The U.S. Senate and our increasing democracy deficit

We are living in an international moment of "democratic deficit." The term is usually used to refer to the feeling among people in the member countries of the European Union that somehow, despite elections and politicians and the paraphernalia of legislatures, the individual nations within which they live fail to enact the policies implied by their voting choices. The larger Eurosystem felt to be in the way of small "d" democratic accountability. Europeans aren't alone in this feeling.

Looking ahead beyond present alarums and the Trumpian fog, I think people in the United States need to face up to our own democratic deficit. Its obvious manifestation is that in two of the last five presidential elections (2000 and 2016), the candidate with less popular votes ended up legally elected. The federalist fudge that enabled the original 13 colonies to enact a slavery-protecting Constitution by allocating two Senators to every state regardless of population size is becoming more distorting of the popular will every decade.

This graphic representation of the projected distribution of U.S. population by 2040 means that all those little gray slivers will radically outweigh the numbers in the Senate from the few big teal blocks -- California, Texas, Florida, New York, etc. Philip Bump spelled out the political implications:

Eight states will have just under half of the total population of the country, 49.5 percent, according to the Weldon Cooper Center’s estimate. The next eight most populous states will account for an additional fifth of the population, up to 69.2 percent — meaning that the 16 most populous states will be home to about 70 percent of Americans. ... [But] 30 percent of the population of the country will control 68 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate. Or, more starkly, half the population of the country will control 84 percent of those seats.

... The gray states on the map ... — states that make up more than two-thirds of the land area of the United States — will similarly control enough of the Senate to overcome any filibuster. The House and the Senate will be weighted to two largely different Americas.

Because the numbers of Congresscritters in the House are determined by actual proportion of national population, there are going to be a lot more states with only one representative, unless Congress decides to increase the overall number which is fixed at an already unwieldy 435. Currently there are seven states with one rep: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. Soon enough, there will be more such states. Meanwhile growing states will get more Congresspeople. The House will continue broadly representative the democratic principle of "one person, one vote."

But then there is the Senate ... More populous states are now, or are trending toward, the Democrats, the political party whose base is urban, of color, and in one way or another a part of the 21st century economy. Yes, even Texas will turn purple if current trends continue. But the federal structure guaranteeing two seats to every state means the Senate will become less and less democratic, less representative, unless something changes.

So what's a progressive to do? Lots.

• Democrats need to support Democratic-leaning groups in small states and help them win. New Hampshire and Maine are small states in a region where government-affirming policies are in the game. Let's win and keep them. Mississippi is home to less than 3 million people -- and 37% percent of them are Black, while the state's whites are the most conservative in the nation. But a decent and smart Democratic party can't abandon Magnolia State Black voters. (Alabama has proven that you never know what might happen.) Note that Dems currently solidly win two of the seven smallest states.

• If/when Democrats control both houses of Congress, admit the District of Columbia as new state, ASAP. DC has more people than two existing states, Vermont and Wyoming. All statehood requires is a majority vote in Congress and a presidential signature; though admitting new states feels today like an historical curiosity, two -- Alaska and Hawaii -- have come in during my lifetime. DC voted overwhelmingly for statehood in 2016; that's not to the taste of the Republican Congress which is actively undermining the local elected government. Republicans will howl when DC becomes a state, but this is a matter on which democracy requires political hardball.

• Are there other U.S. territories that could become states? Well maybe. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens as most of us who are not named Trump know, but the island is not a state. It is home to more people than 20 states. The place and people have been a colony since the U.S. seized it from Spain in 1898. Puerto Ricans are divided about their future. The current elected governor campaigns for statehood; it is not at all clear that a majority of Puerto Ricans agree with him. It's close to certain that Republicans would oppose Puerto Rican statehood -- you know, more Brown people.

• Anywhere else that should be a state? Well, maybe Guam, though this would be a reach. Today, residents live in an “unincorporated territory" and have U.S. citizenship -- when they travel to the 50 states. On the island of Guam, they are subject to the U.S. Congress. You can imagine how much attention Washington pols pay to an island of 175,000 Chamorro-speaking people nearly across the Pacific.

