Saturday, January 30, 2010

January 30, 2009

          I read now that the 9/11 terrorists will not be tried in New
York City after all.  That seems wrong to me.      We have an old tradition
in this country that accused criminals are entitled to public trials before
juries of their peers.  Why not this time?  The attacks took place in New
York, so shouldn't the trial?  Too expensive, critics say, too much of a
security problem.  This is a bit like saying we're afraid that trying these
guys will encourage more attacks.      Maybe.  But surely this powerful
country can secure a courtroom.  If bad guys show up, shoot them.  But it's
important that justice not only be done but be seen to be done.  New York
is surely the place for that.
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Thursday, January 28, 2010

January 28, 2010


 
 
     A year and a bit ago, when Barack Obama was running for president, the country was worried but upbeat.  "Yes we can!" they would shout at his rallies.  Not this year.  "The Union," the New York Times editorialized, "is in a state of deep and justifiable anxiety about jobs and mortgages and two long, bloody wars." That seems about right.
 
     And the president last night seemed in a fighting mood.  He challenged the Republicans for being obstructionist--no argument there, only three GOP senators voted for his stimulus bill and none for his health care plan.  And he criticized his own Democrats for sometimes seeming to "run for the hills" rather than get tough.
 
     The president promised to try to fix things.  He has even scheduled a meeting tomorrow with House Republicans.  The Times' Gail Collins asked, "Have you ever seen all the House Republicans in one place?  It's like a herd of rabid otters."  I wish I'd written that.
 
     Signs of hope?  I don't know.  David Broder reports in today's Washington Post about a proposal to appoint a commission to examine government spending and revenue.  If 14 of the 18 members agreed on a recommendation it would go straight to the Congress for an up or down, no amendments, vote.  This sensible proposal lost, of course.  Got a majority in the Senate, but not the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster.
 
     I'm retired and don't cover Congress anymore, but it seems worse to me than it used to be--more partisan, less interested in legislation.  Poor Mr. Obama.  As George H.W. Bush once said, sir, "Nobody said it was going to be easy. Nobody was right."     


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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

January 27, 2010

      I remember President Dwight Eisenhower, at a long ago news
conference, being asked a question he didn't like.  His face turned bright
red, you could suddenly see the five stars on the shoulders of his business
suit as he ordered the reporter, "Sit down!"  The reporter sat.      I
remember Harry Truman--Give 'em hell Harry, he was nicknamed--saying as an
ex-president, "I never gave anybody hell.  I just told the truth and they
thought it was hell."      Passion in the presidency.  I liked it then.  I
miss it now.  I'd perk up a lot if Barack Obama showed some of it in his
State of the Union speech tonight. This president is unquestionably smart,
thoughtful, well-read, informed.  Passionate?  I don't know.  His big issue
in his first year was health care, which hasn't gone anywhere.  There's a
Senate bill, and a House bill but there isn't any legislation. Maybe a
compromise will happen, but it's hard to tell.      I'd like to see the
president actively, visibly leading the fight.  I'd like to see him kicking
Congressional butt.  I'd also like him to consider that voters seem more
worried about jobs than health care, not that they wouldn't like to have
both. Anyway, please join the battle, Mr. President.  This week's speech
would be a fine place to start. __________________________        Charles
"Mac" Mathias, a liberal Republican (we used to have some of those)
Congressman and then senator from Maryland died this week at 87.  He was
never afraid to buck his party--was for civil rights, a ban on cheap
handguns called Saturday Night Specials, and for cleaning up the Chesapeake
Bay.  He was a good man and a good legislator.  I'll miss him.
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

January 20, 2010

            My previous column explored whether Tuesday's Senate loss in Massachusetts hurt the chances for President Obama's health care bill and concluded that, yes, it surely had.        A second question is:  did the loss damage the President's standing in general and his party's prospects in the November elections?  That's harder.      Most polls, most years, show that the economy is the number one issue with American voters.  At the moment, it's recovering from the recession but not very quickly.  Most Americans would probably give the president and his stimulus plan some credit for perking it up, but not much.  By November--ten months away--it may look a lot better or, of course, worse.      Then, Obama inherited two wars.  We seem to be on the way home from one, Iraq.  By November we may actually have left.  It's much harder to see a happy ending to the other one, Afghanistan.  By November, we'll surely still be there, and if there's some clear road to victory, it certainly has eluded me.      But the Democrats shouldn't be unrelievedly gloomy about November.  On politics, some wise person once said, six weeks is forever.  And November is ten months off.    
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

January 19, 2009

Zounds! (or, golly gee, or the exclamation of your choice) The Republican won in Massachusetts! Does this matter nationally? You bet. Why? Health care.

