For this week: Optimist; U.S. Supreme Court; family ties in politics; methane; Korea; school funding; Tailhook; guilty, when?; the Amazon; Ukraine and Russia; fall colors in North Wales.

Optimist, 23 September. This week's stories. Found: a 100 year-old note from grandad, hidden in the roof; need runners?; survivor to savior, a new Las Vegas cop; USMC to the rescue saving the seniors next door; a robot puppy?

SCOTUS. As the current confirmation (nee circus) act plays out in the U.S. Senate, Charles Lane's column is well worth the read: "Confirmation will be broken as long as America is." Lane makes reference to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist No. 78 which began,"WE PROCEED now to an examination of the judiciary department of the proposed government."
     As Lane points out,

The nation’s founders expected the federal judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, to be the “least dangerous” branch [given the court's]...relatively modest role [envisioned by the authors] outside of such areas as admiralty and interstate business disputes....Today, though, the power of judicial review that Chief Justice John Marshall first assumed in Marbury v. Madison in 1803 — but used sparingly thereafter — is now regularly employed as a de facto alternative to the cumbersome constitutional-amendment process.

     It is a safe bet that there is  no true constitutional scholar on the Senate's Judiciary Committee and it also very likely the committee members are unfamiliar with, have never read, Hamilton's thoughts. Once upon a time, the Senate did have a scholarly constitutional authority, the late Senator Robert C. Byrd (D, WV) was the Senate's trusted source on both sides of the isle; alas his level of expertise has vanished. In fact those small seismic shifts in Washington, D.C., may well be him turning in his grave.

Family political ties. Jeff Greenfield, author and network news analyst, discusses some of the rather unusual TV campaign ads in this latest cycle. He wonders if candidates might not need to "watch their backs?" His first example:

In Arizona, a campaign ad released Friday features six men and women denouncing Republican Rep. Paul A. Gosar. One says the candidate “isn’t doing anything to help rural America.” Another: “Paul is absolutely not working for his district.” And: “He doesn’t have your interests at heart.” Only at the end do we learn that all six are siblings of the congressman, supporting his Democratic rival, David Brill.

 The strange world of American politics is getting "curiouser and curiouser."

Methane, green house gases, and well setbacks. For a fourth time, the Trump administration has attempted to roll back rules regarding the capture of leaking methane gas from drilling operations. CA and NM immediately filed paperwork to block the new rules.
     CO's Initiative 97, on the upcoming November 6th ballot, seeks to increase the required setback for oil/gas wells that are adjacent to "vulnerable areas" from the present 500 feet to 2,500 feet. These areas are defined as “playgrounds, permanent sports fields, amphitheaters, public parks, public open space, public and community drinking water sources, irrigation canals, reservoirs, lakes, rivers, perennial or intermittent streams, and creeks.”
     Not surprisingly, you probably favor the proposal if there will soon be a well near your house, school, office, etc. If you are a driller, not so much. Government revenues may well be impacted, so there is a mixed message from government offices. TV ads, for/against, are running continuously. Large areas in CO are experiencing increased drilling.
     A house in Firestone, CO, was destroyed (and two workers killed) when leaking explosive methane gas was inadvertently ignited. The estimates of how much methane is not properly captured vary widely, but even the lower estimates are cause for concern. (emphasis added)

Korea. North and South Korean officials met formally for lengthy, wide-ranging talks. There was even a hint of another meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Nearly lost in this news was an earlier revelation that the President's military advisers only narrowly voided a presidential tweet that the U.S. was seriously considering withdrawing military dependents from South Korea. Apparently, the president was unaware that his intelligence personnel had earlier noted for him that the North Koreans had publicly stated that such a withdrawal would be seen as an indication of imminent military action by the U.S. and South Korea. So much for the President' "Daily Brief."

School funding. Proposed amendment 73 to the CO constitution would increase funding for schools. One pro- TV ad notes that today CO spends as much on education as when elder president Bush was in office -- even though our population has doubled. The picture is clouded by CO's infamous "Tax Payers' Bill of Rights" and local ballot measures. The last state-wide funding proposal (2013) was defeated 2 to 1. Recent teachers' strikes around the nation indicate this is more than just a one-state issue.

