Friday, December 29, 2023

Fait Accompli, self-evident fact; for Trump himself, now a grim reality?

Question: When then President Trump learned of the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017, what did he immediately declare?

Answer: On May 17, 2017, he exclaimed, "I'm FUCKED!"  Trump broke down and cursed upon learning of the special counsel's appointment: 'This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency.'

Question: Did then President Trump accept what he instinctively knew at that time to be true?

Answer: Clearly, he did not. 

Side note: It has been more than SIX years since May 2017.

Question: What word best characterizes, in the least common denominator, how Trump has reacted to efforts to hold him accountable to the rule of law over that six years?

Answer: Obfuscation.

  • noun The act or process of obfuscating, or obscuring the perception of something; the concept of concealing the meaning of a communication by making it more confusing and harder to interpret.
  • noun Confusion, bewilderment, or a baffled state resulting from something obfuscated, or made more opaque and muddled with the intent to obscure information.
  • noun A single instance of intentionally obscuring the meaning of something to make it more difficult to grasp.
See Firehose of Falsehoods, as previously cited in the Arizona Eagletarian

Question: How many lies, during his administration, did Trump publicly tell?

Answer

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

The only way to deal with bluster and obfuscation is to keep hammering at the facts and spelling out their implications.

FACT: Trump's cacophony is becoming increasingly unhinged, less coherent, and fortunately, corporate media which had been amplifying said auditory chaos ever since January 6, 2021, seems to be paying less attention, figuratively turning down the volume recently.



Because Trump's megaphone is rapidly losing energy, and because of increasing numbers of researchers, pundits, and politicians speaking up and speaking out against the wannabe dictator, the Arizona Eagletarian concludes Trump's self-fulfilling prophecy declared in May 2017, is now virtually a Fait Accompli. For him, a grim reality and self-evident fact. 

Thursday, December 28, 2023

50 years ago today; the importance of paying attention to history

 


The historical event about which Heather Cox Richardson wrote today's Letter from an American, along with the historical record of Reagan administration and severe environmental consequences from Reagan's rollback of federal government regulation HIGHLIGHT the importance of history and significant contextual narratives like Heather has consistently provided to keep us from repeating the some now foreseeable mistakes.

In other words, just as we NOW know Reagan, as president was disastrously mistaken regarding environmental regulation, we ALSO now KNOW enough history to ensure America does NOT repeat the disastrous Trump administration.

Corporate media, skewed by the capitalist profit (and survival?) motive has thus far shirked its responsibility to keep from validating Trump and Trump's cult.
.
We have FAR AND AWAY enough insight to adequately and appropriately declare Trump will be convicted on many of the 91 criminal charges he currently faces and he will NOT be elevated to a second term as president.

The following was written by Heather Cox Richardson. On her substack and on her Facebook post, she includes NOTES with sources for the points she makes. Heather has also recently published Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.

Fifty years ago tomorrow, on December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law. Declaring that Congress had determined that “various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation,” the act provided for the protection of endangered species.
Just over a decade before, in 1962, ecologist Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, documenting how pesticides designed to eliminate insects were devastating entire ecosystems of linked organisms. The realization that human destruction of the natural world could make the planet uninhabitable spurred Congress in 1970 to create the Environmental Protection Agency. And in 1973, when Nixon called for stronger laws to protect species in danger of extinction, 194 Democrats and 160 Republicans in the House—99% of those voting—voted yes. Only four Republicans in the House voted no.

Such strong congressional support for protecting the environment signaled that a new era was at hand. While President Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, tended to dial back environmental protections when he could in order to promote the development of oil and gas resources, President Jimmy Carter pressed the protection of the environment when he took office in 1977.
In 1978, Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as national monuments, doubling the size of the national park system. “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Oil companies, mining companies, timber companies, the cattle industry, and local officials eager for development strongly opposed Carter’s moves to protect the environment. In Alaska, local activists deliberately broke the regulations in the newly protected places, portraying Carter as King George III—against whom the American colonists revolted in 1776—and insisting that the protection of lands violated the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence.
For the most part, though, opposition to federal protection of the environment showed up as a drive to reform government regulations that, opponents argued, gave far too much power to unelected bureaucrats. In environmental regulations, the federal government’s protection of the public good ran smack into economic development.