If we hope to be a country in which popular majorities have a chance, we must understand how the Constitution's federal structure will contribute to a pervasive feeling that majorities don't fully count. That's a recipe for conflict; so conflict we must.

Arenas of denial

This is a testing time.

When commentators talk about “denialism” in Trump’s presidency, they tend to mean denial that climate change is real and human-caused. But Trumpian denialism can stand for something much broader: a refusal to see the facts that tie people together so powerfully and inconveniently. These things include the history of American inequality, the perennial presence in our natural life of migration and undocumented labor, the decline today of relative American power. You could distill it by saying that denialism is the ethos that refuses to see how the world is deeply plural at every scale, how it draws people inexorably into uncertainty and potential conflict, how it puts us at odds.

The denial comes not because the denialist cannot see this, but because he does see it, not because he doesn’t believe others are there, but because he feels their presence so acutely, fears they will make claims on him, fears they will get power over him and take what he has. ...

Jedediah Purdy

Fear paralyses and forecloses. Fear isolates. Fear is bleak lonliness.

We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

Rebecca Solnit

What a bleak prospect. Fear is an empty road to nowhere. We have no choice but to discover courage and to go forward together.

Elect Jacky Rosen to the Senate

Long before she was a software developer, she was a waitress. Now that's the sort of experience Nevada needs in the U.S. Senate.

After yesterday's #TreasonSummit, we can tweet and howl and denounce -- but above all, we can DO something. Our best chance of turning this around -- and there's no guarantee it will work -- is to replace every elected Republican enabler of the Traitor White House.

To that end, after Labor Day, E.P. and I will be working in Nevada for a couple of months to replace a weathervane Republican Senator.

We're fortunate. We are free to go where we have a chance of doing the most good. So we will. Everyone needs to do what they can to have hope of having a decent country in which to struggle another day for more freedom and more justice.

Words for the day

📈Top searches, in order: treason, abase, traitor, collusion, presser

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) July 16, 2018

California is different. Why?

I've been slow to write about State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future because its subject matter is almost too close to me. One of sociologist Manual Pastor's key assertions describes my life, my professional career, if a succession of electoral campaigns, written insights, and organizing efforts can be called a career. (A strategy memo I wrote is quoted in this and Pastor relies heavily on Dan Hosang's Racial Propositions to which I contributed much material.)

Pastor describes California's climb out of a broken political framework built on white fragility and tax revolt. He contends the story cannot be written without emphasizing that something was brewing beyond establishment institutions.

Demography played a role -- a higher share of people of color helped tilt the state left ... The economy played a role as well ... Shifts in the political rules of the game have been essential ...

... organizers did not assume that demography itself would bring change; movement builders were intentional about amplifying the voice of the new majority. The state has become a hotbed of movements for decent wages, immigrant rights, racial equity and environmental justice. ... the state's ability to achieve fiscal balance with new taxes on the wealthy was actually an idea prompted by the movement activists who dragged the political establishment left ...

Omitting movements from the picture -- and focusing just on a septuagenarian governor or even the economic and political rules of the game -- will leave you with a story that is one step short. Policy change does not always start in the halls of the state or local legislatures, but rather in the streets, workplaces and voting booths where power is contested. ... understanding the strategic choices of California's organizers is critical to understanding the evolution of the state and can help others in the United States understand the need for and nature of grass roots work in an era of reaction.

Yes, indeed. And if that seems obscure, read this book. I'm not going to go into the movement aspect of this further here. Pastor provides a multitude of reasons to think that California is about two decades ahead of much of the country at constructing a better society and future. We face many challenges, but we've laboriously built at least some of the prerequisites for people-powered equity and sustainability.

Despite having lived so much of this intimately, there were elements of this story that I found novel and had to question. Pastor documents how the shift in California's wealth creation from agricultural and southern California to Silicon Valley and San Francisco was a boost to our progressive political culture.