If approved, Amendment 73 would increase the corporate tax rate and the income tax rate on individuals earning $150,000 or more, with the additional revenue going to increase base per-student funding, to pay for full-day kindergarten, and to put more money toward students with special needs, such as those learning English, those with disabilities and those who are gifted and talented.

Tailhook, #MeToo, and Lang Sias. A guest commentary by former U.S. Representative Pat Schroeder (D, CO, 1st District) raises questions about the current Republican candidate about Lang Sias, candidate for CO lieutenant governor. Schroeder notes that in 1991 Sias was a naval aviator and present at the much publicized drunken Tailhook bash in Las Vagas. Like others present, high- and low- ranking, Sias has never fully explained what he saw/did not see, did or did not do at that year's convention. The Tailhook scandal, the military's "Harvey Weinstein" moment, led to more than a few changes at the Defense Department.

Guilty? For longer than males like to admit, the "usual" has been been to not believe a woman's accusation of rape or sexual assault. Now that there are two women accusing Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misbehavior in the #MeToo era, the age old legal axiom "innocent until proven guilty" is coming under fire. In what appears to be two long-ago cases of "she said" -- "he said," what is to be done? One key participant, Senator Graham (R, SC) said on “Fox News Sunday” that he’s not going to "ruin Judge Kavanaugh’s life over this." Needless to say, President Trump is "all in" for his nominee.

The Amazon basin. Is there a climate tipping point to our south? The Amazonian rain forests are largely unheralded but vitally important to the Earth's long term health. Many readers wrongly assume that climate change is a new field of study. Read about "Camp 41, a handful of tin-roofed, open-sided structures deep within the world’s largest tropical wilderness and home base for hundreds of ecologists conducting research over the past 39 years." (emphasis added)

Ukraine and Russia. Changes abound, the aftermath of what columnist Anne Applebaum calls "Putin's war," the ongoing conflict, the changes being wrought by the "separation of two countries that have been part of the same empire for centuries."

Fall colors in North Wales. 

A Virginia creeper covering the Tu Hwnt I'r Bont tearoom in Llanrwst, North Wales, displayed its seasonal hues as autumn officially began there Sept. 23 with the arrival of the fall equinox. Rebecca Naden/Reuters

Thank you for reading. I hope your fall has begun well. 

This week's notes: Optimist; my reading table; U.S. House; McCarthyism; national urgency; Front Line; law in the age of globalism and localism; that impractical college course; social democracy; voting; your library.

Optimist, 16 Sep. Link here. From CPR with love. Relax and compose yourself with the Washington Post's annual travel photo contest winners. A "blue zone" liberal moves into the "red zone" of the Ozarks. Tiara to helmet: quite a homecoming weekend. Hamilton, performed by three high school students at the Kennedy Center.

What I'm reading. Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, 1998, Random House. A late 20th century look at how the ever-moving western frontier shaped America. First, there was Frederick Jackson Turner's seminal essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."
     I first ran into Kaplan in his Balkan Ghosts, during the turbulent times after Yugoslavia disintegrated. This sent me back even further to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) by the long-before-her-time travel writer, Dame Rebecca West.

Flipping the House. No, not in the HGTV sense; rather, as in giving Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives on November 6th. The linked story is set in Hollywood, but the trend is being felt in other areas/states. Donors,  including those with deep pockets are donating to individual candidates in carefully selected districts, not donating as much to the national party's coffers. The story opens with a fundraiser in Hollywood, CA, for a female candidate in southeastern PA.

McCarthyism, then and now. Richard Cohen's column. Then: the late Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy of WI; now, Republican U.S. House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of CA. Then: an untruthful, virulent anti-communist witch hunter; now, a trusted confident of less-than truthful president. Pick your poison.

