although as I recall the story that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons was already being debunked. What I did not see was any imminent threat to the United States. However, the Bush administration used 9/11 to argue that if Iraq had dangerous weapons, that already represented enough of a threat to justify going to war. I thought that was ridiculous. Suddenly we (and by extension Russia, China, anybody) were free to start a war against any nations we considered to be bad actors with dangerous military capabilities. It seems obvious to me that logically that opens the door to a global free-for-all.

One thing I remember pretty well from the run-up to the war was a reporter asking Bush what Saddam Hussein needed to do in order to avoid war. Bush answered that Iraq had to totally disarm. When the reporter asked what that meant, Bush answered (and I believe this is an exact quote) "You know, totally disarm." The president of the United States was getting ready to start a war and could not come up with any intelligible steps that might prevent it, which also meant that he did not really have any criteria for starting it. War is supposed to be a last resort; war is not a desired outcome. But it was clear to me that Bush very much wanted this war, that his preference was to send Americans to kill Iraqis and to die overseas, and he was going to start a war no matter what. By the time the war started, I really could not stand the man.

The war in Ukraine has made me think about the Iraq War during these last couple of weeks. There are some pretty important similarities. We were a superpower attacking a much weaker nation that presented no threat to us. Our "reasons" for going to war turned out to be more pretexts than reasons. We went in to topple the government and replace it with one that would favor us.

There were also some significant differences, the most important being that Hussein was widely recognized as a bad guy, whereas Zelensky is clearly not as threatening. Also, the US at least tried to make a plausible case for the invasion and even got several allies to go along. Those things kept us from being near-universally condemned the way Russia is being condemned, but still, the war in Ukraine is a reminder to me of what a mistake it was to go to war with Iraq and how much damage we did without any good justification.

In the six days since I last posted, I have taken 67,000 steps, and I am now 15 miles outside of Helena, Montana. As far as I remember, I have never been to Helena, but it's the capital of Montana, so it counts as one of two significant Montana cities that I will pass through (the other being Billings.) I have managed 10,000 steps all but three days this year (all in January), and I have averaged more than 11,000 steps a day for over a month now.

It will take me about a million more steps to get across Montana. I am less than one quarter of the way to Miami. Long ways to go.