Silicon Valley has long embedded an interesting internal contradiction: its competitive risk takers are frequently connected, partly through venture capital firms and partly because of mobility between business enterprises, and often see themselves in a sort of collective ecosystem that allows for individual success. ... [The "ecosystem" in various formations] sought to coalesce with other public and private actors to push for affordable housing, mass transit opportunities, green space, and other social and environmental infrastructure. One of the reasons for the unusual business support for extensive social serving infrastructure ... was the idea that these were factors key to the quality of life to attract and secure the loyalties of the high-skilled workers key to the new economy.

Well, maybe. Here in tech-impacted San Francisco, it's a little hard to applaud Silicon Valley's commitment to, say, affordable housing. But he's probably on to something in that, minimally, tech moguls inhabited a wider world than California agriculture barons or real estate/sprawl developers. And northern California plutocrats try to survive and thrive amidst a hornet's nest of community, environmental, and labor organizations which win their own impact on the culture of their environment.

As a statewide campaign organizer, one of the difficulties and oddities of state politics since the early 1990s has been that, although 60 percent or more of the people live in the south, nearly all major statewide elected officials -- governors, senators, even legislative leaders -- are from the north. Pastor does not directly address this. I always used to wonder: Los Angeles has the numbers -- why don't Angelenos just take over? The southland certainly has always had some of the most innovative community, worker, and union formations; Pastor describes them well. But the north goes on batting way above its weight. On this topic I find convincing some thoughts from a 2016 Mercury News article:

“If you ask a voter in Los Angeles, ‘Who’s your Assembly member?’ they’ll say, ‘What’s an Assembly member?’” [political consultant Bob Mulholland] said. “But if you ask ‘What’s Lindsay Lohan up to?’ they’ll know all about it.”

Bay Area voters are on the opposite end of the spectrum, said Mulholland, a Chico resident. “If you go door-to-door in San Jose or San Francisco or Oakland, whether it’s rent control or a legislative election, they’ll actually know something.”

...[San Francisco’s] compactness has helped foster a culture of grass-roots political engagement and networking that “much more closely resembles Boston or Chicago than Los Angeles or San Diego,” said Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California’s Unruh Institute of Politics.

One other side note on Pastor's description the California progressive ecosystem: he gives enlightened philanthropy big props for supporting our many para-political organizations. He's probably telling a kind of truth. But I can testify that through much of the 1990s and 2000s, winning any kind of foundation support for building voter engagement in poor communities of color was a miserable experience of confronting incomprehension and parsimony. (I'm retired. /snark)

One oddity of States of Resistance is that Prop. 54 (2003) appears nowhere in the narrative. That feels important, even though Prop. 54 was the ultimate outlier in the history of California's "racial propositions" -- initiative measures passed by a fearful majority white electorate that aimed to reduce the emerging clout of immigrants, African Americans, young people of color, and speakers of Spanish. It would have prevented the state from recording or collection information about racial outcomes of any governmental activity, pretty well guaranteeing institutional racism run amuck. And on this one, the emerging California majority won big, 64-36 percent. Weirdly, it was the only initiative on the ballot in the gubernatorial recall election that dumped Democrat Gray Davis and gifted us with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Since Pastor doesn't tell you his opinion of why this wonderful out-of-pattern result was achieved on Prop. 54, I'll give you mine. (I worked against Prop. 54 in a non-leadership position.) This was the first statewide racial proposition on which grassroots, funders, and policy organizations showed they'd learned the lessons of all the brutal losses of the 1990s and formed a cooperative, sophisticated coalition that could work to deliver the most persuasive, poll tested messaging to the appropriate voters. Ten years of brutal failure began to pay off. Moreover, this was the first of the racialized initiative campaigns in which organized labor was willing to put some (still small) funding into community efforts to get out grassroots voters. This was a change from the decade of the 1990s when labor political directors seemed sometimes to snicker at the idea that community groups could reach people that unions could not. By 2003, we had all learned a lot. It's too bad that Pastor didn't include the Prop. 54 experience in his account of how a new progressive coalition laid the ground work for our present state of resistance.

