The planet’s warming, Al Gore’s winning Oscars and Nobel prizes for his inconvenient truth film and Greenland lost 13 billion more tons of ice last summer than in any previous recorded summer,
That’s an impressive quantity of ice, but who ever skated on it. The speed skating oval at Catamount Family Center – near my house – has closed, never to reopen.
What I’ve done on that oval has never been called “speed skating” but it was exercise in the winter air and I’ll miss it.
When the oval opened in 1994, Catamount was able to log some 80 days of skating each winter. In the 2004-05 season, the oval was open just 17 days and for the last two season, it didn’t open at all.
Two pieces in the MSM flagships today on one theme – fairness.
In the New York Times, Paul Krugman compares Barack Obama’s health plan to John Edwards’s and Hillary Clinton’s and finds it wanting. The reason: Mr. Obama would not make health insurance mandatory. People could choose to remain uninsured, then opt into the system if their health began to fail.
Mr. Obama, who otherwise seems like a bright guy, doesn’t seem to get how the whole “insurance” thing works. As Mr. Krugman writes, Mr. Obama’s plan would allow people to game the system by jumping in and out while the folks who act in good faith and buy insurance while they’re still in health get penalized. Not fair.
Over in the Washington Post, Renae Merle describes similar frustration among those homeowners who acted in good faith during the housing bubble. They paid off their credit cards, saved up a down payment, bought only what they could afford.
Again, some people gamed the system, flipping houses, using their inflated equity as an ATM. Now the mortgage crisis is here and what should have been a day of reckoning was postponed when major lenders agreed to freeze interest rates.
In both cases, no one wants to be punitive and cause others pain fort the sake of doing so, but both Mr. Obama’s health care plan and the mortgage rate freeze send the message that there are worse consequences for playing by the rules than violating them.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted the other day that former White House adviser and current Fox News commentator Karl Rove was meddling the lie that it was the Democrats in Congress and not George W. Bush who pushed to have a vote on the Iraq war resolution before the 2002 mid-term elections.
Mr. Marshall has provided copious evidence to prove Mr. Rove’s lie, but I was thinking, “Hey, I’ve been writing this thing for 11 years, what did I have to say about it?”
Sure enough, there it was in my commemoration of the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
The Catholic diocese of Burlington is litigating a long series of sex abuse cases, in which it is accused of covering up pedophilia by its clergy. I think it’s lost or settled every case so far, but that hasn’t stopped diocesan attorneys from doing all they can to humiliate the victims of abuse on the stand. It’s a nice lesson for the kiddies.
As the current case goes to the jury, today’s Burlington Free Press has a story about our current bishop, Salvatore Matano, who in 1980, was director of personnel for the diocese of Providence in Rhode Island and oversaw the transfer of a priest who’d molested children.
Bishop Matano defended himself by saying he didn’t know why the diocese ordered the priest’s transfer. The Free Press reports that then-Father Matano received a hand-written note from Bishop Kenneth Angell saying, “Sal, for confidential reasons, Father Roland M. Lepire now at St. Aloysius in Woonsocket must be transferred at once. He should not be reassigned in the Woonsocket area.”
Fr. Matano may indeed not have been told the reason for the transfer, but it doesn’t take much to read between those lines. Further, when Fr. Matano suggested Fr. Lepire be assigned to a retreat house (conveniently away from children), the transfer was vetoed by a nun working at the facility, saying she did not want Fr. Lepire on the premises.
So, we asked to believe that the nun figured out what was up, but the director of diocesan personnel remained blissfully ignorant. Keep you mouth shut, stay loyal to your superiors and too bad about what happens to the kids. That, sadly, is how one gets to be a bishop in today’s American Catholic church.
I’ve never been a Bill Clinton fan, but one thing I admired about him was his refusal to throw mud on George H.W. Bush during the 1992 campaign. When asked about rumors circulating that Mr. Bush had a mistress, Mr. Clinton replied: “I’m not gonna comment. I didn’t like it when people said those things about me and I don’t like it when you say them about him.”
In the closing days of that campaign, Mr. Bush, clearly losing and clearly frustrated, took to calling Mr. Clinton and Al Gore “Bozo and the Ozone Man.” It sounded like a mouth full of sour grapes from a politician who’d always taken a higher road than that.
Now, with Barack Obama nosing ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa polls, it’s Mrs. Clinton’s turn to spew mud and sour grapes.
George H.W. Bush, though flawed and wrong-headed in many ways, is a far better person than his son. Bill Clinton, also flawed, also wrong-headed in many ways, now seems a better person than his wife.
In all this dynasty talk, that’s one point I haven’t seen mentioned: they tend to trend downward with each successive generation.
… as those who will not see.
Sunday’s New York Times has a story about how the American business community is rushing the doors at the White House, hoping to get all sorts of lax regulations and deals in place before George Bush goes out the door in 2009.
Anticipating Democratic gains in both houses of Congress and a Democratic win in the presidential election, Corporate America wants full value for the president it paid for.
Question is: what about the Dems? Surely they see this. Once they have control of government do they undo the mess and chastize the greedy corporations or just throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do?
Probably the latter. They are, after all, Democrats.
NIE Q&A, OK?
The big news this week is that a new National Intelligence Estimate says Iran ceased work toward nuclear weapons in 2003, contradicting everything George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been saying about Iran for the past several years.
We here at MarkFloegel.org (well OK, it’s just me) know the ins and outs of this story can be confusing, so we (by which I mean me) have composed a series of clarifying questions and answers.
Q: This new intelligence estimate means Iran does or does not have nuclear weapons?
A: The new consensus from the U.S. intelligence community is: Iran does not have nuclear weapons.
Q: If Iran stopped working on weapons four years ago, why didn’t we know about it sooner?
A: We did know about it sooner. American intelligence agencies knew last summer.
Q: So why are we just finding out now?
A: Because when National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell told Mr. Bush he had new information, Mr. Bush didn’t ask what it was. Or at least that’s what he says.
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