National urgency, then and now. Michael Morell, former deputy and twice acting director of the CIA. Then: the terrorist attack of 9-11; now: "...perhaps the most daunting the United States has faced since World War II, is how to respond to the rise of China....China’s military is also undergoing its most profound organizational reforms since the modern nation’s founding in 1949. Beijing is better capable of projecting military power than ever."     

     Morell contends, 

"The question of how an established power deals with the rise of a new global power is one at least as old as Thucydides. It is one the United States needs to answer, and answer soon.

We have not yet found a long-term strategy. But the status quo is not an option because, every day, China grows in confidence that it can go its own way....Personally, I remain hopeful that a deal may be possible — but it will take the United States convincing China that if it wants to succeed in the world, it still needs us.

     Increased military preparedness? Tighter Far Eastern alliances? Higher tariffs to lower the trade surplus with (and hurt) their "authoritarian political system and mixed economic system?"

Front Line, Dayton, OH.  Last Tuesday's "Front Line" looked at the myriad of problems facing a city that was once at the forefront of American inventiveness and ingenuity. The Wright Brothers, aviation, National Cash Register, and General Motors all left town, and then came the 2008 crash and the opioid epidemic. Wage stagnation, job loss, and the relatively few new jobs have barely allowed the city to keep its head above water. The city's past losses and the opioid crisis have left the city struggling to find employable workers.
     The story of Dayton's decline, fall, and very slow recovery are the too prevalent story across the rust belt heartland. The president's grandiose claims of job growth and wage increases have largely passed Dayton by.

Law: America and the world. Associate Justice Stephen Breyer writes that U.S. Courts cannot ignore the world. Yet, America is being steadily led onto an isolationist path, one devoid of some of its long-time allies. A good path?

Two general tendencies are at work in many fields of human endeavor, including politics, government, and law. On the one hand, there are the forces of globalism, internationalism, and interdependence among nations. On the other hand, there are the forces of localism pulling us toward our communal, even tribal, roots....I wish to suggest that such a view is wrong—that the global and the local both refer to well-functioning features of the modern world....When it comes to matters of law, the best way to preserve American values may well be to take account of what happens abroad.

Humanities courses. Enlightening? Perhaps. But, will it increase your after-graduation paycheck? Thoughts from Ronald J. Daniels, the President of Johns Hopkins University.

Last fall, on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, where I serve as president, I happened to overhear a conversation among a group of students. One student was telling the others that he had decided not to enroll in an introductory philosophy course that he had sampled during the “add/drop” period at the start of the semester. The demands of his major, he said, meant that he needed to take “practical” courses. With an exaggerated sigh, he mused that “enlightenment” would simply have to wait. For now, employability was paramount. What can you do? His friends shrugged. You gotta get a job....At many universities across the country, beset by low enrollments and a lack of university support, the number of humanities course offerings and faculty members are dwindling.

Looking back, he thinks he should have butted in to remind the students that "...[T]he founders of companies such as LinkedIn, Slack and Flickr, [and others] who are among the many tech entrepreneurs with degrees in the humanities, and who credit that training for their success."

Social Democracy. E.J. Dionne worries about the future of social democratic governments world-wide. Gains by the Democrat Sweden party, with its rightist, anti-immigrant tendencies, is the latest move to the right in Europe.

The rise of Donald Trump was shocking, but it was not a one-off. The forces that brought him to power have parallels across democracies as fears about immigration, inward-looking nationalism and discontent over economic globalization push an ever-larger share of voters to the far right.

 Voting: paper vs machine. In Georgia, there looms a real time impending battle. Story about Georgia's electronic voting system in the Washington Post. The story, of course, also involves an election contest for governor, in which Georgia's current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, is a contender; Kemp is a staunch opponent of federal "messing" in local elections. (He has been endorsed by President Trump.) The story notes,

Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity sleuth, thought he was conducting an innocuous Google search to pull up information on Georgia’s centralized system for conducting elections.

He was taken aback when the query turned up a file with a list of voters and then alarmed when a subsequent simple data pull retrieved the birth dates, drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of more than 6 million voters, as well as county election supervisors’ passwords for use on Election Day. He also discovered the server had a software flaw that an attacker could exploit to take control of the machine.

