Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to be executed next month.

 Lisa Montgomery is sitting in a federal prison in Texas. Next month, she is scheduled to be taken to Terre Haute and lethally injected. In 2004, she killed a pregnant woman, cut her open, and took the baby. Montgomery kept the baby girl until she was caught and arrested.

The death penalty is a highly controversial and emotional subject. A lot of people go with their gut feeling and base their stance on that. Some folks think all murderers and rapists should be thrown off a cliff. Some people think that only the worst killers should get the needle. A growing number of people think the death penalty should be abolished entirely. For a long time, I thought that the death penalty should be reserved for terrorists and war criminals. My thinking was that such people are too dangerous to be kept alive. Except that most of these people just don't live long enough to answer to a judge and jury. The rare terrorists who do get caught and convicted in the US are put in an administrative maximum prison, or AdMax for short. See, a while back the government decided it needed a level of prison security more maximum than maximum, so they came up with AdMax. AdMax inmates don't go to lunch, play in the yard, or even get to pick up trash along the highway. They spend 23 hours a day sitting in the cell and they get one hour of exercise where they walk around in a concrete pit. As it stands now, there are no AdMax facilities for women, since no women up to this point have created that kind of a security concern. Instead, Lisa Montgomery is on suicide watch in the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth. She doesn't get to have socks, underwear, or anything that someone might have used to harm themselves in the past. Guards watch her go to the bathroom. Take a moment to appreciate this irony: the government is going to a lot of trouble to keep this woman from killing herself so that she can be killed by a designated government employee. Also, they plan on transporting her more than 800 miles to get this done. As if there is nobody in Texas who knows anything about executions. Only the government can make death this complicated. Lisa Montgomery is a mother of four and suffered from physical and sexual abuse as a child. If you don't feel sorry for her because of what she did, that's understandable. I'm not writing this to save her life. I'm writing this to protect due process. Everyone in jail or prison has a right to a lawyer. If the government starts making exceptions for really bad people or during times of crisis, they'll keep finding reasons to make exceptions. There might come a time where you or someone you love needs a lawyer, and you'll just be told "no". Lisa Montgomery's lawyers have both been infected with COVID-19 as a result of having to fly back and forth to Texas from their offices in Tennessee. Lisa Montgomery's execution should at least be delayed until her lawyers can safely represent her. It is bizarre and macabre that the Trump Administration would make federal executions a priority during a pandemic and his last year in office, but here we are. A lame duck president has nothing to gain or lose politically by commuting a death sentence. This will be the time when we really get to know what kind of man Trump is. https://www.newsweek.com/aclu-files-lawsuit-end-torturous-conditions-lisa-montgomery-1547625

Veterans Day

 Today is Veterans Day. November 11th was chosen because World War 1 ended on that day. That was supposed to be the war to end all wars, but it had a sequel. Sequels are great for Hollywood, not so much for soldiers and people who live near combat zones. Neither world wars nor civil wars should have sequels.

No civil war tonight

 

The cool thing about elections is that it gives you a preview of how a civil war might turn out. The Founding Fathers weren’t allow to vote for or against King George III, so they were flying blind. The South wasn’t terribly happy with the outcome of the 1860 election, but they accepted the outcome eventually in 1865, after Appomattox. If they accepted the outcome sooner, Atlanta wouldn’t have been burned to the ground.

If the guy you voted for wins the presidential election, you might be happy but you might be concerned that the other side won’t accept the results. To be sure, there are always going to be a few people who won’t accept the results. That’s fine. Nobody has to believe in anything in this country. You can believe that the Earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese if you like. All of those college kids who wore “Bush Is Not My President” shirts during the 00’s at least grasped that they weren’t going to finish school if they personally took up arms. The American political landscape is much like the weather: if you don’t like it, wait a while and it will change to something else.

If the guy you voted for lost, welcome to my world. I’m 41, I’ve voted in every presidential election since 2000 and I have never voted for the winner. Bush, Obama, and Trump all have that in common in that I voted against all three of them. The reason why I’m not dead or in prison is because I’m not the type to resort to violence when I don’t get my way. If you’re my age or older, you’re too old for this civil war shit. If you’re younger than me, you need to understand that wars don’t go the want you expect them to.

I expect that the military will back the winner of the Electoral College. If they don’t back the duly elected commander in chief, they lose their billions in funding and there will be no shiny new toys for them next year. If the military can’t agree on who the winner was, well that’s that and it’s been nice knowing all of you. But if the military is united, it’s suicide to try to overthrow the government this year.

Look, if you really want a preview of a 21^st century civil war, turn off the water, power, and gas to your house. Live off the semi-rancid food in your fridge for a month. Odds are, you won’t die in glorious battle, you’ll just freeze or starve to death.

So, yeah. No civil war tonight. Just the same low level violence that America has always had. If you didn’t want that violence, maybe you should start voting against the drug war.