Copyright © 2007 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2007 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings. Email: |
This is big. When the governor of a
state as large as California says
he wants universal health care we could be talking tipping
points. California is the 500 pound gorilla when the U.S. doesn't
assume that role. California is such a huge market that the auto
makers hate it when the state has more rigorous environmental
standards than the U.S. It's a tough market to walk away from.
That special Manhattan smell. If you haven't heard, Manhattan was enveloped by the smell of a natural gas leak this morning. I smelled it as I exited my subway car in Chelsea: not even up on the street, but on the platform. I immediately recognized the smell, and I think I was as surprised by the masses which didn't seem to recognize it as by my own failure to report it. Is this what post-9/11 is like, that a mere "gas leak" doesn't make you react. Sure, we're tough tough tough, but no one reacted on the platform? And as I climbed the stairs to Sixth Avenue, still no faces looking to each other. Are just a bunch of dumb screw-ups? It made me remember my reactions to 9/11, I was there when the second jet hit, and rather than immediately skedaddle back to Brooklyn, I wandered about wondering if my meetings were going to be canceled: and my office was across the street from the WTC. The current line seems to be that it wasn't a genuine natural gas leak, because the utility company couldn't detect a pressure drop strong enough to explain the permeating smell from the upper west side down to Battery Park. And so since it couldn't be explained, it didn't happen. But Chrissakes, you can imagine the implications of what happened here:
That's what I think I learned today. What did
you learn today?
Obviously I haven't seen enough of my
Gators this year. Glad to see them playing for the national
championship tonight, but when alternate QB Tim Tebow threw that
little touchdown flair pass at the end of the 2nd quarter, my jaw
dropped: a leftie! Perfect for hitting a receiver on the left.
Surely there have been others besides Kenny Stabler, but the
difficulty of defending against left-handed opponents is
legendary: that's why the word "sinister" is derived from the
Latin for left-handed.
"President Gore." It has a nice ring to it. I liked its ring back in the 80's when he ran for the first time. It had a nice ring in the 90's with that whole "reinventing government" initiative. It had a nice ring in 2000, and again in Richard Clarke's book when Gore was very much the "why not?" guy when it came to taking someone out. I hope Gore thinks it has a nice ring in 2008. If a statesman can make it in a world that seems to prefer politicians, then Gore's gotta be the go-to guy. (Oh Theresa Lepore, I know you meant the best, I forgive
you...)
If the Democrats won't fund an escalation
in Iraq, (Pelosi is warning of "the harshest scrutiny" for new funding requests), and
Bush proceeds anyway, I think it will be important to start
avoiding the "support the troops" language and start talking in
terms of the President recklessly endangering the troops.
That kind of language should have come out years ago, and
Rumsfeld's "Sometimes you go to war with the army you have
comment" (in the face of a question about inadequate armor) would
have been a prime occasion. Obviously, when an enemy attacks you
on your shores, yes, whatever army you have you deploy. But go
and pick a fight with an enemy out of choice, when that "enemy"
is already allowing you to inspect his facilities for WMDs? I'm
sorry, this whole enterprise has been one continuing adventure in
reckless endangerment. A lot of Americans, Iraqis, Brits, Poles,
Australians, UN personnel, and so on and so on won't be coming
home to their loved ones because of it all. This is no longer an
issue of pointing fingers over supporting the troops: it's about
genuinely getting something accomplished, or getting out. Today
the New York Times' John Burns told Wolf Blitzer he thought
20,000 more U.S. troops
could have a genuinely positive impact in Baghdad. I have
more faith in his opinion than I do in Bush, to be honest with
you, but while not denigrating the importance of improving the
situation in Baghdad, will holding Baghdad be enough? How many
troops will it take, and for how long? Will it be merely an issue
of temporarily putting a lid on the boiling pot?
