Leonard Zwelling

In his column in The New York Times on May 7, David Brooks makes the case that the failure of the United States to achieve herd immunity from the novel coronavirus despite having more than enough vaccine for everyone and many places to get inoculated, bodes poorly for America’s ability to triumph in the world.

The America that emerged from the Great Depression and won the Second World War was a nation of sacrificers—people willing to do what’s best for their country, even if that meant crossing an ocean and dying. Are we that people any more? As Brooks says, “we’re not asking you to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima: we’re asking you to walk into a damn CVS.”

As Tom Friedman points out on May 5 in The New York Times, the key requisite position for any Republican right now is that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen and that Donald Trump really won. As ludicrous as such a stand is, it is the one that must be taken if one is to run on the GOP ticket in 2022 and beyond. It will certainly be required in any Republican primary for any office from senator to dogcatcher.

Bryce Covert makes an impassioned plea to include federal support for child care and elder care in any infrastructure bill and President Biden seems to agree. Along with fixing roads, repairing bridges, laying high-speed cable and paving runways, a host of social safety net programs is being proposed for expansion and justified as required to get America back to work after the pandemic. I hear the cries for more, but they seem to be insatiable.

One of the commonest fallacies perpetrated on the American people by the health care industrial complex (hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, device makers, insurers and the government) is that the American health care system is the best in the world. It’s not.

I have been mulling over the writing of a blog on the George Floyd-Derek Chauvin trial and verdict. I decided to try to make sense of it for myself. I am not fooling myself into thinking what I think will be shared by many, but here goes.

Well, you knew it was coming and coming it is. The Biden tax increases that are necessary to pay for all the programs the president is proposing are here. Philosophically, I am not really opposed to having the well-to-do pay more taxes. What I don’t like is the raises in certain taxes like that on capital gains and estate taxes. Why? Because in my mind, this money has been taxed already.

In the give and take of political battles on Capitol Hill, it is sometimes hard to recall that the existence of political parties is no more a part of the Constitution than are political action committees.

The most enjoyable part of writing and posting this blog is the Comments I get back on the site or via email. My favorites are the ones that dramatically disagree with me. Today (April 16), I got an earful.

In a recent newsletter, Frank Bruni of The New York Times tells about former Speaker of the House John Boehner. The Speaker has a new book out that is climbing the best seller lists mostly because he dishes all kinds of political dirt, mostly on fellow Republicans like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell. You would think such a book and such a literary event as its publication would be a cause of joy among the opinion writers of The Times, but Bruni is a harsh critic of Boehner’s latest play for redemption. If he saw all of this misbehavior when he was Speaker, why didn’t he speak up then?

Lately, we Americans have been given ringside seats to a series of police actions that led to the assault on or deaths of a number of young people. Most of these people were young, Black males. Where there might have been a time when white America could dismiss such occurrences, that time is long gone because we now have documentation of what happened and we are all aware of the racial aspect of these acts of violence.