Not that I’m gloating about the success of our plot to take over the judiciary, but if Elena Kagan is confirmed, there will not be a single Protestant on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hey-heh-heh. I mean, uh, isn’t this interesting?
The fact that Ms. Kagan is Jewish draws attention away from the fact that two-thirds of the court is now Catholic. Crafty, eh?
Now, to work on the other two branches…
Just as it did for Joe Lieberman, ditching party identification to appeal to us UnPartisans is working so far for Charlie Crist:
Washington (CNN) – Gov. Charlie Crist leads in a hypothetical three-way race for Senate in Florida, a week after he decided to leave the Republican primary and run as an independent.
Crist enjoys a six point advantage over Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Kendrick Meek in a new Mason-Dixon poll of 625 registered voters surveyed by telephone.
Crist captures 38 percent in the new poll, followed by Rubio with 32 percent and Meek with 19 percent…
Gee, I wonder what that means…. Could it indicate that, just as Connecticut rejected the MoveOn.org extremism that chased Joe out of his party in 2006, Floridians are sending the message that the DeMint/Tea Party path won’t be a winner for Republicans in November?
Maybe.
Times Square has been evacuated from West 44th to West 47th Streets after the police received reports of a suspicious package at Broadway and West 46th Street at about 12:45 p.m.The package appeared to be a small, white cooler, The Associated Press reports.
It was the second suspicious-package call and at least partial evacuation in the area today.
… but it looks like quite a pattern of nervousness has developed around Times Square.There’ve been seven such suspicious-package calls in the last few days.
That car bomb the other day didn’t go off, but it’s having an effect.
Bart brings to our attention this transcript of a radio interview with a guy said to have been on the scene when the Gulf oil rig blew. He certainly sounds like a guy who knows what he’s talking about; you may get a bit bogged down in the technical details. But it’s there if you’re curious. An excerpt:
James: Well obviously, the gas blew the sea water out of the riser, once it displaced all of the sea water, the gas began to spill out on the deck and up through the center of the rig floor. The rig, you have to imagine a rectangle, about 400 feet by 300 feet, with the derrick and the rig floor sitting directly in the center. As this gas is now heavier than air, it starts to settle in different places. From that point, something ignited the gas, which would have caused the first major explosion.
Mark: Now, what might ignite the gas, do you know?
James: Any number of things, Mark. All rig floor equipment is what they consider intrinsically safe, meaning it cannot generate a spark, so that these types of accidents cannot occur. However, as much gas that came out as fast as it did, it would have spilled over the entire rig fairly rapidly, you know, within a minute. I would think that the entire rig would be enveloped in gas. Now a lot of this stuff, you can’t smell, you can’t taste it, it’s just there, and it’s heavier than oxygen. As it settled in, it could have made it to a space that wasn’t intrinsically safe. Something as simple as static electricity could have ignited the first explosion, which set off a series of explosions.
Mark: Alright, so what happened? You’re standing where? You’re sitting somewhere? What happened?
James: Well, I was in a location that was a pretty good ways from the initial blast. I wasn’t affected by the blast. I was able to make it out and get up forward where the life boats were. The PA system was still working. There was an announcement overhead that this was NOT a drill. Obviously, we have fire drills every single week to prepare for emergencies like this (fire and abandonment drills). Over the intercom came the order to report to life boats one and two, that this was not a drill, that there is a fire, and we proceeded that way.
Mark: So, the eleven men who died, were they friends of yours?
James: Yes sir, they were….
Bart says, “Suggest you read it and hopefully, we try to put the accident into proper perspective, not become another political event for the uninformed.”
Sorry to get all heavy on y’all on the day before Thanksgiving, but some of you got to talking about “hate crimes” back on this post, and I just can’t let it pass without reciting my usual homily on the subject…
Karen said:
And Kathryn, did you notice that in this country that after race, the highest number of hate crimes concern religion? Why do I not think that Christians are the ones being picked on?
To which Kathryn replied:
I thought sexual orientation was the biggest source of hate crimes (which makes your point, I suspect).
To which I just had to say:
It depends on how you define “hate crime” … which is sort of what the whole phenomenon of “hate crimes” is about, isn’t it?
A “hate crime” is a political act, one to which Orwell assigned the term “thoughtcrime,” a.k.a. “crimethink.” And writing and defining the hate crime law is also a political act.
