AUGUST 28, 2014

We're having an election this year, not the big important one that picks a president (that's in 2016) but the state oriented ones that pick a third of the 100 member Senate for six year terms and of all of the 435 member House of Representatives for two year ones.  It's not the White House, but it matters.

     One of the worst things that can happen to a legislative party is a split. They depend on numbers for their strength.  When they split, as Republicans did over civil rights bills years ago, the party is hurt.

     You can argue--I would--that the bills were good for the country, but the split hurt the party.   The Republicans have a split this year too--generally between its moderates and its Tea Party members, its conservative core.

 
     We don't know yet what effects the split will have. But it's there.

 

AUGUST 24, 2014

     Low income families struggle everywhere in America.  A story in the Washington Post notes that those who live here in Washington have we the second easiest time of those in any major city.  Only San Francisco beats DC in comfort for the poor.

     This is of course a story with all sorts of different implications.  Do we want poor visitors because they'll like it here and want to stay?  But then won't it be even poorer so we'll like it less and maybe leave?  And if we leave will the newly arrived poor maybe leave too?  And then could we come back?  And then....Pretty silly pretty quickly, huh?

    I don't know.  I like San Fran but I'm probably not poor enough to go there. Besides, I live right next to a big old stall market with fishmongers and cheesemongers and, well, you get the idea.

    So come grocery shopping,  just don't move here, okay?  Unless you want to be president, of course. Then you have to. 
    

 

 

AUGUST 22, 2014

     We have off-year elections this year.  That means elections for the Senate--a third of its hundred seats up for six year terms and all of the the House's 435 seats, for two year terms.  The District of Columbia won't vote;  we have no representation in the Congress.

     In a lot of districts the issues will be local--a bridge, an allegedly crooked pol.  It will be harder, I think, for Republicans to make President Obama's person or policies be issues because he and they have been moderate,

     I can remember when public anger was so strong here--during the Vietnam War or the Nixon impeachment--when perfect strangers would yell on the street at those of us who covered the news.

     There's none of that now.  It looks like a clean battle for November, followed by the big shootout two years later.

 

 

AUGUST 20, 2014

     This city, Washington, is in its August daze--hot, humid and helpless,  It maybe because I'm old now, but it seems a little more bearable.  Baseball is an example. In the olden times, when this city's team was in the American League, its slogan was, "Washington:  first in war, first in peace, last in the American League."  Today the team, the Nationals, leads its division and may well make the playoffs.  Imagine!

     If you want an enduring image of lousiness in baseball, try the team I grew up with, the Chicago Cubs.  Last won the pennant in1945, though even back then they had an outfielder whose nickname was "Swish" for the sound his bat made when it missed the ball.  My Cubs last won the World Series--none of us was born then--in 1908.

     I worried a little when this year's Chicago team was in last place, okay, but only ten games out of first.  Shouldn't have, they started playing down to standard and were sixteen games out the last time I looked.

     Lose, Cubs. It's what you do really well.  And I'll pull for you no matter what.  That is something I'm used to doing well.

 

AUGUST 17, 2014

     Years ago the championship of the National Football League was settled by a single game between the winners of its Eastern and Western divisions. In 1940, this elderly Chicago kid still remembers, his Bears humiliated the Washington Redskins, 73--0.  Yes, that's correct.  Yes, it's more than a point a minute.  Yes, it is hard to believe.  And yes, it really did happen.

     Nothing like that happens any more, of course.  Basketball deals in high digits;  baseball, in shutouts.  But nothing in sports offers both.

     It's not that it's impossible now just unlikely and one of the reasons why our stogy lives can sometimes be a lot of fun.

AUGUST 12, 2014

      "Obama vows limits as US airstrikes continue."  That Washington Post headline explains why peacekeeping is harder now that so many countries can blow others off the map.

   Once upon a time a powerful country could say to a weaker one, let us in or we'll beat you up.  Many countries, to survive, would submit.  Now even smaller countries may have some nuclear weapons and be tempted to to say no.
Negotiating has never been easy and is surely harder now.

