October 7, 2010

 

     I've never seen a political TV ad which began with a U.S. Senate candidate saying, "I am not a witch."  I'll bet you haven't either, but if we go to Delaware, we probably can.

 

     She is, of course, Christine O'Donnell, the Republican candidate in Delaware.  It all started when she said she had "dabbled into" witchcraft, whatever that means.  Then there was some quote about a date on a "Satanic altar," but I don't quite understand that either.  Her ad also says that along with not being a witch, "I'm you."  Well, no--younger, prettier and a woman.  She is against masturbation, which she once compared to adultery.  I thought it took two to adulterate, but what do I know.  She's also against Hare Krishna. I'm not sure why.  I'm also not sure how she writes her list of things she's against.

 

     Everyone at first thought she was a preposterous candidate, but that's changed. Since she won the GOP primary, she's raised, the state's largest newspaper says, 2.7 million dollars.  Small state, Delaware.  Big bucks.  The Democrats also have a candidate--it's Joe Biden's old seat, after all.  But I think he's a pretty average guy. Maybe they could get him to resign and nominate a warlock.

 

     Now wouldn't that be a bewitching race to watch?  

October 4, 2010

     I love the  Sports Section of the paper--full of happy endings and sad ones--stories that seem, unlike those about, say, Congress, to have a point and end.
 
    Sunday football:  During the NFL offseason, the Philadelphia Eagles traded 11-year veteran quarterback Donovan McNabb to the Washington Redskins. The two teams played yesterday in Philadelphia. The Philly fans, often rowdy, gave McNabb a standing ovation.  He led the Skins to a 17-12 victory over the hometown Eagles.  So McNabb, of course, gets the last word.  "Everybody makes mistakes in life," McNabb said after the game, "and they (the Eagles) made one last year."  Well, yes.  Point  taken.
 
     Then I read about baseball.

The MLB season ended yesterday.  I know, I know. That's only the regular  season, the playoffs haven't started yet.  But if you root, as I feebly do, for the hapless--hopeless--I never know which to use--Chicago Cubs, the regular season is all there ever is.  They finished next to last in their division, sixteen games out of first place. Their manager, I think I read somewhere, said he'd hoped they'd do a little better. 

I can't imagine why.
 
     The Cubs--lovable losers, Chicago sportswriters sometimes call them, but who loves losers--last won the National League pennant in 1945, losing the World Series to, I believe, the Detroit Tigers. They last won the Series in 1908, 102 years ago.  Now that's a losing streak.
 
     The poet Alexander Pope once wrote,  "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."  But not if you're a Cubs fan, sir.  Not then. 

October 1, 2010

 
     This is a vile story.
 
     The Washington Post reported yesterday about Shirley Phelps-Roper and her family who show up at the military funerals of U.S. soldiers to praise God for killing them. "Thank God for dead soldiers" is one common sign.  The group's message is that America's tolerance of homosexuality has angered God.
 
     This is offensive, of course.  The question is, is it protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution,
which reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press...."  Does that language protect even speech as offensive as this?
 
     A man named Albert Snyder, whose
son's funeral was disrupted by these protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church, sued.  A Baltimore jury ruled that Westboro had to pay Snyder 10 million dollars.  The judge cut the amount in half.  But then a three judge panel for the 4th Circuit U. S. Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the judgment, calling the Phelps protest "distasteful and repugnant" butprotected by the First Amendment.
 
     The Supreme Court will now have to decide.   As an absolutist about the Constitution, I'm with the Court.  What do you think?   

September 30; 2010

     Wilfred Owen, a British poet who saw combat in
 World War I had it about right when he wrote: "If  you could hear at every jolt the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted longs/...My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory/ The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum ast/ Pro patria mori." Which is Latin for "It is sweet and proper/ To die for one's country.
 
     Maybe it's sweet when the war is good but we don't seem to have many of those anymore. What we do have, increasingly, is  not just servicemen being killed by the enemy by young Americans in the military killing themselves.
 
     The New Yirk Times had a story this week, :Four
 suicides in a week take a toll on Ft. Hood. Well, I should think so!. Ft. Hood, in Texas, is the largest base in the United States. So far this year, it  has had 14 confirmed suicides; six others are believed to have killed  themselves, but the cases haven't been decided yet. The previous higfh was in 2008, whenb 14 soldiers killed themselves.
 
    The Times quotes the Center for Disease Control says that works out to about four ntimes the national avaerage.
 
     It's understandable. When I covered Vietnam back
 in thr 1960s, most draftees did a one year tour there.
Now, with a smaller professional army, soldiers go back to thye war zone   for four tours, sometimes five. Sick to death of it? Sure they are.
 
