The Daily Parker

My ex and I got Parker in part because every morning we could see a doggy play group right outside our bedroom window. Here's Parker, 14 years ago today, having a great time there:

Today we went back to the same park. Parker initially wanted to go into the building where we lived back then, so I had to explain that someone else lives there now. Once in the park, though, he forgot all that and just strolled around with a happy look on his face:

Today was a good day for him, except for the parts where he pooped in his bed around 2am and in the bathroom around 9am. He seemed to have a great time sniffing all the old places he used to play. I suspect that he remembered the terroir of the park, but he might have remembered its appearance as well. And as I said, he definitely remembered the building. (Here's another post about the dog park, when Parker met the sweet Rottweiller who wanted to play a bit rougher than my puppy did.)

He's sound asleep now, despite the Roomba whirring around the place, and he's likely to stay that way for the rest of the afternoon unless the Roomba bumps into him. As good as today was, it's likely tomorrow won't be, as he really exhausted himself this afternoon. But we'll see. He's happy, which is all that matters at this point.

Milestones today:

• Sir Sean Connery has died at 90.
• On this day in 1864, just 8 days before a hotly-contested presidential election during the Civil War, Congress admitted (abolitionist, Republican-leaning) Nevada as the 36th State, adding 3 Electoral College votes towards President Lincoln's re-election and, three months later, a solid vote towards ratification of the 13th Amendment. Think about this precedent when the District of Columbia becomes a state next summer.
• The Atlantic's Megan Garber suggests the character Dwight Shrute in the US version of The Office "was a warning."
• With 3 days to go before polls close, the president's net approval rating remains -9, and the Economist's model has his chance of re-election at 4%.

Also, this is the 600th post on the Daily Parker since last November 1st, and the 7,600th since May 1998. In each of the last 6 months, the 12-month running total has hit a new record, mainly because if I post once more today, this will be the 8th month in a row of 50+ posts. In the 22-year history of this blog, I've only posted 50+ posts 13 times, including those 8. So in future, when I look back on 2020, I'll have at least one good thing to talk about.

A few:

• Illinois set another record for Covid-19 infections with almost 7,000 reported today.
• Three-time Hannah Arendt Memorial Banality of Evil Award winner Stephen Miller has laid out how much more evil he would do if his boss gets re-elected.
• All 15 New York Times columnists look back on what we have lost in the past four years.

More later.

Parker had his semi-annual vet visit this afternoon. We decided, based on the doctor's observations, that Parker didn't need to have a flu shot this year. Nor did he need a blood test, or to have the suspected fatty cyst in his side biopsied.

I mentioned Sunday that he's going into the home stretch. Today's visit pretty much confirmed it. His heart and lungs are fine, and the doctor found no worrying problems anywhere else in his body, except for his spine. His German shepherd genes have slowly broken down his spinal cord for the last two years or so, to the point where he can no longer control his anus at all, and he's having intermittent problems standing and walking. Intermittent, however, is becoming regular. And regular will become permanent in due course. Right now he has more good days than bad, but the rate of degeneration has slowly increased and will keep on increasing.

I'm going to concentrate on the election for the next few days. After that, I might take some time off from posting regularly.

The UK Labour Party has suspended former leader Jeremy Corbyn after an independent report found he presided over, and did nothing about, an increase in anti-Semitism in the Party:

The suspension was provoked by a statement from Corbyn that rejected the overall conclusions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report, saying the problem was “dramatically overstated for political reasons” by opponents and the media.

That statement set the former Labour leader directly at odds with his successor. Moments after Corbyn’s statement was released, [current Labour leader Sir Keir] Starmer spoke at a press conference where he said those who “deny there is a problem are part of the problem … Those who pretend it is exaggerated or factional are part of the problem.”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission report found Labour responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination over antisemitism. It cites “serious failings in the Labour party leadership in addressing antisemitism and an inadequate process for handling antisemitism complaints”.

However, the former Labour leader said he had been obstructed by party officials in trying to tackle the issue. “One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media."

When a party leader takes his party into the worst election defeat in a generation, while doing nothing about systemic problems in the party that contributed to that loss, there is usually a reckoning. The only thing the failed leader can do at that point is show contrition, or be sacked. I hope the US Republican Party undergoes a similar realignment next year, for similar reasons.

Jennifer Rubin (a Republican, I keep having to remind myself) finds former President Obama's mockery of the current president impressive and effective:

In Orlando on Tuesday, Obama told the crowd, “Our current president, he whines that ’60 Minutes’ is too tough,” he said referring to Trump’s walking out of an interview last week with CBS News’s Lesley Stahl. “You think he’s going to stand up to dictators? He thinks Lesley Stahl’s a bully.” He does not need to say Trump is a “crybaby” or “weak”; he lets Trump indict himself with his own conduct.

