Those were some of the volleys from yesterday.
We did not put the three tankers CENTCOM struck on Monday on our map, including the one reported now on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. But you can see the ominous red lines of the missile tracks heading west from Iran. The reported target solution was the U.S. air base at Al-Azraq in Jordan.

There are blue arrows headed the other way from a variety of vantage points—two carriers as well as land facilities—so for the moment we will simply call this touch-and-go, back-and-forth exchange a deliberate series of measured responses to IRGC commands that still have access to a diminishing supply of rockets and drones.

We have no means of ascertaining the actual state of those inventories, or how much may remain available for use during the electoral cavalcade that will occupy the next 55 days when we will know the direction of the volleys to come in the two years to a new Administration not under assault.

Which brought the war rather abruptly back into the 4th Floor Conference Room.

We weren’t conducting a constitutional seminar. We were trying to figure out where to go vote next week.

Early voting in Fairfax begins on 18 September. The first three locations are the Fairfax County Government Center, Mt. Vernon Governmental Center and North County Governmental Center, and any registered Fairfax County voter may use any Fairfax early-voting location.

The idea was simple: find the place, get the Conference Room crowd over there, cast our ballots and be done with that particular part of the spectacle.

Then somebody actually looked at what was going to be on the ballot.

And that was when we discovered Question One.

That got our attention—not because the Conference Table suddenly agreed about abortion. It most certainly did not. It got our attention because we had somehow arrived within days of voting on a proposed change to the Virginia Constitution without having much idea what the proposed words actually said.

So we read them.

FIRST: We support women’s rights and the broad right of a woman to control decisions concerning her own health. But this is precisely the sort of issue in which the words matter.

The public discussion of abortion used to be framed partly around the trimesters of fetal development. There are people whose religious conviction holds that human life begins at conception. Others place considerable importance on viability and the developing ability of a fetus to survive outside the womb.

And somewhere inside those profoundly different views sit medicine, individual liberty, religion, government power and the question of whose rights the law is supposed to protect.

Question One would amend Virginia’s Constitution to protect decisions concerning prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, abortion, miscarriage management and fertility care. The ballot language also says the Commonwealth could restrict abortion during the third trimester, except when the patient’s health is at risk or the pregnancy cannot survive.

The underlying amendment goes into more detail. It states that Virginia may regulate abortion in the third trimester, but may not prohibit one when, in a physician’s professional judgment, it is medically indicated to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual, or when the fetus is not viable.

That is not the same thing as saying abortion would simply be permitted without restriction until the morning of delivery.

And that distinction is exactly why we think the thing deserves some public discussion.

Not because everyone around the Conference Table is going to come to the same conclusion.

They won’t.

But because changing a state constitution is different from passing an ordinary statute, and voters ought to know what words they are being asked to put into it.

With everything else being blasted in volleys across our September sky, we think we ought at least to know what is being put before the polls.

We didn’t even get to whether LSU is going to be ejected from the SEC over the NFL players returning to their rosters for football season.

There are limits to what one Production Meeting can accomplish.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com