Current Affairs « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Sunday, September 27, 2015

◊ John Boehner and Joe Johnston, Reconsidered

Current Affairs ... History ... Politics ...

Another one of the “not entirely crazy” Republican leaders has bitten the dust. I’m talking about House Speaker John Boehner, who on Friday announced that he was giving up his Speakership position and resigning his seat as a Congressman from Ohio in about a month. Boehner is 65 years old (will be 66 in November), and was first elected to the House in 1990. He beat a Republican incumbent named Buz Lukens in a primary and then defeating the Democrat candidate by a 60-40 margin. (“Buz” . . . now there’s a real middle-American name! Although lunar astronaut Buzz Aldrin hails from the same part of metropolitan New Jersey where I am based. I can’t say that I know of any other Buz[z]’s from this neck of the woods.)

Since then, Boehner has maintained a safe seat, beating his Democratic alternative by margins close to 70-30 every two years. Boehner’s biggest nightmare of course is from within his own party. He could well face a strong primary challenge in 2016; the defeat of seven-term Republican Congressman Eric Cantor last year to a Tea Party primary candidate casts a dark shadow on Boehner’s prospects (recall that Cantor was the House Majority Leader). So, Boehner is getting out while the getting is good.

I never thought much of Boehner. He appeared to dead set on blocking President Obama at every turn, with no regard for the merits. Whenever Obama took action, you could depend on seeing or hearing Boehner on the news that night criticizing whatever was ordered (sometimes in an annoying, whiny fashion). And yet . . . all of that just wasn’t good enough for the “conservative base” of the GOP. They expected that Boehner would get the House » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:56 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, September 20, 2015

◊ Risky Business With Iran

Current Affairs ... Foreign Relations/World Affairs ...

I’m not feeling entirely optimistic about the Iran nuclear deal. Sure, there are a lot of good things to be said about it; avoiding a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East would be quite an accomplishment for civilization (the word “holocaust” itself has its ultimate origins in the ancient Middle-Eastern Hebrew language, i.e. “olah” meaning burnt offering). Still, I wish that Obama, Kerry and the Dems were totally honest about what the JCPOA agreement with Iran ultimately is: i.e., a huge bet that politics in Iran are going to fundamentally change over the next decade, such that the pro-western urban secularists will take charge as the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard fade into a genteel irrelevance, sort of like the British monarchy. Unfortunately, we’ve been waiting for an Iranian regime change to happen since the last days of Jimmy Carter.

My heart really hopes that Obama is right and that an opening to the urban secularists by the USA will finally put them over the top in Tehran. But my head and my knowledge of history, however limited, is a bit more cynical — it’s a big crap shoot, a real “Hail Mary” pass. I guess that we shall find out how it goes.

The JCPOA has a lot of very optimistic supporters in the liberal big media, not surprisingly. A typical supporter is Tom Friedman of the NY Times, who focuses on the Middle East. I must give Friedman credit for hinting in one of his recent articles that he too realizes that Iranian regime change is a necessary condition for the agreement to really work as the Obama Administration hopes. Friedman was in a bit of a whimsical mood » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:04 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, September 7, 2015

◊ Remain Calm and Ignore . . . Donald Trump?

Current Affairs ... Politics ...

OK, so it’s still “way too early” to think about the 2016 Presidential election and the state primaries that will select the main candidates. Nov. 8, 2016 is still 15 months away, and the first state primaries in New Hampshire and Iowa will happen in a little less than 5 months. So if you’re not a political junkie like me, ignore the rest of this post and get back to whatever else you were doing.

But if you do like national politics, then we need to talk about what happened on the GOP side over the summer. According to compilations of average polling data from Real Clear Politics, on May 27 (just after Memorial Day), Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul help the top 4 slots in the race, in that order. It looked like the GOP “Establishment” was well in control. Jeb Bush is considered the candidate with the strongest ties to the establishment, but Walker and Rubio are both seen as acceptable. Rand Paul is a little bit different, a bit more of an “insurgent” with his libertarian stance; but like the other three, Paul is nonetheless an experienced national politician (currently a US Senator from Kentucky). Ever since going to Washington, he has been known to compromise and dilute the strict libertarian stances that his father (Rep. Ron Paul from Texas) took. And anyway, Paul didn’t seem like a real threat; he had captivated a tranche of devoted followers sympathetic to his ideological leanings, but he wasn’t expected to generate a broad appeal across the Republican faithful. The Establishment seemed to have the situation well in control.

Now it’s Labor Day and the top four in the nationwide polls are Donald Trump (27.8%), Dr. Ben Carson (13.5%), Jeb Bush (9.3%) and Marco Rubio (6.8%), with Ted Cruz (6.5%) and Carly Fiorina (5.5%) not far behind Rubio. So out of the top 6, we have three people who have never held public office, and a first-term US Senator (Cruz) who previously held appointed government jobs in the state and federal governments (Rubio has one year more experience in the US Senate, but was an elected Florida legislator since 2000). In other words, the will of the potential primary voters seems to have shifted away from » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 1:18 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, August 27, 2015

◊ NOBODY for President: Revolution In The Air?

