Lovely weekend. I got out and enjoyed it, but I did catch most of the final round of sports’ most pretentious event, the Masters, where the fans are “patrons” and the course is “the property” and elevator music suffuses the broadcast. The best thing about this year’s tournament was Tiger Woods. A guy who shouldn’t even be able to play golf, or walk for that matter, made it through 72 holes. He finished dead last, but you have to admire his work ethic and determination. Cue the tinkling piano music.
Let’s see what escaped YSDA commentary last week.
Bradley surprises. Credit Justice Ann Walsh Bradley for knowing when to hang it up. After 30 years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court she surprised us last week by announcing she’s not going to run for a fourth term. If only Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Charles Grassley and too many others had the same grace to know when to move on and to move over. Bradley, who is 73, may have simply decided that she didn’t want to deal with the inevitable ugliness that would ensue from the stiff challenge she faced from the Republican Brad Schimel in this ostensibly nonpartisan race next April. There are no obvious candidates to replace her on the liberal side, but it doesn’t matter much. Whoever comes out on top on the left will run on abortion and that will decide it.
Tump finds his way on abortion. Speaking of abortion, Trump is showing his party their only way out. Any election in which the Democrats can isolate that issue and make it a simple up or down vote on abortion rights is an election they will win. Trump now has taken a clear position opposing a national law and leaving it to the states, which is the best the GOP can do on an issue that is killing them. Most of the public is pro-choice, but only to a point and that point is viability at around 24 weeks. What the Dems are trying to do now is hang every extreme state law banning the practice before viability around Trump’s neck. We’ll see if that will work. Probably not. I think Trump may have found a way around the abortion issue, at least for himself, but you can count on the rest of his party to cloak themselves in the extremism that will cost them elections.
Gothard speaks. After months of stonewalling, new Madison schools superintendent Joe Gothard finally spoke to the press last week. He didn’t say anything of substance and he didn’t offer an explanation for why he had been so illusive, but at least he’s finally talking to the media.
Good money after bad. Over the last five years California has spent $24 billion on 30 programs spread over nine agencies to fight homelessness. It hasn’t worked. According to a state auditor’s report, 181,399 people were homeless at some point in 2023, up from 118,552 in 2013 and 151,278 in 2019. California voters just narrowly approved a $6 billion referendum to throw still more money at the problem. There’s no reason to think the results will be any better. There needs to be a serious debate in this country about rolling back 1970’s era reforms that emptied institutions for the mentally ill and made it too hard to institutionalize and treat people against their will but in their own, and society’s, best interests.
Journalism as it should be. Robert MacNeil died last week at 93. His approach to journalism is gone, even (maybe especially) at PBS itself, which has followed NPR down the path of not just bias but advocacy. “I cannot stand the theatrical, prosecutorial interview, the interview designed to draw attention to the interviewer, full of either mawkish, false sentiment or theatrically belligerent questioning,” he told The New York Times in 1995, when he retired from the daily newscast. “Every journalist in this country has a stake in the democratic system working, and I think institutions of democracy are worth taking seriously,” he added. “It’s a very old-fashioned, corny view, but Jim (Lehrer) and I both feel that strongly, which is one of the reasons our show is the way it is.” Lehrer died a couple of years ago. RIP, Robert MacNeil and RIP that kind of journalism.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 