Hug them. Hug them long, hard, and gently. My wife and daughter have been out of town this week, visiting my wife's dad and step-mom in Florida. Yes, I miss them. But aside from that, their absence gave me more freedom today than I'm normally accustomed to on a Saturday, and while I could have been completely frivolous, I combined the opportunity with another special opportunity. You see, we have a recipe for duck sausage which Ab cherishes, but to make sausage you need sausage casings. And sausage casings aren't easy to find. One of the places I can reliably find sausage casings is in our old neighborhood in Queens, Astoria; but you have to go on a Saturday, because they're closed on Sundays. So today I decided to plan my day so that I could buy sausage casings. Now, since it's like an hour to Astoria on the subway from here, I had to augment the trip, and me being me, photography was important. I elected to start the trip with St. Michael's Cemetery in East Elmhurst. Not a lot of reason to do so beyond the fact that it was close to where I would look for sausage casings and that this is where Scott Joplin is buried. St. Michael's Cemetery is completely different from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; Green-Wood had many famous historic figures interred there, like Elias Howe, Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, and Horace Greeley. St. Michael's is very much a neighborhood religious cemetery: Scott Joplin is the only star there, and because the cemetery isn't oriented around him so much as helping families find their loved ones, the map the office hands you doesn't even tell you that he's in the cemetery, much less where he's buried. But the people at the desk are helpful, and if you tell them you want to find Joplin's plot, they will tell you where to go (his site is fairly near the office, they can practically point you to it.) So if you stop by his plot, and head further east, and take a right (south), on your left you eventually encounter a series of graves for children. And this is what I wanted to write about: this is the area where parents laid their beloved children to rest, amidst other children whose parents had outlived them. I don't remember seeing stones for infants, the ages of the children seemed to range from maybe two to five. With each one, I imagined the horrible pain a parent must feel: you never, really, expect to bury your child. Sure, you've heard of such things, but you don't internalize the possibility. A small step aside: I think my favorite movie of all time may be Truly, Madly, Deeply. In it, Alan Rickman plays the ghost of a recently departed husband; eventually you figure out that he has returned not to make his widowed wife remember the joys but to get her to re-embrace life. There is a dialog in the back yard while she is hanging wet laundry on the line, and he tells her how he spends his days. In the park he wanders through there is a plaque which parents placed in memory of a lost child, and he tells his widowed wife how other parents read the plaque, weep, and hug their children in tears over the idea of losing them. Steps beyond the children's section, I encountered a grave for a wife who died about age 28. The head stone the husband had erected was fairly conventional on its front: name, birth and death years, and an affectionate expression. But on the top, in bold strong block letters, was this: "We Had Fun." When Ab and Zoe return tomorrow night, I am going to squeeze
them like two tubes of toothpaste with just a little left to get
out. They are precious.
Just between you and me, I think Newsweek should apologize:
I, for one, want to know why the FBI doesn't want us to win
the Global War on Terror.
The tawdry details surrounding Saddam Hussein's execution are probably going to be with us for some time, and it will be hard to claim that it doesn't further tarnish our image, at least indirectly. It's at least a start that Iraq says it will investigate the cellphone footage of him being taunted, and it's good to know that some officials understand the taunting was wrong, but seriously who were these clowns who felt it was right to taunt? Don't they understand the importance of taking the high road? Apparently not: vengeance was theirs, and that was all that seemed to matter. Reconciliation? Just a word others use. A small sliver of our troops, those who abused the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, clearly set no better example for the Iraqis to follow, so it's not like we can act like we're lily white in this arena. (And if you haven't heard, even the Australian's are critical of the way we treat detainees in Guantanamo.) Even if the U.S. questioned Iraq about the speed with which it rushed to execute Hussein, there's no way we can escape the shame; Bush and the White House have touted the progress of the government with every step (even if complaints have been made about the pace) — you have never heard the Bush Administration question the laws or the forms of the democracy once established. We are, to all appearances, a partner of the Iraqi government at least, if not something more than a partner. So the shame of the way Hussein was executed reflects badly on
us, just as Abu Ghraib did. Next time we pick us some partners,
we'd sure better be more careful about the examples that are
being set by the whole process.
Troops' questions about the Iraq war not
getting attention, apparently. In a short little post on Sunday I linked to
a note at
Think Progress about a poll taken among active duty troops
which indicated there are increasing questions among the rank and
file about the progress in Iraq. You would think that while
Senator Joe has been getting lots of press about all the colonels
and generals he's spoken too of late who, he says, want an
escalation in Iraq, that the voices of the ranks would also be
heard. You'd also think that because the new DefSec said he heard
the same from the soldiers he spoke to in Iraq.
But it's not getting attention. The same major news outlets
which misreported the run-up to the war in Iraq and then far too
later castigated themselves for having done so don't seem to have
improved the diversity of their reporting.
Hidden tax cuts. Technically there are no tax cuts unless there are spending cuts. There are of course shifts in who bears the tax burdens and when, but the bills still have to be paid. So technically, this isn't really a tax cut for businesses, but it sure works out to lower tax bills for businesses in the short term. And if there's an interest in reducing the deficit, the bills have to be paid by someone else. The IRS is spending less time auditing businesses' returns. (It's not a new news item, it actually came out a couple weeks ago, but it doesn't seem to have caught much notice.) So read up:
The IRS claims that they make up for the fewer hours by auditing "better," essentially with a higher ratio of claims to hours. But what aren't we seeing with the fewer hours? You'd have to think that there are still a lot of rocks which aren't being upturned if they're spending fewer hours. If businesses aren't paying their taxes, the money they should
be paying has to be paid by someone else. Between you and me, I'm
not comfortable with the idea that this Administration
should be trusted for policing businesses. Especially when every
time someone looks into Bush's corporate behavior and tries to
investigate the cushy treatment and stock deals, the White House
tries to tell us that under-investigated charges are old hat.
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