Current Affairs ... Politics ...

If you read the latest headlines on the national political front, you might think that Hillary Clinton is in trouble. And you might be right. The voters don’t trust her, and things could get even worse depending on what the FBI finds (or doesn’t find) on her e-mail server. Although the vote is still months away, recent polls hint that Clinton could lose the New Hampshire primary to Bernie Sanders. That would not be a good way to start the primary season.

So, it’s looking a bit less likely that Hillary will be the our next President, although it’s not yet to the point of being a lost cause. Perhaps the most cogent insight regarding this topic is that Barack Obama may well be the king or queen-maker; if Obama decides that he wants someone other than Hillary to “carry on his legacy” (say V.P. Joe Biden), Obama could have the FBI and Department of Justice throw the book at Hillary for any petty regulation that she may have violated regarding government records management (something like what they did with David Petraeus). So, we shall see what Barack decides. For now, he seems to be giving Joe Biden a great big “MAYBE”.

On the GOP side, however — the Republican faithful seems to have lost all faith in the “deep bench” of viable candidates that they have. I.e., Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz . . . since the first GOP debate, the three candidates who have picked up the most interest and the most support in the national polls are Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina — three people who have never held public office. It doesn’t seem likely that » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:11 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, August 9, 2015

◊ Structural Racism . . . Everywhere and Nowhere

Current Affairs ... Public Policy ... Society ...

The New Yorker recently published perhaps the first personal profile of former Ferguson, MO Police Officer Darren Wilson since he shot and killed 18 year old Michael Brown. Wilson obviously met with and cooperated extensively with writer Jake Halpern, who gave a detailed overview of Wilson’s life and career experience leading up to the Brown shooting, and since that time. At first, I found the article to be fair and quite informative, a well-needed focus on the perspective of Wilson, given that he unwittingly became involved in an incident where the media overwhelmingly focuses upon the victim and the many reactions from the public. In the end, however, I was disappointed by this article. Halpern had an agenda after all, a very familiar one for media such as the New Yorker; basically, to use Wilson as exhibit 1 in explicating the faults of whites in general, and white police officers in particular, in dealing with African Americans in an organizational context.

Halpern spoke in some detail about Wilson’s choice to work in North County outside St. Louis, as it was a more challenging environment for a police officer than a quieter, more affluent suburb. While working for a different but near-by police agency prior to his employment in Ferguson (in Jennings, MO), Wilson made the acquaintance of Mike McCarthy, another white officer (a field-training officer). McCarthy seemed to have a better understanding than Wilson did of the minority communities they were patrolling, and thus Wilson asked him for guidance in how to best deal with the people living in these areas. Wilson admitted to “culture shock” while addressing McCarthy, who agreed to help Wilson. Halpern seems to indicate that McCarthy’s efforts weren’t in vain, and that Wilson appeared better able to work in relatively high-crime minority communities because of it.

Halpern obviously asks McCarthy how he felt about the Brown killing. McCarthy’s reaction was that Wilson was basically doing his job, doing what any police officer in that situation would have to do, and that the tragic outcome did not have to do with Brown being black and Wilson being white. But of course, Halpern was not satisfied with this, so he pushed McCarthy further. Was it possible, Halpern wanted to know, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:40 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, July 25, 2015

◊ Pope Francis (and Paul Farrell) Fomenting Worldwide Revolution?

Current Affairs ... Economics/Business ... Religion ...

If you are a private investor looking to get rich, or just an aging middle-class schlemiel like myself hoping to retire sometime in the next five years or so, you might know about the marketwatch.com web site. It’s a pretty good place to get up-to-date stock and bond market information, and it publishes a fair number of articles that might be of interest to small-fish “investors” like me.

(Really, I never thought of myself as a capitalist financier. But any working person today who wants a half-way decent retirement is not going to be able to fully rely on Social Security and whatever few real pension arrangements are still out there. You’re going to have to save, and your employer, if they really like you, is contributing to your old-age savings. By the time you pass the big six-oh, if you’ve been diligent, you’ve got what might sound to many like a really big chunk of money; it looks like you’re rich!! But no, this chunk is all that stands between you and poverty over the next few decades of your life, as your body slowly weakens and mind slows, and you really just can’t stay up with the 9-to-5 working world anymore.)

So anyway, if you’re presently in the boat that I’m in, you may have heard of marketwatch.com and have read some of their articles. One of the regular featured columnists on that site is Paul Farrell, who seems to be the “house pessimist”. In late 2008, as the US economy was hitting bottom » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:46 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, July 4, 2015

◊ The Latest Greek Tragedy

Current Affairs ... Economics/Business ... Foreign Relations/World Affairs ...

One of the biggest world-news items over the past few weeks has been a new flare-up of the whole Greece-versus-the-rest-of-Europe (but mostly Germany) thing. As with most big issues, this thing is all about money. Lot’s of money. In a nutshell, Greece borrowed too much of it from the European Union, and now can’t pay it back. So what happens next? Greece is part of the EU. Should it be kicked out? If allowed to stay, should it be punished, or sympathetically helped to resolve its underlying problems?

