Commentary & Opinion

Last week I commented that the issue of impeachment refocuses the flood of presidential moves. The possibility of impeaching the president raises another critical political question – would impeachment so annoy the public that Democrats would be defeated for trying to impeach Trump? Or will the focus in the impeachment process on Trump’s misbehavior leave the public sufficiently disgusted that the next election would go to his opponents? There have been attempts to remove presidents by impeachment. They resulted in two trials in the Senate and one resignation to avoid impeachment. That’s too few cases to draw firm conclusions but they deserve a look.

Governor Cuomo and state lawmakers are now into the final week of the fiscal year.  New York’s fiscal year starts on April 1st.  Given the holidays this year, there is a push to get a budget agreement in place by Thursday, March 29th.

With the deadline for passing a State Budget right around the corner, our lawmakers are cramming like a student studying for finals. 

Lawrence Eagleburger, a key President Reagan adviser, told the president to remove a reference to Star Wars in a national speech. The president balked. Eagleburger tried again and again he failed to persuade Reagan. Clearly the president marched to his own drummer and, in this case, employed use of the theoretical Star War possibilities to extract concessions from Soviet leaders.

President Trump says and does so many things which are parts of much bigger issues, that it’s nearly impossible to keep up.

The human heart beats about 80 times per minute, 4,800 times an hour and 115,200 times a day. It's such a natural process, we don’t think about every individual heartbeat. But each one matters, our life depends on every one of those beats. I never thought of life in heartbeats until the summer of 2016, when a man relied on me to keep his heart beating.  

Last week was Sunshine Week; an annual celebration of the benefits of open government and how to safeguard and expand upon current transparency laws.  If the success of a representative democracy hinges on the informed consent of the governed, it is critical that the public know as much as possible about the information used and the processes by which its representatives spend tax dollars and act on policy recommendations.

On a recent television program a former professional athlete, upset by the reflective knee bend as a protest during the national anthem at professional games, argued that sports aficionados should rely on the “purity” of the college game. As March Madness approaches, it is evident college basketball is far from pure. It is afflicted with fraud. Felony convictions have already occurred, and more are fully anticipated.

Steve Rogers of the current Captain America film franchise lives by one mindset: that no matter what, “I can do this all day.” And it seems with the recent influx of superhero movies, Hollywood has the same mindset.

The seventh round of NAFTA negotiations are set to begin in Mexico City in the next several weeks, with the word coming out of Canada that the Canadians are very pessimistic about this process.  In particular, they view the Americans as having little, if any, flexibility due to the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration. 

Virtually every college distance runner wishes two things. One, that coach doesn’t call an early morning Sunday practice. And two, that you had just a little more leg speed so you could run the mile. See, if you’re a 5000 or 10,000 meter runner, down deep you knew that meant you couldn’t turn it over quick enough to do something shorter. So you just kept going longer and longer until you kind of outlasted people. That’s my story at least, a former mediocre college 10K guy. The same goes for a friend who’s now an ultra-marathoner, who saw the marathon as just a bit too speedy.

For those in the West who have lost their way, no longer sure of whether to believe in their traditions or believe at all, it is useful to recall that liberty is our overarching concern. Liberty, as Edmund Burke counsels, “must inhere in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which… becomes the criterion of happiness.”

When the Metropolitan Opera came on with Madame Butterfly recently, I began to puzzle about why the opera is so strongly anti-American. In Butterfly, an American naval lieutenant trifles with the heart of a young Japanese woman ending with her ritual suicide, leaving their baby to him and his new American wife.

Massachusetts is one of the richest states in the richest nation on earth and yet, 1 in 10 people and 1 in 7 children struggle with hunger. That’s 701,630 of our family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. It’s 187,920 kids. That is a moral outrage and it should spur action to ensure no one goes hungry. Unfortunately, this hasn’t proven to be the case. Thanks to a recent study by Children’s Health Watch of Boston Medical Center we have a new way of thinking about the costs of hunger and with it hope for renewed action.

New York State’s long running corruption crisis continues to this day.  For each of the first seven months of this year, a new high-profile corruption case goes to trial.  Last week the first of those cases went to the jury for deliberations and in the second case, a trial was averted when a former legislator pleaded guilty.

In January 2018, I delivered a commentary in which I quoted economist Dean Baker comparing the savings that major corporations were getting from the tax cut with the amount of money they were committing to the highly touted bonuses they were giving out.   It appeared that about ONE TENTH of the benefit from the increase in after-tax profits was going to these one “time bonuses.

30 years ago, Healthcare accounted for 16 percent of the $20 billion Massachusetts state budget. 10 years ago, it accounted for 30 percent of a $28 billion budget. In 2018, it was 40 percent of a $39.4B budget. You don’t have to be a policy wonk to realize that’s an unsustainable trend.

If you have two kids of a certain age like I do, you spend a whole lot of time in sporting good stores. We tend to do a weekly pilgrimage to buy anything from soccer cleats to compression shirts to running shoes that aren’t even necessarily used for running. It’s an expensive hobby, having kids. And of course, that means we spend a whole lot of time in Dick’s Sporting Goods, the largest retail sporting goods chain in the US. And every time I go to Dick’s, I have an uncomfortable moment when I have to walk my kids by the hunting section of the store. Because there, among other things, is a wall full of guns. There’s also bullets, and scopes and all the other things that make guns work – most of which I’m largely unfamiliar with, despite my three summers of Boy Scout camp in Texas. I tend not to spend much time staring, and I certainly don’t encourage my kids to peruse – which isn’t usually that hard, since they’re busy trying to convince me to buy them $100 basketball shoes they don’t need. It hasn’t stopped me from shopping there, obviously. But the feeling is there, and perhaps one reason I wish I was at Nike Store or a Foot Locker – something I never thought I’d say.

It was part and parcel of the “new world order” espoused by Bush and Obama that a China integrated into the organizational structure of global affairs would not challenge the status-quo. Yet try as Washington has, China has its own agenda somewhat impervious to post-Cold War optimism.

Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of our Nature, argued we’ve become less bloody over the centuries. But so many issues involve life and death. For two weeks this country has been discussing how to stop school shootings. This week let’s address life and death in the Middle East. Next week, events permitting, let’s discuss two issues that threaten life worldwide.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that may forever change the ability of working people to successfully fight for better pay, good health insurance, job security and a secure retirement.