NOVEMBER 16, 2013

     President Obama's health care plan has debuted to very mixed reviews.  In fact, the boos outnumbered the cheers.  But I don't know that this is a great setback to the cause of national health care.

     The law can be amended.  Republicans would like to kill it, but they seem to lack the votes for that.  I am covered by Medicare and Social Security because I am old.  Did they start smoothly?  I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they had some early glitches, which eventually got straightened out. They've certainly worked for me,

     Health legislation is complicated.  It's not like a bill to buy more fighter planes or a few guns.

     The United States is, I believe, the only major power that doesn't have some sort of national health insurance for its citizens. I would bet that in ten years this flawed bill will be viewed as an important first step in ending that.

    

 

 

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

      It's Veterans' Day, but that's its new name.  It used to be Armistice Day, for the truce that ended World War I, which took effect, the combatants agreed, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.  It's easier to remember the numbers than the reasons for that long-ago war.  Various monarchies started quarreling and the next thing you knew, there we were.

     No catchy numbers for the next one.  Nazi Adolf Hitler started conquering Europe in the 1930;  we came in when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and other U.S. bases on December 7, 1941, a date which "will live in infamy," President Franklin Roosevelt said.  This time the cause was clear. I remember Bill Mauldin, a much-decorated veteran of the war and famed editorial cartoonist, saying he wasn't sure the war had made the world any better "but we had to kill Hitler," which, considering his fondness for killing Jews and others, was certainly true.

Korea?  Most said we were defending the South from the Communist North, though at least one book argued the South actually attacked first.

Vietnam?  Our longest war.  58,000 Americans died in it.  I have no idea why.  Sure, the North was Communist, but we get along with them now, all those lives later.  Why did we have to fight them then?

Iraq?  Afghanistan?

Maybe the solution is--honor our veterans, of course, but be very careful about which wars we send them to fight.

 

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

      This column has spotted a trend.  We're not the first, of course, just happy latecomers.  The country is changing on gay rights.

     For evidence, take the headline in today's Washington Post: "Gay rights bill spotlights a shift."  The story:  fifty-four Democrats and seven Republicans voted to take up the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  The Post says it's been seventeen years since the Senate voted on the issue and the sixty-plus votes means the bill will probably pass.  It almost certainly won't in the House, which is led by Republican social conservatives, but we're talking trends here.

     Fourteen states have legalized same-sex marriage.  Polls show Americans agree same-sex couples should have the right to marry.    

      And in Maine, Representative Mike Michaud, a Democratic candidate for governor, has announced he's gay.  "They want people to question whether I am gay," Michaud said. "Yes, I am. But why should it matter?"

     Increasingly, Americans seem to be asking themselves the same question and coming up with the same answer.

 

 

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

      There's a big gubernatorial election in Virginia tomorrow, Tuesday, that offers a lesson about the future of the Republican party.

      The Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, is favored over Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and that suggests a problem the Republicans face in other states too.

     Cuccinelli is a very conservative Republican. This probably helped him get the nomination, but is a less attractive quality in a general election, where appealing to moderates can be important.

     The kind of Republican with a better shot in a general election would be somebody like New Jersey's popular Governor Chris Christie, who is often talked and written of as a presidential possibility in 2016.  He is in fact a moderate, which might well make it harder for him to get the GOP nomination.

     Tricky business, politics  But tomorrow in Virginia, bet on the Dem.  Well, don't bet your life savings, of course, but you know what I mean. 

 

NOVEMBER 3, 2013

      I think we have a lot of laws we don't need.  Sometimes it's simple.  I read from time to time about efforts in this state or that to make same-sex marriage more difficult, and I wonder why.  If two men or two women want to marry, why shouldn't they?  Nothing in what they're doing compels anyone else to do the same thing.

 
     And if the same-sex couple adopt a child, who knows whether it will have a happy life any more than any other kid will.

     Restrictions on abortion?  That's a harder call because there's another life--the fetus'--involved.  But it still seems to me a woman has the right to decide what to do with her body.

     Saluting a flag?  Surely it's up to you, not someone else, what flag, if any, you salute.

     And I'll bet you can think of some more examples.  My point is simply that we don't need a law for everything.  There are plenty of questions grownups can decide for themselves. 

 

Fwd: NOVEMBER 1, 2013

      It was their third World Series title in the last ten years, but it turns out to be the first the Boston Red Sox have won at home--Fenway Park--in 95 years. Who did they beat at Fenway then? It was, of course, the hapless, helpless, hopeless Chicago Cubs.

     "Lovable losers," Chicagoans sometimes call them, but I've always had trouble with that even though they are my team.  They last won the Series in 1908, more than a century ago. I think they're shooting for two.

 

Fwd: OCTOBER 31, 2013

      Something unusual and good in Washington this week: one government executive looks at a troubled program and says--yes, my fault!  When was the last time you heard that?

     The troubled program is what the Washington Post called "the government's problem-plagued health care web site" under the new health care program. There, at a Congressional hearing, came the attacks.  There, for the administration, sat Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who spoke the magic words.

     The site has been "a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans," she said. "Hold me accountable for the debacle.  I'm responsible."  

     They ought to carve those words in granite and put them up somewhere.  A corridor in the Capitol?  The White House lawn?

 

 

OCTOBER 26, 2013

     The National Security Administration has been telling us, through a leaker named Snowden, how it can tap all our telephones, learn and reveal all our secrets, and so on.  We ordinary folk can't do much about the government's snooping into our lives, but foreign countries maybe can and at least two--Germany and France--have complained about it.

     They say the U.S. National Snooping Agency has eavesdropped on some thirty world leaders and they want it stopped.  Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "We want...something that is in line with the spirit of an alliance."  Well, yes, you don't normally spy on your friends, do you?

     Trouble is, our master spies like their jobs.  Told to stop, they'd probably target the White House and produce a bunch of fake stuff  designed to show they had.

     I think the only real solution is to recreate the Soviet Union, which expired in 1991.  It'd be expensive, but I"d rather have the NSA (National Snooping Agency) spying on them than us, wouldn't you?  Of course, they'd probably do both, just wouldn't tell us the part about spying on us.