Nationwide, not all secretaries of state have been quick to respond to the recent hack attacks; they have been remiss in investigating the security of their own state's electronic voting systems.  It seems that in Georgia, protestations not withstanding, the electronic system is less than totally secure. As you read this, the midterm elections (November 6) are uncomfortably close.

Libraries. That well known phrase might be altered slightly to, "What's [available] in your library?" One library in New York City has gone far beyond the usual. The librarian in charge of assisting job seekers to write résumés realized that many could not act on her thoughts about "dressing nicely," of not taking a backpack -- many had no neck ties, purses, or briefcases.
     So it "...began experimenting with [finding and making available on loan] new offerings: neck ties, bow ties, handbags and briefcases intended for people with limited resources who are heading for job interviews, auditions or any other events for which they need to dress up."

Who are you? Personality tests have a long, and very clouded, history. A recent study says "maybe not" so much.

Equality, on whose tab? Columnist Charles Lane examines the unusual proposals of avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders. Tucker Carlson, of Fox News, was not immediately turned off, though some liberals have been less receptive.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."   Samuel Boswell

Thank you for reading. Enjoy your early fall "leaf peeping." The weather here in CO has advanced the color display about 10 to 15 days.

The notes for the week. Optimist column; attorneys general; another political upset; a boycott answered; Bannon in Eastern Europe; elections in Sweden; the "Roberts" Supreme Court; strange hacker target; fascism.

Optimist, 9 September. Link here. Planting gardens on campus, amid their fellow students.
     A cheap meal -- when you are 109, that birthday discount amounts to money back when you leave.
    For Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a $3M prize, but no Nobel award. In 1967, Burnell built, installed, and operated the telescope that gave astronomer's man's first evidence of pulsars. "In 1974, when a Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of pulsars, Bell Burnell's adviser Antony Hewish was one of the recipients....Burnell was not."
     What's in your closet? School custodian, Carolyn Collins, has been giving and giving and giving to needy students from her school closet.

Attorneys General. Is your state's AG office on the ballot this coming November? If so, Karen Tulmulty, suggests you look carefully at your ballot choices. "[T]the growing footprint of the state attorneys general is also a symptom of deeper problems — of the intractability of the nation’s polarization, and the fact that political differences can no longer be worked out by the dysfunctional legislative and executive branches in Washington....[Just] as Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has done so admirably with his investigation of the Catholic Church in his state."

Boston, U.S. House District 7 . Yet another Democratic male officeholder has been ousted from the ballot this coming November. Forty-four year-old African American, Boston city council member, Ayanna Presley, bested 10-term U.S. Representative Mike Capuano. This historic seat was once held by JFK, then later by Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill. Today, the district, which encompasses nearly one-half of Boston, has a majority non-white population. Change is in the air --at least in some areas.
     Here are E.J. Dionne's thoughts on Presley's victory. The online title, "Boston couldn't wait for change." He noted, "Pressley didn’t just win. She swamped Capuano, 58.6 percent to 41.4 percent. The size of the margin seemed to shock even the victor, as suggested by a widely circulated video of her tearful, stunned elation at first word of her triumph." The late Tip O'Neill once held the seat and, as he famously said, "All politics is local." That was certainly true in this now majority-minority district.

Nike's new face. Whatever your view, few football fans doubt that NFL owners have conspired to keep Colin Kaepernick off any NFL roster. In a move both praised and condemned, Nike has made him a spokesperson. Their stark, black and white poster has Kaepernick's face overlaid by , "Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything." In the TV ad, Kapernick makes the same statement. Nike's famous trademark, "Just Do It," is at the bottom/end.

Bannon and right-wing populist nationalism. Krithika Varagur opens by noting that ["l]ike many Americans and Henry James characters before him...the president’s former chief strategist [Steve Bannon], wants to make his name in Europe." Eastern Europe is -- has always been -- a very strange world, indeed.