In their 1980 presidential platform, Republicans claimed to be committed to “the conservation and wise management of America’s renewable natural resources” and said the government must protect public health. But they were not convinced that current laws and regulations provided benefits that justified their costs. “Too often,” they said, “current regulations are…rigid and narrow,” and they “strongly affirm[ed] that environmental protection must not become a cover for a ‘no-growth’ policy and a shrinking economy.”
In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan explained that he wanted to see the U.S. produce more energy to fuel “growth and productivity. Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present Administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.”

In his farewell address after voters elected Reagan, Carter urged Americans to “protect the quality of this world within which we live…. There are real and growing dangers to our simple and our most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” he warned. “The rapid depletion of irreplaceable minerals, the erosion of topsoil, the destruction of beauty, the blight of pollution, the demands of increasing billions of people, all combine to create problems which are easy to observe and predict, but difficult to resolve. If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.”
“But,” Carter added, “[a]cknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world—water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”

Reagan began by appointing pro-industry officials James G. Watt and Anne M. Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) as secretary of the interior and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively; they set out to gut government regulation of the environment by slashing budgets and firing staff. But both resigned under scandal in 1983, and their replacements satisfied neither those who wanted to return to the practices of the Carter years nor those who wanted to get rid of those practices altogether.
Still, with their focus on developing oil and gas, when workers repairing the White House roof removed the solar panels in 1986, Reagan administration officials declined to reinstall them.
Forty years later, we are reaping the fruits of that shift away from the atmosphere that gave us the Endangered Species Act and toward a focus on developing fossil fuels. On November 30 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations, reported that global temperatures in 2023 were at record highs both on land and in the seas, Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record low, and devastating fires, floods, outbreaks of disease, and searing heat waves have pounded human communities this year.
The WMO released this provisional report the same day that the U.N. Climate Change negotiations, known as COP28, began in the United Arab Emirates. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged leaders to commit to act to address climate change, while there was still time to avoid “the worst of climate chaos.” After a year in which countries staggered under extreme weather events, climate change is on people’s minds: nearly 80,000 people, including world leaders and celebrities, registered to attend COP28.

After the convention ended on December 13, Umair Irfan of Vox summarized the agreement hashed out there. For the first time in 27 such conventions, countries explicitly called for the phasing out of fossil fuel…but they didn’t say when or by how much. After taking stock of what countries are doing to address climate change, the meeting concluded that efforts to reduce emissions, invest in technology, adapt to warming, and help suffering countries are all falling short.
In addition to acknowledging the need to move away from fossil fuels, COP28 agreed to cut methane, boost renewable energy considerably, and help countries that are dealing with the fallout from climate change: island nations, for example. But emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, and the hope of limiting warmer temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius now seems a long shot. Still, renewable energy capacity grew nearly 10% in 2022, led by solar and wind power.
Today President Joe Biden used the anniversary of the Endangered Species Act to reclaim the spirit of the era in which it was written, urging Americans to protect ecosystems and biodiversity, “honor all the progress we have made toward protecting endangered species,” and to “come together to conserve our planet.” He noted that thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden-Harris administration has been able to invest billions of dollars in forest management, ecosystem restoration, and protection of watersheds, as well as making historic investments in addressing climate change, and that, as president, he has protected more lands and waters than any president since John F. Kennedy.
And yet the forces that undermined that spirit are still at work. In the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, the Supreme Court claimed that Congress could not delegate “major questions” to executive agencies, thus limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate the emissions that create climate change; and House Republicans this summer held a hearing on “the destructive cost of the Endangered Species Act,” claiming that it “has been misused and misapplied for the past 50 years” with “disastrous effects on local economies and businesses throughout the United States.” Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources Bruce Westerman (R-AR) accused the Biden administration of stifling “everything from forest management to future energy production through burdensome ESA regulations.”
While in 1980 voters could react to such a contrast between the parties’ environmental visions ideologically, in 2023, reality itself is weighing in. Brady Dennis of the Washington Post noted today that in this era of rising waters and epic storms, North Carolina has become the fourth state, along with South Carolina, New York, and New Jersey, to require home sellers to disclose their home’s flooding history and flood risk to prospective buyers.
Nevertheless, America's DEMOCRACY is AWAKENING.