In the 1990s, the introductory book to read about California was Peter Schrag's Paradise Lost. In the 2000s, the book was Peter Schrag's California: America's High-Stakes Experiment. In this decade, Manual Pastor has picked up the California ball and runs with it.

Freedom is a forever struggle

Katia Cardenal sang for her country, her people, and for the earth at La Pena in Berkeley last night to a packed house of Nicaraguans and friends. Banners listing the names of victims of the government's current violence against its own people hung on the stage.

Nicaragua is in trouble and danger, as are we at home. Yet Nicaraguans dance to celebrate. The demand of the peoples for justice, freedom, dignity and peace is never more than temporarily set aside or crushed; it changes form and breaks out again. Few know that better than our Central American neighbors.

Saturday sights: teach the children well

Making my rounds, I've noticed that displays of children's books that are neither fantasies (nothing against a good fantasy) or saccharin are turning up in store windows.

There's one role model.

And here more than one are offered.

One of my favorite authors has contributed to the genre.

There must be a market in these times. Not all these pics were snapped in San Francisco, by the way.

How many stolen children remain to be reunited?

The child whose cries we all heard thanks to the reporting of ProPublica has been reconnected with her mother.

Dude wants to be a conquering eagle. More like a flightless chicken.

As the President continues his antics abroad, I'm reminded of some observations about the dumb bird we've loosed in the global china shop -- written last May by John Feffer of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

It’s not just unilateralism, where Washington acts alone and allies be damned. Nor is it merely unipolarism, in which the United States targets all hegemonic challengers in an effort to preserve its position as the world’s dominant military and economic power.

Let’s coin a new term: unileaderism.

According to unileaderism, only the U.S. president makes foreign policy decisions of any import. ... Unileaderism, at least as it’s embodied by Donald Trump, is a philosophy bound up entirely in the personal quirks of the president himself. Instead of strategy, there are only tactics: wheedling, bluffing, threatening. It’s like playing tennis against someone with John McEnroe’s legendary temper and will to win, but few if any of his actual skills.

Unileaderism may well be the logical endpoint for a country that has used unilateralism to preserve its unipolarism. And Trump is certainly the product of a particular tendency within the U.S. political culture that rejects liberalism and multilateralism.

But it goes beyond that. In its rejection of strategy in favor of tactics, Trumpism is a repudiation of geopolitics altogether. Trumpism isn’t a new kind of opening in the chess game of international relations. The president, out of rage and stupidity and arrogance, has simply picked up the board with all of its pieces and flung the whole thing against the wall. He’s playing a different game altogether.

Like most good U.S. lefties and critics of our wanton wars, I have long believed that U.S. imperial pretensions have passed their sell-by date and begun to stink. Despite considerable timidity when confronted by a population that likes chanting "We're Number One" and "foreign policy experts" confident of U.S. virtue, the previous incumbent POTUS seemed to know his job was winding down global empire. You learn something when, unlike so many of us, you have been educated abroad, even for a short time. A military reform school doesn't impart much; nor does a decorative B.A. in Business.

The rest of the world just isn't going to put up with us (that's U.S.) forever. Empire is over and the U.S. will have to learn to live in the world that is.

Trump is both easily conned and ignorant, acting the part of King Canute, raving against the oncoming ocean waves. Empire is not drifting toward a soft landing.

Friday cat blogging

This is not Morty, but rather someone with a family resemblance inside a very dirty window.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

It's the names! Some family history

When I started thinking about the glorious variety of names carried by contemporary U.S. citizens and residents, I realized a side trip into my own forebears was warranted.