Election in Sweden. Anti-immigrant, pro-law and order forces of the Sweden Democratic party, made significant gains (17.6%) in last Sunday's elections. "They effectively set the terms for debate during what was an unusually heated campaign, forcing other parties to address the country’s immigration policies and move significantly to the right on them"

Justice Roberts' Court. Today, the nonpolitical role of the Court is very much in question. Is a portion of the Court's less-than-splendid past about to be repeated? Is the following narrative (from The Atlantic) correct?

The Roberts Court is poised to shape American society in Trump’s image for decades to come. All three branches of the federal government are now committed to the Trump agenda: the restoration of America’s traditional racial, religious, and gender hierarchies; the enrichment of party patrons; the unencubered pursuit of corporate profit; the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the rival party’s constituencies; and the protection of the president and his allies from prosecution by any means available....That [earlier] cause succeeded for a century not simply because of the implacable commitment of the Democratic Party, but also because the federal courts, filled with Republican-appointed jurists, chose to be compliant, painting the scaffolding of segregation with the language of constitutionalism. Together they built Jim Crow, which would last for a century, until it was torn down to its still-intact foundations by the civil-rights movement.

Another Russian "Fancy Bear" attack.

On Aug. 27, one of the strangest targets yet of Russian hacking was revealed, when The Associated Press broke the news that Fancy Bear—the group infamously entangled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election hacks—had also targeted the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople...That struggle pits the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church against Constantinople and its apparent support for an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

President Putin, sensing a re-surging religious revival among many Russians and wanting an ally in his struggle with Ukraine, wants the Church (i.e. God) on his side. "In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has embraced aspects of this Christian imperial ideology [and] envisaged a messianic role for Russia in the world..."
     Given President Trump's affinity for Putin, should we expect even more Administration outreach to America's Evangelicals? 

Every age has its own fascism. Primo Levi (Quoted by Madeline Albright, in the front-piece of her latest book, Fascism: A Warning, 2018, Harper Collins

Thank you for reading. Prepare to vote wisely; carefully read/watch the flood of campaign literature/TV ads.

Notes for the week: the Optimist; Ken Burns on John McCain; one nation's non-free press; foreign collusion; August primaries; alleged papal complicity; coming soon to your area; DJT and religion; the opera, Doctor Atomic; Judge Kavanaugh; child labor; more beaver news; young voters.

Optimist, 2 September. Link here.Smile for the goat, marriage after death, and other stories.

Ken Burns on John McCain. It is fitting that America's premier living story teller have a last say about his conversations with McCain as Burns put together his epic about the Vietnam era. McCain was insistent that the story include those of ordinary Americans and Vietnamese, South and North, and was gratified that Burns agreed. He even suggested that his story be left out completely, which, of course, did not happen.
     I personally feel that McCain's most shining moment was when he respectfully told his North Vietnamese captors that he could not accept their offer of early release, that to do so would dishonor his fellow POWs. Indeed, one still living senior (then North) Vietnamese official has said (after McCain's death) that that momentous refusal was something for which he had always admired McCain.

Eritrea without a free press. When President Trump inveighs against the main stream media, some wonder.....  Salem Solomon's story about Eritrea's "news desert" is instructive. Even in our much longer-established nation, a free, unfettered, disputed press is a cornerstone of democracy.

Foreign influence and U.S. government. As American as apple pie? Jeremi Suri thinks the influence of foreign governments has a long history in America. The Trump campaign may have been brazen, but it was hardly new.
     "George Washington contended with French meddling from Edmond-Charles “Citizen” Genêt, Abraham Lincoln struggled to block British subsidies to the Confederacy, and 20th-century presidents policed foreign agents promoting their country’s goals to American audiences."
     Richard Nixon profited from money funneled from Chinese-born American socialite, Anna Chennault (ties to Taiwan, home of the then Nationalist Chinese government).

August primary races. The respected Cook Political Report says that only 66 U.S. House races will be competitive in November; that is a mere 15% that might change. In the Senate, of the 36 seats in contention, only 7 races are considered toss ups, 2 of which are open due to retirement.
     No wonder your senator and/or representative may seem a bit aloof, less than energized to do an Aussie walkabout, ringing doorbells.