Friday, December 8, 2023

Leading POLITICAL indicator?






THIS simple phenomenon tells you immediately what the public opinion polling industry cannot. It is NOT a Leading ECONOMIC Indicator. Instead, it is a Leading POLITICAL Indicator, perhaps more tangible than what any poll reports.  From Washington Post's BOOK CLUB email this morning:

Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” went on sale Tuesday and immediately sold out. *
[Liz] Cheney, who was censured by the Republican National Committee in 2022 for refusing to drink the fascist-flavored Kool-Aid, has been promoting her book across the country.

****
Now, do YOU, dear READER, honestly believe the American Electorate is going to be lulled to sleep by ANYTHING the former president stupidly says, or by what the DO NOTHING Congress led by insurrectionist Mike Johnson might do or not do?

My hunch: NOT on your effing life.

****



* I purchased the Kindle version (saves space in my home, and easy to read on my PC)

Monday, December 4, 2023

Hadley Duvall is everybody's daughter, niece, and sister

Trauma, in general, is ubiquitous. Hadley Duvall's trauma was specific (the Washington Post link is a gift article, I subscribe). [Note, her arm injury was the result of an athletic incident]






MIDWAY, Ky. — One month before the governor thanked her for his victory, Hadley Duvall had already won.

Standing in the middle of a football field in mid-October, she looked out at the students of her small Christian university, stunned to be the one wearing the rhinestone tiara. Her classmates could have chosen to honor the student body president or a leading member of the local Bible study. Instead, they’d picked Hadley, the face of a viral ad about abortion and sexual abuse that had begun airing a month earlier, and would soon help Democrats hold the governor’s mansion in one of the most conservative states in the country.

“They don’t hate me,” Duvall, 21, recalled thinking as she accepted a bouquet of red roses from her college president. “They made me homecoming queen.”

By the night of the football game at Midway University, pretty much everyone sitting on the bleachers knew the secret Duvall had kept for 10 years: She’d been raped throughout childhood by her stepfather, who pleaded guilty to rape, sodomy and sexual abuse, and is now serving 20 years in prison. He started sexually abusing her when she was 5 years old, according to police reports — at first convincing her that his behavior was normal, then holding her down when she finally realized it was not.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign learned about Duvall because of a Facebook post about her experience she had written on June 25, 2022, the day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The ruling triggered a near-total abortion ban in Kentucky, one of 12 states with a recently enacted ban that makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Days after she heard from Beshear’s team, Duvall was sitting in the dining room of a wealthy Beshear supporter she didn’t know, staring into a video camera. She aimed her words directly at the Republican candidate for governor, who for months had thrown his full support behind the current version of Kentucky’s law before conceding late in the campaign that he was open to additional exceptions.

“This is to you, Daniel Cameron,” Duvall said in the ad, her blue eyes narrowed in anger.

To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable. I’m speaking out because women and girls need to have options. Daniel Cameron would give us none.”

Cameron and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment, though he reacted to the ad at the time. “My heart goes out to her, and I want her to know that,” Cameron said.

Since Roe fell, voters have overwhelmingly backed abortion rights in each of the seven states where the issue has appeared directly on the ballot, including in conservative Kentucky, Kansas and, most recently, Ohio. [And IF nearly half a million registered voters so indicate on a petition, Arizona voters in 11 months will be able to validate those rights in OUR state, in the 2024 general election]

Democrats have had relatively less success translating voters’ frustrations over abortion bans into races that could oust the politicians responsible for them, or prevent the election of other antiabortion leaders. In Texas, Georgia and Florida, for example, governors who signed abortion bans were reelected by wide margins in 2022, suggesting that voters aren’t necessarily tying antiabortion policies to individual candidates, or aren’t prioritizing the issue when deciding which candidate to support.

Duvall made that connection abundantly clear for Kentucky voters last month. Her ad, viewed online over 3 million times, sparked concerned discussions [but apparently NOT any action in Congress to enshrine those rights in law?] within the Republican Party, with top national leaders acknowledging the critical role Duvall played in Beshear’s reelection.