Many of my ancestors' names would seem mighty foreign to my contemporaries. What's a Gamaliel? The name is Biblical, naturally among those hearty settler Protestants; Gamaliel appears in the Book of Acts as a good guy among the religious authorities of his day who didn't want to condemn the Jesus' followers to death. The particular Gamaliel whose cemetery monument I've posted about actually had an additional Biblical middle name which also sounds foreign. He was also a Cyrus. The only Cyrus I know in my circles is of Iranian/Korean-American origin. Some delightful world!

Another ancestor was an Asaph. What's an Asaph? Again, this is derived from the Bible: there are three named Asaphs in the Hebrew Bible, of whom the most prominent is identified as the author of several Psalms of David.

Asaph's last name, Bemis, may be of Greek derivation, or maybe be a corruption of the English surname Beamus. In contemporary usage, Bemis is a company that makes toilet fixtures.

America marches on.

It's the names!

Way back in 2008 I wrote the story of a progressive white friend's interior struggle to understand her own hesitations about then-Senator Barack Obama's presidential run. Finally she blurted out: "It's the names. I felt it when I watched Michelle's speech and his daughters came on stage. They were called something I can't pronounce." Being the good soul and justice warrior she is, she rapidly learned how to pronounce "Barack," and "Sasha," and "Malia." I suspect she would hardly remember her discomfort today.

But I remember, because that phrase -- "it's the names!" -- has become one of my touchstones in this dark era. A segment of white people fear they are being erased and look to Trump to Make America White Again. But I look at bylines and mentions in U.S. media every day and rejoice that our everyday names have irreparably changed and we now live in a wider world amid a wider national family.

For a few days, I grabbed a small selection of names that would have been strange and foreign to my parents' generation. (A little more behind each link.) Vivek Ranadive. Duke Tran. Ishaan Tharoor. Malkia Amala Cyril. Seung Min Kim. Latona Giwa. Taurean C. Sanderlin. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Rustem Kazazi. Karthik Nemmani. Yphtach Lelkes. I could pull hundreds more, just from my regular reading.

Trump and the GOPers stumble over this reality. Kris Kobach (perhaps a German-origin name?) -- Secretary of State of Kansas and inventor of numerous stratagems to prevent people of color and other Democrats from voting -- fell on his face when he tried to convince a federal judge that many non-citizens were polluting his state's elections. He produced an "expert witness" to explain how they had identifed these improper voters.

[Kobach's expert Jesse Richman] simply flagged people with “foreign”-sounding names, although he was inconsistent in his execution. As Talking Points Memo reported, “two respondents with the last name Lopez were coded as foreign, and three Lopezes were not.”

On the sixth day of the trial, [ACLU lawyer Dale] Ho read a series of names and asked Richman if he would label them as foreign-sounding. When he came to the name Carlos Murguia, Richman said he probably would flag it as foreign. Ho responded that Carlos Murguia was a federal judge in that very courthouse in Kansas City.

Ooops.

The exponentially increasing number of names we bear in this country is one of our national joys and strengths. I'll give the last word to Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozado, whose Latinx name seems conventional to most of us in the U.S. Southwest.

The American experiment is not just worth the fight — it is the fight. With passion always strained, the pursuit of prosperity, freedom and belonging is an endless battle, an enterprise in equal measures exhausting and exhilarating.

California election prospects

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) is trying to make the governor's race between Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and business man John Cox interesting. Good luck with that. Given the disrepute of the Republicans here on the Left Coast, the relevant question is probably whether the GOPer can break 40 percent. I'd guess it will be a close call.

According to the Secretary of State:

Democrats now make up 44.4 percent of California’s 19 million registered voters, with no-party-preference voters at 25.5 percent and Republicans at 25.1 percent.

Most of those "no-party-preference voters" are young, city dwellers, and often from the communities of color. If they vote -- and Republicans keep giving them reasons to turn out in defense of their communities and their futures -- they lean Democratic, however reluctantly.

PPIC polling meanwhile finds a 10 point gap among likely voters, favoring leadership that pushes back against the Trump administration. No wonder Gavin is running as Mr. Resistance. I don't trust my former mayor's leadership, but he'll make the right noises. That we must have.