Immigration. Interestingly, on the policy front, John McCain's death brought forth numerous columns (here is one) about immigration, highlighting his past bi-partisan efforts to write legislation that in the end proved fruitless given the two irreconcilable immigration issues: avoiding mass deportations and finding a legal path to citizenship.
     The administration's mantra now, of course, is "build that wall!" Once again the president's ignorance of history shines brightly. He forgets (if he ever knew) that the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall -- complete with tank traps, death strips, land mines, triple-strand barbed wire, machine gun turrets, dogs, and well indoctrinated marksmen -- and it failed. Not due to the urging of the once Republican beloved Ronald Regan, but by political and economic forces beyond Soviet control. Will President Trump put (convicted) AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio in charge of his southern gun towers?

Papal complicity. Columnists Marc Thiessen and Michael Gerson discuss the ongoing news of pedophilia in the Roman Catholic church. Thiessen says, "Suddenly I understand how the Reformation happened." The letter of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò alleges that the knowledge extended into the Vatican. Thiessen likens Viganò's latter to Luther's "95 Theses".

McCain and Trump. National Hero (5 1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton and National Coward (what with 5 bone-spur draft deferments and avoiding STDs “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”). I had high school cross country runners who insisted on competing while treating their bone-spurs.

Firestorm coming soon. As Ruxandra Guidi notes, the "new normal" of firestorms may soon visit your area. "Yet there’s nothing supernatural about these phenomena...are of our own making. They’re the accidental yet catastrophic side effects of the way we live our lives; witness the rim of a flat tire scraped the asphalt on a highway, causing the sparks...people moving into fire-prone areas, along with forestry practices that suppress natural fires and human-caused global warming." CA Governor Jerry Brown has talked about his state-wide problem that is not going to go away. 
     Ask, how prepared are you for a quick home evacuation -- no matter the cause? Consider, "Are we ready for our climate future — now?"


Religion and November 2018. In "This is the new GOP," Columnist Michael Gerson talks about the President's recent appeal to evangelical leaders, his naked appraisal that the upcoming election amounts to a "referendum on your religion." Gerson went on,

Fighting for Trump, the president argued, is the only way to defend the Christian faith. None of these men and women of God, apparently, gagged on their hors d’oeuvres. 'It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that [Democrats] will overturn everything that we’ve done, and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently.' Christians, evidently, need to start taking “Onward, Christian Soldiers” more literally....This is now what passes for GOP discourse — the cultivation of anger, fear, grievances, prejudices and hatreds.

Doctor Atomic.  This past August Santa Fe's well-known outdoor opera was the venue for the first NM production of Doctor Atomic, the story of Los Alamos and the scientists who created the atomic bomb. (The opera had been previously produced before in New York and San Francisco.)
      However, this was the first time that downwinders — people whose families lived in NM's Tularosa Basin, in the path of the bomb’s radiation — have ever appeared on stage during a performance. The article notes that "[i]n 1945, thousands of people lived in a 50-mile radius of the test site." One downwinder, Frank Gallegos, says, “The government didn’t tell them nothing.”
    Most Trinity downwinders are not covered by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides for those who lived in parts of NV, UT, and AZ while 100 above-ground atomic tests were detonated at the much-used NV site.
It is likely that most Americans do not know that the bomb was actually first tested in the United States, not long before sunrise, 0530 on 16 July 1945 at the Trinity site in NM's Tularosa Basin. Nor that the test occurred a mere 22 days before a second bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. (Nagasaki was destroyed three days later, 9 August.) The public can visit the Trinity site on the first Saturday in April and October.