“Go look at the ad ran against Daniel Cameron in Kentucky of the young woman who was raped when she was 12 years old by her [STEP-]father,” Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said on a recent podcast. The ad clearly contributed to Beshear’s win, McDaniel said, “because we won everything else down ticket in Kentucky.”



Heading into the 2024 presidential election, the resonance of Duvall’s ad offers a new playbook for Democrats, while positioning Duvall herself as a uniquely powerful messenger on abortion, capable of appealing to moderates and conservatives.

“Some people have a stereotype of someone who has to make this kind of choice,” said Duvall’s mother, Jennifer Adkins Miller. “But Hadley is in everybody’s household. She’s everybody’s daughter. She’s everybody’s niece. She’s everybody’s sister.

Duvall has thought critically about why she, in particular, has been such a persuasive voice on the issue. She expects conservatives wouldn’t have been nearly as open to listening to a Black or Hispanic woman with the same story.

“It’s a sad reality,” she said. “White privilege … I believe that’s a thing, 100 percent.”

She said she’s been called “the all-American girl.”

A senior in college, still working through years of trauma, Duvall knows she could lose her appeal in an instant. As she rushes to class or sits in the stands at a basketball game, she can feel her classmates watching her, she said.

“I have to remember my name kind of means something now,” Duvall said. “There are people who are probably just waiting for the chance to shoot me down.”

***

Duvall was in the second grade when she first suspected something wasn’t right.

A guidance counselor visited her class to teach her and the other 8-year-olds about the parts of their bodies no one else was allowed to touch, she said. Thirteen years later, Duvall still remembers every word of the song she learned that day.

Stop! Don’t touch me there. This is my no-no square.

Her stepfather, Jeremy Whitledge, had been touching her in those places for years — first with anal penetration, then later vaginal and oral, according to police reports. But when Duvall asked him about the song that night, she said, he offered an explanation that made sense.

“Those rules are for strangers,” Duvall remembers him saying. “Not for your family.”

While Duvall’s 30-second ad includes only a vague reference to her childhood, Duvall discussed her experience in far more detail in interviews with The Washington Post, describing unrelenting sexual abuse she endured over the course of a decade.

Whitledge declined to comment for the story, according to Lisa Lamb, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Corrections.

In September 2019, Whitledge sent a letter to Miller acknowledging the abuse, writing, “Because of my weakness I failed as her father. I failed as her protector.”

At the beginning, Duvall said, Whitledge framed the sexual abuse as a punishment. When she and her brother did something wrong, she recalled, he would send them to their rooms to await whatever discipline he deemed appropriate.

“My brother would get spankings,” Duvall said. “I would get touched.”

Most of the abuse happened at night, after her mom went to sleep. He would sneak into her bedroom around midnight or 1 a.m., she said, locking the door behind him. She would try to go somewhere else in her mind — sometimes clutching an old T-shirt of her mother’s until it was over.

Duvall said she thought all the time about telling her mom, but she didn’t want to mess up what she imagined other people saw as “the perfect family.” She had parents who came to her cheerleading competitions. Christmases at her stepfather’s family cabin. A jet ski on the lake.

Her mom had struggled with drugs for years, Miller and Duvall said, but eventually became sober after a year in rehab.

“I knew there was no way my mom could do it all on her own,” Duvall said.

The pregnancy test was positive, Duvall said, but she never had to make a choice. Almost two weeks later, she said, she woke up to sharp cramps and far more blood in her underwear than she’d ever seen before. For hours, she said, she sat on the toilet while a steady stream of blood flowed into the bowl.

At the time, she just assumed her period had returned.

It would be years before she understood she’d had a miscarriage, Duvall said.

At the end of eighth grade, in May 2016, she filled out a questionnaire about her hopes and fears for high school, which she keeps in her apartment. Asked about the “biggest mistake you HOPE you DON’T make,” Duvall responded, “Get pregnant.”

Duvall decided to tell her mom about the abuse less than a year after she answered that question, texting her from school in April 2017 to say she had something important to share that night. Miller prodded her daughter for more details — “Are you in trouble? Are the police involved?” — then picked Duvall up early, too unsettled to wait for the end of the day.

Duvall broke the news in the car, both women recalled.

“Jeremy sexually abuses me,” Duvall said to her mom.