The very decision to have such a thing as a “hate crime” is a political act as well — or, at least, a political choice.
And it’s one to which I object. Such things should not exist in America. That’s one of the few points on which I agree with libertarians. Punish the act, not the thought or attitude behind it. The idea that an attitude would be deemed a crime in this country is in its way as ugly as the attitudes such crimes seek to punish. It appalls me that the concept of “hate crime” ever developed in this country…
I mean, I love Big Brother and all, but this is supposed to be a free country, which means people are free to think and feel all sorts of mean, nasty, ugly things. It’s when they do something to other people that we should be concerned, and what we should be concerned about is what they DO.
Just got a call from Carol Klinger at NPR. She wanted to know what I’d written lately about the governor. I suggested checking out the blog.
To make it easier, here are a few key riffs:
And from back in the day, before all the current mess:
Carol, enjoy…
I’ve never had much to say about Sarah Palin one way or the other, because I’ve always had trouble putting what I think of her into words, but one of her supporters does so in the video above, explaining that she is:
… the epitome of conservativeness.”
Just so. It’s not that she has any actual conservative ideas, or any ideas at all. This is not to run her down. There are different kinds of people in the world, as my late mother-in-law used to say. Most are either people people or things people. When I protested to my wife that I saw myself as neither, she said there was a third, less-mentioned, category, idea people.
Sarah Palin is not one of them. Frankly, I suspect she’s a people person, which I think is what a lot of her supporters sense. But I haven’t been able to stand to observe her long enough to tell. Just last night, I surfed past an interview she was having with one of those talking heads, and I could only listen for about five seconds, but ranted at my wife about what I heard in those five seconds for the next minute as I surfed on, which was my wife’s hint that I was feeling a lot better and could start fetching my own cups of convalescent ginger ale.
What got me was that she didn’t have ANYthing to say. She ranted against the stimulus, and when the friendly interviewer asked her what she’d do instead, she slid into vague mumblings about cutting government and returning power to individuals — incantations, rather than arguments.
She doesn’t so much have conservative thoughts as she is… conservative-y. Conservativish. Just loaded with “conservativeness,” which I take to mean the appearance, the general aura of being “conservative,” which is a quality that fewer and fewer of those who embrace the description can coherently describe (and before you liberals start feeling all smug, you have your own set of problems, and they’re not that different).
As you get farther into this clip, if you’re like me, you start to feel sorry for the subjects. I mean, it really IS mean and unfair to ask private citizens who love Sarah Palin to explain their views. I started feeling bad for them the way I felt bad for the gun nuts in “Bowling for Columbine.” Rather than getting upset over our overarmed society, I got ticked at Michael Moore for being a sneering bully.
Which of course is another secret to the Sarah Palin appeal: She generates that kind of resentment toward elites (not that Michael Moore is an elite, even though he thinks he is, even though he would claim that he’s not, and so on…). It may be THE secret of her celebrity.
You hold a microphone in front of Sarah Palin, or someone who admires Sarah Palin (for any qualities other than her undeniable pulchritude), and keep asking “Why?” or “Could you explain your view about that?” and you’re going to come across as obnoxious.
The opinion writers at the WSJ are, predictably, fulminating over the upcoming trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed et alia in NYC. Whatever you think about that, one of them made an excellent point about our nation’s fecklessness with a photograph and a sharp couple of paragraphs:
The third way to consider the trials is to look at Ground Zero itself. After eight years of deliberation, planning, money and effort, what have we got? The picture nearby is the answer.
Let me be more precise. After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we’ve got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence — of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.
By failing to quickly decide what to do at that site and then DO it, our nation has shown its weakness — the flaws that come inevitably with being a liberal democracy riven with partisan and cultural conflicts, a society that values everyone having their say more than going ahead and getting things done.
Some of these things about our country I would not change; others I would. The thing is, a liberal democracy CAN get its act together. This was a pretty great country back in 1941-45, and yet we managed to pull ourselves together after Pearl Harbor and build and operate a towering war machine that quickly eclipsed the ones that Germany and Japan had been building for two decades. Those militaristic and fascistic countries underestimated us then, thinking we were too soft and divided in our purposes to defeat nations as focused as they were.
