Electoral College Billboard

03/29/2019 by Pat Shiplett 2 Comments

Two of our last three presidents won with fewer votes than their opponents.

There’s an unfairness built into our constitution that gives people in less populous states more say in choosing a president than people in larger states.

The Electoral College has recently favored Republicans — every Republican president elected after 1988 has lost the popular vote — but it threatens all of us. Both red-state Texas and blue-state California are cheated from fair representation

It’s a simple numbers game.

Texas has 45 times more people than Wyoming but both have the same number of senators — two each — so a Wyomingite enjoys four thousand, five hundred percent more clout in the US Senate. That advantage carries over to the Electoral College which has overruled the nationwide popular presidential vote five times.

It all goes back to our founding. The smaller colonies held off from joining the republic until they were given extra representation to protect them from the larger ones. The cruel irony is that exactly the opposite has come to pass. To this day a minority exercises a privileged leverage over the majority.

There’s almost no chance of amending the Constitution because the smaller states aren’t about to end their sweetheart deal. But a movement is developing among the states that could get around that problem. They would simply agree to assign their Electoral College votes to the candidate who earns the popular election.

COUNTERPOINT BY JACK PAINTER Read more…

Peter and Enzo

03/18/2019 by Pat Shiplett 4 Comments

There are dogs bred to herd sheep and steers. Enzo isn’t one of them.

And there are dogs that assist the sight-impaired. That’s not Enzo either.

Certain breeds flush game from tall grass but Enzo does not hunt, pull sleds, sniff out contraband or repel intruders.

The two and one-half year-old spent 10 days waiting to be adopted. He was withdrawn, mistrustful and desperately in need of a haircut.

Joanna and Peter drove two hundred miles during one of the meanest days in many years (-20°) bent on adopting a dog that same day. Too soon for a new mutt? Joanna was confident that her Jude would have understood.

The shelter’s app listed three dogs that might work given their apartment and their allergies. The least promising, the only one left when the couple arrived, had been written up for urinating and nipping. Patience was advised.

Enzo inspected every inch of the living room at the Mulder-Baker household before sequestering himself there. Its couch revealed truths about the late Jude that only another dog could understand. It was reassuring.

Enzo feared the hallway leading to the rest of the place. Something in its closet made noise and caused heat to fall from the ceiling. But the kitchen and its activities called and eventually Enzo allowed himself the run of the place. Once on the bed he inched his way toward nighttime contact.

Because he’s skin and bones, Peter and Joanna feed him canned food. They agreed they wouldn’t repeat the table scraps mistake they’d made with Jude. Maybe the squeaker toys Peter brought home would compensate.

Ezno is taken out three times a day. Joanna does the a.m. and Peter the p.m. Midday is a toss-up.

It’s not unusual to see the writer of long-form articles in the New York Times, The New Yorker and The Guardian — one well along on an anticipated novel — abandon his work in a window at our coffee shop to show his new dog the neighborhood.

We tend to think of shelters as places we humans go to rescue animals. And that’s true as far as it goes but more often than not, the rescues that take place go in both directions.

The Value of Beauty

02/26/2019 by Pat Shiplett 2 Comments

Does beauty contribute to a person’s success?

BARCELONA — The students who descended on room 214 had paid their dues. Their Spanish classes were now focused as much on conversation as grammar and syntax.

The professors came armed with questions to engage visitors from various continents, each with histories all their own. Some expressed ideas they wouldn’t have shared at home.

The Italians, French and Portuguese had a Latin-root advantage over the others. Among the most articulate was a Frenchwoman named Mathilde Courty who was younger than the median age around the table.

The group assumed the question relating beauty to success to be directed at women. The men, intelligent men, held back.

It was agreed that voice, facial expressions and eye contact create their own kind of beauty, that vanity can turn a beautiful person ugly and that humor makes a plain person irresistible.

It was Matilda who posed a follow-up question.

Why do woman invest so much time making themselves attractive? Why the mascaras, powders, glosses, buffing and botox? And why are men exempt from the beauty arms race. Dandies once wore powdered wigs and cod pieces. Peacocks parade for hens.

Matilda is a wandering soul who has studied and traveled in Italy, Peru, England, Spain and Vietnam; she has lived in Bénin. Her Spanish studies are prep to serve people with disabilities in South America.

The good looks we inherit courtesy of our parents, the beauty we earn by making ourselves helpful and the beauty we enjoy simply by being young all were in display that final period of the day.

The rain had stopped and the conversation wandered outside to the tables on the sidewalk where it switched to English without anyone noticing.

Second Worst President

02/15/2019 by Pat Shiplett 6 Comments

Our worst president may be yet to come. He or she will build on the damage Donald Trump has already done.If Congress doesn’t stand up to the abuses of President Trump, he will become the ‘new normal’ for our elected officials.

Our future worst-ever president will double-down on the Trump strategy of declawing the justice system, judicial review, checks-and-balances and the Bill of Rights.

Trump 2.0 will threaten endless national emergencies and shutdowns, and will fill a cabinet with fixers and family members totally unqualified to face a real emergency.

She or he will go full Orwell, making hidden payments to dictate media content and bribing favored media outlets with special access.

Our children will encouraged to hate entire populations and religious faiths, and to scapegoat billions of people as rapists, murderers and drug runners.

If the 116th Congress doesn’t go on record and signal to future Americans — through impeachment — that this president is lethal to our democracy, we’ll be punished with an even worse Donald Trump.

God help us if that one is smart and industrious.

Delivering Meals

02/06/2019 by Pat Shiplett 8 Comments

He had reached a time when it seemed the earlier parts of his life had been lived by a another person. And it seemed that the mistakes he had made as a young man were the work of someone he now barely recognized.

He had been self-centered and careless in his youth and couldn’t recall most of his indiscretions.

Because Karma says what goes around comes around. And because of the Reckoning and because Santa Claus tracks who’s naughty and nice, he decided it was high time to perform good works.

As if by Providence, a small ad appeared asking for volunteers to deliver meals.

He responded that same day, figuring that his deliveries would atone for the sins he had committed.

A sack lunch with sandwich and milk would erase promises he’d broken. A Salisbury steak could make up for stiffing an associate. Jello negates gossip. There is salvation in removing mold from a refrigerator, taking out the trash for a stroke victim, and inching his way to the coffee shop with that difficult Mr. Pound who could barely walk.

But the man still was far from sainthood, his deeds had a selfish side. If he helped the needy, he calculated, others would be obligated to help him. In his pyramid scheme, he would get back more in the future than he gave of himself.

But the gratitude of the people he helped was immediate and genuine and disarmed his cynicism. It might have been coincidence, or his imagination, but he sensed that strangers on the street had begun to nod and smile and say hello in ways they never did before.