Miller slammed on the brakes and later threw up.

Over the next 24 hours, Miller said, she cleared out the bank accounts and the gun cabinet, while Duvall stayed with a friend. Soon after that, they went to the police.

That day, Duvall said she decided not to tell anyone about the pregnancy. Police records show that Duvall recounted a pregnancy scare she had at age 12, but that the test had been negative. Looking back, Duvall said she didn’t have the strength to tell a room full of male officers what had really happened.

“I wanted people to know I went through that, but I didn’t want them to know I miscarried,” Duvall said. “I wasn’t ready.”

But as the years passed, Duvall said, she started regretting that she hadn’t recounted her full story in the police station, feeling heavy with secrets she’d planned to keep forever. She told her cousin about the positive pregnancy test in late 2021, when she was 19.

“It was really hard for her [when she reported to the police], everybody bombarding her with questions,” said Chloe Adkins, Duvall’s cousin.

Telling the truth about the pregnancy was “healing in a sense,” Duvall said.

A big secret, she realized, made it harder to move on.

The day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Duvall opened the Notes app on her phone and started to write.

She’d scrolled through over a dozen Facebook posts from friends and family celebrating the decision, growing angrier with each new Bible verse in her feed. A Christian herself, Duvall struggled to understand why they wanted to take rights away from young women and girls in vulnerable situations. If they knew the full extent of what she’d been through, she wondered, would any of them see this differently?

“The father figure in my life had planted his child in me at the age of 12,” she wrote in her draft. “Thankfully, I had my CHOICE. I never had to go through with my decision, but I would have … if you can look at a CHILD & tell them you think they should have to carry their parents child, you are sick.”

With the post still safely tucked away in Notes, Duvall thought about all the people in her life it might upset. Her boyfriend’s conservative family, whom she was eager to impress. Her mom, who still didn’t know about the pregnancy. Most of all, she said, she worried about her half sister, whom her mom put up for adoption when she got pregnant unexpectedly at 21. More than two decades later, her sister — who made contact with the family when Duvall was 13 — would sometimes post antiabortion messages online.

“What if she hates me?” Duvall remembered thinking. “What if she thinks I hate her?”

Duvall wasn’t as pro-abortion rights as some of the people she saw marching through the streets, she said. She couldn’t say when in pregnancy she thought abortion should be banned — but she thought there should be some kind of limit. More than anything, she said, she wanted people to see the issue for all its gray areas and complications.

I’m not pro-abortion,” she’d sometimes say. “I’m pro minding your own business.”

As soon as Duvall copied the draft from Notes and clicked “post” on Facebook, she said, she set her phone facedown on the other side of the room, too scared to look.

By the time Beshear’s campaign team started planning for an abortion ad focused on exceptions for rape and incest, about a year later, Duvall’s post had been shared over 3,000 times. Hundreds of commenters had called her brave. Strong. An inspiration. A few people said she’d persuaded them to change their views.

Duvall drove to the video shoot with her boyfriend one morning in mid-July, five potential outfits in the back of her car. She wasn’t getting paid for the commercial, but she’d agreed to participate as soon as the campaign asked, thinking of all the other abuse victims she’d be able to reach with her message.

On set, Beshear’s media team selected a simple navy dress, then asked for permission to airbrush the tattoo on her arm of angel wings, a tribute to Duvall’s late nephew.

David Eichenbaum, Beshear’s Washington-based media consultant, handed Duvall a script based on fragments of things she’d said, tailored to appeal to the Republicans the governor couldn’t win without. Duvall would never say the word “abortion.” Instead, she would stress the importance of “options.”

“It’s an inclusive word,” Eichenbaum said. “We’re trying to persuade people here.”

After Duvall read through the script for the first time, Eichenbaum said, the room went silent. He and the cameraman were crying. So was Duvall’s mom.

Miller said she’d heard her daughter talk like that once before — five years ago in a Kentucky courtroom, reading her victim impact statement before the sentencing as she stared down her stepfather.

Duvall didn’t let herself cry until she was lying in bed that night, hours after the filming was over. Then the feelings surfaced all at once, messy and conflicting. She felt proud of what she’d done that day, she said, but also sad.