     The only solution may be truly massive peacekeeping forces and even they may be truly at risk.
    

AUGUST 1, 2014

     It's happened.  Republicans lost a vote in the House of Representatives on Thursday even though they have a majority there. They lost because their majority split in two--moderates versus more conservative, Tea Party types.

    This will make Republican politics more fun to watch, though probably less fun for actual, role-playing Republicans. "Got an ID card?  No, not those ugly orange ones. Ours are bright red," and so on.

     And if the GOP vote splits in the primaries, won't the Democrats have a better chance of winning back the House, which the GOP now controls?  And in 2016?  Three national candidates instead of two?

     On a good day, politics can be more fun than cards.

 

AUGUST 8, 2014

     I wrote the the other day about how difficult, maybe impossible, it is for the great powers to make or keep the peace.  I didn't need new proof, but the headline in today's Washington Post is, "Obama authorizes possible Iraq strikes."  Please, sir, not again.

   The story says the U.S. is already dropping food and other good things there and that's fine.  But please, nothing lethal.  That's how these blood feuds start. You got us out of Iraq once, please don't make an encore necessary.

     Enforcing our ideas of law and order in other peoples' countries seldom works well.  Please know this.   

 

 

 

 

 

AUGUST 7, 2014

         Yes, the Middle East is a war zone again--Arabs and Israelis shooting at one another with the Israelis seeming, to this amateur eye, better trained for the job though outnumbered.

   You want to think this can be settled but the odds are certainly against that.  If two peoples are willing to kill for a territory, the odds on peace seem slender.

     The odds against some kind of international peacekeeping force seem equally long.  The warmakers would do awful, barbarous things the peacemakers simply couldn't.

     I've been reading about the Middle East all my adult life.  I may not have much time left, but I"m afraid it does.

Fwd: JULY 24, 2014

JULY 23, 2014

     Quivers in Ukraine.  A passenger jet was shot down mysteriously. Today there are reports of two military jets downed.

     

    These are reasons for worry, of course.  We always have those, but these are not enough, I think, to fear that World War III will break out next Tuesday.

 

     Vladimir Putin, and whoever succeeds him in his job, will presumably worry more about keeping Russia dominant in what used to be the Soviet Union than about scuffing with the United States.  Barack Obama seems a moderate with no haste for a World War III.  Let's hope his successor shares that view.

 

       History courses emphasize wars;  they're dramatic, but we have had times of peace and enjoyed them.  Let's work to have more.

 

JULY 22, 2014

The headline in today's Washington Post is straightforward "Obama makes his most unequivocal remarks yet in favor of D.C. statehood."  Now as an experienced Washingtonian--lived here more than forty years--let me tell you what that presidential endorsement actually mean--zip, zero, squat.

     Londoners vote in British elections; Parisians, in French ones. Washingtonians? Our betters, as they must see themselves, allow us to elect a mayor and to vote for president--we are too few to matter much there.

     But in the legislative branch, nothing.  The District is allowed no senators--states have two apiece--and no Congressmen--states have from one to dozens depending on their population. The District has one token delegate who is not allowed to vote.  Fair, hunh?

     Efforts to change this require Congressional approval and Congress has always refused, jealous of its power and unwilling to amend the Constitution so as to share its power with us.

     I do not exepect this to change in my lifetime.

Fwd: JULY 9, 2014

 

     It's been kind of  a quiet, lazy summer so far, which if fine with this quiet, lazy reporter.  

 

   My childhood baseball team--grownups aren't allowed to support them, they're too awful--are in last place in their division by, I think, nineteen games.  Only recently they had closed to within ten, but they've gone back to work.  Need to ask which team?

    And it has nothing to do with work, but strawberries are coming back!  Formerly wonderful, they changed to beautiful but tasteless.  In recent years they've

started tasting like the real thing again. 

     So life goes on and getting old is sometimes even kind of fun.

 

Fwd: JULY 3, 2014

      I saw a political column about Hillary Clinton's unofficial presidential campaign.  One struck me as about right.  Many more and we'd all be saying, "Why is she running so hard?"  The job she seeks, after all--president, we assume--isn't available to the voters until the year after next.