Today, fanatics who are willing to die for their cause think we are too soft, comfort-loving, life-loving, indecisive and ineffectual to defeat them. Failing to rebuild and move on at Ground Zero — allowing their act of terror to leave us in a state of paralysis at that site for eight years — speaks volumes about our dysfunction, and makes them look right. I mean, what do you say about a country that goes into paroxysms over something as obvious as the need for health care reform — or the need to rebuild at Ground Zero?
It’s not that we don’t know how to design something and build it. We’re great at that. We just can’t decide what to build, and that is just one among many effects of the fact that, as a nation, we still haven’t been able to get together on HOW we want to respond to 9/11.
Is a nation that divided and confused capable of continuing (is it capable, for instance, of summoning the energy to overcome our economic crisis so that I can get a job, just to bring it down to the personal level)? Or are we all washed up? Or is the answer somewhere in between, and if so, precisely where?
First, I really should have mentioned this sooner, but I just remembered that I’m going to give blood at the Red Cross at 5 p.m. today, and the need is sufficiently great that they asked me to “bring a friend” if I could.
So far, the people I’ve mentioned it to in person have not stepped forward — which is par for the course, and besides, it was relatively short notice for them, too.
But in case any of y’all can drop everything and come join me, please do. You might not be able to do exactly what I plan to do (if my iron is high enough), which is give double red cells, but I’m pretty sure they’ll take whole blood from a walk-in.
And if you can’t make it today, how about tomorrow, or some other time soon? I’ll be glad to help you set it up, or you can call (803) 251-6000. The need is great, particularly now, according to a piece I saw last week in The Wall Street Journal:
A number of blood centers are reporting an unusual drop in collections because too many potential donors are sick with the H1N1 virus, or swine flu. Some blood drives in high schools and corporate offices have had to be scaled back or canceled because of high levels of absenteeism.
Another problem: Some centers say a growing number of donors are calling a day or two after giving blood to say they’ve come down with flu-like symptoms, forcing the centers to dispose of the blood as part of government regulations. Researchers in a government-funded study are testing samples of these donors’ blood for viremia, the medical term for virus in the blood.
That’s nationally. Here in the Midlands, we always have a shortage, because, well, we don’t give as much as we should in this community. So come on out and help, if you can.
No, that’s not the name of my band that I’m going to form once I come up with a new name, although I think I might put it on the short list…
This is just me free-associating from one post to the next.
Back on this one, I said something about how some politicians seem to have a sixth sense about when a camera is pointing at them. Or at least, they did back in my reporting days (when I, more often than not, was my own photographer).
That got me to thinking about this picture that I ran across recently while sorting through old files. It’s a print I made from a shot I took at the Democrats’ mid-term national convention in Memphis in 1978. This was that didn’t go well for Jimmy Carter, whereas Ted Kennedy was greeted lovingly. They went wild for his presentation before a panel on health care reform (yes, we’ve been talking about it that long), during which I took the shot below (I wish I could find the negative from which I cropped this image of Kennedy, because as I recall, one of the panelists behind him was a baby-faced guy from Arkansas named Bill Clinton). Two years later, the party’s left wing would unite behind Kennedy in full-scale revolt against their own incumbent president.
And yes, I realize the Kennedy picture is low-quality. But I shot it on Tri-X with low ambient light, and blew up this portion of the frame, so gimme a break…
Anyway, where was I? … oh yes, the Sixth Sense.
I was looking around and saw Jody Powell sitting on that table at the back of the room a few feet from me. He was unnoticed for the moment by everyone else, and he was relaxing with a cigar and a bottle of beer. As I aimed and focused the Nikkormat and manually adjusted the exposure (and yes, Burl, it was the Tiger tank of cameras; I loved the one that the paper assigned to me), without looking at me, he very deliberately moved the beer in his right hand down to where I couldn’t get it in the picture. I mean, heaven forbid anybody from the Carter White House should be seen having a good time.
Dang. But I took the picture anyway.
And yes, I realize both of these guys died this year, so consider this their official blog elegy.
Just now I got an automated phone call on my land line inviting me to take part in a telephone “town hall meeting” with Jim DeMint. So I listened in.
And first, I want to say that I appreciate that Jim DeMint is mild-mannered. None of that shouting, in-your-face demagoguery for him.
But that said, I have to say that after awhile, hearing some fairly extreme ideas espoused mildly and politely starts to creep me out.