It takes sixty votes to break a filibuster in the Senate. Yesterday, the Democrats had sixty. Today, they have fifty-nine. So the Republicans can filibuster health care and quite possibly kill it. Are there ways around this? Yes, but they're tricky, especially when Democrats will be worrying about becoming the next Martha Coakley--the Massachusetts loser. The winner, Republican Scott Brown, campaigned specifically against the health care bill. That seems to have worked for him.

The easiest way to get a bill would be to have the House pass the version the Senate's already approved. Several House Democrats have already said they won't go along with that, and the House version of the bill passed by only a handful of votes in the first place.

Another way would be to get the House to pass the Senate bill, and then a second bill cleaning up what the House doesn't like in the Senate bill, and then (I said this was tricky) get the Senate to pass that bill under a process called reconciliation, which needs only fifty-one votes, not sixty. To "tricky" add "unlikely." POLITICO today quotes moderate Democrat Evan Bayh of Indiana as saying he thinks his party's agenda has wandered too far to the left. People, he told ABC News, "just don't believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems. That...has got to be corrected."

Health care? Don't hold your breath.

Monday, January 18, 2010

January 18, 2009

       What?  A Republican win a Senate race in Massachusetts?  I'm kidding, right? Well no.  Could happen.  It's true that Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state something like 3--1, but independents outnumber them both.  And sure, Edward Kennedy held that seat for seventy years, or whatever it was, but the state did elect GOP governors for sixteen straight years though the present incumbent, Deval Patrick, is a Democrat.  Anyway, the Senate race, reports from the state say, is wide open and the Democrat, Martha Coakley, is in enough trouble that President Obama went to the state to campaign for her this past weekend.      What's happening?  Well,  reports say Coakley has run a listless campaign. And she's said some dumb things--suggesting in a debate last week, according to the New York Times, that  "the terrorists were gone from Afghanistan."  Huh?  With headlines this morning talking about gunfire fifty feet from the presidential palace in Kabul, that's hard to believe.      State senator Scott Brown, the Republican, seems to have run a pretty good campaign.  And voters are angry.  Unemployment isn't quite as bad as it is nationally but, at 8.8% in November, it's high.      Does it matter nationally?  Oddly enough, it might.  President Obama's big legislative priority these days is, of course, health care.  It will take sixty votes to override a Republican filibuster.  That's exactly how many the Democrats have now.  If they lose tomorrow, they'll be one short.  There are ways around this--get the House to approve the bill the Senate's already passed, for instance--but no one can be quite sure they'll work
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Sunday, January 17, 2010

January 16, 2009


 
 
     Same-sex marriage is in the news these days.  The New York state Senate recently voted against it, amidst arguments over whether it's a right guaranteed by the Constitution.  Good question.
 
     The Declaration of Independence, which is not part of the Constitution, says that all "Men (it was men only back then) are created equal and endowed...with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  Does that pursuit cover same sex marriage?  You could argue, but the Declaration is a declaration, not a law.
 
     The 14th amendment to the Constitution, which of course is law, says, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."  But does any of that cover same-sex marriage?
 
     Again, you could argue.  But the fact is, the Constitution never mentions marriage at all--any marriage, traditional, same-sex, whatever.  The word does not appear in it.  And you have to wonder whether, two hundred plus years ago, the notion of same-sex marriage ever crossed the minds of the men who wrote the document.
 
     The Constitution doesn't endorse same-sex marriage nor prohibit it.  I personally would vote to allow it, but pretty clearly, this is an issue headed toward the Supreme Court.  Good luck, justices.  No easy calls here.


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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

January 13, 2009

      When I was a working reporter I was often assigned to write poll stories.  I liked writing them;  it was a snapshot of what Americans were thinking.  The Pew Research Center has a poll out this week of African-Americans, a year into our first African-American president's term.  It's just full of fascinating stuff.      Thirty-nine percent of the blacks in the poll said that "the situation of black people in this country" is better than it was five years ago.  Just 20% said that in 2007.  As for the future, they are optimistic--53% of those polled said life for blacks in the future will be better than it is now.  Two years ago, 44% said that.       Was Obama's election a factor?  54% of the blacks polled said, yes, his victory had improved race relations here.  A third of the whites agreed;  45% said it had made no difference.      Economics?  A third of the blacks in the poll said their economic situation was good or excellent, up a bit from 27% in 2006.  But for whites it was down--35% saying good or excellent now as against 52% in '06.      We haven't killed off racism, of course.  More than eighty percent said we need to make more changes before they have equal rights with whites;  about a third of the whites agreed.  Progress?  Sure.  As I've written before, we inch forward.  
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Monday, January 11, 2010

January 11, 2010

 
     I wasn't going to write about Washington Wizards basketball star Gilbert Arenas, but he's behaved so stupidly I kind of have to.
 
