The Nature of Things

My beloved Houston Astros are five years removed from their lone World Series appearance, and, in those five years, the team has fallen on hard times. For fans of a team that was once respected for its professionalism and hard-nosed play, it's been painful to watch. There are signs though that that era and our frustration may be coming to an end. This week, the Astros traded their last two ties to their winning era, Roy Oswalt and Lance Berkman. In return, they got some young and very promising players. All of a sudden, this formerly old team has gotten a lot younger. They have rookies or very young players at nearly all positions. These kids bring their enthusiasm and excitement with them to the game and that is very exciting to their fans. Suddenly, their games are fun to watch again. I know that they have a lot of learning to do and there will probably be some rough spots in the road ahead. Well, the Astros' road this year, as well as last year, has been mostly one o...

So it seems that Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, believes that two wars are just not enough for our military forces to contend with. He believes that we should also attack Iran and North Korea, the two remaining points on George Bush's "Axis of Evil". At least that is the message he gave to the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank, this week. He recommends this for a military that is already stretched thin, almost to the breaking point, a military that has seen many of its members serve multiple tours of duty in the war zones that are Iraq and Afghanistan. A military that is dealing with increased suicides from members stretched beyond the breaking point by the stresses of war. Of course, Mr. Gingrich has never been in a war, has never been in the military even. He is another of those chicken-hawk politicians who never saw fit to serve themselves but feel perfectly comfortable and happy sending other people's childr...

Sometimes you just need to read a happy story in the news. Especially in the middle of a summer beset with oil spills, tea partiers, unemployment, disappointing politicians, journalists who only know how to report what Fox News tells them is important. Oh, I could go on, but I would only depress myself. No, I've been searching assiduously lately to find some light at the end of the tunnel, some bright spot on the horizon. It turns out Gail Collins has been searching, too, and she expounded on what she has found in her column in today's Times . Now, I always read Collins' columns because she is of my generation and has lived through the history that I have lived through and has come to some of the same conclusions about that history that I have. It's always satisfying to read someone that you agree with. It reinforces your beliefs (prejudices?) and makes you feel smart. Especially when that writer has the intelligence and wit of Gail Collins. Anyway, today in her c...

Listening to the morning news programs on NPR over the weekend, I was interested to hear two separate interviews with the actor Robert Duvall. Duvall, who is 79, has a new movie coming out called "Get Low". In it, he plays a hermit, Felix Bush, who has lived the life of a misunderstood exile in a cabin in the woods for some forty years. Now he has come out of the woods to contact the local funeral director, played by Bill Murray, to plan his own "funeral party". The film is actually based on a real-life story of a hermit in Tennessee. The events took place in 1938. In both of the interviews that I heard, Duvall made the point that there is a direct arc between his first role in the movies, Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird", and that of the hermit Felix Bush. Boo Radley was a shy, sensitive, emotionally fragile man who was not able to deal with society. Felix Bush is, apparently, almost an older version of that man - a loner, a man who cannot be ...

The title of Paul Krugman's column today was "Who Cooked the Planet?" And the answer is we all did. There was a bill before the Senate this year that would have allowed us as a society to start work on reversing the effects of human-caused global climate change. It certainly was not a perfect bill. That doesn't exist in our world. But it would have encouraged the transition to "greener" forms of energy and changed some of the ways in which we continually subsidize dirty forms of energy like oil and coal. It looked like this might be the year when something finally got done on these issues. As usual, the House did its work and waited for the Senate to join it at the finish line. And waited. And waited. And waited. In the end, the Senate declined to even get out of the starting gate. It's the same old story we have heard so often in this session of Congress. The Republicans - 100% of them - refused to support the bill. The Democrats, including ...

The financial reform bill that was signed into law this week provides for the creation of a consumer protection agency. The consumer advocate who foresaw the need for such an agency and who wrote an article proposing it in 2007 was Elizabeth Warren. Since that time she has campaigned indefatigably for her idea. Her common sense and empathetic approach to the needs of consumers has made her the go-to person for television news shows that have bothered to cover this aspect of the financial meltdown. Thus, her face has become very familiar to viewers who have watched any of these shows over the last couple of years. Now that the bill has become law and her brainchild is on the verge of becoming reality, the time has come to choose someone to lead the new agency and many of us can conceive of no one else other than Warren filling that role. The problem is that she would need to be confirmed by the Senate which, in the current practice of that body, would mean 60 votes, and it is unlik...