      In the meantime she wants, I assume, to look like the right woman for the job. She would be the first woman president, of course.  Barack Obama was the first black eight years ago.  If he could break one barrier, you can presuably break the other.

     Avoid overconfidence is my advice.  Remember that the Democrats had a sure frontrunner once before, Edmund Muskie.  He disappeared and never saw the White House.  Neither did the man who beat him, George McGovern.

     Buy hey, go for it.  It's a fun ride mostly.  Ask your husband.  And if you win, Lord knows what lies ahead.

Fwd: JUNE 25, 2014

     We had elections Tuesday, primary elections, so you learned which Republican Republicans liked, which Democrat Democrats, but not which candidate would win a real election.  Still, there were hints.

     An incumbent Republican senator beat off a Tea Party challenger in Mississippi;  good news for GOP incumbents elsewhere?  A Democratic Lt. Gov. won his party's gubernatorial nomination in Maryland but must face a GOP cabinet member in the fall.

     Democrat Charlie Rangel of New York, who's been in Congress about since they invented it--no, only forty years or so--is expected to win another term.

Straws in the wind.  Easy to catch.  Hard to read.  November will tell all.  Well, mostly all.

Fwd: JUNE 26, 2014

Fwd: JUNE 14, 2014

    There's something unsettling in the air when the world's two strongest countries threaten each other with war, especially when they have enough nuclear weapons, as the U.S. and Russia do, to destroy the planet.  We got through several of those;  if you're old enough, you remember Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev telling American president John Kennedy, "We will bury you."

      Nobody buried anybody but the talk was certainly warlike.  This time it seems a little more civilized.  Maybe we're just lucky.  I hope I'm right.

JUNE 11, 2014

     Republican Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Majority Leader in the Republican-controlled House, has lost a primary in Virginia and therefore lost his seat in Congress when the new one meets next year.  People are talking.

     Traditional, moderate Republicans always travel these days looking behind them to see if ultraconservatives are after them.  With Cantor, they were.  The Washington Post reports he lost to "an obscure professor with tea party backing."

     The ultra-right poses several questions for the rest of the party.  Can they beat you, as they did Cantor?  Can they force you to join the Democrats to survive?  Are they the GOP's wave of the future, and so on?

     Party activists on both sides will try to answer these and other questions this election year, which will make it more interesting than it would otherwise have been.

 

Fwd: june 6, 2014

      People are being very picky about this prisoner swap--what was it, five of theirs for one of ours?  Unfair, the critics say, dangerous, racist even.

     Well, maybe, but wars, cold or hot or whatever this one is supposed to be, are not widely seen as a fair fight among equals.  We are good, of course;  they are evil-minded thugs.  And why not return some bad guys?  We save all sorts of things like patrol guard time, food and soap.

     And we knew we'd treat their guys fairly;  what did we know about how they'd treat ours?

    C'mon...we got one of our own back alive and well.  Let's cheer some, huh?

MAY 30, 2014

      I think moderation is probably the wisest principle on which to run a democracy like ours.  I think President Obama knows this, which is why he's a pretty good president.      

 

    There are times when moderation won't work, of course.  When Lincoln said, "This country cannot exist half slave and half free," he may have known he was invoking our bloodiest war.

     The trajectory of putting a man on the moon or all men into the voting booth would have been different with out the extraordinary measures of Kennedy and Johnson. 

    

     When Franklin Roosevelt promised to heal "a third of a nation, ill-clad, ill-housed, ill-fed," he knew moderation wouldn't do it.

 

      But mostly it will.  We have problems with gun violence because have so much of it.  Fewer with knife or hammer assaults.  Moderate laws work there.

    So I think we can look on Obama as a moderate, successful president with one of our two wars over;  the other, ending; and the economy recovering – moderately. 

 

     I have no idea who our next president will be.  But I think our national fondness for moderation is one reason the Tea Party won't score big gains this fall.

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