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

Of all the differences between American soccer and the sport played around the world, perhaps the most notable is the concept of promotion and relegation. That’s a system where the highest finishing teams from one league move up to a higher division next season, and the lowest teams move down.

I’m giving my spirits a break with a more light-hearted classically trained musician’s take on immigration.

The cherry trees that line Washington’s Tidal Basin are not a species bred to yield tasty pies, jams and jellies. Washington’s cherry trees live mainly to display abundant clusters of delicate pinkish-white flowers. I was admiring them a couple of weeks ago, at the peak of what the Japanese call Sakura hanami — the season of viewing the cherry blossoms.

If media reports are to be believed, Governor Hochul and the state’s legislative leaders are inching toward a budget deal this week. The big issues – housing, K-12 education funding, Medicaid – have been getting all of the airtime, but there are many other important policies that are in play.

A major celestial event occurred at our house this week. It’s not the one you’re thinking of. Indeed, the total eclipse of the sun turned out to be a partial bust. Thick clouds rolled in approximately half an hour before totality – or the ninety-five percent of it we were granted in our part of the Hudson Valley – and didn’t part for a good sixty minutes.

It's time to roll back this week's highlights from the WAMC Listener Comment Line.

I feel like I write some version of this topic every couple of years, only with a different sport and a different city. It might be St. Louis, or the Nets, or the Raiders.

Neither Israel, Hamas nor the Palestinians are working for peace. If Israel wanted peace it would have throttled the so-called “settlers” years ago and protected the Palestinian population. Hamas made it’s aversion to peace obvious in the brutality of their Oct. 7 attack – they got what they wanted in Israel’s brutal response.

There’s an art to the put-down, but it seems to be vanishing. You know, if you say someone’s brain is the size of a pea, you get the point across, but it’s not as memorable as, say, the approach taken by Will Rogers, who once said of a politician that “if his brain was gunpowder, he wouldn’t have enough to blow the wax out of his ears.” That, folks is rhetorical art.