     One solution would be to revive the draft. I'd  probably vote for it, but would Congress? I doubt it. The other solution is to  get out of these dumb wars. Let's.  

September 29, 2010

 
      One of the oddities of Barack Obama's presidency is that so many Americans say, wrongly, that they think he's a Muslim.  One recent Pew Forum survey shows that 18% of us think Obama is a Muslim, up a bit from a 2009 survey.  34% say he's a Christian,
down from earlier surveys, and 43% say they don't know what his religionis.
 
     Obama himself spoke of his religion in a New Mexico campaign stop this week, telling voters that he wasn't raised as a churchgoer but embraced Christianity as an adult.  "It was because the precepts of Jesus spoke to me," he said, "in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead--being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."  His public service, he said, is "part of that effort to express my Christian faith."  He went on to say that he's somebody "who deeply believes that part of the bedrock strength of this country is that it embraces people of many faiths and of no faith."
 
     Fair enough.
 
     Religion is something which draws controversy, especially when it's mixed with politics.  I'm old enough to remember voters grumbling that if John Kennedy (our first Roman Catholic president) were elected, he and we would be taking orders from the Pope.  Didn't happen, of course.
 
      And will Obama's latest comments end the rumor-mongering about his religion?  It would be lovely to
think so, but I'm sure it won't.

September 22, 2010

  If the United States had a motto, it might well be something like "Good times ahead."  A flood of new economic numbers suggest that's changing--that we may have to add some words like "but not anytime soon."

 

     The recession officially ended in June 2009.  But unemployment is still high and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says it may stay that way until at least 2013.

 

     The OECD report says the U.S. economy has started to grow again.  It doesn't forecast a double-dip recession, but it adds, "We don't see either a recovery that is strong enough to put a significant dent in unemployment....It could be early 2013, at best, before the rate returns to it's pre-recession level."  It says the unemployment rate will average 9.7% this year and 9.0% in 2011.  I am old enough to remember the good old days when unemployment averaged around 5%.

 

      There is no silver lining here.  It suggests that some old assumptions--kids will have it better than their parents, for instance, or I'm looking forward to retiring on my pension--will have to be put on hold.  The economists are not suggesting that things will get worse than they now are--only that they will get better very, very slowly.  

 

September 22, 2010

     Christine O'Donnell is the Republican candidate for the Senate in Delaware--seeking Joe Biden's old seat.  She's unusual.  The Washington Post's Richard Cohen
pointed out in a column that she admited having "dabbled into witchcraft."  This is first, of course, an indictment of the Delaware public schools.  You dabble "in" witchcraft or winemaking or widgets - not
"into" it.  Sill, I'd love to meet whomever else was in her coven.
 
     Qualification?  She's for sexual abstinence before marriage, against abortion and against masturbation, which the Post says she once compared to adultery.  I find that confusing, but it may make sense to you.
 
     She doesn't seem to have worked anywhere much.  Apparently she lives in her campaign headquarters,
though that's confusing and, if you're seen many campaign headquarters, depressing.  On the stump she sometimes claims to have carried two of the
state's three counties in an earlier run for the Senate when, in fact, she carried none.
 
     Financial setbacks include a near foreclosure on her home, an IRS lien and a lawsuit from her alma mater for failing to pay bills.
 
     Oddly, she won the GOP primary by beating a former governor and Congressman, Mike Castle.
 
     She can't win, can she?  Sure she can.  It's that kind of a year. 

September 18 , 2010

     Former Governor Sarah Palin, the GOP's 2008 vice presidential nominee, was in Iowa yesterday.

 This proves, of course, that the 2012 presidential campaign is underway. You remember Iowa?  First in the nation caucuses, it's where George McGovern upset Ed Muskie in 1972 and went on the become the Democratic presidential nominee? That Iowa.  It's a good state for a first test.  Blacks are under-represented, but the people are literate and tend to select thoughtful politicians of both parties.  
 
     I know it's early;  we haven't even had the 2010 midterm elections yet.  But presidential campaigns seem to start earlier with each new cycle, so this is not really a surprise.  Want more proof?  President Obama is going to Iowa, too, later this month. You knew he was going to run again, didn't you?

 
     The British do it differently, of
course.  Their campaigns are short--about a month, if I remember
rightly.  But length has its charms.  Everyone gets tired and you see
glimpses of character you might otherwise miss.  I remember one weary nominee, being heckled by rowdies at an airport one night, saying to a shouter in a soft but firm voice, "Kiss my ass."  It made me like him.
 
      Anyway, it's started. Brace yourselves.  Sure, the election is more than two years off, but we'll be having those Iowa caucuses in just over a year.