Basically, the way this thing worked was that ordinary, regular, plain, normal, average Americans in the 2nd District asked the senator question after question in a manner that was rather like T-ball. Nobody was trying to throw it past him, and he kept saying “good question” to little sermonettes from folks who are worried about that Barack Obama guy giving away “our freedoms,” on issue after issue. Whether we’re talking global warming or trade or monetary policy to crime to health care, that’s what it always boiled down to: Thank goodness we have you, senator, to stand up for our freedoms. No problem, folks, glad to do it, and be sure to sign up for my “Freedom Alert” reports…
When somebody calls in, truly worried about crime — her house has been broken into twice, she said — and says “Is it possible that they’ll be able to take away our constitutional right to bear arms?,” it seems to me that the right thing to do would be say, “Of course, not — no one is trying to do that to you.” But not Jim. In his own mild, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth way, he makes sure he gives the impression that the only reason ATF goons aren’t about to batter down your door and take your guns from your cold, dead fingers is because he’s there stopping ’em: “I’m doing all I can,” he promises, “to make sure we don’t lose our constitutional rights.”
So why am I not reassured?
Yes, I could have hit a button and tried to butt in with a “Hey, wait a minute” sort of question, but all those years of not upstaging regular folks — of not wanting to become the story — stopped me.
One guy, though, did — right at the end — ask Jim what in the world would be wrong with ordinary working Americans having the same kind of health coverage as Congress (this was the only question I heard on the subject that wasn’t about that Obama wanting to take away our Medicare and turn it over to the gummint). Jim assured him that HE wanted ordinary Americans to have good health care, which was why he provided insurance when he was an employer in the private sector, and that he thought members of Congress should be forced to sign up for whatever gummint plan it cooked up, etc., etc. — everything, of course, except to say that yes, members of Congress are in a government health care system, and it works just great for them.
Far more typical was Hazel, who wanted to know why she had worked to pay into Medicare for over 40 years, and now that Obama “wants to take it away from us.”
And of course, Jim didn’t say, “You like Medicare? So what’s wrong with having it for everybody?” That would apparently defeat his purposes.
Anyway, when it was over Jim went away feeling all that much better about his brave stances against health care reform and cap and trade and so forth.
Maybe I should have said something. You think I should have said something? I should have said something…
One of the really irritating things about Twitter is that it is a tease. Time after time, I follow links to things that I hope will be interesting and informative, only to find that they don’t really tell me much more than the original Tweet.
For instance, a tweet from Romenesko said…
NPR CEO Vivian Schiller is asked in a chat: “Why do you keep Daniel Schorr around?” (She admits he’s liberal, but…) http://is.gd/4RZz5
This grabbed my attention because I find myself wondering why NPR keeps Daniel Schorr around, too. But the link to the item at Romenesko in turn linked to a typo-ridden transcript of an interview, and here was the entire discussion of Schorr:
Derwood, Md.: Why do you keep Dan Schorr around? His analysis is reliably faulty, liberally-biased, and mean-spirited (yeah, I guess I’d feel the same way after what Nixon did to me). But still — he really knocks down any credibility you have of being ‘unbiased’, especially since he is a part of the news wing, not entertainment.
Vivian Schiller:
Dan Schor is a liberal commentator. I will not deny that is true. So what do we do about that? We balance his views with those of conservative guest commentators who frequently appear on our airwaves. Granted, they are not staff and you may think that makes a difference. But their voices are heard on our air, and I’m comfortable with that. We’re not planning to make 93- year old Dan Schor a freelancer at this point.
Not very satisfying. So I’ll add two cents worth of my own…
Excuse me for being disrespectful to the elderly, but I cannot abide listening to Daniel Schorr, even for a few seconds. And it’s not because he’s “liberal.” It’s because he’s so unpleasantly arrogant. It drips from every word he says.
Yeah, I get it, Dan: You were on Nixon’s enemies list. You were one of Murrow’s boys. You’ve been around, and had a storied career. Got it. It doesn’t make you God Almighty, and yet that’s what he sounds like he thinks he is with every pronouncement. And it’s not so much any particular thing he says; it’s the way he says it.
Bill Moyers is liberal, but he can be pleasant. David Broder has been around forever, but he acts like a normal, humble human being. Daniel Schorr is just obnoxious to listen to. It occurs to me, when I hear him, that any journalist about to express an opinion (or, allegedly, report) on radio or television would do well to tell himself, just before going on, “Don’t sound like Daniel Schorr.”