     I mean, here's a guy with a contract worth $111. million. That's right, $111. million.  And he's dumb enough to maybe throw it all away?  Yes...suspended indefinitely without pay for now, maybe out of the game for good.  What did he do?  He brought a gun--well, no, four guns--to work, laid them out for a teammate he'd been arguing with over gambling debt with a note that said, "Pick one."  The teammate promptly produced a gun of his own and, some accounts say, chambered a round.  Arenas also pointed his finger at photographers as if it were a gun, cocked it and pretended to shoot them.
 
     Sounds like school kids on the playground, right?  But an alleged grownup, a multi-millionaire?  Give me a bleeping break!
 
     Arenas, I read somewhere, has tattoos on his body of inspirational figures including Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.   Important leaders.  Wise men.  Gun carriers?  Nah, though Malcolm of course was murdered.  Maybe Arenas should have skipped practice one day and read a little about them.  They wanted to change the world, not shoot it.
 
     It's inevitable, I suppose, that professional athletes are overpaid, idolized, and all that.  Many of them, Michael Jordan, Mohammed Ali, do just fine with it all. Arenas, on the other hand, for now can't do the one thing he's good at, the one thing we can admire about him - play basketball.  Seems like someone who shouldn't be walking around without a keeper.
 


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Friday, January 8, 2010

January 5, 2010


 
 
     Welcome to 2010, the year, according to the New York Times' op ed page, of gloom, doom and more gloom.
 
     Here's Bob Herbert, quoting the Washington Post, "'...the entire past decade was the worst...in modern times.'  There was no job creation--none--between December 1999 and now.  None!"  David Brooks quotes the Ipsos/McClatchy organizations as asking voters which party did a better job of handling 13 different issues.  During Democrat Obama's first year, he reports, the Republicans gained on all 13.
 
     Still, it may be a tad early for unrelieved despair about America.  Obama did get Congress to pass a stimulus bill and almost everyone agrees it did some good, though another one may be needed.  The House and Senate did pass different versions of health care reform.  They still must work out and pass a compromise, but they probably will do that.  The bill, though certainly flawed, will do some good and can be improved in years to come.
 
     The President seems smart and capable, though I wish he were better at knocking Congressional heads together.  Congress seems to be the real problem. In the House, districts get redrawn every ten years.  The recent trend has been toward more and more one-party districts producing liberal Democrats,  conservative Republicans and fewer moderates, which makes compromising on legislation harder.  In the Senate they need to change the rules which allow threatened filibusters on everything and means you need 60 votes to do anything.
 
     So things are gloomy and change will be hard, to say the least.  But we survived eight years of W.  It's way too early to give up on the new guy.


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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

January 5, 2009

 
     Welcome to 2010, the year, according to the New York Times' op ed page, of gloom, doom and more gloom.
 
     Here's Bob Herbert, quoting the Washington Post, "'...the entire past decade was the worst...in modern times.'  There was no job creation--none--between December 1999 and now.  None!"  David Brooks quotes the Ipsos/McClatchy organizations as asking voters which party did a better job of handling 13 different issues.  During Democrat Obama's first year, he reports, the Republicans gained on all 13.
 
     Still, it may be a tad early for unrelieved despair about America.  Obama did get Congress to pass a stimulus bill and almost everyone agrees it did some good, though another one may be needed.  The House and Senate did pass different versions of health care reform.  They still must work out and pass a compromise, but they probably will do that.  The bill, though certainly flawed, will do some good and can be improved in years to come.
 
     The President seems smart and capable, though I wish he were better at knocking Congressional heads together.  Congress seems to be the real problem. In the House, districts get redrawn every ten years.  The recent trend has been toward more and more one-party districts producing liberal Democrats,  conservative Republicans and fewer moderates, which makes compromising on legislation harder.  In the Senate they need to change the rules which allow threatened filibusters on everything and means you need 60 votes to do anything.
 
     So things are gloomy and change will be hard, to say the least.  But we survived eight years of W.  It's way too early to give up on the new guy.


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