“This is what I’m going to be known for: being raped,” she said to her boyfriend. “And that’s just that.”

***

When the ad posted online in late September, Duvall stared at her computer for the better part of three days, refreshing every few minutes as the likes and retweets climbed higher and higher. She read every individual post she could find, she said, fixating on any negative comment.

Worried about her daughter, Miller eventually called Duvall’s boyfriend.

“Take her out,” she told him. “She needs to have fun. She needs to be a college student.”

But when they arrived at their favorite dive bar, Duvall’s ad was playing on the big screen.

“What is even happening right now?” she recalled saying to her boyfriend, as the people around them started to stare.

Two months later — the election long over — the staring hasn’t stopped. If anything, Duvall said, it has intensified. Now, she’s not just the girl in the ad. She’s the girl who helped the governor win reelection.

In his acceptance speech, Beshear thanked Duvall right after his wife and kids.

“Because of her courage, this commonwealth is going to be a better place and people are going to reach out for the help they need,” he said. “Thank you, Hadley.”

Duvall has thought a lot about why her ad resonated so deeply, especially with moderates and conservatives in her Republican state. While a lot of people don’t particularly like the idea of abortion, she said, they might think differently about the issue when they’re introduced to a real person with a story like hers.

“It’s real easy to dismiss the rape and incest exceptions when they’re not right in front of your face,” Duvall said.

Ahead of the election, she decided to keep a few of her Facebook posts public — so voters could see her hugging her mom, walking her dog, wearing her homecoming sash. If her face was persuasive to people, she decided she might as well use it.

From the beginning, the Beshear campaign had warned Duvall to brace for backlash to the commercial. But sitting in the Midway student center a week after the election, Duvall told her friends she hasn’t had to deal with much.

“It’s been nothing bad,” said Duvall, lying back in a chair, pink sneakers slung over the armrest.

Duvall had just arrived back on campus with her arm in a cast after having surgery for an old athletic injury.

“I don’t even know how you hate on it, not going to lie,” one of Duvall’s friends said. “There’s not really a way to hate on it.”

“Especially when you are the male species,” Duvall said. “Like, what are you talking about? Nobody even asked you.”

“And was never, ever going to,” said Kyaria Cotton, Duvall’s best friend and former roommate.

They all laughed.

These were the moments that made Duvall feel like she could keep speaking out forever. She could become a victim advocate, fighting for other little girls abused in their bedrooms late at night. She could campaign for Democratic candidates in 2024 — and show voters across the country how abortion bans can harm young women like her.

Then a guy on the basketball team walked by.

“Hey, superstar,” he said. “Can I get your autograph?”

Duvall rolled her eyes and smiled, like she does every time this happens. But her mind was already off somewhere else, spinning up anxious thoughts. Did people think she was doing all this to get rich and famous? People were always observing her now, her face familiar across Kentucky. What if she did something embarrassing at a bar one night, she wondered, and someone caught it on video?

With a few hours to kill, Duvall and Cotton decided to walk to the local coffee shop. They bounded across the soccer field, yanking off their sweatshirts to soak in the warmth of one of the year’s last summerlike days. They talked about Duvall’s boyfriend and the day of homecoming — how Cotton knew all along that her best friend would win.

In line for coffee — a mile from campus — Duvall could have been any 21-year-old, debating which fall drink to try that day.

Then the barista recognized her.

“Which drink was hers?” the barista asked Cotton once Duvall stepped away. “I’ll cover it.”


*****





Gov. Katie Hobbs signs her name to Arizona's abortion access ballot initiative 





Seated in front of the Arizona Pioneer Women Memorial Tuesday morning, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs added her signature to a petition for a statewide ballot initiative that in November 2024 could enshrine the right to an abortion in the Arizona Constitution.

Arizona for Abortion Access, which is supported by the ACLU of Arizona, Arizona List and Planned Parenthood of Arizona, among others, spearheaded the ballot initiative, which would both expand and protect abortion rights in Arizona through a constitutional amendment.

The campaign needs to gather at least 383,923 valid signatures from Arizona voters by July 3, 2024, but the aim is to gather about double that number, organizers have said.

*****

By the way, who cares what critics say? The Arizona Constitution gives WE the PEOPLE the authority to override the critics.