Obama does not need to label Trump “nuts” or a “conspiracy monger.” Again, Obama simply needs to point out what Trump has done and asks the audience whether it’s normal. “[Our] president of the United States retweeted a post that claimed that the Navy SEALs didn’t actually kill [Osama] bin Laden. Think about that. And we act like, well, okay. It’s not okay.” He added: “We’ve gotten so numb to what is bizarre behavior. We have a president right now who lies multiple times a day, and this is not my claim. Even Fox News sometimes says, well, what he says, isn’t really true, he didn’t mean it. It’s not normal behavior. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a coworker. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a football coach. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal. I mean, we might have to put up with it if it was a family member, but we talk about them afterward.”

With his relaxed body language and humorous delivery, Obama conveys in these short vignettes what pundits and psychologists have spent years analyzing. In doing so, he makes clear to those who do not follow politics routinely that this is not hard. You don’t have to be a political junkie or policy wonk to figure out something is very, very wrong with Trump.

And here we are, six days until the election, with the following polls-of-polls:

• The Economist has the chance of Biden winning the Electoral College at 97%, with an 80% chance of taking Florida*, and the Democrats with a 75% chance of taking the Senate.
• Nate Silver has Biden at 88%.
• The University of Virginia model has Biden winning 350 Electoral College votes.
• Even Fox News had Biden up 16 points a week ago, but for some reason they haven't published a new poll since the 2nd debate.

Know hope.

* Florida matters, because they will count all their ballots on the 3rd—in fact, they're already counting them. If Florida's 29 votes go to Biden, the president's path to re-election becomes nearly impossible.

The first polls close in the US next Tuesday in Indiana at 6 pm EST (5 pm Chicago time, 22:00 UTC) and the last ones in Hawaii and Alaska at 7pm HST and 8pm AKST respectively (11 pm in Chicago, 05:00 UTC). You can count on all your pocket change that I'll be live-blogging for most of that time. I do plan actually to sleep next Tuesday, so I can't guarantee we'll know anything for certain before I pass out, but I'll give it the college try.

Meanwhile:

• The US Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court last night by a vote of 52-48, with only Susan Collins (R-ME) joining the Democrats. It's the first time since Reconstruction that the Senate confirmed an Associate Justice with no votes from the opposition party. And in the history of our country, only two people have been confirmed by a smaller margin: Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas. I'm sure the three of them will continue to fight for bipartisanship and good jurisprudence as strongly as they ever have.
• Emma Green points out "the inevitability of Amy Coney Barrett," because the Republicans don't care. And Olivia Nuzzi brings us the story of "the tortured self-justification of one very powerful Trump-loathing anonymous Republican."
• Bill McKibben reminds us "there's nothing sacred about nine justices; a livable planet, on the other hand..."
• Speaking of the planet, Tropical Storm Zeta became Hurricane Zeta last night. The 2020 season has now tied the all-time record for the number of named Atlantic storms set in January 2006, and it's only October.
• Bars and restaurants in suburban Cook County have to close again tomorrow as statewide Covid-19 cases exceed 4,500 on a rolling 14-day average. Some parts of the state have seen positivity rates over 7.5% in the last couple of weeks. My favorite take-out Chinese place down by my office is also closing for the winter, which I understand but which still saddens me.
• The Washington Post asked TV screenwriters how 2020 should end.
• In one small bit of good news, the Food and Drug Administration has finally agreed that whisky is gluten-free, as gluten does not evaporate in the distilling process and so stays in the mash.

Finally, from a reader in Quebec comes a tip about violent clashes between a Canadian First Nation, the Mi'kmaw tribe of Nova Scotia, and local commercial fishermen over First Nations lobster rights. If you think Canada is a land without racism, well...they're just more polite about it.

I did not expect that. It all melted as soon as it hit the ground, at least.

In other news, today is Doonesbury's 50th birthday.

This will be a more personal post than usual, so bear with me.

The Daily Parker has existed in one form or another since May 1998—incidentally making it one of the oldest websites on the planet—and Parker has existed in one form or another since June 2006—incidentally making him one of the oldest dogs on the planet. He's not small, either: he weighs almost 30 kilos, and before he tore his CCL 2½ years ago he could comfortably put his paws on my shoulders and lick my face while I was standing. The shelter I got him from told me he's half German shepherd and half...something. (My vet at the time assured me he was 100% dog.)

I've always thought the "something" included some beagle, which would explain his longevity. Or maybe he's just had a really great life. For whatever reason, after 14 years, 4 months, and 10 days, he still eats like a dog and still recognizes hand signals, even if he can't actually obey all of them anymore because it hurts too much to sit and lie down. He still knows his name, he still learns new things (like how me putting on a mask means he might get to go outside), and he still says hello to all the dogs in the neighborhood who recognize how old he is and don't try to jump on him. He even says hi to the boxer puppy who tries to jump on him, come to think of it.

