Joyce and I spent three days in Atlantic City at the New Jersey State League of Municipalities Annual Conference. I noticed three things:
Republicans were smiling more this year.
Democrats weren’t all that unhappy.
People were nicer to me.
What a difference an election makes!
Ten People I Bet You Wished You Had Been Nicer To a Year Ago
Jeff Michaels
Gregg Edwards
Bob Martin
Mike DuHaime
Vernon Hill
David Knowlton
Rick Mroz
Bill Palatucci
Sheila Oliver
Marcia Karrow
Where was the Preventive Services Task Force when we needed them?
An obscure Federal board – the “Preventive Services Task Force” – has opened up a can of worms and a full-blown national debate about whether mammograms are really as useful in preventing breast cancer in women as they are believed to be. (That is a fact. I don’t have an opinion on it. So leave me alone.)
Where was this group hiding when the Corzine Campaign decided to make this issue the most important one facing New Jersey?
Two Things That Matter More Than They Should
The Nobel Peace Prize – People care about the Nobel Peace prize. I have never figured out why. The prize winner is named by five people selected by the Norwegian Parliament. There is nothing else the Norwegian Parliament does that anybody else in the world cares about. But somehow this selection by their chosen five is important. Go figure. Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt and Corazon Aquino never won Nobel Peace Prizes. It would be like the Baseball Writers never inducting Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Sandy Koufax into the Hall of Fame, but us still caring who they named this year.
The Iowa Caucuses – Iowa has selected nine of the last 10 major party presidential nominees for us. Why do we let them do that? There are only three million of the little suckers (less than one percent of the U.S. population). As compared to the nation, they are older, whiter, less bilingual, less educated and poorer than us. There are no major professional sports franchises within their vast borders – presumably they root for losers like the Cubs. Let’s resolve to stop letting them pick our presidents for us.
The Nobel Peace Prize, like its literature prize, is sometimes off the wall and sometimes spot on. You can ignore what you don't agree with.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Iowa caucuses, when my daughter and her husband were teaching at Grinnell, they went to the caucus because they figured they would never see this kind of thing again, but the process is Byzantine, a sort of prefer-ential voting with your feet, with the losers throwing their vote to second choice. It's bizarre but I don't think we actually let Iowa choose our candidates, only THEIR candidates. Sometimes they match the country, sometimes they don't.