You’d think that sympathy and addressing underlying problems would be the right way to go. But a lot of people think that Greece hasn’t been such a good member of the Euro Union, that it has built up a lot of bad habits and has been lying and otherwise acting in bad faith, and now needs to suffer a bit so as to discourage other members of the Union from ever trying anything like this (and dissuade the Greeks from ever thinking about it again). This is approximately the same rationale that underlies all criminal law. I.e., people don’t always act nicely, and nations don’t either. So they sometimes need to be roughed up for a while; once they’ve shown that they’ve learned their lesson, the Union can get more lenient about getting them back on their feet (i.e, give them significant debt forgiveness).

I’ve read a number of articles on the situation over the past few days, and I’m going to cite some that I’ve found interesting. First off, Bloomberg has a good overview of the whole situation, not surprisingly; if you want to understand something about big money, Bloomberg is » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:00 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

◊ Caitlyn, Rachel . . . and Jeb?

Current Affairs ... Society ...

I haven’t said anything here yet about the current hubbub over Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, because both cases are very tricky situations. Some conservative pundits try to paint the liberal acceptance (and even celebration) of Jenner’s new female identity as hypocritical in light of their disdain for Dolezal’s claim to African-American identity. These writers make some good points. But IMHO, the situation is not that simple; the Jenner and Dolezal situations have significant differences (I mean, Jenner cannot even try to coverup her past as a him, whereas Dolezal seemed to need a few fibs or, excuse the term, “white lies”, to get where she was).

I believe or at least hope that both situations are doing America some good by making us think about and discuss the deep but seldom-questioned issues regarding who we think we are and what makes us whatever that is. Philosophers and sociologists will have a field day dissecting these cases with their classes. Hopefully some rational thoughts and enlightened attitudes will filter their way through all the static and hucksterism that our non-stop media circus has created over Caitlyn and Rachel.

About the only thing that I can add is that in the end, society will decide what a man or a woman is, and what white or black identity involves. The lead-off agents in that social determination process should be those » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:03 am Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, June 15, 2015

◊ HRC 2016: Part 2

Current Affairs ... Politics ...

I’n not a big fan of the mildly conservative NY Times pundit David Brooks, although every now and then “good old Brooksie” shines a lightbeam thru the word-fog. I think that Brooksie caught some lightening once again in his recent column about Hillary’s “mobilization error”. I could try to sum up what Brooks says, but he says it himself so brilliantly that I’m going to do a fair usage quote here, to wit:

Every serious presidential candidate has to answer a fundamental strategic question: Do I think I can win by expanding my party’s reach, or do I think I can win by mobilizing my party’s base . . . Two of the leading Republicans have staked out opposing sides on this issue. Scott Walker is trying to mobilize existing conservative voters. Jeb Bush is trying to expand his party’s reach . . . The Democratic Party has no debate on this issue. Hillary Clinton has apparently decided to run as the Democratic Scott Walker. As The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reported this week, Clinton strategists have decided that, even in the general election, firing up certain Democratic supporters is easier than persuading moderates.

SO, it looks like Hillary is starting out by doing exactly the opposite of what her husband did in the early 1990s; i.e., Bill Clinton’s famous “triangulation” and move towards the center, which allowed the Democrats to revitalize themselves being critically weakened by the “Reagan Revolution”. The first thing that I thought after reading Brooks’ column is that Bill must be rolling in his grave — and he’s not even dead!!! Is the Democratic Left really that strong today? Would Hillary really face a credible challenge from » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:18 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 17, 2015

◊ The (Rail) Road Not Taken . . . Into Gun Fire?

Current Affairs ... Personal Reflections ...

It’s hard to get interested in, never mind emotionally connected with, all of the tragedies that you hear or read about in the media these days. The world is probably not more tragic than it ever was, but given how interconnected we are these days, we hear about most everything unfortunate thing that happens anywhere on the planet. Even the big ones like the recent earthquake(s) in Nepal often don’t get more than a minute or two of my attention on any given day.

So, I pick my tragedies based on personal connection. The recent train crash in Philadelphia made it to my personal interest list, because I was once a railroad buff like 32-year old Brandon Bostian, the Amtrak engineer who last Tuesday night drove his passenger train into a 50 mph curve while moving at about 106 mph. This caused a violent derailment that killed eight passengers and took the important Northeast Corridor line between New York and Philadelphia out of service for about a week. I also rode trains over that track quite a few times in my life, especially in the late 1970s when I lived in Arlington, Virginia and often took the train to visit my family in Jersey.

When I heard that a train using the same kind of passenger cars that I used to ride in had crashed, I immediately read up about it on the media web sites (I don’t get much of my news from radio or TV, as they seldom take the time to drill-down into the details). But being a train guy, I wanted more than the media could offer, and I knew where I could get to it. There are a variety of railfan discussion sites on the web, where both train buffs and actual railroad employees » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 5:10 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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