Though PPIC finds that overall we want push back, in their poll independents are more evenly divided. I wonder if that will hold up through further rounds of child-snatching?

A wrinkle in 2018 is that California is in the midst of a transition to all-mail elections, in which every registered voter will be mailed a ballot and the number of polling places and drop-off points for election day voting are cut back. Five counties tried this in the June primary:

Compared to 2014, Napa, Nevada and Sacramento counties had a 10 to 12 percent increase in voter turnout this year. Two were outliers: Madera’s turnout increased 8 percent, and San Mateo’s shot up 17 percent.

Let’s put that into perspective. Voter turnout in the 2014 primary was dismally low, so it didn’t take much to outdo that year’s turnout with 37.6 percent of registered voters casting ballots. ...

... San Mateo was one of a few counties that tested out parts of the new model, mailing ballots to every registered voter during a local election in 2015. As a result, last month’s primary voters and the city knew what to expect.

I worked briefly on that 2015 election and I think this conclusion is exactly right. Voters had to learn anew how to vote -- and then many rejoiced to get the task done in their homes in advance. Other counties, except Los Angeles, can opt-in to the universal mail-in ballot system in coming elections. This procedural change comes on top of the existing no-excuse "absentee for all" option which meant that 11.5 million ballots were mailed to primary voters across the state. Election Day as the focus of voting is receding.

For my running friends ... a Senate candidate from our tribe

Beto O’Rourke is running to replace Ted Cruz. Literally. ...

... O’Rourke explains to me the origins of this novel campaign event, which has him running several miles under the Texas sun, stopping in the middle to take questions and lingering at the end to pose for selfies. “Some sadistic member of our team,” he recalls, “was like, ‘So we’re doing like six town halls a day in six different counties. We’re driving hundreds of miles every day, we’re visiting all 254 counties. What more could we do? Ah, get up earlier and have running town halls.’”

Politico

O’Rourke is a plausible challenger in a Texas perhaps not quite ready to turn purple, but inching toward a multi-party future in which ethnic, economic, and political diversity makes it more like other prosperous areas of the country.

The Politico story is fun and includes a much better video of Beto running which I didn't embed because I didn't trust it would play on this blog. Enjoy.

Yet another Trump regime atrocity

If they don't survive infancy, those children from "shit-hole" countries will not make it to the border. To prop up the profits of wealthy first world vendors of baby formula, the Trump administration is trying to undermine cooperative work for better health across the globe.

Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times reports that a resolution affirming what decades of research has proved, that breast feeding is safer and better for babies than commercial processed formula products, was set to glide through the World Health Assembly. That is, until U.S. reps started throwing their weight around for the benefit of corporate behemoths like Abbott Laboratories and Nestle.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

Ecuador is depending on U.S. aid at present because it fears the failing Columbian state on its border. Poor nations in Africa and Latin America feared to step up for the resolution amid U.S. threats. In the end the resolution was presented -- and passed with only minor nods to the baby food industry demands. Russia stepped up to sponsor it, despite being the site of significant recent Nestle investment.

... the Americans did not threaten them.

... The $70 billion industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies, has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years, as more women embrace breast-feeding. Overall, global sales are expected to rise by 4 percent in 2018, according to Euromonitor, with most of that growth occurring in developing nations.

If these children can't survive infancy, they'll never show up at the border, right?

"Whether I'm 15 or 100, I'm going to be myself."

To close out what has felt like a week long Independence week, here's a worthy take-down of some limiting social expectations. Enjoy.

Via my good friend Ronni at Time Goes By, a good place to drop in for perspective on aging.

Running wear and tear tangent

I use my feet hard. I'm prone to nasty seasons of plantar fasciitis. I'm also prone to black toenails from the pounding. My feet have grown to a men's size 12 after more than 30 years of fairly diligent running. Finding shoes that don't hurt and possibly help is a challenge. Two years ago, I chanced upon a shoe that served as well as anything I've ever worn, the first iteration of the HokaOneOne Challenger. Since shoes routinely are "improved" every year, ceasing to fit, I snapped up four pairs. Last week I sadly retired pair Number III (shown on the left) and broke out Number IV, the last.