And yes, I admit this is probably an irrational prejudice on my part. Something about the frequency of his voice or something sets me off. He comes on the air, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard; I have to change the station away from NPR. Am I alone in this?
Yesterday, I talked my Dad into heading home from Maryland straight through the heart of our nation’s capital so we could say we had sure enough been in it, rather than skirting it on the Beltway again. So we took the George Washington Parkway in, which was beautiful on this unseasonably warm fall day, and drove over the river via the Memorial Bridge, which is definitely the way to do it.
Trouble was, I was driving, and the weather was so great that all the parking spaces were taken, so my photography (with my phone) of the landmarks leaves something to be desired. You may actually recognize the landmark above, even thought the pointy part at the top was missing.
But the one below — well, all I can say is that we were crossing over the Mall from the Pennsylvania Ave. side to the other, and we had a great view of the Capitol off to the left, and, well, I snapped this (without looking, of course) a split-second too late. I think the dome that does show is actually part of the Smithsonian.
At least my intentions were good. I meant to share the view with y’all; I really did…
Here I am, trying to figure out what the House just passed in the way of a health care bill, and I get this Tweet from Gresham Barrett:
Sad day 4 Freedom. I worry abt my children. Big Gvt-more red tape-more debt-is NOT the answer. Today-our Forefathers cry.1 minute ago from mobile web
Oh, give it a rest, Gresham. What pitiful histrionic nonsense. I don’t know about your forefathers, but mine were made of sterner stuff.
I don’t know at this point whether this was a good bill or a bad bill, but I suspect rather strongly that whether it was the best conceivable bill, or the worst thing you ever saw, or somewhere in between, ol’ Gresham would still be over-emoting against it. He’s been overreacting to all sorts of stimuli this week, hasn’t he?
One thing you’ve got to hand to Mark Sanford — he looks like a governor, even though he has generally not acted like one. This is a key to his electoral success.
I remember back before he was elected — I guess it was about this time in 2001 — he sent out Christmas cards with pictures of himself with his family. As soon as he received his, Sen. John Courson said to me (and you’ve got to imagine that booming bullfrog voice of his saying it), “Faaahhhn lookin’ family! Kennedyesque…” and said that on the basis of that picture, he expected Sanford to be our next governor.
Anyway, I’m reminded of that today, having just seen a picture of Jon Corzine for the first time (this was on the front of the WSJ). As I previously noted, unlike the national media, I don’t pay attention to state elections in other states because they have nothing to do with me. People elect their governors for their own reasons (sometimes things as superficial as how they look, although of course that’s not the only reason South Carolinians went for Sanford in 2002), reasons that I cannot infer meaningfully from afar, so I don’t try to do so.
Anyway, my reaction on seeing this guy for the first time as he was on his way out (having lost yesterday, for those of you who pay even less attention than I do), was this: “What? This guy is the governor of an actual state? You’re kidding. He looks like a college professor, and maybe not even an American college professor at that. He looks more like Leon Trotsky than a guy who could get elected in this country.” And what’s that he’s got in the back in this picture? Is that a ducktail?
I realize that standards of political pulchritude vary from state to state, that we would elect people in South Carolina that New Jerseyites (or whatever you call them) would never take a second look at, and vice versa. But if I had tried to imagine somebody who could get elected up there and not down here, I would have pictured a guy who would have looked at home hanging around in front of Satriani’s Pork Store with Tony Soprano. Yeah, I realize such stereotypes are the bane of New Jerseyians, who deserve better, but that I could have believed in. Whereas this Corzine guy … if Tony had shown up for his first therapy session and his shrink had looked like this instead of like Lorraine Bracco (and that’s the only role I could imagine a guy who looks like this filling on that show about north Jersey), he would have turned around and walked out.
No wonder this Trotsky-looking character lost. That Christie looks like a regular guy, a guy you might actually imagine being in the, uh, sanitation business.
Boy, am I tired of hearing references to the Tuesday elections in Virginia and New Jersey by the national media as something with national import, the most common intellectually lazy assertion being that they are somehow A Referendum On Barack Obama.
How absurd. When people go to the polls in Virginia to elect a governor, or whatever else they’re voting for there (I don’t know because I haven’t paid attention, because I don’t frickin’ live in Virginia, so it is none of my business), they will make their decision based on guess what: Which guy they want to be their governor. Or whatever.