George Will on Kavanaugh. George Will poses some last questions for the nominee. How do you get a nominee to a nominee's philosophy without asking questions he will not discuss hypothetical "what if-s" about today's questions? Segregation in the public schools is not a closed issue; for many 2018 reasons, city' school systems are quite segregated. Therefore, for example, Will poses, "The 1866 Congress that drafted the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the law” continued to fund racially segregated schools in the District of Columbia, which Congress controlled. Yet the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education held that segregation violated that guarantee. Can originalists defend the court’s reasoning in Brown? How might the court have better reached the Brown result?"
     Other then vs now issues:

• the 14th Amendment's prohibition of sodomy; 
• the 8th amendment and cruel and unusual punishment at a time when "branding, pillorying, whipping and mutilation were permitted. "Would originalism allow these?" 
• "Can the meaning of words be severed from the intentions of those who use them?"
• "Do you believe that the Constitution’s authors intended their words to advance what the Declaration began — the securing of natural rights?"
• Justice Thomas said, “We as a nation adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning that does not change.” "Can you cite an important constitutional provision (certainly not the regulation of interstate commerce, or the establishment of religion, or government taking private property for 'public use,' or the prohibition of 'cruel and unusual punishments,' the meaning of which today is the same as the public meaning when the provision was ratified?

It is doubtful, though, that so rigorously intellectual questions will be asked, though hope springs eternal. More likely, asserts Ruth Marcus there will be the "kabuki dance" (then Senator Biden, 2005) or a "vapid, shallow charade" (then law professor, now Associate Justice, Elana Kagan, 1995).

Child Labor. Appropriately on Labor Day, there was this Washington Post story about Lewis Hines' "searing" photographs that showed the world when, where, how children were forced to work. He told owners he was a "humble Bible salesman ...who wanted to spread the good word to the laborers inside." Or a post card salesman or a machinery photographer. Whatever would get him inside. The unions of the day did little to protect child laborers. "The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed."
     The story notes that "Today, the Library of Congress maintains a collection of more than 5,000 of Hine’s photographs, including the thousands he took for the National Child Labor Committee, known as the NCLC."
     The story of Hines' early hard-scrabble life is, in itself, a story of "moving on up."

Laborers on Labor Day. E.J. Dionne wonders, "Two Labor Days into Donald Trump’s presidency, what has happened to the working class?" Overall, not much has improved. In fact, "[A]ccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real hourly wages overall dropped between July 2017 and July 2018, and they dropped for mid-wage workers, too." That's not a statistic the President brags about at his rallies. 

     What seems to be increasingly undeniable is that the President's "base" is ever more based on mere personality,  a base willing to cheer even when there are no provable personal gains. His smiling, self-satisfied smirk has somehow come to be a reflection of their own feelings. Dionne: "Watch the typical Trump stump speech, and you will find that fear-mongering smothers any uplift and that falsehoods about immigrants outnumber truths about the challenges to middle-class living standards."

     This is scary. It is so hauntingly like Hitler's base in the 1930s: the German population wildly supported him even he moved towards war, their country became increasingly less free, and belts were tightened for a conflict they were sure could be avoided. Der Fürher would surely not lead the nation to war. Hitler's rallies were a continual source -- and proof -- of strength for the Nazi regime. (See Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich, her "Afterwards," and the discussion of how even seasoned travelers were so easily misled.)

Beavers and water in the west. This HCN article discusses how these industrious little critters "make the desert bloom." James Rogers, the manager of the nearly 1M acre Winecup Gamble ranch in NV, put a halt to his cowboys' indiscriminate shooting of beavers. He says, “I’m always looking for ways to keep water here, and the beaver do it for free. They don’t do it perfectly, but who am I to think that I can do it better?”  Along the Thousand Springs Creek, "....the string of ponds soaked into the soil...raised the water table, sub-irrigating pastures in one of the driest corners of North America."

Golden, CO, and the vote. Students at Golden High School have pushed the town fathers, and so town voters are being asked if the Golden should lower the voting age to 16? While CO mandates 18, Golden is a "home rule" city and can lower the age for city-related issues and offices.
     The idea of allowing 16 year-olds to vote in school board elections was recently discussed in Boulder, CO, but not acted upon. In 2013, newly enfranchised 16-17 year-old voters in Takoma Park, MD, turned out at at 4 times the rate of those 18 and up.

Thank you for reading. I hope your Labor Day weekend went well.