(Senior US Senator Diane Feinstein, 2004)
It’s Wednesday, the Hump day for this cycle. The Lady in Red on the office flatscreen says it is warm again, temps in the mid-80s, but with a cooling trend approaching with rain by this weekend. In the meantime, our clouds will burn off here above the Potomac River shoals for a couple days of exquisite near-summer temperatures. Oh, right. It’s Spring.
There is Change all over. It is something we mention in the context of the great sweeping social things in America. That apparently includes pole-dancing entertainment in gradeschools, and the responsibility of schools to keep secrets from the parents who pay for it. Better said, “it is Change across the Globe.” There are threats of war and one in savage kinetic conflict.
In the background is all the other stuff. One of them is the aging of the gerontocracy that rules us. A big deal in the muted Red Wave of the last election was the change of the House from one side to another. A seat in the Senate allegedly gave a one-vote majority to the opposing party, locking the senior chamber in opposition to that of the House, from which body stacks of our former money is issued.
There is more, of course, and a one-vote majority makes situational awareness critical. Particularly if one of your new members has spent the last eight weeks confined to a bed at Walter Reed, unable to join his colleagues to actually “vote” at the Capitol. Senator Feinstein, the most senior member in the body, has not been seen much in the last two months with the exception of the Press informing her she had decided not to seek reelection. She seemed surprised. You can see that with two members absent from a one vote majority, things get complicated.
We first met Senator Feinstein when she was newly elected from California. That was back in 2004, nearly twenty years ago. She was vibrant and charming at the time. Now, there are calls for her to resign so California Governor Newsom can appoint a reliable relief without having to bother the voters of the Golden State. So, there is one of the minor challenges in governing our nation. With the Campaign to replace the current President already rising for an election that will not occur for twenty months, we will share some adventures ahead. We heard about some of that with a former Chief Executive who is declared and running again after his arrest in New York.
You may have seen him chat last night with Fox personality Tucker Carlson, who is likewise a component of the change. They have tailored his former mildly ironic and humorous approach to our politics with a more strident appeal to part of his audience. Some of the rhetoric arcs beyond what used to be heard from either side of the media’s rhetorical divide. We took a poll to see where the Writer’s Section stands on the matter. Some of us voted for Trump twice. Others quit voting. Still others thought a mature veteran politician who swore to unite us would be an attractive option.
We naturally hope the two Senators return to health and vibrant participation in our Republic. That is true for the Chief Executive, who says he is probably running again and will tell us about that in the months ahead. The small cadre of others interested in the position this morning seems to include the same Governor who can appoint a replacement for Senator Feinstein. South Carolina’s Senator Tim Scott is “exploring” the waters of the Potomac to see if the only GOP Senator of Color might be a useful candidate in 2024.
Governor Desantis was the “good government” alternative for a few weeks, and we don’t know who is paying for those ads claiming he is in favor of raising the retirement age. We are all in favor of not having the system collapse of its own weight, since we might actually live long enough to see it.
There are only about 600 Daily editions to figure it out. China says they are ready to fight over Taiwan. In response we have shipped our inventory of weapons to Ukraine. And Afghanistan. We have issued contracts to replace them, which we are assured will be ready for delivery after the election. Unless something happens first.
So, with that unsettling prospect, there was some real and good news. We found a manuscript assembled years ago. It is not complete, of course, but it harvested one segment of learning how our government works. The baseline includes some of the reporting for Congressional Delegations, both Staff and Member versions, to places like Taiwan, Myanmar, both Koreas, Haiti, Guantanamo and Croatia. There were some exciting events contained in the travel, which had direct immediacy to the interests of the Executive and Legislative branches of government. The interesting part was that the Executive Branch paid for the travel to support oversight of themselves by the Congress. And of course, the Government cannot “lobby” itself while we lobbied ourselves.
But there is much more to all that. This is the working cover for the next book:
(Waiting to tour the famous Shwedagon Temple in Rangoon. Note the feet on the Navy Escort Officer- left- and Burmese Activist- right- who supported that component of that trip. The temple is believed to contain relics of the four previous Buddhas of the present kalpa. We took a “barefoot in the Park” approach. It seemed to be the way things are done in Myanmar. This morning they claim fifty people were killed in an incident in the long-simmering civil war. No word on footgear).
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