But the Washington-based media, having to wait a whole other year until any of the politicians in Washington face the voters again, and not knowing any other way to write about politics except in the simplistic, one-side-vs.-the-other, partisan, sports-oriented, winner-vs.-loser terms of elections, decide to regard these completely unelected contests as being between surrogates, rather than between real people running for real offices with real issues that actually don’t translate past state lines.
As Ron Elving blogged over at NPR:
The people in Virginia or New Jersey may know the names of their candidates for governor; the rest of the country does not. Everyone, however, will recognize the name Obama, and that is where the conversation will turn.
Exactly. Except you don’t blame it on “the rest of the country.” It’s the national media who don’t know anything about the candidates for governor or the issues, so they will pretend it’s really about Obama, because they know who he is. Or think they do. Or believe they can fool enough viewers and readers that they do. And Mr. Elving makes another good point:
And however small the president’s role has actually been this fall, the focus on him is fair in one sense. The results of these elections will affect him. They will make his struggles in Washington a tad easier, or more difficult, depending on how they change the political conversation.
In other words, because the national media will act as though these are referenda on the president (or to a lesser extent the Democrats in Congress), and everybody in Washington will follow their coverage and believe that they are indeed referenda on the president, and will then act according to how said referenda went, it will affect real life in Washington. To the extent that real life can be said to exist there.
This stuff is so wrong, and it really makes me tired.
Back on this post, I made a gratuitous name-dropping reference to covering Lamar Alexander back during his gubernatorial campaign in 1978, and Kathryn replied with a suitably unimpressed, “Plaid shirt guy. Swell.”
Indeed, as name-dropping goes, “Lamar” isn’t the same as “Elvis.” So it was a forgettable reference.
I only return to it because, coincidentally, I was going through even MORE files from my newspaper career just hours later, and ran across these two shots from that week I followed Alexander in 1978. I practically lived with the guy that whole time. I flew on his campaign plane with him (with my paper paying a pro rata share of the cost), went where he went, ate where he ate… I’d get about five or six hours away from him at night, and spent a couple of hours of that in my hotel room writing. We used to do stuff like that in those days — actually cover political campaigns.
This was a pretty exciting experience for me, my first exposure to statewide politics as a reporter. The following week, I was following his opponent, Jake Butcher, just as closely. We sort of tag-teamed the candidates in the last weeks of the election.
Anyway, the photo above, with Lamar’s tasteful plaid shirt clashing with a really ugly plaid sofa (be grateful it’s not in color) in the back room of a political headquarters in Nashville, captures a tense moment for the candidate. He had just been interrupted during this Nashville leg of his celebrated walk across the state by a reporter from the Tennessean with legal papers in hand. The legal papers — affidavits, I believe — had something to do with a business deal Alexander had been involved in. I want to say it had to do with ownership of some Ruby Tuesday restaurant franchises.
Anyway, somebody was alleging there was something irregular about it, and the candidate was being confronted with it. Big drama. This was his first look at the document, and there he sits with a suitably furrowed brow while we stare at him and wait for a reaction. One of us (guess who) is actually taking pictures of this potentially bad moment for Lamar Alexander. We were all about the next political scandal in those days, and Lamar had served in the Nixon White House, so he knew to take such things seriously, and soberly, and not complain about the pesky press.
But I will confess now to a bit of feeling bad for the guy at that moment. We weren’t supposed to feel that way, but I did. Even as I was dutifully taking the picture (if this is the end of his candidacy, I captured the moment!), I was sort of thinking it would be kind of nice if the guy had a moment to read this in privacy and compose his thoughts — if only so we could get actual facts from him instead of a gut reaction. But we didn’t allow him that.
Anyway, to balance that, here’s a happier moment below. It was taken on his campaign plane, as it was preparing for takeoff, early on the morning of Oct. 18, 1978 (going by the newspaper). The Yanks, as you see, had just won the World Series again. Check out Jimmy Carter and Moshe Dayan. The day was going well so far — no scandals yet — and was filled with possibilities.
I like the way the light works in the picture. I was a pretty fair photographer, for a reporter.
