August 2019

Conflict Of Interest By Leonard Zwelling I recently presented a talk to grand rounds of the Department of Pediatrics at the UT School of Medicine in Houston about conflict of interest. It is a presentation I have given many times before, but always seems to catch the audience by surprise. First, most members of the […]

Why I Hate United Airlines By Leonard Zwelling It had been a great trip up until the day of our departure back from Scotland to Houston. We had motored down from Nairn in the Highlands late Thursday after playing the last of our six golf courses there. The journey took almost four hours as traffic

St. Andrews: Disneyland For Golfers By Leonard Zwelling There are several destination rounds of golf that every golfer wants to play. Pebble Beach is on everyone’s list and well, it should be. It is a unique experience in one of the most beautiful parts of North America, the Monterey Peninsula. Like most golf destinations, the

The American Jewish Community Doesn’t Need Trump’s Advice By Leonard Zwelling On August 20, President Trump let it be known that he thought American Jews that voted for Democrats displayed a “total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” It is no longer surprising that the president makes outrageous statements. It is no longer surprising that

The 1619 Project By Leonard Zwelling Most magazine articles don’t change my point of view. Some do. Sometimes you can read a well-crafted piece that gets you to examine an issue in a whole new way. Never have I read a magazine or newspaper article that has caused me to doubt my entire view of

Two Congresswomen; One Democracy: Israel’s Poor Decision By Leonard Zwelling As this blog has written before, the criticism aimed at the four freshman Congresswomen known as the Squad is well founded. They have expressed anti-Semitic ideology and anti-Israeli positions. Two of these women are Muslims, the first Muslim women ever elected to the U.S. House.

Is There A Winning Choice? By Leonard Zwelling So, who would you run against Donald Trump? A good and fair question. The choices seem both vast and varied, male and female, black and white, gay and straight, east and west, north and south. That’s not the question. If life is like a box of chocolates—and

A Critical Moment For America By Leonard Zwelling Sometimes, in fact most times, a particular inflection point in history can only be perceived in retrospect. When was the critical time that the arc of history changed? When was it clear that the South would secede from the United States? When did Hitler make a mistake,

Enough Guns By Leonard Zwelling I feel like we’ve been here before. Two mass shootings over one weekend have once again raised the issue of when will enough be enough to get Congress to do something about gun violence in the United States. Clearly, we haven’t yet reached the tipping point as the President of

Trust And Relationships As The Way To Improve Health Care By Leonard Zwelling Early in my fellowship on Capitol Hill, I was taught the four P’s of life in DC—policy, process, politics and personality—in ascending order of importance. Every congressional office knew what it believed proper policy was. The policies of my Democratic heritage were