Over the course of the past hour, former President Trump lost at the Supreme Court and saw his lawyer knocked around like a piñata by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The timing was coincidental, but wow what a flurry of legal activity.

We build stories out of the messy, contradictory realities of our lives. Rich Fierro is the hero of the mass shooting at the Club Q, the gay club in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We need more heroes and fewer events that create them. Fierro is a retired Army major who appears to have had something approaching a flashback, a reflex response from the brutalizing violence he experienced in Iraq when Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire in the night club.

These are the indelible memories, psychic damage that haunt so many veterans. In interviews, Fierro has said they haunt him too and were one of the reasons he left the military. In this moment, though, they were lifesaving. Fierro rushed, tackled, disarmed and violently beat Aldrich, alongside another patron and a trans dancer in the club who helped subdue him. Numerous accounts include the evocative detail that the dancer helped subdue Aldrich by stomping him with her high heel.

Nice scoop here. Local reports, one of which I picked up last night, had it that the top official in Maricopa County, Arizona had had to go into hiding after the midterms because of threats tied to the midterms. That’s not the case, though he still has additional security provided by the Sheriff’s Dept. It turns out, as Kaila Philo reports, that this happened on election night, when Republican Board of Supervisors Chair Bill Gates had to be taken to an undisclosed location under armed guard because of Big Lie-themed threats.

Ironically, it is often Republican elected officials who are the top targets of MAGA-aligned terrorist groups and paramilitaries.

After retaining the Senate, Democrats’ biggest win in the midterm election was locking House Republicans into a slender and brittle majority. Though holding the House would have been a boon for Democrats, it also came with significant disadvantages. There’s a thermostatic dynamic in American politics. One party in power for too long spurs a desire to provide some check on the incumbent party. It also builds up partisan energy in the opposition. 2024 is the year when everything is at stake, when either party could take total control of the federal government. Joe Biden holding the presidency provided a check on the worst that could happen from a GOP congress in 2023 and 2024. After that, all bets are off.