Sorry if I’m boring y’all. Don’t know why I’m taking y’all down memory lane. Oh yes, I do: This is my way of getting y’all to think, Ol’ Brad has been covering this politics stuff up close and personal for a long, LONG time, so maybe sometimes his reflections are based in experience and not just gut reactions.
Is it working?
Anyway, it’s certainly been a long time. Burl and I graduated from Radford High just seven years before this…
The WSJ had an interesting piece about how Thomas Donohue, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has been trying to climb to the top of the Obama “enemies list” (move over, FoxNews) lately with his adamant opposition to the administration’s positions on global warming, health care and bank oversight.
Some of his comments have been immoderate enough to alienate some prominent Chamber members, such as Apple, Nike and Duke Energy. And when you’re not progressive enough on climate change for Duke (Donohue’s Chamber has said of global warming that warmer temperatures could help by reducing deaths related to cold weather), you may have a problem.
But what really struck me was this:
Through a spokesman, Mr. Donohue declined to be interviewed for this article.
Whoa. I can see the POTUS wanting to cold-shoulder Fox, but the head of the Chamber of Commerce not wanting to talk to The Wall Street Journal? It may be time for the Chamber board to consider whether this is the right guy to be heading up their effort. When a business leader won’t talk to the Journal, something is amiss.
Oh, and about the “enemies list” thing — I was just using that as a way of bringing up my old friend Lamar Alexander, whom I covered in the 70s when he was a pup. I broke bread with him numerous times while traveling with his gubernatorial campaign. I even went out with him and some campaign staffers to a disco in a black neighborhood in Nashville, and witnessed the improbable spectacle of this Pat Boone near-clone taking the dance floor, which is one of the odder things I’ve seen in my career of covering politics. (Back in those days, we COVERED campaigns.)
Where did that come from? Oh… Kathryn gave me a hard time for name-dropping back on this thread, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.
Here’s the thing that really frosts me about this health care debate: One of the little bargaining chips offered by those milquetoast “liberals” who don’t have the guts to stand up for the public option (and seriously, a “liberal Democrat” who won’t stand up for single-payer or something equally sweeping is a waste of skin) is the idea of letting states “opt out.” For instance, from the WSJ story I mentioned earlier:
Mr. Reid announced his support Monday for a government-run health plan — the so-called public option — while adding an escape clause for states that don’t want to participate.
OK, so you’re going to subject me to all this hullabaloo — the townhall meetings, the “You lie!” nonsense, all of this — and in the end, even if you get the guts to institute the public option, you’re going to deny it to me and mine?
Think about it, folks: If only one state in the union opted out, which state do you think it would be? Hmmm, let’s see … could it be the one that fired on Fort Sumter? Could it be the one where the governor wanted to lie down in front of the truck delivering the stimulus? Could it be the home of Joe “You Lie” Wilson and the “We Don’t Care How You Did It Up North” bumper stickers? Could it be the state with the highest number of elected radical libertarians (on the Eastern Seaboard, anyway)?
As the former governor of the state that would probably be the second one to opt out used to say, “You betcha!”
And folks, that would just be too bitter a pill to swallow.
This story in the WSJ today about health care reform causes me to make the following observations:
That last one will tell you that I obviously haven’t been paying much attention to the “debate” in Washington lately. But at least now I can see why a reasonable person might oppose reform, if there are actually people proposing a public option without asking participants to pay for it.
Folks, I want to go on record, here and now, as being more than willing to pay for federal government health care. I am willing to pay up to the almost $600 a month I am personally currently paying for my COBRA. I’m thinking that if you require every household to pay that much (or even $500), you could have a real Cadillac system that would be FAR more efficient than what I’ve got now. And most importantly to me and I would think to most people, I couldn’t lose it. And I could take any job for which I’m qualified and which pays enough to pay mortgage, buy groceries and pay the light bill and such, rather than having to limit my options to something with a great health plan.
Lemme ‘splain to you the problem with the current situation, folks. It’s not the one out of seven who don’t have coverage; it’s the far greater number who currently have coverage through their employer, but live in constant threat of losing it, and who don’t DARE stimulate the economy by going out and starting a business or something because they can’t give up their coverage. That’s the really big problem, far bigger than the problem of the uninsured.
If that’s what they’ve been talking about — a choice between a public plan that we don’t pay for, or no public plan — then I might have to join Doug Ross’ movement to just get rid of all the incumbents.
Doesn’t anybody up there have any sense?