Number III had nearly 500 miles on it. I flatten a shoe; the trails have done a job on the tread.

Now I'll have search for a modern replacement. First stop will be the Challenger's fourth iteration, but I won't be surprised if a few false attempts deposit me with a different shoe company. Shoe obsolescence is infuriating. Just when someone builds a good one, it disappears.

Friday cat blogging

So here's a tale. When we got back from the border two weeks ago, Morty seemed withdrawn. And, notably, his eyes looked oversized, like a Keene painting if you've ever seen such a thing. When we shined a light in them, there was no response.

So off to the vet we all three trooped, Morty in his box, E.P. to carry, comfort and cajole, and the driver. And pretty soon the verdict came in: Morty had outrageously high blood pressure, so high his retinas had detached. He was blind, not seeing. Fortunately there was a pill he'd have to be given daily for the rest of his life for the blood pressure. But he was blind.

So every day we gave him his pill, and the blood pressure came right down to an acceptable cat level (top number 140) -- but Morty still moped and stared into space. And then, a couple of days ago, this. At least in some lights, his eyes are functioning more normally. Can cats heal their detached retinas? Maybe.

He's certainly more adept at fighting his daily pill. Perhaps the old boy is going to be with us a little longer.

14 month old boy separated from parents at the border ...

and that's not the worst of it.

14 month old boy separated from immigrant parents at the border, was returned after 85 days, covered with lice, had apparently not been bathed - part of lawsuits filed by states against Trump administration @LisaDNews reports @NewsHour tonight

— Judy Woodruff (@JudyWoodruff) July 5, 2018

As Therese Patricia Okoumou says, that's what "this monster" does.

Resist and protect much.

John Adams on why we are suckers for men with gold toilets

Yesterday, in addition to marking U.S. independence from George III, was the 192nd anniversary of the death of John Adams. The second president of the United States was a Massachusetts lawyer, an instigator and signer of the Declaration, the chief diplomatic representative in Europe of the upstart republic during the Revolutionary War, and not a very competent politician. During his presidency, he urged executive rule against a fractious Congress and is tarred with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts restricting citizenship and penalizing dissident speech. Civil libertarians then and now consider these laws abominations. At a moment when the new country was developing its politics, Adams lacked the essential knack of making friends and coalitions.

But Adams was also different from the more aristocratic gentleman founders, never owning slaves nor enjoying the financial security of commercial wealth or a grand plantation. Perhaps in consequence, he had a sharp eye for how men of wealth maintained their advantages in a democratic republic. According to historian Luke Mayville:

Adams drew on the moral psychology of Adam Smith to describe how public admiration of wealth, much like public admiration of royalty, could be a potent source of political power. ...The political power of wealth, he insisted, could not be fully appreciated without understanding its roots in public sentiments. Though it was true that oligarchic power derived in large part from more tangible sources, such as social connections and relations of material dependency, Adams insisted that “there is a degree of admiration, abstracted from all dependence, obligation, expectation, or even acquaintance, which accompanies splendid wealth, insures some respect, and bestows some influence.”

Adams did not deny the importance of the purchase of political influence by money. It was “a natural and unchangeable inconvenience in all popular elections,” he wrote in Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, “that he who has the deepest purse, or the fewest scruples about using it, will generally prevail.”

But Adams also traced the influence of wealth to the deep admiration for the rich felt by the public and to the insatiable appetite for that same admiration possessed by society’s most ambitious. It was the grandeur of wealth, and not merely its purchasing power, that accounted for its immense political influence. ... ... Adams warned that “the distinction of property will have more influence than all the rest in commercial countries, if it is not rivalled by some other distinction.”

***Adams also had a pleasantly humane notion of what all that struggle to found a new polity was for.

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine."

I feel certain his fiercely competent and independent wife Abigail reminded him to remember his daughters as well as sons.