Former New York Congressman Bill Owens discusses the past week's political, economic and social events

We went to Maine for four days last week — more like three if you subtract the time it took to drive back and forth — I consumed two lobster rolls and one whole lobster, went swimming, more of a painful plunge in the fifty-eight degree ocean every day, took one hike and attended one wedding. It was entirely too short a trip. Now returned, I could almost be persuaded that the journey was a vivid figment of my imagination.

How many listeners remember the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”? Set in a POW camp during World War II, it was, if you can believe it, a comedy about American and British POW’s running rings around bumbling Nazis at the camp. One major character was a fat German Sergeant named Shultz who when observing the shenanigans of Hogan and his heroes would loudly proclaim I KNOW NOTHING…. NOTHING!

It's that time again. Here are this week's highlights from the WAMC Listener Comment Line.

The Olympics are coming -- just in time for Americans to take a big breath, settle on the couch, and root for the home team. In the midst of more political chaos than my brain can handle, the Paris Olympics might be exactly what we need right now. Lafayette, to rephrase Colonel Charles Stanton’s famous words in 1917 when Paris celebrated American Independence Day, we are coming.

Having done several sprint triathlons over the years in Key Biscayne, I am well familiar with the challenges of summer sporting events in Miami. Even with a 6 a.m. start time, it felt like racing through a furnace and the air was nearly as wet as the ocean. And beyond the morning, it pours pretty much every afternoon, followed by a weather condition best described as steam. So even evening outdoor sporting events feel like a wet sauna.

President Biden has pulled as much as possible of his political ads from the media in the belief that it is the wrong time to continue attacking Mr. Trump. But all eyes and ears are focused on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump this weekend.

It’s peaceful these days in our neighborhood on the edge of the farms and rolling hills of Rensselaer County, but last summer was a doozy. The kids whose family moved into a house down the hill were buzzing around on dirt bikes – just about driving us nuts from the noise. My wife teaches online and does a podcast from her home studio, and I’ll tell you that a lesser person would have become, you know, grouchy.

The planet is getting hotter and will continue to do so from now on. This week the Northeast will be enduring another heat wave, the second one of the summer. The impacts of rising temperature are well-documented and increasingly obvious: health consequences, more intense storms, worsening air quality, flooding, and rising sea levels.

A tape surfaced of Chief Justice Roberts testimony at his confirmation hearing in which it appears he gave a dramatically different opinion about whether or not the President was immune from the law, essentially saying that no President is above the law without qualification.