The thing is, big dogs don't usually live this long, especially German shepherd mixes. Because the thing is, Parker is essentially 100 years old. I hope I still have as many of my faculties at 100 that Parker has at 14½, because if so, I'll probably make it to 110. But I'm human; I can communicate precisely how much pain I'm in, and I can choose or reject treatment for whatever doesn't kill me before then.

Because the thing is, despite his cognitive abilities and how much I love him, he's not doing well. About two years ago he started showing signs of deterioration in his hindquarters. It was subtle at first: sometimes he tripped running up stairs, but shook it off and kept going. (This is how he tore his CCL, in fact.) Three years ago, we did our morning around-the-block walk in 8 minutes. A year ago, it took 11 minutes. Today it took 14. On bad mornings it takes 16. And some mornings, we turn back at the corner, because he just can't do it.

He hasn't wagged his tail in over a year, because he no longer has control over his tail. While he still has some control over his bladder, he has almost none over his anus. His nocturnal pooping has gotten so regular that I wake up several times during the night because I don't know if he's pooped while sleeping. He also has leg tremors in his sleep, so even if he's not trying to clean up the mess he made (which is why I immediately leap out of bed in those circumstances), he makes a lot of noise. He also has significant hearing loss, which lets him sleep like Rip Van Winkle no matter what I'm doing, but which also means he doesn't know I'm home until I start patting him.

You don't really notice some things until one day you realize they're gone. Parker no longer greets me at the door, because he can't hear me. He no longer wags his tail when I get home, because he can't control his tail muscles. He doesn't bark when someone buzzes my doorbell, because even if he hears the bell, he can't really bark anymore either. At least he can make really happy groaning noises when I rub his belly just right. Unfortunately, he can't roll onto his back to give me full belly access anymore, so we just make do.

Then, in the last two months, he has started losing control over his back legs to the point where he almost can't walk when he's fatigued. I took video on Thursday when he started "crabbing" because his right and left hind legs didn't coordinate properly. That was only 8 minutes into a walk, in the middle of the day. Sometimes later in the evening he doesn't even try to get up because he knows his legs won't be there for him. Other times he walks like nothing has changed since he was 10. But going down stairs has started to terrify him, no matter how strong he feels.

And yet he's still Parker. He's the same sweet dog he's been for 14 years. He still passes the same cognitive tests I gave him when I got him, though not as quickly. He's still aware of his world. He's still aware of me. He knows when I've dropped something edible on the floor from two rooms away. He knows how close I'll let him get to my dinner plate. He knows he's my dog.

So, I'm planning to talk to a hospice vet this week, after Parker has a routine semi-annual geriatric wellness exam on Thursday. His regular vet already has the video I linked above. So by the end of the week, I expect to have a plan for the thing I've always known would come but that I never wanted.

Ernest Hemingway wrote that people go bankrupt in two ways: "Gradually, then suddenly." That's also how dogs get older. Parker has entered the "suddenly" part. And the only good thing about this happening in 2020 is that the pandemic is letting me be home with him for every one of his last days. I just don't know how many last days we have.

In the March 2020 Atlantic, writer and attorney Simon Barnicle laid out one of the simplest ways to re-balance the Senate and Electoral College without a constitutional amendment:

Realizing that the deck is stacked against them, but recognizing that constitutional amendments are a pipe dream, some Democrats have called for structural reforms that could be accomplished with a simple majority in Congress: court packing, filibuster reform, and the legally dubious Senate Reform Act, to name a few. These proposals, while perhaps well intentioned, are inadequate. At best, they are temporary fixes—the minute Republicans regain control, they will retaliate in kind. And given the structural advantages enjoyed by Republicans, Democrats are unlikely to benefit in the long run.

A better solution to the problem of minority rule would address it directly. Democrats—if and when they regain control of Congress—should add new states whose congressional representatives would likely be Democrats. In areas that are not currently states, like Washington, D.C., or territories like Puerto Rico, this could be done with a simple congressional majority. But Democrats should also consider breaking up populous Democratic states and “un-gerrymandering” the Senate. Perhaps there could be a North and South California, or an East and West Massachusetts. A new state of Long Island, an area that is geographically larger than Rhode Island, would be more populous than most of the presently existing states.

In the short term, new Democratic states would remedy the advantages Republicans currently hold in the Senate—and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College—which allow a party to control the federal government despite a lack of popular support. And unlike other progressive proposals, the risk of retaliation and escalation is low. Because adding states would also add Democratic senators, there would be no way for Republicans to immediately add states of their own without an overwhelming electoral victory.

[T]he federal government is increasingly acting on behalf of a smaller fraction of the population. And unless Democrats get serious about adding new states to counteract the Republican advantage, the disconnect between popular votes and control of the federal government is likely to grow.

My guess is that DC will become the 51st state before the end of the next Congress, possibly followed by Puerto Rico in 2023. But here we have to tread carefully: Puerto Rico would probably send one member of each party to the Senate, if not two Republicans. I'm willing to take that chance though.